Prehistory the rise of civilization, and the ancient Middle East to c.500 B.C.E
Prehistory and the rise of Civilization to c.3000 B.C.E.
Biological, Cultural, and Technological Evolution In History
Introduction
The “Rubber Band Theory”
An overview of the flow of history
The challenges of modern society: the rubber bands stretched
A Possible Scenario of Human Evolution
Where to start?
Out of the trees
Technological and cultural developments since the Australopithecines
Fire.
The Ice Ages
Accelerated technological development
Speech
A Possible Scenario For The Evolution of The Family and Gender Roles
Gender differences in the species
The Birth of Agriculture and Its Effects
Introduction
Why Eurasia and Mesopotamia?
Why Mesopotamia?
The invention of agriculture
The Rise of Cities and Hydraulic Civilizations (c.8000-3000 B.C.E.)
The rise of hydraulic civilizations
The Birth of Writing and Its Impact
Prelude to Writing
Different stages of writing
Scribes and education
Results of writing
The Birth of Metallurgy and Its Impact
Introduction
The ages of metals
The ancient Middle East (c.3000-323 B.C.E.)
The Sweep of Mesopotamia's History (c.3000-529 B.C.E.)
Introduction: the environment
Sumer: myth and history (c.2800-2350 B.C.E.)
The Akkadian Empire (c.2350 - 2250 B.C.E.)
Sumer's last flowering: the Third Dynasty of Ur (c.2100-2000 B.C.E.)
Hammurabi and the Babylonian Empire (c.1750-1600 B.C.E.).
The horse and chariot (c.1650 B.C.E.)
The First Assyrian Empire (c.1365-1100 B.C.E.)
The Second Assyrian Empire (911-612 B.C.E.)
The Neo-Babylonian or Chaldaean Empire (612-539 B.C.E.)
Egypt’s Old and Middle Kingdoms (2850-2052 B.C.E.)
The Old Kingdom (c.2850-2190 B.C.E.)
The First Intermediate Period (2190-2052 B.C.E.)
The Middle Kingdom (2052-1778 B.C.E.)
Egypt’s New Kingdom and Final Decline (1778-525 B.C.E.)
The Second Intermediate Period (1778-1570 B.C.E.)
The New Kingdom (1570-1085 B.C.E.)
Final decline (c.1085-525 B.C.E.)
The Indus River Civilization and The Pattern of India's History
The pattern of Indian history
Masters of The Sea: The Phoenicians (c.1200-500 B.C.E.)
Geopolitics
Phoenician exploration and colonies
The Israelites (c.2000-500 B.C.E.)
Introduction
The Patriarchal period (c.2000-1650 B.C.E.)
The Egyptian Period and Exodus (c.1650-1200 B.C.E.)
Israel (c.1200-586 B.C.E.)
The divided kingdom (922-586 B.C.E.)
The Persian Empire (c.550-330 B.C.E.)
Introduction
Cyrus the Great and the Rise of Persia (c.550-522 B.C.E.)
Darius I "the Great" and the consolidation of the Persian Empire
Religion
Decline and fall (c.464-330 B.C.E.)
Birth of Western civilization: Greece, Rome, and Europe to c.1000 C.E.
Bronze Age Greece: The Minoans & Mycenaeans (c.2500-1100 BCE)
Introduction
The Minoans (c.2000-1500 B.C.E.)
The Dark Age of Greece & The Rise of The Polis (c.1100-750 BCE)
Introduction: the Dark Age of Greece
The birth of the Polis
The Rise of Greek Democracy (c.750-500 BCE)
The Age of Colonization (c.750-550 B.C.E)
The Western way of war
The rise of Greek democracy
Economic reforms
Greek Philosophy From Thales To Aristotle (c.600-300 BCE)
Introduction
The Milesian philosophers
The nature of change
The Delian League and The Athenian Empire (478-431 BCE)
Formation of the Delian League
From Delian League to Athenian Empire
The Persian Wars (480-478 BCE)
The Persian Wars (510-478 B.C.E.)
The Ionian Revolt (5l0-494 B.C.E.)
Athens alone (494-490 B.C.E.)
Xerxes' invasion (480-478 B.C.E.)
Formation of the Delian League
The Decline & Fall of The Greek Polis (431-336 BCE)
Economic and military changes
Continuing warfare after the Peloponnesian War (404-355 B.C.E.)
The rise of Macedon (355-336 B.C.E.)
The Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE)
Disaster and Collapse (421-404 B.C.E.)
The Sicilian Expedition
Athens' comeback and final fall (413-404 B.C.E.)
Alexander The Great and The Hellenistic Era (336 BCE-31 BCE)
Alexander the Great (336-323 B.C.E.)
Alexander's successors and the establishment of a new order (323-c.275B.C.E.)
Hellenistic accomplshments
Conclusion
The Impact of Geography On Ancient Italy
Introduction
Geopolitics
The Roman Conquest of Italy (c.500-265 BCE)
Rome's pattern of conquest
Rome's campaigns of conquest (387-265 B.C.E.)
Rome Versus Carthage: The Punic Wars (264-201 BCE)
The First Punic War(264-241 B.C.E.)
Between the wars
The Second Punic War (218-201 BCE)
The Fall of The Roman Republic (133-31 BCE)
Pattern of decline
First attempts at reform: the Gracchi
Marius and the Roman army
Sulla and the First Civil War
The rise of Julius Caesar
Octavian, Antony, and two more civil wars (44-31 B.C.E.)
The Augustan Principate (31 BCE-160 CE)
The Empire after Augustus
The Near Collapse of The Roman Empire (160-284 CE)
Mounting problems (161-235 C.E.)
The third century anarchy (235-284 C.E.)
The Collapse of The Western Roman Empire (395-c.500)
Why the West?
How and why the barbarians took over
The Rise of The Christian Church To c.300 CE
Early history (c.30-3ll C.E.)
The great persecutions
Constantine and triumph of the Church
The Impact of The Church's Triumph (c.300-500)
Religious disputes and heresies
Poverty, chastity, and obedience: the rise of monasteries
The Mediterranean's Transition To The Middle Ages
Introduction: the “Dark Ages”
Converging interests
Justinian and the reconquest of Italy
A gradual transition
The Rise of The Franks (c.500-841)
Charlemagne (768-8l4)
The disintegration of the Carolingian order (8l4-c.1000)
The Collapse of Order & Rise of Feudalism In W. Europe
Feudalism
The Byzantine Empire (c.500-1025)
Introduction: the "Second Rome"
Turmoil, crisis, and the transition from Roman to Byzantine Empire (527-7l7 C.E.)
The imperial centuries (c.750-1025)
Our debt to the Byzantines
Classical Asia to c.1800 C.E.: Islam, India, China, and Japan
The Rise of The Arabs & Islamic Civilization (632-c.1000)
The sweep of Empire (632-750 C.E.)
Adapting to empire
The ruler
Ruling the empire
The development of Islamic Civilization
Muslim Civilization In Spain (711-1492)
The coming of the Moors
The Ummayad Caliphate of Cordoba (c.800- 1008)
Fall of the Caliphate of Cordoba and rise of the Taifa, or "Party kings" (1008-c.1080)
Islamic resurgence from North Africa: the Amoravids & Almohads (1080-1250)
Nasrid Granada and the end of Moorish power in Spain (c.1250-1492)
Moorish Spain's legacy
The Rise of The Seljuk & Ottoman Turks (c.1000-1565)
The Seljuk Turks
Rise of the Ottoman Turks
Indian History and Civilization
The Development of Indian Civilization (1500-500 BCE)
Aryan society and the Vedic Age (c.1500-1000 B.C.E.)
The Later Vedic Age (c.1000-500 B.C.E.)
Caste
The evolution of India's religious ideas
Jainism and Buddhism
India From The Maurya To The Gupta Dynasties (500 BCE-711 CE)
The Mauryan Empire (c.325-200 B.C.E.)
The Kushans (78-c.300 C.E.)
Mahayana and Hinyana Buddhism
The Guptas (c.300-500)
Hinduism
The Coming of Islam To India (711-c.1800)
Introduction
Pattern of development
Arabs and Rajputs (711-c.1000 C.E.)
Turkish invaders and the Sultanate of Delhi (c.1000-1526)
Decline of the Mughals
Early China (1500-221 BCE) and The Recurring Pattern of Chinese History
The geographic factor
The Shang Dynasty (c.1500-1028 B.C.E.)
The pattern of Chinese history
The Zhou Dynasty (1028-256 B.C.E.)
Confucianism and Taoism
The Qin and Han Dynasties (221 BCE-220 CE
The Later Zhou (772-221 B.C.E.)
Qin Dynasty (256-202 B.C.E.)
The Han Dynasty (202 B.C.E.-220 C.E.)
The Parallel Impacts of Disease On Chinese and Roman History
The Sui and T'ang Dynasties (220-906 CE)
The Six Dynasties Period (220-581 C.E.)
The Sui Dynasty (581-618)
The T'ang Dynasty (618-906)
Fall of the T'ang Dynasty
The Sung & Mongol Dynasties (906-1368)
The Mongol Empire (1279-1368)
The Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368-c.1800)
The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644)
The Qing Dynasty (1644-1911)
The Rise of Japanese Civilization
The Development of Early Japan To c.700 CE
Introduction: the geographic element
Early elements of Japanese culture
Growing Chinese influence
The Taika reforms and rise of the Japanese state
Japan's Heian & Samurai Eras (c.700-1338)
Heiankyo and Japanese court society (794-1184)
The Kamakura Shogunate and rise of the samurai (1185-1333)
Civil War & Reunification By The Tokugawa Dynasty (1338-1639)
The breakdown of centralized rule and rise of the Daimyo
Zen Buddhism
The restoration of order and unity by Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1551-98)
Revival of the West c.1000-1500 C.E.
The High and Later Middle Ages in Europe
The Agricultural Revolution In Medieval Europe
Europe (c.1000 C.E.)
First stirrings of revival
An agricultural revolution
The Rise of Towns In Western Europe (c.1000-1300)
From trade fairs to towns
The impact of towns
Leagues & Guilds In Western Europe
Leagues
Rise of The Medieval Papacy (c.900-1300)
Introduction: the plight of the Church in the Early Middle Ages
The zeal for reform (910-1073)
The Investiture Struggle (1073-1122)
The Papal monarchy at its height (1122-c.1300)
The Crusades & Their Impact (1095-1291)
The First Crusade (1095-99)
The Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099-1187)
The Holy Roman Empire of Germany (911-c.1500)
Introduction
The Saxon Dynasty
The Crisis of The Later Middle Ages (c.1300-1450)
Introduction
Causes of Stress
The Black Death and its results
Decline of the Church and nobles
Popular uprisings
The Black Death and Its Effects (1347-c.1450)
Origins of the Plague
The results of the Black Death
Popular uprisings
Decline of the Church and nobles
Schism & Heresies In Late Medieval Europe (1347-c.1450)
The Avignon Papacy or "Babylonian Captivity" (1309-77)
The Great Schism and Conciliar movement
The challenge from below: the Lollard and Hussite heresies
The Hundred Years War (1337-1453)
Introduction
Causes
The new face of war
Phase I: England ascendant 1337-1369)
Phase II: The French resurgence (1369-1413)
The English resurgence (1413-1428)
Joan of Arc and the final French triumph (1428-53)
Conclusion
The Invention of The Printing Press and Its Effects
Introduction
The impact of the printing press
The Economic Recovery of Europe (c.1450-1600)
Social changes
New business techniques
The Italian Renaissance (c.1400-1550)
Introduction: why Italy?
New patterns of thought
The Revolution In Renaissance Painting
Introduction
Materials used
New techniques
The Northern Renaissance (c.1500-1600)
Introduction
Reconciling religion and the Renaissance
The emerging national cultures in the Northern Renaissance
Results of the Northern Renaissance
He Rise of The Nation State During The Renaissance
Finances
The new warfare
Limits to the Renaissance state's power
The "New Diplomacy"
The Age of Exploration (c.1400-1900)
Geopolitical Factors In The Rise of Europe
Introduction
Europe's geography and its effects
Early Voyages of Exploration (c.1400-1550)
Introduction
Factors favoring Europe
Portugal and the East (c.1400-1498)
Spain and the exploration of the West (1492-c.1550)
Interior and coastal explorations (1519-c.1550)
The Later Voyages of Exploration (c.1550-1900)
Conclusion
The Age of Reformation and religious wars (1517-1648)
The Roots and Birth of The Protestant Reformation
The storm breaks
Luther’s religion
The spread of Lutheranism
Luther’s achievement
The Reformation Fragments II: Calvinism
Introduction
Calvin's religion
Long range effects of Calvinism
The Reformation Fragments I: Zwinglianism &Anabaptism
Introduction
Huldreich Zwingli and the Swiss Reformation
Grassroots Protestantism: the Anabaptists
The English Reformation
Early reactions by the Church to Protestantism
Reform from the top: the Council of Trent (1543-63)
Reform from below: Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits
The Age of Religious Wars (c.1560-98)
Germany (1521-55)
Revolt of the Spanish Netherlands (1566-1648)
The French Wars of Religion (1562-98)
Elizabethan England and the Spanish Armada
An Overview of The Thirty Years War (1618-48)
Introduction
Causes and outbreak of war
The Early Stages of The Thirty Years War (1618-31)
Opening phases of the war (1618-35)
The Later Stages of The 30 Years War (1631-48)
The Swedish Phase
The war of attrition (1635-48)
End of the war and its results
The rise of absolute monarchies in Eastern and Western Europe (c.1600-1700)
The Comparative Geographies and Histories of Eastern and Western Europe
Between East and West
The Early History of Russia To 1725
Early history
Muscovy
The “Time of Troubles”
The Rise of The Dutch Republic In The 1600's
Introduction
Geography of the Netherlands
The Dutch pattern of growth
A cultural golden age
Conclusion
Introduction
Louis' early life and reign (1643-61)
Louis' internal policies
Versailles
Louis' diplomacy and wars
Results of Louis' reign
The English Revolution: (1603-88)
Introduction: a century of change
Background to the Revolution
Pattern of events (1625-88)
James I, Charles I, and The Road To The English Civil War (1603-1642)
The English Revolution: From Civil War To Military Dictatorship (1642-60)
The English Civil War (1642-45)
More bickering and a second civil war (1645-1648)
Cromwell's Dictatorship (1649-60)
The English Revolution From The Restoration Monarchy To The Glorious Revolution (1660-1688)
Charles II and the Restoration Monarchy (1660-85)
James II and the Glorious Revolution (1685-88)
Results of the English Revolution
The Rise of The Modern State In Enlightenment Europe
Introduction
Russia
Balance of Power Politics In The Age of Reason (1715-1789)
Introduction
Diplomatic maneuvering (1715-1740)
The rise of Prussia
The War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48)
The "Diplomatic Revolution" of 1756
The Partitions of Poland
The American Revolution
Toward a new universe: the downfall of Aristotle (1543-1687)
Pattern of development
Johannes Kepler
Galileo
Unravelling The Mysteries of The Heart: William Harvey and The Discovery of The Circulatory System
Galen's physiology
From Faith To Reason: Deism and Enlightenment Philosophy
Blinded by Science
Deism
The Early Modern era (1500-1789)
The Age of Revolutions (1789-1848)
Analyzing The French Revolution and Revolutions In General
Introduction
The French Revolution
The Rise of Napoleon (1795-1808)
Napoleon's rise to power
Consolidating his power
The Napoleonic state
Napoleon's Years of Triumph and Fall (1800-1815)
The Continental System and Spanish Ulcer
Napoleon's invasion of Russia
The end of the Napoleonic Empire
Revolution and Reaction In Europe (1815-1848)
The Congress of Vienna
The pattern of revolts
Revolutions in the 1820's
Revolutionary fever spreads: the 1830's
The Revolutions of 1848
The Agricultural Background To The Industrial Revolution
Introduction
A new agricultural revolution
The Technological Background To The Industrial Revolution
The medieval roots of the Industrial Revolution
The textile industry in Britain
Ripsaws and bellows, coal and iron
The Start of The Industrial Revolution In Britain (c.1750-1800)
The Spread of Industrialization Beyond Britain (c.1850-1900)
The Cycle of Foreign Investment and The Spread O F Industrialization
Nationalism & imperialism in the Late Nineteenth Century
Disease and The Decline of The Hapsburg Empire In The Late 1800's
Nationalism and Its Impact In Europe (1848-1914)
Introduction
European Imperial Expansion In Africa (c.1870-1914)
Introduction
The "Dark Continent"
British Rule In India (c.1600-1947)
Introduction
Company expansion (1601-1773)
Growing parliamentary control and rising tensions (1778-1857)
From the British Raj to independence (1858-1947)
The Decline of Imperial China (c.1800-1911)
Introduction
The Opium War and its aftermath (1839-64)
The Emergence of Modern Japan (1868-1937)
Decline of the Tokugawa Shogunate
The Meiji Restoration (1868-c.1890)
Japan's quest for empire
The upheavals of the early twentieth century (1914-45)
War and revolution in Europe (1914-20)
The Causes and Outbreak of World War I
Introduction
Economic competition
German unification
The Road to war (June-August, 1914)
The war of movement (August-September, 1914)
The new face of war
Total War
New fronts and new weapons
Material and human resources on the home front
The Eastern Front
New Fronts
New Weapons
The end of the "war to end all wars" (1917-18)
Introduction
Europe's colonies
Eastern Europe
Background To The Russian Revolution
Causes and background
The Russian Revolution and Civil War (1917-20)
The 1917 Revolution and Bolshevik triumph.
The Russian Civil War (1918-20).
The Communist Dictatorships of Lenin & Stalin (1920-39)
Lenin’s Rule
Stalin’s revolution (1924-40).
Depression, Fascism, and world war (1920-45)
Post War Boom and Bust (1920-29)
The illusion of prosperity
The Crash
The Great Depression (1929-39)
Efforts to solve the Depression
Keynesian economics: a new view of the state's role in the national economy
Benito Mussolini and The Rise of Fascism In Italy (1919-25)
Introduction: the response to Communism
Mussolini and the rise of Fascism in Italy
Adolf Hitler and The Rise of Nazism In Germany (1919-39)
Introduction
From chancellor to dictator (1933-38)
The growing darkness
Conclusion
The Road To World War II (1919-39)
Introduction
France, Britain and the Treaty of Versailles
The Depression and the Far East (1931-41)
The Russian Revolution and Soviet Union
The cycle of aggression and the road to war in the 1930's
World War II In Europe (1939-45)
Blitzkrieg (1939-41)
The allied response and counter-attack (1942-45)
Germany triumphant (1939-41)
The Eastern Front (1939-1944)
The Western Front (1942-44)
The end of the Third Reich (1944-45)
A New Balance of Power and Cold War (1945-1948)
The aftermath of World War II
A new balance of power emerges (1945-48)
The Cold War begins (1948-55)
New Rules For A New Game: The Evolution and Anatomy of Cold War Crises
Introduction
Wars and crises up to 1945
The new rules of the game
The Cold War in Europe (1948-55)
The struggle widens: East Asia (1945-53)
Missed Opportunities: The Aftermath of Stalin's Death (1953-56)
Introduction
Mixed signals
Nikita Khrushchev
Unrest and crisis in Eastern Europe
Postwar Conformity and The Seeds of Dissent In The 1950s
Pressures to conform
Conformity and deformity
Things we don’t talk about
Conclusion: toward a decade of dissent
The Height of The Cold War (1957-72)
Rising tensions
The Berlin Wall
The Cuban Missile Crisis
Vietnam (1954-75)
The Nuclear Arms Race (1945-2001)
Introduction
MAD
Gradually defusing the nuclear time-bomb (1962-2001)
The later Cold War and the “New World Order” (1970-2000)
A More Detailed Look At The Chinese Revolution
The Cultural Revolution (1966-70)
China since the Cultural Revolution
There are three types of evolution that have driven the development of human societies. The first of these is biological evolution where nature very slowly adapts us physically to our changing environment. Whether one believes in the theory of dynamic biological change and evolution or a more static creationist model of biology, one cannot deny we are biological beings with certain characteristics that largely distinguish us from other animals. There are five major characteristics that make humans unique. One is our binocular and color vision that gives us depth perception and a more detailed view of our surroundings respectively. This sends a lot of information to our brains for processing, making us very much a visually oriented species with 90% of the information we take in coming in through the eyes. Second we have upright posture, which frees our hands. This brings us to the third factor, our hands with opposable thumbs, which allow us to manipulate various objects and our environment. That in itself would be worth very little if it were not for the fourth characteristic, our brain that allows us to use our hands in intelligent and creative ways. The brain also makes possible the fifth characteristic, speech which allows us to share knowledge and ideas quickly so each generation does not have to rediscover that knowledge on its own, giving it time to discover and develop new knowledge and ideas.
This unique combination of biological characteristics is the basis for two other types of evolution: cultural and technological. One can see cultural evolution as how people adapt their behavior to the environment. Since these are conscious rather than totally random, or non-existent, changes, they occur at a much faster pace than biological change. However, the force of tradition typically keeps people from rapidly changing long-standing cultural traditions that generally have served society well in the past. This is because people through most of history have barely survived with little or no surplus, giving them little or no margin for error if the new change does not work, and making them reluctant to change cultural norms very rapidly.
Technological evolution enables people to adapt or change their environment to meet their needs. This is often something that can be done without immediately changing cultural norms. Therefore, it tends to happen at a much faster rate than cultural change. Not only that, but each new invention, being developed consciously and often based on previous successful inventions, is likely to improve the standard of living. This makes people more likely to develop new inventions, further improving their standard of living, and so on.
One of the most important concepts to understand about history is how any particular event or development rarely has just one cause or just one result. Typically, if one part of a culture changes, it leads to changes in the other parts of the culture. One can visualize each part of a culture (social structure, political structure, technology, the arts, religion, economy, military institutions, etc.) as being connected to each of the other parts by rubber bands. If one part (e.g., the economy) changes and moves forward, it tries to pull all the other parts along with it. If any, some, or all the other parts do not move, the rubber bands connecting them stretch as the distance between them increases. If the distance and tension become too great, one or more of the rubber bands snaps, signifying some form of breakdown or dramatic change, such as a revolution.
The combination of cultural and technological change along with the Rubber Band Theory helps explain the overall flow of history. The process driving this comes increasingly from technological change. This leads to surpluses that lead, among other things, to wars and conflict since people have typically fought over material wealth. These surpluses and the wars they cause lead to efforts to find new and better technologies. These create even more surpluses and wars, more new technologies, and so on. Since there are more technologies on which to base new ones each time this feedback cycles around, technology growth continually accelerates in speed and intensity. This process has created four successive stages of development in human society, each of which feeds back into the cycle of technological growth, thus leading to the next stage.
First, through the vast majority of our species’ existence our ancestors followed a hunting and gathering way of life, with men typically doing the hunting and women gathering fruits and grains while watching the children. Such societies were highly mobile as they pursued wild game. They had little or no surplus and therefore virtually no private property since, being mobile, they could carry very little with them. By the same token, they had to be highly cooperative and share freely, since a man or the men as a group did not always bring home any meat and had to rely on what the women had gathered. All this made for a somewhat egalitarian society with little difference in status between men and women. At this early stage, with little previous technology to draw upon, new technologies developed slowly.
That changed somewhat with the next stage: the invention of agriculture (c.8000 B.C.E.). This forced people to settle down as they generated progressively larger surpluses. For the first time, people could amass private property, which led to different social classes distinguished by wealth. That in turn triggered conflict within the society and wars between societies. With survival based increasingly on brute strength, men emerged as the leaders and women’s status started to drop.
Social stratification and conflict accelerated during the next stage, pre-industrial civilization, which started c.3000 B.C.E. Two new inventions especially distinguished this stage. First of all, metallurgy, provided new forms of wealth and weapons with which to fight over that wealth. Writing helped people keep track of and amass larger amounts of wealth. More wealth led to wars of much greater intensity, frequency, and destructiveness. It also further reduced the status of women who had lost virtually all control over property by now.
The fourth stage, industrial society, started in Britain (c.1750) and has spread rapidly across the globe since then. This period has been especially marked by the rapid acceleration of technological growth. Unfortunately, this has been particularly true of military technology, which has increased the destructive power of warfare by several quantum leaps as seen in the two world wars which dominated the first half of the twentieth century. Ironically, the status of women has risen dramatically in industrial societies, largely because machines have reduced the need for or value of brute muscle, thus making women more competitive for jobs and opportunities, even in the military.
Technology is a double edged sword that has helped generate by far the highest standard of living and longest life expectancy in human existence. But the spiraling rate of technological growth over the past 200 years has created progressively greater stresses on the “rubber bands” holding human society together. This is because, compared to technological growth, all the other aspects of society (social structure, religion, morals, etc.) are much more dependent for their rates of change on cultural evolution which, as mentioned above, is very traditional and slow. This growing gap between the rate technological change and that of other parts of society has created ever mounting stresses and strains, and continues to do so as technological growth continues to accelerate. These problems break down into three main categories.
First of all, most aspects of society, being more bounded by traditional rates of cultural change, cannot keep up with and adapt to the rate of technological growth. All too often, new technologies are introduced without studying or trying to anticipate their long-range effects. An example of this is the birth control pill introduced in 1960. While the Pill did free women from being burdened with large numbers of children, which was the goal of its inventors, few, if any, people gave serious thought to how the Pill would change people’s attitudes toward sex and marriage, or how that would affect the status of women and the raising of future generations of children.
A second problem lies in the unbelievable destructive power of modern weapons, in particular hydrogen bombs. Before the industrial revolution, the destructiveness of war was largely proportional to the number of men directly engaged in it, and the number of those men was largely determined by the relatively low productivity of the pre-industrial societies that had to support them over time. This put distinct limits on how long and destructive wars could be, thus giving societies time to recover. Modern warfare, however, is by no means limited by such factors. A relatively few men can launch devastating destruction upon the planet totally out of proportion to their numbers. The technology of destruction has grown even faster than the technology of production, making total war as we understand it obsolete.
Finally, modern technology has transformed our economy from being mainly concerned with producing enough for everyone to being concerned with selling all it produces. This has spawned a pervasive culture of materialism and consumerism heavily influenced by advertising. Modern economies rely on more sales and consumption and sales to make the money to expand their production, which requires more consumption, and so on. Given the vastly larger population that is involved in this cycle and the ever growing levels of per capita consumption, there is no way the environment can support this level of growth.
All this adds up to a fairly grim prospect for the future. However, we are an ingenious and adaptable species that could very well see us successfully through our technological adolescence. For example, during the Cold War the United States and Soviet Union did manage to avoid a catastrophic third world war. While we are not out of the woods yet, there is still hope while there are still some woods left for us.
While human history is primarily concerned with cultural and technological evolution, we need to understand a possible scenario for the evolution of the biological characteristics that have served as the basis for the human species’ other advances. Maybe a good starting point would be some 75,000,000 years ago. This is a mere drop in the bucket of time, but we have a long way to go before reaching anything closely resembling humans. We pick up our story with the lowly tree shrew.
The tree shrew, which appears quite similar to a mouse, hardly looks like anything we would like to call our ancestor. Yet scientists think this little creature was our connecting link with the lower forms of mammals. Converting this animal into a human would tax the skills of the most imaginative artist. It lacked binocular and color vision, upright posture, hands with opposable thumbs, a larger better-developed brain, and speech. In other words, it had none of the five characteristics that distinguish humans as a species. It also had to lose its tail, fur, and long snout.
The first critical step was moving into the trees away from intense competition on the ground. Life in the trees was more three-dimensional, involving accurately judging distances from branch to branch or else taking some nasty falls. This helped the development of binocular vision. Life in the trees also required hanging on to things to keep from falling. As a result, a primitive grasping hand started to evolve. Also, the more three-dimensional world of the trees required more awareness of things in all directions. This stimulated brain size and development.
Some 25,000,000 years later some tree shrews have evolved into the prosimians. These included the tarsier and ring-tailed lemur, which are often seen at the zoo and mistaken for monkeys. The prosimians resembled humans much more than the tree shrew, having binocular vision, shorter snouts, hands of a sort, and bigger brains. However, they still lacked erect posture and speech, while their brains, hands, and eyes fell far short of human standards. Some 40,000,000 years ago monkeys evolved from the prosimians. Although showing no obvious new developments toward human characteristics, they were more intelligent than prosimians and had better developed hands and eyes.
Next, we come to the apes, our closest cousins. Apes practiced one activity, tree swinging, that helped lead to human evolution in several ways. First of all, since tree swinging put the ape in an upright position, its head had to switch its position in order to see where it was going. A quadrupedal (four-legged) animal's head connects to the spine at the back of the skull. If we were to stand a dog on its hind legs, its head's normal position would have it looking straight up. The same was true for the still quadrupedal ape when it started tree swinging, making it more prone to crash into trees. Therefore, the ape's normal head position moved to connect to the spine at the base of the skull in order to adapt to this new tree swinging posture. This also paved the way for the later adaptation of erect posture that would free the hands for tool use. Speaking of the hands, tree swinging also led to more use and development of the hands giving apes better hand dexterity. The fairly rapid speeds at which apes swung also meant a lot of things came at them quickly and forced them to react quickly, thus leading to further brain development.
If apes had so much going for them, why did they not all evolve into humans? In general, one can say that evolution and natural selection are conservative and do not favor changes unless forced to by circumstances. This was especially the case with chimps, who had an easy niche in nature and felt no need to evolve. It was also true of gorillas whose great size let them stay pretty much the same. Timing was also important. Gibbons and orangutans were swinging in the trees for so long that their arms became over specialized for tree swinging and could not adapt well to life on the ground where our ancestors evolved. On the other hand, baboons came out of the trees too early and had not swung long enough to develop their upright posture. Thus they remained quadrupedal.
Still, some three to five million years ago some apes did emerge from the trees into the African Savannah (grassland), and the question once again is why? The most likely answer is for food, and this is supported by the most plentiful and durable evidence we have from then: their teeth and jawbones. About this time their molars and jawbones got much bigger, suggesting they were eating lots of seeds and grains, which required massive jaws and molars to grind them up. This also meant that the canine teeth, their main defensive weapon in the harsh and dangerous Savannah, got in the way of chewing. Choosing between defense and eating, nature decided eating was more important and the canines were lost.
This of course created the problem of defense against predators. The solution seems to have been some sort of weapon. It was certainly nothing more than a stick, bone, or rock, but it apparently was effective. If it had not been effective we would not be here to talk about it. The importance of all this is that for the first time in the history of life on the planet, an animal was using a form of technology to extend its power dramatically and increase its chances of survival. The dawn of humans, or more properly, hominids had arrived.
The term hominids refers to modern humans (i.e., ourselves), our most direct ancestors, and collateral branches of our family tree that came to a dead end, such as the Neanderthals. . The earliest of these hominids, known as Australopithecines, lived from one to five million years ago. They were somewhat human in that they had better developed eyes, posture, hands, and brains than the apes. However, scientists do not generally call them humans because their brains were still much smaller than ours (about 450cc compared to around 1400cc for modern man). Their hands also had little or no precision grip, and they probably could not speak. Many see Australopithecines as the missing link between apes and humans.
There were several varieties of Australopithecines. The earliest, Australopithecus Afarensis, provided us with one of the most amazing discoveries in archaeology: forty percent of one skeleton. That may not sound like much, but it was unheard of to find that much of such an old skeleton intact. The scientist who found it, Donald Johansen, was so struck by this find that he even gave it the name Lucy after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."
Australopithecus Afarensis was the likely ancestor of two other branches of Australopithecines. One branch, the larger in size, was vegetarian. The other branch ate both meat and plants. The importance of this is that hunting for meat required more inventiveness than did collecting vegetation. As a result, the meat eaters developed tools (possibly including containers for better gathering) and weapons much more than the vegetarians did.
Eventually the meat eating Australopithecines evolved into what many scientists call the first true humans, Homo Habilis ("handy man") with a brain capacity of 650cc. They used and made very crude tools, although they still could not speak. For that reason, other scientists reserve the honor of the first humans for people known as Homo Erectus who had a brain capacity of some 750cc., which gave them the ability to speak.
A good deal of controversy surrounds the evolution of humans and their family tree. However, our evolution over the last million years has revolved increasingly around our technological and cultural innovations rather than biological changes. This is largely because on the one hand, biological changes are purely random, thus making evolution quite slow. However, technological and cultural changes are the products of more conscious and focused efforts to solve problems or create something. Therefore, such innovations happen at a much faster pace and accelerate the pace of change since they build upon previous efforts.
There were two main types of technological development our prehistoric ancestors came up with early on: flint tools and fire. Flint is unique among rocks because, when hit in the right way, it shatters, leaving very thin and razor-sharp pieces that can be worked into blades. Over time, as people spread to areas with little available flint or used up once plentiful supplies, they had to make more efficient use of this precious resource. At first, people were somewhat wasteful of it, maybe making only one hand ax out of a block of flint. It is estimated they got only 2-8 inches of blade for every pound of flint they used. Early Ice Age peoples came up with a method of knocking chips off of a piece of flint and using each chip for an ax or spearhead. As a result, they were able to get up to forty inches of blade per pound of flint. Their descendants would further refine this to get forty feet of blade per pound of flint.
Of all the things that our ancestors invented or mastered to protect themselves from the harshness of the physical environment, none was more important than fire. As the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote, it was the "brightness of fire that devises all” To the Greeks, it was the source of their crafts and civilization itself. It was what distinguished humans from the rest of the animal kingdom and gave them so much power; too much power as far as Zeus, king of the Greek gods was concerned.
The first people who mastered fire could use it, but probably not make it. As a result, they depended on natural sources such as a volcanoes or forest fires caused by lightning for their fire. Considering animals' natural fear of fire, we must admire the courage of that first individual who dared to pick up a burning ember and take it home. Once our ancestors had harnessed fire and found a way to keep it burning, they discovered some important uses for it.
The first use was probably for hunting and defense against wild animals, since it was obvious that animals feared fire. A common hunting technique would be to start a brush fire and use it to drive game toward other hunters or over a cliff. The value of fire for light and warmth soon became apparent, especially after our ancestors migrated out of Africa into the cooler climates of Europe and Asia. Fire could also harden sharpened sticks into better weapons. Finally, fire was useful for cooking food with several important results.
Cooked meat in particular held several advantages. The heat caused a chemical reaction that created proteins out of the amino acids in meat, thus making it more nutritious and leading to a healthier population. Fire also killed microbes in the meat, making it safer to eat. Finally, fire softened meat, making it possible for the very young and sick to chew it and thus be nourished. Altogether, cooking led to a healthier population that could grow and spread across the globe. We today are so concerned with overpopulation that we lose sight of how important and difficult it was to maintain a stable or growing population until very recently. Back then the average life expectancy was probably no more than twenty years, and half of all children died before the age of five. Thus extinction was a very real possibility. Cooking removed that possibility a bit.
Around 200,000 years ago, the planet started turning much colder. The cause of the ice ages is still unknown and subject of several theories including variations in the tilt of the earth's axis and its orbital path, continental drift, and clouds of cosmic dust blocking some of the sun’s radiation. Whatever the cause or causes, glacial sheets of ice moved south, covering much of the Northern Hemisphere. Summertime temperatures in England probably reached no more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit. By the same token, winters were horribly cold.
Such harsh conditions forced important changes in our ancestors and the various other life forms then. Keep in mind that physical adaptations were not planned or conscious. Rather, natural selection just accelerated the process whereby genetic mutations would be favored. What emerged was a whole new array of animals: giant cave bears, saber toothed cats, and woolly mammoths and rhinos to name a few. Our ancestors also went through some changes as well. Homo Erectus, as our prehistoric ancestors from then are called, had moved into cooler climates in search of game and living space. However, when the glaciers came, they were forced to adapt. What had been a fairly stagnant culture and species in stable conditions now changed at a relatively rapid rate. Even more rapid than their physical evolution was the evolution of their technology and culture.
At this point, we see a cycle of technological development emerge to accelerate our evolution. Tool use stimulated brain development, which helped lead to more successful hunting and gathering. The improved diet and resulting brain development stimulated more tool development, better hunting, and so on. This basic feedback set in motion by hunting and tool use continued to repeat itself through the ages and is still at work today. Each new invention we come up with extends our power and also stimulates us to come up with more new inventions. This was a process that had started long before with the Australopithecines and continues now.
One of the effects of a bigger brain was the evolution of speech. This allowed both closer cooperation and more efficient sharing of information in such ventures as hunting. Therefore, each generation could easily learn the skills its ancestors had developed and perfected over the years instead of spending most of its time re-discovering them. This stimulated more brain development and ability to speak, encouraging more cooperation and sharing of knowledge, and so on. This feedback also fed back into and further accelerated the previous cycle of technological development, stimulating more sophisticated speech, etc.
However, there were severe limits to early humans' speech. For one thing, their pharynx, or voice box, did not drop enough to allow the full range of sounds we are accustomed to making now. As a result, their physical ability to speak was only about one-tenth of ours in terms of the sounds they could make and the speed at which they could make them. Their mental ability to speak was also severely limited. It takes a brain capacity of about 750cc to reach the ability to speak. Babies today reach that threshold between one and two years of age. Many prehistoric humans may never have reached that capacity. Or if they did reach the threshold of speech, they probably reached it much later in life than children today do. Combining that with their short life spans, prehistoric peoples had little time to develop anything profound to say, greatly impeding cultural and technological progress for a million years or so.
Better hunting and gathering technology. The Ice Ages also reduced the amount of vegetation available for gathering, thus increasing our ancestors’ reliance on hunting and develop more powerful weapons. When a better ability to speak combined with the process of each invention stimulating ideas for even more new inventions, a dramatic leap in technology and culture also took place. By 10,000 B.C.E., our ancestors, known as Cro Magnon but essentially Homo Sapiens Sapiens (i.e., ourselves) in a primitive setting, had learned to use other materials, notably wood, bone, and antler, in combination with flint, thus vastly expanding their range of tools and weapons compared to the crude and limited tool kit of the earliest hominids:
the use of bone, antler, and ivory for making tools that flint was unsuited for;
the sewing needle that led to warmer, better fitting clothes;
the spear which both extended the range and power of the hunter as a throwing weapon while maintaining a safe distance from dangerous animals when used as a hand held weapon;
barbed and grooved spearheads, which, being more deadly, led to better hunting;
the bolo for tripping up game;
the ability to make fire, giving them a stable source of warmth;
grooved air channels under the fire which led to hotter fires (which would lead to fired ceramics, which led to pottery and the kiln, and eventually to the furnace for smelting metals with all their contributions to civilization;
flint sickles, with bone or wood handles, which led to better gathering and a healthier population;
the burin, the first tool used for making other tools;
woven baskets, which also led to better gathering and more food;
fishing with spears, nets, and gorges (a type of hook), which led to a more stable food supply; and
crude shelters, built at first as wind breaks in the entrances of caves, and later as free-standing structures
Looking at all these inventions, Cro Magnons seem to tower over their ancestors, much as we see ourselves towering above them. This is deceptive, however, because we are building on what our ancestors built. Without the accomplishments of Cro Magnon and those who went before them, our own civilization could never have evolved.
All these new advances had profound implications for the future. For one thing, our ancestors’ larger brains would help lead to the development of the human family. Secondly, increasingly efficient hunting, gathering, and fishing made possible a more settled lifestyle, giving people time and opportunities to notice certain things around them, in particular the way seeds grow into plants. This revelation was the basis for the next great step in human evolution, the food producing revolution, or agriculture. Finally, better brain development and technology inspired and made possible new activities and behaviors that make the Cro Magnons seem much more modern to us.
Our ancestors’ behavior over the last 100,000 years or so also shows a much higher degree of intelligence than ever before. For example, they seem to have first realized the inevitability of death and created a religion to prepare for it. We have found people buried facing east and west, and also with the pollen of flowers in their graves. Our ancestors apparently worshipped the spirits of cave bears with whom they competed for living space. One Neanderthal cave has the skulls of some eighty bears arranged around it.
Prehistoric people also seem to have cared for their sick and infirm as evidenced by the skeleton of one man who lived to about forty years of age (old for back then) with the use of only one arm. They also apparently practiced female infanticide (killing female babies) as a form of population control. This is a comment not so much on our ancestors’ brutal nature as on the brutal conditions they had to deal with in order to survive. Not practicing such a measure might have meant extinction for the whole tribe or species.
Cro Magnons seem more modern to us culturally as well, especially in their art. In southern France and Spain they left a number of cave paintings that are amazing for their artistic touch and sensitivity. These paintings depict the various animals people then hunted. Their function may have been some sort of sympathetic magic in which portraying a successful hunt would cause a successful hunt. Whatever their purpose, these paintings are striking in the way they depict these animals in motion. They also can make us feel much more akin to these people we call our ancestors.
The dramatic physical changes our ancestors experienced also triggered equally significant social changes that led to the evolution of the most basic social unit of our species: the family. One likely scenario involved two lines of development converging to create the family. First, as our ancestors moved out of the trees into the savannah in search of grains and grasses, they occasionally came across a carcass that they would pick clean for the meat. This casual scavenging gave them a taste for meat that developed into more intentional hunting. With the females tied down by the children, the males were generally the only ones free to hunt. Meanwhile the females and children would gather edible plants. Most likely, hunting was rarely successful, providing only about 10-20% of the food our ancestors ate, although the meat did provide valuable protein. The need to supplement the usually meager returns on their hunting may give us another clue as to why the males kept returning to the rest of the group. This pattern of food sharing created bonds vital to the evolution of the family.
Another development had to do with the evolution of a large brain and head which made the birthing process for humans more difficult. As a result, nature compensated by having human babies come to full term prematurely, making them among the most helpless animals at birth in all of nature. This greatly increased and prolonged children’s dependence on their mothers, who in turn needed protection and help getting food, especially in the harsh environment of the savannah.
The question is: why did males keep returning to the females and children? According to one theory, the answer lies in the evolution of year round mating in females to replace the seasonal estrus cycle that occurs in most mammals. The females who developed this pattern (by a purely random mutation) were better able to attract males to help them with food gathering and protection. As a result, more of their children survived to pass this characteristic on to future generations until it became the prevailing trait in humans.
Over time, these factors (year-round mating and food sharing) created permanent bonds that we have come to know as the family. Strengthening these bonds were two other factors. One was the added companionship and security of family life. We know, for example, that our prehistoric ancestors would feed and care for crippled members of their group despite their inability to contribute significantly to everyone else’s survival. Secondly, there was the emotional satisfaction that children gave their parents in terms of companionship, care in old age, and as an extension of themselves.
For centuries there has been a controversy over the source of differences in male and female behavior and values within our species. Oftentimes described as the “Nature vs. Nurture” debate, it focuses on whether differences between men and women are the result of genetic or environmental factors. Coming largely from the Women’s Movement in the 1970s, the pendulum swung heavily to the side of nurture, the assumption being that aggressive tendencies in boys were the result of cultural factors and upbringing. The hope and belief was that if boys could be raised in an environment that didn’t stress aggression and violence, they would be no more aggressive than girls. Unfortunately, more recent research shows things are not quite that simple. While the environment is important in determining the way aggression is channeled, there are also inherent genetic factors influencing the equation. Testosterone levels in an individual are one factor. How men and women’s brains are structured is another. This may be the result of the hunting and gathering lifestyle our ancestors followed for the vast majority of our species’ existence and the different roles men and women played in it.
For men, who typically did the hunting, stalking and waiting for game required two main mental abilities: staying focused on one goal for long periods of time and keeping quiet during that prolonged period of waiting. This discouraged verbal socializing that could scare off any game. Nature would favor males whose brains were adapted to these qualities by awarding them successful hunts while killing off the more chatty ones through unsuccessful hunting and starvation.
Women, who performed very different tasks, required very different qualities. While looking for and gathering any edible vegetation, they also might have to keep track of several children and look out for predators. Unlike men, who had to stay quiet, those women who cooperated with one another (especially in looking out for one another’s children) and communicated verbally would be much more successful than women who operated quietly and independently of one another. For one thing, the sound of a number of women talking might be enough to scare off some potential predators. Such cooperation and communication would also create strong social bonds between the women, providing much of the glue that has kept societies together down through the ages. And just as nature would favor men with brains adapted to focus quietly on one goal, it would favor women whose brains were more adapted to verbal socializing and keeping track of several things at once.
Indeed, recent research has shown that men and women’s brains are largely structured in those ways. Women will typically use five times as many words in a situation as men will. Also, while men will listen with just one side of their brains, women will use both sides, indicating more of a talent for multi-tasking. It is important to note that these are general, not absolute, tendencies in men and women. Within each gender there is a wide range of differences between individuals, thus creating a large gray area that one certainly could not describe as absolutely male or female. Thus one should not use these general tendencies as supporting a “biology is destiny” argument for locking men and women into certain rigid roles. By the same token, these are tendencies we cannot afford to ignore in discussing issues of gender differences.
Cursed is the ground for your sake; in sorrow shall you eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to you; and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face shall you eat bread till you return to the ground; for out of it were you taken; for dust you are, and unto dust you shall return.(Genesis)
Some 10,000 years ago, only 5-10,000,000 people inhabited the planet, certainly no more. Our ancestors’ technology had taken them a long way, but they still lived as part of nature, not in any way as its master. They did not realize it, but the last one per cent of our existence so far would see unbelievable changes sweep across the planet and change its face forever. Humanity stood on the verge of over-running the earth with vast numbers of its species. Supporting those vast numbers was possibly the greatest revolution in our history: agriculture, the ability for people to produce their own food supply. The agricultural revolution had two parts: the domestication of plants and the domestication of livestock.
Starting with the birth of agriculture most of history’s major developments have taken place in the vast land mass known as Eurasia and extending across the Mediterranean and North Africa. Europeans who dominated the globe in the late 1800s and early 1900s claimed religious, cultural, and even biological superiority as the basis for their predominance. While such ideas hold little favor today, there still remains the question of why Asia and Europe have held central place in the history of civilization. Much of the answer probably rests in geographic and biological factors.
The underlying factor is that Eurasia lies along an East-West axis in mostly temperate zones. In contrast, Africa and the Americas are oriented from north to south and thus straddle a variety of climates. As a result, crops found in Eurasia are more adapted to the same diseases, climate, and seasonal variations in sunlight (which determine when plants germinate, flower, and bear fruit). Therefore, domesticated crops and intensive agriculture can spread more rapidly across Eurasia than they can across the vastly different climactic zones in Africa and the Americas. For example, because of intervening tropical zones, the cultivation of corn in the Temperate Zone of Mexico in the northern hemisphere never spread to Peru in the southern hemisphere until after 1500 when Europeans conquered both regions. Similarly, crops adapted for temperate zones in northern parts of Africa did not reach the southern tip of Africa until Dutch settlers introduced them in the 1600s.
Of course, there are also topographical and even climactic barriers within Eurasia, such as the Tibetan Plateau, Himalayan Mountains, and Asian steppes isolating East Asia from the rest of Eurasia. Therefore, agriculture probably developed independently in China and spread from there to Southeast Asia, Korea, and Japan. However, despite topographical barriers, the similar climates of East Asia and the western half of Eurasia ultimately allowed crop sharing in both directions, thus helping both civilizations advance more quickly.
More specifically, it was Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) where agriculture first evolved in Eurasia and then spread westward across North Africa and Europe and eastward to the Indus River Valley. Environmental factors favored this specific region as the birthplace of agriculture. First of all, Mesopotamia, and the Middle East in general, have cool rainy winters and hot dry summers, encouraging plants, especially cereals, to develop large seeds for rapid growth in the limited growing season. This produces relatively small plants without woody stems, which, in turn leads to cereals with lots of large seeds (i.e., more food) that are easy to harvest (without woody stems).
Another factor is that Mesopotamia has many self-pollinating crops (six of them exclusive to that area) that can reproduce without pollination with other plants. The importance here is that recessive traits that are vital to farming but harmful to the plant in nature do not get bred out of the plant through cross-pollination. For example, along with the dominant trait for grains and pea pods to shatter in order to spread their seeds is a recessive trait for a few plants not to shatter. This made it easier for people to harvest them, plant more of them next season, and spread the varieties with the normally harmful tendency not to shatter.
Along with the spread of agriculture from Mesopotamia, other ideas and technologies could spread as well, leading to the relatively rapid development and spread of civilization across Eurasia compared to other regions of the globe whose environments prevented or greatly slowed down such exchanges. And, of course, after the impetus started by Mesopotamia, the exchange of new ideas became two-way, further accelerating the rise and spread of civilization in Eurasia.
In addition to factors unique to Mesopotamia,two other converging factors led to the domestication of plants. First, better hunting and gathering technology provided a more stable food supply. Second, warmer and wetter conditions in the Near East at the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago led to the spread of cereal grains. Together these provided more stable food supplies that allowed people to settle down in more permanent villages. These villages produced two very different effects that together helped lead to the discovery and triumph of agriculture.
One was a growing population that needed more food than the hunting and gathering lifestyle could supply. This may have been partly due to earlier weaning of the young. Since women in hunting and gathering societies were always on the move, they could deal with only one highly dependent child at a time. Therefore, so they have only one small child to carry at a time, they would nurse their young up to age four to interrupt their fertility until their youngest child was less dependent on the mother. More settled village life made such strict birth control less mandatory, allowing earlier weaning and a higher birth rate as a result.
Settled village life also was gave people the opportunity to watch seeds in one place for a long time and notice how seeds grow into plants. Exactly how and when this happened is not known, but women probably made this discovery since they gathered the seeds and had more opportunity to notice how they sprouted and grew. Possible scenarios of this discovery include seeds spilled near camp or a wet grain supply sprouting and growing. However it happened, the realization of the potential of this discovery was probably gradual.
So was the transition to a completely settled agricultural lifestyle. While later civilizations would see agriculture as a gift of the gods, hunting and gathering peoples, such as the early Hebrews quoted above, saw it as a curse since it involved much more work and went against the traditional ways of life they had followed for countless generations. Whereas tradition today is generally shoved aside and scorned, we should keep in mind that until very recently, it was a major force in people's lives. They did not take change so lightly as we do since it disrupted the fragile stability of their lives. So the question arises as to why did people turn to farming.
The most likely explanation was they had to. For a long time after the discovery of agriculture, people continued to follow a hunting and gathering lifestyle mixed in with some casual agriculture, such as scattering seeds along a riverbank or in a field and coming back in a few months to harvest it. This did improve the food supply, and dramatically increased the number of people that could be supported. Even the primitive agriculture practiced then could support up to fifty times more people than hunting and gathering could. However, those extra people put a growing strain on the natural environment’s ability to feed them. One solution was to expand the agriculture. Of course, that led to more food and more population, causing even more strain on the natural food supply and leading to further expansion of the agriculture. In time, both men and women had to devote more and more time to tending the crops and less time to their traditional hunting and gathering ways. Eventually, they settled down and became full-time farmers.
Settled agricultural life had dramatic effects on human society and the environment. First of all, farming required less cooperation and sharing than hunting and gathering did. Before, all members of a tribe had to hunt together and share the results. Since there was no private property or anything to fight over, hunting and gathering societies were (and still are) relatively peaceful and harmonious. In contrast, agriculture allowed individual families to farm their own lands. As a result, private property evolved which led to social classes and more conflict in society between rich and poor.
New agricultural techniques, which replaced the more primitive slash and burn agriculture, also had their effects. The two-field system, which left one field fallow each year to replenish the soil, and crop rotation, which used different crops to take different nutrients out of the soil, reduced soil exhaustion. Both of these, combined with one other technique, irrigation, also created a surplus of grain and the need for a high degree of organization and cooperation. That surplus and level of organization in turn would lead to the rise of the first cities and civilizations with specialized crafts and technologies such as writing and metallurgy.
In the process of farming, our ancestors also inadvertently disrupted natural selection. There were two varieties of wheat they collected on the hillsides of the Near East. The dominant type shattered upon the slightest touch, scattering the seeds so the species could spread and survive. The other, recessive type, did not scatter its seeds so easily, and thus was harder to find. However, it was easier to harvest since the seeds did not scatter. As a result, a higher proportion of this variety was collected and planted than occurred in nature. With each succeeding year a higher proportion of the non-scattering wheat was harvested and planted. Natural selection had been reversed.
About the same time as the invention of agriculture (c.8000 BC) another revolution occurred: the taming of wild animals for domestic use. As with agriculture, the more settled lifestyle that better hunting and gathering allowed at the end of the last Ice Age was important, because it gave people the time and opportunity to keep and domesticate animals.
However, while animals of many different species have been tamed and kept as pets by humans, only a very few have been big enough (100 pounds or more) to be useful as sources of food and labor while meeting three basic criteria for true domestication. First, they must be herbivorous (plant eaters) and fast growing so they use up a minimum of our food resources and quickly become useful to us as a food source. Herbivores directly convert the plants they eat into meat, while carnivores require at least one extra level (i.e., other animals) in the food chain to survive. Therefore, pound for pound, it will take up to ten times as much plant nutrition to raise and support a carnivore as it does to for an herbivore.
Secondly, animals suitable for domestication should live in herds or packs with a strict social hierarchy of which humans can assume leadership. The third criterion for domestication is that animals must be easy to tame and willing to breed in captivity. This also rules out most carnivores, who are typically aggressive hunters and less easily domesticated than herbivores. An obvious exception is dogs who, being relatively small, must hunt cooperatively in packs, making them more social and easy to domesticate.
As with agricultural plants, what few animal species that are suitable for domestication are found predominantly in Eurasia and especially in what we call the Middle East of the Fertile Crescent. There were five such animals. The first two of these to be domesticated were sheep and goats, largely because they were the most docile and easy to tame. Sheep provided meat, milk, and fur. They also were ruminants, which meant they could digest the cellulose from grass, thus making previously useless land (e.g., rocky hillsides) useful.
As with plants, our ancestors also tampered with natural selection, using selective breeding to produce animals that were fat, meaty, slow, and with long wool rather than fur that is shed seasonally, qualities that are useful for us but normally harmful to a species in the wild. Eventually, this process would produce sheep and goats that differed considerably from their cousins in nature.
The next animal domesticated was the pig (c.7000 BC). Unlike sheep and goats, the pig was not a ruminant and providing no milk or fur. However, pigs did provide meat and, being scavengers, had several advantages. Whether scavenging in the local woods or city streets, they were cheap to keep. They also needed little or no supervision, making them easy to keep compared to flocks of sheep and goats that needed constant shepherding. Finally, until very recently, towns and cities rarely had proper sanitation facilities, making them extremely unclean and unhealthy. Pigs scavenging in the streets helped keep them a little cleaner. In fact, many towns had laws protecting them, despite their mean dispositions and occasional habit of attacking children.
Cattle were next (c.6500 BC), which gave milk, meat, hides, and could eat grass. However, they were bigger, wilder, and tougher to tame than sheep, goats, and pigs, causing some civilizations, such as the Minoans on Crete, to see the bull as a symbol of power. Probably the most innovative use for the cow was to hitch it up to a plow, tapping a non-human energy source that increased the power at our disposal and the amount of land under cultivation many times over. However, the earliest farmers hitched the plow up to the cow's horns, not the most efficient use of its power.
Somewhat later (c.3000 BC), horses were domesticated with three far-reaching effects. First of all, they could be used as a source of labor like cattle although their full potential wouldn’t be tapped until the invention of the horse-collar (c.900 AD) which pulled from the chest rather than the neck. Secondly, mounted warfare made armies much more mobile, dangerous, and destructive. This was especially true of nomadic horsemen who would occasionally be the scourge of richer and more sedentary civilizations. Finally, mounted messengers dramatically quickened communications, making it possible to keep in touch with and rule much larger empires.
Agriculture and domestication of animals created two basic types of lifestyle: settled farmers tending their crops and livestock in the richer farmlands, and nomads wandering with their herds of sheep, goats, and horses across the dry grasslands on the fringes of civilization. As we shall see, these two ways of life, nomads and farmers, have clashed repeatedly throughout history. We shall also see how the infectious diseases domesticated herds of animals carried would play a critical role in Eurasia’s dominance of the planet.
To a nomad, first encountering an ancient city must have been much like walking into one of our science fiction movies, only more incredible. After all, we have cities on which to base our concepts of science fiction movies. The nomad really had little or nothing to give him the idea for our ancient city. One should see what a remarkable leap forward it was when the human animal started changing the face of the earth with cities. If agriculture, with its surplus that frees other people for other pursuits, is the backbone of civilization, cities are its heart and soul. Cities are where those extra people congregate to practice the arts and skills of civilization: pottery, metallurgy, weaving, art, architecture, literature, commerce, and so on. Even the word civilization shows the importance of cities to it, since it comes from the Latin word, civitas, meaning city.
The earliest cities arose around 8000 B.C.E., soon after the birth of agriculture, although they do not always seem to have been dependent on farming to survive. The oldest know city was Jericho, dating back to c.8000 B.C.E., making it twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids. Jericho was a desert city, located around a fresh water spring and largely owing its existence to that spring, since traveling caravans would trade their goods to the people of Jericho for its water. Jericho probably had several thousand inhabitants, who were well enough organized to build a fairly impressive city wall, citadel, and reservoir and dig a moat out of solid rock. Another early city, Catal Huyuk, in modern Turkey, dates from about 6500 B.C.E. It was a religious center, living off of a combination of hunting, farming, and trade.
Isolated cities such as Jericho and Catal Huyuk did not create civilizations. That accomplishment depends on a number of cities spread out over an area and sharing a common culture: language, technology, religion, art, and architecture. The first civilizations arose along hot dry river valleys in Egypt, Mesopotamia, northwest India, and China. The importance of rivers to these civilizations has given rise to the term : hydraulic civilization, coming from hydra, the Greek word for water. Such rivers provided easy transportation and trade for people in their valleys. Such people traded goods and also ideas. In time, a common culture would emerge, as each village would tend to adopt the better ideas and techniques of its neighbors along the river. The rivers and the hot dry climate spawned another activity critical to early civilizations: irrigation.
Let us focus on Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were the only reliable sources of water for farming. The fact that these rivers flooded annually gave the farmers the idea of bringing river water to their fields. At first, it involved nothing more than catching floodwaters and letting them gradually run back to the fields. In time, as the population and need for more farmland increased, the irrigation got more involved and complex. Such a project required a high degree of organization and cooperation, and that required leadership. Keep in mind, ancient peoples viewed rivers as gods. This meant that cutting into them and tapping their water supplies had religious implications. As a result, the local village priest supervised the irrigation.
In return, the priest would get offerings of grain and farm animals. Since these offerings were much more than he could consume himself, the surplus food served as the earliest form of "capital", that is wealth that can be invested in operations beyond what is needed for survival. Naturally, the priest put the "capital" back into his "business", building a bigger temple and storehouse to hold the extra grain and animals. This involved hiring extra accountants, builders, and guards who would settle with their families around the temple. Over time, the irrigation would lead to more crops, which led to more people, which led to the need to develop more farmland and irrigation. This, in turn led to more offerings and further expansions of the temple and the settlement around it. Once the town was large enough, craftsmen would move in who would provide needed goods such as pottery and tools to the temple's workers. Thus, a third level of population below those of the priest and their workers would emerge. Over the centuries, as the population, irrigation, and temple kept expanding, what was once a small farming village evolved into a thriving city gathered around the temple. Such a city would need or want wood, limestone, metal, and other goods that the area could not supply. As a result, some men would become merchants, traveling far and wide to trade the city's surplus for other goods. In this way, the city would grow even more populous and wealthy.
The long, continuous river valley of Mesopotamia meant that not just one village priest, but dozens were faced with the problems and rewards of irrigation. Thus, the process of cities growing up around temples was repeated over and over throughout Mesopotamia. Since the rivers tended to create a common culture, these cities resembled each other quite a bit in how they grew up and even in how they looked. For example, temple expansion generally took the form of building additions on top of the older temple. This gave the temples, or ziggurats as they were called, the appearance of pyramids. At this point, with dozens of cities united by a common culture springing up throughout Mesopotamia, we can say civilization has emerged. Its first people, the Sumerians, step onto the stage of history around 3000 B.C.E.
Civilization brought problems as well as blessings. For one thing, the continued expansion of population and farmland to feed it eventually led to cities clashing over new lands. With civilization came the first wars. Since priests were ill suited for fighting, they would choose a lugal, ("great man") to lead them in the fight. After the war, the lugal would be expected to resign his office. However, either because of ambition or the fact that another war was always around the corner, the lugal would keep his office. In time, he became a permanent official, the king, who led the city-state in war and administered justice in peacetime.
This often led to tension with priests who felt their own positions threatened. The temple (or, more technically, the gods) controlled most of the land. This often made the temple unpopular with the people, who looked to the king for protection. Eventually, the king would emerge as the most powerful figure in the city, although the temple would remain quite influential, still controlling much land, patronizing the arts, and acting as a grain bank and redistribution center during times of famine.
Another problem brought on by civilization was that the larger population of cities (sometimes 20-30,000) meant that people did not always know one another. This led to distrust and oftentimes crime. The influx of wealth also meant more clearly defined social classes since the wealth was not distributed evenly. This, plus all the different types of jobs being done, led to distrust and disagreement. Law codes had to be formed and courts of justice maintained, which also led to the need for a king's strong central government.
Cities and civilization also gave rise to new arts, crafts, and technology. Weaving was certainly one of the most remarkable crafts if we consider how much imagination it took to see a fabric in the fiber of the flax plant. Its importance should be obvious to anyone who wears clothes. Pottery was another craft of great significance. Sealed pottery jars could keep bugs and vermin out of peoples' food supply, preserving it in terms of quantity and hygiene. The rise of civilization also saw the evolution of two other types of technology vital to our way of life: writing and metallurgy.
One of the hardest aspects of history to document, yet maybe one of the most important, has been festive dancing. It seems especially remote to us, since we have become progressively more isolated as individuals since the industrial revolution, so we tend to lose sight of the importance of community in our lives. However, we are a social species that has relied on numbers to survive down through the ages, which brings up the question: what has kept us together all these years. The biological root of the answer lies largely in a pleasure center in our inner ears that likes a rhythmic beat.
Throughout most of our existence as a species, we have relied on hunting and gathering for our survival. Yet this was the time when our species was especially vulnerable and had to depend on the group for survival. One survival technique against large predators was for people to move together to make it seem that the predator was up against one big animal instead of a lot of small scared animals. Very likely, rhythmic community movement had its origins here, and either was based on or led to rhythmic dancing to celebrate or anticipate a successful hunt. When people practice moving together in time for a prolonged period, it induces a trancelike & spiritual experience of all being together as one. Besides being pleasurable, it also made our ancestors more effective in hunting as well as creating cohesiveness for the whole community in day-to-day life.
When cities and civilizations evolved into societies containing many times more people than found in hunting and gathering groups, governments needed to provide the basis for identifying with and loyalty to these new states. Therefore they attempted to control collective dancing by formalizing it into state run religions monopolized by the ruling classes.
At this point, we can see a cycle that constantly has repeated itself throughout history. Once the state or a ruling clique within a religion has taken it over, they tend to tighten their control by increasingly formalizing the religious rituals. By the same token, the religion becomes increasingly boring and uninspiring to its members. Therefore, some of them start a new sect from within that religion or a new religion comes along, either of which incorporates festive dancing in its rituals, attracting large numbers of new followers. The new faith or sect grows in numbers until some of its members feel a need to impose some order by rigidly formalizing the rituals. Eventually this religion of sect becomes boring and the cycle goes on.
In Western civilization we can see this cycle repeating at least four times. The first time had to do with the wild Dionysian rites spinning off from the Greeks’ state religion of Olympian gods. Euripides’ play The Bacchae gives us a somewhat frightening scenario of what happens when the king tries to suppress these rites, and the Maenads, formerly mild mannered women who are caught up in the frenzy of the Dionysian worship, literally tear him apart. To their credit, the Greeks realized that to maintain our normal rational ways of living, we must occasionally give in to our irrational passions. Therefore, they incorporated and formalized the Dionysian rites into state festivals. One aspect of these festivals was Greek drama, such as Euripides’ play discussed above.
The cycle next repeats in the early days of the Christian Church. The Romans, being a bit more conservative than the Greeks, had severely limited the practice of the Dionysian rites. Unfortunately, they saw Christianity in the same light as the Dionysian rites, since both worshipped the son of a woman and god who had died and been resurrected, and both practiced wild, although typically asexual, rites. Therefore, St. Paul, in an effort to dissociate his religion from the Dionysian rites and make it look legitimate to the Romans, tried to control the festive dancing. As Christianity grew in popularity and a hierarchy of bishops and archbishops evolved, Church leaders continued efforts to calm down its services.
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Church had gone through a major religious revival, largely from the grassroots level of the monasteries, and emerged as the most powerful institution in Western Europe by 1200. In order to gain more control over its more enthusiastic members’ practices and beliefs, it banned dancing in church. However this only pushed the dancing out into the streets where the Church had much less control and evolved into Carnival, the festival that precedes the period of Lent leading up to Easter. At first, Carnival may have had some spiritual aspects, but it soon evolved into an excuse to indulge in the various activities banned during Lent, to satisfy any desire for those activities for the next forty days leading up to Easter. Among those activities was eating meat (thus the word carnival as in carnivore) and festive dancing. Carnival also largely became of parody of the Church and ruling classes, who naturally felt somewhat threatened by it.
By the mid 1500s, Northern Europe was in the midst of another religious revival, the Protestant Reformation. At this time, Carnival was still being celebrated in the North, when it ran into two obstacles. One was the puritanical idea, especially associated with the Calvinists (AKA Puritans in America), that most any kind of pleasure was evil. At this time Europe was undergoing major shifts away from a land based to a money and credit based economy. Such shifts always leave some people behind, in this case the peasants, and generate social tensions that occasionally turn into armed rebellions. Therefore, the authorities in the North suppressed Carnival, but with some disturbing results. There is evidence by the 1600s that being deprived of communal dancing was creating a sense of isolation in people with a corresponding rise in depression.
Fast forward to the period of the French Revolution in the late 1700s. A new secular idea was sweeping across France and then Europe: nationalism, which united peoples with a common language, history, and culture into that giant collective consciousness called the nation. The revolution’s leaders the importance of communal celebrations in bringing people together and actively promoted civic festivals to unite the people behind their leadership. When Napoleon seized power in 1799, he repeated the mistake of trying to control and structure such celebrations from above with military parades that had a stirring beat, but reduced the people to being a passive audience. The idea was to replace the horizontal social bonds between the people on the same level with a top-down bond between the people and their leader who was supposed to embody the very nation itself. The result, however, was to seriously reduce the impact of such events on creating social bonds among the people.
The pattern would repeat itself again in the 1920s and 1930s in Fascist Italy and Germany with the extra twist that Mussolini and Hitler in particular had modern loudspeaker systems that allowed them to stage-manage huge spectacles with thousands of people attending. These events did use rhythmic chanting of slogans to create some communal feeling, being reinforced by another psychological phenomenon of losing one’s individual identity in such huge crowds. However, the predominantly passive role played by the masses could soon make these stage-managed rallies seem boring, giving them limited success in the long run.
After the end of World War II in 1945, accelerated urbanization, suburbanization, and the tendency to move to a new neighborhood or city every few years have created new subdivisions, but not communities, which require generations to sink the deep common roots that truly unite people. Instead, mass media, especially television, has largely replaced community events in which people are actively involved. Television watching is a fairly solitary activity where it is rare for whole families to watch the same program together. Television may provide us common cultural reference points, but it doesn’t give us community. This lack of community seriously inhibits people from participating in common activities such as festive dancing. In fact, the idea of even trying to start such events on just a neighborhood level would seem laughable, so far have we become cut off from our cultural roots and each other.
Like so many other aspects of our civilization, we take writing for granted since we grew up with it. Therefore, consider the story of John Cremony, an army officer in the American southwest writing a letter to his mother back home. A Navajo Indian saw Cremony writing the letter and asked what he was doing. Cremony replied that he wrote words on the paper and sent it home. His mother would look at the paper and get his message. The Indian just laughed at such a ridiculous story. Therefore, in order to prove his story, Cremony wrote a note and told the Indian to take it to another officer who would read it and give him a piece of candy. The Navajo took the note to the officer who read it and, to the Navajo's astonishment, gave him a piece of candy.
Before we condemn the Indians or anyone else for not having writing, we should keep in mind that no one thought of the idea until about 5000 years ago. At that time, the first civilizations were emerging, and with them, a much more complex way of life. The temple of the Sumerian city of Lagash provides a good example. It employed some 1200 people, including 300 slaves. The temple employed 205 cloth workers in addition to sailors, millers, bakers, cooks, guards, fishermen, herders, and scribes. Such a complex operation was beyond one man's ability to keep everything straight in his head. A more efficient record keeping system had to be developed.
People used to think that writing developed overnight in response to the needs of civilization. Actually, it gradually evolved with the increasingly complex society that started to develop with agriculture. At that time, people started making little clay tokens in various shapes to represent the types and numbers of goods they possessed. For example, a man might have ten small clay discs or one large disc to represent the ten bags of grain he owned. It was such a simple system of record keeping that sometimes the tokens had holes in them and were strung together in a necklace.
Around 3500 B.C.E., cities and much more complex economies were evolving. As a result, we find the number of types of tokens expanding dramatically as new types of goods were being produced and traded. Long distance trade was also starting with merchants and temples sending caravans with large amounts of goods from city to city. The caravan drivers would be entrusted with tokens representing all the goods they were travelling with. They would present the tokens along with the goods to a merchant in the next city after making a transaction. Unfortunately, it was apparently easy for the caravan driver to steal a few goods and the tokens for himself without the first merchant knowing he had done that instead of selling them honestly. As a result, the first merchant started putting the tokens in a sealed clay ball or envelope. If the second merchant found the seal broken, he knew the goods had been tampered with. However, the sealed envelope made it difficult for the caravan driver to remember how many items of each type of merchandise he was travelling with. Therefore, the merchant started making impressions of the shapes of the tokens on the outside of the clay envelope while it was still wet. Before long, someone realized that the envelope and tokens were not needed as long as there was an impression of them in the clay. The tokens were dispensed with, the envelope was flattened into a tablet, and writing was born.
Writing was first developed for keeping records of goods. In time its uses expanded, and that meant new ways to express and interpret the symbols had to be developed. There were five basic stages in the history of writing.
Pictographs(c.3500 - 3000 B.C.E.). In this stage, one pictograph or symbol means what it looks like. For example, a picture of the sun means the "sun". This stage was well suited for straight record keeping, but little else.
Ideographs(c.3000 - 2100 B.C.E.). Here the symbols can also mean something a bit more abstract than their literal meaning. A sun can mean "day" as well as "sun". A picture of legs can mean "legs" or "walk". Thus the uses of writing were greatly expanded, although there are severe limits on what one can write this way.
Rebus writing (c.2100 - 1000 B.C.E.). This was a critical turning point. Up till now, one related to what the symbols looked like to tell the meaning. With rebus writing, one used the phonetic sounds of words created by symbols to create new words. For example, a word like "Neilson" would be very difficult to write with pictographs unless everyone knew what Neilson looked like as distinguished from other people. However, with rebus writing, one could use the sounds suggested by a picture of a man kneeling plus a sun to build the word "Neilson". Rebus writing, by making the reader relate to the ears, not the eyes, made it possible to write just about anything. It was a complex system, however, since it required hundreds of symbols, one for each syllable used in a language. Both Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics used about 700 symbols.
Phonetic alphabet (c. 1000 B.C.E. to the present). This system is based on the fact that we can only make about twenty-five or so different sounds, while we can combine those individual sounds into hundreds of symbols, each requiring a different rebus. The alphabet simplifies the process vastly by using just one symbol for each individual sound we make (e.g.--B, D, K, etc.). Although we generally give credit for the alphabet to the Phoenicians (thus the term "phonetics"), it seems the Egyptians also had an alphabet of sorts that the Phoenicians drew upon. The Greeks completed the process by adding vowels, which the Egyptian and Phoenician systems lacked.
Along with writing, mathematics also evolved to help keep records. The Mesopotamians in particular had some sophisticated math, using base 60 instead of base 10 which we use. Mesopotamian influence is reflected even today in our 360-degree circle with 60 minutes in each degree. They seem to have developed the Pythagorean theorem for figuring out the lengths of the sides of a right triangle. They also figured a number of square and cube roots. The ancient Greeks, who gave us much of our math, drew heavily upon the Mesopotamians for their math.
Before the invention of a much simpler alphabet, only a small group of men had the time to learn how to read and write a system using some 700 symbols. These men were known as scribes.
Scribes usually came from middle class families with the money to pay for their sons' education. In Egypt, the temple oversaw education, but in Mesopotamia private teachers ran their own schools. Education started around age six and lasted about twelve years. Students went to school from sunrise to sunset about four days out of five, twelve months of the year. Younger students' lessons involved memorizing long lists of symbols that represented various sounds and syllables. Older students memorized the rules for combining those symbols into words. They also learned math for keeping records and surveying fields. At the end of their schooling, they took an exam. If they passed, they became scribes. If they failed, they could only find employment in such lowly jobs as writing letters for people in local villages.
Fully qualified scribes could look forward to a promising career working for the king, temple, or rich merchants. They had high status in society, since their skills were so specialized. In some 2500 years of Mesopotamian history, only one king, Ashurbanipal of Assyria, is known to have been able to read. Society was completely dependent on this narrow class of scribes to keep the machinery of government and business running smoothly. In fact, their dependence was so complete that there was always the danger of scribes taking bribes to misread letters or tamper with government records. Oftentimes, letters were introduced with a plea or threat to the scribes reading the letters to read them accurately. We can easily imagine the palace intrigue that resulted from this situation.
The invention and spread of the much simpler alphabet meant that more people could learn to read. As a result society was less dependent on scribes, whose status declined accordingly. The alphabet also meant the uses of writing could expand to such things as literature, poetry, and history. Before the alphabet the small number of scribes had to devote most of their energies to running government and business. With the alphabet, more people were literate and free to pursue more cultural applications of writing. We should keep in mind that the vast majority of people, especially the lower classes, remained illiterate until about a century ago.
The importance of writing to history is hard to overestimate. Without it, kings, priests, and businessmen would not be able to keep track of anything beyond their immediate surroundings. With it, trade routes could expand and kings could keep the tax and census records necessary for expanding their city-states into empires. Two subsequent inventions have built upon writing and expanded our capabilities as a species by quantum leaps beyond what they had been before: the printing press and the computer. Today, with the computer, we are witnessing a revolution every bit as dramatic as writing was 5000 years ago. But it is important that we keep in mind that the computer traces its lineage back to those first clay tokens used to keep rudimentary records.
The time is around 9000 B.C.E. A Stone Age hunter picks his way through a riverbed looking for flint suitable for tools and weapons. His eye is caught by the sight of a rock that glimmers "far, as from the moon" as the Greek poet Homer would put it over 8000 years later. It certainly is not flint, but it is interesting, so he takes it home to see what he can do with it. The rock bends, but does not break or chip under the blows of his hammer stone. Our hunter can shape it into some little trinket such as a pin that will probably make quite a stir with his friends and family and be a valuable item in trade. In such a modest way was metallurgy born.
Today it would be hard to imagine our civilization without metals. After all, just about every manufactured object we have either has metal in it or was made by metal machines and transported on ships, trains, or trucks made of metal. Without metals, we would literally be living back in the Stone Age. The development of metallurgy was a long, and sometimes devious process that involved five basic steps.
Identifying and discovering its usefulness . There is little in nature to suggest the existence of metals or their usefulness. Our Stone Age hunter managed to find a small copper ingot. Unfortunately, metals rarely occur in such a pure state. Instead, we find them mixed with other minerals in rocks called ore. Ores usually do not present the appearance of anything resembling metal, so the question arises as to how people discovered them. As with so many discoveries, it was probably by accident. One likely scenario is that potters would put some minerals containing copper on the pottery to give it a glaze when fired. The kiln's heat would separate the copper from the rest of the glaze, leaving little beads of copper lying around. Further experiments would lead to the realization that other rocks were also ores containing copper.
Locating metals in quantity. Our potters, wanting larger amounts of the copper ore, find there is little to be found lying on the surface. As a result, they start digging near the surface deposits and find more copper ore in the ground or the sides of hills. Eventually, they will find that copper mixes with different minerals to produce a variety of ores rarely resembling each other.
Mining the ores. Now that they know where the ores are, they have to mine them. This is one of the more unpleasant aspects of ancient metallurgy. In fact, work in the mines will become the most brutal and demoralizing job in the ancient world, being reserved for slaves and condemned criminals. It is unfortunate that the glories of ancient civilizations and the modern civilizations later built upon them would have to depend so much on the intense suffering of slaves whose life expectancy in many of the mines was no more than six months to a year.
Smelting the metal. Smelting means heating an ore to a high enough temperature that the metal will separate from the rest of the ore, known as slag. As stated above, the first incidence of smelting was probably by accident in a pottery kiln. Over the years, metal smiths would come up with various innovations that created hotter fires and the ability to smelt stronger metals such as bronze and iron. Bellows were invented for blowing air into the fire. The kiln was enclosed to trap heat. And charcoal, partially burnt wood that burns at a higher temperature than regular wood, was developed as a fuel.
Shaping the metal into something useful. There were two basic methods for doing this. One method was to pour the molten metal into molds. The other was to pound the metal into the desired shape, such as a sword.
There were three basic ages of metals in the ancient world, named after the dominant metal used for tools and weapons in that day and age: the Copper Age (c.4000 - 3000 B.C.E.), the Bronze Age (c.3000 - 1000 B. C.), and the Iron Age (c. 1000 B.C.E. to the present). They followed this sequence from the easiest metal to smelt and shape (copper) to the hardest to smelt and shape (iron).
The Copper Age saw fairly limited use of copper in the Near East, because copper is a soft metal and not useful for many tools and was also quite expensive for the average person. Therefore, most people continued using stone tools.
The Bronze Age, during which such civilizations as Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Minoan Crete reach their zenith, saw metals come into their own in the Near East. Bronze is an alloy (mixture) of copper and another metal, usually tin, that is much stronger than either of its components. The first bronze used was a natural alloy of copper and arsenic. Unfortunately, arsenic fumes are deadly, and blacksmiths found it quite unpleasant to work with this variety of bronze. But it did give them the idea of mixing copper with other metals to develop a bronze of copper mixed with a small amount of tin, usually only 1-4% of the total mixture. However, even that much tin was scarce and had to be sought out in Europe and central Asia. This was important because trade routes spread ideas as well as goods. Therefore, we see civilization spreading to Europe and central Asia by way of the tin routes. One drawback of Bronze was its expense, which made it available to a limited number of people. As a result, Bronze Age civilizations were highly aristocratic societies of narrow classes of nobles and priests ruling over masses of peasants still using stone tools.
Around 1200 B.C.E., a massive upheaval of nomadic peoples swept through the civilized Near East, toppling or severely weakening the older cultures in that area. The Hittites in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and Mycenaean Greeks of Trojan War fame disappeared from history at this time. In fact, the Trojan War was probably part of this upheaval. As far as our story is concerned, this wave of invasions seems to have disrupted the trade routes that supplied the Near East with its bronze. This put a rather abrupt end to the Bronze Age.
By this time, people were quite hooked on the idea of metals, and started looking for a substitute for bronze. That substitute was iron. However, iron presented a severe drawback. It has a smelting temperature much higher than ancient furnaces could obtain. All these furnaces could produce was a spongy mass called bloomery iron. This had a tensile strength little better than copper. Fortunately, smiths kept working with bloomery iron and learned how to use it. Hammering out the impurities led to an improved bloomery iron that was much better than copper, but a poor substitute for bronze. Heating it next to charcoal made the carbon in the charcoal combine with the iron. This created a crude form of carburized steel with a tensile strength twice that of bronze. Even without being able to smelt iron, ancient metal smiths had found a way to make it useful.
Iron has been called the democratic metal because it is so plentiful and so many more people could afford it compared to those who could afford bronze. It could well be that iron is the metal that pulled most people out of the Stone Age. It was not until the masses could arm themselves with iron that democracy could evolve in such places as the Greek city-states. Although we today use many other materials such as plastics, steel made from iron is still the metal that we make our machines from. Even today, we live very much in the Iron Age.
Metals have been very important to civilization throughout history by creating tools that could do old jobs better than ever and new jobs never done before. For example, iron tipped plows in medieval Europe would lead to more land under cultivation, more population, and the rise of towns and civilization in Europe. Metals allowed for more extensive clearing and exploitation of forests since an iron axe can fell trees much faster than a stone axe can. The better housing and food supplies made possible by metals led to a higher standard of living for people who could be better fed and housed because of metal tools.
Metals also created new sources of wealth in their own right. The value that people placed on gold, silver, and even bronze led to a common medium of exchange that everyone agreed was valuable. This made trade much easier. For example, a leather tanner wanting grain might not be able to find any farmers that wanted to trade their grain for leather. But if the tanner could sell his leather to a third party for silver, any farmer would be willing to trade grain for the tanner's silver because everyone recognized silver as something worth having. As a result, all three parties got what they wanted without having to take the trouble of finding someone with exactly what they needed and willing to trade exactly what they wanted. Precious metals made trade easier, expanded trade, and usually benefited all parties involved. As a result, just about everyone's standard of living went up.
One final stage was the invention of coinage around 700 B.C.E. The advantage of coinage was that a government guaranteed the weight and purity of its metals. As a result, people did not have to worry about being cheated with fixed scales or ingots of gold or silver debased with other less valuable metals. The higher level of trust coinage generated further expanded trade.
Metals did create problems also. The new wealth that metals created also led to more wars and conflicts over that wealth. The need for charcoal as fuel led to deforestation, erosion, and possibly climactic changes in such areas as Asia Minor and the Indus River valley. One theory suggests that the Indus River civilization declined because deforestation caused a hotter, drier climate and crop failures. For the first time, human use and misuse of power was backfiring against us. Metals have indeed proven to be a mixed blessing, but one we would not want to live without.
With the end of this unit around the year 1000 B.C.E., we see the human race has attained most of the skills that will help it survive for several thousand years. Not until the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700's will we see many new technological innovations changing people's lives. Until that time, most innovations will be refinements of the skills first developed in the centuries when civilization first emerged.
Until about 1500 C.E. history largely revolved around the relationship between two ways of life that people have followed since the birth of agriculture: nomadic herding and settled farming. Environment largely determined how these peoples lived, with wetter climates or river valleys favoring settled farming and drier climates leading to the nomadic way of life. These peoples often co-existed peacefully, exchanging goods and ideas in peaceful trade. But at other times, clashes would frequently occur either because of population pressures forcing the nomads to try to take more land, nomadic jealousy of the richer civilization’s goods, or just mutual hostility between the two ways of life.
Each side had its own advantages in such conflicts. On the one hand, civilized peoples usually outnumbered the nomads since agriculture could support more people than nomadic herding could. Also, their armies generally had better organization, discipline, equipment and technology. On the other hand, the nomads, being more involved with animals, had more meat and protein in their diets, making them bigger and stronger than the farmers.
Probably even more decisive was the nomads' mobility, which let them choose the time and place in which to attack the more settled farmers and cities. Mobility also made it harder for slower civilized armies to catch them. Finally, since nomads often lived on land unsuited to farming, it was not usually worth the civilized armies' time and trouble to try and conquer them, even if they could catch them. This, plus their size, often gave nomads a psychological edge against the farmers, which in any given battle, could be the most decisive element in determining which army would break and run.
Still, as long as a civilization was well governed, its economy healthy, and its armies well trained and disciplined, it was very difficult for a few nomads to prevail. Not until civilization experienced internal troubles such as civil wars, famine, or a breakdown in the government and military organization, could the nomads strike effectively. Typically, they would do this in small-scale isolated attacks, not in one overwhelming wave. Repeatedly raiding the farms, stealing the livestock, and burning the crops, the underlying basis for civilization, over a period of years would trigger a further breakdown in the government, economy, and defense. This, of course, would lead to further raids, more serious breakdowns, and so on. At the same time, the nomads often infiltrated civilization as merchants, settlers, slaves, and mercenaries (professional soldiers). Eventually, the civilization would be so weakened that the nomads could take over. However, this was just the start of a cycle of civilized decline, revival, and expansion that would repeat itself throughout most of recorded history.
After a nomadic takeover, civilization would continue to decline either because the nomads did not care to keep it going, or they cared but just did not know how. What largely determined their attitude toward civilization was the length of contact they had had with it. Generally the longer the contact with civilization, the more it influenced the nomads and made them want to try to continue it. For example, the Saxons who conquered Roman Britain had little prior contact with the Romans and were quite willing to obliterate any signs of Roman civilization they found. On the other hand, such tribes as the Franks and Visigoths who had been exposed to Roman culture for two centuries tried to adopt Roman titles, copy Roman government, live in Roman style villas, wear Roman togas, and even speak Latin.
However, even if the new nomadic masters tried to carry on the old civilized ways, they usually failed because they did not fully understand how the government, record keeping, and technology worked. As a result, the civilization would continue to break down despite their efforts. The damaged economy might not be able to support schools to train civil servants, or the new masters might not even understand the schools' importance. Therefore as civil servants died off, there would be no new civil servants to take their place. Such vital public works as roads and irrigation canals would not be kept up, and the economy would further decline, making it even harder to maintain an efficient government. For whatever reasons, either neglect or the inability to understand how civilization worked, the decline would continue for decades, generations, or even centuries, as was the case with Europe after the fall of Rome.
Despite all this, there were forces working in favor of civilization's recovery. First of all, extended contact with civilization gradually made the nomads more willing to try to preserve it. This at least slowed the rate of decline. Also, the greater material comforts of civilization, such as sleeping on a soft bed or in a warm dry house, might change the nomads' attitudes toward civilized life. Finally, and possibly most important, many nomadic men would take civilized wives. Their sons, although part of the nomadic ruling class, would also be influenced by their civilized mothers to be more accepting of civilized ways. They might also marry civilized women and further dilute the nomadic influence in their children. Eventually, the distinction between the nomads and the civilized people they ruled would virtually disappear, and with it any nomadic hostility toward civilization.
Gradually, the semi-nomadic masters, with their still somewhat restless nomadic spirit, would rebuild civilization to its previous level and expand it beyond that to new frontiers, both culturally and geographically. Of course, the revived civilization would meet new nomadic tribes, and the process would start all over again: new clashes with nomads, their eventual victory in a time of civilized weakness, the further decline of civilization, its revival largely through intermarriage, and its further expansion to new frontiers.
This goes a long way toward explaining much of human history. Of course, each situation had its own particular twists and turns. But the pattern has repeated itself again and again, spreading civilization from such isolated centers as Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Mexico, and Peru. For example, from Mesopotamia and Egypt, civilization would spread to Syria and Palestine, up to Asia Minor, and from there to Greece. The Greeks would bring civilization to Rome and the Western Mediterranean. From there it would spread to northern Europe, and eventually the Americas. If we add other important elements such as colonization and trade, we can view history as the gradual but steady march of civilization across the planet. Taken in that light, one might see history as progress rather than an endless series of wars.
In modern day Iraq, along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, lie the deserted ruins of a civilization that lay forgotten for centuries until its rediscovery in the 1800's. Looking at these ruins, one finds it hard to imagine a thriving civilization full of people haggling in the market place, fighting wars, dancing in festivals, celebrating births and marriages, mourning their dead, and going about their daily routines much as we do today. Yet, that is exactly what went on here when these were not ruins, but the center of the first human civilization.
Every culture is largely a product of its environment and must be understood within the context of that environment. We use the term geopolitics to describe an area's geography (physical and climatic) and the effects of that geography on the area's history and politics. Mesopotamia, from the Greek words meaning "land between the rivers," presented a harsh environment to inhabit, but also an ideal one in which to build the first civilization. Its geopolitics consisted of three basic elements:
It was a hot dry river valley. This forced the inhabitants to organize irrigation projects that led to civilization.
It had virtually no natural resources except for mud and water. This forced its inhabitants to be very resourceful. Basically, just about everything about early Mesopotamian civilization was made from mud: its houses, temples, palaces, fortifications, writing tablets, and the crops which were traded for the resources needed to build up this civilization to new heights. Underlying all the glories of this civilization was mud.
It was flat and open terrain with virtually no natural barriers. This led to jealous nomadic neighbors constantly invading Mesopotamia, either breaking up already existing empires or forcing the Mesopotamians to build strong empires at each other’s expense in self-defense. Mesopotamian history was nothing if not violent.
The Sumerians were the people who built the first civilization, living in the southeastern end of Mesopotamia known as Sumer. Our knowledge of the very early Sumerians is much like our knowledge of the early Hebrews in the Biblical book of Genesis. In each case, the dividing line between dim misty legends and a clear historical account was a great flood. In the Bible before the flood, we find patriarchs who loom larger than life, living for well over 900 years each and coming across more like stiff and lifeless statues than real human beings. The same is true of Sumerian heroes or patriarchs before their flood (c.2800 B.C.E.), except they live for tens of thousands of years and seem even more fantastic than the Biblical patriarchs. After the great flood of 2800 B.C.E., we see more written records and, consequently, real personalities emerge. The Bible is the same way after its great flood and Noah. The larger than life patriarchs give way to more human ones, such as Abraham.
The myths that often fill the gaps in the historical record can help us understand real history. If we carefully interpret them, they can tell us about historical events and the values that civilization held. For example, the story of Cain and Abel in the Bible is seen by some as symbolic of the ongoing struggle between farmers and nomads. Only this time it is told from the nomadic Hebrews' point of view rather than from the farmer's point of view. Thus the nomadic shepherd Abel is good and his farmer brother, Cain, is the murderer. In Mesopotamian myths, the roles are reversed. The many similarities between Biblical stories and Mesopotamian myths suggest early contacts between the two cultures. Both have stories of a great flood and of a paradise, or Garden of Eden, from which humans are driven because of their folly. If a new god replaces an older one, this often signifies that one culture has conquered another. Such was the case when the Babylonian Marduk replaced the Sumerian Enlil as the chief Mesopotamian god, signifying Babylon's conquest of Sumer.
When the Sumerians finally emerge into history, we find them divided into thirteen major city-states who spent a good deal of their time fighting each other. Although they shared a common religion centered around their holy city of Nippur, that religion seems to have done more to spark wars than prevent them. Each city-state had its own patron god or goddess that made it feel superior to the other city-states. Each city-state also wanted to control the holy city of Nippur, which led to constant fighting that caused Nippur to change hands nineteen times in twenty-four years! For centuries, Sumerian chariots and infantry battalions ranged across Mesopotamia, raising its dust in battle. Whenever one city-state, such as Kish, would gain the upper hand and seemed on the verge of conquering Sumer, the other cities would gang up on it and restore the balance of power. And so it went on for centuries.
It should come as no surprise that all this fighting wore down the Sumerians and left them open to attack from one of the many nomadic desert tribes surrounding them. In this case, it was a people known as the Akkadians. The story goes that its founder, Sargon of Kish, much like Moses, was set afloat in a reed basket as a baby to save his life. He was found by the royal gardener and raised in the palace where he rose quickly to power and influence as the king's cupbearer. At last, he murdered the king and seized the throne, calling himself Sargon, which meant "legitimate king." What this legend most likely tells us is that the Akkadian takeover of Sumer was a long process of gradual infiltration by the Akkadians into Sumerian society rather than the result of one big invasion. The fairly smooth transition to power also suggests that the Akkadians had absorbed much of Sumerian culture and become civilized. Thus the Akkadian Empire signified the spread of civilization more than its overthrow.
Sargon managed to take over all of Sumer and probably gave it a greater degree of peace than it had known for most of its history. He used Akkadian governors and garrisons (occupation armies) to keep the city-states in line. He would also take hostages and tear down the walls of any rebellious cities to ensure their good behavior.
Once his hold on the Sumer was secure, Sargon fought against the ever-troublesome Elamite tribes in the mountains to the east. He then marched northwestward, subduing all of Mesopotamia and even reaching the Mediterranean Sea, which seemed like the ends of the earth to people then. To commemorate this, Sargon took the title "King of the Four Quarters" (of the known world). His realm was history's first empire.
Sargon's grandson, Naramsin, further extended Akkadian power. However, he supposedly committed the fatal mistake of sacking the holy city of Nippur, which resulted in a series of revolts. These revolts weakened the Akkadian Empire enough to allow some other nomads, the Gutians, to attack and take over. Agade, the Akkadian capital, was so thoroughly destroyed in this turmoil that its location is still not certain.
Partly, through a process of absorbing the nomadic Gutians and partly through popular revolts, Sumerian civilization revived in one final flowering known as the Third Dynasty of Ur. Much of Sargon's old empire was reunited, while new cities and expanded trade routes spread civilization northward. The most impressive monument of the age was the ziggurat of Ur. It was 120 feet high with a base of 260 feet by 175 feet. Even today, its mere ruins strike us with awe.
Once again, nomadic tribes, this time the Amorites, weakened and eventually overthrew the Sumerians. As with the earlier Sumerians, civil wars and revolts set them up for this. Gradually, the nomads settled down and new city-states rose up in the north. One of these city-states would build a new civilization grafted upon the old. That city was Babylon.
Certainly one of the most famous figures in Mesopotamian history was the Babylonian king, Hammurabi. When he came to the throne around the year 1750 B.C.E., his city, Babylon, was just one of several city-states vying for power in Mesopotamia. Surrounded by aggressive and warlike rivals, and with a territory only fifty miles in diameter, Babylon needed a shrewd and tough king. Hammurabi fit the bill marvelously.
Over the next twenty-five years, this Babylonian king masterfully maneuvered his city-state among all its hostile neighbors. At one point, he would ally with one state to eliminate another. Later on, he would make a new ally to help him destroy the first. In such a way, he steadily expanded Babylon's borders and swelled its army's ranks with troops supplied by subject cities. One final showdown with the city-state, Larsa, left him master of Mesopotamia and "King of the Four Quarters."
It is one thing to conquer an empire. It is an entirely different thing to hold it together. Hammurabi proved himself an excellent ruler as well as a conqueror. Following the example of the Akkadians, he put governors and garrisons in the subject cities to prevent revolts. But he clearly saw that those measures alone would not be enough to build a lasting empire. Therefore, he worked to establish a code of laws and one language for government and business to tie his empire together. He also constructed public works projects, such as temples and irrigation canals, throughout his empire. By providing jobs and a greater degree of prosperity, he hoped to build loyalty to Babylon or at least reduce resentment to his rule if they saw him working for their welfare.
Little is known about the Babylonian Empire after Hammurabi's death. It seems that his empire entered a period of decline after his death. Usually, the reasons for an empire's decline are numerous, and they interact with each other in a way that makes them feed back upon one another. This creates more problems, making them interact even more intensively, and so on. For example, Hammurabi's building and irrigation projects were very expensive and ate up a good deal of royal revenues. This left the crown with little money to pay its local officials. That led to a greater degree of freedom for those officials. As a result, their abuses grew, and royal revenues declined further. This process would then repeat itself with greater intensity again and again.
This feedback also led to even more problems. Extra officials were created to gather more taxes, which added further to the burdens of society. In order to pay those extra taxes, farmers started abandoning the two-field system, irrigating and planting both fields each year instead of leaving one fallow. The extra irrigation raised the water table and poisoned the soil with minerals such as salt, while the extra planting without giving the land any rest exhausted the soil's fertility. Crop yields, the underlying basis for civilization, went down and intensified all the other problems feeding into and off of the agriculture. Bit by bit, Babylon's empire crumbled to pieces. And waiting in the wings, as always, were the nomads. Only this time they had a new and frightening weapon with which to terrorize the Near East.
As far back as the Sumerians, Mesopotamians had driven in war chariots pulled by wild donkeys, called onagers. However, the old Sumerian chariot had been quite cumbersome, with four solid wheels that added weight and reduced speed and mobility. As a result, such a chariot probably did not play too decisive a role in Mesopotamian warfare. Then, around 1650 B.C.E., nomads from the north appeared with a new type of chariot. It had two wheels mounted on the back, which made it more maneuverable. Also, its wheels were spoked, not solid, making it lighter and faster. Finally, it was pulled by a strange new beast, the horse, which was faster and more powerful than the onager.
Armed with the horse and chariot and the much more powerful composite bow, the northern nomads burst upon the civilized world with a ferocity that sent its kingdoms reeling back in confusion for a century or more. Peasant infantry were totally unprepared for the spectacle of maybe hundreds of chariots drawn by these strange beasts bearing down on them, stirring up clouds of dust, and making strange and terrifying noises. At times, they broke and ran at this sight alone, leaving their cities as open prey to the victorious nomads. All across the Near East, one civilization after another fell prey to the nomads armed with this terrifying new weapon. A people known as the Hyksos conquered northern Egypt. The Hittites overwhelmed the cities of Asia Minor and even raided as far as Babylon, sacking it in 1595 B.C.E. Another people, the Kassites, conquered Babylon and ruled it more permanently. Further east, the Indus River civilization fell to the Aryans, also armed with the horse and chariot. For a century or more civilization was thrown into turmoil.
Eventually, these nomads would follow the example of other nomadic conquerors by adopting civilized ways and merging their identities with the cultures they had conquered. Civilized people had also learned a lesson: the value of the horse and chariot. For several centuries, the elite corps of Near Eastern armies ruling the battlefields of the Near East would be their battalions of horse drawn chariots.
Assyria lies at the northern end of Mesopotamia where many of the trade routes of the Fertile Crescent and the Near East converged. This made Assyria a prosperous land for trade. It also was a dangerous place, since trade routes are also convenient invasion routes. As a result, Assyria had an especially warlike history, and its people were known for two occupations: trade and warfare.
Since they lived in such a rough environment, the Assyrians became quite capable empire builders. Their first empire seems to have encompassed most, if not all, of Mesopotamia, and bordered the newly emerging civilization and empire of the nomadic Hittites. They also conquered the kingdom of Mitanni, originally founded by another chariot driving group of nomads, the Hurrians.
Once again, a new wave of nomads swept in with a devastating ferocity that toppled civilized empires and kingdoms far and wide. To the northwest, a mysterious people known as the Sea Peoples overwhelmed the Hittite Empire. Some of these Sea Peoples, the Peleset (the Biblical Philistines), seriously weakened the Egyptian Empire and conquered Palestine, thus giving Palestine its name. To the west of the Hittites, the Mycenaean Greeks fell to Dorian invaders from the north. The Trojan War was probably part of these upheavals. The Assyrians themselves were not immune, being conquered by the Aramaeans coming out of the desert. Among the results of these invasions, the trade routes bringing tin to the Near East were cut. This brought the Bronze Age to an abrupt halt and ushered in the Iron Age.
The Assyrians were a tough resilient people. Once the dust had settled from the latest round of upheavals and the nomads had started to assume a degree of civilization, the Assyrians reasserted themselves and built what amounted to the greatest Near Eastern Empire up to that point in history. At the height of their power, they ruled over Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. There were several reasons for their success as empire builders.
They had a plentiful supply of iron with which to equip their armies . Other less well-endowed peoples, such as those of Egypt, would be at a decisive disadvantage when fighting the Assyrians.
Refinements in siege warfare . Up to this point in history, about the only effective method for besieging a city was to starve it into submission. This made sieges long, tedious, and often unsuccessful endeavors. The Assyrians changed all that. They designed rolling siege towers from which they could assault city walls, and battering rams that could pound mud brick walls to dust. Armed with such weapons, the Assyrians were able to reduce city after city and establish a much firmer control over their empire.
A deliberate policy of terror to keep people obedient. The Assyrians are largely remembered in history as being extremely cruel. To a large extent, this reputation is justified. Cities daring to defy them in a siege or subject peoples desperate enough to revolt often suffered large-scale massacres. The Assyrians themselves who wanted to scare other people from defying them may have exaggerated the extent of this bloodshed. Also, the greater degree of success in besieging cities gave them more opportunities to sack cities than other peoples had. Keep in mind that most ancient peoples indulged in wholesale plunder and slaughter of cities that had tried to resist them and failed. Another Assyrian terrorist tactic was to uproot rebellious peoples enmasse and settle them away from their home in order to disorient them in strange surroundings and prevent further revolts. The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel were lost by this process of being resettled in a new land and gradually losing their culture and identity in the new cultures surrounding them. Contrary to their expectations, the Assyrians' terrorist policies seem to have inspired more revolts than fear.
Cavalry. At first the horse was seen as useful only for pulling chariots. Eventually, some nomads caught on to the fact that horses could be ridden. This involved solving several problems. First of all, the horse had to be bred up to a size where it was capable of carrying a man. Secondly, it had to get used to someone riding it, since no animal takes kindly to another animal jumping on its back. Finally, people had to figure out where to sit. For some reason, maybe height, men first rode the higher, but precarious, rump. Finally, someone figured out that the lower, but safer, back was a better place to ride.
Nomads to the north especially took to the horse. The speed with which the Plains Indians adapted to the horse when the Spanish introduced it to this continent shows what an impact it probably had on other nomads as well. Nomadic horse archers, controlling their horses with knee pressure, gained a mobility that civilized peoples could never match. Supposedly, a Comanche Indian could fire twenty arrows a minute while hanging under the protection of his horse's neck and moving at a full gallop.
When large civilized armies, such as that of the Persian King, Darius I, tried to conquer such nomads, they usually failed miserably in just trying to catch them. One measure to contain the nomads was the maintenance of long expensive fortified frontiers, such as the Great Wall of China, to stop their raids. Occasionally, the problem of nomadic raids would become a serious threat when various nomadic tribes would be united into one empire, such as that of Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan. Luckily for civilization, such empires were usually dependent on the personality and leadership of their founders and fell apart soon after their deaths.
The Assyrians were the first civilized people of the Near East to mount the horse for military purposes. Cavalry were more maneuverable and versatile than chariots. For one thing, they could operate on rougher ground than chariot wheels could. Possibly more important, riding the horse led to much faster communications. This allowed kings to build and hold much larger empires than before, since they could learn of revolts and react to them much more quickly. The fact that the Assyrian Empire was three times bigger than any empire, which preceded it, was probably due in large part to the horse.
Assyria administered its empire somewhat harshly but efficiently. States close to the Assyrian homeland answered directly to Assyrian governors and garrisons. States farther away, such as Egypt and Israel, could continue to exist under their own rulers as long as they paid tribute and loyally supplied troops for Assyrian wars. If they rebelled, massacres or mass deportations would result, followed by direct Assyrian rule.
Assyrian history was quite turbulent. It was under constant pressure from nomads to the north, and always quelling revolts within its empire. People objected as much to the Assyrian merchants who flooded their market places as they did to their army and ruling methods. As the Biblical prophet, Nahum put it: "Thou hast multiplied thy merchants above the stars of Heaven" (Nahum III, 16). Assyria's subjects apparently had a wide variety of complaints against their masters.
As long as the empire had able and energetic kings, it survived all these wars and revolts, although they must have been a terrible strain on Assyria's economy and resources. The death of the last strong king, Ashurbanipal, in 625 B.C.E., touched off one last round of popular revolts and invasions that the Assyrians were not destined to survive. An alliance of Babylon with the nomadic Medes to the north finally brought the Assyrian Empire crashing down in ruins. In 612 B.C.E., despite heroic resistance to the last, the Assyrian capital, Nineveh was taken and destroyed. The biblical prophet, Nahum, certainly expressed the feelings of many when he wrote: "Woe to the bloody city!...All who hear of your destruction shall clap their hands over you; for upon whom has your wickedness not passed continuously." Such celebrating was somewhat premature, for the Israelites and others like them would merely be trading one master for another. One state that recognized the danger was Egypt. Strangely enough, they allied with the hated Assyrians to stop the advance of a resurgent Babylon. The issue was decided at Carchemish in 605 B.C.E., the last great chariot battle in history. The result was a decisive victory for the Babylonians, who largely took the place of Assyria in the Near East.
In dividing the spoils of victory, the Medes got the vast lands to the north, while Babylon got the more compact, but richer and civilized lands of the Fertile Crescent. The Neo-Babylonian or Chaldaean Empire, as it is variously called, encompassed most of the old Assyrian Empire with the exception of Egypt. This period saw Babylon at the height of its power and glory.
Babylon's most famous king during this period was Nebuchadnezzar. His main concern was controlling the Western end of the Fertile Crescent: Syria, Phoenicia, Palestine, and Egypt. He never did conquer Egypt, although it no longer presented a threat to him. The remaining two tribes of Israelites in Judah made the mistake of rebelling. As a result, Jerusalem was sacked and destroyed in 587, and the Jews were hauled to Babylon for a captivity that lasted some seventy years. Fortunately, they kept their identity and were allowed to return home by the Persians who overthrew the Babylonians.
One other people Nebuchadnezzar had trouble with were the Phoenicians who had helped the Jews in this revolt. Although most Phoenician cities surrendered, Tyre did not. This city sat on an island about one-half mile from shore. Supposedly, Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Tyre for thirteen years without taking it. The main reason was he had no navy with which to blockade Tyre and cut off its supplies. Finally, the Tyrians paid Nebuchadnezzar some tribute if he would leave them alone.
The showpiece of the empire was Babylon, which contained some of the most wondrous sights of the ancient world. The Greek historian, Herodotus, has given us a second hand description of the city at its height. Even taking into account that Herodotus exaggerated a bit, we get a picture of a marvelous city. The Euphrates River split the city into two halves that were connected by a 400-foot long masonry bridge. A massive double set of walls protected the city from invaders and floods. Herodotus claimed a four-horse chariot could drive on top of the battlements and have enough room to turn around! The main ceremonial gateway was the beautiful Ishtar Gate. It was made of blue glazed bricks and decorated with relief sculptures of various animals. The palace complex covered thirteen acres and supposedly the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon were placed here. Their purpose was to comfort the queen who was homesick for the lush hills of her homeland. Finally, there was the fabled Tower of Babel, the largest and most elaborate ziggurat of its day. It was eight stories high and, according to Herodotus, the sanctuary on top was filled with tons of gold.
Babylon's final glory was short lived. Various factors combined to weaken it and set it up for a final fall. For one thing, religious disputes over trying to replace Marduk with the moon god split the empire. Even more important were economic factors. Babylon seems to have lost much of its trade because the Medes cut the overland routes to the north. The southern sea routes also suffered when the ports were silted up, preventing ships from coming in or going out. All of these triggered a feedback cycle much like that which wrecked Babylon after Hammurabi's death some 1200 years before. Heavy expenses from building projects and declining revenues from trade caused the government to raise taxes. This extra burden on the peasants caused them to abandon the two-field system and farm and irrigate both fields each year. The soil again became salinated as a result of too much irrigation, which raised the water table and brought salt with it, poisoning the crops in the process. This damaged the economy and lowered tax revenues even further, bringing on more tax increases and so on.
The final blow came in 539 B.C.E. when the Persians took Babylon in a night attack. The center of power shifted away from Babylon to the Persian Empire in the north. Mesopotamia's glory days were over, although its culture heavily influenced the Persians, who in turn heavily influenced Muslim civilization, the dominant culture in the Near East today. As a result, Mesopotamia is very much with us. Its culture has just changed and evolved with the times.
Egypt was the scene of the other great hydraulic or river civilization of the ancient Near East. Like its Mesopotamian counterpart, it evolved in a hot dry river valley that required irrigation which in turn required organization and a strong government that led to civilization. In fact, Egyptians depended so much on the irrigation and the high level of organization and authority needed to maintain it that they considered their rulers, the pharaohs, gods. The power and effectiveness of these god-kings corresponded directly to Egypt's prosperity, which itself depended on the floods' regularity and the effectiveness of the irrigation system.
However, Egypt, unlike Mesopotamia, which had no natural barriers and was open to attack, was isolated by desert to the east and west and the Mediterranean Sea to the north. As a result, its history was relatively peaceful compared to Mesopotamia's, allowing the Egyptians to build a strong centralized state without external disruptions. Egypt's more peaceful environment tended to make the Egyptians optimistic about life, but also suspicious of strangers and new ideas.
More than anything else, the Egyptians realized quite well that their prosperity and welfare depended on the Nile which provided its people with most of what they needed to survive: fish and wildlife, mud for building materials, a "highway" for easy transportation, and papyrus for paper. Most importantly, the Nile floods annually from June to October, watering the ground and replenishing the soil with a rich fertile layer of silt. The Egyptians called their land kmt ("the Black land") after this layer of silt. The real essence of Egypt consisted of a long thin strip of land along the Nile that was never more than a few miles wide. Outside of this strip was the "Red land", the desert. Today one can still stand literally with one foot in the "Black land" and one foot in the "Red land". To the ancient Egyptians, this symbolized the sharp contrast between life and death.
The Egyptian peasant's yearly schedule revolved around the Nile's cycle. During the flood season, he might work on the pharaoh's projects, such as pyramids. When the floods subsided, he would repair any damage to his home and the irrigation canals and then plant his crops. Harvest time would come in time to gather the crops right before the Nile flooded, and the cycle would start all over again.
Egyptian history overall followed a basic cycle corresponding to and ruled by the Nile's flood cycles. Regular floods led to prosperous agriculture, which would increase the pharaoh's tax revenues and his status in the eyes of his subjects who saw him as responsible for the floods as well as irrigation. As a result, his power and the ability to control the local governors and priests in the various city-states ( nomes) stretched out along the length of the Nile River valley would grow. Pharaoh's increased authority would bring the irrigation system under even tighter and more efficient control, which would further improve Egypt's agriculture and prosperity. This cycle would keep repeating itself as long as regular floods continued.
However, when irregular floods started, the cycle would reverse itself. The agriculture would decline, lowering the pharaoh's tax revenues and discrediting him in the eyes of his subjects. His power and status would decline, as would his control over the provincial governors and priests. As they got increasingly out of control, the efficiency of the irrigation system would decline, further damaging the agriculture and so on. This cycle would also keep repeating until regular floods would return, and the first part of the cycle would start over.
As a result, Egypt's history is divided into six periods whose prosperous times corresponded roughly to regular floods of the Nile and whose troubled times corresponded to periods when the Nile's annual floods were either too high or too low:
The Old Kingdom (c.2850-2150 B.C.E.) | Regular floods (c.3000-2250 B.C.E.) |
---|---|
The First Intermediate Period (c.2190-2052 B.C.E.) | Low floods (c.2250-1950 B.C.E.) |
The Middle Kingdom (c.2052-1778 B.C.E.) | Regular floods (c.1950-1840 B.C.E.) |
The Second Intermediate Period (c.1778-1570 B.C.E.) | High floods (c.1840-1770 B.C.E.) |
The New Kingdom (c.1570-1085 B.C.E.) | Regular floods (c.1770-1170 B.C.E.) |
The Final Decline (c.1085-525 B.C.E.) | Low floods (c.1170-1100 B.C.E.) |
Egyptian civilization started much as Mesopotamian civilization did, with the rise of independent city-states, called nomes, organized around irrigation projects. These city-states often fought each other for land and power. Bit by bit, different nomes absorbed each other in these wars until there were only two kingdoms left: Upper Egypt in the south, and Lower Egypt in the north. Finally, a king of Upper Egypt, known variously as Menes or Narmer, conquered Lower Egypt and united the land. Soon afterwards, the period of Egyptian history known as the Old Kingdom began. Generally, during periods of prosperity such as the Old Kingdom, Egypt would be united under one pharaoh. However, during times of turmoil, it would split back into Upper and Lower Egypt until a strong ruler reunited the land.
The Old Kingdom was a peaceful and prosperous period. It was also the great age of building pyramids, massive tombs to preserve and protect the dead for the afterlife. Tied in with this was the involved and expensive process of mummification, which preserved the body for the next world. Contrary to popular belief, the pyramids were not built using slave labor, but rather the labor of peasants who were free for such work during the flood season. At this time, the pharaoh was seen as a god who embodied all of Egypt and was the only one entitled to an afterlife. However, Egyptian peasants could feel that they were sharing in some of that afterlife by working on the pyramids. Pyramid building also provided peasants with employment and some income from the pharaoh during the flood season when they could do little else anyway.
There were about eighty of these monumental structures built. The largest of these, the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, contained some 2.3 million limestone blocks, each weighing several tons. Even in the best of times, building such structures would be a huge burden on the economy. In times of low floods, such as started around 2250 B.C.E., the strain proved to be too much. As a result, the Old Kingdom went into a period of decline.
There were several reasons for this decline. The huge cost of the pyramids coupled with low floods and the resulting poor crops have already been mentioned. There were also religious, economic, and political factors. Since the pharaoh mainly worshipped Re, the sun god, at Heliopolis, the priests of Re gained power and prestige. Eventually, they undermined the divinity and status of the pharaoh himself, referring to him merely as the "Son of Re". The pharaohs' status also diminished because they often married women of non-royal blood, which made them seem closer to the people and less god-like.
Besides the economic strain of building pyramids and maintaining priests for the benefit of previous pharaohs, the royal treasury also suffered from giving out lands to various priesthoods and nobles. Consequently, they could establish their positions more independently of the pharaoh. The king's officials ruling the different nomes were often of royal blood themselves. Many of them established hereditary positions in their nomes, passing the governorships on to their sons. In time, they became virtually independent rulers, splitting Egypt up into a number of separate city-states. Symbolic of the pharaoh's decline was the fact that these governors started claiming afterlives for themselves, building their own tombs in their home provinces rather than in the shadow of the pharaoh's pyramid.
As often happens, decline bred further decline. The poor harvests hurt the pharaohs' power and prestige since they were supposedly responsible for good crops. This bred turmoil and civil war, further weakening the agriculture and economy. Nubian tribes from the south and Libyans from the western desert seized the opportunity to raid and add to this anarchy. Contemporary accounts reflect this situation. "The dead are thrown in the river...Laughter has perished. Grief walks the land." According to one Egyptian historian, "Seventy kings ruled for seventy days." The truth is that for nearly two centuries no king ruled all of Egypt. Five dynasties are listed from this period, but none of them could control more than just part of the land.
Eventually, a strong dynasty arose around the city of Thebes in the south and reunited Upper and Lower Egypt in 2052 B.C.E. The new pharaohs faced three major problems in restoring order to Egypt: powerful local governors, the powerful priesthood of the sun god Re, and agricultural turmoil. The new pharaohs replaced local governors with their own men and rotated them occasionally so they could not establish their power in one area. They also created many of their officials from the middle class of artisans and traders. These men would depend on the pharaoh for their positions since they were from humble origins. As a result, they would be more obedient to the pharaoh.
The priests of Re were dealt with by replacing Re with Amon, the patron god of Thebes, as the main state deity. This broke the power of one priesthood by putting another less threatening one in its place. However, over time the priests of Amon would gather huge amounts of land and power into their own hands, controlling an estimated thirty percent of Egypt's real estate by the time of the New Kingdom.
Agriculture and prosperity revived as the pharaohs repaired the complex irrigation system that the Egyptian peasants relied on. One major engineering project was the restoration of Lake Moeris in the desert west of the Nile Delta. Over the years the channel feeding this lake had silted up, causing the lake to dry up. In the Middle Kingdom, the channel was dredged, the lake was restored, and new farmland was developed around it. The lake also served as a reservoir since its channel could be opened up or blocked off in times of high or low floods respectively.
The Middle Kingdom also saw Egyptian power expand beyond its borders. During the Old Kingdom, no major enemies threatened Egypt's security. As a result, the pharaohs had been content to stay mostly within Egypt's borders along the Nile, just safeguarding their gold supply from Nubia to the south and the copper mines in the Sinai Desert to the east from nomadic raiders. The pharaohs of the Old Kingdom had not even kept a permanent standing army, relying on civil officials to lead peasant recruits whenever campaigns were necessary.
The anarchy of the First Intermediate Period changed that a bit. The rulers of the Middle Kingdom extended Egypt's power southward into Nubia. This land was important to Egypt as its primary source of gold and had been loosely controlled during the Old Kingdom. Now the pharaohs built a string of massive fortresses along the Nile in Nubia to secure their hold over it. Egypt's influence was also felt to the northeast in Palestine in order to protect its copper mines in the Sinai. Its control here was not nearly as tight as it was over Nubia, which the Egyptians saw as especially vital to their interests.
This period also saw Egyptian trade with the outside world increase in importance. Commercial contacts extended to Cyprus for bronze and copper, Phoenicia for cedar wood, the Minoan civilization on Crete for pottery, and the legendary land of Punt (probably the Somali coast of East Africa) for incense.
Culturally, the Middle Kingdom was a golden age in Egyptian history. Art (especially statuary and jewelry) and literature reached a high point of development. In architecture, pyramids were still built, but not on the grand scale of the Old Kingdom. A burial complex known as the "Labyrinth" was built. It had some 3500 burial chambers and was meant to stop grave robbers with its bewildering complexity rather than with a pyramid's mass. Unfortunately, neither method succeeded in foiling the thieves, and only one tomb from 2500 years of Egyptian history, that of Tutankhamen, escaped being looted. When the Greek historian Herodotus saw the Labyrinth, it was more than just ruins, and he claimed it was more impressive than the pyramids.
Around 1800 B.C.E., Egypt entered another period of decline. Once again, irregular floods, this time being too high, probably played a role in undermining the pharaoh's power and authority. A series of pharaohs, ending with the rare rule of a woman, Nitocris, marked the end of the Middle Kingdom and the beginning of another period of anarchy, the Second Intermediate Period.
Agricultural decline and political anarchy followed much the same pattern as during the First Intermediate Period, with Egypt splitting back into its upper and lower halves. One new factor added to the confusion: foreign invasion. A group of peoples known to the Egyptians as Hyksos, or "foreign kings", came thundering into Egypt with the horse drawn chariot and the more powerful composite bow. These new weapons allowed them to conquer Lower Egypt, although Thebes in the south remained independent under the priests of Amon. The Biblical Hebrews were probably not among the Hyksos invaders, but they probably entered Egypt during the time of Hyksos rule as reflected in the Biblical story of Joseph, a foreigner who rises to very high status in Egypt.
The Hyksos, like so many other nomadic invaders, adopted the ways of their civilized subjects. Their rulers used Egyptian titles and customs, wrote their names in hieroglyphics, and worshiped the Egyptian god Seth. They also used Egyptian officials and tried to maintain the administrative machinery. Still, Hyksos rule was a shock to the Egyptians. When rulers from Thebes finally drove them out of Egypt, their attitude toward the outside world had been radically changed by the experience of foreign domination. The new era which dawned, the New Kingdom, would see the pharaohs actively pursue a policy of foreign conquest and empire building. Egypt's age of glory had arrived.
Egyptian history is traditionally divided into thirty-one dynasties or ruling families. The most famous of these are the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties who established Egypt as a great imperial power in the Near East. The eighteenth dynasty in particular saw a succession of able rulers.
Amenhotep I (1545-1525 B.C.E.) spent much of his reign securing his realm against the desert tribes who had caused so much trouble during the recent period of turmoil. He realized that it was futile to try to hold the entire desert. Instead he seized various oases scattered throughout the Sahara along Egypt's flanks. This deprived the nomads of places from which to launch raids and refresh themselves. It also gave the Egyptians advanced bases so that they could intercept any nomads trying to slip through for raids.
Thutmose I (1525-1490 B.C.E.) was the pharaoh who really established Egypt's empire. He extended Egyptian power into Nubia once again. This meant Egypt controlled a thin strip of river valley some 1200 miles long. Thutmose also advanced into Palestine and Syria to protect Egypt against any "Hyksos" there. The various independent city-states there, such as Byblos and Ugarit, fell before the onslaught of the pharaoh's army, which fought its way all the way to the upper Euphrates River. There many of the Egyptian soldiers experienced rain for the first time, which they could only describe as "the Nile falling from the sky."
Egyptian rule in Palestine and Syria was more lenient than that of such peoples as the Assyrians and Babylonians. For one thing, any cities that fell to the pharaoh were considered the property of the gods (including pharaoh). As a result, they were not usually allowed to sack a city since that would be a sacrilege. Some strategic or especially rebellious cities were left with Egyptian governors and garrisons. However, for the most part, the pharaohs left native rulers in power as long as they remained loyal to Egypt. Taking the sons of these rulers as hostages back to Egypt insured such loyalty. There they were educated in Egyptian ways so that by the time they assumed the reins of power, they saw things from a very Egyptian point of view.
After Thutmose I and the brief reign of his son Thutmose II, we encounter the first woman to make a major mark in history, Hatshepsut (1590-1560 B.C.E.). Technically, she was only a regent, or temporary ruler, for the young king, Thutmose III. However, she liked the feeling of power and decided to keep the throne for herself. Since the Egyptian people probably would not take kindly to a woman's rule, she styled herself as a "king".
Her statues sported a beard and obscured her more feminine features. Hatshepsut did not push her luck trying to lead the army, and her reign was generally peaceful as a result. The most famous event of her reign was a trading expedition to the exotic land of Punt, which brought back myrrh, incense, ivory, monkeys, and a panther.
Hatshepsut's peaceful reign was followed by that of the great warrior pharaoh, Thutmose III (1469-1436 B.C.E.). It is a tribute to Hatshepsut's ability that she had been able to keep this able young soldier under her thumb even after he came of age. The new king's frustration at having been kept from his rightful throne for so long was quickly shown by his having Hatshepsut's name erased from all public inscriptions and replaced either with his own name or those of his ancestors. Thutmose III spent much of his reign restoring Egyptian power in Syria and Palestine where it had slipped during Hatshepsut's less aggressive reign. He waged six campaigns there and another eleven against the Hurrians who had settled down to found the powerful kingdom of Mitanni. Much of this required long drawn out sieges, such as that of Megiddo, which lasted eleven months and involved building a wooden palisade and moat to completely cut the city off from outside help. Sometimes trickery was used. At the siege of Joppa, Egyptian troops supposedly got into the city by hiding in grain bags going in through the gates. At other times, the Egyptians found themselves involved in some pretty hard fighting.
Such extended campaigning so far from home forced the Egyptians to build a large professional army. Most recruits were Egyptians, but foreign mercenaries, and even captives of war made up larger proportions of the army over time. The Egyptian army was divided into divisions of about 5000 men each. The infantry were armed either with bows and arrows or large shields and axes. The most illustrious branch of the army was the chariot corps, organized into groups of twenty-five chariots each. These were light two man chariots that would sweep in front of the enemy while firing arrows into their ranks to disrupt them. After several such passes, the infantry could move in to finish off the enemy. Egypt also developed a navy whose main purpose was to transport the army by sea between Egypt and Palestine, a much easier trip than marching through the Sinai Desert.
Thutmose III's three successors, Amenhotep II, Thurmoses IV, and Amenhotep III, ruled Egypt for some seventy years. They were all able warriors and generals, and maintained Egypt's power in the Near East. However, they added little or nothing to the size of the empire, probably feeling it was already about as big as they could effectively rule.
Egypt at the height of its power and glory must have been a fascinating place to visit. Wealth poured into its treasury, allowing the pharaohs to build the massive temples of Karnak and Thebes, the magnificent tombs cut out of cliffs in the Valley of the Kings along the Nile, and gigantic statues of themselves, some of them up to sixty-five feet in height. Another popular kind of monument was the obelisk, or needle. This was a tall thin piece of granite, carved into a pyramid shape at the top. This peak was then covered with gold to reflect the brilliance of the sun god to whom it was dedicated. The Washington Monument is in the form of an obelisk, although it is not made out of a single piece of stone.
Egypt's cities also reflected the influx of wealth and new peoples that its empire brought in. Thebes, the capital, was especially renown for its wealth and splendor. Even the Greek hero, Achilles, in the great epic of the Trojan War, The Iliad, mentions "Egyptian Thebes, the world's great treasure house...Thebes with its one-hundred gates where two-hundred men issue from each gate with horses and chariots." The influx of foreign peoples also meant the influx of foreign ideas, and that may have been a factor influencing the next great pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, known to us a as Akhenaton.
The reign of Akhenaton (1370-1353 B.C.E.) was a turning point in Egyptian history. Originally, this new ruler was named Amonhotep in honor of Amon, the primary state god. However, he changed his name to Akhenaton in honor of Aton, the sun god, whom he wanted his people to worship instead. Why he wanted to change the religion is a matter of dispute. Some people think he was influenced by the simpler religious beliefs of his wife, a princess from Mitanni, or even the Hebrews, then captive in Egypt. Others see a more practical motive: trying to break the power of the priests of Amon, who had gradually gathered huge amounts of land and power into their hands over the last 700 years. Some historians estimate that they owned about thirty percent of all the land in Egypt by Akhenaton's reign. This was tax-free land, which deprived the pharaohs of money and created a growing threat to their own power. This in itself would have been enough motive to change the religion, although purer religious motives may have been mixed in as well. It also shows the importance of religion to a society that feels so helpless before the forces of nature.
Contrary to popular imagination, Akhenaton did not create a monotheistic religion worshipping only one god. Instead, he made Aton the primary focus of worship in Egypt, with the royal family worshipping him for all of Egypt's benefit. This eliminated the need for any extensive priesthood, which certainly angered the priests of Amon. They in turn played upon people's fears of what would happen if the old gods who had protected Egypt for so long were neglected. In a traditional society such as Egypt, these fears were a powerful force to overcome. Akhenaton tried to escape these problems by moving the capital from Thebes, the center of Amon's worship, to a new city, Tell-el-Amarna, dedicated to Aton. In the end, Akhenaton's experiment failed and barely outlived him. The nine-year-old Tutankhaton, better known to us as Tutankhamon after he changed his name to please the old state deity, Amon, and his powerful priests, succeeded him. Ironically, Tutankhamon is the best known of the pharaohs, although he was probably just a puppet of the resurgent priests of Amon and died before he was even old enough to rule on his own. However, it was his tomb alone that was destined to survive the ravages of grave robbers and give us a clue to the wealth and splendor of Egypt at its height.
The internal turmoil caused by Akhenaton's reforms and the reaction against them weakened Egypt's hold on its empire and brought its golden age and the eighteenth dynasty to an end. The empire did experience a revival under the nineteenth dynasty, which was founded by Ramses I (1304-1303 B.C.E.). By this time, Egypt's main rival for power in the Near East, the kingdom of Mitanni, had been replaced by an even more dangerous power, the Hittite empire. Once again, the pharaoh's chariot corps rolled northward to defend Egypt's interests. Seti I (1303-1290 B.C.E.) met the Hittites and defeated them, but they still remained a power in Palestine. Seti's successor, Ramses II (1290-1223 B.C.E.), took up the struggle and met the Hittites at Kadesh, one of history's great chariot battles. After being routed by a Hittite surprise attack, Ramses rallied his troops and struck back at the Hittites who had stopped to loot the Egyptian camp. The battle ended basically as a draw that led to a peace treaty and marriage alliance between the two powers. It is remarkable that, after such bitter fighting, the Egyptian and Hittite empires settled down to a peaceful co-existence that lasted until the fall of the Hittite Empire around 1200 B.C.E. At one point, Egypt even sent grain to the Hittites during a famine.
Ramses II was the last Pharaoh to see Egyptian power at its height. After his death, Egypt entered a period of slow but steady decline. The first major shock to its power was the invasion by a mysterious people known to us only as the Sea Peoples. Who they were is not exactly clear, but some of them seem to have come from the area of the Aegean Sea around Greece. Their path of conquest followed the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean. The Hittite Empire crashed down in ruins before their onslaught and disappeared from history. Syria and Palestine were hit next as the Sea Peoples passed on to Egypt where the first recorded naval battle in history was fought. The Egyptians won, but it took a tremendous effort that sapped their strength. The Peleset, as the Egyptians called the Sea Peoples, made their way to Palestine (which gets its name from them), settled down, and became the Biblical Philistines. This period may also be the time of the Exodus when the Israelites made good their escape from Egypt to the Promised Land.
By 1085 B.C.E., Egypt was clearly in decline. It had lost its possessions in Palestine to the Philistines and Israelites, while revolts and raids in Nubia were destroying its grip on that vital part of its empire. It also suffered from various internal problems. For one thing, low floods had damaged its economy and weakened its ability to recover from other troubles. For another thing, the powerful priesthood of Amon was a greater threat than ever to the pharaoh's power, especially after Akhenaton's attempt to destroy them had soured relations between king and priests. Finally, the increased reliance on foreign mercenaries created problems since the pharaohs often did not have the money to pay them. This made the troops restless and put the pharaohs into a very dangerous position.
Egypt's internal troubles added to the problems outside its borders. In 940 B.C.E., a Libyan general by the name of Sheshonk forced his way into the royal family through marriage, overthrew his in-laws, and founded the twenty-second dynasty. Around 750 B.C.E., Nubians coming up from the south founded another foreign dynasty, the twenty-fifth. The fact that these foreign rulers had absorbed Egyptian culture can be seen in the pyramids that the Nubians built in their kingdom of Kush to the south. Egypt was destined to fall under the rule of other peoples even less friendly to its civilization. In 652 B.C.E., the Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal, conquered Upper and Lower Egypt. Although the Egyptians drove the hated Assyrians from their land a few years later, their freedom was short-lived. In 525 B.C.E., the Persian king, Cambyses, overwhelmed any resistance to his armies and took over the Egyptian kingdom. It is at this point that we can say that the age of the pharaohs came to an end, as a long succession of Persian, Macedonian, Roman, Arab, Turkish, and British powers would rule it for the next 2400 years. Not until the modern era would a native Egyptian again rule over the Gift of the Nile.
However, archaeological evidence clearly shows this was a highly organized civilization. The main cities, Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, had sophisticated urban planning and were built on immense mounds of earth and rubble as protection against floods. Harappa's citadel mound was forty feet high, reinforced against erosion by a forty-five foot thick brick-facing wall, and topped by strong fortifications. Another, slightly smaller mound probably contained graineries, threshing floors, and furnaces for bronze smelting. Altogether the entire complex of mounds covered an area three miles in circumference. Other towns and cities were almost identical to Harappa in layout, each having a west-facing citadel surrounded by blocks of houses and a north-south grid of main streets. The houses were also of a standard design, having a central courtyard surrounded by smaller rooms and corridors. Even the bricks were of two standard types: oven fired for foundations and public buildings and sun dried for private homes. Possibly the most impressive feature was the sophisticated sewage and drainage systems, with brick drain pipes issuing from each home to city-sewers which led to main sewers.
Harappan trade extended as far as Mesopotamia, exporting jewelry made from clay, gold, silver, and semi-precious stones, cotton fabrics (a product unique to this area then), and ceramic toy wagons and animals. A system of standard weights and measures promoted trade between the cities of the Indus. The weights were based on units of 16, much like India’s present currency, the rupee, which consists of sixteen annans.
Crudely made statuettes suggest a religion devoted to a mother goddess. Stamp seal inscriptions show the Harappans probably revered such animals as the elephant, tiger, rhino, and buffalo. Large brick lined baths indicate that another feature of their religion was ritual bathing. Both this and a reverence for animals are features of present day Hinduism, suggesting its roots extend back to the Harappan civilization.
There are several theories about the end of the Harappans. Two focus on the climate turning more arid, either from deforestation or a shift of the monsoons away from the river valley. Another suggests that too much irrigation raised the water table and salinated the soil, much as happened in Mesopotamia several times. A fourth theory is that the Indus River changed its course, leaving the Harappan cities high and dry. Whatever the reasons, the Harappans abandoned their cities around 1700 B.C.E., being replaced by new settlers producing much cruder artifacts. Then, around 1500 B.C.E. new invaders, the Aryans armed with the horse and chariot, took over. They would gradually expand to the south-east and develop the civilization we call Indian. However, various aspects of Harappan civilization, especially religious, would survive as integral parts of Indian culture.
India's geography and climate are varied and have largely determined the course of its history. There are five main features of the environment to consider. First, India is hot and humid, breeding many diseases, which both slowed conquest and absorption of India by newcomers and gave people less faith in this life and reason to explore more spiritual paths. Secondly, the Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountains, two of the tallest ranges in the world, cut India cut off from the rest of Asia. Also, India is a huge subcontinent cut into very distinct regions ranging from the mountains in the north through the tropical river valley of the Ganges to the barren deserts of the Deccan. All these factors have made it a very difficult country to conquer. Finally, two other factors, India's position on the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea plus its abundance of spices, gems, and cotton, attracted trade, new peoples, and ideas to its shores.
Together, these factors have made Indian culture and history extremely complex and varied. At the same time it has resisted conquest and attracted new peoples, both keeping them distinct from one another yet absorbing them into the greater unifying fabric of its culture. As a result, Indian history defies treatment as a mere succession of empires, since it has rarely been completely unified by one power. However, there is a certain unity to India's history as seen in its main religion, Hinduism, which has as many variations as India has peoples, yet still maintains a common core that lets us speak about India as a culture that has at once resisted and absorbed a long succession of invaders from Aryans and Greeks to Muslims and the British.
It is easy for us today to take sea-borne trade and travel for granted. But what if no one had dared to venture across the sea? After all, humans do not take naturally to water, and it is conceivable that a natural fear would have kept us complete landlubbers. If that had been the case, the Americas, Australia, Britain, Japan, and numerous other islands would have been completely outside the mainstream of history. Even contact between points within the vast land mass of Asia, Europe, and Africa would have been much more restricted when one considers how much of that contact has been by way of rivers and seas. The lack of water travel might have slowed the progress of human civilization to a virtual snail's pace. Of course, we cannot know for sure how severe the impact would have been, but it certainly would have been significant. However, people with their natural curiosity did take to the water. Although the Phoenicians were not the first to do so, they advanced the art and technology of seafaring to the point that they are considered the premier sailors of antiquity.
As with other civilizations, the Phoenicians' environment, or geopolitics, largely influenced their history. First, ancient Phoenicia, modern day Lebanon, was a hilly coastal area whose rough terrain made it hard to unite. As a result, independent city-states such as Byblos, Ugarit, Tyre, and Sidon emerged along the coast.
Secondly, the Phoenicians did not have the sort of rich soil that one found in Egypt and Mesopotamia. In fact, they had only two major natural resources that were useful for trading: timber and snails. Their timber, the fabled cedars of Lebanon, was highly prized for use on the building projects and navies of the ancient Near East. Unfortunately, all that remain are a few isolated clumps of trees, since the cedar forests on the hillsides were clear-cut to meet the demands of ancient customers. The result has been the serious and most likely irreversible erosion of Lebanon's soils. Most likely, the absence of trees to transpire moisture and moderate temperatures also produced a hotter drier climate. The other, rather unlikely resource was the murex snail. This creature, when left to rot in a pool of water under the hot Near Eastern sun, secreted a hormone that produced a precious colorfast dye of scarlet (ancient purple) color. It took 60,000 of these rotting snails to produce one pound of this dye, making it very expensive. As a result, purple is still seen as the color of royalty, since kings were about the only ones who could afford to dye anything purple. All those decaying snails must have also made it imperative to place the dye works downwind from the cities.
With virtually only these two things to trade, the Phoenicians had to become shrewd traders and, indeed, they were among the sharpest businessmen in the ancient world. Part of their cleverness was the ability to copy other peoples' art and manufacturing styles in order to produce and sell those goods at a cheaper price. It is difficult to identify a distinctive Phoenician artistic style since they were such brilliant copycats. Another example of their business acumen is how they adapted an Egyptian script into the alphabet we use today, minus the vowels. This allowed each merchant to keep his own records rather than having to rely on an expensive scribe to do it for him.
The third and final geopolitical factor of Phoenicia was its position between the two great civilizations of the time: Egypt and Mesopotamia. This brought a lot of trade their way, but also left Phoenicia caught in wars between its powerful neighbors, a situation that modern Lebanon still faces today. For example, the city of Tyre supposedly withstood a siege of five years by the Assyrians and another siege of thirteen years by the Babylonians. Hemmed in and harassed by these empires, the Phoenicians found themselves with only one way to go: across the sea.
The Minoans who flourished from around 2000 to 1500 B.C.E. were the first real sailors of the ancient Near East. Their ships evolved from dugout canoes to larger craft, with the canoe itself serving as a backbone or keel to which other planks were fastened to build up the sides. The Egyptians did most of their sailing in the safe waters of the Nile or on short excursions along the coast between Egypt and Palestine. Unfortunately, they only had the short stubby acacia tree from which to make planks. As a result, their ships were patchworks of boards resembling a jigsaw puzzle and requiring a lot of internal support. So the Egyptians put in ribs and cross braces, called thwarts, to hold their ships together.
The Phoenicians, in deciding between using the Minoan keel or Egyptian ribs and thwarts, chose both. This resulted in a rather bulky, but sturdy sailing vessel. In order to seal it against leaking, a layer of tar or pitch covered the lower part of the hull, which is what the Greek poet, Homer, was referring to this when he spoke of the "black ships". Ships' hulls also often had lead or copper sheaths to guard against sea worms eating into the wood.
For short journeys, men could row these ships, but that was tiring, labor intensive, and expensive in wages and food (which would also take valuable cargo space from trade items. Eventually people figured out how to use wind power, an especially ingenious way of harnessing free energy from nature. Sailing with the wind was no problem. Sailing with a cross or headwind was an entirely different matter. The Phoenicians learned the technique of tacking, turning the sails at an angle to the wind in order to go in the general direction desired. This involved a good deal of zigzagging at different angles to the wind, but it beat rowing, and became a basic part of the sailor's art from then on.
Unfortunately, sea travel and trade also brought piracy, which led to designing specialized warships and naval tactics to meet this threat. At first, naval fights consisted of firing arrows at each other and then grappling enemy ships with hooks to board them for hand-to-hand combat. This mode of fighting at sea continued to be used all the way up through the 1500's C.E. However, around 1000 B.C.E., someone got the idea that sinking enemy ships was a much easier and safer way of disposing of the enemy than fighting them face to face. To this end ships were made much sleeker and more maneuverable with rams attached below the waterline on the bows (fronts) of the ships. The goal now was to ram a hole in the side of the enemy ship and sink it. If that failed, sweeping the enemy ship to shear off its oars with one's ram was the next best thing, since it crippled the other ship and set it up for getting rammed on the next pass. Eventually, a new type of warship evolved, the trireme, a streamlined, low lying ship powered by three banks of oars. It was the most lethal weapon on the high seas, especially when powered by highly trained expert crews. Slaves were not generally used in ancient fleets, since they were too unreliable, and the main difference between two fleets was often the quality of their rowing crews.
Equipped with reliable ships and sailing techniques, the Phoenicians took to the sea in search of new markets, resources, and homes. In the process, the they explored new lands where they often founded colonies. Their travels took them across the Mediterranean and through the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar), which most people considered the ends of the earth. From there, they sailed to Britain, which to most people was no more than a legend, but for the Phoenicians was a valuable source of tin. Even more astounding, they probably sailed around Africa two thousand years before Vasco da Gama did it for Portugal. Unfortunately, we have few details of Phoenician voyages since they wanted to keep geographic knowledge secret from any competition, in particular the Greeks, who might want to invade their markets. We do know that their method of exploration involved coast hopping rather than open sea sailing, since there were no reliable ways to navigate in open waters at this time.
The Phoenicians also founded colonies around the Mediterranean, in particular along the coast of North Africa. The most famous of these colonies was Carthage, founded by refugees from Tyre who were led by a woman known variously as Elissa, the Biblical Jezebel, and Dido in the Roman epic, the Aeneid. Carthage commanded the passage between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean and soon surpassed its mother city in power and wealth. The Carthaginians claimed the Western Mediterranean was their "lake" and tried to keep other peoples out. This led to centuries of bitter warfare between the Carthaginians and Greeks over the island of Sicily. In the end, both sides wore each other out and left the way open for another power, Rome, to take over. After three long and bitter wars, the Romans finally destroyed Carthage in 146 B.C.E., pronouncing a curse on anyone who dared settle there again. However, a century later the Romans themselves, recognizing the Phoenicians’ excellent eye for a site for a city, re-founded a new city on that site, even naming it Carthage. Ironically, some 500 years later, a Germanic tribe, the Vandals, seized Carthage and used it as a base from which to launch a raid and sack Rome in 455 C.E.
Another people who had an even greater impact on history without building a great empire were the Israelites, also known as the Hebrews or Jews. In the course of their history, they would establish Judaism as the first great monotheistic religion and also heavily influence Christianity and Islam. Together these are the three dominant religions throughout the Near East, Europe, much of Africa, the Western Hemisphere and Australia. In addition, these faiths have also shaped the law codes, art, culture, social customs, economics, and histories of their respective societies. Yet if it had not been for their religion, the Jews probably would not have been any more than a footnote in the history books.
The Jews first appear as the Habiru, a Mesopotamian word referring generically to any nomads whom they came into contact with. It was only much later that the Habiru, or Hebrews, were associated specifically with the Jews. Evidence of contact between Mesopotamia and the early Hebrews can be seen in the various stories shared by the two cultures, such as the Great Flood. Around 2000 B.C.E., various groups of Habiru, known as Amorites, gradually weakened and overthrew the Sumerian empire of the Third Dynasty of Ur. Among these tribes was a patriarchal clan that would come to be known as the Jews. One leader of this clan was Abraham, whom Jews, Christians, and Muslims all look back upon as their spiritual ancestor. While many of his Amorite kinsmen and allies were settling down and adapting to the civilized ways of their subjects, Abraham continued in his nomadic ways. His travels took him over much of the civilized world from Mesopotamia to various places in Palestine, then known as Canaan. He even made his way to Egypt during a famine before returning to Canaan. Thus Abraham's travels put him in contact with the great civilizations of the ancient Near East. Several Biblical stories, such as that of the Great Flood, seem to reflect this contact.
Abraham is especially remembered for his covenant. This was an agreement with his god to follow and worship him exclusively in exchange for his protection. Such a covenant was apparently not unique among Semitic tribes. For example, Abraham refers to the god of his brother Nahor (Genesis 3l: 53), implying Nahor and his people had a similar covenant with their own particular god. This also seems to imply that Abraham and his people believed in other gods at this time, but refused to worship them. Instead, they were the "chosen people" of their god, a distinction that would grow in importance as they came to see their god in more universal and cosmic proportions as the only god.
Around 1650 B.C.E., the Hebrews' history became intertwined with that of Egypt. It was at this time that the Semitic people known as the Hyksos overran and ruled much of Egypt. Although the Hebrews were probably not part of the actual invasion, they do seem to have been related to the Hyksos. For example, Hyksos names with "Jacob", a Hebrew name, occur. The story of the quick rise to power of Joseph, Abraham's descendant, probably could not have occurred under native Egyptian rule. And when Joseph's family migrated to Egypt, they went to Goshen, a Hyksos city.
There is about a 400-year lapse between the end of Genesis, when Joseph is at the height of his power, and the beginning of the next book of the Bible, Exodus. At that point we find Joseph's people, the Israelites, enslaved by the Egyptians. What has happened in between has been a resurgence of Egyptian power that drove the Hyksos out of Egypt. Naturally, the Israelites did not fare too well in this change of masters.
It was during this time, probably in the reign of Egypt's last great warrior pharaoh, Ramses II, that the next great figure in Jewish history, Moses, was born. Although he grew up in the upper ranks of Egyptian society, Moses kept, or regained, touch with his unfortunate kinsmen. Pitying an Israelite slave who was being beaten by his Egyptian master, Moses killed the Egyptian and then fled into the desert. It was there that he found what he saw as a sign from God: a burning bush that was not consumed in its flames. This inspired him to lead his people out of Egypt.
The Exodus, as this mass migration is called, is probably the most important single event in the history of the Jews, since it won them their freedom and gave them their identity as a people. It probably occurred after Ramses II's reign, when the strain of extended warfare and the burden of supporting the powerful priesthood of Amon were starting to take their toll on Egypt. The Biblical ten plagues that forced the pharaoh to let the Israelites go may reflect Egypt's internal troubles at that time. Also, more than the Israelites escaped at this time, as reflected in the Bible's reference to a "mixed multitude".
The Exodus was also important in the development of the Jewish religion. The climactic event of the Exodus was receiving the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai. The revolutionary nature of these laws is easily obscured by the fact that they have become an essential part of our culture. This makes them commonplace, and thus taken for granted. However, the idea that people are morally responsible for their own actions rather than just being at the mercy of fickle gods who act unpredictably dates from the time of the Ten Commandments. Also, the idea of worshipping only one god and not making idols that one can touch and feel was a radical departure from most other peoples' practice up to that point in history. Since that time, the Ten Commandments have served as the religious, moral, and ethical foundations for the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures.
The Bible tells us the Israelites wandered for forty years in the wilderness. This may seem like a long time, but for a nomadic people used to wandering, that might be a reasonable figure. Archaeology and the Bible tend to support each other here, giving us a date of around 1200 B.C.E. for the Israelites' entrance into the Promised Land when Jericho and other Canaanite cities seem to have been destroyed by invaders. Also the Sea Peoples, or Peleset as the Egyptians called them, probably arrived in Palestine about this time. Although they would later be the Israelites' archenemies, the Philistines, their raids at this time probably helped the Israelites by weakening the Egyptian Empire.
The Bible gives two very different versions of the conquest of Israel. One version has Joshua, Moses' successor, winning one spectacular victory that delivered the whole land into the Israelites' hands. The other version gives the impression of a piecemeal conquest. This is probably closer to the truth. The nomadic Israelites were divided into twelve tribes loosely held together by their common religion. Most likely, each tribe took over its own part of Israel independently of the other tribes. It was a fairly drawn out process that involved fighting here and peaceful absorption there. Many of the inhabitants were Habiru, akin to the Israelites, but who had stayed behind when Joseph and his clan went to Egypt.
Israel's geopolitics did not mark it out as the ideal place to settle. It was a hot dry land with scattered areas that had enough fertile soil and water to make them worth settling in. It had few natural resources besides some copper and iron in the south. Worst of all, it was in between the great empires of Egypt to the south and Mesopotamia to the north. This made it a constant battleground or highway for invading armies. That situation has not changed too much to the present day.
Settling in Israel created two very different problems for the Israelites. Like other nomadic peoples who conquered civilized areas, the Israelites found themselves drawn to adopt the ways of their more settled subjects. However, their transition to civilization was particularly difficult, because the Canaanites' polytheistic religion attracted many Israelites to its rituals. Since the Israelites saw themselves as God's chosen people, and felt that their survival and success depended on God's favor, they took very harsh measures against anyone, Israelite or Canaanite, they found practicing pagan religions.
Another problem the Israelites faced was hostile neighbors, especially the Sea Peoples, or Philistines, who had settled in the coastal areas of Palestine. These people, possibly from contact with the Hittites, whom they had conquered, had iron technology and weapons. This gave them a decisive edge in battle that allowed them to deal some fairly serious beatings to the different Israelite tribes. As long as the tribes remained separate and did not cooperate, the Philistines could do just about as they pleased. They even captured the Israelites' holiest object, the Ark of the Covenant, in battle. Because of this outrage, the Israelites started agitating for a king to unite them against the common enemy.
Up to this point, the main officials of the Israelites had been tribal leaders called judges. These men, such as Samson and Gideon, often served as military leaders as well as performing judicial functions. There was at least one woman judge, Deborah, who was renown for her wisdom. The most influential of the judges at this time was Samuel. He tried to convince the Israelites that a king would be a bad idea, since he would demand military service and forced labor, just as they had endured when in Egypt. Nevertheless, the people insisted and Samuel chose Saul as Israel's first king.
Saul's reign (c.1020-1000 B.C.E.) was not a happy one. Besides facing the formidable Philistines and other enemies in battle, he also had to deal with the different tribes refusing to cooperate with each other. He even had trouble with the judge Samuel, who may have been jealous of the power this new king was taking at the expense of the judges. In the end, Saul's reign ended in a military disaster at the hands of the Philistines. His reign was important, nonetheless, because, once the Israelites had taken that fateful step towards civilized monarchy, they never went back to their old nomadic ways.
The reigns of the next two kings, David (c.1000-96l B.C.E.) and Solomon (96l-922 B.C.E.), saw Israel's power at its height. The Israelites during this time were able to extend their sway directly or indirectly over the Eastern Mediterranean coast from the Sinai Desert in the south to the Euphrates River in the north. Much of their success was a result of timing, because both Egypt and Assyria were experiencing internal problems at the time. This created a power vacuum which the Israelites could fill.
The reigns of David and Solomon saw further signs of the transition from nomadic to civilized life. David founded, or refounded, the city of Jerusalem and built a splendid palace there. Solomon built a magnificent temple in which the Ark of the Covenant could reside rather than in a tent. Both kings built up a standing army and bureaucracy to protect and rule the land. Of course, there was a price for all this: heavy taxation and even forced labor. True to Samuel's prediction, many Israelites did grumble about how this was just like their forced labor in Egypt.
Dissatisfaction with Solomon's high taxes and forced labor led to the kingdom splitting after his death in 922 B.C.E. The ten tribes in the north, feeling they had borne more than their fair share of the burden, broke away and founded the kingdom of Israel, while David's line continued to rule the remaining two tribes in the southern kingdom of Judah. Neither kingdom had the power and resources to maintain itself in the style of David and Solomon. A growing gap between rich and poor led to social turmoil, while corruption and internal quarrels further weakened each kingdom. And all the while, the spreading shadow of the Assyrian Empire was approaching the Israelites.
Both kingdoms gave in to Assyrian rule and were allowed to govern themselves as long as they loyally supplied the Assyrians with money and troops. Unfortunately, the northern kingdom of Israel made the mistake of rebelling. The Assyrian lion descended with typical speed and ferocity, killing much of the population and dragging the rest off into mass exile. There, the ten tribes of Israel became the "ten lost tribes of Israel", being absorbed by the surrounding cultures and losing their identity as a people. The southern kingdom of Judah managed to hang on until 586 B.C.E., when it rebelled against the Babylonian successors to the Assyrian Empire. Babylonian vengeance was also swift and deadly. Jerusalem was sacked and burned, and the remaining two tribes were dragged into captivity in Babylonia. However, these two tribes managed to survive and keep their identity, largely because the Persians, who conquered the Babylonians in 539 B.C.E., allowed them to return to their homeland before they were totally absorbed and had lost their identity.
Ironically, this time of troubles saw the Jewish religion achieve new heights. Since the time of David, a succession of prophets had emerged in order to chastise the people for their sins and warn them of God's retribution. When that retribution came at the hands of outside powers, such as Assyria and Babylon, the idea emerged that the Jewish god was the god of all peoples. For example, the prophet Jonah was sent to warn the Assyrians to mend their ways, showing a concern for Gentiles (non Jewish peoples) that had not appeared previously.
Also, in the midst of all these troubles, a messianic idea evolved of a day when divine grace would put an end to human conflict and suffering. Unlike most ancient peoples, such as the Greeks and Romans, who put their golden ages in the past, the Jews saw theirs in the future. The Jews passed this idea on to Christianity and Islam. In later centuries, it would become one of the most dynamic forces in the history of human thought. The Jews were fortunate to have such an optimistic view of the future, for they would need it. Few, if any, people, have endured the suffering and displacement that they were destined to undergo in the 2500 years after the fall of Jerusalem while still maintaining their identity as a people. Although the Persians let them return home from Babylon, fate would not let them stay there.
In 66 C.E., the Jews rebelled against another master, this time Rome. Four years later, Roman legions broke into, sacked, and destroyed Jerusalem. This was the start of the Diaspora, or dispersal of the Jews. For the next 1900 years, the Jews would be a people without a home. Scattered across Europe and the Near East, they would experience alternating periods of tolerance and intense persecution at the hands of the people under whom they lived. The low point of all this was the methodical execution of 6,000,000 Jews by the Nazis in World War II. Remarkably, the Jews kept their identity as a people, and in 1948 finally regained a homeland in Israel. Seeing them through all these centuries of trials and tribulations was the vision of a better day to come when
(Isaiah 2:4)“Nation shall not lift up sword against nation
Neither shall they learn war anymore.”
Few people today can boast a longer and prouder history than the Iranians, descendants of the ancient Persians. Not only did they build the greatest empire of the ancient Near East, but they also absorbed the ancient civilizations they ruled, in particular that of Mesopotamia. They then added their own distinctive touches and passed them on to Islamic civilization, still one of the main cultural traditions of modern times. Therefore, this remarkable people who have survived and flourished from antiquity to the present have been a major connecting link with our past.
We first encounter the Persians around 2000 B.C.E. emerging from the grassy steppes of Central Asia in the north. At that point, they were closely associated with two other peoples: the Medes and Aryans. The latter of these turned eastward, crossed the Hindu Kush Mountains, and overthrew the Indus River civilization. Eventually these nomads would settle down and build Indian civilization upon the foundations laid by the Indus culture. Meanwhile the Persians and Medes were turning westward where they encountered the Elamites, a people whose extended contact with Mesopotamia had influenced them to absorb the culture of the "Cradle of Civilization".
The Medes and Persians in turn started absorbing Elamite culture. One need only look at the relief sculptures of the Persians, with their curly beards and stiff formal poses, to see the connection with Mesopotamia. However, the process of becoming civilized was a long one for these people, since they were still on the northeastern fringes of the older Near Eastern cultures. When they emerge fully into the light of history in the pages of the Greek historian Herodotus, they are still very nomadic in their customs and values. According to Herodotus, the nomadic Persians had only three simple goals in educating their sons: "to ride a horse, to draw a bow, and to speak the truth." What more did nomads need? The Medes were actually the first of these nomadic peoples to establish an empire when they joined forces with Babylon to overthrow the Assyrian Empire in 6l2 B.C.E. In the aftermath, Babylon took the richer civilized lands of the Fertile Crescent, while the Medes took the more extensive but wilder lands to the north. Among their subjects were their compatriots, the Persians. It is here that we encounter the founder of the Persian Empire.
Herodotus gives us a detailed and somewhat fanciful account of Cyrus the Great's rise to power. As in the stories of so many great men and legendary figures in history, from Sargon of Kish and Moses to Oedipus and Romulus and Remus, Cyrus barely survived infancy due to a royal death sentence from a king nervous about the child's destiny. In each story, someone saves the baby, who grows up and comes back to overthrow the king who tried to do him in. What does seem clear is that Cyrus led the Persians in revolt against the Medes and overthrew them around 550 B.C.E.
Although the Medes' old neighbors were certainly glad to see the powerful Median state overthrown, they soon found their new neighbor, Persia, was an even more dangerous foe. Cyrus first turned westward against Croesus, king of Lydia in Asia Minor, a land renown for its wealth, as seen in the old saying "rich as Croesus" to denote how wealthy someone is. In order to deal with the tough Lydian cavalry, Cyrus placed camels in front of his lines. The Lydian horses, unused to the camels' strange smell, panicked and bolted, giving Cyrus the victory and Lydia. Cyrus next turned south against Babylon, whose empire was seething with revolt. Herodotus claims that Cyrus had his troops divert the course of the Euphrates so they could march into the city's unguarded river gates. However true that may be, Babylon's empire collapsed like a house of cards, leaving Cyrus the master of a huge empire. Still, he pressed onward, this time into the vast and wild expanses of Central Asia. His intentions here were probably defensive, to protect the frontiers of civilization from the swarms of nomadic horsemen to the northeast. It was here in 530 B.C.E. that Cyrus died in battle against a tribe known as the Massagetae. In his twenty-nine year reign, he had built the largest empire in history up to that time.
Cyrus' son and successor, Cambyses (530-522 B.C.E.), is mainly remembered for his conquest of Egypt in 525 B.C.E. His attempts to conquer the Nile further south and the desert oases of the Sahara met with less success. Supposedly, one of Cambyses' armies was swallowed up by a desert sandstorm. Cambyses was especially unpopular with the Egyptians, who claimed he committed various atrocities, including the slaying of the sacred bull of Apis. Since our main source for his life is Herodotus, who relied heavily on Egyptian sources for his book, we have a picture of Cambyses as a drunken lunatic,. Cambyses died in 522 B.C.E on his way to Babylon to crush a revolt led by his cousin, Darius, who then succeeded him as the next Great King of Persia.
Although Cyrus had founded the Persian Empire, Darius I (522-486 B.C.E.) gave it the internal organization and structure that allowed it to last for 200 years. His accomplishment is all the more impressive when we consider the empire's enormous size, the scale of which no one had ever dealt with before. Darius dealt especially with three areas: organization of the empire's provinces, keeping the provincial governors under control, and maintaining communications with his far flung empire.
Organizing the provincial government presented two options. Darius could either create small provinces with governors too weak to rebel, but also too weak to defend their provinces against invasion. Or he could create large provinces able to defend themselves, but also more capable of defying his authority. He created about twenty large provinces, called satrapies. These ensured that he would not have to race from one end of his empire to the other defending it against every little tribe that decided to attack. Each such campaign might involve years of preparation, marching and fighting. Meanwhile, other frontiers would be vulnerable to attack, involving more years of campaigning and leaving the king with little time for other duties.
Since larger provinces gave the governors, known as satraps, a lot of power, Darius took several precautions to keep his satraps from rebelling. For one thing, he had the provincial treasury officials, secretaries, and garrisons answer directly to him, not to the satraps, except in emergencies. This generally deprived the satraps of the money and troops they needed to revolt while ensuring the defense of the satrapies. There were also officials known as the "King's Ears". These personal agents of the king would travel to the various satraps' courts to check up on their behavior and official records. The King's Ears commanded a great deal of fear and respect, sometimes showing up with no armed escort, but still being able to put down rebellious satraps before the revolts went beyond the planning stages.
Communications in such a far-flung realm was another major problem. Here the Persians adopted the Assyrian practice of setting up a system of relay riders, much like the old Pony Express in American history. Each horse and rider would carry a message for a day and then pass it on to the next horse and rider. In order to speed things along, the Persians established a road system to tie the empire together. The most famous of these was the King's Highway, which stretched 1677 miles from the Persian capital of Susa to Sardis in Asia Minor. It had patrols against bandits, relay stations with fresh horses for the royal messengers, and 111 inns for travelers, placed about one day's journey apart from each other. Another road going through the desert to Egypt had underground cisterns with water for travelers. Although these roads helped trade and travel, their main priority was for the relay riders who could carry a message from Sardis to the king in Susa within seven days, an amazing speed for back then. As Herodotus described these riders: "Nothing stops these couriers from covering their allotted stops in the quickest possible time--neither snow, rain, heat, nor darkness."
In general, Darius took existing practices and institutions and adopted them on a larger scale. However, in one respect, he differed quite markedly from previous Mesopotamian rulers. That was in his treatment of Persia's subjects. Darius realized that there was no way his far-flung empire could survive constant revolts such as had plagued the Assyrians. Therefore, he followed a policy of tolerance toward his subjects' customs and religions. For example, the Jews were allowed to return to Israel from their Babylonian captivity, causing them to sing the Persians’ praises in the Bible.
Darius and other Persian kings also adopted local titles, such as pharaoh in Egypt, to win popular support. Sometimes they also kept local rulers in power as Persian vassals, such as in the Greek cities in Asia Minor. This hopefully would ensure them more loyalty, although it could backfire if those rulers were unpopular to begin with. While Persian rule may not have been wildly popular, most people tolerated it as an improvement over the harsher rule of the Assyrians and Babylonians. Keeping their subjects happy went a long way toward keeping the Persian Empire intact. It also ensured the cooperation of the Syrians and Babylonians, whose scribes and administrative skills were badly needed to keep the government running smoothly.
The Persians also worked hard to promote economic prosperity. Their roads, strong government, and stable coinage encouraged trade. They also promoted agriculture with irrigation projects and the introduction of new crops to different areas, such as sesame to Egypt and rice to Mesopotamia. Of course, increased prosperity also generated more taxes. The Persians also kept their subjects happy by charging moderate tax rates, about twenty per cent of a person's income. Despite this modest tax rate, the Persian kings were fabulously wealthy. By the time Alexander the Great took over the Persian Empire in 330 B.C.E., the Persian kings had reportedly amassed a treasury of 5500 tons of silver.
Darius and other Persian kings further enhanced their authority by assuming divine or semi-divine status to overawe their subjects. In certain provinces, such as Egypt, they took the titles of local rulers who were often seen as gods. They also built a fabulous capital, Persepolis, in the middle of the desert, and adorned it with magnificent government buildings. The Persians also adopted the elaborate court ritual of their subjects. One had to go through a virtual army of officials before getting an audience with the king. When one approached the king, he performed a rite known as proskynesis, which involved throwing oneself at the king's feet. It was a great honor just to be allowed to kiss the hem of his garment and a serious offence for anyone outside the king's closest friends and advisors to look him in the eye. Such elaborate ritual could enhance the king's authority, but it could also cut him off from the day-to-day realities of empire.
