Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
History of Mesopotamia
historical region, Asia
Table of Contents
Introduction
Mesopotamia to the end of the Old Babylonian period
Mesopotamia to the end of the Achaemenian period
Mesopotamia from c. 320 bce to c. 620 ce
Sites associated with ancient Mesopotamian history.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
History of Mesopotamia, history of the region in southwestern Asia where the world’s earliest civilization developed. The name comes from a Greek word meaning “between rivers,” referring to the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but the region can be broadly defined to include the area that is now eastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and most of Iraq. The region was the centre of a culture whose influence extended throughout the Middle East and as far as the Indus valley, Egypt, and the Mediterranean.
This article covers the history of Mesopotamia from the prehistoric period up to the Arab conquest in the 7th century ce. For the history of the region in the succeeding periods, see Iraq, history of. For a discussion of the religions of ancient Mesopotamia, see Mesopotamian religion. See also art and architecture, Mesopotamian. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Mesopotamia to the end of the Old Babylonian period
The origins of Mesopotamian history
The background
In the narrow sense, Mesopotamia is the area between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, north or northwest of the bottleneck at Baghdad, in modern Iraq; it is Al-Jazīrah (“The Island”) of the Arabs. South of this lies Babylonia, named after the city of Babylon. However, in the broader sense, the name Mesopotamia has come to be used for the area bounded on the northeast by the Zagros Mountains and on the southwest by the edge of the Arabian Plateau and stretching from the Persian Gulf in the southeast to the spurs of the Anti-Taurus Mountains in the northwest. Only from the latitude of Baghdad do the Euphrates and Tigris truly become twin rivers, the rāfidān of the Arabs, which have constantly changed their courses over the millennia. The low-lying plain of the Kārūn River in Persia has always been closely related to Mesopotamia, but it is not considered part of Mesopotamia as it forms its own river system.
Mesopotamia, south of Al-Ramādī (about 70 miles, or 110 kilometres, west of Baghdad) on the Euphrates and the bend of the Tigris below Sāmarrāʾ (about 70 miles north-northwest of Baghdad), is flat alluvial land. Between Baghdad and the mouth of the Shaṭṭ al-ʿArab (the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, where it empties into the Persian Gulf) there is a difference in height of only about 100 feet (30 metres). As a result of the slow flow of the water, there are heavy deposits of silt, and the riverbeds are raised. Consequently, the rivers often overflow their banks (and may even change their course) when they are not protected by high dikes. In recent times they have been regulated above Baghdad by the use of escape channels with overflow reservoirs. The extreme south is a region of extensive marshes and reed swamps, hawrs, which, probably since early times, have served as an area of refuge for oppressed and displaced peoples. The supply of water is not regular; as a result of the high average temperatures and a very low annual rainfall, the ground of the plain of latitude 35° N is hard and dry and unsuitable for plant cultivation for at least eight months in the year. Consequently, agriculture without risk of crop failure, which seems to have begun in the higher rainfall zones and in the hilly borders of Mesopotamia in the 10th millennium bce, began in Mesopotamia itself, the real heart of the civilization, only after artificial irrigation had been invented, bringing water to large stretches of territory through a widely branching network of canals. Since the ground is extremely fertile and, with irrigation and the necessary drainage, will produce in abundance, southern Mesopotamia became a land of plenty that could support a considerable population. The cultural superiority of north Mesopotamia, which may have lasted until about 4000 bce, was finally overtaken by the south when the people there had responded to the challenge of their situation.
The present climatic conditions are fairly similar to those of 8,000 years ago. An English survey of ruined settlements in the area 30 miles around ancient Hatra (180 miles northwest of Baghdad) has shown that the southern limits of the zone in which agriculture is possible without artificial irrigation has remained unchanged since the first settlement of Al-Jazīrah.
The availability of raw materials is a historical factor of great importance, as is the dependence on those materials that had to be imported. In Mesopotamia, agricultural products and those from stock breeding, fisheries, date palm cultivation, and reed industries—in short, grain, vegetables, meat, leather, wool, horn, fish, dates, and reed and plant-fibre products—were available in plenty and could easily be produced in excess of home requirements to be exported. There are bitumen springs at Hīt (90 miles northwest of Baghdad) on the Euphrates (the Is of Herodotus). On the other hand, wood, stone, and metal were rare or even entirely absent. The date palm—virtually the national tree of Iraq—yields a wood suitable only for rough beams and not for finer work. Stone is mostly lacking in southern Mesopotamia, although limestone is quarried in the desert about 35 miles to the west and “Mosul marble” is found not far from the Tigris in its middle reaches. Metal can only be obtained in the mountains, and the same is true of precious and semiprecious stones. Consequently, southern Mesopotamia in particular was destined to be a land of trade from the start. Only rarely could “empires” extending over a wider area guarantee themselves imports by plundering or by subjecting neighbouring regions.
The raw material that epitomizes Mesopotamian civilization is clay: in the almost exclusively mud-brick architecture and in the number and variety of clay figurines and pottery artifacts, Mesopotamia bears the stamp of clay as does no other civilization, and nowhere in the world but in Mesopotamia and the regions over which its influence was diffused was clay used as the vehicle for writing. Such phrases as cuneiform civilization, cuneiform literature, and cuneiform law can apply only where people had had the idea of using soft clay not only for bricks and jars and for the jar stoppers on which a seal could be impressed as a mark of ownership but also as the vehicle for impressed signs to which established meanings were assigned—an intellectual achievement that amounted to nothing less than the invention of writing.
The character and influence of ancient Mesopotamia
Questions as to what ancient Mesopotamian civilization did and did not accomplish, how it influenced its neighbours and successors, and what its legacy has transmitted are posed from the standpoint of modern civilization and are in part coloured by ethical overtones, so that the answers can only be relative. Modern scholars assume the ability to assess the sum total of an “ancient Mesopotamian civilization”; but, since the publication of an article by the Assyriologist Benno Landsberger on “Die Eigenbegrifflichkeit der babylonischen Welt” (1926; “The Distinctive Conceptuality of the Babylonian World”), it has become almost a commonplace to call attention to the necessity of viewing ancient Mesopotamia and its civilization as an independent entity.
Ancient Mesopotamia had many languages and cultures; its history is broken up into many periods and eras; it had no real geographic unity, and above all no permanent capital city, so that by its very variety it stands out from other civilizations with greater uniformity, particularly that of Egypt. The script and the pantheon constitute the unifying factors, but in these also Mesopotamia shows its predilection for multiplicity and variety. Written documents were turned out in quantities, and there are often many copies of a single text. The pantheon consisted of more than 1,000 deities, even though many divine names may apply to different manifestations of a single god. During 3,000 years of Mesopotamian civilization, each century gave birth to the next. Thus classical Sumerian civilization influenced that of the Akkadians, and the Ur III empire, which itself represented a Sumero-Akkadian synthesis, exercised its influence on the first quarter of the 2nd millennium bce. With the Hittites, large areas of Anatolia were infused with the culture of Mesopotamia from 1700 bce onward. Contacts, via Mari, with Ebla in Syria, some 30 miles south of Aleppo, go back to the 24th century bce, so that links between Syrian and Palestinian scribal schools and Babylonian civilization during the Amarna period (14th century bce) may have had much older predecessors. At any rate, the similarity of certain themes in cuneiform literature and the Hebrew Bible, such as the story of the Flood or the motif of the righteous sufferer, is due to such early contacts and not to direct borrowing.
The achievements of ancient Mesopotamia
The world of mathematics and astronomy owes much to the Babylonians—for instance, the sexagesimal system for the calculation of time and angles, which is still practical because of the multiple divisibility of the number 60; the Greek day of 12 “double-hours”; and the zodiac and its signs. In many cases, however, the origins and routes of borrowings are obscure, as in the problem of the survival of ancient Mesopotamian legal theory.
The achievement of the civilization itself may be expressed in terms of its best points—moral, aesthetic, scientific, and, not least, literary. Legal theory flourished and was sophisticated early on, being expressed in several collections of legal decisions, the so-called codes, of which the best-known is the Code of Hammurabi. Throughout these codes recurs the concern of the ruler for the weak, the widow, and the orphan—even if, sometimes, the phrases were regrettably only literary clichés. The aesthetics of art are too much governed by subjective values to be assessed in absolute terms, yet certain peaks stand out above the rest, notably the art of Uruk IV, the seal engraving of the Akkad period, and the relief sculpture of Ashurbanipal. Nonetheless, there is nothing in Mesopotamia to match the sophistication of Egyptian art. Science the Mesopotamians had, of a kind, though not in the sense of Greek science. From its beginnings in Sumer before the middle of the 3rd millennium bce, Mesopotamian science was characterized by endless, meticulous enumeration and ordering into columns and series, with the ultimate ideal of including all things in the world but without the wish or ability to synthesize and reduce the material to a system. Not a single general scientific law has been found, and only rarely has the use of analogy been found. Nevertheless, it remains a highly commendable achievement that Pythagoras’ law (that the sum of the squares on the two shorter sides of a right-angled triangle equals the square on the longest side), even though it was never formulated, was being applied as early as the 18th century bce. Technical accomplishments were perfected in the building of the ziggurats (temple towers resembling pyramids), with their huge bulk, and in irrigation, both in practical execution and in theoretical calculations. At the beginning of the 3rd millennium bce, an artificial stone often regarded as a forerunner of concrete was in use at Uruk (160 miles south-southeast of modern Baghdad), but the secret of its manufacture apparently was lost in subsequent years.
Ziggurat at Ur (modern Tall al-Muqayyar, Iraq).Spectrum Colour Library/Heritage-Images/Imagestate
Writing pervaded all aspects of life and gave rise to a highly developed bureaucracy—one of the most tenacious legacies of the ancient Middle East. Remarkable organizing ability was required to administer huge estates, in which, under the 3rd dynasty of Ur, for example, it was not unusual to prepare accounts for thousands of cattle or tens of thousands of bundles of reeds. Similar figures are attested at Ebla, three centuries earlier.
Above all, the literature of Mesopotamia is one of its finest cultural achievements. Though there are many modern anthologies and chrestomathies (compilations of useful learning), with translations and paraphrases of Mesopotamian literature, as well as attempts to write its history, it cannot truly be said that “cuneiform literature” has been resurrected to the extent that it deserves. There are partly material reasons for this: many clay tablets survive only in a fragmentary condition, and duplicates that would restore the texts have not yet been discovered, so that there are still large gaps. A further reason is the inadequate knowledge of the languages: insufficient acquaintance with the vocabulary and, in Sumerian, difficulties with the grammar. Consequently, another generation of Assyriologists will pass before the great myths, epics, lamentations, hymns, “law codes,” wisdom literature, and pedagogical treatises can be presented in such a way that modern readers can fully appreciate the high level of literary creativity of those times.
The classical and medieval views of Mesopotamia; its rediscovery in modern times
Before the first excavations in Mesopotamia, about 1840, nearly 2,000 years had passed during which knowledge of the ancient Middle East was derived from three sources only: the Bible, Greek and Roman authors, and the excerpts from the writings of Berosus, a Babylonian who wrote in Greek. In 1800 very little more was known than in 800 ce, although these sources had served to stir the imagination of poets and artists, down to Sardanapalus (1821) by the 19th-century English poet Lord Byron.
Apart from the building of the Tower of Babel, the Hebrew Bible mentions Mesopotamia only in those historical contexts in which the kings of Assyria and Babylonia affected the course of events in Israel and Judah: in particular Tiglath-pileser III, Shalmaneser V, and Sennacherib, with their policy of deportation, and the Babylonian Exile introduced by Nebuchadrezzar II. Of the Greeks, Herodotus of Halicarnassus (5th century bce, a contemporary of Xerxes I and Artaxerxes I) was the first to report on “Babylon and the rest of Assyria”; at that date the Assyrian empire had been overthrown for more than 100 years. The Athenian Xenophon took part in an expedition (during 401–399 bce) of Greek mercenaries who crossed Anatolia, made their way down the Euphrates as far as the vicinity of Baghdad, and returned up the Tigris after the famous Battle of Cunaxa. In his Cyropaedia Xenophon describes the final struggle between Cyrus II and the Neo-Babylonian empire. Later, the Greeks adopted all kinds of fabulous tales about King Ninus, Queen Semiramis, and King Sardanapalus. These stories are described mainly in the historical work of Diodorus Siculus (1st century bce), who based them on the reports of a Greek physician, Ctesias (405–359 bce). Herodotus saw Babylon with his own eyes, and Xenophon gave an account of travels and battles. All later historians, however, wrote at second or third hand, with one exception, Berosus (born c. 340 bce), who emigrated at an advanced age to the Aegean island of Cos, where he is said to have composed the three books of the Babylōniaka. Unfortunately, only extracts from them survive, prepared by one Alexander Polyhistor (1st century bce), who, in his turn, served as a source for the Church Father Eusebius (died 342 ce). Berosus derided the “Greek historians” who had so distorted the history of his country. He knew, for example, that it was not Semiramis who founded the city of Babylon, but he was himself the prisoner of his own environment and cannot have known more about the history of his land than was known in Babylonia itself in the 4th century bce.
Berosus’ first book dealt with the beginnings of the world and with a myth of a composite being, Oannes, half fish, half man, who came ashore in Babylonia at a time when men still lived like the wild beasts. Oannes taught them the essentials of civilization: writing, the arts, law, agriculture, surveying, and architecture. The name Oannes must have been derived from the cuneiform U’anna (Sumerian) or Umanna (Akkadian), a second name of the mythical figure Adapa, the bringer of civilization. The second book of Berosus contained the Babylonian king list from the beginning to King Nabonassar (Nabu-naṣir, 747–734 bce), a contemporary of Tiglath-pileser III. Berosus’ tradition, beginning with a list of primeval kings before the Flood, is a reliable one; it agrees with the tradition of the Sumerian king list, and even individual names can be traced back exactly to their Sumerian originals. Even the immensely long reigns of the primeval kings, which lasted as long as “18 sars” (= 18 × 3,600 = 64,800) of years, are found in Berosus. Furthermore, he was acquainted with the story of the Flood, with Cronus as its instigator and Xisuthros (or Ziusudra) as its hero, and with the building of an ark. The third book is presumed to have dealt with the history of Babylonia from Nabonassar to the time of Berosus himself.
Diodorus made the mistake of locating Nineveh on the Euphrates, and Xenophon gave an account of two cities, Larissa (probably modern Nimrūd [ancient Kalakh], 20 miles southeast of modern Mosul) and Mespila (ancient Nineveh, just north of Mosul). The name Mespila probably was nothing more than the word of the local Aramaeans for ruins; there can be no clearer instance of the rift that had opened between the ancient Middle East and the classical West. In sharp contrast, the East had a tradition that the ruins opposite Mosul (in north Iraq) concealed ancient Nineveh. When a Spanish rabbi from Navarre, Benjamin of Tudela, was traveling in the Middle East between 1160 and 1173, Jews and Muslims alike knew the position of the grave of the prophet Jonah. The credit for the rediscovery of the ruins of Babylon goes to an Italian, Pietro della Valle, who correctly identified the vast ruins north of modern Al-Ḥillah, Iraq (60 miles south of Baghdad); he must have seen there the large rectangular tower that represented the ancient ziggurat. Previously, other travelers had sought the Tower of Babel in two other monumental ruins: Birs Nimrūd, the massive brick structure of the ziggurat of ancient Borsippa (modern Birs, near Al-Ḥillah), vitrified by lightning, and the ziggurat of the Kassite capital, Dur Kurigalzu, at Burj ʿAqarqūf, 22 miles west of Baghdad. Pietro della Valle brought back to Europe the first specimens of cuneiform writing, stamped brick, of which highly impressionistic reproductions were made. Thereafter, European travelers visited Mesopotamia with increasing frequency, among them Carsten Niebuhr (an 18th-century German traveler), Claudius James Rich (a 19th-century Orientalist and traveler), and Ker Porter (a 19th-century traveler).
In modern times a third Middle Eastern ruin drew visitors from Europe—Persepolis, in the land of Persia east of Susiana, near modern Shīrāz, Iran. In 1602, reports had filtered back to Europe of inscriptions that were not in Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Georgian, or Greek. In 1700 an Englishman, Thomas Hyde, coined the term “cuneiform” for these inscriptions, and by the middle of the 18th century it was known that the Persepolis inscriptions were related to those of Babylon. Niebuhr distinguished three separate alphabets (Babylonian, Elamite, and Old Persian cuneiform). The first promising attempt at decipherment was made by the German philologist Georg Friedrich Grotefend in 1802, by use of the kings’ names in the Old Persian versions of the trilingual inscriptions, although his later efforts led him up a blind alley. Thereafter, the efforts to decipher cuneiform gradually developed in the second half of the 19th century into a discipline of ancient Oriental philology, which was based on results established through the pioneering work of Emile Burnouf, Edward Hincks, Sir Henry Rawlinson, and many others.
Today this subject is still known as Assyriology, because at the end of the 19th century the great majority of cuneiform texts came from the Assyrian city of Nineveh, in particular from the library of King Ashurbanipal in the mound of Kuyunjik at Nineveh.
Modern archaeological excavations
More than 150 years separate the first excavations in Mesopotamia—adventurous expeditions involving great personal risks, far from the protection of helpful authorities—from those of the present day with their specialist staffs, modern technical equipment, and objectives wider than the mere search for valuable antiquities. The progress of six generations of excavators has led to a situation in which less is recovered more accurately; in other words, the finds are observed, measured, and photographed as precisely as possible. At first digging was unsystematic, with the consequence that, although huge quantities of clay tablets and large and small antiquities were brought to light, the locations of the finds were rarely described with any accuracy. Not until the beginning of the 20th century did excavators learn to isolate the individual bricks in the walls that had previously been erroneously thought to be nothing more than packed clay; the result was that various characteristic brick types could be distinguished and successive architectural levels established. Increased care in excavation does, of course, carry with it the risk that the pace of discovery will slow down. Moreover, the eyes of the local inhabitants are now sharpened and their appetite for finds is whetted, so that clandestine diggers have established themselves as the unwelcome colleagues of the archaeologists.
A result of the technique of building with mud brick (mass production of baked bricks was impossible because of the shortage of fuel) was that the buildings were highly vulnerable to the weather and needed constant renewal; layers of settlement rapidly built up, creating a tell (Arabic: tall), a mound of occupation debris that is the characteristic ruin form of Mesopotamia. The word itself appears among the most original vocabulary of the Semitic languages and is attested as early as the end of the 3rd millennium bce. Excavation is made more difficult by this mound formation, since both horizontal and vertical axes have to be taken into account. Moreover, the depth of each level is not necessarily constant, and foundation trenches may be dug down into earlier levels. A further problem is that finds may have been removed from their original context in antiquity. Short-lived settlements that did not develop into mounds mostly escape observation, but aerial photography can now pick out ground discolorations that betray the existence of settlements. Districts with a high water level today, such as the reed marshes (hawrs), or ruins that are covered by modern settlements, such as Arbīl (ancient Arbela), some 200 miles north of Baghdad, or sites that are surmounted by shrines and tombs of holy men are closed to archaeological research.
Excavations in Mesopotamia have mostly been national undertakings (France, England, the United States, Germany, Iraq, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, Japan, and the former Soviet Union), but joint expeditions like the one sent to Ur (190 miles south-southeast of Baghdad) in the 1920s have become more frequent since the 1970s. The history of archaeological research in Mesopotamia falls into four categories, represented by phases of differing lengths: the first, and by far the longest, begins with the French expedition to Nineveh (1842) and Khorsabad (the ancient Dur Sharrukin, 20 miles northeast of modern Mosul; 1843–55) and that of the English to Nineveh (1846–55) and Nimrūd (ancient Kalakh, biblical Calah; 1845, with interruptions until 1880). This marked the beginning of the “classic” excavations in the important ancient capitals, where spectacular finds might be anticipated. The principal gains were the Assyrian bull colossi and wall reliefs and the library of Ashurbanipal from Nineveh, although the ground plans of temples and palaces were quite as valuable. While these undertakings had restored the remains of the Neo-Assyrian empire of the 1st millennium bce, from 1877 onward new French initiatives in Telloh (Arabic: Tall Lōḥā, 155 miles southeast of Baghdad, reached almost 2,000 years further back into the past. There they rediscovered a people whose language had already been encountered in bilingual texts from Nineveh—the Sumerians. Telloh (ancient Girsu) yielded not only inscribed material that, quite apart from its historical interest, was critical for the establishment of the chronology of the second half of the 3rd millennium bce but also many artistic masterpieces. Thereafter excavations in important cities spread to form a network including Susa, 150 miles west of Eṣfahān in Iran (France; 1884 onward); Nippur, 90 miles southeast of Baghdad (the United States; 1889 onward); Babylon, 55 miles south of Baghdad (Germany; 1899–1917 and again from 1957 onward); Ashur, modern Ash-Sharqāṭ, 55 miles south of Mosul (Germany; 1903–14); Uruk (Germany; 1912–13 and from 1928 onward); and Ur (England and the United States; 1918–34). Mention also should be made of the German excavations at Boğazköy in central Turkey, the ancient Hattusa, capital of the Hittite empire, which have been carried on, with interruptions, since 1906.
The second phase began in 1925 with the commencement of American excavations at Yorgan Tepe (ancient Nuzi), 140 miles north of Baghdad, a provincial centre with Old Akkadian, Old Assyrian, and Middle Assyrian/Hurrian levels. There followed, among others, French excavations at Arslan Tash (ancient Hadatu; 1928), at Tall al-Aḥmar (ancient Til Barsib; 1929–31), and above all at Tall Ḥarīrī (ancient Mari; 1933 onward) and American excavations in the Diyālā region (east of Baghdad), at Tall al-Asmar (ancient Eshnunna), at Khafājī, and at other sites. Thus, excavation in Mesopotamia had moved away from the capital cities to include the “provinces.” Simultaneously, it expanded beyond the limits of Mesopotamia and Susiana and revealed outliers of “cuneiform civilization” on the Syrian coast at Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit; France, 1929 onward) and on the Orontes of northern Syria at Al-ʿAṭshānah (ancient Alalakh; England, 1937–39 and 1947–49), while, since 1954, Danish excavations on the islands of Bahrain and Faylakah, off the Tigris-Euphrates delta, have disclosed staging posts between Mesopotamia and the Indus valley civilization. Short-lived salvage operations have been undertaken at the site of the Assad Dam on the middle Euphrates (e.g., German excavations at Ḥabūba al-Kabīra, 1971–76). Italian excavations at Tall Mardīkh (ancient Ebla; 1967 onward) have yielded spectacular results, including several thousand cuneiform tablets dating from the 24th century bce.
In its third phase, archaeological research in Mesopotamia and its neighbouring lands has probed back into prehistory and protohistory. The objective of these investigations, initiated by American archaeologists, was to trace as closely as possible the successive chronological stages in the progress of man from hunter-gatherer to settled farmer and, finally, to city dweller. These excavations are strongly influenced by the methods of the prehistorian, and the principal objective is no longer the search for texts and monuments. Apart from the American investigations, Iraq itself has taken part in this phase of the history of investigation, as has Japan since 1956 and the former Soviet Union from 1969 until the early 1990s.
Finally, the fourth category, which runs parallel with the first three phases, is represented by “surveys,” which do not concentrate on individual sites but attempt to define the relations between single settlements, their positioning along canals or rivers, or the distribution of central settlements and their satellites. Since shortages of time, money, and an adequate task force preclude the thorough investigation of large numbers of individual sites, the method employed is that of observing and collecting finds from the surface. Of these finds, the latest in date will give a rough termination date for the duration of the settlement, but, since objects from earlier, if not the earliest, levels work their way to the surface with a predictable degree of certainty or are exposed in rain gullies, an intensive search of the surface of the mound allows conclusions as to the total period of occupation with some degree of probability. If the individual periods of settlement are marked on superimposed maps, a very clear picture is obtained of the fluctuations in settlement patterns, of the changing proportions between large and small settlements, and of the equally changeable systems of riverbeds and irrigation canals—for, when points on the map lie in line, it is a legitimate assumption that they were once connected by watercourses.
During the four phases outlined, the objectives and methods of excavation have broadened and shifted. At first the chief aim was the recovery of valuable finds suitable for museums, but at the same time there was, from early on, considerable interest in the architecture of Mesopotamia, which has won for it the place it deserves in architectural history. Alongside philology, art history has also made great strides, building up a chronological framework by the combination of evidence from stratigraphic and stylistic criteria, particularly in pottery and cylinder seals. The discovery of graves and a variety of burial customs has thrown new light on the history of religion, stimulated by the interest of biblical studies. While pottery was previously collected for purely aesthetic motives or from the point of view of art history, attention has come to be paid increasingly to everyday wares, and greater insight into social and economic history is based on knowledge of the distribution and frequency of shapes and materials. The observation and investigation of animal bones and plant remains (pollen and seed analysis) have supplied invaluable information on the process of domestication, the conditions of animal husbandry, and the advances in agriculture. Such studies demand the cooperation of both zoologists and paleobotanists. In addition, microscopic analysis of the floors of excavated buildings may help to identify the functions of individual rooms.
The emergence of Mesopotamian civilization
The Late Neolithic Period and the Chalcolithic Period. Between about 10,000 bce and the genesis of large permanent settlements, the following stages of development are distinguishable, some of which run parallel: (1) the change to sedentary life, or the transition from continual or seasonal change of abode, characteristic of hunter-gatherers and the earliest cattle breeders, to life in one place over a period of several years or even permanently, (2) the transition from experimental plant cultivation to the deliberate and calculated farming of grains and leguminous plants, (3) the erection of houses and the associated “settlement” of the gods in temples, (4) the burial of the dead in cemeteries, (5) the invention of clay vessels, made at first by hand, then turned on the wheel and fired to ever greater degrees of hardness, at the same time receiving almost invariably decoration of incised designs or painted patterns, (6) the development of specialized crafts and the distribution of labour, and (7) metal production (the first use of metal—copper—marks the transition from the Late Neolithic to the Chalcolithic Period).