The Persians, like most ancient peoples, started out with a polytheistic religion to account for the forces of nature. However, around 600 B.C.E., a new religion emerged, called Zoroastrianism after its founder, Zoroaster. This was a dualistic religion, which meant it saw life as a constant struggle between the forces of good and evil. In the end people would all be held accountable for their deeds in a judgment day when they would go to heaven as a reward for good deeds or suffer eternal punishment for their sins. Zoroastrianism seems to have had some influence on Judaism. In the book of Daniel, which takes place at the Persian court, the ideas of Heaven and Hell and of Satan as a force always opposed to God first appear in the Bible. Both of these ideas have become central to Christianity and Islam as well as Judaism.
Any state needs a strong ruler to keep things running smoothly. After the death of Xerxes (486-464 B.C.E.), the Persian Empire lacked that strong hand. As a result, various problems developed that fed back upon one another and led to Persia's decline and fall. For one thing, weak rulers led to numerous provincial revolts, especially in Egypt, which always had detested Persian rule. Secondly, the provincial satraps also became more independent, ruling their satrapies more as kings than as the king's loyal subjects. They even carried on their own foreign policies and waged war on each other, which only added to Persia's problems.
Revolts and unruly satraps caused serious economic problems for the empire. Persian taxes became heavier and more oppressive, which led to economic depression and revolts, which in turn led to more repression, heavier taxes and so on. The Persian kings also started hoarding gold and silver rather than re-circulating it. This created economic turmoil without enough gold and silver for doing business. As a result of this economic turmoil, the Persian kings got weaker still, which fed back into the problem of revolts and powerful satraps and so on.
Around 400 B.C.E., Cyrus the Younger, a royal prince, rebelled against his brother and king, Artaxerxes. Although Cyrus was killed in battle, his force of 10, 000 Greek mercenaries survived only to find themselves stranded in the heart of Persia. In order to get home, they marched and fought their way through a good part of the Persian Empire. This exploit, known as the March of the Ten Thousand, exposed the weakness of the Persian Empire. This encouraged Alexander the Great to invade Persia, which he conquered in a remarkably short time and with a remarkably small army.
Nevertheless, the Persians survived and reestablished their empire under the Sassanid dynasty around 200 C.E. Around 650 C.E., they fell once again, this time to the Arabs inspired by their new religion, Islam. Still, Persia survived, passing its culture on to the Arabs. Thus the Islamic culture which emerged was very much Persian, and ultimately Mesopotamian, in origin. The Persian Empire revived once again around 1500 under the Safavid dynasty, and its culture and traditions live on today in modern Iran.
While the peoples of the ancient Near East gave us civilization, the Greeks gave it forms and meanings that make us look to them as the founders of our own culture, Western Civilization. Greek genius and energy extended in numerous directions. Much of our math and science plus the idea of scientific research and the acquisition of knowledge apart from any religious or political authority goes back to the Greeks. The philosophy of such Greeks as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle laid the foundations for the way we look at the world today. Our art, architecture, drama, literature, and poetry are all firmly based on Greek models. And possibly most important, our ideas of democracy, the value of the individual in society, and toleration of dissent and open criticism as a means of improving society were all products of the Greek genius. Even those critical of our own society and Western Civilization overall have the Greeks, creators of Western Civilization, to thank for that right.
Greece's geography strongly affected its history. Greece was a hilly and mountainous land, breaking it up into literally hundreds of independent city-states. These city-states spent much of their time fighting one another rather than uniting in a common cause. Greece was also by the sea with many natural harbors. This and the fact that it had poor soil and few natural resources forced the Greeks to be traders and sailors, following in the footsteps of the Phoenicians and eventually surpassing them.
The first Greek civilization was that of the Minoans on the island of Crete just south of Greece. Quite clearly, the Minoans were heavily influenced by two older Near Eastern civilizations, Mesopotamia and Egypt, by way of the Cycladic Islands, which formed natural stepping stones for the spread of people from Greece and of civilized ideas from the Middle East. Egyptian influence on the Minoans is especially apparent. Minoan architecture used columns much as Egyptian architecture did. Minoan art also seems to copy Egyptian art by only showing people in profile, never frontally. Still, the Minoans added their own touches, making their figures much more natural looking than the still figures we find in Egyptian art.
Since we have not been able to translate the few examples of their hieroglyphic script, known as Linear A, there are some very large gaps in the picture we have of these people. We do not even know what the people on Crete called themselves. The term Minoans comes from Greek myths concerning a legendary king of Crete, Minos, who supposedly ruled a vast sea empire. As with most myths, there is a grain of truth in this myth, for the Minoans were a seafaring people who depended on their navy and trade for power and prosperity.
Two things, both relating to Crete's maritime position, largely determined the nature of the Minoan's civilization. First, they had a large fleet, which was useful for both trade and defense. Second, Crete's isolated position meant there was no major threat to its security at this time and therefore little need for fortifications. These two factors helped create a peaceful and prosperous civilization reflected in three aspects of Minoan culture: its cities and architecture, the status of its women, and its art, especially its pottery.
The Minoans had several main cities centered around palace complexes which collected the island's surplus wealth as taxes and redistributed it to support the various activities that distinguish a civilization: arts, crafts, trade, and government. The largest of these centers was at Knossos, whose palace complex was so big and confusing to visitors, that it has come down to us in Greek myth as the Labyrinth, or maze, home of the legendary beast, the Minotaur. The sophistication of the Minoans is also shown by the fact that they had water pipes, sewers, and even toilets with pipes leading to outside drains. Since their island position eliminated the need for fortifications, Minoan cities were less crowded and more spread out than cities in other civilizations.
Minoan women seem to have had much higher status than their counterparts in many other ancient civilizations. One likely reason was that, in the absence of a powerful warrior class and a constant need for defense, they had more opportunity for attaining some social stature. This is reflected in their religion where the primary deity was an earth goddess. Minoan art also depicts women as being much freer, even participating with men in a dangerous gymnastic ritual of vaulting themselves over a charging bull.
Minoan art especially its pottery, also shows a peaceful prosperous society, depicting floral designs and such marine wildlife as dolphins and octopuses rather than scenes of war. Its diffusion around the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean shows that Minoan influence was quite widespread, extending throughout the Cycladic Islands and Southern Greece. The myth of Theseus and the Minotaur where Athens had to send a yearly sacrifice of its children to Crete, reflects Minoan rule and indicates that it might not always have been so peaceful. Recent archaeological evidence indicates the Minoans did at times practice human sacrifices.
Minoan civilization continued to prosper until it came to a sudden and mysterious end. A combination of archaeology and mythology provide clues to how this may have happened. The central event was a massive volcanic eruption that partially sank the island of Thera some eighty miles northeast of Crete and left a crater four times the size of that created by the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, the largest recorded volcanic eruption in recorded history, This eruption had three devastating effects: a shock wave which levelled Crete's cities, a tidal wave which destroyed its navy, and massive fallout of volcanic ash which poisoned its crops. Together these weakened the Minoans enough to let another people, the Mycenaean Greeks eventually take over around 1450 B.C.E.
This seems to correspond to the myth of the lost continent of Atlantis, passed on to the Greeks from the Egyptians who had been frequent trading partners with the Minoans. When the Minoans, whose fleet was destroyed by the tidal wave, suddenly stopped coming to visit Egypt, stories drifted southward about an island blown into the sea (i.e., Thera) which the Egyptians assumed was Crete. Over the centuries the stories kept growing until Crete became the vast mythical continent and empire of Atlantis set in the Atlantic Ocean. The Greeks picked up the story, which is found in its most complete form in Plato's dialogues, Timaeus and Critias.
Three types of evidence tell us at least a little about Mycenaean society. First of all, we know that they were divided into different city-states such as Mycenae, Pylos, Tiryns, and Athens. Most of these consisted of highly fortified central palace complexes which ruled over surrounding villages. The Mycenaeans tried to run these as highly centralized states such as existed in Egypt and Mesopotamia. We do not know if these city-states were completely independent or looked to one city, probably Mycenae, for leadership. However, sources, such as the Iliad tell us that the Mycenaeans could apparently unite in a common endeavor such as the Trojan War.
Second, the art, armor, and remains of fortifications, such as those at Mycenae, tell us the Mycenaeans were much more warlike than the Minoans. Later Greeks had no idea of the existence of Mycenaean civilization and thought these massive walls and gates had been built by a mythical race of giants known as the Cyclopes.
Finally, archaeological remains also tell us that the Mycenaeans, at least the upper classes, were fabulously wealthy from trade and probably occasional piracy. Gold funeral masks, jewelry, bronze weapons, tripods, and a storeroom with 2853 stemmed goblets all attest to the Mycenaeans' wealth. Keep in mind this is only what we have found. There is no telling how much of their wealth was plundered by grave robbers.
Around 1200 B.C.E., a period of migrations and turmoil began that would weaken and eventually help destroy Mycenaean civilization. Once again, the main troublemakers were the Sea Peoples whom we have seen destroy the Hittite Empire, conquer the coast of Palestine, and shake the Egyptian Empire to its very foundations. The Sea Peoples also hit the Mycenaeans, destroying some settlements and driving other inhabitants inland or across the sea away from their raids. The historical Trojan War and sack of Troy took place at this time at the hands of the Mycenaeans, who may have been running from and, in some cases, joining up with the Sea Peoples. Hittite records associate their own decline with people known as the Ahhiwaya, translated as "Achaeans" (Greeks).
Whatever role the Mycenaeans may have played in all these raids, the result was widespread turmoil as cities were sacked, populations displaced, and trade disrupted. Even though the Mycenaeans survived the actual onslaught of the Sea Peoples, they did not survive the aftermath of all this destruction. Reduced revenue from trade may have caused more warfare between the city-states over the meager resources left in Greece. This warfare would only serve to weaken the Mycenaeans further, wreck trade even more, aggravate grain shortages at home, and so on. This recurring feedback of problems opened the way for a new wave of Greek tribes, the Dorians, to move down and take over much of Greece. A period of anarchy and poverty now settled over the Greek world which virtually blotted out any memories of the Minoans and Mycenaeans. However, on top of the foundations laid by these early Greek cultures an even more creative and vibrant civilization would be built, that of the classical Greeks.
The centuries following the fall of the Mycenaeans are mostly obscured from our view by an extreme scarcity of records. As a result, this is known as the Dark Age of Greek history. Still, there are a few things that we know about this period that saw the transition from Mycenaean to classical Greek civilization. It was a period of chaos and the movements of peoples. New tribes of Greeks, the Dorians, moved in and displaced or conquered older inhabitants. Those peoples in turn would migrate, oftentimes overseas, in search of new homes. It was also a period of illiteracy and poverty leaving us no written records or sophisticated monuments to tell us about the culture of this period.
All this led to the Greek world at this time being divided up between various Greek-speaking peoples who were distinguishable from each other by slight differences in dialect and religious practices. However, their similarities were important enough so that we can talk about the Greeks as a people. Two of these Greek peoples in particular should be mentioned: the Dorians and Ionians. The Dorians were Greek invaders who came down from the north to conquer many of the Mycenaean strongholds around 1100 B.C.E. Sometimes they completely blended in with their pre-Dorian subjects, and there was little class conflict in their city-states. In other places the Dorians did not intermarry and remained a distinct ruling class over the non-Dorian population. The most extreme cases of this were Sparta and Thessaly, where the non-Dorians were virtually enslaved and forced to work the soil for the ruling Dorians. Such situations posed a constant threat of violence within city-states.
The Ionians were pre-Dorian inhabitants who avoided conquest by the Dorians, either by fighting them off or by migrating. The region of Attica, centered around Athens, was one main pocket of resistance to Dorian conquest, as seen in the myth of the Athenian king, Codrus, who sacrificed himself in battle to ensure Athens' safety against a Dorian invasion. Many Ionians either chose to migrate overseas or were forced to do so by invaders. Most of them settled in the Cycladic Islands or on the western coast of Asia Minor, which became known as Ionia from the large number of Ionian Greeks there.
The chaos and Greece's mountainous terrain forced people to huddle under the protection of a defensible hill known as an acropolis. By 800 B.C.E., these fortified centers had produced more security and settled conditions that triggered two important developments vital to the emergence of Greek culture. First, the more settled conditions plus the fact that Greece was by the sea and had few resources led to a revival of trade and contact with the older cultures to the East. For example, the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet and added vowels to it, so literacy returned to Greece. Also, Egyptian influence can be seen in Greek architecture and sculpture. Here too we see the Greeks would add their own innovations, giving their pillars more slender and graceful lines, and creating more lifelike statues than the stiff formal Egyptian models they had to copy. These influences would lead to and be the partial basis of classical Greek civilization .
Also, the settled conditions along with Greece's poor soils and hilly and dry conditions led to a new type of agriculture and farmer at this time. Instead of the overly centralized agriculture of the Mycenaean period and the under-worked aristocratic estates of the earlier Dark Age, farmers started developing less desirable lands which the nobles probably did not even want. Rather than raising just grain crops or grazing livestock, they developed a mixed agriculture of grains, orchards, and vineyards that was better adapted to the varied conditions of their lands and climate. The intensive labor such farms required bred very independent farmers who would be largely responsible for the emergence of democracy in the Greek polis.
The revival of trade and development of small independent farms also combined to allow the settlements to grow into towns and cities (poleis) that spread out beyond the confines of their original acropolises. Later, in some cities, notably Athens, the acropolis would become a place to build temples to the gods while also serving as a reminder of earlier more turbulent times. In order to understand the Greeks, one must understand what this most distinctive of all Greek institutions, the polis (city-state), meant to them.
The word polis means city, but it was much more than that to the Greek citizen. It was the central focus of his political, cultural, religious, and social life. Much of this was because the Greek climate was ideal for people to spend most of their time outdoors. Therefore, they interacted with one another much more than we do and became more tightly knit as a community. Since poleis were so isolated from each other by mountains, they became largely self sufficient and self-conscious communities. Greeks generally saw their poleis as complete in themselves, not needing to unite with other Greek poleis for more security or fulfillment. We can see three main qualities that were typical of major and minor poleis alike.
The polis was an independent political unit with its own foreign policy, coinage, patron deity, and even calendar. For example, the tiny island of Ceos off the coast of Attica, had four independent city-states, each claiming the right to carry on its own business and wage war as it saw fit-- all this on an island no more than ten miles in length!
The polis was on a small scale. This is obvious from the example of Ceos. But consider a major city-state such as Corinth, which controlled an area of only some 320 square miles, considerably smaller than an average county in one of our states. Athens, by far the most influential of the city-states on our own culture, controlled an area only about the size of Rhode Island. Yet it is to Athens that we look for the birth of such things as our drama, philosophy, architecture, history, and democracy.
The polis was personal in nature. This follows logically from its small size. Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato thought that a polis should be small enough for every citizen to know every other citizen. If it got any bigger, it would get too impersonal and not work for the individual citizen's benefit. Even in Athens, the most populous Greek city-state, some citizens could pay their taxes in very personal ways, such as by equipping and maintaining a warship for a year or by producing a dramatic play for the yearly festival dedicated to Dionysus. This tended to breed a healthy competition where citizens would strive to make their plays or warships the best ones possible, thus benefiting the polis as a whole.
The polis' small and personal nature bred an intense loyalty in its citizens that had both its good and bad points. On the plus side, it did inspire members of the community to work hard for the civic welfare. The incredible accomplishments of Athens in the fifth century B.C.E. are the most outstanding example of what this civic pride could accomplish.
On the negative side, the polis' narrow loyalties led to intense rivalries and chronic warfare between neighboring city-states. These wars could be long, bitter, and costly. Sparta and Argos were almost always in a state of war with each other or armed truce waiting for war. The Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens lasted 27 years, destroying Athens' empire and golden age. Sometimes city-states would be entirely destroyed in these wars, such as happened to Plataea and Sybaris. In addition, there was often civil strife within the city-state as well: between rich and poor, Dorians and non-Dorians, and citizens and non-citizens. This internal turmoil could be every bit as vicious and bloody as fighting between city-states. Ultimately, the Greeks sealed their own doom by wasting energy and resources in their own petty squabbles while other larger powers were waiting in the wings for the right moment to strike.
However, there were several factors that gave the Greeks a common identity and some degree of unity. First of all, the Greeks spoke a common language that largely gave them a common way of looking at things. The Greeks generally divided the world into those who spoke Greek and those who did not. Those who did not speak Greek were called barbarians, since, to the Greeks, they senselessly babbled ("bar-bar-bar").
Religion also gave the Greeks a common identity. Athletic contests in honor of the gods especially emphasized the Greeks' unity as a people. The most famous of these were the Olympic Games held every four years in honor of Zeus. During these games a truce was called between all Greek city-states, allowing Greeks to travel in peace to the games, even through the territory of hostile states. The modern Olympic Games, even though they are no more successful than the ancient games in putting an end to war, still serve as a symbol of peace in a less than peaceful world.
Finally, several city-states might combine into leagues. These leagues might be purely for the purpose of celebrating religious rites or kinship common to their cities. A good example was the Delphic Amphictyony, a league of twelve cities formed to promote and protect the Oracle of Delphi. Some leagues were for political and defensive purposes. The Peloponnesian League under Sparta and the Delian League under Athens were for such a purpose and together claimed the loyalties of most of the city-states in Greece and Ionia. This was good for preventing war between individual city-states. But it backfired when Sparta and Athens went to war in 431 B.C.E. and dragged most of the Greek world into the most tragic and destructive struggle in ancient Greek history.
By 750 B.C.E., the Greek world had largely taken shape as a collection of city-states, often at war with one another, but also feeling certain common ties of language, religion, and customs. At this point, there was nothing remarkable about the Greeks, but forces were at work that would transform Greece into the home of democracy and the birthplace of Western Civilization.
Greece was not a rich land capable of supporting a large population. Yet the revival of stable conditions and the rise of a new class of independent farmers practicing a mixed agriculture of grains, vines, and orchards after 800 B.C.E brought population growth. This, in turn, brought problems, since family lands had to be split up among the surviving sons. These sons also had families to support, but on less land than their fathers had. Greece's poor soil and occasional droughts would lead to famines, forcing the victims of those crop failures to seek loans from the rich nobles. Of course, there was interest on the loan, generally equal to one-sixth of the peasants' crops. Failure to pay back the loan and interest in time led to the loss of the family lands or the personal freedom of the farmer and his family. Unfortunately, bad harvests often run in cycles of several years at a time. As a result, the Greek poleis in the eighth century B.C.E had a few rich nobles and a multitude of desperately poor people, creating an unstable situation for the polis and the nobles who controlled it. Therefore, many city-states started looking for new lands on which to settle their surplus populations. The Age of Colonization was born.
The Greeks looked for several qualities in a site for a colony: good soil, plentiful natural resources, defensible land, and a good location for trade. They especially found such sites along the coasts of the North Aegean and Black Seas to the northeast, and Sicily and Southern Italy to the west. However, Greek colonies dotted the map of the Mediterranean from Egypt and Cyrene in North Africa to Spain and Southern France in the West.
Founding a colony was no easy task. A leader and enough settlers had to be found, which often involved two city-states combining their efforts to found the colony. Finding a site for the colony was also a problem. Generally, colonists would ask the Oracle of Delphi for advice, usually getting a vague double-edged answer that could be interpreted in several ways, thus making the Oracle always right. For example, the colonists who founded Byzantium by the Black Sea were told to found their city across from the blind men. They figured the blind men were the settlers of nearby Chalcedon who had missed the much superior site of nearby Byzantium, since it controlled the trade routes between the Black and Aegean Seas and between Europe and Asia.
Although a colony was an independent city-state in its own right, it generally kept close relations with its mother city ( metropolis), symbolized by taking part of the metropolis' sacred fire, representing its life, to light the fire of the new colony. Eventually, many Greek colonies, especially ones to the west such as Syracuse, Tarentum, and Neapolis (Naples), would surpass their mother cities in wealth and power. As a result, Southern Italy and Sicily came to be known as Magna Graecia, (Greater Greece).
Colonies triggered a feedback cycle that would help maintain the colonial movement and lead to dramatic economic, social, and political changes in the Greek homeland. First of all, colonies relieved population pressures at home and provided resources to their mother cities. This helped support the emergence of craftsmen who made such things as pottery and armor for export. It also made life easier for the free farmers who had more land now that there was less crowding. These two rising groups, craftsmen and free farmers, constituted a new group, the middle class, which could afford arms and armor and help defend their poleis.
That, in turn, allowed the Greeks to deploy into a phalanx, a much larger mass formation of heavily armored soldiers who together formed a sort of human tank. Thanks to this deadly new formation, the Greeks were better able to found and defend colonies in territories with large hostile populations. This would feed back into the beginning of the process whereby colonies would produce more wealth and resources that would add further to the rising middle class that could afford arms and armor, leading to more heavily armed Greeks who could found and defend more colonies, and so on.
Another development that helped this process was a new invention: coinage. Although for centuries, people had used gold and silver as common mediums of exchange to expedite trade, there were always problems of determining the accurate weight and purity of such metals to avoid being cheated. Then, around 600 B.C.E., the Lydians, neighbors of the Ionian Greeks in Asia Minor, issued the first coins, lumps of gold marked with a government stamp guaranteeing the weight and purity of those lumps. Greek poleis soon picked up on this practice and issued their own coins. Coinage created a more portable form of wealth that everyone agreed was valuable. Trade became much easier to carry on, thus increasing its volume and the fortunes of the merchants involved in it. Overall, this signaled a growing shift from the land-based economy dominated by the nobles to the more dynamic money economy controlled by the middle class.
The cycle of colonization spread a new type of warfare across the Greek world. Previously, Greek warfare had been the domain of the nobles, since they were the only ones who could afford the arms and armor necessary for fighting in the front lines. While this put the brunt of the fighting on their shoulders, it also gave them prestige and power, since they had the weapons to enforce their will.
However, by the mid seventh century B.C.E, the wealth brought in by colonies led to a new type of warfare, the hoplite phalanx, a compact formation of heavily armored soldiers (hoplites, from the Greek word for shield) with overlapping shields and armed with spears. The idea was to use the weight of the phalanx to plow through the enemy. It wasn’t elegant, but it was effective and brought into play two new revolutionary factors. First, since the phalanx’s success relied on numbers, anyone able to afford heavy armor and shield had to be used. This meant including the rising middle class of independent farmers, craftsmen, and merchants, which would have a dramatic impact on the polis’ political structure in the future.
Secondly, the hoplite phalanx created a new concept of warfare. Previously, when warfare had been primarily a matter of honor and power for a narrow group of kings and nobles who had nothing better to do, battles had mainly been a matter of hit-and-run tactics with some face-to-face combat. However, with middle class farmers now making up the bulk of the phalanx, warfare became a matter of defending their very livelihood. Therefore, the practice developed of meeting invaders in short, but brutal, head-on clashes to protect the defending farmers’ lands and homes from ruin. Also, the fact that most of those fighting the battles had regular occupations to get back to reinforced this urge for a quick resolution of a war in one decisive battle.
This concept of resolving wars in decisive head-on clashes long outlived the Greek poleis that started it. The Romans would subscribe to this principle with systematic efficiency and pass it on to Western Civilization where it is still seen as the way to fight wars. Until the mid 1900s this strategy served Western powers well, but in recent decades it has not always proven effective, as the Vietnam War, Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and American occupation in Iraq have shown.
Pheidon, the ruler of Argos, was the first to use the new hoplite phalanx against Sparta, defeating it in the process. Soon Sparta had adapted to these new tactics, and other Greek poleis quickly proceeded to arm their middle classes and form phalanxes of their own in order to survive. Soon the "Hoplite Revolution" had spread throughout Greece and its colonies.
By 550 B.C.E, the cycle of Greek colonization was running out as few good sites for new colonies remained. However, colonization had spread of Greek civilization to other peoples, notably the Macedonians to the north and the Romans to the west. Rome in particular would adapt Greek culture to its own needs and pass it on to Western Civilization.
Increased prosperity oftentimes leads to trouble, for it creates expectations of power and status to go with it. People who have virtually nothing expect nothing more. People who have had a taste of something generally expect more and will even fight to get it. Such is the fuel of revolutions, and ancient Greece was no exception. The problem was that, while the middle class artisans and farmers had little or no social status or political power to go with the expectation to fight in the phalanx. Their frustration in more commercial poleis played itself out somewhat differently than in the more agricultural poleis, but ultimately with the same basic result.
In many, usually the more commercial poleis such as Corinth, Megara, and Athens, some disgruntled and ambitious nobles used the frustrated middle class to seize power from the ruling aristocracy. The government they set up was called a tyranny, from the Greek word tyrannos, meaning one-man rule. Such an arrangement was usually illegal, but not necessarily evil. That association with the word tyrant would come later.
In order to maintain his popularity, the tyrant typically did three things. First, he protected peoples' rights with a written law code, literally carved in stone, so that the laws could not be changed or interpreted upon the whim of the rich and powerful. Second, he confiscated the lands of the nobles he had driven from power and redistributed them among the poor. Finally, he provided jobs through building projects: harbors, fortifications, and stone temples with graceful fluted columns, a new Greek innovation. In addition, tyrants had the means to patronize the arts. Thus the sixth century B.C.E. saw a flourishing of Greek culture in such areas as architecture, sculpture, and poetry.
However, the increased prosperity brought on by the tyrants only gave the people a taste for more of the same. By the second or third generation, tyrants could not or would not meet those growing demands, and people grew resentful. In reaction to this resentment, tyrants would often resort to repressive measures, which just caused more resentment, more repression, and so on. Eventually, this feedback of resentment and repression would lead to a revolution to replace the tyrants with a limited democracy especially favoring the hoplite class of small landholding farmers, though excluding the poor, women, and slaves.
In the more agricultural poleis, the farmer-hoplites seem to have taken control more peacefully. Their dual status as farmers and hoplites supported each other in maintaining control. As farmers, they were the ones who could afford arms and armor and serve in the phalanx. And as hoplites in the phalanx, they were the ones with the power to run the state. Much like the states that experienced tyrannies, these agrarian poleis also established limited democracies favoring the small land-holding farmers. While these democracies may have excluded a majority of their populations, they did exhibit several characteristics that made them a unique experiment in history and a giant step toward democracy.
A high value was placed on equality, at least among the citizens ruling the polis. This ethos of equality discouraged the accumulation of large fortunes and encouraged the rich to donate their services and wealth to the polis. This created a fine balance between individual rights and working for the welfare of the society as a whole that helped create fairly stable poleis.
The polis was largely dominated by a middle class of small landholders, merchants, and craftsmen. In addition to women and slaves, Greek democracies typically excluded freemen without any property from the full advantages of citizenship. However, despite its shortcomings, the moderate style of democracy born in Greece by 500 B.C.E was the basis for the later, much more broadly based democracy in Athens and our own idea of individuals controlling their own destinies.
Hoplite warfare limited the scope and damage of warfare among the Greek poleis. Since it was the farmers who both declared war and fought it for the polis, they made sure that it was short and decisive so it would not disrupt their agricultural work or damage their crops. A typical war might take only three days: one day to march into enemy territory, one day to fight, and one day to get back home to the crops. They also made sure it was cheap. Since hoplite warfare was simple and everyone supplied his own equipment and rations, there was no need for taxes to support generals and buy supplies. This limited, almost ritualistic, style of warfare maintained a stability among the Greek poleis despite the frequency of their wars.
Come home with your shield or on it.— Spartan women, to their men leaving for battle
No Greek city-state aroused such great interest and admiration among other Greeks as Sparta. This was largely because the Spartans did about everything contrary to the way other Greeks did. For example, Sparta had no fortifications, claiming its men were its walls. While other Greeks emphasized their individuality with their own personal armor, the Spartans wore red uniforms that masked their individuality and any blood lost from wounds. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that we remember Sparta for being a military state always ready for war, but not against other city-states so much as against its own enserfed subjects.
Originally, Sparta was much like other Greek city-states, being a leader in poetry and dance. However, by 750 B.C.E., population growth led to the need for expansion. Instead of colonizing overseas, like other Greeks did, the Spartans decided to attack their neighbors, the Messenians. In two bitterly fought wars, they subdued the Messenians and turned them into serfs ( Helots) who had to work the soil for their masters. Unfortunately for the Spartans, the Helots vastly outnumbered them.
As a result, Sparta became a military state constantly on guard against the ever-present threat of a Helot revolt. This especially shaped five aspects of Spartan society: its infants, its boys, its girls, its government, and its foreign policy. Infants were the virtual property of the state from birth when state inspectors would examine them for any signs of weakness or defects. Babies judged unlikely to be able to serve as healthy soldiers or mothers were left to die on nearby Mt. Taygetus.
Boys were taken from home at age seven to live in the barracks. There they were formed into platoons under the command of an older man and the ablest of their number. Life in the barracks involved a lot of hard exercise and bullying by the older boys. At age twelve it got much worse. Adolescence brought the Spartan training at its worst. The boys received one flimsy garment, although they usually trained and exercised in the nude. They slept out in the open year round, only being allowed to make a bed of rushes that were picked by hand, not cut. They were fed very little, forcing them to steal food to supplement their diet and teaching them to forage the countryside as soldiers. Their training, games, and punishments were all extremely harsh. One notorious contest involved tying boys to the altar of Artemis Orthia and flogging them until they cried out. Reportedly, some of them kept silent until they died under the lash.
At age eighteen, the Spartan entered the Krypteia, or secret police, for two years. The Krypteia's task was to spy on and terrorize the Helots in order to keep them from plotting revolt. The Spartans even declared ritual warfare on the Helots each year to remind themselves and the Helots of their situation and Spartan resolve to deal with it. At age twenty, the Spartan entered the army where he would spend the next thirty years. As an adult, he could grow his hair shoulder length in the Spartan fashion to look more terrifying to his enemies. Not surprisingly, he had little in the way of a family life. However, it was illegal not to marry in Sparta, since it was part of the Spartan's duty to produce strong healthy children for the next generation. After getting married, the young husband might have to sneak out of the barracks at night in order to see his wife and children. It was said some Spartan fathers went for years without seeing their families by the light of day. At age fifty, the Spartan could finally move home, although he remained on active reserve for ten more years.
Girls did not have it much easier. Although they did live at home rather than in the barracks, they also went through arduous training and exercise. All of this was for one purpose: to produce strong healthy children for the next generation. Surprisingly, Spartan women were the most liberated women in ancient Greece. This was because the men were away with the army, leaving the women to supervise the Helots and run the farms. In fact, Spartan women scandalized other Greeks with how outspoken and free they were.
Spartan government, in sharp contrast with the democracies found in other city-states, kept elements of the old monarchy and aristocracy. They had two kings whose duty was to lead the army. Most power rested with five officials known as ephors and a council of thirty elders, the Gerousia. There was also an assembly of all Spartan men that voted only on issues the Gerousia presented them. The Spartans had a very conservative foreign policy, since they did not want to risk a Helot revolt while they were away at war. They did extend their influence through leadership of the Peloponnesian League, which contained most of the city-states in the Peloponnesus, making Sparta the most powerful Greek city-state, although its army was never very large.
Spartan discipline did produce magnificent soldiers, inured to hardship and blind obedience to authority, but with little talent for original thinking or self-discipline. However, in the Persian wars, the Spartans would do more than their share in the defense of freedom, as ironic as that may have sounded to them.While Athens is the city we generally think of when the Greeks are mentioned, it did not always seem destined for glory. Rather, its greatness was the product of a long history laying the foundations for the great accomplishments of the fifth century B.C.E.
Two things in Athens' early history led to internal peace that made its history and development much easier. First of all, there was no Dorian conquest of Attica, the region surrounding Athens. The myth of the Athenian king, Codrus, who sacrificed himself in battle against the Dorians tells us there probably was Dorian pressure on Attica, but that it failed. Consequently, with no conflict of Dorians against non-Dorians, internal peace could reign in Athenian society. Second, Athens united all of Attica under its rule at a fairly early date and made all its subjects Athenian citizens. Therefore, they were more likely to work for Athens' interests in contrast to the Spartan Helots who were always looking for an opportunity to revolt.
Despite these advantages, the tensions that accompanied both a rising middle class and overpopulation in other poleis affected Athens as well. For example, there was a failed attempt to establish tyranny at Athens by a man named Cylon who seized the Acropolis with the aid of Megarian troops.
One issue causing discontent was the lack of a written law code. Since nobles controlled the religion, which was seen as the source of law, they could say the law was whatever they pleased and then change it at will. At last, in 62l B.C.E., they gave in and commissioned Draco, whose name meant "dragon", to write down the laws. His law code was so harsh that even today we use the term "draconian" to describe something extremely severe. Some people claimed Draco's law code was written in blood rather than ink. But Draco did get the laws written down, which was a step forward for the people. And, of course, they wanted more.
By 600 B.C.E., the nobles in Athens were becoming more nervous as the complaints of the very poor and the rising middle class grew increasingly louder. As a result, they gave a man named Solon extraordinary powers to reform the state and ease the tensions between the different classes. Solon passed both economic and political reforms that laid the foundations for Athens' later greatness.
Solon improved Athens' economy in several ways. First, since Attica's soil was particularly poor for farming wheat and barley, he outlawed the export of grain from Attica. This encouraged the cultivation of olive trees that were better suited for Attica's soil. The olive oil produced from these trees was a valuable commodity used for cleansing and as a fuel for light and cooking. Later, grapevines would also be cultivated, and Attica's wine became still another highly valued Athenian product. Second, Solon developed trade and manufacture in Athens, largely through attracting skilled craftsmen to settle there. He especially encouraged pottery since Attica had excellent clay for ceramics. In later years, Athenian pottery would come to be some of the most beautiful and highly valued in the Mediterranean. One other thing Solon did to relieve the poverty in Athens was to abolish debts and debt slavery. While this was not popular with the nobles, it did ease some of the tensions threatening Athenian society at that time.
The profits gained from selling olive oil, pottery, and wine were then used for buying grain from the Black Sea. Since Athens' economy now was much more suited to local conditions than when it was barely getting by on the old subsistence agriculture, it could buy the grain it needed and still have money left over. The Athenians could use this extra money for further developing their economy through more trade, industry, and olive orchards. This would lead to even more profits, and so on.
Solon's reforms set the stage for the Persian Wars and Athens' later cultural accomplishments. Since Athens was heavily dependent on the Black Sea for grain, it was very sensitive to any events in that part of the world, just as the United States today is sensitive to events in Middle East where it gets much of its oil. As a result, Athens expanded to the shores of the Black Sea, thus leading to a collision with Persia over control of that region.
These measures delayed, but did not prevent, the overthrow of the aristocrats by a tyrant. Fighting in Athens continued between the Hill (peasants on small farms), Shore (artisans and traders), and Plain (nobles) factions. Eventually, the leader of the hill faction, Peisistratus, gained the upper hand and became tyrant. Peisistratus did two things important for Athens' future. For one thing, like other Greek tyrants, he enriched the lower classes by providing them with land and jobs on building projects. Second, he secured Athens' grain supply from the Black Sea by getting control of the town of Sigeum, which safeguarded Athens' grain ships in that area but also set Athens up for an eventual clash with Persia.
There were also cultural developments during Peisistratus' rule. For one thing, he gathered scholars to take all the different versions of Homer's Iliad and decide which was the definitive one. One other cultural accomplishment was the invention of tragic drama. This evolved from rather boisterous goat songs ( tragoidea) dedicated to Dionysus, the god of song and revelry. However, by this time, these songs had become much more serious, and the addition of an actor to interact with the chorus of fifty led to the birth of drama.
As we have seen, in most poleis the first generation of tyrants would rule rather peacefully. For example, Cypselus, tyrant of Corinth, was so popular that he went about without so much as a bodyguard. However, the second or third generation of tyrants usually ran into problems, either because their rule was oppressive or people wanted more political rights to go along with their rising wealth. Athens was no exception. Peisistratus ruled and died peacefully, but his son, Hippias, ruled more oppressively, especially after an unsuccessful assassination attempt aroused his suspicions of all around him. Popular anger would grow, triggering more oppression, causing more anger, and so on. Finally, Hippias was driven out of Athens with help from the Spartans who then put a garrison of 700 soldiers in Athens' Acropolis. However, the Spartans were hardly the people to go along with the democratic aspirations of the Athenians, and their garrison had to be driven out of the Acropolis before democracy could be established. The man who did this, Cleisthenes, was also responsible for setting up a stable democracy at Athens.
Cleisthenes saw clearly that the friction between the factions of Hill, Shore, and Plain and between the four different tribes had to be stopped. He cleverly did this by breaking up the old tribes and replacing them with ten artificial tribes comprised of elements from different tribes and factions. Artificially mixing people from different loyalties tended to break up those old loyalties, leaving only loyalty to Athens. Cleisthenes also made the popular assembly the main law making body. The democracy that emerged, much like those in other poleis of the time, was a somewhat limited one favoring the middle class of farmers, merchants and craftsmen. However, it was still a democracy, which meant the Athenians had more than ever at stake Athens' security.
Therefore, the combination of this greater sense of commitment to Athens, the struggle with Persia over the security of the Black Sea grain supply, and the fortunate discovery of large deposits of silver at Laurium in Attica, would prompt the Athenians to use their economic power to build a navy with which to fight Persia. It was this navy which would lead the Greeks to victory over Persia and lay the foundations for the Athenian Empire in the fifth century B.C.E. That empire in turn would provide the wealth to support the cultural flowering at Athens that has been the basis for so much of Western Civilization.
When people think of the ancient Greeks, they usually think of such things as Greek architecture, literature, and democracy. However, there is one other contribution they made that is central to Western Civilization: the birth of Western science.
There were three main factors that converged to help create Greek science. First of all, there was the influence of Egypt, especially in medicine, which the Greeks would draw heavily upon. Second, Mesopotamian civilization also had a significant impact, passing on its math and astronomy, including the ability to predict eclipses (although they did not know why they occurred). Third, there was the growing prosperity and freedom of expression in the polis, allowing the Greeks to break free of older mythological explanations and come up with totally new theories. All these factors combined to make the Greeks the first people to give non-mythological explanations of the universe. Such non-mythological explanations are what we call science.
However, there were also three basic limitations handicapping Greek scientists compared to scientists today. For one thing, they had no concept of science as we understand it. They thought of themselves as philosophers (literally "lovers of wisdom") who were seeking answers to all sorts of problems about their world: moral, ethical, and metaphysical as well as physical. The Greeks did not divide knowledge into separate disciplines the way we do. The philosopher, Plato, lectured on geometry as well as what we call philosophy, seeing them as closely intertwined, while Parmenides of Elea and Empedocles of Acragas wrote on physical science in poetic verse. Second, the Greeks had no guidelines on what they were supposed to be studying, since they were the first to ask these kinds of questions without relying on religious explanations. However, they did define certain issues and came up with the right questions to ask, which is a major part of solving a problem. Finally, they had no instruments to help them gather data, which slowed progress tremendously.
Greek science was born with the Ionian philosophers, especially in Miletus, around 600 B.C.E. The first of these philosophers, Thales of Miletus, successfully predicted a solar eclipse in 585 B.C.E., calculated the distance of ships at sea, and experimented with the strange magnetic properties of a rock near the city of Magnesia (from which we get the term "magnet"). However, the question that Thales and other Ionian philosophers wrestled with was: What is the primary element that is the root of all matter and change? Thales postulated that there is one primary element in nature, water, since it can exist in all three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas.
Thales' student, Anaximander, proposed the theory that the stars and planets are concentric rings of fire surrounding the earth and that humans evolved from fish, since babies are too helpless at birth to survive on their own and therefore must arise from simpler more self-sufficient species. He disagreed with Thales over the primary element, saying water was not the primary element since it does not give rise to fire. Therefore, the primary element should be some indeterminate element with built-in opposites (e.g., hot vs. cold; wet vs. dry). For lack of a better name, he called this element the "Boundless." Another Milesian, Anaximenes, said the primary element was air or vapor, since rain is pressed from the air.
All these speculations were based on the assumption there is one eternal and unchanging element that is the basis for all matter. Yet, if there is just one unchanging element, how does one account for all the apparent diversity and change one apparently sees in nature? From this time, Greek science was largely split into two camps: those who said we can trust our senses and those who said we cannot.
Among those who distrusted the senses was Parmenides of Elea, who, through some rather interesting logic, said there is no such thing as motion. He based this on the premise that there is no such thing as nothingness or empty space since it is illogical to assume that something can arise from nothing. Therefore, matter cannot be destroyed, since that would create empty space. Also, we cannot move, since that would involve moving into empty space, which of course, cannot exist. The implication was that any movement we perceive is an illusion, thus showing we cannot trust our senses.
On the other hand, there was Heracleitus of Ephesus, who said the world consists largely of opposites, such as day and night, hot and cold, wet and dry, etc. These opposites act upon one another to create change. Therefore not only does change occur, but is constant. As Heracleitus would say, you cannot put your foot into the same river twice, since it is always different water flowing by. However, since we perceive change, we must trust our senses at least to an extent.
A partial reconciliation of these views was worked out by two different philosophers postulating the general idea of numerous unchanging elements that could combine with each other in various ways. First, there was Empedocles of Acragas who said that the mind can be deceived as well as the senses, so we should use both. This led to his theory of four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, where any substance is defined by a fixed proportion of one or more of these elements (e.g., bone = 4 parts fire, 2 parts water, and 2 parts earth). Although the specifics were wrong, Empedocles' idea of a Law of Fixed Proportions is an important part of chemistry today.
In the fifth century B.C.E., Democritus of Abdera developed the first atomic theory, saying the universe consists both of void and tiny indestructible atoms. He said these atoms are in perpetual motion and collision causing constant change and new compounds. Differences in substance are supposedly due to the shapes of the atoms and their positions and arrangements relative to one another.
In the fifth century B.C.E., Athens, with its powerful empire and money, became the new center of philosophy, drawing learned men from all over the Greek world. Many of these men were known as the Sophists. They doubted our ability to discover the answers to the riddles of nature, and therefore turned philosophy's focus more to issues concerning Man and his place in society. As one philosopher, Protagoras, put it, "Man is the measure of all things." Being widely traveled, the Sophists doubted the existence of absolute right and wrong since they had seen different cultures react differently to moral issues, such as public nudity, which did not bother the Greeks. As a result, they claimed that morals were socially induced and changeable from society to society. Some Sophists supposedly boasted they could teach their students to prove the right side of an argument to be wrong. This, plus the fact that they taught for money, discredited them in many people's eyes.
Unfortunately, such a technique practiced in public tended to embarrass a number of people trapped by Socrates' logic, thus making him several enemies. In 399 B.C.E., he was tried and executed for corrupting the youth and introducing new gods into the state. Although Socrates left us no writings, his pupil Plato preserved his teachings in a number of written dialogues. Socrates influenced two other giants in Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, who both agreed with Socrates on our innate ability to reason. However, they differed greatly on the old question of whether or not we can trust our senses.
Plato drew upon Pythagoras' idea of a central fire and proposed there are two worlds: the perfect World of Being and this world, which is the imperfect World of Becoming where things are constantly changing. This makes it impossible for us to truly know anything, since this world is only a dim reflection of the perfect World of Being. As Plato put it, our perception of reality was no better than that of a man in a cave, trying to perceive the outside world through viewing the shadows cast against the wall of the cave by a fire. Since our senses alone cannot be trusted, Plato said we should rely on abstract reason, especially math, much as Pythagoras had. The sign over the entrance to Plato's school, the Academy, reflected this quite well: "Let no one unskilled in geometry enter."
Aristotle accepted the theory of four elements and the idea that the elements were defined on the basis of two sets of contrasting qualities: hot vs. cold, and wet vs. dry, with earth being cold and dry, water being cold and wet, air being hot and wet, and fire being hot and dry. Thus, according to Aristotle, we should be able to change substances by changing their qualities. The best example was heating cold and wet water to make it into hot and wet air (vapor). This idea would inspire generations of alchemists in the fruitless pursuit of a means of turning lead into gold.
Aristotle said the four elements have a natural tendency to move toward the center of the universe, with the heavier substances (earth and water) displacing the lighter ones (air and fire), so that water rests on land, air on top of water, and fire on top of air. He also said there was a celestial element, ether, which was perfect and unchanging and moved in perfect circles around the center of the universe, which is earth where all terrestrial elements are clustered.
Aristotle's theories of the elements and universe were highly logical and interlocking, making it hard to disprove one part without attacking the whole system. Although Aristotle often failed to test his own theories (so that he reported the wrong number of horse's teeth and men's ribs), his theories were easier to understand than Plato's and reinstated the value of the senses, compiling data, and experimenting in order to find the truth. Although Plato's theories would not be the most widely accepted over the next 2000 years, they would survive and be revived during the Italian Renaissance. Since then, the idea of using math to verify scientific theories has also been an essential part of Western Science. While both Plato and Aristotle had flaws in their theories, they each contributed powerful ideas that would have profound effects on Western civilization for 2000 years until the Scientific Revolution of the 1700's.
We can well imagine the Greeks' incredible feelings of pride and accomplishment in 478 B.C.E. after defeating the Persian Empire. The Athenians felt that they in particular had done more than their part with their army at Marathon and their navy at Salamis and Mycale. It was this incredible victory which gave them the self-confidence and drive to lead Greece in its political and cultural golden age for the next half century.
However, victory had been won at a heavy price. Fields, orchards, and vineyards lay devastated throughout much of Greece, and it would take decades for the vineyards and olive groves in particular to be restored. Athens itself was in ruins, being burned by the Persians in vengeance for the destruction of Sardis during the Ionian Revolt. Therefore, the Athenians immediately set to work to rebuild their city, and in particular its fortifications. The Spartans, probably through fear or jealousy of Athens' growing power, tried to convince the Athenians not to rebuild their walls. They said that if the Persians came back and recaptured Athens, they could use it as a fortified base against other Greeks. The Athenian leader, Themistocles, stalled the Spartans on the issue until his fellow Athenians had enough time to erect defensible fortifications. (This was later extended by what was known as the Long Walls to connect Athens to it port, Piraeus, so it could not be cut off from its fleet.) By the time Sparta realized what was happening, it was too late to do anything. One could already see bad relations starting to emerge between Athens and Sparta. In time, they would get much worse.
Since the Athenians and other Greeks could not assume that the Persians would not come back, they decided the best defense was a good offense, and formed an alliance known as the Delian League. The League's main goals were to liberate the Ionian Greeks from Persian rule and to safeguard the islands in the Aegean from further Persian aggression. The key to doing this was sea power, and that made Athens the natural leader, since it had by far the largest navy and also the incentive to strike back at Persia. At first, Sparta had been offered leadership in the league because of its military reputation. However, constant fear of Helot revolts made the Spartans reluctant to commit themselves overseas. Also, their king, Pausanias, had angered the other Greeks by showing that typical Spartan lust for gold. As a result, he was recalled, leaving Athens to lead the way.
The Persian navy, or what was left of it, was in no shape to halt the Greek advance after taking two serious beatings from the Greeks in the recent war. Ionia was stripped from the Great King's grasp, and the Persians were swept from the Aegean sea island by island. Within a few years, the Delian League controlled virtually all the Greeks in the islands and coastal regions of the Aegean.
At first each polis liberated from Persia was expected to join the league and contribute ships for the common navy. However, most of these states were so small that the construction and maintenance of even one ship was a heavy burden. Therefore, most of these states started paying money to Athens which used their combined contributions to build and man the League's navy. This triggered a feedback cycle where Athens came to have the only powerful navy in the Aegean, putting the other Greeks at its mercy. Athens could then use its navy to keep league members under control, forcing them to pay more money to maintain the fleet which kept them under control, and so on.
The changing nature of the league became apparent a decade after the defeat of the Persians when the island states of Naxos (469 B.C.) and Thasos (465 B.C) felt secure enough to try to pull out of the League. However, Athens and its navy immediately pushed them back in, claiming the Persian threat was still there. The Naxians and Thasians could do little about it since the only navy they had was the one they were paying Athens to build and man. And that was being used to keep them inthe League so they could keep paying Athens more money. The Delian League was turning into an Athenian Empire.
The cycle supporting Athens' grip on its empire also supported (and was itself reinforced by) another feedback loop that expanded and supported the Athenian democracy. It started with the empire needing the fleet as its main source of power and control. Likewise, the fleet needed the poor people of Athens to serve as its rowers. Since these people, even more than the middle class hoplites, were the mainstay of Athens' power, they gained political influence to go with their military importance, thus making Athens a much more broadly based democracy. The poor at Athens in turn needed the empire and its taxes to support their jobs in the fleet and their status in Athens. This fed back into the empire needing the navy, and so on.
The Athenian democracy likewise strongly enforced collection of league dues to maintain what in essence was now an "imperial democracy. Thus the navy was the critical connecting link between empire and democracy, holding the empire together on the one hand, while providing the basis for democratic power on the other. The Athenian democratic leader, Pericles, especially broadened Athenian democracy by providing pay for public offices so the poor could afford to participate in their polis' government.
Athens further tightened its hold on its empire by settling Athenian citizens in colonies ( cleruchies) on the lands of cities it suspected of disloyalty, making their subjects come to Athens to try certain cases in Athenian courts, thus supplying them with extra revenues, and moving the league treasury from its original home on the island of Delos to Athens where the Athenians claimed it would be safer from Persian aggression. Athens installed or supported democracies in its subject states, feeling they would be friendlier to Athenian policies since they owed their power to Athens. It also allowed the minting and use of only Athenian coins. This provided the empire with a stable and standard coinage as well as exposing everyone in the empire to Athenian propaganda every time they looked at a coin and saw the Athenian symbols of the owl and Athena.
When Pericles came to power in 460 B.C.E., the Athenians were trying to extend their power and influence in mainland Greece while also supporting a major revolt against the Persians in Egypt. However, Athens overextended itself in these ventures that, after initial successes, both failed miserably. Sparta led a coalition of Greeks to stop Athens' expansion in Greece, while the Persians trapped and destroyed a large Athenian fleet on the Nile by diverting the course of the river and leaving the Athenian ships stuck in the mud. As a result, Pericles abandoned Egypt to the Persians, left the rest of mainland Greece to the other Greeks, and restricted Athens' activity to consolidating its hold on its Aegean empire. By 445 BC, peace Persia and Sparta, recognizing each others' spheres of control allowed Athens to concentrate on more cultural pursuits which flourished in a number of areas.
In sculpture, the severe classical style succeeded the stiffer Archaic style after the Persian Wars. One key to this was the practice, known as contrapposto, of portraying a figure with its weight shifted more to one foot than the other, which, of course is how we normally stand. The body was also turned in a more naturalistic pose and the face was given a serene, but more realistic expression. The severe style was quite restrained and moderate compared to later developments, expressing the typical Greek belief in moderation in all things, whether in art, politics, or personal lifestyle. The overall result was a lifelike portrayal of the human body that seemed to declare the emergence of a much more self assured humanity along with Greek independence from older Near Eastern artistic forms. Other art forms showed similar energy and creativity.
In architecture, Pericles used the surplus from the league treasury for an ambitious building program, paid for with funds from the league treasury to adorn Athens' Acropolis. This also provided jobs for the poor, resulting in widespread popular support for Pericles' policies. Foremost among these buildings was the Parthenon. Constructed almost entirely of marble (even the roof) it is considered the pinnacle of Classical architecture with its perfectly measured proportions and simplicity. Ironically, there is hardly a straight line in the building. The architects, realizing perfectly straight lines would give the illusion of imperfection, created slight bulges in the floor and columns to make it look perfect. Although in ruins from an explosion in 1687 resulting from its use as a gunpowder magazine, the Parthenon still stands as a powerful, yet elegant testament to Athenian and Greek civilization in its golden age.
Another important, if less spectacular art form that flourished at this time was pottery. Around 530 B.C., the Greeks developed a new way of vase painting known as the red figure style. Instead of the earlier technique of painting black figures on a red background (known as the black figure style), potters put red figures on a black background with details painted in black or etched in with a needle. This technique, combined with the refined skills of the vase painters' working on such an awkward surface, gave Athenian pottery unsurpassed beauty and elegance, putting it in high demand throughout the Mediterranean.
In addition to its artistic value, Athenian pottery provides an invaluable record of nearly all aspects of Greek daily life, especially ones of which we would have little evidence otherwise, such as the lives of women, working conditions and techniques of various crafts, and social (including sexual) practices. Given these themes and the large number of surviving pieces, Greek pottery also reflected the more democratic nature of Greek society, since it was available to more people than had been true in earlier societies where high art was generally reserved for kings and nobles with the power and wealth to command the services of artisans.
Possibly the most creative expression of the Greek genius at this time was in the realm of tragic and comic drama, itself a uniquely Greek institution. While still sacred to the god of wine and revelry, Dionysus, Greek drama at this time developed into a vibrant art form that also formed a vital aspect of public discourse on contemporary problems facing the Athenian democracy. However, being part of a state supported religious festival still overtly concerned with religious or mythological themes, the tragedians' expressed their views indirectly by putting new twists on old myths. This kept discussion of the themes treated in the plays on a more remote and philosophical level. That, in turn, allowed the Athenians to reflect on moral issues that were relative to, if not directly about, current problems that they could then understand and deal with more effectively.
For example, Sophocles' Oedipus the King on one level was about flawed leadership which, no matter how well intentioned, could lead to disastrous results, in this case a plague afflicting Thebes for some mysterious reason. However, this play was produced soon after a devastating plague had swept through Athens and killed its leader, Pericles, who had led Athens into the Peloponnesian War. must have given the Athenians watching it reason to reflect on their own similar problems and what had caused them.
Greek comedy was best represented by Aristophanes, sometimes referred to as the Father of Comedy. Whereas Greek tragedians expressed their ideas with some restraint, comedy cut loose practically all restraints in its satirical attacks on contemporary policies, social practices, and politicians. Where else, in the midst of a desperate war, could one get away with staging such anti-war plays as Lysistrata, where the women of warring Athens and Sparta band together in a sex strike until the men come to their senses and end the war?
Such freedom of expression was also found in the realm of philosophy. We have seen how the most famous philosopher of the time, Socrates, "called philosophy down from the skies" to examine moral and ethical issues. In addition to Socrates, there arose a number of independent thinkers, referred to collectively as the Sophists, who were drawn to Athens' free and creative atmosphere. Inspired by the rapid advances in the arts, architecture, urban planning, and sciences, they believed human potential was virtually unlimited, One Sophist, Protagoras, said that, since the existence of the gods cannot be proven or disproven, Man is the measure of all things who determines what is real or not. This opened the floodgates to a whole variety of new ideas that also challenged traditional values. In his play, The Clouds, Aristophanes mercilessly satirized the Sophists as men who boasted they could argue either side of an argument and make it seem right. This belief that there is no real basis for truth would especially affect a younger generation of Athenians. Some of them, ungrounded in any sense of values, would mistake cleverness for wisdom and lead Athens down the road to ruin.
It is incredible to think that Western Civilization is firmly rooted in this short, but intense outpouring of creative energy from a single city-state with perhaps a total of 40,000 citizens. However, Athens' golden age would be short-lived as growing tensions would trigger a series of wars that would end the age of the polis.
In winter, on your soft couch by the fire, full of food, drinking sweet wine and cracking nuts, say this to the chance traveler at your door: 'What is your name, my good friend? Where do you live? How many years can you number? How old were you when the Persians came...?— Xenophanes
To the Greeks, there was one defining event in their history: the Persian Wars. Even today, we see a good deal of truth in this assessment, for the Greek victory in the Persian Wars triggered the building of the Athenian navy, which led to the Athenian Empire, the expansion of the concept of democracy, and the means to develop Greek civilization to its height.
Two main factors led to the Persian Wars. First, there was Persian expansion into Western Asia Minor, (bringing Ionian Greeks under their control) and into Thrace on the European side of the Aegean in search of gold. Second, Solon's reforms and Peisistratus’ seizing control of Sigeum had made Athens especially sensitive to any threats to its grain route from the Black Sea. Further complicating this was the fact that several Athenian nobles held lands in the North Aegean. The spark igniting this into war with Persian was a revolt of the Ionian Greeks.
The Ionian Greeks had peacefully submitted to Persian rule and lived under Persian appointed Greek tyrants since the time of Cyrus the Great. Then in 5l0 B.C.E., the Ionian Greeks raised the standard of revolt and drove their tyrants out. Realizing they needed help against the mighty Great King, Darius, they appealed to their cousins across the Aegean for aid. Sparta, ever wary of a Helot revolt, refused to help. However, Athens and another city-state, Eretria, did send ships and troops who joined the Ionians, marched inland, and burned the provincial capital, Sardis, to the ground. After a Persian force defeated the Greeks as they were returning from Sardis, the Ionian Greeks decided to stake everything on a naval battle at Lade (494 B.C.E.). Unfortunately, the combination of disunity in their ranks and Persian promises of leniency caused the naval squadron of one polis after another to defect to the Persians and Ionian resistance to collapse. Miletus, leader of the revolt was sacked and the rest of Ionia fell back under Persian sway.
The Athenians and Eretrians had eluded the Ionian disaster, but not Darius' notice. After finding out who the Athenians were, Darius supposedly appointed a slave to remind him of them daily until he had punished them. In 492 B.C.E., an expedition set sail, but much of it was shipwrecked off the coast of Thrace and the rest of it was forced to return home. Nothing daunted, Darius prepared another invasion force which set out in 490 B.C.E.. Persian ambassadors had preceded the army to demand earth and water as signs of submission from all the Greeks. Most gave in rather than face the might of the Great King. However, the Athenians supposedly threw them into a pit and told them to take as much earth as they wanted, while the Spartans, equally defiant, gave them their water by throwing them into a well.
Later that year, a Persian force of some 20,000 men landed at Marathon in Attica. Unfortunately, the Spartans, being as superstitious as they were defiant, could not march before the end of a festival on the full moon. Thus the Athenians were left to face the might of Persia all alone, or nearly alone, since the tiny city-state of Plataea sent its army of 1000 men to stand bravely by Athens. The Greeks still faced an army twice as numerous as their own and reputedly invincible in battle. Therefore, they did the last thing the lightly clad and overconfident Persians expected: they charged. The Persians hardly had time to unleash a volley of arrows before the Greeks were upon them. The shock of this human tank of heavily armored Greek hoplites crashing into their lines sent them reeling back and scurrying for their ships. The Persian fleet made a quick dash for defenseless Athens, only to find the Athenians had doubled back to meet them. Having lost their stomach for anymore fighting, they sailed for home.
The Athenians and other Greeks knew they had little cause for celebration, for the Persians would surely be back. It took ten years for the next invasion to materialize, because Egypt rebelled, as usual, and then Darius died. His son and successor, Xerxes, needed a decade to set his house in order and create a new army to invade Greece. Hoping to crush the Greeks by weight of numbers, this new army was nearly ten times as big as the one that lost at Marathon. Greek preparations were more thorough this time. For one thing, many, although by no means all, the city-states banded together in a defensive league with Sparta as its leader. The Athenians let their leader, Themistocles convince them to use the extra money from a large lode of silver found at Laurium in Attica to pay for a larger fleet, believing sea power would be the key to victory.
The Greeks sent an advance force of some 7000 Greeks under the Spartan king Leonidas to hold the narrow pass of Thermopylae in northern Greece. Nearby was a Greek fleet holding the narrow straits of Artemesium. Fighting in such narrow spaces would prevent the Persians from using their superior numbers to advantage. For several days, the Greeks, led by the Spartans, severely repulsed any Persian assaults at Thermopylae and threatened to stall Xerxes' whole invasion. Unfortunately, treachery accomplished what frontal assaults could not, for a local shepherd showed the Persians another path behind the Greeks. Before the trap was closed, most of the Greeks escaped. However, Leonidas and his picked guard of 300 Spartans along with 700 troops from Thespis chose to stay and fought to the last man, selling their lives dearly in the process. When Thermopylae fell, the Greek fleet defending nearby Artemesium had to retreat after some hard fighting.
As the Persian multitude spread southward, city after city surrendered or was abandoned, until the Peloponnesus was about the only part of Greece left free. Even the Athenians had to evacuate their population to the nearby island of Salamis and watch their city go up in flames as they waited for the decisive battle to decide the issue. That battle took place at sea in the strait of water between Salamis and Attica. The Greeks, under the leadership of the Athenian Themistocles, lured the Persians into the narrows where they were ambushed, crushed together so they could not maneuver, and destroyed ship by ship. This victory proved decisive enough to convince Xerxes to go home, leaving part of his army to finish the job.
However, it was the Greeks who would finish the job. First they crushed the Persian army at Plataea in 479 B.C.E., with the Spartans carrying off the honors for valor, to no one's surprise. Then the remainder of the Persian fleet was caught and destroyed at Mycale. This led to another, more successful Ionian revolt, so the Ionians were finally free. It also left the way open for the Greeks to destroy the bridge of boats that the Persians had used to cross the Hellespont from Asia into Europe. The destruction of that bridge signaled the end of the Persian wars, although no one at that time could assume the Persians would not come back.
We can well imagine the Greeks' incredible feelings of pride and accomplishment in 478 B.C.E. after defeating the Persian Empire. The Athenians felt that they in particular had done more than their part with their army at Marathon and their navy at Salamis and Mycale. It was this incredible victory which gave them the self-confidence and drive to lead Greece in its political and cultural golden age for the next half century.
However, victory had been won at a heavy price. Fields, orchards, and vineyards lay devastated throughout much of Greece, and it would take decades for the vineyards and olive groves in particular to be restored. Athens itself was in ruins, being burned by the Persians in vengeance for the destruction of Sardis during the Ionian Revolt. Therefore, the Athenians immediately set to work to rebuild their city, and in particular its fortifications. The Spartans, probably through fear or jealousy of Athens' growing power, tried to convince the Athenians not to rebuild their walls. They said that if the Persians came back and recaptured Athens, they could use it as a fortified base against other Greeks. The Athenian leader, Themistocles, stalled the Spartans on the issue until his fellow Athenians had enough time to erect defensible fortifications. (This was later extended by what was known as the Long Walls to connect Athens to it port, Piraeus, so it could not be cut off from its fleet.) By the time Sparta realized what was happening, it was too late to do anything. One could already see bad relations starting to emerge between Athens and Sparta. In time, they would get much worse.
Since the Athenians and other Greeks could not assume that the Persians would not come back, they decided the best defense was a good offense, and formed an alliance known as the Delian League. The League's main goals were to liberate the Ionian Greeks from Persian rule and to safeguard the islands in the Aegean from further Persian aggression. The key to doing this was sea power, and that made Athens the natural leader, since it had by far the largest navy and also the incentive to strike back at Persia. At first, Sparta had been offered leadership in the league because of its military reputation. However, constant fear of Helot revolts made the Spartans reluctant to commit themselves overseas. Also, their king, Pausanias, had angered the other Greeks by showing that typical Spartan lust for gold. As a result, he was recalled, leaving Athens to lead the way.
The Persian navy, or what was left of it, was in no shape to halt the Greek advance after taking two serious beatings from the Greeks in the recent war. Ionia was stripped from the Great King's grasp, and the Persians were swept from the Aegean sea island by island. Within a few years, the Delian League controlled virtually all the Greeks in the islands and coastal regions of the Aegean.
If the Persian Wars were the great epic of Greek history, the century of conflict between Greek poleis from 431 to 338 B.C.E.. was its great tragedy. During this time, the Greeks wasted their energies fighting one another and left the way open for an outside power, Macedon, to come in and take over. There were three main lines of development that led to the final fall of the polis in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E.
First of all, the Persian wars exposed the Greeks to a wider world of trade as well as different military tactics that could threaten the powerful, but largely immobile hoplite phalanx. Athens especially adapted to these new challenges, relying more on trade, foreign grain, and a money economy, along with the navy and Long Walls to protect its empire. Growing fear of Athens and the resulting Peloponnesian War would force other poleis to adapt in order to be able to compete with Athens. Sparta, in particular, built a navy and, after the Peloponnesian War, relied increasingly on mercenaries to bolster its power. In addition, lightly armed troops known as peltasts were used to give Greek armies more flexibility.
As a result, more and more Greeks were drawn from the countryside by the lure of riches to be made as traders and mercenaries. Trade and a money economy grew in importance compared to the small family farms that had previously been the mainstay of the polis' economy. Also, warfare became professional, sophisticated, chronic, and expensive. This contrasted sharply with the previous style of cheap, amateur, and less destructive warfare waged by hoplite farmers over the last 250 years. Rising taxes to support this new style of warfare put increasing burdens on the farmer hoplites who started to decline economically, militarily, and politically. Gradually, large estates worked by tenant farmers or slaves would replace the small family owned farms worked by independent farmers. And once these farmers, the backbone of the traditional polis, went into decline, so did the polis itself. The Greeks were still a dynamic people, but the polis itself was starting to decay.
All these factors led to an unfortunate pattern of wars that also would eventually destroy the polis. Triggering this pattern was a tendency of the poleis to gang up against the most powerful Greek state at that time. This would bring about not only the downfall of that state, but also the rise of another polis to dominance, causing the other poleis to gang up on that state, and so on. This cycle would repeat itself three times: first in the Peloponnesian War to bring down Athens, next in a series of wars that wrecked Sparta's power and brought Thebes to pre-eminence, and finally in the struggle against Thebes that would leave all of Greece open to attack by the growing Macedonian kingdom to the north.
We have already seen in detail how Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War. However, Sparta’s victory hardly meant peace for the Greek world. Many of Athens' subjects had joined Sparta, believing they would be free to run their own lives. Instead, the Spartans installed pro-Spartan oligarchies that were watched over by Spartan governors and garrisons in many poleis. Sparta also failed to turn over Ionia to Persia in return for its aid against Athens. Naturally, such high-handed actions angered both Persia and most other Greeks. Leading the way were the Athenians who replaced the Spartan backed and repressive oligarchy of The Thirty with a new democracy.
All this led to the Corinthian War (395-387 B.C.E.). The Spartans in Ionia could more than hold their own against the Persian forces there. However, what Persian armies could not accomplish, Persian gold could by funding Athens, Thebes, and Corinth against Sparta, which drew the Spartan forces out of Ionia and back to Greece. Persia also gave Athens a navy that crushed the Spartan fleet, sailed to Athens, and oversaw the rebuilding of the Long Walls. Sparta's gains from the Peloponnesian War were quickly slipping away.
Faced with such a powerful coalition, Sparta made peace with Persia, handing Ionia over in return for help against the other Greeks. In 387 B.C.E. Persia dictated a treaty called the King's Peace to all the Greeks, taking Ionia for itself, and putting its ally Sparta back on top of the Greek world. The irony of it all was that the Persians, without striking a blow, had accomplished what Xerxes' huge army had failed to do a century before.
Naturally, the Greeks, did not abide by this decision for long, with Thebes and Athens leading the resistance against Sparta. The Thebans drove the Spartan garrison from their citadel and formed the Boeotian League in direct defiance of Sparta and the King's Peace. At Leuctra in 37l B.C.E...,he Theban general, Epaminondas stacked one flank of his phalanx 50 ranks deep, crushed the opposing Spartan wing, and then rolled up the rest of their army. A similar battle at Mantinea nine years later destroyed the mystique of Spartan invincibility, and with it most of Sparta's power and influence. Unfortunately for Thebes, Epaminondas was killed, and with him died Thebes' main hope to dominate the Greek world..
Meanwhile, the Athenians had formed a second Delian League with various Aegean states, promising to treat them better than they had treated the first Delian League. But Athens soon reverted to its old imperialist behavior. This triggered a revolt known as the Social War that ended Athens' imperial ambitions once and for all. Thus by 355 B.C.E., after 75 years of almost constant warfare, Athens' empire was gone, Sparta's army and reputation were wrecked, and Thebes' hopes for dominance were virtually laid to rest with Epaminondas. The polis' resulting exhaustion combined with the long-range forces undermining the polis due to the Persian Wars and Greek colonization left the polis was in serious decline opened the way for a new power to step in.
Macedon was a country north of Greece inhabited by tribes speaking a dialect related to Greek. While the Greeks considered them barbarians, the Macedonians liked to think of themselves as Greeks, and had played a minor role in Greek history from time to time. However, Macedon had never been a strong power until Philip II came to the throne in 359 B.C.E. after invading tribes from the north had killed his predecessor.
Philip was one of the most remarkable figures in Greek history, only being overshadowed by his son Alexander. He was a shrewd, ambitious, and unscrupulous politician who knew how to exploit the hopes, fears, and mutual hatreds of the Greeks to his own advantage. The key to much of Philip's success was control of the gold mines of Amphipolis, which gave him the money to do three things: build roads to tie his country together, bribe Greek politicians, and build up his army. Philip was an outstanding organizer and general who built what was probably the best army up to that point in history. Its main striking arm was an excellent cavalry, but it also utilized a phalanx armed with thirteen-foot long pikes (spears) and lightly armed peltasts. Together, these gave him the flexibility and coordination to deal with almost any situation on a battlefield.
Preferring diplomacy to fighting whenever possible, Philip was able to work his way into the confidence of various Greek states to undermine their resistance to him when he finally decided to strike. For example, he gained a foothold in Greece by defending Delphi from another city-state, Phokis. He also undermined Athens' power by taking and then freeing one of its allies and posing as the champion of all Greek liberties. Bit by bit, Philip worked his way southward, with only a few Greeks recognizing what was happening. Among these was Demosthenes, probably the greatest orator of the ancient world. In a masterful series of speeches known as Philippics, he repeatedly warned the Athenians of the danger to the north, but they did little.
Historians through the ages have blamed the Athenians for their failure to react well to the Macedonian threat. However, in all fairness, the Athens faced a difficult dilemma, since acting against Philip could have been as ruinous as not moving to stop him. On the one hand, failing to act against Philip would allow him to conquer Greece. However, on the other hand, without an empire to provide it with the full treasury it had the previous century, Athens could no longer sustain a prolonged war against such a power as Macedon. Therefore, fighting such a war very likely would have wrecked Athens' finances and given Philip the victory anyway.
Athens and Thebes did finally band together to meet the Macedonians at Chaeronea in 338 B.C. A tricky back-stepping maneuver by the Macedonian phalanx lured the Athenians out of position, exposing the Thebans to the decisive cavalry charge led by Philip's eighteen-year old son, Alexander. Demosthenes and others fled the field, leaving their shields and Greek liberty in the dust. For all intents and purposes, the age of the Greek polis was dead. The age of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic kingdoms was about to dawn.
The conflict that triggered the long collapse of the polis was the Peloponnesian War. It started when Athens, wanting to control trade to the west with Southern Italy and Sicily, helped Corcyra in a dispute with its founding city, Corinth. In retaliation, Corinth helped another of its former colonies, Potidaea, in a revolt against Athens and also turned to Sparta for help. This prompted Athens' leader, Pericles, to issue the Megarian Decree, cutting off all the empire's trade with another Spartan ally, Megara. As Megara joined Corinth in pressuring Sparta to take action against Athens, war fever grew on both sides.
In 431 B.C.E., as war with Sparta loomed, Euripides (485-406 B.C.E.), the third of the great tragic playwrights staged
Medea., Its title character, the barbarian princess who had helped Jason get the Golden Fleece, is rejected by Jason in favor of a more desirable marriage to a princess of Corinth.
Medea exacts a grisly revenge, murdering, not only Jason's new bride, but her own children to keep them from her enemies. At the end of the play, however, she is granted asylum in
Athens. Did
Medea represent the Athenians' own ruthlessness as they prepared for war, or possibly the civil strife in Corcyra that Athens had recently allied with against its enemy, Corinth?
Either way, Euripides' closing lines warn the Athenians against the uncertainty of the future:
Many things are determined by Zeus on Olympus, and many wishes are unexpectedly granted by the gods. But many things we expect to happen do not come to pass, for the gods continue to
bring about what we did not expect.
Euripides' warning went unheeded and war was declared.
Our main source for the period is Thucydides, whose History of the Peloponnesian War set the standard for historical accuracy and impartiality until the modern era. His history is especially valuable for its portrayal of the psychological effects of war on the human spirit. And just as the plays of the time let us use tragedy as history, Thucydides' account of the prolonged agony of the Peloponnesian War presents history as a form of tragedy. His history along with the tragic dramas of the time and Aristophanes' satirical comedies chronicle the long descent into madness that seemed to overtake the Athenians as the war dragged on.
Since Sparta was a land power and Athens was a naval power, Pericles, decided to rely on the navy to protect the empire and raid the coasts of the Peloponnesus. When the Spartans marched into Attica, he would pull the rural population inside the Long Walls, abandoning the countryside to the enemy until they left. As long as its grain routes were open, Athens should be able to hold out until Sparta tired of the war and gave up.
It was not easy to convince the Athenians to leave the countryside and passively watch from the Long Walls as their homes and fields went up in flames. However, Pericles' policy might have worked except for one thing that he had not counted on. In the second year of war, an epidemic broke out in Athens. Ordinarily, any epidemic would have been bad enough, but the crowded and unsanitary conditions of Athens under siege in the heat of summer intensified its effects. Thucydides gives a frightening account of the disease:
“The crowding of the people out of the country into the city aggravated the misery; and the newly arrived suffered most. For, having no houses of their own, but inhabiting in the height of summer stifling huts, the mortality among them was dreadful, and they perished in wild disorder. The dead lay as they had died, one upon another, while others hardly alive wallowed in the streets and crawled about every fountain craving for water. The temples in which they lodged were full of the corpses of those who died in them; for the violence of the calamity was such that men, not knowing where to turn, grew reckless of all law, human and divine. The customs that had hitherto been observed at funerals were universally violated, and they buried their dead each one as best he could. Many, having no proper appliances, because the deaths in their household had been so frequent, made no scruple of using the burial-place of others. When one man had raised a funeral pyre, others would come, and throwing on their dead first, set fire to it; or when some other corpse was already burning, before they could be stopped would throw their own dead upon it and depart.
“There were other and worse forms of lawlessness which the plague introduced at Athens. Men who had hitherto concealed their indulgence in pleasure now grew bolder. For, seeing the sudden change, how the rich died in a moment, and those who had nothing immediately inherited their property, they reflected that life and riches were alike transitory, and they resolved to enjoy themselves while they could, and to think only of pleasure...for offenses against human law no punishment was to be feared; no one would live long enough to be called to account. Already a far heavier sentence had been passed and was hanging over a man's head; before that fell, why should he not take a little pleasure? (II,48-49; 52-53)
Among the epidemic's victims was Pericles whose moderate and reasonable leadership would be sorely missed by Athens. Afterwards, men of much narrower vision would guide the polis on less trustworthy paths, and eventually to ruin. Soon afterwards, Sophocles staged Oedipus the King, considered by many as the greatest of Greek tragedies. Taking place in Thebes that is also suffering from a mysterious plague, an oracle says the murderer of the previous king, Laius, must be found and punished. The present king, Oedipus, who does not realize he himself unwittingly had killed Laius years before, launches an investigation. When Oedipus finally realizes he is the killer, he blinds himself and goes into exile to free Thebes from the curse. Given the time it was written, one could see Sophocles comparing Pericles to Oedipus, both being great leaders with the best intentions for their respective cities. However, some fatal unforeseen flaw in each leads, however unjustly, to disaster. The play ends with a somber warning by the chorus on the uncertainty of life:
“People of Thebes, my countrymen, look on Oedipus
He solved the famous riddle with his brilliance,
he rose to power, a man beyond all power.
Who could behold his greatness without envy?
Now what a black sea of terror has overwhelmed him.
Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day
count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.”
The first phase of the struggle, known as the Archidamian War, lasted ten years and became increasingly vicious the longer it lasted. Athens brutally put down revolts by the city-states, Mytiline and Skione, totally destroying the latter when it fell. Likewise, Thebes besieged and finally destroyed Athens' ally, Plataea, which had bravely stood by Athens at the Battle of Marathon sixty years earlier. Thucydides gives a grim analysis of the effects of war and the resulting civil strife within the various city-states:
“In peace and prosperity, both states and individuals are more generous, because they are not under pressure; but war, which cuts down the margin of comfort in daily life, is a teacher of violence, and assimilates ordinary people's characters to their conditions.
“Revolution now became endemic;.… even the former prestige of words was changed. Reckless daring was counted the courage of a good party man; prudent hesitation cowardice in disguise; moderation, a cover for weakness, and the ability to see all sides, inability to do anything...The bitter speaker was always trusted, and his opponent held suspect. The successful conspirator was reckoned intelligent, and he who detected a plot more brilliant still, but he who planned not to need such methods was accused of splitting the party and being afraid of the enemy...
“The tie of party took precedence over that of the family;...Most people would rather be called clever knaves (if knave is what they are) than honest fools; they are ashamed of the latter label, but proud of the former.
“The cause of the whole trouble was the pursuit of power for the sake of greed and personal ambition...Leaders everywhere used honorable slogans—'political equality for the masses' or 'the rule of a wise elite'; but the commonwealth which they served in name was the prize that they fought for...And moderate men fell victims to both sides...And the cruder intellects generally survived better; for conscious of their deficiencies and their opponents' cleverness, and fearing that they might get the worst of it in debate and be victims of some cunning plot if they delayed, they struck boldly and at once; but the others, contemptuously sure that they could see danger in time and had no need to take by force what they could get by wit, were more often caught off their guard and destroyed.”
At this time, comic drama, also sacred to Dionysus, was becoming increasingly popular in Athens, with two annual festivals, also sacred to Dionysus, being devoted to comedy. Whereas tragic drama skillfully veiled its messages in myth, Aristophanes, the most prominent of the comic playwrights, blatantly attacked his targets head-on, whether they be the war (during which he wrote numerous anti-war plays), social and political ills, specific public figures, or the Athenian democracy itself. Aristophanes, a conservative upset with the disturbing trends of the times, pulled no punches and, to the Athenians' credit, got away with it all. One of his favorite victims was the popular, but crude and brutal politician, Cleon the Tanner, whose character and tactics Thucydides seemed to be specifically describing in the passage cited above. Supposedly, when no actor could be found with the nerve to play Cleon in The Knights, Aristophanes himself played the role.
In Aristophanes' oldest surviving play, The Acharnians (425 B.C.E.), Dicaeopolis, a farmer ruined by the war, makes a separate peace with Sparta. The resulting prosperity (including wine and dancing girls) for Dicaeopolis and his neighbors is contrasted with a returning general who has only wounds to show for his efforts.
The Knights (424 B.C.E.) raked both Cleon and the Athenian democracy over the coals. Lord Demos ("Democracy") has two slaves, Nicias and Demosthenes (two conservative politicians) who are ruled by the cruel overseer, the Paphlagonian leather monger, an obvious reference to Cleon the Tanner. The two slaves recruit a crude sausage seller, Agoraritus, who engages Cleon in a shameless bribery contest for the favor of Lord Demos, offering cheap fish, fresh rabbit meat, pillows for the stone assembly seats, and even world dominion. Agoracritus finally wins by offering the aged Lord Demos renewed youth. Thus the democracy is revived as young, energetic, and statesmanlike just as in the good old days. This appeased the democratic audience that had been portrayed as old, conceited, and easily fooled. Cleon was not so lucky, being accused in the play of bribery, slander, lies, threatening opponents with the charge of treason, and false accusations. Coming at the peak of Cleon's popularity after he had won a victory over the Spartans and then arrogantly refused to make peace, The Knights helped deflate his ego and won Aristophanes first prize in the dramatic competition
In The Wasps (422 B.B.), Aristophanes took on the addiction many Athenians had to serving as jurors in the courts. He also lambasts Cleon who had raised the jurors' pay, largely funding the raise with fines and legal fees paid by political enemies whom he brought to court. As the chorus tells the jurors, "You deprive yourself of your own pay if you don't find the accused guilty." At another point the character, Philocleon ("Lover of Cleon"), himself a chronic juror, says " We are the only ones whom Cleon, the great bawler, does not badger. On the contrary he protects and caresses us; he keeps off the flies..." Philocleon's son, Bdelycleon ("Hater of Cleon") finally breaks his father's addiction to the courts by letting him stage mock trials at home. In one he tries the family dog, Labes, for stealing some cheese. A second dog testifies against Labes, saying he refused to share the cheese. Bdelycleon, defending Labes, brings in her puppies, urging them to "yap up on your haunches, beg and whine" to win the court's sympathy (a common tactic then). Philocleon at last acquits the dog.
After Cleon was killed in battle, peace was signed with Sparta in 421 B.C.E. Neither side gained anything, supposedly returning any lands taken during the war. However, neither side abided by these terms, keeping tensions high and the likelihood of a lasting peace correspondingly low. In 417 B.C.E. Athens attacked the small island state of Melos for no good reason. Thucydides' dialogue between Melian and Athenian delegates reveals how deeply the Athenians had become corrupted by power:
“Athenians: Well, then, we Athenians will use no fine words; we will not go out of our way to prove at length that we have a right to rule, because we overthrew the Persians; or that we attack you now because we are suffering any injury at your hands. We should not convince you if we did; nor must you expect to convince us by arguing that, although a colony of the Lacedaemonians (Spartans), you have taken no part in their expeditions, or that you have never done us any wrong. But you and we should say what we really think, and aim only at what is possible, for we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice only enters where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must...And we will now endeavor to show that we have come in the interests of our empire, and that in what we are about to say we are only seeking the preservation of your city. For we want to make you ours with the least trouble to ourselves, and it is for the interest of us both that you should not be destroyed.
Melians: It may be your interest to be our masters, but how can it be ours to be your slaves?
Athenians: To you the gain will be that by submission you will avert the worst; and we shall be all the richer for your preservation.
Melians: But must we be your enemies? Will you not receive us as your friends if we are neutral and remain at peace with you?
Athenians: No your enmity is not half so mischievous to us as your friendship; for the one is in the eyes of our subjects an argument of our power, the other of our weakness.
Melians: But are your subjects really unable to distinguish between states in which you have no concern, and those which are chiefly your own colonies, and in some cases have revolted and been subdued by you?
Athenians: Why, they do not doubt that both of them have a good deal to say for themselves on the score of justice, but they think that states like yours are left free because they are able to defend themselves, and that we do not attack them because we dare not. So that your subjection will give us an increase of security, as well as an extension of empire. For we are masters of the sea, and you who are islanders, and insignificant islanders too, must not be allowed to escape us.”
When Melos fell in 415 B.C.E. the Athenians mercilessly slaughtered the men and enslaved the women and children. Euripides expressed his outrage at this reckless abuse of power in The Trojan Women, possibly the most powerful statement until modern times on the senseless suffering caused by war. The scene is Troy after its brutal destruction as seen through the eyes of the victims, the various Trojan women being parceled out as slaves to different Greek warriors. One by one, they learn of their individual fates, including the murder of Hector's baby son, Astyanax. Poseidon at the start of the play utters a grim warning to the Greeks for their sacrileges in the sack of Troy, but one that could as well apply to the Athenians for their recent actions: "How are ye blind, ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast temples to desolation and lay waste tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie the ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die!"
Convincing the Athenians to carry out the horrible massacre of the Melians was Alcibiades, a brilliant and handsome young politician and former student of Socrates. We have already seen how clever, although lacking in perspective, this young man was in the dialogue with his uncle Pericles on the definition of law. He was equally unscrupulous in his pursuit of power and publicity, at one point entering seven chariots in the Olympics and at another buying a very expensive dog and cutting off its tail so people would talk about him.
In 415 B.C.E. Alcibiades convinced the Assembly to invade Sicily, blinding them to the realities and difficulties of the undertaking with the lure of untold riches. Therefore, the Athenians, sent a large fleet and army under Alcibiades and Nicias (who was opposed to the expedition to start with). Alcibiades might have carried out the whole scheme if he had been allowed to. However, he was summoned home on what were probably trumped up charges of defacing some statues sacred to Hermes. Instead of facing a hostile jury, he jumped ship, went to Sparta, and convinced it to declare war on Athens while it was occupied in Sicily.
All this left Nicias in command in Sicily. Considering his lack of enthusiasm and slow-moving, superstitious ways, he made remarkable success, besieging Syracuse and almost cutting it off from outside help. However, Nicias' failure to act quickly let the Syracusans turn the tables on him, and soon it was the Athenians who were in danger of being cut off from escape. A second army and fleet came to relieve Nicias' force, but soon they too found themselves in a trap that was quickly closing. Unfortunately, a lunar eclipse caused the superstitious Nicias to wait twenty-seven days before letting the Athenians make their move. By then it was too late. After a desperate and futile effort to break out of Syracuse's harbor, the Athenians abandoned their waterlogged fleet and tried to escape overland. The army, demoralized by defeat and decimated by hunger, thirst, and disease, came to an end in a pathetic mob scene described by Thucydides.
“When the day dawned Nicias led forward his army, and the Syracusans and the allies again assailed them on every side, hurling javelins and other missiles at them. The Athenians hurried on to the river Assinarus. They hoped to gain a little relief if they forded the river, for the mass of horsemen and other troops overwhelmed and crushed them; and they were worn out by fatigue and thirst. But no sooner did they reach the water than they lost all order and rushed in; every man was trying to cross first, and, the enemy pressing upon them at the same time, the passage of the river became hopeless. Being compelled to keep close together they fell one upon another, and trampled each other under foot; some at once perished, pierced by their own spears; others got entangled in the baggage and were carried down the stream. The Syracusans stood upon the further bank of the river, which was steep, and hurled missiles from above on the Athenians, who were huddled together in the deep bed of the stream and for the most part were drinking greedily. The Peloponnesians came down the bank and slaughteed them, falling chiefly upon those who were in the river. Whereupon the water at once became foul but was drunk all the same, although muddy and dyed with blood, and the crowd fought for it.”
Nearly all the Athenians were either killed or captured by the Syracusans. Because of their great number, the prisoners were kept in a quarry where exposure to the elements killed most of them off. Some who could recite passages from Euripides' plays, which were popular in Syracuse, were rescued by rich families. These who eventually returned home made a point of thanking Euripides for saving their lives..
Hardly an Athenian family was left untouched by the Sicilian disaster, while Athens itself had lost two fleets and armies. Now trouble piled on top of trouble as much of Athens' empire rose up in revolt. Thanks to Alcibiades, the Spartans now continuously occupied a fort in Attica to keep the Athenians huddled behind their Long Walls. Worst of all, Alcibiades had arranged for the Spartans to ally with Persia, getting Persian money and ships in return for promising to turn Ionia over to the Great King. An oligarchic revolution even briefly replaced Athens' democracy.
Despite these adversities, the Athenians bounced back, scraping together enough money and men to build a new fleet and carry on the war for nine more years. Alcibiades even returned to the graces of the Athenians and led their fleet to several decisive victories that at least partially restored Athens' crumbling empire. On two different occasions, Sparta even asked for peace, and was twice turned down by the Athenians, a foolish response since Persia could easily rebuild any Spartan fleets the Athenians destroyed.
In the midst of all this Aristophanes produced possibly his most outrageous, and profound statement on the war, Lysistrata in 411B.C.E. In it the main character, Lysistrata ("she who disbands armies") organizes the women of Athens and Sparta, who are all sick of the war, to stage a sex strike and seize the treasury on the Acropolis until the men agree to make peace. The lowly women, who abound in common sense, triumph, and peace is happily made. Unfortunately, in real life, the war went on.
Another crisis erupted when an old drinking friend of Alcibiades, whom he had irresponsibly left in command of the fleet during his absence, offered battle against orders and was defeated. The Athenians, blaming Alcibiades, exiled him a second time. With him went Athens' best chance to win the war. In 406 B.C.E., stormy conditions after an Athenian victory at Arginusae prevented the rescue of several thousand shipwrecked Athenians. The mob blamed the six Athenian generals in charge of the fleet and had them tried and executed.
These events inspired Euripides' frightening portrayal of human madness, The Bacchae, produced a year after his death in 406 B.C.E. In it Dionysus returns to Thebes and incites wild frenzies in the forest by the local women who become his followers, the Maenads. When the king, Pentheus, who represents civilized rationality, tries to save Thebes from the wild irrational Dionysiac rites, he is torn apart by the Maenads. Madness reigns supreme as his own mother returns to town with his head on a stick, thinking it is a lion. Greek audiences must have been especially shaken as they watched the one thing on which they especially prided themselves, their moderate rationality, drowning in a sea of madness, whether on stage or in war.
Unlike the earlier days when the playwrights could help guide the democracy on a wise course, it seemed they could no longer offer guidance through the morass of problems Athens had gotten itself into. Now they could only point out the shocking failure of its leaders and assembly in the policies they pursued. And after the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles, there seemed to no playwrights with the talents to do that.
Therefore, in Aristophanes' play, The Frogs, Dionysus goes down to Hades to retrieve a good playwright from the dead. A poetry contest between Aeschylus and Euripides, with the verses weighed on a cheese scale, ensues to decide who gets to return to earth. Aeschylus wins first place and Sophocles gets second, even though he is not even in the contest. The play ends with the chorus of frogs escorting Aeschylus back to earth, urging him to “heal the sick state, fight the ignoble, cowardly, inward foe, and bring us peace.”
However the Athenians continued to ignore the wiser counsels of their playwrights. In 405 B.C.E. they built one last fleet, paying for it by stripping the gold from the temples and statues. However, a clever Spartan general, Lysander, lulled the Athenian generals into a false sense of security and then destroyed their fleet in a surprise attack at Aegospotami. Athens fell the next year after a long desperate siege. The Long Walls were torn down and its empire was stripped away, although Sparta did spare the city from destruction, probably as a counterweight against the rising power of Thebes. The democracy was replaced by an oligarchy of thirty men led by another of Socrates' old students, Critias, who conducted a vicious reign of terror.
Several years later, the Athenians were able to restore their independence, democracy and even the Long Walls. However, peace was no more in sight than it had been twenty-seven years before. In 399 B.C.E., Socrates was tried and executed for corrupting the youth of the city with his teachings. That event, as much as any, symbolized the end of Athens' cultural golden age.
The period of the Greek polis before the Macedonian conquest of Greece and Alexander the Great's conquests is known as the Hellenic Age and is concerned primarily with the narrow world of Greek poleis in Greece and the Aegean. The three centuries following Alexander's death are known as the Hellenistic Age, during which period Greek influence was spread across Asia far beyond the Greek homeland.
Philip of Macedon was smart enough to realize that it would be wise to rule the Greeks as leniently as possible. Therefore, instead of occupying Greece, he formed all the poleis (except Sparta which he left alone) into a league whose purpose was to invade Persia and supposedly avenge Xerxes' invasion from 150 years before. He even called it the Corinthian League to make the Greeks think it was for their benefit. But, with Philip as president, everyone recognized quite well who was in charge and that the era of the free polis was over, at least for the time being. Then, in 336 B.C.E., the opportunity for revolt suddenly presented itself when Philip was assassinated.
Philip's successor was Alexander III of Macedon, known to us as Alexander the Great. Few figures in history have inspired so many tales of romance and adventure. This is easy to understand when one looks at a map of Alexander's empire, and considers it took him only eleven years to conquer it.
When Alexander came to the throne, he was only twenty years old, although he had excellent training and experience for someone so young. He had received a tough, almost Spartan, training from a man named Leonidas. Then, at age thirteen, he was tutored by the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, who trained Alexander’s intellect as intensively as Leonidas had trained his body. Largely because of his education, Alexander displayed both an incredible physical toughness and intellectual genius. Those qualities, combined with early campaigns against northern tribes and at the battle of Chaeronea, made the young king more than ready to assume power. However, the various Greek city-states did not realize this until it was too late. Almost immediately after Philip's death, the Greeks, led by Thebes and Athens, raised the standard of revolt. The young king was at their gates so quickly that they could not believe it was really Alexander. A quick surrender saved them this time, but a second revolt by Thebes upon a rumor that Alexander had died while campaigning against tribes in the north led to a second rapid descent by the Macedonian king and the destruction of Thebes as a warning to other Greeks.
Alexander then prepared to pursue his father's plans to conquer Persia. For the next eleven years, from 334 to 323 B.C.E., he carried out one of the most amazing campaigns of conquest in history, only being rivaled by the Mongols under Chinghis Khan. During that time, his army marched over 21,000 miles, covering terrain ranging from the hot plains of Mesopotamia to the Hindu Kush Mountains and the hot humid environment of India. He even conquered Bactria, modern Afghanistan, something Soviet forces failed to do in the 1980's using advanced modern weaponry. Such feats required Alexander's brilliant and flexible mind. Whether faced with the massive armies of Darius III, the island fortress of Tyre, the mountain stronghold known as the Sogdian Rock in Bactria, or crossing the rain swollen waters of the Jhelum River in the face of a hostile Indian army, Alexander could always come up with an ingenious, and usually unexpected solution to the problem.
Alexander's success was also largely due to his charismatic personality. He knew thousands of his troops by name, and shared the dangers of battle and the fruits of victory equally with them. He could put down a mutiny with a mere speech reminding his soldiers of their shared exploits, or shame his troops to action by leading an assault alone. Ironically, in the end, the only army that halted his advance into Asia was his own. Tired from years of marching and fighting, and thousands of miles from home in the hot, humid plains of India, they refused to go any further. It was only then that Alexander turned around and went back. Soon afterwards in Babylon, he died, struck down by fever. Although on his deathbed, he let his troops file through his tent for one last farewell to their dying king and comrade. He was only thirty-three years of age when he died.
Various factors besides his personality aided Alexander. His father left him an excellent, well-drilled army that Alexander constantly experimented with to adapt to the changing conditions of his campaigns. The Persian Empire at that time was also in a state of decay and ruled by a timid king, Darius III, whose tendency to panic in battle cost him two large armies and his empire. Still, Alexander met some fierce resistance, especially in Bactria and India, and had to prove his abilities as a general constantly. In the end, Alexander's immortality was assured by his early death that gave rise to a wealth of romantic legends surrounding this handsome young man who conquered most of the known world.
Alexander died leaving only a mentally unfit half brother, Philip Arrhidaeus, and a pregnant wife, Roxanne, who eventually gave birth to a son, Alexander IV. Neither of these was capable of ruling, which left the job of organizing and ruling Alexander's empire to his generals. Rarely, if ever, has a more capable and ambitious group of men been gathered in one place with such an empire at stake. As one might expect, a long and bitter struggle for control of the empire ensued.
The basic pattern of these wars was that one general would gather a large amount of power into his hands, which would drive the other generals to unite against him before he took everything and destroyed them. As a result, no one was able to control all of Alexander's empire, which had fragmented by 275 B.C.E. into three large kingdoms: Antigonid Macedon, Seleucid Asia, and Ptolemaic Egypt.
The first of these kingdoms, Macedon, was ruled by the Antigonid dynasty. The Antigonids also tried to maintain control of Greece, but were only able to hold onto various strategic cities from time to time. Opposing the Antigonids and each other were the Aetolian and Achaean Leagues, which commanded the allegiance of most of the cities in Greece. Greece during this period saw a confusing and continuous power struggle between these leagues, Macedon, and various independent city-states such as Athens and Sparta. In the end, no one gained control and everyone was worn out from all this constant bickering. This set the stage for Rome to come in and finally establish long lasting peace and stability through its conquest of Greece in 146 B.C.E.
The bulk of Alexander's Asian lands were united under the Seleucid dynasty, founded by Seleucus I. Because of the size of their Empire, the Seleucids did what they could to attract Greek and Macedonian soldiers, artisans, and merchants to settle in their realms. Although many Greeks and Macedonians were willing to abandon their poorer homelands for the promise of wealthier horizons to the east, they were still few in number compared to the native population they ruled. Most Greeks and Macedonians coming to settle in Asia were concentrated in the many Greek style poleis founded by the Hellenistic monarchs. The Seleucids in particular were great founders of cities, seeing each one as an island of Greek power and culture in the midst of a hostile Asian sea. Outside of these Greek cities, native culture continued, largely untouched by Greek civilization. Most of these colonies were concentrated in the western parts of the empire, especially in Asia Minor and Syria, the most famous being the Syrian city of Antioch. In the vast interior of the eastern part of the empire, the cities were few and far between, and the influence of Greek culture was confined to the cities, reaching very little into the countryside. Even in the western parts of the empire, Greek influence rarely spread outside of the cities.
Such a widespread realm had virtually no cohesion, making it very difficult to hold together. Almost immediately after Seleucus I founded his dynasty, the fringes of the empire started to splinter. Seleucus first let his Indian lands go to the great Indian king, Chandragupta, in return for 500 war elephants. Asia Minor also started to fragment when Attalus, king of the city-state of Pergamum, started to carve out a kingdom in the western and southern parts of the peninsula. Soon other states such as Bithynia, Pontus, and Cappadocia were also emerging in Asia Minor. This left Syria, Palestine, and the Asian heartland to the Seleucids. A new tribe, known as the Parthians, invaded from the northeast and kept chipping away at the Seleucid lands until all that remained were the lands around Antioch in Syria. In 64 B.C.E., the Roman general, Pompey, finally put an end to these pathetic remnants and replaced Greek rule in the East with that of Rome.
The last, most successful, and longest-lived kingdom was in Egypt, founded by another of Alexander's generals, Ptolemy. He clearly saw that no one would be able to hold all of Alexander's empire together. Therefore, he went for a more realistic and limited goal, taking Egypt, which was rich and fairly isolated from invasion. All the kings of this dynasty were named Ptolemy and ruled much as the pharaohs had done for centuries. They were absolute rulers over a highly centralized state. All land was owned by the king and worked by the peasants for his benefit. Government monopolies on grain, oil, metals, glass, and papyrus also swelled the king's treasury, making Ptolemaic Egypt the richest of the Hellenistic kingdoms.
The showpiece of the Ptolemaic kingdom was Alexandria, which was founded by Alexander in 330 B.C.E. and destined to be the greatest of all Hellenistic cities. It was here that the Ptolemies established possibly the finest library and university up to that point in history. The library had an estimated 700,000 scrolls and was the largest collection of books in the ancient world. Unfortunately, it was destroyed by several fires set off by wars and riots that occasionally rocked Alexandria throughout its history. There is no telling how much ancient knowledge was lost as a result.
The Museum, or university, in Alexandria was also another splendid example of royal patronage. It had some 14,000 students along with botanical gardens, a zoological park, and a medical school. It was here that many of the greatest minds of the day converged to develop and show off their talents. As a result, ancient Greek science saw many of its greatest advances in Alexandria during this period. Finally, there was the Lighthouse of Pharos, which was 100 feet tall and cast a beacon for 30 miles. It supposedly had a steam-powered foghorn and a system of mirrors much like a periscope, so that people on ground level could survey the horizon from the perspective of being on top.
The Ptolemies' main rivals were the Seleucid rulers of Asia. These two powers clashed constantly for a century over control of Syria and Palestine, with the Seleucids finally winning the struggle. The Ptolemies also built a large navy and had political and economic interests in Asia Minor. Egypt's wealth and stability made it the last of the Hellenistic kingdoms to fall, as with the others, at the hands of Rome. In 3l B.C.E., in a naval battle at Actium off the coast of Greece, the combined fleets of the Roman general, Marc Antony, and Cleopatra were destroyed by another Roman, Octavian. This marked the end of Hellenistic Egypt, and also the Hellenistic era, although to a large extent, Roman civilization was a continuation of Hellenistic civilization.
Along these lines, trade was on a much larger scale than in the old Greek world centered around the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean Seas. Alexander's conquests largely fused the Greeks' Mediterranean centered economy with the Asian centered economy of Persia. Commerce flourished between the Greek and Persian worlds, with trade links being established as far east as India and China, creating a virtual world economy. The volume of trade was also large. Ptolemaic Egypt was able to export an estimated 20,000,000 bushels of grain each year. This made Hellenistic civilization much richer than the older Hellenic civilization, which made much more money available for the patronage of cultural pursuits. The best example of this was in Alexandria, the capital of Ptolemaic Egypt, already discussed above.
The second feature of Hellenistic Civilization caused by its large scale was the large number of older cultures it ruled over and was subsequently influenced by. Babylonian math and Egyptian medicine were the most notable examples of this influence. However, the fusion of cultures took place as far away as India and Bactria, where an interesting dialogue was written down between a Buddhist monk and Menander, the Greek ruler of a Greek kingdom which controlled Bactria and Northwest India in the third and second centuries B.C.E. Greek sculpture also had its influence on the Gandharan style of Buddhist sculpture as seen by the portrayal of curly haired Buddhas, even though the Greeks were the only ones in the area with curly hair. This influence even filtered as far east as China where the curly haired motif of Buddhas showed up.
The third aspect of Hellenistic civilization to note was that Greek influence was dominant and spread widely across Alexander's empire, especially throughout the Middle East as seen in the widespread use of Koine (common) Greek in the cities there. For example, the New Testament of the Bible was written in Koine Greek rather than Hebrew since it could reach more people that way. However, as mentioned above, the small numbers of Greeks and Macedonians compared to the numbers of peoples they ruled meant that they stayed concentrated in the cities and their cultural influence rarely reached the peasants in the countryside.
Because of the expansion of trade, its wealth, and contact with other cultures and ideas, Hellenistic civilization flourished in a variety of areas. Prominent among these were medicine, philosophy, math, and mechanical science. In medicine, the center of research and development was Alexandria, where researchers came up with several new findings. They used dissections to show the distinction between arteries and nerves. They learned to use the pulse for diagnosis and saw the heart as a pump with valves. They were even able to control bleeding with tourniquets and surgically remove hernias, bladder stones, and hemorrhoids.
Despite these findings, there was still no comprehensive understanding of how the human body operates as an integrated system of organs. For example, Greek physicians thought the heart only pumped blood out of the heart and had no concept of the circulatory system, believing the body produced new blood rather than recirculating and oxygenating it in the lungs. It would not be until the 1600's that serious progress would be made beyond the Greeks in our understanding of human anatomy and physiology.
In philosophy, several new ideas emerged. One of these, Stoicism (named after the colonnaded walkway, or stoa, in which it was taught in Athens), stressed, among other things, doing one's duty and bearing up under hardship. Even today, the term stoic is used to denote someone who bears adversity with strength and courage. The other major new philosophy to emerge was Epicureanism. This said our main goal in life is to avoid pain. Many people misinterpreted this to mean we should live a hedonistic, "eat, drink, and be merry" lifestyle. The term epicurean still denotes this sort of attitude. However, Epicureus, the founder of this philosophy, saw such a lifestyle as ultimately destructive, and therefore exactly the opposite of what he was striving for. Rather, we should live moderate sensible lives. This and his idea that God exists, but is totally detached from events on earth, would have a profound influence on the philosophy of Deism during the Enlightenment in the 1700's.
There were also considerable accomplishments in mathematics and mechanical science during the Hellenistic Age. Greek mathematicians mainly excelled in geometry, since they did not have place value digits or the zero, both of which are needed for higher level computations. Euclid wrote a geometry book whose proofs are still used in schools today. Eratosthenes, another mathematician working in Ptolemaic Egypt, accurately calculated the circumference of the earth by measuring the different lengths of shadows of two sticks two hundred miles apart at high noon on the summer solstice. However, Eratosthenes' calculation was ignored in favor of a much smaller estimate of the earth's size. This was important, since the smaller estimate of the size of the globe would give captains the courage to sail the high seas during the Age of Exploration.
In mechanical science, the steam engine was invented by Hiero of Alexandria and used for various toys and tricks to amaze people, such as opening temple doors. However, people having plenty of cheap slave or poor labor, found few practical uses for steam power, and it was eventually forgotten until the 1600's in Western Europe when there was a need for labor saving devices. Finally, there was Archimedes of Syracuse who demonstrated the properties of water displacement. He also defended his city from a besieging Roman army by designing catapults and fantastic machines, such as giant cranes for picking up and dropping enemy ships beneath Syracuse's walls. Thanks largely to Archimedes' devices, Syracuse held out for two years before the Romans broke in. Archimedes died in the sack of the city, totally absorbed in a math problem and oblivious to the havoc going on around him.
If one looks only at how many people were directly affected by Greek culture during the Hellenistic Age, then the Greeks would seem to have failed to spread their culture. However, looking at numbers alone to assess the success of the Hellenistic Greeks is deceptive. While Greek culture was largely confined to Greek cities, the high culture of most civilizations was also confined to their cities as well. It is true that Greek culture had little lasting impact in Mesopotamia and farther east. However, its impact in Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt was quite profound. The fact that Koine Greek became the common language spoken throughout the Eastern Mediterranean cities and was the original language of the New Testament says a great deal about Greek influence.
Just as important, if not more, the Romans, coming into contact with the Hellenistic East, would adopt Greek culture as their own and pass it on to our culture developing in Western Europe. The Romans' successors in the East, the medieval Byzantines (Greeks), would also pass Greek civilization directly on to Western Europe and to the Muslim Arabs. They, in turn, would add to Greek math and science and then pass it on to Western Europe through Muslim Spain. Thus Europe received its Greek heritage from three separate sources. That alone should show the importance of the Greeks to our own culture, and how, thanks to the diffusion of Greek culture during the Hellenistic Age, the Greeks are still very much with us.
When we think of the Greeks, we think of a bold, intelligent people who gave us so much in the way of art, architecture, drama, democracy, science, and math. When we think of the Romans, we think of empire builders. They were a more down to earth people who may have done little that was original compared to what the Greeks did. But they built and maintained an empire that peacefully embraced the entire Mediterranean Sea for some two centuries, an accomplishment unparalleled in history. The Romans also spread civilization into Western Europe. In that sense, they were the bridge between the older cultures of the ancient Near East and our culture, known as Western Civilization.
There is probably no story that better illustrates what the early Romans were all about than that of the founding of Rome by the twin brothers, Romulus and Remus. According to this legend, there was disagreement over where to found the city. When omens from the gods failed to settle the dispute, Romulus just started digging the pomerium (sacred boundary) of Rome where he thought the gods wanted it. Remus mockingly leaped over this trench and Romulus killed him, declaring that such a fate should befall all who dared to breach the walls of Rome. The story of Romulus and Remus shows that the Roman sense of honor, duty, and loyalty to Rome ran even deeper than family and kinship ties. Other Roman legends also had this theme of honor and duty running through them: the story of Horatius, who single-handedly defended a bridge against invading Etruscans in order to buy his city time to prepare a defense; the consul Brutus who had his own sons executed for plotting treason against Rome; and Lucretia, who committed suicide rather than live with dishonor to herself and Rome. Such stories idealize the Roman character, but also raise the question of what factors shaped it and pushed Rome to greatness. And, of course, the first place to look is the environment surrounding Rome and its people.
At the time of its founding around 750 B.C.E., there was little to hint that Rome and Italy would be the center of the greatest empire in antiquity. Italy did have good soil along with some resources and good harbors in the South. These features attracted Greek colonists whose culture would exercise an immense influence on Roman civilization. Also, Italy's soil tended to make its people farmers rather than artisans and merchants.
These factors, in particular the close ties to the soil, largely molded the Romans' personality as a people. While it is dangerous to stereotype a whole people's character, there are certain values and circumstances that any people as a whole share which helps define how they think and act. The quick-witted Greeks, whom the sea and lack of resources forced into becoming clever and resourceful traders, looked upon the agricultural Romans as slow and dull. But there were several characteristics that would help the Romans become great empire builders. First of all, being farmers bred a certain ability and willingness to persevere through hardships. Nothing shows this better than Rome's dogged perseverance and eventual victories in its first two wars against Carthage, wars which dragged on for 23 and 17 years respectively. Agriculture tended to make the Romans somewhat more conservative and wary of change. They were also a tightly knit society, more willing to submit to the rule of law than the quarrelsome Greeks ever were. This Roman discipline produced magnificent soldiers and the most efficient and effective armies in the ancient world. It also produced an intense desire for the rule of law that made the Romans possibly the greatest lawgivers in history. Many Western European countries today base their law codes directly on earlier Roman law codes.
One other characteristic marked the Romans for greatness: a willingness to adapt other peoples' ideas for their own purposes. All people borrow ideas, but few have been so adept at it as the Romans. Their art, architecture, technology, city planning, and military tactics all owed a great deal to other peoples' influences. Indeed, there was little that the Romans did that was totally original. But the sum total of what they did was uniquely Roman and marked them out as one of the most remarkable peoples in history.
Italy's topography also had an impact. The Alps to the North provided some protection, although occasionally invaders, such as the Gauls and Carthaginians, did break in. Another mountain range, the Apennines, ran along the length of the peninsula much like a backbone. While this had the effect of dividing Italy into various city-states, it was not nearly to the extent that Greece was broken up by its mountains. These two factors, plus the Roman character, allowed Rome to unite Italy relatively free from outside interference
Finally, Italy's location favored it in two ways. It had a strategic position that divided the Mediterranean into western and eastern halves. Also, it was far enough away from the older civilizations of antiquity to allow it to develop on its own without too much outside interference. Therefore, once Italy was unified, its geographic position allowed Rome to unite the Mediterranean under its rule.
Although there is evidence in Roman myth and archaeology of various shepherd villages on Rome's seven hills, the city's history really started with the Etruscans. The origins of this mysterious people are obscure. Some ancient sources liked to trace them back to Asia Minor because of their religious practices such as augury (reading flights of birds to tell the future), style of dress (in particular their pointed shoes which resembled those of the Hittites), their use of the arch in architecture, and their obscure language. However, even to this day, the origins of the Etruscans remain a mystery.
The Etruscans were organized into a loose confederation of city-states to the north of Rome. Around 650 B.C.E., they took control of the site of Rome, with its defensible hills and location on a ford of the Tiber River. They did a number of things to transform this crude collection of shepherds' huts into a true city. The Etruscans introduced rectangular urban planning. They drained the surrounding marshes and built underground sewers. They built public works using the arch and vault, and laid out roads and bridges. They promoted trade, the development of metallurgy, and better agriculture in and around Rome. The Etruscans, being heavily influenced by the Greeks, also introduced the Greek alphabet, thus introducing Greek influence into Roman culture. In fact, Roman nobles during this period would send their sons to be educated in Etruscan schools much as they would later send their sons to Greece for an education. The dark and gloomy Etruscan religion, in particular the custom of gladiators fighting to the death at the funeral of a king or noble, also had a significant impact on Rome. This is seen much later in Christian images of demons that seem to be modeled after Etruscan demons. Overall, the Romans owed a great deal to the Etruscans. The genius they would show for urban planning, road and bridge building, and civil engineering projects such as public aqueducts and baths, was a direct result of the legacy left by the Etruscans.
By 500 B.C.E., the Etruscans had also made Rome most important city in the central Italian region of Latium. This enabled it to dominate its close neighbors, the Latins and finally encouraged it to rebel against its masters. Two other factors aided the Romans in their struggle. First of all, Rome's hills and fortifications helped defend it against attack. Second, the Etruscans' loose organization into a confederacy of independent city-states made them vulnerable to attack by the Greeks in South Italy who were their rivals for trade and sea power.The Greeks won a decisive victory, which allowed Rome to successfully shake off Etruscan rule around 500 B.C.E. or later. However, Etruscan aggression remained a serious threat for the better part of a century. Therefore, it was not until around 400 B.C.E. that Rome was secure enough to embark upon its own path of conquest.
Except for the brief interruption of the Gallic disaster, Roman expansion in Italy was almost uninterrupted in the period 400-265 B.C.E. Among its first victims was the Etruscan city, Veii, which Rome attacked on its own without any help from its Latin allies. Therefore, when Veii fell, Rome gained a large amount of land for itself without having to share it with the Latins. It gave much of this land to poor Roman citizens, which set into motion a recurring pattern that would eventually help Rome conquer Italy. Since more Romans had land, they could now afford the arms and armor to serve in the army. This gave Rome a larger army, which meant it could conquer more land, distribute it to more citizens, further increase its army, and so on.
Two other Roman practices came out of this cycle and led back into it to help Rome in its path of conquest. One was the practice of founding colonies to gain and secure their hold on a region. The other was the building of roads to help Roman armies move more quickly and easily than their enemies to threatened areas.
After the fall of Veii, Rome would sweep from one conquest to another, first crushing a revolt by its Latin allies, next conquering the Samnites and Campania in two hard-fought wars, and finally defeating the Hellenistic army of Pyrrhus of Epirus to bring the Greeks in Southern Italy under control. And with each conquest, more Romans would get land, buy arms and armor, and increase Rome's army, conquests, etc.
Rome's recovery from the Gallic invasion was swift. It quickly put down a revolt of the Latin allies and then replaced the Latin League with separate treaties between Rome and each Latin state, thus tying each city to Rome alone.
Rome's victory now got it involved in affairs in Campania. When southern hill tribes, known as Samnites, started threatening the rich cities of Campania, they looked to Rome for help. This touched off the Second Samnite War (326-304 B.C.E.). The Romans quickly ran into serious problems fighting the Samnites in the hills. Up to this point they had used the Greek style phalanx as their main tactical unit. This was ill suited to fighting in mountain passes. An entire Roman army was even captured in a pass known as the Caudine Forks. The Roman, being ever adaptable, copied their Samnite enemies who used more open and flexible formations with soldiers equipped with throwing javelins, swords, and lighter armor. These formations, called maniples, were arranged in a checkerboard fashion that allowed the Romans to advance fresh troops into a battle and withdraw tired ones from it. The new Roman legions might bend, but they rarely broke. Not only did they win the Samnite wars and Italy for Rome, but, with a few modifications, they would eventually conquer the entire Mediterranean.
The Second Samnite War was a long, hard fought affair that saw Rome initiate two other policies: road building and colonies. In 3l2 B.C.E., the Romans built the first of their military roads, the Appian Way, to move troops quickly in times of war. However, the Appian Way and other such roads would also be highways of trade and commerce in peacetime. Eventually, there would be 5l,000 miles of paved roads linking different parts of the Roman Empire together. Rome also founded colonies to cut Samnite supply lines and communications and established firm Roman control in the area.
Because of their military reforms, roads, and colonies, the Romans finally defeated the Samnites in 304 B.C.E. They were lenient with their defeated enemies, but this allowed the Samnites to start a third war (298-290 B.C.E.). However, the Roman system of maniples, roads, and military colonies on their enemies' borders gradually strangled the Samnites into submission once again.
Except for Cisalpine Gaul, only the Greeks in the very south were now free of Roman control. Growing increasingly nervous about Rome's intentions, the most powerful of these cities, Tarentum, went to war with Rome in 280 B.C.E. Tarentum had great wealth, but little fighting spirit. Therefore, it had the unusual habit of hiring foreign kings to fight its wars. In this case, it called in Pyrrhus, a cousin of Alexander the Great and ruler of the kingdom of Epirus, north of Greece. For the first time, the Romans were up against a military system more sophisticated than their own, using the dreaded Macedonian phalanx and war elephants. The more flexible maniples fought bravely on the plains of Heraclea and Ausculum, but were beaten. However, Pyrrhus' victories were so costly compared to what he gained that even today we refer to such victories as "pyrrhic". In the face of such defeats Roman perseverance shone forth, the Senate refusing to make peace until every last Macedonian had left Italian soil. In 275 B.C.E., the Romans beat the Macedonian phalanx by luring it onto hilly or broken ground. Pyrrhus beat a hasty retreat back to Epirus, and Italy now belonged to Rome.
Conquering a region is one thing. Ruling it is another. And it was here that the Romans showed their true greatness. Instead of ruling like tyrants, they offered various grades of Roman citizenship and the chance to share the benefits of Roman rule with the Italians in return for their loyalty. Newly conquered cities were made allies that had trade and marriage privileges with Romans. As a city gradually proved its loyalty to Rome, it would receive the status of partial, or Latin, citizenship. Eventually, a city proving its loyalty over a long period of time would be granted full Roman citizenship. All of Rome's subjects were expected to supply troops for war and give up their independent foreign policies. However, Rome did let them keep their local governments and customs, but they tended to resemble those of the Romans more and more with the passage of time. Rome also kept building roads and founding colonies. Colonies with Latin citizenship were especially popular, since they were a bit more independent than full Roman colonies, while still providing Rome with troops.
The value of Rome's system for governing Italy should be obvious. Instead of constantly worrying about rebellions, it had a reliable source of loyal manpower and resources to help increase its power. The greatest test of this was when Hannibal tried to conquer Italy, thinking the Italians would flock to his standard against the Roman tyrant. Instead, most of Italy, especially the parts under Roman rule the longest, stood fast by Rome, despite the fact that Hannibal's army was in Italy for sixteen years. The Romans would continue this policy of offering citizenship to their subjects. In fact, in 2l2 A.D., the Roman emperor, Caracalla, completed this process by offering Roman citizenship to all freeborn men in the empire.
By 265 B.C.E., Rome had a strong stable government and Italy firmly under its control, secured by the lure of citizenship, a growing network of military roads and colonies, and probably the best-trained and most efficient army of its day. Given such a large, well organized, and energetic power, it should come as no surprise that Rome was ready for further expansion. Across the narrow strait of water to the south beckoned Sicily. Expansion there would mean war with a great naval power, Carthage, and the start of the road to empire.
Reading in Development
Just as Rome got caught up in a cycle of expansion that led to the conquest of Italy, it experienced another such cycle that led to their dominance of the Mediterranean. In this case, what triggered the pattern was the mere fact that each new conquest brought Rome into contact with a new set of neighbors. This would lead to new opportunities for conquest, but also mutual fears and suspicions on each side. Either way, Rome would get drawn into a new set of wars, which it would eventually win with new conquests. This, of course, would present Rome with some more new neighbors and the pattern would repeat itself until Rome had conquered the Mediterranean.
The first phase of this expansion involved Rome in two desperate wars against Carthage (264-241 & 218-201 B.C.E.). Initially, this struggle was over Sicily, since it was rich, very close to Italy, and Rome had to protect the trade of its Greek subjects in Southern Italy against Carthaginian encroachment. Rome's victory in these wars made it a major naval power controlling Sicily and dominating the Western Mediterranean. Feeding back into the cycle of expansion, this also led to contact and conflict with new peoples in the Eastern and Western Mediterranean.
In the West, Rome got involved in wars with Carthage and the Celts in Spain, both of whom Rome feared from previous wars. Therefore, Rome conquered and destroyed Carthage in 146 B.C.E. and the Spanish Celts by 133 B.C.E., both of them in rather brutal and treacherous fashion.
In the East, Rome was more reluctantly drawn into wars against Antigonid Macedon and Seleucid Asia by two main factors. For one thing, Macedon, suspicious of Rome since it had crushed the Illyrian pirates close to Macedon's shores, had declared war on Rome during its darkest days of the Second Punic War. While nothing much came of this First Macedonian War (215-205 B.C.E.), Rome was naturally suspicious of Macedon. Feeding this suspicion was the second factor, various Greek states running to Rome for protection, at first against Macedon and the Seleucids, and later against each other. As Rome was drawn increasingly into affairs in the East, its frustrations grew until it annexed Macedon (149 B.C.E.), Greece (146 B.C.E.) and Pergamum in Asia Minor, which was willed to Rome by its king in 133 B.C.E.
By 133 B.C.E., Rome was the dominant power in the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, having an empire would put stresses and strains on Roman society, including the creation of ambitious generals looking for new opportunities for conquest, plunder, and glory. Therefore, the Roman tide of conquest continued after 133 B.C.E. In the West, an ambitious general named Julius Caesar would push the barbarian threat even further north by conquering the Celts in Gaul. Eventually, the rest of North Africa would fall under Roman rule to round out control of the Western Mediterranean. Meanwhile, in the East, Mithridates of Pontus attacked Rome's provinces in Asia Minor. Rome won both of these Mithridatic wars, and its generals, most notably Pompey, progressively annexed the rest of Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Thus by the early Christian era, the entire Mediterranean was firmly under Roman rule.
Rome's first overseas wars were against Carthage on the coast of North Africa, the largest, most prosperous, and aggressive of the Phoenician cities. The prize they fought for was the island of Sicily, which for centuries had been a constant battleground between Carthage and various Greek colonies. Neither side had won a decisive victory, and when Rome got involved, the island remained divided between Carthage in the western end of the island and the Greeks in the east. Rome's relations with Carthage down to 264 B.C.E. had been friendly. The two powers had even allied around 500 B.C.E. against the Etruscans. By this treaty Rome recognized the Mediterranean as Carthage's sphere of influence, and Carthage even claimed a Roman could not wash his hands in the sea without its permission. As long as Rome was just a land power preoccupied with conquering Italy, this arrangement was fine. However, in 264 B.C.E., with Italy firmly under control, the Romans first got involved in Sicilian affairs.
There were several reasons for this war. For one thing, both Rome and Carthage saw Sicily as a natural extension of their respective territories. Similarly, the Greeks in Southern Italy felt Sicilian trade and resources were rightfully theirs to exploit and probably put pressure on Rome to protect their interests there. The immediate cause of this war was a group of Italian mercenaries called the Mamertines ("Sons of Mars") who had seized the strategic port of Messana just across from Italy. The Romans, seeing the port as vital to the security of Italy, helped the Mamertines when Carthage moved to take the city, and this led to war.
The First Punic War (264-24l B.C.E.)resembled the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, in that each conflict pitted a land power against a sea power where one side would have to attack the other side's strength. In each case, it was the land power that built a navy. Roman experience with a navy up till now had been limited, which seems surprising considering how much coastline Italy had to defend. However, probably with the help of Greek shipwrights in the south, the Romans built a fleet with which to challenge Carthage.
The Romans realized they could not match Carthage's centuries of experience in naval warfare. As a result, they adapted a heavy boarding bridge, known as the corvus ("crow"), from the Greeks. Any Carthaginian ship daring to get close enough would find this bridge slamming down on its deck and Roman soldiers pouring over to capture it. In essence, the Romans were turning a sea battle into a land battle. As ridiculous as it seemed, it worked. Time and again, Roman fleets crushed Carthaginian fleets and were steadily sweeping Carthage from the seas. However, Rome had one very powerful enemy that evened things out: Mother Nature. It seemed that for every Carthaginian fleet the Romans destroyed, a storm would rise up to demolish a Roman fleet. Thousands of lives were lost on each side with neither Rome nor Carthage making any headway or willing to quit.
For twenty years the war dragged on, bleeding each side white. Finally, in 24l B.C.E., the Romans mounted one last supreme effort to build a fleet, this time without the heavy corvus to weigh down the ships. As luck would have it, they caught the last Carthaginian fleet loaded down with supplies and destroyed or captured most of it. Carthage had had enough and sued for peace. Rome took 3200 talents (2ll,200 pounds) of silver and three- fourths of Sicily, leaving its ally Syracuse with the other quarter. Sicily became Rome's first province, having little prospect of Roman citizenship since, in Roman eyes, the Sicilians were too different to be able to share in the benefits of Roman rule.
Rome was quite active in the years after the First Punic War. To the north, it conquered the Gauls in Northern Italy, known as Cisalpine Gaul ("Gaul this side of the Alps"), thus extending Roman rule all the way to the Alps. To the east, the Romans crushed the Illyrian pirates operating in the Adriatic Sea. Although this was done mainly to protect the shipping of the Greeks in Southern Italy, the Macedonian king, Philip V, viewed it as an act of aggression by Rome in his home waters. Another power getting concerned about Roman power was Syracuse, which found itself hemmed in by Roman rule in most of Sicily.
Then there was Carthage. In 238 B.C.E., when Carthage was still weakened from the First Punic War, Rome seized Sardinia and Corsica, two islands off the west coast of Italy that it saw as a threat if they remained in Carthaginian hands. However, the Carthaginians were a resilient people who were not about to accept Rome's victory for long. Soon after the war, Carthage's most capable general, Hamilcar Barca, set off for Spain to carve out a new empire for his city. Over the next twenty years, Hamilcar, his son-in-law Hasdrubal, and Hamilcar's own son Hannibal, brought most of Spain, with its plentiful silver and mercenaries, under Carthaginian rule.
As Carthaginian power revived in the West, Rome became increasingly nervous. Finally, war broke out when Hannibal attacked the Spanish city of Saguntum, which was an ally of Rome. The Second Punic War (2l8-20l B.C.E.) would be an even more desperate struggle than the first war with Carthage.
The Carthaginian general, Hannibal, was a brilliant commander who figured the best way to beat Rome was to invade Italy so Rome's subjects would desert to his side. Since the Roman navy was too strong for him to risk an invasion by sea, Hannibal took the only remaining route, over the Alps. This march, which involved taking some 40,000 men and 37 war elephants through hostile Gallic territory and treacherous mountain passes, certainly ranks as one of Hannibal's most remarkable achievements.
Only some 25,000 men and one elephant survived this march, and the Romans immediately moved north to finish off Hannibal's sick and exhausted army. However, it was Hannibal who, over the next two years, dazzled the Romans with an array of tricks and strategies that trapped and destroyed one army after another. The most devastating of these battles, Cannae (216 B.C.E.), was a masterpiece of strategy using a collapsing center to draw the Romans in and then envelop their flanks. The ensuing slaughter cost Rome 35,000 men. Cannae unleashed a virtual avalanche of problems on Rome as other states, nervous about Roman power, flocked to Hannibal's standard. Syracuse joined the Carthaginian side. Philip V of Macedon, fearing Roman encroachment in the Adriatic, also allied with Hannibal against Rome. In Italy, both the Gauls in the north and the Greeks in the south defected to Carthage's side. However, Hannibal was disappointed that the overwhelming revolt against Rome never took place. Instead, the central core of Italy stood fast by Rome, producing more armies as Rome pursued new strategies.
In their darkest hour after Cannae, The Romans displayed incredible spirit and determination. They defiantly refused to ransom soldiers who had surrendered at Cannae and forbade any talk of peace or even public mourning that might lower morale. They quickly put Syracuse under siege, found allies in Greece to keep Philip V of Macedon too busy to be able to help Hannibal in Italy, and raised armies to invade Spain and deprive Carthage of its main resource base. In Italy, Roman armies gradually pushed Hannibal into the South, while being careful not to test his wizardry in open battle. Instead, the Romans, using superior manpower and resources, gradually wore Hannibal down while chipping away at his supports elsewhere.
It was a slow exhausting strategy that required remarkable perseverance. But in time it bore fruit. Macedon was neutralized. Syracuse fell after an epic two-year siege. Spain was gradually stripped from Carthage's grasp. And two relief armies sent to Hannibal's aid were destroyed in the north before reaching him. Hannibal managed to hang on tenaciously in southern Italy as he saw even his Italian allies melting away under growing Roman pressure. Finally, the Romans mounted an invasion of Africa that forced Hannibal to return home. At Zama, the brilliant Roman general, Scipio, used Hannibal's tactics against the old master to crush his army and bring Carthage to its knees. Rome deprived Carthage of Spain, most of North Africa, 10,000 talents (660,000 pounds) of silver, all its war elephants and all but ten warships. Its African lands went to Rome's ally Numidia, while Spain remained to be conquered. The quarter of Sicily around Syracuse also fell to Rome. Rome had arrived as the dominant power in the West.
Like it or not, (and many Romans did not), Rome was now a Mediterranean power. This involved it in an ever-widening circle of affairs that it found itself less and less able to avoid contact with. As a result, the next seventy years saw Rome's power and influence growing throughout both the Western and Eastern Mediterranean.
Much of Rome’s expansion was tied in with the nature of Roman politics, which were both highly competitive and expensive. A Roman’s public career consisted of rising through a tight mixture of military and civil offices, with success in war being the most important factor. Military victories brought a Roman glory, status (which heavily affected his success in politics), and money (which helped him pay for his political career). Therefore, after 200 B.C.E., when Romans found themselves outside of Italy and far from the control of the Roman Senate, they were often tempted to attack foreign peoples to gain the money and glory needed to continue their careers back home. Although Romans might be eager to win fame and riches, they were generally reluctant to conquer new lands, since that would involve the trouble and expense of actually ruling those new provinces. Therefore, while Rome’s power was clearly dominant in the Mediterranean by 133 B.C.E., a map of the Mediterranean at that time would hardly reflect that power as the Romans during this period often passed up opportunities for conquest.
Despite the harsh treaty imposed in 20l B.C.E., Carthage bounced back to regain its prosperity, although not its power. This still worried some Romans who recalled the trials and tribulations of two previous wars with Carthage. One of these Romans, Cato the Elder, was so fearful of Carthage that no matter what the topic of his speech in the Senate, he always ended it with "Carthage must be destroyed." Finally, in 149 B.C.E., the Romans listened to Cato, and tricked the Carthaginians into disarming before demanding the complete destruction of their city. This was too much, and the Carthaginians somehow managed to rearm and put up a furious defense. The resulting siege of Carthage, known as the Third Punic War, lasted three years (149-146 B.C.E.). In the end, the Romans stormed Carthage's walls and leveled it to the ground. This destroyed Rome's most dangerous enemy, but also put a serious blotch on its record for fair play. However, Rome still left most of North Africa to Numidia rather than taking it for itself, showing it was probably motivated against Carthage more by fear than greed.
Rome’ wars with Celtic tribes in Cisalpine Gaul (Northern Italy) and Spain were also brutal. However, it was largely cultural differences, especially over their respective concepts of the state,that triggered disastrous misunderstandings between Rome and the Celts. The Romans’ saw the state as being the totality of the people in a society, as expressed in their motto “The Senate and the Roman People” (SPQR). Therefore, any treaty signed by legal representatives of the Roman state was considered binding on all Romans. On the other hand, Celtic peoples, especially those in Spain, were much more loosely organized into tribes. And even if a tribe’s leaders signed a treaty with Rome, other members of the tribe, especially those with their own war bands personally loyal to them, might not agree with it and continue fighting. In the Romans’ eyes, this was a clear violation of the treaty and merited retaliation. Unfortunately, since the Romans could not tell who was guilty or innocent, they often struck against tribesmen who were abiding by the treaty, seeing them all as equally guilty since they were all bound by the same treaty. Naturally, the wrongly accused Celts would strike back, confirming Roman opinions of them and triggering a cycle of hatred and violence that was very hard to break.
Therefore, the Roman conquests of Cisalpine Gaul and Spain were especially brutal, involving ambushes, massacres, and broken treaties by both sides. It took the Romans half a century to pacify Cisalpine Gaul and and nearly seventy years to conquer most of Spain. The final conquest of north-western Spain would not be finished until 19 B.C.E.
Roman involvement in the East was more reluctant, especially after two exhausting wars with Carthage. However, Rome had already been involved there in suppressing pirates in Illyria and in the war that Macedon had declared on it during the struggle with Hannibal. To some powers, such as Macedon and the Seleucid kingdom, the rising power of Rome seemed a threat. But to others, such as Rhodes and Pergamum, it seemed like salvation from aggression by Macedon and Seleucid Asia. When they appealed to Rome for help, they portrayed their enemies as a threat to Rome as well, pointing out how Philip V had attacked Rome in the midst of its life and death struggle against Hannibal.
Reluctantly, the Roman people agreed to declare what is known as the Second Macedonian War (20l-196 B.C.E.). After a slow start, the Romans finally met the Macedonian phalanx at Cynoscephelae. As in the war against Pyrrhus a century before, the legions' flexibility proved decisively superior to the phalanx's rigidness, and Rome won the war. Rome's settlement shows its reluctance to get involved in the East beyond securing Italy's flanks. Rome took no land and only 1000 talents (66,000 pounds) of silver to cover the costs of the war. Either as a generous move or in order to further weaken Macedon, Rome declared all Greeks free from foreign intervention, and by 194 B.C.E. its own troops were gone from Greek and Macedonian soil.
However, Rome's troubles with Macedon and the Seleucid Empire were far from over. The Greeks, as always, kept squabbling with each other. This opened the way for the Seleucid king, Antiochus III, to invade Greece. Appeals from various Greeks and the advance of Antiochus' army into Greece led to the Syrian War (192-189 B.C.E.). The Romans turned Antiochus' defenses at Thermopylae Pass, drove him from Greece, and tracked him into Asia Minor. For the first time, Roman troops crossed into Asia. After crushing Antiochus' phalanx and army at Magnesia, Rome made peace, claiming no land for itself, but taking 15,000 talents of silver to pay for the war and giving land to its ally, Pergamum.
Of course, Rome's involvement could not end that easily. More squabbling between Macedonians and Greeks led to the Third Macedonian War (17l-167 B.C.E.) with the same basic result. Again, the legions tore up the Macedonian phalanx. And again, Rome took no land, but it did break Macedon into four separate and weak states. By now, Roman patience was at an end. A revolt in 149 B.C.E. led to Rome finally annexing Macedon as a province. And more Greek quarreling led to war, the sack of Corinth, and turning Greece into a Roman province in 146 B.C.E.
In 133 B.C.E., the king of Pergamum died and willed his kingdom to Rome, probably thinking annexation was only a matter of time. Two other kingdoms, Bithynia and Egypt, would also be willed to Rome in the next half-century, showing the dominance of Rome in the Mediterranean. Even those areas not directly under Roman rule increasingly felt its presence and would eventually fall. However, as remarkable as the rise of Roman power was, it also brought serious problems that would plunge Rome into bloody civil strife.
Success often carries with it the seeds of its own destruction, and that was certainly the case with the Roman republic by the late second century B.C.E. "Superpower" status wrought far-reaching changes affecting all levels of Roman society. Unfortunately, the conservative Romans had great difficulty adapting to such rapid changes. The result was a century of political and social turmoil during which Rome kept trying to patch up these new problems with the same old solutions. Fortunately for Rome, it was still dynamic and energetic enough to survive and even expand during this period of social decay and political and military turbulence. Rome faced serious problems in three areas: the fate of its peasants, the government of its provinces, and its army.
For Rome's peasants, the fruits of empire were bitter indeed. The Second Punic War against Hannibal had devastated many fields in Italy. The other wars of the third and second centuries B.C.E. had left many fields ruined by years of neglect while the farmers were off campaigning. When the farmers came home, two things came with them. First of all, thousands of prisoners of war flooded Roman slave markets. This influx of cheap slave labor let rich Roman senators set up huge estates that competed with the free peasants already struggling to revive their farms. Added to this was an influx of cheap grain from Sicily (also from estates worked by slaves). Faced with such competition, thousands of peasants lost their farms and migrated to the cities, especially Rome.
Life in the cities was little better. Slaves there had also taken many of the jobs the peasants might have hoped for. Thus the dispossessed peasants became an idle urban mob dependant on various politicians for food and rent in return for political support. This led to untold squalor and the occasional cheap spectacles of gladiatorial fights and chariot racing, the proverbial "bread and circuses" of ancient Rome. Because of this, Roman politics became corrupt, violent, and split into two factions, the Optimates who drew their support from the Senate and other nobles, and the Populares who relied on the Tribal assembly and mob for support.
Provincial government was no better. The root of the problem was that Rome was trying to rule a large empire with an amateur city-state government. At first, extra praetors (judges), and later pro-consuls (ex-consuls) and pro-praetors (ex-praetors) were created to run the provinces for terms of one year. However, one year was not nearly enough time to learn about a foreign culture and how to govern it. Therefore, such governors were untrained, unsupervised, and unpaid. Being unpaid forced them to cover their expenses through corruption. Being unsupervised let them get away with almost anything they wanted. Being untrained meant they were usually incompetent. Even the creation of permanent extortion courts to try corrupt ex-governors only encouraged more corruption so they could bribe the jurors who were also their senatorial colleagues who hoped for similar leniency in the future when they were tried for corruption.
In addition there were no professional Roman bureaucrats to run the daily machinery of provincial government. Instead, governors brought personal friends and slaves. Tax collection was done through tax farming, a system where rich businessmen, known as equites, bought the right to collect the taxes of a province, paying the state the agreed sum and then over-taxing the provinces to cover their expenses and more.
These problems with dispossessed peasants and corrupt provincial government led to two problems with the army. For one thing, Rome’s army of peasant militia had been fine when Rome’s wars were close by and campaigns ended in time for harvest. However, long terms of service in overseas wars had ruined many farms through neglect, leaving fewer recruits able and willing to go to war, lowering the army's morale and efficiency. Second, the yearly turnover of governors led to inexperienced generals who suffered frequent military defeats.
This led to two reforms. First, generals created a long-term professional army by recruiting the dispossessed peasants, promising them land after the war as an inducement to enlist. They also had to supply them with their equipment since the Senate still felt only those who could afford to equip themselves should serve in the army. Therefore, the soldiers were more loyal to their generals than to the state (probably seeing little distinction between the two). The second reform was to extend the terms of provincial governors from one year to as many as five. This resulted in a few experienced, ambitious and rival generals.
These reforms triggered a vicious cycle where those few governors with armies had more scope for long-term campaigns and outright conquest of new lands. This upset the balance of power in the Roman Senate, between a small number of rich and powerful men and the majority of senators who had few opportunities for glory and riches. The combination of all these social, economic, administrative, and military problems bred a century of political turmoil, administrative unrest, and civil wars between rival generals.
Rome's failure to adapt its city-state style government to ruling an empire triggered a century long pattern of events that would eventually lead to fall of the old oligarchy led by the Senate. Either out of genuine concern for reform, desire for personal gain and glory, or a combination of the two, an individual politician or general would introduce new, but also disruptive practices. These would weaken Roman customs, traditions, and institutions, especially the Senate. That would create the need and open the way for new figures to rise up that would introduce even more disruptive practices, and so on. Thus the cycle would keep repeating until the old order was destroyed. There were five main figures this process brought to the forefront of Roman politics and who in turn perpetuated the cycle, allowing the rise of the next figure: Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius Gracchus, Marius, Sulla, and Julius Caesar. Not until Caesar's nephew and heir, Octavian, seized power would the cycle be broken and a new more stable order established in place of senatorial rule.
In 133 B.C.E., Tiberius Gracchus became tribune. He saw that many of Rome's troubles revolved around the decline of the free peasantry who were flocking into the cities. Therefore, he proposed a bill to give land to the idle mob and re-establish them on their own farms. The land he proposed using was public land owned by the state that, unfortunately, was controlled by rich and powerful senators who most likely would be reluctant to give it up.
Seeing that the Senate could well be hostile to his plan, Tiberius did several rather unheard of things. Although not necessarily illegal, his actions certainly flaunted the deep-seated traditions by which Roman government had operated for centuries. For one thing, Tiberius by-passed the Senate and went directly to the tribal Assembly where his bill had a better chance to pass. When the Senate bribed another tribune to veto the bill, Tiberius took the radical step of impeaching the man. With that done, the land bill passed despite the fury of the Senate. In order to get money to start the peasants on their new farms, Tiberius had the assembly appropriate the treasury of Pergamum, which had just been willed to Rome. Financial and foreign matters were both the realm of the Senate, but Tiberius and the assembly just shoved that aside as well. Tiberius then tried to do away with one more tradition by running for re-election as tribune. This was too much, and in the discussion of its legality, a riot broke out that ended with the death of Tiberius and 300 of his followers. Civil violence was starting to be used to decide an issue in Roman politics.
Despite his good intentions, Tiberius' methods hastened the decline of the Republic more than they helped it. For one thing, he made the Tribal Assembly, which controlled the Urban Assembly, a major factor in Roman politics. Likewise, he weakened the senatorial nobles who had traditionally run Rome. This gave rise to factional politics of the Optimates and Populares, causing Roman politics often to degenerate into little more than bribery contests and street fights to win power. However, Tiberius' reforms also had some positive results as some 75,000 people were put back on farms in the decade after his death. However, there was still a lot of work to be done, and in 123 B.C.E. Gaius Gracchus, Tiberius' younger brother, became tribune.
An ardent reformer like his brother, Gaius passed a law guaranteeing cheap grain for the urban poor. Later politicians would make that grain free at state expense. Another move to weaken the Senate and gain allies was to give the equites (rich businessmen) control of the juries in the courts that tried Roman governors for corruption. While this prevented corrupt senatorial governors from relying on their senatorial friends to acquit them in the extortion courts, it hardly solved the corruption problem. Now equites who had bought the right to "farm" a province's taxes could threaten the governor with conviction in the extortion courts if he did not let them take all they wanted from the provincials. This also made the equites a new force in Roman politics, symbolized by special seats at the games and the right to wear distinctive rings. At the same time, it further weakened the Senate.
The Senate was understandably nervous about how far this new Gracchus would go, and tried to outbid him for popular support. Unfortunately, Gaius overstepped himself by proposing citizenship for the Italian allies. This was unpopular with the mob, which jealously guarded their citizenship as the only thing they had left to make them feel special. As a result, a riot broke out (probably with some help from the Senate), and Gaius was killed much as his brother had been.
The next figure to rise up was Gaius Marius, a man of equestrian rank and opposed to the senatorial nobility. Marius' rise to power started when he was serving in the army in North Africa against the Numidian king Jugurtha. The war in itself was not too important except that it showed the further corruption of Roman politics. Through a series of intrigues against his general, Marius got leave of absence to get elected consul. He then had the Tribal Assembly give him command of the war in place of his former general, Metellus. Marius and an ambitious junior officer named Sulla finished off Jugurtha and Marius got the credit. This set him up for the next big step in his career.
For several years, the migrations of some Germanic tribes known as the Cimbri and Teutones had been wreaking havoc in the north. When they turned on Rome in earnest and mauled a Roman army in Gaul in 105 B.C.E., panic set in and Rome looked for a savior. That man, of course, was Marius, the conqueror of Jugurtha. He was elected to an unheard of six straight consulships in order to prepare the army for the northern menace.
Marius' main legacy was a long overdue reform of the army. Rome's extended campaigns required a long-term professional army to replace the reluctant and inefficient peasant draftees Rome had used till now. Marius took the final steps of making it just that, with volunteers serving instead of peasants hauled off their farms. Marius' recruits came largely from the unemployed mob lured by the promise of land after their service was over. This had three main effects. For one thing, since these recruits were too poor to supply their own equipment, the state had to supply it, thus making equipment and training more regular and the army more efficient. Along these lines, professional soldiers could devote all their time to training which, combined with the proverbially tough Roman discipline, also made for a very effective army.
The third effect had to do with getting recruits. The main inducement to serve was that after his term of service, a veteran would receive a plot of land on which to start his own farm. However, since each general had to get a separate land bill passed by the Senate for his particular army, the soldier looked to his general for a land settlement. Therefore, the troops' loyalty tended to belong to the individual generals rather than the Senate. This meant that a new element, generals backed by their own armies, had become a factor in Roman politics.
However, Marius' recruiting and tactical reforms created a much more efficient and professional army, which is what Rome needed at this time. In Marius' sixth consulship, the Cimbri and Teutones finally got around to invading Italy after a leisurely rampage through Spain and Gaul. The newly reformed legions cleverly maneuvered the invaders into a bad position and then destroyed them under the hot Italian sun. Marius was the hero of the hour and acclaimed the Third Founder of Rome after the legendary Romulus and Camillus.
Marius may have been a good general, but he was a mediocre politician. When his ally, the tribune Saturninus, tried to seize power, a riot broke out. Marius thus found himself in the difficult spot of having to suppress his own rioting supporters. He did his duty, killed many of his followers, and lost most of his popularity as a result. After all this, he retired from politics, waiting for a new opportunity for military glory.
For some time, one of the hot issues of the day in Rome was citizenship for the Italian allies. While the Romans had previously been fairly liberal in granting different allies full citizenship, lately they had been satisfied to grant only second class, or Latin, citizenship. Unfortunately, the Italian allies were not nearly as satisfied with this and were agitating for full rights. We have already seen how this issue cost Gaius Gracchus his life. When another Roman, Marcus Livius Drusus, proposed full citizenship and was assassinated, Italian frustration boiled over into open rebellion. This revolt, known as the Social War, or war of the allies (9l-88 B.C.E.), saw Rome faced with a formidable Italian enemy trained in Roman tactics. In fact, it was so formidable that the Senate did the one thing it could to defuse the rebellion: it granted full citizenship to any Italians who remained loyal or immediately laid down their arms. This clever move stripped the rebellion of much of its support. The Senate then called on two of its ablest generals, Marius and Sulla, to finish the job. In the end, the rebellion was put down, but the Italians had gained full citizenship, definitely a step forward for Rome and Italy.
The Social War had brought a poor, but very ambitious senatorial noble to the forefront of Roman politics, Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Always on the lookout for the opportunity for power and glory, he found it right after the Social War in the form of a new war in the East against Mithridates, king of Pontus on the Black Sea. Seeing widespread resentment against Rome for its corruption and mistreatment of the provincials in Asia Minor, Mithridates, stirred up a revolt that supposedly massacred 80,000 Italians in Asia Minor in one day. With Rome still preoccupied with the Social War, Mithridates overran Roman Asia and then crossed into Greece (90 B.C.E.). However, once the Social War was over, Rome was ready to tangle with the king of Pontus.
The problem was: which of Rome's generals, Marius or Sulla, should get command of the war? Sulla, who was the consul at this time, legally had the right and initially got it. But as soon as he set out for the port of Brundisium, Marius' followers seized power and gave Marius the command. Sulla then took the unprecedented step of marching on Rome with Roman troops to drive Marius' followers away in flight. However, once Sulla had left again for the East, Marius returned to Rome and seized power again. He was now a bitter old man who started a reign of terror so bloody that his own followers had to put an end to it. Several days into his seventh consulship, Marius died, but his followers remained in power and sent an army to relieve Sulla in the East.
Meanwhile, Sulla had been driving Mithridates from Greece. After two desperate battles and a long terrible siege of Athens, Mithridates fled to Asia Minor. Luckily, the Roman army and general sent to relieve Sulla concentrated more on Mithridates and let Sulla track him into Asia. Mithridates sued for peace and Sulla gladly granted it so he could turn on his enemies in Rome.
What followed was the First Roman Civil War (83-82 B.C.E.). Sulla's tremendous energy and drive made short work of his enemies, and he entered Rome in triumph. His first act was to massacre any of his enemies, including some 90 senators and 2600 rich equites. Among those narrowly escaping Sulla's wrath was the defiant young son-in-law of Marius, Julius Caesar. Sulla then became dictator, and reformed the government to put the Senate back in firm control of the state, just like in the good old days. A year later, Sulla abdicated his powers and retired to the luxury of his villa where he died soon afterwards (78 B.C.E.).
Sulla's settlement did little or nothing to solve Rome's real problems. And after his strong hand was removed, political turmoil returned in full force. The first man to take advantage of this situation was Pompey, one of Sulla's young army officers. Pompey's early rise to power was the result of some drive and energy, but also a good deal of luck. He held several military commands before holding public office. That was illegal, but apparently of little account anymore in Rome. Quite a bit of luck accompanied Pompey as he destroyed Marius' supporters holding out in North Africa and Spain. Also, by chance, as he returned to Rome from Spain, he encountered and mopped up the remnants of a great slave revolt led by a gladiator named Spartacus. Another of Sulla's former officers, Crassus "Dives" (the rich), had actually broken the back of this slave revolt that had terrorized Italy for two years. Nevertheless, Pompey claimed partial credit.
Nerves were on edge as the two potentially hostile Roman generals and their armies were poised on the outskirts of Rome. Luckily, Pompey and Crassus made their peace and together became consuls for 70 B.C.E. Pompey's star just kept rising. Soon afterwards he received an extraordinary command to clear the Mediterranean of pirates who had infested its waters for years and were even threatening Rome's grain supply. After sweeping the seas clear of these pirates in an amazingly short time, Pompey received another important command. This time he was sent to fight Mithridates of Pontus who had revived his struggle against Rome. Once again luck was with Pompey, because another general, Lucullus, had already done most of the job. Still, it was Pompey who finally crushed Mithridates (who then committed suicide), and it was Pompey who got the credit and triumphal parade. He then spent the next few years marching through the Near East and reorganizing it along lines more favorable to Rome by creating new Roman provinces in Asia Minor and Syria (where he put a final end to the decrepit Seleucid dynasty) and establishing client kings loyal to himself and Rome elsewhere. In 6l B.C.E., Pompey finally returned to Rome, but this was where his star began to wane.
Pompey, like Marius, may have been a good military man, but he was not much of a politician. Trusting in the power and glory of his name alone, he disbanded his army before he got a land settlement for his veterans from the Senate. When the Senate refused to help him out, Pompey found two allies with whom he formed the First Triumvirate, an informal political alliance designed to control Roman politics. One of these was his old colleague, Crassus the Rich. The other was a popular young politician, Julius Caesar. With Pompey's military reputation, Crassus' wealth, and Caesar's popularity with the mob, the Triumvirate should and could rule Rome effectively.
The first order of business was to elect Caesar as consul for 59 B.C.E. He had a wild term of office where he ran roughshod over the Roman constitution. Using a good deal of intimidation, he got Pompey's troops their land and himself a lucrative military command in Gaul (modern France) where he was determined to gain a military reputation equal to Pompey's.
Caesar had little military experience before going to Gaul. However, one would never have known it by looking at the masterful way he brought it under Roman control in a mere ten years. We can hardly imagine the sense of relief to the Romans now that the menace of the northern tribes was further removed from Rome. The Roman conquest of Gaul was also an important step in the process of civilizing Western Europe. Although Gaul was already showing major steps in that direction, the Roman conquest made it heir to the high cultures of the ancient Near East and Greece by way of Rome. It should be noted that, as in the case of Alexander, the glory of Caesar's victories obscured the butchery of countless thousands of innocent people and blurred the distinction of who was civilized and who was barbarian.
During his ten years in Gaul, Caesar also built up a highly efficient and intensely loyal army that could brag of exploits to rival and even surpass those of Pompey's army. Naturally, this caused jealousy and suspicion on Pompey's part. Crassus, whose influence helped keep the Triumvirate together, was killed fighting the Parthians, nomadic tribesmen who had taken much of the old Persian Empire's Asian lands from the now extinct Seleucid dynasty. The death of Julia, Caesar's daughter and Pompey's wife, removed another bond holding the two men together. Day by day, tensions grew as rival political gangs disrupted the streets of Rome with their clashes and the Senate started to back Pompey in opposition to Caesar. Caesar, fearing for his life after he gave up his army, led his troops into Italy and started another civil war (49-45 B.C.E.).
Pompey was no match for Caesar's quick, decisive, and brilliant generalship, and was crushed at the Battle of Pharsalus in Greece in 47 B.C.E. He fled to Egypt where Ptolemy XII who feared the wrath of Caesar murdered him. Soon afterwards, Caesar showed up in Egypt where he spent the next year supporting Ptolemy's sister, Cleopatra, in a civil war against her brother. He then set out to meet Pompey's other allies and followers. In a whirlwind series of campaigns in Pontus, North Africa, and Spain, Caesar crushed the Pompeian forces. By the end of 45 B.C.E., Caesar was the undisputed master of the Roman world and was appointed dictator for life.
Unfortunately, the problems plaguing Rome were too complex to be solved by mere military victories. Caesar did carry out several reforms. He extended citizenship outside of Italy for the first time. He also changed the old Roman lunar calendar to the more efficient and accurate Egyptian solar calendar, which we still use today with some minor adjustments. However, even Caesar seemed to be at a loss for finding solutions to the deep-seated problems plaguing Roman society and instead planned a major campaign against Parthia. The prospect of Caesar gaining more military glory and becoming even more of a dictator worried a number of senators who formed a plot against his life. On March 15, 44 B.C.E., the eve of his setting out on his campaigns, the conspirators surrounded Caesar in the Senate house and brought him down with twenty-three dagger wounds. Ironically, he fell at the foot of the statue of Pompey.
Unfortunately, Caesar's murder did nothing to solve Rome's problems as there were always new generals waiting to follow in the footsteps of Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar. In this case, two men emerged in that capacity: Marc Antony, one of Caesar's most trusted officers, and Octavian, Caesar's 19 year old nephew and chosen heir. Octavian was young, inexperienced in politics and military affairs, and somewhat sickly. No one much gave him a very big chance to survive in the vicious snake pit of Roman politics. Surprisingly, he proved himself quite adept at politics, playing the Senate off against Antony while the Senate thought it was using him in the same way. He then did an about face and allied with Antony and another general, Lepidus, to form the Second Triumvirate.
The first act of the new triumvirate was to clear its enemies out of Rome in a bloody purge. Among the victims was the great Roman statesman, orator, and philosopher, Cicero. We still have many of his speeches and letters that tell us a great bit about life and politics in the crumbling Republic. After this purge, there were still several of Caesar's murderers to contend with in Greece where they were building an army. In the third Roman civil war in less than 50 years, Antony and Octavian tracked down the conspirators, Brutus and Cassius, and destroyed their forces at Philippi (42 B.C.E.).
This put the Second Triumvirate in undisputed control of the Roman world. Lepidus was gradually forced out of the picture, leaving Antony and Octavian to split the spoils. Antony took the wealthier eastern provinces and got involved in his famous romance with Cleopatra of Egypt. Octavian took the less settled West along with the Roman homeland and recruiting grounds of Italy. As one might expect, tensions mounted between the two men and finally erupted into another civil war. At the battle of Actium in 3l B.C.E., Octavian's fleet crushed the combined navies of Antony and Cleopatra. After a desperate defense of Egypt, both Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide, leaving Octavian as sole ruler of the Roman Empire. It seems ironic that a non-military man should emerge as the final victor in these civil wars and bring them to an end. However, as a non-military man, Octavian saw that the solutions to Rome's problems involved much more than marching some armies around. It would be Octavian, known from this point on as Augustus, who would bring order to Rome and inaugurate one of the most long lasting periods of peace and prosperity in human history: the Pax Romana, or Roman Peace.
Octavian's victory over Antony and Cleopatra ended a century of civil turmoil and decay. When he returned to Rome in triumph in 29 B.C.E., everyone anxiously wondered how he would use his victory. The Roman people and Senate heaped all sorts of honors on Octavian: triumphal parades, political offices, and titles, including that of Augustus ("revered one"), by which title he has been known ever since.
Augustus saw that there were two basic needs he had to satisfy in order to avoid the pitfalls of the past century. He saw two basic needs he had to satisfy. For one thing, the civil wars and turmoil of the last century clearly showed the need for a strong one-man rule backed by the army. Second, the traditional and conservative nature of the Romans made it mandatory that he make any reforms at least appear to be like the good old days of the Republic with its elections and many political offices. Satisfying these two needs required a politician cleverer than Marius, Sulla, and even Caesar himself. Luckily for Rome, it had such a man in Augustus who founded a new order known as the Principate after his honorary title of princeps (first citizen).
Augustus' solution was to take the army and law making powers and disguise them with harmless sounding Republican titles. Out of all the Republican offices he took only two main offices, or more properly powers without the offices: those of tribune and proconsul (provincial governor). Having special tribunician powers allowed him to propose laws to the Senate and assembly. Being just a tribune, one of the humblest offices in Rome, made Augustus look like a man of the people and their protector. However, his title of princeps gave him the right to speak first before all other officials instead of having to wait his turn like other tribunes.
Proconsular power gave Augustus all the strategically placed provinces with armies, thus giving his tribunician powers the clout to pass any laws he wished with a minimum of resistance. In order not to appear too greedy, Augustus gave the Senate control of the non-military provinces. In fact, one or two of these even had a legion with which the Senatorial governors could play soldier. In such a way Augustus took effective control of the laws and army while leaving the Republic intact, at least on the surface.
Although his own position was secure, Augustus still had to provide for a smooth succession so his system would continue peacefully after he died. He needed to appoint a successor much like a king would, but once again, make it look like the Republic. He solved this with typical Augustan shrewdness by having his chosen successor assume the powers of tribune and proconsul while he was still alive. Therefore, when Augustus died, the new emperor would already hold the important offices to guarantee a smooth transition of power. Over time, and the memories of the Republic faded would fade and it would be taken for granted that the emperor's son or chosen successor should be the next emperor, even if he did not already hold the appropriate powers.
Once he had secured his own position, Augustus still had to provide for three things in order to rule the empire effectively: honest and efficient provincial governors, an honest and efficient bureaucracy to help them, and a loyal and efficient army to defend the frontiers instead of making trouble in Rome. Augustus did two things to ensure honesty and efficiency in his governors. For one thing, he paid officials regular salaries instead of leaving it up to them to make up for their own losses at the expense of the provincials. This at least eliminated the more blatant need for corruption. Augustus also had his own personal agents, called procurators, to keep an eye on officials in the provinces. Any corrupt governors would be tried by the Senate. However, it was unlikely that a governor's fellow senators would be so lenient with him as before, because Augustus kept a close eye on these proceedings to ensure justice. Together, these reforms gave Augustus the efficient and honest governors he needed.
Augustus ensured more efficient governors by reviving the old cursus honorum (ladder of honors), whereby aspiring senatorial politicians would gain necessary experience and training by serving in the army and then holding a sequence of old Republican offices. At the same time, it maintained the fiction of the Republic still carrying on by making good use of the old Republican offices. Augustus obtained trained middle level officials from the rich business class of the Equites. They had their own cursus honorum to go through before being eligible for various lucrative positions such as command of the fleet, Rome's grain supply and fire brigades, the Praetorian Guard (the emperor's own personal regiments), and the governorship of Egypt (kept as Augustus' private domain).
Augustus also needed trained bureaucrats to do the daily work of running the empire. Previously, senatorial governors would take their friends and slaves to fill these positions, which led to all sorts of inefficiency and corruption. Augustus replaced this system with a professional class of tax collectors and record keepers who held their jobs for extended periods. He also ended tax farming, where the government auctioned off the right to collect the taxes. This had been one of the worst sources of abuse under the Republic. These reforms provided the provinces with an honest, efficient, and stable government. There was also the need for trained people to fill many “middle-level” jobs, to oversee such things as the fleet, Rome’s grain supply, the emperor’s Praetorian Guard, and his new para-military fire brigade that doubled as a police force to keep order in Rome. In this case, Augustus used the rich equites class, training them with a cursus honorum similar to that of the Senatorial class before they were eligible for these critical positions.
There were two issues to resolve with the army: its loyalty and expense. In terms of loyalty, since Augustus' proconsular powers gave him control of the provinces and the armies within them, there was technically only one commanding general (imperator) of nearly all the Roman armies: himself. Obviously, any emperor, especially a non military man like Augustus, would have to appoint men to lead at least some of the troops spread out along Rome's vast frontiers. However, the troops stayed loyal to Augustus, not their immediate generals, for one good reason. It was Augustus now, not the generals, who paid soldiers their regular pay and pension, generally with coins that bore the emperor's image as a constant reminder of who took care of the troops. The central government, meaning Augustus, once again had control of its armies. Occasionally, the troops would rediscover the fact that they held the key to power and would revolt to put their own generals on the throne. For the most part, they stuck to the business of guarding the frontiers and left governing to the emperors in Rome.
Finally, in order to increase efficiency and cut costs, Augustus reduced the army from 60 legions to 28. He generally placed these along the frontiers most threatened by invasion: the Rhine and Danube Rivers in the north and the Euphrates River in the east. An equal number of auxiliaries (light infantry and cavalry) were also maintained there. The total number of troops Rome had amounted to roughly 250-300,000 men defending an empire of possibly 50,000,000 people. Such a small force for so large an empire had to be efficient. The Roman legions during the Principate comprised the most tightly disciplined and efficient army of antiquity, and everyone knew it. It was their reputation as much as their swords that defended the frontiers and gave the Mediterranean two centuries of peace. Rome was also lucky in two ways at this time. First it faced no major threats on its borders. Second, the Mediterranean, as the central geographic feature of the empire, allowed much faster communications and reaction time during emergencies.
Augustus died in 14 C.E., but his work lived on long afterwards. For nearly two centuries afterward, the Roman world would experience peace such as it had never known before or since. Its government was well trained, efficient, and honest, while its legions kept the frontiers and interior provinces secure. Roman political history during this time is not very exciting, because relatively little happened besides a few palace scandals in Rome.
The empire expanded very little during this time, just rounding out its control of the Mediterranean and invading Britain. Occasional wars would flare up in the East with the Parthians and in the north with various Germanic tribes, but there were no serious threats to the Empire. The vast majority of people in the empire never experienced war and invasion. Even the troops on the frontiers often saw so little action that they were kept busy and in shape by building the vast network of roads Rome is so famous for. Peace and prosperity brought trade, both within the empire and beyond its borders with such exotic places as India and China far to the east. Merchants traveled the legionary roads and the Mediterranean free from fear. Peasants harvested their crops undisturbed by war. And the legionary camps on the frontiers grew into permanent cities.
This was certainly a golden Age for civilization. However, even times of peace and prosperity can carry within them the seeds of their own decay. That was true of the Roman Empire in the second century C.E., although few if any people recognized the problems within their society. At the same time, pressures were starting to mount against the northern frontiers. Together, these internal problems and external pressures would combine to destroy the Roman Empire and begin the transition from the ancient world to the Middle Ages.