These stages of development can only rarely be dated on the basis of a sequence of levels at one site alone. Instead, an important role is played by the comparison of different sites, starting with the assumption that what is simpler and technically less accomplished is older. In addition to this type of dating, which can be only relative, the radiocarbon, or carbon-14, method has proved to be an increasingly valuable tool since the 1950s. By this method the known rate of decay of the radioactive carbon isotope (carbon-14) in wood, horn, plant fibre, and bone allows the time that has elapsed since the “death” of the material under examination to be calculated. Although a plus/minus discrepancy of up to 200 years has to be allowed for, this is not such a great disadvantage in the case of material 6,000 to 10,000 years old. Even when skepticism is necessary because of the use of an inadequate sample, carbon-14 dates are still very welcome as confirmation of dates arrived at by other means. Moreover, radiocarbon ages can be converted to more precise dates through comparisons with data obtained by dendrochronology, a method of absolute age determination based on the analysis of the annual rings of trees.
The first agriculture, the domestication of animals, and the transition to sedentary life took place in regions in which animals that were easily domesticated, such as sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs, and the wild prototypes of grains and leguminous plants, such as wheat, barley, bitter vetch, pea, and lentil, were present. Such centres of dispersion may have been the valleys and grassy border regions of the mountains of Iran, Iraq, Anatolia, Syria, and Palestine, but they also could have been, say, the northern slopes of the Hindu Kush. As settled life, which caused a drop in infant mortality, led to the increase of the population, settlement spread out from these centres into the plains—although it must be remembered that this process, described as the Neolithic Revolution, in fact took thousands of years.
Representative of the first settlements on the borders of Mesopotamia are the adjacent sites of Zawi Chemi Shanidar and Shanidar itself, which lie northwest of Rawāndūz. They date from the transition from the 10th to the 9th millennium bce and are classified as prepottery. The finds included querns (primitive mills) for grinding grain (whether wild or cultivated is not known), the remains of huts about 13 feet in diameter, and a cemetery with grave goods. The presence of copper beads is evidence of acquaintance with metal, though not necessarily with the technique of working it into tools, and the presence of obsidian (volcanic glass) is indicative of the acquisition of nonindigenous raw materials by means of trade. The bones found testify that sheep were already domesticated at Zawi Chemi Shanidar.
At Karīm Shahir, a site that cannot be accurately tied chronologically to Shanidar, clear proof was obtained both of the knowledge of grain cultivation, in the form of sickle blades showing sheen from use, and of the baking of clay, in the form of lightly fired clay figurines. Still in the hilly borders of Mesopotamia, a sequence of about 3,000 years can be followed at the site of Qalʾat Jarmo, east of Kirkūk, some 150 miles north of Baghdad. The beginning of this settlement can be dated to about 6750 bce; excavations uncovered 12 archaeological levels of a regular village, consisting of about 20 to 25 houses built of packed clay, sometimes with stone foundations, and divided into several rooms. The finds included types of wheat (emmer and einkorn) and two-row barley, the bones of domesticated goats, sheep, and pigs, and obsidian tools, stone vessels, and, in the upper third of the levels, clay vessels with rough painted decorations, providing the first certain evidence for the manufacture of pottery. Jarmo must be roughly contemporary with the sites of Jericho (13 miles east of Jerusalem) and of Çatalhüyük in Anatolia (central Turkey). Those sites, with their walled settlements, seem to have achieved a much higher level of civilization, but too much weight must not be placed on the comparison because no other sites in and around Mesopotamia confirm the picture deduced from Jarmo alone. Views on the earliest Neolithic in Iraq have undergone radical revisions in the light of discoveries made since the 1970s at Qermez Dere, Nemrik, and Maghzaliyah.
About 1,000 years later are two villages that are the earliest so far discovered in the plain of Mesopotamia: Ḥassūna, near Mosul, and Tall Ṣawwān, near Sāmarrāʾ. At Ḥassūna the pottery is more advanced, with incised and painted designs, but the decoration is still unsophisticated. One of the buildings found may be a shrine, judging from its unusual ground plan. Apart from emmer there occurs, as the result of mutation, six-row barley, which was later to become the chief grain crop of southern Mesopotamia. In the case of Tall Ṣawwān, it is significant that the settlement lay south of the boundary of rainfall agriculture; thus it must have been dependent on some form of artificial irrigation, even if this was no more than the drawing of water from the Tigris. This, therefore, gives a date after which the settlement of parts of southern Mesopotamia would have been feasible.
The emergence of cultures
For the next millennium, the 5th, it is customary to speak in terms of various “cultures” or “horizons,” distinguished in general by the pottery, which may be classed by its colour, shape, hardness, and, above all, by its decoration. The name of each horizon is derived either from the type site or from the place where the pottery was first found: Sāmarrāʾ on the Tigris, Tall Ḥalaf in the central Jazīrah, Ḥassūna Level V, Al-ʿUbaid near Ur, and Ḥājj Muḥammad on the Euphrates, not far from Al-Samāwah (some 150 miles south-southeast of Baghdad). Along with the improvement of tools, the first evidence for water transport (a model boat from the prehistoric cemetery at Eridu, in the extreme south of Mesopotamia, c. 4000 bce), and the development of terra-cottas, the most impressive sign of progress is the constantly accelerating advance in architecture. This can best be followed in the city of Eridu, which in historical times was the centre of the cult of the Sumerian god Enki.
Originally a small, single-roomed shrine, the temple in the Ubaid period consisted of a rectangular building, measuring 80 by 40 feet, that stood on an artificial terrace. It had an “offering table” and an “altar” against the short walls, aisles down each side, and a facade decorated with niches. This temple, standing on a terrace probably originally designed to protect the building from flooding, is usually considered the prototype of the characteristic religious structure of later Babylonia, the ziggurat. The temple at Eridu is in the very same place as that on which the Enki ziggurat stood in the time of the 3rd dynasty of Ur (c. 2112–c. 2004 bce), so the cult tradition must have existed on the same spot for at least 1,500 to 2,000 years before Ur III itself. Remarkable as this is, however, it is not justifiable to assume a continuous ethnic tradition. The flowering of architecture reached its peak with the great temples (or assembly halls?) of Uruk, built around the turn of the 4th to 3rd millennium bce (Uruk Levels VI to IV).
In extracting information as to the expression of mind and spirit during the six millennia preceding the invention of writing, it is necessary to take account of four major sources: decoration on pottery, the care of the dead, sculpture, and the designs on seals. There is, of course, no justification in assuming any association with ethnic groups.
The most varied of these means of expression is undoubtedly the decoration of pottery. It is hardly coincidental that, in regions in which writing had developed, high-quality painted pottery was no longer made. The motifs in decoration are either abstract and geometric or figured, although there is also a strong tendency to geometric stylization. An important question is the extent to which the presence of symbols, such as the bucranium (a sculptured ornament representing an ox skull), can be considered as expressions of specific religious ideas, such as a bull cult, and, indeed, how much the decoration was intended to convey meaning at all.
It is not known how ancient is the custom of burying the dead in graves nor whether its intention was to maintain communication (by the cult of the dead) or to guard against the demonic power of the unburied dead left free to wander. A cemetery, or collection of burials associated with grave goods, is first attested at Zawi Chemi Shanidar. The presence of pots in the grave indicates that the bodily needs of the dead person were provided for, and the discovery of the skeleton of a dog and of a model boat in the cemetery at Eridu suggests that it was believed that the activities of life could be pursued in the afterlife.
The earliest sculpture takes the form of very crudely worked terra-cotta representations of women; the Ubaid Horizon, however, has figurines of both women and men, with very slender bodies, protruding features, arms akimbo, and the genitals accurately indicated, and also of women suckling children. It is uncertain whether it is correct to describe these statuettes as idols, whether the figures were cult objects, such as votive offerings, or whether they had a magical significance, such as fertility charms, or, indeed, what purpose they did fulfill.
Seals are first attested in the form of stamp seals at Tepe Gawra, north of Mosul. Geometric designs are found earlier than scenes with figures, such as men, animals, conflict between animals, copulation, or dance. Here again it is uncertain whether the scenes are intended to convey a deeper meaning. Nevertheless, unlike pottery, a seal has a direct relationship to a particular individual or group, for the seal identifies what it is used to seal (a vessel, sack, or other container) as the property or responsibility of a specific person. To that extent, seals represent the earliest pictorial representations of persons. The area of distribution of the stamp seal was northern Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Iran. Southern Mesopotamia, on the other hand, was the home of the cylinder seal, which was either an independent invention or was derived from stamp seals engraved on two faces. The cylinder seal, with its greater surface area and more practical application, remained in use into the 1st millennium bce. Because of the continuous changes in the style of the seal designs, cylinder seals are among the most valuable of chronological indicators for archaeologists.
Babylonian sealImpression from a cylinder seal from Babylonia, 8th century bce; in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York City.Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City
In general, the prehistory of Mesopotamia can only be described by listing and comparing human achievements, not by recounting the interaction of individuals or peoples. There is no basis for reconstructing the movements and migrations of peoples unless one is prepared to equate the spread of particular archaeological types with the extent of a particular population, the change of types with a change of population, or the appearance of new types with an immigration.
The only certain evidence for the movement of peoples beyond their own territorial limits is provided at first by material finds that are not indigenous. The discovery of obsidian and lapis lazuli at sites in Mesopotamia or in its neighbouring lands is evidence for the existence of trade, whether consisting of direct caravan trade or of a succession of intermediate stages.
Just as no ethnic identity is recognizable, so nothing is known of the social organization of prehistoric settlements. It is not possible to deduce anything of the “government” in a village nor of any supraregional connections that may have existed under the domination of one centre. Constructions that could only have been accomplished by the organization of workers in large numbers are first found in Uruk Levels VI to IV: the dimensions of these buildings suggest that they were intended for gatherings of hundreds of people. As for artificial irrigation, which was indispensable for agriculture in south Mesopotamia, the earliest form was probably not the irrigation canal. It is assumed that at first floodwater was dammed up to collect in basins, near which the fields were located. Canals, which led the water farther from the river, would have become necessary when the land in the vicinity of the river could no longer supply the needs of the population.
Mesopotamian protohistory
Attempts have been made by philologists to reach conclusions about the origin of the flowering of civilization in southern Mesopotamia by the analysis of Sumerian words. It has been thought possible to isolate an earlier, non-Sumerian substratum from the Sumerian vocabulary by assigning certain words on the basis of their endings to either a Neolithic or a Chalcolithic language stratum. These attempts are based on the phonetic character of Sumerian at the beginning of the 2nd millennium bce, which is at least 1,000 years later than the invention of writing. Quite apart, therefore, from the fact that the structure of Sumerian words themselves is far from adequately investigated, the enormous gap in time casts grave doubt on the criteria used to distinguish between Sumerian and “pre-Sumerian” vocabulary.
The earliest peoples of Mesopotamia who can be identified from inscribed monuments and written tradition—people in the sense of speakers of a common language—are, apart from the Sumerians, Semitic peoples (Akkadians or pre-Akkadians) and Subarians (identical with, or near relatives of, the Hurrians, who appear in northern Mesopotamia around the end of the 3rd millennium bce). Their presence is known, but no definite statements about their past or possible routes of immigration are possible.
At the turn of the 4th to 3rd millennium bce, the long span of prehistory is over, and the threshold of the historical era is gained, captured by the existence of writing. Names, speech, and actions are fixed in a system that is composed of signs representing complete words or syllables. The signs may consist of realistic pictures, abbreviated representations, and perhaps symbols selected at random. Since clay is not well suited to the drawing of curved lines, a tendency to use straight lines rapidly gained ground. When the writer pressed the reed in harder at the beginning of a stroke, it made a triangular “head,” and thus “wedges” were impressed into the clay. It is the Sumerians who are usually given the credit for the invention of this, the first system of writing in the Middle East. As far as they can be assigned to any language, the inscribed documents from before the dynasty of Akkad (c. 2334–c. 2154 bce) are almost exclusively in Sumerian. Moreover, the extension of the writing system to include the creation of syllabograms by the use of the sound of a logogram (sign representing a word), such as gi, “a reed stem,” used to render the verb gi, “to return,” can only be explained in terms of the Sumerian language. It is most probable, however, that Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium bce, just as in later times, was composed of many races. This makes it likely that, apart from the Sumerians, the interests and even initiatives of other language groups may have played their part in the formation of the writing system. Many scholars believe that certain clay objects or tokens that are found in prehistoric strata may have been used for some kind of primitive accounting. These tokens, some of which are incised and which have various forms, may thus be three-dimensional predecessors of writing.
Sumerian is an agglutinative language: prefixes and suffixes, which express various grammatical functions and relationships, are attached to a noun or verb root in a “chain.” Attempts to identify Sumerian more closely by comparative methods have as yet been unsuccessful and will very probably remain so, as languages of a comparable type are known only from 500 ce (Georgian) or 1000 ce (Basque)—that is, 3,000 years later. Over so long a time, the rate of change in a language, particularly one that is not fixed in a written norm, is so great that one can no longer determine whether apparent similarity between words goes back to an original relationship or is merely fortuitous. Consequently, it is impossible to obtain any more accurate information as to the language group to which Sumerian may once have belonged.
The most important development in the course of the 4th millennium bce was the birth of the city. There were precursors, such as the unwalled prepottery settlement at Jericho of about 7000 bce, but the beginning of cities with a more permanent character came only later. There is no generally accepted definition of a city. In this context, it means a settlement that serves as a centre for smaller settlements, one that possesses one or more shrines of one or more major deities, has extensive granaries, and, finally, displays an advanced stage of specialization in the crafts.
The earliest cities of southern Mesopotamia, as far as their names are known, are Eridu, Uruk, Bad-tibira, Nippur, and Kish (35 miles south-southeast of Baghdad). The surveys of the American archaeologist Robert McCormick Adams and the German archaeologist Hans Nissen have shown how the relative size and number of the settlements gradually shifted: the number of small or very small settlements was reduced overall, whereas the number of larger places grew. The clearest sign of urbanization can be seen at Uruk, with the almost explosive increase in the size of the buildings. Uruk Levels VI to IV had rectangular buildings covering areas as large as 275 by 175 feet. These buildings are described as temples, since the ground plans are comparable to those of later buildings whose sacred character is beyond doubt, but other functions, such as assembly halls for noncultic purposes, cannot be excluded.
The major accomplishments of the period Uruk VI to IV, apart from the first inscribed tablets (Level IV B), are masterpieces of sculpture and of seal engraving and also of the form of wall decoration known as cone mosaics. Together with the everyday pottery of gray or red burnished ware, there is a very coarse type known as the beveled-rim bowl. These are vessels of standard size whose shape served as the original for the sign sila, meaning “litre.” It is not too rash to deduce from the mass production of such standard vessels that they served for the issue of rations. This would have been the earliest instance of a system that remained typical of the southern Mesopotamian city for centuries: the maintenance of part of the population by allocations of food from the state.
Historians usually date the beginning of history, as opposed to prehistory and protohistory, from the first appearance of usable written sources. If this is taken to be the transition from the 4th to the 3rd millennium bce, it must be remembered that this applies only to part of Mesopotamia: the south, the Diyālā region, Susiana (with a later script of its own invented locally), and the district of the middle Euphrates, as well as Iran.
Sumerian civilization
The Sumerians to the end of the Early Dynastic period
Despite the Sumerians’ leading role, the historical role of other races should not be underestimated. While with prehistory only approximate dates can be offered, historical periods require a firm chronological framework, which, unfortunately, has not yet been established for the first half of the 3rd millennium bce. The basis for the chronology after about 1450 bce is provided by the data in the Assyrian and Babylonian king lists, which can often be checked by dated tablets and the Assyrian lists of eponyms (annual officials whose names served to identify each year). It is, however, still uncertain how much time separated the middle of the 15th century bce from the end of the 1st dynasty of Babylon, which is therefore variously dated to 1594 bce (“middle”), 1530 bce (“short”), or 1730 bce (“long” chronology). As a compromise, the middle chronology is used here. From 1594 bce several chronologically overlapping dynasties reach back to the beginning of the 3rd dynasty of Ur, about 2112 bce. From this point to the beginning of the dynasty of Akkad (c. 2334 bce) the interval can only be calculated to within 40 to 50 years, via the ruling houses of Lagash and the rather uncertain traditions regarding the succession of Gutian viceroys. With Ur-Nanshe (c. 2520 bce), the first king of the 1st dynasty of Lagash, there is a possible variation of 70 to 80 years, and earlier dates are a matter of mere guesswork: they depend upon factors of only limited relevance, such as the computation of occupation or destruction levels, the degree of development in the script (paleography), the character of the sculpture, pottery, and cylinder seals, and their correlation at different sites. In short, the chronology of the first half of the 3rd millennium is largely a matter for the intuition of the individual author. Carbon-14 dates are at present too few and far between to be given undue weight. Consequently, the turn of the 4th to 3rd millennium is to be accepted, with due caution and reservations, as the date of the flourishing of the archaic civilization of Uruk and of the invention of writing.
In Uruk and probably also in other cities of comparable size, the Sumerians led a city life that can be more or less reconstructed as follows: temples and residential districts; intensive agriculture, stock breeding, fishing, and date palm cultivation forming the four mainstays of the economy; and highly specialized industries carried on by sculptors, seal engravers, smiths, carpenters, shipbuilders, potters, and workers of reeds and textiles. Part of the population was supported with rations from a central point of distribution, which relieved people of the necessity of providing their basic food themselves, in return for their work all day and every day, at least for most of the year. The cities kept up active trade with foreign lands.
That organized city life existed is demonstrated chiefly by the existence of inscribed tablets. The earliest tablets contain figures with the items they enumerate and measures with the items they measure, as well as personal names and, occasionally, probably professions. This shows the purely practical origins of writing in Mesopotamia: it began not as a means of magic or as a way for the ruler to record his achievements, for example, but as an aid to memory for an administration that was ever expanding its area of operations. The earliest examples of writing are very difficult to penetrate because of their extremely laconic formulation, which presupposes a knowledge of the context, and because of the still very imperfect rendering of the spoken word. Moreover, many of the archaic signs were pruned away after a short period of use and cannot be traced in the paleography of later periods, so that they cannot be identified.
One of the most important questions that has to be met when dealing with “organization” and “city life” is that of social structure and the form of government; however, it can be answered only with difficulty, and the use of evidence from later periods carries with it the danger of anachronisms. The Sumerian word for ruler par excellence is lugal, which etymologically means “big person.” The first occurrence comes from Kish about 2700 bce, since an earlier instance from Uruk is uncertain because it could simply be intended as a personal name: “Monsieur Legrand.” In Uruk the ruler’s special title was en. In later periods this word (etymology unknown), which is also found in divine names such as Enlil and Enki, has a predominantly religious connotation that is translated, for want of a better designation, as “en-priest, en-priestess.” En, as the ruler’s title, is encountered in the traditional epics of the Sumerians (Gilgamesh is the “en of Kullab,” a district of Uruk) and particularly in personal names, such as “The-en-has-abundance,” “The-en-occupies-the-throne,” and many others.
It has often been asked if the ruler of Uruk is to be recognized in artistic representations. A man feeding sheep with flowering branches, a prominent personality in seal designs, might thus represent the ruler or a priest in his capacity as administrator and protector of flocks. The same question may be posed in the case of a man who is depicted on a stela aiming an arrow at a lion. These questions are purely speculative, however: even if the “protector of flocks” were identical with the en, there is no ground for seeing in the ruler a person with a predominantly religious function.
Literary and other historical sources
The picture offered by the literary tradition of Mesopotamia is clearer but not necessarily historically relevant. The Sumerian king list has long been the greatest focus of interest. This is a literary composition, dating from Old Babylonian times, that describes kingship (nam-lugal in Sumerian) in Mesopotamia from primeval times to the end of the 1st dynasty of Isin. According to the theory—or rather the ideology—of this work, there was officially only one kingship in Mesopotamia, which was vested in one particular city at any one time; hence the change in dynasties brought with it the change of the seat of kingship:
Kish–Uruk–Ur–Awan–Kish–Hamazi–Uruk–Ur–
Adab–Mari–Kish–Akshak–Kish–Uruk–Akkad–
Uruk–Gutians–Uruk–Ur–Isin.
The king list gives as coming in succession several dynasties that now are known to have ruled simultaneously. It is a welcome aid to chronology and history, but, so far as the regnal years are concerned, it loses its value for the time before the dynasty of Akkad, for here the lengths of reign of single rulers are given as more than 100 and sometimes even several hundred years. One group of versions of the king list has adopted the tradition of the Sumerian Flood story, according to which Kish was the first seat of kingship after the Flood, whereas five dynasties of primeval kings ruled before the Flood in Eridu, Bad-tibira, Larak, Sippar, and Shuruppak. These kings all allegedly ruled for multiples of 3,600 years (the maximum being 64,800 or, according to one variant, 72,000 years). The tradition of the Sumerian king list is still echoed in Berosus.
It is also instructive to observe what the Sumerian king list does not mention. The list lacks all mention of a dynasty as important as the 1st dynasty of Lagash (from King Ur-Nanshe to UruKAgina) and appears to retain no memory of the archaic florescence of Uruk at the beginning of the 3rd millennium bce.
Besides the peaceful pursuits reflected in art and writing, the art also provides the first information about violent contacts: cylinder seals of the Uruk Level IV depict fettered men lying or squatting on the ground, being beaten with sticks or otherwise maltreated by standing figures. They may represent the execution of prisoners of war. It is not known from where these captives came or what form “war” would have taken or how early organized battles were fought. Nevertheless, this does give the first, albeit indirect, evidence for the wars that are henceforth one of the most characteristic phenomena in the history of Mesopotamia.
Just as with the rule of man over man, with the rule of higher powers over man it is difficult to make any statements about the earliest attested forms of religion or about the deities and their names without running the risk of anachronism. Excluding prehistoric figurines, which provide no evidence for determining whether men or anthropomorphic gods are represented, the earliest testimony is supplied by certain symbols that later became the cuneiform signs for gods’ names: the “gatepost with streamers” for Inanna, goddess of love and war, and the “ringed post” for the moon god Nanna. A scene on a cylinder seal—a shrine with an Inanna symbol and a “man” in a boat—could be an abbreviated illustration of a procession of gods or of a cultic journey by ship. The constant association of the “gatepost with streamers” with sheep and of the “ringed post” with cattle may possibly reflect the area of responsibility of each deity. The Sumerologist Thorkild Jacobsen sees in the pantheon a reflex of the various economies and modes of life in ancient Mesopotamia: fishermen and marsh dwellers, date palm cultivators, cowherds, shepherds, and farmers all have their special groups of gods.
Both Sumerian and non-Sumerian languages can be detected in the divine names and place-names. Since the pronunciation of the names is known only from 2000 bce or later, conclusions about their linguistic affinity are not without problems. Several names, for example, have been reinterpreted in Sumerian by popular etymology. It would be particularly important to isolate the Subarian components (related to Hurrian), whose significance was probably greater than has hitherto been assumed. For the south Mesopotamian city HA.A (the noncommittal transliteration of the signs) there is a pronunciation gloss “shubari,” and non-Sumerian incantations are known in the language of HA.A that have turned out to be “Subarian.”
There have always been in Mesopotamia speakers of Semitic languages (which belong to the Afro-Asiatic group and also include ancient Egyptian, Berber, and various African languages). This element is easier to detect in ancient Mesopotamia, but whether people began to participate in city civilization in the 4th millennium bce or only during the 3rd is unknown. Over the last 4,000 years, Semites (Amorites, Canaanites, Aramaeans, and Arabs) have been partly nomadic, ranging the Arabian fringes of the Fertile Crescent, and partly settled; and the transition to settled life can be observed in a constant, though uneven, rhythm. There are, therefore, good grounds for assuming that the Akkadians (and other pre-Akkadian Semitic tribes not known by name) also originally led a nomadic life to a greater or lesser degree. Nevertheless, they can only have been herders of domesticated sheep and goats, which require changes of pasturage according to the time of year and can never stray more than a day’s march from the watering places. The traditional nomadic life of the Bedouin makes its appearance only with the domestication of the camel at the turn of the 2nd to 1st millennium bce.
The question arises as to how quickly writing spread and by whom it was adopted in about 3000 bce or shortly thereafter. At Kish, in northern Babylonia, almost 120 miles northwest of Uruk, a stone tablet has been found with the same repertoire of archaic signs as those found at Uruk itself. This fact demonstrates that intellectual contacts existed between northern and southern Babylonia. The dispersion of writing in an unaltered form presupposes the existence of schools in various cities that worked according to the same principles and adhered to one and the same canonical repertoire of signs. It would be wrong to assume that Sumerian was spoken throughout the area in which writing had been adopted. Moreover, the use of cuneiform for a non-Sumerian language can be demonstrated with certainty from the 27th century bce.
First historical personalities
The specifically political events in Mesopotamia after the flourishing of the archaic culture of Uruk cannot be pinpointed. Not until about 2700 bce does the first historical personality appear—historical because his name, Enmebaragesi (Me-baragesi), was preserved in later tradition. It has been assumed, although the exact circumstances cannot be reconstructed, that there was a rather abrupt end to the high culture of Uruk Level IV. The reason for the assumption is a marked break in both artistic and architectural traditions: entirely new styles of cylinder seals were introduced; the great temples (if in fact they were temples) were abandoned, flouting the rule of a continuous tradition on religious sites, and on a new site a shrine was built on a terrace, which was to constitute the lowest stage of the later Eanna ziggurat. On the other hand, since the writing system developed organically and was continually refined by innovations and progressive reforms, it would be overhasty to assume a revolutionary change in the population.
In the quarter or third of a millennium between Uruk Level IV and Enmebaragesi, southern Mesopotamia became studded with a complex pattern of cities, many of which were the centres of small independent city-states, to judge from the situation in about the middle of the millennium. In these cities, the central point was the temple, sometimes encircled by an oval boundary wall (hence the term temple oval); but nonreligious buildings, such as palaces serving as the residences of the rulers, could also function as centres.