One of the greatest legacies of the Pax Romana was the spread of Roman culture to Western Europe. Roman rule in the semi-civilized areas of Western Europe (Gaul, Britain, and Spain) and Augustus' establishment of peace during the Pax Romana meant that there were Roman troops permanently stationed in the provinces. This helped Romanize and civilize the provinces in the West in three ways. First, as the legionary camps became permanent settlements, merchants, families, and other sorts of camp followers settled down around them. In time, these army camp settlements became towns and cities, whose military origins are still reflected in Britain in such place names as Winchester and Lancaster (from the Latin word for camp, castra). After they were discharged from the army, legionaries, who were Roman citizens, and auxiliaries (non-citizen soldiers who received Roman citizenship after their terms of service) would often settle in these towns, marry local women, and raise their children as Roman citizens.
Along these lines, the peaceful conditions brought on by the Pax Romana, promoted the growth of native towns into cities. Those cities whose leading citizens copied Roman styles of dress, language, architecture, and local government would earn Roman citizenship for their towns. The poorer citizens would then follow the leading citizens' leads, thus encouraging the spread of Roman civilization that way. Finally, with extended periods of peace, the Roman army spent much of its time building an excellent system of some 51,000 miles of paved roads stretching across the empire. While these roads' original purpose was to facilitate the rapid movement of Roman troops to trouble spots, they also promoted trade and the influx of Italian merchants into the towns of the western provinces.
In these three ways, the western provinces saw the heavy Romanization of their towns and also nobles on country estates who felt they had some incentive to copy Roman ways for personal advancement. However, there were limits to Romanization. For one thing, it only happened to any great extent in Gaul, Britain, and Spain where there was no long established civilization in place before the Romans came. By contrast, the Eastern provinces were already heavily influenced by Greek culture in the cities and native cultures in the countryside. In a sense, the Roman Empire was a bi-cultural empire, with Greek language and culture dominant in the East and Roman language (Latin) and culture and dominant in the West. (Coins in the East were even struck with Greek inscriptions.) In both East and West, the influence of these respective cultures was mainly limited to the cities and barely touched the countryside.
However, despite the serious decline of cities in the West during the Middle Ages, Roman culture would survive in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire and thanks to the efforts of monks in the West who copied many works of Roman literature. As a result, there would be a resurgence of Roman culture during the Italian Renaissance where it would reassert itself as the foundation of Western Civilization.
Why a society goes into decline and eventual oblivion is one of the most complex, interesting, and important questions one can ask in history. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire has especially fascinated historians down through the centuries. How could the most powerful empire in antiquity just come apart at the seams and disintegrate? While historians have focused on various causes ranging from barbarian invasions and moral decadence to the influence of Christianity and lead poisoning, the fact is that many factors combined to lead to the downfall of Rome and open the way into the Middle Ages. Furthermore, these different factors fed back on one another to aggravate the situation and also to make the process of decline more complex to trace.
The first signs of trouble came in the reign of Marcus Aurelius (16l-180 C.E.), the last of the so-called "Good Emperors". When he came to the throne, the Roman Empire still seemed to be experiencing a golden age. The government was efficient, fair, and honest. The army secured the frontiers from invasions. And the economy was healthy in both the countryside and cities. However, during Marcus' reign things started to fall apart. There were five major problems feeding into Rome's decline.
Two problems were of an especially long-range nature dating back to the time of Augustus. One was that few new provinces were added to the empire during the Pax Romana, thus providing Rome with few new sources of revenue. Another drain on the economy was the growing volume of trade with the East for such luxury goods as silks and spices. Silk came all the way from China through a multitude of middlemen and cost its weight in gold, causing a tremendous amount of gold and silver to leave the empire to pay for these luxuries.
A third problem was a devastating epidemic spread throughout the empire by victorious legions returning from a war with the Parthians in the East. Historians then, having little understanding of such phenomena, concentrated mainly on individual people rather than on larger forces, such as disease, affecting history. Therefore, we have little information on what this plague was (possibly smallpox), what its symptoms were, and how many people were affected. If the plague destroyed a significant part of the population, say 10% or more, then it may have been an important factor in the decline of the Roman Empire. Since this was not a mechanized society, most of its labor and energy came from people. If many of those people were lost, society was in trouble. The greater number of labor saving devices such as waterwheels being used from this time on seem to indicate there was a serious population loss. Disease would be a major candidate for its cause.
The fourth major problem Marcus Aurelius faced was barbarian invasions. Apparently population pressures were building among the various nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes beyond Rome's frontiers. At the same time, extended contact with Rome had taught many of these tribes how to combine into larger more effective confederations for fighting Rome. The result was a massive invasion by a tribe known as the Marcomanni across the Danube frontier, with some of these invaders even making it all the way into Italy. The problems of defense were complicated by the fact that the legions were weakened by sickness. The effort to drive the invaders out was so desperate and recruits were so hard to find that even slaves were enlisted. Eventually, the frontier was restored, broken through again several years later, and restored again. By Marcus Aurelius' death in 180 C.E., the empire's population, army, and economy were exhausted by the tremendous efforts of the past two decades. Although the frontiers were restored, pressure from the tribes on the frontiers continued to grow. This required a larger army to defend the frontiers, more taxes to support that army, more bureaucrats to collect those taxes, and even more taxes to support those bureaucrats.
A fifth problem was that, after Marcus Aurelius' death in 180 C.E., men unworthy of the throne generally ruled Rome. For example, there was Marcus Aurelius' son, Commodus, who spent most of his time racing chariots and fighting gladiators in the arena instead of facing the important problems of ruling. Most of these emperors met violent ends, either through court intrigues or military mutinies. One common and unfortunate pattern these emperors followed in order to keep their thrones was to give ever increasing bonuses to the army to keep it happy, thus heaping another huge burden on the Roman economy. Despite all this, the illusion of eternal Rome persisted in people's minds.
So many drains on the economy left the Roman government short of money. Therefore, it raised taxes and started debasing the coinage (i.e., decreasing its gold and silver content). This led to inflation, causing the soldiers to demand more pay to meet their expenses. The government thus faced more money shortages, leading to more taxes and coinage debasements, and so on. To make matters worse, this process triggered an even more serious cycle that left the empire in chaos for fifty years.
At the center of this new cycle were rebellious troops who would overthrow an emperor and put their own generals on the throne in order to get a raise in pay. While some criticism for the troops' actions is justified, we should keep in mind that coinage debasement and the resulting inflation were destroying the buying power of the their salaries. They felt they had to do something to protect their incomes. However, the resulting civil wars stripped the frontiers of troops as they marched to Rome to put their general in power. This in turn invited invasions by the tribes to the north and Persians to the East. The resulting civil wars and invasions would further ruin the economy. This, of course, made it hard to pay the troops who therefore rebelled again, leading to more invasions, more economic problems, and so on. Complicating all this was a new epidemic (possibly measles) that hit the empire around 250 C.E. Meanwhile, all this would feed back into the ongoing cycle of coinage debasement discussed above, which then generated more revolts, civil wars, invasions, etc.
The fifty-year period starting with the reign of Maximinus the Thracian in 235 C.E. was one of the most turbulent and chaotic periods in history, making it extremely difficult to discuss in any detail. At one point, eighteen different men were each claiming they were the emperors of Rome. At the low point of these troubles, the Emperor Gallienus controlled no more than Italy, Greece, Illyria (modern Yugoslavia), and North Africa.
Many of the invaders crashing across the frontiers were new tribes, such as the Goths, whom growing population pressures had forced to migrate toward the Roman Empire. Since these newcomers had little or no prior contact with Rome, they looted and plundered with incredible ferocity, murdering thousands of helpless people whose only crime was being in the path of conquest. Parts of the empire that had seen no wars for centuries were subjected to devastating raids while the army was largely busy making and unmaking emperors. To the East, a new and more aggressive neighbor, Sassanid Persia, had replaced the Parthians. The Persians probably would have overrun the whole eastern half of the Roman Empire, except that the independent oasis city of Palmyra stopped them and then basically ruled the East for itself.
Luckily, a series of remarkably tough and capable emperors emerged from Illyria to restore the Roman world's boundaries. The most important of these emperors, Aurelian (270-275), attacked and destroyed Palmyra and its famous queen, Zenobia. This restored the eastern frontier. Aurelian then reclaimed Gaul, Spain, and Britain to restore the Western frontiers as well and earn himself the title: "Restorer of the World". Despite the remarkable accomplishments of Aurelian and the other Illyrian emperors, they were all murdered by their own troops. Finally, in 284, an even more remarkable emperor, Diocletian, came to the throne and started to put the empire back on its feet. It was this emperor who put an end to the half-century of anarchy that had come close to destroying the Roman Empire.
When Diocletian took the throne in 284, he found an empire in shambles from 50 years of civil wars, invasions, and plague. The population was decimated and demoralized. Many of the peasants had become serfs tied to the soil for local lords in return for protection. Large sections of the empire's agriculture and trade were wrecked. The coinage was debased to the point of being almost worthless. The frontiers were under constant pressure. And the army was in serious need of reforms. Everywhere he looked Diocletian saw serious problems, while the means to solve those problems were horribly damaged. Therefore, he concentrated on three issues: defense, creating a more efficient government, and protecting the emperor against revolts and assassination.
Turning to the army, Diocletian saw two needs that worked against each other: the need for efficient defense against the growing threats on his frontiers, and the need for insurance against revolts. The larger the army he created, the more potential there was for revolt. But too small an army meant invasions, which was even worse. Therefore, he increased the army to twice its size under Augustus. And since there were now simultaneous threats on several frontiers, Diocletian also split this army into two parts: stationary frontier militia who could stop small invasions and slow down big ones, and mobile legions, increasingly made of cavalry, that could rush to any trouble spots that the militia could not handle.
Unfortunately, the Roman populace, unused to military service after the Pax Romana and reduced in numbers by the recent anarchy, could not provide the number and quality of recruits that were needed. As a result, the government resorted more and more to recruiting Germanic tribesmen who were willing to fight for Rome for a price. While these recruits were warlike enough, they were generally unwilling to submit to the level of discipline and training that had made the Roman army so effective through the centuries. As a result, the Roman army, especially in the West where roughly half the recruits were Germanic, decayed to a pathetic shell of its former greatness.
However, this larger army further increased the danger of revolts by powerful generals. Diocletian did three things to protect himself against this. First, he broke the army into smaller commands for each general, while keeping part of the mobile legions under his personal command. Second, he split the control of each province between civil and military authorities. This made it harder for a rebellious general to command such resources as food and money needed for a successful revolt. However, it also meant that civil governors and generals might not cooperate against invasions. Finally, Diocletian isolated himself with elaborate court ritual similar to that of the Persians. Not only did this physically separate him from potential assassins, it also gave him a semi-divine status that made attacking the emperor seem like a sacrilege.
Finally, the empire needed a more efficient government than it had had in the calmer days of the Pax Romana. For one thing, the empire was much too large for one emperor to defend, especially now that several frontiers would come under attack at the same time. Therefore, Diocletian split the empire between the Latin speaking West and the Greek speaking East, with an emperor, known as an Augustus, and separate administration in each half. Technically, there was still one Roman Empire, but more and more it functioned as two independent and, at times, competing empires. Overall, splitting the empire aggravated the natural split between Greek East and Latin West and prevented cooperation when it was most needed.
Unfortunately, a larger army, bureaucracy, and elaborate court required heavy taxes. This merely stifled people's initiative to work hard. In order to ensure a stable tax base, people and their descendants were tied to their stations in life. Not only did a shoemaker, soldier, or farmer have to remain in his profession for life, but his sons had to follow in his footsteps, as did their sons after them and so on. This plus the high taxes reduced people's incentive to work hard and helped create a stagnant economy. The depressed economy meant a lower tax base to draw taxes from, which forced the government to further raise taxes, thus catching Roman society in a vicious feedback cycle similar to the one that triggered the anarchy of the third century.
The Roman Empire under Diocletian presents a depressing picture, with its frontiers under constant pressure, oppressive taxes, and people stuck in their positions in society. However, it was more secure from invasion, which did allow trade and agriculture to revive some. One might doubt whether Roman security was worth the price paid for it. However, Diocletian did accomplish one thing of importance for later civilization. He propped the Roman Empire back up for two more centuries, allowing the new tribes along the northern frontiers to become more accustomed to Roman civilization through trade, raiding its borders, and serving as mercenaries in its army. When the western half of the empire finally fell by 500 C.E., these tribes were more willing to try to preserve Roman civilization and pass its heritage on to the Middle Ages and eventually to our own culture.
For the century since Diocletian, generally capable and energetic emperors had ruled the empire. However, the death of Theodosius the Great in 395 C.E. marked a turning point in Roman history as the Western half of the empire steadily slipped into oblivion. There were several reasons why the West fell and the East survived. First of all, the East, with its older civilizations and more established trade routes, was considerably richer than the West, so it could buy off the barbarians until it found the strength to fight them.
The second factor was the barbarization of the Roman army. Depopulation and centuries of peace made it hard to get enough qualified recruits for the army. As a result, the Romans had turned more and more to enlisting Germanic tribesmen in their ranks. In the East, there were still areas where good native recruits could be found to balance out the number of barbarians. The West, having few good native recruits, relied more heavily on Germanic recruits. By 400 C.E., they made up an estimated half of the Roman army in the West and ruined its effectiveness by refusing to submit to Roman discipline. Not only that, but the high military commands were also often held by men from these tribes who spent much of their time intriguing for political power rather than defending the empire.
A third factor was that the West had two large frontiers, the Rhine and Danube, to guard against the barbarians, while the East had only the Danube. Granted, the Eastern Empire also had to deal with Persia, but it was often preoccupied with threats on its own borders, in particular from the Huns. Finally, the East had fairly capable emperors after 450 C.E., while the West never had a good emperor after Theodosius I's death in 395.
Popular imagination tends to see the final collapse of the empire in the West as a cataclysmic wave of Germanic tribes overrunning the Roman world. In fact, it was more a case of barbarians infiltrating a civilized society and destroying it from within. The century between the military disaster at Adrianople and the final collapse of the empire in the West did not see a single major victory of barbarians over a Roman army. Instead, in some cases, the Romans freely let in individuals or even whole tribes, which was the case with the Visigoths in 376. In other cases, tribes just walked in when legions were pulled from a frontier to revolt or meet an invasion or revolt elsewhere. That is how such tribes as the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Visigoths, and Alans got into the empire.
Once inside the empire, the tribes would loot and pillage, but they were also anxious to gain legal status and Roman titles. In the case of a few exceptions, such as the Saxons who had little previous contact with Roman civilization, the invading tribes wanted to become a legal part of the Roman Empire, not destroy it. Long after the Empire in the West was gone, the legal fiction of its existence persisted, both at the Eastern Empire's court in Constantinople, and among the peoples who settled in the West. In fact, the idea of the Roman Empire was so strong among these people that in 800 C.E., three centuries after its fall, the imperial title was revived in the West. The Holy Roman Empire, as this revival of Roman grandeur was called, lived on at least as an idea for 1000 years. Finally in 1806, Napoleon declared the Holy Roman Empire dead, largely to make room for his own imperial ambitions with Roman style titles and military standards. The idea of Rome did not die easily.
This triggered a pattern of events much like the cycle of anarchy in the third century C.E., only this time, no Aurelian or Diocletian emerged to save the Empire. Once a tribe was in the empire, it would loot and pillage, wrecking the empire's economy and lowering its tax base. The increased military burden and decreased means to meet it would weaken the empire's ability to provide an adequate defense, causing more tribes to break in and repeat the pattern. Thus the Visigoths, Vandals, Saxons, Huns, and Franks in turn would benefit from this cycle and also perpetuate it, allowing the next people to come in, and so on.
The Visigoths who started this cycle managed to sack Rome in 410. Pulling troops from the Rhine frontier to meet this threat allowed the Vandals and other tribes to invade Gaul, Spain, and eventually North Africa. The loss of North Africa meant the peace and unity of the Mediterranean were disrupted, further stretching Rome's dwindling defenses and resources. In 455, the Vandals sailed to Italy and sacked Rome in much worse fashion than the Visigoths had. Meanwhile, all this turmoil plus an attempt by a rebellious general, Constantine, to seize the throne had stripped Britain of its legions, and the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes started crossing the Channel. At this point, Britain virtually dropped from the sight of recorded history.
By 450, the Western Empire's material resources were so depleted that there was little or nothing that could save it. When Attila the Hun demanded a huge tribute from the Western Empire, Rome did manage one final military victory in alliance with the Visigoths and other tribes against the much more dangerous Huns. Attila's death soon afterward led to the break-up of his empire, which unleashed his subject tribes against Rome. While Germanic generals in Italy intrigued against one another, setting up puppet emperors in rapid succession, the decrepit remains of the Western Empire came crashing down, and various tribes came pouring in to carve out new kingdoms on its ruins. The last and, as it would turn out, most important tribe, the Franks, now started to make its move to carve out its own kingdom in northern Gaul. As it turned out, the Franks would be the tribe to contribute the most to the transition from the ancient world to Western Civilization.
The last legally recognized emperor of the West, Julius Nepos, died in exile in 480. Although the eastern emperors in Constantinople claimed that they now ruled over the whole empire, for all intents and purposes the Roman Empire in the West was gone. The Dark Ages would descend upon the West, while the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire managed to survive, revive, and attain new heights of its own in the centuries ahead. The heritage of antiquity would live on, but a new era in history was dawning: the Middle Ages.
Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's— The Bible
If one is to understand Western Civilization, one has to understand Christianity and the history of the Christian Church. No single faith or institution has had a more profound impact on Western Civilization than Christianity. However, many of its influences may not be so readily apparent because they are so deeply rooted in our past and therefore are harder to recognize. One example is the work ethic that traces its roots back to medieval Christian monasteries. Other examples abound, but suffice it to say that the Christian heritage is a significant part of our culture today, whether or not we belong to the Christian faith.
During the Middle Ages, the influence of Christianity was much more obvious. In fact, Christianity played such a dominant role in medieval life and culture that we still refer to the Middle Ages as the Age of Faith. During that time, the art and architecture were primarily religious in nature. The calendar was the Church calendar whose holidays (holy days) were those of the Christian faith. The daily lives of the people, even their diets, were largely controlled by Christian dictates. And politics were tightly interwoven with religion and the Church. Christianity, which traces its beginnings all the way back to the time of the Roman Empire, is still thriving as one of the world's great religions. Therefore, it is a major bridge linking the ancient world and its civilization to the medieval world and ultimately our own.
In its basic form, Christianity is a simple religion centering around the brief life of a humble Jew, Jesus Christ. According to Christian dogma, Jesus was the Son of God, but miraculously born in human form to a virgin named Mary. For several years he performed various miracles as proof of his divinity and preached a simple but profound doctrine of love and forgiveness, faith in God, and penitence for our sins. At the age of 33, Jesus was brutally executed on a cross because of his teachings. However, on the third day after his execution, he supposedly rose from the dead, seen as further proof of his divinity. Forty days later, after appearing to other disciples and followers, he ascended into Heaven. He said that sometime in the future he would return for a final judgment day whereby the dead would be resurrected and go either to Heaven or Hell according to their faith.
Christianity is a monotheistic religion (i.e.- believing in just one god) that is derived from Judaism. The God of the Jews in the Old Testament is also the God of Christianity. However, there is one aspect of Christian theology that has confused people down through the ages and led to untold controversy and even bloodshed. That is the belief that the god of Christianity is a triune god or Trinity. In other words, there are three aspects to God, but all are parts of one united god. They are: God the Father and creator; Jesus Christ, his son who came to earth as a human in order to save us from our sins by giving up his life on the cross; and the Holy Spirit which inspires us with faith. Through the years, people have disagreed, at times violently, over the exact nature of each of these aspects and how they relate to one another. The various points of view and arguments to support them are too subtle, involved, and oftentimes confusing to relate here, although they would emerge from time to time with tremendous impact.
Christ's ministry left two things of vital importance to the later success of Christianity. One was an appealing message of love, forgiveness, and eternal salvation for all people. The other was the mission for Christ's apostles and all Christians to spread this new faith. After Christ's departure, his followers started spreading his message in order to win new converts to the faith. At first, preaching this message was confined to Jews, and the ruling Romans saw it as merely a sect or offshoot of the Jewish religion. But a critical turning point in Christianity came with St. Paul of Tarsus, who saw Christianity as a religion for all peoples: Jews and Gentiles (non-Jews). Therefore, he started spreading the word of Christ throughout the Roman world.
Thanks to its message and this preaching, the Christian religion grew in popularity slowly but steadily during its first century and a half (c.30-180). Hollywood and popular imagination have romanticized and exaggerated the persecutions of the Christians during this period. The truth is that Christianity during this time was still a relatively minor religion that drew little attention to itself from the Roman authorities. There were occasional persecutions in these early years, not so much for the Christians' religious beliefs as their refusal to worship the Roman emperor and state gods. Such worship was more like a pledge of allegiance than a religious act to most Romans, and refusal to do it was seen as an act of treason. The Christians could have freely practiced their religion if they would only have paid the empire this worship.
However, unlike most other ancient religions where the religion was intimately tied up with the state and society as a whole, Christianity was a very personal religion that drew a sharp distinction between what one owed to the state on the one had and to God on the other. Therefore, Christians refused to worship the state gods and that was where they got into trouble. During the Pax Romana, the persecutions were few and intermittent, and most Christians could practice their religion with little or no interference. Times were good and the authorities saw little harm coming from the odd habits of this minor sect. In the third century all that changed.
The third century was a time of intense anarchy. Civil wars, barbarian invasions, and plague wracked the empire from end to end and threatened its very existence. This seems to have affected Christianity in two very different ways that both worked ultimately toward one end. First of all, the widespread troubles of the time caused many people to question the truth of their old pagan religions whose gods did not seem to be protecting Rome anymore. Consequently, people started turning to new, more emotionally satisfying salvation religions to comfort them in such troubled times. Christianity was just one such religion that gained converts during this turmoil. Other cults worshipping the Persian Mithra, Asia Minor's earth goddess Cybele, and Egypt's Trinity of Isis, Horus, and Osiris also gained in popularity.
The second effect of the third century anarchy was more intense persecutions of Christians. As long as the Empire was peaceful and prosperous, the refusal of the Christians to pay homage to the emperor and state gods was usually overlooked. However, when things started falling apart, many Romans blamed the Christians for abandoning the old gods who in turn abandoned Rome. The late third and early fourth centuries saw the most intense periods of persecutions, the worst coming under Diocletian and his successors from 303 to 3ll C.E. Ironically, the persecutions helped the Christian Church, because they gave the Christians publicity that won them widespread sympathy and many new converts. Consequently, right on the heels of its darkest hours of persecution came the Church's greatest victory: legalization and acceptance as the virtual state religion of the Roman Empire.
The man who gave Christianity its big break was the emperor Constantine. Legend has it that on the eve of a major battle against a rival for the throne, Constantine saw a vision of a cross in the sky with the words: "In this sign conquer". Taking this as a message from God, Constantine placed a Christian emblem on his troops' shields and then won the battle. However true this legend may be, the fact is that in 3ll, Constantine declared toleration for Christianity in the Western half of the Roman Empire. When he took over the eastern half in 323, he also legalized it there. From this point on, the Christian Church quickly became the dominant religion in the Roman Empire, largely from the favor bestowed upon it by Constantine and his successors.
The question arises as to why Christianity triumphed over other competing salvation religions. Besides strong state support, there are five main reasons. For one thing, it was exclusive. Unlike most ancient religions which tolerated other faiths, the Christians said a person could belong to only one faith, Christianity, and be saved. Such a belief naturally scared many people away from other competing faiths. Second, Christianity actively sought converts. Most other religions were there for other people to accept, but did not go out of their way to gain new members. In sharp contrast to this, Christianity did seek new members, which gave it a decisive edge. For another thing, Christianity was secretive and treasonous. As seen above, this led to persecution, which led to publicity and popularity. Fourth, from the reign of Constantine onward (with the brief exception of Julian’s reign), the Church received strong state support that put increasing pressure on pagans to convert until Theodosius I shut down all pagan temples in 393. Finally, Christianity was well organized much along the lines of the Roman Empire. As the faith spread across the empire, it especially caught on in cities. Consequently, each city, which was already a center of Roman administration, became a Christian center as well under a bishop. Each province, besides having a governor to rule it, also had an archbishop to rule the affairs of its bishops in the different cities. Diocletian had divided the empire into four large districts called prefectures. The Church, similar to this, had five main centers where Church patriarchs resided. Four of these centers (Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria) were in the East, reflecting where Christianity's main strength was then.
The fifth patriarchal center, Rome, was destined to become the most influential for several reasons. First of all, it was the capital of the empire, giving it a good deal of prestige. Second, Peter, the most important of Christ's disciples, had started Rome's first Christian congregation, which also gave Rome prestige. Finally, after 600 C.E., Rome was free from the control of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) emperors. This made life more dangerous for Rome's popes (patriarchs), but it also gave them more freedom to expand their influence when more peaceful times came after 1000 C.E.
The city is full of mechanics and slaves, who are all of them profound theologians and preach in the shops and in the streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply that the Son is inferior to the Father; if you inquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is that the Son was made our of nothing.— Gregory of Nyssa
The favor Constantine and his successors showed the Christian Church increasingly made it the state religion of the empire until 393, when the emperor Theodosius ordered public worship in the pagan temples to be ended throughout the empire. Christianity had triumphed, but success would also bring its problems.
The root of the Church's problems lay largely in the heavy persecutions of the third century that did two things. For one thing, they created a more decentralized Church by driving into hiding Christians who had lost contact with one another. On the other hand, the persecutions also helped lead to the triumph of Christianity as the virtual state religion by giving it publicity that attracted converts. In addition, as Christianity gained popularity, formerly pagan intellectuals joined the Church in greater numbers and started grafting pagan, especially Greek, philosophies onto Christianity. These factors would contribute to two very different lines of development in the history of the Church: the spread of religious disputes and heresies and the rise of monasteries.
One of the more confusing aspects of Christianity was the nature of the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and the relation of the three parts to one another. During the persecutions, communities of Christians isolated from one another had developed different ideas on the Trinity. Christianity's legalization meant these different congregations which persecution had forced underground (literally in some cases) now could come out into the open to find they had very different ideas on this point. Added to this was the growing number of intellectuals joining the Church who, instead of just accepting Christianity as a simple religion, saw various subtle interpretations of the concept of a triune god. Confounding the confusion was the vague wording of the Bible itself, which also led to different points of view.
The most serious of these disputes centered on the relationship of the divine and human natures of Christ. The first of these, the Arian dispute, flared up soon after Constantine had legalized Christianity. The issue was whether Christ, being the begotten son of God the Father, was co-eternal with the Father, and thus fully divine. An Egyptian priest, Arius, said he was not co-eternal with the Father. The Arian view, as it was called, spread widely throughout the Roman world, causing heated arguments and even violence. Therefore, instead of creating a unifying factor for his empire by legalizing and favoring Christianity, Constantine had unleashed a wholly new type of controversy that threatened to tear the empire apart. Given the Church's close relationship now with the Church, Constantine and later emperors felt they could not tolerate religious disputes and heresies.
There was a general and unfortunate pattern to these religious disputes that made a correct solution to them practically impossible to achieve. A new interpretation of Christianity would pop up and gain converts. This would lead to arguments and at times bloodshed. A church council, backed by the emperor, would denounce the new belief as a heresy (wrong belief) and either exile the heretics or persecute them within Rome's borders in order to preserve the public peace. Unfortunately, dealing with heresies in this manner usually backfired much as imperial persecution of Christianity had backfired a century earlier.
Today, many people may wonder why people and governments got so emotionally involved in these disputes. The answer revolves largely around Christianity's exclusiveness. It was seen as the only true religion and path to salvation. Along those same lines, one had to have exactly the right belief in order to be saved. Just the slightest deviation from that belief could mean eternal agony in Hell. The Roman government also believed in supporting the exact right belief in order to ensure God's favor and protection. Tolerating heresies could lead to God's disfavor, and any military defeats or natural disasters were interpreted in that light. Also, since the Roman Empire had tied its fortunes securely to the Christian Church, its religious and political policies were tightly interwoven. Tolerating religious heresies was seen as the same as tolerating treason. Therefore, from the later Roman Empire to the early modern era (c.300-1700), religion and politics went hand in hand, and a decision in one realm generally had serious implications in the other realm as well. The history of two of these heresies, the Arians and Monophysites, especially shows this mentality & its results in action.
In the case of Arius, Constantine called a council of Christian bishops together at Nicaea in Asia Minor in 325. Arius was logically shown to be wrong, his beliefs were declared a heresy, and he himself was exiled. Arius then went to the northern tribes whom he converted to his brand of Christianity. A century later, when these tribes conquered the Western Roman Empire, they did it as Arian Christians. Now it was the Catholic Christians, who made up most of the Roman population, which were often persecuted.
Another heresy, that of the Monophysites, was suppressed in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, which led to strong undercurrents of resentment and even rebelliousness against the Roman government. When the more tolerant Arab Muslims invaded these provinces in the 600's, instead of meeting stiff Christian resistance, they found the populace oftentimes welcoming them against Roman oppression.
The success and favored status of Christianity also brought other problems. When Christianity was an outlawed religion, the motives and sincerity of its members were rarely in doubt since there was nothing to gain and plenty to lose by joining the Church. When Christianity became the favored religion of the Roman Empire, all that changed. There was an influx of new members joining for reasons of social, political, or material advancement. Also, the influx of intellectuals who grafted pagan philosophies upon the Christian faith was complicating the religion almost beyond recognition. The purity of the Church's membership was becoming seriously diluted.
This upset many of the more devout members of the Church, and they wanted to purge it of such worldliness. Since they could not drive the new members from the Church, they retreated into the desert to live pure Christian lives away from worldly temptations. In order to cleanse themselves of their sins, some of these men performed incredible feats of endurance nearly to the point of self-destruction. One such feat was to sit on the top of a pillar for years at a time. Another was abstinence from food almost to the point of starvation. As word of these "super-hermits" spread, other devout Christians moved out to the desert to be near them and share in their holiness. Soon the desert was so crowded with these people that they had to be organized into communities called monasteries. In the East, St. Basil was the man who established the first monastic rule.
In the West, it was St. Benedict. After a fairly sinful and dissolute youth, this man launched a career of violently trying to purge himself of his sins. At last, he arrived at a more moderate concept of Christianity and formed a monastic order known as the Benedictine Rule. The Benedictine Rule reflected its founder's more moderate views, though it was still strict by modern standards. A new monk took three vows: poverty (no material possessions), chastity (clean living), and obedience (to God and the superiors in the monastery). The day was divided into roughly equal parts of prayer, work, and rest. Incredible acts of self-torture or self-denial were not expected. Instead the monk worked around the monastery and in the fields, the belief being that idle hands are the devil's playground. Our own modern work ethic is directly descended from this idea.
The moderate expectations of the Benedictine Rule led to the spread of their monasteries all over Western Europe. As the orderliness of the Roman Empire gave way to the anarchy of barbarian rule, monasteries and monks would provide the one shining light of civilization in the West. These quiet and vigilant men bravely spread the word of their religion beyond the frontiers of the old Roman Empire, thus spreading civilization to new areas as well as preserving it in old ones. Monasteries were also the main centers for any kind of social and economic relief in the Dark Ages. The poor and destitute looked to them for food, shelter, and protection. The sick looked to them for hospital care. And travelers looked to them for safe havens on their journeys.
Another important and somewhat ironic aspect of monasteries was that many of the pagan intellectuals whom the hermits had originally tried to avoid were now showing up in the monasteries in an effort to flee the growing anarchy as the Roman Empire fell. These men, who had received a pagan classical training brought their love of that pagan culture with them and devoted much of their time to copying pagan works of literature. Thus ironically, monasteries, which started as a somewhat anti-intellectual movement, were the primary agents for preserving ancient pagan culture during the Middle Ages by carrying on this tradition of book copying.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the contributions and monasteries and of the Church overall were immensely important to our culture. The early Church was very much a part of Roman Civilization and absorbed a good deal of it into its own theology and ritual as shown by keeping the mass in Latin until very recently. As the Roman Empire faded from history, the Christian Church survived to carry on the Roman heritage along with its own unique contributions to Western Civilization.
The disintegration of the Roman Empire in the West left in its wake a patchwork of Germanic kingdoms founded on its ruins. The Germanic general, Odovacer, ruled Italy. The Visigoths held Spain and southern Gaul. North Africa was the realm of the Vandals. Britain was divided between the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, known to us simply as the Anglo Saxons. And the rest of Gaul was starting to fall under the sway of what would eventually become the most successful of these tribes, the Franks. In addition, there were various minor tribes scattered throughout the West trying to carry on an independent existence: Burgundians, Lombards, Heruls, Gepids, Alans, Sueves, and so on.
Traditionally historians have described the centuries following Rome’s fall as a barbaric and chaotic period known as the Dark Ages. However, recent historical research shows a much more gradual transition to the Middle Ages, especially in the Western Mediterranean where Roman influence was more deeply rooted and contact continued with the Eastern Roman (AKA Byzantine) Empire.
To a large extent the fall of the Western Empire saw the interests of the Germanic rulers in the West and Byzantine emperors in Constantinople largely converging. This was largely because of the attitudes that the Germanic tribes and emperors in the Eastern Roman Empire had toward the situation and each other.
From many of the barbarians’ point of view, rather than coming to destroy the empire, they had been looking for new lands within the empire and Roman titles to go along with those lands. For example, the Visigoths originally entered the empire as allies of Rome. Throughout their wanderings, they continued to see themselves as such allies, and occasionally acted accordingly. They settled in Gaul and Spain as part of a deal with Rome where they would clear other tribes out of those provinces for the empire. They also fought at Rome's side against a much more deadly common enemy, the Huns. When dividing their new lands between themselves and their Romans subjects, the invaders even tried to follow an old Roman custom known as hospitalitas, where the conquerors would take one-third of any conquered lands and leave the other two-thirds for the natives.
Therefore, the Germanic kings wanted Roman titles for two basic reasons. First of all, they had sincere respect for the accomplishments of Rome with its vast empire, network of roads and incredible system of aqueducts. Even if they had contempt for the unwarlike inhabitants, they still stood in awe of the Roman achievement and wanted to carry it on, although ultimately they failed. Secondly, holding Roman titles made the Germanic rulers look more like legitimate rulers to the Roman natives under them. This was especially important since most of these tribes were Arian Christians facing the hostility of their Roman Catholic subjects.
On the other hand, the emperors in Constantinople still felt the lands in the West were rightfully theirs and wanted to keep their legal claim to those lands alive until they were strong enough to take them back. Therefore, they granted Roman titles to the Germanic rulers in the West to maintain the legal fiction that the Empire was still alive in the West and owed allegiance to the one emperor in Constantinople. This way, they could bide their time until the Eastern Empire was strong enough to reclaim the West in reality as well. Until that time came they would have to follow other strategies.
One such strategy was to play different tribes off against one another. This was especially tempting in the case of the Ostrogoths (cousins of the Visigoths) who were troubling the Eastern Empire. The Byzantines decided to kill two birds with one stone by diverting the Ostrogoths into Italy, giving them the legal right to settle there. This way, they would be rid of the Ostrogoths while weakening them and Odovacer in the fight for Italy, hopefully, opening the way for eventual reconquest by the Byzantines. Therefore, in 487, the Ostrogothic king, Theoderic, led his people into Italy, which they soon conquered.
Theoderic's rule in Italy is a perfect example of how well some of the Germanic tribes had absorbed Roman culture during the last 200 years. While the army consisted solely of Ostrogothic warriors, Theoderic was smart enough to keep the Roman civil servants in charge of day-to-day government operations. Although the Ostrogoths were Arian Christians, Theoderic showed tolerance for his Roman Catholic subjects who formed the majority of the population. He also had swamps drained, harbors dredged, and aqueducts repaired. As a result of this enlightened rule, Italy, which had been a parasite on the rest of the empire for centuries, was self-sufficient for the first time in 500 years. However, trouble was looming on the horizon.
In 527, Justinian I became emperor in Constantinople. He has been called the last of the Roman emperors, since he spoke Latin and was clean-shaven. After him, the emperors spoke Greek, wore beards, and are generally called Byzantines rather than Romans. Justinian also saw things from a Roman point of view and worked to restore the old boundaries of the empire. Therefore, he turned the Eastern Roman Empire's resources toward reconquering the West.
His first campaign against the Vandals in North Africa was a quick and resounding success. Easy living had sapped the Vandals' vitality, and the Catholic population hated these Arian Christian rulers. From North Africa, the Byzantine forces moved north against the Ostrogoths. Sicily and Southern Italy fell almost without a fight, and it seemed Justinian's dream of a reunited Roman Empire might come true. Then trouble hit as the Ostrogoths regrouped and counterattacked. What ensued were twenty years of warfare raging up and down Italy. Rome was besieged three times and, for a while, became a virtual ghost town.
In the end, Justinian conquered Italy, but it was a costly victory for both the Eastern Empire and Italy. The cost of his wars in the West, tribute to keep the Persians to the east quiet, and a devastating epidemic (probably Bubonic Plague) left the Eastern Empire exhausted. This opened it up to 200 years of invasions from all directions, which nearly destroyed it.
As far as Italy was concerned, three years after Justinian's death in 565, the Lombards invaded from the north and conquered about half of the peninsula. When Rome was threatened, pope Gregory I had to lead its defense since the Byzantines were unable to defend it any longer. Rome had passed from the city of the Caesars to the city of the Popes. Italy would remain fragmented into a number of warring states for 1300 years until its final reunification in 1871.
As stated above, historians have revised their traditional view of a sudden collapse of civilization in Western Europe during the early Middle Ages, seeing instead a gradual transition to medieval civilization. This was especially true for the areas surrounding the Mediterranean that were reclaimed by the Byzantines or were ruled by tribes strongly influenced by extended contact with Rome before taking over. However, this period was a mixed bag, showing signs of continuity with the Roman Empire in some ways, but decline or change in others.
There were several areas of continuity and even revival. For one thing, both the Byzantines and Germanic rulers maintained Roman law codes for their Roman subjects. Justinian’s codification of Roman law reinforced this trend in areas of Byzantine rule (N. Africa, Italy, and S. Spain). The Church, which maintained its own courts, also used Roman law, spreading its influence among the Frankish, Lombard, Visigothic and Celtic realms.
The social structure of the old Roman lands largely continued as before. Although the old Roman nobility had been expelled by the Vandals and Lombards in North Africa and parts of Italy, they remained influential in Spain, Southern Gaul, and Central Italy, having fled to their country estates to avoid religious persecution and tax collectors in the cities. Over time, many of these nobles would intermarry with the ruling Germanic nobles, blending into a new ruling class that by 700 had even replaced their tripartite Roman names (e.g., Gaius Julius Caesar) with Germanic forms. By the same token, the late imperial trend continued where peasants sought protection from nobles protection in return for their freedom.
After the turmoil of the invasions subsided, agriculture revived somewhat as peasants abandoned marginally productive lands in favor of more fertile ones. This involved dispersal of the population from the safety of the estates to more rural areas where some peasants could maintain or reclaim their freedom from nobles. An abundance of coin hoards indicate trade also continued to thrive across the Mediterranean as Byzantine silks, Egyptian papyrus & natron (for making glass), and Chinese and Indian spices were traded in return for Western products such as grain, pitch, pottery, and slaves. Likewise, Germanic kings and a large number of local mints issued gold, but not silver or bronze, coins according to Byzantine standards. However, the huge purchasing power of gold made trade on a small scale difficult, leading to a gradual deterioration of the gold coinage to conform to real trade conditions. It remains a mystery why the Germanic rulers failed to issue silver and bronze coins.
However, there were areas of decline and change existing alongside those of continuity and revival. One unfortunate policy of continuity at first was the oppressive tax system of the late empire and the self-perpetuating bureaucracy needed to run it. However, as rulers tried to squeeze as much as they could from the economy, their subjects often revolted or fled the tax collectors, letting themselves become nobles’ serfs in return for protection from the government. As a result, tax revenues diminished, causing gradual break down of the old Roman administration.
Cities overall in the Western Mediterranean went into decline, ceasing to function either as centers of production and consumption or centralized administration (as Roman central government broke down). Wars seriously damaged some cities, such as Milan, Trier, and Arles. Rome especially suffered, with its population declining from an estimated 800,000 in the 300s to 25,000 after the turmoil of the Byzantine re-conquest. However, other cities, such as Pavia and Ravenna in Italy, Toulouse and Paris in France, and Toledo and Barcelona in Spain, revived as centers of local government, trade, or church administration. Such cities were always walled and, if the seat of royal government, mimicked Roman imperial cities with palaces, palace staff, and royal retinues. More often were centers of trade and local administration with a count (from the late imperial comes) and/or a bishop over-seeing local administration, justice, and commerce. Bishops were an especially new factor, since they ran their own courts, hospitals, and hostels for travelers. As agriculture (and church revenues from its lands) revived, bishops became the primary patrons of new buildings. Thus the landscape of early medieval cities saw Roman secular monuments give way to more religious buildings such as churches and bell towers.
The armies of these new states differed greatly from the professional Roman armies of old. For one thing, Germanic rulers usually used only their own people for military service, excluding the Roman population. Also, as government funds declined, soldiers were typically paid with land instead of money. In partial compensation, kings, nobles, and even bishops typically kept their own private armies of retainers, known then as bucellarii (Latin for “biscuit eaters”). Thus we see the beginnings of the more private feudal armies of a later age.
Much of Europe's destiny would be tied in with a new Germanic power, the Franks. This tribe had played a minor role in the breakup of the Roman Empire. In fact they had occasionally served as loyal allies, defending Rome's Rhine frontier against the invasions of the Vandals in 406 and the Huns in 451. However, after 451 when the Western Empire was coming totally unraveled, the Franks made their move and started taking northern Gaul. It was at this time that the first of their great kings, Clovis, emerged.
Clovis was only fifteen when he came to the throne in 48l. Despite his youth, he was an ambitious and capable ruler, who made a shrewd and far-reaching move of converting to Catholic Christianity. The story goes that in a desperate move to influence the course of a battle against another tribe, the Alemanni, he prayed to the god of the Christians to give him victory in return for his conversion. For whatever reason, the Franks prevailed, and Clovis kept his promise and became a Catholic Christian like his Roman subjects. While the other Germanic tribes were Arian Christians often persecuting and alienating their Roman Catholic subjects, the Franks could count on more loyal support from their Catholic subjects. As a result, the Franks under Clovis and his immediate successors expanded rapidly at the expense of the Arian Christian kingdoms around them. By 600 C.E., this factor of Frankish rulers and Roman subjects united by the Catholic faith made the Frankish kingdom the largest and most powerful of the Germanic states to succeed the Roman Empire in the West
Unfortunately, the Frankish kings shared the other Germanic tribes' concept of the state as the king's property and, as a result, split the kingdom between their sons. Because of this, civil wars and turmoil plagued the Frankish kingdom from the death of Clovis to the early 700's. As a result, the Franks were split into three kingdoms: Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy. All were ruled by weak "do nothing kings" that let their kingdoms degenerate into further turmoil.
Luckily, new officials, called mayors of the palace, emerged to rebuild the Frankish state. One of these mayors of the palace, Pepin of Heristal, reunited the Frankish kingdom and laid the foundations for one of the greatest dynasties of the Middle Ages, the Carolingians. Several factors helped in the resurgence of the Franks under the Carolingians. One factor was the decline of the neighboring Germanic kingdoms because of the anarchy and decay generated by their poor understanding of the Roman state they had inherited.
Another factor was the Frankish adoption of the stirrup for warfare. While the Frankish kingdom had been wrecking itself in civil wars and palace intrigues, a dynamic new power had been rising in the East: the Muslim Arabs. United and inspired by their new religion, Islam, the Arabs had swept both to the east and west with incredible speed. A century after the death of the prophet, Mohammed, Muslim armies had conquered North Africa and Spain and were raiding into southern Gaul. In 733, the Frankish mayor of the palace, Charles Martel, turned back an invading Muslim force at the Battle of Tours.
Historians have argued whether this was the defeat of a major invasion or just a large raid. Either way, it apparently saw the dramatic introduction of the use of the stirrup in battle and the rise of mounted knights as shock cavalry that would rule the battlefields of Western Europe for centuries. Since the Franks were the first to adapt the stirrup for this purpose, they gained a decisive military edge over their enemies and a reputation as the fiercest fighters in Western Europe. Writers of the period would typically refer to any warriors from that region as Franks because of that reputation.
The third factor helping the Franks was the natural alliance of kings with the Church which often needed each other's help. This especially held true for the Franks and the pope. Charles Martel and his son, Pepin the Short, continued to rebuild the Frankish state to its previous status as a great power. However, they did this as mayors of the palace, while the "do nothing" Merovingian kings they served did nothing useful except ride around in a cart from estate to estate. Pepin wanted the crown as well as the power and authority, and in 752 he got it. Meanwhile, the Lombards who had invaded Italy soon after Justinian’s reconquest were hard pressing the popes. Pepin helped the pope against these enemies in return for his blessing to take the Frankish crown for himself. Soon afterwards, Pepin shaved the king's long hair (the symbol of royalty), packed him off to a monastery, and had himself declared the new king, thus officially establishing the Carolingian dynasty as the ruling family of the Franks.
Archaeological evidence points to a fourth factor helping the Franks: money. Although the Germanic kingdoms were not producing much silver coinage at the time, the Arab Muslim caliphs to the east were. Much of this money was making its way through Russia and the Baltic Sea to the Franks in return for such things as furs and slaves. This increased silver supply gave the Franks the means to expand and consolidate their power and helped pave the way for the greatest ruler of early medieval Europe: Charlemagne.
Possibly the most legendary figure in the medieval period was Pepin the Short's son, Charles, known to us as Charles the Great or Charlemagne. As is true of any legend, there was some factual basis for certain stories surrounding this remarkable man, but there was also a good deal of fantasy. Physically he was a big man, which in the simple world of the eighth century helped him assert his authority among those around him. He was also a strong willed man, which was necessary for holding together an empire under such primitive conditions as existed then. There were three aspects of Charlemagne's reign that were especially important: his conquests, his attempts to revive Roman culture in what is known as the Carolingian Renaissance, and the revival of the Roman imperial title.
Charlemagne was an extremely energetic king who spent a large part of his reign campaigning on his empire's ever widening frontiers: in Italy against the Lombards, in Spain against the Muslims, in the east against the Avars, and in Germany against the Saxons whom he forcibly converted to Christianity at the point of the sword. By the end of his reign, Charlemagne's empire contained most of Western Europe: France, Germany, Austria, half of Italy, the Low Countries, and Denmark. The size of his empire was the primary basis for his later legend.
Charlemagne did his best to rule his empire efficiently, but there were too few trained officials with which to rule and too many lands for them to administer effectively. As a result, he also had to delegate a good deal of power to local nobles who ruled in his name. The king's officials would travel around and periodically check up on the nobles. And Charles himself was a strong enough king to inspire most men to keep in line. However, he failed to set up a lasting government that could function under less exceptional kings. As a result, when he was gone, his empire fell apart.
People have argued over whether Charles was a barbarizing or civilizing influence on Europe. On the one hand, he did spend a lot of his reign fighting, and occasionally used some brutal methods, especially in converting the Saxons to Christianity. On the other hand, he patronized culture and the arts in what came to be called the Carolingian Renaissance. This was a self-conscious revival of Roman culture, which people then looked back upon as a golden age and the pinnacle of civilization. There was very little that was original in this revival, but it did manage to copy a large number of Roman books. As a result, 90% of to oldest versions of Roman texts we have come from the Carolingian Renaissance.
The most celebrated event of Charles' reign was his being crowned Roman emperor by the pope on Christmas day, 800 AD. There has been endless debate about the motives of Charles and the pope and just exactly what this revived title meant three centuries after the end of the Roman Empire in the West. The revival of such a title does show how much of a grip the memory of the golden age of Rome had on the medieval imagination. The real importance of this revived title would fade somewhat after Charlemagne's death and not regain its luster until 961 when the ruler of Germany, Otto I, was crowned emperor by the pope. For some 850 years, Germany will be known as the Empire, or the Holy Roman Empire. Despite the glory it invoked, this title would ultimately be a source of tremendous problems for Germany. In later years, it was said that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor empire, but we can see that it represented a powerful idea.
Succeeding generations would look upon Charlemagne's reign as a golden age. It did encompass most of Western Europe in a larger and relatively peaceful empire. It did try to revive the grandeur of Rome's empire and culture. And a powerful energetic king did rule over it. Although his empire collapsed soon after his death, Charles' reign did have lasting and profound effects. Frankish political institutions, in particular feudalism, and military tactics (the mounted knight) would dominate Western Europe for centuries. In fact, the predominance of Frankish culture and customs was so overwhelming in Western Europe that the Byzantines and Muslims typically referred to anyone from Western Europe as a Frank.
Possibly the most significant sign that Charlemagne's reign was a turning point in history was the fact that for the first time scholars referred to a unified culture and realm known as Europe. After Charlemagne, Western European culture would no longer be a cheap imitation of Roman culture. Rather, from now on, it would define its own institutions and culture in its own terms. Western Civilization was being born.
Charlemagne's' death seemed to be the signal for every thing to go wrong at once. Indeed, a number of factors did combine to send Western Europe into some of its darkest centuries ever. First of all, the money coming from the Arab Muslims that helped make possible the palace and cathedral that Charles had built in his capital at Aachen dried up as the caliphs in Baghdad lavishly spent themselves into bankruptcy. This led to a decline of trade that caused a reversion to a land-based economy and a weaker government. This in turn hurt the Vikings in the north and Arabs in the south who had relied on Arab silver and trade. As a result, they turned to raiding and piracy, which further weakened the Frankish economy and state, causing more raids, and so on.
Along these same lines, the growing dependence on mounted knights for defense also meant a growing dependence on nobles to provide those knights. Since there was no money to pay these nobles, the king had to give them land. As we have seen, land regenerated wealth in the form of crops and made the nobles independent of the king's authority and therefore more rebellious. These rebellions also invited invasions, which encouraged more revolts, etc.
Finally, there were problems within the ruling family. Charlemagne's successor, Louis the Pious, was a weak king who let matters get out of control. He also followed the old Germanic custom of dividing the state among his three sons as if it were personal property rather than a responsibility. This division led to civil wars that ended with splitting the Frankish realm into three states: West Frankland (modern France), East Frankland (modern Germany), and Lotharingia, (modern Lorraine) in the middle. Because of its position between France and Germany, Lorraine remained a source of conflict between its neighbors into the twentieth century. Civil wars also forced the kings to give away more and more royal lands for military support. Soon those lands were parts of virtually independent states. And, as with the independent nobles and weakened economy, turmoil at court also invited invasions.
These invasions came from three directions. From the south came the Muslims who devastated parts of Italy and southern France with their raids. From the east came the Magyars, nomadic horsemen related to the Huns. Eventually they would be defeated and would settle down to found the kingdom of Hungary. Worst of all, from the north came the Vikings whose raids and invasions tore a good part of the Frankish state to pieces and nearly overwhelmed England. In 9ll C.E., the Viking chief Rollo gained recognition from the French king to rule what came to be called Normandy in return for military service to the crown. Of course, the Vikings, or Normans, were their own men and lived under the king's rule in name only. By 1000 C.E., France was a hopeless patchwork of some 55 virtually independent principalities. The king was the nominal ruler of all this, but in reality just the head of one of these many states. As a result, a new political order would emerge: Feudalism.
In the 1920s, a Belgian historian, Henri Pirenne, challenged the commonly accepted notion that the end of the Western Roman Empire around 500C.E. signaled a catastrophic collapse of Roman civilization itself. The Pirenne Thesis claimed that Roman civilization continued until the Muslim Arabs broke up the unity of the Mediterranean in the seventh century. Elements of the Pirenne thesis have come under attack since then, although historians have learned to take a more balanced look at the fall of Rome and the start of the Middle Ages thanks to Pirenne.
Archaeological evidence has provided an interesting twist to the link between the Arab Muslims and the Frankish dynasty of the Carolingians, but in the eight and ninth centuries rather than the seventh. It starts at the height of the Arabs’ power when they were carrying on trade as far away as India, Central Asia, North Africa, Spain, and also present day Russia, where they would exchange silver for furs and amber. Viking merchants from Russia would then sail by way of the Baltic Sea to the Franks’ realm and trade Muslim silver for Frankish goods. Archaeologists have found evidence of a good deal of this silver in the Frankish realm, which would go a long way toward explaining the sudden resurgence of the Franks in the 700s, and early 800s, and in particular their cultural activities: trying to revive learning, copying ancient Roman manuscripts, and building projects such as Charlemagne’s cathedral at Aachen.
Unfortunately, just as Muslim silver from Baghdad helped make Frankish power and prosperity possible, the lack of it helped bring down Charlemagne’s successors. The reason was apparently too much spending by the caliphs on building projects. When, for whatever reasons, their money ran out, and so did trade up into Russia, thus cutting off the Franks’ source of silver and much of their power. Then everything started going wrong.
When Arab traders in the Mediterranean and Vikings in the Baltic and North Seas saw their trade drying up, they turned to raiding to supplement their incomes. This, of course, was destructive to the overall economy, thus weakening the Franks’ ability to trade and marshal the resources necessary, thus allowing more Arab and Viking raids, and so on. By 900, the Frankish empire had disintegrated into various pieces, leaving the way for new powers and institutions to take over.
First, we need to understand the sorts of conditions that made the highly specialized and interdependent economy of the Pax Romana possible. Overall, it relied on a combination of five factors:
As we have seen, most of the Germanic tribes that took over the lands of the Western Roman Empire had absorbed at least some respect for Roman civilization and a desire to maintain it. However, in the end, most of those Germanic kingdoms failed to establish strong long lasting states despite their efforts to carry on Roman traditions. The root of this failure lay in the fact that, despite their best intentions, the Germanic tribes still had a poor understanding of the Roman heritage they had taken over. This created problems in two ways.
First of all, no matter how much they may have admired Roman government and technology, the Germanic rulers had, at best, an imperfect understanding of how such things worked. Occasionally a ruler, such as Theoderic the Ostrogoth, would be smart enough to use Roman technicians and bureaucrats to run his state along Roman lines with some success. But that was the exception to the rule. More often, the barbarian kingdoms were loosely knit states with local nobles ruling their lands and sometimes following their kings in war. The few trained Roman bureaucrats that were left became scarcer with each generation. Bit by bit, orderly Roman rule gave way to a more casual kind of order, veering more and more toward anarchy. Taxes went uncollected; roads, bridges, and aqueducts went unrepaired; and public order broke down, sending towns and trade into decline.
The second problem, which tied in with the first, was the Germanic concept of the state, or lack of it. The Romans saw the state as an abstract concept that encompassed all the people. The Germanic concept of the state was that the crown and the loyalty of the subjects were the personal property of the king. A warrior had no loyalty to a state, only to his chieftain or king, and that was a very personal matter. It also led to serious problems. Since the kingdom was the personal property of the king, he divided it between his sons after he died much as we today will split our estates among our various children. These sons were naturally jealous of their brothers' shares, and civil wars often resulted.
Together, these civil wars and the breakdown of the old Roman economic and political order bred even more economic decline and the passing of money from circulation. This had two serious results. First of all, schools closed down without money to run them, and the trained Roman bureaucracy gradually died off without anyone to replace them. Second, with money disappearing from circulation, land was becoming the main source of wealth. These two factors forced the kings to rely more and more on local nobles to administer their kingdoms. And since money had virtually disappeared from circulation, kings had to pay their noble supporters with land. This was where their troubles really started to mount.
The problem with land as the main source of wealth was that it regenerated wealth in the form of crops. Giving nobles land that kept producing crops meant the nobles no longer needed the king. Therefore, they became more independent and started defying royal authority. For the king to bring these rebels under control, he would need an army. Unfortunately, he needed to pay his armies, and the only thing he had to pay them with was land, which started the whole vicious cycle over again. In such a way, kings in early medieval Europe saw their power continually disintegrating.
Two other factors led into this feedback process. One was the cycle of Church corruption and reform where people would donate land to the Church in hopes of saving their souls. This would make the Church rich and corrupt, which would trigger a new round of reforms by devout church members. The reformed Church would thus attract more donations of land, and the cycle would start over.
As a result, the Church had large amounts of land, making it a major source of wealth and power in the early medieval state. This created the problem of local nobles fighting and scheming to control Church lands. Typically, they would give their younger sons the offices of bishop or abbot (head of a monastery) while passing the family lands on to the older sons. However, putting a bishop's robes on a young noble did not usually change his wild and warlike ways, and we find bishops and abbots engaged in drinking bouts and fighting in the front ranks of battle along with the most unruly of the other nobles. The problem of these ambitious nobles trying to gain control of Church lands also fed into the vicious cycle of land regenerating wealth, making nobles more independent, and so on.
Naturally, this situation did little for the piety of the Church. Also, as a result, the lower clergy were largely unsupervised, illiterate, and ignorant of the religion they were supposedly in charge of, while carrying on fairly lax lifestyles themselves. This is not to say there were not any good pious Christians at the time. One of the remarkable things about the history of the medieval Church is the fact that pious individuals did exist and occasionally prevailed against the corruption that constantly plagued the Church. Still, the view we get of the early medieval Church is not a very pretty one.
The Church naturally wanted to maintain its independence and often looked to kings for protection from the nobles. The kings in turn looked to the Church for land (or at least support from the land), spiritual support to make them popular, and monks to provide what few educated officials there were. One striking example of this mutual support was when the German monarch, Otto I, went into Italy in 96l, roughly 75% of his troops were supplied from Church lands. This made it critical for early medieval monarchs to control the elections of bishops and abbots, which would give them control of the Church's extensive lands and wealth. If they could do this, they were in a good position for ruling their states. In later centuries, when both kings and popes became powerful independently of one another, there would be trouble between church and state. However, in the chaos of the early medieval world, church and state often relied heavily upon one another out of necessity.
The other factor contributing to the decline of the early medieval state was the spread of a simple invention that would revolutionize medieval warfare and, to a large extent, medieval society: the stirrup. The main function of the stirrup was to hold the rider more securely in the saddle. This allowed him to use the impetus of his charging horse to drive a lance through an opponent without himself being thrown from the saddle. The success of this new shock cavalry forced defeated enemies to adopt the stirrup if they were to survive. This led to the further spread of shock cavalry until it had become the dominant form of warfare in Western Europe.
Such shock tactics, as they are called, required a large warhorse, lance, heavier armor, and professional troops trained in riding a horse and using a lance. However, such an army was expensive, especially by medieval standards. The Frankish leader Charles Martel's confiscation of large amounts of church lands in 732, the year before the battle of Tours, suggests he was building up an army of this new type of cavalry, paying them land in order to support them while they trained and fought.
Because of this cycle, Western Europe disintegrated into anarchy as local nobles rebelled against their kings and fought each other in their own private wars. This in turn would encourage raids and invasions by such peoples as Vikings from the north, Arabs from the south, and nomadic Magyars from the east. Such raids and invasions would only encourage more turmoil, which would bring in more invasions and so on. To aggravate matters even further, this cycle of anarchy and invasions would also feed back into the original cycle involving land as a source of wealth. And so it would go, as these mutually reinforcing cycles of decline, anarchy, and invasions would continue to feed into one another, dragging Western Europe down into further chaos. Not until money came back into circulation could the nobles' stranglehold be broken. This was because money did not regenerate itself, thus keeping nobles and officials constantly dependent on the king.
Out of this chaos there emerged a new political order, known as feudalism. This was a decentralized political order where a king or lord would give his nobles land worked by serfs (peasants bound to the soil) in return for military and other forms of service. Each of those dukes and counts wanted his own army. Therefore, they subinfeudated (subdivided) their lands, giving them to lower nobles in return for service from them. Those nobles in turn might subinfeudate to get their own armies from loyal followers. And so it would go until the whole kingdom was split up into dozens of little states. A petty noble who owed service to his overlord, and probably was owed service by vassals beneath him ran each of these. Theoretically, every noble owed allegiance to the king, but in reality he dealt mainly with his immediate overlords and vassals. What resulted were innumerable little wars that usually amounted to little more than border raids that burned some crops, inflicted few if any casualties, and added greatly to the confusion already plaguing Western Europe.
Manorialism was the economic counterpart to feudalism. As the name implies, Western Europe's economy centered on isolated agricultural manors worked by the local lords' serfs. Because of its isolation, the manor had to be virtually self-sufficient. It had agricultural land divided into two or three fields (one always fallow), wasteland which was the lord's private preserve for hunting, a peasant village, a church, a mill, and the lord's manor house or castle (generally made of wood until the 1100's).
The feudal order was an extremely localized and decentralized arrangement. States were so small and poor, and terms of service were so short (in France, usually only 40 days a year) that no one was able to build up much power. However, in the absence of a strong central government, feudalism did provide some degree of defense against the constant raids and invasions then besetting Europe. By l000 C.E., things would settle down and a certain amount of stability had been established as the Viking, Muslim, and Magyar raids died down. This stability set the stage for a revival of civilization in Western Europe known as the High Middle Ages. Out of that civilization would evolve our own modern Western Civilization.
For nearly two centuries there was hardly a church in northern Europe that did not echo with the prayer: "Deliver us O Lord from the wrath of the Northmen". While other peoples, notably the Arabs from the south and the nomadic Magyars (Hungarians) from the east, also raided and plundered Europe, it was the Vikings who wreaked the most havoc in the short run, but probably had the most positive long term effects on Europe.
Various forces launched the Vikings in their raids and voyages of exploration. Two of these factors we have already seen: the decline of the Frankish Empire after Charlemagne's death which invited raids, and the overspending by the Arab caliphs which wrecked trade in the Baltic Sea and forced the Vikings to seek their fortunes through more violent means. Another factor was a growing population of landless younger sons looking for fortune and adventure caused by a good climate (allowing more children to survive), and the Viking customs of polygamy (having more than one wife) and primogeniture (leaving the entire inheritance to the oldest son).
Two other remarkable factors were the Vikings' ships and their navigation techniques. There were various classes of Viking ships ranging from the typical longship and the larger dragonships ( drakkar) to the stouter oceangoing hafskips (half ships). However, they shared certain common characteristics that made them quite versatile. They could hold up to 200 men in some cases, yet be sailed by as few as 15 sailors. They were strong enough to handle rough seas, but were also light enough to sail up inland rivers and even be carried around river defenses. Likewise, Viking navigation techniques, which were basically the product of a centuries' long oral tradition of sailors' lore, got them safely across open waters that other peoples of the time would never dream of sailing. In our eyes, the Vikings were remarkable and fearless sailors. In the eyes of many of their contemporaries, they were downright mad for making the voyages they did, which only added to their mystique.
Starting around 800 A.D., wave after wave of Vikings set out from Scandinavia either to raid their neighbors or explore new and more distant lands for the purpose of trading and settling there. Viking raids created a feedback cycle by weakening their victims while also winning plunder and status, which encouraged more and larger raids, and so on. As raiding parties increased in size, the Vikings would grow bolder and strike further inland by sailing up inland rivers or even seizing local horses to carry them and their plunder. As repeated successes further increased the size of the raiding parties, the Vikings would establish winter bases rather than return home to Scandinavia for the winter. Eventually these winter bases might become permanent settlements and the basis for the eventual conquest of the region.
Viking raids and conquests were accompanied by a good number of atrocities that reflected the Vikings' rough character, but were also designed to intimidate their victims. The Vikings showed no special respect for Christian churches and monasteries. In fact, those were generally their first targets, since the Church owned so much of the wealth in Western Europe at the time. However, the Vikings were also great traders, not seeing trade and plunder as mutually exclusive, and combining these activities according to what the situation dictated or allowed. As a result, they opened up trade routes, which helped start a revival of Europe's economy.
Ironically, considering all the chaos and destruction the Vikings brought with them, they founded some of the best-organized and most dynamic states in Western Europe. In 911 A.D. they founded Normandy as a virtually independent state in western France. Having established a well-run government there, they spread out to conquer England in 1066, laying the foundations for that modern nation. They also gradually conquered Southern Italy and Sicily in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and set up strong state there just as they had in Normandy and England. Some of these Normans later joined the First Crusade and conquered Antioch in Syria, holding it for nearly two centuries.
Other Vikings (known as the Rus) struck eastward and founded the first Russian state centered around Kiev. From there, they raided the Byzantine Empire. Later, Byzantine missionaries followed them back to Russia, bringing with them Christianity, Byzantine architecture and the Cyrillic alphabet, all of which became vital elements of Russian culture.
The Vikings were also fearless explorers. To the west, they founded a state in Iceland, continued across the Atlantic and discovered Greenland and North America. However, Greenland's climate proved to be too harsh to support even the Vikings, while attacks by Native Americans called "Skraelings" (screechers) made settlements there also short-lived. However, the rest of Europe was not ready to absorb these new discoveries, and they were forgotten for nearly 500 years.
England followed a somewhat different course of development from the countries on the continent. Being separated from the rest of Europe by the English Channel certainly made it harder to keep in touch with the continent, especially during the Dark Ages. By the same token, the Channel generally has also made it harder to invade England, although that did not seem to be the case against Viking raids and invasions.
After the departure of the Roman legions in the early 400's, the Romano-British population probably carried out resistance against the invading Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (known collectively as the Anglo-Saxons). This resistance is very likely reflected in the legend of King Arthur. However, the Anglo Saxons eventually conquered Britain in the 400's and split it into 7 competing kingdoms known as the Heptarchy. For a brief time, one kingdom or the other might have the upper hand in trying to unite Britain, but the other kingdoms would gang up on that kingdom and restore the balance of power. By 700, the Anglo-Saxons had been converted to Catholic Christianity, and English scholars, led by such men as the Venerable Bede, were in the forefront of European scholarship. However, the advent of Viking raids in the ninth century would radically alter all that.
England especially suffered from the Vikings. Being divided into seven independent kingdoms made it an irresistible target, and Viking raids on England were merciless. Six of the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were overrun, with only Wessex in the south, led by Alfred the Great (871-99), holding on grimly against the Northmen. Alfred did three things to defend his realm against the Vikings. First of all, he kept a standing army, with half of its soldiers on guard at any given time while the other half could tend their crops. Second, he kept a navy to head off Viking invasions and raids before they could even reach English shores. Finally, Alfred established fortified centers, known as burhs, to protect his people and their property from the Vikings.
These measures saved Wessex from Viking conquest, and Alfred and his successors were gradually able to take the offensive and reclaim a good part of England. In a sense, the Viking raids were good for Anglo-Saxon England in two ways. For one thing, they forced the Anglo-Saxons to build a strong state in self-defense. For another thing, the Vikings eliminated the six Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms Wessex had been competing with before. As a result, as Wessex retook one part of Britain after another, a single strong united kingdom replaced seven separate ones. Also, it could more easily impose its own laws and customs on other Saxons, since the Vikings had eliminated the other Saxon kingdoms' laws and customs. Probably reinforcing that trend was the Saxons' fear of the Vikings returning, thus making them more likely to submit to the rule of a strong king. Therefore, the Saxon kings of Wessex could establish a much stronger state than would previously have been possible.
Besides their defense measures, Alfred and his successors did three other things to build a strong English state. First of all, they set up royal officials, known as thegns and reeves, to administer the king's justice throughout his realm. The second thing was to extract a loyalty oath from all Saxon freedmen under their rule. In an age when oaths were taken especially seriously, this was important, since it made loyalty to the king more important than loyalty to any other lord or official. Finally, the Saxon kings collected a permanent tax known as Danegeld. This was originally tribute paid to the Vikings to keep them from raiding. Later, it was used as a defense tax to support the army and navy, thus keeping England safe from attack.
In 973 C.E., a century after Alfred came to the throne, the Church anointed his descendant, Edgar, with oil as God's chosen king of all England. Although the Vikings still controlled much of England under what was known as the Danelaw, this act showed the progress Wessex had made and the ambitions it had toward uniting all of England. Also, by anointing the king as God's chosen, it marked the king as someone special in society and laid the foundations for the later doctrine of Divine Right of Kings.
These measures kept the Saxon state strong until Ethelred "the Unready" (literally "No plan") came to the throne at the age of ten. This triggered renewed Viking raids until the Danish king, Knut, conquered all of England. As luck would have it, when Knut died, his sons fought for the throne, which allowed the Saxons to regain their independence and give the crown to another Saxon king, Edward the Confessor.
However, England was never far from some sort of Viking intervention. In this case, it was the Norman duke, William, who, as a cousin of the childless Edward the Confessor, claimed the English throne when the Saxon king died. When the Saxons chose another Saxon, Harold of Wessex, to succeed Edward, William gathered an army, crossed the channel, and crushed Harold's forces at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 in what would prove to be the last successful invasion of Britain. Despite this, the Anglo-Saxon heritage would continue as the Normans would adopt many of the policies and institutions the Saxons had used to build their state in times of crisis.
When we study the Middle Ages, we tend to focus on Western Europe since it is the homeland of Western Civilization. However, this gives us a distorted view of medieval history, for Western Europe was little more than a backwoods frontier compared to the real centers of civilization further east. It is here that we are concerned with one of those eastern cultures, Byzantium, and its contributions to civilization. Cities provide the central focus of civilization, and no civilization seemed to center on a city more than Byzantine civilization did on Byzantium, or Constantinople as it was known after its refounding by Constantine in 330 C.E.
Constantinople's location at the narrow juncture between the Aegean and Black Seas was ideal for controlling trade between those two bodies of water as well as the trade routes that converged there to link Asia and Europe. The city itself was blessed by nature, with water bordering two of its three sides. This provided it with easy defense and an excellent harbor known as the Golden Horn. The natural advantages of the city were further enhanced by human ingenuity. The harbor was protected from invasion by a massive chain stretched across its entrance. The landward side had a huge triple set of walls to protect it. Down through the centuries, when all else failed, that chain and set of walls kept Constantinople safe from invasions. Many times all that seemed to remain of the empire was Constantinople itself. But as long as the city survived, the empire also survived to bounce back and recover its old territories.
Inside its walls, Constantinople contained some of the most marvelous sights in the civilized world. Many of these reflected the Roman heritage that the Byzantines were carrying on: aqueducts, sewers, public baths, and street planning. Other sights, in particular some 100 churches, reminded one that Constantinople was a very Christian city. Still other sights reflected oriental influences: the bustling markets offering goods from all over the civilized world, the palace complex of the Boucoleon with its reception halls, mechanically levitating thrones, imperial gardens, and silk factories. Much of the Byzantines' success in dealing with their less sophisticated neighbors was due to their ability to dazzle visitors with such wonders.
While we refer to the Byzantine Empire, people in the Middle Ages never lost sight of the fact that this was the eastern half of the Roman Empire that had survived the barbarian invasions of the fifth century C.E. As a result, they called them "Romans". Both the terms Byzantine and Roman have some truth to them. They were the direct heirs of the Roman Empire and did carry on the remains of that empire for some 1000 years after the fall of the western half of the Empire. However, for all intents and purposes, it became a predominantly Greek empire and culture as the Middle Ages progressed. Its subjects spoke Greek, worshipped in what came to be the Greek Orthodox Church, and wore beards in the Greek fashion. They even argued and fought over religion in much the same way the ancient Greeks had argued and fought over politics.
The turning point in this transition from Roman to Byzantine civilization came in the reign of Justinian I (527-565). We have seen how this "last of the Roman emperors" tried to reclaim the Western empire. In the process, he virtually wrecked the eastern empire with the high cost in money and manpower for his wars and tribute to keep the Persians quiet in the east. Two other factors merely added to the damage: persecution of Monophysite heretics in Syria, Palestine and Egypt which alienated much of the population against the central government and bad luck in the form of a devastating plague which decimated the population. When Justinian died, the empire may have looked strong on the map, but in reality it was exhausted and in desperate need of a rest. Unfortunately, rest was the last thing the empire would get.
The next two centuries would see the Byzantines constantly beset by waves of invaders coming from the north, the east, and the west. The very fact that the Empire survived at all seems a miracle considering the troubles it endured. In the West, the first wave of invaders, the Lombards poured into Italy in 568, only three years after Justinian's death, and set off centuries of fighting between themselves, Byzantines, Franks, and even Arabs. The Byzantines did manage to hold onto Ravenna and Venice in the north and southern Italy and Sicily to the south. However, except for those outposts, the Roman Empire in the West was gone.
A more serious threat to the empire's existence came from the east. Around 600 C.E., the chronic hostility between Byzantines and Persians erupted into a titanic life and death struggle that would last a quarter of a century. The Persians overran Syria, Palestine, and Egypt while the nomadic Avars in the north were rampaging through Greece and the rest of the Balkan Peninsula. At the low point of the war, Constantinople was virtually all that remained of the empire in the east, and it had to withstand a siege by the combined Persian and Avar armies. Fortunately, the stout walls of Constantinople held fast against the enemy assaults, and a new hero, the emperor Heraclius, emerged to save the empire. Leaving Constantinople to defend itself, he struck deep into Persia to draw its armies away from his capital. In a series of resounding victories, the Persians were crushed and the Byzantine Empire saved. However, in the process, both empires had been thoroughly exhausted.
Unfortunately, right on the tail of this war a much more serious threat suddenly appeared. The Arabs, united and inspired by their new religion, Islam, swept in like a desert storm, toppling Persian and Byzantine resistance like a house of cards. The Persian Empire was subjugated in its entirety. Meanwhile, the Byzantines watched as Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa all fell to the Arabs. Not content with these conquests, the Arabs pressed on through Asia Minor toward the coveted prize of Constantinople itself. Once again, the city's fortifications held out, and after a four-year siege, the invaders were driven back. One reason for this victory was the use of a new secret weapon, Greek Fire, which sent the Arab ships into wild uncontrollable flames. This chemical would be a mainstay of the Byzantine defense and a highly guarded state secret for centuries to come. We still do not know exactly what was in it, although it was probably some sort of petroleum compound.
In 7l7 C.E., a new emperor, Leo III, from Isauria in southern Asia Minor, came to the throne. The empire's situation at the time was not very hopeful, for another huge Arab army was descending on Constantinople. As in times past, Byzantine fortifications and Greek Fire took their toll. By the following spring, the Arabs were in full retreat. This was the last time the Arabs would besiege Constantinople, and the end of this siege symbolized the beginning of a period of stabilization for the empire's frontiers and internal development. Fighting would continue with the Arabs, but mainly in the form of sporadic border raids rather than massive invasions.
The Byzantines also faced serious threats in the north from both Asiatic nomads and their Slavic subjects whom they drove in front of them. Two of these nomadic tribes, first the Avars, and later the Bulgars, waged relentless warfare on the Byzantines, mercilessly devastating the Balkan Peninsula in their raids. The Balkans virtually dropped out of Byzantine control and the light of history for nearly two centuries as they were inundated with Slavic invaders. To the north, a powerful Bulgar kingdom proved to be nearly as serious a threat as the Arabs for the next 350 years. Eventually, the Bulgars would settle down, adopt Christianity, and even briefly be conquered by the Byzantines. But for now, they were one more major problem to be overcome.
By 750 C.E., thanks to some astute diplomacy that turned their enemies against one another, perseverance in the face of disaster, and the fortifications of Constantinople, the Byzantines had survived, often against incredible odds, both foreign invasions and internal religious strive. However, they had been stripped of all their lands except for Asia Minor, part of Thrace around Constantinople, Sicily, and parts of Italy. And they were still surrounded by very aggressive neighbors. No longer was it a Roman Empire in anything but name and a few Italian holdings. From this point on, it was truly a Byzantine Empire.
Unfortunately, just as outside pressures from the Arabs were starting to ease, a cloud of religious controversy descended upon the empire. The new issue, Iconoclasm, concerned the icons (religious images) the Church used to depict Christ and the saints. The iconoclasts thought that the use and veneration of these images was idolatry. The iconodules said icons were needed to instruct the illiterate masses in the teachings of Christianity. Leo III and several of his successors were iconoclasts and moved to abolish this form of idolatry by seizing the icons and destroying them.
As one might expect in an era when religion was such a vital issue to both the individual and the state, Iconoclasm touched off some violent reactions from people attached to the icons. Riots swept through the cities of the empire. Relations were strained with the Church in Western Europe, which also defended the icons. Palace intrigues and murders centered largely on the icon issue. When an iconodule empress, Irene came to the throne (blinding her own son in order to seize power), she disbanded several of the best regiments of the army since their troops were mainly iconoclasts. This, of course, damaged the empire's ability to defend itself and invited raids from its neighbors. After over a century of this turmoil (726-843), the images were restored and the empire could pursue a more stable course undisturbed by major religious controversies.
The disturbances of the seventh and eighth centuries left a very different empire from the one that Justinian had ruled. The most noticeable difference was that the empire was much smaller, having been stripped of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa. While this deprived the Byzantine government of valuable revenues, it also made the empire much more compact and easier to defend since it was now confined mainly to Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula.
The recent turmoil also made the Byzantine Empire a more ethnically, culturally, and religiously united realm. The largely Aramaic speaking peoples and Monophysite "heretics" of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were now under Muslim control. This left a predominantly Greek speaking populace more or less united by the same religious views once the Iconoclasm struggle had settled down. The empire may have been smaller, but it was also more cohesive.
The upheavals caused by two centuries of foreign invasions forced the Byzantines to adapt their society, government, and defenses to what seemed to be a continuous state of crisis. There were five main factors that helped the empire revive. First of all, after 750 C.E., the pressure from invasions let up somewhat, although it was still an ever-present menace. Second, the Byzantines pursued an active policy of repopulating Asia Minor that had been devastated by the wars of the previous centuries. The main policy they followed to this end was to take hundreds of thousands of the Slavic people who had overrun the Balkans and resettle them on the empty lands in Asia Minor. These people were hard working industrious folk who became loyal subjects and excellent soldiers for the Byzantine state. No single policy probably did more to revive the fortunes of the Byzantine Empire than this resettlement policy.
A third factor aiding Byzantine revival had to do with the administration and defense of the empire, which needed serious overhauling. Back in the third century, Diocletian had created separate civil and military officials in his provinces to cut down on the possibility of revolt. However, the constant threat of invasions faced by the Byzantines forced them to abandon Diocletian's system and create military provinces called themes run by military governors ( strategoi). The emperors did cut down on the possibility of revolt somewhat by having the tax collectors answer directly to them. This still left the governors enough power and freedom to defend their provinces. The governors needed professional help in running the provinces, which was provided by an excellent civil service, possibly the best of any medieval state.
Given the high priority that defense should be given, it should come as no surprise that the Byzantine army also carried on the ancient Roman tradition of excellence. However, the nature of the warfare the Byzantines faced, (usually quick hit and run border raids), differed considerably from the Roman style of warfare. As a result, the army's core consisted of highly mobile and versatile regiments of cavalry known as cataphracts. The cataphract was heavily armed and could rely on shock tactics similar to those of western knights to drive back the enemy. But he was also armed with a bow and could function as a horse archer when necessary. The Byzantines also fielded light cavalry plus heavy and light infantry who were useful in different types of terrain, especially hills and mountains. Recruitment was done according to village, each village being responsible for supplying a quota of peasants armed and ready for service. This system was superior to that of Western Europe where the more troublesome and ambitious nobles were responsible for and in control of defense.
Another important aspect of Byzantine defense was the navy, since the empire contained so much coastline. At its height, the Byzantine navy consisted of some 200 ships of the line called dromons. These were galleys armed with rams as well as catapults or siphons for launching the deadly Greek Fire. Unfortunately, the high expense of maintaining a fleet and the rebellious nature of the sailors caused the Byzantine government to neglect the navy from time to time. Such periods of a weak navy allowed the resurgence of piracy and enemy navies, in particular those of the Arabs.
The fourth factor helping the Byzantines was their diplomacy and the fact that they were the only people of the Middle Ages who made a systematic study of their enemies and how they fought. They produced several military manuals detailing precisely what formations, maneuvers, and tactics to use against the heavy knights of Western Europe as opposed to the mobile light cavalry used by their enemies to the north and east. The Byzantines had to be more scientific about these matters because they were usually outnumbered by their enemies and had to rely on every trick or stratagem possible.
The first goal they generally pursued was to avoid a war if at all possible. As a result, the Byzantines were very skillful in diplomacy, especially against the less sophisticated cultures to the west and north. The first principle of Byzantine diplomacy was to turn two neighbors against each other and let them fight for Byzantine interests even though they might not realize they were doing just that. Naturally the neighbors who were duped into this kind of behavior would be somewhat bitter about it. Byzantium's neighbors, especially those in Western Europe, denounced the Byzantines as cowards for their strategies. Even today the word "byzantine" is used to denote vicious intrigue. However, looking at the Byzantines' situation, we can understand why their behavior and concepts of war and heroism differed so much from those of Western Europe. When they had to fight, they did so very well. But they were masters of conserving their meager human resources and relying on other methods to attain their goals.
Finally, such a well-run empire with a highly trained civil service, army, and navy, required a healthy economy to support it. The invasions of the seventh and eighth centuries severely damaged the Byzantine economy. Most of its cities were reduced to little more than fortified strongholds to protect the surrounding peasants. In spite of this, Byzantine wealth was legendary, especially to the relatively simple peoples surrounding the empire. Such contemporary writers as Liutprand of Cremona tell of being thoroughly dazzled by the wealth and splendor of Constantinople. The capital city was the crossroads of much of the trade of the civilized world at that time.
A ten per cent toll on all imported goods from this trade raised sizable revenues. The government also kept monopolies on such goods as silk, grain, and weapons. Furthermore, it kept tight control on all the craft guilds, strictly regulating their quality of workmanship, wages, prices, and competition. As stifling to their economy as these measures may seem, they did protect the somewhat fragile industries and trade in the unstable period of the early Middle Ages. As a result of this protection, Byzantine industries flourished and its goods were among the most highly prized and sought after in the Mediterranean. Later, when trade and industry revived elsewhere, strict Byzantine controls would work against its people in more competitive markets.
The firm foundations of administration, defense, and economy laid by the Isaurian and Amorian dynasties (7l7-867) bore fruit under the Macedonian dynasty, which took the Byzantine Empire to the height of its power. The century and a half from 867 to 1025 saw a succession of generally excellent emperors who maintained the stability of the empire internally while expanding its borders. In 863, a major Arab invasion was annihilated at Poson, which set the stage for the steady advance of Byzantine armies against the Muslims. Even Antioch, one of the five original patriarchates of the Church lost to the Muslims in the 600's, was recovered. The Byzantines even had their eyes set on retaking the Holy Land and Jerusalem. In the north, the emperor Basil II waged relentless warfare against the Bulgarians, eliminating their kingdom entirely, and earning the title "Bulgar slayer". By Basil's death in 1025, the Byzantine Empire's borders extended all the way to the Danube River in the north and the borders of Palestine in the south. The Byzantines were definitely the super power of the Near East, but after Basil II's death everything started going wrong.
Byzantine civilization created little that was new or unique, being largely absorbed in religious matters or copying the literary forms of ancient Greece. However, in such an age of violence and confusion, the Byzantines did make invaluable contributions to civilization. First of all, Byzantine missionaries spread Greek Orthodox Christianity and civilization northward. Eastern Europe, especially Russia, was heavily influenced by Byzantine architecture, religion, and the Cyrillic alphabet. For example, the "onion domes" atop many Russian Churches testify to Byzantine influence. Orthodox Christianity has also had a profound and lasting impact on the Russian people down through the centuries to the present day, even surviving and outlasting official discouragement from the communist regime that held sway for nearly 75 years.
Second, the Byzantines passed Greek civilization, in particular its math and science, on to the Muslim Arabs. They in turn took the Greek heritage, added their own ingenious touches (such as the invention of algebra), and passed it on to Western Europe by way of Muslim Spain. This helped lay the foundations of our own scientific tradition.
Finally, the Byzantines directly passed much of ancient Greek culture to Western Europe during the Renaissance. Also, the Byzantines, just by holding back so many nomadic invaders from the East through the centuries, allowed Western Europe’s culture survive and develop in relative peace. Many writers from the West, hostile to the Byzantines for historical reasons discussed above, have downplayed and criticized the role the Byzantines have played in the history of our civilization. This is unfortunate, since, during the Early Middle Ages in particular, the Byzantines did more than their share in the preservation and advance of civilization
The Byzantine Empire, much like the Roman Empire, faced a formidable array of external enemies. However, it was largely internal decay which destroyed both empires. The political and economic stability of the empire by 1000 A.D. led to two lines of development which combined to trigger a pair of interlocking feedback cycles that, in turn, eventually wrecked the empire. First of all, there was the free peasantry upon which the government depended for taxes and recruits. When the empire had been under constant attack, land had been a poor investment. But once stability started to return in the eighth century, many nobles looked greedily upon the farmlands controlled by the free peasantry. There was a constant battle as the nobles tried to get these lands and enserf the peasants. The government, seeing the free peasantry as the backbone of its economy and defence, did what it could to defend them. Basil II in particular fought long and hard to defend the peasants, but even he was unable to break the power of the nobles.
Secondly, and unfortunately for the peasants, not all emperors were strong or even concerned enough to defend the peasants. This was especially true after Basil II's death in 1025 when the empire was at its height and a strong military seemed less necessary. Therefore, a series of weak rulers with little military experience succeeded Basil. During hard times, such as famine, nobles would take the chance to dispossess the peasants. This wouild lead to the decline of the free peasantry and army, which in turn forced the state to rely more and more on expensive foreign mercenaries. This further increased the tax burden on the peasants, which caused more of them to lose their lands, leading to more reliance on mercenaries and so on.
This vicious cycle weakened the economy and tax base to the point where the Byzantines could not even afford to maintain their navy. Therefore, they asked such rising Italian city-states as Venice and Genoa to fight their naval battles for them. The price they paid was to lower and eventually eliminate the 10% import toll the Venetians and Genoese would normally pay. This allowed them to undersell Byzantine goods, which lowered government revenues from trade as well as ruining the tightly run guilds of Byzantine artisans and craftsmen. The even lower revenues forced the Byzantines to rely even more on the Italians, who then got an even tighter stranglehold on the Byzantine economy, thus repeating the cycle.
This also fed back into the first feedback cycle as the loss of money from lower tolls forced the government to raise taxes further and create an even greater burden for the peasants. The combined effects of these cycles led to growing internal decay within the empire and growing tensions with the Italian city-states who were taking over more of the empire's trade.
Along with these processes, events elsewhere were closing in on the Byzantines in the tenth and eleventh centuries. By 1070, a new and more aggressive enemy, the Seljuk Turks, had replaced the Arabs as the main Muslim threat to the Byzantines. In 107l, at the battle of Manzikert, the Byzantines found out that, besides being expensive, mercenaries can also be unreliable. The result was a disastrous defeat when their Norman and Turkish mercenaries abandoned them without even fighting, leading to the loss of part of the Balkans and most of Asia Minor, the very heart of the empire. This, along with the declining economy described above, generated steady internal decay for the empire.
Desperate for help, the new emperor, Alexius I, made a plea to Western Europe for mercenaries. What he got instead was the First Crusade, a religious war with the goal of taking Palestine and Jerusalem from the Seljuk Turks. Alexius skilfully handled this wave of half civilized Westerners as they passed through his empire on the way to Palestine. He even managed to use them to recover part of Asia Minor. Alexius and his successors, John I and Manuel I did manage to stabilize the empire's frontiers and recover some ground. Unfortunately, in 1176, Manuel and his army were ambushed and severely defeated by the Turks at the battle of Myriocephalum. The lands regained over the last century were lost once again, showing how hollow the Byzantine recovery actually was.
Meanwhile, in addition to the Italian stranglehold on the Byzantine economy, growing cultural and religious differences led to rising tensions between the Byzantine East and Latin West. These tensions and the West's growing involvement in Byzantine affairs also helped lead to the First Crusade.
All the while, contact with the West kept growing, and with it friction between the two cultures. As the Italian city-states' stranglehold on the Byzantine Empire's trade grew, so did hostility against Italian merchants, who numbered some 60,000 in Constantinople alone. Cultural differences, such as how the two cultures carried on war and diplomacy, and a religious schism which split the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches permanently in 1054, just added to the mutual animosity. In the late ll00's riots broke out in various Byzantine cities, causing the massacre of numerous Italian merchants.
A major backlash came from Western Europe in 1204 when Venice directed the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople, which they stormed and brutally sacked. A short lived Crusader state was set up but the Byzantines recaptured Constantinople in 126l. However, irreparable damage had been done. The Venetians still held strategic Aegean islands, and the Crusaders still controlled parts of Greece. Furthermore, much of the wealth and splendor of Constantinople had been hauled off to Venice and Western Europe.
The energy and resources the Byzantines used in recovering from this blow would have been better spent in meeting a potent new threat from the East: the Ottoman Turks. From 1300 onwards, the Ottomans steadily encroached on Byzantine lands in Asia Minor. In 1345 they crossed into Europe never to leave. The Byzantine state crumbled piece by piece into a pathetic remnant of itself. Finally in 1453, Constantinople, the last remnant of the old Roman Empire, fell to the Turks after a desperate and heroic siege. With that siege went the last remnants of the Roman Empire.
The death of Mohammed shocked many Arabs who had attributed divine qualities to the prophet. In order to ease their doubts, one of Mohammed's chief followers, Abu Bakr, addressed the crowd gathered in Mecca: "Whichever of you worships Mohammed, know that Mohammed is dead. But whichever of you worships God, know that God is alive and does not die." Then he quoted a passage from the Quran: "Mohammed is a prophet only; there have been prophets before him. If he dies or is slain, will you turn back?" Their nerves soothed and their faith reassured, the Arabs struck out on a path of conquest almost unparalleled in its scope and speed.
The civilizing influences filtering into Arabia from Rome and Persia had two effects combining to give the Arabs the dynamic energy for conquering an empire. For one thing, those influences made Arabia fertile ground in which Islam could take root. Second, they helped the Arabs to unify and expand outward, especially when inspired by Islam, whose warriors believed that death in a holy war for the faith led to being transported instantly to Paradise. Add to this very capable leaders armed with the lightning fast tactics of the desert, and Islam's armies became the most potent forces of their day.
Two other outside factors also made the Arabs' rapid expansion possible. First, there was the degree of support, or at least non-resistance from the many Aramaic speaking peoples under Roman and Persian rule, since they felt much closer kinship to the Arabs than to their rulers. Also the Muslims were tolerant of Christians and Jews, charging only a special tax instead of forcing them to convert. This contrasted sharply with the harsher Byzantine policies against the Monophysite Christians in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. The second factor was timing. Both the Byzantine and Persian Empires were worn out from years of prolonged warfare against each other. Likewise, Visigothic Spain was suffering internal decay and was thus ready for a fall.
The Arabs' first victims were the Byzantines and Persians. At the Yarmuk River in Palestine they were facing a large enemy force when a sandstorm blew up in the Byzantines' faces. Taking this as a sign from God, the Arabs charged and destroyed the Byzantine army. Syria and Palestine, along with Jerusalem, a city Muslims also revere, fell into the Arabs' hands. The Patriarch of Jerusalem, resplendent in his finest robes, had to meet this rag tag army of desert nomads and personally lead their leader's horse into the city. Nothing could better symbolize the contrast between the wealthy civilized subjects and their new masters fresh out of the desert.
The Arab advance continued northward into Asia Minor toward Constantinople, a particularly prized goal for Muslims. Despite their desert origins, they rapidly built a navy (with the help of their newly conquered Greek and Phoenician subjects) with which they twice besieged Constantinople (674 and 717). In each case, the Byzantines' dreadful new weapon, Greek fire, helped save the city and empire. The Byzantines held fast, and a fairly stable frontier between Christianity and Islam gradually took shape in Asia Minor.
Sweeping westward the Arabs took Egypt with an army of only 4,000 men, following quickly with the conquest of North Africa. In 711 C.E., a small Muslim force crossed into Spain, where the Visigothic kingdom also crumbled before its onslaught. Storming into southern Gaul (France), the Arabs were finally stopped by the Franks at the Battle of Tours (733). Eventually a stable frontier formed in northern Spain between the Muslim and Christian worlds.
The Arabs also advanced eastward into Persia, which, also exhausted by prolonged war with the Byzantines, collapsed like a house of cards in 651. However, Persian culture would re-emerge as a major influence on Islamic civilization as it developed. In 711 C.E. (the same year Muslim forces entered Spain), the Arabs entered northwestern India and started to establish their power there. They also extended their rule into Central Asia and beat a Chinese army in a battle near the Talas River, which brought the Arabs a new type of product, paper, and helped establish Islam as the dominant religion in Central Asia. Thus, by 750 AD, after little more than a century, the Islamic Empire stretched from Spain in the west to north India and the frontiers of China in the east, the most far-flung empire of its day.
In the year 640, a messenger brought news to the Caliph Omar in Mecca that his forces had taken Alexandria with its 4000 villas, 4000 baths, and 400 places of entertainment. To celebrate this victory, Omar had the messenger share a meal of bread and dates with him, the simple fare of desert nomads. However, as ill suited to ruling such an empire the Arabs may have seemed, contact with their civilized Persian and Byzantine subjects allowed them to adapt quite quickly. They had three things to do: decide who was to rule, set up a system of government to rule the empire, and absorb and adapt the older cultures they ruled to Islam.
The first problem was who should be caliph, the spiritual and secular successor to Mohammed. The first four caliphs were elected by a tribal council of elders and are referred to as the Orthodox Caliphs, ruling from 632 to 661 C.E. However, as the empire grew, this form of government became increasingly inadequate. In addition, tribal and clan jealousies continued. Of the four Orthodox Caliphs, only one, Abu Bakr (632-634) died a natural death. Finally, the Umayyad clan took over and established the Umayyad Dynasty (661-750). From now on, the dynastic principle of one family choosing the caliph would dominate.
However, not everyone saw the Umayyads as rightful rulers. Some known as Shiites felt that only descendants of Ali, the last Orthodox Caliph and a member of Mohammed's family, should be caliph. Those who felt any Arab could be caliph were known as Sunnites. The Sunnite-Shiite split is still one of the major factors dividing the Muslim world today.
In 750 C.E., a revolt led by Abbas, a governor of Persia, overthrew the Ummayads and established the Abassid Dynasty (750-1258). Abbas was a ruthless man who worked to exterminate the Umayyad clan to a man. He even invited eighty Umayyads to a banquet and had them murdered at the table, then covering the bodies so he could finish his meal in peace. One member of the clan did survive, Abd-al-Rahman, who barely escaped Abbasid agents to make his way across the Mediterranean through the use of disguises and trickery. He arrived in Spain and founded an independent Umayyad dynasty. This was the first crack in the unity of the Islamic state. It would never be unified again.
From the start, the Umayyads saw that they must adapt Byzantine and Persian techniques for ruling their empire. Therefore, they instituted some major changes. They moved the capital from Mecca to a much more central location, Damascus in Syria. They created the first Muslim coinage. They also adapted Byzantine and Persian bureaucratic methods as well as the Persian system of relay riders for faster communication of news from the further parts of the empire.
The Abbasids continued Umayyad centralizing policies. Consequently, more and more Persians, Greeks, Jews, and other non-Arabs gained positions of responsibility, since they had the training and experience necessary for running the government. This signified more equality and less distinction between the Arab conquerors and their subjects, especially for those non-Arabs who converted to Islam. Even the Abbasid caliphs had less and less Arab blood in them, since few of them married Arab wives.
Nothing better shows these changes in Muslim government than the position and status of the caliph himself, which was modeled after the Persian concept of kingship. Although he still tried to advertise his religious functions by wearing the tattered robe of Mohammed upon occasion and styling himself as the "Shadow of God on earth", he was no longer a simple man of the people. Just getting an audience with him involved dealing with a multitude of officials. Upon approaching the throne, one prostrated himself, while the caliph remained out of sight, speaking to people through an elaborate screen that hid him from view. An executioner with drawn sword reminded one of the need to behave according to the strictest rules. This contrasted sharply with the Caliph Omar sharing his bread and dates with a messenger.
Exalting the caliph and keeping him hidden from view also isolated him from his people and the problems of his empire. As a result, the vizier, or prime minister, assumed more power and became the power behind the throne for the generally weak or disinterested caliphs. Later, mamelukes, slave bodyguards, also gained increasing power, virtually holding the caliph as a prisoner in his own palace.
Symbolic of the great changes going on in Muslim government and culture was the new capital the Abbasids built: Baghdad. Just as Constantinople was the crown jewel of the Christian world, so Baghdad became the same sort of gem for Islam. Its site in Mesopotamia was flanked by the Tigris River and various canals, thus making it easy to defend. Its central location also put the government in closer communication with the empire's far-flung provinces.
The form of the city shows the growing influence of Persian culture at court. Its layout was round in the Persian style, and had three sets of surrounding walls. The middle wall was the tallest, supposedly being 112 feet tall, 164 feet thick at the base, and 46 feet thick on top! Two highways split the city into four quadrants, each with a central market. The central part of the city was dominated by a great mosque and the caliph's palace, which was made of marble with a golden gate and a massive green dome 120 feet in diameter. On top of the dome was a statue of a lancer. According to legend, this statue would point toward parts of the empire where there was trouble. Baghdad was supposed to be inhabited mainly by the caliph, his court, and government officials, but such a capital drew a large population from all over the empire, its population reaching, according to some estimates, as high as one and a half million.
At first, all these expenditures stimulated trade with Western Europe, which helped both the Arab and Frankish empires. Unfortunately, continued heavy spending by the caliphs on expensive palaces, court ritual, adorning such cities such as Baghdad, and patronizing culture and the arts drained the treasury, which in turn wrecked trade with Europe. With trade so disrupted, Vikings in Russia and the Baltic Sea and Arabs in the Mediterranean turned increasingly to raiding and piracy in the ninth and tenth centuries. This brought the Dark Ages to their lowest point in Western Europe.
The period of roughly 750-1000 C.E. is known as a cultural golden age for Islam. During this period, the vigorous desert tribesman from Arabia assimilated the older cultures of the Near East and Mediterranean and infused new life into them.
The basis for such a golden age was the orderliness and resulting prosperity that Arab rule brought the empire from India to the Atlantic. The Arabs flourished as middlemen in a trade that involved silks and porcelains from China, gems and spices from India, slaves and gold from Africa, and slaves and furs from Europe. The stability and range of this trade are seen by a custom of writing letters of credit that would be honored in other cities of the empire. The Arab word for this, sakk, is the origin for our word "check". The Italian city-states would adopt these practices to become the premier centers of business in Europe in later centuries.
There were three main cultures the Arabs assimilated and fused into what we call Muslim civilization: Indian, Persian, and Greek. From India, the Arabs picked up two concepts essential to the evolution of mathematics: the place value digit and zero. Both of these were vital to being able to do much more complex calculations than the old system of using letters represent numbers.
From the Persians, the Arabs inherited the full scope of Near Eastern cultures that extended back to the early days of Sumer. Much of Muslim art and literature was heavily influenced by Persia. The classic One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, with such tales as Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, dates from this period. Poetry also flourished, although it should be noted that the Arabs already had a strong poetic tradition before the conquests. Even such games as Backgammon, Chess, and Polo came to Islamic civilization by way of Persia.
The Greeks also contributed substantially to Muslim culture in the fields of philosophy, math, science, and architecture. Mohammed had said nothing wastes the money of the faithful more than building. However, the Muslims were great builders who owed much of their architectural skill and style to the Greeks. It takes little imagination to see the relationship between the dome of a Moslem mosque and the dome of a Byzantine church such as the Hagia Sophia.
Arab rule and civilization had important results by way of providing economic stability and the spread of civilization. In time, it would pass many of its ideas to India, modern Islamic culture, and even Western Europe where they would be instrumental in the flowering of culture known as the Italian Renaissance.
In the seventy years after the death of Mohammed in 632, the Arab Muslims conquered an empire that stretched from the borders of India in the East to the Atlantic coast of North Africa in the West. In 711, an Arab general, Tariq, was sent into Spain with a force of unruly North African Berbers (from the Roman word for barbarians). Tariq, after whom the Rock of Gibraltar was named (from Jebel Tariq, the Rock of Tariq), decisively defeated the Visigoth king Roderic in 712, after which the Moors, as the Arab-led Berbers were called, overran the rest of the peninsula by 720.
Several factors aided the rapid Muslim conquest of Spain. First, despite the hilly and fragmented nature of Spain's geography, the Romans had succeeded in creating a tightly knit and romanized province (both politically and culturally). Rome's Visigothic successors carried on these traditions, thus giving the Moors a fairly unified state whose government largely fell into their hands after one decisive battle, much as England fell to the Normans after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. A very different, but complementary factor was the de-centralized nature of Roman (and Visigothic) rule, where local nobles who copied Roman culture and showed loyalty to the empire, were allowed to run their cities or regions for Rome. There is evidence the Moors avoided prolonged sieges by confirming these local officials in their positions in return for their loyalty. Therefore, there was often little more than a change of management at the top that many people might not have even noticed.
By the same token, the Moorish conquest and its aftermath to c.800 seem to have been a fairly destructive and chaotic period in Spanish history for several reasons. For one thing, there was some resistance by the king and his nobles who lost their lands to Tariq's followers. Secondly, the Berbers who made up the bulk of the conquering army, were still unruly tribesmen and, for the most part, only superficially Muslim. Thus they often plundered and destroyed at will. Finally, although all Muslims were supposedly equal, the Arab rulers and officers treated the Berbers as second class citizens, taking the best lands and lions' share of the plunder for themselves. This triggered a Berber revolt and period of turmoil (c.740-90).
This anarchy allowed the survival of the Christian states in the north, the most prominent of which would evolve into Portugal and Leon in the west, Castile in the middle, and Aragon in the east. Likewise, the Franks, who had turned back the Moors at Tours in 733, entered northern Spain in 778 under Charlemagne, supposedly to help the city of Sargasso. Although this expedition failed, Charlemagne's son, Louis I established a more permanent Frankish presence and military frontier, the Spanish March, in the northeast. This helped knit strong cultural ties with Catalonia, centered around Barcelona, which has maintained its own Catalan culture and language (a mixture of French and Spanish) and still harbors designs for political independence, much like the Basques do in the north-west.
During this time, Abd al-Rahman, the lone survivor of the Ummayad Dynasty in the East after the Abassid Dynasty's bloody coup, had escaped to Spain and gradually extended his control there (756-88). The Ummayads always had trouble maintaining firm control of their frontier regions, which were remote, turbulent, less wealthy and sparsely populated. This forced them to give more freedom and power to their military governors so they could defend the frontiers against the constant raiding that created a virtual no-man's-land between the Christian and Moorish realms.
However, under Abd al-Rahman III (912-61), al-Hakem II (961-76) and the viziers al-Mansur and his son Abd al-Malik ruling for the weak Hisham II (976-1009), the Ummayads established some degree of control over the frontiers and presided over the height of Muslim power in Spain. In 929, they even took the title of Caliph, spiritual and secular ruler of the Islamic world, most likely in reaction to the Shiite Fatimids in North Africa claiming that title by right of descent from Mohammed's daughter, Fatima. The Ummayads also moved their capital from the old Visigothic center, Toledo, to Cordoba, where they built one of the Islamic world's most splendid mosques and a magnificent palace complex. This palace had 140 Roman columns sent from Constantinople, a menagerie, extensive fishponds, and a room with a large shallow bowl of mercury that, upon shaking, reflected light wildly around the room like lightning in order to impress and terrify visitors. The court was also a flourishing center of culture, especially after the renowned Arab musician, Ziryab was attracted there from the East, bringing with him the latest in fashionable foods, clothing, and personal hygiene, most notably toothpaste. Cordoba was famous for its extensive library with 400,000 books and may have had a population of 100,000, making it one of the most splendid cities in the world at the time.
At this time, a growing number of Christians started coming from Northern Europe to absorb the growing body of knowledge stored in Cordoba, taking back such things as the abacus, astrolabe, Arab math and medicine, and translations of Aristotle. This transmission of Arab learning from Spain would be the basis for the revival of learning in Western Europe in the following centuries.
By 950, the population of Moorish Spain was largely Muslim, since as many as one million Berbers may have migrated to Spain and many Spanish Christians converted to Islam, either out of conviction, the influence of friends and family, or the improved opportunities such conversion might bring. Evidence for these conversions comes from the large number of Arab genealogies, which often show a point where Christian names are replaced by Arabic ones, indicating their conversion to Islam. Another source of converts was slaves, largely Slavs brought from Eastern Europe by Viking traders. These were often converted to Islam and trained as slave bureaucrats or bodyguards (although slaves with much higher status than the average subject). The caliphs in Cordoba had as many as 60,000 such recruits in their army, which largely freed them from dependence on unreliable Berber recruits.
Maintaining such a splendid court, capital, and army required a vibrant economy, which seems to have recovered in general across the Mediterranean after 750 and particularly in Spain after the turmoil of the 700s. Spain's agriculture especially flourished, from such new crops as rice, hard wheat for pasta (which required less water and stored better as a result), sorghum, sugar cane, cotton, oranges, lemons, limes, bananas, pomegranates, figs, watermelon, spinach, and artichokes. Figs, which were a Byzantine monopoly, supposedly reached Spain by smuggling seeds wrapped in a book past the customs agents. Making this "green revolution" possible were extensive irrigation and waterwheel systems copied from Syrian models, the largest being around Valencia. There were reportedly 5000 waterwheels along the Guadalquivir River alone by 1200.
Better agriculture produced a healthier and more numerous population, which allowed the government to lower tax rates, which in turn promoted more innovation, thus creating even better agriculture, and so on. This, of course, allowed and encouraged urban growth and more industries, such as metals, ceramics, glass, silk, ivory carving, paper and book making, woolens, and dying with dyes imported from as far away as India. One indication of Moorish Spain's prosperity at this time was government revenue, which reached 6,500,000 gold dinars a year.
After the death of the powerful vizier, Abd al-Malik, a period of civil wars and strife known as the Fitnah broke out (1008-31). Various claimants to the throne had to rely on Berber mercenaries, who claimed lands and provinces for their services. As a result, a string of caliphs rapidly followed one another, one supposedly reigning for only forty-seven days. In 1013 Cordoba was sacked and its library destroyed by Berber troops who, resenting their inferior status under the Arabs, saw no reason to preserve their culture. While the government disintegrated at the center, Christian princes in the north raided and conquered Muslim lands or extorted tribute from local rulers.
This chaos led to a fragmentation of power into some three dozen city-states known as the Taifa (literally party or factional rulers, although our other meaning for party might also apply). Gradually, the smaller taifas were gobbled up by the larger ones, leaving six main ones: Seville and Granada in the south, Badajoz, Toledo, and Valencia in the middle, and Zaragoza in the northeast. Once affairs settled down and stabilized, there was a rapid revival of the economy and culture. However, rather than being concentrated at one central court, culture was dispersed and localized in a number of taifa states. Taifa rulers' status, much like that of princes in Renaissance Italy, rested as much on which scholars and artists they could attract to their courts as it did on warfare and conquest.
The richest of the taifa states was Seville in the lower valley of the Guadalquivir River, specializing in its olive oil, crimson dye made from a beetle, sugarcane, and musical instruments. Its rulers, al-Mu'tadid (1042-69) and his grandson, al-Mu'tamid, took Seville to the height of its cultural prestige and political power (even recapturing Cordoba from the Christians in 1069), and were themselves accomplished poets.
Meanwhile, the Christian states of Aragon-Catalonia in the east, Castile-Leon in the middle, and Portugal in the west were attacking and extorting tribute from the various taifa states. Such tribute was a major, if not the main, source of revenue for these princes who, in turn, passed it on to their soldiers, nobles, churchmen, and merchants, making it a vital part of their economies. Joining in this were Muslim and Christian mercenaries who would fight for either side, depending on the pay and circumstances. The most famous of these was Rodrigo Diaz, known as El Cid (from the Arabic word for boss). During his very active career, Diaz served Castile (until he was exiled from there), the Muslim ruler of Zaragoza (fighting both Christians and Muslims), and Castile again until another falling out with its ruler. Having built up his own fortune, reputation and following, he fought, plundered, and extorted tribute from both Christians and Muslims until he took Valencia in 1094, where he ruled until his death in 1099.
Just as the Moors had originally come from North Africa and constantly drawn upon its Berber tribesmen for settlers and soldiers, so they drew renewed strength from two more North African groups to stem the tide of Christian conquest. The first of these, the Almoravids, were led by ibn Yasin, who had founded a ribat, a frontier religious community with a strong military character since it must be able to defend itself, and spread Islam through preaching and charity. As ibn Yasin's movement grew, it came to be called the Almoravids (from al-Murabitun, meaning people of the ribat). They founded Marrakech as a base in 1060 and took over Morocco by 1083.
They then turned toward the taifas in Spain which they saw paying tribute to non-Muslims, not recognizing the authority of the caliph in Baghdad, and failing to abide by the Muslim ban on drinking wine. In 1085 when the ruler of Castile took over Toledo, several alarmed taifas called the Almoravids into Spain for help. In 1086, the Almoravids crushed Castile's forces and embarked on a series of campaigns (c.1100-1125) to recover lands recently lost to the Christians. If the Almoravids were intolerant of any breaches of Islamic law by fellow Muslims, they were even less tolerant of Jews and Christians. From this point on we see growing hostility between Christians and Muslims who used to tolerate each other. Add to this aggressive Christian princes desperate to recover the lost revenue from tributes cut off by the Almoravids and a Church reform movement that wanted to channel the military energies of Europe's nobility into campaigns, such as the wars in Spain and the Crusades, to serve its own interests, and one can see a growing strain of intolerance that would plague Spain for centuries.
Arrogance toward other Muslims, growing indulgence in the very luxuries they had originally condemned, and the re-emergence of Berber tribal loyalties led to Almoravide decline after 1125. However, a new group of North African reformers emerged to take their place, the Almohads (from al-Muwahhidun, upholders of divine unity). Founded by Muhammed ibn Tumart, their career seemed to parallel that of the Almoravids, starting with a ribat and winning over the local tribes with their own brand of religious fervor. One major difference between the two movements was that the Almohads believed in a more mystical unity of God in which all of us are immersed. In 1121, ibn Tumart was declared the Mahdi (rightly guided one) by his followers to restore righteousness in the final days before the Last Judgment. At this time, the Christian princes were taking advantage of a new period of turmoil (sometimes referred to as The Second Fitnah) by conquering more lands. In 1146, Alfonso VII of Castile briefly took Cordoba before losing it again. The following year, Alfonso I of Portugal took Lisbon with the help of an English navy, marking the start of a long friendship between those two countries. Consequently, a Sufi leader, ibn Qasi, called in the Almohads who took over the Almoravids and attacked the Christian states, inflicting a crushing defeat on them at Alcaros in 1195. This served as a wakeup call to the Christian states, which united against the Almohads and stopped them decisively at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212.
In the ensuing forty years (1212-52) nearly all the Iberian Peninsula came under the three Christian states of Portugal, Aragon, and Castile. Fernando III of Castile took Cordoba in 1236, and Seville fell to him in 1248 after a grueling siege. In the latter case, he ejected the surviving population and replaced it with Christians. A later elegy on the fall of Seville by the poet ar-Rundi seemed to bemoan the fate of Muslim Spain in general:
Ask Valencia what became of Murcia,
And where is Jativa, or where is Jaen?
Where is Cordoba, the seat of great learning,
And how many scholars of high repute remain there?
And where is Seville, the home of mirthful gatherings
On its great river, cooling and brimful with water?
These cities were the pillars of the country:
Can a building remain when the pillars are missing?
The white wells of ablution are weeping with sorrow,
As a lover does when torn from his beloved:
They weep over the remains of dwellings devoid of Muslims,
Despoiled of Islam, now peopled by infidels!
Those mosques have now been changed into churches,
Where the bells are ringing and crosses are standing.
Even the mihrabs weep, though made of cold stone,
Even the minbars sing dirges, though made of wood!
Oh heedless one, this is fate's warning to you:
If you slumber, Fate always stays awake.
By the mid thirteenth century, Moorish power in Spain was confined to a thin mountainous strip of land in the south that was never more than sixty miles wide. In the 1230s and 1240s, Muhammed ibn Yusuf ibn Nasr established a state centered around the city of Granada, thus giving his name to its ruling dynasty (Nasrid). Granada's strength was undercut by two main factors. First of all, it suffered from a good deal of internal disunity caused by tribal divisions, the ever-troublesome Berber mercenaries from North Africa, and an influx of Muslim refugees from the north. Second, it had a weak economy caused by its poor soil, forcing it to import much of its food, while its trade was largely controlled by Genoese merchants. Also, heavy tribute to the Christian states in the north forced the amirs (rulers) of Granada to charge high taxes, which made them unpopular.
Granada's survival depended on several factors: an excellent army consisting largely of Berber light cavalry, an extensive system of castles every five or six miles along its frontier and as many as 14,000 watchtowers scattered across the countryside, strong support from the Merinid dynasty in North Africa, generally capable rulers until the early 1400s, and some luck, such as the intervention of the Black Death (1349), Castilian involvement in the Hundred Years War in the 1300s, and turmoil both within and between the various Christian states.
Despite its problems, culture flourished in Nasrid Granada, especially in the fields of poetry, architecture, and art. The most remarkable example of this is the Alhambra, probably the best surviving example of a medieval Muslim palace. Much of its beauty lies in its elegant gardens, fountains, and courtyards that provided a serene setting for meditation, reading, or romance. The rooms of the palace itself show Islamic decorative art at its peak, with intricate geometric designs gracing the walls, doorways, and ceilings. According to the poet, Ibn Zamrak:
“...The Sabika hill sits like a garland on Granada's brow,
In which the stars would be entwined,
And the Alhambra (God preserve it)
Is the ruby set above that garland.
Granada is a bride whose headdress is the Sabika, and whose adornments are its flowers.”
In the 1400s, Granada's luck ran out in several ways. Genoese control of its trade tightened, which further aggravated resentment caused by the high tax rates (three times that paid by the people in Castile) to pay tribute to the Christians. The Merinids in North Africa went into decline and could no longer provide Granada their support. Tribal strife within Granada increased while the Christian states of Portugal, Castile, and Aragon resolved their own internal problems. In 1469, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile married, thus uniting Spain into one powerful state when they ascended their respective thrones in 1474. The only missing piece of the puzzle, in their minds, was Granada, which they attacked in 1482. The war boiled down to a series of sieges, as one city after another fell to the Christian artillery. In 1492, after an eight-month siege, Granada fell to Ferdinand and Isabella, who accepted the surrender dressed in Moorish clothes. After nearly 800 years, Spain was again united under Christian rule.
For Spain's Jewish and Moorish subjects, Christian rule was anything but pleasant. Almost immediately, the Jews were expelled from Spain, thus depriving it of some of its most productive population. Despite Ferdinand and Isabella's promise to tolerate their religion, the Muslims were forced to convert to Christianity or leave Spain in 1502. Since emigration was so costly, most converted in name while secretly maintaining their own beliefs and practices. In 1568, Philip II, increasingly concerned about his image as a strict Catholic monarch and support the Moriscoes (Moors supposedly converted to Christianity) might give to the Ottoman Turks and his other Muslim enemies, tried to stamp out their Muslim customs, which triggered a revolt. After brutally suppressing this uprising Philip dispersed the Moriscoes across Spain. However, since they still refused to assimilate into Christian society, Philip III took the final step of expelling some 300,000 Moriscoes from Spain in 1609. Aside from the suffering it caused the Moriscoes, this also substantially hurt Spain, by ridding it of much of its most productive population just when its power and wealth in other quarters were going into decline. This only accelerated Spain's decline into the rank of a second rate power by the mid 1600s.
As discussed previously, many Christian scholars during the Middle Ages came to Spain to absorb its learning, helping trigger a revival of learning in Europe. Very simply, this was the single most important legacy of Moorish Spain to Europe. One of its most significant contributions came from the philosopher, ibn Rushd (known in Europe as Averroes), who devoted his life to reconciling faith and reason (in particular that of Aristotle). The Christian philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, whose book, Summa Theologica, similarly reconciled faith and reason, quoted ibn Rushd no less than 503 times in his works. It was Aquinas' work that laid the foundations for the Renaissance and the birth of Western science in the centuries to come, but in a very real sense, it was the work of an Arab scholar, ibn Rushd, that was the real foundation.
"/>The flow of history sometimes takes some devious twists and turns in its course of events. Such is the case with our own modern science, which received its legacy of Greek science and math not directly from the Greeks, but by way of Islam. Indeed, one of Islam's greatest cultural legacies was the preservation of Greek philosophy, math, and science. Islam and the rise of the Arab empire affected Arab math and science in two ways. First of all, rather than rejecting ancient Greek learning, Muslim culture remained quite open to it. The story goes that the caliph al-Ma'mun had a dream where the Greek philosopher Aristotle assured him that there was no conflict between reason and faith. This revelation led al-Ma'mun to start gathering the works of the Greek philosophers. Second, the rise of their empire directly exposed the Arabs to Byzantine and Persian cultures that still carried on ancient scholarship. Therefore, the Arabs were both willing and able to absorb Greek math and science.
There were three things the Arabs needed to do: get copies of the Greek texts, translate them, and provide funding for these endeavors. As far as getting the books was concerned, many of them had fallen into Arab hands through conquest. However, there were still many texts that they needed. Sometimes they would negotiate with the Byzantines for copies of these books. At other times, raids into Byzantine territory would actually be aimed at seizing such works along with more material plunder.
Once these works had been gathered, the Arabs needed to translate them into Arabic. Luckily, Islam attracted a large number of converts, among them many men educated in Greek. However, since the Koran at that time was written only in Arabic, new converts had to learn that tongue in order to read Islam's holy book. As a result, Islam's appeal created a number of brilliant translators.
Funding largely came from the caliphs themselves. Caliph Ma'mun founded a palace learning center known as the House of Wisdom where many of the most brilliant minds of the age were gathered to translate Greek works and then add to this knowledge. The budget for the House of Wisdom was 500 gold dinars a month, with fifty-seven translators working there at one point. The translator, Hunayn, was supposedly paid the weight of his translated books in gold.
All this led to a level of scholarship that was unsurpassed in its day. Since books were hand written, and thus prone to a growing number of mistakes as each generation of books was copied, the translators would gather as many copies of a particular book as they could. They would then compare these texts to see which was probably closest version to the original text. Just compiling such critical texts alone was one of Islam's greatest legacies to us.
Starting with this excellent base of Greek knowledge, the Arabs made their own advances in the fields of Mathematics, medicine, and physics. Since Islam also encompassed part of India, its math was assimilated into the larger body of mathematical knowledge and passed on to us. The Indians came up with two very valuable concepts that simplify math for us immensely: place value digits and zero. As brilliant as Greek math was, it did not have these two tools, thus severely limiting what it could accomplish, since any math using Roman numerals is extremely cumbersome. Because of such limits, Greek math excelled in geometry, which could function better than other branches of math without place value digits and zero. Even proofs in non-geometric math were done with the brilliant use of geometric figures to illustrate problems.
The Muslims embraced Greek geometry wholeheartedly. One need only look at Islamic art and architecture to see their fascination with various geometric shapes and the ingenious things they could do with them. The religious ban on portraying the human figure certainly spurred Muslim art to excel in this direction.
However, the Muslims did not just slavishly copy the Greeks. Rather, they made their own original contributions in the fields of mathematics, medicine, and physics. Equipped with the Indian place value digits and zero, they developed trigonometry and first clearly defined sine, cosine, and cotangent functions. They further developed algebra (from the Arabic, al-jabr, which means "the missing"). The mathematician al-Khwarizmi wrote the first textbook on algebra and was probably the first to solve quadratic equations with two variables. In future centuries his textbook would be the basis for European algebra. It has been said that science is always pushing against the frontiers of math. If that is true, then the Muslim mathematicians certainly allowed those frontiers to be expanded considerably.
As advanced as Islamic math and science were for their day, we should keep in mind that scientists then were not specialized in the way scientists today are. For example, the translator Qusta ibn Luqa wrote on such topics as politics, medicine, insomnia, paralysis, fans, causes of the wind, logic, dyes, nutrition, geometry, astronomy, etc.
The Arabs also excelled in medicine. The great physician al-Rhazi, or, as he was known in Europe, Rhazes (865-923), correctly differentiated between the symptoms of small pox and measles and showed that diagnosis on the basis of examining a patient's urine was not very useful. He also used animal gut for suturing wounds and developed mercurial ointments for treating skin and eye diseases. Keep in mind that the accomplishments of Muslim science were done without the microscope. Not until that was invented in the 1600's would scientists be able to see microbes and understand the real causes of most diseases. This makes Muslim medicine seem all the more remarkable.
Al-Rhazi also knew how to use psychological treatment. It is said that he was once commissioned to cure a caliph stricken with paralysis. He took the caliph to a cave and threatened him with a knife. The enraged caliph got up and chased al-Rhazi out of the cave and into exile. Al-Rhazi later sent a letter explaining that was the treatment, and the caliph subsequently rewarded the physician.
Muslim scientists also made advances in physics and optics, anticipating later European theories on specific gravity and developing formulae for figuring specific and absolute weights of objects. They calculated the size of the earth to an unprecedented degree of accuracy, though they still followed Aristotle in their belief in the geocentric (earth centered) universe. Muslim scientists disproved the Greek theory that light emanates from the eye to the object perceived. Ibn al-Hathan showed this theory was wrong by studying how light is refracted through water.
Muslim civilization peaked around 1000 C.E. But, as with other civilizations, a higher level of culture tended to make the Arabs soft and open to attack. Also, Arab civilization was also running into problems of internal decay that triggered two waves of invasions. First came the Seljuk Turks out of Central Asia. Although they did adopt Islam & restore some of its unity, the arrival of these Asiatic nomads initially had a somewhat disruptive effect on Arab culture and its attitudes toward the outside world. Even more upsetting in this respect were the Crusades, wars of conquest waged by Christians from Western Europe to recover Palestine for their faith. Unlike the Turks, the Crusaders were not about to convert to Islam and were much more hostile toward and destructive of Arab civilization, especially in the early years of the crusading era. Finally, the most destructive invasions of all came from the Mongol onslaught in the 1200's. The wholesale massacres of populations and destruction of cities that they committed dealt a terrible blow to Islamic civilization. These invasions were such a shock to the Arabs that Muslim culture became much more resistant to new ideas and foreign influences, making it more conservative and inward looking.
This helped cause a religious reaction against putting too much emphasis on science and reason and too little emphasis on faith. Except for the House of Wisdom, science and learning were largely supported by religious institutions and thus subject to their conservative influences. Also there arose a mystical movement known as Sufism, which discredited learning and reason, believing in a more direct and mystical experience with God. From this point on, Muslim science and math started to stagnate.
However, Islamic science spread to Western Europe and survived. By the 1100's, translations of Arabic texts were making their way from Muslim Spain into European universities. These Arab texts stimulated the growth of Western science, which is the dominant scientific tradition today. We should never lose sight of the fact that our own science today rests squarely on the accomplishments of Muslim science, which, as a result, is still very much alive.
Although Islam experienced a golden age under the Abbasids, the empire gradually fell apart as the Arabs became less warlike and one province after another broke away. Weak caliphs under the power of mameluke bodyguards, the size of the empire, and the disaffection of Shiites and various ethnic groups all led to this disintegration. Fortunately for Islam, a new people came in to revitalize it: the Seljuk Turks.
Various Turkish tribes had been known for centuries from the borders of China to the borders of Islam. Fortunately, the Persians and the Arabs had held them in check. Instead of overwhelming the empire, these Turkish tribesmen, infiltrated it, coming in as mamelukes and mercenaries whom the Arabs relied on more and more, much as the Romans had relied on Germanic troops. An even more interesting parallel is between the most successful Germanic tribe in Europe, the Franks, and the most successful Turkish tribe in Islam, the Seljuks.
The Seljuk Turks, named after a semi-legendary leader and founder, were the first Turkish tribe to convert to Sunnite Islam, thus gaining the favor of the civilized population in much the same way as the Franks' conversion to Catholic Christianity had made them more popular with their subjects. The Seljuks also came to the aid of Islam's spiritual leader, the caliph, who was under the thumb of a Shiite dynasty known as the Buwayids, much like the Franks under Pepin and Charlemagne had protected the Pope from similar difficulties. And in each case, the spiritual leader granted his protectors the title and responsibility for defending the faith. In the case of the Seljuks, their leader Toghril was made king, or sultan, of the East and West in 1058 with the job of restoring the political and religious unity of Islam.
Because of their dual mission to unify Islam and expand its frontiers, the Seljuks turned against the Shiite dynasty of the Fatimids in Egypt and Palestine and also against the Christian Byzantine Empire (much as Charlemagne had waged campaigns for Christianity in Spain and Saxony). One reason for these wars was to divert the ever-growing number of wild Turkish tribesmen away from destroying fellow Muslims and towards waging the holy war outside its borders. Because of their ongoing decline, the Byzantines were the ideal target, although the Shiite Fatimid dynasty in Egypt was also a useful target. In each case Seljuk victories triggered a backlash.
In 1071, the Seljuks and Byzantines met in the Battle of Manzikert. The result was a resounding victory for the Seljuks who then proceeded to take over most of the Byzantine heartland in Asia Minor. Their military, political, and religious victory was so complete there that we still call that land Turkey, even though it is a long way from the Turks' original homeland in Central Asia. The Byzantine emperor, Alexius I, called for mercenaries from Western Europe to help him reclaim Asia Minor from the Turks. Instead, he got the First Crusade, which took much of Syria, and Palestine for the Christian faith.
At the same time, the Seljuks were expanding against the Shiite Fatimids, which brought them up against a fanatical Shiite sect known as the Assassins. This group was centered in a mountain fortress and led by Hassan-ibn-al-Sabah, also known as the Old Man of the Mountain. Determined to stop the advance of the Sunnite Seljuks, he launched a campaign of political terror and murder that has become legendary. Hassan's followers operated under the influence of the drug, hashish, from which we get the word assassin. They showed remarkable determination and ability to infiltrate the most tightly guarded palaces and reach their intended victims with their poison daggers. Among those victims was the Seljuk sultan, Malik Shah, in 1092. His death combined with the First Crusade and the Seljuk custom of dividing their realm between all their sons (much as the Franks had done), created enough turmoil in the Seljuk realm to allow the Crusaders to take Palestine. Despite these setbacks, the Seljuks did manage to restore their power in Asia Minor. Their state, the Sultanate of Rum (Rome), thrived throughout the 1100's. However, much like the Franks with the Vikings, The Seljuks had their own nemesis: the Mongols.
In the early 1200's, a leader known to us as Genghis Khan united the various Mongol tribes in Central Asia into the most fearsome war machine known to history up to that point. Striking at incredible speed (up to 100 miles a day), they burned a path of destruction from China to Europe and the Muslim world unsurpassed until the wars of the twentieth century. Cities daring to resist them were methodically destroyed and their populations put to the sword. The defiance of the Assassins brought the wrath of the Mongols upon the Muslim world. In 1245, the Mongols annihilated the Seljuk army at Kose Dagh. In 1258, they sacked Baghdad and killed the last in the line of Abbasid caliphs. The Egyptian sultan Baibars finally halted the Mongols’ relentless advance in 1260. The Mongols eventually settled down and even adopted Islam in the Muslim areas where they ruled. However their rampage had far reaching effects on the Turks and the Islamic world.
On the frontier between the Turks and the Byzantines were various warlike groups, know as ghazis (holy warriors) for their efforts against the Christians. While the Sultanate of Rum was intact, these bands were largely held in check, since their wild ways were often as disruptive to the Seljuks as to the Byzantines. With the shattering defeat at Kose Dagh, however, these ghazi bands were freed to raid at will. Among them was a leader of particular renown, Osman, who gave his name to the greatest of the Turkish states, the Ottomans.
Osman's leadership in battle attracted many Turkish warriors to his standard and made him the most successful of the ghazi states attacking the Byzantines and neighboring Muslims. His successes brought conquests and plunder which attracted more ghazis to his standard. This would trigger more campaigns against the Ottomans' enemies, which would bring more conquests and so on.
There were various reasons for the Ottomans' success. First of all, their army was the best in Europe and the Middle East. In addition to swarms of tough Turkish cavalry, the sultans also had the age's best artillery and its most dreaded regiment: the Janissaries. These were originally young boys taken from the homes of the sultan's Christian subjects and raised in his service as devout Muslims. Technically, the Janissaries were the sultan's slaves, but slaves with very high status. Trained to a peak of high efficiency, they ruled the battlefields from Persia to Eastern Europe.
Ottoman government was also well organized. Much of the bureaucracy was a class called ghulams, also originally Christian boys taken from their homes by the sultan's men. Like their counterparts in the army, the Janissaries, they were also known for their loyalty and efficiency. At the top of the government was the sultan, who had received "on the job" training as a boy, ruling provinces with the aid of experienced ministers. Upon the death of a sultan, his sons would typically fight for the throne. Such struggles were usually to the death, but, along with the training of the sultan's sons, did tend to produce the toughest and ablest rulers.
The Ottoman sultans also emphasized their religious position to claim leadership of Islam. For one thing, they were ghazis fighting for the faith. Later, they also controlled the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, as well as the last shadowy claimants to the Abbasid caliphate.
However, for a number of years, the Ottomans were seen as just one of a number of ghazis. Then, in 1345, they took the opportunity to intervene in a Byzantine civil war in Europe. And once they had crossed into Europe, they were there to stay.
By 1400, the Ottomans had subdued the other ghazis in Asia Minor and were poised to take that long sought prize of the faithful, Constantinople. Then disaster struck when the last major eruption of nomadic tribes from Central Asia burst upon the scene. Their leader was Timur the Lame, whose path of conquest and destruction ranged from India to Russia. In 1402, he destroyed the Ottoman army, captured the sultan, Bayezid, and dragged him around in a cage for the rest of his days as a monument to his triumphs.
Timur's intentions were to loot and plunder, not to build a lasting state. As a result, his empire disintegrated upon his death, and the Ottomans were able to reassert their control in Asia Minor and Europe. By 1453, they were at the walls of Constantinople, finally ready to claim that prize.
The siege of Constantinople was the last heroic stand of the Byzantine Empire in one of the most desperate and hard fought struggles in history. It saw the destructive power of the newly emerging gunpowder technology being used alongside old style siege towers, galleys, and crossbows. In the end, the defenders were overwhelmed, and the Byzantine (and Roman) Empire passed into history.
For Europe, the fall of Constantinople meant that the old trade routes to the Far East were shut off by the Turks and new ones had to be found. This helped spur Portuguese exploration around Africa and Columbus' famous voyage to America. The fall of Constantinople also caused a number of Greek scholars to flee to Italy where they helped to stimulate the Italian Renaissance, one of the great cultural periods in history. In that way the Byzantines still lived on. For Islam, the victory meant that the Ottoman Turks had arrived as a major power. For the next century and a half, their very name would terrorize the Christian world.
The century from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the death of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566 saw the Ottoman juggernaut roll to an almost unbroken series of conquests against both Christians and neighboring Muslim states. Mohammed II (1451-1481), the conqueror of Constantinople, continued his path of conquest, bringing the Balkan Peninsula south of the Danube River under his control.
The sultan Selim I (1512-1520), known to history as "the Grim", concentrated on his Muslim neighbors. To the east was a revived Persia under the Shiite dynasty of the Safavids. In 1514, Turks and Persians met on the field of Chaldiran. Turkish superiority in artillery and firearms proved decisive as the Persian cavalry were swept away by the Ottomans' massed gunfire. However, the Persians, learning from this, changed their strategy, laying waste the land before the Ottoman advance so the invaders would have nothing to sustain them. This proved effective, and a stable, if uneasy, frontier emerged between the Persian and Turkish realms.
Selim was more successful against the Mameluke dynasty centered in Egypt. At the battle of Dabik (1516), the Ottomans once again used their firepower with terrible effect and, this time, with more lasting results. The unpopular Mameluke rule quickly collapsed and Ottoman rule extended into Palestine, Egypt, and Arabia, thus giving the sultan control of Islam's holiest places.
The reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-66) was the high point of Ottoman expansion. His energies were directed mainly in the holy war against the Christians, driving northwest into Europe and due west across the Mediterranean. In 1526, at the battle of Mohacs, Turkish firepower proved its superiority once again, this time against the Hungarians, who left their king and most of their nobility dead on the field. The road to Vienna lay open, and it was here that the Ottoman advance into Europe ground to a halt. The siege of Vienna was the Turks' first major defeat. In its wake, a new frontier emerged between Christian and Muslim worlds, guarded by a complex and expensive series of fortresses on each side.
The Ottoman drive across the Mediterranean also was eventually stopped in two desperate clashes between Turks and Christians. The first was a titanic siege of the Knights of St. John on the strategic island of Malta in 1566. After four months of bitter fighting, a Christian relief force drove the battered Turkish army away. An equally desperate battle was fought at sea at Lepanto in 1571. The fact that there was no place for soldiers to retreat in a sea battle made the hand to hand fighting especially ferocious. After this, the Ottomans' fleet was severely crippled, their tide of victories and conquests pretty much ceased, and their empire entered a long period of steady decline.
In the late 1500's, the Ottoman Empire started going into decline as a result of both internal and external factors. Internally, the Ottomans suffered from three major problems. First of all, after Suleiman's death, the sultans were less capable and energetic, being raised and spending their time increasingly at court with all its harem intrigues. Without the sultan's strong hand at the helm, corruption became a major problem. Second, the Janissaries became a virtual hereditary caste, demanding increasingly more pay while they also grew soft and lazy. Finally, the size of the empire created problems. The sultan was expected to lead the army, setting out with it each spring from the capital. This meant that as the frontiers expanded, it took the army longer to reach the enemy, thus shortening the campaign season to the point where it was very hard to conquer new lands. This especially hurt the Turks at the siege of Vienna in 1529. They did not reach the city until September, and winter set in early with disastrous results for the troops not used to European winters. Because of these factors, the Turks made few new conquests after 1565 and, as a result, gained no significant new revenues and plunder.
Two external economic factors also hurt the Ottomans, both of them stemming from the Age of Exploration then taking place. For one thing, the Portuguese circumnavigation around Africa to India had opened a new spice route to Asia. Therefore, the Turks lost their monopoly on the spice trade going to Europe, which cost them a good deal of much needed money. The other problem came from the Spanish Empire in the Americas that was bringing a huge influx of gold and silver to Europe. This triggered rampant inflation during the 1500’s, which worked its way eastward into the Ottoman Empire. This inflation, combined with the other factors hurting the empire's revenues, led to serious economic decline.
That economic decline hurt the empire militarily in two ways that fed back into further economic decline. First of all, after 1600, the Turks lost their technological and military edge. While European armies were constantly upgrading their artillery and firearms, the Ottomans let theirs stagnate, thus putting them at a disadvantage against their enemies. Also, as Turkish conquests ground to a halt, a stable frontier guarded by expensive fortresses evolved, which drained the empire of even more money. At the same time, Europeans were reviving the Roman concept of strict drill and discipline to create much more efficient and reliable armies. However, the Turks failed to adapt these techniques and, as a result, found themselves increasingly at a disadvantage when fighting against European armies.
Second, the tough feudal Turkish cavalry that had been the backbone of the army in the mobile wars of conquest were less useful to the sultans who now needed professional garrisons to run the frontier forts. Without wars of conquest to occupy and enrich them, they became restless and troublesome to the central government. That combined with the problems from the Janissaries, caused revolts that further disrupted the empire. (Eventually, the Janissaries would become so troublesome that one sultan would have to surround and massacre them.) Both of these military problems, the failure to keep up with the West and the increasingly rebellious army, fed back into the empire's economic decline, which further aggravated its military problems.
The following centuries saw the Ottoman Empire suffer from steady political and economic decay. By the 1800's, its decrepit condition would earn it the uncomplimentary title of "The Sick Man of Europe". Finally, the shock of World War I would destroy the Ottoman Empire once and for all, breaking it into what have become such Middle Eastern nations as Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel.
There was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred?...There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day...Darkness was hidden by darkness...Whence was [the universe] produced? Whence is this creation?...The one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows---or perhaps he does not know.— Vedic hymn
It is hard to imagine that the same warrior society that took over the Indus River civilization could also compose such philosophical speculations as those quoted above. However, it was these Aryans who would create the core and essence of Indian civilization while they themselves were being transformed by elements of the older Indus River culture they had replaced. Several things distinguished early Aryan society, as seen in the series of four sacred texts, the Vedas, our main source of information on this period. For one thing, they were a warlike society of nomadic herders closely associated with the Persians until the two peoples parted ways around 2000 B.C.E. They were organized into tribes ruled by a king and a priest. The Aryans measured their wealth in cattle, which was a standard unit of trade in the absence of coinage and the primary cause of wars and raids. Even today, the cow is still highly revered in Indian society. Aryan society was strongly patriarchal, giving women an inferior status. However, women probably had a say in who they married, could attend public ceremonies, and could remarry when widowed. Some women even attended the priestly schools, composed hymns, and were considered sages.
Another important aspect of Aryan society was its religion. The Aryans worshipped thirty-three gods in human form who were divided into three groups corresponding to the heavens, the sky, and earth. The most frequently summoned god was Indra, a god of war carrying a lightning bold who ate, drank and lived with gusto. This reflected a similar joy of living in Aryan society that enjoyed music, dancing, gambling, drinking, and chariot racing. Possibly the most distinguishing feature of Aryan society was its powerful priesthood, the Brahmins. Although the Aryans had no temples or images of their gods, just open air sacrificial altars, their priests were the only ones who could perform the highly ritualized and elaborate sacrifices that their religion demanded.
Around 1000 B.C.E. the Aryans started expanding into the Ganges River valley to the east. Several factors aided them in this. One of these was the use of iron that could cut through the Ganges Valley's thick rain forests and clear the way for settlement. A second factor was the cultivation of rice that has the highest calorie content of any grain, thus supporting large populations. These combined with the renewal of sea borne trade with Mesopotamia in the 700's and the introduction of coinage by the Persians two centuries later led to the creation of powerful kingdoms in the Ganges Valley characterized by three features. First they were heavily populated, thanks to the rice agriculture. Secondly, they were highly centralized under the rule of powerful kings who were needed to supervise the irrigation systems vital to the cultivation of rice. And third, there was a thriving urban culture with a large middle class involved in trade.
These new cities and kingdoms caused the center of power to shift from the more sparsely populated Indus River Valley in the West to the heavily populated kingdoms and cities of the Ganges. However, in addition to this shift in the center of power, the structure of Aryan society was being radically changed. Kings assumed more power for directing the irrigation projects and their wars against neighboring non-Aryans. Also as many Aryans settled from herding cattle into rice agriculture or moved into the growing cities, they had more daily contact with the non-Aryan population. The more complex society that was evolving led to mounting concerns among ordinary Aryans about losing their superior status over the non-Aryans.
Meanwhile, as time passed, the Vedas, which had been composed in an archaic form of Sanskrit, became increasingly vague in their meaning to the majority of people. This left the Brahmins as the only ones who could read and interpret them and properly perform the elaborate rituals needed to influence the gods. And that gave the Brahmins an even higher status in society. These changes in society, along with the probable resurgence of many pre-Aryan beliefs, triggered two of the most important developments in Indian history: the caste system and India's unique religious and philosophical ideas.
Before their entry into India, Aryan society was divided into three loosely defined classes: nobles (who chose king), Brahmins (priests), and the ordinary tribesmen who tended cattle. At that time, there were no restrictions on diet, intermarriage, or occupations. When they took over the Indus River Valley, the original inhabitants, whom the Aryans had complete contempt for, were lumped together into one class. At first, this simple arrangement had worked for the Aryans until the changes mentioned above made them more defensive about their traditional place in Indian society. The result was a rigid stratification of Indian society known as the caste system. Simply put, a caste is a social group often sharing the same occupation and among whose members intermarriage and dining can exclusively take place.
Justification for the caste system came from commentaries on the Vedas known as the Brahmanas which defined four divinely ordained castes corresponding to various parts of the body: the Brahmins (mouths), Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers) who were the arms, Vaisyas (productive members) who were the thighs, and the Sudras (feet) who performed the humblest tasks, especially those carrying some sort of religious stigma. The first three castes were composed of Aryans, while the non-Aryan Sudras were, according to the Brahmanas, "fit to be beaten" and could be "slain at will".
Caste defined the boundaries of an Indian's social world, outside of which he could do little. As Indian society became more complex, literally thousands of castes evolved. Newcomers, such as the British, would be excluded from other castes and thus became castes of their own. The caste system fragmented Indian society in such a way as to make political unification very difficult. As a result, the state has had less power and influence over India's history than its counterparts in other societies. Instead, the more unifying forces in Indian history have come from its religious and philosophical ideas.
As we have seen, the archaic Sanskrit used in the Vedas made the Brahmins the only ones who could interpret them and perform the intricate sacrifices they required. As a result, they claimed and assumed a higher place than ever in society. In fact, their commentaries on the Vedas, the Brahmanas, played down the power of the Vedic gods and exalted their own since their sacrifices could manipulate the powers of the universe. This exalted status plus the growing vagueness of the Vedas caused many Brahmins to engage in some wild speculations on the meanings of these texts and the rites they performed.
Not everyone blindly accepted the Brahmins' claims and the value of the rigid rituals they performed. Instead, a number Indians went to the forest to live as ascetics who, much like the early Christian hermits centuries later, performed various feats such as walking on nails or sitting close to fires in the hot sun to mortify the flesh and thus gain enlightenment. Many of these hermits were nobles whose status had been cut down by the rising power of kings. Whereas in most cultures such nobles would stage a rebellion, in India it was common for such men to seek higher knowledge as hermits. Taking a cue from the Brahmins themselves, these hermits also engaged in philosophical speculations. From these speculations came another series of treatises, the Upanishads. Although these works were unsystematic and varied greatly in their conclusions, they all shared a common belief in a more mystical and personal religious experience.
The Upanishads introduced several key concepts of Indian philosophy. One was a vague universal and spiritual entity known as Brahman . Although the various gods still existed, they were mere manifestations of Brahman. This would be a key unifying factor in Hinduism that worshipped thousands of gods, all of which were seen as aspects of the one spirit, Brahman. Another important idea was reincarnation, the belief that we are reborn over and over again in forms that reflect our karma, the sum total of our good and bad deeds. The better our karma, the higher the form of life we are reborn as. Finally, there is dharma, the duty that we are obligated to carry out in our present station in life. If we carry out our dharma, our karma is improved so we can be reborn in a higher form. Ironically, this belief in karma and dharma both justified the rigid caste system of India and offered people the hope of rising up from their present station in life to a better one in the next.
Our ultimate goal, according to the Upanishads, is not the old Aryan goal of prosperity and good health in this life. Rather it is to shed our karma and ego to become one with Brahman like a river flowing into and merging with the sea. Since these somewhat obscure and esoteric ideas mainly appealed to intellectuals, the Brahmins were willing to accept them as long as people also paid them honor. As fragmented as India might be politically and socially, these ideas of Brahman, reincarnation, karma, and dharma would provide a unifying thread between India's main religions, in particular Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.
The radical departure that the Upanishads took from the traditional Brahminic religion opened the way for new beliefs that totally rejected the authority of the Brahmins. Two of these were Jainism and Buddhism. Jainism was founded around 500 B.C.E. by a prince Vardhamana known also as Mahavira ("great hero") and Jina ("conqueror"), which gave Jainism its name. After twelve years of severe austerity and meditation as a hermit, he attained enlightenment and spent the rest of his life sharing his insights with others. Mahavira accepted the Upanishads' principles of Brahman, karma, and reincarnation.
However, rather than seeing karma as an abstract principle, he viewed is as a material substance that clings to us and weighs us down. Thus our goal is to cleanse our souls of karma so we can cease to be reborn. Since nearly every act produces impurities, the ideal life is to retire to a monastery and do nothing. Even rocks and streams were seen to have souls that it is terrible to kill, causing some Jain monks to sweep paths before them and wear masks to avoid inadvertently killing the tiniest life forms. Since even plowing the land can turn over the soil and kill worms, agriculture was frowned upon, causing many Jains to become merchants. The ideal death was seen to be starving oneself, which Mahavira himself did at the age of 72. Jainism was fairly popular since it made karma more concrete and understandable while offering hope for a better existence to its followers.
Buddhism was founded by Siddhartha Gautama who, like Mahavira, at first led the sheltered and privileged life of a prince. A prophecy supposedly foretold that Siddhartha would either unify all India or spiritually redeem the world. His father, wanting him to be a great king, tried to shelter him from seeing any of the troubles of the world. However, this strategy backfired, because when Siddhartha finally did come across humans suffering, he was so shocked that he ran off to live the life of an ascetic. After six years of this severe lifestyle, he left the forest and found enlightenment while sitting under a fig tree. From this he became known as the Buddha (Enlightened one). The basic ideas of Buddhism are found in its four noble truths.
Life is sorrow.
Sorrow arises from craving (especially for individual fulfillment).
The stopping of sorrow is the complete stopping of craving.
A noble eightfold path exists to stop sorrow and which we should follow in order:
Right belief or knowledge—renouncing worldly things & dedication to humanitarianism;
Right resolve—one should aspire to the achievement of Nirvana;
Right speech—lets one serve as a model for others to follow;
Right conduct—acknowledges life's sanctity thorugh chastity, sobriety, & non-violence;
Right livelihood—life of service, not selfishness, preferably monk;
Right effort—helps one keep his inner self-free of evil thoughts;
Right mindfulness—constant awareness that craving is pointless; and
Right meditation—lets one be selfless in thought & acts.
Eventually, following this noble eightfold path should break the chain of reincarnations, and lead to the attainment of Nirvana, a state of bliss where one's ego will melt away and merge with Brahma like a drop of water is lost in the ocean. In its purest form, known as Hinyana ("smaller vehicle"), Buddhism technically is not a religion with rites for such things as birth and death or a developed theology. Instead, one must rely on his or her own efforts to attain Nirvana. However, later versions known as Mahayana ("Greater vehicle") more closely resembled more traditional religions with various rites and reliance on Buddha for salvation.
Buddhism bore some striking similarities to Christianity. Both were egalitarian, treating women and children as equally important as men. Both had a savior god bridging the gap between humans and god. The main goal in each religion was salvation of the soul, not earthly wealth or power. Each of them demanded ethical behavior and had networks of monasteries to spread their respective messages. Both also made room for the invocation of lesser beings. In the case of Christianity, those beings were saints and angels. In Buddhism they were the bodhisattvas, people who were on the verge of attaining Nirvana, but chose to stay behind to help others in their spiritual efforts. One major difference between the two was that Christianity was an historical religion with certain defining events, such as the Exodus, Christ's life, etc. In contrast, Buddhism was cyclical in nature, believing that the universe goes through an endless number of cycles of creation and destruction.
Although Buddhism would spread its influence across south and East Asia, it would nearly die out in its homeland of India. This was because the Brahmins would adopt many of Buddhism's ideas and fuse them with their own practices and the pre-Aryan polytheistic beliefs of the people. The result would be that unique synthesis known as Hinduism, a religion that would unify India by taking its many cults and gods and interpret them all as manifestations of the same religion
As we have seen, various factors such as climate, topography, and disease made India very difficult to unify. By the same token, we have also seen how India's religious and philosophical ideas were flexible enough to act as a unifying influence. After 400 BC, the combination of these opposing influences has allowed a succession of states to unify India briefly, only to come apart again.
The first empire of note was that of the Mauryan Dynasty. Its founder, Chandragupta Maurya (325-299 B.C.E.), was the ruler of Maghada, then the largest state in northeastern India. By 315 B.C.E. he had expanded into the Punjab and Indus River valley where he clashed with the Macedonian general, Seleucus. Being preoccupied with the struggles for power following Alexander the Great's death, Seleucus surrendered his Indian lands to Chandragupta in return for 500 war elephants. (Those elephants would play a crucial role in the battle of Ipsus and the subsequent emergence of the Hellenistic Kingdoms).
Chandragupta and his son, Bindusara, extended Mauryan rule over northern India and the Deccan to the south. Their rule was strict, reputedly having an army of some 700,000 men and 9,000 elephants. In the words of the Arthashastra, the political manual written for Chandragupta, "Government is the science of punishment." On the other hand, also following the Arthashastra's advice that a king's good is what is good for his subjects, Chandragupta and Bindusara built and maintained roads, bridges, and irrigation systems.
Bindusara's successor and one of the most remarkable rulers in history was Ashoka (269-232 B.C.E). A bloody struggle for the throne and the even bloodier conquest of Kalinga in 261 B.C.E upset him so much that he embraced the Buddhist concept of non-violence and renounced war, gave up the hunt, and outlawed the killing of any animals not used or eaten. Throughout his reign, Ashoka continued to rule in the spirit of Buddhism (which he may also have seen as a unifying force for his empire). He sent out officers of righteousness to ensure the just rule by his officials. He codified Buddhist laws and principles. And he worked for the welfare of his subjects by digging wells, building rest houses and planting banyan trees for shade, medicinal herbs, and mango trees. Unfortunately, Ashoka’s policy of non-violence also undermined his army's efficiency, which allowed revolts, invasions, and the fall of the Mauryan Empire by 185 B.C.E.
The fall of the Mauryan Empire allowed the expansion of the Greek kingdom of Bactria (modern Afghanistan) into northwestern India around 150 B.C.E. The Greeks probably influenced Indian culture in a number of fields: medicine, astrology, drama, and sculpture. There is even a philosophical work, The Menander, where the Greco-Bactrian king, Menander has a dialogue with a Buddhist monk.
From about 50 B.C.E to 78 C.E. a succession of Asiatic tribes pushed into northwestern India. One of these tribes, the Kushans, united the others behind them and established a kingdom that encompassed northern India from the Indus to the Ganges valleys and possibly to the Himalayas and the Silk Road. This period also saw the rising influence of a middle class of merchants and craftsmen who took full advantage of their central position for trade. Therefore, the Kushan capital of Purashapura in the rich province of Gandhara became the hub of a lively trade between Rome, India, and China. Indian merchants especially profited from their middleman role of getting spices from South-east Asia and silk from China for Roman traders. The large number of Roman coins circulating in India at this time indicates how extensive and profitable this trade was for India and likewise how costly it was for Rome, being one of the causes for its decline and fall.
India exported and imported more than material goods at this time. Buddhism was especially popular with Indian merchants, since it was one occupation that could stay clear of killing people, animals, and even small creatures in the soil. As a result, merchants spread Buddhism to Southeast and Central Asia and as far away as China. Indian culture was so influential in the emergence of civilization and kingdoms in Southeast Asia that this region along with India has been referred to as Greater India. Buddhist ideas may have even influenced such religious groups in the Roman Empire as the Manicheans, Gnostics, and Neo-Platonists.
By the same token, foreign ideas also influenced India. Greek influence was seen in the Gandharan style of sculpture, which portrayed Buddha with curly hair and made its way as Far East as China. Also the Kushan rulers adopted the Chinese title "Son of Heaven." Even more striking was the influence Christianity might have had on Buddhism, in particular the idea of Maitreya Buddha, the suffering savior who would redeem us through his own pain.
Although Buddha himself had resisted any attempts to deify him, such attempts started soon after his death. By the first century C.E., this had created a split in Buddhism. The old belief of each of us being responsible for our own salvation was known as Hinyana Buddhism ("the Lesser Vehicle") since we each must strive for salvation on our own. The newer belief was called Mahayana ("the Greater Vehicle") since Buddha saves all of us together. One spin-off of this idea was that of the Bodhisattvas, people who have earned Nirvana but have chosen to stay behind in this world to help other people attain Nirvana. Over time, various branches of Mahayana would emerge, some having innumerable Bodhisattvas inhabiting complex hierarchies of heavens as stages leading to Nirvana. Hinyana Buddhism would be the dominant form of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Burma, and Southeast Asia. Mahayana would prevail in India, Central Asia, Tibet, China, and Japan.
The Kushan realm remained a center of culture until its demise in the late third century at the hands of a new power rising in the West, the Sassanid Persians. However, a new native dynasty, the Guptas, emerged in the fourth century to take the Kushans' place. Its founder, Chandra Gupta I (319-335), although from an obscure family in Bihar in the northeast, made a favorable marriage that helped him control the Ganges River Valley by his death. His successors eventually brought Northern India under their rule while states in the Deccan and Sri Lanka agreed to become the Guptas' vassals.
The Gupta period is seen as a golden age of Indian culture. Indian astronomers came up with the idea of a round earth rotating on its axis. Indian mathematicians developed such concepts as Pi, negative numbers, a decimal system with place value digits, zero, and quadratic equations. Unfortunately, these ideas remained the preserve of a select group of individuals. Not until the Arabs came into India and adapted these concepts for their own uses were they made generally available. This is reflected by our still referring to them as Arabic numerals. In literature, India's two greatest epic poems, the Ramayana, and Mahabharata, which itself contains possibly the most revered work in Indian literature, the Bhagavad Gita, were written down in their final forms. India's greatest playwright, Kalidasa, flourished at this time. Unlike Greek drama, the point of Indian drama is to delight the audience and leave it with a serene and peaceful feeling. Both Buddhist and the emerging Hindu art and architecture also thrived. Once again, Greek influence can still be seen in the simplicity and serenity of Buddhist art. Hindu temples were modeled after caves, which Indians always considered sacred and were decorated with sculptures.
During this time, a major shift took place in the religious climate of India. The Guptas, like many rulers before them, had been active supporters of Buddhism. This, and their popularity among the rich middle classes, led to large contributions to Buddhist monasteries, which became quite wealthy, much like their counterparts in Christian Europe. Besides theological disputes and the corruption such wealth and influence at court might bring, Buddhists tended to move their monasteries away from populated areas. Meanwhile, the Brahmins were renewing contact with the people and winning many converts to their religion, which at this point had evolved into what we now call Hinduism. In the following centuries, Hinduism would replace Buddhism as the major religion in India, although it continued to spread across Asia.
Of the world's great religions, Hinduism is especially unique, since it has no historical founder who had some revelation at some point in time. It has no fixed set of worship, with some people praying, others making sacrifices, and still others meditating. Although it is polytheistic, recognizing millions of gods, it is somewhat monotheistic in that it sees these various gods as manifestations of the one unifying god, Brahma. It is this flexibility that has made it so popular and such a unifying force in India.
While there are millions of gods, there are three that most people worship one or the other of: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Brahma is seen as the supreme being of creation who put into motion a constantly repeating cycle of destruction and rebirth. Although seen as the supreme god, who all others are reconciled to, Brahma has not been as popular as Vishnu and Shiva. Vishnu is the kind and merciful preserver of Brahma's creation who has appeared in various manifestations, known as avatars, to help humanity. The most popular of his manifestations has been Krishna, who as a child was full of mischief and as an adult a great lover and a mighty warrior, qualities once associated with Indra. Shiva combined the attributes of various Harappan and Aryan gods, being at once a god of destruction and rebirth, mercy and wrath, and constancy and unpredictability.
Hinduism maintains the old Brahmanic and Buddhist principles of karma, dharma, and reincarnation. Unlike the old Brahmanic religion, it puts more emphasis on personal devotion to a god than on sacrifices performed by the Brahmans. This made Hinduism especially popular in India and it has dominated India ever since. However, the coming of Islam in the eighth century offered a new challenge to Hinduism's dominance.
Until 711 C.E., India had faced many invaders, but no substantial challenges on both a military and cultural level. The Persians and Greeks had confronted India with highly developed civilizations, but also had reached the limits of their expansion by the time they arrived there. The various nomadic peoples who entered India between the second century B.C.E. and eighth century C.E. may have been more potent military threats, but their cultures were thoroughly absorbed by India. However, in 711 C.E., India faced for the first time a vital people with a culture and religion both as sophisticated and powerful as its own: Islam.
Much of the relationship between Islam and Hinduism hinged on a battle that took place at the Talas River in Central Asia in 751 C.E. between the expanding empires of the Arab Muslims and T'ang China. The Arab victory in that battle not only stopped the T'ang dynasty's expansion to the West; it also led to the triumph of Islam over Buddhism as the prevailing religion in Central Asia. As a result, although India continued to face a succession of invaders from the North, all those invaders had Islam as the common defining element of their cultures, a religion that in its own way was as appealing as Hinduism.
For 1000 years following the entry of the Arab Muslims into India, a basic pattern of development emerged. Muslims would come into North-western India and expand to the south and east. Eventually, India's environment would slow them down, as Islamic and Indian civilizations would leave their marks on each other. Then another group of Muslims would come in and repeat the process. This pattern repeated itself in three successive waves: the Arabs in the eighth century, various Turkish peoples starting around 1000 C.E., and the Mughal dynasty that entered India in 1526. This cycle may have continued repeating itself except for the intrusion of the British who would present India with a new cultural challenge.
The Arab Muslims entered India in 711, the same year their religious compatriots in the West entered Spain. They conquered the area known as Sind in the Indus River valley (modern Pakistan). It is hard to imagine two religions and civilizations so different in their outlooks as Islam and Hinduism. Whereas Islam saw all people as equal before God, India's rigid caste system presented a highly stratified social structure sanctioned by religion. On the other hand, while Hinduism was incredibly tolerant of a multitude of gods, Islam was strictly monotheistic. For better or worse, the two cultures have co-existed, though not always peacefully, since the Arabs arrived until the present day.
Arab expansion was stopped by various feudal Indian princes known as the Rajputs who themselves may have been descended from invading Huns two centuries earlier. While theoretically loyal to a king, they functioned as virtually independent rulers. As trade increased, so did competition for the control of that trade. As a result, the Rajputs often spent as much time fighting each other as they did resisting foreign invaders. Their warfare was highly ritualized and regulated by an elaborate code of behavior, much like the codes of chivalry and Buhsido regulated the fighting of elite nobles in medieval Europe and Japan. Our modern game of chess, originating in India, reflects this ceremonial way of fighting wars. Unfortunately for the Rajputs, this also kept them from adapting to changes in warfare and hampering the Muslim advance across Northern India.
Arab rule was fairly tolerant of Hinduism. They even preserved the temple of a Hindu sun god in Multan, which also prevented Hindu attacks on the city that might damage this holy spot. Although the Arabs only conquered the northwestern part of India, their tolerant rule won many converts to Islam in that region which remains Muslim to this day. This provided a solid base for further Muslim expansion into India.
By 1000 C.E., the Abbasid Caliphate and Arabs' grip on their empire were in decline because of the empire's vast size, weak caliphs, and the split between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Like the caliphs in Baghdad, the Arabs in Afghanistan relied increasingly on slave bodyguards drawn chiefly from neighboring Turkish tribes. Eventually these Turkish warriors asserted their independence and took over from the Arabs. From this base in Afghanistan, they launched raids into India, thus resuming Muslim expansion in the subcontinent.
Compared to the Arabs, Turkish raids into India were much more ruthless and destructive. The first of these raiders, Mahmud of Ghazni, earned the title of "the Idol Smasher" for the damage he did to Hindu Temples, while the ruler, Ala al-Din, similarly came to be called "the World Burner." These raids and invasions especially hurt Buddhism, as kings in East India were no longer able or willing to patronize Buddhist monasteries. This led many Buddhists either to convert to Islam or flee to Tibet and Southeast Asia. As a result, Buddhism virtually died out as a religion in India although its influence elsewhere continued to spread.
The Mongol invasions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries seriously disrupted Muslim civilization, especially in Central Asia. As a result, Muslims left on their own in India built an independent kingdom, the Sultanate of Delhi (1206-c.1500). Also, many Muslim scholars fleeing the Mongol onslaught came to India. This, along with an active sea-borne trade with Southeast Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East led to a flowering of Muslim culture in India. The Sultanate of Delhi witnessed a gradual blending of Muslim and Hindu cultures. Many Hindus learned Persian and Muslim bureaucratic procedures. Helping this process was the introduction of paper, which made record keeping easier, thus, enhancing the Sultan's control over his realm. Islam gained a number of converts from lower castes, especially from such castes as elephant trainers, weavers, and butchers who worked for the Muslims and saw this as a way to improve their station in life.
Muslims also absorbed Indian Culture, with caste distinctions starting to appear among them, Muslim men marrying Hindu women, and a mystical branch of Islam, Sufism, developing that used Hindu techniques such as meditation. Altogether, these developments paved the way for the next wave of invaders: the Mughals.