Enmebaragesi, king of Kish, is the oldest Mesopotamian ruler from whom there are authentic inscriptions. These are vase fragments, one of them found in the temple oval of Khafajah (Khafājī). In the Sumerian king list, Enmebaragesi is listed as the penultimate king of the 1st dynasty of Kish; a Sumerian poem, “Gilgamesh and Agga of Kish,” describes the siege of Uruk by Agga, son of Enmebaragesi. The discovery of the original vase inscriptions was of great significance because it enabled scholars to ask with somewhat more justification whether Gilgamesh, the heroic figure of Mesopotamia who has entered world literature, was actually a historical personage. The indirect synchronism notwithstanding, the possibility exists that even remote antiquity knew its “Ninus” and its “Semiramis,” figures onto which a rapidly fading historical memory projected all manner of deeds and adventures. Thus, though the historical tradition of the early 2nd millennium believes Gilgamesh to have been the builder of the oldest city wall of Uruk, such may not have been the case. The palace archives of Shuruppak (modern Tall Faʾrah, 125 miles southeast of Baghdad), dating presumably from shortly after 2600, contain a long list of divinities, including Gilgamesh and his father Lugalbanda. More recent tradition, on the other hand, knows Gilgamesh as judge of the nether world. However that may be, an armed conflict between two Mesopotamian cities such as Uruk and Kish would hardly have been unusual in a country whose energies were consumed, almost without interruption from 2500 to 1500 bce, by clashes between various separatist forces. The great “empires,” after all, formed the exception, not the rule.
Emergent city-states
Kish must have played a major role almost from the beginning. After 2500, southern Babylonian rulers, such as Mesannepada of Ur and Eannatum of Lagash, frequently called themselves king of Kish when laying claim to sovereignty over northern Babylonia. This does not agree with some recent histories in which Kish is represented as an archaic “empire.” It is more likely to have figured as representative of the north, calling forth perhaps the same geographic connotation later evoked by “the land of Akkad.”
Although the corpus of inscriptions grows richer both in geographic distribution and in point of chronology in the 27th and increasingly so in the 26th century, it is still impossible to find the key to a plausible historical account, and history cannot be written solely on the basis of archaeological findings. Unless clarified by written documents, such findings contain as many riddles as they seem to offer solutions. This applies even to as spectacular a discovery as that of the royal tombs of Ur with their hecatombs (large-scale sacrifices) of retainers who followed their king and queen to the grave, not to mention the elaborate funerary appointments with their inventory of tombs. It is only from about 2520 to the beginnings of the dynasty of Akkad that history can be written within a framework, with the aid of reports about the city-state of Lagash and its capital of Girsu and its relations with its neighbour and rival, Umma.
Sources for this are, on the one hand, an extensive corpus of inscriptions relating to nine rulers, telling of the buildings they constructed, of their institutions and wars, and, in the case of UruKAgina, of their “social” measures. On the other hand, there is the archive of some 1,200 tablets—insofar as these have been published—from the temple of Baba, the city goddess of Girsu, from the period of Lugalanda and UruKAgina (first half of the 24th century). For generations, Lagash and Umma contested the possession and agricultural usufruct of the fertile region of Gu’edena. To begin with, some two generations before Ur-Nanshe, Mesilim (another “king of Kish”) had intervened as arbiter and possibly overlord in dictating to both states the course of the boundary between them, but this was not effective for long. After a prolonged struggle, Eannatum forced the ruler of Umma, by having him take an involved oath to six divinities, to desist from crossing the old border, a dike. The text that relates this event, with considerable literary elaboration, is found on the Stele of Vultures. These battles, favouring now one side, now the other, continued under Eannatum’s successors, in particular Entemena, until, under UruKAgina, great damage was done to the land of Lagash and to its holy places. The enemy, Lugalzagesi, was vanquished in turn by Sargon of Akkad. The rivalry between Lagash and Umma, however, must not be considered in isolation. Other cities, too, are occasionally named as enemies, and the whole situation resembles the pattern of changing coalitions and short-lived alliances between cities of more recent times. Kish, Umma, and distant Mari on the middle Euphrates are listed together on one occasion as early as the time of Eannatum. For the most part, these battles were fought by infantry, although mention is also made of war chariots drawn by onagers (wild asses).
The lords of Lagash rarely fail to call themselves by the title of ensi, of as yet undetermined derivation; “city ruler,” or “prince,” are only approximate translations. Only seldom do they call themselves lugal, or “king,” the title given the rulers of Umma in their own inscriptions. In all likelihood, these were local titles that were eventually converted, beginning perhaps with the kings of Akkad, into a hierarchy in which the lugal took precedence over the ensi.
Territorial states
More difficult than describing its external relations is the task of shedding light on the internal structure of a state like Lagash. For the first time, a state consisting of more than a city with its surrounding territory came into being, because aggressively minded rulers had managed to extend that territory until it comprised not only Girsu, the capital, and the cities of Lagash and Nina (Zurghul) but also many smaller localities and even a seaport, Guabba. Yet it is not clear to what extent the conquered regions were also integrated administratively. On one occasion UruKAgina used the formula “from the limits of Ningirsu [that is, the city god of Girsu] to the sea,” having in mind a distance of up to 125 miles. It would be unwise to harbour any exaggerated notion of well-organized states exceeding that size.
For many years, scholarly views were conditioned by the concept of the Sumerian temple city, which was used to convey the idea of an organism whose ruler, as representative of his god, theoretically owned all land, privately held agricultural land being a rare exception. The concept of the temple city had its origin partly in the overinterpretation of a passage in the so-called reform texts of UruKAgina, that states “on the field of the ensi [or his wife and the crown prince], the city god Ningirsu [or the city goddess Baba and the divine couple’s son]” had been “reinstated as owners.” On the other hand, the statements in the archives of the temple of Baba in Girsu, dating from Lugalanda and UruKAgina, were held to be altogether representative. Here is a system of administration, directed by the ensi’s spouse or by a sangu (head steward of a temple), in which every economic process, including commerce, stands in a direct relationship to the temple: agriculture, vegetable gardening, tree farming, cattle raising and the processing of animal products, fishing, and the payment in merchandise of workers and employees.
The conclusion from this analogy proved to be dangerous because the archives of the temple of Baba provide information about only a portion of the total temple administration and that portion, furthermore, is limited in time. Understandably enough, the private sector, which of course was not controlled by the temple, is scarcely mentioned at all in these archives. The existence of such a sector is nevertheless documented by bills of sale for land purchases of the pre-Sargonic period and from various localities. Written in Sumerian as well as in Akkadian, they prove the existence of private land ownership or, in the opinion of some scholars, of lands predominantly held as undivided family property. Although a substantial part of the population was forced to work for the temple and drew its pay and board from it, it is not yet known whether it was year-round work.
Itis probable, if unfortunate, that there will never exist a detailed and numerically accurate picture of the demographic structure of a Sumerian city. It is assumed that in the oldest cities the government was in a position to summon sections of the populace for the performance of public works. The construction of monumental buildings or the excavation of long and deep canals could be carried out only by means of such a levy. The large-scale employment of indentured persons and of slaves is of no concern in this context. Evidence of male slavery is fairly rare before Ur III, and even in Ur III and in the Old Babylonian period slave labour was never an economically relevant factor. It was different with female slaves. According to one document, the temple of Baba employed 188 such women; the temple of the goddess Nanshe employed 180, chiefly in grinding flour and in the textile industry, and this continued to be the case in later times. For accuracy’s sake it should be added that the terms male slave and female slave are used here in the significance they possessed about 2000 bce and later, designating persons in bondage who were bought and sold and who could not acquire personal property through their labour. A distinction is made between captured slaves (prisoners of war and kidnapped persons) and others who had been sold.
In one inscription, Entemena of Lagash boasts of having “allowed the sons of Uruk, Larsa, and Bad-tibira to return to their mothers” and of having “restored them into the hands” of the respective city god or goddess. Read in the light of similar but more explicit statements of later date, this laconic formula represents the oldest known evidence of the fact that the ruler occasionally endeavoured to mitigate social injustices by means of a decree. Such decrees might refer to the suspension or complete cancellation of debts or to exemption from public works. Whereas a set of inscriptions of the last ruler from the 1st dynasty of Lagash, UruKAgina, has long been considered a prime document of social reform in the 3rd millennium, the designation “reform texts” is only partly justified. Reading between the lines, it is possible to discern that tensions had arisen between the “palace”—the ruler’s residence with its annex, administrative staff, and landed properties—and the “clergy”—that is, the stewards and priests of the temples. In seeming defiance of his own interests, UruKAgina, who in contrast to practically all of his predecessors lists no genealogy and has therefore been suspected of having been a usurper, defends the clergy, whose plight he describes somewhat tearfully.
If the foregoing passage about restoring the ensi’s fields to the divinity is interpreted carefully, it would follow that the situation of the temple was ameliorated and that palace lands were assigned to the priests. Along with these measures, which resemble the policies of a newcomer forced to lean on a specific party, are found others that do merit the designation of “measures taken toward the alleviation of social injustices”—for instance, the granting of delays in the payment of debts or their outright cancellation and the setting up of prohibitions to keep the economically or socially more powerful from forcing his inferior to sell his house, his ass’s foal, and the like. Besides this, there were tariff regulations, such as newly established fees for weddings and burials, as well as the precise regulation of the food rations of garden workers.
These conditions, described on the basis of source materials from Girsu, may well have been paralleled elsewhere, but it is equally possible that other archives, yet to be found in other cities of pre-Sargonic southern Mesopotamia, may furnish entirely new historical aspects. At any rate, it is wiser to proceed cautiously, keeping to analysis and evaluation of the available material rather than making generalizations.
This, then, is the horizon of Mesopotamia shortly before the rise of the Akkadian empire. In Mari, writing was introduced at the latest about the mid-26th century bce, and from that time this city, situated on the middle Euphrates, forms an important centre of cuneiform civilization, especially in regard to its Semitic component. Ebla (and probably many other sites in ancient Syria) profited from the influence of Mari scribal schools. Reaching out across the Diyālā region and the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamian influences extended to Iran, where Susa is mentioned along with Elam and other, not yet localized, towns. In the west the Amanus Mountains were known, and under Lugalzagesi the “upper sea”—in other words, the Mediterranean—is mentioned for the first time. To the east the inscriptions of Ur-Nanshe of Lagash name the isle of Dilmun (modern Bahrain), which may have been even then a transshipment point for trade with the Oman coast and the Indus region, the Magan and Meluhha of more recent texts. Trade with Anatolia and Afghanistan was nothing new in the 3rd millennium, even if these regions are not yet listed by their names. It was the task of the Akkadian dynasty to unite within these boundaries a territory that transcended the dimensions of a state of the type represented by Lagash.
Ur-Nanshe of LagashUr-Nanshe, king of Lagash, detail of a limestone relief, c. 2500 bce; in the Louvre, Paris.© Photos.com/Jupiterimages
Sumer and Akkad from 2350 to 2000 bce
There are several reasons for taking the year 2350 as a turning point in the history of Mesopotamia. For the first time, an empire arose on Mesopotamian soil. The driving force of that empire was the Akkadians, so called after the city of Akkad, which Sargon chose for his capital (it has not yet been identified but was presumably located on the Euphrates between Sippar and Kish). The name Akkad became synonymous with a population group that stood side by side with the Sumerians. Southern Mesopotamia became known as the “land of Sumer and Akkad”; Akkadian became the name of a language; and the arts rose to new heights. However, even this turning point was not the first time the Akkadians had emerged in history. Semites—whether Akkadians or a Semitic language group that had settled before them—may have had a part in the urbanization that took place at the end of the 4th millennium. The earliest Akkadian names and words occur in written sources of the 27th century. The names of several Akkadian scribes are found in the archives of Tall Abū Ṣalābīkh, near Nippur in central Babylonia, synchronous with those of Shuruppak (shortly after 2600). The Sumerian king list places the 1st dynasty of Kish, together with a series of kings bearing Akkadian names, immediately after the Flood. In Mari the Akkadian language was probably written from the very beginning. Thus, the founders of the dynasty of Akkad were presumably members of a people who had been familiar for centuries with Mesopotamian culture in all its forms.
bronze head of a kingBronze head of a king, perhaps Sargon of Akkad, from Nineveh (now in Iraq), Akkadian period, c. 2300 bce; in the Iraq Museum, Baghdad.Interfoto Scans/age fotostock
Sargon’s reign
According to the Sumerian king list, the first five rulers of Akkad (Sargon, Rimush, Manishtusu, Naram-Sin, and Shar-kali-sharri) ruled for a total of 142 years; Sargon alone ruled for 56. Although these figures cannot be checked, they are probably trustworthy, because the king list for Ur III, even if 250 years later, did transmit dates that proved to be accurate.