The greatest of the Mughal rulers was Akbar the Great (1656-1605). Coming to the throne at the age of thirteen, he soon proved himself a firm and shrewd ruler who quickly crushed any revolts in his inherited lands and expanded Mughal power into the Deccan. However, it was Akbar's talents as a ruler, not a conqueror that earned him the title, "the Great." Instead of trying to rule the stubborn Rajputs by force, he allied with them, using them as his officers and government officials to keep his unruly Muslim nobles in line. He tolerated Hinduism, married Hindu princesses, and held scholarly discussions on any and all religions each Friday. He even founded his own religion, Din Ilahi, a simple monotheistic faith that would not survive its founder's death.
Akbar looked out for his peoples' welfare by holding a land survey to ensure fair taxes. He would even over-rule his own Muslim judges, the ulema, in order to secure justice and prosperity for his subjects. Akbar was also a patron of the arts, encouraging both Hindu and Muslim artists, poets, and musicians.
Akbar established a strong and stable state that allowed his three successors, Jahangir (1605-27), Shah Jahan (1628-58), and Aurangzeb (1658-1707), to keep expanding the Mughal realm. During this time, India experienced another flourishing of the arts with the fusion of Persian and Hindu styles. In painting, Mughal artists combined the Persian tradition of colorful painting with the looser and more natural style of Indian artists. Architecture especially reflected Muslim influence as seen in the Taj Mahal, a mausoleum for Shah Jahan's wife and still considered one of the world's most beautiful buildings. In music, the sultan, Aurangzeb's ban on music caused Muslim musicians to flee to the countryside where they blended their style of music with Hindu folk music to create a style of music still known as Mughal music.
It was during the reign of Aurangzeb that two major seeds of Mughal decline were sown. One was the over-extension of his empire in the conquest of all but the southern tip of India. The other was his persecution of Hindus, a reversal of the traditional Mughal policy of tolerance. Together, these bred disaffection among the people and drained the empire's resources. After Aurangzeb's death in 1707, the Mughal Empire went into rapid decline, allowing a new people with a new culture, the British, to take over.
With harmony at home there will be order in the nation. With order in the nation there will be peace in the world.— Confucius
Far to the east of the civilizations developing in Egypt and Mesopotamia another great hydraulic civilization, China, was evolving. As with Egypt and Mesopotamia, geography heavily influenced the development of Chinese civilization. For one thing, the eastward flow of the rivers from the mountains in the west also meant that China's most fertile land was in the coastal lowlands in the east. Even today, 80% of China's population lives in the eastern third of the country. Throughout its history, this factor has given China a vast concentrated reservoir of human resources to draw upon for its wealth and power.
Secondly, China is largely isolated from the rest of the world by rain forests to the south, some of the highest mountains in the world to the west, the Pacific Ocean to the east, and vast grasslands (steppe) and deserts to the north. Direct contact with other civilizations would be rare, although occasional influences have passed back and forth between China and the rest of the world with profound effects. For the most part, however, China evolved largely in isolation and saw itself as the "Middle Kingdom", both unique and superior to other cultures. This attitude would create difficulties, especially in the modern era when growing contact with the outside world forced China to deal with different cultures.
Another dominant feature of China's geography has been its rivers, in particular the Huang He (Yellow), Yangtze, and Xi Jiang. The Yellow River valley in the north was particularly important as the birthplace of Chinese civilization, because its irregular rainfall and devastating floods forced the Chinese to organize massive irrigation and flood control projects. Such organization required a strict hierarchy of authority, which influenced subsequent Chinese history.
By 1500 B.C.E., China's geography helped lead to one of history's early hydraulic civilizations in the Yellow River Valley under the Shang, the first of the dynasties into which Chinese history is traditionally divided. The Shang and various local nobles who ruled in their name combined both government and priestly functions. As a result, no distinct or elaborate class of priests emerged in China as happened in other early civilizations such as Mesopotamia and Egypt.
China saw several technical developments during the Shang period in the way of silk textiles, carving in ivory and jade, and especially bronze technology. Bronze artifacts from the Shang period are some of the finest examples of metalworking found in any Bronze Age culture. Among those artifacts were bronze arms and armor which, along with the horse drawn chariot, gave Shang armies an edge over their enemies and allowed the expansion of Chinese civilization.
Another advance during this time was writing. Chinese writing was and remains ideographic, being based on pictures rather than sounds. Such a script required many more symbols to memorize, making it harder to read and seriously restricting the number of literate people. However, ideographic writing had one benefit. Since it was not based on the sounds of any particular language, it was readily adaptable to different dialects of Chinese and even non-Chinese languages in East Asia such as Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. As a result, Chinese culture spread and became the predominant cultural influence across East Asia.
A basic recurring pattern has repeated itself throughout Chinese history. A new dynasty would take over and revive Chinese civilization in two ways. First, it would restore the army, the Great Wall, government and bureaucracy. It would also lower taxes, redistribute land to the peasants, and rebuild the irrigation and flood control systems. Together, these would create a strong and prosperous society until lazy emperors took over and neglected their duties, allowing corrupt officials, high taxes, powerful nobles who took the peasants' lands, and the decay of the army and Great Wall. This would lead to peasant revolts from within and raids and invasions from without that together would weaken the government, causing more corruption, high taxes, military decay, and powerful nobles oppressing the peasants. Eventually, a new dynasty would seize power and start the cycle over again.
One concept combining religion and politics that was central to this process and China's political thinking was the Mandate of Heaven. This said that a ruling dynasty had the mandate or approval of Heaven to rule as long as there was peace and prosperity. However, natural and man-made disasters were signs that the dynasty was not doing its job and that the mandate had been withdrawn and passed to a new dynasty. Thus the Mandate of Heaven was a double-edged sword, justifying the power and rule of a successful dynasty on the one hand, but also justifying revolution when things went wrong.
The Shang Dynasty prospered until weak rulers allowed the realm to fragment into various warlord states. Eventually, this situation enticed nomadic tribes from the North-west to come in. One of these tribes, the Zhou, eventually assumed power as the next dynasty to rule China.
By 700 B.C.E., the Zhou had succumbed to the temptation of the softer cities in the East and gone into decline. Powerful warlords carved out their own principalities while giving the Zhou emperors only nominal allegiance. Naturally, these warlords turned on each other with increasing ferocity in a period known as the age of "the Warring States" (481-221 B.C.E.). However, despite this turmoil, Chinese civilization continued to spread and advance thanks to several innovations. First of all, the use of gold and copper coins replacing such things as shells and rolls of silk as the primary mediums of exchange made trade much easier and put more wealth into circulation. Secondly, the use of oxen to draw plows and the introduction of iron farm implements enabled Chinese peasants to clear more land, produce more food, and raise China's population and wealth dramatically.
Still, this was a turbulent period which sparked a good deal of intellectual ferment, leading to two very different philosophies that together would become essential parts of Chinese culture: Confucianism and Taoism.
Kung Fu-tzu (known to the West as Confucius) was born in 551 B.C.E. He started his career as a government official, but later became a traveling teacher who attracted many students. He saw the key to China's stability in a strict observance of rituals and traditions. Among these rituals was ancestor worship, which had been an integral part of Chinese religion for centuries. However, Confucianism was not a religion, but rather a systematic philosophy for maintaining peace and harmony in this world. (Confucius himself said that he knew too little about this world to even begin worrying about the next. That would have to take care of itself in due time.) Central to Confucius' philosophy was a strict hierarchy of relationships, the five most important being those between ruler and ruled, father and son, husband and wife, older and younger brother, and friend and friend. As long as the proper conduct and respect took place in these relationships, overall harmony would prevail. As Confucius saw it, a harmonious society rested firmly on a harmonious family structure. Confucius also advocated a civil service that got its positions through merit (in particular education and knowledge of the classics) rather than through birth or personal connections. Although not too popular in his own day, Confucius' ideas later had a profound impact on Chinese government and society that carry on to the present day.
Lao-tze (600's B.C.E.) founded the other great Chinese philosophy of the day, Taoism, which differed from Confucianism much as night differs from day. Whereas Confucianism provided a very strict framework for dealing with civilized society, Lao-tze advocated escape from that society and a return to our natural state through contemplation of the Tao (the Way), the cosmic principle through which the harmony of the universe was maintained. He saw everything in nature and the universe as being balanced between two complementary forces: the active male Yang ("sunlit") and the passive female Yin ("shaded"). Rather than seeing one as superior to the other, Lao-tze saw a truly healthy and harmonious person or society as being perfectly balanced between the active Yang and passive Yin. An example of this is the Chinese martial art, Tai Chi, which strives to use an opponent's own strength and force to knock him off balance. Lao-tze saw disease, floods, famines and wars as the result of an imbalance in nature, often caused by human actions. By the same token, any attempts to conform to strict government or personal codes of discipline were artificial and deformed human nature. Taoist ideas would strongly influence Chinese art, especially landscape painting, medicine with its idea of keeping a body in balance, and even Sun-tzu's Art of War that advocated dexterity and balance in conformity with nature rather than merely the use of brute force.
As different as Confucianism and Taoism were, they each had a profound impact on Chinese culture. Later, with the addition of Buddhism, the three philosophies would be known as the Three Doctrines. However, rather than competing with one another, each philosophy would fulfill a particular need in China's culture. Together they would give it a balance that would make it uniquely Chinese.
You won the world from horseback, but can you rule it from horseback?— Minister to Liu Pang, founder of the Han dynasty
The early period of the Zhou dynasty, known as "Spring and Autumn" (722-481 B.C.), saw relative stability and the growth of trade, towns, and a middle class of merchants and artisans. However, this prosperity contained the seeds of the Zhou’s decline, since it gave local princes in the provinces the resources to do three things. First, they built canals which themselves had three effects. For one thing, they further increased trade, thus giving the princes more tolls and taxes. They also improved transportation of grain, allowing them to feed their cities, armies, and bureaucrats better. And finally, they led to the cultivation of new lands that the princes could claim for themselves. Together, these effects gave the princes more wealth and power that they could use to develop more canals and so on.
Secondly, princes and local nobles started appointing their own agents to collect taxes instead of doing it indirectly through local village leaders, as had been the custom. Finally, the princes started arming peasants and using them in their armies alongside the traditional feudal levies supplied by their vassals. This especially reduced the distinction between the Zhou emperors and their princely subjects in the provinces.
Together, these developments gave the princes more control over their own local nobles and establish more tightly centralized states. This in turn led to increased warfare between the princes who now had much greater resources for waging war than before. With larger armies using peasant levies as well as noble warriors, the intensity of fighting increased and the old courtesies of warfare and diplomacy that had governed relations between princes and nobles disappeared. The resulting chaos, known as the age of "Warring States" (481-221 B.C.E.), generated a good deal of intellectual ferment that provided the background for such philosophers as Confucius concerned about the decay of values.
By the third century B.C.E., seven major warlord states had emerged. Among these was the Qin Dynasty in the north, which built up a powerful state through sweeping internal reforms and the creation of a powerful army using horse archers modeled after those used by their nomadic enemies. By 221 B.C.E., the Qin ruler, Shih Huang Ti, had replaced the last Zhou emperor, and ruled all of China. In fact, his title, Shih Huang Ti, meant first universal emperor, while his dynasty's name (also spelled Ch'in) came to represent all of the people of the Middle Kingdom which we today still call China.
Shih Huang Ti was a harsh, but efficient ruler who brought China under a single autocratic rule. He lowered taxes and restored canals and irrigation systems. He also redistributed land to the peasants in an attempt to break up the nobles' power. Along these lines he broke up China's old provinces and loyalties and created new ones ruled by non-hereditary governors who could not build their power up in one place over several generations. Shih Huang Ti also created a unified law code, tax system, coinage, and system of weights and measures so that government and commerce could proceed smoothly.
The Qin emperor had numerous building programs, among which were roads and canals to promote trade as well as the swift movement of armies, a huge capital at Hsien Yang where all the most powerful families of the realm were required to move, and a fabulous tomb guarded by 6000 larger than life terra-cotta soldiers in full battle order armed with bronze weapons, chariots, and terra-cotta horses.
However, the most famous and far-reaching of Shih Huang Ti's building projects was the Great Wall built to contain the nomadic horsemen from the north. In fact, previous generations of warlords had built several local walls to protect their realms from the nomads and each other. Shih Huang Ti, in a mere seven years, connected them into one continuous defensive system 25 feet high, 15 feet thick, and stretching some 1850 miles through mountains and deserts. The cost in human lives was staggering, as thousands died from exposure to the elements, hunger, and exhaustion, causing Chinese peasants to call the Great Wall "China's longest cemetery."
Manning the entire wall was beyond the means of even the Chinese. However, it was built more against the nomads' horses than the nomads themselves. As long as the wall was kept in repair and the intermittent forts and towers were manned, the nomads would be held at bay by two factors. First, they lacked siege engines for attacking manned forts. Second, they would not scale the unmanned sections, since that would involve leaving their horses behind. Only when the wall was in disrepair and unmanned during times of weak government and turmoil, could the nomads could break (or bribe their way) into China. Otherwise the Great Wall served its purpose as succeeding Chinese dynasties would repair, modify, and expand it as the real and symbolic boundary between civilization and the nomads.
Shih Huang Ti's reforms may have unified China into one empire and people, but of the heavy burden in taxes and labor needed to support his building projects made him very unpopular. Another source of resentment was the emperor’s refusal to tolerate any dissenting ideas, especially those of the Confucianists who preferred the traditional feudal structure of government to his more impersonal bureaucracy. Therefore, he ordered the burning of all works of philosophy that in any way contradicted his policies. He even had some 460 dissenting scholars executed, supposedly by burying them alive. Although some scholars tried to entrust these works to memory so they could be written down later, there were certainly mistakes in the recopying, and there is no telling how much was lost. This purge also deprived the emperor of good advisors and poisoned the atmosphere at court, making it difficult to create sound policies. Therefore, his death in 210 B.C.E. triggered a number of revolts and civil wars that led to the rapid fall of the Qin Dynasty and the rise of the Han Dynasty.
Liu Pang, the founder of the Han Dynasty, found China worn out by civil strife and heavy taxes and also facing threats from the northern nomads. Liu Pang (also known as Kao Tsu) and his successors tackled each of these problems and laid the foundations for one of China's true golden ages. Although the Han reversed the more repressive aspects of the Qin dynasty, they also built upon many of their other policies. In that sense, the Qin and Han dynasties should be viewed together as forming the basis of Chinese imperial power and cultural influence in East Asia.
For one thing, the Han rulers reduced Shih Huang Ti’s more excessive demands by eliminating forced labor, lowering taxes, and restoring the Classics, although the accuracy of that restoration is still in dispute. However, they did uphold the Qin Dynasty’s more enlightened reforms, especially redistribution of land to the peasants, making them much more popular than the Qin and the foundations for one of the high points in Chinese history and civilization.
In government, the Han ended the Qin policy of using non-hereditary governors and reverted to the older practice of using royal family members instead. However, they continued and expanded the Qin use of professional bureaucrats to run the day-to-day machinery of government. This was the result of growing influence of Confucianism at court, since the Han dynasty saw its emphasis on ritual and tradition as a valuable justification and support for their rule. Therefore, it instituted the civil service exams that determined applicants' potential as bureaucrats by testing their knowledge of Confucian teachings, now the official state philosophy. Although modern civil service exams test supposedly more practical skills, such as math and reading, to choose bureaucrats, the idea of hiring government officials on the basis of ability rather than birth or personal connections traces its roots back to the Chinese civil service exams of the Han dynasty. Despite China's varying fortunes, the Chinese civil service was generally the best in the world until the 1800's.
The backbone of the Chinese bureaucracy was a class of scholars known as the civil gentry who would run Chinese government and administration until the early 1900's. Since gaining admission into this class depended on knowledge of Confucianism rather than birth or connections, many middle class families advanced their sons' fortunes in society by investing heavily in their education. Even after the demise of the civil service exam system, this emphasis on education has remained a powerful factor in East Asian societies, helping to account for their high literacy rates and rapid economic development in recent history.
Finally, there was the ever-present threat of the northern nomads. The Han emperors, here also continuing the work started by the Qin, maintained and expanded the Great Wall and a huge army to bring the nomads under control. Although Han armies met frequent defeats, their persistence did establish a semi-civilized buffer zone in the north.
However, especially in times of turmoil, semi-civilized nomads would often prove to be even more dangerous to China, since they combined both their own restless nomadic energies with knowledge of Chinese civilization in order to organize powerful states that could conquer China. But, as always, such invaders would eventually be absorbed by Chinese civilization. As the historian, Fernand Braudel put it, China let in such invaders and then shut the door behind them.
For nearly four centuries, Han reforms and rule provided a strong empire which expanded its political and cultural influence southward into the rice growing regions of Southeast Asia, northward into the nomadic regions, and northeastward into Korea and Manchuria. Internally, the Han provided a period of peace and prosperity that largely resembled the Roman Empire then flourishing at the opposite end of Eurasia. Science and technology flourished, making China the leading culture in those fields for centuries. The invention of paper (made from rags), the sundial, water clocks, and surgery using acupuncture were some of the main accomplishments of this period. New forms of literature, especially, history, poetry, and diaries, were developed.
Buddhism started gaining influence in China at this time despite initial resistance from the Confucianists and government. However it gained popularity and became the final part of the Three Doctrines of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Whereas the three religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam would compete, sometimes violently, for adherents, the Chinese were able to incorporate all of the Three Doctrines into their culture since they fulfilled various needs, Confucianism being a very practical and structured way to run one's daily life and career, Taoism being a more natural way to enjoy life outside of work, and Buddhism being a preparation for what lies beyond this life. As many Chinese saw it, one is Confucianist during the day at work, Taoist in the evening when relaxing, and Buddhist at night when going to bed.
Trade also prospered as never before, both within China and with other cultures. The most renowned example of this foreign trade was the fabled Silk Road that carried silk, furs, cinnamon, iron, and rhubarb westward across Central Asia through any number of middlemen and eventually to Rome. Silk was a luxury in Rome that was literally worth its weight in gold. In order to stretch it out, the Romans wove silk into a very loose gauze-like fabric that the Chinese would hardly have recognized. Interestingly enough, the Romans and Chinese did not meet face to face until 166 C.E. when a Roman envoy finally made it to China. Unfortunately, both civilizations were on the verge of their respective declines, and contact was lost soon afterwards.
As powerful and prosperous as Han China was, it had an inherent weakness, namely that it was based on a huge army and bureaucracy that put a tremendous strain on the economy. This had two main results. First of all, the peasants, who bore the brunt of the taxes, increasingly lost their lands to nobles whose power grew in opposition to the central government. This caused revolts both by oppressed peasants and power hungry nobles. Secondly, as the economy faltered under the strain of heavy taxes, nomadic raids stepped up, which hurt the economy even more, triggering more raids, and so on. Together, these raids and revolts weakened the Han Dynasty, forcing it to increase the army and taxes, and so on. Finally, in 220 C.E., the Han Dynasty fell, ushering in another period of turmoil.
The fall of the Han Dynasty brought in a period of political anarchy known as the Six Dynasties Period. During this time, China was divided into three main kingdoms: Wei in the north where wheat and millet were grown and nomadic pressure was most intense, Shu Han in the west, and Wu in the rice growing regions of the south-east where many Chinese fled to escape the chaos in the north. The kingdom of Wei, which was situated between other nomads in the north and the Chinese in the south, was the first kingdom to successfully combine nomadic culture and Chinese influence. As a result, it was more organized than its nomadic neighbors while still keeping its nomadic energy, making it able to protect Chinese civilization in the south from the wilder nomads in the north. In addition, there were several technological innovations to compensate for labor shortages at this time: the wheel barrow, watermill, and a primitive seed-sower, all of which allowed Chinese culture to prosper more than the Germanic heirs of Rome were able to at this time in Western Europe.
After several centuries of various dynasties competing for power, the Sui Dynasty reunited China. Much as the Qin Dynasty had laid the foundations for the Han Dynasty's greatness, the Sui Dynasty, despite the shortness of its reign, laid the foundations for the T'ang Dynasty's accomplishments through several endeavors. The Sui restored the Great Wall and mounted a number of huge expeditions against the northern nomads. They helped restore foreign trade, especially along the Silk Road. Likewise, they restored internal trade by connecting China's main rivers, which all run from west to east, with a north-south channel known as the Grand Canal. As a result, trade and travel between North and South China became much easier. Unfortunately, much as with the Qin Dynasty, these military expeditions and building projects involved a tremendous cost in lives and money. This triggered widespread revolts and the overthrow of the Sui Dynasty by a new dynasty, the T'ang, which would take Chinese civilization and imperial power to new heights.
The T’ang were a military family from the wild northwest frontier and were especially skilled in the use of cavalry. The T'ang, themselves devoted horsemen, bred thousands of horses for their cavalry and imported polo from Persia, which even ladies from court played. Using their cavalry along with large numbers of allied nomadic cavalry and peasant infantry, the T'ang could deal with the Northern nomads and expand Chinese rule in several directions. After stubborn resistance, they conquered Korea in 668 and saw Chinese culture take deeper root in Japan. The T'ang also conquered North Vietnam, then known as Annan (modern Annam), meaning "pacify the South". They drove westward against Turkish tribes in Central Asia, established their power and influence in Tibet, Afghanistan, and India. In 661, Chinese forces even briefly restored the last Sassanid Persian ruler, Peroz, against the rising tide of Arab Muslim conquest. When the Persian king was finally overthrown for good, he found refuge in the Chinese court. Later, the Arabs would defeat a Chinese army at the Talas River in 751 and bring T'ang expansion to a halt.
The unprecedented foreign influences that empire brought into T'ang China were welcomed with a new open-mindedness. Foreign fashions, music, cuisine, art, and religious influences from Central Asia, India, and Persia found favor at the court in China's capital, Ch'ang-an. Islam, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism all found their way to China, while Nestorian Christians, who were branded heretics and exiled by Rome in the fifth century, gained converts across Central Asia and were granted toleration in China as well. Later on, religious persecution (841-45) would eliminate Christianity, although the other religions would survive. Buddhism especially became absorbed into the fabric of Chinese religions, assuming a place alongside Taoism and Confucianism as one of the Three Doctrines which complemented one another rather than acting as competition against each other, as happened between Judaism, Christianity and Islam further west.
Cultural influence worked both ways, however, as Chinese culture and technology spread to Korea, Japan, and even the tribes in Central Asia. One example of this influence was the spread of rag paper, which was invented, in the early Christian era. Most likely it reached the Muslim world as a result of the Battle of the Talas River in 751, when the victorious Arabs captured Chinese technicians skilled in its manufacture. Eventually, it would spread to Western Europe where it would be combined with another Chinese invention, block printing to create the printing press, one of the most dynamic and important inventions in history. While it is a European invention, its roots lie deep within Chinese history.
Drawing upon these foreign influences and combining them with its own dynamic energy, Chinese culture prospered and flourished under the T'ang Dynasty in three areas: the economy, government, and culture. China's economy prospered largely through trade that thrived both within China and with the outside world. Foreign trade prospered, especially along the Silk Road that maintained commerce and contact with other cultures further west. Although trade certainly thrived, little is known about it, since so much was controlled as government monopolies (e.g., salt, wine, iron, and tea) or interpreted as "tribute" from foreign lands and reciprocal "gifts" going back out. China’s internal prosperity was especially reflected in its cities, which were the largest and most populous in the world. Foremost among these cities was the capital, Ch'ang-an with a population of some 2,000,000 people. It was laid out in a rectangular grid five miles wide by six miles long and facing the cardinal directions in accordance with the Chinese concept of the cosmic plan.
One of these monopolies had a profound influence on the history of finance. In the early 800's, merchants selling tea to the government received government notes worth the hard cash value of the tea. These exchange notes, known as "flying money," proved to be popular, since they eliminated the need for carrying heavy coins. The use of credit slips soon spread among Chinese merchants and moneychangers and eventually westward to the Arab world, where they were known as sakk, and eventually to Western Europe where the term sakk became check. Meanwhile, in 1024, the Chinese government would expand the use of credit slips by issuing the first true paper currency in history.
Chinese agriculture also prospered under the T'ang Dynasty. For one thing, careful censuses and an equitable system of distributing land and the tax burden among the peasants strived to ensure their prosperity. Second, the system of canals connecting China's rivers meant that relief could be brought to famine stricken areas. Finally, agriculture saw particular progress in the South where new strains of rice and better farming techniques dramatically increased crop yields with resulting population growth. Eventually, under the next major dynasty, the Song, the balance of power and population would shift from the North, where Chinese civilization first evolved, to the South.
Power and prosperity also brought a flowering of the arts in China. Buddhism, coming from India, had an especially profound influence on Chinese sculpture. However, it was in poetry and painting that one could especially see the Chinese genius at work. Both poetry and painting showed a typically Taoist love of nature through their portrayals of flowers, mountains, rivers, and clouds, but rarely the sea, since the Chinese were traditionally a land loving people.
Another development was the further improvement of the civil service exam system and the emergence of the official gentry who had passed these exams as the main bureaucrats of China. This system had been used by the Han Dynasty, but only in conjunction with the older patronage system favoring nobles and political connections. Now the exam alone determined who attained bureaucratic positions in China. However, since education was expensive, only the rich could afford to train one son per family to take the exam. As a result, the officials became a virtually hereditary class. The training and exam stressed Confucianist classics more than mathematics and law, the purpose being to cultivate wisdom and morality in China's officials. In the centuries to come, China's stability and resilience would largely be based on these official gentry.
In 690, the official gentry's fortunes rose further when the only woman to rule China in her own right, the empress Wu, seized power. Her fear of the T'ang military aristocracy in the Northwest probably spurred her to complete the transformation of the civil service in order to favor a completely civilian class of bureaucrats whose status was based on merit. However, their rise to power meant a corresponding decline of the military nobles, which eventually would weaken China's defenses and help lead to the decline of the T'ang Dynasty.
Several factors led to the fall of the T'ang Dynasty, three of them related to the triumph of the official gentry and the civil service system. For one thing, the government granted the gentry estates, thus taking land from the peasants and increasing their tax burden. This, along with a series of famines partly caused by government corruption and neglect of flood control and irrigation systems, triggered peasant revolts. Secondly, the gentry's dominance of the government caused the emperors to ignore the army and start relying on nomadic mercenaries who were more expensive and much less reliable than native recruits. As a result, T'ang armies suffered a number of defeats, notably at the Talas River against the Arabs in 751, making Islam rather than Buddhism the dominant religion in Central Asia. The weakened army invited invasions from without and revolts from within. Finally, the rise of the official gentry unleashed a Confucianist reaction against foreign influences in China. From now on, China would be more inward looking, sometimes blocking out new ideas that could have been of great use.
The Sung Dynasty (960-1279) . The fall of the T'ang Dynasty ushered in a brief period of chaos referred to as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (906-960). Despite this turmoil, Chinese civilization maintained itself, especially in the South where many people fled to avoid the northern nomads. Out of this chaos, two new kingdoms emerged.
First of all, the semi-nomadic Khitan built a powerful realm in the North that even encompassed the Great Wall. What made the Khitan so dangerous was that they had partially absorbed Chinese culture, thus fusing their nomadic energy with Chinese sophistication. In the middle Ages, many people mistook the Khitan as the Chinese and referred to China as Cathay (land of the Khitan). Throughout this period, the Khitan kept up pressure against a new Chinese dynasty, the Sung, who brought all but the northernmost provinces and the Great Wall under their control. Sung government was efficient, maintaining the irrigation and flood control projects to ensure economic prosperity. The Sung also weakened the influence of the military in favor of the bureaucratic gentry who were hostile toward the military. This and the lack of pasture for good cavalry horses in the south caused the Sung to pay less attention to maintaining a good native-born military and to rely more heavily on expensive mercenaries and paying tribute to keep their northern enemies at bay. Therefore, when the Sung did finally attack the Khitan, they were no match for their mobile horse archers who forced them onto the defensive.
In the early twelfth century, the Sung called in another nomadic people from further north, the Jurchen ruled by the Chin dynasty, to destroy the Khitan realm. Unfortunately, the Jurchen, proving less civilized and more dangerous than the Khitan, turned against the Sung and forced them even further south after 1126. One advantage of ruling in the South was that its numerous waterways and lack of pasture impeded invasions by any nomadic cavalry, thus keeping Sung China relatively secure.
Despite these pressures, the Southern Sung Dynasty (1126-1279) still flourished with a thriving economy based largely on rice agriculture. This helped create a more urban society, with five Chinese cities reaching populations of one million. Ironically, the more comfortable urban culture hurt the status of Chinese women, since their labor, which was so vital on the farm, was not needed nearly as much in town.
Economically, the Chinese were the first to use paper money, getting the idea from the bills of credit used under the T'ang Dynasty. The advantage of paper money was that it saved the burden of transporting heavy cash (which was all in copper coins), especially taxes, long distances. As its nickname, "flying money", implies, paper money was easy to print (thanks to block printing also invented by the Chinese), and its overuse later on triggered inflation. Even such measures as scenting it with perfume or sewing in threads of silk failed to solve this problem that still bothers governments today.
The Chinese economy, largely blocked from overland trade to the northwest, saw rapid expansion through the vigorous pursuit of sea-borne trade to South-east Asia and into the Indian Ocean. Unlike the northern Chinese, who preferred to remain on land, the Chinese in the South were more at ease with the sea. (Even today, a preponderance of Chinese immigrants to the United States originates from the southern parts of China.) Several technological innovations helped the Chinese in their maritime ventures. First of all there was the Chinese sailing ship, the junk, which was faster and several times larger than any European ships then sailing. It also had a sternpost rudder and separate watertight compartments, something European sailing ships would not be able to match until the 1800's. Another invention brought back by Arab traders to Europe that would be vital to later European explorations was the compass. For centuries, the Chinese had used the compass for divination and fortune telling before applying it to navigation. Chinese compasses pointed south, since that was where spring winds came from and was considered the most important direction on Chinese maps.
By 1200, the Chinese had replaced the Arabs as the dominant commercial power in the Indian Ocean, trading books, paintings, and porcelain along with silk, tin and lead. All this trade brought large numbers of foreign traders to China, many of whom settled down in self-contained communities where they could live under their own laws. One of the most prominent of these was a Jewish community that survived into the 1800's.
Two other Chinese inventions deserve mention here: the water-powered clock and gunpowder. The Chinese clock was powered through a complex system of gears and escapements. In addition to keeping daily time, it also tracked celestial time and the movement of the sun, moon, and planets for astrological purposes so the emperor would know the best time to embark upon various projects and ventures. Although it was an imperial monopoly, the clock made its way to Europe where it would be adapted in the later Middle Ages to tracking daily time. Eventually, the clock would heavily influence Western Civilization's concept of time by breaking it into precise and discrete units that still regiment our lives today.
Gunpowder, according to legend, was the accidental result of a Taoist alchemical experiment for replacing salt with salt petre (the active ingredient in gunpowder). Contrary to popular belief, the Chinese did use gunpowder for military purposes in the form of rockets and firing projectiles out of bamboo and metal tubes. Most likely, it made its way westward to Europe thanks to the Mongol conquest of China in the 1200's. Eventually, the Chinese invention of gunpowder would be instrumental in the rise of the nation state in Western Europe and Europe's colonial dominance of the globe in the late 1800's and early 1900'.
The arts, in particular painting, flourished under the Sung Dynasty. Chinese painting heavily reflected Buddhist and Taoist values by emphasizing nature and even empty space. Some painters were so brilliant that they could create a painting that had to be viewed from multiple perspectives. This contrasted greatly with European painting, which put more emphasis on humans as the center of attention.
Although the overland routes to the West were mostly cut off, the Sung Dynasty did see some trade, largely in the form of superior iron weapons, going north through the semi-civilized Jurchen to the much more dangerous Mongol tribes further north. In the late 1100's, the most remarkable nomadic leader of all time, Genghis Khan (1167-1227), combined the use of Chinese weapons, Mongol fierceness, and his own genius for organization and generalship to launch the conquest of the most far-flung empire in history. He succeeded in conquering northern China, but the large fortified cities, lack of pasture for the Mongol horses, and the vast network of waterways obstructing the way kept him from conquering the Sung Dynasty in the South. Therefore, he left it to his successors to complete the conquest, which his grandson, Kublai Khan, did in 1279. By that time, Mongol conquests spread from the Pacific to Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Although there were several virtually independent Mongol khanates, Kublai Khan was recognized, at least in theory, as the supreme ruler over all.
Mongol rule led to several changes in China and Asia. For one thing, the Mongols protected safe travel across Asia and reopened trade along the Silk Road. Because of this, Western Europe, then recovering from the Dark Ages, re-established contact with China, allowing numerous traders and missionaries to make their way there. Among these travelers was Marco Polo, whose account of his travels and the wonders of the East sparked a growing interest in China which would help stimulate the Age of Exploration some two centuries later.
The Mongols ruled with a brutal efficiency that not only discouraged any criticism of them, but also discouraged innovations in the arts. Among the Mongols' ruling policies was replacing the civil service exam system with the use of non-Chinese governors and officials and even a foreign script. However, in the 1300’s, the civil service exam was restored as the Mongols in turn succumbed to the influence of Chinese civilization. Mongol rule was especially unpopular with the Chinese, who looked for any opportunity to revolt. Two factors helped provide that opportunity, dissension within the Mongol ranks and corruption among their bureaucrats. Finally, in 1368, the Chinese overthrew Mongol rule and established a new dynasty, the Ming, which would once again restore Chinese power and wealth.
The expulsion of the Mongols from China in 1368 ushered in a new period of peace and prosperity for China under the Ming ("brilliant") Dynasty. The early Ming emperors revived Chinese power and wealth through their foreign, governmental, and economic policies. In the realm of foreign policy, several strong emperors aggressively extended Chinese power to the old borders of the Han Empire. Not surprisingly, the Ming Dynasty was especially concerned with the threat of the northern nomads who had so recently humiliated China. Therefore, they put forth a tremendous effort to subdue the nomads (with very limited success) and partially restored the Great Wall. The fortifications around the first capital, Nanjing, were 60 feet high and extended in a perimeter 20 miles long, the most massive urban fortifications in the world In 1421, the Ming moved the capital to Beijing, only 40 miles from the northern frontier in order to keep a better eye on nomadic movements. Not only did this endanger the capital, since it was so close to the nomads, it also removed the government from contact with and understanding of the more economically vibrant South. As it was, the nomads posed no real serious threat to China during most of the Ming Dynasty's rule.
Beijing itself became a magnificent city with 40-foot high walls around a perimeter of 14 miles. Central to the capital was the emperor's palace complex, known as the Forbidden City. Unlike Western architecture, which reaches ever skyward away from earth, as seen in Gothic cathedrals and skyscrapers, Chinese architecture aims for a more balanced and harmonious effect in the true Taoist spirit. The Forbidden City especially shows this, being spread out on a broad horizontal plane under the overarching dome of the blue sky, which counterbalances the effect of the high roofs of many of the government buildings and palaces. The overall effect is one of horizontal stability, emphasizing the permanence of the regime of the Son of Heaven (Chinese emperor).
The Ming reversed the unpopular policies of the Mongols and reinstated the system of civil service exams for selecting officials, thus restoring the Mandarins to prominence in Chinese society. They also retained the other features of government used by previous dynasties, such as the Six Ministries and the Censorate. The Censorate was largely concerned with preventing corruption and abuses by sending traveling censors to the provinces to hear complaints and investigate the conduct of local magistrates. Unfortunately, many censors were young officials being asked to report against senior officials who could seriously damage their careers later on. Since the censors had little protection against such reprisals, they often shrank from doing their jobs properly. However, the overall effect of Ming policies was to provide fair and efficient, though strict, government.
Ming economic policies similarly provided for China's prosperity during this period. Dikes and canals were repaired, while extensive land reclamation program was instituted, since some regions of China were totally depopulated from earlier Mongol depredations and neglect. The government offered tax exemptions lasting several years to any peasants who moved into the ruined areas, a policy which effectively revived much of China. Another policy was to encourage extensive reforestation, probably for shipbuilding purposes, although palm, mulberry, and lacquer trees were also planted for other economic purposes.
As a result of the Ming Dynasty's policies, China was again a strong and prosperous empire, making it the dominant political and cultural power in East Asia. China's cultural vibrancy can be seen in several aspects of the Ming era. For one thing, architecture flourished, as the Chinese constructed arched bridges and tall pagodas with graceful curved roofs. As stated above, the setting of these buildings in broad horizontal planes provided a more balanced effect than the lofty spires of cathedrals one found in Europe at that time.
Chinese science and technology at this time was largely bound up with newcomers from the West. The expulsion of the Mongols in 1368 effectively cut China off from the West for nearly two centuries. In fact, Columbus was still looking for the Mongols in 1492, since Europe had not received word of their fall over a century after its occurrence. However, in the 1500's, the Portuguese and then the Spanish arrived in China by sea. Most of China's contact with the West at this time was through the Jesuits who skillfully presented Christianity in Confucian terms in order to gain entrance into China and win converts to their faith. Ironically, the Jesuit leader, Matteo Ricci, won court favor by presenting the emperor with a wind-up clock, which, of course, was ultimately derived from the Chinese water clock. (He kept in their good graces by keeping the key, so he would be summoned to court each week to rewind the clock.) Over time, the Jesuits provided the Chinese with a good idea of the state of Western science and technology, especially in the areas of mathematics, cartography, astronomy, and artillery. Europe learned a great deal from China as well, such as the idea for its first suspension bridge, built in Austria in 1741, over 1000 years after the first such bridge had been built in China.
Extensive maritime expeditions into Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, and as far as East Africa and Arabia, were another feature of the early Ming period. Between 1405 and 1433, no less than seven major expeditions were launched under the command of the admiral, Zheng He (1371-c.1434). Some of Zheng He's expeditions comprised over 25,000 men sailing in ships that were 400 feet long, many times larger than anything Europe, just then embarking on its age of exploration, could put into the water. The purpose of these expeditions is not entirely clear, probably being more to display Chinese power and influence than cultivate trade, although profitable trade was certainly carried on, especially in fine porcelain, which we today still call china. Then, in 1433, the expeditions suddenly ended, once again for vague reasons. One idea is that the mandarins, resentful of the profits made by the middle class merchants running these expeditions, pressured the emperor to end them. Whatever the reasons, it is tantalizing to think of what might have happened if these expeditions had continued, possibly with China discovering a route to Europe. As it was, Europe was left to find those routes and eventually dominate the globe.
The end of these expeditions had other far-reaching results for China, since they deprived the government of vital trade revenues. This, combined with two other factors, led to the decline and fall of the Ming Dynasty. First of all, the later Ming emperors lost interest in government, retreating to the comfort and pleasures of the Forbidden City and allowing abuses and corruption to multiply in the provinces. At the same time, the practice of making military offices hereditary led to the gradual deterioration of the army. Together, these factors weakened China and encouraged a growing number of peasant rebellions, attacks by nomads in the North, and raids from pirates in Japanese and Chinese ports. In 1644, another northern people, the Manzhou from Manchuria, replaced the Ming Dynasty and founded a foreign, and China's last, dynasty.
The Qing Dynasty founded by the Manzhou, although of nomadic origin, had absorbed much of Chinese culture and did everything it could to portray itself as a legitimately Chinese dynasty. As a result, the emperors revived the civil service exams and other governmental institutions, restored the mandarins to the levels of prestige they had enjoyed before Mongol rule, and maintained interest in classical scholarship. (However, the Manzhou also outlawed the crippling practice of binding Chinese women's feet and forced the Chinese peasants to shave their heads except for wearing Manchurian-style pigtails.) Militarily, the Manzhou extended China's borders to their greatest extent ever, encompassing Manchuria, Mongolia, Siankiang, Tibet, Korea, Burma, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
All this time, contact with the West continued. However, in the long run, it caused problems for China in two very different ways. For one thing, several new crops, such as corn, sweet potatoes, and better strains of rice, were imported, thus making China's agriculture much more productive. In the short run this was good. But, in the long run, these new crops and improved transport of food along China's canals and waterways, both of which allowed specialized cash crops suited to local soils, triggered a population explosion that pushed China's population to nearly 400,000,000 by 1800. At the same time, China's agriculture was expanding into Manchuria, which held the upland and drainage areas of some of China's rivers. Extensive farming here caused soil erosion and deforestation that triggered disastrous flooding downstream. These floods plus overpopulation put severe strains on China's ability to feed so many people and seriously weakened it.
The second problem had to do with religion. As we have seen, the Jesuits were allowed to preach Christianity in China, because they presented their religion in Confucian terms and were tolerant of Confucian practices. All that changed when Franciscan and Dominican priests arrived and started behaving in a much less tolerant manner than the Jesuits, condemning, among other things, the venerated Chinese custom of ancestor worship. Also, unlike the Jesuits, who concentrated on the educated ruling classes, the Franciscans and Dominicans preached more to the masses, which made Chinese authorities suspicious and resulted in a crackdown on Christianity in China (although the Jesuits still maintained some status at court) and a curtailment of trade with the West in the 1700's.
Unfortunately for China, Europe's power and interest in Chinese goods, especially tea, were growing beyond China's ability to hold these western "barbarians" back from its gates. The result would be a century of humiliation at the hands of the West and a revolution that would at once transform China and maintain its unique culture and integrity as a nation.
Certainly one of the most vibrant and influential cultures in the later twentieth century has been Japan. Despite the fact that it is mountainous, small (being roughly 2 percent the size of the United States) and has few natural resources, Japan is still one of the most productive industrial nations in the world. At first glance, Japan seems to be a mirror image of Great Britain, since both are small island nations just off the coasts of Eurasia. Indeed similarities do exist, such as the relatively independent existence each island nation has maintained in relationship to the respective continental cultures with which they are most in contact. However, significant differences also exist between the two cultures.
Three main geographic factors have influenced the history of Japan. First of all, Japan is an island nation consisting of four main islands (Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu) and thousands of islands that reach nearly to Taiwan. Japan's closest point to Korea on the mainland is still 115 miles away, some five times the distance between Britain and France. This relative isolation has had two main results. For one thing, it has led to fewer invasions of Japan, thus creating less need for a strong central government. It has also let Japan pick and choose the influences it has taken from other cultures, in particular China, since it is close enough to the continent to absorb foreign influences, but isolated enough to be able to reject the aspects it does not want. One of the most striking characteristics of Japanese culture has been its ability to blend select elements of foreign cultures with its own native innovations to create something uniquely Japanese.
The second important aspect of Japan's geography is its mountains, which cover 72 percent of the land. This has led to some political fragmentation throughout much of Japan's history, although its extensive coastline helps tie Japan together through communication by sea. The mountainous landscape has also severely restricted the amount of available farmland, forcing Japanese peasants to intensively cultivate what little land is available. This has led to both a crowded and necessarily cooperative society that values the group, loyalty, and obedience to authority over the rights of the individual. The introduction of Confucianism after 400 C.E., with its emphasis on strictly defined social roles, further reinforced this trend.
Finally, except for forests, which cover 55 percent of its land, Japan is poor in natural resources. This has forced its people to be resourceful traders and manufacturers, especially since the late 1800's when the Industrial Revolution vastly increased Japan's dependence on outside resources. Overall, Japan's geography, in particular its isolation, caused civilization to come considerably later than it did elsewhere for many of the high civilizations of Eurasia.
Early Japan seems to have had a number of different peoples migrating to its shores and influencing its early culture. Among the earliest were the Ainu, a Caucasian people quite distinct from the Mongolian stock that most Japanese are descended from. Some 17,000 Ainu still inhabit the northern island of Hokkaido. However, the primary influences on Japan's early culture were of Mongolian stock. From about 250 B.C.E. to 300 C.E., a culture from Asia known as Yayoi predominated, introducing rice agriculture, iron and bronze technology, and weaving. Yayoi society seems to have been matriarchal, with women holding high positions as priestesses or shamans. Only much later in Japanese history would women be reduced to a more subservient role in society.
By the third century C.E., cultural influences probably introduced from Korea, in particular better iron weapons and fighting from horseback, led to the Yamato period of Japanese culture (c.300-710). At first, the country was divided between numerous warring clans, known as Uji, each with its own patriarchal chief and guardian deity. Gradually, the Yamato clan unified most of Japan under its rule, claiming divine descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu. The imperial family in Japan today still traces its lineage back through the Yamato clan in the fourth century. Since there was no real distinction between governmental and religious functions in early Japan, the imperial family's duties have always been largely concerned with religious ritual. The burden of these ritualistic duties would hinder the emperors in the exercise of real political power so much in later centuries that they would often abdicate their thrones to their sons so they could be free to rule.
The emperors were especially concerned with their duties in Shinto, a uniquely Japanese religion that was emerging at this time. Shinto, which means "Way of the Gods" and is still popular in Japan, concerns itself with reverence for the forces of nature, which affect Japan so profoundly (e.g., typhoons, earthquakes, and volcanoes). It has no written texts or organization, being centered on shrines to local deities, known as kami. Worship is simple, consisting mainly of clapping (to get the kami's attention), bowing, and possibly making offerings. Shinto largely focuses on ritual purification to remove impurity caused by contact with physical dirtiness, sex, childbirth, wounds, and death. The modern Japanese insistence on baths and cleanliness probably derives from this aspect of Shinto. The most important Shinto shrine at Ise is sacred to the sun goddess and has helped provide a national focus of loyalty to the imperial family associated with that deity.
By the fifth century C.E., the growing power and sophistication of the Japanese state was making Japanese society more open to the influence of Chinese culture coming in by way of Korea. (A list compiled in 815 C.E. showed that more than one-third of Japan's aristocratic families claimed ancestry from Korea or China by way of Chinese colonies in Korea.) In addition, two other factors fed into this influence. For one thing, the Uji system of individual local clans was inadequate for meeting the growing needs of the state, oftentimes challenging or disrupting its authority. Secondly, the T'ang dynasty, which took power in 618, was taking China to new heights of power and influence that were being felt especially in Japan.
Two of the most important influences from China were Buddhism and Confucianism. In 552, the Korean state of Paekche presented scriptures and an image of Buddha to the Yamato court. Despite initial resistance by Japanese nobles, the Soga clan, which then effectively controlled the emperor and government, won Buddhism's acceptance. An important side effect of the introduction of Buddhism was the introduction of Chinese writing to Japan. This led many Japanese scholars to study in China where they would pick up other aspects of Chinese civilization and bring them back home. Thus Buddhism served as a vehicle for spreading Chinese civilization in much the same way that Christianity spread Mediterranean civilization to North Europe.
Confucianism brought two important elements to Japanese culture. First of all, its stress on a strict hierarchy of relationships reinforced the already cooperative nature of Japanese society as well as the autocratic social and political order that would emerge. Second, the Confucian emphasis on merit and education as the means of advancing in government would have some effect on Japanese values. However, this concept of advancement by merit would meet with stiff resistance from the hereditary Japanese nobility.
In the early 600's, Chinese, in particular Confucian, influence, sparked a number of governmental reforms. First of all, in 603 and 604, Prince Shotoku advocated the Chinese concepts of a supreme ruler, a centralized bureaucracy, advancement through merit, and the Confucian virtues. He tried to accomplish this by creating a system of court ranks that would replace the hereditary Uji ranks as the major basis for status. Prince Shotoku also sent several large embassies to China whose main importance was to bring back even more Chinese culture, which further accelerated the process of Japan's cultural transformation.
By 700 C.E., the central government was ready for the next step in consolidating its power: the Taika ("great change"). This set of reforms tried to apply Chinese governing techniques and institutions to Japan in several ways: the establishment of central government ministries, provincial government, law codes, and a taxation system modeled after that of T'ang China. Central to these reforms was a census to redistribute lands to the peasants, although the emperor in theory owned all these lands and parceled them out among his loyal followers. In 702, these reforms were formalized in the Taiho law codes. At the same time, the government established its first permanent capital at Nara, which was modeled after the Chinese capital, Ch'ang-an, being laid out in a rectangular grid along a north-south axis.
The Taika reforms and Taiho law codes increased the power of the emperor and court, but with some typically Japanese modifications. For one thing, the Japanese never adopted the Chinese doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven, which justified revolution against corrupt rulers. Therefore, the same dynasty of emperors has kept the throne in Japan throughout its history however unqualified some of them may have been. Second, resistance by the hereditary Japanese nobles against the Confucian system of promotion by means of an examination system meant that birth, not merit, remained the main criteria for government office. Finally, since dues to an overlord were cheaper than taxes to the central government, many peasants commended their lands to monasteries and powerful court nobles whose lands were tax exempt. This created a narrower tax base for the government and a greater tax burden on the peasants who kept their lands. Despite these limitations, the Taiko reforms and Taiho law codes were still a major step forward in the development of the Japanese state.
There are three things which I cannot control, the fall of the dice, the flow of the River Kamo, and the turbulent monks of Mount Hiei.— Emperor Go-Shirakawa
By the eighth century, the Japanese state had developed to the point of establishing a permanent capital at Nara. Unfortunately, at the same time, the power of the Buddhist monasteries was getting out of control. One Nara temple alone possessed forty-six manors and 5000 acres of excellent farmland, all of it tax-free. As we have seen, peasants often commended their lands to the monasteries in order to avoid government taxes. When a Buddhist monk, Dokyo, exercised undue influence over the empress Koken, this triggered a reaction against women running the government that reduced their overall status in society. It also caused the next emperor, Kammu, to move the capital away from the monasteries. Following the example of the T'ang dynasty then at the peak of its power in China, he founded a new capital at Heiankyo, meaning "Capital of Eternal Tranquility". The new city, modeled after the T'ang Chinese capital, Ch'ang-an, but on a smaller scale, was laid out in a rectangular grid facing South with the palace at the north end.
Since Japan was isolated and faced no foreign invasions at this time, Heiankyo had few fortifications and was little concerned with military affairs. It was able to maintain control over most of Japan through peaceful means. However, thanks to the non-military character of the government, two elements of Japanese society were creating problems that eventually would weaken Heiankyo’s control. First of all, the power and rivalries of the different Buddhist monasteries often got out of control. These monasteries went so far as to form their own armies that fought each other and disrupted the public peace. Another source of trouble came from the Ainu on the frontiers. Japanese settlers and nobles claiming new lands had to spend much of their time fighting these primeval inhabitants. As a result, these frontier settlers became both tough fighters (ancestors of the Samurai) and increasingly independent.
For the time being, however, a powerful landed family, the Fujiwara, was able to maintain effective control over both the countryside and the emperors, through whom they ruled. They used the power that came from their extensive landed estates and exercised a skillful diplomacy of playing one faction off against another to control the nobles in the countryside. Their influence over the emperors and the government came from their ability to marry their daughters into the imperial family. By this time, the emperors were also so burdened by their ritual duties that it was increasingly difficult for them to exercise real power. Thus the custom of indirect rule, a dominant feature of Japanese history, became firmly entrenched during several centuries of Fujiwara influence.
Thanks to the peace and security provided by the Fujiwara, a handful of idle nobles in Heiankyo were able to participate in the brilliant, if somewhat artificial and inbred, culture that court life offered. Much like the French nobles at Louis XIV's court at Versailles, these nobles engaged in activities where manners, taste, and fashion counted for more in gaining status than did accomplishing anything more substantial. Careers rose and fell on the basis of the choice of colors for clothes and stationary or the proper phrasing in a poem. Long hair, blackened teeth, and eyebrows that were shaved and repainted higher on the forehead were the marks of beauty for women. A continuous round of love affairs, cuckoo viewing expeditions, and winding water banquets, where men would drink from floating cups of wine and then compose poems, occupied their time.
Our best source for getting the flavor of this court life comes from the pen of a woman, Lady Murasaki, who wrote one of the greatest works of Japanese literature, The Tale of Genji, whose title character spends his life in search of true love. Interestingly, women at court tended to write the best literature since, unlike men who had to concern themselves with the precise calligraphy of the difficult Chinese writing system, they could use the more phonetic Kana script. As artificial as much of court life at Heiankyo may have been, it did have a profound effect on later Japanese tastes in such things as art and poetry.
Whatever the later influences of this court culture, it also had several factors working against its continued existence. For one thing, it was cut off from the realities of mainstream society and its powerbase in the countryside. Also, the Taika reforms and Taiho Law Code were meeting with growing resistance from both nobles and peasants. Along these lines, the peasants' practice of commending their lands to local nobles and monasteries to avoid government taxes seriously cut into government revenues. As a result, the central government's power and the influence of the Fujiwara family declined. This led to the rising power of the provincial warlords, which further accelerated the decline of the government, and so on. The resulting turmoil triggered a civil war between the two most powerful noble clans, the Taira and Minamoto, both of whom were originally minor offshoots of the imperial family who had gone to the provinces to make their fortunes. In the end, the Minamoto, who had the backing of the shadowy emperors in Heiankyo, won the civil war and the title of Seii-tai-shogun, meaning "barbarian suppressing generalissimo". The shortened version of this title, shogun, would be the one that most effective rulers of Japan would carry until 1868, ruling indirectly through the emperors who still carried on as ceremonial figureheads.
As the term shogun suggests, the Kamakura Shogunate that the Minamoto established was in essence a form of military rule. This contrasted sharply with the highly cultured but non-military regime that preceded it in Heiankyo, and was referred to as the bakufu ("tent government"), to reflect this military nature. Gradually, the shoguns replaced the formal government centered in Heiankyo with a strongly run feudal administration that rewarded their followers with income from estates and offices in the provinces. In 1221, a retired emperor who was resentful of this erosion of the central government's power rebelled in what was known as the Shokyu War. He was easily defeated, which allowed the shoguns to extend their feudal government all across Japan.
Feudal rule in Japan was very similar to its counterpart in Western Europe at the time. This was especially true of the warrior class that served as the backbone of the feudal order, known as the bushi ("warriors") or samurai ("those who serve"). Much like the European knights who were descended mainly from the Germanic invaders who had overthrown the Roman Empire, the samurai were largely descendants of the old provincial uji aristocracy, each group inheriting its military traditions from its respective ancestors. Both groups were an elite aristocracy, since the arms and armor needed to fight were too expensive for most people. Both groups also fought primarily from horseback in a series of individual encounters that often required the exchange of courtesies that befitted warriors of an elite class. Opposing samurai would greet each other with their respective genealogies to ensure they had worthy opponents, compliment their defeated opponents' courage afterwards, and even burn incense in their helmets so their heads would smell good if they were decapitated, a common practice in samurai combat, largely for the purpose of proving one’s victory.
The Samurai code of honor, later known as the Bushido ("Way of the Warrior"), demanded selfless loyalty to one's lord. Much like in Western Europe, the lord-vassal relationship was a reciprocal one, where the lord gave his vassal protection and income from land or an office in return for lifelong service. However, in times of turmoil when the law of the jungle prevailed, many samurai would quickly change loyalties according to the shifting fortunes of war and politics. Samurai were also expected to display unflinching bravery in combat and bear incredible hardships without so much as complaining. Even to feel pain and hunger, let alone show or express it was considered a dishonor. Such values tended to breed a certain callousness for human suffering and disregard for human life which later shocked Westerners first coming into contact with Japan.
Many of the same virtues were expected of samurai women, who were taught to repress their feelings, ignore suffering, loyally serve their husbands, and in some cases to handle weapons. Women handled household affairs, including money, which was considered beneath a warrior's dignity. Even today, Japanese women typically handle family finances, probably deriving from this custom. At first, a samurai woman could inherit her husband's property and take charge of her family affairs and deceased husbands' duties to his lord. But, as time went on and warfare became more chronic, women's property rights declined and they found themselves condemned to an increasingly inferior position in society.
Japanese arms, armor, and techniques of combat were quite different from their counterparts in Western Europe. Instead of using the lance as their primary weapon, as European knights did, the samurai relied primarily on the bow and splendid curved swords, probably the finest crafted blades anywhere. As a result, the samurai's sword became the material focus of his honor, and a whole tradition and mythology grew up around both Japanese sword making and their swords. In contrast to the heavy plate armor which evolved in Western Europe, samurai armor was made up of thin strips of steel held together by brightly colored threads, making it much lighter and more flexible, while still providing a good deal of protection.
The strong rule established by Minamoto Yoritomo continued under his widow, Masa-ko, and her father, Hojo Tokimasa (1138-1215). Afterwards, the Hojo clan established a regency (1205-1333) that controlled the shoguns who in turn were supposedly running Japan in the name of the emperors. The Hojo Regency ruled Japan with a firm and somewhat just hand. In 1232, it established a guideline for jurists known as the Joei Code. Magistrates were expected to find and carefully weigh evidence in trials. (If that failed, they would then look for some evil omens, such as nosebleeds, choking, or being wet by a crow or a kite to determine the case.) Society was divided into three classes (samurai, commoners, and slaves), but did not always give the upper classes better treatment. Women's status was also relatively high. They inherited land, administered offices, and even led troops into battle. One of them, Masa-ko who was Minamoto Yoritomo's widow, was a power behind the throne after her husband's death.
The Hojo Regency saw two problems arise that would bring about their eventual fall. First of all, the peace and prosperity it brought encouraged the rise of a middle class. Although the samurai looked with disdain upon people so concerned with money, prosperous times did influence them to imitate the more elegant and expensive lifestyles carried on at court. At the same time, the rising money economy triggered rising prices. As in Western Europe, this inflation hurt the samurai, especially the poorer ones who were on fixed incomes from lands and offices and were also not very good at handling money. As a result, many of the lower ranks of samurai found themselves in difficulties, some of them becoming unattached and footloose bandit samurai known as ronin who would add to Japan's troubles in the future.
The second problem came in 1274 when the Mongol ruler of China, Kublai Khan, launched his first invasion of Japan. Although this was driven back by a typhoon, the Mongols returned in 1281 with a much larger force of some 140,000 men. Despite the Mongols' numbers and use of such weapons as catapults that fired explosive projectiles, the samurai fought furiously to repel the invaders. However, once again, it was the force of nature in the form of a typhoon that decided the issue by wrecking much of the Mongol fleet and saving Japan. The Japanese called these typhoons kamikaze ("divine winds"), feeling that Japan was specially protected by the gods. The Mongol invasions forced the Japanese to band together as never before in the common defense of their nation.
However, the cost of driving out the Mongols had been a tremendous burden for the Hojo government. It also led many samurai to expect rewards from the government for their efforts. Unfortunately, since the Hojos had gained no new lands or plunder from these wars and could not meet samurai expectations of rewards, they lost many of their followers' support. Therefore, because of both economic strains and dissatisfaction among many samurai, the Hojo Regency and Kamakura Shogunate gave way to the weak rule of the Ashikaga Shogunate (1338-1573). The government's weakness allowed local lords, known as daimyo, to assert their independence. Eventually, Japan was split into some 60 virtually independent states whose daimyos disrupted the public peace with their private wars.
The Ashikaga shoguns who took over in 1338 found themselves faced with many of the same problems that had led to the downfall of their Hojo predecessors, namely resistance from outlying regions of Japan and continuing turmoil caused by bandit samurai (ronin). In addition, two other things weakened the Ashikaga government. First of all, the emperor Godaigo, rather than remaining a shadowy figurehead, challenged the Ashikagas for power. Although he was defeated, his revolt further weakened the shoguns. Secondly, the Ashikagas engaged in expensive building projects that cut into their already diminishing tax and estate revenues. As a result, many constables, the shoguns' officials in the provinces, started assuming more power locally, further weakening the central government.
This triggered revolts and the assassination of the shogun in 1441. A regency of four competing houses followed, which only led to more feuding and the Onin War (1467-77). Although a settlement was patched up, the damage was already done, and a period known as the Age of Warring States ensued, dominated by new provincial warlords known as daimyo. The turmoil of the age created a good deal of social upheaval, which allowed many ambitious men of lower class origins to rise to positions of power. (Among these would be Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a peasant who would eventually unify Japan under his rule.) Contributing to the era's social mobility was the introduction of European muskets in 1542. This created a greater reliance on peasants for the daimyos' armies, some of which had three peasants in the ranks for every samurai. Another impact of the age's upheaval was declining status for women. This was largely the result of wider enforcement of primogeniture in order to prevent the splitting of family estates in these dangerous times. Therefore, women lost most of their property rights and became little more than pawns in the power politics of the day.
The roughly 142 daimyo who controlled Japan at this time were virtually independent rulers who fought each other viciously for survival and power. For about a century, rival daimyos plundered towns, devastated the countryside, and massacred innocent civilians. However, many or most daimyo also saw that a healthy society was essential to their power. Therefore, they closely supervised their estates and encouraged economic improvements, especially through public works such as irrigation projects. This helped create more settled conditions, which had three major results. First of all, much like in Western Europe, the more settled conditions along with improvements in agriculture, led to the rise of towns. These generally started as markets under the protection of the daimyo's castle walls and then grew into full-fledged towns with a middle class of moneylenders using both cash and credit.
Second, the more settled conditions and a desire for trade combined with a growing problem with Japanese pirates, known as wako, combined to make Japan more open to trade and relations with Portuguese explorers who were then first entering East Asian waters. This was because wako raids on the mainland had caused the Ming dynasty in China to cut trade relations with Japan. The Japanese, who were especially anxious to get silk from China, saw the Portuguese, who could trade in China, as useful middlemen to that end. In addition to trade, two other very different things came into Japan with the Portuguese. One was the manufacture and use of firearms in warfare, which spread rapidly across Japan. The other influence was Christianity, which was spread by Jesuit missionaries who displayed great self discipline and concentrated on the upper classes, both of which features the Japanese samurai liked. As a result, many samurai and even daimyos converted to Christianity. Both firearms and Christianity would later lead to growing stresses in Japanese society.
Another effect of the more settled conditions then prevailing was a cultural flowering in Japan. This largely centered on a new Buddhist sect known as Zen. Up to this point, the most popular form of Buddhism was Amida, or the Pure Land, sect. Unlike Theraveda Buddhism, whose members thought that it took personal effort to attain Nirvana, the extinction of the self which they felt was an illusion anyway, Amida Buddhism's followers saw Buddha and the Bodhissatva (other mortals who had gained enlightenment) as deities who would help them reach a paradise to the West. While this paradise was originally meant to be merely a sort of halfway spot where people could attain final enlightenment, many people saw it as an end in itself.
Amida Buddhism came to resemble Christianity in several ways. For one thing, it based salvation on God's grace. Second, it conceived of Buddha as something of a Trinity in the doctrine of the Three Buddhas: the body of Essence, who was the primordial Buddha pervading the universe, the Created Body, which was the historical Buddha much like Christ, and the Body of Bliss which takes the form of many Buddhas. The most important of these is Amida Buddha (Immeasurable Glory) who dwells in the Western paradise. Also, like Christianity, Amida Buddhism concerned itself with good works and charity. By the fifteenth century it was the most popular form of Buddhism in Japan, and it has kept that distinction to this day.
However, by this time another form of Buddhism, Zen, was becoming especially popular with the Samurai. Zen, which had reached Japan in the sixth century, emphasized reliance on one's own efforts rather than the grace of Buddha to attain enlightenment. As a result, it never achieved the popularity of Amida Buddhism. The basic idea of Zen is that there is an underlying unity tying everything together; but we are trapped in our daily perceptions by the illusion of a distinction between ourselves and the world around us. The goal of Zen is to be able to perceive the reality of that unity and extinguish our egos that create the illusion that separates us from all around us. This is not done through rational means, since rational thought is the product of minds that still perceive a subjective and objective world where things are separate from one another. Rather, Zen strives for enlightenment ( satori) through an intuitive grasp by means of meditation and concentration.
There are two primary techniques to this end. One is the koan, which from the rational point of view is an illogical riddle or theme that is meant to break the mind's customary thinking and "derail" it from its normal rational patterns of thought. The strain that the koan puts on the conscious mind should liberate the subconscious and break down the barriers between the two, thus leading to enlightenment. The second technique is zazen, a strict meditation using proper posture, breath, and concentration that stills the mind, controls the emotions, and strengthens the will. Unlike the koan, which through its "illogic" suddenly shakes one into enlightenment, zazen generally attains a more gradual enlightenment. However, zazen was more popular with the samurai, since its emphasis on discipline helped them develop their military skills, while its ideas on life and death (which in Zen are one and the same) helped them face death in battle with more resolve. Not surprisingly, such martial arts as swordsmanship and archery came to be closely associated with Zen, a far cry from Buddha's original intentions.
Zen, with its emphasis on harmony, purity, tranquility, and simplicity, had a profound impact on several aspects of Japanese culture during this time. One was the tea ceremony, which had also been imported from China several centuries earlier. This ritual, where one person served tea to another, took place in a simple hut and emphasized simplicity through the precise arrangement of objects and the equally precise motions in the ceremony itself. Ceramics and flower arranging, which were inherent parts of the tea ceremony, also became important aspects of Japanese culture at this time. Zen also influenced the development of Japanese gardens, and in particular rock gardens of raked gravel (to represent the tranquility of the sea) interspersed with larger rocks arranged in precise and asymmetrical patterns. The beauty and simplicity of these gardens were designed to help one in meditation.
Although these various cultural advances were not of a political nature, they did help provide Japan with a common culture that promoted the unity of Japan as a whole. At the same time, the rising towns and middle class along with the spread of firearms and Christianity were available for anyone with the daring and foresight to exploit them in the reunification of Japan. That person, Oda Nobunaga, came to power in a relatively obscure but strategically placed province of Owari in 1551. He and his successors, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Ieyasu Tokugawa, would restore unity and order to Japan.
Nobunaga was a cruel and ruthless tyrant who once had a maid executed for leaving a fruit stem on the floor. However, he was a skillful general and ruler who successfully exploited the forces of the day to his advantage. He was a leader among Japaneses daimyo in adapting firearms to his army and using them to great effect. He also built his economy by building roads, abolishing tolls, and establishing open markets and a standard coinage. One other thing Nobunaga did was favor the Christians against the militant Buddhist monasteries that he especially disliked. Success bred success for Nobunaga, since each victory attracted more followers to his standard, which led to more victories and so on. By his death in 1582, Nobunaga controlled 32 of Japan's 66 provinces. It was left to his successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, to complete Japan's unification.
Hideyoshi was originally a peasant who had risen through the ranks to become one of Nobunaga's most trusted generals. Like Nobunaga, he was also a superior general, being both bold and resolute in action. Although not quite as cruel as his predecessor, he could still be ruthless as he avenged Nobunaga's death, eliminated any rival generals who might make a bid for power, and got Nobunaga's lands under his control, By 1590, Hideyoshi had unified all of Japan except for the lands of Ieyasu Tokugawa with whom he concluded a treaty that lasted until Hideyoshi's death in 1598. Hideyoshi declined to assume the title of shogun since he was not related by blood to the current line of shoguns.
Once Hideyoshi's power was established, he followed three policies that would profoundly affect Japan's future course of development. For one thing, he launched two invasions of Korea (1592 and 1597). Both of these failed, largely due to the Korean navy of armored "turtle" ships that cut the Japanese army in Korea off from its homeland and forced its retreat. Despite these defeats, one can see this as part of a greater expansion of the Japanese people, going along with the spread of Japanese settlers, mercenaries, and pirates (wako) throughout East and Southeast Asia.
Secondly, despite his own peasant origins, Hideyoshi cracked down on society in an attempt to stifle the social mobility that had helped stir up so much turmoil over the past century. In an attempt to disarm the populace, Hideyoshi launched the Sword Hunt, confiscating all weapons, especially firearms, from non-nobles under the pretext of melting them down to make a statue of Buddha. He also prevented peasants, merchants, and samurai from changing their professions or even their overlords, thus creating a rigid social structure that lasted until the mid 1800's.
Hideyoshi's third policy concerned growing tensions with European Christians, whose ability to trade with China had greatly increased their influence in Japan. As we have seen, the Japanese liked the Jesuits whose self-discipline and habit of preaching mainly to the upper classes did little to disrupt the harmony of Japanese society. However, several things about Christianity disturbed many Japanese: their meat diet (since the Japanese were mainly vegetarian), their intolerance of other religions, their slave trade which took Japanese out of their country, and the question of who Japanese Christians were more loyal to, their own rulers or the Christian God. In 1587, after one of his vassals refused to renounce Christianity, Hideyoshi decreed all Christian missionaries should leave the country. However, the decree was not strictly enforced, and missionaries just kept a low profile as they did their work. Tensions increased in 1593 with the arrival of Spanish Franciscans who raised suspicions of trying to stir up rebellion by preaching to the lower classes. A dispute over ownership of a Spanish galleon shipwrecked off the coast of Japan in 1596 led to fears of a Spanish invasion and persecution of Japanese Christians.
Hideyoshi's death in 1598 led to a power struggle which ended with the new ruler, Ieyasu Tokugawa, establishing his power and even assuming the title of shogun. During this time, problems with the Christians were put on hold. However, in 1600, Dutch Protestants arrived who told stories about their Spanish enemies that revived Japanese fears of all foreigners. As a result, Tokugawa outlawed and persecuted Christians. His successors went even further, banning virtually all foreigners from Japan by 1639. Only two Dutch ships and a handful of Chinese and Korean ships could trade each year. For the next two centuries, Japan would cut itself off from the rest of the world and develop on its own.
The first stirrings of revival from anarchy in Western Europe took place in Italy. There were three reasons for this. First of all, the Roman cities were older and more deeply rooted than cities in Northern Europe. Second, their position in the middle of the Mediterranean attracted trade from the richer Byzantine and Muslim civilizations in the East. Finally, the Byzantine Empire, which ruled parts of Italy, protected its towns there from at least some of the chaos of the times. Italian towns were much reduced in size from the days of the Roman Empire, but they still functioned as religious centers ruled by bishops as well as centers of defense.
In the eighth century, the popes had summoned the Frankish rulers, Pepin the Short and Charlemagne to Italy to defend them against the Lombards. Especially as a result of Charlemagne's campaigns, the northern half of Italy came under Frankish rule. After Charlemagne's death in 814, law and order collapsed with the central government, but the Frankish nobles left behind by Charlemagne remained as the power in the countryside while the bishops ruled the cities.
The turmoil following Charlemagne's death attracted waves of Muslim raids These raids reached their peak in the ninth and tenth centuries, and, at one point, the Muslims even controlled part of Rome. Eventually, they were driven out, leaving the Frankish nobles in the countryside to fight one another for control of Northern Italy. Holding the balance of power in these struggles were the bishops in the towns. In order to enlist the bishops' aid the Frankish nobles promised various rights to them. Typically, the first of these rights was to build their own fortifications. Since such projects were expensive, the Franks gave the bishops the right to collect taxes. And along with that would come certain judicial rights that also brought in court fees. Over time, the bishops' power and their desire to break free from the nobles steadily grew.
Luckily for the bishops, a strong German state with interests in Italy was emerging under Otto I. At the pope's request, Otto came down and crushed the power of the nobles and left the bishops in the cities as his agents of control in Northern Italy. This resulted in two things. For one thing, the pope rewarded Otto in 961 with the Roman imperial title that Charlemagne had been given 160 years before. For the next 850 years, the aura of the imperial title would influence German rulers' policy and be the cause of ruin for Germany. However, at this time, a strong Germany, or Holy Roman Empire as it came to be called, was useful for protecting the peace in Italy. Second, the Italian cities, now freed from the nobles, started to take the offensive against the Muslim raiders. By 1200, Italian navies and merchants would be powerful enough to dominate the Mediterranean, help the Crusaders conquer and maintain their states in Syria and Palestine, and even conquer Constantinople in 1204.
Together, these factors brought peace and security from the Muslims and Frankish nobles, which led to the revival of towns and trade. At first, this benefited the bishops ruling the cities, since it brought in more taxes from trade. But it also meant the rise of a middle class of artisans and merchants in each city who were increasingly dissatisfied with living under the rule of the bishops. Eventually, they rose up against the bishops and overthrew them, establishing independent town governments known as communes. As nobles moved into the towns where many of them took up trade and merchants seized more and more political power, the distinction between nobles and middle class became somewhat blurred. What emerged in Italy was a new nobility known as magnates (literally "great ones") that was a fusion of these two groups.
It is important to note that while we talk about Italy as a country, it still existed as a patchwork of different and competing states. Northern Italy, in particular, was made up of a large number of independent city-states, the most important being Venice (a former Byzantine city), Genoa, Pisa, and, later on, Milan and Florence. It was these cities that led the way for Western Europe to emerge from the Early Middle Ages. Their example and wealth would help spark a similar revival of towns north of the Alps. However, as we shall see, the political development of Northern Europe would be quite different from that of Italy, giving rise to the emergence of what would be our modern nation states.
Until this century, the vast majority of people spent their lives involved in one basic occupation: getting food, either through hunting and gathering, herding, or agriculture. When these people could produce a surplus, they were freed to do other things, which provided the basis for towns, cities, and civilization. Without the ability to produce surplus food, no civilization would be able to survive. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the first step in building a new civilization in Western Europe was developing ways for producing a surplus of food.
Before discussing these new agricultural techniques, it is useful to look at the state of Medieval life and agriculture in the Early Middle Ages. The vast majority of peasants were serfs, bound to the soil and service of a lord who owed them protection in return for work in his fields. These serfs lived in villages, isolated pockets of farmland in the midst of a vast wilderness of forests, thickets, and marshes. Typically, a village would have several acres of cultivated fields, a wooden castle or manor house for the lord, a peasant village, a parish church, and a mill. A village might be equivalent to a manor, the economic unit given to support a noble. However, it could just as well be divided into several manors to support several nobles or be only one of several villages making up a large manor.
The village had to be self-sufficient because it was virtually cut off from the outside world. Roads were poor and brigands or local lords constantly threatened travel. Raids from neighboring nobles and such invaders as the Vikings, Magyars, and Moslems also kept most people huddled under the safety of their lord's castle walls. As a result, the flow of trade and commerce was reduced to a fraction of what it had been during the Pax Romana. Compared to the thriving Byzantine and Islamic cultures to the south and east, Western Europe was a fragile outpost on the western fringe of civilization.
Europe’s agriculture reflected this low level of culture. The plow used then was still the scratch plow that worked fine in the thin dry soils of the Mediterranean, but was not very suitable for the wetter, deeper soils of Northern Europe. Such a plow might be reinforced with iron, or it might be nothing more than a curved digging stick. The main source of power for pulling the plow was the ox hooked up by a yoke harness that pulled at the neck. Although slow, the ox was more than some peasants could afford. As a result, they had to pull their own plows or dig with spades (known as delving). Finally, the peasants used the two-field system, where one field lay fallow to reclaim the soil's nutrients while the other field was being cultivated. This left only fifty percent of the farmland for use in any given year. As a result, crop yields were very low. In the Roman Empire, for every bushel of seed grain planted, four bushels would be harvested. In the Early Middle Ages with the poor techniques being used, this ratio dropped to one and a half or two to one. In other words, a full half or more of a peasant's harvest had to be saved as seed grain for next year's planting. In years of famine, this led to serious difficulties. Given these limits, it should come as no surprise that population remained low and grew at a very slow rate, if at all.
One has to be very careful when generalizing about what techniques were used where. This is because we have little evidence to go on, especially concerning the peasants, whose lives were of little concern to the monks writing religious histories. Also, the poor communications between manors meant that widely different techniques and tools might be used in a fairly local area. However, it does seem likely that the light scratch plow, oxen, yoke harness, and two-field system were in general use in Western Europe in the Early Middle Ages. Then came some changes that would lay the foundations for more advanced civilization.
It is impossible to say when population first started expanding in Western Europe, although we can make some educated guesses. For one thing, the climate seems to have turned warmer in the 800's. We base this on tree ring evidence and the fact that the Vikings could sail in northern latitudes unobstructed by ice. The warmer climate meant longer growing seasons, better harvests, and thus a healthier and growing population. Major plagues that had hit intermittently since the later Roman Empire also ceased after 743 C.E. This might be partly a result of the better-fed population having more resistance to disease. Finally, a certain amount of political stability had returned to Western Europe by 1000 C.E. The feudal system, whatever its faults, was providing at least a minimal amount of security to Europe. Along with this, the invasions of Vikings, Magyars, and Muslims were letting up by this date. The increased stability created by all these factors helped provide the conditions needed for population growth and economic revival. This brings us to new farming techniques that would greatly expand food supplies and lead to the rise of towns.
The first of these techniques was the three-field system. Originally, the spread of civilization to Northern Europe brought with it the two-field system. This was well suited to the climate of the Mediterranean with its hot dry summers and one growing season in the cooler, wetter winters. The more temperate climate of Northern Europe allowed growing seasons in both summer and winter. However, planting two crops a year would exhaust the soil if peasants used the old two-field system. As a result, peasants divided their farmland into three fields, one for winter crops, one for summer crops, and one to remain fallow. The use of the fields was rotated each year. A second part of the system, in order to prevent soil exhaustion, was to use different crops that took different nutrients from the soil. The winter crop typically would consist of winter wheat or rye, and the spring crop would be either spring wheat or legumes (beans or peas). The greater variety of crops provided people with a more balanced diet. Also an advantage of legumes is that they take nitrogen out of the air rather than the soil, and when buried, actually replenish the soil with nitrogen. (The Romans referred to this as "green manuring".) The following charts show how the two systems work.
TWO-FIELD SYSTEM | ||
---|---|---|
Field 1 | Field 2 | |
Year I | Winter crop | Fallow |
Year II | Fallow | Winter crop |
Year III | Winter crop | Fallow |
THREE-FIELD SYSTEM | |||
---|---|---|---|
Field 1 | Field 2 | Field 3 | |
Year I | Winter crop | Summer crop | Fallow |
Year II | Fallow | Winter crop | Summer |
Year III | Summer crop | Fallow | Winter crop |
Year IV | Winter crop | Summer crop | Fallow |
Consider what the changeover from the two-field system would have meant to a peasant village farming 60 acres. In the old system only 30 acres would be planted each year. In the new three-field system 40 acres would be planted, an increase of 33%. Also, peasants would plow the fallow land twice to keep weeds down. In the two field system this mean plowing all 60 acres once plus the 30 fallow acres again, 90 acres of plowing in all. The three-field system, involved plowing all 60 acres plus only 20 acres of fallow again, a total of only 80 acres of plowing. Thus while producing 33% more food, the peasants were plowing considerably less, especially considering what hard work plowing was back then. The extra time saved could be used for clearing new farmland from the surrounding wilderness, which, of course, meant even more food. Likewise, the extra food meant more people from population growth, who would also clear new lands to produce more food, and so on. Eventually, enough new land would be cleared and surplus food produced to support population in towns.
Another major development in farming was the heavy plow that could cut through the deep, wet, and heavy soils of Northern Europe much better than the light scratch plow. It had three basic parts: the coulter or heavy knife that cut through the soil vertically, the plowshare that cut through the soil horizontally, and the mouldboard, which turned the soil to one side. Some models had two wheels that acted as a fulcrum to keep the plow from getting stuck. There were two advantages to this kind of plow. First, it cut the soil so violently that there was no need for cross plowing as there was with the scratch plow. This saved time, which could be used for, among other things, clearing more land and producing more food. Second, the heavy plow created furrows, little ridges and valleys in each plowed row. In times of drought, water would drain into the valleys and ensure some crops would survive. In times of heavy rains, the crops on top of the ridges would not get flooded out. As a result, peasants could usually look forward to at least some crops to harvest even in bad years. The furrows the heavy plow created also meant that the rich alluvial bottomlands by rivers could be farmed without their frequent floods doing too much damage. As with the three-field system and crop rotation, the heavy plow also fed into the feedback cycle of more food, population growth, etc.
The heavy plow had an impact on peasant society and land holding patterns. Being heavy, it required as many as eight oxen to pull it compared to two oxen on the scratch plow. Since few peasants could afford their own teams, they would combine their ox teams and hook them to one plow. Occasionally, disputes might arise as to whose land would be plowed first, especially if the weather had been bad and it was doubtful that all the fields could get plowed in time for a good crop. As a result, peasants split their lands into long strips and interspersed them among other peasants' and the lord's strips. Some peasants might have 50 or 60 strips spread out over the manor. The advantage of this was twofold. First of all, it ensured that everyone got at least some land plowed. Second, the long strips of land meant that the plow team did not have to turn as much, one of the most difficult aspects of plowing, especially with four rows of oxen to increase the turning radius. The heavy plow also created a more cooperative peasant society and caused small hamlets to combine into larger villages in order to share ox teams.
The last major development in farming was a new source of power, the plow horse. Several factors allowed the use of the horse in Western Europe. The invention of the horseshoe (c.900 C.E.) prevented the hooves of the horse from cracking in the cold wet soil. The horse collar let the horse pull from the chest rather than the neck. This increased the horse's pulling power from about 1000 lbs. (with the yoke harness) to as much as 5000 lbs with the horse collar. Finally, cross breeding to make larger warhorses also provided the peasants with larger plow horses. Although it could not pull any more than an ox, the horse did have two advantages. It could pull up to fifty percent faster than the ox, and it could work one to two hours longer per day. The one drawback was that the horse ate a lot. Overall, despite eating more, the plow horse could increase farm production as much as 30 percent for those peasants who could afford horses. As with the three field system and heavy plow, this led into the feedback cycle of producing more food, population growth, and developing new lands for even more food production, etc.
There were some interesting side effects of the use of the horse. Being fifty percent faster than oxen, horses could bring food into a town from outlying villages fifty percent farther away without taking any more time than before with an ox team. Increasing the radius of the surrounding farmland supplying a town by fifty percent more than doubled the area of farmland and amount of agricultural produce available to support that town, and, subsequently, the potential size of the town itself. In addition, the replacement of the two-wheeled cart with the four-wheeled wagon with a hinged post for greater maneuverability increased the amount of grain a peasant could bring into town.
We should keep in mind the limits to medieval agriculture. While a yield to seed ratio of four to one was good back then, farmers today expect at least ten times that. What this means is that for centuries it took ten farmers to create enough surplus to support one townsman. Still, along with the greater stability brought by feudalism, the increased food production brought on by the agricultural revolution of the Middle Ages was essential for the revival of towns, without which our own civilization would not have evolved.
In the twelfth century, towns and trade in Western Europe, which had long been in decay since the end of the Roman Empire, saw a renewed outburst of energy. A combination of four factors would lead to this. First, there were the old Roman cities in Italy that had evolved from centers of defense into thriving towns with a strong middle class primarily concerned with trade and manufacture.
Second, another area, Flanders (roughly equivalent to modern Belgium), soon saw the development of towns and trade also. Crucial to this was the wool industry started by a new monastic order, the Cistercians. These monks were part of the ongoing cycle of Church corruption and reform that usually started with the monasteries. To protect their spiritual purity from the corruption of the outside world, they would found their houses "far from the haunts of men." Oftentimes, this was on hilly rocky ground that was often unsuitable for farming. Other uses were found for it, in particular raising sheep. The Cistercians were well organized and very good at raising sheep and wool, which they traded to Flemish merchants, who started a wool industry and towns.
However, the Flemish had a problem that limited the scope of their operations: slow weaving on the old hand loom. Luckily, an improved mechanical loom came up from Muslim Spain sometime in the eleventh century. This device, possibly originating in China, eliminated hand weaving the weft thread in and out between each individual warp thread. Instead, foot pedals attached to every other warp thread would raise those threads and speed up the process of weaving in one direction. Another foot pedal would raise the other warp threads for the weft coming back. This increased wool production, but the traditional method of spinning thread with the drop could not keep up with the pace of weaving. Not until the thirteenth century, thanks largely to the crusades and increased contact with the East, was the spinning wheel introduced, which quickly pulled and spun wool through a spindle and wound it on a bobbin. Woolen production jumped by a factor of ten times and Flemish woolens became the basis of a thriving urban culture in northern Europe.
Indeed, Flemish wool was a highly valued commodity, reputedly being as smooth as silk. The tendrils of Flemish trade stretched far and wide, but especially across the Channel to buy rough English wool for weaving into fine Flemish product. The close economic ties this bred between England and Flanders, then a French vassal, would help lead to the Hundred Years War. The influence of Flemish woolens also reached southward to Italy and beyond, touching off trade at intervening points in France where towns next revived.
The emerging feudal order helped make possible two other factors vital to the rise of towns and trade. One was the agricultural revolution that could support town populations. The other was the end of Viking and Arab raids that made the roads safer for trade. These four factors helped create more political stability, which encouraged merchants to take to the roads once again. In the middle of the old Roman trade routes linking Italy and Flanders was the French county of Champagne, whose counts were shrewd enough to take advantage of this trade by sponsoring six annual trade fairs held in four rotating locations. Rather than robbing these merchants, the counts charged them for the use of booths, local justice, lodging, food, and protection. Among those attending these fairs and providing the counts with revenues were wealthy merchants from Italy and Flanders.
The excitement these fairs generated was infectious. So were the profits. Some jealous nobles attacked and robbed merchants traveling to the fairs. Others, being more far-sighted, worked to ensure safer travel so they could start their own fairs and make their own profits. With each new fair came greater incentive to stifle troublesome local nobles and increase political order. This in turn stimulated more trade fairs, more profits, more law and order, and so on.
Eventually fairs and trade became so common that merchants started settling down in permanent towns. Generally, such settlements were on well-traveled routes that could attract the trade of passing merchants. They also were under the protective walls of a lord's castle, an abbot's monastery, or a bishop's settlement. Many towns were brand new settlements, but others were outgrowths of already established communities. Even today, many European towns have a castle in or near them, evidence of their medieval beginning.
More stable conditions had helped produce the rise of towns. The towns in turn helped create even more peaceful conditions with far reaching effects. For one thing, towns generated taxes in the form of money, a new more fluid kind of wealth vastly superior to land as the primary form of wealth. Previously, almost any noble with a castle and a stockpile of food could defy his lord by going under siege, since feudal armies were notoriously unstable and prone to breaking up after their terms of service (usually forty days) were up. However, the more powerful lords that could attract settlers for towns now had money from taxes. With that money, they could buy mercenaries, usually landless knights, who would fight as long as the lord could pay them. Such armies were more stable and allowed their owners to crush the power of their rebellious vassals and establish more law and order. The increased order would encourage more towns which would generate more taxes for the king and upper nobles, who could impose even more law and order, and so on. This would also feed back into the ongoing cycle encouraging trade fairs. All this led to two things: a rising class of townsmen and a money based economy, both of which would help lead to the rise of kings.
Money created another problem especially hurting the nobles and Church: inflation. At first, when towns were just getting started and there was little money in circulation, the fixed rent set by the original town charter seemed like a good deal. However, as more money came into circulation, prices rose, and the buying power of the fixed rents declined. This especially hurt the nobles and the Church. The nobles often took the short term expedient of selling freedom to their towns and serfs for one lump sum. This gave them some immediate cash, but wrecked much of their power, leading to the decline and eventual end of the feudal order.
The Church, with its wealth mostly in land and fixed rents, also suffered. It did have other options for raising money, namely selling church offices and indulgences (reprieves from punishment in Purgatory before being admitted into Heaven). Such practices were subject to abuse and led to popular discontent that cut into the Church's power and prestige. Eventually, that would lead to the Protestant Reformation, which would destroy the Catholic Church's religious dominance in Western Europe.
As far as townsmen were concerned, nobles and churchmen first saw them as an asset providing them with taxes and militia. However, as the class of townsmen grew, so did tensions with their overlords. For one thing, townsmen (or burghers, from burg, the German word meaning town) felt increasingly stifled under a lord's rule. The two classes had very different values, the burghers being concerned with trade and commerce and their overlords being concerned with power and fighting. Therefore, one by one, towns started trying to gain their freedom. Some towns bought it with one big payment to the lord or fought for it, sometimes in long protracted struggles. For example, the town of Tours in France fought twelve wars before it finally won its independence.
Another tactic was to appeal to the king for support, since kings and townsmen saw each other as valuable allies against the nobles and Church in between. Eventually, the towns managed to break free and form communes (urban republics) like their counterparts in Italy. Oftentimes confirming the town’s independent status would be a charter that would detail the specific duties and liberties the town and lord owed each other. Also, as serfs and towns bought their freedom, they came more closely under the king's authority, supplying him with taxes and loans.
Two other factors unique to the king gave him an edge over other nobles. One was his religious position as God's appointed ruler, which was symbolized by a churchman anointing him with oil in the same manner as Biblical rulers. The second factor was his position as the supreme judge of the land. When the kings were weak in the Early Middle Ages, this did them little good. However, as they rose in power, they could exercise their judicial powers more effectively, which in turn would give them more political power and so on.
All these factors, the rise of a money economy, the growing class of townsmen, and the kings' judicial and religious status gradually led to the decline of the medieval Church and nobles and the corresponding rise of kings with money that could buy them two things. One was stable full time mercenary armies that would fight for as long as they were paid. The other was a bureaucracy drawn increasingly from the middle class. These new royal bureaucrats had several advantages over feudal vassals. For one thing, they were more loyal, being the king's natural allies against the nobles. Also, they were more efficient since they were generally literate and could keep records. Finally, they were easier to control because they were totally dependant on the king for their status. Also, they were paid with money, so the king could just cut their pay if they got out of line. This contrasted greatly with the land based economy of the Early Middle Ages when the king had to physically drive rebellious vassals from their lands. Although the rise of kings and national monarchies would be a centuries long process, it was the rise of towns starting in the twelfth century that set that process in motion and laid the foundations of the modern world.
The years when towns and trade were first reviving in Western Europe were precarious ones for the emerging middle class of merchants and artisans. Costly tolls levied by local nobles hampered trade when times were peaceful, while more turbulent times could see each of those nobles cutting off trade and marauding merchants on the road. Different weights, measures, and standards of coinage complicated transactions between merchants of neighboring towns. Famine could drive prices up dramatically, thus cutting down the flow of trade and causing turmoil among the workers who wanted higher wages to keep up with rising prices. Given such a dangerous world for the medieval merchants and artisans, it should come as no surprise that they formed associations, leagues and guilds, to protect and promote trade. These were not examples of free enterprise, however. Their purpose was to exclude outside competition from their markets since the evolving market economy was seen as too fragile to sustain much competition.
In northern Europe, various towns would band together in leagues to establish collective security. The most important of these leagues was the Hanseatic League*, which was centered on the city of Lubeck in the southwest corner of the Baltic Sea. At the height of its power (c.1350 C.E.) the League contained over seventy German cities throughout the Baltic and North Seas. It kept an effective monopoly on the trade in this area by keeping out Russian, Scandinavian, and English competition. When pirates, local lords, or even kings threatened their trade or freedom, the League's forces could successfully defend their interests. The king of Denmark found this out to his dismay in 1370 when he tried to encroach on the League's territory and was driven back. The Hanseatic League dominated the trade of the Baltic and North Seas in the north much as the Italian cities dominated the Mediterranean trade in the south.
Besides common military action, the Hanseatic League carried out other measures to protect and promote trade. For one thing, it established common weights, measures and coinage throughout its member cities. This cut down on the time-consuming hassles of having to convert from one weight and measurement system to another each time a new business transaction took place. Today we are in the final stages of this standardization process, as the metric system is being pushed for worldwide use.
The Hanseatic League's success was also based on more advanced business techniques, in particular the use of credit. With a cash economy, a merchant could only buy as many goods as he had the cash on hand to pay with, which severely limited the scope of his activities. With credit that merchant could borrow more money than he actually had and use it to buy goods that he could sell for a larger profit than with a cash economy. This was because he was borrowing, buying, and reselling on a much larger scale (even after repaying the loan) than he ever could if he were dealing strictly with cash. As the merchant’s credit rating improved, he could borrow ever-larger sums of money, oftentimes in several places at a time through the use of his agents, which vastly expanded the scope of his activities, his profits, and his credit rating. Buying in larger volume also allowed him to sell each unit of goods more cheaply and thus undersell other merchants not dealing in credit. In such a way, the Hanseatic League established a virtual monopoly on trade in the Baltic and North Seas.
The political expansion of the German people also helped the German cities of the Hanseatic League. At this time, German peasants and the crusading order of the Teutonic Knights were expanding into the interior of Eastern Europe against the Slavic peoples there. Meanwhile, the German cities founded colonies in their wake, thus increasing their economic power over the Baltic Sea and further restricting competition there.
Although the Hanseatic League was the most important of the medieval town leagues, it was by no means the only one. There were several leagues of towns along the Rhine whose main concerns were to stop the raids of local nobles on trade and to curb the tolls those nobles imposed on goods passing through their territory. The most famous of these leagues, the Swabian League, had over eighty member cities at its height (late 1300's) and was strong enough to challenge the dukes of Austria and Bavaria. In Flanders, there was a league of twenty-two towns whose purpose was to buy raw wool from England. Another league of seventeen towns in Champagne County, France regulated marketing practices at trade fairs. Whatever their functions, the cumulative effect of leagues was to improve the trade and economy of Western Europe. And that in turn contributed to the rise of kings and more stability.
Guilds went much farther than excluding outside competition from within their walls. In fact they controlled just about every aspect of the town's economy, in particular wages, prices, quality of goods, and guild membership. For example, an armorer would buy the materials he needed through the guild at a set price, not on his own for whatever price was cheapest. His workers worked for the number of hours and wages set by the guild. His armor had to be of certain quality meeting the guild's specifications. He could not advertise beyond setting one example of his work in his window. The guild also determined the price he could charge so he would not get an advantage over other members of the guild. Set prices also reflected the Church's displeasure with profits.
Training for and admission into the guild were also strictly regulated. Apprenticeship was almost always restricted to sons or nephews of guild masters, something that caused anger among the common laborers. Typically, a master craftsman would send his son to another craftsman for apprenticeship at the age of ten to twelve years. The boy would live in the master's home, work in his shop, and learn the craft in an apprenticeship lasting from three to fifteen years. At the end of his training, the apprentice would usually get a gift of money from the master to help him start his own business. He then became a journeyman who worked as a day laborer for different masters until he could save enough money to start his own shop. When he was ready, the journeyman would be examined by the guild masters for his technical ability, oftentimes having to produce a masterpiece to show his proficiency at the craft. If he passed the exam, and there was room in the guild, he became a master who shared in the limited, but fairly stable market established by the guild for its members.
The guild was more than a business association. It was also a social and political organization that looked after the welfare of its members. It provided justice by settling disputes between its members. It supervised the morals of its members in such matters as public fighting, drunkenness, and a dress code. It provided insurance against fire, flood, theft, prison, and old age (for those few who survived that long). It paid for members' funerals and for masses and prayers to free their souls from Purgatory. The guilds would also build hospitals, almshouses, schools and orphanages for the many orphans in society back then.
The guild was also a source of pride for its members. Each guild had its own guildhall where meetings and social functions were held. On the day celebrating its patron saint, a guild would put on parades and religious plays. Guilds would also dedicate to the town cathedral stained glass windows depicting biblical scenes that were also concerned with that guild's particular craft.
Guilds, like leagues, caused Europe's economy and trade to improve, which made possible the rise of kings and more stable conditions. However, those very kings who profited from guilds and leagues were largely the cause of their decline in the 1400's. For one thing, the stable conditions protected by the kings made the guilds’ protective restrictions unnecessary. In spite of this, the guild masters who ran the towns restricted membership even more than before while maintaining strict price and quality controls on their goods. Earlier, such practices had been good since they had protected a fragile trade vulnerable to the harsh conditions of the time. By the late 1400's, those same practices that had once protected the guilds now worked to destroy them. Restrictive membership and low wages, even in time of inflation, led to worker revolts in many cities. Even more devastating was the competition from outside of town. Rich merchants started cottage industries where they moved production outside the city walls (and the guilds' jurisdiction). Here they could pay individual peasants lower wages to produce wool and undersell the guilds which were still locked into their controlled wage and price structure. As a result, guilds went into decline.
The rise of strongly centralized states in the Later Middle Ages also hurt leagues, because the kings now protected trade and also saw the leagues as rivals for political power. At the same time, stability and trade fostered by the rise of kings sent explorers looking for new markets. The discovery of new trade routes to America and around Africa shifted trade away from the Baltic and North Seas, thus hurting the German leagues.
Few stories better illustrate the problems of the medieval Catholic Church than the story of Pope Formosus. When this pope died in 856, his troubles were far from over. A personal enemy became the new pope and had Formosus' body dug up and put on trial. To no one's surprise, the late Formosus was convicted of illegally seizing the papal throne. His body was stripped of its priestly vestments, the fingers on his right hand (used for giving the benediction) were cut off, and his body was thrown into the Tiber River. Not surprisingly, the rest of the Church, ranging from bishops, archbishops, and abbots down to the lowliest monks and parish priests, was also seething with corruption.
The Church's wealth, some 20-30% of the land in Western Europe, was a big part of the problem. With little money in circulation at this time, land was the main source of wealth and power, making the Church the object of the political ambitions of nobles throughout Europe. Naturally, such nobles, who were warriors by trade, usually ignored and even trampled over the religious interests of the Church.
Even in such troubled times, the Church's ongoing cycle of corruption and reform meant there were always men of religious conviction determined to set the Church back on its spiritual path. As so often happened, reform started in the monasteries, in this case in the monastic house founded at Cluny, France in 910 C.E. The monks of Cluny placed themselves directly under the pope's power and out of the reach of any local lords. That meant virtual independence from any outside authority, since the popes were too weak to exert any authority from so far away. Technically, they were Benedictines and there was no separate order of Cluniac monks, but their agenda of reforms became so widely adopted that they have been referred to as Cluniacs ever since. Over the next 150 years, Cluniac reforms spread to hundreds of monasteries across Western Europe.
The zeal for reform was also strong in Germany, especially among the upper clergy and the emperors. The emperors saw church reform as a way to weaken the power of the nobles trying to control church lands and elections. By the same token, devout bishops and abbots looked to the German emperors for protections from ambitious nobles. As a result, both German emperors and German clergy supported the growing reform movement. Emperors put reformers into church offices throughout Germany. Such men were generally loyal to the emperor since they owed their positions to him and saw him as the main defender of reform.
The emperor, Henry III, even appointed four reform popes. One of them, Leo IX, carried out numerous reforms against simony (selling church offices), clerical marriage, violence, and overall moral laxity among the clergy. He even felt strong enough to tangle with the patriarch in Constantinople, thus causing a schism (break) within the Church in 1054 that was never healed. Since that time, the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches have functioned as two separate Churches. Consequently, by the mid eleventh century, the popes were taken seriously as a real moral force in Western Europe. However, a storm was about to break that would destroy relations between Church and Empire.
In 1056, the reform Church's main ally and guardian, Henry III, died leaving a child, Henry IV, as his successor. This deprived the Church of any effective imperial protection until the young emperor came of age. As a result, the popes had to seek new allies, and settled on the Normans in Southern Italy and the dukes of Tuscany in Northern Italy. Both of these were enemies of the German emperors, thus creating a tense situation between the popes and Henry IV when he came of age. One reform adding to the tension was the creation of the College of Cardinals whose job it was to meet in private to elect a new pope. Designed largely to keep the turbulent Roman mob out of papal elections, it also kept the German emperors out of direct participation, although they still could veto any choice the College of Cardinals made.
Another problem was the pope, Gregory VII, an ardent and stubborn reformer who agitated to replace imperial with papal control of Church elections. Growing suspicion and tension between pope and emperor finally erupted in the Investiture Struggle over who controls Church elections and invests (bestows) the bishops and abbots with the symbols of their power.
The stakes in this fight were high on both sides. Henry needed control of the bishops and abbots to maintain effective control of his empire. Pope Gregory felt the Church had to free itself from outside secular control if it were to fulfill its spiritual mission. There was also the larger question of who was the real head of the Christian world: the Universal Empire or the Universal Church. Although the Byzantine emperor in the east usually held sway over the patriarch in Constantinople, this question of supremacy, extending back through Charlemagne to the later Roman Empire, had never been resolved in Western Europe.
The Investiture struggle was a bitterly fought conflict on both sides. Pope and emperor stirred each other’s subordinates into revolt. The reform bishops, appointed up to this time by the emperor, generally supported him against the pope. Meanwhile, the pope stirred the German nobles into rebellion against Henry. When Henry and his bishops declared Gregory a false pope, Gregory excommunicated Henry. Excommunication could be a decisive weapon since it released a ruler's vassals from loyalty to him until he did penance to get accepted back into the Church. As a result, Henry did such penance by standing barefoot in the snow outside the pope's palace at Canossa.
However, the struggle was hardly over. Gregory was driven from Rome and died in exile in the Norman kingdom to the south, while Henry's reign ended with Germany torn by civil war and revolts. Finally, a compromise was reached where only clergy elected new bishops and abbots, but in the presence of an imperial representative who invested the new bishop or abbot with the symbols of his secular (worldly) power. Although the struggle between popes and emperors continued for centuries, the popes had won a major victory, signifying the Church's rising power and a corresponding period of decline for Germany.
The papal victory in the Investiture Struggle and the higher status it brought the popes led to many more people turning to the Church to solve their problems, in particular legal ones. Canon (church) law and courts were generally seen as being more fair, lenient and efficient than their secular counterparts.
However, the more the Church's prestige grew, the more its courts were used, and the more its bureaucracy grew. As a result, the popes found themselves increasingly tied down with legal and bureaucratic matters, leaving less time for spiritual affairs. The popes of the 1200's generally had more background in (church) law than theology. By and large they were good popes, but also ones with an exalted view of the Church's position. The most powerful of these popes, Innocent III (1199-1215), even claimed that the clergy were the only true full members of the Church.
Unfortunately, growing power and wealth again diverted the Church from its spiritual mission, and led to growing corruption. Two other factors aggravated this problem. One was the rising power of kings, which triggered bitter struggles with the popes over power and jurisdiction. Popes often used questionable means in these fights, such as overuse of excommunication, declaring crusades against Christian enemies, and extracting forced loans from bankers by threatening to declare all debts to the bankers erased if the loans were not granted. A second problem was inflation, which arose from the rise of towns and a money economy. The Church, with its wealth based in land, constantly needed money and therefore engaged in several corrupt practices: simony, selling indulgences (to buy time out of Purgatory for one's sins), fees for any and all kinds of Church services, and multiple offices for the same men (who were always absent from at least one office).
All these factors combined to ruin the Church's reputation among the faithful and undermine its power and authority. Eventually, they would lead to the Protestant Reformation, shatter Christian unity in Western Europe for good, and help pave the way for the emergence of the modern world.
...But these were small matters compared to what happened at the temple of Solomon, a place where religious services are ordinarily chanted. What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much at least, that in the temple and portico of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God, that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, when it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.— Foucher de Chartres
The modern reader (both Christian and non-Christian) is justifiably shocked at how medieval Christians such as Foucher de Chartres exulted in the wholesale butchery that took place in Jerusalem, the holiest city of Christianity, to end the religious war known as the First Crusade. However, that description expresses quite well not just the rough edge of medieval Christian faith, but also the power and energy that, for nearly two centuries, drove Europeans to launch the Crusades in order to conquer and hold Palestine. There were several reasons for the Crusades happening when they did.
First of all, there was the expanding power of Western Europe in the eleventh century. More settled conditions plus better agricultural techniques helped trigger population expansion that created large numbers of landless younger sons of nobles. Adding to these pressures was a series of bad harvests providing an even greater incentive to find land elsewhere. While the Crusades were the most dramatic and publicized example of Europe's expanding frontiers, there was similar expansion by Spanish Christians in Spain, by the Normans in Southern Italy and Sicily, and by the Germans in Eastern Europe.
The most immediate reason centered on events in the Middle East. In the eleventh century, a new people, the Seljuk Turks, replaced the Arabs as the dominant power in the Islamic world, overrunning most of Asia Minor after crushing the Byzantine army at Manzikert (1071) and seizing Palestine from the Shiite Fatimids of Egypt. These conquests led to pleas to the West for help, both from Christian pilgrims to Palestine who suffered from mistreatment at the hands of the Turks and from the Byzantine emperor, Alexius I, who just wanted mercenaries with which he could reconquer Asia Minor. As an added enticement, Alexius held out the possibility of reuniting the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, which had been split since the schism of 1054.
The rising power of the Church at this time was another factor leading to the Crusades. This created a rising tide of piety in Western Europe that expressed itself in pilgrimages to Palestine before the Turks seized it, and adapted itself to a holy war (crusade) after the Turkish conquest. This rising tide of piety was part of a broader movement for Church reform led by the popes that had caused the Investiture Struggle with the German emperors over control of the election of Church officials. Both the reunification of the Catholic Church with Byzantium and the recovery of Jerusalem fit into the larger ambitions of Pope Urban II. If the pope could lead all of Christendom in a crusade to recover the Holy Land (Palestine), then his moral authority would far surpass that of the German Emperor. Therefore, in 1095, at the French town of Clermont, Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade (from the Latin word, crux, for cross) to liberate the Holy Land from the Turks. Apparently his speech struck a nerve, because thousands enthusiastically "took the cross" (i.e., vowed to go on crusade).
This raises the question of what spurred the rank and file of Europe to undertake such a long and dangerous journey. Two main factors present themselves: piety and poverty. Piety should never be downplayed in the Middle Ages, although the nature of medieval piety may have been somewhat different from our own concept of it. Crusaders went to the Holy Land believing that such a journey and the killing of non-Christians in defense of the faith would earn them forgiveness for their sins. Poverty and greed also played their role. As we have seen, Europe's expanding population created a large number of landless younger sons of nobles. Going on crusade offered them both the opportunity to win such lands and forgiveness for their sins as well. No wonder so many of them decided to undertake such a long and dangerous enterprise.
Most of those who went were nobles who needed time to get supplies for their journey and set their personal affairs in order before leaving. Therefore the departure of the First Crusade was set for August 1096 from Constantinople. This would also give the Byzantines time to prepare supplies along the line of march.
However, there were also many desperately poor peasants who had no substantial affairs to set in order. Therefore, they just set off for the Holy Land without making any plans or provisions for the march. These undisciplined mobs, known collectively as the Peasants' Crusade, gained followers and momentum in each village through which they passed. Their growing numbers also created ever mounting supply problems that often erupted into violence as they turned to pillaging for food. Such violence was often turned against local Jews, since they were non-Christian and this was a "holy war" to begin with. As a result, thousands of Jews were either killed or forced to flee their homes. However, the Jews were not the only ones upset by these peasant groups, and local populations and rulers would often turn against these unwelcome intruders. For example, three waves of peasants who went through Hungary were each destroyed by the Hungarians who were tired of their plundering.
Those who made it to the Byzantine Empire fared no better. Many were picked off on their foraging raids by Byzantine cavalry. The rest were quickly ferried across to Asia Minor to prevent further trouble in Constantinople. Not trusting the Byzantines, this undisciplined mob ignored Alexius’ advice to stay by the coast and Byzantine support. As a result, the Turks annihilated all but a few of them.
The more organized and disciplined crusading knights and nobles made their way to Constantinople in isolated groups. This allowed the emperor to deal with them singly, impressing them with his collection of relics and mechanical wonders and then extracting an oath from them to turn over any lands formerly held by the Byzantines. He would then shuttle them across to Asia Minor in time to meet the next group of crusaders arriving in Constantinople and repeat the process. These measures did help Alexius recover part of Asia Minor, notably the city of Nicaea, but they also added to growing tensions with the Crusaders who felt they were the victims of Byzantine trickery.
The crusaders saw their first serious fighting in Asia Minor. Helped by both the turmoil caused by the Assassins' murder of Malik Shah and the Turks' expectation that these European knights would be as easy a prey as the Peasants' Crusade had been, the crusaders' heavily armored shock cavalry defeated the Turks in their first major encounter. The crusaders themselves were frustrated by the Turks' mobile hit and run tactics that made it hard to win a decisive victory over them. Despite this and the intense heat, the crusaders fought their way across Asia Minor.
While the rest of the crusaders pressed into Syria, one of their leaders, Baldwin, carved out his own state around the city of Edessa using only 80 knights and some skillful diplomacy and intrigue. Naturally, this spurred the ambitions of other crusaders, in particular a Norman knight named Bohemond who had his eyes set on Antioch, one of Syria's premier cities. Antioch fell after a long grueling siege, thanks largely to the intrigues of Bohemond who then claimed the city as his own. This was the second of the crusader states to be founded as well as the source of a good deal of jealousy and quarrelling among the various crusader leaders.
The eight-month siege and stay at Antioch had decimated the Christian army through disease, hunger, and battles against various Muslim armies sent to relieve Antioch. Add to this the constant bickering between its leaders and the polyglot mixture of French, English, Germans, and Italians making up the army, and the chances of continued success did not look good. However, the rank and file in the army insisted on putting aside their quarrels and marching on Jerusalem. Finally, in June 1099, with an army of only 15,000 men, they reached their long sought goal, Jerusalem.
The crusaders endured desert heat and shortages of food and water while besieging Jerusalem. They also faced the threat of a large Egyptian army coming to relieve the city. Luckily, an Italian fleet arrived at the harbor of Jaffa, bringing the crusaders supplies and timber for siege engines. After doing penance by marching barefoot in the desert heat around Jerusalem, the crusaders launched an assault that broke into the city on July 15. What ensued was one of the worst massacres in history, spurred on by religious frenzy combined with frustration from the hardships of the last three years. Foucher de Chartres' graphic description at the top of this reading shows how the crusaders used religion to justify this ghastly event. The success of the First Crusade was a remarkable feat, but it was stained with the blood of thousands of innocent Muslims and Jews.
Despite their incredible victory, the crusaders had much going against them. First of all, they were surrounded and outnumbered by hostile Muslim states that eventually learned to unite against the Christian invaders. Secondly, since they were so far from their home base in Europe and many of the original number went back home after the conquest of Jerusalem, the remaining crusaders suffered a chronic manpower shortage, leaving them spread thinly across Syria and Palestine.
Third there was a growing cultural gap between the crusaders who stayed behind in the Holy Land and any newcomers who did arrive from Europe. They were shocked to find that after a number of years in the Near East, the original crusaders had adapted to local ways. Their clothes and houses resembled those of the Muslims. Some even kept harems with veiled women wearing makeup. More surprising yet, they set aside chapels in their churches where their Muslim neighbors could worship. Even their wars were fought in the more sophisticated local method of small local raids interrupted by truces with the Muslims. Nothing daunted, these newcomers, who had come all this way with the purpose of killing Muslims, would often break the truces, attack the Muslims, and then go home, leaving the crusaders in Palestine to bear the brunt of Muslim reprisals.
A fourth problem stemmed from the feudal system that the crusaders transplanted from Europe. Instead of one unified kingdom, they founded four separate states: the kingdom of Jerusalem and the counties of Edessa, Antioch, and Tripoli. This prevented the cooperation and unity of purpose needed against the surrounding Muslim enemies. Compounding this into a virtually hopeless situation was the further fragmentation of these states into individual baronies and fiefs.
Finally, the presence of the Italian city-states proved to be a mixed blessing. While they did provide a vital lifeline to Europe along with valuable naval support in taking the coastal cities of Palestine, this was all done for a price: the establishment of independent quarters in the coastal cities that they had helped take. This could be somewhat disruptive, since at times they might not cooperate with the crusaders in wars that could hurt their trade and business. At other times, two Italian cities might go to war with each other and the fighting would spread to those cities quarters in various crusader cities. In addition, Italian merchants also controlled much of the trade of Palestine and Syria, depriving the crusaders of much needed revenues.
Despite all these hardships, the crusader states did remarkably well, even expanding their territory in the early decades of the 1100's. Europe was still enthusiastic about the crusaders' success and kept a constant (if barely adequate) stream of reinforcements going to the Holy Land. However, as the surrounding Muslim states unified against the common enemy, the tide started to turn.
The first crusader state to fall was Edessa in 1144, which promptly triggered the Second Crusade to recover it. This crusade, led by Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, tried to follow the route taken by the First Crusade. However, the heat of Asia Minor and severe supply problems decimated the crusaders' army, which was then beaten near Damascus, leaving Edessa in Muslim hands for good.
The next forty years saw Egypt and Syria become unified in a strong Muslim state under the skillful leadership of Salah-a-din. Gradually, he tightened the noose around the beleaguered crusader states and finally destroyed the crusader forces at the Battle of Hattin in 1187. Jerusalem and most of the coastal cities of Palestine and Syria soon fell into Saladin's hands.
This brought on a series of crusades that failed to take Jerusalem or hold it for any substantial time. The third Crusade (1187-92), led by the famous warrior king of England, Richard "the Lionhearted", managed to take the coastal city of Acre after a prolonged siege. However, despite a march down the coast and various exploits, including a hard fought victory against Salah-a-din at Arsuf, Richard failed to take Jerusalem. Salah-a-din did grant Christian pilgrims free access to the holy city in order to worship, something he would have been willing to do anyway.
Later crusades tended to stray further and further from their goal of Jeruslam. For example, the Fourth Crusade (1202-4) was diverted by the Venetians to Constantinople, partly to cover the cost of transporting the crusaders, and partly because of growing tensions with the Byzantines over the growing Italian stranglehold on Byzantine trade. In 1204 the Venetians and crusaders stormed and mercilessly sacked Constantinople.
Besides never reaching Palestine, the Fourth Crusade set in motion the final decline of the Byzantine Empire and deprived the crusaders of a potentially valuable ally. Relations between the Byzantines and Western Europe, which had been deteriorating for some time, grew that much worse as a result of the Fourth Crusade.
The Fifth Crusade (1228-9), led by Frederick II of Germany, did manage to negotiate the surrender of Jerusalem, but without fortifications. As a result it fell back into Muslim hands soon after Frederick returned home. The Sixth Crusade (1248-50) under Louis IX of France (Saint Louis) was directed against Egypt in the hope of being able to trade it for Palestine. The strategy would have worked except that Louis refused to negotiate with the Muslims when they were ready to give in. Then the Nile flooded, disease set in, and the entire French army was captured and forced to ransom itself from captivity. The Seventh Crusade (1270), also led by Louis IX, was directed even further afield against Tunis in North Africa. The idea was to cut off Muslim trade in the Mediterranean between Tunis and Sicily (which was held by Louis' shrewder and more practical brother, Charles of Anjou). Once again, disease did its work, this time claiming Louis, who died with the words "Jerusalem, Jerusalem" on his lips.
After this, interest in the crusades fizzled out for a couple of reasons. For one thing, Europe had changed dramatically in the 200 years since Urban II had preached the First Crusade. The rise of towns and a money economy had raised Europe's standard of living tremendously and given its people something to get interested in besides holy wars in distant lands. Also, the popes had gotten into the habit of declaring crusades against heretics in Europe (e.g., the Albigensians in France) and their mortal enemies, the German emperors. This cheapened and tarnished the image of the crusade and cost it a good deal of support.
Meanwhile, the crusader states huddled along the coast of Palestine were gradually being worn down by Muslim pressure. A brief hope of delivery seemed to present itself with the Mongols, who shattered one Muslim army after another in their rampage across Asia. However, in the Battle of Ayn Jalut (1260), the Mameluke sultan of Egypt, Baibars, crushed the Mongols and stopped their advance once and for all. This also sealed the fate of the crusaders who had encouraged the Mongols. In 1291, the last of their strongholds, Acre, fell after a desperate siege. For all intents and purposes, the age of Crusades was over.
Despite their failure, the crusades had important results. For one thing, they opened Europeans' eyes to a broader world beyond Europe, stirring interest in and a bit more tolerance of other cultures. In particular, an influx of Arab texts and translations of classical Greek and Roman literature created a more secular outlook that helped lead to the Italian Renaissance in the 1400's. The Arabs passed on knowledge in a wide array of topics ranging from math, astronomy, and geography to such techniques as papermaking and the refining of alcohol and sugar (both of which are Arabic words). On a more basic level, the Crusades stimulated an increased desire for luxury goods from the East. When they lost control of these trade routes to the Turks, they embarked upon a series of voyages of exploration in search of shorter and cheaper routes to get those luxuries. In the process, Africa was circumnavigated, Asia was more thoroughly mapped, and the Pacific Ocean, the Americas, and Australia were discovered. Thus, the Crusades, by helping lead to the Renaissance and Age of Exploration, were instrumental in opening the way to the modern world.
For the Arab world, the Crusades had less positive results. True, the Muslims ultimately won, but at a heavy price. Besides the human and material cost, there was also the psychological factor. Since c.1000 C.E., the Arab world had been assaulted by Turks, Crusaders, and Mongols. These successive invasions generated the feeling that Arabs must harden their attitude toward other cultures in order to preserve their own. In succeeding centuries, as Western Europe created its own high civilization, which has largely dominated the globe since the 1800’s, many Arabs have resisted the pressure to adapt aspects of that culture to benefit their own, an attitude that has often put them at a disadvantage in the modern world. The struggle of whether or not to modernize and make compromises with Western culture still divides the Arab world today.
In addition to the rise of towns and a money economy, the High Middle Ages also saw the development of strong feudal monarchies in Western Europe, especially in France and England. These feudal monarchies were a transition between the personal and decentralized feudal system of the Early Middle Ages and the more highly centralized nation states of the modern era. At the beginning of this era, most people may have believed in the concept of Universal Empire or Universal Church (as embodied in the Holy Roman Empire in Germany and Roman Catholic Church respectively). However, by the end of this era, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the future belonged to neither Church nor Empire, but to these newly emerging nation-states. Prominent among these was France. There were four main factors leading to the rise of the French feudal monarchy.
First of all, there was the ability of the Capetian dynasty to keep its hold on the throne, and that hinged on three things. First of all, the Capetians were lucky to consistently produce male heirs, which eliminated the need to look outside the Capetian family for a new king to succeed the old one. Second, the Capetians practiced primogeniture, ensuring that what little they controlled stayed together under one ruler, unlike the disastrous policy of earlier kings of dividing the kingdom. Finally, they ended elective monarchy by having their sons rule jointly with them, ensuring a smooth transition of power when the older king died. Over time, the Capetians gradually replaced the elective monarchy with the dynastic principle of son succeeding father to the throne.
The second factor, the medieval agricultural revolution, helped both the French kings and the great dukes and counts since they owned most of the land being cleared and could support the surplus population needed for towns. In contrast, lower nobles had neither the land to support towns nor the power to defend them.
However, the rise of towns ultimately helped kings against even the dukes and counts, because townsmen and kings were natural allies against the nobles. While the towns could supply kings with militia, their primary means of help was money with which to buy mercenaries who were much more reliable than feudal armies. Bit by bit, this alliance of towns and kings helped break the power of the nobles.
The kings' legal position as supreme judge in the land was the third factor helping them. No matter how weak a king might be, his crown distinguished him as the supreme judge whom townsmen and lower nobles could appeal to over the heads of their own lords. When kings were weak, this was done on a very local level. However, it helped kings gradually establish their power over the local nobles and assert their authority on a wider level.
Finally, there was the kings' religious position, symbolized by the Church anointing them with oil to mark them as God's chosen agents on earth. Although this raised the question of who had more authority, kings or the churchmen who anointed them, it did give the king a certain amount of religious sanctity that medieval people took very seriously. In addition, the king's sanctity also symbolized his alliance with the Church, whose powers, in particular the power of excommunication, could be very useful in bringing rebellious nobles under control. It is significant that Louis VI's right hand man was a churchman, Suger, abbot of St. Denis.
Together these factors (the Capetians' firm grip on the throne, their sacrosanct nature, their position as supreme judge, and their alliances with the towns who could also supply money with which to buy mercenaries) allowed kings to gradually expand and exert their power and authority across France. That, in turn, enhanced their judicial and religious authority, bringing them into contact with more towns that could ally with the kings and provide more taxes for mercenaries, and so on.
For over a century (987-1108) the Capetians could barely hang onto their throne, but they did manage to survive. By 1100, in addition to the king's realm around Pairs, known as the Ile de France, France's numerous independent feudal states were largely gathered into five greater feudal states: Flanders, Normandy, Toulouse, Aquitaine, and Burgundy. Even in his own small realm, the king's vassals defied him. At one point, the king was taken prisoner by a particularly unruly vassal and only rescued by the loyal militia of Paris. However, the succession of Louis VI in to the throne in 1108 marked the beginning of over two centuries of expansion for the French monarchy and the Capetian dynasty. During this time, seven kings reigned, three of who were especially capable. These three kings, Louis VI, Philip II, and Louis IX, would especially exploit the cycle mentioned above to lay the foundations for the modern French nation.
Louis VI (1108-1137), known as "the Fat" started the process of building up royal power. The first step, which he accomplished, was to establish the king's authority in his home territory around Paris. Confronting Louis were several rough and obstinate barons renown for their lawless ways. Louis had one valuable ally, Suger, abbot of St. Denis, who brought the power of the Church down against these nobles. In general we find the Church allied to the kings during this period, since both were concerned with ending the chronic violence and feudal warfare plaguing the land. Suger was a staunch and valuable ally throughout Louis' reign.
Louis' usual method was to call a noble to his court to account for the crimes his vassals and subjects accused him of. Often, the noble refused to come, giving Louis the legal excuse to claim the noble's lands now belonged to the king. Of course he had to enforce such a declaration and drive the noble off of the land. One potent weapon at the king's disposal was excommunication of the noble by the abbot Suger. This released the noble's vassals from any legal obligations to him and deprived him of some, if not all his support.
Louis still had to ride constantly with his troops from one end of his realm to the other, burning nobles' castles and wasting their lands in order to bring them to heel. It took him seven years to break the power of a certain Hugh de Puiset and sixteen years to subdue another noble, Thomas de Marley. This was because Louis had little money and had to rely on feudal armies to break his vassals. Therefore, he could accomplish little in the 40 days of campaigning he got each year. Once he was gone, the noble could rebuild any burnt castles and restore much of his power.
Still, the effects of excommunication and yearly raids gradually broke the nobles' power. By the end of Louis' reign, the Ile de France was firmly in royal control, giving the king the troops and resources to expand even further. Louis' prestige was enhanced to the point that he was able to restore the infant lord of Bourbon and bishop of Clermont to their rightful places. He was even able to arrange a marriage alliance between his son and Eleanor, daughter and heiress of William X, the powerful duke of Aquitaine. Much of the subsequent history of France and England would revolve round this woman.
When Eleanor of Aquitaine married Louis VII (1137-80), she claimed she married a king only to find him a monk. Eleanor's fun loving ways certainly clashed with the pious king's personality and eventually led to getting the marriage annulled. Not only did this cost Louis the valuable lands of Aquitaine, it let Eleanor marry Henry II of England. The result of this union was what is known as the Angevin Empire, whereby the king of England controlled Aquitaine in addition to his hereditary lands of Normandy and Anjou (hence the name Angevin). This gave Henry II control of one-third of France, much more than the king of France, his nominal overlord, ruled. However, the size of Henry's empire alarmed other French nobles and drove them to support Louis. At the time the English holdings seemed like a threat to the very existence of the French monarchy. The next French king, Philip II, would destroy this threat.
Philip II (1180-1223), called "Augustus", was certainly one of the greatest of French monarchs, being responsible for establishing the French monarchy as the recognized power throughout most of France. He was an astute and unscrupulous diplomat, though not a great general. In the early years of his reign he was lucky to maintain his own against Henry II, his main tactic being to stir Henry's rebellious sons against their father. Philip had little luck against the warrior king Richard I "the Lion-hearted" (1189-99). His luck was better against Richard's brother and successor John I (1199-1216) of Robin Hood fame.
Philip skillfully used his position as John's overlord in France to bring charges against John and summon him to court. Of course, John refused and Philip declared John's lands forfeit and now belonging to the French crown. War resulted in which a powerful coalition of England, Flanders and Germany was formed against Philip. Luckily for Philip, John moved too slowly and the French king was able to crush the Flemish and German forces at Bouvines in 1214.
This battle had far reaching consequences for France, England and Germany. In France it tripled the size of the king's realm at one stroke while driving the English out of France except for Bordeaux and Bayonne. The blow to king John's prestige was such that the next year the English barons rebelled and forced John to sign the Magna Charta, one of the cornerstones of British and American democracy. Bouvines also helped some with the disintegration of the German monarchy, as we shall see.
However, our main concern here is Philip's victory and what he did with it. Not since Charlemagne had any ruler so effectively controlled France. However, times had changed, and Philip found he had different and more effective means for ruling France than Charlemagne had. Whereas Charlemagne had been forced to rely on giving land to uneducated nobles in return for service, Philip had money and an educated middle class at his disposal to help him rule. As a result he started putting middle class baillis (bailiffs) paid with money, not land, to administer his far-flung state for him. Such baillis were loyal to him and were kept in line by the threat of the king cutting off their salaries. Also their lower social status made them less likely to try to gain power for themselves. Philip rotated them from place to place so they would not get established in one area. Since soldiers would not follow middle class baillis in battle, any offices requiring military duties were filled by lower nobles called seneschals. Being lower nobles, they were less likely to rebel, although their power and prestige could increase after years of service with the king.
The size of the king's realm and its efficient administration provided him with money that allowed him to hire mercenaries who helped him further increase his power within his realm and in areas of France still outside it. This of course gave him more revenues that allowed him to further increase his power, and so on. Philip II made the French monarchy the most powerful and respected in Western Europe. The work of his successors mainly embellished upon what he had accomplished. Keep in mind, however, that Philip was building on the foundations laid by Louis VI. Still, it is safe to say that Philip II's reign was a major turning point in French history.
Louis VIII (1223-26) made one significant innovation: the appanage system whereby younger sons of the king were given lands (appanages) to rule in the king's name. These princes were not independent rulers in their own right, such as happened with earlier Frankish kings. But the system did have its dangers, as seen by the appanage of Burgundy, which almost established itself as an independent power in the 1400's. The appanage system shows the limits of medieval government. Since royal power and prestige still depended largely on dealing with affairs in person and the king could not be everywhere at once, members of the royal family were the next best choice for enforcing royal control. Despite its dangers, the appanage system worked fairly well.
Louis IX (1226-70), known as Saint Louis, extended royal power even further. He asserted that lower nobles could appeal directly to the king's courts over the heads of their immediate lords. Nobles were excluded from interfering with Church elections. He also hemmed in the nobles by outlawing trial by combat and making restrictive rules that took the "fun" out of feudal warfare. Nobles could not slaughter peasants or burn their crops. They had to give enemies notice of impending attacks and had to grant truces when asked to do so. Royal officials scoured the land to enforce these rules. Louis also launched two disastrous crusades that deprived France of many of its troublesome nobles, although that was not his intention. Bit by bit, peace and order were replacing feudal anarchy in France, which by 1300 was the most powerful and respected state in Western Europe.
As we have seen, the Anglo-Saxons, largely because of pressure from the Vikings, had built one of the strongest states in Western Europe by 1000 C.E. However, the Anglo Saxons could never quite escape the Vikings. A Danish king, Canute, took over and ruled England in the early part of the eleventh century. And in 1066, William of Normandy, a descendant of Hrolf the Walker, the Viking chief who became the first duke of Normandy in 911 C.E., landed in England to claim the English crown.
The Normans, as the Viking descendants who ruled Normandy were called, had assumed at least a veneer of Frankish culture and Christianity while their dukes had built one of the strongest and best run feudal principalities in Europe. However, their most long-lasting accomplishments took place in England.
In December 1065, the Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, whose excessive piety is said to have prevented him from producing any heirs to the throne, died. William, Duke of Normandy, had a legitimate claim to the throne as Edward's cousin, but the Saxon nobles chose Harold of Wessex instead. For William, there was only one response: take the crown by force. He gathered an army of some 5000 knights and infantry, promising his followers land in England. He also was armed with a papal blessing and banner, partly because of the Norman dukes' policy of liberally endowing the Church with lands and partly because the Pope wanted to bring the somewhat independent Saxon clergy more into line with current Catholic practices.
Ironically, luck was with the Normans, since adverse winds held them up long enough for still another Viking claimant to the throne, Harold Hardraade of Norway, to land in the north. The Saxon king, Harold of Wessex, rushed north to drive out his namesake, which he did at the bloody battle of Stamford Bridge. Then he had to rush his tired Saxons southward to meet the Normans who had now landed in England.
The Battle of Hastings (10/14/1066) pitted mounted medieval knights against the Saxon infantry drawn up in a shield wall on the crest of a ridge. Frontal assaults by Norman knights, infantry, and archers could not make a dent in the shield wall. Norman trickery could. Feigning retreat, the Norman knights drew groups of Saxons out of formation, surrounded them, and wiped them out. Being weakened several times by this tactic, the Saxon army then came under a barrage of arrows and one final charge of Norman cavalry that won the day. This gave William the crown and the title "the Conqueror", which was much more appealing than his previous nickname "the Bastard". Never since has England fallen to foreign conquest.
Much more remarkable than William's victory was how he consolidated it through a combination of feudal practices from the continent and old Saxon customs. While he owed his followers land, William also wanted to keep them from getting too powerful as had happened to the French monarchy. The solution was to give the nobles lands, but scatter them over England so that they could not gather power in one area as a threat to the king. There were exceptions to this, notably on the frontiers bordering Scotland and Wales where power needed to be concentrated for defense. William also took about 20% of England's land for himself, showing that it was still a primary source of power. He demanded a large feudal army totaling 5000 knights from the 180 barons to whom he had given land, which forced them to subinfeudate their lands to meet this quota. Thus England quickly came to resemble the feudal monarchy of France. The Normans also built some 500 castles in England between 1066 and 1100 AD, to guard against native uprisings as well as foreign invasions.
William also used several Saxon institutions to great advantage. He demanded from each freeman in England a personal oath of loyalty that took precedence over any feudal oaths vassals paid their lords, thus strengthening ties of loyalty to the king. He continued to collect the only non-feudal tax in Western Europe, based on the Danegeld, which the Saxons had originally paid to buy off the Vikings and later to pay for defense against them. Although he allowed the Church to set up its own independent court system in England as it had on the continent, William kept tight control of the elections of bishops, archbishops, and abbots. He saw these men as his ministers and entrusted them with much local power and responsibility. Finally, William used the Anglo Saxon officials, earls and sheriffs to look after the king's interests. Under William I and his son William II these were usually strong nobles who had the independent means to enforce their king's will, but could also be a threat. Later kings used lower nobles who, being dependent on the king for their positions, were both more loyal and less dangerous to the king.
The two centuries after William I’s reign (1066-1087) saw the growth in the power and sophistication of royal government. At the same time, various Saxon democratic practices reasserted themselves and became an inherent part of the Anglo-American tradition of democracy. There was a constant struggle during this period between kings and their barons over their respective rights and obligations. In times of weak kings, the nobles won the upper hand. However, most of England's kings were strong and able to extend royal power.
Henry I (1100-35) started a more efficient treasury system, thanks to the introduction of Arabic numerals and the exchequer, named after the checkered table cloth they used to organize the king's money in rows. The court system also saw advances, with the king adopting the Anglo Saxon belief that such personal crimes as murder, rape, and arson were also crimes against the king and state. Henry used this principle to send his justices throughout the land to try such cases. Henry also married a Saxon princess and, in the process, signed a charter where he promised to rule less harshly in the Norman manner and more in accordance with Saxon rights and customs. This charter would heavily influence the Magna Charta signed a century later.
After the feudal anarchy and civil wars during the reign of the weak Stephen I (1135-55), Henry II (1155-89), one of England's greatest monarchs came to the throne. As a feudal ruler, Henry still had to deal with the privileges and obligations of his noble vassals. However, as king, he claimed certain special rights and privileges to increase his power. Some of Henry's greatest accomplishments were in his legal reforms. Previously, private citizens had to bring charges against criminals, who often prevented such proceedings by intimidating their victims. Even without intimidation, few people wanted to risk bringing cases to court, because they had to pay a severe penalty ( talion) if they lost. Henry changed that by having the state, not private individuals, bring suspects to trial. He also established grand juries whose duty was to gather evidence and submit the names of any likely suspects of crimes. Failure to do this resulted in heavy fines. As a result, more cases were brought to trial, a greater degree of law and order was established, and the king made money from the increased court revenues. The concept of state prosecution of criminals and fact-finding grand juries is still a major part of our legal system going back to Henry II. Ironically, suspects brought to trial demonstrated their guilt or innocence through ordeals, such as by water. However, even if a suspect passed the ordeal but he was still suspected of the crime, the king might exile him from England.
Henry II is also remembered for his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose lands gave him control over one-third of France. However, the Angevin empire, as it is called, was more trouble than it was worth, since Philip II of France, technically Henry’s overlord for his French lands though he was much weaker than the English king, was always trying to stir up trouble and revolts. However, Henry and his older son Richard I, known as “the Lionhearted” (1189-99) for his exploits in the Crusades, held their own against Philip.
Unfortunately, Henry’s younger son, John I (1199-1216), was not. John got into trouble on a number of accounts: losing a quarrel with the Pope, overtaxing England for his war against Philip, and then losing that war. All these problems led to a revolt of the English barons who forced John to sign the Magna Charta in 1215. Based largely on Henry I’s charter a century earlier, this was basically a feudal document, but it put forth the principles that not even the king was above the law and that no free man could be arrested without due process of law and a trial by his peers. This idea of due process of law is still a vital part of our legal system today.
The long reign of John's son Henry III (1216-1272) saw the barons under the leadership of Simon de Montfort controlling the government and usurping many privileges. However, Henry’s son, Edward I (1272-1304), was a strong king who reestablished royal authority over the nobles, conquered Scotland and Wales, developed the Welsh long-bow into the weapon that would rule the battlefields of the Hundred Years War.
Edward I is also remembered for his governmental reforms, and especially the evolution of Parliament. Originally, this was any meeting of the king and his vassals or subjects to talk ( parley), usually over taxes. Since negotiating taxes with each town and shire was cumbersome, Edward called the Model Parliament in 1295. This body consisted of representatives from all three estates. Although later parliaments did not necessarily contain all these elements, in time it came to be the rule that all three estates should be represented.
Parliament became especially important in England for a couple reasons. First of all, England being an island enhanced its trade and the status of the middle class. As a result, the middle class merchants and lower nobility (gentry) were thrown together in the House of Commons. In time, their common interests led to a powerful combination capable of challenging royal power. Secondly, since England was an island, it faced few invasions, giving little need for heavy taxes to pay for expensive armies. This, in turn, left English kings relatively weak, so that, by the 1600's, Parliament would have both the power and the constitutional right (or so it thought) to usurp much of the king's authority and lay the foundations of modern democracy.
The history of the Holy Roman Empire, as Germany was then known, differed quite markedly from France and England. Whereas those two countries were well on their way to developing national monarchies by 1300, Germany was disintegrating into feudal anarchy. This was largely the result of Germany being tied to the ancient and somewhat outdated concept of a universal Roman Empire that claimed dominion over all of Europe. This put it into conflict with the Catholic Church, which had its own claims to universal dominion. The ensuing centuries long struggle between popes and emperors would exhaust the empire, destroy most of the emperors' authority in Germany, and leave it in the power of independent princes and church prelates. Also, the quickly emerging nation states had little room for the idea of a universal empire interfering in their affairs. The concept of such an empire may have had some appeal in the time of Charlemagne. Five hundred years later the luster of such claims was tarnished and starting to rust.
The breakup of the Frankish Empire in the ninth century created two main states: West Frankland, which would become France, and East Frankland, which would become Germany. The death of Louis the Child in 911 put an end to the German branch of the Carolingian dynasty, forcing the German nobles to choose a new ruler. Largely because they recognized the need for a strong monarchy to protect them against the nomadic Magyars to the East, the nobles chose the rulers of Saxony as their king. In the following century, the Saxon dynasty (919-1024) established one of the strongest of the early medieval monarchies. The Saxons based their power, as most monarchs then did, on the twin pillars of holding land and an alliance with the Church.
In addition, the Saxon rulers did two other things to strengthen their alliance with the Church. For one thing, they supported the spread of the Cluniac reforms into Germany, largely as a means to weakening the power of local nobles. Secondly, in 961 the pope and Italian bishops called in the Saxon ruler, Otto I, to defend them against their enemies. In return for this favor, the pope crowned Otto Roman Emperor. From this time until 1806, the imperial dignity would belong to the rulers of Germany, known afterwards as the Holy Roman Empire.
The Salian Dynasty (1024-1106), which succeeded the Saxons, also depended on controlling Church officials and large amounts of land to maintain and build its authority. In addition, the rising power of the nobles made it even more mandatory that they form a more efficient administration. In the absence of towns at this early date, the Salians used a peculiar institution known as ministeriales. These were originally non-free peasants whom the Church would use for knight service to the emperor. The bishops and abbots would give the ministeriales use, but not possession of land to pay for these services. The Salian emperors used ministeriales for various military and civil services, since their low social status kept them dependent on the emperor. They also drew silver from the mines in the Hartz Mountains, which gave them still more power.
Their power and policies made the Salians unpopular in Germany, especially with the nobles. However, by 1075, the emperor Henry IV seemed well on his way to building the strongest monarchy in Western Europe. He had extensive lands, a permanent capital at Goslar, money revenues, and a body of servants loyal to the king. Unfortunately, as we have seen, the emperors' support of the Church reforms had also raised the power and status of the popes who then challenged the emperors' control of Church elections in Investiture Struggle (1075-1122). When pope Gregory VII excommunicated Henry, the German nobles seized the opportunity to rebel against their emperor and elect a new ruler. Rebellions, civil war, and anarchy tore through Germany and Italy. Pope Gregory VII died in exile, but his successors continued the struggle. When Henry IV died, his successor, Henry V, finally managed to reach a compromise settlement, but the damage was already done.
The anarchy and wars of the past half a century had allowed the German nobles to assert their independence. Great nobles became virtually independent princes, while the lower nobles became their vassals. Bishops and abbots also granted fiefs in return for military service. The free peasants virtually disappeared. Even the ministeriales were forced to break their bonds of service to the empire and become other nobles' vassals as the empire started to fragment.
What ensued was a vicious cycle whereby German emperors, seeing Germany as increasingly hopeless and themselves as Roman emperors, would neglect Germany and concentrate on building their power in Italy. As a result, Germany would disintegrate into worse anarchy. This would encourage the emperors to concentrate further on Italy while ignoring Germany, and so on.
This process especially accelerated under the Hohenstauffen dynasty, starting with its first emperor, Frederick I Barbarossa (1152-1190). Frederick I first tried to reassert imperial power in the rich cities of Lombardy in north Italy. After some initial successes, he was defeated by the combined forces of the Lombard League in 1176. Although they acknowledged him as their emperor and paid some money, they remained virtually independent. Frederick did manage to seal a marriage alliance of his son to a Norman princess of Southern Italy and Sicily. Frederick also had some success in controlling the cities in Central Italy. This had the effect of alarming the popes who became the avowed enemies of the Hohenstauffen emperors surrounding them.
Frederick Barbarossa died while on Crusade in 1190. His son and successor Henry VI, being married to Constance of Sicily was even more involved in Italian politics. For one thing he had to spend several years putting down a rebellion of Norman nobles who did not want a German ruler. Although Sicily brought the empire a very well organized and wealthy state, it also kept the emperors out of Germany even more, allowing it to disintegrate further. The acquisition of Sicily also further alienated the popes who were now surrounded with an even tighter noose.
The last great "German" emperor, Frederick II (1196-1250) came to the throne as a baby. After a stormy childhood, during which pope Innocent III was his guardian against more threatening German nobles, he came to the throne in high own right. Frederick was one of the most fascinating medieval characters, keeping Muslim advisors, a harem, and a menagerie of exotic animals. His irreligious ways shocked contemporaries. Even his crusade where he gained Jerusalem through negotiation rather than fighting with the Muslims did not seem quite Christian.
Frederick grew up in Sicily and considered Germany too cold and bleak for a home, spending only two years of his reign there. His policy there was to keep it quiet so he could concentrate on building his power in Italy and fighting the popes. As a result, he was willing to grant further privileges to the German nobles in order to pacify them. The last vestiges of imperial control fell into the hands of nobles who were now granted full powers of government in their individual lands. The popes added to the confusion as they stirred up rebellions against Frederick in both Italy and Germany. Although Frederick maintained his power in Italy, he never succeeded in breaking the popes' power. Even after his death in 1250, the emperors' fight with the popes continued.
The popes finally emerged victorious in their struggle with the German emperors. They broke the ring of enemies surrounding them by inciting rebellions in the cities to the north and bringing in the French royal prince, Charles of Anjou, to overthrow Frederick's son in Sicily and Southern Italy. The pope even forced loans out of the Italian bankers by threatening to ruin them with a decree absolving all debtors from their obligations to the bakers. The means that the popes used to defeat the emperors also served to tarnish their own reputations and that of the Church.
In 1350, the German monarchy became purely elective, further weakening the power of the emperors. By 1500 Germany would be a patchwork of some 300 independent states nominally united under the empire. For centuries, Germany, too weak and divided to defend itself, would be a constant battleground for other powers' wars. Even after its unification in 1871, the memory of these humiliations would largely determine Germany's foreign policy and be an underlying cause of the two world wars in this century.
In the 1300s, Europe entered a
period of turmoil that shook of medieval civilization to its
foundations and paved the way for such aspects of the modern world as
nation states, capitalism, and the Protestant Reformation. Such
periods of transition are rarely easy to endure, and this was no
exception. It was a period which saw recurring famines, outbreaks
of plague, peasant and worker revolts, the rise of religious heresies,
challenges to the Church's authority, and long drawn out wars, in
particular the Hundred Years War between France and England.
Ironically, the problems were largely the result of better farming
methods.
The Black Death, also known as Bubonic plague, appears to
have arisen in Central Asia in the early 1300's. The most likely
scenario for its spread points to Mongol rulers in Asia who had settled
down from their rampages to establish stable caravan routes from China
to the Black Sea where Italian merchants would trade for the silks and
spices so highly valued in Europe. Ironically, these trade routes
were also the invasion routes of a very different sort.
Apparently, the Asian black rats, which carry the fleas that carry the
plague, burrowed into the caravan's grain sacks and hitched a free ride
across Asia. Rumors had already filtered westward of a terrible
plague that depopulated whole regions of China and India. Rumor
became reality for Europe in 1347 when a Genoese ship pulled into the
Sicilian port of Messina with half its crew dead or dying from
plague. The Black Death had arrived.
The Plague quickly spread death and terror across Europe, sweeping
through Italy in 1347, France in 1348, and the Low Countries, England,
and Scandinavia in 1349. Its pattern was to flare up in the summer and
taper off in the winter, only to flare up again and sweep onwards the
next summer. By 1350, it had pretty well passed on, leaving in
its wake a population decimated by its effects.
Cities, with their crowded unsanitary conditions, generally suffered
worse than the countryside. Although contemporary accounts
generally exaggerated the toll, it was certainly was staggering.
Supposedly 800 people died in Paris each day, 500 a day in Pisa, and up
to 600 a day in Vienna. Some cities lost anywhere from 50-70% of
their populations. Monasteries, also being crowded, suffered
similar death rates. In the countryside where people were more
spread out, maybe 20-30% of the population perished.
All across Europe black flags flew over towns to warn travelers that
the plague was there. Church bells rang constantly to announce
the deaths of citizens until town councils voted to silence their
demoralizing clangor. The Hundred Years War was interrupted by
the plague, and construction on the cathedral in Siena, Italy stopped
and never resumed, a grim memorial to the plague's power.
People, having no idea then of the existence of microbes, were
completely ignorant of the plague's cause. Some, seeing a
correlation between fleas and plague, killed dogs and cats, just giving
the black rats more freedom to spread the disease. Most
explanations of the Black Death concerned divine retribution.
This gave rise to the flagellants, people who would march from town to
town whipping themselves to atone for society's sins. However, as
they spread penitence, they also spread the plague. Therefore,
the authorities outlawed them, as much for the social unrest they
seemed to stir up as for the disease they were spreading. The
most effective way of avoiding the plague was to avoid people who might
carry it, causing those rich enough to flee the towns during the
plague's height in the summer months. In fact, a virtual panic
seized people as husbands abandoned wives, parents abandoned their
children, and even priests and doctors refused to see their
patients. It seemed as if the whole fabric of society was coming
unraveled.
In the absence of any effective remedies, people looked for
scapegoats. Many blamed the Jews whose religion dictated a bit
cleaner lifestyle, which in turn meant less incidence of rats, fleas,
and plague. In some peoples' minds, however, the Jews had
poisoned the wells or made a pact with the devil to cause the Black
Death. The resulting disturbances resembled those accompanying
the First Crusade, with Jews being massacred or burned in their
synagogues. Germany and the Low Countries saw especially bad
outbreaks of such violence, and, by 1350, few Jews remained in those
areas.
The plague hit Europe six more times by 1450, each time with less
severity than before, since more survivors were immune to it. And
those without resistance were weeded out by natural selection.
Still, some 30-40% of Europe's population was lost. Census
figures in England fell from 3.7 million in 1348 to 2.1 million by
1430. Even then, Europe was not free from the Black Death's
ravages, suffering recurrent outbreaks until the early 1700's.
Why it receded is also a matter of controversy, with such theories as
the European brown rat driving out the Asian black rat, tile roofs
replacing thatched ones where rats often lived, and the more deadly
plague microbe, which more readily killed off its host and left itself
no place to go, being replaced by a less deadly version.
The Black Death also created problems for the nobles and clergy in
two main ways. First, the huge population loss in the cities'
caused a virtual collapse of the urban grain markets, a major source of
income for noble and church landlords with surplus grain to sell.
This especially hurt the nobles and clergy, whose incomes were still
based on land and who relied on selling surplus grain in the towns for
badly needed cash. There were two main strategies for making up
for this lost income.
Both nobles and clergy resorted to selling freedom to their
serfs. This raised some quick cash, but it also deprived them of
future revenues, which contributed to their decline and the
corresponding rise of kings and nation states. At the same time,
the serfs were now transformed into a free peasantry with more
incentive to work harder since they were working more for
themselves. This also helped lead to a more even distribution of
wealth which contributed to a revival of agriculture, towns, and trade,
especially after 1450 when the climate seems to have improved.
But with the guilds and nobles weakened by the turmoil of the last 150
years, a new broader consumer market evolved, but one where the average
person had less money to spend than the average noble beforehand would
have had. Since these people could not afford the guilds'
expensive goods and the guilds refused to adapt to this market, rich
merchants established cottage industries and sold their goods outside
of the guilds' jurisdiction. The profits they made and the
absence of the guilds' restrictive regulations helped these merchants
establish a new economic system, capitalism, which would replace the
guild system and lead the way into the modern world.
The Church had several other fund raising options in addition to
selling serfs their freedom: selling church offices (simony), letting
one man buy several offices at the same time, charging fees for all
sorts of church services, and selling indulgences to buy time out of
Purgatory after one died. These practices plus the Church's
inability to cope with the crisis of the Black Death led to growing
public discontent. As a result, the Church would experience
serious challenges to its authority in the Later Middle Ages.
"Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands as unto the Lord"--St. Paul
"…every reasonable man must prize, cherish, love woman...She is his mother, his sister, his friend; he must not treat her as an enemy."-- Christine de Pisan
One of the major trends in Western societies over the last 150 years has been women’s progress towards equal status with men. The roots of this lie in medieval Europe, although it is best to look separately at the three main social classes of middle class, peasants, and nobles, since they each told a different story.
Middle class women saw little or no gain, and maybe even a decline, in their status as town revived during the high and late Middle Ages. This was typical of pre-industrial towns, since most townspeople originally came from peasant backgrounds where the labor was more equitably shared, since every person’s labor was critical for bringing in and processing the crops. When families moved to towns, the men typically became craftsmen who ran their own shops with little or no help from the women. This loss of economic status led to a corresponding loss of social status, and can be seen in practices across a number of pre-industrial urban cultures such as the wearing of veils, not just in Muslim, but also the ancient Greek society and foot binding in China. Women in urban societies were also married off at earlier ages and as pawns in family alliances, although this could happen among peasants as well. That being said, practices could vary a bit from country to country. For example, a woman in England could take over her husband’s business after he died if he hand no adult sons to succeed him. In general, however, urban living was no bargain as far as women’s status was concerned.
Peasant women actually laid the firmest foundations for later gains in status. Part of this comes from the fact that they shared in the farm work and thus had status closer to that of their husbands than did their counterparts in town. This is typically overlooked because we have few written sources by or about women overall, and even fewer for peasant women who were almost always illiterate (as were their husbands). However, in the 1300s, a colder climate and bubonic plague would improve their status in an unforeseen way.
People realized that overpopulation had made the disasters of the fourteenth century especially bad. Therefore, they made efforts to limit population growth so they didn’t have to keep splitting up family lands until the plots were too small to support anyone. The primary method for this was to delay the age of marriage for both men and women. Men would typically wait until they could independently support themselves, which usually meant when their parents died or were too old to manage the family lands. Thus the multi-generational extended family of several generations living together under one roof gave way to the nuclear family of just parents and children in the household. However, most relatives still stayed in the same village or close by, thus providing the same basic safety net of support that extended families had provided for centuries. The real fragmentation into isolated nuclear families would not take place until the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century and the invention of the suburbs a century later.
Women also married later, which was especially critical to population control by restricting the number of active childbearing years. Thus women who previously might have married in their teens, now married in their twenties. However, women in their twenties were a bit harder to force into an arranged marriage than girls in their teens (despite what the behavior of the fourteen year old Juliet in Shakespeare’s play might suggest).
Two bits of peasant culture support this. One is a common betrothal ceremony. When a couple had mutually agreed to get married, the man would approach the woman in the presence of neighbors and ask her if she were married, which everyone of course knew was not the case. He would then say he thought they should get married, and the crowd would agree. But then someone would say the prospective bride should have a say, to which everyone agreed. She would then assent to the marriage and they were betrothed.
Another bit of evidence comes from children’s games, which typically mimic adult behavior. In one game, a circle of girls protects one girl from the boys who are trying to break in and “marry” her. After the boys have tried to win the girl over with all sorts of promises, she chooses whom she will marry. The point in each of these examples is that peasant women in Western Europe had a say in whom they would marry, giving them more say in their lives than found in other cultures. Women would build on this status during the suffrage movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
. Women of the noble class underwent a very different sort of change in status. Their position in the warrior class gave them status over men for lower classes, but they were still subordinate to their husbands who almost exclusively did the fighting. However, the need for and value of warriors gradually started to drop as more settled conditions took over in the high Middle Ages. Meanwhile, there was a rising tide of piety, especially toward the Virgin Mary who symbolized a more gentle and merciful side of Christianity, and this was reflected on the esteem given to women overall.
One can see this reflected in the account of an Arab observer in the 12th century: "The Franj (Franks, Western Europeans) have no
sense of honor. If one of them is walking in the street with his wife and encounters another man, that man will take his wife's hand & draw her aside and speak to her, while the husband stands waiting for them to finish their conversation. If it lasts too long, he will leave her with her interlocutor & go off.”
The scene shifts to Duke William IX of Aquitaine, father of one of the more assertive women of the age, Eleanor of Aquitaine. When Arab love poetry coming up from Spain was introduced to William’s court, it caught on, first with the duke and then with his subordinates. Following is a selection from one such poem:
“A gazelle's are her eyes, sun-like is her splendor,
Like a sandhill her hips, like a bough her stature:
With tears I told her plaintively of my love for her,
And told her how much my pain made me suffer.
My heart met hers, knowing that love is contagious,
And that one deeply in love can transmit his desire…”
Traveling troubadours, who depended on the generosity of their hosts to make a living and previously had subsisted on stirring tales of battle, added these poems to their repertoire with great success, especially with the ladies of the household. In Southern France, where they started, they had to be careful not to make the songs too explicitly romantic with the man of the house right there. Therefore, at first, this was all very idealistic and non-physical in nature, but that changed when it spread to northern France and generated a new movement: the courts of love.
The courts of love were set up as a mirror image of regular courts. Whereas, in the king and nobles’ courts, men ruled by right of strength and power, and prowess in battle or tournaments was celebrated, in the courts of love, women presided and romantic virtues, poetic ability and good manners determined one’s place.
According to Andreas Coppolamus, an early writer on courtly love: "Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of or excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex which causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other & by common desire to carry out all of love's precepts in the other's embraces.”
Supposedly, a true lover never slept soundly, but always tossed & turned in bed. True love improved a man in every way. Fools became wise; klutzes became graceful & polished; cowards became heroes. It was even doubted whether a man who didn't truly love a woman could be a true knight. In fact, it was ideas like that last point that probably worked the courtly love ideals into the mainstream of society ruled by men.
The courts of love established strict rules on what true love is.
It was always between people of nearly equal social standing. Ironically it was supposedly acceptable for a noble to rape a peasant without losing his lady’s favor since peasants were considered incapable of feeling love.
It was always adulterous. The Church idea that sex was only for reproduction led to the belief that people so bound to each other couldn't love each other. Therefore, courtly love must be outside marriage and one was not in fashion if one didn't have boyfriend or girlfriend outside of marriage.
It was always idealized & pure. This was a fairly new notion, considering love before was often spelled l-u-s-t (e.g., Ovid). With courtly love, the true test of love was for a couple to sleep together without doing anything but sleep.
It was religious in tone. This fit well with being idealized and pure, but hardly with the Church's stance on sex & love.
It was always secretive and expressed through sly glimpses, shadows of a smile and other signs of affection. Although it was best to keep one's extramarital affairs secret, women naturally wanted to advertise the attentions of other men to themselves. This led to a highly stylized ritual behavior where every word or action had significance.
It was always long lasting, faithful, & arduous, as seen in this story by Boccaccio:
"A knight who had offended his mistress was told, after two years of refusal, that if he would have one of his fingernails torn off & if 50 loving & faithful knights presented it to her, she might forgive him. He hastened to obey her. The nail was brought to her by 50 knights- all certified to be in the good grace of their ladies- resting on a velvet cushion. She was so touched by his obedience & commitment that she forgave him."
Of course this raises the question of how the ladies got the men to buy into this new code of behavior. For one thing, women did have higher status than before, and therefore more say in who received their favors.
One possible scenario may be that if one nobleman at court brushed his teeth and bathed regularly, talked about nice things rather than the latest foe he decapitated in battle, and used a handkerchief instead of his hand as the receptacle for blowing his nose, he must have gotten all the ladies’ attention. Therefore, other guys would have to do the same if they wanted a date for Saturday night.
Since nobles set the tone for the rest of society, these new ideas about romance, everlasting love, and chivalrous behavior toward women spread to the lower classes and became firmly embedded in our culture. Not until the later twentieth century would these values come under attack as being demeaning to women. However, if one considers the position women had been in before, this was a giant step forward.
The Later Middle Ages were a time of turmoil for the Catholic Church, as the growing power of kings and popes in the High Middle Ages led to rising tensions over various forms of authority and jurisdiction. Although they had largely won their struggle with the emperors in Germany, the popes were less successful in dealing with the rising power of the French and English monarchies. Problems centered on control of two things: the local clergy and Church taxes. The popes had a habit of rewarding their Italian supporters with church offices all across Europe. Both common people and local native clergy resented this and looked to the king for help against these Italian clergy. As a result, the popes found much of their own local clergy aligned against them and with the kings.
Meanwhile, during their struggle with the Holy Roman Empire, the popes had granted kings the right to collect church taxes in return for aid against the German rulers, justifying their actions by declaring these wars crusades. But when war broke out in 1294 between France and England, both countries' kings used the precedent of collecting church taxes for the popes' wars to justify collecting church taxes for their own wars. When Pope Boniface VIII refused to let Philip IV of France do this, Philip and his agent, Nogaret, planned to subject the pope to the inquisition for crimes he allegedly had committed. When this plan failed, Nogaret and the pope's enemies in Rome kidnapped Boniface. Although he was soon rescued by loyal followers, he died a few days later.
The College of Cardinals, probably feeling pressure from the highhanded acts of the French king and his agents, elected a Frenchman, Clement V, as the new pope. Clement set out for Rome, but never made it there, stopping at Avignon, a papal city close to French territory. For the next 70 years (1309-77), the popes, all of who were French born, stayed in Avignon. During this period (known as the Babylonian Captivity after the 70 years of captivity the Old Testament Jews had spent in Babylon), the popes came under increasing criticism for being corrupt and under the thumb of the French kings. Whatever the truth of these charges, the Avignon papacy symbolized the decline of the medieval papacy. The kings' increasing ability to claim the loyalty of the local clergy and to collect church taxes helped create several quasi-national churches that officially were part of the Roman Catholic Church but were increasingly under royal control. The Babylonian Captivity, along with the Hundred Years War then going on, also triggered challenges to papal authority from two other directions: church councils and popular heresies.
The resentment that the Babylonian Captivity aroused against the Church grew worse when the popes tried to move back to Rome. By the 1370's, the turmoil of the Hundred Years War was making life at Avignon increasingly dangerous. The capture and ransoming of Pope Innocent VI by a company of English mercenaries (who had little use for a French pope, anyway) convinced Pope Gregory XI to move to Rome. However, at this time, Rome was a more dangerous place to live in during times of "peace" than France was during war. It took Gregory three attempts to get into Rome, and once he got in, he quickly decided he wanted to leave and return to Avignon. Unfortunately, Gregory died before he could get out.
For the first time in 70 years, Rome was the scene of a papal election, and the Roman mob clamored outside for an Italian pope. Under such pressure, the College of Cardinals elected an Italian, Urban VI, as the next pope. Unfortunately, Urban was something of a violent and bigoted man whose actions drove all but three cardinals back to Avignon where they elected a second pope. Thus began the Great Schism, a period of turmoil when the Church was divided in its loyalty between two lines of popes, one French and one Italian. To no one's surprise, each pope refused to recognize the other and even excommunicated him and his followers. This led to enormous anxiety among devout Christians, who found themselves supposedly excommunicated by one pope or the other. With neither pope willing to resign, something had to be done.
The most popular suggestion was a general church council such as the ones summoned to solve major disputes in the past. There were several problems with this solution. First of all, popes traditionally called such councils, and neither pope was willing to call such a council. This made the legality of such a council questionable if not called by at least one pope. Second, different rulers in Europe supported particular popes, largely for political reasons. Such political divisions made it almost impossible to get people to agree on the site of a council, not to mention the deeper issues involved. Finally, the whole issue of a Church council raised the question: if a council could depose the pope, who was the real head of the Church? This was a question that lingered on long after the Great Schism had faded away.
At last, a council was called at Pisa, Italy in 1409. It deposed the two rival popes and elected a third. Unfortunately, neither original pope recognized the council's power to depose a pope, so now the Church had three popes. However, by this time, people were committed to the idea of a church council, and another one was called at Constance, Switzerland. All three popes were deposed, and a fourth, Martin V, was elected. Although one of the deposed popes held on in Avignon until 1429, the Great Schism ended here. Its effects did not, because it caused people all over Western Europe to question the authority of the pope in the Church. Although a single pope once again ruled the Church, his reputation and authority were permanently undermined.
Besides discontent within the ranks of the clergy, the Babylonian Captivity also caused popular discontent in the form of heresies. During the Hundred Years War, the French popes at Avignon were especially unpopular in England, and it was here that the first of these heresies emerged. Its leader was an Oxford scholar, John Wycliffe (called Wicked Life by his enemies). His main point was that the Bible is the sole source of religious truth, and therefore anything not in the Bible did not belong in the Christian faith or practice. In Wycliffe's view this meant that such mainstays of Catholic practice as confession, penance, pilgrimages, veneration of saintly relics, excommunication, Church ownership of property, and the gap in status between the clergy and laity (non-clergy) should all be abolished since there was no mention of them in the Bible.
Possibly Wycliffe's most revolutionary act was translating the Latin Vulgate Bible into English so the common people could read it for themselves. Such an act made it much more difficult for the Church to keep its monopoly on religious truth. It also led to a variety of interpretations of the Bible by some of Wycliffe's followers known as Lollards (meaning mumblers or babblers). The more radical Lollards did such things as chopping up images of saints for firewood, holding mock masses, and eating communion bread with onions to show it was no different from regular bread.
Because of England's hostility to the French and the popes at Avignon, initial reaction to the Lollards was mild until the Wat Tyler Rebellion broke out in 1381. After that, the authorities were much sterner with the heresy, burning some fifty Lollards at the stake over the next 40 years. Wycliffe himself was mildly reprimanded. He died peacefully in 1384. However, his heresy did not.
Among the Lollards were a number of influential people, including Queen Anne, who came from Bohemia (modern Czech Republic). She sent several copies of Wycliffe's writings home where the heresy caught on. In addition to this heresy, there was also a growing national consciousness among the Bohemians aimed mainly against the German ruling class. This combination of heresy and a growing national consciousness would prove to be a devastating force in the events about to unfold.