Stone relief depicting Sargon (c. 2334–c. 2279 bce) standing before a tree of life; in the Louvre, Paris.© Photos.com/Jupiterimages
As stated in an annotation to his name in the king list, Sargon started out as a cupbearer to King Ur-Zababa of Kish. There is an Akkadian legend about Sargon, describing how he was exposed after birth, brought up by a gardener, and later beloved by the goddess Ishtar. Nevertheless, there are no historical data about his career. Yet it is feasible to assume that in his case a high court office served as springboard for a dynasty of his own. The original inscriptions of the kings of Akkad that have come down to posterity are brief, and their geographic distribution generally is more informative than is their content. The main sources for Sargon’s reign, with its high points and catastrophes, are copies made by Old Babylonian scribes in Nippur from the very extensive originals that presumably had been kept there. They are in part Akkadian, in part bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian texts. According to these texts, Sargon fought against the Sumerian cities of southern Babylonia, threw down city walls, took prisoner 50 ensis, and “cleansed his weapons in the sea.” He is also said to have captured Lugalzagesi of Uruk, the former ruler of Umma, who had vigorously attacked UruKAgina in Lagash, forcing his neck under a yoke and leading him thus to the gate of the god Enlil at Nippur. “Citizens of Akkad” filled the offices of ensi from the “nether sea” (the Persian Gulf) upward, which was perhaps a device used by Sargon to further his dynastic aims. Aside from the 34 battles fought in the south, Sargon also tells of conquests in northern Mesopotamia: Mari, Tuttul on the Balīkh, where he venerated the god Dagan (Dagon), Ebla (Tall Mardīkh in Syria), the “cedar forest” (Amanus or Lebanon), and the “silver mountains”; battles in Elam and the foothills of the Zagros are mentioned. Sargon also relates that ships from Meluhha (Indus region), Magan (possibly the coast of Oman), and Dilmun (Bahrain) made fast in the port of Akkad.
Impressive as they are at first sight, these reports have only a limited value because they cannot be arranged chronologically, and it is not known whether Sargon built a large empire. Akkadian tradition itself saw it in this light, however, and a learned treatise of the late 8th or the 7th century lists no fewer than 65 cities and lands belonging to that empire. Yet, even if Magan and Kapturu (Crete) are given as the eastern and western limits of the conquered territories, it is impossible to transpose this to the 3rd millennium.
Sargon appointed one of his daughters priestess of the moon god in Ur. She took the name of Enheduanna and was succeeded in the same office by Enmenanna, a daughter of Naram-Sin. Enheduanna must have been a very gifted woman; two Sumerian hymns by her have been preserved, and she is also said to have been instrumental in starting a collection of songs dedicated to the temples of Babylonia.
Sargon died at a very old age. The inscriptions, also preserved only in copies, of his son Rimush are full of reports about battles fought in Sumer and Iran, just as if there had never been a Sargonic empire. It is not known in detail how rigorously Akkad wished to control the cities to the south and how much freedom had been left to them; but they presumably clung tenaciously to their inherited local autonomy. From a practical point of view, it was probably in any case impossible to organize an empire that would embrace all Mesopotamia.
Since the reports (i.e., copies of inscriptions) left by Manishtusu, Naram-Sin, and Shar-kali-sharri speak time and again of rebellions and victorious battles and since Rimush, Manishtusu, and Shar-kali-sharri are themselves said to have died violent deaths, the problem of what remained of Akkad’s greatness obtrudes. Wars and disturbances, the victory of one and the defeat of another, and even regicide constitute only some of the aspects suggested to us by the sources. Whenever they extended beyond the immediate Babylonian neighbourhood, the military campaigns of the Akkadian kings were dictated primarily by trade interests instead of being intended to serve the conquest and safeguarding of an empire. Akkad, or more precisely the king, needed merchandise, money, and gold in order to finance wars, buildings, and the system of administration that he had instituted.
On the other hand, the original inscriptions that have been found so far of a king like Naram-Sin are scattered at sites covering a distance of some 620 miles as the crow flies, following the Tigris downriver: Diyarbakır on the upper Tigris, Nineveh, Tall Birāk (Tell Brak) on the upper Khābūr River (which had an Akkadian fortress and garrison), Susa in Elam, as well as Marad, Puzrish-Dagan, Adab (Bismāyah), Nippur, Ur, and Girsu in Babylonia. Even if all this was not part of an empire, it surely constituted an impressive sphere of influence.
Also to be considered are other facts that weigh more heavily than high-sounding reports of victories that cannot be verified. After the first kings of the dynasty had borne the title of king of Kish, Naram-Sin assumed the title “king of the four quarters of the earth”—that is, of the universe. As if he were in fact divine, he also had his name written with the cuneiform sign “god,” the divine determinative that was customarily used in front of the names of gods; furthermore, he assumed the title of “god of Akkad.” It is legitimate to ask whether the concept of deification may be used in the sense of elevation to a rank equal to that of the gods. At the very least it must be acknowledged that, in relation to his city and his subjects, the king saw himself in the role played by the local divinity as protector of the city and guarantor of its well-being. In contemporary judicial documents from Nippur, the oath is often taken “by Naram-Sin,” with a formula identical with that used in swearing by a divinity. Documents from Girsu contain Akkadian date formulas of the type “in the year in which Naram-Sin laid the foundations of the Enlil temple at Nippur and of the Inanna temple at Zabalam.” As evidenced by the dating procedures customary in Ur III and in the Old Babylonian period, the use of such formulas presupposes that the respective city acknowledged as its overlord the ruler whose name is invoked.
Ascendancy of Akkad
Under Akkad, the Akkadian language acquired a literary prestige that made it the equal of Sumerian. Under the influence, perhaps, of an Akkadian garrison at Susa, it spread beyond the borders of Mesopotamia. After having employed for several centuries an indigenous script patterned after cuneiform writing, Elam adopted Mesopotamian script during the Akkadian period and with a few exceptions used it even when writing in Elamite rather than Sumerian or Akkadian. The so-called Old Akkadian manner of writing is extraordinarily appealing from the aesthetic point of view; as late as the Old Babylonian era it served as a model for monumental inscriptions. Similarly, the plastic and graphic arts, especially sculpture in the round, relief work, and cylinder seals, reached a high point of perfection.
Thus the reign of the five kings of Akkad may be considered one of the most productive periods of Mesopotamian history. Although separatist forces opposed all unifying tendencies, Akkad brought about a broadening of political horizons and dimensions. The period of Akkad fascinated historiographers as did few other eras. Having contributed its share to the storehouse of legend, it has never disappeared from memory. With phrases such as “There will come a king of the four quarters of the earth,” liver omens (soothsaying done by analyzing the shape of a sheep’s liver) of the Old Babylonian period express the yearning for unity at a time when Babylonia had once again disintegrated into a dozen or more small states.
The end of the dynasty
Of the kings after Shar-kali-sharri (c. 2217–c. 2193), only the names and a few brief inscriptions have survived. Quarrels arose over the succession, and the dynasty went under, although modern scholars know as little about the individual stages of this decline as about the rise of Akkad. Two factors contributed to its downfall: the invasion of the nomadic Amurrus (Amorites), called Martu by the Sumerians, from the northwest, and the infiltration of the Gutians, who came, apparently, from the region between the Tigris and the Zagros Mountains to the east. This argument, however, may be a vicious circle, as these invasions were provoked and facilitated by the very weakness of Akkad. In Ur III the Amorites, in part already sedentary, formed one ethnic component along with Sumerians and Akkadians. The Gutians, on the other hand, played only a temporary role, even if the memory of a Gutian dynasty persisted until the end of the 17th century bce. As a matter of fact, the wholly negative opinion that even some modern historians have of the Gutians is based solely on a few stereotyped statements by the Sumerians and Akkadians, especially on the victory inscription of Utu-hegal of Uruk (c. 2116–c. 2110). While Old Babylonian sources give the region between the Tigris and the Zagros Mountains as the home of the Gutians, these people probably also lived on the middle Euphrates during the 3rd millennium. According to the Sumerian king list, the Gutians held the “kingship” in southern Mesopotamia for about 100 years. It has long been recognized that there is no question of a whole century of undivided Gutian rule and that some 50 years of this rule coincided with the final half century of Akkad. From this period there has also been preserved a record of a “Gutian interpreter.” As it is altogether doubtful whether the Gutians had made any city of southern Mesopotamia their “capital” instead of controlling Babylonia more or less informally from outside, scholars cautiously refer to “viceroys” of this people. The Gutians have left no material records, and the original inscriptions about them are so scanty that no binding statements about them are possible.
The Gutians’ influence probably did not extend beyond Umma. The neighbouring state of Lagash enjoyed a century of complete independence, between Shar-kali-sharri and the beginning of Ur III, during which time it showed expansionist tendencies and had widely ranging trade connections. Of the ensi Gudea, a contemporary of Ur-Nammu of Ur III, there are extant writings, exclusively Sumerian in language, which are of inestimable value. He had the time, power, and means to carry out an extensive program of temple construction during his reign, and in a hymn divided into two parts and preserved in two clay cylinders 12 inches (30 centimetres) high he describes explicitly the reconstruction of Eninnu, the temple of the god Ningirsu. Comprising 1,363 lines, the text is second in length only to Eannatum’s Stele of Vultures among the literary works of the Sumerians up to that time. While Gudea forges a link, in his literary style, with his country’s pre-Sargonic period, his work also bears the unmistakable stamp of the period of Akkad. Thus, the regions that furnish him building materials reflect the geographic horizon of the empire of Akkad, and the ensi’s title “god of his city” recalls the “god of Akkad” (Naram-Sin). The building hymn contains interesting particulars about the work force deployed. “Levies” were organized in various parts of the country, and the city of Girsu itself “followed the ensi as though it were a single man.” Unfortunately lacking are synchronous administrative archives of sufficient length to provide less summarily compiled information about the social structure of Lagash at the beginning of the 3rd dynasty of Ur. After the great pre-Sargonic archives of the Baba temple at Girsu, only the various administrative archives of the kings of Ur III give a closer look at the functioning of a Mesopotamian state.
The 3rd dynasty of Ur
Utu-hegal of Uruk is given credit for having overthrown Gutian rule by vanquishing their king Tiriqan along with two generals. Utu-hegal calls himself lord of the four quarters of the earth in an inscription, but this title, adopted from Akkad, is more likely to signify political aspiration than actual rule. Utu-hegal was a brother of the Ur-Nammu who founded the 3rd dynasty of Ur (“3rd” because it is the third time that Ur is listed in the Sumerian king list). Under Ur-Nammu and his successors Shulgi, Amar-Su’ena, Shu-Sin, and Ibbi-Sin, this dynasty lasted for a century (c. 2112–c. 2004). Ur-Nammu was at first “governor” of the city of Ur under Utu-hegal. How he became king is not known, but there may well be some parallels between his rise and the career of Ishbi-Erra of Isin or, indeed, that of Sargon. By eliminating the state of Lagash, Ur-Nammu caused the coveted overseas trade (Dilmun, Magan, and Meluhha) to flow through Ur. As evidenced by a new royal title that he was the first to bear—that of “king of Sumer and Akkad”—he had built up a state that comprised at least the southern part of Mesopotamia. Like all great rulers, he built much, including the very impressive ziggurats of Ur and Uruk, which acquired their final monumental dimensions in his reign.
Assyriologists have given the name of Code of Ur-Nammu to a literary monument that is the oldest known example of a genre extending through the Code of Lipit-Ishtar in Sumerian to the Code of Hammurabi, written in Akkadian. (Some scholars have attributed it to Ur-Nammu’s son Shulgi.) It is a collection of sentences or verdicts mostly following the pattern of “If A [assumption], it follows that B [legal consequence].” The collection is framed by a prologue and an epilogue. The original was most likely a stela, but all that is known of the Code of Ur-Nammu so far are Old Babylonian copies. The term code as used here is conventional terminology and should not give the impression of any kind of “codified” law; furthermore, the content of the Code of Ur-Nammu is not yet completely known. It deals, among other things, with adultery by a married woman, the defloration of someone else’s female slave, divorce, false accusation, the escape of slaves, bodily injury, and the granting of security, as well as with legal cases arising from agriculture and irrigation.
Before its catastrophic end under Ibbi-Sin, the state of Ur III does not seem to have suffered setbacks and rebellions as grievous as those experienced by Akkad. There are no clear indications pointing to inner unrest, although it must be remembered that the first 20 years of Shulgi’s reign are still hidden in darkness. However, from that point on until the beginning of Ibbi-Sin’s reign, or for a period of 50 years at least, the sources give the impression of peace enjoyed by a country that lived undisturbed by encroachments from abroad. Some expeditions were sent into foreign lands, to the region bordering on the Zagros, to what later became Assyria, and to the vicinity of Elam, in order to secure the importation of raw materials, in a fashion reminiscent of Akkad. Force seems to have been employed only as a last resort, and every attempt was made to bring about peaceful conditions on the other side of the border through the dispatch of embassies or the establishment of family bonds—for example, by marrying the king’s daughters to foreign rulers.
Shulgi, too, called himself king of the four quarters of the earth. Although he resided in Ur, another important centre was in Nippur, whence—according to the prevailing ideology—Enlil, the chief god in the Sumerian state pantheon, had bestowed on Shulgi the royal dignity. Shulgi and his successors enjoyed divine honours, as Naram-Sin of Akkad had before them; by now, however, the process of deification had taken on clearer outlines in that sacrifices were offered and chapels built to the king and his throne, while the royal determinative turned up in personal names. Along with an Utu-hegal (“The Sun God Is Exuberance”) there appears a Shulgi-hegal (“Shulgi Is Exuberance”), and so forth.
Administration
The highest official of the state was the sukkal-mah, literally “supreme courier,” whose position may be described as “(state) chancellor.” The empire was divided into some 40 provinces ruled by as many ensis, who, despite their far-reaching authority (civil administration and judicial powers), were no longer autonomous, even if only indirectly, although the office was occasionally handed down from father to son. They could not enter into alliances or wage wars on their own. The ensis were appointed by the king and could probably also be transferred by him to other provinces. Each of these provinces was obliged to pay a yearly tribute, the amount of which was negotiated by emissaries. Of special significance in this was a system called bala, “cycle” or “rotation,” in which the ensis of the southern provinces took part; among other things, they had to keep the state stockyards supplied with sacrificial animals. Although the “province” often corresponded to a former city-state, many others were no doubt newly established. The so-called land-register text of Ur-Nammu describes four such provinces north of Nippur, giving the precise boundaries and ending in each case with the statement, “King Ur-Nammu has confirmed the field of the god XX for the god XX.” In some cities, notably in Uruk, Mari, or Dēr (near Badrah, Iraq), the administration was in the hands of a šakkana, a man whose title is rendered partly by “governor” and partly by “general.”
The available histories are practically unanimous in seeing in Ur III a strongly centralized state marked by the king’s position as absolute ruler. Nevertheless, some caution is indicated. For one thing, the need to deal as carefully as possible with the ensis must not be underestimated. A further question arises from the borders between and relative extent of the “public” and the “private” sector; the latter’s importance may have been underrated as well. What is meant by “private” sector is a population group with land of its own and with revenues not directly granted by a temple or a “palace,” such as by the king’s or an ensi’s household. The traditional picture is derived from the sources, the state archives of Puzrish-Dagan, a gigantic “stockyard” situated outside the gates of Nippur, which supplied the city’s temples with sacrificial animals but inevitably also comprised a major wool and leather industry; other such archives are those of Umma, Girsu, Nippur, and Ur. All these activities were overseen by a finely honed bureaucracy that stressed the use of official channels, efficient administration, and precise accounting. The various administrative organs communicated with one another by means of a smoothly functioning network of messengers. Although almost 24,000 documents referring to the economy of Ur III have so far been published, the majority of them are still waiting to be properly evaluated. Nor is there yet a serviceable typology for them; only when that has been drawn up will it be possible to write a book entitled “The Economic System of Ur III.” Represented in the main by contracts (loans, leases of temple land, the purchase of slaves, and the like), the “private” sector makes up only a small part of this mass of textual material. Neither can the sites at which discoveries have been made so far be taken as representative. In northern Babylonia, for example, scarcely any contemporary written documents have yet been recovered.
Ethnic, geographic, and intellectual constituents
From the ethnic point of view, Mesopotamia was as heterogeneous at the end of the 3rd millennium as it had been earlier. The Akkadian element predominated, and the proportion of speakers of Akkadian to speakers of Sumerian continued to change in favour of the former. The third group, first mentioned under Shar-kali-sharri of Akkad, are the Amorites. In Ur III some members of this people are already found in the higher echelons of the administration, but most of them, organized in tribes, still led a nomadic life. Their great days came in the Old Babylonian period. While clearly differing linguistically from Akkadian, the Amorite language, which can be reconstructed to some extent from more than a thousand proper names, is fairly closely related to the so-called Canaanite branch of the Semitic languages, of which it may in fact represent an older form. The fact that King Shu-Sin had a regular wall built clear across the land, the “wall that keeps out the Tidnum” (the name of a tribe), shows how strong the pressure of the nomads was in the 21st century and what efforts were made to check their influx. The fourth major ethnic group was the Hurrians, who were especially important in northern Mesopotamia and in the vicinity of modern Kirkūk.
It is likely that the geographic horizon of the empire of Ur III did not materially exceed that of the empire of Akkad. No names of localities in the interior of Anatolia have been found, but there was much coming and going of messengers between Mesopotamia and Iran, far beyond Elam. There is also one mention of Gubla (Byblos) on the Mediterranean coast. Oddly enough, there is no evidence of any relations with Egypt, either in Ur III or in the Old Babylonian period. It is odd if no contacts existed at the end of the 3rd millennium between the two great civilizations of the ancient Middle East.
Intellectual life at the time of Ur III must have been very active in the cultivation and transmission of older literature, as well as in new creations. Although its importance as a spoken tongue was slowly diminishing, Sumerian still flourished as a written language, a state of affairs that continued into the Old Babylonian period. As shown by the hymn to the deified king, new literary genres arose in Ur III. If Old Babylonian copies are any indication, the king’s correspondence with leading officials was also of a high literary level.
In the long view, the 3rd dynasty of Ur did not survive in historical memory as vigorously as did Akkad. To be sure, Old Babylonian historiography speaks of Ur III as bala-Šulgi, the “(reigning) cycle of Shulgi”; however, there is nothing that would correspond to the epic poems about Sargon and Naram-Sin. The reason is not clear, but it is conceivable that the later, purely Akkadian population felt a closer identification with Akkad than with a state that to a large extent still made use of the Sumerian language.
Ur III in decline
The decline of Ur III is an event in Mesopotamian history that can be followed in greater detail than other stages of that history thanks to sources such as the royal correspondence, two elegies on the destruction of Ur and Sumer, and an archive from Isin that shows how Ishbi-Erra, as usurper and king of Isin, eliminated his former overlord in Ur. Ibbi-Sin was waging war in Elam when an ambitious rival came forward in the person of Ishbi-Erra from Mari, presumably a general or high official. By emphasizing to the utmost the danger threatening from the Amorites, Ishbi-Erra urged the king to entrust to him the protection of the neighbouring cities of Isin and Nippur. Ishbi-Erra’s demand came close to extortion, and his correspondence shows how skillfully he dealt with the Amorites and with individual ensis, some of whom soon went over to his side. Ishbi-Erra also took advantage of the depression that the king suffered because the god Enlil “hated him,” a phrase presumably referring to bad omens resulting from the examination of sacrificed animals, on which procedure many rulers based their actions (or, as the case may be, their inaction). Ishbi-Erra fortified Isin and, in the 10th year of Ibbi-Sin’s reign, began to employ his own dating formulas on documents, an act tantamount to a renunciation of loyalty. Ishbi-Erra, for his part, believed himself to be the favourite of Enlil, the more so as he ruled over Nippur, where the god had his sanctuary. In the end he claimed suzerainty over all of southern Mesopotamia, including Ur.
While Ishbi-Erra purposefully strengthened his domains, Ibbi-Sin continued for 14 more years to rule over a decreasing portion of the land. The end of Ur came about through a concatenation of misfortunes: A famine broke out, and Ur was besieged, taken, and destroyed by the invading Elamites and their allies among the Iranian tribes. Ibbi-Sin was led away captive, and no more was heard of him. The elegies record in moving fashion the unhappy end of Ur, the catastrophe that had been brought about by the wrath of Enlil.
The Old Babylonian period
Isin and Larsa
During the collapse of Ur III, Ishbi-Erra established himself in Isin and founded a dynasty there that lasted from 2017 to 1794. His example was followed elsewhere by local rulers, as in Dēr, Eshnunna, Sippar, Kish, and Larsa. In many localities an urge was felt to imitate the model of Ur; Isin probably took over unchanged the administrative system of that state. Ishbi-Erra and his successors had themselves deified, as did one of the rulers of Dēr, on the Iranian border. For almost a century Isin predominated within the mosaic of states that were slowly reemerging. Overseas trade revived after Ishbi-Erra had driven out the Elamite garrison from Ur, and under his successor, Shu-ilishu, a statue of the moon god Nanna, the city god of Ur, was recovered from the Elamites, who had carried it off. Up to the reign of Lipit-Ishtar (c. 1934–c. 1924), the rulers of Isin so resembled those of Ur, as far as the king’s assessment of himself in the hymns is concerned, that it seems almost arbitrary to postulate a break between Ibbi-Sin and Ishbi-Erra. As a further example of continuity it might be added that the Code of Lipit-Ishtar stands exactly midway chronologically between the Code of Ur-Nammu and the Code of Hammurabi. Yet it is much closer to the former in language and especially in legal philosophy than to Hammurabi’s compilation of judgments. For example, the Code of Lipit-Ishtar does not know the lex talionis (“an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”), the guiding principle of Hammurabi’s penal law.
Political fragmentation
It is probable that the definitive separation from Ur III came about through changing components of the population, from “Sumerians and Akkadians” to “Akkadians and Amorites.” An Old Babylonian liver omen states that “he of the steppes will enter, and chase out the one in the city.” This is indeed an abbreviated formula for an event that took place more than once: the usurpation of the king’s throne in the city by the “sheikh” of some Amorite tribe. These usurpations were regularly carried out as part of the respective tribes became settled, although this was not so in the case of Isin because the house of Ishbi-Erra came from Mari and was of Akkadian origin, to judge by the rulers’ names. By the same linguistic token the dynasty of Larsa was Amorite. The fifth ruler of the latter dynasty, Gungunum (ruled c. 1932–c. 1906), conquered Ur and established himself as the equal and rival of Isin; at this stage—the end of the 20th century bce—if not before, Ur had certainly outlived itself. From Gungunum until the temporary unification of Mesopotamia under Hammurabi, the political picture was determined by the disintegration of the balance of power, by incessant vacillation of alliances, by the presumption of the various rulers, by the fear of encroachments by the Amorite nomads, and by increasingly wretched social conditions. The extensive archive of correspondence from the royal palace of Mari (c. 1810–1750) is the best source of information about the political and diplomatic game and its rules, whether honoured or broken; it covers treaties, the dispatch and reception of embassies, agreements about the integration of allied armies, espionage, and “situation reports” from “foreign” courts. Devoid of exaggeration or stylization, these letters, dealing as they do with everyday events, are preferable to the numerous royal inscriptions on buildings, even when the latter contain historical allusions.
Literary texts and increasing decentralization
Another indirect but far from negligible source for the political and socioeconomic situation in the 20th–18th centuries bce is the literature of omens. These are long compendiums in which the condition of a sheep’s liver or some other divinatory object (for instance, the behaviour of a drop of oil in a beaker filled with water, the appearance of a newborn baby, and the shape of rising clouds of incense) is described at length and commented on with the appropriate prediction: “The king will kill his dignitaries and distribute their houses and property among the temples”; “A powerful man will ascend the throne in a foreign city”; “The land that rose up against its ‘shepherd’ will continue to be ruled by that ‘shepherd’”; “The king will depose his chancellor”; and “They will lock the city gate and there will be a calamity in the city.”
Beginning with Gungunum of Larsa, the texts allow greater insight into the private sector than in any other previous period. There is a considerable increase in the number of private contracts and private correspondences. Especially frequent among the private contracts are those concluded about loans of silver or grain (barley), illustrating the common man’s plight, especially when driven to seek out a creditor, the first step on a road that in many instances led to ruin. The rate of interest, fixed at 20 percent in the case of silver and 33 percent in that of grain, increased further if the deadline for repayment, usually at harvest time, was not kept. Insolvency resulted in imprisonment for debt, slavery by mortgage, and even the sale of children and the debtor’s own person. Many private letters contain entreaties for the release of family members from imprisonment at the creditor’s hands. Yet considerable fortunes were also made, in “liquid” capital as well as landed property. As these tendencies threatened to end in economic disaster, the kings prescribed as a corrective the liquidation of debts, by way of temporary alleviation at least. The exact wording of one such decree is known from the time of Ammiṣaduqa of Babylon.
Until the Ur III period, the only archives so far recovered dealt with temples or the palace. However, belonging to the Old Babylonian period, along with documents pertaining to civil law, were an increasing number of administrative records of privately managed households, inns, and farms: settlements of accounts, receipts, and notes on various transactions. Here was clearly a regular bourgeoisie, disposing of its own land and possessing means independent of temple and palace. Trade, too, was now chiefly in private hands; the merchant traveled (or sent his partners) at his own risk, not on behalf of the state. Among the civil-law contracts there was a substantial increase in records of land purchases. Also significant for the economic situation in the Old Babylonian era was a process that might be summarized as “secularization of the temples,” even if all the stages of this development cannot be traced. The palace had probably possessed for centuries the authority to dispose of temple property, but, whereas UruKAgina of Lagash had still branded the tendency as leading to abuses, the citizen’s relationship to the temple now took on individual traits. Revenues from certain priestly offices—benefices, in other words—went to private individuals and were sold and inherited. The process had begun in Ur, where the king bestowed benefices, although the recipients could not own them. The archives of the “canonesses” of the sun god of Sippar furnish a particularly striking example of the fusion of religious service and private economic interest. These women, who lived in a convent called gagûm, came from the city’s leading families and were not allowed to marry. With their property, consisting of land and silver, they engaged in a lively and remunerative business by granting loans and leasing out fields.