Public sermons in the streets of Prague criticized Church corruption while translators produced 33 handwritten copies of the Bible in the Czech language. At the center of all this turmoil was Jan Hus, a popular preacher and professor who was heavily influenced by Wycliffe. Hus' writing and preaching stirred up more and more anti-church and anti-German feeling. This led to a condemnation of Hus' works, which in turn provoked a wave of riots and protests across Bohemia. Faced with the possibility of a full-scale rebellion against the Church, the pope and the Council of Constance summoned Hus, under promise of a safe conduct, to defend his views. The council unwisely went back on its word, had Hus declared a heretic, and burned him at the stake. Rather than depriving the Bohemians of a leader, this act provided them with a martyr around whom they could rally. The resulting Hussite Wars (1420-36) showed how powerful a combination nationalist feeling and popular piety could be.
The Church launched five crusades against the Hussites, all of them dismal failures. The Hussites combined new firearms technology with the ancient Bohemian tactic of making circular walls of wagons ( wagenburgs) to create a seemingly invincible army. Hussite armies even invaded Germany, plundering at will all the way to the Baltic Sea. By 1433, the Church had had enough and opened negotiations with the Hussites to keep them from spreading their heresy across Europe. The Hussites, not ready for a complete break with the Catholic Church that had led the faith for centuries, were also willing to compromise. The Church allowed certain religious liberties in return for the Hussites' allegiance to the Church.
Although the Hussites had returned to the Church, their importance lived on. For, just across the border in Saxony some 85 years later, another reformer by the name of Martin Luther would lead another revolt against the Church, raising many of the same points Wycliffe and the Hussites had raised. Only this time, the break, known as the Protestant Reformation, would be permanent and alter the course of European and world history.
Nothing better epitomizes the turmoil of the Later Middle Ages than the prolonged and desperate struggle between France and England known as the Hundred Years War. Technically, this was a series of wars intermittently separated by periods of uneasy peace, but the fact that it took over a century to resolve this struggle justifies treating it as one war. Although, on the surface, the issues involved just concerned who held certain territories and the French throne, there were deeper processes going on that gave this struggle an importance far beyond its battles. The main process taking place was the painful separation of the two nations from a feudal and dynastic concept of the state that had kept French and English histories intertwined with one another since the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The growing use of the English language throughout the war especially illustrated this process. Whereas French was the primary language of the English court at the start of the war, by the end it was English. Also, Geoffrey Chaucer had written Canterbury Tales, one of the first great works of English literature, and John Wycliffe had translated the Bible into English, all this showing a growing sense of an English nation and culture.
Three main factors set France and England on a collision course in the 1300's. Over the last two centuries, the French monarchy had gradually brought nearly all of France under its effective rule. In the early 1200's, John I had lost most of England's lands in France. However, two rich wine producing areas in the southwest of France, Gascony and Guienne, remained in English hands, a fact which greatly irked the French kings. Another source of concern to the French kings was England's flourishing wool trade in the north with Flanders, which was part of France. When the Flemish workers revolted in 1302, they looked to England for support. Although the French put down the revolt, they were still suspicious of English intentions in Flanders.
But the issue taking center stage was Edward III of England's claim to the French throne when the childless Charles IV died. Edward was Charles' nephew, while the next closest male claimant to the throne was a cousin, named Philip. However, the French did not want an Englishman on the French throne, and thereby chose Philip VI as their king. Edward, feeling slighted by this decision and being concerned about his hold on Gascony and Guienne, decided to fight for the throne. The Hundred Years War was on.
One of the most dramatic signs of the transition from the medieval to modern world was the changing nature of warfare. The English were especially innovative in this regard, probably because they faced a much larger and more powerful enemy and thus felt more of a need to experiment with new ways of fighting. The armies of the Hundred Years War would differ from the armies of the Dark Ages in three major ways. One change was that, for the most part, these were not feudal armies of noble vassals fighting to fulfill their personal obligations to their lords. Rather, they were largely collections of mercenary companies containing many members of the lower classes and even criminal element. Their captains would contract their services to a king in return for the promise of pay, plunder, and ransoms for any captured enemies. Such armies may have been more stable and reliable than the old feudal armies, but they also created serious problems. Since they were rarely paid in full or on time and their ranks were often filled with the more disreputable types in society, they were prone to desertion, plundering, and violence against the civilian populace.
Two other big changes had to do with weaponry. One was the longbow, adopted from the Welsh by Edward I in the late 1200's. This was a specialized weapon that took a full year to make and years to master. As a result, only richer free peasants (yeomen) and professional mercenaries had the leisure time for practice. The longbow was both powerful and had a rapid rate of fire. Formations of English long-bowmen, protected by rows of sharpened stakes and intervening formations of English knights, could unleash ten to twelve volleys of arrows per minute, a devastating rate of fire as the French would find out. Another weapon that would assume greater importance as the war continued was gunpowder. Both the English and, later on, the French would use cannons effectively to demolish castle walls and the medieval order they stood for.
While the history of the war was long an involved, it followed a basic pattern. At first, the English, with strong leaders and new weapons and tactics, would win striking victories against much larger French armies. This would continue until weak leaders would take power in England and more decisive one would take over in France. Then the French would adapt to the English weapons and tactics and gradually recover their lands. However, England would once again see strong leaders while France would suffer weak ones again and the pattern would start all over. This pattern cycled around two times, dividing the war into four basic phases.
The first major battle of the war, Sluys (1340), was a naval battle and determined who would control the English Channel. Naval battles in the Atlantic were rare, since the seas were too rough for oar driven galleys, and the square sail then in use could not tack well into the wind. Therefore, one navy or the other was usually confined to port, depending on the wind. Without the use of oars, ramming and clipping enemy ships was impractical, so naval battles were mainly land battles fought at sea, with each side trying to grapple and board the other side's ships. In such a battle, the English had a definite advantage, since their longbows provided the firepower to clear enemy decks and let English soldiers storm their ships. As a result, the Battle of Sluys was a decisive victory for the English and gave them the freedom to raid France while securing their own coasts from seaborne raids.
For several years, small English armies would raid and plunder French territory while being careful to avoid any large French forces, since the English themselves were not sure of how effective their longbows would be against French knights. However, in 1346 a large French army succeeded in cornering a much smaller English army and forcing it to fight at Crecy. Lined up behind protective wooden stakes, the English long-bowmen launched volley after volley of arrows as "thick as snow", first mowing down enemy crossbowmen and then bringing succeeding waves of charging French knights crashing to the ground. By sundown, the English had won a stunning victory against what seemed like insurmountable odds, considering enemy numbers and the high regard in which French knights were held all over Europe. Crecy opened the French countryside to the English, allowing them to seize the port of Calais, which they held until the 1550's.
However, the French refused to recognize that the outcome at Crecy using these new tactics of long-bowmen in coordination with knights was anything besides a fluke. Therefore, after an interlude in the fighting brought on by the Black Death, they went after the English army again. This time they tracked down Edward the Black Prince and an army of some 8000 men at Poitiers (1356). Once again the French knights charged the English lines, and once again the hissing volleys of English arrows littered the field with French dead and wounded. Among the numerous prisoners held for ransom was the French king. Poitiers confirmed Crecy's verdict that the balance of power on the battlefields of Europe was clearly shifting away from the heavily armored knight.
The aftermath of Poitiers saw the English conquer large areas of France in the western coastal areas. Meanwhile, peasant revolts, such as the Jacquerie, were challenging new taxes and the nobles' power in society. Given all this turmoil and their inability to beat English armies, the French concluded the Treaty of Bretigny in 1360, recognizing Edward's new conquests in return for his relinquishing any claim to the French crown.
However, peace did not return to France, because the English did not want to disband their so-called free companies of mercenaries in England where they could raise all sorts of havoc. Instead, they turned them loose in France where they continued to loot and pillage as if peace had never been signed. One free company made a living from capturing castles and then selling them back to their original owners. Another company, under Sir Robert Knollys (knighted by Edward for his exploits and atrocities in France), controlled forty castles and plundered at will from Orleans to Vezelay. In response to these ravages, French peasants fortified their churches, slept on islands in local rivers, and dug tunnels to escape the English. Seeing no apparent difference between peace and war, the French resumed the war in 1369.
By now, the French had learned to avoid open battle against the English long-bowmen, choosing instead to bolster town and castle fortification, cut off any isolated raiding parties, and deny the English the plunder that made the war worthwhile to them. Thanks to this strategy, the French recovered most of their lands from the English. This, the return of the Black Death, and then the Wat Tyler rebellion in 1381 all combined to make the war very unpopular in England. Therefore, in 1396, it was the English turn to ask for peace, giving up most of their French possessions in the process.
However, the tide soon turned back to favor the English for a couple reasons. First of all, the rule of the mentally unstable French king, Charles VI (1380-1422), unleashed factional strife between the noble houses of Orleans and Burgundy over who would control the king and French policies. Therefore, France was in a state of turmoil and open to attack. Also, about this time, a warlike English king, Henry V, took the throne and decided to launch a new campaign in France.
Henry entered France with a small army of 1000 knights and 6000 long-bowmen. Like Edward III and the Black Prince before him, Henry was trapped by a much larger French army that forced his tired and hungry army to fight at Agincourt (1415). By this time, knights were wearing suits of plate armor weighing up to 65 pounds, a much harder shell for the longbow arrows to penetrate. Despite this, the longbow still played a vital role in winning Agincourt. For whatever reasons, the French chose to avoid the formations of long-bowmen and instead attacked the groups of English knights in between. This had the effect of cramming the French into ever-narrower spaces that gave them no room to raise their weapons. Meanwhile, their comrades in back, unaware of this, kept pushing forward, creating even more of a crush up front that the English knights exploited mercilessly. At the same time, the English long-bowmen were hitting the French from the sides. This combination of being unable to maneuver and being attacked from three sides made Agincourt as much of a disaster for the French as Crecy and Poitiers had been.
Agincourt unleashed an avalanche of misfortunes upon France. The Duke of Burgundy, bitter over the murder of his father by the Duke of Orleans, defected to the English side. Paris fell to the enemy, while famine and turmoil stalked the land. Equally decisive and portentous for the future was another new weapon that was changing the face of warfare: gunpowder. Cannons had been used as early as Crecy in 1346, but mainly as glorified noisemakers. However, by the early 1400's, the English had a large and effective siege train of cannons that pulverized the old medieval fortifications of towns and castles. By 1420, the English and their Burgundian allies had control of the northern half of France, forcing the French to agree to the Treaty of Troyes, by which Henry would take the French throne after Charles VI died. However, Henry died shortly before Charles and was succeeded by the infant, Henry VI. The French refused to give the throne to this child, and war resumed.
At first, the Duke of Bedford, regent for the young Henry VI, ably continued the English advance against the pale and feeble Charles VII. It was then that a remarkable peasant girl, known to history as Joan of Arc, came to the French court, claiming divine voices had told her to lead France to victory. Despite the snickering at this simple peasant girl by the court, her persistence and genuine faith in her mission persuaded Charles to let her accompany the French army trying to relieve the city of Orleans. For whatever reasons, the French succeeded in saving Orleans, thus opening the road to Reims where Charles could officially be crowned.
To the soldiers, Joan was a symbol of French defiance, and her example restored the army's spirit. However, her luck soon ran out. In 1430, the Burgundians captured Joan and sold her to the English who tried her as a witch for hearing demonic voices. After a long and exhausting trial, she was convicted by a French church court and burned at the stake in the market place of Rouen in 1431. Years later the Church would reverse its decision and declare Joan a saint. She was only 19 years old when she died.
Joan's death backfired against the English in much the same way as the execution of the Hussite leader, Jan Hus, had backfired against the Church a few years before. Charles VII took heart and led a vigorous offensive against the English, while the French people agreed to a war tax to pay for soldiers and artillery to free their land of the now hated English. Now it was the French turn to use cannons to demolish English fortifications and sweep through France. Meanwhile, high war taxes and the lack of plunder to pay for the war made it increasingly unpopular in England. As a result, Parliament cut most funds for fighting in France. In 1451, at the Battle of Castillon, the French, using another experimental weapon, primitive firearms, defeated the last English army in France. Two years later in 1453, the same year the Ottoman Turks used artillery to help them storm the walls of Constantinople, the English were out of France except for the port of Calais. The Hundred Years War was over.
What had all this accomplished? The main significance of the Hundred Years War was that France and England, bound together for centuries by outmoded feudal ties and concepts, were now wrenched apart, leaving in their wake two distinct nations free to follow their own destinies. The Hundred Years War also symbolized far reaching military and social changes. Although nobles would be around for centuries to come, the longbow and gunpowder showed that their days were numbered. Gunpowder in particular meant that nobles were no longer safe, either on the battlefield or behind their own castle walls. And with their military dominance went the nobles' unchallenged social preeminence. Gunpowder technology was also expensive. As a result, only kings and princes were able to afford armies with cannons and firearms, thus stripping nobles of even more of their power and prestige, leaving the way open for the rise of the modern nation state.
At the height of the Hussite crisis in the early 1400's, when the authorities ordered 200 manuscripts of heretical writings burned, people on both sides realized quite well the significance of that act. Two hundred handwritten manuscripts would be hard to replace. Not only would it be a time consuming job, but also trained scribes would be hard to find. After all, most of them worked for the Church, and it seemed unlikely that the Church would loan out its scribes to copy the works of heretics. Although the Hussites more than held their own against the Church, their movement remained confined mainly to the borders of their homeland of Bohemia. One main reason for this was that there was no mass media, such as the printing press to spread the word. A century later, all that had changed.
Like any other invention, the printing press came along and had an impact when the right conditions existed at the right time and place. In this case, that was Europe in the mid 1400's. Like many or most inventions, the printing press was not the result of just one man's ingenious insight into all the problems involved in creating the printing press. Rather, printing was a combination of several different inventions and innovations: block printing, rag paper, oil based ink, interchangeable metal type, and the squeeze press.
If one process started the chain reaction of events that led to the invention of the printing press, it was the rise of towns in Western Europe that sparked trade with the outside world all the way to China. That trade exposed Europeans to three things important for the invention of the printing press: rag paper, block printing, and, oddly enough, the Black Death.
For centuries the Chinese had been making rag paper, which was made from a pulp of water and discarded rags that was then pressed into sheets of paper. When the Arabs met the Chinese at the battle of the Talas River in 751 A.D., they carried off several prisoners skilled in making such paper. The technology spread gradually across the Muslim world, up through Spain and into Western Europe by the late 1200's. The squeeze press used in pressing the pulp into sheets of paper would also lend itself to pressing print evenly onto paper.
The Black Death, which itself spread to Western Europe thanks to expanded trade routes, also greatly catalyzed the invention of the printing press in three ways, two of which combined with the invention of rag paper to provide Europe with plentiful paper. First of all, the survivors of the Black Death inherited the property of those who did not survive, so that even peasants found themselves a good deal richer. Since the textile industry was the most developed industry in Western Europe at that time, it should come as no surprise that people spent their money largely on new clothes. However, clothes wear out, leaving rags. As a result, fourteenth century Europe had plenty of rags to make into rag paper, which was much cheaper than the parchment (sheepskin) and vellum (calfskin) used to make books until then. Even by 1300, paper was only one-sixth the cost of parchment, and its relative cost continued to fall. Considering it took 170 calfskins or 300 sheepskins to make one copy of the Bible, we can see what a bargain paper was.
But the Black Death had also killed off many of the monks who copied the books, since the crowded conditions in the monasteries had contributed to an unusually high mortality rate. One result of this was that the cost of copying books rose drastically while the cost of paper was dropping. Many people considered this unacceptable and looked for a better way to copy books. Thus the Black Death rag paper combined to create both lots of cheap paper plus an incentive for the invention of the printing press.
The Black Death also helped lead to the decline of the Church, the rise of a money economy, and subsequently the Italian Renaissance with its secular ideas and emphasis on painting. It was the Renaissance artists who, in their search for a more durable paint, came up with oil-based paints. Adapting these to an oil-based ink that would adhere to metal type was fairly simple.
Block printing, carved on porcelain, had existed for centuries before making its way to Europe. Some experiments with interchangeable copper type had been carried on in Korea. However, Chinese printing did not advance beyond that, possibly because the Chinese writing system used thousands of characters and was too unmanageable. For centuries after its introduction into Europe, block printing still found little use, since wooden printing blocks wore out quickly when compared to the time it took to carve them. As a result of the time and expense involved in making block prints, a few playing cards and pages of books were printed this way, but little else.
What people needed was a movable type made of metal. And here again, the revival of towns and trade played a major role, since it stimulated a mining boom, especially in Germany, along with better techniques for working metals, including soft metals such as gold and copper. It was a goldsmith from Mainz, Germany, Johannes Gutenberg, who created a durable and interchangeable metal type that allowed him to print many different pages, using the same letters over and over again in different combinations. It was also Gutenberg who combined all these disparate elements of movable type, rag paper, the squeeze press, and oil based inks to invent the first printing press in 1451.
The first printed books were religious in nature, as were most medieval books. They also imitated (handwritten) manuscript form so that people would accept this new revolutionary way of copying books. The printing press soon changed the forms and uses of books quite radically. Books stopped imitating manuscript forms such as lined paper to help the copiers and abbreviations to save time in copying. They also covered an increasingly wider variety of non-religious topics (such as grammars, etiquette, and geology books) that appealed especially to the professional members of the middle class.
By 1482, there were about 100 printing presses in Western Europe: 50 in Italy, 30 in Germany, 9 in France, 8 each in Spain and Holland, and 4 in England. A Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius, realized that the real market was not for big heavy volumes of the Bible, but for smaller, cheaper, and easier to handle "pocket books". Manutius further revolutionized book copying by his focusing on these smaller editions that more people could afford. He printed translations of the Greek classics and thus helped spread knowledge in general, and the Renaissance in particular, across Europe. By 1500, there were some 40,000 different editions with over 6,000,000 copies in print.
The printing press had dramatic effects on European civilization. Its immediate effect was that it spread information quickly and accurately. This helped create a wider literate reading public. However, its importance lay not just in how it spread information and opinions, but also in what sorts of information and opinions it was spreading. There were two main directions printing took, both of which were probably totally unforeseen by its creators.
First of all, more and more books of a secular nature were printed, with especially profound results in science. Scientists working on the same problem in different parts of Europe especially benefited, since they could print the results of their work and share it accurately with a large number of other scientists. They in turn could take that accurate, not miscopied, information, work with it and advance knowledge and understanding further. Of course, they could accurately share their information with many others and the process would continue. By the 1600's, this process would lead to the Scientific Revolution of the Enlightenment, which would radically alter how Europeans viewed the world and universe.
The printing press also created its share of trouble as far as some people were concerned. It took book copying out of the hands of the Church and made it much harder for the Church to control or censor what was being written. It was hard enough to control what Wycliffe and Hus wrote with just a few hundred copies of their works in circulation. Imagine the problems the Church had when literally thousands of such works could be produced at a fraction of the cost. Each new printing press was just another hole in the dyke to be plugged up, and the Church had only so many fingers with which to do the job. It is no accident that the breakup of Europe's religious unity during the Protestant Reformation corresponded with the spread of printing. The difference between Martin Luther's successful Reformation and the Hussites' much more limited success was that Luther was armed with the printing press and knew how to use it with devastating effect.
Some people go as far as to say that the printing press is the most important invention between the invention of writing itself and the computer. Although it is impossible to justify that statement to everyone's satisfaction, one can safely say that the printing press has been one of the most powerful inventions of the modern era. It has advanced and spread knowledge and molded public opinion in a way that nothing before the advent of television and radio in the twentieth century could rival. If it were not able to, then freedom of the press would not be such a jealously guarded liberty as it is today.
The turmoil of the Later Middle Ages (c.1300-1450) continued and accelerated the changes that started with the rise of towns and kings in the High Middle Ages (c.1100-1300). Although these were certainly difficult times to live through, they also paved the way for the modern institutions, movements, and values that would emerge after 1450: capitalism with its new attitudes toward money and profit, the Renaissance with its new attitudes toward the secular world and Man's place in it, the nation state with its relatively centralized bureaucracy and army, and the age of exploration with the new perspective it gave on Europe's place in the world. New technological innovations such as the printing press, gunpowder, and better ships and navigation would also generate significant changes.
The turmoil of the Later Middle Ages did not affect everyone equally. Nobles, in particular, saw a decline in their position as a class. The longbow, gunpowder, and massed formations of infantry pikemen effectively challenged the armored knight's supremacy on the battlefield. Even his place in the castle grew ever more dangerous as new and more destructive cannons were constantly being developed. Economically, the Later Middle Ages had seen labor shortages that led to higher prices. Inflation cut increasingly into the noble's wealth since it was based on land with a more static value. By 1450, almost all the peasants in Western Europe had been able to buy freedom from their lords, paying them fixed rents instead of labor. Even those rents failed to help the nobles much since inflation reduced their value and nobles often had little skill or desire to spend within their means.
The nobles' decline meant other social classes could rise in power and status. Peasants benefited because they had bought their freedom and many even owned their land. The greater incentive provided by working for themselves rather than their lords led to greater agricultural production and the revival of Europe's population. The middle class benefited by making money from the nobles, either through loans with interest or selling them goods for a profit. However wealthy nobles may have been, it seemed that a lot of their money was ending up in the hands of middle class merchants. The middle class was also assuming a larger role in the governments of the emerging national monarchies in Western Europe. Kings also benefited since the nobles had been the main obstacles to building strong nation-states. The alliance of kings and middle class meant that the kings were the only ones with the power and wealth to afford the new gunpowder technology that was becoming a necessary part of any respectable army.
In spite of this, some powerful and influential nobles remained. Others were forced to seek employment in the king's army or at his court as courtiers, basically idle hangers on whose job was to make the king's court look impressive. Many others lost their noble status by having to support themselves through such ignoble pursuits as agriculture and commerce. Still, the nobles were considered the class to belong to. As a result, we see wealthy members of the middle class buying titles of nobility from the king (who always needed cash), giving up their businesses, and settling down on their landed estates just like other nobles. In this way, the noble class was constantly replenished by new blood, although the importance of the nobles kept on its path of gradual decline. The changes sweeping through European society were making it harder and harder to find a place for the nobles.
By 1500, we see the peasants in Western Europe free and often in possession of their own land. The middle class' status was getting steadily higher, both through their money and positions in the king's bureaucracy. And the kings were tightening their grip on their realms through their bureaucracies and armies.
First of all, the dramatic population growth of the late 1400's meant that towns and trade could also rapidly recover and surpass their previous prosperity. In 1450, the wealthiest banking family in Europe was that of the Medici of Florence, whose fortune consisted of 90,000 florins. By the 1500's, another banking family, the Fuggers of Augsburg in Germany, had taken over first place with nearly one million florins to their credit, over ten times that of the Medici half a century before. What this suggests is that the amount of trade and money in circulation had increased a great deal.
The second effect was that there were new consumer markets, but with a very different distribution of wealth from before. In the High Middle Ages, nobles had provided merchants with much of their market since they controlled so much of Europe's wealth at that time. By 1450, this had changed. Most nobles had lost money and status and could not afford the fine woolens and other goods made by the guilds. Instead there were common laborers and peasants, each with a modest amount of money to spend. A lot of money was there. It was just spread out more widely.
This change in the consumer market from a few rich nobles to a large number of people each with modest amounts of cash led to a change in production techniques as well. Up to this point, guilds had controlled the production and selling of manufactured goods, while nobles could afford the high quality and prices that the guilds maintained. The new type of consumer emerging by 1500 could not afford them. In response to this, some wealthy businessmen went outside the town walls and the jurisdiction of the guilds to the various peasant cottages in the countryside. Here the peasants would produce lower quality woolens than the guilds produced. The businessmen would pay them lower prices for those woolens and turn around and undersell their guild competitors. In this way, older medieval cities and guilds, such as in Flanders, went into decline, while other centers of production took their places. This also led to the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few rich businessmen instead of being spread out among the guilds. Thus by 1500, the consumer market was more spread out than before, while the means of production and investment were concentrated in fewer hands.
The third effect of Europe's reviving economy was that its expanding internal markets prompted Spanish and Portuguese explorers to search for new trade routes to the sources of spices in the Far East. Besides opening up whole new continents for discovery and exploration, this also vastly expanded the volume of Europe's trade.
In order to handle this higher volume of trade, new techniques of handling money became prevalent about this time. The Italian city-states especially pioneered these new methods. The prosperity that these new business techniques brought Italy largely explains why Italy would lead the rest of Europe in the Renaissance. Very briefly, these techniques were:
Joint stock companies. These allowed people with small amounts of cash to take part in business enterprises such as merchant expeditions. Their importance was that, instead of hoarding their money, people put it into circulation in Europe's economy, allowing it to grow even more.
Insurance companies. These reduced the risk of losing all of one's investment in a business venture. The result was much like that of joint stock companies, in that it encouraged people to invest, rather than hoard, their money, which stimulated further growth in Europe's economy.
Deposit banks and credit. These gave bankers more money to invest in business ventures since they attracted investors with their promise of guaranteed interest from the deposits. Banking houses also opened branches and extended a system of credit across Western Europe. Credit allowed a businessman to use more money than he actually had to embark on some venture, paying his creditor back with interest when he made his profit. Europe's economy grew much more quickly this way than if it had been limited by the amount of cash on hand at any particular time. Banking and credit also made the transfer of funds across Europe much safer. For example, with a strictly cash economy, someone transferring funds from Florence to London ran the risk of being ambushed by brigands and losing his money. With credit, the same merchant could send an agent to London with a note saying he was worth so much money guaranteed by the bank back in Florence. The agent might get that money in the form of church taxes bound for Italy. He could use that cash in England, and then send a credit note back to Florence worth the amount he borrowed in Church taxes. If brigands ambushed an agent either way, all they got was a credit note that they could not spend. Meanwhile, the Florentine banker got hold of all the funds he needed in England, and the Church in Italy safely collected its taxes from England.
There were dangers to this system, especially debtors not repaying their creditors. Kings were especially bad risks in this respect. For example, in the 1340's, Edward III of England failed to repay the Bardi and Peruzzi firms of Florence. This caused their bankruptcies, which sent ripples throughout Western Europe's economy since so much of it was tied up with these two banking houses.
These new business techniques combined to create a feedback cycle that accelerated the growth of Europe's economy. More money was invested in new business ventures. This increased trade, which stimulated more production of goods. That, in turn, created more jobs for people, who had more money to spend, which was safer because of the new business techniques, and so on.
Overall, the system worked quite well, providing money for the expansion of Europe's economy and the growth of its monarchies. Two other important factors should be mentioned. One is the dramatic improvement in mining techniques in Europe at this time. Germany in particular saw a fivefold increase in mining production between 1400 and the early 1500's, which put much more silver into circulation. Secondly, the adoption of Arabic numerals improved accounting techniques so trade and business could run more efficiently. All this increased economic activity and prosperity transformed European values and attitudes toward money and helped create a new economic system called capitalism.
Private ownership of the means of production. This was largely a break from the Middle Ages when guilds controlled the means of production. We have seen how wealthy businessmen started to break the guilds' monopoly by having peasants produce textiles in the countryside. This process continued and accelerated after 1500. Modern communism theoretically has the means of production owned by the workers, represented by the government, which in some ways seems closer to medieval guilds than its main rival, capitalism.
The law of supply and demand determines prices. Once again, this is a break from the guilds which kept prices artificially fixed no matter how plentiful or scarce its goods were. Communist governments also control prices in a similar way.
There is a sharp distinction and often little contact between the workers and the capitalist who owns the means of production. Such a distinction existed to a much smaller degree between guild masters and their laborers, and this became a serious problem in the later Middle Ages. Such a gap between capitalists and their workers would widen considerably and become especially bad in the early Industrial Revolution of the 1800's.
The profit motive. Although medieval guilds and merchants made profits, those profits were largely restricted by the Church's ban against charging more than a "fair price" for goods and services. The emergence of the profit motive by 1500 especially shows the changing attitudes and values in European civilization.
Capitalism helped lay the foundations for the rise of national monarchies in Europe by providing them with the capital to build up strong professional armies and bureaucracies. The states that best adapted to capitalism, in particular the Dutch Republic in the 1600's and England in the 1700's, would emerge as the economic and political powerhouses of Europe and eventually establish dominance of the world in later centuries. European prosperity in the later 1400's also made patronage of the arts possible and helped create one of the greatest cultural movements in history: the Renaissance.
One of history’s most important financial innovations was banking, which was closely bound up with credit. The main problem spurring on this development was the need to safely transport large amounts of cash over long distances in order to carry on trade across Europe. Such journeys were particularly beset by two dangers: natural disasters, especially storms, and attacks by pirates or brigands. Luckily, there were two parties with complementary needs that led to a solution. One was the Church, which needed to send its taxes to Italy from all over Europe. The other consisted of Italian merchants who wanted to take money from Italy to destinations across Europe in order to carry on trade.
At some point, a merchant started sending agents to other countries to trade. However, instead of carrying cash, they had letters of credit that they would present to local Church officials in return for cash that they could use there for trading. When they or church officials returned to Italy, they would bring letters of credit worth the amount borrowed from the Church and present them to the Italian merchant who would then give the church the money he owed them. In that way, both parties could transfer large amounts of money across Europe without carrying any cash.
As this practice caught on, there were other people who wanted to transfer funds across Europe without the risks that came from traveling with cash. Therefore, they would deposit cash with a merchant who had branch offices all over Europe, take a letter of credit to their destination, and reclaim their cash from the merchant’s branch office there. Naturally, the merchant would charge a fee for this service. He would also use the money deposited with him for his own business deals, hopefully making a profit on the depositor’s cash before he reclaimed his money. Thus was born our modern institution of banking, an essential ingredient in the capitalist system.
...everything that surrounds us is our own work, the work of man: all dwellings, all castles, all cities, all the edifices throughout the whole world, which are so numerous and of such quality that they resemble the works of angels rather than men. Ours are the paintings, the sculptures; ours are the trades sciences and philosophical systems.— Gianozzo Manetti, 1452
On rare occasion one comes across a period of such dynamic cultural change that it is seen as a major turning point in history. Ancient Greece, and especially Athens, in the fifth century B.C. was such a turning point in the birth of Western Civilization. The Italian Renaissance was another. Both were drawing upon a rich cultural heritage. For the Greeks, it was the ancient Near East and Egypt. For the Italian Renaissance, it was ancient Rome and Greece. Both ages broke the bonds of earlier cultural restraints and unleashed a flurry of innovations that have seldom, if ever, been equaled elsewhere. Both ages produced radically new forms and ideas in a wide range of areas: art, architecture, literature, history, and science. Both ages shined brilliantly and somewhat briefly before falling victim to violent ends, largely of their own making. Yet, despite their relative briefness, both ages passed on a cultural heritage that is an essential part of our own civilization. There were three important factors making Italy the birthplace of the Renaissance.
Italy's geographic location. Renaissance Italy was drawing upon the civilizations of ancient Greece and especially Rome, upon whose ruins it was literally sitting. During the Middle Ages, Italians had neglected and abused their Roman heritage, even stripping marble and stone from Roman buildings for their own constructions. However, by the late Middle Ages, they were becoming more aware of the Roman civilization surrounding them. Italy was also geographically well placed for contact with the Byzantines and Arabs who had preserved classical culture. Both of these factors combined to make Italy well suited to absorb the Greek and Roman heritage.
The recent invention of the printing press spread new ideas quickly and accurately. This was especially important now since many Renaissance ideas were not acceptable to the Church. However, with the printing press, these ideas were very hard to suppress.
Renaissance Italy, like the ancient Greeks, thrived in the urban culture and vibrant economy of the city-state. This helped in two ways. First, the smaller and more intimate environment of the city-state, combined with the freedom of expression found there, allowed a number of geniuses to flourish and feed off one another's creative energies. Unfortunately, the city-state could also be turbulent and violent, as seen in the riot scene that opens Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Secondly, the Italian city-states, especially trading and banking centers such as Venice and Florence, provided the money to patronize the arts. Therefore, the wealth and freedom of expression thriving in the urban culture of Italy both helped give birth to the Renaissance.
Still, the term "renaissance" has some validity, since its conscious focus was classical culture. The art and architecture drew heavily upon Greek and Roman forms. Historical and political writers used Greek and Roman examples to make their points. And renaissance science, in particular, relied almost slavishly upon Greek and Roman authorities, which was important, since it set up rival authorities to the Church and allowed Western Civilization to break free from the constraints of medieval thought and give birth to the Scientific Revolution during the Enlightenment.
Whether one sees the Renaissance as a period of originality or just drawing upon older cultures, it did generate four ideas that have been and still are central to Western Civilization: secularism, humanism, individualism, and skepticism.
Secularism comes from the word secular, meaning of this world. Medieval civilization had been largely concerned with religion and the next world. The new economic and political horizons and opportunities that were opening up for Western Europe in the High and Late Middle Ages got people more interested in this world. During the Renaissance people saw this life as worth living for its own sake, not just as preparation for the next world. The art in particular exhibited this secular spirit, showing detailed and accurate scenery, anatomy, and nature, whereas medieval artists generally ignored such things since their paintings were for the glory of God. This is not to say that Renaissance people had lost faith in God. Religion was still the most popular theme for paintings. But during the Renaissance people found other things worth living for besides the afterlife.
Humanism goes along with secularism in that it makes human beings, not God, the center of attention. The quotation at the top of this reading certainly emphasizes this point. So did Renaissance art, which portrayed the human body as a thing of beauty in its own right, not like some medieval "comic strip" character whose only reason to exist was for the glory of God. Along those lines, Renaissance philosophers saw humans as intelligent creatures capable of reason (and questioning authority) rather than being mindless pawns helplessly manipulated by God. Even the term for Renaissance philosophers, "humanists", shows how the focus of peoples' attention had shifted from Heaven and God to this world and human beings. It also described the group of scholars who drew upon the more secular Greek and Roman civilizations for inspiration.
Individualism takes humanism a step further by saying that individual humans were capable of great accomplishments. The more communal, group oriented society and mentality of the Middle Ages was giving way to a belief in the individual and his achievements. The importance of this was that it freed remarkable individuals and geniuses, such as Leonardo da Vinci to live up to their potential without being held back by a medieval society that discouraged innovation.
Besides the outstanding achievements of Leonardo, one sees individualism expressed in a wide variety of ways during the Renaissance. Artists started signing their paintings, thus showing individualistic pride in their work. Also, the more communal guild system was being replaced by the more individualistic system of capitalism, which encouraged private enterprise.
Skepticism, which promoted curiosity and the questioning of authority, was largely an outgrowth of the other three Renaissance ideas. The secular spirit of the age naturally put Renaissance humanists at odds with the Church and its purely religious values and explanations of the universe. Humanism and individualism, with their belief in the ability of human reason, raised challenges to the Church's authority and theories, which in turn led to such things as the Protestant Reformation, the Age of Exploration and the Scientific Revolution, all of which would radically alter how Western Europe views the world and universe. These four new ideas of secularism, humanism, individualism, and skepticism led to innovations in a variety of fields during the Renaissance, the most prominent being literature and learning, art, science, the Age of Exploration, and the Protestant Reformation.
In response to this, new schools were set up to give the sons of nobles and wealthy merchants an education with a broader and more secular curriculum than the Church provided: philosophy, literature, mathematics, history, and politics. Naturally much of the basis for this new curriculum was Greek and Roman culture. Classical authors such as Demosthenes and Cicero were used to teach students how to think, write, and speak clearly. Greek and Roman history were used to teach object lessons in politics. This curriculum provided the skills and knowledge seen as essential for an educated man back then, and served as the basis for school curriculums well into the twentieth century. Only in recent decades has a more technical education largely replaced the curriculum established for us in the Renaissance.
Along the same lines, a more secular literature largely replaced the predominantly religious literature of the Middle Ages. History, as a study of the past (Greek and Roman past in particular) in order to learn lessons for the future, was emerging. So was another emerging new discipline deeply rooted in history: political science. The father of this discipline was Nicolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). His treatise on governing techniques, The Prince, urges the prince to carry on with whatever ruthless means were at his disposal. This serves as a stark contrast to St. Augustine's concept of the "just war."
Another book of a secular nature was Castiglione's The Courtier, which spelled out the ideal education and qualities of a nobleman attending a prince's court. Unlike the usually illiterate and rough mannered medieval noble, Castiglione's courtier should be versed in manners (such as not cleaning one's teeth in public with one's finger). This ideal of the well-rounded "Renaissance Man" hearkens back to the Greek ideal of a well-rounded man and has continued to this day.
Renaissance art contrasted sharply with medieval art in all these respects. More paintings were on secular themes, especially portraits. And even the religious paintings paid a great deal of attention to glorifying the human form and accomplishments. Starting with Giotto in the early 1300's, Renaissance artists increasingly perfected and used such things as background, perspective, proportion, and individuality. In fact, Leonardo's detail was so good that botanists today can identify the kinds of plants he put into his paintings.
Although painting was especially prominent during the Renaissance, other art forms also flourished. For example, architecture broke somewhat with the medieval Gothic style during the Renaissance. However, it was less innovative and relied more heavily on classical forms, in particular columns, arches, and domes as well as building on a massive scale. Possibly the supreme example of this is the dome of St. Peter's in Rome which was designed by Michelangelo and towers 435 feet from the floor. Music in the Renaissance saw developments that would later blossom into classical music. Instruments were improved and the whole family of violins was developed. Counterpoint (the blending of two melodies) and polyphony (interweaving several melodic lines) also emerged during this period.
The Italian Renaissance is generally seen as lasting until about 1500, when Italy's political disunity attracted a devastating round of wars and invasions that ended its most innovative cultural period. However, in the process, the invaders took the ideas of the Italian Renaissance back to Northern Europe and sparked what is known as the Northern Renaissance.
Perhaps the most dramatic, or at least widely acclaimed, breakthrough in the Renaissance was in the realm of art, in particular painting. Not only did Renaissance art reflect growing concern with secular subjects, it involved new artistic tools and techniques that more accurately portrayed those subjects. Pre-eminent among those tools was the shift from tempera (egg based) paints painted on wood or as frescoes on walls to oil based paints applied to canvas.
Frescoes were wall paintings applied to wet plaster that set into the wall when dry. While this did help preserve the painting, it had several drawbacks. First of all, frescoes dried quickly so an artist had to plan his work thoroughly in advance, since to change any mistakes involved redoing the whole painting. This made frescoes stiff and less spontaneous. Also, the rough surface of a plaster wall made it hard to render details, forcing the artist to use a pointed brush and even at times to stipple the surface dot by dot. To deal with these limitations, an artist would divide the wall into sections, one for each day’s work. He would also do extensive preliminary drawings of the planned painting on the wall.
Tempera was the type of paint used in frescoes, consisting of egg mixed with pigment. This created a light, but somewhat limited range of colors. It dried quickly, which prevented the layering of paints and the subtle shading (known as chiaroscuro) of a painting.
Oil based paints were developed as early as the 1100s and were first widely used in the Low Countries in the early 1400s. Since it dried slowly, oil had three major advantages over tempera. First, it could be layered, which made possible the use of chiaroscuro & sfumato (a technique giving a painting a misty, foggy, or smoky effect). Second, artists could mix colors with oils, giving them a broader and richer palette to work with than ever before. Finally, as evidenced by X-rays of paintings, artists could, and did, change mistakes, thus letting them be more spontaneous in their work.
While oil paints were widely used in the North, they did not reach Italy until about1475. Artists in Venice were the first Italians to use oil enthusiastically, their paintings being distinguished by the rich reds they often used. From Venice, the use of oil based paints spread rapidly across Italy.
Canvas replaced walls as a medium for painting had as dramatic an impact on art as oil replacing tempera. Not having to rely on walls, especially Church walls, for a painting surface, artists could paint smaller portraits and paintings with other themes, opening up wider markets for their talents. Canvas was also more portable, so artists could work in the privacy of their own studios where they could better attract models (especially for nude paintings). These two factors, plus growing middle class patronage, led to a commercial revolution in art and the end of the dominance of the Church, kings, and nobles who previously had the money and walls artists needed. Consequently, they could now pursue a much broader range of topics for paintings than ever before.
New techniques in painting also helped transform Renaissance art. The most important of these was linear perspective, which allowed artists to attain three-dimensional effects on a two dimensional surface. Without it, paintings were crowded and limited in the number of people and details that could be represented. Greek and Roman paintings had achieved a high degree of perspective, but their techniques were lost during the Middle Ages. True linear perspective was first attained around 1420 in a remarkable experiment done by Filippo Brunelleschi, the same man who had designed the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence.
Brunelleschi painted Florence’s Baptistery from the perspective of the facing cathedral doorway. He then drilled a hole through the vanishing point of the painting (which faced the Baptistery) and set a mirror in front of it. As someone in the cathedral doorway looked toward the Baptistery through the peephole, Brunelleschi could raise or lower the mirror so the viewer was alternately seeing the Baptistery or the reflection of the painting. Supposedly, his painting and mastery of perspective were so good, viewers could not tell the difference between the real Baptistery and the reflected painting. This dramatic demonstration, plus more secular themes, proper proportion, and attention to details, triggered a virtual revolution, not just in art, but in a whole new way of viewing the world that has become a vital part of our civilization. In the 1600s, this new perspective on the world would help lead to the Scientific Revolution.
There are several reasons why the Renaissance came later to Northern Europe. First, it was further removed from the centers of trade and culture in the Mediterranean. As a result, towns, trade, and the more progressive ideas that tend to come with wealth developed more slowly in the north. Along these lines, the greater influence of feudalism and the Church kept the political, social, and intellectual institutions much more medieval and backward. This in turn provided more resistance to the humanistic ideas developing in Italy.
However, the revival of towns and trade in the North combined with other factors in three ways to bring the Renaissance to Northern Europe. First of all, the urban revival in the North along with the Portuguese and Spanish overseas colonies created the financial resources needed to patronize the arts. Secondly, growing trade in the North, combined with the French invasion of Italy in 1494 and the ability of the printing press to spread ideas quickly and accurately, led to growing contact with the ideas of the Italian Renaissance. Finally, the rise of towns together with the rising national monarchies in France, England, Spain, and Portugal led to the decline of the feudal nobility and medieval Church. This created less resistance to the new ideas from the Renaissance. All these factors came together to produce the Northern Renaissance (c.1500-1600).
The Northern Renaissance should not be seen as a mere copycat of the Italian Renaissance. There were two major differences between the two cultural movements in Italy and the North. First of all, the Church's influence, despite being shaken by recent corruption and scandals, still was strong enough to make the Northern Renaissance more religious in nature. Second, the rising power of the national monarchies made the Northern Renaissance more nationalistic in character.
The more intense religious feelings prevailing in Northern Europe posed a difficult question: could a humanist education based on classical culture be reconciled with Christianity? The answer humanists came up with was yes. This was largely thanks to the greatest humanist of the age: Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536). Called the "Prince of Humanists" and the "scholar of Europe", Erasmus dominated Northern Europe's culture in a way few, if any, other scholars have before or since his time. So great was his reputation that kings and princes from all over Europe competed for his services at their courts. Erasmus popularized classical civilization with his Adages, a collection of ancient proverbs with his own commentaries. His Praise of Folly satirized the follies and vices of the day, in particular those of the Church, while further popularizing humanism. Erasmus was still a pious Christian who pushed the idea that it was one's inner spirit, not outward shows of piety through empty rituals, that really mattered. However, he saw no contradictions between Christianity and ancient cultures. He underscored this attitude by referring to the ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates, as "Saint Socrates".
Other northern humanists picked up this banner. In England, Thomas More brilliantly defended studying classical Greek and Roman culture by saying their knowledge and the study of the natural world could serve as a ladder to the study of the supernatural. Besides, he pointed out, even if theology were the sole aim of one's education, how could one truly know the scriptures without knowing Greek and Hebrew, their original languages? It was in this spirit that the French humanist, Lefebvre d'Etaples, laid five different Hebrew versions of the Book of Psalms side by side in order to get a better translation than the one in the Latin Vulgate Bible. Even in Spain, the most staunchly Christian country in Europe, Cardinal Ximenes, who served as virtual prime minister for Ferdinand and Isabella, set up a university at Alcala with a very humanist curriculum. Its purpose was to use humanism to provide better understanding of Christianity. The major accomplishment of Erasmus and the Northern humanists was that they successfully defended the study of the classics and a more secular education as a ladder to better understanding of Christianity. This in turn paved the way for using a secular education for more secular purposes and that would revolutionize Western Civilization.
Art also reflected the more religious nature of the Northern Renaissance. Secular and even mythological themes would appear, but with less frequency then in Italy. This intense religious passion is especially reflected in the work of the Spanish artist, El Greco. Technically, art in the North lagged behind Italy throughout the 1400's, especially in its use of perspective and proportion. The key turning point came when the German artist, Albrecht Durer, traveled to Italy in 1494 to study its art. Durer was heavily influenced by the Italians and the ancient writer, Vitruvius, in their efforts to find the mathematical proportions for portraying the perfect figure. Among other things, this shows a growing fusion of art and science that anticipated the scientific revolution that would sweep Europe two centuries later. Other northern artists followed Durer, and from this time one sees a more realistic art in the North, which approached the standards of the Italian artists.
The other major feature of the Northern Renaissance was the national character of the cultures that were evolving along with their respective nation-states in Europe. The literature of the age especially showed this. For one thing, it tended to be written in the vernacular and reflected its respective national cultures. In Spain the great literary genius was Cervantes, whose Don Quixote showed the changing values of the age by satirizing the medieval values of the nobility. Probably the greatest literary genius of the age was William Shakespeare, whose work reflects heavy influence from the Italian Renaissance. Many of his plays have Greek and Roman themes, sometimes copying the plot lines from classical plays (e.g.-- Comedy of Errors) or take place in Italy (e.g.-- Romeo and Juliet). However, many of Shakespeare's other plays take place in England and reflect the fact that the various nations in Northern Europe were defining their own unique cultures apart from Italian and classical influence.
Ironically, one could say the most important result of the Northern Renaissance was a religious revolution. This was the result of a several factors: anger at the church's corruption, the rising power of kings at the expense of the popes, and the fusion of Renaissance ideas from Italy with the still intense religious fervor and emerging national cultures of the North. The dynamic combination of these factors would lead to the Protestant Reformation that, in turn, would branch off in three lines of development.
First, the Protestant Reformation would open the way for new ideas about money and the middle class, and that would lead to the triumph of capitalism in Northern Europe. Secondly, the Protestant Reformation would play a vital role by shattering the Church's monopoly on religious truth, breaking its iron grip on scientific thinking, and paving the way for the Scientific Revolution of the late 1600's and 1700's.
Third, the growing power of kings in Northern Europe, combined with Renaissance learning and local anger at Church abuses, helped pave the way for more secular theories about the state. The Reformation, by challenging the power of the Church, would also help kings in their claims to greater sovereignty through the theory of Divine Right of Kings. Ironically, the Reformation would also provide the theoretical backing for the democratic revolutions that would eventually overthrow the very monarchies that tried to use it against the Church in the first place.
Just as the turmoil of the Later Middle Ages had cleared the way for sweeping economic, cultural, and technological changes in Western Europe, it likewise produced significant political changes that led to the emergence of a new type of state in Western Europe: the nation state. It did this along five lines of development, four of them corresponding to various nation-states in Europe and the other having to do with the overall decline of the Church and nobles which helped lead to the revival of towns and middle class allied to the kings.
The later 1400's saw kings in Western Europe picking up the pieces left by the turmoil of the last century in order to build stronger states. However, this process of unification, or in some cases reunification, involved more violence and warfare. In England, the aftermath of the Hundred Years War saw a period of civil strife known as the Wars of the Roses (1455-85) over control of the throne. In the end, Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII, triumphed and restored order with such new government institutions as the Star Chamber.
France, badly hurt by the Hundred Years War, gradually reunified as the Valois kings regained control of Picardy (1477), Anjou (1481), and Brittany (1491). The greatest challenge to the French kings came from the powerful and aggressive Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Charles controlled both Burgundy and the Low Countries (Flanders and the Netherlands) and threatened to become a major power in his own right until he met disaster at the hands of the Swiss pikemen at the Battle of Nancy (1477). With this potent threat removed and Burgundy also back under French control, a strong unified French state was emerging by 1500 after some 150 years of conflict.
A unified Spain also was born by 1500. The key event here was the marriage in 1469 of Isabella of Castile to Ferdinand of Aragon, which united most of Spain under their joint rule. (However, the two states continued to function largely as separate administrative entities for generations to come.) The final piece of the puzzle was put into place when the last of the Spanish Muslim states, Granada, was conquered in 1492. Among other things, this freed the new Spanish state to fund the voyage of a Genoese captain named Christopher Columbus who was looking for new routes to the spices of the East.
Even Germany, fragmented after centuries of feudal strife and the emperors' struggle with the Papacy, saw its fortunes seem to revive with the rise of the Hapsburg Dynasty that controlled the imperial throne at this time. This family, through a number of astute marriage alliances, would come to control Austria, the Low Countries, Hungary, and Spain along with its Italian possessions and American colonies. In fact, as impressive as this empire looked, it worked to Germany's disadvantage since it would trigger a number of wars to crush the Hapsburg "superpower"-- wars that would use Germany as a battleground and ruin it. Therefore, by 1500, nation states were evolving, having their own strengths and problems.
Strengths of the new nation-states consisted of four main pillars of support: money, which in turn enabled kings to pay for professional bureaucracies and mercenary armies, and control of the Church. This mixture of medieval and modern elements underscores the transition of Europe from the medieval to modern era.
The old medieval sources of revenue, such as feudal dues and income from royal lands and monopolies, were totally inadequate for the greater burdens, which the new types of government and army placed on Renaissance kings. Borrowing money against future tax revenues was a dead end that just got kings into deeper trouble, although that was commonly the practice. However, more regular taxes had to be collected. In France, the "extraordinary" taxes the townsmen had granted the crown to drive out the English in the Hundred Years War were collected annually and became a permanent tax, the taille. In Spain, the crown increased sales taxes to boost revenues. In England, the king was unable to get a high permanent tax granted to him by Parliament. He did increase his control over revenues for such things as customs on wool and cloth. Luckily, England was an island and in less need of a large expensive army and bureaucracy than states on the continent. Overall, Renaissance kings by 1500 were still faced with serious financial shortcomings. However, no one else in their realms possessed the resources to effectively challenge them. Along with their bureaucracies and armies, their finances presented a picture of the European state in transition from the medieval to the modern era.
The main drawback was that such a system bred corruption, since money, not ability, was often the key to gaining office. Bureaucrats tended to assume their own consciousness as a class, maintaining a common silence to thwart any attempts to weed out corruption. They could often successfully resist or slow down reforms or other policies they did not like. But, for all the problems the new bureaucracy created, it was still more efficient than the old feudal system and gave kings a far greater degree of control over their states.
Renaissance armies told a similar story, being somewhat unruly but still better than their feudal predecessors. The ranks were now filled with mercenaries who fought until the king's money ran out. This gave the king much longer campaigning seasons than the forty days that feudal vassals typically owed. But it could still present some serious, and, at times, embarrassing problems. As soon as the king ran out of money, such armies would often desert or refuse to fight any longer. Also, since they were not usually natives of the state they were fighting for, they often had no qualms about plundering the people they were supposedly defending. Despite these drawbacks, Renaissance armies gave kings in Western Europe much tighter control over their states, largely because they were so expensive that no one but kings could afford to maintain them.
Part of that expense lay in the new type of warfare emerging by 1500. Although heavily armored knights were still prominent, their role was being reduced by two new ways of fighting, one medieval and one modern. One was massed formations of pikemen, reminiscent of the old Greek and Macedonian phalanxes, who formed the core of the Renaissance army. Until the early 1500's, the Swiss were reputedly Europe's best pikemen, and every prince wanted Swiss mercenaries in his army, no matter what the cost. In the 1500's, German pikemen, known as landsknechte, and Spanish pikemen would rival the Swiss in their reputations for ferocity on the battlefield.
The other new and expensive element emerging in the new warfare was gunpowder. Hanging on the flanks of each pike square were men wielding primitive muskets. Such guns were heavy, hard to load, and even harder to aim accurately. They also presented the danger of blowing up in their users' faces. Still, they could be very deadly when fired in massed volleys, having a range of up to 100 meters. Gradual but constant improvements, such as the matchlock that freed both hands for aiming, made them increasingly effective throughout the 1400's and 1500's. As a result, the number of musketeers, and their cost, gradually climbed throughout this period. The combination of guns' firepower with the solid pike formations proved to be the most potent military innovation of the Renaissance. It ruled Europe's battlefields until the later 1600's when better muskets and the bayonet phased out the pikeman for good.
Artillery was another important, but expensive, element in the Renaissance prince's army. Smaller and more mobile cannons were made for use in pitched battles as well as sieges. There was no standardization in the Renaissance artillery corps, each cannon being made by an independent contractor. The French, with Europe's best artillery, had 17 separate gauges of artillery requiring 17 different sizes of shot. The Hapsburg emperor, Charles V, had 50 different gauges. Obviously, this could create untold confusion in the heat of battle.
The advent of artillery made the tall thin walls of medieval castles obsolete, since they were so easily breached by cannons' firepower. However, this did not make fortifications obsolete. By the early 1500's, a new style of fortifications, the trace Italienne, was coming into use and slowing down, if not stopping artillery. These new fortifications were much thicker and more elaborate than their medieval predecessors, having multiple sets of walls, moats, and bastions set at different angles to one another to provide flanking fire from various directions against any enemy assaults. As with muskets and artillery, these new forts were so expensive that only kings could afford them or, more properly, afford to go into debt to bankers to buy them. And, by the same token, this increased the kings' power and put any rebellious nobles more at the kings' mercy.
This new type of warfare and army showed the beginnings of some aspects we associate with modern warfare. For one thing, it was expensive because of the size of its armies and the new technology. It was also very destructive to the inhabitants who were unlucky enough to be in the path of these plundering mercenaries and their hordes of camp followers. The seventeenth century general, Albrecht von Wallenstein, once said he could better support an army of 50,00 than one of 20,000 since it could more effectively plunder the countryside. This says a lot about supplying such armies and its effect on military strategy: fight in the enemy's territory and make him pay for the war. Finally, the new warfare was much bloodier than the medieval warfare that preceded it. We find nobles complaining because any low born peasant with a small amount of training and a gun could blow them out of the saddle. Even more significantly, the humanists condemned warfare for its bloodiness, no matter to what class. Throughout the modern era, that outcry has slowly gained force with the growing destructiveness of warfare.
Elsewhere, the story was similar. In England, during the Avignon Papacy of the 1300's, kings had limited the right of foreign clergy to visit England and also restricted English clergy in their right to appeal to foreign (i.e., papal) courts. In Spain, the crown came to dominate the Church and, with it, the Inquisition. In all these countries, levying Church taxes was subject to the approval of the kings, who often made a deal to get a percentage of the taxes for themselves.
In addition to the structure of the emerging nation-state, peoples' attitudes toward that state were also in transition from a very personal feudal outlook to a broader concept of a nation. There was a growing awareness among various peoples that there were factors, such as language and culture, making them unique as nations. But the form of nationalism we are familiar with was still several centuries away. During this transitional period, the loyalties of people focused largely on the person of a king rather than on the nation's people as a whole.
We should keep in mind that, while the Renaissance state was a vast improvement over the feudal anarchy of the Middle Ages, it was still rudimentary and highly inefficient when compared to the modern state. There were three main limitations to state building at this time.
First of all, the decentralized chaos of the Dark Ages had given rise to a multitude of local institutions and customs, rights, and inherited titles and offices. France alone had some 300 local legal systems dating back to a time when there was essentially no central government, while there were 700 in the Netherlands. The force of tradition with centuries of history to back it up made it well nigh impossible for kings to do away with these offices, customs, and privileges. A good example of this were the parlements, local French courts which could modify the king's laws, delay enforcing them, or even refuse to enforce them if they thought those laws interfered with long established local customs and traditions. As a result, kings were forced either to work around the old offices by creating new parallel offices that would very gradually take over their functions, or incorporate the old offices into the new state apparatus. What this meant was that any regularization of government institutions and practices on a national scale was still centuries away.
A second problem was the continued existence and aspirations of the nobles. While we have seen them suffering from a prolonged decline since the High Middle Ages, they remained somewhat resilient as a class. One big reason for this was that they were still seen as the class to belong to, and many middle class merchants and bankers were eager to buy noble titles and lands so they could carry on like the nobles of old. A prime example of this was the Fuggers of Augsburg, Germany, the richest banking family in Europe, who bought noble titles and lands and passed into idle noble obscurity. Aiding this process were the kings who were always in need of cash and willing to sell noble titles and offices to anyone with the money. As a result, fresh blood kept infusing the nobility with new life. Unfortunately, these nobles, of whatever origin, could still be quite troublesome and lead revolts against their rulers, as happened in the Netherlands (1566), England (1569), and France (1582).
A third problem was the kings' inability or unwillingness to stay out of debt and pay their armies and bureaucrats. This encouraged corruption in the government and plundering and desertion by the mercenaries, which further reduced the kings' revenues and ability to pay their bills, leading to more loans at high rates of interest, and so on. Finally, although kings could control their national churches, they could not control the medieval mentality still linking politics and religion and causing disastrous wars over religious issues. This especially became a problem after 1560 in the repeated religious wars between Protestants and Catholics.
Despite these problems, a new and more dynamic type of nation state was emerging by 1500. And once kings had affairs within their own borders reasonably under control, they started extending their involvement in diplomacy outside of their states. By 1500, we see Western Europe starting to function as an integrated political system, whereby one state's acts affected all the other states and triggered appropriate reactions. This new interdependence and sensitivity to other states' plans and actions sparked the beginnings of modern diplomacy. Two factors aided this process of outward expansion, and, once again, they were a mixture of medieval and modern forces.
Among the older methods still used to consolidate and improve a prince's position, the most notable was the marriage alliance. Rulers still thought of their states as their property. That property could be passed on to their sons, and it could be added to by marrying into another ruling family and assuming all or part of that family's property (i.e., state) as part of the deal. A number of such marriages took place in this period. Henry VII of England married Elizabeth of York, the heiress of his chief rival to the throne, a union that gave him undisputed claim to the crown. Charles VIII of France married Anne of Brittany and tied that region much more closely to the French king's interests.
Certainly the most spectacular example of dynastic empire building through marriage was the Hapsburg Empire, which controlled most of Western Europe in the first half of the 1500's. In 1469, Ferdinand of Aragon married Isabella of Castile, thus uniting Spain under one house, although the two governments functioned separately for some time. Meanwhile, the Hapsburg emperor, Maximillian, had wed Mary, duchess of Burgundy, and added Burgundy and the Low Countries (Flanders and Holland) to his family lands in Austria and the Holy Roman Empire. Finally, their son, Philip, married Ferdinand and Isabella's daughter, Joanna, to seal an alliance in reaction against the French invasion of Italy in 1494. The product of that union, Charles V (Charles I of Spain), inherited most of Western Europe: Germany, Austria, the Low Countries, most of Italy, and Spain with its American holdings. As the contemporary saying put it: "Others make war, but you, happy Austria, make marriages."
Marriage alliances alone were not enough to keep one diplomatically safe. For one thing, they created nearly as many problems as they solved. Since the network of marriage alliances was so extensive and interlocking there were almost always numerous claimants for vacant thrones whenever a ruler died childless. Such a situation often triggered wars, despite the original intention of the marriage alliance to stop such wars. Second, the Renaissance, with its increased political interdependence between states, created shifting alliances to maintain or improve their positions. This required a ruler to keep a much closer eye on what other states were doing so that they could not surprise him by switching alliances or suddenly declaring war. This led to permanent resident ambassadors, forerunners or our own modern diplomats.
Like so many other innovations, the idea of keeping permanent ambassadors at other rulers' courts originated in Italy. Previously, negotiations between states involved sending special ambassadors only for special occasions, such as a treaty of alliance or celebrating a dynastic marriage. By 1450, a delicate balance of power had evolved in Italy between its five main states: Milan, Venice, Florence, the Papal States, and Naples. The weakest of these states, Florence, felt nervous about its more powerful neighbors and wanted to maintain the balance of power to keep any one of them from threatening its own security. Therefore, it started maintaining permanent resident ambassadors at the other states' courts.
During the Renaissance, these officials were mainly of lower noble and middle class origin. They were expected to maintain themselves in the high style of their home court while being engaged in information gathering, which amounted to little more than spying. They had to send weekly letters home, often in code, repeating all pertinent facts, rumors, conversations, and character descriptions they could come up with. All this was done at their own expense, which many of them could not afford. We have letters from such men, pleading with their home governments not to force them to serve. Usually such pleas were to no avail.
There was no diplomatic immunity then, and the resident ambassadors suffered accordingly. Foreign courts saw them as spies and treated them as such, subjecting them to hostile treatment, insults, surveillance, imprisonment, and even torture. To add insult to injury, the home government often did not believe the letters these men sent home and kept spies at the court to watch their own diplomats. When important negotiations were to take place, the home government still appointed special ambassadors of high noble status to do the job.
In 1494, the French king Charles VIII invaded Italy. This prompted the intervention and fateful marriage alliance of Spain and the Holy Roman emperor, Maximillian, mentioned above. It also touched off a series of wars that devastated Italy and ended its leadership in European affairs. All these wars and shifting alliances caused the great rulers of Europe to start maintaining permanent ambassadors at each other’s courts. Over the years, as resident ambassadors became a permanent fixture of diplomacy in Europe and the world, their status and treatment would improve. Florence's policy of maintaining a stable balance of power would also spread northward and become a cornerstone of European diplomacy in the centuries to come.
The four centuries following 1500 would see the meteoric rise of Western Europe from a cultural backwater to the first culture to dominate the planet. Given Western Europe's tiny size, the question arises: what singled it out as the civilization to rise to global dominance? A century ago, Europeans would attribute their dominance to the moral and religious superiority of European and Christian culture. However, life and history are not quite so simple. Rather, there was a unique combination of forces that converged at the right time and place to make European civilization the culture that would largely define the modern world, especially in terms of its technology and political ideologies.
On the surface, other civilizations seemed more likely to predominate, having larger populations, strongly centralized governments, wealth, and technologies comparable to, if not greater than, Western Europe's. For example, Ming China had a population two to three times that of Western Europe. Traditionally, Chinese technology had been among the most innovative in the world, heavily influencing Europe itself with such inventions as gunpowder, the clock, paper, and the compass. China's government was strongly centralized and autocratic, being run by what was probably the best civil service in the world at that time.
The other major civilizations in the world, such as the Ottoman Turks, Mughal India, Tokugawa Japan, Muscovite Russia, and the Incan and Aztec Empires in the Western Hemisphere, told a similar story of being populous, wealthy (except for Russia), and highly centralized under strong autocratic rulers. In fact, it was Western Europe's lack of autocratic rulers, such as these other cultures had, which would be the key to its leaping ahead of the pack. For, while the absolute rulers outside of Europe tended to exploit and suppress their middle class and, in the process, stifle inventiveness and initiative, the spirit of free enterprise and inventiveness had much more free rein in Western Europe. That freedom created a powerful dynamic that allowed Europeans to forge ahead with new ideas, business techniques, and technologies that would shape the modern world. And if freedom was the key to Europe's success, geography was much of its underlying basis.
There were two main geographic factors that would help lead to Western Europe's later dominance. First of all, Western Europe was broken up by mountains, forests, and bodies of water: the Alps and Pyrenees cutting Italy, Spain, and Portugal off from northern Europe; the English Channel cutting England off from the continent; and the Baltic Sea separating Scandinavia from the rest of Europe in the south. This broke Western Europe into a large number of independent states that no one ruler had the power and resources to conquer and hold. Second, Western Europe had a wide diversity of climates, resources, and waterways which promoted a large number of separate economies, but which were linked together for trade by the extensive coastlines and river systems covering the region. Therefore, just as no one power could control all of Europe politically, no one power could monopolize one vital aspect of its economy. Thus Europe was characterized by what we call political and economic pluralism, which also reinforced each other.
Political and economic pluralism also combined to promote the rise of a prosperous and innovative middle class that could create and spread new ideas, business techniques, and technology if the local rulers would allow it. If they did not allow it, there was always the option of moving to another state that did give them the freedom to pursue their interests. The results of such moves, such as when the French Protestant Huguenots left France en masse to avoid Louis XIV's religious persecution in 1685, were to deprive the economies of the persecuting nations of some of their wealthiest and most innovative people while boosting the economies of the countries that took these immigrants in. As a result, the balance of power would constantly shift away from powerful and repressive states and in favor of the more progressive and free thinking ones, thus reinforcing political pluralism in Western Europe.
The rise of a free middle class had two other important effects. First of all, in conjunction with Western Europe's political pluralism, it could spread new technology (e.g., the printing press) and ideas (e.g., the Reformation). Second, in conjunction with Western Europe's economic pluralism, the middle class was able to create a freer capitalist economy and promote a competitive spirit that encouraged new technologies and generated profits for those with the drive and imagination to invent and sell them.
These two factors combined to generate even more rapid technological development, especially in the realm of military inventions. There were three main areas of military technology developed. First of all there was the new gunpowder technology which, when combined with the Roman drill and march recently rediscovered and revived during the Renaissance, created the most powerful and efficient armies in the world by the late 1600's. The defensive response to gunpowder gave Europe the second military factor: stronger and more sophisticated fortresses to resist artillery. These fortresses tied invading armies down to prolonged and tedious sieges that stopped, or at least drastically slowed, the progress of invading armies. One side effect of this was that it fed back into and further reinforced Western Europe's political pluralism. The third military innovation (or more properly, application of peaceful technology to military purposes) was the development of large bulky ships to withstand long voyages over the rough waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Such ships also served as excellent gun platforms, thus making European navies the most deadly on the planet.
These three factors converged to help Western Europe establish large overseas colonial empires which were conquered by Europe's small but well armed and disciplined armies and navies and held under control by powerful European fortresses. As time and Western Europe's technology progressed, European armies would show an amazing ability to defeat non-European armies many times their size with astounding regularity, each time increasing and strengthening their hold on their overseas colonies.
Europe's large colonial empires brought an influx of money and resources into Europe. This fed back into Europe's economic and political pluralism, especially after 1600 when smaller states such as England and the Dutch Republic were taking their share of overseas trade and colonies, thus starting the cycle all over again. These colonial empires also made Western Europe the center of a world economy, providing it with the money and resources needed for the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700's. It is no accident that the Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain, which also happened to be the foremost colonial power of its day.
Thanks to this cycle, Europe and European derived cultures (e.g., the United States, Canada, and Australia) were able to control 85% of the globe by 1900. Since then, Europe has lost its colonial empire, thanks primarily to two highly destructive world wars, but not before it could spread its ideas and technology across the globe where they have taken firm root.
In 1400 A.D. Europeans probably knew less of the globe than they had during the Pax Romana. Outside of Europe and Mediterranean, little was known, with rumor and imagination filling the gaps. Pictures of bizarre looking people with umbrella feet, faces in their stomachs, and dogs' heads illustrated books about lands to the East. There was the legendary Christian king, Prester John with an army of a million men and a mirror that would show him any place in his realm whom Christians hoped to ally with against the Muslims.
Europeans also had many misconceptions about the planet outside their home waters. They had no real concept of the size or shape of Africa or Asia. Because of a passage in the Bible, they thought the world was seven-eighths land and that there was a great southern continent that connected to Africa, making any voyages around Africa to India impossible since the Indian Ocean was an inland. They had no idea at all of the existence of the Americas, Australia, or Antarctica. They also vastly underestimated the size of the earth by some 5-10,000 miles. However, such a miscalculation gave explorers like Columbus and Magellan the confidence to undertake voyages to the Far East since they should be much shorter and easier than they turned out to be.
However, about this time, European explorers started to lead the way in global exploration, timidly hugging the coasts at first, but gradually getting bolder and striking out across the open seas. There were three main factors that led to Europeans opening up a whole new world at this time.
The rise of towns and trade along with the Crusades in the centuries preceding the age of exploration caused important changes in Europeans' mental outlook that would give them the incentive and confidence to launch voyages of exploration in three ways. First, they stimulated a desire for Far Eastern luxuries. Second, they exposed Europeans to new cultures, peoples and lands. Their interest in the outside world was further stimulated by the travels of Marco Polo in the late 1200's.
Finally, towns and the money they generated helped lead to the Renaissance that changed Europeans' view of themselves and the world. There was an increasing emphasis on secular topics, including geography. Skepticism encouraged people to challenge older geographic notions. Humanism and individualism, gave captains the confidence in their own individual abilities to dare to cross the oceans with the tiny ships and primitive navigational instruments at their disposal.
Medieval religious fervor also played its part. While captains such as Columbus, da Gama, and Magellan had to rely on their own skills as leaders and navigators, they also had an implicit faith in God's will and guidance in their missions. In addition, they felt it was their duty to convert to Christianity any new peoples they met. Once again we see Renaissance Europe caught in the transition between the older medieval values and the new secular ones. Together they created a dynamic attitude that sent Europeans out on a quest to claim the planet as their own.
Europe’s geographic position also drove it to find new routes to Asia in three ways. First of all, Europe's geographic position at the extreme western end of the trade routes with the East allowed numerous middlemen each to take his cut and raise the cost of the precious silks and spices before passing them on to still another middleman. Those trade routes were long, dangerous, and quite fragile. It would take just one strong hostile power to establish itself along these routes in order to disrupt the flow of trade or raise the prices exorbitantly. For Europeans, that power was the Ottoman Empire. The fall of the Byzantine Empire and the earlier fall of the crusader states had given the Muslims a larger share of the trade headed for Europe. Thus Europe's disadvantageous geographic position provided an incentive to find another way to the Far East.
However, Europe was also in a good position for discovering new routes to Asia. It was certainly in as good a position as the Muslim emirates on the coast of North Africa for exploring the Atlantic coast of Africa. And when Spain gained control of both sides of the straits of Gibraltar, it was in a commanding position to restrict any traffic passing in and out of the Western Mediterranean. Europe was also well placed for exploration across the Atlantic Ocean.
Finally, ships and navigation technology had seen some dramatic leaps forward. The most striking of these was the compass, which had originated in China around 200 B.C. This allowed sailors to sail with much greater certainty that they were sailing in the right direction. Instruments such as the quadrant, crosstaff, and astrolabe allowed them to calculate latitude by measuring the elevation of the sun and North Star, although the rocking of ships at sea often made measurements taken with these instruments highly inaccurate. Columbus, one of the best navigators of his day, took readings in the Caribbean that corresponded to those of Wilmington, North Carolina, 1100 miles to the north! As a result of such imperfect measurements, sailing directions might be so vague as to read: "Sail south until your butter melts. Then turn west." Compounding this was the lack of a way to measure longitude (distance from east to west) until the 1700's with the invention of the chronometer.
Maps also left a lot to be desired. A medieval map of the world, showing Jerusalem in the center and Paradise to the Far East, gives an insight into the medieval worldview, but little useful geographic information. By 1400, there were fairly decent coastal maps of Europe and the Mediterranean, known as portolan charts. However, these were of no use beyond Europe, and larger scale global projections would not come along until the 1500's. As a result, explorers relied heavily on sailors' lore: reading the color of the water and skies or the type of vegetation and sea birds typical of an area. However, since each state jealously guarded geographic information so it could keep a monopoly on the luxury trade, even this information had limited circulation.
Advances in ship design involved a choice between northern Atlantic and southern Mediterranean styles. For hulls, shipwrights had a choice between the Mediterranean carvel built design , where the planks were cut with saws and fit end to end, or northern clinker built designs, where the planks were cut with an axe or adze and overlapped. Clinker-built hulls were sturdy and watertight, but limited in size to the length of one plank, about 100 feet. As a result, the southern carvel built hulls were favored, although they were built in the bulkier and sturdier style of the northern ships to withstand the rough Atlantic seas. One other advance was the stern rudder, which sat behind the ship, not to the side. Unlike the older side steering oars which had a tendency to come out of the water as the ship rocked, making it hard to steer the ship, he stern rudder stayed in the water.
There were two basic sail designs: the southern triangular, or lateen, (i.e., Latin) sail and the northern square sail. The lateen sail allowed closer tacking into an adverse wind, but needed a larger crew to handle it. By contrast, the northern square sail was better for tailwinds and used a smaller crew. The limited cargo space and the long voyages involved required as few mouths as possible to feed, and this favored the square design for the main sail, but usually with a smaller lateen sail astern (in the rear) to fine tune a ship's direction.
The resulting ship, the carrack, was fusion of northern and southern styles. It was carvel built for greater size but with a bulkier northern hull design to withstand rough seas. Its main sail was a northern square sail, but it also used smaller lateen sails for tacking into the wind.
Living conditions aboard such ships, especially on long voyages, was appalling. Ships constantly leaked and were crawling with rats, lice, and other creatures. They were also filthy, with little or no sanitation facilities. Without refrigeration, food and water spoiled quickly and horribly. Disease was rampant, especially scurvy, caused by a vitamin C deficiency. A good voyage between Portugal and India would claim the lives of twenty per cent of the crewmen from scurvy alone. It should come as no surprise then that ships' crews were often drawn from the dregs of society and required a strong and often brutal, hand to keep them in line.
Portugal and Spain led the way in early exploration for two main reasons. First, they were the earliest European recipients of Arab math, astronomy, and geographic knowledge based on the works of the second century A.D. geographer, Ptolemy. Second, their position on the southwest corner of Europe was excellent for exploring southward around Africa and westward toward South America.
Portugal started serious exploration in the early 1400's, hoping to find both the legendary Prester John as an ally against the Muslims and the source of gold that the Arabs were getting from overland routes through the Sahara. At first, they did not plan to sail around Africa, believing it connected with a great southern continent. The guiding spirit for these voyages was Prince Henry the Navigator whose headquarters at Sagres on the north coast of Africa attracted some of the best geographers, cartographers and pilots of the day. Henry never went on any of his expeditions, but he was their heart and soul.
The exploration of Africa offered several physical and psychological obstacles. For one thing, there were various superstitions, such as boiling seas as one approached the equator, monsters, and Cape Bojador, which many thought was the Gates of Hell. Also, since the North Star, the sailors' main navigational guide, would disappear south of the Equator, sailors were reluctant to cross that line.
Therefore, early expeditions would explore a few miles of coast and then scurry back to Sagres. This slowed progress, especially around Cape Bojador, where some fifteen voyages turned back before one expedition in 1434 finally braved its passage without being swallowed up. In the 1440's, the Portuguese found some, but not enough, gold and started engaging in the slave trade, which would disrupt African cultures for centuries. In 1445, they reached the part of the African coast that turns eastward for a while. This raised hopes they could circumnavigate Africa to reach India, a hope that remained even when they found the coast turning south again.
In 1460, Prince Henry died, and the expeditions slowed down for the next 20 years. However, French and English interest in a route around Africa spurred renewed activity on Portugal's part. By now, Portuguese captains were taking larger and bolder strides down the coast. One captain, Diego Cao, explored some 1500 miles of coastline. With each such stride, Portuguese confidence grew that Africa could be circumnavigated. Portugal even sent a spy, Pero de Covilha, on the overland route through Arab lands to the Indies in order to scout the best places for trade when Portuguese ships finally arrived.
The big breakthrough came in 1487, when Bartholomew Dias was blown by a storm around the southern tip of Africa (which he called the Cape of Storms, but the Portuguese king renamed the Cape of Good Hope). When Dias relocated the coast, it was to his west, meaning he had rounded the tip of Africa. However, his men, frightened by rumors of monsters in the waters ahead, forced him to turn back. Soon after this, the Spanish, afraid the Portuguese would claim the riches of the East for themselves, backed Columbus' voyage that discovered and claimed the Americas for Spain. This in turn spurred Portuguese efforts to find a route to Asia before Spain did. However, Portugal's king died, and the transition to a new king meant it was ten years before the Portuguese could send Vasco da Gama with four ships to sail to India. Swinging west to pick up westerly winds, da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope in three months, losing one ship in the process. Heading up the coast, the Portuguese encountered Arab surprise and hostility against European ships in their waters. Da Gama found an Indian pilot who led the Portuguese flotilla across the Indian Ocean to India in 1498.
The hostility of the Arab traders who dominated trade with India and the unwillingness of the Indians to trade for European goods which they saw as inferior made getting spices quite difficult. However, through some shrewd trading, da Gama managed to get one shipload of spices and then headed home in August 1498. It took over a year, until September 1499, to get back to Portugal, but he had proven that Africa could be circumnavigated and India could be reached by sea. Despite its heavy cost (two of four ships and 126 out of 170 men) Da Gama's voyage opened up new vistas of trade and knowledge to Europeans.
Subsequent Portuguese voyages to the East reached the fabled Spice Islands (Moluccas) in 1513. In that same year, the Portuguese explorer, Serrao, reached the Pacific at its western end while the Spanish explorer, Balboa, was discovering it from its eastern end. Also in 1513, the Portuguese reached China, the first Europeans to do so in 150 years. They won exclusive trade with China, which had little interest in European goods. However, China was interested in Spanish American silver, which made the long treacherous voyage across the Pacific to the Spanish Philippines. There, the Portuguese would trade Chinese silks for the silver, and then use it for more trade with China, while the Spanish would take their silks on the even longer voyage back to Europe by way of America. In 1542, the Portuguese even reached Japan and established relations there. As a result of these voyages and new opportunities, Portugal would build an empire in Asia to control the spice trade.
Spain led the other great outward thrust of exploration westward across the Atlantic Ocean. Like, Portugal, the Spanish were also partially driven in their explorations by certain misconceptions. While they did realize the earth is round, they also vastly underestimated its size and thought it was seven-eighths land, making Asia much bigger and extending much further west. Therefore, they vastly underestimated the distance of a westward voyage to Asia.
This was especially true of a Genoese captain, Christopher Columbus, an experienced sailor who had seen most of the limits of European exploration up to that point in time, having sailed the waters from Iceland to the African coast. Drawing upon the idea of a smaller planet mostly made up of land, Columbus had the idea that the shortest route to the Spice Islands was by sailing west, being only some 3500 miles. In fact, the real distance is closer to 12,000 miles, although South America is only about 3500 miles west of Spain, explaining why Columbus thought he had hit Asia. The problem was that most people believed such an open sea voyage was still too long for the ships of the day.
Getting support for this scheme was not easy. The Portuguese were already committed to finding a route to India around Africa, and Spain was preoccupied with driving the Moors from their last stronghold of Granada in southern Spain. However, when the Portuguese rounded the Cape of Good Hope and stood on the verge of reaching India, Spain had added incentive to find another route to Asia. Therefore, when Granada finally fell in 1492, Spain was able to commit itself to Columbus' plan.
Columbus set sail August 3, 1492 with two caravels, the Nina and Pinta, and a carrack, the Santa Maria . They experienced perfect sailing weather and winds. In fact, the weather was too good for Columbus' sailors who worried that the perfect winds blowing out would be against them going home while the clear weather brought no rain to replenish water supplies. Columbus even lied to his men about how far they were from home (although the figure he gave them was fairly accurate since his own calculations overestimated how far they had gone). By October 10, nerves were on edge, and Columbus promised to turn back if land were not sighted in two or three days. Fortunately, on October 12, scouts spotted the island of San Salvador, which Columbus mistook for Japan.
After failing to find the Japanese court, Columbus concluded he had overshot Japan. Further exploration brought in a little gold and a few captives. But when the Santa Maria ran aground, Columbus decided to return home. A lucky miscalculation of his coordinates caused him to sail north where he picked up the prevailing westerlies. The homeward voyage was a rough one, but Columbus reached Portugal in March 1493, where he taunted the Portuguese with the claim that he had found a new route to the Spice Islands. This created more incentive for the Portuguese to circumnavigate Africa, which they did in 1498. It also caused a dispute over who controlled what outside of Europe, which led to the pope drawing the Line of Demarcation in 1494.
Ferdinand and Isabella, although disappointed by the immediate returns of the voyage, were excited by the prospects of controlling the Asian trade. They gave Columbus the title "Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Viceroy and Governor of the Islands that he hath discovered in the Indies." Over the next decade, they sent him on three more voyages to find the Spice Islands. Each successive voyage put even more of the Caribbean and surrounding coastline on the map, but the Spice Islands were never found. Columbus never admitted that his discovery was a new continent. He died in 1504, still convinced that he had reached Asia.
However, by 1500, many people were convinced that this was a new continent, although its size and position in relation to and distance from Asia were by no means clear. The Portuguese discovery of a route to India around Africa in 1498 provided more incentive for Spanish exploration. In 1513, the Spanish explorer, Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean, having no idea of its immensity or that the Portuguese explorer, Serrao, was discovering it from the Asian side. Given the prevailing view of a small planet, many people though that the Pacific Sea, as they called it, must be fairly small and that Asia must be close to America. Some even thought South America was a peninsula attached to the southern end of Asia. Either way, finding a southwest passage around the southern tip of South America would put one in the Pacific Sea and a short distance from Asia. If this were so, it would give Spain a crucial edge over Portugal, whose route around Africa to India was especially long and hard.
In 1519, Charles V of Spain gave five ships and the job of finding a southwest passage around South America to Ferdinand Magellan, a former Portuguese explorer who had been to the Spice Islands while serving Portugal. Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe was one of the great epic, and unplanned, events in history. After sailing down the South American coast, he faced a mutiny, which he ruthlessly suppressed, and then entered a bewildering tangle of islands at the southern tip of the continent known even today as the Straits of Magellan. Finding his way through these islands took him 38 days, while the same journey today takes only two.
Once they emerged from the Straits of Magellan into the Pacific "Sea", Magellan and his men figured they were a short distance from Asia, and set out across the open water and into one of the worst ordeals ever endured in nautical history. One of those on the journey, Pigafetta, left an account of the Pacific crossing:
“On Wednesday the twenty-eighth of November, one thousand five hundred and twenty, we issued forth from the said strait and entered the Pacific Sea, where we remained three months and twenty days without taking on board provisions or any other refreshments, and we ate only old biscuit turned to powder, all full of worms and stinking of the urine which the rats had made on it, having eaten the good. And we drank water impure and yellow. We ate also ox hides, which were very hard because of the sun, rain, and wind. And we left them...days in the sea, then laid them for a short time on embers, and so we ate them. And of the rats, which were sold for half an ecu apiece, some of us could not get enough.
“Besides the aforesaid troubles, this malady (scurvy) was the worst, namely that the gums of most part of our men swelled above and below so that they could not eat. And in this way they died, inasmuch as twenty-nine of us died...But besides those who died, twenty-five or thirty fell sick of divers maladies, whether of the arms or of the legs and other parts of the body (also effects of scurvy), so that there remained very few healthy men. Yet by the grace of our Lord I had no illness.
“During these three months and twenty days, we sailed in a gulf where we made a good 4000 leagues across the Pacific Sea, which was rightly so named. For during this time we had no storm, and we saw no land except two small uninhabited islands, where we found only birds and trees. Wherefore we called them the Isles of Misfortune. And if our Lord and the Virgin Mother had not aided us by giving good weather to refresh ourselves with provisions and other things we would have died in this very great sea. And I believe that nevermore will any man undertake to make such a voyage.”
By this point, the survivors were so weakened that it took up to eight men to do the job normally done by one. Finally, they reached the Philippines, which they claimed for Spain, calculating it was on the Spanish side of the Line of Demarcation. Unfortunately, Magellan became involved in a tribal dispute and was killed in battle. Taking into account his previous service to Portugal in the East, Magellan and the Malay slave who accompanied him were the first two people to circumnavigate the earth.
By now, the fleet had lost three of its five ships: one having mutinied and returned to Spain, one being lost in a storm off the coast of South America, and the other being so damaged and the crews so decimated that it was abandoned. The other two ships, the Trinidad and Victoria, finally reached the Spice Islands in November 1521 and loaded up with cloves. Now they faced the unpleasant choice of returning across the Pacific or continuing westward and risking capture in Portuguese waters. The crew of the Trinidad tried going back across the Pacific, but gave up and were captured by the Portuguese. Del Cano, the captain of the Victoria, took his ship far south to avoid Portuguese patrols in the Indian Ocean and around Africa, but also away from any chances to replenish its food and water. Therefore, the Spanish suffered horribly from the cold and hunger in the voyage around Africa.
When the Victoria finally made it home in 1522 after a three year journey, only 18 of the original 280 crewmen were with it, and they were so worn and aged from the voyage that their own families could hardly recognize them. Although the original theory about a short South-west Passage to Asia was wrong, they had proven that the earth could be circumnavigated and that it was much bigger than previously supposed. It would be half a century before anyone else would repeat this feat. And even then, it was an act of desperation by the English captain Sir Francis Drake fleeing the Spanish fleet.
Meanwhile, the Spanish were busy exploring the Americas in search of new conquests, riches, and even the Fountain of Youth. There were two particularly spectacular conquests. The first was by Hernando Cortez, who led a small army of several hundred men against the Aztec Empire in Mexico. Despite their small number, the Spanish could exploit several advantages: their superior weapons and discipline, the myth of Quetzecoatl which foretold the return of a fair haired and bearded god in 1519 (the year Cortez did appear), and an outbreak of smallpox which native Americans had no prior contact with or resistance to. Because of this and other Eurasian diseases, native American populations would be devastated over the following centuries to possibly less than ten per cent their numbers in 1500.
The Spanish conquistador, Pizarro, leading an army of less then 150 men, carried out an even more amazing conquest of the Inca Empire in Peru in the 1530's. Taking advantage of a dispute over the throne, Pizarro captured the Inca Emperor, whose authority was so great that his capture virtually paralyzed the Incas into inaction. As a result, a highly developed empire ruling millions of people fell to a handful of Spaniards.
The conquests of Mexico and Peru more than compensated Spain for its failure to establish a trade route to the Spice Islands. The wealth of South America's gold and silver mines would provide Spain with the means to make it the great power of Europe in the 1500's. Unfortunately, Spain would squander these riches in a series of fruitless religious wars that would wreck its power by 1650.
Other Spanish expeditions were exploring South America's coasts and rivers, in particular the Amazon, Orinoco, and Rio de la Plata, along with ventures into what is now the south-west United States (to find the Seven Cities of Gold), the Mississippi River, and Florida (to find the Fountain of Youth). While these found little gold, they did provide a reasonable outline of South America and parts of North America by 1550. However, no one had yet found an easy route to Asia. Therefore, the following centuries would see further explorations which, while failing to find an easier passageway, would in the process piece together most of the global map.
Even before da Gama had set out for India, a Genoese explorer sailing under the Spanish flag, Christopher Columbus, had returned from what he believed was a direct route to Asia. This provoked a dispute between Spain and Portugal over who could claim what territories outside of Europe. In 1494, the pope arbitrated the dispute and drew a Line of Demarcation down the middle of the Atlantic. Everything outside of Christian Europe and west of the line belonged to Spain; everything east of it was Portugal's to claim. The line extended all around the globe, but since the size of the earth was not known, just where that line came out was anybody's guess. Despite these uncertainties, the Pope's Line of Demarcation determined the direction of both Spanish and Portuguese explorations. For the Portuguese, this meant they must control the trade routes to the East.
In 1500, only a year after da Gama's return, Pero Alvares Cabral followed da Gama's route to India with a fleet of ten Portuguese ships. Using da Gama' tactic of swinging westward to pick up westerly winds to take him around the Cape of Good Hope, he accidentally hit Brazil which juts eastward into the Atlantic. Since that part of Brazil lay east of the Line of Demarcation, Cabral claimed it for Portugal. He continued to India, but found the same problems da Gama had encountered: Arab hostility and an unwillingness to trade for European goods.
Therefore, the Portuguese decided to change their approach. The third expedition to India, led by da Gama in 1502, took 14 well-armed ships that would take the spice trade by force. The bulky European ships, built to stand the rough Atlantic seas, also provided excellent gun platforms for artillery, and that was the decisive factor in the battle that followed as the Portuguese beat the Arab fleet opposing them. A second decisive victory by the Portuguese fleet in 1509 established the Portuguese reputation for naval invincibility in Eastern waters and started Portugal on the road to establishing a maritime empire in the East.
The architect of the Portuguese Empire in the East was a capable and daring leader, Alphonse de Albuquerque. He realized that such a tiny state as Portugal could not conquer a land empire in Asia and run it all the way from Europe. Therefore, he concentrated on seizing key strategically placed ports that could control the flow of the spice trade. First he captured the strongly fortified island of Goa off the coast of India. From there he could strike out in several directions. Although he failed to cut off Muslim trade coming out of the Red Sea, he did cut off much of the Arab trade by seizing Ormuz at the tip of the Persian Gulf through some masterful bluffing and sailing with only six ships.
The Portuguese maintained their dominance of the East through a combination of astute and ruthless policies. Albuquerque was especially talented in establishing the proper ratio of escort ships to cargo ships. The Portuguese also blackmailed other merchants into paying for certificates of free passage in the Far East. For a few years they managed to have nearly all spices headed for Europe traveling on Portuguese ships.
However, there were serious limits to Portugal's power in the East, which led to the eventual decline of its Empire in Asia. For one thing, the Portuguese, in a fit of religious fervor, had expelled their Jewish bankers and merchants from Portugal, thus eliminating most of Portugal's business community. As a result, the Flemish port of Antwerp handled most of Portugal's spice trade and took much of its profit. Second, Portugal's empire put a tremendous strain on its very limited manpower. Along these same lines, it was very expensive to maintain forts, garrisons, and fleets, especially over such long distances. Finally, the hostility of local rulers, in particular the Mughal Dynasty ruling India, put extra strains on Portugal's ability to hold its empire.
All these factors cut deeply into Portugal's profits and prompted several cost cutting moves. The Portuguese cut corners by not maintaining their ships in the best condition. They would replace lost European crewmen with half-trained natives unfamiliar with European ships and rigging. Finally, because of the limited number of ships and the desire for as large a profit as possible, they would over pack their ships with spices. All these measures led to costly shipwrecks, which cut further into Portuguese profits and caused even more of these cost cutting measures. By 1600, the Portuguese Empire in Asia was in serious decline and increasingly losing ground, first to the Dutch and later to the English.
The progress of the past 150 years still left many questions to answer and myths to dispel concerning the world map. Subsequent explorations concerned four main issues and followed four lines of development:
Finding a practical northwest passage around North America to Asia;
Finding a practical northeast passage around Scandinavia to Asia;
Determining if North America and Asia were connected or separate, which would determine if any north-west or north-east passages, if they existed, could get through to Asia; and
Looking for a great southern continent to counterbalance the weight of the Northern Hemisphere.
The English largely led the search for a northwest passage. In 1576, Martin Frobisher, while exploring arctic regions, found an inlet, making him believe he had found the way to Asia and that the Eskimos were Mongols. Further explorations followed. Hopes especially soared in the early 1600's when Henry Hudson found a deep inlet, known ever since as Hudson's Bay. Because of this bay's size and the fact that no one had any idea of North America's size, people believed they had found the way to Asia. However, the North-west Passage was never found, unless one counts voyages by modern nuclear submarines under the Arctic Ocean's icecap.
At the same time, Europeans were trying to find a northeast passage north of Scandinavia to Asia. The English explorer, Richard Chancellor, reached the Russian port of Archangel, but got no further. He did claim to have "discovered" Russia and established relations between it and England. However, it would not be until the early 1700's that the czar Peter I would make Russia an integral part of European affairs. Subsequent attempts by Dutch explorers met with similar failures in finding the North-east Passage. Finally, in 1878, the Swedish explorer, A.E. Nordenskjold, found the Northeast Passage along the rim of the Arctic Ocean and then down the Bering Straits to Asia. Even today, Russian icebreakers ply the route to keep it open for trade and shipping.
The usefulness of the North-east Passage depended on whether North America and Asia are connected. If they were, any northwest or northeast passages would be cut off from entering the Pacific. The answer to this hinged on determining the size of North America, which most people then vastly underestimated. Therefore, a number of expeditions explored the northwest coast of North America to find a passage between it and Asia. The key expedition was led by a Russian, Vitus Bering, who found the passage (the Bering Strait) in 1725. He also claimed Alaska, which Russia held until its sale to the United States in 1867.
For whatever reasons, many people did not believe Bering had found this passage; so more expeditions were launched to this region. Spain and England both explored North America's northwest coast in order to claim lands for the growing fur trade as well as search for the strait of water separating Asia from the New World. Conflicting claims between the two countries were resolved in 1790, with Britain getting everything from Oregon to Alaska. In the meantime, England's most famous explorer, Captain James Cook, confirmed Bering's discovery. By 1800, the coastal map of North America was pretty much in place.
Expeditions in the South Pacific centered on finding the great southern continent. At first, the Dutch led the way in the 1600's in discovering Australia (literally "Southland"), New Zealand (named after a province of the Netherlands), and Tasmania (named after the Dutch captain, Abel Tasman). Since the Dutch had not circumnavigated Australia, many believed it was the great southern continent. In 1768, the English Captain Cook disproved this by circumnavigating it and New Zealand. On his next voyage, he sailed further south to find out if there was a great southern continent, but rough icy waters forced him to turn back. (On his third voyage, which confirmed the existence of the Bering Strait, Cook met his death in Hawaii when trying to recover hostages taken by the natives.) It was not until 1820 that the explorer, Nathaniel Palmer, finally discovered the long sought great southern continent, which we call Antarctica.
By 1800, most continental coastlines had been mapped. The following century was mainly one of exploring and settling continental interiors. Two things helped this process, both of them products of the ongoing Industrial Revolution. First of all, the railroad made possible the movement and supplying of large numbers of settlers in continental interiors. This was especially decisive in the development of the interior of North America. Second, germ theory and the development of vaccines for various tropical diseases meant that Europeans could now explore and conquer tropical regions. This particularly affected Africa, known until then to Europeans as the "Dark Continent" since its interior had been so impenetrable.
The roots of the Reformation lie far back in the High Middle Ages with the rise of towns and a money economy. This led to four lines of development that all converged in the Reformation. First of all, a money economy led to the rise of kings who clashed with the popes over control of Church taxes. One of these clashes, that between pope Boniface VIII and Philip IV of France, triggered the Babylonian Captivity and the Great Schism. Second, the replacement of a land based with a money economy led to growing numbers of abuses by the Church in its desperation for cash. Both of these factors seriously damaged the Church’s reputation and helped lead to the Lollard and Hussite heresies which would heavily influence Luther’s Protestant Reformation.
Another effect of the rise of towns was a more plentiful supply of money with which humanists could patronize Renaissance culture. When the Renaissance reached Northern Europe, the idea of studying the Bible in the original Greek and Hebrew fused with the North’s greater emphasis on religion, thus paving the way for a Biblical scholar such as Martin Luther to challenge the Church.
Finally, towns and trade spread new ideas and technology. Several of these bits of technology, some from as far away as China, helped lead to the invention of the printing press which helped the Reformation in two ways. First of all, it made books cheaper, which let Luther have his own copy of the Bible and the chance to find what he saw as flaws in the Church’s thinking. Second, the printing press would spread Luther’s ideas much more quickly and further a field than the Lollards and Hussites ever could have without the printing press.
All of these factors, growing dissatisfaction with corruption and scandal in the Church, the religious emphasis of the Northern Renaissance, and the printing press, combined to create a growing interest in Biblical scholarship. Nowhere was this interest more volatile or dangerous than in Germany. The main reason for this was the fragmentation of Germany into over 300 states, which helped the Reformation in two ways.
For one thing, there was no one power to stop the large number of Church abuses afflicting Germany, thus breeding a great deal of anger in Germany against the Church. For another thing, the lack of central control also made it very difficult to stop the spread of any new ideas. This was especially true in Germany, with over 30 printing presses, few, if any, being under tight centralized control, and each of which was capable of quickly churning out literally thousands of copies of Protestant books and pamphlets. If Germany could be seen as a tinder box just waiting for a spark to set it aflame, Martin Luther was that spark.
Luther, like all great men who shape history, was also a product of his own age. He had a strict religious upbringing, especially from his father who frequently beat his son for the slightest mistakes. School was little better. Young Martin was supposedly beaten fifteen times in one day for misdeclining a noun. All this created a tremendous sense of guilt and sinfulness in him and influenced his view of God as a harsh and terrifying being. Therefore, Luther’s reaction to the above mentioned thunderstorm in 1506 should come as no surprise. He carried out his vow and joined a monastic order.
As a monk, Luther carried his religious sense of guilt to self-destructive extremes, describing how he almost tortured himself to death through praying, reading, and vigils. Indeed, one morning, his fellow monks came into his cell to find him lying senseless on the ground. Given this situation, something had to give: either Luther’s body or his concept of Christianity. His body survived.
Out of concern for Martin, his fellow monks, thanks to the printing press, gave him a copy of the Bible where Luther found two passages that would change his life and history: “ For by grace are you saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God; not of works, lest any man should boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9) “ Therefore, we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.” (Romans 3:28) As Luther put it, “ Thereupon I felt as if I had been born again and had entered paradise through wide open gates. Immediately the whole of Scripture took on a new meaning for me. I raced through the Scriptures, so far as my memory went, and found analogies in other expressions.” From this Luther concluded that faith is a “free gift of God” and that no amount of praying, good deeds or self-abuse could affect one’s salvation. Only faith could do that.
In the following years, Luther’s ideas quietly matured as he pursued a career as a professor, back then a Church position. Then, in 1517, trouble erupted. Pope Leo X, desperate for money to complete the magnificent St. Peter’s cathedral in Rome, authorized the sale of indulgences. These were documents issued by the Church that supposedly relieved their owners of time in purgatory, a place where Catholics believe they must purge themselves of their sins before going to heaven. Originally, indulgences had been granted to crusaders for their efforts for the faith. In time they were sold to any of the faithful who wanted them. The idea was that the money paid was the result of one’s hard work and was sanctified by being donated to the Church. However, it was easily subject to abuse as a convenient way to raise money.
Indulgence sales were especially profitable in Germany where there was no strong central government to stop the Church from taking money out of the country. This greatly angered many Germans and made them more ready to listen to criticism of the Church when it came. The Church’s agent for selling indulgences in Brandenburg in Northern Germany, John Tetzel, used some highly questionable methods. He reportedly told local peasants that these indulgences would relive them of the guilt for sins they wished to commit in the future and that, after buying them, the surrounding hills would turn to silver. He even had a little jingle, much like a commercial: “ As soon as coin in coffer rings a soul from Purgatory springs.”
Luther was then a professor in nearby Wittenburg, Saxony, not far from the home of the Hussite heresy in Bohemia. When some local people showed him the indulgences they had bought, he denied they were valid. Tetzel denounced Luther for this, and Luther took up the challenge. On October 31, 1517, Luther nailed a placard to the church door in Wittenburg. On it were the Ninety-five Theses, or statements criticizing various Church practices, some of which are given here.
26. “They preach mad, who say that the soul flies out of purgatory as soon as the money thrown into the chest rattles.
27. “It is certain that, when the money rattles in the chest, avarice and gain may be
increased, but the suffrage of the Church depends on the will of God alone…32. “Those who believe that, through letters of pardon, they are made sure of their own salvation, will be eternally damned along with their teachers.
43.“Christians should be taught that he who gives to a poor man, or lends to a needy man,
does better than if he bought pardons…56. “The treasures of the Church, whence the Pope grants indulgences, are neither sufficiently named nor known among the people of Christ.
65 & 66. “Hence the treasures of the Gospel are nets, wherewith they now fish for the men of riches...The treasures of indulgences are nets, wherewith they now fish for the riches of men…
86. “Again; why does not the Pope, whose riches are at this day more ample than those of the wealthiest of the wealthy, build the one Basilica of St. Peter when his own money, rather than with that of poor believers…?
Luther’s purpose was not to break away from the Church, but merely to stimulate debate, a time honored academic tradition. The result, however, was a full-scale religious reformation that would destroy Europe’s religious unity forever.
Soon copies of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses were printed and spread all over Germany where they found a receptive audience. Indulgence sales plummeted and the authorities in Rome were soon concerned about this obscure professor from Wittenburg. Papal legates were sent to talk sense into Luther. At first, he was open to reconciliation with the Church, but, more and more, he found himself defying the Church. Luther’s own rhetoric against the Church was becoming much more radical:
“If Rome thus believes and teaches with the knowledge of popes and cardinals (which I hope is not the case), then in these writings I freely declare that the true Antichrist is sitting in the temple of God and is reigning in Rome—that empurpled Babylon—and that the Roman Church is the Synagogue of Satan…If we strike thieves with the gallows, robbers with the sword, heretics with fire, why do we not much more attack in arms these masters of perdition, these cardinals, these popes, and all this sink of the Roman Sodom which has without end corrupted the Church of God, and wash our hands in their blood?”
“…Oh that God from heaven would soon destroy thy throne and sink it in the abyss of Hell!….Oh Christ my Lord, look down, let the day of they judgment break, and destroy the devil’s nest at Rome.”
Luther also realized how to exploit the issue of the Italian church draining money from Germany:
“Some have estimated that every year more than 300,000 gulden find their way from Germany to Italy…We here come to the heart of the matter…How comes it that we Germans must put up with such robbery and such extortion of our property at the hands of the pope?….If we justly hand thieves and behead robbers, why should we let Roman avarice go free? For he is the greatest thief and robber that has come or can come into the world, and all in the holy name of Christ and St. Peter. Who can longer endure it or keep silence?”
The papal envoy, Aleander, described the anti-Catholic climate in Germany:
“…All German is up in arms against Rome. All the world is clamoring for a council that shall meet on German soil. Papal bulls of excommunication are laughed at. Numbers of people have ceased to receive the sacrament of penance… Martin (Luther) is pictured with a halo above his head. The people kiss these pictures. Such a quantity has been sold that I am unable to obtain one… I cannot go out in the streets but the Germans put their hands to their swords and gnash their teeth at me…”
What had started as a simple debate over Church practices was quickly becoming an open challenge to papal authority. The Hapsburg emperor, Charles V, needing Church support to rule his empire, feared this religious turmoil would spill over into political turmoil. Therefore, although religiously tolerant by the day’s standards, Charles felt he had to deal with this upstart monk. A council of German princes, the Diet of Worms, was called in 1521. At this council, the German princes, opposed to the growth of imperial power at their expense, applauded Luther and his efforts. As a result, Charles had to summon Luther to the diet so he could defend himself.
Luther’s friends, remembering Jan Hus’ fate, feared treachery and urged him not to go. But Luther was determined to go “ though there were as many devils in Wurms as there are tiles on the roofs.” His trip to Worms was like a triumphal parade, as crowds of people came out to see him. Then came the climactic meeting between the emperor and the obscure monk. Luther walked into an assembly packed to the rafters with people sensing history in the making. A papal envoy stood next to a table loaded with Luther’s writings. Asked if he would take back what he had said and written, Luther replied:
“Unless I am convinced by the evidence of Scripture or by plain reason—for I do not accept the authority of the Pope, or the councils alone, since it is established that they have often erred and contradicted themselves—I am bound by the scriptures I have cited and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. God help me. Amen.”
Having defied Church and empire, Luther was hurried out of town where he was “ambushed” by his protector, Frederick of Saxony, and hidden in Wartburg castle to keep him out of harm’s way. However, although Luther dropped out of sight for a year, the Reformation did not go away.
Because of his criticism of papal authority and Church practices, Luther had been excommunicated from the Church. This along with the dramatic meeting at Worms led him to make a final break with the Catholic Church and form Lutheranism, the first of the Protestant faiths. This was not a new religion. It had basically the same beliefs about God as the Catholic faith. However, there were four main beliefs in the Lutheran faith that differed substantially from Catholicism.
Faith alone can gain salvation. No amount of good works can make any difference because man is so lowly compared to God. In the Catholic faith, penance and good works are important to salvation.
Religious truth and authority lie only in the word of God revealed in the Bible, not in any visible institutions of the Church. This largely reflects what Wycliffe had said about the many institutions and rituals the Church valued. As a result, Lutheranism tended to be simpler in practice than Catholicism.
The church is the community of all believers, and there is no real difference between priest and layman in the eyes of God. The Catholic Church gave greater status to the clergy who devoted their lives to God.
The essence of Christian living lies in serving God in one’s own calling. In other words, all useful occupations, not just the priesthood, are valuable in God’s eyes. This especially appealed to the rising middle class whose concern for money was seen as somewhat unethical by the Medieval Church.
When the Church burned 300 copies of Hus’ and Wycliffe’s writings in the early 1400’s, this dealt a heavy blow to the Hussite movement. However, from the start of the Reformation, printed copies of Luther’s writings were spread far and wide in such numbers that the movement could not be contained. By 1524, there were 990 different books in print in Germany. Eighty percent of those were by Luther and his followers, with some 100,000 copies of his German translation of the Bible in circulation by his death. Comparing that number to the 300 copies of Hussite writings underscores the decisive role of the printing press in the Protestant Reformation.
When discussing whom in society went Lutheran or stayed Catholic and why, various economic and political factors were important, but the single most important factor in one’s decision was religious conviction. This was still an age of faith, and we today must be careful not to downplay that factor. However, other factors did influence various groups in the faith they adopted.
Many German princes saw adopting Lutheranism as an opportunity to increase their own power by confiscating Church lands and wealth. Many middle class businessmen, as stated above, felt the Lutheran faith justified their activities as more worthwhile in the eyes of God. The lower classes at times adopted one faith as a form of protest against the ruling classes. As a result, nobles tended to be suspicious of the spread of a Protestant faith as a form of social and political rebellion. Many Germans also saw Lutheranism as a reaction against the Italian controlled Church that drained so much money from Germany. However, many German people remained Catholic despite any material advantages Lutheranism might bestow. For both Catholics and Protestants, faith was still the primary consideration in the religion they adopted.
Lutheranism did not win over all of Germany, let alone all of Europe. Within Germany, Lutherans were strongest in the north, while the south largely remained Catholic. However, Germany’s central location helped Protestants spread their doctrine from Northern Germany to Scandinavia, England, and the Netherlands.
Although Luther had not originally intended to break with Rome, once it was done he tried to keep religious movement from straying from its true path of righteousness. Therefore he came out of hiding to denounce new more radical preachers. He also made the controversial stand of supporting the German princes against a major peasant revolt in Germany in 1525, since he saw the German princes’ support as vital to the Reformation’s survival. This opened Luther to attacks by more radical Protestants who saw him as too conservative, labeling him the “Witternburg Pope”. However, as the Protestant movement grew and spread, it became increasingly harder for Luther to control.
Martin Luther died February 18, 1546 at the age of 63. By this time events had gotten largely out of his control and were taking violent and radical turns that Luther never would have liked. Ironically, Luther, who had started his career with such a tortured soul and unleashed such disruptive forces on Europe, died quite at peace with God and himself. Like so many great men, he was both a part of his times and ahead of those times, thus serving as a bridge to the future. He went to the grave with many old Medieval Christian beliefs. However, his ideas shattered Christian unity in Western Europe, opening the way for new visions and ideas in such areas as capitalism, democracy, and science that shape our civilization today.
While the Catholic Church kept Western Europe religiously united for 1000 years, Protestant unity broke up almost immediately. There were three major reasons for this. First, Luther's successful challenge to the Catholic Church set an example for other reformers to follow. Second, the printing press and translations of the Bible from Latin to the vernacular let more people read and interpret scripture on their own. Previously, the Church's monopoly on Bibles, all written in Latin, severely limited individual interpretations. Finally, the Bible itself is often vague, which also encouraged widely differing interpretations. Consequently, a number of different sects (religious groups) sprang up on the heels of Luther's Reformation.
The first break in Protestant unity came from the Swiss reformer, Huldreich Zwingli. Although only a year younger than Luther, Zwingli seemed to come from a different world. While Luther's outlook and background were very medieval, Zwingli received a liberal humanist education and did not have the great sense of guilt and fear of the terrors of hell his German counterpart had. Zwingli's humanist education influenced him to call for a religion based entirely on the Bible. In 1518 he became a common preacher in Zurich, Switzerland and echoed Luther by speaking out against Bernhardin Samson, a local seller of indulgences. He also denounced other church abuses and thus launched the Swiss Reformation.
Zwingli's religion was both similar to and different from Luther's. Like Luther, he stressed a more personal relationship between man and God, claimed faith alone could save one's soul, and denied the validity of many Catholic beliefs and customs such as purgatory, monasteries, and a celibate (unmarried) clergy. However, Zwingli's goal from the first was to break completely from the Catholic Church. His plan for doing this was to establish a theocracy (church run state) in Zurich.
By 1525, he had accomplished this, having banished the Catholic mass and introduced services in the vernacular. He vastly simplified the service to sermon and scripture readings. Despite his love of music, Zwingli banned it from the service and even smashed the church organ. He either destroyed or whitewashed religious images, which he saw as idolatrous, served communion in a wooden bowl rather than a silver chalice, and closed down monasteries or turned them into hospitals and schools. Although not persecuted, Catholics had to pay fines for attending mass and eating fish on Fridays (a Catholic practice then to symbolize personal sacrifice by not eating meat) and were excluded from public office. Zwingli also closely supervised the morals of his congregation. All these measures anticipated the later reforms of John Calvin.
By 1528, Zwingli's reforms had spread across northern Switzerland with the South remaining Catholic. Because of fear of being caught between Catholics in southern Switzerland and Germany to the north Zwingli followed a more aggressive foreign policy and attempts to unite with the Lutherans in common cause against the Catholics. The proposed alliance never occurred because the two camps could not agree on one piece of theology: whether the bread and wine of communion were actually transubstantiated (transformed) into the body and blood of Christ. The Catholic Church had claimed for centuries that transubstantiation did take place, and Luther agreed with them in a modified form. Zwingli said it was only symbolic of Christ's body and blood. A personal meeting between Luther and Zwingli in 1529 accomplished nothing except hard feelings, and the proposed alliance between the Zwinglians and Lutherans fell through.
Aggressive Zwinglian missionaries in the Catholic districts of Switzerland led to war in 1531, and an army of 8000 Catholics destroyed Zwingli and his force of 1500 men. An uneasy co-existence between Protestants and Catholics followed, and Protestantism survived in Switzerland. Zwinglianism, however, did not survive, being replaced by Calvinism in the Swiss Reformed Church. Still, Zwingli was important for establishing Protestantism in Switzerland and serving as an example for the more successful Calvinists who followed.
After breaking the Catholic Church's centuries long monopoly on religion, the issue arose of how far beyond the old set of rules the new beliefs could go. Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, despite significant religious differences, drew up new sets of rules fairly close to the Catholic Church's. Among other things, they all believed in obedience to civil authority. However, some men preferred to go much further in rewriting the rules. As a result, some 40 different religious sects sprang up in Western Europe. Although their beliefs varied somewhat from one another, they have been lumped together under the name of Anabaptists from their common practice of baptizing members as adults when they could make the free choice to be Christians. In addition to the Bible as a source of religious truth, they also believed in inner revelation coming directly from God.
The Anabaptist movement was more involved with social discontent than the other Protestant sects were. The 1500's saw economic difficulties resulting from rising population and inflation. Peasants, town craftsmen, and miners were especially hard hit, and it was they who especially joined the Anabaptist ranks in hope for a better world to come. Most Anabaptists denied the right of civil governments to rule their lives. They refused to hold office, bear arms, or swear oaths, which naturally made the authorities suspicious of them.
Actually, most of the Anabaptists were just trying to live good, peaceful; Christian lives in imitation of Christ himself. They did not openly resist the authorities, but they still aroused suspicion because of their different ways. Some groups held property in common. Others went to extremes in interpreting the Bible literally, preaching from rooftops and even babbling like children as the Bible supposedly told them to. They tended to separate themselves from the rest of society, which they saw as sinful. Despite their peacefulness, the Anabaptists were heavily persecuted. This forced them to migrate, which spread their beliefs from Switzerland down the Rhine to the Netherlands. It was here that the movement turned more violent as it combined frustration from economic hard times with an older tradition of socially revolutionary ideas that were popular among the peasants. The climax of this process took place in the German city of Munster in the early 1530's.
It was in Munster that radical Anabaptists seized power and combined religious fanaticism with a reign of terror that tarnished the reputation of other Anabaptists for years. All books except the Bible were burned. Communal property and polygamy were enforced. Their leader, John Bockleson, ruled with a lavish court while ensuring his followers that they too would eat from gold plates and silver tables in the near future. So alarming was this spectacle that Lutherans and Catholics combined forces to snuff it out. The determined and disciplined resistance of the Anabaptists led to a drawn out siege (1534-35). The city was finally betrayed and the Anabaptist leaders exterminated. An intense persecution of the Anabaptists followed, killing thousands and driving many more from place to place. Some of them, such as the Mennonites and Amish, found a home in North America and have had a profound influence on our attitude of separating church and state. Others made their way to the Spanish Netherlands where they helped stir up a major revolt against Catholic Spain.
As discussed above, the strong medieval monarchies of France, England, and Spain assumed more and more control over the Church within their own lands. As a result, these kings had few grievances against the Church and were generally hostile to the Reformation, since it threatened their own control of religious policies. They were also strong enough to repress the spread of Protestantism among the lower classes. However, the Reformation found a home in one of these monarchies, England, thanks to some very peculiar circumstances.
Henry VIII of England had been given the title of "Defender of the Faith" by Pope Clement VII for a work he had written attacking the Lutherans, mainly on political grounds. However, just as at one point he defended the Church for largely political reasons, at a later date, Henry broke with the Church, also for political reasons.
Henry had a problem: he needed a son to succeed him to the throne. Without such a son, England might plunge back into civil war like the Wars of the Roses that Henry's father had ended in 1485. Henry's wife, Catherine of Aragon, had borne him a daughter, Mary, but no sons. Since Catherine was getting older, Henry wanted his marriage annulled so he could find a new wife to bear him a son. Unfortunately, Catherine was the aunt of the Hapsburg emperor, Charles V. Naturally he wanted Catherine to remain as Queen of England in order to influence its policies and possibly get control of the throne herself. Since Charles also controlled the pope, the annulment was refused. Meanwhile, Henry had fallen in love with a young woman of the court, Anne Boleyn, giving him more reason to dispose of Catherine.
Only twenty years earlier, Henry would have had to accept this verdict or resort to violent means to solve his problem. Ironically, the Lutherans that Henry despised provided him with an answer to his problem: break with Rome. However, he had to move quickly, because Anne was with child and Henry wanted the baby, hopefully a boy, to be born after the break with Rome in order to be legitimate.
In 1533, Henry started to break England's ties with the Catholic Church. He was clever in how he accomplished this, doing it in stages, first by cutting off money to Rome, then curtailing the power of the Church courts and assuming more authority over the English clergy. Also, he did this through Parliament so it would seem to be the will of the English people rather than the mere whim of the king. In 1534, he severed the last ties with Rome, and the Church of England replaced the Catholic Church. All this took place in time for the birth of the baby, which turned out to be a girl, Elizabeth.
The average churchgoer in England would have noticed little difference in the dogma and service as a result of this break, since the Church of England was basically the Catholic Church without a pope. Therefore, most people accepted it since there were no drastic changes, they resented Church abuses, and feared a civil war if Henry died without a male heir.
After Henry's death, his nine-year-old son, Edward VI, the son of Jane Seymour, one of Henry's later wives, took the throne. During his brief reign, the nobles ruling in his name followed Protestant policies. However, when Edward died in 1553, his older half sister, Mary, came to the throne. She was an ardent Catholic like her mother, Catherine. She even married Philip II of Spain to enforce her Catholic policies. The main effects of Mary's persecutions were to alienate the English People, make them more firmly Protestant, and earn her the title of Bloody Mary.
When Mary died childless in 1558, her half sister, Elizabeth I, succeeded her. This remarkable woman, one of England's ablest and most popular monarchs steered an interesting course between Protestantism and Catholicism. The English, or Anglican, Church under Elizabeth grafted moderate Protestant theology on top of Catholic organization and ritual. This compromise satisfied most people, but the more radical English Calvinists wanted more sweeping reforms, such as doing away with bishops and archbishops altogether. These people were known as Puritans, since they wanted to purify the Anglican Church of all Catholic elements. Their numbers and power would continue to grow throughout Elizabeth's reign, although she was able to control them.
In addition to England's navy saving European Protestantism from extinction at the hands of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the English Reformation was important for opening the way for the more radical Puritans Calvinists to filter in. Eventually, they would become influential enough to overthrow the pro-Catholic king, Charles I, and establish a parliamentary democracy. This in turn would inspire the spread of democratic ideals to America, Europe, and the rest of the world.
As important as the Zwinglian, Anabaptist, and English reformers may have been, it was Calvinism that would have the most profound and revolutionary impact on Western Civilization. Although the Calvinists' primary concerns were religious, their reforms would radically alter the political and economic institutions of Europe, helping lay the foundations for the eventual triumph of capitalism and democracy.
Luther's break with the Church was especially difficult since he had grown up without any religious alternatives to Catholicism or examples to follow in his reforms. The next generation of reformers, led by John Calvin, grew up in a world that offered alternatives to Catholicism, thus making it easier to break with the Church and carry religious reforms much further than Luther ever had.
Calvin himself grew up in France as the first shock waves of the Reformation rocked Europe. Although not officially allowed in France, Protestant ideas still filtered across the border and won converts. Unlike Luther, whose tormented soul provides fascinating reading, Calvin was a much calmer individual. He seems to have been plagued by none of Luther's self doubts and his personal character was described as nearly flawless. After receiving a good education in theology, law, and also humanist studies, which prompted him to read the Bible more carefully, he seems to have arrived at some sort of conversion in 1533.
The cornerstone of Calvin's theology was God's all encompassing power and knowledge. There was nothing God did not know or have control of: past, present, or future. As a result, God knew and controlled from the beginning of time whose souls would be saved or condemned for eternity. This doctrine, known as predestination, had scriptural support and was a logical outgrowth of what Luther had said about faith and salvation being a free gift of God. Predestination raised several disturbing questions. First of all, if God were all-powerful, could we have any free will in choosing between God and Satan? Quite bluntly, Calvin said no. Second, if God were good, how could he let evil exist in the world? Calvin answered that these were mysteries of God that we cannot know the answers to and probably have no business asking.
Finally, can we know we are saved and how? According to Calvin, there is no way for us to know for sure. However, if we meet the requirements of living an upright life, profession of faith, and participation in the sacraments, we could become pleasing to God and be saved despite our sinful nature, if predestined to do so. Such a puritan lifestyle might not ensure salvation, but it could be a sign that one might be one of the few elected by God to go to heaven. However, Calvin said our primary concern should not be going to Heaven, but rather carrying out God's plan for us in this life. As fatalistic as Calvinism with its denial of the existence of free will may sound, its adherents felt empowered by this idea that they were the special instruments for carrying out God's plan. This gave them an unshakable faith in the utter rightness of their cause and made Calvinism the most dynamic movement of its day.
Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, published in 1559, became one of the most popular and influential books of its day. However, Calvin went beyond words in trying to make a point about his religion. To ensure that as many people as possible had a chance to be saved, he established a model Church and community in Geneva, Switzerland to enforce the proper lifestyle needed for salvation. Naturally, Calvin's reforms met resistance and it took him nearly twenty years to get control of Geneva and reform it.
Although the city government still functioned, the Consistory, a church council of twelve elders, wielded the real power over people's lives in Geneva. All citizens were members of the church and had to attend services three or four times a week. This was because there was no telling who was predestined to be saved, and so all must be given a chance. Such acts as fighting, swearing, drunkenness, gambling, card playing, and dancing were outlawed. Even loud noises and laughing in church were fined. Theaters and taverns were closed and replaced by inns allowing moderate drinking accompanied by sermons and church propaganda. Members of the Consistory would make annual inspections of homes to ensure they were morally run. People were even expected to report their neighbors for any behavior that was less than saintly.
The Consistory also ruled the more trivial aspects of peoples' lives. Jewelry and lace were frowned upon, the color of clothing was regulated by law, and women were fined for arranging their hair to immodest heights. Children were to be named after Old Testament figures, and one man was jailed for four days for naming his son Claude instead of Abraham. Punishments were equally harsh, with fifty-eight executions between 1542 and 1564, mostly for heresy (especially Catholicism) and witchcraft. Fourteen witches were burned in one year and one boy was beheaded for striking his parents. Not surprisingly Geneva was called "City of the Saints".
Geneva served as a model to other reformers in Europe, helping make Calvinism the most popular form of Protestantism in the Netherlands, Scotland, and England. This was in spite of its lack of support from rulers who feared both Calvinism's emphasis on God's absolute power, which might undercut the doctrine of Divine Right of Kings, and its lack of being associated with any particular nation. In Germany and Scandinavia, Lutheranism was quickly identified with strong nationalist sentiments that rulers could exploit for their own political purposes. However, Calvinism had no particular national ties, thus depriving it of the strong state support that Lutheranism enjoyed.
However, this lack of state support forced Calvinists to form independent local congregations without any real central organization, making it virtually impossible to uproot and destroy their movement by concentrating on a few leaders. These congregations were somewhat democratic, thus inspiring greater loyalty in all their members, even when facing intense persecution for their beliefs.
Two of Calvin's ideas would have far reaching effects going far beyond religion. First, the idea of predestination meant not only that Calvinist merchants were allowed to do business and make money, they were predestined to do so and should do so fervently as God's will. Of course, as devout Calvinists, they were to make money for the good of the church and community, and at first that was what they did. However, later generations, lacking the intense fervor of the first generation of reformers (a normal pattern with any revolutionary movement), came to feel justified in pursuing profits for their own personal good. The result of this was the triumph of capitalism, especially in England and the Dutch Republic where Calvinists predominated, as the dominant economic system in Western Europe. This in turn would make Western Europe the economic center of the world and home of the Industrial Revolution.
The second Calvinist far-reaching effect of Calvinism was the concept of God's absolute power that, along with the idea that God sees all useful occupations as equal, discredited the doctrine of Divine Right of Kings. Calvin himself preached obedience to authority unless religious conviction forced civil disobedience. But it should never involve open resistance, since God alone would punish any evil rulers. However, some Calvinists, such as John Knox, the fiery leader of the Scottish Calvinists, preached people could overthrow a corrupt prince to defend their religious beliefs and God's law. The revolt of the Spanish Netherlands (1566-1648) and the English Civil War (1642-45) were two prime examples of such Calvinist religious revolts.
Later, these two ideas, capitalism and religious revolution, combined into an even more powerful idea discussed in John Locke's Two Treatises on Government (1694). Much as middle class contracts define obligations in a business deal, Locke saw government as an implied contract especially defining obligations for the king who acted as caretaker of the state for the good of the people, protecting their lives, liberties, and property. If the king failed in these duties, the contract was null and void and the people had the right to overthrow him. This combination of middle class contracts and the belief in religious revolution would become the cornerstone of democracy. And within that idea lay the seeds for the democratic revolutions that would sweep through France, Europe, and eventually the entire globe in the 1800s and 1900s.
One must remember that the Protestant reformation had only limited success. The two most powerful monarchies in Europe, Spain and France, remained Catholic, as did Austria, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, Poland and parts of Germany. Still, Protestant success had been rapid and posed a serious threat to the Catholic Church. As a result, the Church went through its own Catholic Reformation, also known as the Counter Reformation, in which it reformed itself, defined its theology, reestablished the pope’s authority in the now reduced Church, and prepared for a counter-offensive against the Protestants.
The Church had often been challenged with criticism in the past, but each time had patched things up with internal reforms. Therefore, at first it saw Protestantism as just another protest that a few reforms could mend and failed to recognize the deep philosophical and religious issues involved. Since many Church abuses were the result of the financial problems deeply rooted in the later Middle Ages, maybe it was too much to expect reforms of abuses at this time. However, those problems only got worse in the 1500s. Inflation, loss of lands and revenue to the Protestants, and invasions of Papal lands left Pope Paul III with only 40% of the revenues his predecessor had jus ten years earlier. As difficult as it would be, the threat of further losses to the Protestants made reforms all the more necessary. In 1536, Pope Paul III established a fact-finding commission to find out why there was so much protest and what could be done about it. The resulting report, Advice on the Reform of the Church, blamed the Church for many of its problems and called for reforms that would convince the Protestants to rejoin the Church. Two things resulted from this report. First, the Church failed to accept responsibility for its problems, making what few reforms that result only half-hearted. Consequently, Protestantism kept expanding.
The second result was that the Church, rather than trying to reform itself, decided to attack its enemies. In 1542, the pope brought the Inquisition into Italy, giving the Inquisitor general authority over all Italians. This effectively uprooted any elements of Protestantism in Italy and restored the pope’s authority over the whole peninsula. To a large extent, the Inquisition helped put an end to the Italian Renaissance, since it suppressed Italy’s vigorous intellectual life for the sake of conformity to the Church. Remarkable individuals, such as Galileo, might still come along, but they would face the Inquisition’s repression for any new ideas they might propose. The Church was also waking up to the dangers that a free press presented to the established order. In 1543, the Inquisition published the first Index of Prohibited Books, the first full-scale effort to limit or destroy the free expression of ideas through the press. It would not be the last. Among its victims was the report Advice on the Reform of the Church, since it was seen as giving solace to the Protestants and their ideas.
However, by the mid-1540s, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the Catholic Church would have to institute serious reforms if it were to halt the rising tide of Protestantism. These reforms came from two directions: the Papacy at the top and the grassroots (popular) level below.
One problem facing the Church was the wide variety of interpretations people had of the Bible and other Church writings. This was not a new problem, but it became an urgent one when faced with competing Protestant interpretations. Consequently, Pope Paul III called a general Church council that met at Trent, Italy to define decisively what the official doctrines of the Church were. People remembered the threat to the pope’s power that councils had posed during the Great Schism a century earlier. Naturally, the pope was nervous about this and tried to restrict the council to working on Church doctrine instead of reforms that might threaten his position.
The Council of Trent met in three sessions from 1543 to 1563. Popular hopes focused on the desire to restore Christian unity, since Protestant representatives were supposed to attend (but never did). Even if it did not achieve such unity the Council did revitalize the Catholic Church and restore the pope’s power within the Church. It strictly defined religious doctrine. It emphasized the role of both faith and good works in achieving salvation. It declared the Latin Vulgate Bible the only acceptable form of scripture, thus excluding any vernacular translations. It also reaffirmed the validity of all seven Catholic sacraments and the writings of such Church Fathers as St. Augustine as sources of religious truth. It kept the elaborate ritual and decoration of the Church, since they were inspirational for the mass of illiterate Catholics with little or no understanding of Church dogma. It also enacted various reforms, ensuring clergy were better educated and their morals better supervised. The pope was even able to restore his authority over local church and clergy at the kings’ expense.
Although the Council of Trent did not peacefully restore Christian unity, it did reestablish the authority of the popes within the Catholic Church, giving it the power to launch an offensive against the Protestants to reclaim formerly Catholic lands. Also restoring the Church’s spirit was a new religious order: the Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits.
The Jesuits’ founder, Ignatius Loyola, (1491-1556) was quite similar to Luther in how he achieved inner religious peace, although the two men arrived at some very different conclusions about their respective faiths. Loyola was born a Spanish noble and, like Luther, had no initial plans for a religious career, being a soldier by profession. Also, like Luther, a somewhat dramatic event turned his life to religion. Instead of lightning, it was a leg broken by a cannonball while defending a fort that forced him into a long period of convalescence and ultimate conversion. Instead of the tales of war and chivalry that Loyola liked, the only reading material available was religious in nature. Eventually, this literature had its effect. Loyola experienced an intense conversion and decided to devote his life to Christ.
Like Luther, Loyola almost killed himself trying to purge his guilt. He finally obtained some inner peace by deciding the Devil was responsible for any self-doubts and despair one had for sins he had already confessed to the Church and done penance for. Loyola developed a four-week long set of spiritual exercises help others achieve similar inner peace. These exercises first had people contemplate their sins and their eternal consequences in Hell for two weeks, then contemplate Christ’s life, sacrifice on the Cross, and resurrection for a week, and finally contemplate the final ascension into Heaven.
After a pilgrimage to Palestine, Ignatius decided to get an education in order to preach more effectively. In school he gathered a loyal core of followers, the most famous being Francis Xavier. In 1536, they went to Rome determined to win souls, not by the Inquisition or the sword, but by educating people, especially the young who are most impressionable.
In 1540, they founded the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits. The order was organized along military lines with four ranks or classes. Members were expected to show absolute obedience to their superiors, the pope and God. Instead of ascetic activities such as endless praying and whipping themselves, the Jesuits performed Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises and menial labor. Discipline was rigorous, but flexible, helping the Jesuits produce some remarkable leaders. The Jesuits also carefully selected their target audience from two main groups in society: nobles and children. As the confessors for royalty and nobles, they exercised considerable influence on religious policies within catholic states. They also ran numerous schools, believing that if they could influence children at an early age, they would remain loyal Catholics for the rest of their lives.
The order grew rapidly and became the virtual “shock troops” of the Catholic Church. They had missionary activities to South America (still mostly Catholic) and Asia. Within Europe, they spearheaded the Catholic reformation by strengthening the Church’s power in areas it still held while restoring allegiance in such areas such as Bohemia and parts of Germany.
With their Church on much firmer ground than before, many Catholics felt ready to go on the offensive against Protestantism. What resulted was a series of religious wars that would engulf Western and Central Europe for the next century.
Kill them all; God will know his own.— Catholic general, ordering a massacre of a town containing both Protestants and Catholics
By the mid 1500's, three main factors were converging to push Western Europe into a century of brutal religious wars. Two of these were the Protestant and Catholic Reformations that were firmly opposed to each other. Added to this was a prevailing medieval mentality linking religion with political issues, making it impossible for either side to tolerate the other side's presence or rule. The first round started in Germany.
The emperor Charles V's dramatic confrontation with Luther at Worms in 152l had resulted in outlawing the Lutheran heresy. However, this was easier said than done for several reasons. First, Charles had little control over the Holy Roman Empire (Germany), a patchwork of over 300 principalities, Church states, and free cities, all jealously guarding their liberties against any attempts by the emperor to increase his authority over them. Charles could not even get effective support from the Catholic states to help suppress the Lutherans, since his success might give him more power over Catholic princes as well.
Second, the size of Charles' empire made him many enemies, in particular France and the Ottoman Turks, who posed a constant threat from west and east. As a result, Charles felt forced to let the Protestants alone and turn to more pressing matters on his borders. Finally, Charles was plagued with money problems. Several times in his career he found himself short of funds while on the verge of a major victory. In an age of mercenary armies prone to run out on their employers as soon as funds for paying them ran out, this was fatal and forced him to let his enemies, especially France, off the hook. All these factors kept Charles from effectively dealing with the Lutherans for over twenty years.
Therefore, it was 1546 before Charles could attack a defensive alliance of Lutheran princes known as the Schmalkaldic League. Charles won a decisive military victory. But the complex forces discussed above kept him from imposing either firm imperial control or his Catholic faith on Germany. Both Lutheranism and the privileges of the German princes were too deeply entrenched for that. Consequently, Charles agreed to the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, a compromise giving each German prince the right to choose his realm's religion, as long as it was either Catholic or Lutheran. Calvinists, Anabaptists, and other non-Lutheran Protestants were outlawed.
Instead of settling Germany's religious problems, the Peace of Augsburg actually made them worse in three ways. For one thing, Calvinism kept spreading across Germany, even among German princes, thus raising religious tensions even more. Also, Charles V, worn out by over 30 years of trying to maintain his empire and religious unity, gave up his throne. The family lands in Austria and the Imperial title went to his brother Ferdinand, while Charles' son, the staunchly Catholic Philip II, inherited Spain, the Netherlands, most of Italy, and Spain's American colonies. Philip's passionate hatred of the Protestants would also aggravate the growing religious conflict brewing. Finally, the Peace of Ausgburg led to thousands of refugees, especially Calvinists and Anabaptists, fleeing Germany and spreading their religious beliefs to the Spanish Netherlands (modern Belgium and Holland), France, and eventually England.
As a result, religious conflict spread to these three countries after 1560. In the Spanish Netherlands the influx of Protestants created growing religious unrest that led to a pattern of Spanish repression, riots and protests in response, more repression, and so on. Despite its disunity, the ensuing revolt would hang on due to its control of seaports in the North, good leadership, and anger against Spanish atrocities. In France, rising tensions between Calvinists and Catholics triggered its own vicious cycle of weakening the government, which allowed more anarchy, further weakening the government, etc. Coming from this was a series of bitter civil wars aggravated by the weak government, feudal separatism, nobles’ rivalries, and foreign intervention, especially by Spain. Finally, tensions between Protestant England and Catholic Spain led the English to raid Spanish shipping and support the revolt in the Spanish Netherlands while Philip II conspired to dethrone Elizabeth I.
The critical turning event in all three of these conflicts was the defeat of Philip II's Spanish Armada (1588) that was aimed against the Dutch and French Calvinists as well as England. While this did not destroy Spain as a power, it did save Protestantism in Western Europe, thus setting the stage for the Thirty Years War. It also helped the Dutch win their freedom (1648) and become the premier naval and trading power in the 1600's. Finally, it allowed the Calvinist leader, Henry of Navarre, to take the throne of France after placating his Catholic subjects by converting to Catholicism while ensuring religious freedom to the French Calvinists. This ended the French Wars of Religion so Henry IV could lay the foundations for the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV.
The Spanish Netherlands was a collection of seventeen semi-independent provinces lumped together under Spanish rule. With the possible exception of Italy, they were the wealthiest trading and manufacturing area in Europe in the 1500's. Their main port, Antwerp, handled a full 50% of Europe's trade with the outside world. Charles V had been born there and was somewhat popular with the inhabitants. That was not the case with Philip II. It was said that Charles neglected the Spanish Netherlands, but his son, Philip, abused them. This was largely true, although Charles also heavily taxed the Netherlands for his wars and tried to impose his religious policies on them. The major difference was that Philip did it with a heavier hand and with little or no concern for the feelings of his subjects there.
Philip was Spanish born and never left his homeland after his coronation in 1556. His view of the world was very Spanish and very Catholic. He taxed the Netherlands to pay for Spanish wars and he claimed he would rather die a hundred deaths than rule over heretics. As it was, Anabaptist and Calvinist "heretics" were making their way into the Netherlands, especially after the Peace of Augsburg outlawed them in Germany. Philip, determined to get them out, brought in the Inquisition and increased the number of bishops the Netherlands had to support from four to sixteen. This repression started a cycle that led to protests and riots, more Spanish repression and so on until rebellion broke out. This rebellion would drag on until 1648, become part of the wider European struggle known as the Thirty Years War, and itself become known as the Eighty Years War.
In 1566, the Duke of Alva with an army of 10,000 Spanish troops established the so-called "Council of Blood" which burned Calvinist churches, executed their leaders, and raised taxes to levels ruinous for trade, and nearly extinguished the revolt. However, despite the disunity of the revolt itself, it managed to survive for several reasons. First, Calvinist raiders, known as "Sea Beggars", managed to gain control of some ports in the North. When word of these Calvinist havens spread, more Calvinists flocked in. As a result of this migration, Holland in the north became and remains primarily Protestant today. The second reason was the rebels' leader, William, Prince of Orange, called "the Silent" for his ability to mask his intentions. Although a mediocre general, William was a brave and patriotic leader whose selfless determination gave the revolt what little cohesion it had. His accomplishment, much like that of George Washington in the American Revolution, would be as much to keep the rebels together as keeping the enemy at bay.
Finally, Spanish attempts to crush the revolt of the Sea Beggars often alienated more people and made them go over to the rebels' side. This was especially the case in 1576 when Spanish troops in the loyal provinces to the south rioted and went on a rampage of looting and slaughter in Antwerp after going unpaid for 22 months. (However, they were pious enough to fall to their knees and pray to the Virgin Mary to bless this atrocity.)
Fighting in the war itself was desperate and destructive. The siege of Maastricht in 1579 involved vicious battles in the miles of underground mines and countermines dug around the city. When Spanish troops finally poured in through a breach in the wall, a slaughter ensued which killed all but 400 people out of a population of 30,000. At times the rebels had to stop Spanish invasions by opening up their dikes and literally flooding the enemy (and their own crops) out. At the siege of Leyden, this was done also to provide water on which the Dutch rebels could float relief ships full of grain right up to the walls of the city. The city held out, but only half of its inhabitants survived the rigors of the siege, having subsisted on boiled leaves and roots, wheat chaff, dog meat, and dried fish skins. Interestingly enough, it was not until 158l that the Dutch rebels formally deposed Philip II as their king and declared the Dutch Republic in the Oath of Abjuration, a document that would strongly influence the American Declaration of Independence and later democratic movements.
Philip's efforts to establish Catholic rule in England and France got the Netherlands involved in the wider scope of European religious wars. Troops from England helped the rebels, as did the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, which was aimed against the Dutch and French Calvinists as well as England. After Dutch advances in the 1590's and early 1600's, the two sides signed a twelve years truce in 1609. However, the Dutch continued to blockade the Scheldt River and cut off Antwerp's trade. Gradually, this trade shifted to the Dutch city of Amsterdam, thus making it the new commercial capital of Europe. Hostilities resumed in 1621 as part of the wider conflict known as the Thirty Years War. Gradually, growing Dutch economic power and Spanish exhaustion from constant warfare turned the tables in favor of the Dutch. In 1628, the Dutch captured the entire Spanish treasure fleet. In 1639, they crushed another Spanish Armada at the Battle of the Downs and ended Spanish naval power once and for all.
After eighty years of struggle, Spain finally recognized Dutch independence in 1648 in the Treaty of Munster. At this point, the Dutch were at the height of their commercial and naval power, although England would challenge them for that position in the later 1600's. The southern provinces would remain under Spanish, then Austrian, and finally Dutch rule until they won their freedom in 183l and established the modern nation of Catholic Belgium in the south.
France was another country that saw the devastating effects of religious wars in the last half of the 1500's. In this case, the antagonists were the Catholic majority of France and a strong minority of French Calvinists known as Huguenots. Although only comprising about 10% of France's population, the Huguenots had several factors that helped them maintain their struggle for over thirty years. Their number included many nobles who provided excellent leadership. They were concentrated largely in fortified cities in the south. Finally, they were enthusiastic and well organized into local congregations.
For thirty years Catholic and Huguenot armies marched across France destroying its fields and homes. All this bred a cycle of chaos and destruction where growing anarchy would steadily weaken the French government's power, thus allowing even more anarchy and so on. There were actually seven French religious wars with intermittent periods of peace, which made these wars & this period of French history confused, chaotic, and bloody.
Once the wars started, they tended to drag on and were aggravated by several factors that made them especially destructive. First of all, besides the religious struggles, fighting between noble factions and revolts by old feudal provinces exposed and added to the weaknesses of the French state. Second, foreign intervention, especially by Spain, but also by other states such as England, compounded the turmoil and destruction. Finally, France was ruled by weak monarchs who let these forces tear the country apart.
The fighting was confused and often involved the massacres of women and children. From 1562-157l there were eighteen massacres of Protestants, five massacres of Catholics, and over thirty assassinations. The most famous such event was the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre (8/24/1572), when the Paris Catholics suddenly burst upon local and visiting Calvinists and killed some 3000 of them. A letter from a Spanish ambassador shows the degree of fanaticism and viciousness that infected peoples' minds and values then: "As I write they are killing them all, they are stripping them naked...sparing not even the children. Blessed be God."
Philip II added to the disorder by actively supporting the Catholics. The turning point came with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, which led to a series of assassinations. First, the king, Henry III, assassinated the Catholic leader, Henry of Guise. Then, a fanatical monk assassinated the king for what he saw as his betrayal of the Catholic cause. The man in line to succeed Henry was still another Henry, duke of Navarre, who also happened to be the Huguenot leader. The prospect of a Calvinist king did not set too well with the predominantly Catholic population of France and led to even more fighting. Despite brilliant victories against heavy odds, Henry still faced the desperate resistance of the Parisians, whose priests told them it was better for them to eat their own children than let them live under a Calvinist king. When confronted also with Spanish intervention to put a Catholic back on the throne, Henry somewhat cynically converted to Catholicism to give his Catholic opponents no more reason to attack him.
Despite Henry's obvious political motives and the fact that he guaranteed Huguenot religious freedom by the Edict of Nantes (1598), Frenchmen were ready to accept him as king, since they were tired of constant warfare and wished only for peace. In order to ensure this, Frenchmen were willing to submit to the stronger rule of a king. This attitude helped set the stage for the rise of France as the dominant power in Europe in the later 1600's and the rule of one of its most glorious and absolute monarchs, Louis XIV, the Sun King.
Certainly one of the most fascinating and capable monarchs of the age was Elizabeth I of England (1558-1603). We have already seen how she skillfully defused religious tensions in England by grafting Catholic ritual and organization onto mild Protestant theology, thus keeping most people reasonably content. Good Queen Bess, as she was known, was quite popular with her people, since she kept taxes low and knew how to get what she wanted from Parliament without being too demanding about it. She also kept the people's good will by acting as one of their own, patiently sitting through any pageants or speeches given in her honor. Elizabeth and her subjects understood and loved each other quite well. Her tolerant reign was a virtual golden age for England, nurturing among other things, the genius of William Shakespeare, possibly the greatest literary figure in its history.
Being a woman, Elizabeth had to be crafty to keep her throne, avoiding at all costs a marriage that would put a husband in her place as the real power in England. As a result, she never married, although she cleverly held out the prospect of marriage to neutralize potential enemies and keep them on their best behavior.
The great test of Elizabeth's reign was the war against Spain culminating in the Spanish Armada in 1588. The causes of the war revolved mainly around religious differences between Spain and England that caused various acts of aggression by each side against the other. Philip II still hoped fervently to re-establish Catholicism in England. Throughout the 1570's he plotted toward this end, trying to put Mary Queen of Scots, a Catholic, in Elizabeth's place. Elizabeth countered these intrigues by finally executing Mary after a long imprisonment. She also sent troops to help the Dutch rebels, while encouraging freebooting English captains, such as Sir Francis Drake, to raid Spanish shipping. Finally, Philip decided to crush the Protestants in England, Holland, and France by sending a huge armada (navy) and army northward in 1588.
Philip's plan was to send the Armada to pick up the Spanish Army of Flanders which was then fighting the Dutch, transport it to England to crush the English, and then transport it back to crush the Dutch rebels and French Huguenots. Thus the Armada presented a serious threat, not just to England, but also to the very existence of Protestantism in Europe.
On the surface, the struggle looked like an uneven one, heavily stacked in Spain's favor. However, the English had developed radical new tactics and ship designs that would revolutionize naval warfare. They built sleeker ships powered totally by sails. Instead of boarding and grappling, they relied on cannons fired from the broadside to destroy the enemy fleet. Recent research shows that the English enjoyed a decisive edge in firepower thanks to their use of shorter four wheeled carriages that made it easier to reload and fire the cannons. This contrasted with the Spanish who still used longer gun carriages adapted for land use. These had long trailers, which made it very difficult, if not impossible, to pull them inside the cramped quarters of the ship's gun deck for reloading during the heat of battle. These innovations successfully frustrated the Armada's attempts to come to grips with the English. However, the English, in turn, were unable to stop the Spanish advance up the coast for its rendezvous with the Army of Flanders.
When the Spanish pulled into the French harbor of Calais to rest, get supplies, and try to establish contact with the Army of Flanders (which through poor communications had no idea of its approach), the English struck. Launching eight fireships into the midst of the Spanish fleet, they forced the Spanish ships out into the open and out of formation where the English could use their superior firepower and speed to destroy the Spanish ship by ship. An ensuing storm added to the damage and forced the Spanish to give up on their rendezvous with the Army of Flanders and return home by sailing all the way around the British Isles. When the Armada finally came limping back home, a full half of it had been destroyed.
The defeat of the Spanish Armada did not destroy Spain as a great power. However, it did signal the beginning of the end of Spanish dominance of Europe. In the first half of the 1600's this process would accelerate as Spain wrecked itself by trying to maintain its power in an exhaustive and devastating series of conflicts, most notably the Thirty Years War (1618-48). As a result, a new balance of power would emerge in Europe. France would replace Spain as the main superpower, while the Dutch Republic and then England, despite their small size, would become the most dynamic naval and economic powers in Europe.
Europe's mentality would also change in the 1600's. Exhausted and disgusted by the seemingly endless religious wars and disputes, many people would take a more secular (worldly) view of things, seeing religion more as a source of trouble than comfort. By the late 1600's, these views would flower in the great scientific and cultural movement known as the Enlightenment.
The last half of the 1500's saw Europe embroiled in a number of religious conflicts. For the most part, these wars were either between two countries (e.g., England vs. Spain, the Dutch vs. Spain) or internal affairs with some outside interference (e.g., France and Germany). However, as the seventeenth century dawned, religious and political tensions grew to encompass all of Europe in an interlocking network of states extending from Russia to England and from Sweden to Spain. These tensions exploded into what can be seen as the first European wide conflict in history: the Thirty Years War (1618-48).
The roots of the Thirty Years War extended back to two main developments in the 1500's: the religious wars emanating from the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and fear of Hapsburg Spain and Austria, who between them controlled nearly half of Western Europe. Religious tensions (complicated by political rivalries) led to conflicts between Lutheran Sweden and Catholic Poland, German Protestants and Catholics, and the Protestant Dutch and English against Catholic Spain. Fear of the Hapsburgs also contributed to the English and Dutch conflicts with Spain. In addition, France, once it had recovered from its own religious wars, increasingly took the lead against the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs who ringed its borders to the north, south, and east. Venice also had problems with Austria over pirates in the Adriatic.
All these tangled religious and political tensions of the early 1600's polarized Europe into two camps defined largely, but not exclusively, by religion. The Protestant camp consisted of German Protestants, Denmark, the Dutch Republic, England, Sweden, Catholic Venice, and Catholic France. The Catholic camp had German Catholics, Spain, Austria, the Spanish Netherlands, Naples, Milan, the Papacy, and Poland.
Two such hostile camps staring menacingly at one another led to the common fear and expectation of a general war embroiling all of Europe. As a result, kings and princes built up armies and fortifications in preparation for the coming war, which merely reinforced the other side's fears of war, triggering more military spending and so on. Travelers of the time noted how states all over Europe seemed to be armed to the teeth and ready for a fight. This was especially true in Germany where the Protestant princes formed a defensive league known as the Protestant Union in 1609 while the Catholic princes quickly answered with the Catholic League.
Added to this were two other factors making Europe's economy less vibrant than it had been in the 1500's. For one thing, the flow of silver from the Americas had passed its peak. For another, the climate turned colder, reducing crop yields and straining Europe's ability to feed its population (which had doubled since 1450). This, in turn, led to lower resistance to disease (including Bubonic Plague which made a comeback in the 1600's). The combination of soaring military budgets, declining silver production, and the effects of a colder climate led to rising tensions in Europe, both between different states and between social classes within individual societies.
These problems combined with the fact that Europe was split between two hostile political/religious camps meant that any conflict or crisis between individual members of each camp could drag in all the other members of their respective camps and trigger a European wide war. In this respect, the situation largely resembled the one that would drag Europe into World War I in 1914.
In 1618, Protestants in Bohemia, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, rebelled against the Austrian Hapsburgs. Unfortunately, Germany's fragmented political situation generated a vicious cycle that would turn a local struggle into a European wide conflict using Germany as its battleground. As the crisis grew, more states would get involved and commit increasing amounts of resources. As more allies joined each side, the war grew into an exhausting stalemate that neither side could either win or afford to quit since it had already spent so much on it and felt it had to recover its expenses from its enemies. Concern over a Protestant or Hapsburg Catholic victory and belief that the balance could be tipped to their advantage would draw in more powers, eat up more resources, perpetuate the stalemate, and so on.
Thus Spain, Poland, the German Catholics, and the Pope came to Austria's aid to crush the Bohemian rebels. This caused Denmark, England and the Dutch Republic to join the conflict against the Hapsburgs and were defeated. Then Sweden attacked Austria, supposedly in defense of the German Protestants, but was eventually defeated. Finally, Catholic France threw itself into the fray, helping the Protestants against the Hapsburgs. Each new power that would get involved merely fed more fuel into the veritable firestorm of continuing stalemate until there was hardly anything left to burn.
More and more, this has become the pattern of modern warfare, as its expense makes it too expensive to fight, but also too costly to back out once a country has committed itself to it. And as the cost and destructiveness of war goes up, the spoils of war to make it pay for itself dwindle correspondingly. This dilemma has increasingly plagued modern warfare to the present day as the technology of war has gotten progressively more destructive and expensive, both to build and use.
Many people figured war would start in 1621 when a truce between the Dutch Republic and Spain was due to expire. In fact, it started in Bohemia (the modern Czech Republic) and Germany over the succession to the crown of the Holy Roman Empire that the Hapsburgs had held for generations. However, there was no guarantee the electors would choose another Hapsburg when the old emperor Matthias died. Since six of the seven imperial electoral votes might easily be split between three Catholic and three Protestant electors, the Bohemian king's electoral vote could be the decisive one.
Here was where the trouble began, because Ferdinand of Styria, the king of Bohemia and heir apparent to Matthias, was an ardent Catholic, whereas Bohemia had been a hotbed of religious turmoil ever since the Hussite revolt in the early 1400's. When Ferdinand tried to end the Protestant Bohemians' religious freedom, they retaliated by defenestrating (throwing out a window) two imperial ministers in the famous Defenestration of Prague (1618) and deposing Ferdinand as their king. Although the ministers miraculously survived the sixty-foot fall, the peace did not survive with them as the turmoil quickly spread across Germany.
Unfortunately for the Bohemians, when they rebelled against Austria, they elected a mediocre king, Frederick of the Palatinate, who only brought moral support from other Protestant powers. Cossack raids stirred up by Poland diverted the one bit of substantial help they might have gotten, troops from Transylvania. Meanwhile, Spain, Bavaria (as head of the German Catholic League), and the Pope were helping Austria with men and money. Consequently, the Bohemian War (1618-22) was not much of a struggle as Ferdinand (who had since become emperor) easily swept away Bohemian opposition. Ferdinand and his followers confiscated large tracts of land, exiled Protestants, and reclaimed Bohemia for the Catholic Church.
However, growing fear of a resurgent Hapsburg dominance stirred up activity across Europe in two main theaters of war, one aimed against Spain and the other against Austria. First of all, hostilities between Spain and the Dutch Republic resumed as expected in 1621 when their truce ran out. England also declared war on Spain in 1625 and joined the Dutch in a raid on Cadiz that ended in an embarrassing defeat for the Dutch and English. After this, England became more involved in its own religious and political squabbles that culminated in civil war in the 1640's. This kept them from playing any major role in the wider conflict unfolding on the continent.
Meanwhile, France was also active, fighting Spain over strategic towns and passes in Italy. If the French could control this area, they could block the flow of Spanish troops to the Netherlands along the so-called Spanish Road. However, France's effort was somewhat ineffective at this point, largely because of turmoil at court. Cardinal Richelieu, who wanted to commit France wholeheartedly to fight the Hapsburgs, had to fight for his own political life against the Queen mother, Marie de Medici. Richelieu and his policy would eventually triumph, throwing the full weight of France against the Hapsburgs with momentous results for European history. But for now, France's effort was of little account, and Spain held on in Italy.
Despite these victories, ten years of warfare were taking their toll on Spain's wealth, manpower, and ability to protect its treasure fleet, which the Dutch captured for the first time in 1629. This and Spain's already seriously damaged finances forced it to declare bankruptcy, leaving outstanding loans unpaid.
Meanwhile, the Austrian Hapsburgs' overwhelming victory in Bohemia had led Denmark to invade Germany in 1625 supposedly in defense of Protestant liberties. The Hapsburg general, Albrecht von Wallenstein, and the Catholic League's general, Tilly, made short work of the Danes, thus winning what is known as the Danish phase of the war (1625-29). The emperor Ferdinand felt so strong after his victory that he issued the Edict of Restitution in 1630. This declared that all land taken from the Catholic Church since 1555 must be returned to the Church. The Edict of Restitution drove thousands of Protestants from their homes and aggravated an already turbulent situation. It also alarmed and angered German princes, Catholic and Protestant alike, who felt the emperor was overstepping his constitutional powers.
At this point Sweden, prodded by fear of Austria's growing power, Spain's apparent weakness, and France's willingness to back it with money, threw in its lot against the Hapsburgs and invaded Germany. This transformed what was already a European wide affair into a prolonged and bloody war of attrition where neither side was able to win a quick decisive victory or willing to concede defeat. To the German people caught in the middle, the war seemed to have assumed a life of its own that would carry on until there was nothing left in Germany to sustain it.
Sweden was a relative newcomer to European diplomacy. However, thanks to a line of brilliant and ambitious kings, the "Swedish meteor" would shine brightly over the Baltic before burning out in the 1700's. Two other Baltic states, Poland and Russia, were also assuming a greater role in European affairs. As a result, events in Eastern Europe and the Baltic had a growing impact on events in Western Europe. At this point, it was peace between Sweden and Poland that freed Sweden to invade Germany.
Sweden's king, Gustavus Adolphus, was a brilliant and daring general with a highly trained and disciplined army at his back. He used Swedish draftees rather than unreliable mercenaries and put them in smaller units that could more effectively use their numbers and firepower. He further increased this firepower by experimenting with mobile field artillery that could wreak havoc on the massed formations of the day. These reforms proved their worth at the battle of Breitenfeld (1631) where Swedish discipline and firepower overcame the desertion of their Saxon allies to crush an imperial army under Tilly. The next year Swedish tactics won a bloody but costly victory at Lutzen. In the smoke and confusion of battle, Gustavus was killed, taking a good part of the heart out of the Swedish effort.
Nevertheless, the Swedes pressed on, devastating Catholic lands on the way. Austria enticed its ally and Sweden's enemy, Poland, into the war, but a war further east against Russia neutralized the Poles. This prompted Spain to send an army north to retrieve the situation in Germany and the Netherlands. In 1634, the Spanish army crushed the Swedes at Nordlingen. The Swedes launched some fifteen heroic, but basically suicidal charges against the Spanish positions, all with disastrous results.
Once again, the Protestant cause seemed on the verge of collapse. The war had raged now for some sixteen years. Hundreds of German towns and villages were devastated, and whole regions were virtually depopulated. The war's destruction and upheaval brought famine, and with that came disease. Germany was ready for peace. Unfortunately, the other powers in Europe were not. Instead, the war was about to enter a much more destructive phase of attrition where each side, instead of expecting a quick and decisive victory, fought to wear down the other side no matter what the cost might be to themselves.
In 1635, France wholeheartedly entered the war, ending any hopes for a quick peace. Its strategy was still largely to fund two of Spain's enemies, the Dutch and Swedes, and let them do as much of the fighting as possible. At first its own armies were somewhat ineffective against Spain's veteran troops. However, the Swedes, bolstered by French funds, beat the imperialists at Wittstock (1636) and forced an invading Spanish army to withdraw from France. This in turn allowed the French to invade Spain to support a revolt in Catalonia.
Meanwhile, the Dutch had dealt a crippling blow to the Spanish war effort by destroying a Spanish armada of 77 ships at the Battle of the Downs (1639). The next year, the Dutch crushed another Spanish and Portuguese fleet off the coast of Brazil. These two naval battles had the double effect of permanently wrecking Spanish naval power in the Atlantic and triggering a Portuguese revolt.
Even for the victors, this war was exhausting and ruinous, and by 1640 most powers were ready for peace. However, several things prevented peace at this time. First of all, the tangled alliances kept any one power on one side from negotiating its own separate peace. Second, rulers had a limited resource base with which to pay for the war, and that was shrinking steadily as the war's destruction ate up those resources. This helped generate the vicious cycle of stalemate discussed above.
However, with each year, the tide of war was shifting more and more against the Hapsburgs. In Germany, the Swedes beat an Imperialist army at the Second Battle of Breitenfeld (1642), which caused most of Austria's German allies to desert it. In 1643, the French crushed a Spanish army at Rocroi, opening the way to invade the Spanish Netherlands and establish France as the premier power in Europe for decades.
With Spain on the verge of bankruptcy and collapse, Sweden's manpower depleted, and even France facing tax revolts, everyone agreed to start negotiations at Westphalia in 1645. Even then, heavy French and Swedish demands for land and money, Austrian reluctance to give up, and the fact that neutral Germany was the battleground caused the negotiations to drag out as the war dragged on.
In 1648, the Dutch finally made a separate peace with Spain, gaining recognition of their independence after an 80-year struggle (1567-1648). This and the growing threat of revolt in its own lands prompted France at last to come to terms that same year. The resulting treaty became known as the Peace of Westphalia.
The Peace of Westphalia symbolized and confirmed the great changes taking place in Europe's balance of power over the first half of the 1600's. Spain, bankrupt and exhausted, was now reduced to the level of a second-class power. Austria's influence was virtually destroyed in the Holy Roman Empire. However, it would find new life by expanding eastward against an even more corrupt and decaying power, the Ottoman Turks. Germany, whose population and property had suffered damages only surpassed by that of World War II, remained hopelessly broken into some 300 states. Yet out of the ashes of this destruction Brandenburg-Prussia would gradually emerge to unify Germany in 1871.
There were winners. Sweden emerged as the dominant power in the Baltic for another half century. However, by the early 1700's, its aggressive policies would wear it out and knock it out of the mainstream of European politics. The Dutch came out of the war in the best shape of any country in Europe. Dutch trade and economy actually flourished during the war, making enormous profits from raiding Spanish shipping, taking over Spain's colonial trade, and selling munitions to the various combatants, including Spain.
Politically, France was the big winner, severely weakening the ring of Hapsburg powers surrounding it as well as gaining territories along the Rhine. All this also had its cost. For one thing, France's war with Spain dragged on until 1659. Secondly, the terrible tax burden of the war triggered a revolt known as the Fronde (1648-53) that nearly toppled the monarchy of the young Louis XIV. As it was, Louis' monarchy emerged triumphant (unlike its counterpart in England also facing revolution), and France emerged as the dominant power in Europe. The age of Spain was giving way to the age of France.
The above quoted poem says a great deal about the reign of Charles II. The English people were ready to throw off Cromwell's strict Puritan rule and enjoy life again. Theaters, taverns, and racetracks opened up again. Flamboyant fashions and hairstyles became the rage. And Britain once again became "Merry Old England". Charles, the "Merry Monarch" seemed to be just what the English people needed. However, despite all this, there still remained an undercurrent of tensions in the areas of politics, money, and religion
In politics, things seemed much calmer than they had been for decades-- at least at first. King and a largely cavalier Parliament seemed reconciled. Charles was voted a sizable income. The army was paid off, and most of the crown's enemies from the civil war were granted pardons. However, many of the old tensions between king and Parliament still existed. For one thing, the Restoration not only restored the king. It also restored Parliament, which Cromwell had suppressed. In fact, it was the restored Parliament that formally summoned Charles back to England, not the king who summoned Parliament. Parliament itself was divided into two parties: the Tories who favored a strong king and a Church of England largely resembling the Catholic Church, and the Whigs who favored a strong Parliament and more Protestant Church and ritual.
As far as money was concerned, England's wealth was rapidly growing. Cromwell's aggressive foreign policy had intensified England's commercial and naval rivalry with the Dutch, largely due to the Navigation Act, which excluded foreign, and particularly Dutch, ships from carrying English goods. This led to three short but bitterly fought naval wars with the Dutch (one under Cromwell and two under Charles II). Although the Dutch held their own, the expense and stress of their wars against England and France allowed the English to replace them as the premier naval and commercial power in Europe by 1700. Between 1670 and 1700, England's foreign trade grew by 50 per cent, and the king's customs revenues tripled. Despite this new prosperity, Charles' allowance from Parliament still could not satisfy his extravagant personal tastes and style of living. Instead of letting this lead to a clash with Parliament, as had led to Civil War in 1642, Charles neatly sidestepped Parliament by signing the Secret Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV. This gave Charles a handsome pension in return for the promise to turn England Catholic when the time was ripe.
Concerning religion Charles II was sly enough to keep to himself his beliefs in the Divine Right of Kings and the Catholic faith. Although he did not openly profess his Catholic faith until he was on his deathbed, he did restore lands confiscated since the civil war to the Church, crown, and nobles. He also restored the power of the Church of England, re-establishing the church courts and persecuting anyone, especially Puritans, not conforming to the Church's doctrines.
Much more unsettling was the fact that Charles had many children, but none of them were legitimate. That left James, Charles' brother and an avowed Catholic, next in line for the throne. This alarmed the Puritans, who put pressure on Charles to disinherit his brother. Puritan pressure intensified with Titus Oates' "Popish plot," a preposterous rumor that the Jesuits were plotting to kill Charles and massacre all the Protestants in England. This led to two years of anti-Catholic persecutions and hysteria, which put Charles in an awkward position, since he did not want to be exposed as a "papist" himself. Rumors of his funds from France made his position that much more delicate. In the end, the slippery Charles managed to avoid disinheriting his brother. He even ruled without Parliament the last few years of his reign, getting by on his subsidies from Louis XIV. By Charles' death in 1685, it seemed the king was as strong as ever.
As strong as the new king, James II, may have appeared, there was no way he could undo the changes of the last 80 years. Charles II was a capable monarch quite adept at handling the Whigs. Unfortunately, James had nearly all the qualities to ensure getting himself dethroned, being bigoted, stubborn, and quite inept. His worst mistake was his open preference for Catholicism. He suspended laws keeping Catholics out of public office and even recruited Irish Catholics for his army. When his own bishops tried to advise him to reconsider his openly favoring Catholicism, he jailed seven of them in the Tower of London.
Even the Tories came to fear the king's religious views more than they did the Whigs' political views. Finally, they joined with the Whigs in inviting James' Protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, William the Prince of Orange, to come from Holland and dethrone James. What followed has been known ever since as the Glorious Revolution, partly for being virtually bloodless (except for James' nosebleed), but mainly for what it accomplished. William and Mary's Dutch army landed unopposed and marched to London. James' army deserted him, and he fled to France.
Royalty and Parliament then came to an agreement whereby William could use England's resources to help stop Louis XIV's drive to dominate Europe. In return, William and Mary guaranteed Parliament's rightful place in the government and signed the Bill of Rights, precursor to our own Bill of Rights. This assured Englishmen such liberties as free speech, free elections, no imprisonment without due process of law, and no levying of taxes without Parliament's consent. In addition, the king agreed to call for new elections every three years. The king could still formulate policy and name his officials. However, the balance of power had definitely shifted in favor of Parliament, especially since it controlled the purse strings. Money was only granted one year at a time, which meant that the king would have to call Parliament each year just to have the cash needed for his policies. This new government where even the king where was subject to the law and certain legal procedures in ruling is called constitutional monarchy,
In the years to come, Parliament gradually gained more power at the expense of the kings. This process gained momentum when the German prince, George of Hanover, became king in 1714. His main interests remained on the continent, and he was generally content to let his allies, the Whigs, run the government for him.
The struggle between kings and Parliament throughout the 1600's ended in a clear-cut victory for Parliament. While a more democratic government emerged as a result of the English Revolution, keep in mind that rather high property qualifications still kept the vast majority of Englishmen from voting.
However, the English Revolution would benefit all England in two areas: civil rights and the economy. For one thing all Englishmen did gain certain civil rights, such as free speech and the right to a fair trial by a jury of peers. Also, all Christians except gained religious freedom, except Catholics and Unitarians, who eventually, would also be tolerated. The English Revolution also opened the way for more democratic reforms over the next two centuries, until England would became a truly democratic society. The power and success of these principles would spread to the American and French Revolutions, and from France to the rest of Europe and the world.
Economically, the English revolution saw the triumph of capitalism in England. One important aspect of this was Parliament's founding of the Bank of England (1694) through which the government did much of its business. The important thing here was that the government guaranteed repayment with interest on any loans it took out. This contrasted sharply with the old medieval method whereby kings took out personal loans, often did not bother to pay them back, and let the liability for the loans go to the grave with them. Now that government was identified more with Parliament, liability for the loans did not die with the king. Therefore, people were more willing to loan the government money, since they knew they would get it back with interest.
Since the government was largely run by hard-nosed middle class businessmen rather than extravagant nobles with no sense of the value of money, it would use these loans wisely by investing them in business and new industries. That, in turn would improve the economy, which not only could pay more taxes, but also invest further in the Bank of England, which could invest even more money in economic development, and so on. Therefore, England, along with the Dutch Republic, was one of the first modern states to operate at a profit rather than in chronic debt. And, as a result, England would be the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in the 1700's, a factor that would make Europe the dominant culture on the globe by 1900.
Throughout the modern era, there have been striking contrasts between the histories, economies, and politics of Eastern and Western Europe. After World War II, those differences became especially obvious with the Soviet led Warsaw Pact forces poised on one side of the Elbe River and the Western NATO alliance on the other. As so often in history, the underlying basis for these differences has been geography.
First of all, Europe's latitude lies quite far north. For example, Rome, Italy is about as far north as Chicago, Illinois. However, it has a much warmer climate, especially in the winter. This is because Western Europe gets the moderating effects of a warm current known as the South Atlantic Drift and warm sea breezes coming across the Mediterranean from North Africa. Eastern Europe is too far inland to benefit much from either of these effects, and thus has more extremes in climate, especially in the winter.
However, the critical difference between Eastern and Western Europe has to do with waterways. Western Europe has an abundance of navigable rivers, coastlines, and harbors along the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean, North, and Baltic Seas. In the High Middle Ages, these fostered the revival of trade and the rise of towns, a money economy, and a middle class opposed to the feudal structure dominated by the nobles and Church.
Kings also opposed the nobles and the Church, so the middle class townsmen provided them with valuable allies and money. With this money, kings could buy two things. First of all, they could raise mercenary armies armed with guns to limit the power of the nobles. Secondly, they could form professional bureaucracies staffed largely by their middle class allies who were both more efficient since they were literate and more loyal since they were the king's natural allies and dependant on him for their positions. As a result, kings in Western Europe were able to build strong centralized nation-states by the 1600's.
Eastern Europe, in stark contrast to Western Europe, provided practically a mirror image of its historical development before 1600. Being further inland compared to Western Europe hurt Eastern Europe's trade, since the sea and river waterways vital to trade did not exist there in such abundance as they did in Western Europe.
Factors limiting trade also limited the growth of a strong middle class in Eastern Europe. This meant that kings had little in the way of money or allies to help them against the nobles. That in turn meant that peasants had few towns where they could escape the oppression of the nobles. Therefore, strong nobilities plus weak, and oftentimes elective, monarchies were the rule in Eastern Europe before 1600. At the same time, the nobles ruled over peasants whose status actually was sliding deeper into serfdom rather than emerging from it.
However, there was one geographic factor that favored Eastern Europe's rulers after 1600. That was the fact that Eastern Europe is next to Western Europe. As a result, some influence from the West was able to filter in to the East. In particular, Eastern European rulers would emulate their Western counterparts by adopting firearms, mercenary armies, and professional bureaucracies. As a result, they were able to build strongly centralized states in the 1600's and 1700's. This was especially true in three states: Austria-Hungary (the Hapsburg Empire), Brandenburg-Prussia in Germany, and Russia.
However, the lower incidence of towns and a strong middle class has continued to hamper the development of Eastern European states in the modern era, since rulers there have had to build their states with less of the strong foundation of a money based economy, basing their states on less developed agricultural economies. While the strong middle class in Western Europe would provide the impetus for further developments in the West, notably the emergence of democracy and the Industrial Revolution, these two things have had a harder time taking root in Eastern Europe, making its overall political and economic development more difficult.
We came, we saw, God conquered.— Jan Sobieski, announcing the relief of the siege of Vienna from the Ottoman Turks in 1683
When the Thirty Years War and Peace of Westphalia stifled Austrian ambitions in Germany, the Hapsburgs expanded eastward against the Ottoman Empire. Ever since the death of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1565, the Ottoman Empire had been in serious decline, with a corrupt government, rebellious army, obsolete military technology, and decaying economy. Such a faltering empire was a tempting target for its neighbors. However, the Hapsburgs were never able to concentrate solely on the Turks. This was because France under Louis XIV posed a constant threat of invasion to the various German states, which forced the Hapsburgs to divide their attention between east and west.
The Hapsburg ruler at this time was Leopold I (1657-1705), a mediocre ruler, but lucky enough to have capable generals to lead his armies. Leopold's main goal was control of Hungary, which had been divided between Turkish and Austrian rule for over a century. When Leopold supported rebels in Transylvania against the Turks, war and an Ottoman invasion resulted. At this time, the Turks were ruled by an able family of viziers, the Koprulus, who started reforming the state in order to make the Ottomans a power to contend with once again. As a result, when the Turkish army started to advance westward, the alarm went up all over Europe, with even Louis XIV sending 4000 troops to help the Hapsburgs (and make himself look like a good Christian). In 1664, a much smaller, but better equipped and trained allied army caught and destroyed a Turkish army while it was crossing the Raba River. This was the first major victory of a Christian army over the Ottomans. However, it encouraged Leopold's allies to feel secure enough to take their troops home, leaving him to face the Turks alone. Instead of continuing the fight, he signed a humiliating peace that damaged his reputation considerably. As a result, the Hungarian nobles under his rule rebelled and called in the Turks to help them.
This triggered the Turks' last major invasion of Europe, climaxing at the siege of Vienna in 1683. A huge Turkish army of possibly 150,000 men, but with no large siege artillery, was faced by only the stout walls of Vienna and a garrison of ll,000 men. The siege lasted two months as the Turks gradually used the old medieval technique of undermining the walls. Just as the hour of their victory approached, a relief army from various European states arrived and crushed the Turkish army. From 1683 to 1700, Hapsburg forces and their allies advanced steadily against the Turks, only being interrupted by having to meet French aggression in the West. In 1697, the allied forces demolished another Turkish army at Zenta and watched as the once proud Janissaries murdered their own officers in the rout. The resulting treaty of Karlowitz (1699) gave Austria all of Hungary, Transylvania, and Slavonia. Karlowitz re-established Austria, now also known as Austria-Hungary, as a major European power. From 1700 until the end of World War I in 19l8, the Hapsburg Empire would dominate southeastern Europe, while the Ottoman Empire staggered on as the "Sick Man of Europe."
Although the Hapsburg Empire had regained its status as a military and diplomatic power, it still had serious internal problems, namely a powerful nobility ruling over enserfed peasants, a hodge-podge of peoples with nothing in common except that they all called Leopold their emperor, and a variety of states that each had their own rights, privileges and governmental institutions. The Hapsburgs dealt with these problems in three ways. First of all, they neutralized the nobles politically by making a deal that let them continue to oppress the peasants as long as they did not interfere in the government. This left the nobles fairly happy while giving the Hapsburgs a free hand to run the state, largely with soldiers and bureaucrats recruited from other parts of Europe. Unfortunately, this also left the empire socially and economically backward. Second, they tried to unite their empire religiously and culturally by imposing the Catholic faith and promoting the German language throughout their empire. Trying to submerge native cultures, such as that of Bohemia, under Catholicism and German culture mostly caused resentment against Hapsburg rule. Finally, they ruled each principality (Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, etc.) separately with its own customs and institutions. This kept nobles of different provinces from being able to combine in revolts against the Hapsburgs, but it also left the empire fragmented into a number of separate provinces. A large standing army and bureaucracy also held the empire together.
For the next two centuries the Hapsburg Empire would be a major power in Europe. However, it had a number of serious problems that it never adequately solved, being socially and economically backward and fragmented into a large number of provinces and increasingly restless ethnic groups. Together, these problems gradually ate away like a cancer at the Hapsburg Empire, rotting it out from within until there was hardly anything left to hold it together by the twentieth century.
The last and easternmost state to assume a place in European culture and diplomacy was Russia. Three aspects of Russia.s geography have had a major impact on its history. First of all, its location on a high northern latitude and far inland gave it a cold and dry climate. That, combined with large areas of poor or mediocre soils, made it a cold dry steppe in which it is difficult to survive, let alone prosper. Famine has affected Russia on an average of one year out of three throughout its history.
Second, Russia lies on the vast Eurasian Steppe with no formidable natural barriers, which has invited a number of invasions with tragic results. In its early history, the main threat would come from the nomadic tribes to the east, making Russia a battleground between nomads and farmers. Only more recently have Russia’s neighbors to the west been a serious threat, as seen by the loss of an estimated 27,000,000 people in World War II. Ironically, Russia’s harsh climate has saved it from invasion more than once. Napoleon and Hitler both found out the power of “General Winter” when they made the mistake of trying to conquer this vast northern giant.
Finally, Russia’s inland location to the north and east of Europe has left it largely isolated from the mainstream of developments in Europe. Altogether, Russia’s geographic features have made it a harsh land facing constant invasions. As a result, Russians have historically been torn between needing and wanting foreign ideas with which they could better compete and survive on the one hand and a suspicion of foreigners bred by the continual threat of invasions they have faced on the other.
This love-hate relationship with foreign ideas has created recurring stress throughout Russian history all the way to the present. In its early history, one can see four major stages of development where it has taken place. The first of these was when the first Russian state, centered on Kiev, was confronted with Byzantine influence from the south. The Cyrillic alphabet, Russian Orthodox Christianity, and Russian art and architecture all bear the distinctive marks of Byzantium. The next major influence came from the Mongols who conquered Russia in the 1200’s and introduced the harsh absolutist strain that became a hallmark of later Russian government. The last two phases, the reigns of Ivan IV and Peter I, witnessed growing influence from Western Europe. Ivan IV’s reign saw the first attempts to gain access to the West for its technology, the use of Western artillery in the conquest of two Mongol khanates, and the attempts to replace the traditional Russian nobility with a new nobility of service. While his efforts had only limited success, they helped set the stage for the more widespread and concerted efforts of Peter I to westernize Russia. Despite the conservative backlash that followed Peter’s reign, Russia from that time on was an integral part of Europe and European civilization.
The earliest written references to inhabitants in Russia were the Scythians, nomadic horsemen who inhabited the southern steppes in the time of the classical Greeks. Russia’s grassy plains provided ideal grazing for these nomads’ sheep and horses. Some time after 500 A.D., various Slavic tribes, ancestors of most of today’s Russians, moved in and settled down in Russia. Then, around 900 A.D., Vikings, known as the Rus, came in and united the Slavs under a state centered around Kiev.
The Rus used Kiev and other Russian cities as bases from which to raid their more civilized neighbors to the south, in particular the Byzantines. The first such raids were successful in forcing tribute from the emperors in Constantinople in order to make the Rus go home. Later raids were met by the dreaded Greek fire, which set the Rus’ navy and the very sea itself ablaze. In the wake of Greek fire came Byzantine missionaries, who converted the Rus and their Slavic subjects to Greek Orthodox Christianity. Byzantine civilization has had a profound impact on Russian culture. Many Russians today still cling to the Orthodox faith in spite of over seventy years of Communist disapproval. The Cyrillic alphabet and the onion domes that grace the tops of the Kremlin also bear solid testimony of Byzantine influence on Russia to this day.
Russian civilization and the Kievan state flourished until l223, when the most devastating wave of nomadic invaders in history arrived: the Mongols. In 1223 C.E. at the Kalka River, the Russian princes were overwhelmed by a small Mongol army whose numbers were exaggerated by panic and confusion to some l50,000 men. Europe itself was only spared Asia’s fate by luck rather than the prowess of its armies. Upon Chinghis Khan’s death his far-flung hordes returned to the Mongol homeland to elect a new khan. However, the Mongols returned to Russia in l237 to finish its conquest. They even struck into Poland and Hungary, giving Europe a taste of things to come. Amazingly, fate intervened again when Chinghis Khan’s successor died. Thus Europe was spared a second time, and the incredible energy that had sent the Mongols to the corners of the known world started to fizzle out. However, Russia remained the western frontier of Mongol power.
Mongol rule was exercised indirectly through whichever Russian princes were most willing and able to carry out the will of their masters. This meant doing things in the rough and brutal Mongol way, so that after two centuries of Mongol rule, much of the Mongol character and way of running a state rubbed off on their Russian vassals. The Mongols’ expectation of blind obedience to authority and the use of such things as a secret police to enforce their will and inspire terror, a postal relay rider system for better communications, and regular censuses and taxation became a major part of the Russian state that would later evolve.
The most successful of the Russian vassals to adapt Mongol ruling methods were the princes of Muscovy (Moscow) who earned the sole right to collect taxes and dispense justice for the Mongols, while increasingly resembling their Mongol masters in their ruling and military techniques. Eventually, the Muscovite princes turned against their Mongol masters and ended their rule in l390. It was around Moscow that the modern state of Russia would form.
Mongol rule was gone, but the Mongol terror was not. Nearly every year, the horsemen of various neighboring khanates would ride in to spread a wide swathe of death and destruction, taking thousands of Russian prisoners to the slave markets back home. These raids would depopulate whole regions of Russia, even Moscow itself being sacked by the Mongols five different times between l390 and l57l. While destabilizing Russian society, these raids also forced the Muscovite princes to tighten their grip on society in order to provide better defense. Muscovite absolutism grew even stronger when the metropolitan, or patriarch, of the Russian Orthodox Church moved to Moscow, giving it claim to the title of “the third Rome” after Constantinople and Rome itself. Likewise, Muscovite rulers laid similar claim to the title of Czars (Caesars).
The first truly memorable Czar was Ivan IV, known as “the Terrible” (l533-84). Ivan’s reign saw four momentous developments, all of which can be seen as growing efforts to bring in influence from Western Europe. The first, the destruction of the neighboring khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan to the south and east, was made possible by the use of European artillery. Although the Mongols of the Crimea still remained to carry out their depredations, destroying these other two khanates did relieve the Russian people of some suffering from nomadic raids. It also opened the way for the rapid expansion of the Russians eastward across Siberia to the Pacific in much the same way the United States would spread rapidly westward to the same ocean in the l800’s.
Second was Ivan’s long but unsuccessful war against Poland and Sweden to conquer Livonia and gain closer access to Western Europe. Compounding this failure was the third development, the Orthodox Church’s growing fear of the Roman Catholic Church. Causing this was increased missionary activity by the Jesuits in the Ukraine and eastern Baltic. Using Western scholarship in debates with the less educated Orthodox clergy, they were able to convert growing numbers of people in these regions. Naturally, the Orthodox clergy saw this as an especially serious threat to their religion and became the most ardent opponents of contact with the West.
Finally there was Ivan’s fight against the boyars, the powerful Russian nobles. Blaming them for the death of his beloved wife, he launched a concerted campaign against them by setting up the Oprichnina, or state within a state, where Muscovy was split between the traditional state and his own Oprichnina. Ivan then launched an eight-year reign of terror (l564-72) against anyone he suspected of disloyalty. He also tried to replace the boyars with a new nobility of service that would be more subservient to the crown. Since Russia’s economy was still quite backward, the czar had to pay this service nobility with land worked by peasants. Consequently, many peasants fled to the freer lands in Siberia, now opened for settlement by Ivan’s wars. The government reacted with a series of laws that tied the free peasants to the soil and made them serfs.
Ivan’s reforms and purges made his reign a turbulent and costly one. Also, Ivan’s accidental slaying of his most able son in a fit of passion left the throne to the feebleminded Feodor, who liked to spend most of his time praying and ringing church bells. The reins of government thus fell to the boyar, Boris Gudonov, who succeeded Feodor as Czar in l598. At this point, everything in Russia seemed to go wrong at once. The Boyars resisted his attempts to increase royal power. The Orthodox Church thwarted Boris’ early attempts to bring Western European knowledge and culture to Russia. And, worst of all, in l601 a horrible drought and famine killed millions of peasants who revolted out of desperation and the belief that the famine was the Czar’s fault. The rebels got help from the Poles, who supported a supposed son of Ivan IV as Czar. Boris successfully defended his realm until, right on the verge of victory, he suddenly died, capping off a remarkably unlucky reign. The Poles had little better luck in holding the throne, their candidate being assassinated and replaced by another boyar. More peasant revolts and another Polish invasion, which took Moscow, tore Russia further apart. Finally, the Church managed to rally the people, drive out the Poles, and set up a stable government. A national assembly called the Zemsky Sobor set up a new dynasty, the Romanovs. However, the boyars were as independent and troublesome as ever while increasing their hold on the serfs below. The Church blocked any progressive reforms that it saw as irreligious even making it illegal to play chess or gaze at the new moon. This was the condition of Russia when probably its greatest Czar, Peter the Great, took the throne in l682.
The first step was the Great Embassy, a grand tour of Europe where Peter traveled in disguise so he could experience its culture and technology more freely. The huge Czar’s identity was the worst kept secret in Europe, but he did learn about such things as Prussian artillery and Dutch and English shipbuilding first-hand instead of from a distance. In their wake, Peter and his wild entourage left a trail of ransacked houses and enough material to keep Europe gabbing for years about these “wild northern barbarians.” But Peter had also gained a much firmer understanding of European technology, further fueling his determination to bring it to Russia, whether Russia wanted it or not. The subsequent transformation of Russia is known as the “Petrine Revolution”.
Peter first had to secure better communications with the West. At this time, Poland and Sweden effectively blocked such contact in order to keep Russia backwards and at their mercy. Peter’s determination to end Russia’s isolation and gain a “window to the West” as he called it, led to The Great Northern War with Sweden (l700-l72l). This was a desperate life and death struggle for both Sweden in its attempt to stay a great power, and for Russia in its effort to become one. Despite the brilliance of Sweden’s brilliant warrior king, Charles XII, Russia’s superior resources and manpower, along with its winter, wore out the Swedes. The “Swedish meteor” which had burned so brightly in the l600s was quickly fading away. In its place, the Russian giant started to cast its huge shadow westward and make Europe take note that a new power had arrived.
Peter’s new capital and “window to the West” was St. Petersburg. Its location was less than ideal, being on marshy land, twenty-five miles from the sea up the Neva River, and in a high northerly latitude that gave up to nineteen hours of sunlight a day in the summer and as little as five hours a day in the winter. Stone for the city had to be brought in on the backs of laborers, since there were no wheelbarrows. As a result, thousands of laborers died while building this new capital which legend said was built on the bones of the Russian people.
Meanwhile, Peter&dsquo;s other reforms left hardly anything untouched. He more tightly centralized the government and built up a more modern army, navy, and merchant marine along European lines. He dealt with his main obstacle to reform, the Orthodox Church, by not electing a new patriarch when the old one died. Without effective leadership, the Church could do little to fight Peter&dsquo;s reforms. After twenty-one years of this, Peter appointed a council, or Holy Synod, which made the Church little more than a department of state.
Peter tried to westernize the economy by first creating mines to develop the resources needed for industry. By l725, Russia had gone from being an iron importer to an iron exporter. He brought in western cobblers to teach Russians how to make western style shoes. Anyone refusing was threatened with life on the galleys. As a result of Peter&dsquo;s strict measures, Russian industries grew, and with them an “industrial serfdom” tied to their jobs in much the same way the peasants were tied to the soil. Peter also worked to build up commerce and a middle class like that he saw in Western Europe. He raised the status of merchants to encourage more men to take up trade and started an extensive canal building program that connected rivers and made water transport possible between the Baltic and Black Seas. Peter tried to westernize people&dsquo;s lifestyles as well. He updated the alphabet and changed the calendar to get more in line with that of the West. He established newspapers, libraries, and western style schools, imported music, theater, and art from the West, and imposed European fashions upon the Russian people. Even beards were taxed, because they were not in style in Europe.
By Peter’s death, Russia’s economy and culture were starting to look much more western. However, many of these reforms were superficial, touching only the nobles or a limited part of the economy. For one thing, such widespread and comprehensive reforms would naturally cause a good deal of resistance and turmoil in such a traditional society as Russia. Therefore, after Peter died, there was a serious reaction against his reforms in an effort to go back to the old ways. However, Peter, by the force of his character, had so thoroughly exposed Russia to the West that there was no turning back. From this point on, like it or not, Russia was a part of Europe.
Although it took the Dutch until 1648 to force formal recognition of their independence from Spain, for all intents and purposes, the Dutch Republic was free by the twelve-year truce signed with Spain in 1609. The question arises: how did the Dutch hold off and defeat the biggest military power in Europe? While geographic distance from Spain, foreign aid from France and England, and the occasional desperate measure of opening their dikes to flood out invading armies all certainly played a role, the single most important factor was money. For example, of the 132 military companies in the Dutch army in 1600, only 17 were actually made up of Dutch soldiers. The rest were English (43), French (32), Scottish (20), Walloon (11), and German (9) companies fighting for the Dutch because they had the money to pay them. The war took a tremendous financial effort to win, costing the Dutch 960,000 florins in 1579, 5.5 million florins in 1599, and 18.8 million florins in 1640. Despite this expense, the Dutch were in stronger financial shape than ever by the end of the war and were well on their way to becoming the dominant commercial and economic power in Europe. This economic dominance was the product of a chain reaction of events and processes that, as so often was the case, was rooted in geography.
Three geographic factors influenced the rise of the Dutch Republic. First, as the name Netherlands (literally "lowlands") implies, much of the Dutch Republic is below sea level. The Dutch have waged a constant battle in order to claim, reclaim, and preserve their lands from the sea through the construction of dikes, polders (drained lakes and bogs), drainage systems, and windmills (for pumping out water). Roughly 25% of present day Holland is land reclaimed from the sea and still partially protected by hundreds of windmills. The second factor is the Netherlands' position at the mouths of several major rivers and on the routes between the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean. The third factor is the Netherlands' relative scarcity of natural resources. All three of these factors forced the Dutch to be resourceful engineers, merchants, sailors, and artisans. With these geographic factors as a foundation, the Dutch launched themselves on a career that was a classic case of the old saying: it takes money to make money. The whole process started with fish.
In the 1400's, the herring shoals, a mainstay of the Hanseatic League, migrated from the Baltic to North Sea. The Hanseatic League's loss was the Dutch Republic's gain, since, in the absence of refrigeration, salted herring was then an important source of protein in Europe, especially the Netherlands whose population was 40% urban and had to import about 25% of its food. The other half of this trade was salt for preserving the herring. The best sources of salt were off the coasts of France (the Bay of Biscay) and Portugal. These two activities complemented each other well, since the herring season lasted from June to December, so the Dutch could collect salt from December to June.
The Dutch ran large scale operations compared to those of other countries. Unlike the simple open English fishing boats, the Dutch sailed virtual floating factories, called buses, with barrels of salt for curing the herring on board. Although the claims by other competing countries that the Dutch had 3000 ships working the herring shoals were vastly exaggerated (500 being closer to the mark), the Dutch still produced such a volume of salted herring that they could undersell their competition and drive them out of business.
Dutch control of the herring trade touched off a cycle where the Dutch would get profits, invest those profits in new ventures, which generated more profits and so on. This initially led into two general areas of development, foreign trade and the domestic economy, each of which fed back into the cycle of profits and so on. Both of these also led to expansion of trade across the globe to the Mediterranean, West Indies, Africa, East Indies, and the South Pacific, which also fed back into the cycle of profits.
In terms of foreign trade, the Dutch first expanded their operations into the Baltic Sea where they traded for Norwegian timber, Polish grain, and Russian furs for both home consumption and selling abroad. The Baltic trade became so important that the Dutch referred to it as the "Mother Trade."
All this trade required durable, efficient, and cheaply built ships that could operate in the rough waters of the North and Baltic Seas as well as the shallow coastal waterways that were typical of the Netherlands. What the Dutch came up with was the fluyt , a marvel of Dutch efficiency and engineering. The fluyt was both sturdy enough to withstand rough seas and shallow draught for inland waterways. Unlike other countries' merchant ships, which doubled as warships, the fluyt carried few, if any, guns, leaving extra space for cargo. It was cheaper to build, costing little more than half as much as other ships, thanks to the use of mechanical cranes, wind-driven saws, and overall superior shipbuilding techniques.
The fluyt also had simpler rigging that used winches and tackles, thus requiring a crew of only 10 men compared to 20-30 on other European ships. This resulted in two things. First of all, the Dutch could carry and sell goods for half the price their competition had to charge, giving them control of Europe's carrying trade. Second, they were able to dominate Europe's shipbuilding industry.
Meanwhile, the Dutch were developing their domestic economy in two ways. First they invested in a wide variety of industries, some traditional and some new: textiles, munitions, soap boiling, sugar refining, tobacco curing, glass, and diamond cutting. The need for efficient handling of all the money from this and other enterprises spurred the Dutch to develop another aspect of their economy: financial institutions For one thing, they established the Bank of Amsterdam in 1609, the first public bank in North-West Europe, being modeled after the Bank of Venice (f.1587). The vast sums of cash this bank attracted in deposits allowed it to lower interest rates, which in turn brought in more investments, and so on. Even in wartime, the Bank of Amsterdam was able to lower its interest rates from 12% to 4%. The Dutch also created a stock market. At first this was just a commodities market. Only later did it evolve into a futures commodities market where, by the time a shipload of such goods as wool or tobacco landed, someone had already bought it in the hope of reselling it for a profit.
The success of the Baltic Mother Trade and their domestic economy led the Dutch to expand their foreign trade on a global scale. They did this in three basic directions. First was the Mediterranean, where recurring famines hit in the 1590's, signaling the start of a "Little Ice Age" that would afflict Europe for the next century. This opened new markets for Polish grain, which the Dutch traded in return for, among other things, marble. (It was this Italian marble which Louis XIV would buy from the Dutch for his palace at Versailles.) The Dutch even expanded this Mediterranean trade to include doing business with the Ottoman Turks.
Second, when Portugal (then under Spain's rule) closed access to its supplies of salt, the Dutch crossed the Atlantic to find salt in Venezuela. While there, they found the plantations in the West Indies needed slaves, which got them involved in the African slave trade. They also discovered an even more lucrative condiment in the Caribbean than salt: sugar. Soon, the Dutch were founding their own colonies (e.g., Dutch Guiana) and sugar plantations and gaining control of the sugar trade. Soon, sugar was rivaling even the spices of the Far East in value. However, this is not to say the Dutch ignored the Far Eastern trade.
However, breaking into the lucrative Asian Spice market, the third new direction of Dutch expansion, was not so easy. For one thing, they had to find the East Indies. Amazingly, the Portuguese had kept the South East Passage around Africa a secret for a full century since da Gama's epic voyage. The Dutch looked in vain for a northeast passage around Russia. They also sought a southwest passage, which Oliver van der Noort found (1599-1601), making him the third captain to circumnavigate the globe after Ferdinand Magellan and Sir Francis Drake. But that route was no more practical for the Dutch than it had been for the Spanish and English.
Finally, Jan van Linschuten, a Dutch captain who had served Portugal, showed the way around Africa in 1597. Although the first voyage was not a financial success, the second was, bringing back 600,000 pounds of pepper and 250,000 pounds of cloves worth 1.6 million florins, double the initial investment. Investors rushed to get in on the action, forming the Dutch East Indies Company in 1602. This privately owned company operated virtually as an independent state, seizing control of the spice trade from Portugal's weakening grip. From there, always in search of new markets, the Dutch explored the South Pacific, discovering Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania, the last two names bearing evidence of their presence.
Such a far-flung trading empire, combined with the struggle with Spain, required a navy to protect its merchant ships. Therefore, the Dutch developed such a navy, excelling in this as well as their other endeavors. At this point, warships generally followed the principle of the bigger the better. As a result, the man-of-war, as it was called, was a huge and bulky gun platform that did not suit the Dutch needs. For one thing, they needed more of a shallow draught vessel that could sail in their home waters. They also needed a long-range ship that could protect their far-flung commercial interests. The result was the frigate, a sleeker shallow draught vessel with only about 40 guns, but capable of long-range voyages. Dutch frigates, along with their excellent sailors and captains, made the Dutch the supreme naval power of the early 1600's and also helped them dominate the warship-building industry, building navies for both sides in a Danish-Swedish war and even for their French rivals. And, of course, this brought in more money and pushed the Dutch to expand their domestic industries and finance operations in three ways.
By the early 1600's, Amsterdam was the center of world trade, which allowed the Dutch to engage in one more type of activity: patronage of the arts. The seventeenth century saw the Dutch Republic become the center of a cultural flowering much as Italy had been during its Renaissance. Along with money to patronize the arts and sciences, the Dutch Republic had both a free and tolerant atmosphere and enterprising spirit willing to challenge old notions and creatively expand the frontiers of the arts and sciences. The Dutch Republic acted as a virtual magnet for Jewish émigrés from Spain and Portugal and Calvinist dissidents from England, some of who would eventually move on to Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts. The Jewish philosopher from Spain, Spinoza, and the French mathematician, Descartes, were two of the shining lights that the Dutch attracted. Notable among Dutch artists were Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Van Dyck, Steen, Ruysdael, and Hobbema, whose portraits, domestic scenes, landscapes, and mastery of light and shadow brought their age to life on the canvass as no artists before them had done.
The Golden Age of the Dutch Republic was to be short lived, once again largely because of geography. It was the Dutch Republic's great misfortune to border the great land power of the day, France. In the 1670's, the French king, Louis XIV, due to a combination of jealousy of Dutch prosperity and hatred of Protestants, launched a series of wars that would embroil most of Europe and put the Dutch constantly on the front line of battle. At the same time, just across the channel, the growing economic and naval power, England, was challenging the Dutch on the high seas and in the market place. Three brief but sharply fought naval wars plus the strain of fighting off Louis exhausted the Dutch and allowed England to become the premier economic, naval, and colonial power in the world by the 1700's. However, England owed the techniques and innovations for much of what it would accomplish in business and naval development to the Dutch from the previous century.
The roots of the problems of state building in the 1600's, go back to the turmoil of the Dark Ages which helped give rise to two medieval institutions: feudalism and the medieval Church. Feudalism formalized the fragmentation of France into some 300 different legal systems. Over the centuries, custom and tradition firmly established a multitude of local rights and privileges across France. Various nobles and local officials claimed these rights, privileges, and the offices that went with them as their patrimonial birthrights. Meanwhile, the chaos of the age helped make the medieval Church a major factor in state and society. However, the revival of towns and trade in the High Middle Ages helped lead to the rise of kings. They had always been recognized in theory as the rulers of France, but it had been centuries since anyone had taken them seriously.
By the 1200's kings were making serious claims to rule in fact as well as name, strengthening those claims with the doctrine of Divine Right of Kings. However, they were continually clashing with the Church and the locally entrenched rights and privileges that had evolved during the Dark Ages. French courts, known as Parlements, were particularly troublesome in modifying, slowing down, or even stopping the king's decrees from being carried out. The king could appear before the Parlements and plead his case, but that was seen as being beneath his royal dignity and was rarely done.
This made it especially difficult for kings to get new taxes, which the inflation and high military costs of the 1500's made even more necessary. Kings had to resort to such fund raising techniques as taking out loans and selling offices and noble titles to ambitious members of the middle class. Unfortunately, these created even bigger problems. Kings repaid loans through tax farming where creditors would collect the taxes of certain provinces. Naturally, these creditors would take everything they could get from the provinces, which bred widespread corruption and discontent in the absence of a professional bureaucracy to check these abuses. Selling offices and noble titles also bred corruption and made their owners tax exempt. All this merely reduced the king's tax base even more, forcing him to sell more offices and tax farms, and so on until he was so far in debt he would declare bankruptcy or imprison his creditors on charges of corruption in order to erase his debts.
By the mid 1500's, these financial problems, combined with growing religious turmoil and continuing feudal separatism, helped trigger the French Wars of Religion which devastated France on and off for nearly forty years (1562-98). One outcome of these wars was the willingness of people to recognize the king's power in order to ensure the peace. The new king, Henry IV (1598-1610), and his minister, Sully, used this new attitude favoring absolutism and various economic measures to restore the power of the monarchy. First of all, they repudiated all foreign debts, while repaying French creditors at a much lower rate of interest. Second, they established the Paulette, a tax on hereditary offices that would partially make up for lost revenues when commoners bought into the tax-exempt ranks of the nobility. Third, they built and repaired roads and bridges to encourage internal trade. Finally, in the spirit of the economic theory of the day, mercantilism, which encouraged domestic industries to increase the flow of gold and silver into a country, they promoted such luxury industries as silk and tapestries to compete with foreign industries. By the end of Henry's reign, the royal government was probably as financially solid as it had ever been.
Henry's successor, Louis XIII (1610-43), and his minister, Cardinal Richelieu, continued building royal power. They particularly focused on breaking the power of the nobles by destroying their castles, quickly crushing any of their conspiracies, and infringing on their privileges (such as dueling). They also excluded them from royal councils, relying more on middle class officials who had just recently bought noble titles and were thus more reliable. By 1635, they felt France was strong enough to throw its weight into the Thirty Years War to stop Spain. Unfortunately, the war's expense largely wrecked the progress of the last 35 years and forced Richelieu to resort increasingly on tax farming, but this time with one important innovation.
In order to protect the financiers who bought the tax farms, Richelieu created new officials known as Intendants, whose job was to report corruption and make sure the financiers got their money. Naturally, both the financiers and intendants were quite unpopular, and got involved in numerous disputes. However, since the intendants were new officials with no tradition of being tried in local or Church courts, all their cases went to the royal courts, which favored them and the king's interests. Eventually, Richelieu expanded the intendants' authority, making them supreme in all provincial affairs and rearranging the provinces into 32 non-feudal districts known as generalites. This neatly sidestepped the firmly entrenched interests of local authorities and laid the foundations for more thorough royal control of the provinces and France under Louis XIV.
I am the state.— Voltaire, incorrectly quoting Louis XIV
From 1643 to 1815 France dominated much of Europe's political history and culture. Foreigners came to France, preferring it to the charms of their own homeland. Even today, many still consider it the place to visit in Europe and the world. In the 1600's and 1700's there was a good reason for this dominance: population. France had 23,000,000 people in a strongly unified state compared to 5,000,000 in Spain and England, and 2,000,000 in the Dutch Republic and the largest of the German states. This reservoir of humanity first reached for and nearly attained the dominance of Europe under Louis XIV, the "Sun King".
Louis was born in 1638 and succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king in 1643 at the age of five. Luckily, another able minister and Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, continued to run the government. In 1648, encroachment by the government on the nobles' power, poor harvests, high taxes, and unemployed mercenaries plundering the countryside after the Thirty Years War led to a serious revolt known as the Fronde, named after the slingshot used by French boys. Louis and the court barely escaped from Paris with their lives. Although Mazarin and his allies crushed the rebels after five hard years of fighting (1648-53), Louis never forgot the fear and humiliation of having to run from the Parisian mob and fight for his life and throne against the nobles. This bitter experience would heavily influence Louis' policies when he ruled on his own.
From 1643 to 1661, Cardinal Mazarin ruled ably in the young king's interests, although he provided Louis with a rather odd upbringing for a king. Despite an immense fortune, Mazarin was something of a miser who gave the young king inadequate food, clothing, and attention. (Once the young Louis was left unattended and fell into a fountain where he almost drowned.) Louis also got little in the way of a formal education and, even as an adult, was barely literate. But Mazarin did give Louis a sense of what it meant to be a king. As a result, he turned out to be a hard working ruler, but often lacked much common sense and the willingness to entrust enough freedom of action to his subordinates. From his mother, a full-blooded Spanish princess, Louis learned great religious piety and love of ritual, another trait that would influence his reign. In 1661, Mazarin died. Louis' officials, assuming he would be a "do nothing" king like his father, asked to whom they should now answer. Louis' reply was "To me." The age of Louis XIV was about to begin in earnest.
Louis XIV may not have said, "I am the state", but he ruled as if he had said it. Louis was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, and other rulers in Europe could do no better than follow his example. Although Louis wished to be remembered as a great conqueror, his first decade of active rule was largely taken up with building France's internal strength. There are two main areas of Louis' rule we will look at here: finances and the army.
Louis' finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, was an astute businessman of modest lineage, being the son of a draper. Colbert's goal was to build France's industries and reduce foreign imports. This seventeenth century policy where a country tried to export more goods and import more gold and silver was known as mercantilism. While its purpose was to generate revenue for the king, it also showed the growing power of the emerging nation state. Colbert declared his intention to reform the whole financial structure of the French state, and he did succeed in reducing the royal debt by cutting down on the number of tax farms he sold and freeing royal lands from mortgage. Colbert especially concentrated on developing France's economy in three ways.
First of all, Colbert concentrated on developing French internal trade in order to reduce foreign imports. He developed better inland trade routes by building canals and improving ports and river ways, which would connect different parts of the country to each other and open up new markets. Secondly, Colbert worked to develop French industries. Most industries he developed can be seen as being aimed against imports from other countries: mirrors from Venice, lace from England, and iron and firearms from Sweden. He also built a merchant marine to stop foreign powers, especially the Dutch, from carrying French goods and making profits at France's expense. In 1661, France had a merchant marine of 18 ships. By 1681, it was up to 276 ships. Finally, Colbert encouraged the development of overseas colonies much like those of other European powers. During this time, France established and tightened control over colonies in Canada, French Guiana, and Madagascar.
For all his efforts and financial wizardry, Colbert's successes were limited, largely because he was trying to drag a basically medieval economy into the modern world. Guilds were still powerful and held back progress in new production and financing techniques. Local authorities still jealously guarded their rights to charge tolls on trade. Getting across France involved paying up to 100 such local tolls, which of course stifled trade. The tax burden was extremely unfair, with nobles and the Church virtually exempt from taxation even though they controlled much of the land. Colbert's own techniques of having the government control so many aspects of the economy were heavy handed and tended to stifle initiative. His efforts at trying to centrally control France's overseas colonies were especially disastrous.
However, Colbert did make real progress in developing the French economy. A merchant marine and navy were built. Industries were developed. And for a few years Colbert even managed to run the government at a profit. Unfortunately, Louis' desire for glory and conquests led to a long series of wars that embroiled Europe in a new round of bloodshed and wrecked France's economy. Not even Colbert could do anything to stop that.
The army was another primary object of reform. By the mid 1600's, the old system of recruiting armies and fighting wars was clearly outmoded. Mercenaries were disloyal, untrustworthy, and terribly destructive to friend and foe alike. By contrast, the Swedish army of Gustavus Adolphus and the English army of Oliver Cromwell each had loyal native recruits that proved reliable and effective, while Brandenburg-Prussia was transforming its troublesome nobles into a loyal professional officer corps. These lessons were not lost on Louis and his minister of war, Louvois, who built what amounted to one of the first modern national armies. Three aspects of the army they concentrated on were its training and discipline, its equipment, and its supplies.
First of all, soldiers in Louis' new army, whether mercenaries or peasant draftees, found military life was much stricter and more regularized in several ways. For one thing, instead of mercenary captains who recruited, paid, and commanded them, soldiers now answered to the state and its officers. Along these lines, there was also a regular chain of command from the Intendant de l'armee (roughly equivalent to our modern secretary of defense) down through field marshals, generals, colonels, and captains. Officers also got regular training and were much more strictly under the rule of the central government than ever before.
Naturally, the nobles claimed the officers' positions as their birthright. However, the government kept tighter control of its army, largely through new positions filled by men of more humble birth. These lieutenant colonels performed many vital duties in lieu of the noble officers without actually replacing them. In this way, a more modern army helped Louis bring the old troublesome medieval nobility more tightly under his control.
A second reform was that uniforms and equipment were more standardized, which made the army easier to supply, more efficient, and promoted more of a group identity and higher morale. Finally, the army maintained regular supply lines. This reduced the need for foraging, which increased discipline and control over the army and protected the civilian populace from being plundered.
There were two major factors that limited the effectiveness of Louis' military reforms. For one thing, Louis's standing army was large and expensive, having some 400,000 men at its height. It is estimated that a pre-industrial society such as seventeenth century France could only afford to support 1% of its population in the military. Louis' army at its height was nearly twice that, which was a terrible strain on French society. This became especially apparent in Louis' later wars when supply lines broke down, which led to foraging and a breakdown in discipline. Second, the expense of Louis' wars forced him to sell military offices, which brought in less capable and dedicated officers. Overall, Louis' military reforms were much like Colbert's economic reforms. They made progress, but met severe obstacles that prevented them from being completely successful.
Despite these limits to Louis' economic and military reforms, France was the most powerful state in Europe by the late 1660's. Louis realized this quite well, in fact probably too well, because he embarked on an ambitious series of policies that nearly ruined France by the end of his reign. There were three areas where Louis chose to show his power: religion, his palace at Versailles, and foreign expansion.
As a result, Louis gradually restricted the rights of the French Huguenots and finally, in 1685, revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had given them religious freedom since the end of the French Wars of Religion in 1598. This drove 200,000 Huguenots out of France, depriving it of some of its most skilled labor. Thus Louis let his political and religious biases ruin a large sector of France's economy.
Louis' religious faith was largely a superficial one attached to the elaborate ritual of the Catholic mass. This love of ritual also showed itself in how Louis ran his court at his magnificent palace of Versailles, several miles outside of Paris. Much of the reason for building Versailles goes back to the Fronde that had driven Louis from Paris as a young boy. Ever since then, Louis had distrusted the volatile Paris mob and was determined to move the court away from the influence of that city. Versailles was also the showpiece of Louis' reign, glorifying him as the Sun King with its magnificent halls and gardens.
The palace facade was a quarter of a mile across. The famous Hall of Mirrors alone was 250 feet long. Water pumped from the Seine River to hills 500 feet above Versailles fed its fountains. The Orangery had over 1200 orange trees that were moved inside for the winter. All this was built and maintained at tremendous expense. But it was worth it to Louis, regardless of the burden it put on the French people.
As splendid as it may seem, life at Versailles was not always such a picnic. The site itself was on low marshy ground that made it unhealthy to live in. Except for a few magnificent rooms and bedrooms, most people had small cramped rooms with little or no ventilation. Nevertheless, a noble was considered socially and politically dead if he did not live at Versailles. He lived there at his own expense and was expected to keep up a sumptuous life style in order to be a proper ornament for Louis' court. The seemingly endless round of masquerades, plays, operas, and parties eventually grew old to even the most ardent partygoers. For many, life became a bitter series of petty intrigues over such things as who could stand closest to Louis when he held court or got dressed in the morning. Some even saw this as a plot to ruin the nobles by making them go bankrupt while they were trapped in the gilded cage of Versailles. And indeed, Versailles did bankrupt many nobles along with the French government, helping lead to the French Revolution some 75 years after Louis died.
Just as Louis's palace at Versailles dominated European culture during the late 1600's and early 1700's, his diplomacy and wars dominated Europeans political history. As Louis himself put it: "The character of a conqueror is regarded as the noblest and highest of titles." Interestingly enough, he never led his troops in battle except for overseeing a few sieges from a safe distance.
Louis' main goals were to expand France to its "natural borders": the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees. This, of course, would make him enemies among the Dutch, Germans, Austrians, Spanish, and English. Therefore, Louis' diplomacy had to clear the way to make sure he did not fight everyone at once. For this purpose he skillfully used money to neutralize potential enemies (such as Charles II of England in the Secret Treaty of Dover) and extracted favorable terms from stalemate or losing situations. But Louis could also make some fateful blunders to hurt his cause. His obsessive hatred of the Dutch dominated his policy too much, as did his own self-confidence and arrogance in trying to publicly humiliate his enemies. However, this just alarmed Louis' enemies more, especially the Dutch, Austrians, and English, who allied against Louis to preserve the balance of power.
Several new inventions transformed the warfare of this period. First of all there was the bayonet, invented in Bayonne, France around 1670. This blade, when attached to the end of a musket, transformed it into a short pike, thus eliminating the need for separate pikemen to protect the musketeers in hand-to-hand combat. Second, there was the flintlock musket, which provided more reliable firing and faster loading than the old matchlock muskets. Finally, there was the introduction of paper cartridges with pre-measured amounts of gunpowder that also sped up the process of loading in combat. With all infantrymen carrying flintlock muskets, premeasured charges of powder, and bayonets for hand-to-hand combat, generals could create much less dense formations and greatly stretch their battle lines.
These new linear tactics vastly increased European armies' firepower and warfare's destructiveness. They also made armies harder to control since they were stretched out over such a great distance. As a result, discipline was tightened even more, which further increased the power of the state over its armies. It also made it harder to attract recruits, leading to a growing reliance on peasant draftees.
The general trend in Louis' wars was for them to become increasingly longer, bloodier, and less successful. His first major conflict, the War of Devolution, lasted only two years (1667-1668). Louis' goal was to conquer the Spanish Netherlands (modern Belgium), which would give him control of the mouth of the Rhine and much of Germany's trade.
At this point, Colbert's financial measures provided Louis a strong economic base with which to wage war. Louis' military reforms had also given him the best fighting machine in Europe. The system of supply lines worked so well that the French officers were even supplied with silverware for their tables. As a result, Louis gained several strategic towns and fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands. However, Europe's suspicion and fear of French aggression had been aroused, and each succeeding war would be progressively harder for Louis to win.
The Dutch War (1672-78) brought in the Dutch Republic, Spain, Brandenburg-Prussia, Denmark, and Austria against Louis. French progress was much slower, and fighting much costlier, as the Dutch in particular fought desperately to defend their homeland, even opening the dikes to flood out the French. Although Louis gained nothing against the Dutch, he did win lands along the Rhine at the expense of various German states, but at considerable cost. France lost its two best field marshals, and the French people endured ever-higher taxes, some peasants even being reduced to making bread from acorns and roots.
Louis' next adventure, the War of the League of Augsburg, also known as the Nine Years War (1688-97), embroiled Europe in an even more prolonged and fruitless conflict. French expansion was directed across the Rhine into Germany while Austria was preoccupied with its Turkish war. Austria put the Turks on hold and allied with the Dutch, English, and several German states to stop French aggression. Fighting raged through most of the 1690's. Peasants were drafted in greater numbers, taxes were raised to intolerable heights, and a major famine in 1694 merely added to the misery. Finally, peace was made in 1697 with little changed, except for everyone being severely weakened by the senseless struggle. By 1700, France's population had declined from an estimated 23,000,000 in 1670 to 19,000,000.
Unfortunately, a new and bloodier war soon arose. This time the prize was Spain and its extensive empire, left without a ruler by the death of Charles II. Louis' grandson had an excellent claim through Louis' wife, a Spanish princess. Predictably, the rest of Europe would not tolerate a French Empire that surpassing even that of Charles V in the 1500's. The resulting conflict, the War of the Spanish Succession, would bring twelve more dreary years of warfare and destruction to Europe (1701-13).
For the first time, Louis' generals suffered decisive defeats, mostly at the hands of the brilliant British general, John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough. French armies were thrown on the defensive, and French peasants were drafted in growing numbers to defend their homeland. Resistance stiffened and the war ground down to a bloody stalemate. Exhaustion on both sides finally led to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Louis' grandson took the throne of Spain and its American empire, but the French and Spanish thrones could not be united under one ruler. Austria got the Spanish Netherlands to contain French aggression to the north. Just as the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 had contained Hapsburg aggression, the Treaty of Utrecht contained French expansion. Two years later Louis XIV was dead, with little to show for his vaunted ambitions as a conqueror except an exhausted economy and dissatisfied populace.
The age of Louis XIV was important to European history for several reasons. First of all, it saw the triumph of absolutism in France and continental Europe. Versailles was a glittering symbol and example for other European rulers to follow. Any number of German and East European monarchs modeled their states and courts after Louis XIV, sometimes to the point of financial ruin. Second, Louis' wars showed the system of Balance of Power politics working better than ever. French aggression was contained and the status quo was maintained. All this had its price, since the larger sizes of the armies and the final replacement of the pike with the musket took European warfare to a new level of destruction. Finally, Louis' reign definitely established France as the dominant power in Europe. However, the cost was immense and left his successors a huge debt. Ironically, the problems caused by Louis XIV's reign would help lead to the French Revolution in 1789 and the spread of democratic principles across Europe and eventually the world.
The state of monarchy is the supremest thing on earth; for kings are not only God's lieutenants on earth, but even by God himself they are called gods.<\q> — James I of England
A king is a thing men have made for their own sakes, for quietness' sake. Just as in a family one man is appointed to buy the meat...— John Selden
As the Greek philosopher, Heracleitus, said, nothing is so constant as change. While history has always seen changes taking place, few times and places saw more dramatic changes in such a wide variety of areas ranging from fashions and diet to the Scientific Revolution as England saw in the 1600's. But nowhere were there more sweeping changes than in the realm of government. In 1600, the absolute monarch believing in the concept of Divine Right of Kings was becoming the most fashionable form of rule. By 1700, a new more democratic government with checks and balances between the executive (king) and legislative (Parliament) branches had emerged in England, setting the stage for modern democracies.
There were three main factors that came to the surface in the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) to set the stage for the English Revolution. For one thing, going back to the Magna Charta (1215) which itself drew upon even more ancient Anglo-Saxon traditions, England had a long tradition that no one, not even the king, is above the law. Secondly, Elizabeth reigned in a period of intense religious strife, both within England itself as well as triggering an expensive war with Spain. Finally, the 1500's and 1600's were a period of rampant inflation, which made monarchs everywhere increasingly desperate for money.
The convergence of these factors during Elizabeth's reign generated problems in two critical areas: money and religion. As far as money went, the Queen knew how to get money from Parliament while outwardly showing respect to that body's rights and privileges. However, such treatment gave Parliament a growing sense of its own power and importance, which it was unlikely to give up peacefully. Elizabeth also partly paid for her rising expenses from the struggle with Spain by selling up to one-fourth of the royal estates. This left her successors with even less of an independent financial base, which in turn made them more dependent on Parliament for funds, thus leading to fights over money.
In religion, Elizabeth skillfully maintained peace in England while much of Europe was embroiled in religious wars. She did this by grafting moderate Protestant theology onto Catholic style ritual and organization. She also blunted the ferocity of the religiously radical Puritans (Calvinists) by incorporating many of them into the hierarchy of the Church of England. However, this put many Puritans into positions of authority where they could demand more sweeping reforms beyond the Queen's lukewarm Protestantism. In addition, many of these Puritans were also members of the gentry (lower nobles) and middle classes who controlled the House of Commons in Parliament and voted on taxes. Thus the issues of religion and money became even more tangled.
Religious wars, which threatened everyone's peace and security, and inflation, which made maintaining armies too expensive for rebellious nobles, also combined to help with the rise of absolutism in Europe. This rising tide of absolutism would influence the Stuart kings of England to try to establish absolutism in their own realm in spite of popular opinion. A less skillful and diplomatic ruler than Elizabeth would have trouble dealing with these new forces rising up in England. Such an undiplomatic ruler succeeded Elizabeth in the person of James I (1603-1625).
While Elizabeth had so skillfully kept the issues of money and religion in check, James' absolutist beliefs and abrasive personality brought them to the surface. As far as religion went, James fought the largely Puritan Parliament to keep the Church of England's Catholic style ritual, decorations, and hierarchy of clergy, over which he as king had control. In money matters, king and Parliament clashed over James' growing requests for money to support his lavish lifestyle. He also angered the middle class by raising customs duties, one of his main sources of revenue, to keep pace with inflation. While James and Parliament never completely broke with one another over these issues, their constant squabbling did set the stage for the revolution that was to follow.
While the individual events of the English Revolution could be somewhat involved and complicated, they did fit into a basic pattern. Parliament and the ruler of England would clash over the issues of religion and taxes as the government became less decisive and/or reasonable. This would trigger a reaction by Parliament that would bring in a new ruler, and then the process would start all over again. This cycle would repeat itself three times over the next sixty years, with each successive stage feeding back into the aforementioned cycle as well as into the next stage.
The first stage would see England plunged into civil war (1642-49) that would result in the beheading of Charles I and the rise of the Puritans and Parliament to power. In the second stage, continued fighting over religion and money, this time between Parliament and its army, would bring in military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell in the 1650's. After Cromwell's death (1658) would come the third stage with the restoration of the monarchy (1661-88). However, the old conflicts over money and religion would resurface in the reign of James II and lead to his overthrow by Parliament with the help of William III and Mary of Holland in 1688.
This time, Britain would resolve its cycle of conflicts in what is known as the Glorious Revolution (1688) This established a constitutional monarchy where the law is above the king, not the other way around as often happened in absolute monarchies. The Glorious Revolution would have three important results. First of all, it would lead to the political triumph of the rich middle class and nobles in Parliament which had the sole right to grant taxes for one year at a time, thus forcing the king to call Parliament each year if he wanted taxes. Also, in order to keep the king from packing Parliament with his own men for an extended period of time, Parliamentary elections were to be held every two years. While the Glorious Revolution resulted in a political victory for a narrow upper class oligarchy, it opened the way for further reforms over the next 200 years to make England a more truly democratic society.
Second, the Glorious Revolution gave all Englishmen a Bill of Rights guaranteeing such civil liberties as speech, assembly, religion (except for Catholics and Unitarians at this time), and due process of law. Both the political and civil liberties gained by the English would help lead to the French Revolution which in turn would spread the ideas of democracy across Europe and the globe.
Third was the establishment of the Bank of England (1694), which was modeled after the Bank of Amsterdam. This national bank would both provide the government with the funds it needed while repaying its loans with interest. This helped foster a more prosperous economy and encourage more investment in the bank, which in turn helped provide the government with more funds, and so on. This feedback of growing profits would eventually provide Britain with the money to start the other revolution that would spread worldwide: the industrial revolution. had plunged into civil war.
James I (1603-25), Elizabeth I's successor (who also ruled Scotland as James VI), was much more overbearing and prone to make enemies than Elizabeth had been. He lectured Parliament on the Divine Right of Kings and even wrote a treatise on it, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies. Such an attitude did not set too well with Parliament. James' abrasive manner, absolutist beliefs, more Catholic concept of what the Church of England should be, and demands for money to support his lavish lifestyle made him many enemies who dubbed him the "most learned fool in Christendom."
In religious matters, the king headed the High Commission, which exercised powers of censorship and excommunication and appointed the higher clergy who in turn chose the local clergy. News of the outside world came mainly from the clergy who got their news from the higher clergy and ultimately the king. As Charles I: put it: "People are governed by the pulpit more than the sword in times of peace." No wonder that religion became the main focal point of trouble at this time. There was also the issue of observing the Sabbath. Puritans felt that Sundays should be reserved for strictly religious activities and discussions. The king, fearing that such discussions might breed revolution, encouraged more frivolous sports on Sundays to keep people militarily fit and harmlessly occupied. Such a policy outraged the Puritans and turned them further against the king.
Money was the other big source of conflict, and the House of Commons in Parliament was the primary battlefield. Among Parliament's most jealously guarded liberties was the right to grant taxes. This had not been such a vital issue when kings could largely get by on the revenue from their estates, various feudal fees, and the right to sell monopolies and titles. However, inflation further reduced the value of the royal estates after Elizabeth sold a quarter of them, James own extravagant lifestyle and the rising cost of warfare in the 1500's and early 1600's led to growing friction between king and Parliament over money.
Parliament then was not so democratic in makeup as today. Even the House of Commons consisted solely of gentry (lower nobles) and merchants with an annual income of at least 40 shillings, a sizable sum back then. The rights and privileges they jealously guarded and fought for, such as immunity from arrest and flogging and the right to free speech, were reserved for them alone, not the lower 90% of society. As one Member of Parliament put it: "He that hath no prosperity in his goods is not free." Still, the rights and privileges Parliament fought for and won in the 1600's set a precedent, and eventually would extend to all of society.
James did have one growing source of revenue: customs duties from a rapidly expanding foreign trade. In order to take advantage of this, James raised the taxable value of various commodities to keep up with their real market value, which had risen due to inflation. Naturally, the merchants in Parliament disliked this tactic and disputed James' right to revise those values without Parliament's consent.
Further aggravating James' problems was the lack of an efficient bureaucracy such as was developing in continental states. Taxes were collected by tax farming, where local merchants paid a lump sum to the king in advance and then collected however many taxes they could get away with. This, of course, led to lower royal revenues, more corruption, and rising tensions.
Thus the stage was set for a conflict between the king on one side and Parliament and the Puritans on the other. During James' reign, relations with Parliament were generally stormy. Constant haggling over money and such religious issues as the existence of bishops in the Church of England would reach fever pitch and then subside with an occasional compromise to patch things up. There was even a temporary alliance between king and Parliament when a proposed marriage alliance with Spain (which was very unpopular with Parliament) fell through and got England involved in the broader conflict known as the Thirty Years War. For the time being, this drove king and Parliament together against the common Catholic enemy. However, the overall situation was deteriorating, and by James' death in 1625, relations between the two parties were, at best, strained.
It was said that James steered the ship of state for the rocks, but left it for his son, Charles I, to wreck it. Charles was undiplomatic, insensitive to public opinion, and a weak monarch who let events get out of control and send England drifting toward civil war. Charles, like his father, was largely a victim of the times, being caught between rising prices and the rising aspirations of Parliament and the Puritans on the one hand and his own ideas favoring Catholicism and absolutism on the other. Charles even resorted to forcing loans out of men and imprisoning those who refused to cooperate. In 1628 Parliament reacted by forcing Charles to sign the Petition of Right in which he agreed not to levy taxes without Parliament's consent, imprison free men without due process of law, or quarter his troops with private citizens. After this, he dissolved Parliament and ruled on his own.
For the next eleven years (1629-40) Charles managed to get by without Parliament by stretching various royal rights and fees to the limit. One of these methods was selling monopolies. Under this system only the man who bought a monopoly on a particular type of goods had the exclusive right to sell or grant the right to others to sell those goods. This wreaked havoc with prices and caused a good deal of discontent, especially since the monopolists controlled a wide range of products including buttons, pins, dyes, butter, tin, beer, barrels, tobacco, dice, pens, paper, gunpowder, feathers, soap, lace, and hay to name just a few. Another method was extending the traditional ship's tax (previously levied only on coastal towns) to the whole countryside. As unpopular as these measures were, they raised the king his money and kept him going.
Charles might have continued like this indefinitely, but in 1637, he tried to impose the English Prayer Book on the Scots and triggered a revolt instead. Unfortunately for Charles, many of the Scots were battle-hardened veterans from the Thirty Years War who made short work of his largely untrained rabble. Desperately in need of money to continue his war, Charles called Parliament in 1640. However, after three weeks of arguing with Parliament over the last eleven years' religious and monetary policies, the king dismissed this "Short Parliament." However, the Scots did not go away. Instead, they occupied part of the north and made Charles promise a large sum of money every day until a final settlement was reached. Charles had no choice but to call Parliament again. This Parliament is known to history as the Long Parliament, because it would sit for over a decade and preside over a civil war and the end of absolute monarchy in England.
The events leading to civil war were a bit more straightforward. Charles, desperate for money and support to take care of the Scots, initially agreed to Parliament's demands. He would not levy taxes or dismiss Parliament without its consent. And he would agree to call Parliament at least every three years. He even let Parliament execute one of his chief ministers, Sir Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford.
However, there was hardly peace between king and Parliament, only an uneasy truce. In November 1641, a spark was struck which led to civil war. A revolt broke out in Ireland, with Irish Catholics killing thousands of English and Scottish Protestants who had taken their best lands. An army was needed, but neither king nor Parliament was going to allow the other to command such an army. When Parliament refused Charles his army, he sent troops in to arrest five Parliamentary leaders. They found refuge in London and support from other towns. Charles left London, and by August 1642, England had plunged into civil war.
Trust in God and keep your powder dry.— remark attributed to Oliver Cromwell
Few people on either side wanted civil war. However, the issues involved were so important and the differences between the two sides so great that each party felt itself forced into war. Although both sides had support from all classes, one can generalize about where each side got its support. The king's centers of power were in the more agricultural regions of the North and West. His main supporters tended to be the upper nobles, known as peers, from the House of Lords. In the war they were referred to as Cavaliers since they mainly fought as cavalry. Parliament's support came mainly from lower nobles (gentry) and the middle class merchants concentrated in the towns and ports in southeastern England. They were known as Roundheads for their short haircuts, as opposed to the long hair of the Cavaliers. (In fact, many parliamentary leaders, being from the upper classes, kept their hair long.) Both sides also looked outside of England for help. The king hoped for support from the Catholic Irish, while Parliament was allied to the Scots. Since the Roundheads controlled the ports and the navy, the king was virtually cut off from his Irish allies. Meanwhile, the Scots could provide very effective aid to Parliament.
Historians used to think that both sides fought poorly in the early stages of the war, since England, being an island, had no standing army and little in the way of a military since the Hundred Years War. However, recent research shows that both sides drew heavily upon veterans from the Thirty Years War and fought more effectively than previously supposed. Despite inferior manpower and resources, the king's forces did have superior cavalry, led by the king's dashing German nephew, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, and could more than hold their own against the Puritans in the early stages of the war.
The first battle, Edgehill (1642), was a bloody draw, probably cut short by lack of gunpowder. Both sides came out of this realizing the need for training, discipline, and supplies. Ultimately, Parliament's superior resources and the Puritans' greater willingness to submit to military discipline would be decisive in the war's outcome. It was here that one of the key figures of English history first emerged: Oliver Cromwell.
Cromwell was an obscure country gentleman and stern Puritan, typical of many gentry who sided with Parliament. After Edgehill, it was apparent that the Puritans needed better cavalry to face Prince Rupert's wild cavalry charges. Cromwell raised and trained such a regiment, later known as Ironsides for its steadiness in battle. Rather than taking mercenaries drawn from the dregs of society, Cromwell relied mainly on men of a religious nature and committed to the cause instead of looting and plundering. Their first test came in 1644 at Marston Moor. Ironsides held fast against the cavaliers, and the king's forces were crushed.
In January 1645, Parliament passed an ordinance to form the New Model Army. Contrary to the myth of the body of "Bible warriors," the New Model Army was made up of draftees and mercenaries fighting for money. However, following Cromwell's example, it was a highly trained and disciplined professional force with regular pay and equipment. In the 1640's and 1650's it would be the most feared army in Europe. Later that year, it met and destroyed the king's last army at Naseby. Charles surrendered to the Scots hoping to turn them against Parliament. However, they turned him over to Parliament.
Charles was right in assuming he could split the victors, and the reasons for that split were largely the same reasons that had first led to civil war: money, religion, and government. The civil war, like most wars, had been expensive, and Parliament did not have the money to pay the New Model Army it had raised. It tried to disband the army without pay, promising to repay it later. This did not set too well with the troops, who refused to disband. Instead, they set up a General Council of the Army composed of generals, officers, and "agitators", elected from the rank and file. This council took custody of the king, occupied London, and forced 11 parliamentary leaders out of the House of Commons.
Religion was another point of controversy between Parliament and army. Both parties were Puritans, but of somewhat different types. Most of Parliament wanted a state run, or Presbyterian, church. Most of the army, including Cromwell, wanted independent churches with freedom of religion. This was what many of them had fought for, and they were not about to give it up to Parliament.
Finally, there was the issue of what sort of government the victors would establish. Parliament and most of the officers, including Cromwell, were property owners who felt that they were most fit to rule since they had so much property to be responsible for. The rank and file in the army, sensing their power, pushed for a much more radical and democratic government. The most radical of these, the Levelers, wanted the vote for all men, a bill of rights, and the abolition of the monarchy and House of Lords. A meeting of the General Council of the Army led to a deadlock between the officers and common troops. Cromwell ended the discussion and ordered the agitators back to their regiments, having one of them shot in order to convince the others to submit.
At this point, events forced army and Parliament to reunite, because Charles had escaped and raised the Scots and English royalists in revolt with promises of establishing a Scottish style Presbyterian Church if he regained his throne. This second civil war was a short and decisive affair. Cromwell, armed with the New Model Army, moved to annihilate the Scottish and royalist forces in quick succession.
Once this war was over, Cromwell and the army moved just as decisively to resolve the problems in London. First, there was Parliament, which the army especially disliked since some Parliamentary members had entered into negotiations with Charles to restore the monarchy. This led to Pride's Purge, named after a Colonel Pride who used the army to expel some 100 Presbyterian members. This left a "Rump Parliament" of about 60 members who were more agreeable or submissive to the will of Cromwell and the army. Next came the king, who was tried for treason and executed on January 30, 1649. Bishops and the House of Lords were abolished and the religious independents prevailed.
However, the democratic reforms that the Levelers and much of the army hoped for never materialized. Resulting mutinies were quickly put down and Leveler demonstrations led to the arrest of their leaders. Henceforth, military dictatorship would rule England. At first, Cromwell ruled through the Rump Parliament and a government known as the Commonwealth (1649-53). However, frustrated by what he saw as Parliament's lack of fervor for his type of rule, he established a more blatant dictatorship known as the Protectorate with himself as Lord Protector.
Outside of England, Cromwell faced a war with Scotland, which he conquered and ruled with some moderation since the Scots were fellow Protestants. Catholic Ireland, another enemy, was not so lucky. Cromwell's conquest of Ireland was methodical and brutal, leaving wounds that still have not healed today. Like it or not, Scotland and Ireland were incorporated into the greater Commonwealth of Britain, something no English king had been able to do. Cromwell also had an aggressive foreign policy outside of Britain, fighting successful wars against the Dutch and Spanish. England was becoming a military and naval power to be reckoned with.
Inside England, people felt Cromwell's heavy hand as well. His wars, standing army of 30,000 men, and navy required taxes three times higher than any which James I and Charles I had ever imposed. Churches were more locally controlled, but people were expected to live good religious lives. Theaters, taverns, and racetracks were all closed down. People dressed in somber colors to reflect the mood of the ruling regime. Life under Cromwell seemed like Calvinist Geneva, except on a much grander scale. Rather than put up with this regime, many cavalier families, such as the Washingtons, Madisons, and Monroes, left England for the American colonies, especially Virginia, much like the Puritans had fled to New England from royal repression thirty years earlier. These two ways of life, the aristocratic nobles in the South and the capitalist Puritans in the North, would take root and clash with one another two centuries later. Thus the American Civil War was largely an extension of the English Revolution.
Oliver Cromwell died on September 3, 1658. He was certainly one of the greatest figures in English history, although his motives and the nature of his greatness are still disputed by historians. However, no one of his caliber emerged to take firm control of England after him. His son Richard tried, failed, and resigned. This led to various generals wrangling over power. People in general were tired of the strict Puritan rule. They also longed for a king, since that was the traditional ruler for a country. Finally, a certain General Monk led the army in Scotland to London, restored the Long Parliament, and asked Charles II, Charles I's son who had escaped to France, to come back as the king. England's experiment in government without a king was about to end.
Western science, like so many other aspects of Western Civilization, was born with the ancient Greeks. They were the first to explain the world in terms of natural laws rather than myths about gods and heroes. They also passed on the idea of the value of math and experiment in science, although they usually thought only in terms of one to the exclusion of the other. It is easy for us to be critical of their early scientific theories, but we must remember several things about their world. First, by that time, the human race had learned to exploit the environment for survival (e.g., agriculture, woven cloth, metallurgy, etc.), but knew little about the physical laws that rule nature and the universe. Also, there were no telescopes, microscopes, or other instruments to aid the naked eye in its observations and measurements. Everything they learned about the natural world had to be done with the unaided senses and whatever rational deductions they could make based on them.
Knowing the limitations the Greeks operated under helps us appreciate the scientific view of the world they evolved and handed down to posterity. The Greeks realized the limitations to their observations, and many of them argued that relying on one's senses was a faulty way to unravel the mysteries of the universe. The philosopher, Plato, compared our perception of reality to that of a man chained to the wall of a cave who only sees shadows from the outside world cast against the opposite wall.
However, other Greek philosophers argued that use of the senses for observation, as faulty as it may be, was still worthwhile. One of these Greeks, and by far the most influential figure in Western science until the 1600's, was the philosopher, Aristotle, who created a body of scientific theory that towered like a colossus over Western Civilization for some 2000 years. Given the limitations under which the Greeks were working compared to now, Aristotle's theories made sense when taken in a logical order.
Three basic observations laid the foundations for Aristotle's view of the universe and laws of motion: First of all, there was the theory of the elements. The Greeks came up with several theories on the elements, including Democritus' atomic theory, the idea that all matter is composed of tiny indivisible particles called atoms (from the Greek atomon = indivisible). Other Greeks observed three basic states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. As a result, they came up with four basic elements to correspond to the states of matter: earth (solid), water (liquid), air (gas), plus fire, which the Greeks saw as an element. Of course, since few objects are made of just one element, it was logical to assume they were compounds of two or more of the terrestrial elements. The Greeks spent a good deal of time figuring out the elements different objects contained by observing the qualities they exhibited. For example, wood is composed of earth (because it is solid), fire (because it burns), and air (because the ash left behind floats on top of water). Second, there was the observation that the stars, sun, planets, and moon seem to orbit the earth in perfect circles. Finally, all dropped objects seem to fall toward the center of the earth. These led to several important conclusions.
For one thing, the theory of four elements plus the perfect circular orbits of the stars and planets gave rise to the idea that the celestial bodies were made of a perfect element, ether. Ether was weightless or very light so the stars and planets could easily orbit the earth every day. It must also be perfect, incorruptible, and unrelated to the earthly elements since its motions are always in perfect circles, a motion rarely seen on earth.
Second, the motion of dropped objects toward the center of the earth (no matter where on earth they are dropped) and the apparent orbits of the heavenly bodies around the earth led to the geocentric theory, the idea that the earth is the center of the universe. Aristotle and most educated Greeks assumed the earth was round since one can see ships disappear over the horizon, the earth casts a round shadow on the moon during lunar eclipses, and the positions of the stars change as we move north or south.
Finally, there was Aristotle's law of motion. Aristotle saw that heavier objects (made of earth and water) have a tendency to fall or sink toward the center of the earth, while lighter objects (made of air and fire) rise or float. He called these tendencies of the elements to rise or fall natural motions and said that all elements have an inclination to rise or fall to their natural resting places in relation to one another. Aristotle called all other terrestrial motions forced or violent motions since they needed an outside force in constant contact with the object in order to take place. Thus the theory of four terrestrial (earthly) elements and the falling of those elements toward the center of the earth led to a law of motion which said everything must stay in contact with a prime mover in order to keep moving and could only be stopped by some other intervening object or force.
There were several factors that worked both to overthrow Aristotle's system and to preserve it. First of all, Aristotle's theories relied very little on experiment, which left them vulnerable to anyone who chose to perform such experiments. However, attacking one part of Aristotle's system involved attacking the whole thing, which made it a daunting task for even the greatest thinkers of the day. Secondly, the Church had grafted Aristotle's theories onto its theology, thus making any attack on Aristotle an attack on the tradition and the Church itself.
Finally, there were the Renaissance scholars who were uncovering other Greek authors who contradicted Aristotle. This was unsettling, since these scholars had a reverence for all ancient knowledge as being nearly infallible. However, finding contradicting authorities forced the Renaissance scholars to try to figure out which ones were right. When their findings showed that neither theory was right, they had to think for themselves and find a new theory that worked. This encouraged skepticism, freethinking, and experimentation, all of which are essential parts of modern science.
The combination of these factors generated a cycle that undermined Aristotle, but also slowed down the creation of a new set of theories. New observations would be made that seemed to contradict Aristotle's theories. This would lead to new explanations, but always framed in the context of the old beliefs, thus patching up the Aristotelian system. However, more observations would take place, leading to more patching of the old system, and so on. The first person who started this slow process of dismantling Aristotle's cosmology was Copernicus. His findings would reinforce the process of finding new explanations, which would lead to the work of Kepler and Galileo. The work of these three men would lead to many new questions and theories about the universe until Isaac Newton would take the new data and synthesize it into a new set of theories that more accurately explained the universe.
Copernicus' solution was basically geometric. By placing the sun at the center of the universe and having the earth orbit it, he reduced the unwieldy number of epicycles from 80 to 34. His book, Concerning the Revolutions of the Celestial Worlds, published in 1543, laid the foundations for a revolution in how Europeans would view the world and its place in the universe. However, Copernicus' intention was not to create a radically new theory, but to get back to even older ideas by such Greeks as Plato and Pythagoras who believed in a heliocentric (sun centered) universe. Once again, ancient authorities were set against one another, leaving it for others to develop their own theories.
It took some 150 years after Copernicus' death in 1543 to achieve a new model of the universe that worked. The first step was compiling more data that tarnished the perfection of the Ptolemaic universe and forced men to re-evaluate their beliefs.
At this time, Tycho Brahe, using only the naked eye, tracked the entire orbits of various stars and planets. Previously, astronomers would only track part of an orbit at a time and assume that orbit was in a perfect circle. Brahe kept extensive records of his observations, but did not really know what to do with them. That task was left to his successor, Johannes Kepler.
Kepler was a brilliant mathematician who had a mystical vision of the mathematical perfection of the universe that owed a great deal to the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras. Despite these preoccupations, Kepler was open minded enough to realize that Brahe's data showed the planetary orbits were not circular. Finally, his calculations showed that those orbits were elliptical.
As important as Kepler's conclusions was his method of arriving at it. He was the first to successfully use math to define the workings of the cosmos. Although such a conclusion as elliptical orbits inevitably met with fierce opposition, the combination of Brahe's observations and Kepler's math helped break the perfection of the Aristotelian universe. However, it was the work of an Italian astronomer, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), armed with a new invention, the telescope, which would further shatter the old theory and lead the way to a new one.
In the year 1608, several Flemish gentlemen arrived in Venice carrying a startling new invention: the telescope. Upon hearing of this, Galileo, who was then working in Venice, quickly figured out its principles and built one himself, increasing its magnification from three times to ten. He got the Venetian senate excited about the telescope as an early warning device that could spot enemy ships twenty miles away and make them appear as if they were only two miles away. Galileo's curiosity was a bit more far ranging than spotting enemy ships, and eventually he turned his gaze toward the skies. That was when trouble began.
The impact of that first telescope can better be appreciated by imagining how our views of the universe might change if our technology increased our view of the universe by a factor of ten times. Galileo's findings were probably more disturbing. He saw the sun's perfection marred by sunspots and the moon's perfection marred by craters. He also saw four moons orbiting Jupiter. In his book, The Starry Messenger (1611), he reported these disturbing findings and spread the news across Europe. Most people could not understand Kepler's math, but anyone could look through a telescope and see for himself the moon's craters and Jupiter's moons.
The Church tried to preserve the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic view of the universe by clamping down on Galileo and his book and made him promise not to preach his views. However, in 1632, Galileo published his next book, Dialogue on the Great World Systems, which technically did not preach the Copernican theory (which Galileo believed in), but was only a dialogue presenting both views "equally". Galileo got his point across by having the advocate of the Church and Aristotelian view named Simplicius (Simpleton). He was quickly faced with the Inquisition and the threat of torture. Being an old man of 70, he recanted his views. However, it was too late. Word was out, and the heliocentric heresy was gaining new followers daily.
Galileo's work was the first comprehensive attack on the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic cosmic model. He treated celestial objects as being subject to the same laws as terrestrial objects. However, Galileo was still enthralled with perfect circular motion and, as a result, did not come up with the synthesis of all these new bits of information into a new comprehensive model of the universe. This was left to the last, and probably greatest, giant of the age, Isaac Newton.
Meanwhile, two celestial phenomena added further doubts about the Aristotelan system. First, a bright new star (probably a supernova explosion) suddenly appeared in 1572. Within a year, it was gone from the sky, leaving in its wake doubts about the changeless perfection of the stars. Five years later, a new comet cut across the skies and through the crystalline spheres that were supposed to hold the stars and planets in their orbits. Of course, the question was raised: did such perfect spheres even exist, and, if they did, how could a comet cross through them?
One needs to understand the new problems that the discoveries of the 1500's and early 1600's presented for seventeenth century scientists. Galileo's work had done more to destroy the Aristotelian system than create a new working one. As a result, there was great confusion among scholars as to what the structure of the universe really was. There were three major problems confronting them. One problem bothering seventeenth century scientists concerned the nature of motion. Aristotle's law of inertia said basically two things:
An object is naturally at rest unless moving toward its natural resting place. It takes forced or violent action to move that object, and that force must be in constant contact for the object to keep moving.
The object will keep moving until something else intervenes to stop it.
The main problem with Aristotle's law of inertia was the assumption that the moving object had to be in constant contact with the moving force. For example, the question was raised of how could an arrow keep flying once removed from the force driving it. This was explained by saying the air being displaced by the arrow went around behind it and pushed it along. This seemed unlikely, since the same air driving the arrow also would also be slowing it down.
This concept of a prime mover had bothered Renaissance scholars, who then came up with the new theory of Impetus. According to this, moving objects were carried forward by some vague force within the object or imparted to it like the heat in a red-hot piece of iron. The theory of impetus allowed people to discuss motion after contact with a mover was broken. There was just one problem with this theory: it was wrong. Nevertheless, it was an important theory because it challenged Aristotle's authority and opened the way to a new theory. The great French mathematician, Descartes, finally came up with the modern theory of inertia, which said a moving object will keep moving in a straight line until something interferes to stop it or slow it down.
The second problem bothering philosophers was what kept objects from flying out of their orbits and into space. Descartes, like Aristotle, did not believe in the existence of vacuums, since they would create no resistance to moving objects, thus allowing them to accelerate to infinite speed, which, of course, is both impossible and absurd. Space, according the Descartes, was filled with ether and cosmic whirlpools that kept the planets in orbit. Not everyone discounted the existence of vacuums, especially since the experiments of Galileo's student, Toricelli, with barometric pressure proved that vacuums can and do exist. Once again this raised the problem of what keeps the planets and stars in orbit if ether did not
The Englishman, William Gilbert offered a solution in 1600, suggesting that magnetism was the answer. He saw the earth as a giant magnet, keeping both terrestrial and celestial objects from flying off into space. Although his theory was basically wrong, it did open people's minds to the idea of objects exerting a pull on one another. As a result, in 1643, the Frenchman, Roberval, suggested a theory of universal gravitation, the tendency of all matter to have an attraction for all other matter. However, he did not have the math to prove the theory.
Even if Roberval's theory of gravity were right, it raised a third problem: what keeps the moon and other celestial bodies from falling to earth? For Roberval, it was the resistance of ether in space. In 1665, Alphonse Borelli suggested centrifugal force. A mathematician named Huygens figured out the formula for centrifugal force, but he also believed in circular motion. And there was still the problem of what kept the sun, moon, planets, and stars in their orbits. That was where Isaac Newton came in.
The story of Newton being hit on the head by an apple may very well be true. However, the significance of this popular tale is usually lost. People had seen apples fall out of trees for thousands of years, but Newton realized, in a way no one else had realized, that the same force pulling the apples to earth was keeping the moon in its orbit. Of course, Roberval had suggested this before, but Newton proved it mathematically. In order to do this, he had to invent a whole new branch of math, calculus, for figuring out rates of motion and change. The genius of Newton in physics, as well as William Harvey in medicine and Mendeleev in chemistry, was not so much in his new discoveries, as in his ability to take the isolated bits and pieces of the puzzle collected by his predecessors and fit them together. In retrospect, his synthesis seems so simple, but it took tremendous imagination and creativity to break the bonds of the old way of thinking and see a radically different picture.
The implications of Newton's theory of gravity can easily escape us, since we now take it for granted that physical laws apply the same throughout the universe. To the mentality of the 1600’s, which saw a clear distinction between the laws governing the terrestrial and celestial elements, it was a staggering revelation. His three laws of motion were simple, could be applied everywhere, and could be used with calculus to solve any problems of motion that came up.
The universe that emerged was radically different from that of Aristotle. Thanks to Newton, it was within our grasp to understand, predict, and increasingly manipulate the laws of the universe in ways no one had been able to do before. Newton's work also completed the fusion of math promoted by Renaissance humanists, Aristotelian logic pushed by medieval university professors, and experiment to test a hypothesis pioneered by such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo into what we call the scientific method. This fusion had gradually been taking place since the Renaissance, but the invention of calculus made math a much more dynamic tool in predicting and manipulating the laws of nature.
The printing of Newton's book, Principia Mathematica, in 1687 is often seen as the start of the Enlightenment (1687-1789). It was a significant turning point in history, for, armed with the tools of Newton's laws and calculus, scientists had an unprecedented faith in their ability to understand, predict, and manipulate the laws of nature for their own purposes. This sense of power popularized science for other intellectuals and rulers in Europe, turning it into virtual religion for some in the Enlightenment. Even the geometrically trimmed shrubbery of Versailles offers testimony to that faith in our power over nature. Not until this century has that faith been seriously undermined or put into a more realistic perspective
It seems amazing that the basic functions of the heart, circulatory system, and other bodily organs remained such a mystery to humans for so long, since they are so close to us and so vital to our very existence. However, early doctors faced serious obstacles in determining those functions. Religious taboos seriously limited the amount of human dissections taking place. Surgery's low status and primitive state is seen by the fact that barbers would typically double as surgeons, since they had the necessary cutting tools. Another major limitation was the lack of anesthetics to kill the pain. Heavy doses of liquor or a blow to the head were the closest thing to painkillers that doctors had before the 1800's.
As a result, people would rarely submit to surgery except in the most extreme circumstances (e.g., amputation for gangrene). And by then it was often too late. Without willing patients, surgery was rarely performed and could not advance. And without such advances, few people would risk operations. Caught in this vicious cycle, doctors had to resort to the dissection of animals. However, inferences made from animal dissections about human anatomy were often incorrect. Also, the practice of dissecting animals bled to death led to the misconception that only air flowed through the arteries and left side of the heart. This plus Aristotle's theory of four terrestrial elements led to various conclusions about human biology as seen in the theories of the dominant medical authority since the second century, the Greek physician Galen.
While Galen did clear up the misconception that only air flowed through the arteries, he also passed on several misconceptions. For one thing, he said that air passes directly from the lungs to cool the heart, which is the seat of the soul, a furnace to heat the body, and the source of the blood in the arteries, while the liver is the source of blood in the veins. His second contention was that blood then flows out to the body, which absorbs the blood and does not recirculate it. Third, Galen said that air mixes with the blood to form a spirituous substance called pneuma . There are three kinds of pneuma, formed in the liver, heart, and brain, and controlling such things as the passions, senses, and consciousness. According to Galen, pneuma is the main source of the life process and consciousness in an organism. Finally, drawing upon Aristotle's theory of four terrestrial elements, there was the theory of the four humours (blood, bile, black bile, and phlegm), which must be in balance in order for one to be healthy.
These incorrect conclusions about human biology in turn led to two major misconceptions about disease. First of all, scholars saw sickness as a sign of an imbalance of the four humours that should be treated by bloodletting or other forms of purging. This supposedly would rid the body of imbalanced humours and cause it to restore the balance. This tied in closely with the second misconception: that disease is purely a result of internal balance, not external factors. Therefore, each person's disease was seen as a purely individual matter having no relationship to anyone else's disease, no matter how similar the symptoms may be
Despite the Church's support of Galen and feelings against dissection, problems started to arise with Galen's theories over time just through normal observations. This and two other factors, both leading out of the Renaissance, led to new research to figure out what the nature of the heart was. For one thing, the Renaissance artists placed increased emphasis on accurate representation of nature and human anatomy. Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks are the best-known examples of this emphasis on realism. Also, the printing press helped publicize and popularize these ideas within the medical community.
Second, in biology, as in physics and astronomy, the Renaissance oftentimes was not so important for breeding new ideas as for discovering other ancient authors that contradicted the accepted authority, thus forcing scholars to seek the truth for themselves. Interestingly enough, the opposing authority was Aristotle, who differed with Galen on several points, claiming the life process was the product of all the various organs in the body, not of pneuma. This helped open up discussion on the life process and the nature of disease.
As with Aristotle, the combination of these factors generated a cycle that both undermined Galen and slowed down the creation of a new set of theories. New observations would be made that seemed to contradict his theories. This would lead to new explanations, once again framed in the context of the old beliefs, thus patching up the system. However, more observations would take place, leading to more patching of the old system, and so on. Eventually, the system would be so full of holes that someone would take the new data and synthesize it into a new set of theories that more accurately explained the universe.
Much of this research was done at the University of Padua, which was one of the main centers of research and new theories in the 1500's and 1600's. Being controlled by Venice, which had a bit of an anti-clerical tradition, the University of Padua encouraged more of the intellectual freedom needed to develop new theories that better explained nature. Copernicus and Galileo, had both worked there, as did most of the men who discredited Galen's theory and formed the modern theory of circulation. Two men in particular opened the way for challenging the old theories: Vesalius and Paracelsus.
Paracelsus (1493-1541) never received a medical degree, but he continued to teach, write about, and practice medicine. However, he taught from his own experiences, not Galen's books, and he taught in the vernacular. This was contrary to the Hippocratic Oath by which doctors were supposed to teach in Latin to prevent any trade secrets from getting into the wrong hands and being popularized. Paracelsus' actions made him an outsider to the medical community and caused him to challenge many of its most honored (and mistaken) theories and practices. One thing he claimed was that disease was the result of outside forces acting on the body, not an internal imbalance. Although he had no concept of germ theory, this idea opened the way for a new approach to diagnosing and treating disease. Paracelsus was reviled by the medical establishment of his day, but became something of a folk hero to later generations and inspired further challenges to Galen.
Vesalius (1514-64) also took steps in overthrowing Galen and opening the way for a new theory on the heart and circulatory system. Unlike most medical scholars, who had assistants do the actual dissection while they read the appropriate passages from Galen, Vesalius did his own dissections and saw things for himself. He even saw things he was not looking for and that disagreed with Galen. He had a hard time believing that what his eyes saw was true and that Galen could be wrong. Nevertheless, in 1543, the same year that Copernicus (who also worked at Padua) published his book proposing a heliocentric universe, Vesalius published De Fabrica. This book, which was illustrated by the great artist Titian's own art students, provided anatomical drawings of unprecedented accuracy for medical manuals and set the standard for years to come. It also proved many of Galen's anatomical descriptions to be completely wrong.
Thanks to Vesalius and Paracelsus, more evidence kept coming in to cast doubts on Galen. In 1559, one of Vesalius' students, Colombo, published a description of how blood went from the right side of the heart to the lungs and then to the left ventricle. However, he still kept the traditional view that blood flowed out of the heart through both the arteries and veins. In 1574, Fabricius published a work describing valves in the veins preventing the outward flow of blood from the heart. Still, he refused to see that this meant the blood flowed from the veins to the heart. Instead he said the purpose of the valves was to keep too much blood from flowing to the veins from the heart. In 1606, Cesalpino observed blood flowing from the arteries to the veins and toward the heart. However, he also failed to grasp the meaning of this. As obvious as it should have been that Galen's system was not working, scientists' minds were too rigidly set to admit it. Finally, a man came along whose genius, like that of Newton and Mendeleev, was to synthesize the recent evidence into a new system that shattered the old views. That man was William Harvey, an Englishman also working at Padua.
Harvey, who was influenced by Fabricius' work on valves in the veins, developed very modern methods of observation and experimentation. In 1628, nine years after his experiments confirmed his suspicions about Galen's system, Harvey published his findings in De Motu Cordis (Concerning the Motion of the Heart). The wealth of evidence it brought to bear effectively shattered Galen's theory forever.
Harvey showed that blood did not seep through a septum and that blood passes through the lungs to be refreshed, although he was not aware of oxygenation. He pointed out that animals without lungs also had no right ventricle and, that in developing embryos, the blood took a shorter route from the right to left side of the heart. Harvey's most important and astounding contribution was the calculation that, in one hour, the heart pumps more than the body's weight in blood. This could only mean one thing: that the blood circulated from the left side of the heart, through the body, then to the right side of the heart, and from there through the lungs and back to the left side of the heart.
It took nearly half a century for Harvey's work to be accepted by the medical community. Once it was accepted, it provided a much better framework for studying the rest of the body. With the mysteries of the circulatory system unraveled, the respiratory and digestive systems could be better understood. And with those in place, other functions of the body could be figured out. Thanks to Harvey's brilliant synthesis, the way to modern biology was opened.
Alexander Pope's short poem largely summarizes the impact that Isaac Newton's work had, not just on science, but also on the imaginations of his contemporaries. The 1700s abounded with heightened interest and discoveries in the sciences. Nobles and monarchs pursued different sciences as hobbies as well as funding serious research. In a popular play of the era, a woman even refuses to elope with her lover because she would have to leave her microscope behind. There were serious advances as well.
In astronomy, William Herschel, noticing fluctuations in Saturn's orbit, surmised they were caused by the gravitational pull of a hitherto unknown planet and discovered Uranus. He also showed the vastness of space by demonstrating the Milky Way is not a cloud of gas but a whole galaxy of stars, and that so-called fixed stars were actually entire distant galaxies. Carl Linnaeus, using his system of binary nomenclature, catalogued the huge numbers of new plants and animals being discovered across the planet. In chemistry, Henry Cavendish isolated hydrogen; Joseph Black discovered carbon dioxide, and Antoine Lavoisier, separated water, supposedly an indivisible element, into oxygen and hydrogen. This destroyed Aristotle's theory of four elements and opened the way for the emergence of modern chemistry in the 1800s. And in medicine, Edward Jenner created a vaccine against the deadly disease, smallpox, although germ theory would not be developed for another century.
However, not everyone was impressed with the scientific progress of the day. Among them was Jonathon Swift who satirized much of contemporary society, including its obsession with science, in his book, Gulliver's Travels. In the following selection, Gulliver visits the science academy of the mythical Laputa, a land where everyone is so absorbed in theoretical speculation that they have lost all touch with reality. Supposedly, he based this fictional account on real experiments being conducted at the time.
The first Man I saw was of a meagre Aspect, with sooty Hands and Face, his Hair and Beard long, ragged and singed in several Places, His Clothes, Shirt, and Skin were all of the same Colour. He had been Eight Years upon a Project for extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers, which were to be put into Vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the Air in raw inclement Summers. He told me, he did not doubt in Eight Years more, that he should be able to supply the Governors Gardens with Sun-shine at a reasonable Rate; but he complained that his Stock was low, and entreated me to give him something as an Encouragement to Ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear Season for Cucumbers. I made him a small Present, for my Lord had furnished me with Money on purpose, because he knew their Practice of begging from all who go to see them.
I went into another Chamber, but was ready to hasten back, being almost overcome with a horrible Stink. My Conductor pressed me forward conjuring me in a Whisper to give no Offence, which would be highly resented; and therefore I durst not so much as stop my Nose. The Projector of this Cell was the most ancient Student of the Academy. His Face and Beard were of a pale Yellow; his Hands and Clothes dawbed over with Filth. When I was presented to him he gave me a very close Embrace, (a Compliment I could well have excused). His Employment from his first coming into the Academy, was an Operation to reduce human Excrement to its original Food, by separating the several Parts, removing the Tincture which it receives from the Gall, making the Odour exhale, and skimming off the saliva. He had a weekly Allowance from the Society, of a Vessel filled with human Ordure, about the Bigness of a Bristol Barrel.
There was a most ingenious Architect who had contrived a new Method for building Houses by beginning at the Roof, and working downwards to the Foundations; which he justified to me by the like Practice of those two prudent Insects the Bee and the Spider....
I was complaining of a small Fit of the Cholick; upon which my Conductor led me into a Room, where a great Physician resided, who was famous for curing that Disease by contrary Operations from the same Instrument. He had a large Pair of Bellows with a long slender Muzzle of Ivory. This he conveyed eight Inches up the Anus, and drawing in the Wind, he affirmed he could make the Guts as lank as a dried Bladder. But when the Disease was more stubborn and violent, he let in the Muzzle while the Bellows was full of Wind, which he discharged into the Body of the Patient; then withdrew the Instrument to replenish it, clapping his Thumb strongly against the Orifice of the Fundament; and this being repeated three or four Times, the adventitious Wind would rush out, bringing the noxious along with it (like Water put into a Pump) and the patient recovers. I saw him try both Experiments upon a Dog, but could not discern any Effect from the former. After the latter, the Animal was ready to burst, and made so violent a Discharge, as was very offensive to me and my companions. The Dog died on the Spot, and we left the Doctor endeavouring to recover him by the same Operation...
The Enlightenment saw more than new advances in the sciences. In fact the very revolutionary nature of those scientific discoveries ensured that no field of thought would remain untouched. This was especially true of religion and philosophy, which had been so closely intertwined with the old scientific theories.
Starting with the rise of towns in the High Middle Ages, several historical forces converged to produce a revolution in European religion and philosophy. First of all, there was the Protestant Reformation. As we have seen, the Reformation led to a series of religious wars that ravaged Europe for nearly a century (c.1550-1650). One result of those religious wars was that many people grew tired of religion and looked for less restrictive modes of thought. Second, the Renaissance, with its interest in ancient Greek philosophies, gave rise to secular ideas that helped spawn the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment as well as. This helped discredit the Church's old ideas on the universe and raise the status of humanity and its ability to reason on its own. Finally, the rise of towns led to resurgence of feudal monarchies into nation states. We have seen how they started challenging the Church's power during the turmoil of the Later Middle Ages. By the sixteenth century, they were using the doctrine of Divine Right of Kings to undercut the Church's authority in order to elevate their own.
All of these factors converged to undermine the role of blind faith in the Church's authority. While faith was still of prime importance, human reason was also an important element, especially in recognizing and avoiding the pitfalls of religious fanaticism and intolerance. After all, if God gave us the power to reason, should we not use it? As time went on the role of reason in religion increased while the role of faith declined correspondingly. Finally, reason completely replaced faith in a philosophy known as Deism. This was based largely on a Greek philosophy, Epicureanism, which saw God as detached from worldly affairs. Our main purpose in life was to avoid pain, not through sensual self-indulgence, which ultimately brings pain, but through a reasonable and moderate way of life.
While Deism incorporated the Epicurean ideas and added its own twists, it was not an organized religion with a central dogma and places of worship. However, despite differences on various points, their beliefs can be summarized as follows:
God exists, but is detached from the affairs of this world. Drawing upon the mechanistic views of Newtonian science, they saw the universe as a giant clocklike machine that God had set in motion and then left to run on its own.
Religious truth can only be found through reason, not divine inspiration or clerical authority.
Miracles do not exist, only natural phenomena for which we have not yet found reasons.
Universal moral laws exist and can be found in all cultures around the globe, not just in Christian Europe. This reflected the exposure of Europe to other cultures in the Age of Exploration.
Keep in mind that Deism was a philosophy mainly of an upper crust of intellectuals (known then as philosophes). Most people in the Enlightenment stayed devout church members totally untouched by Deistic ideas. However, although Deism was confined to such a narrow upper class, including Thomas Jefferson in the United States, its influence was profound, since it was the ideas of these intellectuals who inspired the revolutionary ideas of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Deism also downplayed the role God plays in this world. This thrust more power and responsibility upon humanity to solve its own social, political, and economic problems, giving rise to remarkable new ideas in those areas as well.
The Enlightenment was a period of nearly unbounded optimism and faith in the human race's ability to solve its own problems, including restructuring government and society along more reasonable lines. There were two main factors leading into this search for a rational approach to creating a better society. First of all, Deism, with its idea of a God detached from our affairs, gave us the ability and responsibility to solve our own problems. Second, this was a period of rapid social and economic changes, especially in England with its booming colonial empire and economy. London's population jumped from c.700,000 in 1715 to 2.7 million by 1815. Such rapid growth led to squalid living conditions, alcoholism (gin consumption increasing by a factor of 10 times), drug abuse, and crime. While Deism may have given us the power and responsibility to reform society, these conditions provided an urgent need for such reforms. The result was a flurry of new ideas in political science, economics, psychology, and social reform.
Enlightenment ideas on politics were rooted in John Locke's Two Treatises on Government (1694). Locke's basic idea was that government, rather than being at the whim of an absolute monarch with no checks on his power, existed merely as a trust to carry out the will of the people and protect their "lives, liberty, and property." If it failed in its duties or acted arbitrarily, the subjects had the right to form a new government, by revolution if necessary.
Locke's ideas largely summarized the achievements of the English Revolution of the 1600's. They had a tremendous impact on political thinkers in France chafing under the corrupt reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI. Three of these men, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau would profoundly influence French political thought and provide the theoretical justification for the French Revolution.
Montesquieu, sometimes seen as the father of political science, looked at various types of government and analyzed what made them work in his book, The Spirit of the Laws. Among the ideas he supposedly derived from England was the separation of powers in government, a vital part of our own constitution.
Voltaire, who first made his name by championing the cause of a Jew wrongly accused and executed for a crime, was probably the most famous of the Enlightenment philosophers. Voltaire wrote on a wide range of topics, but should be remembered here for advocating more civil and political liberties, at least for educated people who can understand the implications of their actions. Voltaire was less clear on what rights the illiterate masses should have.
Finally, there was Rousseau who said that people could only legitimately follow laws they themselves have made. Otherwise, they were the victims of someone else's tyranny. Therefore the ideal state is a small-scale democracy in which everyone participates. Together, the ideas of Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau provided the basic ideas we have today on personal rights and liberties and how a government can best be structured to guarantee those rights and liberties.
In economics, the most important figure was Adam Smith, whose The Wealth of Nations pushed for a wholly new attitude toward economics. Smith saw people as selfish and willing to work much harder and produce much more if they had the incentive to do so. He saw the mercantilism of the 1600's and 1700's, where the state tried to import gold and silver while exporting its goods, as stifling to an economy. Therefore, doing away with mercantilist monopolies and restrictions would provide more incentive to produce. There was no need to regulate the market since people's greed and the law of supply and demand would make the market self-regulating. Smith's free market policy, known as laissez faire ("hands off") was widely adopted in the 1800's as Britain, Europe, and the United States rapidly industrialized. It is still a vital part of our economic thinking today.
In psychology, there was Helvetius, who claimed our minds and personalities are blank slates at birth and that we are the products of our environment and the sum total of our past experiences. Combining Helvetius' "blank slate" theory with the prevailing optimism of the age was Jeremy Bentham. He felt we could teach people to act in rational ways by providing an ideal environment where they can learn the right sorts of behavior. Bentham's movement, Utilitarianism, became quite popular and pushed for a wide range of social reforms in such areas as prisons, law codes, and public health.
It appears that God has created me, pack horses, Doric columns, and us kings generally to carry the burdens of the world in order that others might enjoy its fruits.— Frederick II, "the Great", of Prussia
Just as the Enlightenment philosophes saw a rational plan in the laws of nature and the universe, they also influenced rulers in building their states along rational lines. For the first time in European history, there was a general realization of the relationship between economic, administrative, diplomatic, and military factors in state building. Despite their vast differences, there was a general trend in both Eastern and Western Europe toward more tightly run bureaucratic states. Public works projects, such as roads, bridges, dams, and canals, multiplied in the hope of building the economy of the mercantilist state. New government departments also appeared in such areas as postal service, forests, agriculture, and livestock raising. States also took censuses and kept statistics in order to plan out policies better.
In order to understand the evolution of the modern state, one needs to understand that the feudal state was patrimonial. In other words, the kingdom was the patrimony (hereditary property) of a dynasty. Likewise, the various judicial and administrative offices that ran the kingdom at the provincial and local levels were the patrimonies of privileged families. The modern concept of kings and officials who were accountable for their actions and responsible for the welfare of their subjects was alien to the old feudal state. This made the feudal state more a federation of separate principalities that, in theory, owed allegiance to a common monarch. In the High Middle Ages, this concept of one monarch, among other things, provided at least some degree of order, helping lead to the rise of towns and feudal monarchies which supported each other and increased each other's strength. Over the years, a common language and culture along with the spread of nationalism after the French Revolution united many of these states into what we would call nations. The feedback between the rise of towns and kings produced two lines of development that would help each other in the rise of the modern state.
For one thing, the rise of towns and a money economy helped provide the basis for the Italian Renaissance and Protestant Reformation. Calvinism, in particular, saw all believers as equal in God's eyes, which discredited Divine Right of Kings, helped justify religious/political revolution, and lay the foundations for modern democracy in the Dutch Revolt and English Revolution. By the late 1600's the religious element was fading from theories of revolution. Such political writings as John Locke's The Social Contract pushed the idea of the ruler being responsible for the welfare of his subjects. Second, kings were building strong nation-states that, by the 1600's, were assuming greater control over all aspects of the state. For example, the economic theory of mercantilism spurred rulers to work to develop the resources of their kingdoms.
Together these led to a growing realization of the interrelationships between administrative, economic, and political factors in the overall welfare of the state. As a result, more and more royal officials were trained professionals. They had to take competitive exams to gain their positions and did their jobs efficiently and impartially. Kings and their officials also paid more attention to building and maintaining public works such as roads, bridges, and canals to improve the economy. While the purpose of these reforms was to increase the tax base for the kings, they also benefited their subjects. Higher standards of administration made people see their officials as a bureaucracy of service rather than one of privilege. And since they were the king's men carrying out his will, people also saw their kings as public servants rather than as privileged owners of the state. Frederick the Great's quotation at the top of the reading best represents this idea of the king as public servant. As a result, in the 1700's the term absolute monarchy gave way to the term "enlightened despot", a monarch who ruled according to enlightened principles rather than the divine right of kings.
The eighteenth century state still had problems. For one thing, it had a modern political administration superimposed upon a feudal social order. Nobles were still the privileged social class, holding most of the important administrative and military positions. Peasants in Central and Eastern Europe were still downtrodden serfs. Even French peasants, who were otherwise free, had feudal obligations imposed upon them.
In spite of this, the centralized states emerging in the Enlightenment were important in the evolution of our own modern states in two ways. First of all, the emergence of a professional bureaucracy, chosen largely for merit, not money or birth, provided the state with a modern administrative structure that continues today. Second, the idea of the rulers and officials being servants, not owners, of the state was central to the revolutionary ideas that swept Europe starting with the French Revolution in 1789. A closer look at several of the major states of eighteenth century Europe will give a better idea of their accomplishments and limitations.
Another problem for the central government was the intense competition between the council of state (from which all laws supposedly emerged) and the various ministers (justice, finance, war, navy, foreign affairs, and the king's household). The ministers carried out and often formulated the king's policies. However, we have seen what court intrigue did to many of the ministers, and one can imagine the confusion and lack of direction in the central government.
By contrast, the provincial government was fairly efficient. The main figures here were the intendants that ran the 32 generalites (provinces) set up by Richelieu some 100 years before. He was in charge of tax collection, justice, and policing his province, and he had a fairly free hand to carry out these duties as he saw fit. The intendant was the king's agent in the province and was the man most Frenchmen saw as representing royal authority. He also represented the interests of the people to the central government, and his opinion was generally respected by the king's ministers and councilors. In contrast to the unfortunate officials close to Versailles, the intendants generally kept their positions for decades, which allowed them to know their territories and peoples more thoroughly and better rule them. The intendants were often criticized for being too powerful and corrupt. There certainly was some corruption, but in general, the intendants represented efficient and conscientious government. Unfortunately, nobles, anxious to preserve and regain their ancient prestige, even took over more and more intendant positions as the 1700's progressed.
The intendants needed help at the local level. These lower level officials fell into three categories. The first category consisted of feudal officials who had bought or inherited their positions. Such men had little training or care for their work and were a burden to the intendants that were stuck with them. Next, there were subdelegates, who were poorly paid, poorly trained, and also of little use. Finally, there were what we might call true civil servants. These were specialists (engineers, architects, physicians, etc.) who had to take competitive tests to gain their positions. These were the men who usually carried out the directives of the intendants and kept the French state running. It was these officials who would survive the French Revolution and become the nucleus of the modern French civil service.
At the provincial level, an administrative board known as the gubernium largely replaced the power of the noble estates. In 1748, after the disasters of the War of the Austrian Succession, the estates recognized the need to reform the state and granted ten years worth of taxes to the central government. This meant that the empress could rule without the estates for the next decade. As their power withered, that of the gubernium increased. Thus the feudal estates were gradually replaced by a more modern system. Another important principle that took over here was that of the separation of powers within a government, specifically between the courts and the executive/legislative branches. This principle was pushed by the French philosophe, Montesquieu, and has remained an important part of the modern state down to this day.
At the local level, a Hapsburg official, the kreishauptmann, interfered more and more in the affairs traditionally left to the noble estates. The more such officials became involved in the daily affairs of the peasants, the more concerned they and the Hapsburgs were for their welfare and their ability to pay taxes. Therefore, the kreishauptmann became the virtual champion of the peasants against the nobles, preventing them from evicting peasants and taking their lands or forcing them to do extra servile labor.
Maria Theresa's government also effected a major fiscal reform to raise revenue. Even nobles and clergy had to pay regular property and income taxes. This distributed the tax load more evenly, but there were still gross inequities. The average peasant still paid twice the taxes that a noble paid. And Bohemia was liable for twice the taxes that Hungary was. Still, her reforms were a giant step forward for the Austrian Empire, and her system remained the basis for Hapsburg administration to the end of the empire in 1918.
Maria Theresa's son, Joseph I, carried the spirit of enlightened rule even further than his mother had. He was an enlightened ruler who was determined to use his power to make his people live according to enlightened principles whether they liked it or not. Joseph's reforms cut across the whole spectrum of the Hapsburg state and society. In the judicial realm, he had the laws codified, tried to get speedier and fairer trials presided over by trained judges, and outlawed torture, mutilation, and the death penalty. He ordered toleration for both Protestants and Jews and legalized interfaith marriages. Along the same lines, he relaxed censorship, restricting it only to works of pornography, atheism, and what he deemed superstition.
Joseph was a devout Catholic, but saw the Church as a virtual department of state that needed some house cleaning. Therefore, in 1781 he closed down many monasteries or converted them into hospitals and orphanages. He also required a loyalty oath from the clergy to ensure tighter control of the Church. He controlled and encouraged education, especially for the purpose of producing trained civil servants. Through a combination of incentives for families who sent their sons to school and punishments for those who did not, Austria under Joseph had a higher percentage of children in school than any other state in Europe.
Joseph's reforms extended to trying to make his subjects' lives easier. Although he failed to abolish serfdom, he did get the number of days per week that peasants had to work for their lords reduced from four to three and evened out the tax burden paid by peasants and nobles. He tried to encourage trade and industry through high protective tariffs, tax relief, subsidies, loans, and the building of roads and canals. He rewarded immigrants, but severely punished those trying to emigrate from his empire. Sometimes, his decrees could interfere with the minutest aspects of people's lives, such as forbidding them to drink the muddy water of the Danube or to eat gingerbread and encouraging peasants to mix vinegar with their water.
By his death, Joseph had increased his empire's revenues from 66 million to 87 million florins, while virtually tripling the size of his army. Unfortunately, no amount of reform probably could have solved the Empire's most serious problem: the large number of different nationalities and cultures forcibly held under Hapsburg rule. German language and culture were imposed throughout the Empire. But in the long run, the Hapsburg Empire was a virtual time bomb of nationalities waiting to explode and fragment into different states.
Frederick's workday started at 4 AM and extended to 10 PM. The vast body of work and responsibilities he undertook required an incredibly organized schedule and work routine. His civil servants in Berlin sent him details and data on specific matters, and he sent back orders he expected them to carry out punctually. His court at Potsdam had neither family, court etiquette, religious holidays, nor other distractions to impair the government's efficiency. The court and government resembled a barrack and were run with military precision. If any one man gave us the idea of the state serving the people rather than the other way around, it was Frederick the Great.
Frederick had little faith in either his troops or bureaucracy and subjected them to severe surveillance and discipline to make sure they did their jobs. Royal agents, known as fiscals, combined the duties of spies and prosecuting attorneys to keep the bureaucrats in line. Any examples of corruption led to immediate dismissal. Civil servants had virtually no civil rights (including that of a trial) and have been described as the "galley slaves" of the state. Even with the fiscals, Frederick felt he needed better information about his government and kingdom. Therefore, he had subordinates report to him about their superiors. He also made an annual tour of the kingdom from May to August, personally examining officials, interviewing private citizens, inspecting local conditions, and gathering immense amounts of information. There were few things of importance that escaped Frederick's notice for long.
Unlike the rest of Europe, where most public offices were either bought or inherited, Prussia required all of its civil servants to earn their positions by passing a civil service exam. Most candidates had a college education in jurisprudence and government management. All of them, regardless of class, also had to spend one to two years on a royal farm to familiarize themselves with the various aspects of agriculture, in particular the new scientific agricultural techniques being developed and the problems of lord-serf relations.
At the provincial level, there were 15 provincial chambers, each with 15 to 20 members. Since the members were responsible for each other's actions, there was little corruption at this level. The provincial chambers had two main duties: to collect taxes; and stimulate the economy to raise the tax base. In true mercantilist spirit, they had sandy wastes reclaimed, swamps drained, and new settlements founded. They went to England and Holland to study commercial and agricultural methods there, sought out markets for Prussian goods, and arrested any vagabonds they found, since laziness and indolence were public offenses in Prussia.
At the local level there were the steurrat and landrat, who administered towns and rural affairs respectively. The steuerrat ruled from 6 to 10 towns, and left them little in the way of home rule. In addition to collecting taxes, he fixed food prices, enforced government decrees, regulated the guilds, and kept the garrison properly housed. The landrat had much the same duties in the countryside, but was not so closely supervised by the central government, largely because the king had too little money to closely control the Junkers (nobles). The landrat was always a local noble and estate owner and was elected to his position by his fellow Junkers as often as he was appointed by the king. The landrat exercised all the functions of local government: tax collecting, administering justice, maintaining public order, and conscripting recruits for the army. As long as he did his job and did not abuse the peasants too severely, the central government largely left him alone.
To a large extent, poverty built the Prussian state of the 1700's. It created a tightly run and loyal officer class by forcing impoverished nobles into service to the state. It also forced Prussia's rulers to adopt the tight-fisted economic measures that became the basis of Prussian discipline and regimentation into this century.
Catherine the Great of Russia also strived to be an enlightened despot, at least in appearance. However, Russia was too big and too far behind the West for it to be transformed into an enlightened society overnight. The court, to be sure, reflected the fashions and manners of courts in the rest of Europe. However, this was a mere facade to mask the still medieval nature of the rest of society in the countryside. Symbolizing this facade was the series of fake villages stocked with healthy prosperous looking peasants that Catherine's prime minister, Potemkin, set up to fool Catherine into thinking her realm was indeed on a par with the West. Unfortunately for Russia, parity with the West was far from the case, and Russia would pay a heavy price for its backwardness in the years to come.
Dogs! Do you want to live forever?— Frederick the Great, to his troops in the heat of battle.
The period from 1715-1789 was one of transition between the religious wars of the 1500's and early 1600's and the wars of nationalism and democracy starting with the French Revolution. This was also the era of balance of power politics where Europe operated as an integrated system, so that one state's actions would trigger reactions from all the other states. As a result, it was hard for one state to gain an overwhelming position in Europe without everyone else, in particular Britain, ganging up to restore the balance. Finally, it was a period of intense competition between European states, a competition that would launch Europe into the two bloodiest centuries in all human history.
The death of Louis XIV in 1715 ended the bloodiest and most exhausting period of warfare up to that point in European history. The scale of bloodshed and expenditure was so massive that it would take several years before Europe would be ready for another major war. However, mutual distrust kept the various powers eyeing each other suspiciously and constantly maneuvering to maintain a stable or superior position in case war did break out. Spain and Austria conspired to take Gibraltar from England, causing Britain and France to ally to stop this plot. Britain, Austria, and Holland signed the Barrier Treaty in 1718, by which Austria got the Spanish Netherlands (modern Belgium) in return for manning the barrier fortresses against French aggression. Because of this maneuvering (or maybe in spite of it) peace ruled over most of Europe for nearly two decades.
The first major disturbance was the War of the Polish Succession (1733-39). The death of the Polish king led to rival claims by French and Austrian candidates, and these claims led to war. Austria and its ally, Russia, being closer to Poland, emerged victorious over France and Spain. The only compensation was that the Spanish Bourbons got control of Southern Italy and Sicily. The War of Polish Succession symbolized the growing importance of Eastern and Central Europe in diplomatic affairs. In fact, events surrounding two of these states, Prussia and Austria, would dominate European affairs for much of the eighteenth century.
Since the late 1600's, Prussia had been quietly but steadily gaining strength. Under Frederick William the Great Elector (1640-88) and his grandson, Frederick William I (1713-40), Prussia evolved from a small war ravaged principality to a highly centralized independent kingdom. The two pillars of Prussian strength were a highly disciplined and efficient army and bureaucracy. Prussia was a poor country, and Frederick William I did a masterful job of making the most from the least. He did this through a combination of intense economizing and severe discipline and regimentation of virtually every aspect of Prussian society. History has seen few skinflints of Frederick William I's caliber. He cut his bureaucracy in half, cut the salaries of the remaining civil servants in half, dismissed most of his palace staff, sold much of his furniture and crown jewels, and even forcibly put tramps to work. But he expected no more of his subjects than he did of himself as the first servant of the state, probably a legacy of his Calvinist upbringing.
Frederick William's main expense was the army, which is not surprising when one considers Prussia was surrounded by Austria, Russia, and France, all with large armies of at least 90,000 men. By his death in 1740, Prussia’s army numbered some 80,000 men. Frederick William's pride and joy was his regiment of grenadiers, all of them over six feet tall (a remarkable height back then). His friends would give him any six-foot tall recruits they could find, while he kidnapped most of the rest. In spite of this military buildup, Frederick William I followed a peaceful foreign policy and left his son, Frederick II, both a large army and full treasury.
Frederick II presents a fascinating contrast to his father. While the old king detested anything that suggested France and culture, his son treasured those very things. This made Frederick's childhood very difficult. On the one hand, he was required to wear a military uniform and live the life of an officer. On the other hand, he took every possible chance to learn music, speak French, and curl his hair and dress in French fashion. This infuriated the king who often beat his son in fits of rage. The king's chronic illness did not help his temper. Neither did Frederick's tendency to tease his father and see how far he could push him. At one point, Frederick tried to escape from Prussia, was captured, court-martialled, condemned to death, and finally released after a lengthy imprisonment. It is a wonder that one of them did not kill the other. However, when Frederick William I died, father and son were reconciled. It is interesting to see how similar to and different from his father Frederick II would turn out to be as king.
Frederick's eyes were turned toward the rich province of Silesia, then under Hapsburg rule. The timing could not have been better for Prussia. Austria was in pitiful shape to fight a war, having just lost a disastrous struggle with the Ottoman Turks. Its generals and ministers were old men past their prime, while the administration was full of corruption and confusion. And to make matters worse, the old emperor, Charles VI had just died, leaving only a young woman, Maria Theresa, to succeed him. Charles had gotten most of Europe's rulers to sign the Pragmatic Sanction, a document recognizing Maria Theresa as the lawful heiress. But many questioned the legality of Maria and her husband taking the throne, and set up the elector of Bavaria as an alternate candidate. This was the situation for the unfortunate Maria Theresa (who was also pregnant) when Frederick invaded Silesia.
However, as Frederick William I had warned the young Frederick, wars were generally much harder to end than start, and this one did not stop at Silesia. France, Spain, Bavaria, and Saxony all joined Prussia, hoping to pick Austria clean. Austria's ally, Russia, was neutralized when Sweden joined the other side against it and Austria. That left Britain, who was already involved in a war with Spain over control of the West Indies trade. Britain, which generally tried to maintain the balance of power and its trade, backed Austria. Unfortunately for Austria, Britain had a small army and was mainly concerned with defending George II's principality of Hanover from neighboring Prussia. As if Frederick William I had been a prophet, a simple move into Silesia had triggered what amounted to a global conflict, with fighting in India and the American colonies as well as Europe.
Mollwitz, the first battle of the War of the Austrian Succession, was a bit embarrassing for Frederick. His army won, but not until he had run prematurely from the field. After that, however, he showed a flair for brilliant generalship and decisive movements that were unequalled until Napoleon some fifty years later. Frederick's victory at Mollwitz left him with Lower Silesia and left Maria Theresa, who had just given birth to a son, somewhat destitute. However, the young queen showed she had some spirit and fight of her own. She rallied the Hungarian nobles to her side, raised an army, and secured an alliance with England. Next, she made a secret truce with Frederick, giving him Lower Silesia if he would drop out of the war. Then, she surprised everyone by invading Bavaria and throwing her enemies, now without Frederick, off balance.
With Austria's fortunes restored, the war dragged on for eight more years. Frederick would occasionally re-enter the war, revive his allies with his brilliant leadership, and then be bought off with more of Silesia. At last, bloodshed and exhaustion led to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. Frederick kept Silesia, while Maria Theresa had survived and saved the rest of her empire. However, she was burning for revenge against Frederick.
The first thing Maria Theresa needed to do was reorganize the Hapsburg Empire. Therefore, she centralized the government, reorganized finances, and built up the army. Next, she set about looking for allies to help her gang up on Frederick. First, she renewed her alliance with Russia, thus securing her eastern flank and endangering Prussia's at the same time.
In this she was helped by Prussia's own position and actions. The Austro-Russian alliance already threatened Frederick with a two front war. If he were also attacked from the west and faced a three front war, that would be disastrous. His choice for allies lay between France and Britain. France, his traditional ally was slow moving and reluctant to fight another war. England, on the other hand, threatened him with its Hanoverian lands on his western border, and had signed a treaty agreeing to pay for Russian armies. By secretly allying with Britain, Frederick felt he was neutralizing the threats to both his western and eastern borders, since Britain would now guard, not threaten, his western borders, and subsidize his armies, not Russia's.
Frederick felt that Russia could not fight without British money. He also felt France would not mind his alliance with Britain to keep the balance of power in Germany. He was wrong on both accounts. Louis XV was furious about Frederick making this treaty with Britain without consulting France. As a result, France allied with Austria and agreed to finance Russia's war effort. This ended 250 years of hostility between France and Austria and brought about a virtual diplomatic revolution in how the powers in Europe were aligned. Frederick, finding himself surrounded by enemies, took the initiative and invaded Saxony. The Seven Years War had begun. Now it was Frederick's turn to prove himself in the face of overwhelming odds.
Prussia's struggle was especially desperate. Frederick, faced with a three front war, was forced to race from one frontier to the next in order to prevent his enemies from combining in overwhelming force. Even then, he still was always outnumbered. Frederick's oblique formation, where he stacked one flank to crush the opposing enemy flank and roll it up, worked time and again to save the day for Prussia. After two brilliant Prussian victories in 1757, Britain came to the rescue with troops to guard Hanover and money to pay for the Prussian army, thus neutralizing the French war effort on the continent.
Even with France out of the picture, the war against Austria and Russia raged year after year and fell into a sort of vicious cycle where Frederick would clear one frontier of enemies. Meanwhile, another enemy would invade Prussia elsewhere, forcing Frederick to rush there to expel this new threat. However, this only exposed another frontier to invasion, and the cycle went on. Against such odds, Frederick lost as many battles as he won. However, his iron will and determination to save Prussia gave him the strength to bounce back, gather a new army, and drive back each new invasion. The Seven Years War became something of a patriotic struggle for the Prussian people, who were called on in greater numbers to defend their homeland. Junkers (nobles) only 14 or 15 years of age rushed to enlist, as did many peasants. The civil service carried on throughout much of the war without pay. The heroic example of Frederick inspired many Germans outside of Prussia to praise him as the first German hero within memory able to defeat French armies. Even French philosophes sang his praises.
But the grim business of war dragged on and on. From Frederick's point of view, this was a war of attrition and exhaustion. If he could hang on long enough and inflict enough casualties, his enemies would tire of the war and go home. As luck would have it, the Tsarina Elizabeth died in 1762. Her successor, Paul, was an ardent admirer of Frederick. Not only did he abandon Austria, but also he offered Russian troops to help Frederick. But Paul was soon murdered by his wife, Catherine, who ascended the throne and pulled Russia completely out of the war. This left only Austria and Prussia, who were both exhausted by the war.
Meanwhile, Britain was striving to build a colonial empire and eliminate French competition. Part of its strategy was to protect Hanover in order to keep Frederick in the war and divert French men and money away from the colonial wars. The colonial struggle took place over North America (known as the French and Indian Wars), the West Indies, India, and slave stations on the African coast. In each case, British financial and naval superiority proved decisive, cutting French troops off from home support while bringing British colonial armies overwhelming reinforcements. The resulting British victories cut French colonial trade by nearly 90% while British foreign trade actually increased. This both deprived France of the means to carry on the colonial war and gave Britain added resources for it, which led to more British victories, more British money, and so on.
In 1762, Spain suddenly joined France's side. By this time, the British war machine was in high gear under the capable leadership of Prime Minister, William Pitt. Therefore, British forces easily crushed the Spanish and took Havana in Cuba and Manila in the Phlippines.
By the end of 1762, both sides were ready for peace. The resulting Treaty of Paris in 1763 was a victory for Prussia and Britain. Prussia, while getting no new lands, kept Silesia and confirmed its position as a major power. Britain stripped France of Canada and most of its Indian possessions, and emerged as the dominant colonial power in the world. Although Russia gained no new lands, it emerged as an even greater European power.
The Treaty of Paris had effects in both Eastern and Western Europe. In the East, the emergence of Russia as a major power was a matter of concern to other European nations. The country directly in Russia's path of expansion was Poland. At one point, Poland had been a major power in its own right that had picked on the emerging Russian state. Now the tables were turned. Russia was a growing giant, and Poland was crumbling to pieces, largely because of a powerful nobility and weak elective monarchy. Frederick also had his eyes on Poland, in particular the lands cutting Prussia off from the rest of his lands in Germany. Since Russia, Prussia, and Austria were still exhausted from the Seven Years War, they agreed to divide part of Poland peacefully among themselves in 1771. However, their greed was not satisfied, and there were two more such partitions in 1793 and 1795, which eliminated Poland from the map. Since that time until the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1989), Poland has mostly lived under the yoke of foreign (mainly Russian) domination.
In the West, the last major event before the French Revolution was the American War for Independence (1775-83). For once, Britain, the big colonial power, found itself ganged up on by France, Spain, and Holland. This war had two important results in Europe. First, it left France bankrupt, which helped spark the French Revolution. Second, it established a democratic republic that many Frenchmen saw as an inspiration for their own revolution and the spread of democratic ideas across Europe and the globe.
Despite his defeat, Napoleon had several important effects on Europe. For one thing, he had spread the idea of liberalism, especially in Western and Central Europe. By the same token, he had also spread the idea of nationalism in East and Central Europe. Finally, his defeat prompted the victors to meet at the Congress of Vienna with the goal of turning back the clock to restore the Europe that had existed before the French Revolution. This was especially the goal of the brilliant Austrian minister, Metternich who led much of the deliberations at Vienna.
The most pressing issue was what to do about France: punish it for causing all this trouble, or restore it to its former position as one of the great powers. Realizing that breaking up France would upset the balance of power, destabilize Europe, and lead to more revolutions, the allies restored it to its old position, punishing it with only a mild indemnity and short military occupation. However, the new king, Louis XVIII, was a constitutional, not an absolute monarch. Even in defeat, the French Revolution had made progress.
There were other changes in the political map of Europe and the world. Britain took South Africa from the Dutch to secure its sea route to India. In compensation, the Dutch got the Austrian Netherlands from Austria, which in turn received control of Northern Italy. The Grand Duchy of Warsaw formed by Napoleon, continued to exist as the Kingdom of Poland, although its king also happened to be the Czar of Russia. And Germany, thanks largely to Napoleon's administrative work, was consolidated into 38 states. These last three changes would all contribute to nationalist revolts in succeeding years.
For the time being, the Congress of Vienna did restore the old order and a period of relative international peace known as the Concert of Europe, since it saw the major powers working largely together for several years to guard the common peace and old order. However, the ideas born in the French Revolution and spread by Napoleon had not been eliminated. The seeds of revolution had taken root and were spreading rapidly across the face of Europe. Like it or not, the age of kings was in its twilight and a new age of democratic and nationalistic reforms and upheavals was dawning.
The period 1815-48 saw periods of apparent tranquility broken by recurring waves of revolution. In two of three cases (1830 and 1848), these revolutionary movements started in France and inspired similar outbreaks all over Europe. Generally, revolutions in Western Europe focused on liberal reforms, since, with the exception of Belgium, nation states with a strong middle class were already established there. Eastern Europe, with its multi-national empires, saw more nationalist uprisings as various ethnic groups wanted independence from the Hapsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires. Germany and Italy, in the middle of Europe, were especially turbulent since they were striving for both national unification and liberal civil rights.
A basic pattern of events emerged during this period. Authorities would think they had crushed the ideas of liberalism and nationalism. However, they had merely driven these ideas underground where they would continue to spread and revolutions would flare up again. While most of them would be suppressed, one or two would succeed and might prompt more liberal reforms in countries where the uprisings had been put down. Rulers would again think they had suppressed the revolutionary ideas, and the cycle would repeat. There were three major waves of revolutions: in the 1820's, 1830's, and 1848.
In 1820 the revolutions started in Spain and spread to Greece, South America, and Germany. Most of these were put down, but Greece and the South American colonies did win their independence, with a constitutional monarchy established in Greece and republics in South America. The next wave of revolutions would start in France in 1830 and spread to Poland, Belgium, Italy, and Germany. While the uprisings in Germany, Italy, and Poland were crushed, France won a slightly more liberal constitutional monarchy, Belgium won its freedom, and more liberal reforms were peacefully passed in Britain.
The final, and biggest, wave of revolutions occurred in 1848, with some fifty uprisings taking place across Europe. The French this time established a republic, only to have it taken over by a dictator, Napoleon III, and turned into the Second Empire. Elsewhere, other revolutions collapsed, but they did lead to some reforms. Serfdom was abolished in the Hapsburg Empire while a weak constitutional monarchy was established in Prussia. Despite apparent failure, nationalist reformers would learn from their mistakes and set more realistic goals and strategies toward attaining national unity in Germany and Italy by 1871.
It took only five years before a new wave of revolutions threatened the old order recently reestablished by Metternich and the Congress of Vienna. Ironically, it was one of the more backward countries of Western Europe, Spain, that led the way. A number of liberal army officers, apparently influenced by the ideas of the French Revolution, rebelled against the corrupt and repressive rule of the Bourbon king, Ferdinand VII. As if on cue, riots and revolts broke out all over: in Italy, Germany, Russia (1825), the Spanish American colonies, and Romania and Greece in the Ottoman Empire. In most cases these revolts were put down. Austria suppressed the revolts in Italy and unrest in Germany. France, despite some protests from Britain, put down the revolution in Spain. The new czar, Nicholas I, had no trouble crushing the Decembrist Revolution led by liberal army officers (many of whom thought that their battle cry, "Constantine and Constitution", referred to their liberal candidate for the throne, Constantine, and his wife. Likewise, the Ottoman Turks put down the Romanian uprising.
However, in two cases on the fringes of European power, Greece and the Spanish American colonies, revolutions succeeded for reasons peculiar to each situation. In the case of the Greek revolt, it was largely a romantic sentiment for ancient Greece, home of democracy and Western Civilization that sparked popular support for the Greeks. The fact that the Greek rebels were descendants of Slavic invaders of the early middle ages, not the Greeks from the time of Pericles and Socrates, made little impact on the European public. In fact, many of them, including the Romantic poet, Byron, went there as freedom fighters. In the end, the European powers, having little regard for the non-Christian Turks and fearing Russian aggression that might threaten the balance of power in southeastern Europe, pressured the Ottomans to grant Greece its freedom. In the style of the day, the Greeks established a constitutional, not absolute, monarchy in 1832. It was the first major break in the old order since the Congress of Vienna.
The Spanish American colonies had taken advantage of the revolution in Spain to throw off the yoke of Spanish rule. Much of their inspiration came from the newly formed republic to the north, the United States. It was the United States that also stood up to protect the Americas from foreign intervention in the famous Monroe Doctrine in 1823. More important than the fledgling American republic's stand was Britain, which supported the revolutions so it could break Spain's mercantilist monopoly on trade and open new markets for British merchants to exploit. Spain could ignore the Monroe Doctrine, but it could not ignore the power of the British navy, so its American colonies went free.
However, independence brought two sources of instability to Latin America (covered in FC.108A). For one thing, most Spanish bureaucrats fled back to Spain, leaving few trained bureaucrats to handle government business. As a result, the armies that won the revolutions were often the only means of keeping matters under control. Second, with Latin American markets now open for free trade, Britain and other European countries encouraged the production of one type of commodity in each nation, such as beef in Argentina or copper in Chile. This made each new nation too dependent on international markets for its one product. Therefore, if the market for their product fell, their economy would have nothing else to fall back upon. This happened to El Salvador in the late 1800's when cheaper industrially produced dyes destroyed the need for its indigo dye, thus wrecking its economy. Together, these factors led to unstable economic and political structures in Latin America encouraging rule by military dictatorships. Misrule and poor economic conditions would lead to more military coups and revolutions, that would further destabilize the economy and the new government, leading to more revolutions and so on.
By the mid 1820's, most of Europe was pacified once again. However, the ideas of nationalism and liberalism, still simmering under the surface, broke loose again in 1830. Once again, the trouble started in France. The government of the restored king, Louis XVIII (1815-24), was a conservative constitutional monarchy with a legislature elected by a narrow electorate of 100,000 property owners. Louis realized that, after a quarter century of revolution, he had to treat the French people with care. His brother and successor, Charles X (1824-30) was not so wise. He censored the press, restored the clergy's position in the schools and politics, tried to bring back feudalism, gave pensions to nobles who had lost lands and rights from the Revolution, and dissolved the legislature.
In 1830, the Parisians revolted and barricaded Paris' narrow streets. The army refused to fire on the crowd, and Charles fled to England (a common habit for deposed kings back then). Now the question was: what type of government to set up. Students, intellectuals, and the Parisians wanted a republic. However, the middle class, probably with the backing of the more conservative peasantry, prevailed in its desire for a constitutional monarchy. The new king, Louis Philippe, known as the "Citizen King", was a man with little to commend him except that he was both a Bourbon and a former revolutionary, thus a compromise candidtate who satisfied no one. Admittedly, his constitution was a bit more liberal than the previous one, with 200,000 property owners given the right to elect the legislature. Things did settle down in France for a few years, but not before revolutionary turmoil flared up all over Europe.
Word of events in France triggered revolts in Belgium, Italy, Germany, and Poland, plus giving further impetus to a reform movement in Britain. Austria put down the uprisings in Germany and Italy, while Czar Nicholas I easily crushed the Polish rebellion against Russia. The one successful revolution was in Belgium where religious and linguistic differences with the ruling Dutch caused deep resentment that erupted into open rebellion in 1830. Austria and Prussia wanted to put this revolt down, but France and Britain supported the Belgian cause, largely to keep the other two powers from meddling so close to their shores. Since Austria and Prussia were also preoccupied with the Polish revolt, France and Britain could pressure Holland to recognize Belgian freedom in 1831. As was becoming the norm, a constitutional monarchy was established.
Although Britain did not experience revolution, it did see a strong reform movement that liberalized the criminal code and culminated in the Reform Bill of 1832. Electoral representation was redistributed to reflect the shift in population to the rapidly industrializing northern counties. The vote was extended to about 20% of British men (twice of what it was before). The Reform Bill of 1832 also opened the door for more liberal reforms as the century progressed: extending the vote to urban workers (1867) and miners (1884) and also instituting the secret ballot. Finally, after a long struggle, even women would get the vote in 1917. Although Britain remained technically a constitutional monarchy, by the early part of this century it was essentially a modern democracy.
The success of revolutionary and reform movements in Western, Europe and frustration at the failure of other similar movements in Central and Eastern Europe led to the spread of liberal and nationalist ideas in the 1830's and 1840's. Economic forces also played a role in spreading discontent. A series of bad harvests in the 1840's caused starvation (with one million people dying in Ireland from a severe potato famine), which led in turn to higher food prices, bankruptcies, unemployment and urban unrest. Once again, events in France sparked a new wave of revolutions.
The government of the "Citizen King", Louis Philippe, had proven to be conservative, corrupt and unpopular, and in 1848 revolution broke out in Paris. Just like in 1830, the barricades went up in Paris' narrow streets, many soldiers refused to fire on the crowd, and the king fled to Britain. And just like before, revolutionary fever spread all over Europe, with close to 50 revolutions erupting in the German states, Italian states, and Hapsburg Empire.
The suddenness and scale of the uprisings caught rulers completely by surprise. In Germany, they agreed to more liberal constitutions, while a convention was held at Frankfurt to establish a national parliament for all of Germany. In Italy, the Austrians were driven out of Milan and Venice, while rulers in Naples, Tuscany, and Piedmont agreed to liberal reforms. In the Hapsburg Empire, a Hungarian revolt triggered similar revolts by Czechs, Croats, Galicians, and Transylvanians living under Hapsburg rule. Metternich, the conservative prime minister and architect of the Congress of Vienna, was forced to resign, and the emperor fled to Innsbruck. It seemed like the old regime was about to collapse all over Europe. But just as events in France had set off these revolutions, events there led the way in suppressing them.
This time, the French established a republic where all Frenchmen could vote for delegates to a convention to draw up a new constitution. However, it reflected the more conservative views of French peasants and middle class, which touched off riots by the urban masses suffering from lack of food and shelter in the recent economic troubles. The army met the crowd's cry of "Bread or Lead" with a hail of lead from artillery fire, killing 10,000 demonstrators. This was a turning point in suppressing radicals both in France and across Europe.
In France, the establishment of the Second Republic led to the election of Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Napoleon III, who, like his uncle, used a military coup to extend his presidency and then make himself emperor of the Second Empire (1852-70). Victor Hugo, in his The History of a Crime, described this coup in grim terms that probably would apply to such events at any time:
"Suddenly, at a given signal, a...shower of bullets poured upon the crowd....Eleven pieces of cannon wrecked the Sallandrouze carpet warehouse. The shot tore completely through twenty-eight houses. The baths of Jouvence were riddled. There was a massacre at Tortoni's [cafe]. A whole quarter of Paris was filled with an immense flying mass, and with a terrible cry....
"Adde, a bookseller of 17, Boulevard Possonniere, is standing before his door; they kill him. At the same moment, for the field of murder is vast, at a considerable distance from there, at 5, Rue de Lancry, M. Thirion de Montauban, owner of the house, is at his door; they kill him. In the Rue Tiquetonne, a child of seven years, named Boursier, is passing by; they kill him. Mlle. Soulac, 196, Rue du Temple, opens her window; they kill her...
"New Year's Day was not far off, some shops were full of New Years' gifts. In the Passage du Saumon, a child of thirteen, flying before the platoon firing, hid himself in one of these shops, beneath a heap of toys. He was captured and killed. Those who killed him laughingly widened his wounds with their swords. A woman told me, 'The cries of the poor little fellow could be heard all through the passage.' Four men were shot before the same shop....
"At the corner of the Rue du Sentier an officer of Spahis, with his sword raised, cried out, '...Fire on the women.' A woman was fleeing, she was with child, she falls, they deliver her by the means of the butt-ends of their muskets. Another, perfectly distracted, was turning the corner of a street. She was carrying a child. Two soldiers aimed at her. One said, 'At the woman!' And he brought down the woman. The child rolled on the pavement. The other soldier said, 'At the child!' And he killed the child....
"In the Rue Mandar, there was, stated an eyewitness, 'a rosary of corpses,' reaching as far as the Rue Neuve Sainte-Eustache. Before the house of Odier twenty-six corpses, thirty before the Hotel Montmorency. Fifty-two before the Varietes, of whom eleven were women. In the Rue Grange-Bateliere there were three naked corpses. No. 19, Fauborg Montmartre, was full of dead and wounded. A woman, flying and maddened with dishevelled hair and her arms raised aloft, ran along the Rue Poissoniere, crying, 'They kill! they kill! they kill! they kill! they kill!'"
Despite its violent beginning, Napoleon III's rule was much more peaceful than that of his uncle. France's prosperity rapidly grew as he promoted the building of industries and a centralized railroad network. He also put Paris through an extensive urban renewal project, providing the city with wide boulevards that critics were quick to point out could not be barricaded so easily in the event of revolution. Napoleon's reign would come to an end in 1870 after a disastrous war against Prussia in its final stage of unifying Germany. In his wake came the Third Republic of France. With the exception of Nazi rule in the 1940's, democracy has prevailed in France ever since.
Meanwhile, in the rest of Europe, the defeat of the more radical elements in France gave heart to other kings and princes reeling from the current wave of revolutions. Uprisings in Italy, Germany, and the Hapsburg Empire, were crushed as quickly as they had erupted and nearly overthrown established governments. By the end of 1848, the old regimes were back on top, and nothing seemed to have been gained.
Even in failure, the revolutions of 1848 did have positive results. For one thing, several reforms, such as the abolition of serfdom in the Hapsburg Empire and the granting of at least nominal constitutions in the German states signaled some progress. The spirit of reform extended even further east to Russia where serfdom was abolished in 1861. Second, despite their failure, the revolutions spread the popularity of liberal and nationalist causes. Failure also taught reformers to be more realistic in trying to attain more liberal reforms or national unification. Two such men in particular, Camillo Cavour in Italy and Otto von Bismarck in Germany, clearly recognized these lessons and skillfully put them to work in building nations forged, as Bismarck would put it, from "blood and iron".
“Walking up a long hill to ease my mare, I was joined by a poor woman, who complained of the times, and that it was a sad country. Demanding her reasons, she said her husband had but a morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little horse, yet they had a franchar (42 pounds) of wheat and three chickens to pay as a quitrent to one seigneur; and four franchar of oats, one chicken, and one franc to pay to another, besides very heavy tailles (income tax) and other taxes. She had seven children and the cow's milk helped to make the soup. 'But why, instead of a horse, do not you keep another cow?' Oh, her husband could not carry his produce so well without a horse; and donkeys are little use in the country. It was said, at present, that something was to be done by some great folks for such poor ones, but she did not know who nor how, but God send us better, 'car les tailles et les droits nous ecrasent' (for the taxes are crushing us).
“This woman, at no great distance, might have been taken for sixty or seventy, her figure was so bent and her face so furrowed and hardened by labor, but she said she was only twenty-eight. An Englishman who has not traveled cannot imagine the figure made by infinitely the greater part of the countrywomen in France; it speaks, at the first sight, hard and severe labor. I am inclined to think that they work harder than the men, and this, united with the more miserable labor of bringing a new race of slaves into the world, destroys absolutely all symmetry of person and every feminine appearance.”— Arthur Young, Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789
The French Revolution, along with the Industrial Revolution, has probably done more than any other revolution to shape the modern world. Not only did it transform Europe politically, but also, thanks to Europe's industries and overseas empires, the French Revolution's ideas of liberalism and nationalism have permeated nearly every revolution across the globe since 1945. In addition to the intense human suffering as described above, its origins have deep historic and geographic roots, providing the need, means, and justification for building the absolute monarchy of the Bourbon Dynasty which eventually helped trigger the revolution.
The need for absolute monarchy came partly from France's continental position in the midst of hostile powers. The Hundred Years War (1337-1453) and then the series of wars with the Hapsburg powers to the south, east, and north (c.1500-1659) provided a powerful impetus to build a strong centralized state. Likewise, the French wars of Religion (1562-98) underscored the need for a strong monarchy to safeguard the public peace. The means for building a monarchy largely came from the rise of towns and a rich middle class. They provided French kings with the funds to maintain professional armies and bureaucracies that could establish tighter control over France. Justification for absolute monarchy was based on the medieval custom of anointing new kings with oil to signify God's favor. This was the basis for the doctrine of Divine Right of Kings. In the late 1600's, all these factors contributed to the rise of absolutism in France.
Louis XIV (1643-1715) is especially associated with the absolute monarchy, and he did make France the most emulated and feared state in Europe, but at a price. Louis' wars and extravagant court at Versailles bled France white and left it heavily in debt. Louis' successors, Louis XV (1715-74) and Louis XVI (1774-89), were weak disinterested rulers who merely added to France's problems through their neglect. Their reigns saw rising corruption and three ruinously expensive wars that plunged France further into debt and ruined its reputation. Along with debt, the monarchy's weakened condition led to two other problems: the spread of revolutionary ideas and the resurgence of the power of the nobles.
Although the French kings were supposedly absolute rulers, they rarely had the will to censor the philosophes' new ideas on liberty and democracy. Besides, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, they were supposedly "enlightened despots" who should tolerate, if not actually believe, the philosophes' ideas. As a result, the ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu on liberty and democracy spread through educated society.
Second, France saw a resurgence of the power of the nobles who still held the top offices and were trying to revive and expand old feudal privileges. By this time most French peasants were free and as many as 30% owned their own land, but they still owed such feudal dues and services as the corvee (forced labor on local roads and bridges) and captaineries (the right of nobles to hunt in the peasants' fields, regardless of the damage they did to the crops). Naturally, these infuriated the peasants. The middle class likewise resented their inferior social position, but were also jealous of the nobles and eagerly bought noble titles from the king who was always in need of quick cash. This diverted money from the business sector to much less productive pursuits and contributed to economic stagnation.
Besides the Royal debt, France also had economic problems emanating from two main sources. First of all, while the French middle class was sinking its money into empty noble titles, the English middle class was investing in new business and technology. For example, by the French Revolution, England had 200 waterframes, an advanced kind of waterwheel. France, with three times the population of England, had only eight. The result was the Industrial Revolution in England, which flooded French markets with cheap British goods, causing business failures and unemployment in France. Second, a combination of the unfair tax load on the peasants (which stifled initiative to produce more), outdated agricultural techniques, and bad weather led to a series of famines and food shortages in the 1780's.
All these factors (intellectual dissent, an outdated and unjust feudal social order, and a stagnant economy) created growing dissent and reached a breaking point in 1789. It was then that Louis XVI called the Estates General for the first time since 1614. What he wanted was more taxes. What he got was revolution.
When analyzing the French revolution and revolutions in general, there are several recurring aspects we should keep in mind. For one thing, revolutions tend to develop like a fever that starts mildly, but worsens progressively until it reaches "fever pitch" and then breaks. This cycle may recur several times before matters finally are resolved. A second theory is that revolutions start out rebelling against an absolutist or arbitrary power and end up setting up another arbitrary power in its place. The French Revolution certainly fits into both of these patterns. Finally, the revolutions that succeed do so because the ruling regimes are too weak willed to crush the opposition early before matters get out of hand. That was the case with England in the 1640's, Russia in 1917, and certainly with France in 1789. However, even a corrupt and decaying government, is if it acts decisively at the start, can usually crush a revolution before it can spread and grow.
All this makes sense when one considers that a revolution is against an order that people have come to depend on over a long time. Most people, however dissatisfied, are still reluctant to get rid of that "security blanket" and take their chances with something new and untried. Therefore, successful revolutions, like fevers, start off small and moderate. This has its good and bad points. For one thing, their moderation makes them seem safer to more people and does not invite a severe crackdown by the authorities. In fact, at this early stage, a revolution may seem more like a reform movement than a revolution. That was largely the case with the very moderate National Assembly that took power in 1789.
However, the very moderation that makes a new regime such as the National Assembly so widely acceptable also creates problems in a couple ways. First of all, in order to seem legitimate, the government feels it must hang onto many of the very policies and symbols that had triggered the revolution in the first place. In the National Assembly's case, it was keeping the king as a figurehead and honoring his debt. In the Russian Revolution it was keeping Russia in the First World War. In both cases, these policies, while making the new governments look more legitimate, also severely undercut their power. Second, the new regime's moderate policies keep it from taking the drastic measures necessary to solve the problems that led to revolution in the first place, since that would seem to betray the principles of the revolution. Despite these shortcomings, the new regime leads to high expectations that it will solve the nation's problems.
However, a major problem the new regime faces is that the transition to a new government will cause a good deal more confusion and turmoil before it starts turning things around. The new regime's failure to solve the nation's problems quickly just adds to the frustration of people who expect a quick fix to the country's problems and do not understand that solutions to such deeply rooted problems take time. This leads to a vicious cycle that will drive the revolution to a crisis stage.
First of all, more radical elements will exploit the government's problems and weaknesses in order to seize power. In France those "radicals" were the Girondins, who were still relatively moderate. They in turn found themselves faced with many of the same problems the original National Assembly had as well as high expectations that they would solve them. Unfortunately, the more radical the revolution gets, the more alarmed neighboring countries become about the prospects of the revolution spreading. Also the more turbulent the revolution, the more tempting it might be for outside powers to intervene for their own greedy purposes. This results in the other countries ganging up against the revolutionary country, as happened to France in 1792. Naturally, internal anarchy makes the revolutionary regime ill prepared for war and it starts losing. This creates more internal turmoil, giving a new group of radicals the opportunity to gain support and seize control, which is what the Jacobins did in France. This feeds back into alarming foreign powers who increase outside pressure on the revolution, thus triggering more confusion and turmoil, and so on.
At some point, this mounting feedback between internal anarchy and military defeat leads to three things. First of all, the revolution reaches a crisis stage where someone has to take firm control of affairs if the nation and revolution are going to survive. In the French Revolution, the Jacobins organized France into what was in essence a police state under the "reign of terror". However these measures, including a universal draft that led to huge armies by the standards of the day, did provide the internal order and productivity necessary to support France's armies.
However, the revolution has also unleashed two other factors that will help save it. One of these consists of new ideas and symbols, in particular nationalism, which inspired the French people to fight, sometimes with inspired fury, for a nation they now saw as their own, not the king's. Finally, the revolution freed the French to think in innovative ways, especially in the form of new military tactics introduced by a new generation of officers who had taken the place of the departed nobles. This combination of nationalism, new military tactics, and police state measures saved France in the crisis of 1793-94. But the revolution was not finished yet.
As stated above revolutions tend to go from arbitrary power to arbitrary power. This happened with Cromwell's military dictatorship in the English Revolution and with Lenin's dictatorship in Russia. It also happened in France.With the passing of the crisis of 1793-94 there was a backlash against the radical Jacobins and their reign of terror. A more moderate government, the Directory, took over and found many of the old problems (e.g., food shortages and inflation) re-emerging. It also found a new coalition of foreign enemies ranged against it, even more scared of the revolution after its recent, nearly miraculous comeback. In such a situation, the solution lay with the army, much as it did with Cromwell's New Model Army in England and Lenin's Red Army in Russia. Likewise, in France, it was an ambitious young artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, who seized power and established a military dictatorship.
On the surface, it may seem that Napoleon killed the French Revolution and that nothing had been gained. However, one should keep in mind it was powerful revolutionary forces that brought him to the top and gave his army the power to march across and dominate Europe. Napoleon may have tamed the revolution's more chaotic aspects and stifled its more radical innovations (especially in the way of democracy), but he also consolidated it. He kept and expanded its administrative and economic reforms. He codified into law its principles of social and legal equality for all men. And he shamelessly used the concept of nationalism to inspire his armies in battle. He also provided the stability necessary for economic growth and the further rise of the middle class. And it was the combination of repressing parts of the revolution and fostering others that gave Napoleon and France the power to conquer or dominate nearly all Europe by 1807.
Whether or not he meant to, Napoleon also spread the revolutionary ideals of liberalism and nationalism across Europe where they took root and grew into a force largely responsible for his eventual defeat. Foreign powers armed the masses and invoked the power of their own nationalism to defeat Napoleon by 1815. Long after Napoleon the ideas of the revolution imbedded in the law codes he had imposed upon Europe continued to take root and grow, first in Europe, and then by way of Europe's colonial empires, across the globe. Then it was the turn of non-Europeans to use the powerful ideas of the French Revolution to overthrow European rule in much the same way that Europeans had used those same ideas to overthrow Napoleon. When put into that kind of perspective, one can see what a powerful force the French Revolution has been in modern history.
Hopes ran high for widespread reforms when Louis XVI called the Estates General to Versailles in the spring of 1789. While Louis' main concern was to get more taxes to cover France's mounting debts, the delegates from the Third Estate (mostly middle class lawyers and businessmen) came with notes ( cahiers) from their constituents urging such reforms as taxing the clergy and nobles to even the tax burden. However, before these issues could be addressed, a more basic problem arose: voting procedure.
The First and Second Estates (clergy and nobles respectively) wanted bloc voting where each estate's votes collectively counted as one vote. This would give the nobles and clergy two votes to one for the Third Estate (representing the middle and lower classes who comprised 98% of France's population). Therefore, the Third Estate, whose delegates equaled the combined number of noble and clergy delegates, wanted one vote per delegate. Since a number of liberal clergy and nobles would probably vote with the Third Estate, this would give the Third Estate an effective majority of votes.
The decision belonged to Louis, whose weak and indecisive nature let matters get out of control. On June 17, the Third Estate, seeing the king's indecision, put pressure on him by withdrawing along with many poor delegates from the clergy and declared themselves the National Assembly with the exclusive right to grant taxes. When Louis locked them out of the Assembly Chamber, they withdrew to an indoor tennis court and took what became known as the Tennis Court Oath, vowing never to separate until they had formed a constitution. Somehow, a meeting about taxes had turned into a movement to form a new government. On June 27, Louis gave in and ordered the First and Second Estates to merge with the National Assembly. The Revolution had begun.
Two weeks later, on July 10, Louis, under pressure this time from the nobles, ordered troops to surround Paris and Versailles. The next day he fired a popular finance minister, Neckar, who had advocated taxing the nobles. These acts, plus continued food shortages triggered demonstrations in Paris that culminated in the storming of the Bastille (7/14/1789), an old prison with so little value that Louis himself had plans for tearing it down. Despite this, the Bastille was a symbol of oppression and its storming has been celebrated ever since as France's Independence Day.
All across France the Bastille's fall touched off the Great Fear, waves of violence in which armed bands of peasants killed nobles and royal officials, burned chateaus, and destroyed records of feudal obligations. This created several effects. First, concerned property owners in cities throughout France took the lead from Paris and formed their own National Guard units to protect themselves and their property. As a result, France now had two armies: the king's royal army and the revolution's National Guard. Also, the mounting violence and chaos started a wave of nobles emigrating to other countries. Successive waves of emigration would bring stories of ever mounting turmoil in France that would stir up foreign fears, hostility, and eventually full scale military attempts to overthrow the revolution. The resulting wars would rage across Europe for a quarter century.
Finally, fear of violence also seems to have affected the National Assembly. On the night of August 4, 1789, nobles and clergy surrendered their feudal rights and privileges in a remarkable show of generosity (or fear). In one fell swoop, feudalism had been abolished in France, although the final draft of the document did give compensation to the nobles and clergy and delayed dismantling the feudal order.
In much the same spirit, the National Assembly issued the "Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen" (8/27/1789). This remarkable document declared for all men, not just Frenchmen, the basic ideals of the revolution: liberalism (the belief in civil and political rights and liberties for all men) and nationalism (the belief that a people united by a common language and culture should control its own destiny). These two principles have proven to be two of the most powerful ideas in modern history.
Center stage now moved back to the Paris mob of laborers and small shopkeepers, known popularly as the sans culottes from their wearing long pants rather than the more fashionable short breeches (culottes) of the upper class. Partly inspired by the Great Fear and the acts of the National Assembly, but even more by continued food shortages, they marched on Versailles and brought the king and National Assembly back to Paris to ensure they would relieve the suffering of the urban poor. From this point on, the sans culottes would exact an ever more powerful and radical influence on the French Revolution, a power and influence far out of proportion to their numbers.
However, the Revolution at this point was still a fairly mild and civilized affair controlled by moderate middle class delegates. It was the enlightened ideas of such philosophes as Rousseau and Voltaire plus the growing need for reforms, not pressure from the sans culottes, that mainly influenced the constitutional monarchy they established in July, 1790. Power mostly resided in the National Assembly, with the king having only a weak temporary veto on its actions. In order to weaken old feudal loyalties, France was broken up into 83 new provinces known as departements, the basis of France's administration to this day. Jury trials were established, torture was outlawed, and a more humane form of execution, the guillotine, was introduced. Internal tolls were abolished, and a standard system of weights and measures, the metric system, came into use. The new constitution definitely had a narrow middle class bias, as seen by its measures to improve trade plus its property qualifications for voting that shut out all but 4,000,000 Frenchmen from full citizenship. It was a combination of the new government's more progressive measures and shortcomings that would lead to more radical reforms.
One problem the National Assembly did not solve was the huge royal debt that had started the revolution in the first place. Since the king was kept as constitutional figurehead of the government in order to make it look legitimate, the National Assembly could not repudiate the royal debt and still seem credible. Therefore, it came up with one of the more innovative policies of the revolution: confiscation of Church lands, the value of which would back up government bonds called assignats. The National Assembly originally sold 400,000,000 francs worth of assignats to pay off its most urgent debts.
Unfortunately, many people saw the assignats as money and used them rather than hard cash to pay their taxes. As a result, the Government, finding itself still in need of cash, issued more assignats and the cycle started all over. There were two main results of the government's Church policies. First of all, the flood of assignats triggered an inflationary cycle that destabilized the French economy and political structure. By the end of the revolution, the assignats were only worth 1% of their face value. Second, many people were angry over the state's control of the Church that extended to electing priests and making them swear a loyalty oath to France. Both of these would combine to unleash forces making the revolution more radical and violent.
At the first annual celebration of the revolution 50,000 National Guardsmen from all over France and 300,000 Parisians witnessed the king taking an oath of loyalty to the new constitution. However, Louis was not loyal to the revolution since it severely restricted his power and even prevented him from leaving Paris to attend Mass in the country. On June 20, 1791, the king tried to escape to the Austrian Netherlands and seek refuge with the Hapsburgs. Unfortunately for Louis, everything went wrong. Detachments of royal troops failed to meet him in time. Then, despite Louis' disguise as a German servant, a postmaster at Varennes recognized him from his portrait on the assignats. The postmaster called out the National Guard who captured Louis and escorted him back to Paris. Whatever faith most people may have had in their king before was now shattered by his attempted betrayal of the revolution.
Louis' foiled flight was a turning point in the revolution. First, it further alarmed foreign royalty about the mounting revolutionary threat in France. Second, it widened the rift between the radicals who wanted a republic (democracy without a king) and the bourgeoisie (upper middle class) who wanted to keep the king as figurehead to maintain the moderate respectable image of the revolution. To protect Louis and their position, they claimed the king had not fled but had been kidnapped. At the same time they suspended Louis' powers. But the damage had been done. In July, a demonstration of 50,000 Parisians demanding Louis's abdication turned violent and the National Guard killed 50 demonstrators. The revolution was starting to fragment.
On September 30, 1791 the National Assembly dissolved itself after over two years of leading the revolution. One of its last acts was to exclude its members from re-election to the new National Assembly, thus bringing in new blood, but also eliminating many experienced leaders from participation as well.
The elections of 1791 showed how fragmented the revolution was becoming. On the left wing (sitting to the left of the speaker's platform in the assembly) were the radicals led by the Jacobins who wanted a more strongly centralized republic. Next to them and controlling the most votes were the Girondins who also favored a republic, but with more provincial freedom from central control in Paris. Just to the right of them were moderates who were happy with their gains from the revolution and resisted further change. To the far right were the monarchists who wanted to restore the feudal order and the king's power. These were not so much organized political parties as they were loosely organized networks of political clubs united by a common political philosophy.
While the Girondins had been able to exploit the moderates' problems in order to gain power, they soon found themselves faced with the old issues of food shortages, inflation, and debt. A new problem was also surfacing that would soon overshadow the rest: war. Ironically, this was the one issue most people agreed on, but for widely different reasons. Louis and the monarchists saw war as a chance for Austria and Prussia to crush the revolution and restore the king to power. The Girondins saw it as an opportunity to discredit Louis and spread the revolution across Europe. War could also divert attention from France's internal problems. Many Frenchmen saw war as a means of preventing nobles from returning to reclaim their lands and feudal rights. Austria and Prussia wanted war to prevent the revolution from spreading outside of France. With everyone in such agreement, France declared war on Austria and Prussia (4/20/1792). This triggered a series of wars between France and the rest of Europe that would last, with few breaks, for 23 years.
The government was optimistic about the war. It should have known better. The combination of old and new debts plus inflation triggered by the assignats had left the treasury in shambles. Likewise, the incomplete transition from the royalist army to a national one had left the army in disarray. Royalist and National Guard units operated separately from one another. Noble officers had either fled or were of suspect loyalty. And the troops, while enthusiastic, were poorly trained, supplied, and led.
The result was a total fiasco as French troops fled at the first sight of the enemy. Charges of treason flew everywhere, especially against Louis, who probably was plotting with the enemy. An ultimatum ordering the French not to harm the king seemed to confirm suspicions of his guilt. On August 10, 1792, 9000 Parisians and National Guard troops stormed Louis' palace of the Tuileries. Louis, hating the sight of his own people's blood being shed, ordered his Swiss Guards to cease-fire. The mob massacred the guard, looted the palace, and turned Louis over to the Paris Commune who threw him into jail. The National Assembly, under heavy pressure from the sans culottes, agreed to new elections for a convention to form a new constitution. The monarchy was abolished and replaced by The First Republic, which would see the revolution through its trial by fire.
Few men have dominated an age so thoroughly as Napoleon Bonaparte dominated his. In many ways he was like Adolph Hitler: charismatic, a master psychologist and politician, and ambitious to the point of self-destruction. Both started wars that led to vast destruction and a new political order. Both men shaped their times, but both were also products of their times who went with the currents of their respective histories and adeptly diverted those currents to suit their own needs. And ultimately, both were dismal failures.
To a large extent, Napoleon's career resulted from the military and political forces he inherited from the Revolution and exploited for his own purposes. In military affairs, he was lucky to inherit the military innovations of the French Revolution, such as mass conscription which made possible the use of block tactics in order to attack in column and eliminated the need for supply lines, thus making French armies much more mobile. Therefore, the two characteristics of Napoleonic warfare, massed firepower and mobility were already present when he started his career. However, it was Napoleon's genius that knew how to use them effectively in his first Italian campaign against the Austrians.
Politically, France had suffered a full decade of revolutionary turmoil by 1799, making the government unstable and corrupt. Church policies were unpopular, especially since they had triggered rampant inflation. People were sick of this turmoil and longed for a more stable government that would make their lives more secure. Therefore, the interplay of military innovations that made Napoleon a national hero and the longing for a strong, secure government that Napoleon promised led to his seizure of power in 1799. Further military victories, once again against the Austrians in Italy allowed Napoleon to consolidate his hold on power and declare himself emperor of France in 1804.
While we mainly think of Napoleon as a general, he was also a very active administrator, and his internal reforms did a great deal as far as both consolidating some accomplishments of the French Revolution and suppressing others. One way to assess his government of France is to see how it conformed to the revolutionary motto: "Liberty, fraternity (i.e., nationalism), and equality". As far as political and civil liberties were concerned, Napoleon largely suppressed them with strict censorship and the establishment of a virtual police state in order to protect his power.
However, Napoleon saw equality as a politically useful concept that he could maintain with little threat to his position. After all, everyone, at least all men, were equally under his power. One of his main accomplishments as a ruler was the establishment of the Napoleonic Civil Law Codes, which made all men equal under the law while maintaining their legal power over women. Therefore, any hopes women may have had of the Revolution improving their legal position were thwarted by Napoleon.
Napoleon saw nationalism as indispensable to maintaining the loyalty of the French people to his regime. After all, it was the spirit of nationalism that had inspired its armies in a remarkable series of victories that had especially benefited Napoleon and allowed his rise to power. The trick was for Napoleon to build a personality cult around himself so that the French people would identify him with France itself and therefore make loyalty to him equivalent to loyalty to France. However, by identifying national loyalty with one man, Napoleon inadvertently weakened the inspirational force of nationalism and thus his own power.
Overall, Napoleon's internal policies strengthened France and allowed it to dominate most of Europe after a series of successful military campaigns (1805-7). Naturally, he established his style of rule in the countries he overran. However, he mistakenly thought that the administrative and legal reforms of the revolution he carried to the rest of Europe could be separated from the ideas of Nationalism and Liberalism (liberty and equality) that had given those reforms life and substance. Therefore, Napoleon's imperial rule inadvertently spread these ideas of Nationalism and Liberalism.
This had three effects, all of which combined to overthrow Napoleon. First of all, the empire's non-French subjects picked up the ideas of Nationalism and Liberalism and used them to overthrow, not support, French rule. Second, subject rulers adopted many of the very military and administrative reforms that had made France so strong. Once again, this was not to support French rule, but rather to overthrow it.
Finally, Napoleon's power and success up until 1808 apparently blinded him to his own limitations. Therefore, he got involved in a long drawn out war in Spain (1808-14) and launched a disastrous invasion of Russia (1812). This led to the formation of a new coalition that finally defeated and overthrew him in 1815. The victors met at the Congress of Vienna, hoping to restore the old order as it had existed before the Revolution.
However, despite his intentions, Napoleon had effectively planted the seeds of Nationalism and Liberalism across Europe, and these ideas would spread in new waves of revolution by mid-century. Europeans would take these ideas, along with the powerful new technologies unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, to establish colonies across the globe by 1900. Ironically, these European powers, like Napoleon, would fall victim to the force of these ideas when their subjects would use them in their own wars of liberation after World War II.
Napoleon's career largely resulted from the military innovations he inherited from the French Revolution, such as mass conscription which made possible the use of block tactics in order to attack in column and eliminated the need for supply lines, thus making French armies much more mobile. The Revolution also provided him with young officers who had largely developed these new tactics and were willing and able to successfully implement them on the battlefield. Therefore, the two characteristics of Napoleonic warfare, massed firepower and mobility were already present when he started his career.
Napoleon Bonaparte himself was barely French, his homeland Corsica having just become part of France two years before his birth in 1769. He attended a French military school and, while not a great student, picked things up quickly and finished a three-year program in one year. His Corsican accent and wild appearance set him apart from his classmates. Although sociable, he liked to be alone a lot. At an early age he exhibited the qualities that would earn him and France an empire: remarkable intellect, puritanical self discipline, a virtually inexhaustible energy level, and a willingness to plan things out in such detail as to leave nothing to chance. He admired Caesar, Alexander and Charlemagne and, like them, exhibited the quick decisive manner that made them all great leaders.
At age sixteen, Napoleon became a second lieutenant in the royal artillery, but his non-noble and Corsican origins left him little chance of promotion. All that changed with the French Revolution. In 1789, he went back to Corsica to fight for its independence. After quarrelling with the leader of the revolt, he returned to France and joined the Jacobins. In 1793, the young Bonaparte became a national hero by leading the recapture of the French port of Toulon from the British. The next year Napoleon's ties with the Jacobins and their fall in the Thermidorean Reaction landed him in jail for several months.
It was in 1795 that Napoleon got his big break when his famous "whiff of grapeshot" mowed down rebels in the streets of Paris and saved the new government, the Directory, from counter-revolution. This event catapulted Napoleon into the command of the Army of Italy, a ragtag army without enough shoes or even pants for its men. Nevertheless, he led this army against the Austrians in a lightning campaign that showed all the hallmarks of Napoleonic generalship: rapid movement, the ability to outnumber the enemy at strategic points with men and massed firepower, and a knack for doing the unexpected to keep his enemy constantly off balance. Napoleon drove with characteristic speed through northern Italy and then into Austria, forcing it to sign the Treaty of Campo Formio. However, this victory and the prospect of renewed French offensives alarmed kings all over Europe who formed the Second Coalition of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia against France.
Napoleon saw Britain as his main enemy, because it funded France's other enemies and also had a powerful navy protecting its coasts. As a result, Napoleon came up with a bold, if ill conceived, plan: conquer Egypt and use it as a stepping-stone to invade British-held India. At first, all went well. Napoleon's fleet eluded the great British admiral, Lord Nelson and landed in Egypt in 1798. The French decisively beat the Mamluke army and soon ruled Egypt. Then things fell apart. Lord Nelson found the French fleet and demolished it in the Battle of the Nile, thus stranding the French army in Egypt. Napoleon tried a daring march to Istanbul by way of Syria, but his artillery was captured and he had to return to Egypt with his sick and demoralized army. While the French languished in Egypt, Napoleon got word of political turmoil in France. He thereby abandoned his army (which later surrendered to the British) and slipped across to France. He then took part in a daring plot to overthrow the government. The conspiracy succeeded and Napoleon became First Consul of France in 1799.
The government that Napoleon and his allies set up, the Consulate, was a mockery of democracy and aptly reflected the above quotation. People elected delegates who chose other delegates who chose other delegates from whom were appointed legislators who had no power anyway. So much for the legislature. As for Napoleon's fellow conspirators, Ducos and Sieyes, they were shoved into the background and forgotten within a month, leaving Napoleon firmly in charge of France. However, his position was far from secure, because France was still ringed by the Second Coalition.
Napoleon first attacked Austrian forces in northern Italy, which he barely defeated at the Battle of Marengo (1800). This victory allowed Napoleon to return to France in triumph and further consolidate his position there. Meanwhile, his generals finished up the war against Austria, taking the Austrian Netherlands, northern Italy, and the left bank of the Rhine for France.
That left Britain to face France. Since Britain's navy and France's army were virtually unbeatable by the other side, and several neutral nations including the United States and Sweden had armed themselves against both Britain and France, the two big powers made peace in 1802. Prussia and Russia soon followed suit. Peace settled over Europe, at least temporarily.
Napoleon next turned his attention to Germany in order to settle a number of land disputes. Germany was still a patchwork of secular principalities, free cities, and church states. Since the Church tended to favor Catholic Austria against revolutionary France, Napoleon eliminated all but one church state and 44 out of 50 free cities, giving their lands to various German princes who now saw Napoleon as their benefactor.
Having fought his enemies to a standstill and made France the most feared and respected power in Europe, Napoleon could now pursue his next goal: becoming emperor of France. This was a tricky situation, since the French people might not take kindly to getting a new king so soon after getting rid of the old one. Using the title of emperor rather than king would partly ease people's misgiving and also give them a sense of France's imperial superiority over the rest of Europe. Napoleon approached the title in stages, first getting himself elected consul for ten years, then for life, and then, after a fake assassination plot to make people realize how much they loved him, emperor.
The coronation in 1804 was a splendid affair with even the pope coming to crown Napoleon. (Napoleon actually decided to crown himself and just let the pope watch.) The next day the emperor gave bronze eagles to his regiments as standards reminiscent of the Roman Empire. He even created a new nobility of dukes and counts from his officers in order to make a court that rivaled the splendor of other European courts.
The rest of Europe saw Napoleon's imperial crown as part of a plan to rule all of Europe. This triggered the war of the Third Coalition of Austria, Britain, and Russia against France and Spain (1803-1807). Once again, Napoleon was faced with his old nemesis, Britain, that "nation of shopkeepers" (to quote Adam Smith) whose navy shielded them from his military might. If only the British navy could be removed, Napoleon could slip across the Channel with his army and bring Britain to its knees. His plan for removing the British fleet was to lure it to the West Indies with the combined French and Spanish fleets. This would leave the Channel open for the French to cross. However, the British commander, Nelson, guessed this plan and managed to blockade the French and Spanish fleets in the Spanish port of Cadiz. When they tried to break out, the British crushed them in the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). Britain remained safe as its navy still ruled the waves.
Seeing his failure at sea, Napoleon marched his army eastward where he met the much larger combined armies of Austria and Russia at Austerlitz. Concentrating his forces in the center, he drove through and split the Russian and Austrian armies, winning possibly the most brilliant victory of his career (1805).
Austerlitz gave Napoleon the power to declare the Holy Roman Empire defunct, making him the heir apparent of Rome's imperial grandeur. He also used this opportunity to form the Confederation of the Rhine from the German princes grateful to him for the lands he had given them before. The Confederation consisted of about half of Germany and formed a large buffer zone on France's eastern border. This upset Prussia who had been sitting on the sidelines, but now decided to join the war. However as quickly as Prussia entered the war, its forces were shattered by Napoleon's blitzkrieg (1806).
Finally, there was Russia. After a bloody indecisive battle in the snow at Eylau, Napoleon won a decisive victory at Friedland. Now he could impose his kind of peace on Europe. Negotiations between Napoleon and Czar Alexander I were conducted on a raft in the middle of the Nieman River while Frederick William III of Prussia had to await his fate along the shore. The settlement for Prussia was not kind, taking nearly half of its land and population to help carve out the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a revived Poland that owed its existence and lasting loyalty to Napoleon. France and Russia recognized each other's spheres of influence, but France certainly emerged as the dominant power in Europe. Besides France, Napoleon directly ruled Belgium, Holland, the West Bank of the Rhine, the Papal States, and Venice. Then there were the states that were nominally free but lived under French law, administration, and usually French rulers who happened to be Napoleon's relatives: the kingdom of Naples, the Kingdom of Italy, Switzerland, the Confederation of the Rhine, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and Spain (after 1808). Finally, there were Napoleon's allies who had to follow him in war: Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Only Hitler ever came this close to ruling all of Europe.
While Napoleon is mainly remembered for his military campaigns and conquests, much of his importance lies in his government of France and how it consolidated the gains of the Revolution. For one thing, he kept the Revolution's administrative reform of dividing France into 83 departements whose governors ( prefects) he appointed centrally. He centralized the tax system (still used today) and established the Bank of France to stabilize the economy of France. The Revolution's system of free but mandatory education was kept and expanded with military uniforms and discipline being imposed. Napoleon also consolidated many of the Revolution's social and legal advances into five law codes. His civil code maintained the equality of all men before the law, but reasserted the power of the husband over the wife, thus negating some of the influence women had exerted during the Revolution.
Although not a religious man, Napoleon recognized the attachment of most French people to the Catholic Church and how the Revolution's policies against the Church had caused discontent and revolts. Therefore, in 1801 he made peace with the Church, recognizing it as the religion of the majority of Frenchmen and giving the clergy the right to practice their religion within the "police regulations" of France. Those regulations kept confiscated Church lands for the state and still paid the clergy their salaries. Regardless of that, Napoleon gained a great deal of popularity through his Church policy without giving up anything of essence.
Napoleon may have consolidated some gains of the Revolution, but he repressed others, for his "police regulations" in many ways amounted to a police state. Such civil rights as freedom of speech and press were now things of the past as 62 of 73 newspapers were repressed, and all plays, posters, and public conversations had to meet strict standards of what Napoleon thought was proper. Enforcing all this was Napoleon's minister of police, Joseph Fouche, formerly one of the Jacobins' representatives on mission during the Terror. He was a slippery character who had survived the Thermidorean Reaction and attached his fortunes to those of Napoleon. Fouche's spy network (one of four in France) kept him informed on just about everyone of importance in France (including Napoleon's own personal life). Fouche himself claimed that wherever three or more people were talking, one of them was reporting to him. By 1814 he had an estimated 2500 political prisoners locked away. Napoleonic rule certainly had its darker side.
By 1808, Napoleon was at the pinnacle of power. He controlled most of Europe to some degree or other. France was tightly under control and efficiently run. But forces were converging that would bring the Napoleonic regime crashing down in ruins.
Clear policy consists of making nations believe they are free.— Napoleon
The government that Napoleon and his allies set up, the Consulate, was a mockery of democracy and aptly reflected the above quotation. People elected delegates who chose other delegates who chose other delegates from whom were appointed legislators who had no power anyway. So much for the legislature. As for Napoleon's fellow conspirators, Ducos and Sieyes, they were shoved into the background and forgotten within a month, leaving Napoleon firmly in charge of France. However, his position was far from secure, because France was still ringed by the Second Coalition.
Napoleon first attacked Austrian forces in northern Italy, which he barely defeated at the Battle of Marengo (1800). This victory allowed Napoleon to return to France in triumph and further consolidate his position there. Meanwhile, his generals finished up the war against Austria, taking the Austrian Netherlands, northern Italy, and the left bank of the Rhine for France.
That left Britain to face France. Since Britain's navy and France's army were virtually unbeatable by the other side, and several neutral nations including the United States and Sweden had armed themselves against both Britain and France, the two big powers made peace in 1802. Prussia and Russia soon followed suit. Peace settled over Europe, at least temporarily.
Napoleon next turned his attention to Germany in order to settle a number of land disputes. Germany was still a patchwork of secular principalities, free cities, and church states. Since the Church tended to favor Catholic Austria against revolutionary France, Napoleon eliminated all but one church state and 44 out of 50 free cities, giving their lands to various German princes who now saw Napoleon as their benefactor.
Having fought his enemies to a standstill and made France the most feared and respected power in Europe, Napoleon could now pursue his next goal: becoming emperor of France. This was a tricky situation, since the French people might not take kindly to getting a new king so soon after getting rid of the old one. Using the title of emperor rather than king would partly ease people's misgiving and also give them a sense of France's imperial superiority over the rest of Europe. Napoleon approached the title in stages, first getting himself elected consul for ten years, then for life, and then, after a fake assassination plot to make people realize how much they loved him, emperor.
The coronation in 1804 was a splendid affair with even the pope coming to crown Napoleon. (Napoleon actually decided to crown himself and just let the pope watch.) The next day the emperor gave bronze eagles to his regiments as standards reminiscent of the Roman Empire. He even created a new nobility of dukes and counts from his officers in order to make a court that rivaled the splendor of other European courts.
The rest of Europe saw Napoleon's imperial crown as part of a plan to rule all of Europe. This triggered the war of the Third Coalition of Austria, Britain, and Russia against France and Spain (1803-1807). Once again, Napoleon was faced with his old nemesis, Britain, that "nation of shopkeepers" (to quote Adam Smith) whose navy shielded them from his military might. If only the British navy could be removed, Napoleon could slip across the Channel with his army and bring Britain to its knees. His plan for removing the British fleet was to lure it to the West Indies with the combined French and Spanish fleets. This would leave the Channel open for the French to cross. However, the British commander, Nelson, guessed this plan and managed to blockade the French and Spanish fleets in the Spanish port of Cadiz. When they tried to break out, the British crushed them in the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). Britain remained safe as its navy still ruled the waves.
Seeing his failure at sea, Napoleon marched his army eastward where he met the much larger combined armies of Austria and Russia at Austerlitz. Concentrating his forces in the center, he drove through and split the Russian and Austrian armies, winning possibly the most brilliant victory of his career (1805).
Austerlitz gave Napoleon the power to declare the Holy Roman Empire defunct, making him the heir apparent of Rome's imperial grandeur. He also used this opportunity to form the Confederation of the Rhine from the German princes grateful to him for the lands he had given them before. The Confederation consisted of about half of Germany and formed a large buffer zone on France's eastern border. This upset Prussia who had been sitting on the sidelines, but now decided to join the war. However as quickly as Prussia entered the war, its forces were shattered by Napoleon's blitzkrieg (1806).
Finally, there was Russia. After a bloody indecisive battle in the snow at Eylau, Napoleon won a decisive victory at Friedland. Now he could impose his kind of peace on Europe. Negotiations between Napoleon and Czar Alexander I were conducted on a raft in the middle of the Nieman River while Frederick William III of Prussia had to await his fate along the shore. The settlement for Prussia was not kind, taking nearly half of its land and population to help carve out the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a revived Poland that owed its existence and lasting loyalty to Napoleon. France and Russia recognized each other's spheres of influence, but France certainly emerged as the dominant power in Europe. Besides France, Napoleon directly ruled Belgium, Holland, the West Bank of the Rhine, the Papal States, and Venice. Then there were the states that were nominally free but lived under French law, administration, and usually French rulers who happened to be Napoleon's relatives: the kingdom of Naples, the Kingdom of Italy, Switzerland, the Confederation of the Rhine, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and Spain (after 1808). Finally, there were Napoleon's allies who had to follow him in war: Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Only Hitler ever came this close to ruling all of Europe.
While Napoleon is mainly remembered for his military campaigns and conquests, much of his importance lies in his government of France and how it consolidated the gains of the Revolution. For one thing, he kept the Revolution's administrative reform of dividing France into 83 departements whose governors ( prefects) he appointed centrally. He centralized the tax system (still used today) and established the Bank of France to stabilize the economy of France. The Revolution's system of free but mandatory education was kept and expanded with military uniforms and discipline being imposed. Napoleon also consolidated many of the Revolution's social and legal advances into five law codes. His civil code maintained the equality of all men before the law, but reasserted the power of the husband over the wife, thus negating some of the influence women had exerted during the Revolution.
Although not a religious man, Napoleon recognized the attachment of most French people to the Catholic Church and how the Revolution's policies against the Church had caused discontent and revolts. Therefore, in 1801 he made peace with the Church, recognizing it as the religion of the majority of Frenchmen and giving the clergy the right to practice their religion within the "police regulations" of France. Those regulations kept confiscated Church lands for the state and still paid the clergy their salaries. Regardless of that, Napoleon gained a great deal of popularity through his Church policy without giving up anything of essence.
Napoleon may have consolidated some gains of the Revolution, but he repressed others, for his "police regulations" in many ways amounted to a police state. Such civil rights as freedom of speech and press were now things of the past as 62 of 73 newspapers were repressed, and all plays, posters, and public conversations had to meet strict standards of what Napoleon thought was proper. Enforcing all this was Napoleon's minister of police, Joseph Fouche, formerly one of the Jacobins' representatives on mission during the Terror. He was a slippery character who had survived the Thermidorean Reaction and attached his fortunes to those of Napoleon. Fouche's spy network (one of four in France) kept him informed on just about everyone of importance in France (including Napoleon's own personal life). Fouche himself claimed that wherever three or more people were talking, one of them was reporting to him. By 1814 he had an estimated 2500 political prisoners locked away. Napoleonic rule certainly had its darker side.
By 1808, Napoleon was at the pinnacle of power. He controlled most of Europe to some degree or other. France was tightly under control and efficiently run. But forces were converging that would bring the Napoleonic regime crashing down in ruins.
One power Napoleon could not reach was Britain, whose navy safely sheltered it against any continental invasion. The ill-fated invasion of Egypt and the Battle of Trafalgar both bore this out. But Napoleon was determined to bring Britain to its knees, and this time decided to strike the "nation of shopkeepers" where it would hurt the worst: the wallet. With most of Europe under his control, Napoleon imposed the Continental System to stop all European trade with Britain. Hopefully, this would strangle Britain economically and force it to come to terms. And while it did hurt Britain, it also hurt the rest of Europe wanting to trade for Britain's cheaper industrial goods. By a combination of bribing officials, forging documents to mask the British identity of merchant ships, and outright smuggling, the Continental System leaked like a sieve. Even Napoleon secretly bought British goods.
One big leak in the system was Portugal, which refused to join the embargo against Britain. Napoleon decided to plug this leak by taking over Portugal, which he did in several months. However, in order to reach Portugal, French troops had to cross Spain. Therefore, Napoleon decided to replace the Bourbon dynasty ruling Spain with a French regime led by his brother, Joseph, figuring the Spanish people would prefer French rule to that of the corrupt monarchy. However, Napoleon had completely misread the spirit of Spain.
On May 2, 1808, a popular revolt in Madrid and the severe French repression following it triggered a general uprising that spread like wildfire across Spain. What Napoleon had figured to be a simple operation turned into a full-scale war that dragged on for five years. The Spanish revolt was the first example of another country's nationalism being turned against France, although it was led largely by priests and nobles who stood for the conservative values of the old regime.
The Spanish method of fighting was ill suited to Napoleon's style of warfare. Instead of meeting the French in large pitched battles on Napoleon's terms, the Spanish launched hit and run raids to cut enemy communications and supply lines and ambush stragglers and foragers. Such warfare (called guerilla, meaning "little war") tied down some 360,000 French troops in Spain and Portugal. The desperate fighting for the town of Saragossa alone cost the French 60,000 casualties. Even a simple messenger going to France required an escort of several hundred cavalry. This war came to be called the "Spanish Ulcer" since it slowly bled the life out of the French army. Napoleon himself said the invasion of Spain was the worst mistake of his career.
Making matters worse for the French was British help led by Sir Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington) and Sir John Moore. Wellesley in particular was a capable commander who knew how to use the stark Spanish landscape against the French, tying them down to long supply lines that were vulnerable to guerilla raids. Bit by bit, the French forces were worn down and driven back. In 1813 the last French army in Spain was defeated and driven out, leaving behind Joseph's silver chamber pot as a victory trophy to commemorate the "Spanish Ulcer".
Another shock came to Napoleon in 1809 when Austria, apparently inspired by the Spanish revolt, declared war on France again. Napoleon won the war quickly, but not before Austrian forces, showing their own nationalist spirit, inflicted a sharp defeat on the French. In the ensuing peace, Austria lost still more land and population as the price of daring to fight France. Napoleon also claimed an Austrian princess, Marie Louise, as his bride, hoping she would provide him with a legitimate heir to his throne as well as give him ties to established royalty.
This short war against Austria should have indicated to Napoleon that the tide of revolution was starting to favor France's enemies. Both Austria and Prussia were adopting French innovations such as drafting subjects into their armies, while Prussia went so far as to abolish serfdom. Speeches by such men as Johannes Fichte urged the unification of a strong Germany against France and showed a strong undercurrent of nationalism developing there. However, it was events further east that would be Napoleon's real undoing.
There were several reasons for Napoleon's decision to invade Russia in 1812. Czar Alexander I felt snubbed by Napoleon's marriage to an Austrian princess (even though Napoleon had first asked the Czar for a Russian princess and been snubbed). Mutual jealously between the two rulers, and Russian resentment of Napoleon's revival of Poland (as the Grand Duchy of Warsaw) and the Continental System, which was costing it valuable trade with Britain, also contributed to war.
Whatever the reasons, Napoleon was determined to crush Russia. Instead of relying on the typical Napoleonic blitzkrieg, he decided to use the weight of numbers, some 600,000 men drawn from all over his empire, to crush his foe. In June 1812, the Grand Army of France entered Russia.
While most people hearing of Napoleon's Russian campaign think of the horrible Russian winter and march out of Russia, the march going in was rough too, with summer heat, flies, and dust plaguing the French and their allies all along. The Russian scorched earth policy of burning anything of use to the French before they could get it also wore them out. Garrison duty, desertions, and even suicides from despair over the endless march reduced the French army to 125,000 men by September when the Russian General Kutozov was finally forced to make a stand at the village of Borodino some 70 miles west of Moscow. What ensued was the fiercest, bloodiest, and most horrible day of fighting in the Napoleonic era, and possibly in history up till then. Once again Napoleon discovered that nationalist fervor was not something that could be confined to the French people. After a full day of hammering mercilessly at each other, 40,000 Russians and 20,000 French were lost, including 39 French Generals who were killed or seriously wounded. Even though the Russians eventually retreated, with those sorts of losses, nobody could really claim a victory.
The Russians left Moscow to the French, but little else in the way of food and other supplies. Soon after its occupation, Moscow mysteriously went up in flames, thus denying the French any shelter as well. Napoleon, hoping the Czar would come to terms, waited until October 19 to evacuate Moscow and head home. By then it was too late. The Russian winter was quickly setting in.
By Russian standards it was not such a bad winter. But for an army that had brought mosquito nets for continuing its campaign into India, it was a disaster. Men froze from exposure to the elements and starved as supply lines broke down and the surrounding scorched earth yielded little or no food. Many of the French horses died simply because Napoleon had refused to let them be shod for ice. With each day, the situation became more desperate and the retreat degenerated into a rout. At the Berezhina River, total chaos ruled as the mob of French soldiers crowded frantically onto two bridges to escape oncoming Russian forces. One of the bridges broke under the weight of the crowd and thousands drowned or were crushed in the ensuing panic. An island that formed over the pile of bodies still stands as a grim reminder of the French disaster in Russia. Of 600,000 men who invaded Russia, only 55,000 made it back. Napoleon's message to the French people upon returning from this disaster was: "His majesty's health has never been better."
Napoleon's defeat in Russia was a signal to the rest of Europe to rise up against French rule, and Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Britain formed a new coalition to liberate the continent. Napoleon still had some fight left in him and raised new armies to defend his empire. However, the emperor was not as sharp as he used to be and he wasted men on needless marches and countermarches. The year 1813 saw heavy fighting as the allies pushed the French back across Germany. The decisive battle came at Leipzig in the "Battle of the Nations" where 300,000 allies and 190,000 French desperately fought for three days. When France's Saxon allies turned on them in mid battle, the French were forced to retreat through Leipzig. Unfortunately, the one bridge providing an avenue of escape was prematurely blown up, and thousands of French soldiers either surrendered or were drowned. The remaining French forces quickly retreated across Germany while the rest of Napoleon's empire in Holland, Italy, and Spain threw off the yoke of French rule. In fifteen months of disastrous campaigning, Napoleon had lost one million men.
Yet he refused to accept a settlement that would leave him with France. Maybe he hoped for an upsurge of nationalist fervor such as had happened during the crisis of the Revolution in 1793. In this he was sadly disappointed, because France was worn out by nearly a quarter century of warfare. The ranks were now filled with the "Marie Louise Boys", called that since they were too young to shave, but not too young to die for their emperor. While Napoleon showed flashes of his old brilliance in hurling one invading army after another back from French soil, it was still too little too late. On April 13, 1814, Napoleon was forced to abdicate. The man who just recently had ruled most of Europe now had to leave France in disguise to save himself from mobs of French people bitter over having suffered so much from his wars.
However, Napoleon was not quite through. The allies had generously given him the tiny Mediterranean island of Elba to rule, even with an army of 900 men. In 1815 he escaped to France, seized control of the government, and fought one last battle against the Anglo-Dutch and Prussian armies near the Belgian village of Waterloo. It was a poorly run battle on Napoleon's part and ended in total defeat for the French. This time Napoleon was exiled to the island of St. Helena off the southern tip of Africa. He died there in 1821.
Prussia provides possibly the best example of how Napoleon's success inspired other countries to copy many of his reforms in order to break free of French rule. Napoleon was especially severe with Prussia joining his enemies in 1806, taking nearly half of its lands while exacting an indemnity equal to 140% of its annual government revenue before it had lost those lands. In addition its army was limited to 42,000 men. This humiliating settlement brought home to Prussia's rulers the need to copy the reforms that had obviously given France so much dynamic power and vitality during the revolutionary period. These reforms came in two ways: those imposed by the government from above in order to prevent the need for revolution from below, and those suggested by intellectuals, notably Johannes Fichte, in regard to education.
There were three main parts to the reforms imposed by the government. The most sweeping of these was the Edict of Emancipation in 1807, which ended serfdom, feudal privileges, and all class distinctions. Even Jews were given full civil rights by this document, a rarity in Europe at that time. Along with this came a land reform in 1811 that gave the peasants two-thirds of the land they had worked for the nobles while leaving those nobles the other third of land in compensation for their loss. Finally, there were major military reforms, such as promotion by merit and banning foreign recruits, which hopefully would instill some of the same high morale and efficiency into the Prussian army that had made the French army so effective in recent years.
Later in the century, Otto von Bismarck would unify Germany under Prussian rule and institute similar social reforms in order to remove any need for revolution. In each case, there were few political reforms giving the German people any real power in their government. However, these two waves of reforms in the 1800's would make Germans more willing to accept without question the policies of a government they saw as benevolent and ruling in their interests. This would influence many ideas on the modern welfare state, but also, along with the educational reforms discussed below, make the German people prone to fall victim of political groups posing as their benefactors while just using this facade to get power for their own purposes.
The major figure in Prussia' educational reforms was Johannes Fichte. In his "Addresses to the German Nation", he tackled two issues: creating a German national spirit and instilling it into the German people. First of all, Fichte blamed Prussia's and the German people's recent humiliations on a lack of national spirit, which gave, rise to moral failure and complacency. From the English philosopher, Edmund Burke, he borrowed the idea that the nation is the only enduring thing on earth, and thus the living expression of divine immortality. However, while France and England had strong national traditions and institutions to bind them together, the German people had virtually none and thus must find or create them. For Fichte, the best candidates for such German traditions were the Germanic tribes that had conquered the Roman Empire. It was here that one would find the simple and noble virtues that had made those people great and would make Germans great once again. He also saw the Holy Roman Empire, the so-called First Reich, as a unifying institution that Germans could look back to for inspiration.
As far as instilling these traditions in the German people, Fichte saw the public schools as the place where this could be done. While Prussian schools had been and remained places for technical education, this new agenda of instilling nationalist spirit into its children also became an essential element in public education for many modern nations in addition to Prussia and later Germany.
Just as the government's social reforms made the German people somewhat complacent about their rulers, these nationalist ideas had a similar effect on Germany's intellectuals. Fichte's educational proposals would translate intellectual ideas into action on a national scale and give the intellectual community a major role in implementing these reforms. However, it also made the intellectuals a part of and subordinate to a system that valued action over contemplation. This put pressure on them to affirm government policies with absolute conviction rather than questioning them in the spirit of skepticism needed to keep an intellectual climate fresh and vibrant. Therefore, the intellectuals, along with the German people in general, were prone to falling under the sway of people who would use their power for less then benevolent purposes. The most notable example of this was the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, which led to World War II. Ironically, Fichte, who proposed many of the reforms that would eventually lead to this disaster, was himself an idealistic liberal, the sort of person that Hitler would work so hard to eradicate.
No other event or series of events in history has had nearly the impact of the Industrial Revolution. Most likely, people living in the 1700's could more easily relate to the lifestyle of ancestors 2000 years earlier than to our lifestyle a mere 200 years later. Our life expectancies are more than double that of our ancestors. We travel thousands of miles much more easily, quickly, and comfortably than they could travel 20 or 30 miles. We are in much closer touch with events on the other side of the globe than they were with events in the next village. And the price we pay for our medical care, balanced diet, rapid transportation, and mass communication involves much less effort than what they spent for their more primitive comforts and necessities.
Although industrialization happened rapidly, one can see a long steady build-up toward it in Western Europe over many centuries. The extensive use of water wheels, windmills, and other labor saving devices all put the European mentality in touch with exploiting natural forces and laws to increase productivity. The invention of the clock changed Europeans' attitudes toward time, disciplining and regulating their lives to a degree of precision necessary for industrialization. And the Enlightenment's scientific discoveries laid the foundations for the dramatic industrial and scientific advances of the 1800's. All of these developments took place in Western Europe because of a complex variety of forces that fed back on one another to intensify their effects.
Just as various forces combined to make Western Europe the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, several factors combined to focus on Great Britain as the specific area of Europe where industrialization would first take root. One of these was a rapid growth in agricultural production and the labor force that started with the agricultural revolution in the Middle Ages. This led to three lines of development that would later converge to create a new agricultural revolution in the 1700's.
First of all, the three-field system developed in the Middle Ages required nearly all the farmland for growing grain crops. This left little land for grazing cattle, which, in turn, produced little manure for fertilizer. As a result, crop yields were down, forcing peasants to use most of the land for grain crops, and so on. This made the agriculture fairly stagnant and created the need for a better way of feeding Britain's population.
Another medieval innovation, the heavy plow, also generated a vicious cycle. Since peasants were typically too poor to own enough oxen to pull a plow, they had to share plow teams. As a result, they broke their fields into strips in order to ensure that everyone got at least some of his land plowed. This left everyone's lands interlocked in scattered strips of farmland. Because of that, there was little incentive or opportunity to try new agricultural techniques, since all the peasants had to agree on any changes and switch all of the village's lands to the new system. Getting everyone to agree to any such changes was extremely difficult. As with the three field system, this also made agriculture fairly stagnant, keeping individual peasants too poor to farm independently, forcing them to continue sharing plow teams, and so on. This also created the need for better agricultural techniques.
However, another result of the medieval agricultural revolution, the rise of towns in the High Middle Ages, unleashed forces that pushed for change in two ways. First of all, by the early modern era, the rising middle class had bought up much of the farmland in their ambitions for secure investments and noble titles. These landowners were more open to new farming techniques that could earn them more profits. Second, the Enlightenment was discovering new ways to grow better crops. These two factors led to the four-field system that used all four fields rather than leaving one fallow. This had three advantages. First, it made previously useless and marginal land useful, thus expanding the amount of land under cultivation. Second, it used clover and turnips in the fourth field to maintain the soil’s fertility. Finally, with the fourth field now in use, it was using all of the land every year rather than having to keep part of it fallow. These factors led to better crop production so that peasants could afford feed for livestock, leading to more meat and protein in the common people's diet. Unfortunately, this new and more efficient agriculture required large open tracts of land.
In the 1700's, the need for better agriculture and the need for large tracts of land for this new type of agriculture led to the Enclosure Movement, whereby wealthy landowners enclosed the common lands so they could practice the four-field system. This created two effects that helped lead to the Industrial Revolution. First of all, the Enclosure Movement drove many people off their lands, forcing them to flock to the cities in search of homes and jobs. Also, this new kind of agriculture doubled food production, thus leading to dramatic population growth in England in the 1700's. The combination of population growth in the cities created the labor supply for Britain's textile mills when the Industrial Revolution began.
If new agricultural developments provided the backbone for supporting the Industrial Revolution, various technological innovations were its heart and soul. And the roots of those innovations and the cultural attitudes so vital for their formation go all the way back to the Middle Ages and the Cistercian monks. What triggered all this was the Cistercians' desire to get away from the evils of the world. This led them to found their monasteries in the wilderness away from civilization, but also away from any outside labor supply upon which they might rely. Being thrown back on their own resources, they rediscovered, probably in an old Latin or Greek text they were copying, the principles of applying water power with a waterwheel. The ancient Greeks had come up with this invention, along with the principles of steam power. However, the abundance of cheap human labor meant there was no real need for water or steam power in the ancient world. As a result, these principles lay largely unused until this time.
However, the Cistercians did need such principles and started experimenting with labor saving waterwheels, first applying them to the milling of grain into flour. Two later inventions dramatically expanded its uses. First, there was the cam, which was a piece of wood set on the drive shaft that struck anything in its way, such as a bellows or trip hammer, with each revolution of the waterwheel. Second, there was the crank that could convert the circular motion of the waterwheel into oscillating motion. These two developments led to applying waterpower to a multitude of tasks: They could drive ripsaws, bellows, and water pumps. They were connected to grinding stones for sharpening and polishing tools, weapons and armor. And they could power trip hammers for fulling cloth, crushing sugarcane, and pounding hemp and rags for rope and paper.
The number of mills that sprang up was astounding. William the Conqueror's census in 1089, the Domesday Book, listed no fewer than 5624 watermills in England alone. That was one mill for every 50 families and is estimated to have saved the average peasant wife two to three hours of work per day once the tedious task of milling grain was mechanized. The main branch of the Seine River going through Paris had 68 mills. Another sixteen-kilometer stretch of stream had 30 such mills. Wherever rivers were slow, people built dams to increase the waterpower and floating mills to use that power. And where there were no rivers at all, they applied these mechanical principles to harnessing other types of energy, building tidal mills along the ocean and windmills (originally a Persian invention) on flat open land. By 1600, some 40 different types of industries were wholly or partially dependent on water or wind power, mechanizing such tasks as spinning silk, boring the barrels from cannons and muskets, and making gunpowder. In 1694, Louis XIV's main military engineer, the Marquis de Vauban, estimated that France had 80,000 flourmills, 15,000 industrial mills, and 500 iron mills.
As waterwheel technology spread across Western Europe, so did a growing awareness of how to exploit mechanical principles in general. In addition to harnessing the power of the tides and winds, Europeans were also developing better clocks (originally a Chinese invention). In fact, the clock would become the symbol of Europe's increasingly mechanistic view of the universe. However, while Europeans were harnessing time and parceling it out in discrete units of hours, minutes, and seconds, the clock was also more tightly structuring how Europeans lived their lives. This would be another important aspect of the Industrial Revolution as far as conditioning factory workers to the time clock and creating a more precise society.
It was Europeans' rising ability of how to exploit mechanical principles that led to three lines of technological development that together would culminate in possibly the most critical invention of the Industrial Revolution: the steam engine. Those lines of development had to do with mechanical ripsaws, larger bellows, and innovations in the textile industry.
Britain in the 1700's was the perfect example of the idea that necessity is the mother of invention. The triumph of the mercantile middle class in the English Revolution of the 1600's and the growth of European colonial empires, especially that of Britain, had created global trade links such as had never been seen before. However, opening up such new vistas often creates problems, and that was the case with European textile production. Europe's higher standard of living made its goods and labor more expensive, which led to an influx of cheaper textiles from India that could undersell European, and particularly British, goods. In order to compete more successfully, British textile producers needed a cheaper and faster way to produce cloth.
The answer came with the invention of the more mechanized handloom (1733) which had a "flying shuttle" that quickly wove the weft thread in between the warp threads This could double the speed of production, except for one other problem. The spinning wheel used to spin the thread for the loom was too slow. The solution came with two more inventions in the 1760's: the spinning jenny, which could spin seven threads at a time, and the water frame which could use water power to increase the speed of spinning and weaving even more. This series of inventions gave the British textile industry a tremendous boost, and soon textile mills were springing up on just about every available bit of river front property. Unfortunately, the amount of such property was limited, and soon profit hungry businessmen were looking for a new power source to drive their looms and spinning jenny's. Luckily, all this while a new power source had been emerging. That was the steam engine
As mentioned above, one important application of the waterwheel was to drive larger bellows. What this made possible was hotter fires with which metal smiths could finally smelt iron. And that provided purer iron for building stronger boilers and steam engines.
Another important development was the water-powered ripsaw. This was a much more efficient way to cut timber, so efficient in fact that, by 1600, most of Britain was effectively deforested. Therefore, the English, largely without their primary heat source, wood (and charcoal processed from wood), had to find something else to burn. They found it in Britain's plentiful coal deposits.
One problem with coal is that it burns much less cleanly than charcoal, making it harder to come up with good iron. This was until 1709 when someone discovered a way to process coal into a cleaner and hotter burning substance known as coke. However, it was not until 1783 that a smelting technique, known as rolling and puddling, was invented which worked the impurities out of iron and made it strong and cheap enough for widespread industrial use. With stronger and cleaner iron, people could make boilers able to withstand the higher steam pressures needed for more powerful steam engines. This of course was only relevant once the steam engine had been invented, which brings us to another problem with coal.
Unfortunately, most of Britain's coal was buried in deposits that required the construction of deep shaft mines. Eventually coal miners ran into that curse of all deep mines: water seepage. It was here that a crude steam pump was devised to give steam its first practical job. Unfortunately, this early pump was inefficient and burned nearly as much coal as was being mined. More efficient models were designed, notably that of Thomas Newcomen. But a truly efficient design did not come along until 1769 when James Watt introduced a practical two-chamber steam engine that made steam power economical to use in the mines.
Not only was steam power practical for the mines. It also found applications in the textile mills for those businessmen not lucky enough to have waterfront property and the free power that went with it. As a result, British textile production jumped by a factor of 30 times. With each passing year, the hissing, churning, and pumping of the steam engines rang louder in Britain's cities while the black smoke from burning coal steadily darkened its skies. The Industrial Revolution had been born.
Although the four-field system and steam engine provided the basic foundations for the Industrial Revolution, it took other factors combined with these to create this phenomenon. As it happened, Britain in the 1700's was the place where all these factors converged to make it the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.
Much of Britain's favored position came from the English Revolution of the 1600's and the triumph of a wealthy middle class with both the money and willingness to invest in new ventures. This created five basic lines of development that together would trigger the Industrial Revolution. The first of was the new steam and textile technology. Second, there was the new agriculture and population growth crating both the labor force for the new industrial factories and the markets to buy their manufactured goods. The third factor was Britain's colonial empire, which provided raw materials for the factories as well as more markets for their goods.
Fourth was the development of a superior transportation system for getting raw materials to the factories and finished products to markets. Britain was especially favored in this respect, being an island with navigable inland rivers further enhanced by a well-developed system of canals. This, along with its colonial empire, prompted the British to build an excellent merchant marine for transporting its goods. Also, as the nineteenth century progressed, a new form of technology, the steam locomotive traveling on steel rails, would make overland transport increasingly economical and efficient for the first time in history.
The fifth and final factor was a large surplus of capital along with the willingness to spend it on new machines and technology. Central to this was the Bank of England, which encouraged investment, stability, and economic growth in both the public and private sectors. Consequently, when the machines and opportunities to exploit them came along, British businessmen were in by far the best position to take advantage of the situation, making Britain the banker of the world for the next century.
Two other factors also helped Britain. One was its excellent position as an island, which not only helped its trade, but also insulated it from continental wars. Also, Britain was blessed with extensive coal and iron deposits. By 1850, one-half of the world's iron and a full two-thirds of its coal production would come from British mines. Along with providing the resources for producing steam power and heavy industrial machinery, it also triggered a dramatic migration from the more agricultural south to the industrial north where the coal and iron fields lay. In addition to coal and iron, Britain also had access to plentiful supplies of Scottish wool for its textile mills.
Later, Britain would rely on cotton from America. Once Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin (1793) solved the problem of cleaning the seeds out of the fiber, the southern United States became a primary cotton producer for British factories. However, the cotton gin had unforeseen and far-reaching consequences since it prolonged the life of slavery in the United States, making it a red-hot issue in American politics and a major factor leading to the American Civil War.
All these various factors (the new steam and textile technology, a large labor force, extensive markets at home and in its colonies, a superior transportation system, plenty of capital, extensive raw materials, and an excellent position for trade) combined to create a textile industry that could produce, transport, and sell vast quantities of cheap cloth by the late 1700's.
The result of all this was an industrial revolution of vast importance in a number of ways. For one thing, it would spawn the steam powered locomotive and railroads which would revolutionize land transportation and tie the interiors of continents together to a degree never before imagined. It would trigger massive changes in people's living and working conditions as well as the structures of family and society. And its momentum would generate a rapid-fire chain reaction of new technologies, a process that is still accelerating today and shows no signs of slowing down. Nor would these dramatic changes be confined to Europe. Rather, their power would spread across the globe to change the way the entire human species lives, for better or worse.
No invention of the 1800's played a more vital role in the Industrial Revolution than the steam locomotive and railroad, triggering the biggest leap in transportation technology in history. The technology central to railroads, the steam engine, needed two major improvements. First of all, a way had to be found to convert the oscillating motion of the steam engine to rotary motion so it could drive the locomotive's wheels. The solution came with James Watt's Sun and Planet gear, which connected the piston to the wheels somewhat off center to drive it forward. Secondly there was a need for stronger iron so boilers could create and withstand the pressure needed to drive steam locomotives. In 1783, the rolling and puddling process was invented, eliminating impurities in the iron and making it much stronger. In addition to creating much stronger boilers, it also led to stronger and cheaper iron rails on which the locomotives could ride.
Another catalyst for the invention of the locomotive was the loss of so many horses during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. This, along with the rolling and puddling method and Watt's Sun and Planet gear, sparked experiments leading to the first steam locomotive in 1804. However, it was not until the 1820's, when a properly running locomotive had been designed and the rolling and puddling technique had advanced and become widespread enough to make good cheap rails possible, that the first railroads were born.
In 1825, the Stockton and Darlington Railroad carried the first commercial freight of any railroad in history. Five years later, the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad opened operations carrying passengers as well as freight. This quickly sparked a virtual mania for building railroads in Europe and the United States after 1830. The 1800s saw incredible growth in the miles of track being laid. In 1830, Britain had only 95 miles of track. That figure had grown to 1500 miles by 1840 and 6600 miles by 1850. By contrast, Europe in 1850 had only 8000 miles of track. However, after 1850 Europe and the United States rapidly gained to Britain. By 1890, Britain had 20,000 miles of track, while Germany had 26,000 miles and the United States had 167,000 miles. Even Russia had 48,000 miles of track by 1900, although that was spread out over a vast area.
Such rapid expansion had both political and economic effects. Politically, the power of the state grew considerably. For one thing railroads were expensive to build, leading governments to finance them directly or through massive land grants. Also, everyone wanted railroads to pass through and benefit their regions. At first, this was impractical, and governments often had to step in and decide where the main trunk lines should be laid before less profitable branch lines could be developed. Finally, standard gauges (track sizes) and safety standards had to be set so that different railroads could easily link up and run their trains on other companies' tracks without crashing into one another. Naturally, each railroad wanted to avoid the expense of adapting its own gauge to another company's standard, making it necessary for the government to step in and impose a standard gauge and safety practices. Therefore, as railroads unified their nations economically, the governments directing their development unified their nations politically and increased their own power.
Railroads cut travel time by 90% and dramatically reduced freight costs with three important economic results. First, they made possible the settlement and development of continental interiors. For example, in 1869 the first transcontinental railroad across North America was completed, transforming an arduous and dangerous journey of months into an easy trip of a few days. This linked the countryside more tightly to the cities, production areas to markets and raw materials, and continental interiors to coastlines and waterways. Second, farmers switched from raising subsistence crops to cash crops better suited for their local soils, thus increasing crop yields dramatically. They could then sell the crops, buy the food needed to feed themselves, and still have money for buying consumer goods. Finally, areas previously isolated during famines could now be supplied, leading to fewer deaths from hunger and starvation and corresponding increases in population.
With factories more closely connected to markets and the larger population of potential consumers, many more people could afford consumer goods. This stimulated sales, providing more jobs, increased production, and lower prices. With business booming, companies developed new products, triggering a virtual explosion of new technological advances, inventions, and consumer products in the latter 1800's. All these advances led to a higher standard of living, which further increased the consumer market, starting the process all over again.
By 1900, railroads had virtually revolutionized overland transportation and travel, pulling whole continents tightly together (both economically and politically), helping create a higher standard of living, the modern consumer society, and a proliferation of new technologies. Although airplanes and automobiles would continue this revolution, it was the railroad that paved the way.
"It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face over which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full of windows where there was rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next...
"You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there-- as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done-- they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it.... All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end. Amen." —From Hard Times by Charles Dickens
Today we see the Industrial Revolution as being responsible for the higher standard of living we enjoy. This, of course, is true, but there was a great and, at times, appalling, price paid in human suffering to attain this standard of living. From the start, industrialization meant the transformation of countries' populations from being predominantly rural to being predominantly urban. In England, this involved the migration of millions from the agricultural south to the cities springing up near the coal and iron fields in the north. The population of Manchester, England grew from 25,000 in l772 to 303,000 by l850. Liverpool's population rose from 80,000 to 397,000 in the first half of the nineteenth century. Other cities told similar stories of incredible growth. Overall in Britain, the number of cities with populations of 50,000 or more rose from 3 in l785 to 3l in l860. By l850, Britain had become the first nation in history to have a larger urban than rural population. Other countries would soon follow suit.
These early industrial cities created problems in three areas: living conditions, working conditions, and the social structure. First of all, cities built so rapidly were also built shoddily. Tenement houses were crammed together along narrow streets, poorly built, and incredibly crowded. Whole families were packed into attics, cellars, or single rooms, with one house holding 63 people in 7 rooms. Sanitation was virtually non-existent, making clean water a luxury reserved for the rich. Open sewers ran down streets carrying water fouled with industrial and human waste. Diseases such as cholera, typhoid, typhus, and tuberculosis often reached epidemic proportions. Add to these problems air pollution and malnutrition, and one gets a picture of incomparable human misery. Alcoholism, drug abuse, crime, and prostitution were natural outcomes of having to endure these conditions.
Away from home, working conditions were even worse. Depending on the hours of sunlight, the workday could extend up to l9 hours a day, six days a week. The work itself was hard, boring, and tedious. Conditions around the steam engines and in the mines were hot and at times extremely dangerous. In the absence of safety devices, machines often tore off fingers, hands, and even arms. Mine shafts would occasionally explode or cave in, trapping and killing hundreds of workers deep within the earth.
Despite all this, there were often long lines of the unemployed waiting for any available jobs. This surplus of labor kept wages excessively low. As a result, families had to send their women and even their children to work in the factories just to make ends meet. In fact, women and children were preferred as workers because they could be paid less while being worked harder. Occasional depressions in the economy could lead to whole industries shutting down. This left thousands of families with no jobs and no public welfare to see them through such hard times. Even medieval serfs had been assured some rights to a living off their lands, which was more than these people could often enjoy.
The Industrial Revolution also upset old social patterns of life and family. Under the old domestic system of cottage industries, peasants worked in their own homes, produced at their own rates, and were paid accordingly. Under the new factory system, laborers worked in the factories owned by bosses whom they rarely, if ever, saw. They had to be at work precisely on time and work at the much faster pace of the machines. Nevertheless, they were paid by the hour, not according to their productivity, since that was cheaper for the owner.
Previously, the farm, home and the workplace were one and the same, with men and women sharing in many of the same tasks. In the industrial city, there was a separation of home and workplace and a correspondingly greater separation of the roles men and women played. In middle class families, men went to work while women stayed home with the children. In working class families, men, women, and children all went to work, but usually to separate places. For both middle and working class families, these were added strains that pulled the family apart.
Although the nuclear family had generally replaced the extended family in European society since the Black Death (largely in order to keep from splitting up family lands), there was still a network of close friends and relatives in the villages providing each other mutual support. However, as individual families moved to the city, they left behind the support network of the villages, often living in isolation and having little or no support from their neighbors.
The growing numbers of people left helpless and destitute by the rapid changes of industrialization did not go unnoticed, and reform movements arose from three directions. Some reformers were genuinely concerned industrialists such as Robert Owen and W. H. Lever, who built model communities in which their workers could live and work. Other reformers were liberal politicians trying to alleviate the sufferings of the masses or conservative politicians trying to avert social revolution caused by such misery. Together such politicians enacted legislation that gradually eased the plight of the working class, such as the Factory Act of l833, which limited the use of child labor, and the Factory Act of l850, which limited women and children to workdays of ten and a half hours.
However, many workers felt that for real progress to be made, they would have to work for it themselves. That involved organizing into trade unions, the very existence of which was illegal until l824. Even then, they could only exist as mutual aid societies to provide their members with insurance against sickness and injury. Not until l87l could British unions represent their members' grievances and actively work for reforms. The struggle for those reforms was a long, hard, and often violent one. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, trade unions had made substantial progress toward improving the living and working conditions that industrial workers had to endure.
The standard of living for workers in the early Industrial Revolution was certainly horrible, but it did improve in the course of the nineteenth century. Two types of statistics tell us this. First of all, the overall population of Europe rose dramatically from some l87,000,000 in l800 to 466,000,000 by l9l4. Add to that another 60,000,000 who emigrated to other continents, and one gets the distinct impression that the overall standard of living in Europe was getting better.
Another figure telling a similar story of progress is the average life expectancy of Europeans during this time. In l800, most people could expect to live around 30 years or less, depending on their social class. By l900, the average life expectancy had risen about fifty per cent to 45 years. Better living conditions and nutrition, public sanitation, and great advances in medical science were all responsible for this jump. However, the price those early generations of factory workers paid for this progress and our own comfortable life styles was a terrible one indeed.
One of the most dramatic and unexpected consequences of the Industrial Revolution was the rising status of women by the end of the nineteenth century. Two aspects of industrialization in particular moved society in this direction. First of all, there was the separation of home and the workplace, which led to men often competing with women for factory jobs. Men disliked this, especially since women were often preferred by factory owners who could more easily overwork and underpay them. Therefore, working class men did what they could to push women out of what they saw as "male" occupations in order to keep their jobs.
This, along with the growth of new technologies and the emerging consumer society, had two effects. For one thing, more affluent middle class women especially tended to stay home in what became associated with the "housewife" role. This gave many women more leisure time, which they often used to get involved in political and social issues. Oftentimes, this would start through participation in church activities that typically were concerned with such causes. At the same time, since many middle class women were spending time at home and doing the shopping, they were seen as important aspects of the emerging consumer society. Therefore, the advertising industry targeted many of its campaigns specifically toward women. As a result, women's status in society started rising in the last half of the nineteenth century.
By the same token this rising status opened up new avenues of activity and expression for women. More women pursued secondary and university educations. Many of them also found their way into the workplace in what would eventually come to be seen as "female" occupations as nurses, teachers, and secretaries. In their leisure time, women took part in casual social dancing and sports. At first these were "feminine" sports such as croquet, bicycling, and horseback riding using the more "feminine" (and dangerous) sidesaddle. Even women's fashions in the early twentieth century reflected their social mobility by becoming increasingly less confining. More adventurous women were also taking part in mixed swimming and tennis. Only six years after the inauguration of men's singles at Wimbledon, women had their own singles tournament. Not only did women's rising status allow them to take part in these activities, but these activities gave women more visibility in society and increased their status, thus opening them more doors, and so on.
All this encouraged many women to work for suffrage (the right to vote). Serious discussion of this topic largely started with the French Revolution. Mary Wollstonecraft's book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, argued that women were neither mentally or physically inferior to men and that different standards for women were stifling to both sexes. This gained further support, including from such men as the political philosopher, John Stuart Mill. In Britain, demonstrations to gain the vote occasionally met with harsh reactions from men. When several women were jailed after a demonstration in 1905, newspapers finally broke their silence on the suffrage issue. This gave more publicity and support for women's suffrage, which sparked more demonstrations, reactions, publicity and sympathy, and so on. Although some women, frustrated at their treatment, turned to more destructive and even violent actions (vandalism, bombs in mailboxes, and one woman even throwing herself in front of a racehorse), most kept to more moderate tactics and continued to gain support.
Two things accelerated this process. First of all, women became especially vital to the workplace during World War I when so many men were gone and women were needed to fill their jobs. Secondly, there was the philosophy of Liberalism, which was originally intended to apply just to men. However, it could just as easily apply to women and became the philosophical basis for the women's suffrage movement. In 1918, women over 30 won the vote (thus keeping male voters in the majority until 1927 when women over 21 could also vote). Women in other industrial countries soon gained suffrage: Finland (1906), Norway (1913), Russia (1917), and the United States (1919), along with Germany, Sweden, Austria, and the Netherlands. France, Italy, Switzerland and eventually most other countries around the globe would grant the vote later in the century. However, many barriers to equality remained and the struggle to attain equal status continues today.
Religion is the opiate of the masses.— Karl Marx
One of the most powerful and influential philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been socialism, a doctrine believing the means of production should belong to the workers. This contrasts sharply with capitalism which has a small but very rich class of capitalists owning the means of production and an underclass of workers with little or no say in company policies. Socialism was a response to the horrible working and living conditions of the early industrial revolution. It was highly idealistic, drawing inspiration from a tradition of early Christian communal societies. In fact, it was often too idealistic and democratic, which doomed many early socialist communal experiments, such as one in New Harmony, Indiana, to failure.
Much more radical was Marxism, named after its founder, Karl Marx, who published The Communist Manifesto in 1848. While early socialists tried to build a new order within the existing one, Marx believed the present order must first be destroyed by revolution before a truly socialist society could evolve. However, Marxism is more than just a revolutionary call to arms for the working class. It is an entire system of thought with its own all encompassing view of society, economics, and history.
To start with, Marx believed in economic determinism, the idea that how a society produces and distributes its wealth will determine its social and political structure, laws, and even religion. Therefore, he saw history as a series of class struggles as humanity evolved through five basic stages of society:
Primitive hunting and gathering societies which had no extra wealth and therefore no private property, social classes, class struggles, or even the need for government;
Slave societies with a rich ruling class opposed by an oppressed underclass of slaves;
Feudal society with a noble class of landowning lords opposed by an oppressed class of serfs;
Capitalist society with a rich class of factory owners (bourgeoisie) opposed by an oppressed class of factory workers (the proletariat); and finally
Socialist society run by the workers with no private property, and thus no social classes, or class conflicts.
Marx saw each type of society as a necessary stage in the evolution toward the socialist society. Likewise, he saw the capitalist society of his own time as self destructive and moving inevitably toward socialist revolution. This largely hinged on his labor theory of value. This stated that any product was only worth as much the workers were paid to make it. Anything a capitalist charged beyond this amount was called surplus value. And it was here that Marx saw the beginning of the fatal cycle that would destroy capitalism.
If capitalists charged more for a product than their workers were paid to make it, not everyone could sell their goods because, among other things, the workers would not be paid enough to buy them. This would drive some owners out of business and create a smaller business class, although individually they each would be richer. However, to stay competitive, they would have to invest in more efficient, and expensive, machinery, thus laying off workers in the process. Since they would still overcharge for their products and there were now even fewer workers to buy them, more owners would be driven from business and the cycle would repeat.
However, this cycle could not continue indefinitely, since each time around there would be a growing gap between the fabulously rich and desperately poor. Eventually, this would trigger a revolution that would destroy the capitalist order. The triumphant workers would then build a society where people as a whole owned everything in common. Private property would disappear, and with it social classes, conflict over property, and any need for government, family, and religion, which were all seen as instruments of bourgeois oppression. There would be no rich or poor, thus allowing each individual to find true fulfillment. However, for all of this to happen, an intermediate stage of government would be necessary to guide the revolution to this workers' utopia.
Marxism had both its good points and its problems. First of all, it was valuable for pointing out the importance of economics and class struggle in history. On the other hand, it failed to account for the role of individual genius, stupidity, and especially greed in human affairs, assuming that everyone would voluntarily give up all individual possessions for the common good. Also, Marx assumed his socialist revolution would take place in industrialized countries, when in fact it actually occurred in pre-industrial societies such as Russia, China, and Cuba. This was largely because, by Marx's death in 1883, conditions for industrial workers were starting to improve, thus undercutting any appeal socialist revolution might have for them. However, many subsequent social reforms, both in countries that hated and feared Marxism as well as ones that followed it, could trace their existence back to Karl Marx.
By 1850, Britain had become the first industrialized country in the world, with over half of its people living in cities. It controlled ninety per cent of Europe's steam shipping along with half of the world's iron and two-thirds of its coal production. However, outside of Britain, industrial factories were few and far between. There were several reasons for this. For one thing, the competition of cheaper British goods drained the capital needed for investment in industry from other countries and toward Britain. Internal tolls and political disunity prevented the integration of national economies needed to industrialize. Coal and iron deposits were usually far from each other, making it hard to concentrate the resources needed for industrialization. Britain itself actively worked to keep its technical knowledge from leaking beyond its shores. Finally, there was widespread resistance to industrialization in other countries, as people were reluctant to give up their traditional ways, feared the loss of jobs to machines, and saw the pollution and squalor of Britain's cities at that time.
Being so far ahead of the rest of the world, Britain decided to hold a magnificent trade fair, The Great Exhibition, in 1851 to show off its technological achievements. Other countries also contributed exhibits, but Britain's were the centerpiece of the show. Among these was the exhibit hall itself, the Crystal Palace, a magnificent structure of iron and glass covering 19 acres and even enclosing the trees of Hyde Park. The Great Exhibition and Crystal Palace symbolized the completion of Britain's industrialization and the beginning of the spread of industry to other parts of Europe and the world. After 1850, the most spectacular industrial advances would take place in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan.
Despite the edge Britain was showing off in the Great Exhibition, there were five main factors pushing even harder for Western Europe and the United States to industrialize. First, British competition forced these countries to industrialize in order to survive. Secondly, British businesses found ready and cheaper opportunities for building railroads and industries in foreign countries, thus helping them industrialize. Along these lines, Europe and America shared a common cultural heritage with Britain, including an aptitude for machines extending all the way back to the clocks and waterwheels of the Middle Ages. Along these lines, Britain was geographically close to the rest of Europe (and even the United States thanks to much faster steamships). Finally, constant contact with Britain meant that its knowledge could not be kept secret. Designs for steam engines and locomotives were bound to leak out, and they did with incredible impact. The first step most countries took to industrialize was to build railroads to link coal to iron deposits and factories to markets. Once a transportation system was in place, factory building and production could proceed.
Belgium was the first country after Britain to industrialize, largely because, being small and compact, its coal and iron deposits were near each other. Its government also established a national railroad in 1834 to tie the nation closer together. In France, as well, railroad construction, directed by Napoleon III and largely backed by British capital, led the way. By 1870, an extensive railway network radiated from Paris linking the agricultural south with the industrial centers in the north. Some said France did not experience an industrial revolution since it happened gradually and did not affect most Frenchmen who remained farmers. However, by 1900 France was a major industrial power following much the same pattern as other countries. Germany did not seriously start industrializing until after unification in 1871 when it could marshal all its resources in a concerted industrial effort. However, once unified, Germany saw a meteoric rise in its industrial might. Steel production doubled every decade from 1870 to 1900, passing even Great Britain in the 1890's. Its railroad mileage increased from 3500 in 1850 to 26,000 by 1900.
The United States saw even more dramatic industrial growth during this period because of its sheer size and plentiful resources. Railroads (also largely financed by British banks) had developed the interior east of the Mississippi by 1860. The completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 symbolized the opening up of the vast interior west of the Mississippi, with its vast agricultural and mineral resources. Northern factories intensified production during the American Civil War of the 1860's and never let up. In 1870, Europe produced 60% of the world's manufactured goods. By 19l4, it had fallen to 40%, that drop being mainly caused by growing American industries.
One non-Western country, Japan, had also industrialized by 1900. Ironically, Japan had shut itself off from Western influences since the 1600's. But, in 1854 the United States forced Japan to trade with the West, and it decided to beat the West at its own game by industrializing. Few paid serious attention to this until 1903 when tiny Japan took on Russian in a war and shocked the world by tearing its army and navy to pieces with its own largely mechanized forces. Japan had arrived as an industrial power, showing that the West's days as the undisputed masters of the globe were numbered.
Throughout history, the slow pace of progress and the large gaps of time between new advances have generally made technological progress hard to perceive. However, since the mid-nineteenth century, one could hardly miss seeing the rapid evolution of technology at work. The key to this development was the fusion of science and technology in research laboratories resulting from three lines of development.
First of all, as the standard of living of the common people improved, they had money to buy goods. Sales and profits led to more production and jobs for more people, who also now had money to spend. This further improved the standard of living, leading to more sales, production, jobs, and so on, all of which generated the incentive to create new products to sell this growing consumer market.
The second and third lines of development were the parallel, but separate evolutions of science and technology. On the one hand, the Enlightenment spawned new discoveries and ideas in the fields of physics, biology, and chemistry. At the same time, Europeans' growing proficiency in machines produced the power loom, spinning jenny, steam engine, and locomotive in the late 1700s and early 1800s. However, until the 1800's, scientific and technological developments had rarely touched one another. But as technology became more sophisticated, it became increasingly obvious that further progress would depend on fusing it with the more abstract scientific knowledge that had been developing in the universities and labs.
Because of the more complex science and technology and the growing opportunities afforded by a growing consumer market, private companies and governments set up research laboratories where scientists could develop new inventions. No longer would technological progress rely on the random findings of brilliant but isolated inventors with little or no background in scientific knowledge. From this point on, science and technology were fused together into one of the most dynamic partnerships in history, triggering a cycle of new inventions generating more ideas and needs that led to more new inventions and so on. The result has been an incredible outpouring of new inventions and discoveries at an ever-accelerating pace, which continues to the present day. All this progress bred a new optimism and faith in the ability of science and technology to solve our problems. Some historians have even dubbed the period from 1870 to 19l4 as the Age of Progress.
One could hardly give an exhaustive list of the new inventions and discoveries of the later 1800's, but just looking at some of the highlights shows the dramatic technological and scientific progress of this period. In transportation, we have already seen the impact of the railroads. Other developments further accelerated the pace at which the planet was being tied together. Steam powered ships reduced travel time at sea much as the steam locomotives did on land since ships were no longer dependent on tail winds for smooth sailing. By 1900, the automobile, powered by the internal combustion engine, was ushering in an age of fast personal travel that took individuals wherever and whenever they wanted independently of train schedules. In 1903, the internal combustion engine also allowed human beings to achieve their dream of powered flight. The sky was now the limit, and even that would not hold up, as the latter twentieth century would see flights to the moon and beyond.
Developments in communications were even more startling, led by the telegraph, which allowed messages to travel at the speed of electricity rather than the speed of a horse. When transoceanic cables were laid, the time it took to get a message from one side of the planet to the other was literally reduced from months to minutes. The invention of the telephone in 1876 made such communication more personal and accessible to the individual. Twenty years later, Marconi's invention of the wireless radio allowed a message to be broadcast to millions of people simultaneously without having to be directly linked by wire to each receiver. The world was effectively becoming a much smaller place.
Fuelling these new developments were new sources of energy. Petroleum powered the automobile, while natural gas was used extensively for lighting street lamps. Possibly most important of all was electricity, which could be transmitted over long distances and whose voltage could be adapted for use by small household appliances. Among these was Thomas Edison's lightbulb, providing homes with cheaper, brighter, and more constant light than the candle ever could provide.
Medical advances may have had the most significant impact of all on people's lives in the 1800's. Possibly the greatest single breakthrough in medical history was the nearly simultaneous discovery by the Frenchman Louis Pasteur and the Prussian Robert Koch of germ theory, the idea that microbes or germs cause disease. This led to advances in three ways. First, it gave doctors a direction in which to focus their searches for the causes of various diseases. One by one, vaccines and treatments were found for such deadly sicknesses as malaria, tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, bubonic plague, and typhoid.
Secondly, it spawned a public health movement that provided covered sewers, clean water, and an overall more sanitary urban environment. Finally, it led to aseptic procedure, where surgeons practiced their art in a sterile environment, dramatically reducing the chances of a patient contracting further infection on the operating table. Add to this the use of ether as an anesthetic since the 1840's and transfusions and blood typing to compensate for blood loss during surgery, and patients had an excellent chance of survival. No wonder the average life expectancy rose by an unprecedented 15 years or more during the nineteenth century.
Agricultural production skyrocketed thanks to mechanical reapers and combines, steam tractors, hybrid crop strains, and chemical fertilizers. Growing knowledge in chemistry led to a thriving chemical industry, which produced soaps, alkalis, bleaches, dyes, vegetable oils, and a vast number of other products. New building materials were used. The formula for concrete, lost since the time of the Roman Empire, was rediscovered, while the Bessemer Process, which worked iron at much higher temperatures, leading to the production of high-grade steel. Together they made possible the architectural monument that best symbolized the modern age, the skyscraper. In addition, there were numerous other inventions to make life easier or more interesting: refrigeration, cameras, movies, and record players, to name a few.
This rapid and wide range of technological advances had profound economic, political, and even philosophical effects on Western Civilization and eventually the entire human race. Economically, we have become globally interdependent, since industries rely heavily on raw materials found only outside of their countries' borders while less industrialized nations rely on the goods those industrialized nations produce. Global interdependence in the 1800's led to a common worldwide gold standard to smooth over the complications of international trade. Although that gold standard has since been abandoned, the various national economies still operate as one integrated global economy. This has certain dangers as well, since the collapse of one nation's economy can trigger the collapse of others across the globe. The best-known example of this is the Great Depression of the 1930's, starting with the collapse of the United States' economy and then spreading worldwide.
The need for an integrated national economy with common railroad gauges and safety procedures and the elimination of internal tolls and other hindrances to trade has helped create the modern industrial state. New technologies, such as sophisticated and expensive modern weaponry that only governments can afford, faster communication to keep closer track of its citizens, and faster transport for moving its forces quickly to quell any civil disturbances have radically increased the modern industrial state's power over its population. Public education has been another outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution, teaching a nation's population a common body of knowledge and values, such as patriotism and living precisely according to the clock.
The Industrial Revolution has spawned new beliefs and weakened old ones. Longer life spans and the enticements of a higher standard of living have reduced the proportion of people deeply involved in religion. Instead, many people have chosen a more materialistic way of life. In fact, the philosophies of Materialism and Positivism emerged in the late 1800's, showing a growing faith in the potentials and values of material prosperity and modern science respectively. At the same time, Darwin's theory of evolution has emerged, seen by many as a threat to religion. Another powerful idea to emerge was Marxism, an economic and political philosophy that became a major force in the twentieth century.
Technology is certainly a double edged sword that has also created new problems such as pollution, overpopulation, the greenhouse effect, depletion of the ozone layer, and the threat of extinction from nuclear war. It has also been used to give us prosperity our ancestors could never have dreamed about. Whether it is ultimately used for our benefit or destruction is up to us and remains in the balance.
While the multi-ethnic nature of the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires is often cited as the primary reason for their declines in the nineteenth century, other factors also entered into the equation. One factor that seems to have played a major role in determining the nature of Hapsburg rule and society as well as its decline was disease. In order to understand this we need to look at German expansion into Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages.
As the German people expanded into Central and Eastern Europe and established themselves and the ruling class in such areas as Bohemia, they tended to settle and concentrate in towns and cities from which they could rule the countryside. However, both the crowded and unsanitary conditions in cities then led to serious problems with disease. As a result, the ruling German class could rarely sustain its own population, let alone expand its numbers. Fortunately, there was a gradual influx of native Slavic migrants to the cities to replenish their populations. Since this migration was gradual, the ruling German classes could maintain their dominance until these newcomers had absorbed German culture and values, even adopted German names, and been accepted into the ruling classes. For centuries this pattern of gradual absorption of Slavic migrants served to maintain German cultural and political, if not ethnic, dominance of the cities and power in the empire.
However, two things upset this delicate balance in the later 1800's. One was a cholera epidemic that severely depleted the Germanized populations in Hapsburg cities. The other was industrialization, which created a need for a large factory work force. Together these triggered a huge influx of Slavic migrants into the cities. This much larger Slavic population in the cities proved too much for the Germanized ruling classes to absorb as they had before. It also generated a fear that Slavic culture would overwhelm German culture. This created a growing conservative backlash against the Slavs. That in turn led to growing resistance by Slavic nationalist groups against the Germanized ruling classes which merely caused more conservative reactions and so on.
As this cycle repeated itself, Hapsburg society became progressively polarized between the growing restiveness of its Slavic nationalities and ethnic groups on the one hand and the siege mentality of its increasingly isolated and reactionary ruling classes on the other. Therefore, by the early twentieth century, the Hapsburg Empire was on the verge of collapse. World War I would push it over the edge.
As we have seen, the French Revolution and Napoleon spread the ideas of liberalism and nationalism across Europe. These ideas took root and gave rise to several outbreaks of revolution in the 1820's, 1830's, and 1840's, the most severe being the revolutions of 1848. Although most of these revolutions failed, they continued the spread of liberal & nationalist ideas and also gave reformers a more realistic appreciation of what it would take to achieve their goals. The revolutions of 1848 especially influenced the peoples of Eastern Europe under Hapsburg and Ottoman rule as well as the peoples of Italy and Germany in Central Europe.
Both Italy and Germany were lucky to have brilliant prime ministers to lead them through unification: Camillo Cavour for the Italian state of Sardinia and Otto von Bismarck for the German state of Prussia. Both men skillfully combined strong internal developments of their respective states with opportunistic diplomacy and warfare to unify Italy and Germany by 1871. Both nations would also strive to industrialize in the latter 1800's. Germany proved especially successful in this endeavor. However, the presence of two unified nations in place of a multitude of little states, especially that of a strongly industrialized Germany, seriously upset the balance of power in Europe, which would also lead to World War I.
Italy's reunification, or Risorgimento (literally meaning resurrection), was largely the work of Camillo Cavour, prime minister of the north Italian state of Sardinia (also known as Piedmont). Although not a fiery or charismatic revolutionary leader, he was a cool and clear-headed diplomat and brilliant organizer, one of those realistic politicians who emerged from the failed revolutions of 1848. Cavour skillfully gathered popular support throughout the peninsula by exploiting Sardinia's position as one of the few native ruled states in Italy.
He also saw that Sardinia must be developed internally before it could make any moves against the Austrians, who controlled most of northern Italy, and the Bourbons, who ruled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south. To that end he reorganized Sardinia's treasury, tax system, and bank system, and then got foreign loans, especially from Britain, in order to build railroads and industries. Careful management of these loans allowed him to turn a profit and pay off the loans, thus expanding Sardinia's credit for larger loans to further develop the economy and so on. By the mid 1850's Sardinia was the most highly developed state in Italy.
Cavour was now ready for the diplomatic offensive to unify Italy. His main opponent was Hapsburg Austria, against whom he realized he needed outside help. Oddly enough, in order to get this, he attacked Russia. This was during the Crimean War (1854-56), one of the more senseless and futile conflicts in history. It mainly involved French and British efforts to stop Russian aggression to the south against the Ottoman Turks. The fighting centered in the Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea where the British and French fleets could supply armies by sea better than Russia could supply its troops by land. It was a bloody and diseased affair, but it played into Cavour's hands, because Austria had angered France and Britain by refusing to help them against Russia. By sending Sardinian troops to help the French and British, Cavour won Napoleon III's friendship and the promise of French aid if he could make Austria appear the aggressor in a war.
Cavour had no trouble in stirring up rebellions against Austria and drawing it into attacking Sardinia. In the resulting War of 1859, Napoleon III sent 120,000 French troops to Italy by railroad, the first mass movement of soldiers by rail in history. The French won two battles, but suffered such heavy casualties that Napoleon III quickly pulled out, leaving Sardinia in the lurch. Despite this betrayal, the north and central Italian states of Tuscany, Parma, Modena, and Romagna rebelled against their rulers and unified with Sardinia, giving it about half of Italy's population. Events now moved quickly toward unifying the rest of Italy.
The price of Napoleon's aid against Austria was the transfer of Savoy and Nice to French control. This infuriated Giuseppe Garibaldi, a long time revolutionary leader who was as fiery and impulsive as Cavour was cool and calculating. Garibaldi had led the defense of the Republic of Rome in 1848 against French troops who still occupied it. Now the French were taking over Garibaldi's birthplace of Nice, and he intended to attack them there. But Cavour, still needing French diplomatic support, managed to divert Garibaldi and his army of 1000 "Red Shirts" to Sicily in order to overthrow the Bourbon dynasty. Garibaldi's tiny army met with incredible success and swept the Bourbons from Sicily in six weeks. They then crossed to southern Italy and swept the Bourbons from there as well. Practically overnight, southern Italy and Sicily had been liberated, but the question was for whom: Sardinia, who had sent Garibaldi, or Garibaldi himself who bore the title of dictator of southern Italy and Sicily while still wearing a Sardinian uniform?
Between Sardinia and Garibaldi lay the Papal States and Rome, the spiritual capital of Italy and still under French troops. Napoleon III, much preferring Cavour to Garibaldi, told the Sardinians to take the Papal states before Garibaldi got there, but to leave Rome to the French. Sardinia's king, Victor Emmanuel, did this and moved south to meet Garibaldi. In a dramatic meeting on October 26, 1860, Garibaldi turned his conquests over to Victor Emmanuel. The Kingdom of Italy was born.
Two important pieces of the puzzle remained to complete Italy's unification: Venice and Rome, held by Austria and France respectively. In each case, Italy's alliance with Prussia, then in the process of unifying Germany, proved to be valuable. In 1866, Italy won Venice by helping Prussia against Austria in the Austro-Prussian War. Likewise, Italian help in the Franco-Prussian War earned it Rome (except for the Vatican which remained an independent state inside of Rome). By 1871, Italy was unified.
But, as one politician put it, "Italy is made. We still have to make the Italians." After centuries of disunion huge cultural, political, and economic differences existed in this nation of 22 million people. The biggest gap was between the urban north and agricultural south. The Bourbons in southern Italy and Mafia in Sicily fanned discontent into revolts and violence exceeding that seen in the actual process of unification.
The new government did three things to pull Italy together. It built a national railroad system to physically links its parts. It established a national educational system to give its people a similar cultural outlook and loyalty. And it formed a national army to enforce its policies and also unify men from all over Italy in a common cause. However, 1300 years of disunity were a lot to overcome in a few years, and Italy's efforts at forging a nation met with limited success. Despite this, a patchwork of little Italian states had been unified into a new nation, a nation with ambitions to become a great power. Such ambitions would help lead to World War I.
Not by speeches and majority resolutions are the great questions of the day decided—that was the mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by blood and iron.— Otto von Bismarck
Germany had been fragmented into as many as 300 separate states ever since the Investiture Struggle in the Middle Ages had wrecked the power of the German emperors. In the following centuries, it had suffered repeatedly from foreign wars and aggression, most recently Napoleon's rule. However, Napoleon had inadvertently done Germany two favors in the process of his rule. Besides instilling a sense of nationalism in its people, he had also consolidated Germany into 38 states, a giant step toward unification. Since Napoleon's defeat two states had competed for leadership of Germany: Austria and Prussia. Most people would have expected Austria, with its longer imperial tradition and larger territory to dominate. But it was Prussia, with its better organization and more progressive reforms (e.g., its customs union known as the Zollverein), which was destined to unify Germany.
The man who would lead Prussia in Germany's unification was its chancellor (prime minister), Otto von Bismarck (1815-94). He was a man of massive size and strength, brilliant mind, and iron will. Childhood stories of Germany's heroes had inspired him with a sense of German nationalism, while stories of foreign conquerors, especially Napoleon, angered him and instilled in him a desire for a unified nation. Bismarck's early career was rather undistinguished, although he did see foreign diplomatic service, which gave him experience in that field. He also witnessed Austrian arrogance toward Prussia in the German Diet (parliament), which set his mind to earn his country respect both inside Germany and outside of it. In 1862, he got his chance.
In 1858, Wilhelm I had succeeded Frederick William IV. The new king wanted to build up and reform the Prussian army. But one obstacle stood in the way: the Prussian Reichstag (parliament), formed as a result of the revolutions of 1848, refused to grant Wilhelm the needed money. In 1862, Wilhelm, on the verge of abdicating, appointed Bismarck as his chancellor.
Bismarck, among other things, was no lover of democracy, including the Prussian Reichstag, which he said bogged itself down in speeches and resolutions. He believed only clear-sighted decisive policies of "blood and iron" could build a German nation. He figured that once the nation was successfully built, German liberals, inspired by the reality of the long sought for German nation, would come around to his way of thinking. Therefore, he simply ruled without parliament and rammed through his own reforms. Prussia got its army and Bismarck could now turn to unifying Germany. Bismarck was an excellent diplomat who brilliantly manipulated alliances and played different powers off against one another. He was also a master of limited objectives, using each diplomatic step to set up the next one. He started with a revolt in Poland.
The Polish revolt against Russia in 1863 gained a great deal of popular support in Europe. But Bismarck was more interested in power than popular support (unless it was a means to gaining power). He clearly saw that the Czar would put down the revolt, and therefore helped Russia in crushing the rebels. This secured his eastern flank and gained an ally against Austria who had refused to help Russia in the Crimean War even after Russia had helped the Hapsburgs suppress their uprisings in 1848.
With his eastern border secure, Bismarck next championed the liberties of Germans in Schleswig and Holstein, whose Danish ruler was incorporating them more tightly into the Danish state. The resulting Danish War (1864) accomplished three things for Bismarck. First of all, it won him useful popular support among the Germans since he appeared to be defending German liberties. Secondly, it gave the reformed Prussian army valuable combat experience. Finally, it dragged Austria into the war on Prussia's side, since it could not afford to let Prussia be the sole champion of German liberties. This served Bismarck's purpose, since it got Prussia and Austria hopelessly entangled by their joint occupation of Schleswig and Holstein and helped set up a showdown between the two powers: the Austro-Prussian War (1866)
Bismarck laid the diplomatic groundwork for this war with typical thoroughness. Russia, already Prussia's friend and still mad at Austria, was effectively neutral, which suited Bismarck fine. Bismarck kept France out of the war by making vague promises of Rhineland territories if he won. And Italy, wanting to get Venice into its fold, allied against the common Austrian enemy. Prussia's military preparations were equally thorough. The Prussian army was better trained, organized and equipped than the Austrian army. A new breech loading rifle, the "needle gun", gave Prussian soldiers four times the firepower of their Austrian counterparts. A combination of using Prussia's railroad system for rapid movement of its armies with the telegraph to coordinate those movements allowed the Prussians to converge at the point of attack with unprecedented precision and overwhelming force. As a result, the Seven Weeks War, as this was also known, was a rapid and total victory for Prussia, in stark contrast to the drawn out conflict of the Seven Years War a century earlier
Bismarck's settlement looked forward to the eventual unification of Germany. His treatment of Austria was fairly lenient, taking only Venice and giving it, as promised, to Italy. But he also excluded Austria from German affairs, thus clearing the way for Prussian dominance. For Prussia itself, he took Schleswig and Holstein as well as the lands dividing Prussia from its holdings along the Rhine in the West. Bismarck also unified the north German states into a confederation under Prussian leadership, while expecting the south German states to follow Prussia's leadership in war. The confederation was organized along democratic lines to gain popular support, but the real power rested with the Prussian king and chancellor.
Bismarck's next move was to galvanize German support against a common enemy. He found that cause by going to war with France. Napoleon III of France had his motives for war as well. Sagging popularity at home and concern over Prussia's growing power helped drive him on a collision course with Bismarck that erupted into the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1). Once again, Bismarck had laid firm diplomatic foundations. Russia was still Prussia's friend. Italy allied with Prussia in order to get Rome out of French hands. Austria, still licking its wounds from its recent struggle with Prussia, was neutralized. The one big question mark was: what would Britain do? Bismarck took care of that by taking out a full-page ad in the London Times claiming France wanted to annex Belgium. Public opinion was outraged and Britain left France to its fate.
Few people then would have given Prussia any chance to beat the French, anyway, since France was still considered the foremost military power in Europe. The Franco-Prussian War proved that assumption wrong. Prussian training, equipment, leadership, and organization quickly smashed French armies in rapid succession. Within six weeks the Prussians had surrounded Napoleon III’s army at Sedan. After a day of desperate but suicidal assaults against the Prussian positions, Napoleon III was forced to surrender along with 120,000 men. The French mounted sporadic local resistance, especially in Paris whose besieged inhabitants survived on elephant meat from the zoo. In the end, it was too little too late and France had to ask for terms.
The Prussian victory had two main results. First of all, Prussia annexed Alsace and Lorraine, a bone of contention between the two countries since the Treaty of Verdun in 843 A.D. This alone was enough to spark French bitterness. Secondly, Bismarck officially unified Germany by declaring the Second Reich (German Empire) and crowning Wilhelm as Kaiser (literally Caesar or emperor). Not only that, he did this at Versailles, for 200 years the symbol of French power and now the symbol of its humiliation. This newly unified Germany would become an economic superpower by rapidly industrializing. For example, German steel production doubled every decade between 1870 and 1910, even passing British steel production after 1900. Both Prussia's treatment of France and its unification and industrialization of Germany would upset the balance of power and trigger a system of interlocking alliances that kept Europe on a knife-edge of readiness for a war that nearly everyone expected to break out. That war, World War I, would be the beginning of the end of European supremacy.
Internally, Germany between 1870 and 1914 presented a picture of seemingly incompatible contrasts. While its economy forged ahead to make it the most advanced nation in Europe, its political structure resisted any liberalizing trends and remained conservative and autocratic. Likewise, it maintained an increasingly obsolete social structure of rich landowners who had mechanized their farms at the expense of the peasants and even richer capitalists making profits at the expense of a downtrodden working class and shrinking class of small shopkeepers and craftsmen. As the social and political systems lagged behind economic progress, tensions in the form of growing opposition parties (including socialists), protests, and strikes emerged more and more. Discontent was partially diverted away from the government by being focused against such groups as Catholics, socialists, and especially Jews. This and World War I only put off resolving these tensions. Unfortunately, the banner of discontent would be picked up by Adolph Hitler and the Nazis whose terrorist programs would plunge both Germany and the world into a much worse nightmare than even World War I proved to be.
Whatever happens we have got/The Maxim gun and they have not.— 19th century European poem
Ever since the rise of a capitalist economy and strong nation states armed with efficient military machines (c.1500), Europe had steadily extended its power across the globe. By 1800, European and European derived colonies had extended the dominance of European culture over 35% of the globe. Up until this point, the usual explanation for European expansion was the "three G's": God, gold, and glory. Colonies in South America provided gold and silver. Those in the Caribbean produced sugar, a virtual "white gold", for European markets. West African colonies provided slaves for the Caribbean sugar plantations. And the North American colonies and India provided their governments with markets and raw materials.
In the nineteenth century the nature and motives for colonial imperialism changed dramatically. As with the Industrial Revolution, Britain also led the way in the late nineteenth century in a new wave of expansion (known as neo-imperialism) that would put European civilization in control of 85% of the globe. The classic argument explaining this phenomenon has focused on the Industrial Revolution's growing need for new resources and markets. However, this oversimplifies the case. If one looks at where European colonies expanded, in particular in Africa, one sees little economic sense in doing so. Instead, there were three interrelated causes driving Europeans to go out and virtually conquer the globe: growing economic competition as the industrial revolution spread, internal political stresses caused by industrialization, and rising international rivalries.
Economic causes. The 1860's were an economically unsettled time that came to a head with a depression in 1873. While all industrial countries were hurt, Britain especially was feeling the pinch. Its reliance on raw materials was damaging its balance of trade. And it was facing growing competition from newly industrializing nations, especially Germany, who had newer factories and cheaper labor.
Internal political stresses. Economic changes have always caused political problems, and Europe in the late 1800's was no exception. Britain in particular was seeing a transformation of the relatively unified political party system of the pre-industrial era into a more fragmented patchwork of special interest groups: labor unions, land owners, bankers, industrialists, etc. Politicians were desperate for some new cause or ideology to unify the voters behind them.
International tensions. In 1871 the fragile balance of power in Europe had been radically altered by the emergence of a strongly unified Germany and Italy, the equally destabilizing process of the rapid disintegration of Ottoman power in southeastern Europe and the Middle East, and the growing rebelliousness in Ireland against British rule. The British public was especially upset by these challenges to the stability of the world they had known and by Britain's apparent inability to act effectively.
Therefore, Benjamin Disraeli, British prime minister in the 1870's, first pushed the idea of renewed imperial expansion as a way to protect vital British overseas markets, resources and jobs, enhance Britain's national prestige, and give it an edge against other European countries without colonies. Never mind the fact that these arguments were grossly exaggerated if not downright false. The lure of new markets was especially misleading since there were often few consumers in Africa and Asia who could even afford European goods. Granted, as Europe's industries diversified in the late 1800's, there was a growing need for certain resources not found in Europe, such as oil, rubber, and non-ferrous metal. However, many of the resources sought by Europeans were unnecessary luxury or consumer items like bananas, coffee, and African palm oil for soap. Despite that, Disraeli had found one issue he could exploit in order to unify the British voters behind him. The British public and even Queen Victoria (who was also Empress of India) came to believe in the need for colonies.
Of course, opposing politicians could not let Disraeli monopolize the imperialism issue and leave them in his dust. Conservatives and liberals alike also pushed for imperial expansion. Justifying these wholesale conquests was easy enough. Britons saw themselves as bringing the benefits of Christianity and European civilization to less developed peoples. The new ideas of Darwinism, in particular "survival of the fittest", were adapted, or distorted, into Social Darwinism. This claimed that human societies, just like some animals, are better adapted to survive than others. Therefore, it was the "white man's burden" to bring his superior civilization to the inferior cultures of Africa and Asia. Social Darwinism was really little more than a polite or pseudo-scientific term for racism.
Before 1870 Europeans had made little headway into Africa, either as conquerors or explorers, mainly because of their lack of resistance to the area's tropical diseases. This left Africa in a shroud of mystery that earned it the title of the "Dark Continent". After 1870, Europeans made rapid inroads into Africa thanks to the industrial revolution which gave them two new weapons: vaccines for combating the diseases and rifles and machine guns for combating the African natives.
Three lines of development got Europeans interested in Africa and triggered a virtual land rush there. First of all was a highly publicized expedition by the journalist, Henry Stanley to find the explorer David Livingston who had been missing for some time. Stanley's best selling account, mostly remembered for the quotation, "Dr. Livingston, I presume", especially interested King Leopold of Belgium who ruthlessly conquered and exploited the Congo (modern Zaire).
The other two lines of development concerned British expansion into Egypt and South Africa. In Egypt, the ruler's lavish lifestyle led to a growing debt and the eventual takeover of his shares of the Suez Canal by British bankers. The loss of revenue from the canal further disrupted Egypt's stability. Therefore, in order to protect the Suez Canal from native revolution, the British government took over Egypt in the 1880's. Control of Egypt led to near hysteria over the outlandish possibility that the government in Sudan could cut off the source of the Nile and turn Egypt into a desert. As a result, the British also conquered Sudan.
Britain had taken over South Africa from the Dutch in 1815 to secure their route to India. The Dutch settlers (known as Boers) were unhappy with Britain's abolition of slavery in 1832 and trekked inland to settle the Orange Free State and Transvaal. The Boers were left alone until the discovery of diamonds and gold prompted a rush of British prospectors into the Boer territories. Growing friction between the Boers and these newcomers eventually caused the British to take over the Boer Republic of Transvaal in order to protect British business interests there. This got the British into hostilities with various native peoples, most notably the Zulus. After some hard fighting, including the massacre of one British army by the Zulus and a desperately fought guerrilla war against the Dutch Boers at the turn of the century, the British successfully occupied the area.
In each case, one can see how involvement in one area led to involvement in other areas and so on. Even more important was that growing British colonial power alarmed other industrializing nations who wanted their own colonies so they could keep up with Britain. Therefore, Disraeli's strategy to mobilize British public opinion also dragged other European countries with economic and political problems similar to Britain's into imperial expansion. The result was a virtual scramble for colonies in Africa and Asia.
The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, held the Congress of Berlin in 1884 to establish the ground rules for all the imperialist powers involved in this land rush. (No Africans or Asians were invited.) The participants agreed to give prior notice before claiming a new colony. However, mutual distrust between the European powers often led them to be more secretive and sneaky in claiming new colonies.
As stated above, largely the same forces drove the other powers in their grab for colonies as drove Britain: a feeling of economic vulnerability that colonies would magically cure, a fear that other powers would get a head start in claiming colonies, and a need to unify the voters behind a common cause. Each country also had its own particular set of circumstances to drive it along.
In Germany, Bismarck saw colonies as more of a nuisance and drain of resources. However, the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, fired Bismarck in 1890 and pursued an aggressive policy of building an empire (and navy to protect it) in order to claim "Germany's place in the sun. There was also concern about the emigration of Germans to non-German areas, especially America. German colonies would provide homes for emigrants and enclaves of German culture across the globe. France felt the need for a unifying cause after the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the unsettling economic conditions brought on by depression and huge war indemnities to Germany. Colonies would enhance its national prestige and also give it some leverage for future revenge against Germany. Italy, also newly unified in 1871, was still much more politically fragmented and economically undeveloped than Germany. Colonies would provide some focus for national pride and unity.
The partitioning of Africa was one of history's more brutal and insensitive episodes. Europeans came in and carved up Africa along arbitrary boundaries that split some tribes up and threw others together. Europeans legitimized this by having the Africans sign treaties that they did not understand the meaning of. They also used forced labor to build railroads, etc., killing thousands in the process. By 1914, practically all of Africa had fallen prey to European aggression.
There was also the issue of imposing European culture upon native peoples because it was supposedly superior. For example, Europeans would impose their agricultural techniques on Africans and, in the process, ruined the soil, which was better suited for the traditional slash and burn agriculture. They would teach African school children poems about daffodils, even though there were no daffodils in Africa. In the end, this cultural policy backfired against Europeans. Many colonial subjects went to Europe to get college educations and brought back the dangerous ideas of liberalism, nationalism, and Marxism. That, combined with the fact that many colonials served in European armies and had picked up on European firearms technology, helped lead to the ultimate downfall of the European colonial empires.
Even for the European powers, colonies were often more of a liability than an asset. For one thing, many colonies cost more to rule than they brought back in revenues and resources. Second, as the number of available places to take over decreased by 1900, tensions rose between the European powers wanting to take those places. True, by 1914, European or European derived powers controlled 85% of the globe and were definitely sitting on top of the world. But the beginning of the end was near as the specter of the First World War loomed on the horizon.
It has been said that the British Empire was picked up in a "fit of absence of mind." Nowhere was this more true than in the case of India which gradually came under British rule, not by the efforts of Britain's government, but by those of the British East Indies Company, founded in 1599 by a group of merchants in search of nothing more than "quiet trade." However, circumstances would thwart these peaceful intentions, and over the next 250 years the British would find themselves more and more in the role of conquerors and governors than traders. Not only would the British have a profound effect on India's history, but the "crown jewel of the British Empire" would also affect Western Civilization. This is reflected in such English words as bungalow, verandah, punch, dungarees, and pajamas, such customs as smoking cigars, playing polo, and taking showers, as well as more profound influences in the realms of religion and philosophy.
Two main lines of development worked to bring the British East Indies Company to India and make it a power there. For one thing, by 1600, Portugal was losing control of the East Asian Spice trade. Therefore, in 1601, the British East Indies Company started sending ships to the Spice Islands to gain a share of this trade. At this point, there was no intention of even going to India, let alone of conquering it, since the Mughal Dynasty had a firm grip on the subcontinent. However, the Dutch also had designs on the spice trade and rebuffed any British efforts to take part in it. As a result, the British East Indies Company gained the right to set up trading posts along the coast of India. Later, some of these trading posts would grow into major cities such as Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta.
The other factor pushing the British East Indies Company toward conquest had to do with the Mughal Empire. This dynasty had ruled most of India peacefully and tolerantly for a century since the 1500's. However, during the reign of Aurangzeb (1658-1707) all that changed as he started persecuting Hindus. Not only did this trigger centuries of religious strife that still continues, it also began the decline of the Mughal Empire, which suffered from weak and corrupt government from this time on. The resulting turmoil forced the British East Indies Company to defend its trading posts against local princes, brigands, and a new European intruder, France.
The French, to compensate for the lack of European manpower so far from home, initiated the strategy of training and arming native recruits ( sepoys) like European armies. Such forces were so effective that local princes would trade large tracts of land for French trained sepoys, thus giving the French control over much of Southern India. In response to this new threat, the British responded in kind by training their own sepoys. By the end of the Seven Years War (1756-63), British naval superiority and sepoys under the leadership of Robert Clive had virtually ended French involvement in India. Clive dramatically demonstrated the effectiveness of European trained sepoys at the battle of Plassey (1757) when his army of 2800 British soldiers and sepoys routed a Bengali army of 100,000 men. Clive's victories over the Bengalis and French made the British East Indies Company a major power in India, able to install its own candidate on the Mughal throne and claim the wealthy province of Bengal for itself. British dominance resulting from these victories had three main effects.
First, British power, plus the fact that their "honorable masters" in England were 7000 miles and nine months travel away, left India wide open to exploitation by the company and its employees. Many British took full advantage of the opportunity to "shake the pagoda tree", as they called the collection of "gifts" from grateful local princes ( nawabs). While a noble in Britain could live well on £800 a year, even minor company employees were making huge fortunes. One merchant was given a profitable saltworks with 13,000 employees while another was given his own mint. A certain Mr. Watts was awarded £117,000 for bravery at the battle of Plassey. And Clive himself received £211,500 for installing one nawab and another £27,000 a year from another grant. Such opportunities for making quick fortunes unleashed a flood of applicants back home for service in India, some applications being accompanied with bribes of up to £2000. Newcomers from England were often shocked when first encountering their colleagues already in India, since they typically mixed freely with the natives and had adopted their customs, food, and clothing. Service in India had its risks for the British, mainly tropical heat and diseases. As one local proverb put it, "Two monsoons is the age of a man," indicating that few Europeans survived conditions in India more than two years. Bombay was known as "the burying ground of the British".
However, while company employees who survived service in India were making their fortunes, the company's loose management was costing it a fortune, forcing it to apply to the Bank of England for a loan in 1773 in order to avoid bankruptcy. As a result, Parliament exercised increasing control over the company, establishing governors-general to oversee its activities. This led to a succession of governors with different attitudes and policies. While some governors, such as Warren Hastings (ruled 1778-88) were known for their tolerance of and willingness to learn about the native languages and cultures and to give Indians posts in their government. However, other governors, such as Lord Cornwallis (1788-98), reversed many of these tolerant policies and dismissed most native Indians from higher posts in the administration. Getting into the nineteenth century, tensions grew between two factions: one advocating tolerance and respect for Indian culture and another claiming the superiority of European civilization over that of India. This created a growing gap between the British and Indians that also fostered growing discontent.
Two other developments in the 1800s led to growing unrest among Indians. One was the growing number of Christian missionaries coming to India to preach Christianity, which clashed with the more flexible beliefs of the Hindu majority and the strong beliefs of Indian Muslims. Secondly, the British were bringing in modern technology (especially railroads) and business methods, which disrupted the traditional, slower paced culture and economy of India.
Things came to a head with the Great India Mutiny in 1857. Sparking it was a misunderstanding about what kind of grease was used on the bullets for the sepoys' new Enfield rifles. Muslim troops thought pig grease, which they abhor, was being used, while Hindu troops thought the British were using grease from cows, which they hold sacred. The resulting mutiny developed into a serious rebellion that the British finally managed to put down. However, this was the final straw as far as the British government was concerned, assuming direct control over India in 1858 and eventually dissolving the British East Indies Company. Just as one British queen, Elizabeth I had signed the charter forming the British East Indies Company some 260 years earlier, so another queen, Victoria, signed it into extinction. Ironically, its career had started with a group of merchants in search of nothing more than "quiet trade." For the next ninety years, direct British rule would prevail in India.
Britain ruled about 60% of Indian directly and the other 40% indirectly through native princes who followed British policies. During their time in India, the British developed tea and cotton agriculture and coal and iron industries. In fact, by 1940, the Tata Iron Works was the world's largest Iron factory. Likewise, the British continued developing India's infrastructure with more railroads and telegraph lines, so that by 1900 India had the longest railroad in Asia. British administration and bureaucracy were efficient, as was the British style education system Britain established.
However, even these developments contained the seeds of problems for British rule. As before, the new industries, railroads, and telegraphs, however progressive they may have seemed to the British, disrupted the traditional culture and economy of India. By the same token, however efficient the bureaucracy was, there were large gaps between the higher ranking British and lower ranking Indians that carried over to society in general. Increasingly, Indians were getting tired of their second-class status and worked increasingly for independence.
The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, led the independence movement. At first, its goal was to gain more rights for Indians and more say in the British administration. However, as its power grew in the twentieth century, it agitated increasingly for complete independence. This led to a parallel, but somewhat separate independence movement of Muslims in India who feared being a minority in a Hindu-dominated state. Therefore, they wanted a separate independent Muslim state in the northwest.
World War I (1914-18) and World War II (1939-45) further catalyzed India’s push for independence, since Britain had to rely heavily on Indian recruits to fill its ranks. In return, Britain promised more political concessions, thus weakening its hold on India, encouraging more demand by Indians, and so on.
In 1920, a new leader, Mohandas Gandhi emerged as the voice of the Indian National Congress. Educated in both traditional Indian culture and British schools, Gandhi developed very effective non-violent tactics of resistance while protesting British policies. The British, not wanting to risk the bad publicity a violent reaction could generate, had to give in to Gandhi time after time. Therefore, at the end of World War II, Britain promised independence for India. Unfortunately, this revived the issue of whether there would be one large Hindu-dominated state or a separate Muslim state in the North, leading to violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims broke out. Finally, in 1947 Britain the region between Hindu India in the South and Muslim Pakistan in the Northwest that also controlled a separate territory, Bangla Desh, in the Northeast. Despite heroic efforts to keep the peace by Gandhi (who was killed by one of his Hindu followers in 1947), tensions between Hindus and Muslims have continued to the present day and still threaten the peace and stability of South Asia.
The 1800's were not kind to China. Whereas geographic and technological limitations had once kept China fairly isolated from the rest of the world, other forces, in particular the Industrial Revolution then sweeping Europe and America, were closing in to wrench China out of its self-imposed isolation. As in India, the British East Indies Company would lead this intrusion on China's privacy.
In the early 1800's, China, by its own design, was still largely cut off from trade with the outside world. All trade with Europe was channeled through one port, Canton. Even there, Europeans could only trade through specially designated Chinese agents known as co-hong. Several Chinese products, such as silk and porcelain, were in high demand in Europe, but the most popular trade item in the early 1800's was tea, consumption of which increased by a factor of 30 times between 1720 and 1830. Unfortunately, the tea trade led to a serious drain of silver from Britain. The British East India Company, desperate for something to offset this trade imbalance, found such a commodity in opium, which not only upset China's balance of trade, but the stability of its whole society.
Two other factors revolving around the differing philosophical outlooks of these two cultures added to the growing tensions. First of all, they had two very different attitudes toward trade. On the one hand, the Chinese government viewed trade as a monopoly controlled through its agents, in this case the co-hong. Up until the 1800's, this was not such a problem, since most Europeans traded under the mercantilist system that also exercised strong government controls. However, by the 1830's, the British were leading the way in the Industrial Revolution and were pushing for a free trade system known as laissez faire ("hands off") that would give their manufactured goods an edge against the more expensive handmade goods their foreign competition was producing. Secondly, there was the relative status of the two nations. The Chinese traditionally saw themselves as the Middle Kingdom and all other peoples as inferior barbarians. Any goods brought as gifts to the Chinese court were interpreted as tribute that they may or may not graciously acknowledge. By contrast, the British had a strong democratic tradition that refused to recognize another nation's superiority.
All these economic and philosophical tensions came to a head when the Chinese government had 20,000 chests of the British East India Company's opium burned. This threatened the tea trade, in which the British government had a vested interest, since it charged a 100% customs toll on tea coming into Britain. The result was the First Opium War (1839-42) between Britain and China. The British navy, with its modern weaponry, quickly and easily won a decisive victory. The resulting Treaty of Nanjing (1842) gave the British access to trade through five ports, control of Hong Kong, a huge indemnity from the Chinese government to cover the cost of the war, and abolition of the co-hong (merchant guild) system. It also forced China to accept other countries on equal terms, which was a terrible blow to its pride. Finally, the Chinese gentry now assumed the task of quelling any rebellions, which led to the buildup of regional warlords who would be a serious problem in years to come.
Britain's privileged status triggered a rush by other nations such as France, Russia, Germany and Japan to force China to grant similar treaties that gave three main concessions. First of all, they wanted most favored nation status, which automatically gave them all privileges that any other nation had from China. Second, they wanted extraterritoriality, which allowed their citizens to live under their own laws even when in China, thus making them virtually immune from Chinese justice. In fact, any cases involving a European and a Chinese person were to be tried under the European system. Finally, Europeans could recover any debts that the Chinese government owed them by collecting China's customs dues and other taxes if the customs dues were not enough.
The First Opium War and its aftermath unleashed a vicious cycle that would eventually lead to the fall of the monarchy. China's decline would invite either a disastrous war or intervention in a revolt to push or preserve foreign interests. This would cause many Chinese to wake up to the need for reform. However, the Chinese hatred for foreign barbarian ways would trigger a conservative reaction against the reforms, leading to further decay, and so on. This cycle would repeat itself three times, being triggered by the Taiping Rebellion, war with Japan, and the Boxer Rebellion.
Two other factors would aggravate this cycle even further. For one thing, the introduction of new crops from the Americas and a well-regulated agriculture under the Ming Dynasty had caused China's population to expand to 400,000,000, putting a tremendous strain on China's ability to support itself. Secondly there was the government's recent failure to maintain the flood control projects, which had unleashed terrible floods and food shortages on China.
All of these factors triggered the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64), a peasant revolt started by a frustrated scholar, Hong Xiuchuan who claimed he was the brother of Jesus Christ. Hong inspired his followers with a revolutionary fervor that banned alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, held property in common, and called for the equality of all, including women. His movement swept over much of China before the government finally crushed it with foreign help. The Taiping rebellion was typical of any number of peasant revolts throughout Chinese history in its revolutionary and religious vision of a new world. It was also terribly destructive, probably killing even more people than World War I. Adding to China's misery during this chaos was the Second Opium War (1858-60). This war, fought with Britain and France for the flimsiest of reasons, saw the brutal sack of the Summer Palace in Peking by British colonial troops from India. It is from this event that the Bengali word "loot" entered our language.
Faced with these overwhelming problems from both within and without, a two-fold program of reform emerged. On the one hand, Chinese scholars tried to revive and stress the old Confucian virtues. However, they also tried to adapt Western technology in order to control the Western "barbarians". This sparked serious debates about how feasible it was for China to be able to adapt Western technology while maintaining the purity of Chinese culture, for the Chinese still despised Western ways as barbaric. Whatever their doubts, reformers set up several factories producing such things as weapons, ammunition, steamships, and textiles. They built railroads and telegraph lines which peasants often tore down since they disrupted the natural harmony of the countryside. The Chinese government even bought one railroad and tore it up for such a reason.
However, several factors seriously limited the extent of China's modernization. In contrast to Japan, which was successfully industrializing in the late 1800's, there was no real central direction to coordinate these efforts. Rather, provincial officials on a local level did them. Also, the influx of Western "barbarians" created a good deal of bitterness against the West and a reluctance to conform to its ways. At the same time, they plunged China further into debt making it more difficult for the Chinese to fund any modernization programs.
Therefore, China saw little progress toward modernization, especially after the rise to power of the dowager empress, Cixi, who ran China's policies for her weak son and nephew (1875-1908). Cixi especially resisted foreign influence and modernization, preferring to spend money on her palace and lavish lifestyle. As a result, by the 1890's, China was more vulnerable than ever to foreign powers carving out spheres of influence. Under this system, the dominant power in that sphere controlled the economy through such things as collecting taxes and constructing railroads and telegraph wires, while still leaving administrative duties and expenses to local Chinese officials. This allowed the various powers to drain China of money without having to assume the more burdensome responsibilities of government.
However, what really shook China out of its lethargy was a war with Japan, which had successfully modernized in reaction to the West over the past 40 years. This clash, known as the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5) was fought over control of Korea. To everyone's shock, the Japanese navy soundly defeated the Chinese navy and claimed Korea, Taiwan, and a huge indemnity as the price of victory.
Such a humiliating defeat sparked a new movement among Chinese scholars for widespread reforms. This movement was popularly referred to as the Hundred Days Reform because the dowager empress, Cixi, quickly squelched it. As a result, China's problems continued mounting until they triggered another revolt, the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1900). The rebels, fighting under the banner of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, believed they had magical powers to resist enemy bullets. While their revolt was initially aimed against the government, the empress skillfully turned it against foreign influence. The result was a siege of the foreign embassies in Beijing that was finally broken up by an international force led by the Japanese. Such intervention was not without its price, as China was forced to pay a heavy indemnity for all the recent troubles to the foreign powers.
The renewed humiliation caused by the Boxer Rebellion revived calls for reforms, this time with more success. Between 1900 and 1910, more modern ministries were formed, the old Confucian based civil service exams were abolished, provincial assemblies with the semblance of democracy were established, and a new law code was introduced. More modern schools were set up, while many young Chinese students studied abroad in the West, both of which spread the Western ideas of democracy and nationalism among Chinese intellectuals. Unfortunately, such reforms only raised expectations of more reforms, and a revolution in 1911 overthrew the monarchy and established a republic in its place. However, China's problems were far from over. Almost from the start, the new republic was doomed by the lack of a healthy economy and educated middle class, elements necessary to sustain any strong democracy. As a result, the next 40 years would see China embroiled in two world wars, civil war, and revolution.
In the early 1800's the peace and stability of Tokugawa rule came unraveled, leading to a period of turmoil and then restructuring from which a modernized and revitalized Japan would emerge. Several forces combined to generate these changes. First, 200 years of peace and being disarmed by the Tokugawa government undermined the power and even the reason for the existence of the Samurai. Second, the encroachment of the British into China and the ensuing Opium Wars led many Japanese to worry about the threat of encroachment on their shores and the ability of the Shogunate to deal with it. Finally, a series of bad harvests in the 1830's triggered inflation, disease, and unrest in Japan. The result of these various forces was a struggle between traditional isolationists who wanted to keep Japan cut off from the outside world and reformers who wanted to open it to the West and institute reforms to shore up the declining shogunate.
However, before Japan could come to a firm policy one way or another, the West intervened to decide the issue. The United States, by taking California in the Mexican War (1846-8), had become a Pacific power practically overnight. In 1853, a flotilla of American warships commanded by Commodore Perry delivered a conciliatory letter from the president to the Japanese head of state and a more belligerent letter written by Perry himself. The gist of Perry's message was that Japan had better open its doors to the West or the United States would kick down those doors and force Japan to trade.
The Tokugawa Shogunate, seeing Japan was no match for the United States, capitulated when Perry returned the next year. The immediate results for Japan, and especially its government, were disastrous. With the Americans came an influx of Mexican silver, which triggered more inflation. A cholera epidemic also hit at this time. These, plus the humiliation this situation brought to the Tokugawa Shogunate, caused its fall in 1868.
Replacing the shogunate was the restored imperial court under the emperor Matsuhito, called Meiji ("enlightened rule"). The Meiji regime would oversee the transformation of Japan from a largely feudal and agrarian state into a powerful industrial nation. This is often seen as a reaction to and imitation of industrial state building in Western Europe, in particular that of Germany. While this is partially true, Japan during the Tokugawa period had developed in ways that prepared it for the Meiji reforms. For one thing, the Tokugawa Shogunate had maintained a unified Japan for over 200 years, thus helping create a Japanese nation. Also, during this time a strong middle class had evolved along with the financial techniques needed to adapt to industrial capitalism.
As a result, Japan was able to make the transition to an industrial nation state while maintaining its own unique Japanese values of loyalty to the group and the emperor. For example, the Japanese corporation that evolved during this period can largely be seen as an updated version of the paternalistic feudal state, where the workers (peasants) owe lifelong loyalty and service to the company (lord) in return for its protection of their welfare. Japan's transformation into a major power can be seen as taking place in three successive stages: political and social reforms, industrial and military reforms, and early expansion.
Japan went through several Western-style political and social reforms to create the conditions conducive to industrial and military modernization while maintaining a distinctive Japanese character. In order to destroy Japan's feudal structure, the Meiji government replaced Japan's old provinces with seventy-two modern districts. As in the West, all class distinctions were abolished. This especially hurt the Samurai who now were even forbidden to wear their swords or distinctive hairdos. Public education became mandatory for all boys and girls in order to create an educated work force and instill a spirit of nationalism in them. A European style parliament was formed, but like its German model, it had little real power. The emperor kept his exalted position while Shinto was made the state religion, both of these providing points of focus for Japanese national loyalty.
With the political and social reforms in place, the Meiji government proceeded to industrialize Japan, concentrating on heavy and strategic industries: railroads, the merchant marine, mining, modern agricultural techniques, munitions, and the navy. However, Japan had no large-scale capitalists. Therefore, the government, in keeping with Japan's paternalistic tradition, paid for these industries and then sold them at low cost to a few private investors. These new capitalists, called the Zaibatsu ("money clique"), would come to control 70% of Japan's bank deposits and heavily influence government policies, much as the daimyo (feudal lords) had done in previous times. Thus began the long-time alliance of government and big business, which is still a predominant feature of Japan today. One other reform was that of the military. In 1873 the government began universal conscription, which deprived the Samurai of their privileged position as the warrior class. This triggered a Samurai revolt. Surprisingly, the conscripts fought well and crushed the revolt, thus destroying the samurai's aura of invincibility.
By 1890, Japan had largely industrialized and was ready to look outward to protect what it saw as its interests. In a series of three conflicts, the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and World War I, Japan emerged as a major power. Its first concern was Korea, the closest part of the Asian mainland to Japan and which Japan had claimed since the 1500's. The other primary contender for control of Korea was China to the north. In the ensuing war, known as the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5), Japan's modernized army made short work of the outdated Chinese forces, taking Taiwan and establishing its influence over Korea. In addition, this further weakened China's government and helped lead to a revolution in 1911 and eventually to the Communist revolution and victory in 1949.
More shocking was Japan's unlikely victory over the Russian army and navy in the Russo-Japanese War (1903-5). This gave Japan the Liaotang Peninsula and even tighter influence over Korea, which it finally annexed in 1910. It also triggered a revolution in Russia, which, although unsuccessful, helped lead to the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the triumph of the Communists there.
During World War I Japan declared war on Germany, easily taking its possessions in East Asia. However, China, also on the allied side in the war, had claims over those territories. Japan emerged the winner in this dispute, so that by 1919 it had control of Korea, Taiwan, and the Liaotung Peninsula. Not surprisingly, relations with China continued to deteriorate.
In the 1930's two things made those relations much worse. One was Japan's burgeoning population that forced it to import food. The other was the Great Depression, which cut Japan's trade and its ability to pay for that imported food. This led to growing military influence, violence, and instability in the Japanese government. In 1931, Japan seized control of Manchuria from China. The Western powers, mired in their problems with the Depression, were unable to help China. Throughout the 1930's, military control of the Japanese government tightened. In 1937, that military government invaded China, thus starting World War II in Asia.
Yes, this delightful land which we inhabit and which nature caresses with love is made to be the domain of liberty and happiness...I am French, I am one of thy representatives!...Oh, sublime people! Accept the sacrifices of my whole being. Happy is the man who is born in your midst; happier is he who can die for your happiness.— Robespierre
France will have but one thought, to reconstitute her forces, gather her energy, nourish her sacred anger, raise her young generation to form an army of the whole people, to work without cease, to study the methods and skills of our enemies, to become again a great France, the France of 1792, the France of an idea with a sword. Then one day she will be irresistible. Then she will take back Alsace-Lorraine.— Victor Hugo
The lights are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.— Lord Grey
The century from 1815 to 1914 was one of the most peaceful in European history. This was largely because European powers were preoccupied with internal political events (i.e., liberal and nationalist movements) and economic developments (industrialization) which gave them the power and scope to expand their colonial empires without getting too much in each other's way. However, the same forces that kept Europe tranquil in the 1800’s also carried the seeds for trouble in the first half of the 1900's, making it a time of war, revolution, and economic turmoil.
People often cite the assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, as the cause of World War I. This is true as an immediate, short-range cause, but his murder alone could not have triggered a global war. Rather, World War I was the product of two of the most powerful forces driving European civilization in the 1800's: nationalism and industrialization. Together and separately, they would create three factors that led to war: German unification, territorial rivalries, and economic competition.
The spread of the Industrial Revolution outside of Britain after 1850 expanded the consumer markets available for businesses to exploit. But it also expanded the number of producers competing for those markets, triggering more competition for what seemed to be a stagnant economy by the turn of the century. Intensifying this competition in each country were fierce nationalistic feelings fostered by an expanding public school system that preached its nation's superiority over other nations and the dangers they posed to it.
European nations did two things to protect themselves. First, they (especially France, Britain, and Germany) joined in the rush for overseas colonies. However, by 1900, most good places for colonization had been taken, just causing more competition for what few areas were left. For example, Germany and France had two bitter crises that nearly led to war over control of Morocco.
The second strategy was the use of protective tariffs (import taxes) to raise the cost of foreign goods and make the home nation's goods correspondingly more appealing to its consumers. Of course, other nations did the same thing. Prices went up, trade declined, and unemployment grew, causing internal unrest and turmoil. As a result, politicians looked for scapegoats and conveniently blamed other nations. This led to more tariffs, lower trade, rising unemployment, unrest, blame, and so on.
Nationalism created other problems. The unification of Italy and especially Germany upset the balance of power in central Europe, replacing many small and vulnerable states with two unified and aggressive nations. Germany's rapid rise as a political, economic, and military giant alarmed its neighbors, particularly France, still burning to avenge its humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Nations reacted in two ways: the formation of alliances and military build-ups.
In the two decades since the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck had masterfully juggled alliances to keep France isolated and Europe at peace. But Bismarck was fired in 1890 by the short-sighted and aggressive new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who let Germany's alliance with Russia, which Bismarck had carefully nurtured for 30 years, lapse. France quickly seized the opportunity to ally with Russia. As in 1756 with Frederick the Great, the nightmare of a two front war fought on German soil loomed as an imminent threat.
Desperate for allies, Germany attracted Austria (Russia's vehement enemy) and Italy into what was known as the Triple Alliance. France lured Britain into its alliance, known as the Triple Entente, by playing on British fears of the growing German economy, navy, and colonial empire. With all the major powers aligned in one camp or the other, there was the serious danger that if two members of opposing alliances got into a war or crisis, all the other alliance members and their colonial empires would be dragged in, too. That is exactly what would happen in 1914.
The Industrial Revolution's rapid creation of new technologies was by no means confined to peaceful ends. New and improved weapons such as the machine gun, submarine, and steel clad battleship combined with nationalist pride and fear of other nations to trigger an arms race such as the world had never seen. As soon as one nation started building armaments, its rivals would do the same and try to outdo the first nation. This would only alarm the first power, which would further increase its armaments, and so on. Each nation acted in what it felt was self-defense, but what other nations saw as aggression.
Therefore, France built up its forces to avenge the defeat of 1870 and to protect itself against German aggression. Germany armed itself to guard against French aggression and a two front war with Russia as well. The Russian army expanded to protect itself from German aggression. And the Austrian military grew to counter Russian moves into the Balkans. To make matters worse, Wilhelm II, despite Bismarck's advice, wanted a colonial empire to match those of Britain and France. This involved building a navy, which prompted Britain to build up its navy to keep ahead of Germany. Therefore, in addition to a military arms race, Germany found itself involved in an equally expensive naval arms race as well. In the end, this expensive arms race only weakened everyone's security and economies, added to mutual fears and suspicions, and led to a general expectation of war that became a self-fulfilling prophecy as nations prepared for that war.
“...the ethical health of peoples corrupted by a long peace, as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm.”
“...world history is no empire of happiness. The periods of happiness are the empty pages of history because they are the periods of agreement without conflict.”
“World history occupies a higher ground...Moral claims which are irrelevant must not be brought into collision with world historical deeds or their accomplishments. The litany of private virtues—modesty, humility, philanthropy, and forbearance—must not be raised vs. them. So mighty a form [the state] must trample down many an innocent flower--crush to pieces many an object in its path.”
Another German philosopher whose ideas were oversimplified and misinterpreted was Freidrich Nietzsche.
“Ye shall love peace as a means to new war, and the short peace more than the long. You I advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not to peace but to victory...Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth every war. I say unto you it is the good war which halloweth every cause. War and courage have done more great things than charity.”
Playing off these ideas was General von Bernhardi. His book, Germany and the Next War (1911), had such chapter titles as "The Right to Make War", "The Duty to Make War", "Germany's Historic Mission", and "World Power or Downfall" that fairly well summed up its thesis. Another German writer, Heinrich von Treitschke, like Hegel, glorified the state, but more brutishly saw its subjects as basically its slaves and declared war as the highest expression of Man.
“It does not matter what you think as long as you obey”
“...martial glory is the basis of all the political virtues; in the rich treasure of Germany's glories the Prussian military glory is a jewel as precious as the masterpieces of our poets and thinkers.
“...to play blindly with peace...has become the shame of the thought and morality of our age.”
“War is not only a practical necessity, it is a theoretical necessity, an exigency of logic. The concept of the State implies the concept of war, for the essence of the State is power...That war should ever be banished from the world is a hope not only absurd, but profoundly immoral. It would involve the atrophy of many of the essential and sublime forces of the human soul...A people which become attached to the chimerical hope of perpetual peace finishes irremediably by decaying in its proud isolation...”
Psychologically and militarily, Europe was ready for war.
There were two regional "hot spots" in Europe in 1914. First, there were Alsace and Lorraine, which France desperately wanted back from Germany since the Franco-Prussian War. Second, there was the Balkans, destabilized by numerous Slavic nationalities, with Russia posing as their champion, wanted to break loose from the Hapsburg Empire. As serious as the situation in Alsace and Lorraine was, people saw the Balkans as a disaster waiting to happen, calling it the “powder keg of Europe” which would hurl the whole continent into war. They were right.
On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a young member of a Serbian terrorist group known as the Black Hand, murdered the heir apparent of Austria, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife in Sarajevo, Austria. Naturally, this created quite a stir in the papers, but few at that time saw it as important enough to lead to a general war. However, behind the scenes, all the forces of nationalist rivalries, economic competition, military buildups, and interlocking alliances were blowing this murder way out of proportion and driving events wildly out of control and toward war.
Nearly a month passed before events picked up. Although there was no firm evidence that Serbia, a Slavic state bordering Austria, had anything to do with the murder, Austria still blamed it for the murder since the Black Hand was a Serbian ethnic group operating from Serbia and trying to stir up the large Serb population, against Austrian rule. With German encouragement, Austria issued severe demands to the Serbian government on July 23, saying that failure to comply with its terms would lead to war. Compliance with its harsh terms would totally humiliate Serbia. However, Russia supported Serbia and, to show it was serious about the Serbian crisis, started mobilizing its armies.
In the past, this would have been a strong, although acceptable, way of exerting diplomatic pressure, since armies and diplomacy moved slowly, giving each side time to resolve a crisis before it was too late. However, times had changed from the leisurely pace of pre-industrial wars and had drastically reduced the margin of error within which kings and diplomats had to work. Two things specifically made Russia's mobilization unacceptable: Germany's geopolitical position and railroad timetables.
As stated above, Germany's geopolitical nightmare was a two-front war. Russia's alliance with France made that a very real possibility. Since Russia refused to cancel the mobilization order, and France would not reveal if it planned to get involved if war broke out, the Germans could only assume the worst, a two front war. That brings us to the Schlieffen Plan.
The Schlieffen Plan was Germany's strategy for turning a two-front war into two successive one-front wars. It assumed that pre-industrial Russia's armies would be slow to mobilize, thereby giving Germany enough time to concentrate its forces and deliver a knockout blow against France and then concentrate its efforts on Russia.
The key to, and problem with, this plan was the precise timing of railroad timetables necessary for the rapid mobilization of Germany's armies. With Russia already mobilizing, Germany felt compelled to put the Schlieffen Plan into action before it was too late. However, that required war with France, so Germany, with no apparent provocation, declared war on France as well as Russia. That left the question of what Britain would do, which brings us back to the Schlieffen Plan.
Germany's high command considered the terrain and string of French fortresses along its western border with France too difficult for launching a quick offensive. The best route lay through the open low country of Belgium. However, Belgium refused passage to German armies, and so Germany, driven by the strict timetable of the Schlieffen Plan, violated Belgian neutrality in order to crush France and stay on schedule. Britain, outraged by this act, declared war on Germany.
And so Europe, dragging its worldwide colonial empires in its wake, blundered into World War I. Not that everyone saw it in such negative terms. Crowds all over Europe greeted the news jubilantly. Most men saw their nation as superior to all others and expected a quick victory much like that won by Prussia in 1870. Each nation's army would occupy the enemy's capital by Christmas, which meant that anyone not enlisting now would miss out on all the fun and glory. Little did they suspect the scope of the disaster about to befall them over the next four years.
At first there will be increased slaughter--increased slaughter on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue. They will try to, thinking that they are fighting under the old conditions, & they will learn such a lesson that they will abandon the attempt forever. Then...we shall have...a long period of continually increasing upon the resources of the combatants...Everybody will be entrenched in the next war.— I.S. Bloch (1897)
You smug faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go.— Siegfried Sassoon
We are ready, and the sooner the better for us.— German General von Moltke
When Europe went to war in 1914, many, although not all, people welcomed it as an opportunity for national glory. Soldiers, especially in Western Europe, also marched, or rather rolled, to war much more quickly than ever before. France alone, with its extensive network of railroads, had 7000 trains, some only eight minutes apart, moving troops to the front. Also, rapid population growth and mechanization from the Industrial Revolution, freed many more men than ever before for war.
Europe also marched to war better armed by far than any previous army in history. Germany seemed particularly armed to the teeth, thanks to the Kruppworks at Essen, Germany, a vast complex of 60 factories with its own police force, fire department, and traffic laws. One new weapon would especially change the face of war. That was the machine gun, which could fire 600 bullets per minute and stop any old-style human wave assaults dead in their tracks, literally. It was the machine gun that would put an end to the illusion of a quick victory in a war of movement--but not at first.
In the opening weeks, the Schlieffen Plan went like clockwork. While stopping a French offensive, known as Plan 17, from driving eastward into Germany, the strong German right flank swept the French, British, and Belgian forces back toward Paris, covering up to 20 miles a day, an exhausting pace for infantry loaded with up to 60 pounds of equipment. In fact, that pace plus the German General von Moltke's weakening of the Western offensive in order to meet a Russian offensive unexpectedly materializing in the East may have doomed the Schlieffen Plan to failure. The French and British allies made their stand to save Paris along the Marne River, many troops being rushed to the front in Paris taxicabs. The allies stood fast and the German offensive ground to a halt. Then, somewhat spontaneously and out of simple survival instinct, the soldiers started digging trenches. The Schlieffen Plan and war of movement had failed. The age of trench warfare had begun along what would ever after be remembered as the Western Front.
Making trench warfare especially bad was the fact that the opposing trenches were generally only 500 yards or less apart. This kept soldiers in constant contact with the enemy and constantly immobilized in the mud trenches to avoid the danger above. This contrasted sharply with previous wars where armies would fight a battle, withdraw, and then regroup for several weeks or months before the next battle. This had given soldiers long breaks from the terrors of battle, a psychological safety net that kept them halfway sane. But that safety net no longer existed as soldiers stayed in constant contact with the enemy and became worn out from battle fatigue, producing a catatonic-like state known popularly as the "thousand yard stare".
Life in the trenches, even during relative lulls in the fighting, was a thoroughly wretched experience. It was hot in summer and especially cold in winter. It was also wet and muddy, giving the soldiers little or no chance to bathe, exposing them to infestations of rats, lice, disease, and infection. One of the worst of these infections was trenchfoot, caused by the soldiers' not being able to remove their socks and boots for long periods of time and often resulting in amputation of the infected foot or leg. The following excerpts from the novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Eric Maria Remarque, himself a veteran of the war, capture the misery of life in the trenches.
There are rumors of an offensive. We go up to the front two days earlier than usual. On the way, we pass a shelled schoolhouse. Stacked up against its longer side is a high double wall of yellow, unpolished brand-new coffins. They still smell of fir, and pine, and the forest. There are at least a hundred.
“That's a good preparation for the offensive," says Muller astonished.
“They're for us," growls Detering.
“Don't talk rot" says Kat to him angrily.
“You be thankful if you get so much as a coffin," grins Tjaden, "they'll slip you a waterproof sheet for your old Aunt Sally of a carcass.”
The others jest too, unpleasant jests, but what else can a man do?---The coffins are really for us. The organization surpasses itself in that kind of thing...
We are in low spirits. After we have been in the dug-outs two hours our own shells begin to fall in the trench. This is the third time in four weeks. If it were simply a mistake in aim no one would say anything, but the truth is that the barrels are worn out. The shots are often so uncertain that they land within our own lines. Tonight two of our men were wounded by them.
******
The front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen. We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. Over us Chance hovers. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall.
It is this Chance that makes us indifferent. A few months ago I was sitting in a dugout playing skat; after a while I stood up and went to visit some friends in another dugout. On my return nothing more was to be seen of the first one, it had been blown to pieces by a direct hit. I went back to the second and arrived just in time to lend a hand digging it out. In the interval it had been buried
It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dugout I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hours' bombardment unscathed. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
******
We must look out for our bread. The rats have become much more numerous lately because the trenches are no longer in good condition. Detering says it is a sure sign of a coming bombardment.
The rats here are particularly repulsive, they are so fat-- the kind we call corpse rats. They have shocking, evil, naked faces, and it is nauseating to see their long, nude tails.
They seem to be mighty hungry. Almost every man has had his bread gnawed. Kropp wrapped his in his waterproof sheet and put it under his head, but he cannot sleep because they run over his face to get at it. Detering meant to outwit them: he fastened a thin wire to the roof and suspended his bread from it. During the night when he switched on his pocket-torch he saw the wire swinging to and fro. On the bread was riding a fat rat.
At last we put a stop to it. We cannot afford to throw the bread away, because already we have practically nothing left to eat in the morning, so we carefully cut off the bits of bread that the animals have gnawed.
The slices we cut off are heaped together in the middle of the floor. Each man takes out his spade and lies down prepared to strike. Detering, Kropp, and Kat hold their pocket-lamps ready.
After a few minutes we hear the first shuffling and tugging. It grows, now it is the sound of many little feet. Then the torches switch on and every man strikes at the heap, which scatters with a rush. The result is good. We toss the bits of rat over the parapet and again lie in wait.
Several times we repeat the process. At last the beasts get wise to it, or perhaps they have scented the blood. They return no more. Nevertheless, before the morning the remainder of the bread on the floor has been carried off.
In the adjoining sector they attacked two large cats and a dog, bit them to death and devoured them.
Next day there is an issue of Edamer cheese. Each man gets almost a quarter of a cheese. In one way that is all to the good, For Edamer is tasty--but in another way it is vile, because the fat red balls have long been a sign of a bad time coming. Our forebodings increase as rum is served out. We drink it of course; but are not greatly comforted.
For days we loaf about and make war on the rats. Ammunition and hand-grenades become more plentiful. We even overhaul the bayonets--that is to say, the ones that have a saw on the blunt edge. If the fellows over there catch a man with one of those he's killed at sight. In the next sector some of our men were found whose noses were cut off and the eyes poked out with their own saw-bayonets. Their mouths and noses were stuffed with sawdust so that they suffocated. Some of the recruits have bayonets of this kind; we take them away and give them the ordinary kind.
But the bayonet has practically lost its importance. It is usually the fashion now to charge with bombs and spades only. The sharpened spade is more handy and many-sided weapon; not only can it be used for jabbing a man under the chin, but is much better for striking with because of its greater weight; and if one hits between the neck and shoulder it easily cleaves as far down as the chest. The bayonet frequently jams on the thrust and then a man has to kick hard on the other fellow's belly to pull it out again; and in the interval he may easily get one himself. And what's more, the blade often gets broken off.
Four factors, all arising from the Industrial Revolution, had totally changed the face of war. First of all, the Industrial Revolution provided enough men (thanks to population growth and the mechanization of many jobs) and firepower (especially the machine gun) to dig and fill opposing trench systems stretching from the Alps to the North Sea, a system several hundred miles in length. The result was the continuous front which neither side could outflank since it was hemmed in by mountains and sea. Unfortunately, the machine gun and faster loading rifle which made the continuous front possible also made the technology of defense superior to that of offense. There was no way that unshielded infantry could get across that murderous area of flying metal known as No Man's Land. That is not to say that people did not try. They did, and with disastrous results.
Third, most generals either did not understand the nature of this new type of warfare or felt they could not afford to accept it. After all, most of these generals, many of whom were quite old, had not been able or willing to keep up on the rapidly changing technological changes transforming warfare in recent years. It is often said that generals are always fighting the last war, and nowhere did this better apply than to the generals of World War I. Before we become too critical, however, it should be pointed out that at no time in history had warfare been so thoroughly revolutionized in so short a time. The machine gun and continuous front had created a whole new ball game, but no one had a rule book by which to play. And so for four years, the generals just fumbled around the best they could while soldiers continued to die.
The fourth factor, also resulting from the Industrial Revolution and complicating matters further, was the media, in particular the newspapers. Never before had the public back home been so well informed about the progress, or lack of it, in a war. The generals had promised a quick victory, and the public and press had a close eye on how well they were doing. In the more democratic countries of France and Britain the generals found themselves under severe pressure by the public and politicians to win the war decisively and quickly. This was especially true of France, since the German lines contained northern France along with the bulk of its industries, and the French public was clamoring to get it back.
All of these factors combined to create a tragic pattern of suicidal frontal assaults that would prolong the stalemate. The casualties would be so horrible that governments modified or censored news coming from the front. This created a misinformed public and media that, thinking victory was within their grasp, would put more pressure on the generals for a quick victory. As a result, there would be more disastrous offensives more censorship to misinform the public, and so on.
Such offensives were usually conceived by generals behind the lines without any clear idea of what the front was really like. Preceding the attack for several days would be a massive bombardment that did a lot less damage than hoped for and which also told the enemy where the attack was coming. As soon as the shelling stopped, the troops went "over the top" into No Man's Land where the obstacles of barbed wire (left undestroyed by the bombardment) and craters (actually created by the bombardment) held them up so that the enemy machine guns (also unharmed since they had been taken to the dugouts below during the shelling) could cut them down. The men who suffered through this living hell often give us its most graphic and poignant descriptions.
“We listen for an eternity to the iron sledgehammers beating on our trench. Percussion and time fuses, 105's, 150's, 210's—all the calibers. Amid this tempest of ruin we instantly recognize the shell that is coming to bury us. As soon as we pick out its dismal howl we look at each other in agony. All curled and shriveled up we crouch under the very weight of its breath. Our helmets clang together, we stagger about like drunks. The beams tremble, a cloud of choking smoke fills the dugout, the candles go out.” — Verdun veteran, 1916
“the ruddy clouds of brick-dust hang over the shelled villages by day and at night the eastern horizon roars and bubbles with light. And everywhere in these desolate places I see the faces and figures of enslaved men, the marching columns pearl-hued with chalky dust on the sweat of their heavy drab clothes; the files of carrying parties laden and staggering in the flickering moonlight of gunfire; the "waves" of assaulting troops lying silent and pale on the tapelines of the jumping-off places
“I crouch with them while the steel glacier rushing by just overhead scrapes away every syllable, every fragment of a message bawled in my ear...I go forward with them...up and down across ground like a huge ruined honeycomb, and my wave melts away, and the second wave comes up, and also melts away, and then the third wave merges into the remnants of the others, and we begin to run forward to catch up with the barrage, gasping and sweating, in bunches, anyhow, every bit of the months of drill and rehearsal forgotten.
“We come to the wire that is uncut, and beyond we see gray coal-scuttle helmets bobbing about...and the loud crackling of machine-guns changes as to a screeching of steam being blown off by a hundred engines, and soon no one is left standing. An hour later our guns are "back on the first objective," and the brigade, with all its hopes and beliefs, has found its grave on those northern slopes of the Somme battlefield.” — Henry Williamson, age 19
“Verdun transformed men's souls. Whoever floundered through this morass full of the shrieking and dying...had passed the last frontier of life, and henceforth bore deep within him the leaden memory of a place that lies between life and death.” — Verdun veteran
The first day's butchery in an offensive, such as the 60,000 British who fell on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, should have been enough to convince the generals to call off the attack. But that would be admitting failure for all their months of plans and preparations. Therefore, the offensives continued, in some cases for months, with the casualties piling up into the hundreds of thousands. Each successive battle followed the same pattern and would continue that way until someone figured out how to solve the problems that the machine gun and continuous front had created. Until that day, it remained stalemate on the Western Front.
The continuing cycle of stalemate on the Western Front forced the warring powers to realize modern war is total war, demanding activities in all possible directions to sustain their own efforts and wear down those of the enemy. This led to efforts in five areas: control of material resources at home, control of human resources (including the media and morale), continued attempts to break through on the Eastern Front, the search for victory by opening new fronts, thus making it truly a world war, and the search for victory through the development and use of new weapons.
World War I devoured enormous amounts of material resources, forcing governments to closely control production and distribution of those resources. Blockaded Germany, in particular, had to ration food strictly. It also controlled mineral resources and even scientific research, which developed synthetic nutrients and ways to derive nitrates from the atmosphere for explosives. France also had to exert strong central control over production, since its industrial north was largely behind German lines, forcing it to rebuild much of its industry further south by 1918.
Human resources had to be controlled to ensure enough men for the front and a labor force for the strategic industries at home. With so many men gone to war, women entered the work place in unprecedented numbers, taking over many occupations previously reserved solely for men before the war, such as secretaries. After the war, when many husbands and fiancées did not return, many women stayed in the workplace, giving them more economic power and eventually the vote. To maintain morale, governments assumed more control of the media, limiting or distorting the information available to the press and public. Governments also actively tried to harness popular support for the war with brightly colored and illustrated posters that glorified the war effort and portrayed the enemy as less than human.
As the homefront became more of an integral part of the total war effort, governments saw enemy factories and civilians as legitimate war targets. In 1915, a German Zeppelin launched a bombing raid on London, killing several people. Although the damage from this raid was small by later standards, it pointed the way for much worse to come for civilians in wartime.
Allied hopes for a quick Russian victory in the East were quickly dashed in August 1914 when the Germans annihilated invading Russian forces at Tannenburg. (This was the first and only time allied forces set foot on German soil during the war.) Germany also bolstered Austria against the Russians in the south, causing a much looser version of the Western Front to evolve in the East, since the armies (except Germany's) were less mechanized and thus less successful in stopping a war of movement. The Russians were particularly poorly armed (many of them even without rifles), and their offensives against the German positions met with especially disastrous results. By 1917, Russia, bled white by the war, stood on the verge of revolution.
Each side also tried to divert and drain the enemy's strength by opening up new fronts. Turkey was the first new power to enter the war, in this case, on Germany's side. This threatened to cut off British and French supplies to Russia by way of the Black Sea and prompted a British offensive known as the Gallipoli Campaign. This was one of the worst run operations of the war. At least twice, the British generals had victory within their grasp, but chose to nap or have teatime rather than press their advantage, giving the Turks time to bolster their line. For several months, the allies were pinned down to the beaches until disease and casualties forced them to withdraw.
After this, the main British strategy against the Turks was to stir up and support rebellions. In that regard, one of the most celebrated figures of the war was T.E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, a charismatic figure who succeeded in organizing the Arabs and destabilizing the already decrepit Ottoman Empire. The British issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which promised a Palestinian homeland for the Jews in return for their help. This promise, in conjunction with conflicting promises to the Arabs, would be (and still is) the source of intense conflict in the Middle East.
Italy, despite being part of the Triple Alliance, joined France and Britain in order to take disputed lands from Austria. However, Austria managed to defeat Italy, making it more of a burden to Britain and France, who had to keep it supplied with guns, money, and fuel just to keep it in the war. Meanwhile, Bulgaria joined Germany and Austria in order to take Macedonia from Serbia, which it accomplished quickly. Serbia's British and French allies responded by landing 500,000 men at Salonika, Greece, where they did nothing until 1918, earning it the title of Germany's "biggest internment camp."
Europe's African and Asian colonies were also dragged into the war, making it a truly global war. The British were able to seize Germany's African colonies except for German East Africa. In Asia, the Allies persuaded Japan to attack German holdings and spheres of influence in China. This gave Japan a foothold in China that it would expand in the 1930's, laying the foundations for World War II in Asia. Overall, despite mixed results, Germany's allies gradually weakened as the war dragged on.
There was also the naval front. In the years preceding the war, Germany had built a fleet second only to Britain's. In 1915, the two navies clashed at Jutland. It was an indecisive battle, with Germany getting a slight advantage. But the Kaiser, not wishing to damage his nice new navy, called it into port where the British kept it blockaded for the rest of the war. The blockade was soon extended to all German ports and slowly starved Germany to death.
Meanwhile, each side looked desperately for new weapons to solve the problem of the continuous front. Poison gas and flame-throwers, pioneered by Germany, became all too common and horrible features in trench warfare, but failed to achieve a breakthrough. After the war, the Geneva Convention outlawed both weapons as inhumane. However, two other weapons had a big future in warfare. One was the tank, which gained the allies at least limited success in breaking through enemy trenches. Despite their slowness (3 mph) and unreliability (only half making it to the starting line in their first major battle), tanks shielded allied troops, helping them cross No Man's Land with relatively few casualties.
The airplane, first used for observations of enemy lines, was adapted to combat use, being armed with a machine gun to shoot down other planes. At first, aerial warfare consisted mainly of individual combats (dogfights) between pilots. It was very limited, polite (at least by warfare's standards), and the most glorified aspect of World War I, a sort of chivalry in the skies. Even that changed by war's end, with the allies sending up hundreds of planes to sweep the skies and strafe and bomb the German lines, a strategy that would be developed with much more deadly effect for the next war.
The submarine was Germany's great equalizer in the naval war. While Britain ruled the waves after Jutland, German U-boats (submarines) could still lurk beneath the waves and prey upon allied shipping in retaliation for the blockade on Germany. However, some of the ships Germany sank were from the United States, technically a neutral power but actively trading much needed food and other supplies to France and Britain. While Germany felt justified in sinking any ships supplying its enemies, the United States saw these attacks on its ships as barbaric and unprovoked acts of aggression.
Germany eased up on its attacks for a while to keep America neutral. But in 1917, as the war effort got more desperate, U-boat raids resumed. Then the British intercepted and publicized the Zimmerman Telegram, in which Germany offered Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California to Mexico if it would attack the United States and divert its attention from the war in Europe. American public opinion was outraged, and the United States declared war on Germany in March 1917. That same month another ally, Russia, after three years of defeats and shortages, became engulfed in Revolution.
Alexander Kerensky's moderate government that replaced the Czar, needing to look legitimate to the outside world, kept Russia in the war, which only weakened it further and led to its overthrow by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in November, 1917. The following March, Lenin signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, taking Russia out of the war while giving up Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Finland. This also freed one million German troops for the Western Front. The question was: Could the addition of the United States compensate for the loss of Russia?
With virtually no standing army when it declared war in 1917, the United States needed a year to mobilize its industrial and military might. Therefore, in 1918, the war became a race to see who could first arrive on the Western Front in force: the newly mobilizing Americans or the Germans freed from the Eastern Front.
At first, the Germans won the race and launched an offensive, attacking with smaller tactical units to punch holes in the enemy lines and drive them back bit by bit. Also, the attacks were not preceded by artillery bombardments that could warn the enemy where the attack was coming. This strategy succeeded in driving the allies back toward Paris. But, as in 1914, the allies, now bolstered by newly arrived American units, stopped the Germans at the Second Battle of the Marne.
Now the allies went on the offensive. Using the very tactics the Germans had just used, the growing numbers of fresh American troops at their disposal and large numbers of tanks to shield their soldiers crossing No Man's Land, they sent the Germans reeling back step by step toward Germany. At the same time, the British blockade was gradually starving the German homeland to the limits of its endurance.
At this point, all the pressures building elsewhere caved in on Germany, as its allies collapsed one by one: first Bulgaria, then Turkey, and finally Austria. Exposed to attack from the south and east, Germany finally asked for an armistice (ceasefire). On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, after one final flurry of artillery fire, the guns fell silent. Here and there, opposing soldiers met in No Man's Land to pay their respects to men who, like themselves, just happened to be wearing different uniforms, and then turned toward home. The First World War was over. However, its effects would be long-lasting and varied, including the Second World War a mere twenty-one years later.
At 11:00 A.M., on November 11, 1918, World War I ended. The price it had exacted in lives and material was staggering: 37.5 million casualties, 8.5 million deaths, and $300 billion (not adjusted for modern inflation) in damages. People referred to a "lost generation" that never survived to come of age and take their turn in leading their nations. And indeed, the leaders of the next war, World War II, were largely from the same generation that had blundered into World War I.
When the guns fell silent, there were jubilant celebrations by huge crowds expecting life to return to the normal conditions that had existed before the war. However, World War I was like a severe earthquake with devastating aftershocks, leaving the edifice of European economic and political power badly cracked and in no shape for another such jolt that might bring it tumbling down. The results of World War I were varied, far reaching, and interlocking. However, they followed five main lines of development: one of them being concerned with the effects on Europe's colonies, two concerning Western Europe (economic effects and the Treaty of Versailles), and two concerned with Eastern Europe (the Russian Revolution and the collapse of the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires).
World War I had been extremely expensive for the European powers. As a result, they sold many of their colonial mines and plantations for the cash needed to fight the war. This weakened Europe's colonial empires and set the stage for eventual liberation after the next big jolt to Europe's power: World War II.
The resulting Treaty of Versailles (1919) punished Germany materially and politically. Germany lost 13.1% of its pre-war territory, including Alsace, Lorraine, and the so-called Polish Corridor, a strip of land separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Its army was limited to 100,000 men and its navy to twelve ships. (The Germans scuttled their fleet rather than let it fall into British hands.) Germany could have no submarines, air force, heavy artillery, tanks, or even a professional general staff. It lost most of its merchant marine, one-quarter of its fishing fleet and a good part of its railroad rolling stock. Each year it had to build 200,000 tons of shipping for the victorious allies and also make deliveries of other commodities such as coal and telephone poles. The final indemnity forced from Germany amounted to $32 billion (not adjusted for inflation). Germany also had to agree to the War Guilt Clause, according to which it accepted full responsibility for the war.
The German people were furious but, for the time being, helpless to do anything but sign the treaty. However, the Treaty of Versailles remained fixed in German minds as an injustice that must be avenged, especially since it destabilized their economy and helped lead to the Great Depression in the 1930's. This in turn opened the way for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis who started World War II.
Economically, World War I had been horribly expensive, both in its immediate cost to fight and its long-range effects on Europe's industries. In addition to selling colonial holdings, the allies had resorted to borrowing heavily, especially from the United States. By the war's end, European countries owed the United States $7 billion. By 1922, it would be $11.6 billion. Thanks largely to World War I, the center of world finance was shifting from London to New York City. However, the economic effects of the war went far beyond borrowing money.
For four years, European countries had been producing guns and ammunition instead of consumer goods. This had allowed other countries, the United States in particular, to take over many consumer markets from the Europeans who were preoccupied with the war. Not surprisingly, the Americans did not willingly give up these markets to the Europeans after the war. Because of this and the huge war debts, the United States became the premier economic power of the world, creating a heavy dependency on the American economy. This, combined with German instability, made the world economy vulnerable to a worldwide depression when the American economy crashed in the 1930's. And, as discussed above, that would help lead to the rise of the Nazis and World War II.
World War I also catalyzed the Russian Revolution along with the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire in South-eastern Europe. In each case, these events would destabilize their respective regions and lead to future conflicts.
The break-ups of the Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires created problems in two ways. In accordance with the principle of national self-determination, the Hapsburg Empire was broken up into four new democratic nation states: Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, while Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland were formed from parts of the old Czarist empire. In addition there were still the various Balkan states whose squabbles had triggered World War I in the first place. While democratic in form, these new nations generally had little economic strength or history of democracy (both requiring a healthy middle class) on which to base strong democracies. Therefore, Eastern Europe was a patchwork of unstable states, providing Hitler ample opportunity for aggression that would start the Second World War. This instability along with World War II also provided fertile ground for growing anti-Semitic feelings that caused growing numbers of Jews to move to Palestine.
The break-up of the Ottoman Empire also profoundly affected the present day situation in the Middle East. The Arabs, instead of gaining their freedom for helping the allies against the Turks, as they were led to believe would happen, passed under French and British control as mandates to be prepared for independence in the future. This created a good deal of bitterness, made worse by the Balfour Declaration (1917) which had promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine for helping the allied cause. The influx of Jewish settlers into Palestine after Nazi persecution during World War II only made that bitterness worse in the Cold War period following the defeat of Germany.
The Russian Revolution which replaced a corrupt Czarist Russia with a strong communist state, the Soviet Union, created problems in two ways. First, the hostility it generated between itself and the capitalist democracies of the West undermined any joint efforts to contain future German aggression. With the old Triple Entente threatening Germany from east and west broken, Hitler could feel freer to expand eastward in the 1930's, thus providing another catalyst for the Second World War.
World War II would eventually cause a reunion of the old alliance of Russia and the West to crush the Nazis. However, it was an uneasy alliance that would come apart in the Cold War after 1945. The Russian Revolution would also lead to the spread of communism to China and other non-industrialized nations, contributing still further to the tensions of the Cold War.
As the 1920's progressed, the world seemed to be settling down to the normalcy longed for so much since 1914. Russia withdrew into itself to complete its revolution. Germany, propped up by American loans, seemed to have stabilized. And Europe overall seemed to have recovered its prosperity and maintained control of its colonies. However, World War I unleashed unseen forces that would surface with cataclysmic effect to trigger a worldwide depression and World War II.
One of the most startling and far-reaching results of the First World War was the Russian Revolution. Not only did it affect the largest nation on earth, it also had a huge impact on the rest of the world, helping lead to both World War II and the Cold War following it. While World War I may have triggered this Revolution, its roots go much further back into its history and geography in two ways.
First of all, Russia's flat and open terrain made it vulnerable to invasions that forced the Russian Czars to develop a strong absolutist state in self-defense. Second, Russia's huge size, northerly location, and isolation from Europe kept Russia cut off from the mainstream of political, economic and technological developments taking place in Western Europe. Therefore, Russia's geography and history made it a slow moving, autocratic, and backward giant that was constantly falling behind the more advanced societies in the West.
This triggered a vicious cycle of reforms to catch up with the West, a conservative backlash against the reforms, Russia falling further behind the West, more reforms, and so on. Unfortunately, not all Russians felt the West was worth copying. This led to a conservative backlash that would wreck the reforms, causing Russia to fall further behind, and so on. Peter the Great in the early 1700's, Catherine the Great in the later 1700's, Alexander I in the early 1800's, and Alexander II in the mid 1800's' all tried, or at least espoused, the cause of reform which led to conservative backlashes and the cycle repeating. That struggle is still going on in Russia today.
By the 1890s Russians could no longer ignore the forces of industrialization transforming the rest of Europe and leaving it further and further behind. Therefore, reformers targeted Russia's repressive government that used secret police to track down socialist dissidents, its backward social structure that kept the peasants in virtual, if not legal, serfdom, and its equally backward economy just starting to industrialize. Two other factors also pushed Russia toward change. One was the rising popularity of socialism. A more immediate catalyst for change was Russia's humiliating defeat in a war with Japan (1903-5) that dramatized Russia's backwardness.
All this set off the Revolution of 1905, which took Czar Nicholas II by surprise and forced him to agree to both political and economic reforms. The main political reform was the establishment of a Duma (parliament), which attempted to turn the Czar's absolute government into a constitutional monarchy. However, once the revolution settled down, the czar did all he could to crush and eliminate the Duma. Nevertheless, the Duma, however limited in power, persisted in being a voice for reform even as political repression reasserted itself.
At the same time, substantial economic reforms were taking place. The Czar's chief minister, Peter Stolypin, pushed through reforms that distributed land to some two million peasants. This gave peasants an incentive to produce more, and, by World War I, 75% of Russia's crops were going to market, with 40% of those crops going abroad. This, combined with Russia's political repression, created a gap between its economic progress and political backwardness. All that was needed was a catalyst to trigger a full-scale revolution. That catalyst was World War I.
ManyRussians, like other Europeans, greeted war jubilantly in 1914, sure that they would win a quick and glorious victory. In fact, Russia was poorly prepared for war. Its troops, although brave, were barely trained, poorly equipped (many not even having rifles), and incompetently led. Their war minister boasted of not having read a new book on military tactics in twenty-five years. As a result, Russian armies met with one disaster after another. Aggravating the situation was the Czar, Nicholas II, a weak willed man who was controlled by his wife, the Tsarina. She herself was German born and of suspect loyalty as far as many Russians were concerned. She was also under the spell of Rasputin, a drunken, semi-literate Siberian peasant posing as a monk. He did have the apparent ability to control the bleeding of the crown prince, who was a hemophiliac, along with an apparent hypnotic power over women. While scandal reigned at court (at least until Rasputin was murdered), Nicholas took personal command of the war effort, with catastrophic results.
As indicated in the discussion of the French Revolution, there is a logical and long-range pattern that revolutions follow. Therefore, understanding the pattern of past revolutions can help us anticipate events in current revolutions, more specifically the final stages of the process now taking place in Russia and China. One word of caution, however: these are likely trends, not absolute certainties. Outside events (e.g., a major war) and other historical forces unique to Russia and China respectively, could divert events in a very different direction from what is indicated here. Still, this pattern generally holds up and should serve as a guide in how we deal with nations still undergoing this process. That being said, following is a comparison of the French Revolution, which after 82 years finally reached a stable democratic form of government by 1871, and the Russian Revolution, which after 92 years is presumably in its final stage of evolution toward democracy.
Both countries shared three elements that helped lead to war:
1) Both regimes were burdened by heavy debts incurred from wars. In France’s case, this was the debt incurred by its support of the American Revolution. For Russia, this was the even higher cost in lives and money suffered during the first three years of World War I.
2) In each country, there was a growing gap between economic progress and social and political stagnation. For the French this was the continued prominence and privileges of the noble class as opposed to the more liberal ideas and progressive economic practices of the middle class. For Russia, this largely came from the peasantry, whose economic progress from Peter Stolypin’s agrarian reforms contrasted with the repressive rights and privileges of the nobles. In each case new political ideas aggravated these frustrations. In France these were the ideas of Enlightenment philosophes such as Rousseau and Voltaire. In Russia it was Marxism.
3) Both countries had weak leaders who let events get quickly out of control. In France and Russia respectively, these were Louis XVI and Nicholas II.
Both revolutions started out with moderate regimes that kept one or more of the old regimes’ policies to maintain the look of continuity and legitimacy. In France, that government was the National Assembly, which kept the king as a figurehead and honored the royal debt. In Russia, it was the Duma, which kept Russia in World War I. In both cases these policies just worsened the situation, leading to more unrest. Further aggravating both situations was the fact that replacing an old system with a completely different one (whether in politics, business, or sports) typically sees things deteriorate further before they improve. Unfortunately, the high expectations for rapid improvement did not give the new regimes the time they needed to turn things around.
Faced with growing unrest at home and military defeats abroad (the French having rashly declared war on Austria and Prussia in 1792), the moderate governments in France and Russia saw the rise of more radical factions supported by the urban working classes, which alarmed foreign powers and spurred them to intervene before the respective revolutions got out of control. Such intervention (by the First Coalition in France’s case and Russia’ erstwhile allies in World War I) in the short run just destabilized France and Russia further, which led to more military defeats, more support for the radicals, and so on.
In each case, this was the crisis stage of the revolution, where extreme radicals seized power and imposed harsh dictatorial rule to deal with the current emergency. In France it was the Jacobins, supported by the Sans Culottes, who imposed emergency economic measures, a universal draft, and the reign of terror. Similarly, Russia saw the Bolsheviks, supported by the working class soviets who imposed war communism to deal with the economic crisis and the Red Terror, which they consciously copied from the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.
In both revolutions, final victory and exhaustion from the crisis stage led to a brief conservative retrenchment to help their respective peoples recover. In France this was the period of the somewhat loose and corrupt Directory (1785-99). In Russia, this was Lenin’s New Economic Policy that allowed a degree of free enterprise to return so the economy could recover.
However, the overthrow of the Directory by Napoleon Bonaparte and Stalin’s rise to power after Lenin’s death in 1924 led to ruthless dictators who masked their repressive regimes with the revolutionary ideals they supposedly represented. Although Napoleon was finally defeated and Stalin won World War II and kept power till his death in 1953, both dictators effectively ruined their respective countries with their harsh policies.
Therefore, Russia has taken longer in its evolution toward democracy than France did, because it took another thirty-five years for Russia to finally collapse beneath the weight of the Stalinist system. Despite, this, Russia has continued to follow a path similar to France’s. After Napoleon France would undergo two more revolutions (in 1830 and 1848) and abortive attempts at democracy that would lead to a second dictatorship, this time under Bonaparte’s nephew, Napoleon III. Unlike his uncle, Napoleon III was much less aggressive in his foreign policy, focusing on France’s economic and industrial development. As a result, when Napoleon III fell from power in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, he left behind a strong economy and politically active and savvy middle class that ensured the stability of France’s Third Republic.
Likewise, Russia would see the overthrow of communism in 1991 and the establishment of a republic. However, as with France in 1830 and 1848, Russia’s economy was a shambles and it had virtually no middle class with which to sustain a viable democracy. Since then, Vladimir Putin has taken charge and, much like Napoleon III, has ruled with a firm hand while promoting economic growth. Presumably the middle class emerging from that growth will establish a stable democracy sometime in the future.
We are not carrying out war vs. individuals. We are exterminating the Bourgeoisie as a class. We are not looking for evidence or witnesses to reveal deeds or words vs. the Soviet power. The first question we ask is to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education or profession? These questions define the fate of the accused. This is the essence of the Red Terror.— M. Y. Latsis
Not only was Russia bleeding from war, it was also starving. This situation sparked bread riots in Petrograd (renamed that from the German St. Petersburg) in March 1917. Day after day the riots escalated as the government failed to respond decisively to the crisis. Many soldiers joined the demonstrators, Nicholas abdicated his throne, and the Duma set up a moderate republic under Alexander Kerensky.
The Russian Revolution followed a course very similar to that followed by the French Revolution. For one thing, its first government, like France’s National Assembly, was a moderate government that tried to maintain respectability by following many of the old monarchy’s policies. The most ruinous of these policies was its commitment to stay in the war against Germany. This merely intensified the turmoil and anarchy that the war had already generated, which led to more defeats, and so on. The more radical elements agitated for more sweeping changes to undermine the government’s power while exploiting its tolerance and weakness.
The most important of these groups was the radical Marxist party known as the Bolsheviks. (meaning “majority” although they only represented a minority of Russian socialists, let alone the population). Their leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, was a hardened revolutionary and prolific writer, whose career had involved avoiding the Czar’s secret police, spending time in a prison camp, and publicizing Marxism through his writing while in exile. Ironically, when revolution broke out, the Germans sneaked him into Russia, hoping he would destabilize Russia and knock it out of the war. He did that and much more.
When Lenin arrived in Petrograd, he immediately set to work to organize a revolution that would overthrow Kerensky. The steady deterioration of Russia from the prolonged war effort played into his hands, and the Bolshevik program, summarized in the slogans “Bread, peace, and freedom” and “All power to the Soviets” won many followers, especially among the soviets (workers’ councils organized in the factories). Finally, on November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks made their move. Having already seized key strongpoints such as bridges, railroad stations, and telegraph offices, they easily overthrew Kerensky’s government.
Lenin acted quickly in both domestic and foreign policies. In foreign affairs, as he had promised, Lenin pulled Russia out of World War I by signing away large territories in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March, 1918. Russia’s allies were furious since this freed one million German solders for the Western Front. They also feared and hated the Bolsheviks for their claim that they would overthrow Capitalist society. Therefore, the allies, especially Britain and the United States, landed troops in Russia to try to overthrow the Bolshevik government.
Facing strong opposition at home and abroad, much like the Jacobins had in 1793, Lenin followed strict domestic policies. Private property was abolished, industries and banks were nationalized, and the press, briefly free under Kerensky, was once again strictly censored. This combination of internal resistance and foreign intervention led to civil war.
At first the Bolsheviks (also known as the Reds), like the Jacobins in the French Revolution, were heavily outnumbered by their enemies (the Whites) and controlled only about 10% of Russia. That was mainly around Moscow, which they had switched to their capital since it was inland and harder for invaders to reach. The fighting was very confused and brutal, with massacres on both sides. However, the Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, starting with a few units of militia known as the Red Guard (similar to the National Guard in the French Revolution) built the Red Army into a strong and effective force of 5,000,000 men.
Desperate for experienced leaders, he forced old royalist officers into service. To ensure their efficiency and loyalty Trotsky held their families hostage and used a system of political advisors, Commisars, similar to the French Revolution’s representatives on mission. Trotsky’s methods were successful, and by 1921, he had cleared Russia of the foreign invaders and crushed the Whites.
After the devastation of World War I, the Revolution, and Civil War, Russia was a total wreck. Factories were in ruins and half the working class gone, either dead or returned to the farms. Millions had died, mainly from the famine and disease accompanying war. Two million more, mostly nobles, middle class, and intellectuals, had emigrated to other countries. Now it was up to Lenin to restore some degree of prosperity and order. There were four main policies he followed, one that loosened his control for the time being and three that tightened his control.
Lenin eased up a bit with his New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed some degree of free enterprise to encourage higher production by the peasants. While Lenin had little choice but to let free enterprise return, he could also justify NEP in Marxist terms since, according to Marx, Russia would have to evolve through a capitalist phase before it was ready for Socialism. For several years in the 1920’s, Lenin’s Russia saw widespread experimentation in the arts and social engineering as well as economics. Cubist and futuristic art flourished. Avant-garde theater featured acrobats as well as heavy political messages. The family was also under attack as a bourgeois institution with women as the oppressed working class. Therefore, women gained equal rights and pay as well as access to easier divorces and legalized abortions. Some young communists even saw free love and public nudity as revolutionary acts of liberation from bourgeois values. Older Bolsheviks frowned on such acts, but tolerated them in the spirit of creating a new socialist society. Lenin made similar concessions in government, giving tsarist bureaucrats and technical experts more authority in running the government and factories since most communists were uneducated and untrained in the technical expertise needed to run a country.
However, this is not to say that Lenin relinquished any political control over Russia. For one thing, the old non-Russian provinces of the tsarist empire were brought back under tighter control, the rationale being they needed Russia’s help in establishing a socialist paradise more than they needed national independence, which would be irrelevant once the workers’ revolutions had swept the globe. Of course, to these subject peoples, this new Soviet Union looked suspiciously like the empire of tsarist Russia.
Lenin exerted greater control over local governments through the Communist Party. One problem he had from the earlier days was that the local soviets had seized control of local governments. Although the Bolsheviks themselves had used the slogan, “All power to the Soviets” and could do little to control the soviets during the crisis of the civil war, Lenin was determined to eventually get tighter control on local matters. What he did was create a party structure parallel to that of the government. The local party officials were much more tightly controlled than the soviets and correspondingly more efficient in carrying out Lenin’s directives. As a result, control of the Communist party was as important for the rulers of the Soviet Union as was control of the government as a means for ruling the country.
Finally, Lenin, like Marx, felt the workers could not achieve true revolutionary consciousness on their own, but needed a strong centrally directed party of Marxists to lead them to socialism. Therefore, he had to resort to what he called “Proletarian dictatorship” to ensure the workers got what they deserved. However, this was not rule by the working class, but rather rule by the Communist party with working class members in it. Of course, Lenin strictly ruled the party, thus theoretically making his will that of the party and the people. Enforcing “proletarian dictatorship” and the “Red Terror” was the CHEKA (the All Russia Extraordinary Commission for Combating, Counterrevolution and Sabotage). This was Lenin’s secret police, except that it was much larger, more effective, and deadly than the Czar’s secret police had ever been.
The harsh and autocratic nature of the Soviet system that emerged was influenced by several factors. First, there was the dictatorial nature of Lenin’s personality that largely determined the course of the revolution. Second, there was a certain continuity from the tsars’ absolutist regime to Communist rule. Finally, many more Communists had joined the party during the revolution and civil war than before 1917. As a result, they saw the revolution in military terms as a sort of brotherhood in arms, and it assumed a military aspect with party members wearing military uniforms and using military jargon for political offices and concepts.
However, before Lenin could enact a thorough program of reform in the Soviet Union, he died in 1924. He was a brilliant leader and sincere revolutionary who oftentimes ignored human feelings in pursuit of his Communist revolution. His harsh measures must be seen in light of the harsh conditions that demanded them if the Revolution were to survive. Lenin is remembered as the father of the Revolution, but his early death left to his successor, Stalin, the job of carrying out the real revolutionary transformation of Russia.
Lenin’s death led to a power struggle between Leon Trotsky, the creator of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, and Joseph Stalin. Stalin was one of the few real working class members of the Communist party’s upper ranks. The name Stalin, meaning “man of steel”, reflected his willingness to take on jobs no one else wanted, gathering a lot of power into his hands in the process. He was also a cold and ruthless politician who managed to squeeze out the more intellectual Trotsky. Not content with a mere political victory, Stalin’s agents later tracked down Trotsky in Mexico and murdered him in 1940.
While Trotsky had wanted to focus on spreading the Communist revolution worldwide, Stalin wanted to concentrate on building up the Soviet Union internally first. He felt a need for a revival of the revolutionary spirit since many Communists thought Lenin’s NEP had steered Russia away from a true socialist society. His first step was to purge the moderate wing of the party that still wanted to continue Lenin’s policies. Among his victims were the middle class and non-Communist bureaucrats and technicians that Lenin had relied upon to keep the state and economy working. While this was popular with the more radical Communists, it also deprived Stalin of the very people he needed to develop Russia’s industries. Stalin then launched a campaign to build the Soviet Union into a great power. His program had three parts: the transformation of the Soviet Union into an industrial power, collectivization of the farms in order to support the populations in the new industrial cities, and a purge of any elements Stalin suspected of disloyalty.
Stalin’s industrialization was carried out in a series of Five Year Plans where the government set projected goals for economic growth. However, the first Five Year Plan (1928-32) in particular was as much political rhetoric as economic planning, which seriously hampered efforts to meet its goals. For one thing, human and material resources were not adequately figured into the plan, causing constant confusion and work stoppages. However, at least officially, each of Stalin’s Five Year Plans more than met their goals. How much of this was the truth, Stalin lying to the world, or nervous officials lying to Stalin is hard to say. There were harsh penalties, even executions, for officials failing to meet their quotas, thus providing strong incentives to meet their quotas by padding their figures or even sabotaging each other’s efforts.
Whole new cities and even lakes appeared where none had existed before, many of them named after Stalin himself. Oil production trebled, while coal and steel production rose by a factor of four times. Stalin also established a massive system of public schools and universities to provide a literate (and more easily brainwashed) work force as well as engineers for his factories. By 1940, the Soviet Union had an 85% literacy rate and was the third largest industrial power in the world behind only the United States and Germany.
However, this was done at a price. For one thing, Stalin concentrated on heavy industries, such as steel, electricity, and heavy machinery, and consequently ignored the production of basic consumer goods, including even housing, for his people. He also used virtual slave labor by taking millions of peasants and others whom he saw as threats to his regime and using them in building his massive canal, hydroelectric dam, and factory projects. Thus millions died for Stalin’s dream of an industrial state.
Collectivization of the agriculture was mainly a means to an end: to produce enough food to support an urbanized industrial society. Marxist doctrine forbade private property, and Stalin, wanting as much centralized power as possible, used this principle to gather the farms into giant state-run operations. In theory, organizing the farms along the lines of industrial factories should increase productivity enough to support the Soviet Union’s new industrial cities. However, there were several flaws with this. First of all, such a scheme demanded a level of mechanization far beyond the Soviet Union’s capacity, which, at that time, still had 5.5 million wooden plows in use. Also, Stalin failed or refused to recognize that people work harder if they feel they are working for themselves instead of a landlord, even if that landlord is the state. Since many peasants had gained possession of their own land before and during the Revolution, collectivization met with strong resistance from these landholders, known as kulaks, and that led to untold troubles.
Stalin saw the kulaks as traitors to the Revolution and launched an all out campaign against them. Police and soldiers surrounded villages and hauled the peasants off to collectives, labor camps (which provided slave labor for Stalin’s industrial projects), or mass executions. Collectivization was also a disaster for Soviet agriculture and its people. Peasants burned their own grain and butchered their livestock to keep them out of government hands. That and the disruption caused by Stalin’s harsh policies led to widespread famine that killed millions more. Any gains Soviet agriculture may have made were probably in spite of Stalin, not because of him. This brings us to the third feature of his regime, the Stalinist terror.
Stalin was an extremely paranoid man who easily imagined both that anyone not meeting his expectations of performance was a traitor to the state and that anyone exceeding his expectations was an ambitious conspirator against him. In 1936 Stalin purged a wide range of people whom he saw as traitors or threats to his regime: government officials, military officers, old Bolsheviks, and teachers in addition to kulaks and inefficient factory managers.
The trials of these people were an absolute farce, where the accused were forced to read contrived confessions of their alleged crimes against the state before being sent to Stalin’s labor camps, providing much of the slave labor needed for Stalin’s industrial projects. However, the purges did great harm to Russia. Besides stifling initiative and poisoning society with an element of fear, they also eliminated most of the Red Army’s top officers, replacing them with men who were inexperienced and subservient to Stalin. Russia would pay a terrible price for this in World War II.
Those replacing the bureaucrats and engineers eliminated by Stalin’s purges were young men from working class backgrounds educated in the new schools and universities established by Stalin. Instead of the radical and somewhat independent-minded Bolsheviks in military uniforms agitating for more revolutionary reforms, Stalin now had an elite corps of educated engineers and bureaucrats loyal to him and more concerned with technical matters and industrialization than factional politics, Marxist ideology, and loyalty to a fighting Marxist brotherhood. Instead of uniforms and eccentric cultural ideas, they wore suits and attended classical concerts and ballets. They were the products of the revolution, but they were hardly revolutionary themselves, being prone to conserving the gains made by their party rather than pushing toward new frontiers. Stalin’s two successors, Khruschev and Brezhnev, both came from this generation and reflected its more conservative tendencies. The revolution had come full circle.
Regardless of the cost, the 1930’s saw the Soviet Union emerge as a major power, which seemed all the more remarkable since the rest of the world was mired in the Great Depression. This provided great publicity for Communism when resurgent Russia was compared to the ailing capitalist world. Communist membership grew in the western democracies, while a number of poorer countries adopted their own five-year plans in imitation of Stalin’s “socialist miracle”. All of these underscored the fact that the 1930’s were a time of great economic hardship, which led to rising political tensions and eventually World War II.
The 1920's have been popularly seen as a decade of political stability and economic prosperity. Indeed, Germany did settle down, and seemed to stabilize after 1923, new democracies were established in Eastern Europe, and prosperity did seem to return. A whole barrage of new technological breakthroughs and products signaled this: affordable mass-produced automobiles, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, cellophane, radios, talking movies, and commercial air travel to name a few. But in reality, the 1920's presented largely an illusion of prosperity, for beneath the surface were three serious problems, all arising from World War I and undermining the stability of the world economy.
The first problem largely stemmed from the nature of American dominance of the world economy in the 1920's compared to previous British dominance in the 1800's. The British had maintained a fairly balanced cash flow in world trade since they had to buy raw materials with much of the money they made from selling manufactured goods. This prevented too severe a drain of cash from other countries, thus assuring Britain more stable markets. In contrast, the United States was not only an industrial power selling manufactured goods in markets it had claimed from Europe during the war; it also had its own vast natural resources. Therefore, little money had to leave the United States to buy the raw materials needed to manufacture its products. This created an unbalanced cash flow from the rest of the world to the United States. As a result, European nations, still recovering from the war, needed loans, which they got from American banks. This sent even more money to the United States in the form of repayments and interest, just making an even more unbalanced cash flow, and so on.
The second problem had to do with Europe's recovery from World War I. European industries did revive to their old pre-war levels of production by 1925, but they failed to reclaim their old markets from the United States or create new markets to compensate for the losses. As a result, the intense economic competition between nations that had largely caused World War I continued after it. Therefore, nations still maintained high tariffs, which raised prices, cut world trade, and further weakened the world economy.
Finally there was an agricultural crisis in the United States. This was the result of dramatic expansion of farmland in order to meet the food demands of the European countries during the war. However, European agricultural production revived after the war, causing overproduction. Grain prices plummeted, and American farmers went into debt, many of them losing their farms when they were unable to maintain mortgage payments on their newly expanded farms. Therefore, although America's industries seemed to be thriving, its agricultural sector, still a large part of its population and economy, was in trouble.
Ironically, while all of these problems led to an unstable world economy, they also created an illusion of prosperity. This was especially true in the United States where investing in the stock market had become a virtual national sport. However, the American stock market in the 1920's had a fatal flaw, since investors only had to pay as little as 10% cash for their stocks. Banks financed the balance at 10-15% interest. This made it easy to buy stocks, so the stock market rose at an unprecedented rate in the late 1920's. But this also meant the market must rise 10-15% per year for investors to break even after accounting for their loans plus interest. This created an increasingly uneasy atmosphere as investors worried about how much the already inflated value of stocks could rise. For those realistic enough to pay attention, there were danger signs for the economy in the fall of 1929. In October, the market crashed.
Much of what happened was a classic case of panic psychology running wildly out of control. When some investors started selling stocks, this left other investors in debt to the banks nervous about stock prices falling, something they could not afford. Therefore, when some of them started selling, stock prices fell more, which caused more panic selling, even lower prices, and so on. In a matter of hours, millions of investors were ruined, with some stocks falling $75 per share. It got worse. By November 1, investors had lost $40 billion, and by November 13, the stock market had lost half of its value.
This spilled over into the rest of the American economy, causing an overall lack of faith in the future, which led to a decline in investment and buying. Therefore, production was cut, which cost workers their jobs, further undermining faith in the economy, and so on. This only hurt the stock market, which then fed back into the cycle of economic decline. By 1932, industrial production in the United States had fallen by half, national income by 75%, and the value of some stocks from $100 to $.50 per share. This led to the collapse of 5000 American banks, many of which had over-invested in the stock market. These banks called in loans from Europe, whose economies were already unstable and overly dependent on American loans. The result was a worldwide depression spreading from America and Europe to the rest of the world that was tied into their economies.
As the Depression spread and deepened, governments desperately sought ways to revive, or at least protect, their ailing economies. One tactic was to raise tariffs and establish import quotas, trading blocs, and bilateral trade pacts. However, by 1933, this had helped cut world trade to one-third of its 1929 level. Another policy was to reduce government spending by cutting public works programs and civil servants' salaries. But this only created more unemployment and fewer consumers to revive the economy.
A third tactic, started by Britain, was to go off the gold standard and then devalue the British currency, which now had no gold backing it up. The idea was to make other nations' currencies and goods more expensive in comparison to Britain's and thus make the cheaper British goods more appealing to British and foreign customers. However, other countries followed Britain's lead, so nothing was gained, and everyone's currencies were devalued and less stable. Therefore, the Depression deepened even more and international tensions grew.
As the situation worsened, there emerged a growing realization that the laissez faire economics of the nineteenth century was no longer working and that governments must take a more active role in reviving their national economies and looking after the welfare of their citizens. Among the more innovative theories along that line was that of John Maynard Keynes, a British economist whose Keynesian Economics has been one of the most influential economic theories of this century.
The problem as Keynes saw it was that during a depression businesses need sales in order to provide jobs to families, while families need jobs to get the money to provide businesses with sales. However, neither individual businesses nor families have the resources to help themselves or each other out of the downward spiral of depression. Keynes saw the modern industrial state as the only institution with the power and resources to help both businesses and families and to revive a national economy.
However, the state's role is not to respond to changing economic conditions in the same way as a business or family would. Rather, it should act in an almost contrary way in order to maintain stability. Therefore, the state should tax high and spend low in prosperous times in order to build up treasury surpluses. Then, during times of economic hardship, governments would tax low and spend their surpluses to provide jobs for families in such things as public works programs. The money earned from those jobs would lead to increased sales for businesses and an overall revival of the economy. Governments would then go back to taxing high to restore their surpluses in anticipation of the next economic downturn.
While governments generally did assume larger roles in trying to solve the Depression, they did it in different ways. The United States, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, set up the New Deal, which supported vital industries, banks, agriculture, and public works to provide jobs and stimulate the economy. It also set up a social safety net, Social Security, which provided relief for the aged and unemployed. Later, this would be expanded into a virtual retirement fund, although that was not its original purpose. Britain reversed its earlier austerity policy of cutting government salaries and public works, and funded new industries such as shipping, electricity, and, later, armaments as the clouds of World War II loomed on the horizon. In both cases, the United States and Britain were in better positions to act when war came.
More fascist governments, such as Germany, Italy, and Japan, followed more aggressive and militant policies. Nazi Germany and, to a lesser extent, Italy embarked on rapid rearmament programs that provided jobs, but poured money into weapons industries that are unproductive unless they are used in the one thing for which they are suited: war. Japan was especially hard hit by the Depression since it had virtually no natural resources and had lost the trade needed to buy them. This situation prompted a military takeover of the government and an invasion of China to secure a food and resource base. In both Europe and Asia, these events were already undermining the collective peace and laying the foundations for World War II.
Books are good. Muskets are better.— Fascist slogan
World War I and the Treaty of Versailles apparently solved nothing and satisfied no one. Although the Western democracies, such as France and Britain, were regaining some stability and prosperity, no one else was. Ethnic and territorial disputes arose among the new democracies in Eastern Europe. The Bolsheviks in Russia threatened to spread their revolution and overthrow Capitalism. And Italy and Germany, the one a "winner" and the other a loser in the war, were both bitter about the Treaty of Versailles and anxious to reverse its verdict.
These conditions gave rise to Fascism, the belief in a totalitarian dictatorship controlling nearly all aspects of the state: government, army, press, schools, etc. However, unlike the Soviet model of Communism, it allowed free enterprise and private property, thus appealing to the business-oriented middle class since it gave them economic security. Finally, Fascism was also intensely nationalistic and aggressive in its foreign policy.
The first successful Fascist takeover was in Italy under Benito Mussolini. He was born in 1886 in the rough hill country of North Central Italy. His mother was a devout Catholic and schoolteacher, while his father was an atheist and anarchist who liked to smash ballot boxes on Election Day. Benito himself was a troublemaker who had a bad habit of knifing his classmates. As a young adult, he fled to Switzerland to avoid the draft and was converted to socialism there. In 1904, he returned to Italy and served his time in the army in return for a pardon. He then became the editor of several socialist newspapers in which he advocated both political assassination and pacifist resistance to a war with Turkey, calling the national flag a rag fit to be planted on a dung heap. When World War I broke out, he first advocated neutrality, and then, probably after accepting French bribes, called for Italian involvement on the Allied side.
Italy made a poor showing in the war and paid a heavy price for it. Government expenditure during the war was twice its expenditure for the whole period 1861-1913. As a result the economy was in shambles and the country was plagued with unemployment, inflation, riots, strikes, and brigandage. It was then that Mussolini first joined and soon became leader of the Fascist Party, which stood for upholding claims of veterans and the nationalist interests of Italy while crushing any anarchist elements in the country. Ironically, the Fascists did more to promote anarchy than anyone else in Italy at that time. Mussolini would send out his gangs of thugs, the Blackshirts, to riot against Communists and other groups while claiming his men were protecting the peace.
Oddly enough, Mussolini's strategy of spreading chaos in the streets while posing as the champion of law and order who could save Italy started paying off. Even without the Blackshirts' antics, Italy needed law and order, and many people, especially the middle class who feared the Communists, looked to the Fascists as the answer to Italy's problems. In October 1922, they made their move.
It was actually the local party bosses who started a series of riots that stormed various city halls and forced concessions from local governments. This encouraged them to march on Rome and seize control of the national government. Benito himself was hesitant to take part, but when the Ras went ahead without him and it looked as if they might succeed, he put himself at the head of the march as if it were his idea all along. The march itself was a fiasco, getting bogged down in a massive traffic jam, but it scared the government enough to offer Benito the power to form a new government, which he did with typical bombast and bluster. Then, through intimidation and rigged elections, Benito tightened his grip on Italy. He bullied the Italian Parliament into giving him emergency powers that allowed him to shut down other parties, censor the press, and end other civil liberties. By 1925, Italy was a fascist dictatorship.
The riots and strikes did settle down after Mussolini took power, but little else went right for Italy and the Fascists. Mussolini claimed he made the trains run on time, but that was a gross exaggeration, as was just about every other claim he made. He did try to build up Italy's aircraft, shipping and power industries, but the Depression and Italy's lack of natural resources, along with poor planning and corruption, severely limited any economic progress. Mussolini's big dream was to make Italy a major power, thus reviving the Roman Empire. Here again, little progress was made, although Benito made wildly inflated claims about Italy's military strength.
Whatever his failures as a national leader, Mussolini appeared to be a shining example of Fascist strength when compared to the more timid democracies in Europe, and was a hero to other aspiring Fascist leaders of the day. Among these was a struggling German politician by the name of Adolph Hitler.
The driving force of the most important changes in this world have been found less in scientific knowledge animating the masses but rather in a fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drives them forward.— Adolph Hitler
The most ominous development after World War I and one of the primary causes of World War II was the rise of Adolph Hitler in Germany. The Treaty of Versailles helped lead to this in five ways. First, there was the common belief that Germany had been betrayed, since the Armistice had been signed before allied troops had reached German soil. Germans, looking for scapegoats, blamed bankers, Catholics, and especially the Jews. Second, the Treaty of Versailles angered the German people and destabilized Germany both economically and politically. Third, the Weimar Republic, which succeeded the Kaiser’s monarchy, was moderate, but weak, and thus let matters get out of hand. Fourth, the German economy's over-dependence on American loans caused it to collapse with the Stock Market Crash in 1929. Finally, the Depression, especially with the renewed raising of tariffs, created tense international relations. All these provided the conditions for Hitler to seize power.
Adolph Hitler was born in 1889 in Braunau, Austria. His early ambition was to be an artist, but he failed to gain entrance into Vienna's main art academy. Drawing upon strong anti-Semitic sentiments already in Vienna, Hitler blamed the Jews for conspiring to keep him out. He got by as an artist for soap and deodorant ads, having few expenses, since he was neither married, drank alcohol, or smoked. In 1913, having failed to get into the Austrian army, he crossed into Germany. Then came World War I.
Hitler served in the German army with distinction, was wounded twice (once by poison gas) and decorated for bravery. Being a loner, he actually enjoyed the war and the comradeship of the army, since it gave him a sense of belonging. Therefore, he felt especially disappointed and betrayed when Germany surrendered in November 1918. The Treaty of Versailles the next year merely added to this bitterness. Not surprisingly, he conveniently blamed the Jews for Germany's plight.
After the war, Hitler served as a reservist, spying on political parties to make sure they did not add to the chaos then besetting Germany. One such party was the National Socialist, or Nazi, Party. This right wing group attracted Hitler with its racist ideas about a master Aryan race and the so-called "inferior" races, such as the Slavs and especially the Jews who must be destroyed. Hitler became the Nazis' seventh member and soon afterwards its leader. He also found a new talent, speech making, which attracted large audiences and funds to the new party's treasury.
As disturbing as the Nazi ideas were, they were nothing new or original to European culture. Persecution and hatred of the Jews went back to the Middle Ages where they were often resented as moneylenders, accused of such things as the execution of Christ and conspiring with the Devil to cause the Black Death, and subjected to expulsion from their homelands and at times even massacres. Even such a revered figure as Martin Luther said the Jews should be deprived of their property and that:
“...their synagogues or schools be set on fire, that their houses be broken up and destroyed...and they be put under a roof or stable, like the Gypsies... in misery and captivity as they incessantly lament and complain to God about us.”
The idea of an Aryan super-race was also rooted in German philosophy, in particular Freidrich Neitzsche, whose idea of a new superior type of human ("ubermensch") was easily taken out of context and narrowly applied by the Nazis to the German people:
“A daring and ruler race is building itself up...The aim should be to prepare a transvaluation of values for a particularly strong kind of man, most highly gifted in intellect & will. This man and the elite around him will become the 'lords of the earth'” — The Will to Power
Ordinarily, such ideas would have little appeal in normal prosperous times. However, conditions in Germany after World War I were anything but normal or prosperous. Political strife rocked the country as extremists from both the right and left. Notably the Communists, fought for power. Another problem came as the government printed vast amounts of money to support a strike against occupying French troops trying to force Germany to pay its huge indemnity. However, Germany's inability to back up its currency led to a wildly uncontrolled cycle of inflation. As a result, a single turnip would cost 50 million marks and people literally burned money for fuel, carted it around in wheelbarrows, and shoveled it out of bank vaults.
Given these conditions, it is hardly surprising that many Germans were drawn to the idea of themselves as a super-race that had been treacherously betrayed by "inferior" enemies from within and without. Therefore membership in the Nazi party grew rapidly in the early 1920s, prompting Hitler to try to overthrow the government in 1923. His Putsch, as it was called, was a total disaster, but the resulting trial earned Hitler a good deal of publicity as a national hero defending German honor against domestic violence and foreign humiliation. While in prison for nine months, he wrote Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), which outlined his political beliefs and strategies for seizing power.
While its racist ideas were just rehashed versions of older ideas, Mein Kampf did provide a blueprint for modern politics through the use of radio, posters, mass rallies, lies, and catchy slogans which appealed to the emotions without really telling anything of substance in order to manipulate the political process. Nazism was a negative philosophy that thrived on Germany's miseries. However, by the mid 1920's, the illusion of prosperity and the apparently fading hostility toward Germany caused Nazi membership to stagnate.
All that changed in the 1930's, as other two effects of World War I created conditions favoring the Nazis. For one thing, the Depression with its higher tariffs raised international tensions, which Hitler could exploit to gain popularity. Also, the war had created an unstable economy that was overly dependent on financial support from the United States. Therefore, the stock market crash in 1929 dragged Germany down with the American economy. By 1932, six million Germans were unemployed, which played right into Hitler's hands. This time he would use the democratic process to gain power and then use that very democratic process to destroy itself.
The Nazis reacted to these conditions in two ways. First, Nazi thugs, known as Brownshirts in imitation of Mussolini's Blackshirts, started riots with opposing groups, especially Communists, while blaming them for the disorder, embarrassing the government for failing to keep order and portraying themselves as the defenders of the peace. Second, they bolstered their popularity with free food and festivals, making them look like nice concerned Germans, and by staging huge mass rallies to display their popular support.
In late 1932, rich German industrialists, prompted by fear of a Communist takeover, pressured the government to make Hitler chancellor (prime minister), hoping they could control him while he contained the Communists. Little did they suspect that this was just the beginning for Hitler.
Once in power, Hitler worked to increase his own power and German national pride in three ways: destroy any possible rivals to his position, rearm Germany, and launch a campaign of violence against the Jews. In the months following his becoming chancellor, he skillfully used his government powers, propaganda, lies, and brute force to divide his enemies and then destroy them one by one. Needing a majority in the Reichstag (German parliament), Hitler immediately called for new elections, hoping his new position as chancellor would win the Nazis more seats. In order to scare people into supporting them, the Nazis burned the Reichstag building and blamed the Communists. The resulting hysteria allowed Hitler to suspend civil rights and arrest the Communist leaders, thus gaining the Nazis more seats in the Reichstag.
Now it was time to eliminate the Reichstag and the democratic process along with it. Hitler planned to do this by passing the Enabling Act, which would give him legislative and executive power for four years, plenty of time to get a stranglehold on power in Germany. With the Brownshirts outside threatening violence, the law easily passed, giving Hitler the legal framework in which to establish a dictatorship.
In the following months, Hitler used a combination of threats to opposing leaders, alluring promises to their followers, and brute force to eliminate his enemies. One by one they fell: the Social Democrats (with a strong labor backing), the Catholic Center Party, and the German Nationalists (ultra-conservatives who were forced to merge with the Nazi Party). Next came the press and universities, institutions with many educated people who saw through Hitler's lies and might be able to mobilize public opinion against him. In each case, Hitler formed a comprehensive national association that all members of that profession were required to join if they were to keep working. Of course, Nazi officials headed these new organizations, which gradually strangled freedom of speech and thought in Germany.
With Germany firmly under his heel, Hitler moved to gain firm control of his own party. His main rival, Ernst Rohm, was the head of the powerful Brownshirts, the para-military gang of thugs the Nazis used for violence and intimidation. Many army officers and industrialists feared Hitler would replace the army with the Brownshirts, while Hitler himself feared Rohm's power. Therefore, he won the support of the army and industrialists while serving his own interests by having Rohm and his associates murdered in the so-called "Night of the Long Knives." (It is widely believed that Hitler himself pulled the trigger in Rohm's murder.) The Brownshirts were dissolved and replaced by the much more efficient and deadly black-shirted Storm Troopers, commonly known as the Schutzstaffel or SS. From now on they would be the main agents of the Nazi Terror.
In August, 1934, President Hindenburg, symbol of the old Prussian order with which Hitler had been careful to associate himself, died. To symbolize the dawn of a revolutionary new order and the 1000-year reign of the Third Reich, Hitler demanded a loyalty oath from the army, not to Germany, but to himself. From now on Germany was to be Hitler, and Hitler was to be Germany.
Hitler's second goal was the rearmament of Germany. He did this through a massive arms build-up (in direct defiance of the Treaty of Versailles) and public works projects (such as highways for moving armies from front to front). At least in the short run this did provide jobs and prosperity and restore pride in Germany. However, in order to fund all this, the Government budget grew seven times from 1932 to 1938, with 74% of that budget for the military. This put a growing strain on the German economy, which helped lead to German aggression and World War II.
Finally, Hitler attacked the Jews, whom he imagined had kept him out of art school and betrayed Germany in the war. His Nuremberg Laws in 1935 subjected Jews to an ever-growing number of restrictions and acts of violence. The climax of this stage of persecution was the Kristallnacht, or Crystal Night (11/9-10/38), named after the shattered windows of Jewish merchants' shops that were looted that night. Using an incident in Paris between a Jew and German diplomat, the Nazis instigated this wave of violence against Jews across Germany. Nazi-led gangs looted Jewish owned shops, brutally beat their owners, and then rounded them up for the growing number of concentration camps springing up in Germany.
Many Jews, including Albert Einstein, left Germany, costing it many of its brightest minds. The horror stories they took with them led to growing fears of Nazi aggression and eventually World War II. They also took with them talents that the Nazis could have used but claimed were part of a worldwide plot to pollute science and destroy civilization. Einstein's theory of Relativity was especially singled out by one Nazi writer as being:
“directed from beginning to end toward the goal of transforming the living — that is the non-Jewish-- world of living essence, born from mother earth and bound up with blood, and bewitching it into spectral abstraction in which all individual differences of peoples and nations, and all inner limits of the races, are lost in unreality, and in which only an unsubstantial diversity of geometric dimensions survive which produces all events out of the compulsion of its godless subjection to laws."
Wilhelm Mueller, in his book, Jewry and Science, claimed the worldwide acclaim given to Einstein for his theories was really only rejoicing over "the approach of Jewish world rule which was to force down German manhood irrevocably and eternally to the level of the lifeless slave."
“...the Jew conspicuously lacks understanding for the truth...being in this respect in contrast to the Aryan research scientist with his careful and serious will to truth...Jewish physics is thus a phantom and a phenomenon of degeneration of fundamental German physics.” — Nazi, Prof. Philipp Lenard
From 1905 to 1931, ten German Jews won Nobel Prizes in science. Hitler would kill six million more.
Why did Germany go along with this madness? A combination of factors gives at least a partial answer. First, Hitler was a master of dividing and attacking his enemies one by one. He would win over people with tempting promises while eliminating their, leaving them helpless before him. He also effectively used lies and propaganda to deceive the public and turn them against helpless scapegoats, such as the Jews, making people relieved they were not under attack at that time and not seeing what was happening until it was too late to save themselves. Finally, Hitler's programs did restore national pride and relieve some of the Depression's misery. Little did they realize the price they and the world would have to pay for this temporary bit of comfort.
By far, the most destructive aftershock of World War I was World War II, coming a mere 20 years after the Treaty of Versailles. While the rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930's generally took center stage, events elsewhere, some of them as far away as East Asia, also contributed to the outbreak of war. Three main factors, all resulting from World War I, would lead to war: the Treaty of Versailles, the Great Depression, and the Russian Revolution.
Along with leading to the rise of the Nazis, the Treaty of Versailles had quite different results on France's and Britain's relations with Germany and each other. Since they shared a long land border with Germany and had suffered a great deal in the war, the French were much more nervous about a resurgent Germany and wanted to keep its power limited. Therefore, in 1935, when Hitler announced that Germany would rearm (they had been doing so secretly for two years), France signed a series of defensive pacts with Germany's neighbors to contain any future aggression by Hitler. Among these pacts was one with the Soviet Union, which France saw as the primary counterweight to German power.
Britain, however, feared Stalin as much as it did Hitler, and signed a naval pact with Germany giving it the right to build a surface fleet 35% as big as Britain's and a submarine fleet as large as Britain's. While Britain apparently did not feel threatened by this, France did. Consequently, the two powers rarely cooperated effectively during the series of crises that occurred in the late 1930s, providing just the sort of disunity and lack of cooperation Hitler wanted.
Aggravating the situation was a sort of shell shock among the British and French caused by the horrible memories of World War I. Just as they had been too eager to go to war in 1914, now they were overly cautious and willing to appease aggressors in order to avoid a war. Unfortunately, dictators such as Hitler thrived on such weakness. Just as the lesson of 1914 was that too much aggression can lead to war, the lesson of 1939 would be that war can just as easily result from appeasement and giving in to aggression.
The Depression also had unsettling effects outside of Germany. Among other things, it seriously hurt Japan, whose economy depended heavily upon trade to pay for resources and food for its burgeoning population. As tariffs went up and the Depression deepened, Japan grew desperate for resources. This desperation led to a military takeover of the government, somewhat reminiscent of the Fascist dictators in Europe. In 1931, the Japanese seized Manchuria from China on the flimsy pretext of setting up the "independent" state of Manchukuo under Japanese "protection." China protested to the League of Nations, but the League had no power of its own to act against aggression, especially if that aggression were half a planet away. Therefore, Japan kept Manchuria and a foothold in China.
Even before this, China was already deeply mired in its own problems. European and Japanese aggression in the late 1800's had helped lead to turmoil in Chinese society and government. In 1912, a revolution replaced the last Chinese emperor with a republic under the western educated Sun Yat Sen. However, China's experiment in democracy floundered, and, after Sun Yat Sen's death, Chinese politics disintegrated into a three-way struggle for power between the Nationalist government's leader, Chiang Kai-shek, various independent warlords in the countryside, and the Communists led by Mao Zedong.
The Japanese seizure of Manchuria presented the Chinese government with a dilemma: fight Japan right away or crush the Communists and warlords first and then face the Japanese with a united front. Chiang Kai Shek, being strongly anti-Communist, decided to unify China first. For several years he waged intensive warfare against the Communists whom he badly damaged, but failed to destroy. However, Chiang's generals, anxious to turn against Japan, forced him to ally with Mao against the common enemy. Japan, fearing a united China, told the Nationalists to join it against the Communists or it would take "all the steps necessary to assure peace." In July 1937, it "assured" that peace by invading China.
The Chinese army was no match for the more mechanized Japanese forces, which relentlessly and brutally swept across the eastern seaboard of China. Cities were bombed and strafed mercilessly, while their populations were massacred with uncontrolled ferocity. Reeling from these losses, the Chinese switched to a strategy of trading space for time by retreating into the vast interior of China. This drew the advancing Japanese forces further and further inland and stretched their lines to the limit. The war now settled down to a costly stalemate that burnt, bled, and bent China, but could not break it.
As a result, the Japanese decided to look elsewhere for easier conquests. In 1939, they briefly turned north against the Soviet Union. However, defeat at the hands of Soviet forces in a short but sharply fought conflict plus a surprise pact by Japan's ally, Hitler, with Stalin to carve up Poland, convinced Japan to go elsewhere. Therefore, it turned to easier and more lucrative conquests in South East Asia. This involved attacking the colonies of France, Britain, and Holland, all of who were too preoccupied with the war then raging in Europe to effectively stop Japan.
This also brought Japan face to face with the United States. When the United States threatened economic sanctions against the Japanese if they did not pull back, Japan launched a surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands (12/7/1941). From the American perspective, this was the beginning of the Second World War in the Pacific, although the Chinese and others saw it as starting in 1937 with the Japanese invasion of China. Either way, the war in Asia was on.
Ironically, Japan's decision to turn south rather than north may have saved the allied cause in World War II. If Hitler had kept his Japanese allies informed on his intentions to attack Russia in 1941, they could have tied down enough Soviet forces in the Far East to deny Stalin vital reinforcements that would be a significant factor in the ultimate Russian victory against Germany. And, of course, a German victory against Russia would have seriously altered the course of World War II and subsequent history.
That leaves Russia, the other big power that should have been opposed to the Fascists. Unfortunately, relations with the Western powers were poisoned by bitterness over Allied intervention during the Russian Civil War and the deep ideological differences between capitalism and communism. As a result, there was no concerted action between Russia and the West against Fascist aggression. All these factors, the disunity between France and Britain, Russian hatred and distrust of the West, and the unchecked aggression of Japan in the East combined to expose the weakness and disunity of the former alliance against Germany.
As a result, the weakening of the old alliance triggered a vicious cycle of encouraging Fascist aggression which the Western democracies failed to react to, thus causing more aggression, and so on. This pattern was sadly played out several times in the 1930's before the West finally took its stand.
It started in 1935 when Hitler announced that Germany was going to rearm itself in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. (Actually he had been secretly expanding German forces since 1933.) We have already seen how Hitler announced Germany's rearmament in 1935. Since he justified this with the principle of national self-determination, Britain and France did nothing to stop him. This merely encouraged more aggressive actions. Consequently, in 1935, Mussolini sent Italian forces into Ethiopia, using only the weakest of excuses to cover this blatant act of aggression. When the League of Nations threatened economic sanctions against Italy, Mussolini said a boycott on oil (which would have crippled his war machine) would mean war with the League's members. The League, without any real force to back it up, fell for this bluff. Britain wanted to stand up to Mussolini. However, France, still angry about Britain's naval pact with Germany and hoping to stay on good terms with Italy as a counterweight to growing German influence in Austria, refused to support Britain. As a result, Ethiopia fell as the world just stood by and watched.
Therefore, in 1936 Hitler defied the Treaty of Versailles again by moving German forces back into the Rhineland, the demilitarized part of Germany. This especially agitated France, who wanted British backing but received none. Since German rearmament was just starting, the German generals leading the troops into the Rhineland were under secret orders to turn back if they met any French resistance. They met no such resistance. Once again, Hitler got his way.
The aggression continued when the dictators, including Stalin got the opportunity to intervene in the Spanish Civil War. In 1931, unrest had led to the overthrow of the corrupt monarchy still ruling Spain. At first, a fairly liberal and democratic government took power. But, without a strong middle class and economy, riots and turmoil resurfaced. In 1936, the Fascist Phalangists, led by General Franco, seized power and started the Spanish Civil War.
Any civil war is a terrible thing, but Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union chose to intervene and make the war in Spain much worse. Hitler and Mussolini backed the Fascists, known as the Nationalists. Stalin threw his support behind the Republicans, also known as Loyalists, who had many socialists and communists in their ranks. The result was a disaster for Spain, as terrorists from both sides murdered civilians and leaders from the opposition, and the German air force practiced the new tactics of aerial bombardment on Spanish towns.
The most famous of these atrocities, immortalized by the Spanish painter, Picasso, was the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica, where over one-third of its population of 7000 were killed or maimed just because they were in the way. While that was a mere fraction of the millions that would die from aerial raids in the Second World War, it shocked the world since it was documented on film and also because it symbolized a sinister new turn in modern warfare. In the end, the Fascists won again as the Western democracies just watched from the sidelines. The question was: how much further could Fascist aggression go unchallenged? Hitler seemed determined to find out.
Hitler, further encouraged in his contempt for the Western democracies, next moved on to an even bolder objective: the Anschluss (unification) of Austria with Germany. Hitler, himself being of Austrian birth, claimed the Austrians were Germans whose drive to achieve national self-determination was being stifled by being kept separate from the rest of Germany. Whether right or wrong, this logic helped paralyze France and Britain into inaction once again. Therefore, Austria became part of Germany in 1938 whether the Austrians liked it or not.
The next target of Nazi aggression was the Sudetenland, a part of Czechoslovakia with a large German population along with much of the country's industry and defensive fortifications. Raising the cry of national self-determination once again, Hitler threatened war with anyone who got in his way. A conference between Britain, France, Italy, and Germany met at Munich where the Fascist dictators bullied and persuaded France and Britain to agree to the Nazi takeover of the Sudetenland. Convinced, or at least wanting to believe, that this was all Hitler wanted and that he also wanted peace, they gave in to him once more, without even consulting their Czech allies. They figured this was all Hitler wanted.
In March 1939, Hitler swallowed up the rest of Czechoslovakia without French or British resistance. This had two effects. For one thing, France and Britain were now finally convinced that Hitler would not stop on his own and were determined to stand up to him the next move he made. Unfortunately, at the same time, Stalin was convinced that France and Britain would do nothing to stop any further Nazi aggression in Eastern Europe. Therefore, he signed a pact with Hitler (August, 1939) that would carve up Poland between them.
On September 1, 1939, believing Britain and France would do nothing to stop him, Hitler invaded Poland. Two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany. A mere twenty years after the end of the First World War, the Second World War had begun.
What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the light of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour".— Winston Churchill, British prime minister
If you're going through hell, keep going.— Winston Churchill
World War II was the single most destructive war in history, claiming over 60,000,000 lives and untold material damage. In contrast to 1914, most soldiers in 1939 had a better sense of the seriousness of modern war and marched off with grim resolve rather than enthusiasm. The war in Europe can be seen as happening in two phases: the German blitzkrieg (1939-41) and the allied response and counterattack (1942-45). Technological and tactical innovations were central to each phase and affected events on both the Eastern and Western fronts.
As in World War I, many generals at the start of World War II were planning to fight the last war rather than the next, hardly taking into account the changes in warfare over the last twenty years. France, in particular, operated with a World War I siege mentality, relying on a giant enclosed concrete trench, the Maginot Line, which covered much, but not all, of its border with Germany. However, the German generals had a very different perspective. Having lost the last war, they were more determined to find a new way to win the next one. In their minds, that way was blitzkrieg (lightning war).
Blitzkrieg was largely the brainchild of Heinz Guderian, a German tank expert who convinced Hitler that the future of warfare lay with tanks and airplanes, not immobile lines of trenches. Instead of spreading tanks along the front as infantry support, Guderian's idea was to amass his panzer (tank) divisions at strategic points and blast through that part of the line. The German airforce, the Luftwaffe, would bomb and strafe the enemy behind their lines, further demoralizing and disrupting them. Meanwhile, infantry would consolidate their hold on the gaps blown open by the panzers. This would force the enemy back to a new position that was already weakened and threatened by the panzers and Luftwaffe wreaking havoc in their rear.
Blitzkrieg did not do away with the continuous front, since the manpower and firepower needed to fill a continuous front were more available than ever. What it did accomplish was to make the continuous front mobile, thereby pulverizing everything in its path. As a result, the fighting was not confined to a narrow static front, as in World War I. Rather, it swept across all of Europe in a broad swathe of destruction. Also, Blitzkrieg was designed for attaining short decisive victories that would avoid the prolonged type of warfare that had worn Germany out in World War I. At first it took its enemies by surprise and allowed the Nazis to overrun their enemies in both Eastern and Western Europe very quickly.
In the East, the German blitzkrieg easily overran western Poland while Stalin took the rest. Then, while Hitler was pre-occupied with defeating France and Britain in the west, Stalin invaded Finland and took the Baltic republics of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania (lost since World War I) as well as part of Romania. These events, along with Hitler's long-standing hatred of Russia, prompted a planned invasion of Russia, which was delayed by having to help Mussolini in the Balkans and North Africa. When it did get going in June 1941, the German attack met with incredible success, quickly inflicting tremendous casualties and driving almost to the gates of Moscow. Only the onset of winter temporarily stopped the German advance and bought the Russians time to recover.
In the West, Hitler also met with startling success as the German army rapidly overran Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland and France by June 1940. Not until they reached the English Channel did the Nazi advance halt and give Britain renewed life. The ensuing Battle of Britain was the first major battle ever decided primarily by air power, as the Luftwaffe first bombed British airfields and then concentrated on Britain's cities to clear the way for an invasion of Britain. However, the British grimly held on until Hitler abruptly broke off the raids to turn his attention to the invasion of Russia. Britain's war effort was also bolstered by increasing aid from the United States, which would join the war by the end of 1941. Thus, as 1942 dawned, Germany was faced with two new and formidable enemies: the United States and Soviet Union.
However, the benefits reaped by the German blitzkrieg would be short-lived, largely because, while the Germans became complacent and overconfident from their early successes, the allies were urgently adapting to and modifying blitzkrieg to neutralize the German advantage. They did this in three ways. First, they adapted their economies completely to war production. While the Russians were moving entire industries east of the Urals out of Hitler's reach, the United States was building a massive military-industrial complex that by 1944 was more than twice as productive as all its enemies combined. By contrast, Hitler, not wanting to alienate the German industrialists, delayed putting Germany on a full wartime economy until 1943, by which time it was too late.
Secondly, the allies, especially the British and Americans, expanded the use of air power from mainly ground support for tanks and infantry, as the Germans used it, to building large long-range bombers for massive bombing of German cities. Finally, both sides modified their tank divisions by adding mobile assault guns and motorized infantry. This, plus the higher production levels the allies maintained, largely neutralized the German blitzkrieg, slowing it down to a war of attrition that heavily favored Germany's enemies on both fronts.
In the east, the Nazi offensive resumed in 1942 with the coming of spring, advancing eastward until the Russians made their stand in Stalingrad where the Germans found blitzkrieg was totally unsuited for the house to house fighting of urban warfare. The intense fighting there bogged down the German war machine until the Russians could build their forces for a counter-attack that cut off and destroyed the entire German Sixth Army in February 1943. After that, Russian perseverance and industrial production, helped by supplies from the allies via the Arctic Ocean, slowly drove the Germans back across Eastern Europe.
On the Western Front, the allied effort, increasingly bolstered by American military and industrial might, also met with success, driving the Germans from North Africa and Sicily and invading Italy in 1943. The next year, drawing upon their experiences in Italy, the British and Americans used their overwhelming air and firepower to open a second major front in France.
All this time, the British and Americans had also been launching massive long-range bombing raids on German cities. They used this strategy since they had no major foothold on the continent from which to fight the German army directly until 1944. Although it is still argued whether the allied bombing raids did substantial damage to German war production, which had been largely decentralized away from its cities and the bombing raids, they certainly devastated Germany's cities, demoralized its population, diverted German air power away from the Russian front, and wore down German air defenses, thus giving the allies critical air superiority by the time they were ready to invade France and liberate Western Europe from the Nazis.
By the end of 1944, Germany's war effort was collapsing as American and British air raids devastated its cities from above and allied armies converged from east and west. Finally, in May 1945, Russian forces took Berlin, bringing an end to Hitler's regime and the war in Europe.
THE WAR IN DETAIL
When the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, their concept of Blitzkrieg, ran almost flawlessly. The panzers burst through gaping holes in the Polish lines while Stuka dive-bombers spread terror and destruction along the front and well behind it. Polish cavalry brigades launched valiant but hopeless assaults against Guderian's tanks, which mowed them down mercilessly. When Warsaw stubbornly fought the Germans to a standstill, the Luftwaffe came in for round the clock bombing raids until the city finally succumbed.
Meanwhile,France and Britain had declared war on Germany two days after the invasion of Poland, but had done little except sit and wait in what was known as "sitzkrieg" or the Phony War. This gave Hitler the time and initiative to prepare and launch an attack at a time and place of his choosing. He first invaded Denmark and Norway, thus securing his iron ore supply and a long irregular coastline from which to launch submarine raids.
It was not until May 1940 that the showdown with France and Britain came. The Allies expected a repeat of the Schlieffen Plan where the Germans would sweep through the Low Countries into France. The final German plan took advantage of these expectations by launching a diversionary attack into Holland and Belgium that drew the Allied armies north to meet them. However, the real attack came through the supposedly impassable Ardennes Forest between Belgium in the north and the Maginot Line in the south along France's eastern border.
Once again, German plans went like clockwork. The Germans smashed through the lightly guarded French lines in the Ardennes. While the Luftwaffe wreaked havoc in the French rear, Guderian's tanks raced toward the sea to close the trap that would cut the Allied forces in the north off from the rest of their forces in the south.
Panic seized the French troops who were being relentlessly strafed by the Luftwaffe and pursued and even passed up by the panzers (who were in too much of a hurry to stop and take prisoners). Panic also seized Allied High Command, which was virtually paralyzed by this sudden turn of events. Even German Headquarters was uneasy about its plans going too well and wanted Guderian to stop to let his infantry catch up. But Guderian saw first hand the total chaos and panic that ruled the Allies and kept going. He reached the sea in ten days, having gone further than the German army had gone during the whole four years of World War I.
Meanwhile, Allied defensive lines in the north were collapsing around the seaport of Dunkirk. In a desperate bid to rescue their army, the British launched a most unlikely flotilla of military and civilian craft: destroyers, tugboats, river barges, and even pleasure craft. Braving the dive-bombing Stukas and German shore artillery, they managed to get to and extricate most of the British and French forces pinned against the beach. Britain would live to fight another day.
The remaining French forces in the south formed a new battleline where they bravely fought on. But it was too little too late as Paris fell, and France finally surrendered in June 1940. The surrender was signed in Napoleon III's railroad car, the same car where the Allies forced the Germans to sign the Armistice in 1918. The Battle of France was over. The Battle of Britain was about to begin.
Britain's prime minister at that time was Winston Churchill, a leader of indomitable courage who gave the British spirit a defiant edge during these dark times. As in the past, the British realized that an invasion of Britain (codenamed Operation Sea Lion) required control of the sea. But for the first time in history, that also required control of the air. Therefore, the Battle of Britain was largely determined by air power. The first clashes came over the Channel, and the German pilots, who had more experience from fighting in Spain, Poland, and France, at first did quite well. Then the Luftwaffe started concentrating on knocking out the Royal Air Force (RAF) and its bases in order to clear the way for invasion.
In this phase the British had several advantages. First of all, the German fighter planes only had 20 minutes fighting time over Britain after allowing for fuel to get across the Channel and back. In contrast, British pilots had full tanks for fighting. Secondly, the fighting over Britain meant that only British pilots who were shot down and survived could be rescued to fight again, while surviving German pilots became prisoners. Third, the British had a new technology, radar, which let them spot German planes as they were being launched and concentrate their forces against them. Finally, the British had gotten hold of a copy of Enigma, the German decoding machine. This proved to be a decisive element throughout the war since the allies were often able to intercept and prepare for supposedly secret German plans.
This still did not make it easy. Although they suffered heavy losses, German pilots were good and their superior numbers exacted a toll on the RAF through aerial fights and bombing raids on British airfields. Bit by bit, the RAF was being worn down by casualties, battle fatigue and damage to its airfields. Ironically, what saved the RAF and Britain was Hitler's decision to bomb British cities.
Initially, Hitler did not want to concentrate on Britain's cities. However, on August 24, some of his bombers lost their way and accidentally bombed London. Churchill retaliated by launching an air raid on Berlin, which infuriated Hitler and caused him to turn the Luftwaffe loose on London and other cities. This gave the RAF the break it needed to recover its strength.
Thus began the Blitz, nine months of daily bombing raids. At first the raids came by day. But the RAF, now under less pressure, was able to inflict heavy damage on the enemy. Therefore, the Germans soon limited their raids to nighttime when their planes were harder to spot. Since the British could do little against these raids, civilians huddled in their cellars or flocked to the subways for safety. Surprisingly enough, there was little panic. The Blitz became a way of life interwoven with the more normal activities carried on in the daytime. And so, night after night, month after month, the British grimly hung on against these assaults on their cities.
Things looked particularly bleak for Britain in the spring of 1941. In addition to air attacks on their cities, the British also had to contend with German U-boats preying on their shipping in the North Atlantic. They answered this threat to their lifeline by developing sonar to detect German submarines and better depth charges and convoys with naval escorts to combat them.
Meanwhile, the United States, although officially neutral, was becoming increasingly concerned about Britain's survival against the Nazis. President Roosevelt brought America closer to direct involvement through the Lend Lease Act, which provided vital aid to the British in their hour of need. By the end of 1941, Roosevelt's policies and the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would bring the United States into the war. However, it was events further east that proved to be Hitler's ultimate undoing. On June 22, 1941, he invaded Russia, thus ending the Blitz and giving Britain new life.
In the East, Stalin had taken his share of Poland according to his pact with Hitler, and then swallowed up the Baltic Republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Next he attacked Finland, which put up a spirited defense that held the vastly superior Soviet forces at bay for several months. In the end, the Finns were overwhelmed and forced to cede part of their land to Stalin.
Stalin's growing power in the East increasingly alarmed Hitler who had intended from the beginning to destroy Russia. Hitler set his attack for May 1941, but events elsewhere delayed his plans. Mussolini, sensing an opportunity for Italian glory, invaded both Yugoslavia and North Africa, got bogged down by stiff resistance, and called on Germany to bail him out. Hitler was furious, but he sent in troops who overran the Balkans, drove the British out of Crete with a daring paratroop operation, and then drove the British back toward Egypt in North Africa. The delay this caused in Hitler's preparations to invade Russia may have been the critical difference that allowed the Russian winter to stop the German advance on Moscow and eventually defeat the Nazis.
The invasion of Russia was probably Hitler's biggest mistake, although at first it did not seem that way. Much of his mistake was being overconfident from his recent victories and not preparing the sort of force the invasion of Russia would require. Stalin, still trusting in his pact with Hitler, refused to heed warnings of an impending German attack. When the attack, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, came, it hit a Soviet army whose officer corps was decimated by the recent purges and Stalin's insistence on personally authorizing all actions any of his generals took. As a result, Guderian's blitzkrieg inflicted staggering losses on the Russians and drove deep into the Soviet Union in the opening months. Then the Russian winter set in, stalling the German offensive just 20 miles from Moscow. German soldiers, unequipped and unprepared for these subzero conditions, suffered horribly while their equipment broke down. Meanwhile, the Russians launched offensives of their own that nearly destroyed much of the German forces.
The German offensive revived with the spring thaw in 1942. The Germans advanced against Leningrad in the north and Stalingrad in the south. The siege of Leningrad was a long drawn-out affair that lasted 900 days. Starvation, more than bullets exacted its toll, especially on civilians. Although as many as 1.5 million Russians died in the siege of Leningrad, the city stood held out.
If any battle was the turning point of the war, it was Stalingrad, an industrial city that Hitler saw as the key to Russia's oil fields in the south. After initial German successes that took 90% of the city, the fighting bogged down into desperate house-to-house and even room-to-room fighting. As the Russians bled the German army white in the rubble of Stalingrad, they were also building massive forces to the north and south. On November 19, 1942, they slammed into the flanks of the German army guarded by its Italian and Romanian allies, broke through, and met in a giant pincer movement behind the German army. The German army of some 250,000 men besieging Stalingrad was now itself surrounded and besieged.
Hitler refused to let the Germans break out and retreat, insisting that they continue the siege while he tried to airlift supplies to them. Therefore, while starvation, the Russian winter, and shelling took their toll, the fighting in the rubble continued. However, in February 1943, the Germans finally surrendered. Of the 90,000 Germans who survived to surrender at Stalingrad, only 5000 would make it home from Stalin's prison camps.
The Russian victory at Stalingrad provided the impetus to go on the offensive and drive the Germans out of Russia. Two things provided the Russians with the means to fight this war to the bitter end. First, and most important, was the revival of Russian industries, many of them moved beyond the Ural Mountains and out of reach of the Luftwaffe. Second, there was substantial material aid from the United States shipped north of Scandinavia, braving the hazards of both the Arctic Ocean and German U-boats. By war's end, these gave Stalin the means to build the most massive war machine in all history.
The Russian Front in World War II became renown for the intensity and the desperation of its fighting. This was especially true of the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943, a German attempt to break through a strong salient in the Russian line and turn the tide back in Germany's favor. This battle involved over one million men, 5800 tanks and assault guns, 5000 planes, and 30,000 artillery pieces on both sides. After weeks of blasting away at each other, sometimes at pointblank range, the Russians had broken the German offensive.
If Stalingrad signaled the end of the German tide of conquests, Kursk signaled the beginning of the end of Hitler's Third Reich. Not that Germany was completely done for yet. The fighting on the Russian Front assumed epic proportions till the end of the war. Whereas Hitler committed 10 divisions to North Africa, he had 200 divisions on the Russian Front. Therefore, the fighting, destruction, and bloodshed escalated to horrific levels and continued unbroken until the bitter end.
The tide was turning against Germany on other fronts as well, especially as American forces and material were being fed into the war. In North Africa, Allied forces under the British General, Montgomery decisively defeated German General Rommel and his Afrika Corps at El Alamein. Despite all of Rommel's efforts, the German war effort in North Africa faltered without adequate aid from home. By May 1943, the Germans had been cleared from North Africa.
The Allies then swept across Sicily and into Italy. German forces defending Italy used its rocky and mountainous terrain well and slowed down the Allies who referred to Italy as "tough old gut". The slowness of the Allied advance in Italy aggravated Stalin who pushed the British and Americans to open a new front to take the pressure off Russia. Much of the hostility between Russia and the West after the war came from Stalin's belief that his allies intentionally dragged their feet while Russia and Germany bled each other to death.
In fairness to the British and Americans, launching an amphibious assault on France's heavily defended coasts was a very dangerous and tricky operation. It required intense preparations and the build-up of massive forces that were not ready until 1944. Until that time, the British and American air forces were busy taking the war directly to the German heartland. As the war progressed, so did the intensity of aerial bombardments of German cities. In some cases, as at Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945, the bombing was so intense that firestorms developed, whipping up 150 mile per hour winds and temperatures of 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. The destruction and death tolls from these raids were devastating to the German people. However, German war industries had largely been decentralized and spread out away from the heart of German cities, Therefore, they still managed to maintain production of weapons and war materials.
On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the British and Americans finally gave Stalin the second front he wanted by launching an amphibious assault on the beaches of Normandy, the largest such assault in history. It ran a tremendous risk, but was successful in establishing a foothold in France. In the following weeks, the Allies expanded that foothold and then broke out into the French countryside in July. In the following months, they triumphantly advanced through France, liberating Paris in August, and being poised for a final assault on Germany in 1945.
By late 1944, the German position on both the Eastern and Western Fronts was steadily crumbling. On June 22, 1944 (the third anniversary of the German invasion of Russia), the Russians broke through two strong points in the German line and surrounded 40 divisions known as Army Group Center. Eventually they destroyed or captured all but 12 of those divisions. In October, a similar offensive destroyed Germany's Army Group North. Germany's allies, Romania and Bulgaria, dropped out of the war and the Germans were forced to abandon the Balkans. By 1945 the Russians were driving through Poland against a German army that had only one tank for every three or four miles of front and was drafting old men and 14 year old boys to fill its ranks.
In one last desperate bid, probably to get a negotiated settlement from Britain and America and thus force the Russians to stop their advance, Hitler launched a surprise attack against the American and British forces in the Ardennes in December 1944. The Germans were initially successful in this "Battle of the Bulge," but their offensive literally ran out of gas and men as the Allies regrouped and counterattacked. In early 1945, the Russians, Americans, and British invaded Germany from both east and west.
With invasions closing in from all sides and air raids tearing apart Germany's cities, only Hitler, who was secluded in an underground bunker, failed to recognize the inevitable collapse of Germany and refused to surrender. In late April, Russian forces reached Berlin. What few German forces that remained put up a desperate resistance, and it took the Russians three days to take the city. Just as the Russians were closing in on his bunker, Hitler committed suicide. His body, probably cremated beyond recognition, was never found.
In his wake, Hitler left an unprecedented amount of death and destruction, including the brutal and bizarre murder of some 6,000,000 Jews and millions of others in his death camps. He had intended his Third Reich to last 1000 years. It had lasted twelve.
I am become Death, the destroyer of Worlds.— Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Hindu scripture, The Bhagavadgita, upon witnessing the first atomic bomb test in July 1945
We have already seen how the stalemate between Japan and China, Hitler's failure to keep Japan informed about his plans against Russia, and France and Britain being distracted by the outbreak of war in Europe caused Japan to turn south and threaten the European colonies in South-east Asia. The Japanese planned to consolidate their gains there by forming the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, an organization of states that would provide Japan with raw materials as well as markets for its manufactured goods. All this seriously damaged the reputation of the West and set the stage for colonial revolts and independence after the war.
Up to this point, Japan was careful not to antagonize the United States, which then held the Philippines. However, in 1941 the United States, nearly as concerned about aggression in Asia as in Europe, cut off its oil shipments to Japan to persuade it to back off from invading Indonesia. The Japanese, desperate for oil, took the fatal step of attacking the United States' naval base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands (12/7/41). This did cripple American naval power in the Pacific for the time being, but it also brought into action an industrial giant that Japan would have a hard time matching blow for blow. Still, the opening months of 1942 saw a virtually unbroken string of Japanese successes, including the conquest of the Philippines.
However, in the long run, these victories would cause some serious problems for Japan. For one thing, the Japanese generals became overconfident of victory, which in June, 1942 helped set up a serious defeat at the hands of the American navy at Midway, a battle which proved to be the turning point of the war. Secondly, the Japanese advance caused American industrial production to intensify and create overwhelming numbers of ships and planes for the war in the Pacific. In fact, by 1944 American production was twice that of Japan, Germany, and Italy combined. Another major problem Japan had was that, although its empire covered nearly 1/10 of the globe, most of that was water. This spread the Japanese army very thinly over a large number of islands. That in turn stretched the Japanese navy's resources to its limits as it tried to supply the army on the various islands.
As a result, everything started going wrong for Japan. First of all, the widespread nature of the Japanese Empire meant that American warships, especially submarines, could destroy most of the Japanese navy and shipping, thus isolating forces on the islands from each other and Japan. This in turn allowed the allies to concentrate their forces on each island separately and destroy the forces there in detail. Finally, the stepped up industrial production of the United States wore the Japanese down with its superior numbers and firepower. The Japanese fought ferociously, often to the last man, despite being supplied with no food or ammunition and sometimes having to fight with bamboo spears.
By 1944, the Allies had taken islands within bomber range of Japan and were launching devastating raids on Japanese cities. One raid over Tokyo in 1945 triggered a firestorm, much like the ones that hit Hamburg and Dresden, killing 200,000 Japanese civilians in its flames. Japanese houses, made of wood and paper, were much more susceptible to Allied incendiary bombs than European cities of brick and stone.
By the time the war in Europe was over, the Allies were preparing to invade a Japanese homeland whose 60 largest cities were 60% destroyed, whose fuel supplies were depleted, and whose railroads and industries were near collapse. However, an invasion of Japan was not a thought the Allies treasured, since some estimated Allied casualties would reach one million while Japanese casualties might reach 10-20 million.
Complicating this situation was the fact that Stalin had promised to enter the war against the Japanese 90 days after the conclusion of the war in Europe. That would put his entry into the war in early August. The United States, not wanting to give Stalin a chance to expand in Asia, needed to win the war quickly with as few casualties as possible. They found that way with a new weapon: the atomic bomb, which they had been developing through the Manhattan Project since 1942.
On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States Air Force launched nuclear attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. The level of destruction and suffering was unprecedented and signaled a dangerous new era in history. Debates continue about whether the U.S. should have dropped these bombs. Some see it as a needless act of mass destruction launched against a country on the verge of collapse. However, to Americans still caught up in the fury of a world war, it was seen as a way to shorten the war and save American (and Japanese) lives. Whatever one's opinion, Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided a grim and frightening vision of what the future could hold for us. The direct result of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that Japan soon surrendered on September 2, 1945. However, Asia was anything but calm as civil war in China would put the Communists in power there in 1949 and the Cold War between the United States and Russia was starting .
The human capacity for self-destruction had reached new heights in World War II. An estimated 55,000,000 people had died, 27,000,000 in the Soviet Union alone. Most of the dead were civilians who just happened to be caught in the path of a new and ever more destructive warfare. In addition to the dead were another 50,000,000 refugees. There were people displaced by the war trying to find their ways home, Jews still being persecuted even in the aftermath of the war, Germans driven from their homes as Stalin cut back Germany's borders to make room for his own expansion, and Soviets released from German prison camps only to be forced to return home as "traitors" to face Stalin's labor camps. Refugees flocked to the cities desperately seeking jobs, food, and shelter, only to find mountains of rubble. Hardly a city in Europe had escaped the roar of the bombs, with some cities, such as Stalingrad and Berlin, being 95% destroyed. No wonder that one post-war observer referred to Europe as "half graveyard and half junkyard."
When the allied armies met in triumph at the Elbe River in May 1945, all seemed to be smiles and comradeship. But with the common Nazi enemy gone, old animosities quickly resurfaced, causing the Western allies and Soviet Union to establish spheres of influence from which they would eye each other suspiciously during the next half-century. For the first years after World War II, there were three main issues: Soviet intervention in Eastern Europe, the political struggle for Western Europe, and the role the United States would play in the world.
Even by 1947, two years after the war, Western Europe had seen little apparent progress in recovering from the war. Roads and bridges were still in disrepair; cities were still largely piles of rubble, and consumer production was only half of what it had been in 1939. Britain and France, the two main European powers who in the past might have led the way in reconstruction, were themselves severely weakened by the war's staggering cost and growing unrest in their colonies. All this produced a good deal of dissatisfaction with the conservative governments that had failed to avert the Depression and World War II and seemed to be doing little to restore things to normal. Benefiting from these problems were the Communists, who had led much of the partisan resistance to the Nazis and now were gaining popularity and votes.
Although Russia was severely damaged by the war, it also had the world's biggest army, and Stalin was determined to use it to guard his country against a repeat of the last four years. In the post-war years, Stalin rebuilt much of Soviet industry while ignoring the needs of his people. For example, by 1948, Stalingrad, which had lost 95% of its industries and population, had restored 60% of its population and 70% of its factories, but had rebuilt only 20% of its housing. Stalin's domestic policy was driven by his intense suspicions of the West. There were several reasons for this: the long time it took for the Allies to open the second front in Normandy, American possession and use of the atomic bomb at the end of the war, and the deep ideological differences between communism and capitalism. For these reasons, he decided to establish a buffer zone in Eastern Europe to forestall any future aggression.
Stalin's domination of Eastern Europe generally followed a fairly insidious but effective pattern. First the Red Army would liberate the country from the Germans. Then the Communists would form a coalition government with other parties while holding key government posts, in particular the ministry of the interior that controlled the police. Using propaganda, gangs of thugs much like the Fascists had used, and the threat of military force from the police and (if necessary) the Red Army, the Communists would gradually force their opponents from the government until only they remained.
As a result, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, fell under Soviet domination with Soviet troops occupying their territories. Only Yugoslavia, by quickly going Communist and making an outward show of obedience to Stalin, escaped Soviet occupation and kept some measure of independence. For the rest of Eastern Europe, in Churchill's words, an "iron curtain" had descended to keep it firmly under Stalin's heel.
In sharp contrast to this was the United States, whose territory had been virtually untouched by the war. Partly by default due to the war's damage elsewhere and partly by right of its vast resources and industrial strength, the United States in 1945 was by far the number one economic power in the world, controlling an estimated 60% of the world's industrial production.
While the United States was the only nation capable of stopping the Communists, the protection of two oceans made America isolationist at heart. However, having been dragged into two world wars in quick succession, many Americans reluctantly recognized that they were an integral part of a larger world. The fact that a new, hopefully more effective international body, the United Nations, was headquartered in the United States symbolized America's new role in world affairs. Americans also felt increasingly betrayed by the actions of their former ally, Stalin: his stall tactics at the Potsdam Peace Conference (July, 1945), his support of Chinese Communists in their civil war, and his takeover of Eastern Europe. Thus a growing sense of global responsibility and fear of the spread of Communism led the United States to get actively involved in Western Europe.
All these factors, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the situation in Western Europe, and the United States' gradual acceptance of its role in the world at large, combined to create a two pronged policy. Militarily, President Truman committed the United States to stop Communist aggression in Greece and Turkey in what was known as the Truman Doctrine. In the 1950's, the Eisenhower Doctrine issued by President Eisenhower would expand this policy, known as containment, to stop Communist aggression wherever it occurred. At this point, however, the main focus of the Truman Doctrine was Greece. A bitter civil war between Communist guerrillas operating from mountain bases and government forces in the valleys had been raging since the end of World War II. American military aid and advisors managed to help the government forces stop the Communists and drive them out of Greece by 1949. However, Greece had suffered horribly in this civil war following right on the heels of World War II.
America's economic response was known as the Marshall Plan (1948). Its basic premise was that Communism thrived in economically backward or disrupted areas. Therefore, large amounts of foreign aid to revive Europe's economies would deprive the Communists of the conditions on which they thrived, save Western Europe from Communism, and provide the United States with stable trade partners and markets. Marshall Plan aid was offered to any country desiring it, including the Soviet Union. Stalin, not wanting to be dependant on the West, refused the aid, as did his satellites in Eastern Europe.
However, Marshall Plan aid made a huge difference in Western Europe, especially France and Italy which were in danger of Communist takeover. When American aid was announced, French and Italian Communists made a final bid for power by disrupting their nations through strikes, riots, and even sabotage of public works such as railroads. In each case, the Communists largely discredited themselves, while the more moderate democrats had the Marshall Plan aid to back them up and win over voters. As a result, Western Europe experienced a remarkable economic recovery after this.
By 1948, the United States and Soviet Union had established their spheres of influence in Western and Eastern Europe respectively. Unlike World War I when a definitive treaty emerged to determine a new balance of power, no such treaty emerged after World War II. This was because there was such a quick falling out between Stalin and the Western allies after the war. The fates of Western Europe and Eastern Europe had been determined without direct confrontation between the two superpowers. But, by 1948, when the two superpowers had established their spheres of influence, they started confronting each other in what is known as the Cold War.
The Cold War was a period of hostility and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union that always stopped short of direct war between them. It never erupted into open warfare, mainly because their growing arsenals of nuclear weapons made such a war seem suicidal to both sides. Therefore, the Cold War assumed the form of a series of crises that were resolved along two lines of development: either by non military means or by fighting by proxy (substitute) where one or both powers fought each other by supporting smaller allied states in regional wars. The Korean (1950-53), Vietnam (1954-75), Arab-Israeli (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982), and Afghan (1979-89) wars were all examples of the superpowers exploiting regional conflicts to promote their own ends.
Crises resolved through non-military means actually ran a higher risk of erupting into all out war, since the Americans and Soviets were directly opposed to one another. In these cases, each side would play a dangerous game of brinkmanship where it would try to push the other side into a position that would make any further escalation of the crisis run the risk of full-scale war. The initial stages of the Cold War were played out in two widely separated theaters corresponding to the two main theaters of World War II: Europe and Asia.
By 1948, the United States and Soviet Union had established their respective spheres of influence in Western and Eastern Europe. However, unlike World War I when a definitive treaty emerged to determine a new balance of power, no such treaty emerged after World War II because of the quick falling out between Stalin and the Western allies. So far, the post-war settlement had been determined without direct conflict between the two superpowers. But, by 1948, when the two superpowers had established their spheres of influence, they started confronting each other in what is known as the Cold War.
The Cold War crises always stopped short of direct war between the two sides because their growing nuclear arsenals made such a war potentially suicidal to both sides. Already by 1945 two world wars in quick succession had shown the spiraling destructive potential of modern technology. At first, it took a while for both sides to realize nuclear weapons were much more than just big conventional bombs. Even when that lesson sank in with the realization that nuclear war was played by a different set of rules, it still was not clear just what those rules were; but it was clear we could not risk such a conflict. Before the twentieth century, diplomacy could more freely use war and/or the threat of war as tools in its arsenal. However, with the nature of war so radically different, the rules of diplomacy also had to change drastically. The question was how. To the diplomats and leaders who had gone through two previous world wars, the answer largely lay in analyzing what had gone wrong in 1914 and 1939.
The root of the problem lay in the mismatch between the slow rate of change in cultural attitudes toward war and the accelerating pace of technological change triggered by the industrial revolution. By 1914, industrialization had spawned revolutions in communications, transportation, and warfare. In communications, the telegraph and telephone drastically cut the time of communications between governments. That alone might have been manageable, except that, with the telegraph used in conjunction with railroads, armies could mobilize much more quickly, giving diplomats hardly any time to reflect on their situations and negotiate a settlement. As a result, the various powers’ provocative behavior in 1914, especially Russia’s mobilization (an act once accepted as a legitimate diplomatic strategy) spun out of control into war.
During World War I new weapons such as the machine gun, poison gas, and more powerful artillery unleashed a level of carnage and destruction hitherto undreamt of. Between the wars, diplomats, in their efforts to prevent another such disaster, focused on, and tried to avoid the provocative diplomacy of 1914. Unfortunately, they went too far in their efforts to keep the peace in the 1930s, constantly meeting Hitler’s aggression with appeasement. This only encouraged more aggression while Hitler built up his power. Therefore, the Second World War II broke out only twenty years after the end of the First.
In 1939, the tank and airplane, which had just made their debut in the previous war, came into their own. Tanks, rather than eliminating the continuous front, made it mobile, thus spreading the swathe of destruction from a limited static front to one that engulfed all off Europe. Airplanes exacerbated this effect, especially with long-range strategic bombing that now made cities and their civilian populations primary targets.
Unfortunately, if the Second World War seemed to spawn another quantum leap in the destructive capability of modern technology, the entry of a weapon of even more devastating power heralded the end of that era and the start of a whole new era in the history of human warfare: the atomic bomb. Even more ominous was the development of thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bombs just seven years later using a fusion reaction to generate an explosion that dwarfed that of the of the Hiroshima bomb’s fission reaction in much the same way that it had dwarfed conventional bombs. Whereas a simple chemical reaction was the basis of warfare in the age of gunpowder (c.1500-1945), the key to the Atomic Age was a much more complicated chain reaction taking place inside the nucleus of the atom, something so small we still didn’t have microscopes powerful enough to see it. But we could unleash, if not control, its destructive force. Now the very survival of civilization was on the line, and a way had to be found to avert a clash between the two nuclear superpowers, the United States and Soviet Union.
Therefore, the Cold War assumed the form of a series of crises that were resolved along two lines of development: either by non military means or by fighting by proxy (substitute) where one or both powers fought each other indirectly by supporting smaller allied states in regional wars. The Korean (1950-53), Vietnam (1954-75), Arab-Israeli (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982), and Afghan (1979-89) wars were all examples of the superpowers exploiting regional conflicts to promote their own ends.
Crises involving the Americans and Russians in a direct confrontation ran a higher risk of erupting into all out war. Therefore, each side would carefully assess the seriousness and strategic value of the crisis to its own and the other side to calculate how far it could go without starting World War III. This assessment would be based largely on three factors. First was the strategic value (in terms of location and/or resources) of the target country at the center of the crisis. For example, any crisis over the oil-rich Middle East would have serious implications. So would a crisis over any strategic choke points such as the Suez and Panama Canals or Turkey’s control of the Hellespont threatening Russia’s access from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.
The second and third factors were which superpower’s sphere of influence the target country occupied and the diplomatic ties it had with each side. These would usually, but not always, belong to the same power, giving that power a decisive “home field” advantage in the crisis. However, crises where diplomatic ties did not correspond to the sphere of influence tended to run the highest risk of escalating into war because it wasn’t clear who held the all-important home field advantage.
Two examples of such a situation were the Berlin Blockade in 1948-9 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. In the former crisis, West Berlin had strong diplomatic ties with the West but was located in the middle of Soviet controlled East Germany. The Cuban Missile Crisis saw just the opposite situation, with Cuba in the United States’ traditional sphere of influence, but having strong diplomatic ties with the Soviets. In each case it was unclear who had more at stake and was willing to go farther in defense of what it believed to be its “home turf”. This was where the chances of miscalculation and the risk of war ran the highest.
Having assessed the risks in a crisis, each side needed to pursue a strategy between being too aggressive and too weak, such as those which led to World Wars I and II respectively. This needed to meet three criteria. First, it must show strength and resolve without being too provocative. Second, playing a dangerous game known as brinksmanship, it should push the other side into a position that would make any further escalation of the crisis run the risk of war, thus forcing it to back down. For example, during the Berlin Blockade, the United States and Britain airlifted supplies into West Berlin rather than crashing the land blockade Stalin had set up. This avoided committing an act of aggression that might lead to war and it forced Stalin into the position of either letting the planes through or actively shooting them down, which would also lead to war.
Finally, the strategy in a crisis should provide the opposition a face-saving way to back down without feeling publicly humiliated. The United Nations could play a valuable role here as mediator to defuse the crisis. So could secret diplomatic deals between the two powers, such as the secret agreement by the U. S. to remove its missiles from Turkey if Russia would publicly agree to take its missiles out of Cuba in return for a public commitment that the U.S. would not invade Cuba. Recognizing the value of such secret “back channels”, the two powers installed a “hot line” after the Cuban Missile Crisis, thus providing direct communications with one another during any future crises.
It is important to note that these were not hard and fast rules that were ever written down in a handbook so both sides knew exactly how to deal with one another. Rather they were vague principles that evolved through trial and error as the two sides struggled to find a way to deal with the new sort of world nuclear weapons had created. However poorly articulated these principle were, during the most dangerous half-century of human history to that point they helped the United States and Soviet Union break the pattern of resolving differences through total war. In the process, they avoided nuclear Armageddon and provided some glimmer of hope that the human species might survive its technological adolescence.
The first Cold War crisis was over Germany, through which the victors had drawn the line of demarcation between Soviet and Western spheres of influence in 1945. France, Britain, and the United States held the Western two-thirds of Germany, while Russia held the eastern third. At first this division was meant to be temporary with a permanent settlement to be hammered out in the future. But Stalin and the Western allies were soon at odds over the fate of Germany. Stalin wanted it to be Communist and the Western allies wanted it to be Capitalist and democratic.
In 1948, the United States and its allies made several moves that led to a crisis: a military and economic alliance that was aimed against a resurgent Germany but which Stalin thought was against him, the Marshall Plan to stop the spread of Communism, the unification of the three western sectors into what would become West Germany, and the introduction of a new currency to stabilize the German economy. Stalin kept this new currency out of his sector and tried to introduce his own currency into the West. The allies responded by keeping his currency out of the West. Stalin, sensing a resurgent West German economy and fearing that this might threaten his dominance in East Germany and Eastern Europe, raised the stakes in what is known as the Berlin Crisis.
Berlin, which itself lay deep inside East Germany, was divided between the allies in much the same way as the rest of Germany. The Western allies had access to West Berlin through three land corridors and three air corridors. Therefore, West Berlin was quite vulnerable to Soviet pressure, and that is where Stalin struck.
On June 24, Stalin started cutting off utilities and the flow of traffic and supplies along the three land corridors leading into West Berlin. This presented the Western Allies with a difficult choice. If they abandoned West Berlin to its fate and let Stalin have his way, it would encourage more aggression that might lead to war just as a similar sort of appeasement had done in 1939. By the same token, crashing the Soviet blockade could lead to war just as similar acts of aggression had done in 1914.
The Allied solution was tedious but ingenious: an airlift of supplies into West Berlin. This would supply West Berlin while using three-dimensional air space that could not be blockaded. It was a classic case of brinkmanship, since stopping the airlift would require shooting down American and British planes, which might provoke a war. Since the United States had the Atomic bomb and he did not (at least until the following year), Stalin did not want to risk a war with the United States. Therefore, he let the planes go, hoping the British and Americans would get tired of this whole costly operation. They did not. For nearly eleven months, they kept up the round-the-clock flights that were only 30 seconds apart, taking in supplies and taking out some 50,000 sick, elderly, and very young people. Besides food and medical supplies, they also took in cars, heavy machinery, and even Clarence the Camel, a defiant symbol to Stalin that the Western Allies could bring anything they wanted into West Berlin.
Each succeeding day of the airlift embarrassed Stalin with proof of the West's technical ability to pull off such a feat. After eleven months, he lifted the blockade. The Berlin airlift had saved West Berlin. It had involved 276,926 flights that brought in 1,592,287 tons of supplies at the cost of 24 air crashes and 79 lives. The importance of the Berlin Crisis was that it stopped further Stalinist aggression in Europe. The same month that the blockade was lifted (May, 1949), West Germany was formed as a parliamentary democracy.
The Berlin crisis prompted two rival alliances led respectively by the United States and Soviet Union. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed between the United States, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Greece (1952), and Turkey (1952). It was mainly a defensive alliance to stop Soviet aggression by hemming it in to the west and south. In 1954, the NATO allies, in need of manpower and firepower to combat the Soviets, allowed West Germany to rearm itself and admitted it to NATO. Outside of the United States, the West German army became the biggest and best-trained army in NATO.
A similar alliance, the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was formed in 1954 between the United States, Britain, France, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines to contain the Soviets and Communists to the south and east. A third alliance, the Mideast Treaty Organization (1955) completed the ring of hostile powers on Russia's borders to the south. These alliances proved to be less stable and reliable than NATO, but they did ring the Soviet Union with unfriendly alliances, which alarmed its leaders.
In response to this threat, Russia formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955 with its satellite states in Eastern Europe: East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Albania. Making this threat much more potent was the fact that the Soviets now had nuclear weapons of their own. In the following years, Britain, France, China, and India all would join the "nuclear club" and develop their own nuclear arsenals.
Therefore, by the mid 1950's, distinct battle lines had been drawn in Central Europe. Armies which people expected to be demobilized and sent home in 1945 remained in place for nearly a half century, draining their countries' economies, turning Central Europe into an armed camp, and presenting the constant threat of war, which this time would probably be accompanied by a devastating nuclear exchange. Whole generations grew up under the ominous cloud of this atomic umbrella, acutely aware that the next war might well be the last for the human race.
World War II had been a truly global war, especially involving Europe's colonial empires in Asia. By the mid twentieth century, the areas outside of Europe loomed much larger in importance as they shook off Europe's grip and started developing on their own economically and politically. Japan had led the way since the late 1800's, and its early success against the European colonial powers inspired others in Asia to challenge European supremacy as well.
One such country was China, whose civil war between the Communists led by Mao Zedong and the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek had been interrupted by World War II. That civil war resumed right after Japan's defeat. Although the Nationalists started out with more men and resources, the Communists were better led and disciplined and had Soviet help. By 1949, the Communists emerged victorious, and the West found itself confronted by another Communist power that was heavily backed by the Soviet Union. The ensuing clash between Communist East and Capitalist West came in a third country: Korea.
The victorious Americans and Soviets partitioned Korea, which had been occupied by Japan since the early part of the century, after the war at the thirty-eighth parallel. Soviet dominated North Korea became Communist; while American backed South Korea was capitalist and democratic in form. In 1950, North Korean forces invaded South Korea and overran most of it.
This crisis brought to the forefront the fledgling United Nations, founded in 1945 in the recurring hope that such an international organization could help defuse conflicts and safeguard the peace. The members of its main executive body, the Security Council, each had the power to veto any proposed actions. As luck would have it, when the Security Council met to discuss the Korean crisis, the Soviets boycotted its meeting. This allowed the United States to pass a resolution calling for an international force to stop the North Koreans.
The bulk of this force consisted of American troops led by General Douglas Macarthur. With the United Nations forces barely hanging on to a toehold in the south, Macarthur landed an amphibious invasion behind North Korean lines and drove them back north. When the U.N. forces advanced dangerously close to the Chinese border in the North, Chinese forces entered North Korea and drove them back south. What ensued was a long bloody stalemate that ended with a ceasefire at the original border, the thirty-eighth parallel. The Korean War had two major results. For one thing, it contained the spread of Communism, but at the cost of a divided Korea and the loss of millions of lives and untold material damage.
It also affected Japan where the United States was worried about the further spread of Communism and Soviet power into East Asia. Feeling that poor and unstable conditions created the ideal conditions for the spread of, the United States decided to provide Japan with economic aid to help it revive. As a result, Japan's prosperity and stability rapidly recovered, making it a strong ally and trading partner for the United States. However, by the 1980's, Japan' was seriously challenging American dominance of world trade.
The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 marked the end of an era both in the Soviet Union and the world, although no one was sure just what it meant for the future. For many Soviets, the end of Stalin’s brutal dictatorship also meant the end of stability. They wondered who would watch over and defend the Soviet Union now that his strong hand had been removed. To others, it meant an opportunity to dismantle at least some, if not all, the repressive aspects of Stalinist rule. People in Eastern Europe watched anxiously for signs they could gain more liberties, if not outright freedom, from Soviet rule. For the West, it was also an anxious time. Would the new regime in Moscow continue Stalin’s hostility to the West or would it open a new regime of peace and cooperation? Unfortunately, when the dust finally settled by the end of 1956, little would seem to have changed within the Soviet empire or in its relations with the West. Not that people, especially Nikita Khrushchev, wouldn’t try to change things. However, the Stalinist legacy of three decades of repression and paranoia would prove to be too strong to be dismantled within such a short time. To a large extent, it was a period of missed opportunities, but against heavy odds of those opportunities blossoming into a new era of peace and stability.
Since Stalin had not designated a successor, no single figure emerged in the immediate aftermath of his death. Instead a moderate coalition, led by Georgi Malenkov, took over in the Kremlin that did not even institute a major purge of its enemies. Other hopeful signs followed. Peace talks in Korea resumed only two weeks after Stalin’s death and produced a ceasefire by July. Leaders in the Kremlin were even considering the idea of a reunified, but neutral Germany. Along these lines, they summoned to Moscow the East German leader, Ulbricht, a dictator cut in the Stalinist mode, to encourage him to relax his harsh rule. However, this ultimately triggered a more ominous chain reaction of events.
In June 1953, East German workers, sensing more relaxed control from Moscow, demonstrated against Ulbricht, whose response to the message from the Kremlin had been to impose even harsher work quotas on his people. When the East German government did nothing to respond to these demonstrations, the protests turned political, threatening to overthrow Ulbricht and communist rule in East Germany. Eventually, Beria, the former head of Stalin’s secret police, ordered in Soviet forces and crushed the protests.
However, the Kremlin’s initial indecision during this crisis encouraged similar riots and strikes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and even Siberia. Many Soviet leaders saw these as attempts by the United States to upset communist rule in Eastern Europe. This generated a backlash against the government’s recent moderate policies as well as a fiercer power struggle within the Kremlin. Beria, saw this as his opportunity to seize power, but was defeated and executed. This was the only notable execution to take place in the aftermath of Stalin’s death. The fact that its victim, Beria, represented more than anyone the old Stalinist legacy was a sign that times had indeed changed.
Unfortunately, two things would prevent the United States from picking up on these cues. One was the recent Red Scare of the McCarthy era that still heavily affected American politics. The administration of the new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had courted McCarthy’s support during the 1952 election campaign, was split over how to treat these new developments. Even more worrying to the Soviets was West Germany’s admission into NATO in 1954 and the decision to let it rearm the next year. This was done largely due to the strain the Korean War had put on American Military resources. Seeing West Germany as a reliable democracy and ally now, the U.S. decided to use its resources to bolster the Western alliance. However, a rearmed and hostile German state was the last thing Russians wanted to see so soon after World War II. Therefore, they responded by forming their own military alliance, the Warsaw Pact in 1955. Thus the future direction of U.S.-Soviet relations seemed cloudier than ever.
By 1955, a new leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had emerged from the power struggle inside the Kremlin. Khrushchev himself seemed to epitomize the mixed signals being sent to the West in the 1950s. He came from a poor working class background and had joined the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. As political commissar at Stalingrad, he had seen firsthand the destruction World War II had wreaked upon the Russian people and understood as well as anyone the even greater destructive power of nuclear weapons. He firmly believed communism was the best way to create better lives for the people. Unlike Stalin and Malenkov, he had a very personable style, going out to meet the people and generating genuine popular support. He prompted more consumer industries, freedom of the arts, better pensions, and freed thousands of political prisoners from Stalin’s gulags. Trying to project “Socialism with a human face,” he even opened the Kremlin to visitors and children’s parties.
However, Khrushchev had also been a loyal follower of Stalin, being instrumental in carrying out many of his harsh policies. Therefore, to many people, especially in the West, he only represented a continuation of Stalin’s harsh rule. In addition, Khrushchev had a somewhat volatile and unpredictable personality, seeming to be waving the olive branch of peace one minute and his saber the next. This made it difficult for the West to know which Khrushchev it was dealing with at any given time. Contributing to Khrushchev’s unpredictability was the conflict between his own genuine desire to improve the lives of the Soviet people and the need to look tough in his dealings with the West in order to satisfy the hard-liners within the Kremlin. In the end, his attempts to follow both of these seemingly irreconcilable policies would lead to his overthrow from power in 1964.
Initially Khrushchev did two things to show a more moderate and reasonable regime was in charge. In 1955, he withdrew Soviet troops from Austria (which had been occupied like Germany since 1945) on the stipulation that it maintain a neutral position between East and West. The next year, in a six-hour speech to a closed session of a Congress of the Communist party, he took an even bolder step by exposing Stalin’s purges as frauds and denouncing Stalin himself as a pathological criminal. When news of this speech leaked out, the common people welcomed it as a sign of more relaxed times to come. However, many communist leaders in the Kremlin and Eastern Europe worried about where this would lead. Those worries soon proved to be justified.
Khrushchev’s speech excited new hopes in the West, which continuously broadcast the text of his speech over Radio Free Europe, its main medium of propaganda to Soviet satellite countries. Naturally, this stirred up hopes of freedom from Soviet rule across Eastern Europe. Poland was the first country to react, as its workers’ demands for economic reforms grew into demands for political reforms. At first, Khrushchev moved Soviet forces toward Warsaw, threatening to crush the movement. Then, he seemed to do an about face (especially when compared to how Stalin would have acted) and agreed to give the Poles more freedom as long as they stayed loyal to the Warsaw Pact. This was hardly the end of it, though.
Later that month (October, 1956), student demonstrations erupted across Hungary in support of the Poles. When the Hungarian secret police shot several demonstrators, workers joined the students. Soviet troops sealed off Budapest and fierce fighting ensued. A popular leader, Imre Nagy, was restored to power. His government called for amnesty for the demonstrators along with more liberal political and economic reforms while still assuring the Soviet Union of Hungary’s loyalty. Khrushchev withdrew his troops (many of whom were fraternizing with the Hungarians) from Budapest, but moved more forces close to Hungary’s borders. This only caused demonstrations to spread to the countryside while more and more Hungarian troops joined the demonstrators, taking their weapons with them. Then on November 1st, Nagy repudiated the Warsaw Pact and declared Hungary’s neutrality. Meanwhile, Radio Free Europe kept hopes and tensions at fever pitch by promising support to the rebels.
However, as luck would have it, another crisis, this time over the Suez Canal, had erupted with fighting between Israel and Egypt. With the United States thus distracted, the Kremlin seized the opportunity to move fifteen divisions, including 4000 tanks (which are hard to fraternize with) against Budapest. Even without help from the United States, which probably would not have risked war with Russia over Hungary anyway, the rebels held on for three weeks, even fighting Soviet tanks with homemade bombs called Molotov cocktails, Some 700 Soviet soldiers and 3-4000 Hungarians died in the fighting before Budapest was brought back under control. Nagy was ousted from power and executed along with 300 other rebel leaders. Another 35,000 Hungarians were arrested, while 200,000 more fled to the West.
The Hungarian uprising of 1956 showed how far Khrushchev and the Kremlin would let reforms progress within the Soviet Empire before cracking down. Unfortunately, the West took this as a sign that nothing had changed since Stalin’s death and maintained a hostile posture against Khrushchev, and he responded accordingly. Therefore, an opportunity to ease tensions between the superpowers backfired, causing the Cold War to heat up even more in the years to come.
World War II gave Americans an unprecedented era of affluence, technological growth, leisure, and opportunities for education and research. Out of this came four new factors pressuring people to conform, and especially to spend more to keep the consumer economy growing: modern advertising, television, credit cards, and babies.
Advertising had grown in tandem with the industrial consumer economies that emerged in the nineteenth century. As production of goods grew, so did the need to find consumers to buy those goods. After World War II, this need grew dramatically in the United States which, having suffered little material damage from the war, had 60% of the world’s industrial capacity and needed to convince people to buy those goods. Complicating this was the traditional thrift oriented mentality of most people, especially reinforced by the hard times of the recent Depression. In addition, there was little to qualitatively distinguish one brand of product from another.
Therefore advertising agencies hired psychologists who used modern psychological techniques to influence people to subconsciously prefer their products over the virtually identical products of their competition. One of the big pioneers in this field was Rosser Reeves, best known for his Anacin commercials that showed annoying animated images of hammers pounding and throbbing brains to get people to buy his product for their headaches. People hated these commercials, but they also bought lots of Anacin. Other commercials attacked people’s subconscious fears and insecurities to make them believe their products, such as a brand new car, would solve their problems. Vance Packard exposed these tricks in his book, The Hidden Persuaders, but people still kept buying.
Adding a whole new dimension to these advertising techniques was television, which mesmerized people with dynamic moving images designed to sell them the sponsors’ products. Television was the perfect advertising tool for reaching a visually oriented species such as humans whose eyes take in 90% of the information they get from the world around them. Reinforcing these messages were shows that typically showed affluent families with the very sorts of products the sponsors wanted viewers to buy.
Unfortunately, buying all this cost more money than people had saved in cash. So along came the credit card, making it easy for people to get that new car or washing machine now and worry later about paying for it (along with added interest charges). Credit cards did indeed encourage consumer spending. Unfortunately, millions of families also found out how easy it was to lose track of their spending and fall heavily into debt.
Finally, there was the post-war baby boom that put pressure on parents to provide their children with a better life than they had during the Depression. In the consumer society of the 1950s, people equated this with buying lots of toys and other things for their children. And that could only be good for business. These new opportunities and pressures affected people’s attitudes toward two things: conformity and sex.
Both men and women experienced growing frustration with pressures to conform. However, they experienced them in different ways. After the war, millions of men seemed to move seamlessly from the regimentation and conformity of the armed forces to that of the corporations that were rapidly growing with the American economy. However, although corporate regimentation seemed familiar enough to these men, the lack of excitement and sense of purpose they had known during the war was gone. Replacing it was a dull routine of paperwork, meetings, and kow-towing to the boss. Reflecting this lack of purpose was a profusion of adventure magazines that tried to recapture the excitement of the war years. Also reflecting itwas Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955), a book detailing the frustrations of being trapped in the corporate rat race by day, only to return every evening to a house in the suburbs that was increasingly less a home and more a burdensome means of keeping up with the Joneses. Its characters, Tom and Betsy Rath were fictional, but the life they portrayed was all too real to growing numbers of Americans in the 1950s.
For women much of the problem started with an acute post-war housing shortage that developed when millions of veterans came home, got married, and started families. The solution to this problem was a brand new phenomenon: the suburbs. The suburbs were largely the invention of William J. Levitt who applied Henry Ford’s mass production techniques for cars to building homes. He broke home construction into 27 separate steps, each one being handled by a separate team specializing in that step. By 1948, Levitt’s crews were completing 36 houses a day. Each house sat on a lot of 60 by 100 feet and had two bedrooms a bathroom, a 12 by 16 foot living room, and a kitchen. They had no basements, because concrete slabs were much easier and faster to lay down. The first Levittown, as this Long Island community was called, had 17,000 such houses with 82,000 residents.
Mass-produced Levittowns solved the acute post-war housing shortage, but they also created a whole new set of problems for women: isolation. Since the men generally took the family car on their long daily commutes between home and work (another source of stress), their wives were stranded miles away from their families and friends they had grown up with in the city. Instead of apartment buildings shared by a number of families, there were now separate family homes, oftentimes separated from one another by fences. The meaningful relationships and mutual support women had previously relied on were now replaced by a growing sense of desperate isolation from the rest of the world. This malaise was given a name, Housewife Syndrome, and a cure, large doses of anti-depressants to medicate women into passive acceptance of their fates. For both men and women, alcohol consumption also increased dramatically in order to dull the pain.
One woman who had bought into the suburban dream and seen it go sour was Betty Friedan. Coming to a gradual realization that millions of other women shared her malaise, she wrote a book that took her five years to research and write. That book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), would become the handbook for the feminist movement gradually coming together in the 1960s.
That was the general attitude of society toward sex before the 1950s. Underwear was referred to as unmentionables and talk about sex reverted to discussing birds and bees. Enter Alfred Kinsey, a mild straight-laced professor at Indiana University with a passion for collecting things, especially knowledge. In the 1940s Kinsey launched a monumental study that culminated in 1947 with the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, an 804 page, three-pound book that quickly became a bestseller. Kinsey’s book showed that pre-marital sex, extra-marital sex, homosexuality, and other practices typically labeled deviant behavior were more prevalent and normal for men than previously assumed. Naturally, such findings triggered heavy criticism and moral outrage from parts of a society still deeply rooted in its Protestant heritage. Not surprisingly, Kinsey’s next book, Sexuality in the Human Female (1953), sparked an even more violent backlash, since it was about our mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives who were supposed to be pure and basically asexual. More devastating to Kinsey was The Rockefeller Foundation’s decision to cut funding for his research. Kinsey’s reaction was to overwork himself in further pursuit of his research until he died of heart failure in 1956. But the cat was out of the bag.
Kinsey’s work encouraged more open attitudes toward sex. Much of this was healthy, but there were some results of questionable value. Most notable among these was Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine, which showcased glossy airbrushed photos of beautiful women who evoked images of the wholesome girl next door except that they happened to be missing their clothes. Hefner, himself from a strict Methodist background, espoused a philosophy of promiscuous sex divorced from any emotional commitments. All this was slickly wrapped in a package laced with product placement type articles/ads for the latest accessories for the successful playboy: cars, stereos, clothes, etc. There were also serious articles and interviews that Hefner’s customers could conveniently claim they bought the magazine for. The cumulative effect of this approach was to give pornography a pseudo respectability that made it and sex part of the mainstream culture.
Meanwhile a very different sort of quest was being realized: the birth control pill. The driving force behind the pill was Margaret Sanger. For decades she had been crusading to get access to birth control for women suffering in poverty from the burden of too many children. Sanger, an incredibly persistent woman, had been jailed several times just for providing information about birth control.. In the 1950s, she joined forces with John Pincus, whose career had suffered for his dedication to research on hormones and fertilization. Their efforts bore fruit and the birth control pill came on the market in 1960. However, the Pill, as it was called, had far-reaching and unforeseen effects. While it did relieve many women of the burden of unwanted children, it also made sex seem safer for women by removing the fear of pregnancy. Just as Playboy led a movement to bring sex out in the open for men, the Pill made sex less scary and more desirable for women. Together, Kinsey’s and Sanger’s work, Hefner’s magazine, and Pincus’ pill would help lead to the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
The 1950s are typically viewed as a placid and comfortable decade. More properly it was a transitional era seeing revolutionary changes in the home, the workplace and attitudes toward sex. Add to this the start of the Civil Rights Movement and an emerging counter-culture centered on the Beats and Rock and Roll, and one can see the seeds of dissent in the years to come.
As we have seen, Khrushchev’s efforts to ease East-West tensions were unable to overcome the inertia of Stalin’s legacy. Therefore, relations between the two super-powers continued to deteriorate into the 1960s, as one side’s actions would lead to a reaction by the other side, which would only trigger a reaction by the first side and so on. The following years would see the United States and Soviet Union competing in two ways: military build-ups and a new phenomenon, the space race.
In the 1950s the Soviets developed the Bison Bomber and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), both of which could deliver nuclear weapons to the United States. The American public became increasingly concerned about the so-called “bomber gap.” Reaction to this was two-fold. For one thing, the U.S. increased testing of nuclear weapons as a way to flex its muscles. Unfortunately, the Soviets did the same,
Secondly, the U.S. increased its spy flights over the Soviet Union to determine how large the “bomber gap” was. Such a gap did indeed exist, but it was in America’s favor. However, the top-secret nature of his information and how it was obtained kept President Eisenhower from silencing Democrats who criticized him for being soft on defense. His situation was further complicated in 1960 when a U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. Khrushchev was furious and had the American pilot, Gary Powers, publicly tried and sentenced to ten years imprisonment.
While Eisenhower had to worry about concealing how much he knew about Soviet defenses, Khrushchev also had to worry about how much the U.S. knew, in particular how vulnerable the Soviet Union was. Therefore, he increased Soviet nuclear testing to deflect public attention, detonating a 57-megaton H-bomb (1961), the largest man-made explosion in history. Increased nuclear testing by both sides accomplished nothing except for increasing worldwide concern about the higher levels of radiation being released into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, Khrushchev had one more ace up his sleeve: Sputnik.
On October 4, 1951, the Russians launched Sputnik, the world’s first space satellite, into orbit around earth. Although it was only a small metal ball emitting a weak radio signal, it shocked Americans who saw this as a threat to their security. Once again, the response was two-fold. In 1958 Congress passed the National Defense Education Act. From this point on, American schools would stress math and science in their curriculum in order to compete with Soviet science and technology.
The second American response was to launch its own space program. After an embarrassing initial failure, the Americans launched their own space satellite in 1958. The Space Race was on. Over the next decade, the two powers competed to achieve the first manned space flight, the longest space flights, the first walk in space, the first manned orbiting of the moon, and ultimately the first lunar landing. On July 16, 1969, millions of Americans watched a live broadcast of the first human to walk on the moon. Although the space race itself accomplished little of value, it spawned a technology revolution, especially in communications as television broadcasts and telephone calls could now span the globe.
Ever since 1945, the West’s control of West Berlin had presented major problems, since it was situated in the middle of East Germany with several very vulnerable routes there from West Germany. In 1948, Stalin had tried to gain control of West Berlin by cutting off its land corridors to the West, but the Americans and British had successfully air-lifted supplies into the beleaguered city until Stalin gave in. However, West Berlin continued to present a growing problem for the Soviets, since it was a constant reminder to East Germans all around of the much better standard of living in the West. Complicating this was the fact that there was free access between East and West Berlin. This and the lure of a better lifestyle caused growing numbers of East Germans to defect to the West, which only hurt the East German economy more and made the West that much more enticing. This led to Soviet demands for the West to abandon West Berlin, but this only increased tensions that drove even more East Germans to flee to the West and so on.
People worried that Berlin would be the spark to ignite World War III. Then, on August 13, 1961, Berlin awoke to find the East Germans building a wall to cut off all access between the two parts of the city. Despite public indignation, Western leaders breathed a sigh of relief, because the Berlin Wall solved the problem of mass defections to the West without damaging their prestige. However, the Berlin Wall would separate families for nearly thirty years and stand as the most visible symbol of the Cold War until its fall on November 9, 1989.
For years, Cuba had suffered under the corrupt dictatorship of Juan Batista while serving as a playground for rich Americans. In the 1950s Fidel Castro started a small insurgency that gradually grew into a full-fledged revolution and overthrew Batista in 1959. Although Castro had socialist leanings, he was not a declared communist. However, the United States, in the midst of the Cold War, tended to see red when any leader with the slightest socialist leanings appeared in the Western Hemisphere. When it refused to recognize Castro’s regime, he formed closer ties with Russia. The U.S. responded by refusing to refine imported Soviet oil in its Cuban refineries, spurring Castro to nationalize those refineries. When the U.S. put an embargo on all Cuban goods, Castro retaliated by nationalizing all American owned businesses in Cuba. Then it turned nasty, with the CIA launching air raids on Cuban sugar fields and plotting against Castro by putting chemicals in Castro’s cigars to make his beard fall out and spraying LSD into a studio he was visiting to make him act crazy. Finally, Castro declared his movement a communist revolution.
Under Eisenhower, the CIA had organized an invasion of Cuban émigrés to overthrow Castro. However, in 1961, a new president, John F. Kennedy, took office. When presented with the CIA’s plan for an invasion, he agreed to go ahead with it, but cut critical American air support, fearing to expose American involvement in this plan. Consequently, the ensuing Bay of Pigs invasion was an unmitigated disaster that embarrassed Kennedy and infuriated Castro. Khrushchev convinced Castro to let him put medium and intermediate range missiles armed with nuclear warheads in Cuba. For the first time in the Cold War, most American cities were within range of Russian missiles. Therefore, when American U-2 spy planes spotted these missiles in October 1962, Kennedy treated this as a major threat.
The question was how to get rid of the missiles. Just as appeasement had led to World War II in 1939, a mere diplomatic response seemed too mild and ineffective for this situation. By the same token, while the generals pressured Kennedy to invade Cuba or launch an air strike against the Soviet missiles, he remained acutely aware that such aggressive actions could trigger a third world war and nuclear holocaust. (At the time, Kennedy was reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August that told how aggressive diplomatic actions had led to World War I.) Along those lines, he saw that it was unclear as to who was the “home team” defending its turf, because, while Cuba was geographically closer to the U.S., it was firmly allied with the Soviet Union.
He finally decided on the strong but less provocative course of a naval blockade to stop more Soviet missiles from reaching Cuba. While the United States and Britain had been able to airlift supplies into West Berlin over Stalin’s blockade in 1948-9, airlifting heavy missiles into Cuba over such a long distance was not an option for Khrushchev. A few days later, the policy bore fruit when an approaching Soviet convoy turnedback rather than trying to crash the American blockade. However there was still the much stickier issue of how to remove the missiles already in Cuba.
By late October tensions were near breaking point as the American military moved to Def-Con 2, signaling that war seemed imminent. Civilians made plans to evacuate major cities that might be targeted for a nuclear strike. The military was pressuring Kennedy to invade Cuba, unaware that the Soviets had tactical nuclear weapons on Cuba that would have immediately destroyed any invading force. Just to add to the tension, on several occasions false alarms nearly launched our bombers. Then Kennedy received two messages from Moscow, one fairly conciliatory, the other more provocative. Such mixed signals further confused him about the proper response, there even being speculation that a military coup had seized power in the Kremlin in the interim between the two messages. Kennedy decided to respond to the more conciliatory message and ignore the other one, thus establishing a calmer basis for negotiation. On this basis he struck a deal with Khrushchev. Russia would publicly remove the missiles in return for an American promise not to invade Cuba. Privately, Kennedy agreed to remove American missiles from Turkey that posed a similar threat to Russia. Therefore, publicly it seemed that the U.S. had won, while behind the scenes the net result was that fewer missiles threatened Russia than before 1961 and no more missiles threatened the U.S.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a major turning point in the Cold War. It was the closest we ever came to unleashing a nuclear holocaust that would have devastated civilization. Both sides clearly saw this and worked harder to avoid such a scenario. They installed the “Hot Line” to ensure better communications between the two sides and avoid unnecessary speculation, such as whether the other side had had a military coup. In 1963, the two sides agreed to a ban on atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, thus putting an end to such ridiculous saber rattling. The Cold War would continue for almost another thirty years, but the two sides had planted the seeds of at least some level of mutual trust that would form the basis of more substantial progress in the years to come.
Since the 1880s Vietnam had been part of a larger French colonial holding known as Indo-China. After World War II a popular revolt with strong communist elements broke out which eventually surrounded and defeated French forces at Dien Bien Phu, and won independence in 1954. Vietnam was divided between North and South at the 17th parallel, with planned elections to reunite the country in 1956. However, The United States, fearing a communist victory, prevented the elections from taking place, thus keeping Vietnam divided between the communist North and a “democratic” South that actually functioned under a series of American-backed dictators. Civil War soon erupted with North Vietnam supporting a communist insurgency known as the Viet Cong in the South.
The U.S. viewed this struggle in purely Cold War, communist vs. capitalist, terms, ignoring its more nationalist character,. This blinded it to two important facts. One was that the government it supported in Saigon (the South Vietnamese capital) was a brutal dictatorship and anything but democratic. Secondly, ignoring the centuries-long animosity between the Chinese and Vietnamese, it saw North Vietnam as a pawn in a Chinese plot to to conquer all of Asia.
Acting on these assumptions, the U.S. felt it imperative to support the government in Saigon against the Viet Cong and North Vietnam. At first, Eisenhower sent only a few hundred military advisors and Kennedy slightly increased this commitment. However, it was President Johnson who heavily committed American forces and aid to South Vietnam in the 1960s.
Unfortunately for American forces, this was very different from any war they had ever fought in before. Instead of the traditional head-on clashes between clearly identifiable armies, this was a guerilla war where insurgents would attack American soldiers and then melt back into the civilian population, often making it impossible to identify and catch them. Out of frustration, American troops would retaliate against any civilians in the area of the attack, inevitably killing innocent people in their efforts to find the Viet Cong. This would increase public support for the Viet Cong and feed more guerilla attacks which, in turn, would trigger both increased American involvement in Vietnam and more retaliation against innocent civilians, and so on. Vietnam’s jungles also made it virtually impossible for American forces to sweep through the countryside or even effectively disrupt enemy supply lines, known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This trail ran largely through neighboring Cambodia and Laos to avoid American attacks, unless the U.S. wanted to complicate its situation further by sending forces into those countries.
Another factor in this war was television coverage. This was the first television war, where Americans would watch updated accounts and images of the war every night on the evening news. This can make progress in any war seem unbearably slow, but especially so in Vietnam where the nature of the fighting eliminated the traditional measure of success: geographic advance along a front towards a stated goal, typically the enemy capital. However, there were no geographically defined fronts in this war, only isolated raids where American troops would be airlifted by helicopters into remote villages, try to identify and catch the enemy, and then get airlifted out, abandoning control of the villages to the enemy once again. This daily repetition of seemingly identical raids with no apparent progress or purpose increasingly frustrated the American public.
Added to this frustration was the media’s portrayal of the war as a losing cause, especially after the Tet Offensive in 1968. This was a surprise attack that did catch U.S. and South Vietnamese forces off guard, but turned into a major defeat for the communists. However, the media’s portrayal of this battle as a defeat (because of its initial surprise) turned much of the American public against the war. This generated another vicious cycle where media portrayal of the war as a losing cause would trigger student protests that also got heavy TV coverage. These would reinforce the media’s negative portrayal of the war, causing more protests and so on.
The war’s unpopularity forced President Johnson out of the presidential race in 1968. The winner was Richard Nixon who told the public he had a secret plan for ending the war while he was secretly telling the North Vietnamese to keep fighting while Johnson was still in office, saying they could get a better deal with him if he were elected. When Nixon took office, he pushed for “Vietnamization” of the war, replacing American troops with South Vietnamese conscripts, many of who proved unreliable in the fight to defend a corrupt and failing dictatorship. However, this gave Nixon the chance to negotiate a “peace with honor” (1973), which left communist forces still operating in South Vietnam intact, but gave American forces enough time to exit Vietnam before the Saigon government fell. In 1975, North Vietnamese forces entered Saigon, thus reuniting Vietnam. Three years later, as if to underscore the nationalist nature of this prolonged struggle and debunk the idea that the war was a Chinese plot, Chinese and Vietnamese forces were firing at each other as they had for centuries.
We have already seen how Stalin’s domination of Eastern Europe after World War II and the West’s reaction to his aggression led to a vicious Cold War cycle of one side, fearful of the other, developing new weapons, which caused the other side to do the same and so on. Of course, the single factor making the Cold War so unique and dangerous was nuclear weapons. And just as the Cold War’s roots lay back in World War II, so did the roots of the nuclear arms race.
Starting in 1942, almost immediately after its entry into World War II, the United States had worked intensively to develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could do the same. On July 15, 1945 the American program, known as the Manhattan Project, successfully tested the first nuclear bomb at Almogordo, New Mexico. The United States expected to keep its monopoly on the atomic bomb well into the 1950s, by which time its nuclear arsenal would be virtually impossible for anyone else to match or threaten. However, the Stalin’s scientists, thanks partly to espionage reaching into the ranks of the Manhattan Project, successfully developed and tested their own atomic bomb in 1949. The Americans, desperate to regain their technological edge to counterbalance Stalin’s huge conventional forces, decided to work on what was referred to as the Super bomb. This device, also known as a hydrogen bomb, would create a fusion reaction to trigger a thermonuclear explosion as much more powerful than the atomic bomb as that bomb was compared to the conventional bombs used in World War II. In 1952, the United States successfully developed and tested such a fearsome weapon. However, the Russians, following the same line of research, produced their own super bomb in 1953, only a year after the Americans had done the same.
As a result, both the threat and fear of nuclear war grew throughout the 1950s as evidenced by several things. For one thing, despite the death of Stalin in 1953 and the opportunity for better American-Soviet relations, tensions continued and even grew. Also Soviet military technology seemed to surpass that of the Americans, especially in the realm of delivery systems. In 1957, they developed the first Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of delivering nuclear warheads to targets in the United States when fired from Soviet territory. The same year, the Soviets launched the first space satellite, Sputnik, raising American fears of the Russians launching nuclear attacks from outer space. Also, the Russians started developing their first long-range bomber force, another area where the United States previously had a monopoly. Finally, as nuclear arsenals grew and with them the threat of nuclear Armageddon, an anti-nuclear movement emerged in the West.
However, in the late 1950s the arms race combined with continuing Cold War rhetoric made the American public even more afraid of growing Soviet military power than nuclear holocaust. As a result, President Eisenhower, under increasing criticism for being soft on communism, increased military spending, which only brought a similar reaction from the Soviet Union. Ironically, he did this knowing (through top secret information that he could not make public) that the feared “bomber gap” actually heavily favored the United States. Along these lines the United States embarked on an expensive space program to close the “space gap” and reoriented its school curricula to emphasize math and science in order to close the perceived “education gap”.
Finally, the U.S. tried to close the “espionage gap” by increasing spy flights over Russia to compensate for the fact that it was easier for the Soviets to infiltrate America’s open society with spies than it was for the U.S. to do the same into the much more tightly closed Soviet society. Unfortunately, in 1960 an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia and its pilot, Gary Powers, was captured. In addition to the diplomatic furor this raised, it also alarmed Khruschev about how much the Americans knew concerning Russia’s relative nuclear weakness. In order to cover this up, he ordered a series of massive atmospheric tests of Hydrogen bombs as a warning to the West. The U.S. responded in kind and nuclear tensions (and fallout) continued to increase into the 1960s.
Out of this situation evolved the dominant nuclear strategy of the Cold War: mutually assured destruction (MAD). The basic idea was that each side built up such an overwhelming amount of nuclear firepower (known as overkill) that no one would dare launch a war out of fear of massive retaliation. The basic psychological assumption MAD was sound, because it did scare each side away from intentional aggression that might lead to an all-out thermonuclear exchange. However, there was the danger that human or mechanical (especially computer) error could accidentally trigger World War III. Growing fears of such a scenario were reflected in several books and movies of the era, notably Fail Safe and Doctor Strangelove. In fact, there were several incidents where some sort of mechanical error did nearly launch a nuclear war. Fortunately, in each case disaster was averted, typically by an individual who refused to believe the launch orders were real.
MAD produced several results that together seemed to be both hurtling the human race toward certain destruction and bringing it to its senses. For one thing, MAD demanded that each side keep a large retaliatory (second strike) force that could survive a surprise attack by the enemy and act as a deterrent to such an attack. Therefore, both sides continued to build huge nuclear stockpiles and progressively more accurate delivery systems that gave them the combined capability of destroying the human race many times over.
However, despite the perception that nuclear weapons were more cost effective than conventional weapons, providing more “bang for the buck”, so to speak, they were also prohibitively expensive. This was especially true for the research and development of new weapons systems, since the arms race catalyzed increasingly high-tech research that became more costly as the technology involved became more sophisticated. Eventually, the huge price tag of the arms race would drive the Soviet Union into financial oblivion and help end the Cold War. However, that would not happen until the 1980s. In the 1960s, it was a more immediate crisis that would help cool down the arms race: the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The realization of how close we had come to World War III over Cuba woke many people to the dangers of thermonuclear war. As a result, both sides were much more careful to take precautions to avoid such a disaster. The major obstacle to overcome was the deep distrust between the Soviets and Americans. Therefore, bringing the nuclear genie under control involved starting with relatively small measures to gradually build mutual trust as a foundation for more substantial measures. The first such step was installing the Hot Line, a direct phone line between Washington and Moscow that would speed up communications and reduce the chances of a garbled misunderstood message triggering an unintended war. Along these lines, both sides were constantly upgrading their control systems to minimize the chances of some officer or mechanical error launching World War III without authorization from above. In 1963 came an atmospheric test ban treaty to protect the atmosphere from fallout. In 1968 the nuclear non-proliferation treaty committed a large number of nations to not developing nuclear weapons.
In the 1970s, the United States and Soviet Union took a giant step forward with the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaties, SALT I (1972) and SALT II (1979), which put caps on the number of new weapons being produced. Although this did not stop the spiraling arms race, at least it put some limits on it and kept both sides talking. Unfortunately, during the 1980s, the Cold War heated up again, and with it the arms race. However, by this time, high tech, especially computer technology, was making possible a whole new generation of sophisticated weapons systems, including the possibility of mounting a guided missile defense system against an incoming nuclear attack. President Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (AKA “Star Wars” or SDI), although. Technologically unfeasible at the time, still upped the stakes (and price tag) of the arms race. By this time, the Soviet Union’s economy was already sinking under the burden of trying to keep up with the United States’ buildup. Therefore, its new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, announced a unilateral withdrawal of some Soviet forces from Eastern Europe as a gesture to the West for more substantial talks. These renewed disarmament negotiations produced a series of new treaties that significantly reduced nuclear stockpiles and ended the Cold War on a much happier note than it might have:
• Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty eliminates many missiles, especially in Europe (1987)
• Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) cut number of Nuclear warheads from 23,500 à 15,400 (1991)
• START II Eliminated land based MIRV’s (Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles) (1993)
• Agreement to cut American & Russian nuclear forces below 2000 warheads each (2001)
The arms race between the Cold War superpowers ended much better than it might have. That’s the good news, that human beings are capable of resolving their differences peacefully. However, we’re not out of the woods yet as other people try to get and intend to use “weapons of mass destruction”. Still, the final lesson of the Cold War is that there is still hope, and that, as always, is a priceless commodity.
Reading in development
A revolution is not the same as inviting people to dinner... or doing fancy needlework— Mao Zedong
The civil war between Communists and Nationalist Guo Min Dang, interrupted by the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, resumed with victory over Japan in 1945. Despite being heavily outnumbered and outgunned by Nationalist forces, Mao’s forces, supported by Stalin, had prevailed the American backed Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai Chek by 1949. Chiang Kai Chek retreated to the island of Taiwan where his government continued to rule, claiming it was the only legitimate regime for all of China. The status of a prosperous democracy on Taiwan, backed by American military support and claiming independence from the mainland communist regime, remained a serious source of tension into the 21st century.
The victory over the Guo Min Dang was only the start of the communist Revolution in China. It would take hard decisions and tough policies to put China back on the path to being a great power. Luckily for the communists, the Chinese people accepted their rule and policies for several reasons. For one thing, the discipline and helpfulness Mao’s troops showed the peasants contrasted with the actions and policies of the Guo Min Dang. Second, since China was nothing like the industrial society that Marx had predicted as the base for a socialist society, Mao shifted the focus of his revolution to the peasants with land reform as its main goal. This radical shift in emphasis for Marxist revolution created a virtually new socialist theory known as Maoism. Third, the Chinese were weary from years of civil strife and war with Japan, and felt the communists offered the best chance of restoring peace and stability. Finally, Maoism fit into the pattern of previous peasant movements in Chinese history with its utopian vision of a more just society, especially in its promise of land reform.
China in 1949 hardly constituted a socialist society, and the communists themselves were a small minority in the nation. Therefore, at first, they had to rely heavily on the cooperation of non-Communist officials to carry out their reforms until enough communists had been trained to replace them. Mao, described his new government as a democratic coalition under communist leadership, letting non-Communists hold prominent posts well into the 1950's. By the same token, Mao started slowly on his reforms in order to win popular support and avoid too much alarm before instituting more radical reforms and programs.
The Communists' first major policy after seizing power was the long awaited land reform. Communist cadres set up peoples' courts where they encouraged peasants to denounce convict local landlords and rich. Their lands would then be divided among the peasants while they would either be executed or sent to slave camps for indoctrination and hard labor. An estimated 1.5 million people died in these camps from overwork, exposure to the elements, malnutrition, and suicide. Unbeknownst to the peasants, this was only the first stage of agricultural collectivization along the lines of the Soviet Union. However, the Communists, wanting to avoid the disasters that befell Soviet agriculture under Stalin, were determined to follow a somewhat more gradual course.
Encouraged by the success of this first stage Mao implemented more reforms in the first of China's Five Year Plans (1953-57). For one thing, he instituted the next stage of collectivizing the farms by sending in “mutual aid teams” to pool the peasants' farm tools, animals, and labor. This was probably not such a shock, since Chinese peasants had traditionally cooperated in such a way. However, the government soon entered the next phase by “buying” all the peasants’ recently acquired lands and forming communes which assumed control of the agriculture by loaning out seed, selling fertilizer, and purchasing the crops at fixed prices. By 1956, some 90% of the land had been formed into such communes. Similarly, Mao was collectivizing China's industries, railroads, shipping, foreign trade, and banks.
At the same time, the communists started an extensive propaganda and brainwashing campaign to turn the Chinese into devoted Communists whose primary goal was to build a socialist paradise. The government targeted remaining landowning peasants, “corrupt” bureaucrats from the old order, and capitalist merchant. Children were taught to love their fatherland, the Chinese people, science, labor, and public property, but not their families, which were seen as a threat to the state. They also learned that life was serious, humor decadent, and romantic love a bourgeois emotion. By 1954, some 12 million young people were enrolled in the Democratic Youth League.
People targeted for intense brainwashing were cut off from their families and friends and subjected to long hours of hard work to break their spirits. They had to read and memorize long passages of communist literature and undergo grueling "therapy" sessions of self-criticism or small group criticism where they would write, rewrite, and publicly recite confessions of their "crimes" against the people and give speeches on how the struggle for a new society was the only worthwhile goal in life. Such confessions were supposed to provide them with a sense of relief that they associated with communism.
China's foreign policy in the early 1950's was also somewhat aggressive. In 1950, Chinese forces took control of Tibet an area China had ruled from time to time in the past. China’s continued occupation of Tibet has tarnished its international image ever since. China also allied with the other great Communist power, the Soviet Union, which supplied substantial military and technical aid, including the knowledge to help it develop nuclear weapons. China also became involved in the Korean War (1950-53). Although this conflict ended in a stalemate, the Chinese saw it as a victory since, for the first time in the modern era, they had stopped what they saw as Western aggression.
China's successes in these endeavors made it feel confident and strong enough to launch even more ambitious programs. Economically, the Communists carried agricultural collectivization a step further by gathering the communes into large collectives of up to 10,000 acres. In some of these, men and women were kept in separate dormitories, families were split up, and children were raised by nurseries. This was extremely unpopular among the peasants, who relied on the stability of the village and family. Eventually, the government backed off a bit by subdividing the collectives into units that corresponded roughly with the old villages and allowed more family life.
Mao also launched "The Great Leap Forward" in 1958, an ambitious program with the goal of surpassing British steel production in 15 years through intensive use of backyard furnaces. This was largely a reaction against Soviet style central planning. Mao felt that ideological incentives could get economic results and that the people's revolutionary fervor alone would provide the needed impetus for economic growth. However, mismanagement and the lack of incentives and technical expertise in such things as standard controls over heat and quality led to inferior quality steel. The Great Leap Forward Even had an even more disastrous impact on China’s agriculture. The attention diverted away from farming, along with three years of bad floods, produced a severe famine that may have killed 30,000,000 people.
In foreign policy, Mao tried to export the Communist revolution to other countries in Asia, Africa and South America. However, this met with very limited success, largely since it was beyond China's means to effectively support such revolutions from so far away. At the same time, China's relations with the Soviet Union went sour because of border disputes and ideological differences. After Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union softened its stance against the West somewhat, gave more power to specialists in their fields rather than devoted revolutionaries, and did away with the personality cult surrounding its leaders. Chinese communists, still enthusiastic in the early years of their revolution, saw the Soviets as "revisionists" who had sold out the revolution. Mao especially like to emphasize the hero-worshipping personality cult built up around himself. In the late 1950's and early 1960's, tensions increased and the Soviets withdrew their aid from China. This triggered a Sino-Soviet split which at times even erupted into border violence, although never all out war.
By the mid 1960's, China’s Communist revolution seemed to be floundering with Mao's position as leader of the revolution somewhat in jeopardy. Therefore, he launched the Cultural Revolution to revive China's revolutionary fervor, largely by attacking Mao's enemies. The primary agents of this upheaval were the Red Guards, mostly students and other young people who were armed with Mao's Little Red Book of quotations and the belief they had the authority to rampage through China's cities and countryside in the name of Mao’s revolution. Unfortunately, the Red Guards and Cultural Revolution ran out of control, and virtual anarchy reigned for two years, shutting down schools and thoroughly disrupting the economy. Intellectuals and members of the professions (e.g., doctors) were put in prisons and camps or were sent to the country for hard agricultural labor on the farms. Eventually, Mao had to use the army to get the Red Guards and Cultural Revolution under control. By 1970, the worst of the Cultural Revolution was over. It had set China's education and economy back several years, but Mao was satisfied that his Revolution was back on track.
Gradually, the forces of moderation, led by Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, resurfaced and prevailed, especially after Mao’s death at the age of 82 in 1976. After a brief power struggle against extremist elements led by Mao’s widow and a faction known as the Gang of Four, the moderate and more practical Deng Xiaoping emerged as China’s new leader. Since then, China has progressed in both the fields of foreign policy and economy.
In foreign policy, China's more moderate image led to its acceptance as a member of the United Nations in 1971. This put increased pressure on the United States to recognize the communist government in China. The Chinese communists, in turn, wanted better relations with the West to act as a counterbalance against the Soviets. In 1972, President Nixon visited China and started the long road towards normalizing relations between the two nations. A major stumbling block was America’s support of the Nationalist government of still ruling the island of Taiwan. The communist government on the mainland insisted that its relations with Taiwan were an internal Chinese affair and that the United States should cut relations with and support for the government there. In 1978 the United States agreed to most of China's demands, although it informally maintained economic and diplomatic relations with the government on Taiwan. Other erstwhile enemies, notably Japan, also normalized diplomatic and economic relations with mainland China during this period.
Economically, Deng Xiaoping, instituted significant economic reforms known as The Four Modernizations (agriculture, industry, science and technology, and military) which provided farmers and factory workers incentives to work harder. Farmers were allowed to keep small plots for growing surplus food which they could sell, while factory workers could also do business on the side as long as they did not hire (and thus exploit) employees in the capitalist manner. To many hardliners, these reforms seemed too capitalistic in spirit. However, they helped lift China's economy dramatically in the following decades. As Deng put it, he did not care whether a cat was black or white as long as it caught mice.
China's growing prosperity brought demands for more political rights and power for the common people, which Deng was not willing to grant. Unfortunately, this contrast between economic progress and the lack of corresponding political progress created tensions in Chinese society, much like the tensions in Soviet society caused by more political rights but the lack of economic progress. In 1989, massive demonstrations demanding more political rights spread across many Chinese cities. After several weeks of indecision, the aging leaders brutally suppressed the movement at Taiananmen Square in Beijing and reestablished a harsh and repressive rule.
Since then, China has rapidly emerged as a major economic force facing both new opportunities in economic and diplomatic affairs and challenges in its political policies at home. Much of what will happen hinges on what sort of new leadership would take the helm when the last of China's first generation of Communist leaders finally passes on.
Gradually, the forces of moderation, led by Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, resurfaced and prevailed, especially after Mao’s death at the age of 82 in 1976. After a brief power struggle against extremist elements led by Mao’s widow and a faction known as the Gang of Four, the moderate and more practical Deng Xiaoping emerged as China’s new leader. Since then, China has progressed in both the fields of foreign policy and economy.
In foreign policy, China's more moderate image led to its acceptance as a member of the United Nations in 1971. This put increased pressure on the United States to recognize the communist government in China. The Chinese communists, in turn, wanted better relations with the West to act as a counterbalance against the Soviets. In 1972, President Nixon visited China and started the long road towards normalizing relations between the two nations. A major stumbling block was America’s support of the Nationalist government of still ruling the island of Taiwan. The communist government on the mainland insisted that its relations with Taiwan were an internal Chinese affair and that the United States should cut relations with and support for the government there. In 1978 the United States agreed to most of China's demands, although it informally maintained economic and diplomatic relations with the government on Taiwan. Other erstwhile enemies, notably Japan, also normalized diplomatic and economic relations with mainland China during this period.
Economically, Deng Xiaoping, instituted significant economic reforms known as The Four Modernizations (agriculture, industry, science and technology, and military) which provided farmers and factory workers incentives to work harder. Farmers were allowed to keep small plots for growing surplus food which they could sell, while factory workers could also do business on the side as long as they did not hire (and thus exploit) employees in the capitalist manner. To many hardliners, these reforms seemed too capitalistic in spirit. However, they helped lift China's economy dramatically in the following decades. As Deng put it, he did not care whether a cat was black or white as long as it caught mice.
China's growing prosperity brought demands for more political rights and power for the common people, which Deng was not willing to grant. Unfortunately, this contrast between economic progress and the lack of corresponding political progress created tensions in Chinese society, much like the tensions in Soviet society caused by more political rights but the lack of economic progress. In 1989, massive demonstrations demanding more political rights spread across many Chinese cities. After several weeks of indecision, the aging leaders brutally suppressed the movement at Taiananmen Square in Beijing and reestablished a harsh and repressive rule.
Since then, China has rapidly emerged as a major economic force facing both new opportunities in economic and diplomatic affairs and challenges in its political policies at home. Much of what will happen hinges on what sort of new leadership would take the helm when the last of China's first generation of Communist leaders finally passes on.
It was the summer of 1977. While my wife was at work, I stayed at
home with the baby, changed his diapers, fed him, played with him, got
him to sleep, and straightened up the house. Of course, while I
was at work, my wife filled in at home. Typically, whoever was at
work, especially if it was an evening or night shift, got the car so we
didn’t have to get the baby out of bed, thus leaving the other parent
stuck at home without a car. We had a small house with mortgage
payments and the usual assortment of other bills. Nothing remarkable.
We were the typical American family of the so-called Baby Boomer
generation. However, this particular night it came home to me how
different we were as a generation.
It was a particularly hot & sweltering night, and our house, which
was small anyway and had no air conditioning, was stifling.
Therefore, in order to keep cool, I just wore a pair of shorts and the
baby only had a diaper, which sometimes made things worse as a I
carried a hot sweaty baby up against my equally hot and sweaty body.
A friend of mine from work came by on his motorcycle. However, he
didn’t stay long, finding little of interest in hanging out and
watching an eight-month old baby and his father sweat. I remember
standing in the driveway, watching him leave on his motorcycle, that
iconic symbol of freedom for the American male, and thinking, this
isn’t how my ancestors looking down from forty centuries of history
lived, being tied down to a baby and housework. What would they
say if they could see me now? How would I explain myself to
them? But, deep down inside, I knew the answer, and it boiled
down to one word: justice. How could I expect another human being
to work and pay half the bills and also do all the housework and
childcare, just because that other human being was female? Taken on
that level, it was just that simple. But forty centuries of
history made it far from easy. However, in spite of that, I knew
what was the right thing to do, and I was determined to do it.
Meanwhile, my wife was at work, also haunted by forty centuries of
ancestors telling her that her place was at home with the baby.
For many of us, that was America in the 1970s.
People often
think of the Women’s Movement as coming in two distinct waves with
little happening in between: the Suffrage Movement (1848-1920) and the
Women’s Liberation Movement starting in the late 1960s. While there is
some truth in looking at the Women’s Movement as coming in waves, it is
inaccurate to see the period from 1920 to 1966 as an empty lull for
women. To the contrary, the period 1920 to 1966 saw women, who
now had the vote, taking their cause in new directions to gain equality
at home and in the workplace. One of their more prolonged
efforts, starting in 1923, was to push for an equal rights amendment
that, among other things, would eliminate sexual discrimination in the
workplace and in the application of various laws. Unfortunately,
in 1982, after nearly sixty years of efforts, passage of this amendment
fell three states short of ratification.
While
women had the vote by 1920, it was still illegal even to disseminate
information on birth control. The woman who led the fight to
change this was Margaret Sanger. One of the defining events in
her life was watching her mother die in childbirth. Later, as a
social worker, she was constantly coming across young women aged and
worn out by all the children they had given birth to and the poverty
resulting from all those births. As a result, Margaret made it
her life’s work to free women from such a fate, first by legalizing the
spread of information on what birth control techniques were then
available, and later working for the development of a safe and reliable
birth control pill. In defiance of the law, she published
numerous pamphlets on birth control (a term she coined), and opened the
first birth control clinic in 1916. Five years later, she formed
the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in an effort to gain support
from the medical community and middle class so she could work through
more mainstream channels. Finally, after years of hard work
and multiple jail sentences for Margaret and other members, the ABCL
got spreading birth control information through the mail legalized
in1936. Six years later, the American Birth Control League would
become Planned Parenthood
The Second World War, even more than the first one,
set momentous forces for change into motion. Its immediate impact
was the need for women to fill the jobs left behind by the men gone to
war. This brought millions of women into the workforce, giving them a
sense of their own strength and worth, as depicted in the famous poster
of Rosie the Riveter with the message “We can do it.” In 1943,
women introduced the Equal Pay Act in the hopes of making the same
wages as their male co-workers. It would take twenty years to get
this bill passed.
As the war was winding down and the prospect loomed of millions of
veterans coming back to their old jobs, government propaganda started
preparing women to return to their pre-war roles as mothers and
housewives. Although most women acquiesced in this
expectation, a number found themselves attached to their increasingly
independent status. Two decades later, they would be joined by
millions of their daughters.
The post-war period saw Americans enjoying unprecedented prosperity as
millions of couples got married, started families, and moved into their
own houses in the suburbs. On the surface, it seemed middle class
Americans were living in a dream come true. But for a growing
number of these women I suburbia, that dream was becoming a
nightmare. It even got a name: housewife syndrome.
The basic problem was that they were not finding satisfaction and
fulfillment with their supposedly idyllic suburban lives of doing
housework, taking care of the kids, and making life as cozy as possible
for their husbands. Adding to the problem was the fact that people
didn’t talk about such private matters with other people.
Therefore, each woman thought she was the only one suffering such
feelings, thus compounding her misery with guilt for even feeling such
things. Some women saw psychiatrists or got prescriptions for
anti-depressants, feeling that they were mentally ill, which only made
them feel even more inadequate. Others turned to alcohol, which
also made matters worse. Fortunately, one woman started writing.
Her name was Betty Friedan. She was a typical housewife and
mother who also wrote articles on how nice it was to be housewife and
mother for women’s magazines (which, by the way were all run by
men). She also had a nagging feeling that not all was right with
her life. However, being a writer, she had the opportunity
to go out and talk to other women, unlike most housewives who were
suffering at home alone in quiet desperation. During a class
reunion at the women’s college where she had graduated, she started
getting the sense that other women were feeling frustrated and
unfulfilled just as she was. Out of this and subsequent
conversations and research came a book, The Feminine Mystique,
published in 1963, that alerted women that their malaise was not
abnormal and unique, but actually something being felt by millions of
other housewives like themselves. The Feminine Mystique would come to
be the virtual call to arms of the Women’s Liberation movement, and
Betty Friedan became one of the movement’s godmothers.
Other forces were at work as well. For one thing, Margaret
Sanger’s crusade for developing and making available a safe, easy, and
reliable form of birth control bore fruit when she and a researcher
named Gregory “Goody” Pincus had developed the first oral
contraceptive. In 1960 the FDA approved the use and distribution
of the this oral contraceptive that, to a whole new generation of women
whose lives it changed, would be known simply as The Pill.
Secondly, the anti-war movement and counterculture created a reaction
against the warrior ethic, opening the way to wider acceptance of
gentler and more nurturing values associated with
women. Also, there was the spirit of activism in the
1960s. Much like in the previous century, when women first got involved
in various causes, such as abolition, to help other people, women in
the 1960s took part in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements.
And just like in the previous century, they came to realize that their
own issues constituted just as worthy a cause. Catalyzing this
was their treatment as inferior partners in these social
movements. Things came to a head with the Civil Rights Act
(1964), which, among other things, banned sexual discrimination in the
workplace. However, frustration over the federal government’s
inadequate efforts to enforce this clause led in 1966 to the formation
of a new organization: the National Organization of Women (NOW).
The Women’s Liberation Movement was born.
The first major
public event of this new phase was a protest in 1968 against the Miss
America Pageant for treating women as sexual objects. The protest
took the form of an auction where women were sold as pieces of meat as
in a cattle market. The legend is that women also burned their
bras in protest. However, they couldn’t get a fire permit, so no
bras went up in flames. Much like the early suffrage marches,
this protest was met mostly with derision, especially, but not
exclusively, by men. However, NOW’s street theater tactics got
people’s attention and started working their way into their
consciousness.
While mythical bra burnings may remain as people’s primary memories of
the Women’s Liberation Movement, progress was made through the more
pedantic avenues of the courts and Congress. Out of these efforts
came an onrush of laws and legal decisions that dramatically improved
women’s status and influence. In 1972, Title IX was passed,
giving girls and women an equal number of opportunities to benefit from
educational programs, including the right to play sports in
schools. In 1973, in the Roe vs. Wade case the Supreme Court
effectively made abortions safely and legally available to women, the
main argument in favor of this being that women were getting illegal
abortions outside the safe sanitary conditions of medical clinics, thus
costing many of them their lives. Legalized abortion remains the single
most controversial event coming out of the Women’s Liberation Movement.
In 1977, the National Coalition against Domestic Violence was
formed. Many of its early efforts were to call to people’s
attention the fact that domestic violence against women and children
was much more widespread than most people realized, since previously
such things were considered private matters, not to be discussed in
public. Efforts to reduce domestic violence continue today.
Much of women’s progress came in the workplace. In 1978 Congress
passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, protecting women from losing
their jobs because of pregnancy. Women were also breaking down
barriers into various jobs previously considered men’s exclusive
domains. In 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor became the first woman to
sit on the United States Supreme Court. Two years later, Sally
Ride became America’s first woman astronaut. And the year 1992
would be called the “year of the woman” as a record number of women
gained election to public office. However, in the midst of this
there were setbacks, most notably the failure to get the Equal Rights
Amendment ratified in 1982. And while women were making
remarkable progress, there was a price to pay for these gains.
Such rapid changes never come without
putting stress on other parts of society and culture. In
addition, altering traditional gender roles instilled by years of
cultural conditioning inevitably would meet resistance from men.
Not only did these changes threaten their privileged position in
society, they also pressured men to act counter to what they had always
been told was proper behavior. To most men and many women, such
changes were unsettling, if not downright immoral. Therefore, the
legal changes brought on by Women’s Liberation to the workplace and
public life created stresses and strains for both men and women in
their private lives at home.
For men, there was additional pressure based on the theories of
behavioral psychology in the 1970s that cultural conditioning, not
biology, causes most difference between men and women. This led
to the common assumption that traditional male behavior, especially
aggression, could be tamed and that men could be conditioned to be
gentler and more nurturing like women. This pressure to change
led to problems for men from two directions. At home, criticism
of and pressure to change traditional “male” values created frustration
and anger. At the same time, men faced peer pressure to maintain
traditional “male” values and patterns of behavior. Failure to do
that, they were told and conditioned to believe, implied they were
something less than real men. For men, who were conditioned to
keep their feelings bottled up inside, their inability or unwillingness
to verbally express their feelings often led to expressing it in the
only way they knew how: violence.
While it is true that domestic violence has always existed, until now
such matters were kept in the home and not reported. However,
middle class women’s greater sense of empowerment also allowed and
encouraged them to talk about such matters in ways that had been
stifled since the isolation of the nuclear family and suburbia
effectively cut their lines of communication. Now, not only were
they talking about these things in support groups in the private
sector, they also were gaining the political influence to make such
discussions matters of public concern. Thus, while there was
increased domestic violence, it was being reported like never
before. How much more domestic violence there is now compared to
before is impossible to determine, but the extra stresses caused by the
radical changes taking place (including rejection of traditional rules
of etiquette that previously had partially protected women from
violence) certainly added to the problem.
Women faced their own set of new problems. One stemmed largely
from the fact that status was still defined in “male” terms of
successful careers instead of such things as parenting.
Therefore, women often felt they had to downplay their traditional
“female” qualities in order to be accepted and successfully compete in
the business world. To an extent, this was reflected in women’s
fashions with pantsuits as women tried to look the part of business
executives. (By the same token, men wore something called leisure
suits, a fashion I can find no excuse for whatsoever). Just as
there was an underlying assumption that men could be conditioned to be
gentler and more nurturing, there was a corresponding assumption that
women could fulfill both the “male” role in pursuing careers as well as
the “female” roles as mothers. For many career women, this was a
necessity if their husbands refused to take on the less glamorous
domestic chores of cleaning house and changing diapers. Out of
this emerged the stereotype of the “supermom”, the woman who could take
on both a career and raising a family..
However, this led to another problem. Not only did many women
feel overwhelmed by taking on the daunting workload of both having
careers and being mothers, they also felt guilty either for not being
at home with their children or having forsaken having children
altogether so they could pursue careers. Just as men felt
centuries of ancestors were looking down upon them with disapproval for
their taking on domestic and child-raising duties, women felt similar
disapproval from centuries of their own ancestors for not being at home
taking care of the children.
Another problem stemmed from the inauguration of the birth control pill
and the resulting “sexual revolution” that began in the 1960s.
Before this, sex was supposed to be something that only occurred within
the context of marriage. While the Kinsey reports showed that
people didn’t always conform to this standard of behavior, it was much
more common for women to “save themselves for marriage”, if for no
other reason than from the fear of getting pregnant and suffering the
stigma of being single mothers. The Pill largely removed these
fears, but the Sexual Revolution came with a price, especially for
women. For one thing, the idea of sex without emotional
commitment, while appealing at first to many women, wasn’t as easily
attainable as it may have sounded. Many women engaging in what at
first was casual sex often found themselves falling in love with their
partners. While many men also fell in love, it was more common
for men to take undue advantage of the freedom afforded by sex without
commitment and move from partner to partner. They might even
challenge women with the charge that, if they were truly liberated
women, they should prove it by having sex with them. Many women
fell for this faulty logic and were badly hurt as a result. This
was especially true if they got pregnant, because the Pill didn’t
always work, especially if a woman forgot to take it. Therefore,
by the time the baby arrived, the father was often long gone, leaving
many women left broken-hearted and with children to support.
There were other types of fallout from the women’s movement. One
was in education. Previously, women wanting careers had very few
choices, mainly as nurses, secretaries, or teachers. Since
all these were seen as “women’s work”, they tended to be very low
paying jobs. For public schools this meant that a
disproportionate number of the best and brightest of half the
population were being channeled into teaching at bargain prices.
However, schools lost many of their best teachers when better and
higher paying career opportunities opened up for women. To save
public education, taxes would have to be raised to make schools more
competitive in the market place.
Problems also emerged as more families had both parents working
full-time. Finding good quality day-care for small children was one
problem, especially since this was, and largely remains, another area
perceived as “women’s work resulting in low-paying wages. Older
children would often come home from school to empty houses without any
adult supervision. Such “latchkey” children, besides being at
risk in terms of safety, were also more prone to get involved with
drugs and crime.
Unfortunately, not all families stayed together. Along with more
casual attitudes toward sex came more casual attitudes toward marriage
and divorce. Therefore, either the fathers never married their
children’s mothers or divorced them soon after getting married.
Either way, millions of women were left to raise their kids as single
parents. For them, working and raising a family single-handedly was not
a choice. It was a reality they had to deal with by
themselves. For those who got pregnant when they were young and
inexperienced, this made it difficult, and in many cases impossible, to
get an education to prepare them for a professional career. All
that was left for them were low paying jobs that barely paid the bills,
if that. The result was what became known as the “feminization of
poverty”.
Having gained more legal equality in the home and workplace, feminists have turned their focus to such matters as violence against women, sexual harassment, , and issues of race and class disparities among women in the West and across the globe. Some have even referred to this as the Third Wave of the Women’s Movement, since it reaches out to a broader range of women and deals with issues that are not as easily resolved through legislation. Rather, they deal with deeply ingrained cultural values that are just as difficult, if not more so, to tackle.
Two events in the 1980s led to changes on a global scale in the 1990s. The first was the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, followed two years later in the Soviet Union, which also dissolved into a number of new nations, Russia still being overwhelmingly prominent. Thus ended the Cold War, and with it the need to fund corrupt (and financially wasteful) regimes to gain or maintain political influence. The other, less heralded but at least as significant, event was the introduction of the personal computer. While it could be said about any previous decade of the last two centuries, the 1990s saw by far the most dramatic leaps in technology in history. According to a principle referred to as Moore's Law, computing capacity doubles every two years. For example, portable storage capacity has gone from 5.25" floppy discs introduced in 1976 and storing 250 kilobytes on information, to 3.5" discs (1982) with 1.44 megabytes, to zip drives in the late 1990s storing 250 megabytes to portable hard drives a decade later storing 500 gigabytes of information. These represent a jump in storage capacity of 4 million times.
Connecting more and more of these computers across the planet was something known as the Internet, which made possible instantaneous information sharing and business deals on a global scale. Out of this arose any number of multi-national corporations that were more active globally than most nation states. Joining these corporations were millions of investors from across the globe, a phenomenon Thomas Friedman dubbed the "electronic herd". Very rapidly, larger and larger segments of the human race were logging, investing, and buying on the Internet. Together, the end of the Cold War and the computer revolution pushed companies to invest in other countries to get profits rather than political influence. As a result, profits soared, leading to new technologies, more profits, and so on.
However, countries wanting foreign investors had to meet two rigorous criteria. First of all, they had to let the Internet spread in their countries so business could be done efficiently. The problem was that people in general would have access to much more information about the world than repressive dictatorships wanted to allow, since it might give those people ideas about freedom. Secondly, potential investors demanded transparency, meaning governments had to open their books to scrutiny of their ruling policies, liberalize their economic practices, and cut corruption.
As a result, developing countries in the 1990s tended to break down into two categories: the countries that made the necessary reforms to attract foreign investors to develop their economies, and those countries that didn't make such reforms and therefore got no investors or economic growth. Of course this put growing pressure on developing countries (both from outside investors & their own people) to liberalize their political systems and keep peace with their neighbors so business could carry on peacefully. The result of all these forces and pressures, plus the ongoing cycle of foreign investment and spread of industrialization, was rapid globalization, not just of economies, but also of cultures in remote areas of the planet that were increasingly being tied to the mainstream.
However, this was not good news to everyone.
Globalization met growing resistance from people in both developed countries and those with more traditional cultures. For many people in developed countries, foreign investment meant losing their jobs to workers in poorer countries with cheaper labor. There were also groups that feared unrestricted corporate greed was destroying the environment in poorer countries that had little or no environmental. Especially worrisome to growing numbers of people was the issue of global warming. Therefore, meetings of economic leaders in the World Trade Organization were often met with massive, and sometimes violent, demonstrations.
In developing countries, there were two, somewhat different, fears that both saw globalization as a threat. One fear was that they were being left behind by rapidly modernizing neighbors. At the same time, many people felt their traditional cultures and values were being overwhelmed by globalization. In each case, these fears were often expressed in terms of religious backlash and acts of terrorism. Thus as the new millennium approached, what looked to many as a bright new world dawning concealed some very real fears, conflicts, and dangers.Reading in Development
Reading in Development
Reading in Development
Reading in Development
Reading in Development
Reading in Development
Reading in Development
If events in history are like so many pebbles in a pond, then I’m an avalanche.— Santa Claus
To paraphrase Shakespeare, Santa Claus “doth bestride our times like a colossus”—both literally and figuratively. No single man so dominates a season of the year (from Labor Day to Super Bowl Sunday) like he does. Disregarding what we tell our children, disregarding the two Wars of the Elves which triggered two world wars, disregarding the Great Depression (which he caused), and even disregarding the worldwide flu epidemic of 1919 (which he had nothing to do with), there still is no one who has done so much to ruin such a joyous holiday and turn it into the debt-ridden agony of materialistic overindulgence it has become. Maybe that is why we love him so much.
The physical environment has always strongly influenced the flow of history, and the North Pole is no exception. For one thing, the North Pole’s cold climate severely reduced the need for refrigerators, which have an unfortunate tendency to fall on top of and kill people. This allowed the Eskimo population to flourish. The money saved from not buying refrigerators could be used to buy guns, a favorite Eskimo pastime, which makes them very dangerous. Also the long winter nights at the North Pole forced the Eskimos to trade light bulbs to the South Pole for extra light trapped by the Antarctic land mass during its equally long stretches of daylight. (This also accounts for the fact that light bulbs resemble penguins.)
The North Pole’s position on the International Dateline gave it Christmas twice per year (December 11 and March 3). This is appropriate since the North Pole also has most of the world’s green crude toy ore deposits. Teddy Roosevelt once described a lump of this ore as resembling “a gang of Gumby’s trapped for three hours in a microwave oven.,” a remarkable statement since he died decades before microwaves, Gumby, or even accurate time-keeping were invented. The point here is that toy ore needs to be mined and worked. Unfortunately, the one available labor source, Eskimos, refused to work in the mines, preferring either to hibernate or shoot their guns at anything that moves or snores.
During the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s when large scale toy mining and processing was taking place, the next closest source of labor for the North Pole toy mines was Canadian Elves who had formed the last wave of migrants from Siberia to America. Central Asia was their ancestral homeland, but in the late 1100s a chain reaction of events starting in Finland displaced them. Finland, of course, was the homeland of the Clowns who, contrary to popular belief, are a highly evolved subspecies of Homo Sapiens Sapiens (i.e., me). In addition to such natural features as their large red noses, shocks of brightly colored hair (to attract mates), and big floppy feet, Clowns are also endowed with brilliant minds and superhuman strength. Despite our desire to portray them as good natured and harmless circus performers, they are extremely dangerous. In 1180 their relentless leader, Jingles the Merciless (1178-1213) forcibly unified the Clowns and launched a campaign of conquest unparalleled in both its brutality and physical comedy. Using such unspeakable weapons as seltzer bottles loaded with Greek fire similar to our modern napalm), and catapults firing giant cyanide cream pies, the Clowns carved out a savage empire stretching from Finland to Vladivostok. The Empire of the Bozos (from the clown word meaning “pie throwing maniacs” even handed Genghis Khan’s Mongol Horde a humiliating defeat. The Mongols in turn crashed into the Elves, half of whom fled into Siberia, the other half to North America, where they lived peacefully until the 1800s.
Elves were well suited to toy mining for several reasons. They don’t eat much. They are small and thus easy to push around. And they have big ears that let them hear any stalking killer penguins, a particularly large and vicious type of penguin that inhabits caves, and toy mineshafts. All that was needed was someone to lead the Eskimos in raids to capture the Elves. That someone was St. Nicholas (AKA Santa Claus).
St. Nicholas, the thirty-eighth son of an impoverished chimney sweep, was born in Norway around 1850. Large size, both in terms of numbers and bulk, was a family trait. His ancestors had been a special class of Viking berserkers (from the Clown word Bozo) who would jump on enemy ships and tip them over with their weight. How he came to be known as a saint is not completely clear, although most accounts revolve around him visiting Rome as a youth and kidnapping the Pope and forcibly extracting the honor from him.
Because of his size, Nicholas (and the rest of his family, for that matter) were ill suited for chimney sweeping, so it remains a mystery why that was traditionally the family profession. In fact, in 1877, young Nicholas got caught in a chimney, a sight that attracted a large crowd of spectators. His solution was both ingenious and lethal. By eating huge amounts of food, his body mass expanded to the point that the chimney exploded, killing 37 people in what has been known ever after as the great chimney massacre. Nicholas was committed to an insane asylum, not just for the killing, but also for thinking he could fit in a chimney in the first place. Son afterward, he jumped a guard, flattened him, and fled to the North Pole.
The Eskimos made St. Nicholas their leader after he mowed five of them down in a gunfight and promised the rest vacations in Florida. (He actually sent them to Cleveland, but they didn’t know the difference.) Then, from 1882-85 he launched a series of savage raids into Saskatchewan (“Land of the Big Ears”) where he rounded Elves for working in his toy mines. It was at this time that the Elves gave him the name Santa Claus, most likely a Cheyenne word meaning “fat man with a whip”.
But a new problem arose: Canadian Elves may not eat much, but they are picky eaters who require the finest of French cuisine. With Elves dropping like flies from self-starvation, Santa launched a new set of raids, this time into Quebec to get French chefs (1889-92). Meanwhile the United States had been watching events with growing concern and in 1900 invoked the Monroe Doctrine against the “Norwegian Nemesis” as the press called Santa. (Contrary to popular belief, the Monroe Doctrine didn’t get its name from US President Monroe. Rather, it was the maiden name of Santa’ wife.) What ensued was the First War of the Elves (1900-01).
Although it seemed to most that the United States should win an easy victory, Santa’s terrible arsenal of “toys” (typically known as toys of Mass Destruction, or TMD) gave him a decisive edge. For one thing, the Eskimos had harnessed and trained killer penguins to use spiked clubs and fight in packs. In addition, there was Santa’s alliance with the Clowns who had been on the run since the breakup of the Empire of the Bozos in the 1600s. Because Santa himself was 1/16th clown, the Clowns elected him Grand High Bozo and followed him into battle with all the ferocious defiance of death known to their kind. In addition to their catapults throwing giant cyanide cream pies, and seltzer bottles that shot Greek Fire, the Clowns deployed their newly developed tiny tricycles armed with Martian death beams. Last and most decisive, was Santa’s domestication of the flying reindeer who, when hitched to the heavily armed D-1 combat and Delivery Sleigh, proved to be the ultimate weapon of the day.
Early attempts to domesticate the flying reindeer met with limited success. Elf trainers first tried to ride their backs, but were too small to see over the antlers. Next they sat on the reindeer’s head and tried to steer them using the antlers as a sort of handlebars. However, the elves’ tiny feet dangling down blinded the reindeer, causing them to crash into trees (a most puzzling phenomenon to historians, since there are no trees at the North Pole). Finally, the elves tried hitching the reindeer up to a sleigh, and the S-1 Combat and Delivery Sleigh was born. Given Santa’s weight and the heavy arsenal of toys such sleighs had to bear, teams of eight tiny reindeer had to be used for each sleigh. Although its turning radius was extremely wide, the S-1 was lightning quick (literally) and more than a match for the hydrogen-filled zeppelins the Americans used against them.
The American army marched northward, totally unaware of the disaster about to befall them. Suddenly, hundreds of Elf-driven sleighs swooped out of the skies, pouring bombs and razor sharp candy canes on the bewildered and stunned Americans. Then a merciless barrage of cyanide cream pies sent them retreating into hordes of killer penguins who had infiltrated their ranks disguised as household servants.
The First War of the Elves was such a total and unexpected defeat for the United States that American history books never mention it. However, the Americans being a resilient lot, were determined to get revenge. First they developed the airplane in 1903 to combat the flying reindeer. Then in 1914, they cleverly manipulated events in Europe to start World Wa4r I, merely as a testing ground for the airplane’s combat capabilities.
In 1926 the United States invoked a toy embargo against Santa to provoke him into war. The resulting Second War of the Elves (1927-8) reversed the decision of the first war. The airplane proved to be much more maneuverable and easier to mass-produce than the slowly reproducing flying reindeer. Fake Santa’s put in Canadian shopping malls confused the Elves and disrupted Santa’s command structure by giving absurd orders that the elves mindlessly obeyed. Finally, the Americans cleverly planted peppermint candy canes in the Elves’ rations, giving them terrible tummy aches that made them cry.
The victors forced the harsh Treaty of the Tundra on Santa in 1929. Santa could keep his toy mines and slave empire, but his air force was reduced to one sleigh and his eight smallest reindeer (a clause he flagrantly violated). He must also pay a crippling indemnity of free toys each Christmas to all the good children in the world. In the famous “Big Top Clause”, the Clowns were dispersed to circuses across the world and forced to do cruel parodies of themselves while their families were held hostage in nearby trailers. Two of these Clowns, Ronald the Ripper and Rambo MacDonald, escaped with some wild dogs from a circus in southern California and started a well known hamburger chain.
The Treaty of the Tundra had far-reaching and unforeseen effects. In order to meet his huge toy payments, Santa called in his loans from Swiss Banks, and act that reverberated across the Atlantic by triggering the Stock Market Crash and Great Depression. By 1934,, most toy mines and refineries had shut down, throwing Christmas into a crisis. Santa’s response was swift and effective. First of all, he spread rumors that he did not exist, thus pressuring parents to buy toys to keep their children happy. Secondly, he met with American business and signed the “November Contract, which established the practice of “shopping days early” starting right after Thanksgiving. These measures spurred toy sales and increased profits to vastly exceed the cost of Santa’s toy indemnity each Christmas. Santa was back in business, and the world started to emerge from the Depression.
Then came World War II (1939-45), started by Adolf Hitler (who had been a very naughty boy, only getting coal in his stocking each Christmas). Among his victims was Santa’s native land of Norway, which caused Santa to shift from toy production to that of weapons. It was probably the most decisive development of the war and would have a profound effect on the direction of toy production after 1945.
With the war over, Santa’s profits skyrocketed to new heights. The terms of the November Contract successively expanded the Christmas season to Halloween (the October Contract in 1973), Labor Day (the September Contract in 1984) and Super Bowl Sunday (the January Contract in 1987). Negotiations are now underway to extend it further to Valentine’s Day. Much stricter behavior standards plus electronic surveillance of all homes and public buildings allowed Santa to severely restrict the number of children getting free toys and cutting into his profits. Children in communist countries were automatically excluded, largely because of Santa’s personal dislike of his distant cousin, Joseph Stalin.
In 1982, Santa moved his headquarters to Oak Brook, Illinois, next door to the headquarters of his old Clown ally and hamburger tycoon, Ronald the Ripper. Pipelines pump raw toy sludge from the North Pole to the United States where toy factories, cleverly disguised as military bases and missile silos process this sludge into toys. The leftover toy slag is processed into guacamole and sold in a popular taco chain, which Santa also owns. Distribution of toys is done by Santa Clones who undergo a rigorous program at Camp Santa outside of Birmingham, Alabama. Here they are trained in how to dress and act like Santa, use a whip and various sorts of automatic weapons, and fly the S-20, the latest version of the combat and delivery sleigh. Santa Clones have been traditionally recruited mainly from ex-convicts and the seedier elements of society. This initially created a problem of Santa Clones looting and trashing people’s homes every Christmas Eve. In 1953, the same year Stalin died, Santa signed the Tollhouse Accord whereby Santa Clones would refrain from looting any homes where there were cookies and milk left out for them.
Operating from American military bases and aircraft carriers, the corps of Santa Clones can easily deliver all their toys in one night to the estimated 280,000 good children in the world. This surprisingly low figure is the result of a loophole in the Treaty of the Tundra that allows Santa to set the standard of what constitute a good boy or girl. The specific terms of these criteria remain a highly classified state secret.
Concern about depletion of toy ore reserves led to a failed attempt at mining Martian toy ore, which unfortunately turned out to be radioactive. The movie, “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” is based on this attempt, although the only authentic footage of Santa in the film is of the battle scenes. The rest of the movie is totally ridiculous and should not be taken seriously.
Overall, the future looks bright for Santa as he maintains an iron grip on our throats and wallets. As the popular song warns:
“He’s bringing his elves
and his S-20 Sleigh
He’ll get you so fast
There’s no time to pray
Santa Claus is coming to town”