The tendency toward decentralization had begun in the Old Babylonian period with Isin. It concluded with the 72-year reign of the house of Kudur-Mabuk in Larsa (c. 1834–c. 1763). Kudur-Mabuk, sheikh of the Amorite tribe of the Jamutbal, despite his Elamite name, helped his son Warad-Sin to secure the throne. This usurpation allowed Larsa, which had passed through a period of internal unrest, to flourish one more time. Under Warad-Sin and in the long reign of his brother Rim-Sin, large portions of southern Babylonia, including Nippur, were once again united in one state of Larsa in 1794. Larsa was conquered by Hammurabi in 1763.
Early history of Assyria
Strictly speaking, the use of the name “Assyria” for the period before the latter half of the 2nd millennium bce is anachronistic; Assyria—as against the city-state of Ashur—did not become an independent state until about 1400 bce. For convenience, however, the term is used throughout this section.
In contrast to southern Mesopotamia or the mid-Euphrates region (Mari), written sources in Assyria do not begin until very late, shortly before Ur III. By Assyria—a region that does not lend itself to precise geographic delineation—is understood the territory on the Tigris north of the river’s passage through the mountains of the Jabal Ḥamrīn to a point north of Nineveh, as well as the area between Little and Great Zab (a tributary of the Tigris in northeast Iraq) and to the north of the latter. In the north, Assyria was later bordered by the mountain state of Urartu; to the east and southeast its neighbour was the region around ancient Nuzi (near modern Kirkūk, “Arrapchitis” [Arrapkha] of the Greeks). In the early 2nd millennium the main cities of this region were Ashur (160 miles north-northwest of modern Baghdad), the capital (synonymous with the city god and national divinity); Nineveh, lying opposite modern Mosul; and Urbilum, later Arbela (modern Irbīl, some 200 miles north of Baghdad).
In Assyria, inscriptions were composed in Akkadian from the beginning. Under Ur III, Ashur was a provincial capital. Assyria as a whole, however, is not likely to have been a permanently secured part of the empire, since two date formulas of Shulgi and Amar-Su’ena mention the destruction of Urbilum. Ideas of the population of Assyria in the 3rd millennium are necessarily very imprecise. It is not known how long Semitic tribes had been settled there. The inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia called Assyria Shubir in Sumerian and Subartu in Akkadian; these names may point to a Subarean population that was related to the Hurrians. Gasur, the later Nuzi, belonged to the Akkadian language region about the year 2200 but was lost to the Hurrians in the first quarter of the 2nd millennium. The Assyrian dialect of Akkadian found in the beginning of the 2nd millennium differs strongly from the dialect of Babylonia. These two versions of the Akkadian language continue into the 1st millennium.
In contrast to the kings of southern Mesopotamia, the rulers of Ashur styled themselves not king but partly iššiakum, the Akkadian equivalent of the Sumerian word ensi, partly rubā’um, or “great one.” Unfortunately, the rulers cannot be synchronized precisely with the kings of southern Mesopotamia before Shamshi-Adad I (c. 1813–c. 1781 bce). For instance, it has not yet been established just when Ilushuma’s excursion toward the southeast, recorded in an inscription, actually took place. Ilushuma boasts of having freed of taxes the “Akkadians and their children.” While he mentions the cities of Nippur and Ur, the other localities listed were situated in the region east of the Tigris. The event itself may have taken place in the reign of Ishme-Dagan of Isin (c. 1953–c. 1935 bce), although how far Ilushuma’s words correspond to the truth cannot be checked. In the Babylonian texts, at any rate, no reference is made to Assyrian intervention. The whole problem of dating is aggravated by the fact that the Assyrians did not, unlike the Babylonians, use date formulas that often contain interesting historical details; instead, every year was designated by the name of a high official (eponymic dating). The conscious cultivation of an old tradition is mirrored in the fact that two rulers of 19th-century Assyria called themselves Sargon and Naram-Sin after famous models in the Akkadian dynasty.
Aside from the generally scarce reports on projected construction, there is at present no information about the city of Ashur and its surroundings. There exists, however, unexpectedly rewarding source material from the trading colonies of Ashur in Anatolia. The texts come mainly from Kanesh (modern Kültepe, near Kayseri, in Turkey) and from Hattusa (modern Boğazköy, Turkey), the later Hittite capital. In the 19th century bce three generations of Assyrian merchants engaged in a lively commodity trade (especially in textiles and metal) between the homeland and Anatolia, also taking part profitably in internal Anatolian trade. Like their contemporaries in southern Mesopotamia, they did business privately and at their own risk, living peacefully and occasionally intermarrying with the “Anatolians.” As long as they paid taxes to the local rulers, the Assyrians were given a free hand.
Clearly these forays by Assyrian merchants led to some transplanting of Mesopotamian culture into Anatolia. Thus the Anatolians adopted cuneiform writing and used the Assyrian language. While this influence doubtless already affected the first Hittites arriving in Anatolia, a direct line from the period of these trading colonies to the Hittite empire cannot yet be traced.
From about 1813 to about 1781 Assyria was ruled by Shamshi-Adad I, a contemporary of Hammurabi and a personality in no way inferior to him. Shamshi-Adad’s father—an Amorite, to judge by the name—had ruled near Mari. The son, not being of Assyrian origin, ascended the throne of Assyria as a foreigner and on a detour, as it were, after having spent some time as an exile in Babylonia. He had his two sons rule as viceroys, in Ekallātum on the Tigris and in Mari, respectively, until the older of the two, Ishme-Dagan, succeeded his father on the throne. Through the archive of correspondence in the palace at Mari, scholars are particularly well informed about Shamshi-Adad’s reign and many aspects of his personality. Shamshi-Adad’s state had a common border for some time with the Babylonia of Hammurabi. Soon after Shamshi-Adad’s death, Mari broke away, regaining its independence under an Amorite dynasty that had been living there for generations; in the end, Hammurabi conquered and destroyed Mari. After Ishme-Dagan’s death, Assyrian history is lost sight of for more than 100 years.
The Old Babylonian empire
Political fortunes
Hammurabi (c. 1792–c. 1750 bce) is surely the most impressive and by now the best-known figure of the ancient Middle East of the first half of the 2nd millennium bce. He owes his posthumous reputation to the great stela into which the Code of Hammurabi was carved and indirectly also to the fact that his dynasty has made the name of Babylon famous for all time. In much the same way in which pre-Sargonic Kish exemplified the non-Sumerian area north of Sumer and Akkad lent its name to a country and a language, Babylon became the symbol of the whole country that the Greeks called Babylonia. This term is used anachronistically by Assyriologists as a geographic concept in reference to the period before Hammurabi. Originally the city’s name was probably Babilla, which was reinterpreted in popular etymology as Bāb-ili (“Gate of the God”).
The 1st dynasty of Babylon rose from insignificant beginnings. The history of the erstwhile province of Ur is traceable from about 1894 onward, when the Amorite Sumuabum came to power there. What is known of these events fits altogether into the modest proportions of the period when Mesopotamia was a mosaic of small states. Hammurabi played skillfully on the instrument of coalitions and became more powerful than his predecessors had been. Nonetheless, it was only in the 30th year of his reign, after his conquest of Larsa, that he gave concrete expression to the idea of ruling all of southern Mesopotamia by “strengthening the foundations of Sumer and Akkad,” in the words of that year’s dating formula. In the prologue to the Code of Hammurabi the king lists the following cities as belonging to his dominions: Eridu near Ur, Ur, Lagash and Girsu, Zabalam, Larsa, Uruk, Adab, Isin, Nippur, Keshi, Dilbat, Borsippa, Babylon itself, Kish, Malgium, Mashkan-shapir, Kutha, Sippar, Eshnunna in the Diyālā region, Mari, Tuttul on the lower Balīkh (a tributary of the Euphrates), and finally Ashur and Nineveh. This was on a scale reminiscent of Akkad or Ur III. Yet Ashur and Nineveh cannot have formed part of this empire for long because at the end of Hammurabi’s reign mention is made again of wars against Subartu—that is, Assyria.
Under Hammurabi’s son Samsuiluna (c. 1749–c. 1712 bce) the Babylonian empire greatly shrank in size. Following what had almost become a tradition, the south rose up in revolt. Larsa regained its autonomy for some time, and the walls of Ur, Uruk, and Larsa were leveled. Eshnunna, which evidently had also seceded, was vanquished about 1730. Later chronicles mention the existence of a state in the Sealand, with its own dynasty (by “Sealand” is understood the marshlands of southern Babylonia). Knowledge of this new dynasty is unfortunately very vague, only one of its kings being documented in contemporary texts. About 1741 Samsuiluna mentions the Kassites for the first time; about 1726 he constructed a stronghold, “Fort Samsuiluna,” as a bulwark against them on the Diyālā near its confluence with the Tigris.
Like the Gutians before them, the Kassites were at first prevented from entering Babylonia and pushed into the mid-Euphrates region; there, in the kingdom of Khana (centred on Mari and Terqa, both below the junction with the Khābūr River), a king appears with the Kassite name of Kashtiliashu, who ruled toward the end of the Babylonian dynasty. From Khana the Kassites moved south in small groups, probably as harvest workers. After the Hittite invasion under Mursilis I, who is said to have dethroned the last king of Babylon, Samsuditana, in 1595, the Kassites assumed the royal power in Babylonia. So far, the contemporary sources do not mention this epoch, and the question remains unresolved as to how the Kassite rulers named in king lists mesh with the end of the 2nd millennium bce.
Babylonian law
The Code of Hammurabi is the most frequently cited cuneiform document in specialized literature. Its first scholarly publication in 1902 led to the development of a special branch of comparative jurisprudence, the study of cuneiform law. Following the division made by the first editor, Jean-Vincent Scheil, the Code of Hammurabi contains 280 judgments, or “paragraphs,” on civil and criminal law, dealing in the main with cases from everyday life in such a manner that it becomes obvious that the “lawgiver” or compiler had no intention of covering all possible contingencies. In broad outline, the themes treated in the Code of Hammurabi are libel; corrupt administration of justice; theft, receiving stolen goods, robbery, looting, and burglary; murder, manslaughter, and bodily injury; abduction; judicature of tax lessees; liability for negligent damage to fields and crop damage caused by grazing cattle; illegal felling of palm trees; legal problems of trade enterprises, in particular, the relationship between the merchant and his employee traveling overland, and embezzlement of merchandise; trust monies; the proportion of interest to loan money; the legal position of the female publican; slavery and ransom, slavery for debt, runaway slaves, the sale and manumission of slaves, and the contesting of slave status; the rent of persons, animals, and ships and their respective tariffs, offenses committed by hired labourers, and the vicious bull; family law: the price of a bride, dowry, the married woman’s property, wife and concubine, and the legal position of the respective issue, divorce, adoption, the wet nurse’s contract, and inheritance; and the legal position of certain priestesses.
Diorite stela inscribed with the Code of Hammurabi, 18th century bce.Art Media/Heritage-Images/age fotostock
A similar if much shorter compendium of judgments, probably antedating that of Hammurabi by a generation or two, has been discovered in Eshnunna.
Hammurabi, who called his own work dīnāt mīŷarim, or “verdicts of the just order,” states in the epilogue that it was intended as legal aid for persons in search of advice. Whether these judgments were meant to have binding force in the sense of modern statutes, however, is a matter of controversy. The Code of Hammurabi differs in many respects from the Code of Lipit-Ishtar, which was written in Sumerian. Its most striking feature lies in the extraordinary severity of its penalties and in the principle of the lex talionis. The same attitude is reflected in various Old Babylonian contracts in which defaulters are threatened with bodily punishment. It is often said, and perhaps rightly so, that this severity, which so contrasts with Sumerian judicial tradition, can be traced back to the Amorite influence.
There is yet another way in which the Code of Hammurabi has given rise to much discussion. Many of its “paragraphs” vary according to whether the case concerns an awīlum, a muškēnum, or a wardum. A threefold division of the populace had been postulated on the basis of these distinctions. The wardum is the least problematic: he is the slave—that is, a person in bondage who could be bought and sold, unless he was able to regain his freedom under certain conditions as a debtor-slave. The muškēnum were, under King Hammurabi at least, persons employed by the palace who could be given land in usufruct without receiving it as property. Awīlum were the citizens who owned land in their own right and depended neither on the palace nor on the temple. As the Soviet scholar Igor M. Diakonov has pointed out, the distinction cannot have been very sharply drawn, because the classes awīlum and muškēnum are not mutually exclusive: a man in high palace office could fairly easily purchase land as private property, whereas the free citizen who got into debt as a result of a bad harvest or some other misfortune had one foot in the slave class. Still unanswered is the question as to which segment of the population could be conscripted to do public works, a term that included the levy in case of war.
Ammiṣaduqa (c. 1646–c. 1626 bce) comes a century and a half after Hammurabi. His edict, already referred to, lists, among others, the following social and economic factors: private debts in silver and grain, if arising out of loans, were canceled; also canceled were back taxes that certain officials owed the palace and that had to be collected from the people; the female publican had to renounce the collection of outstanding debts in beer and barley and was, in turn, excused from paying amounts of silver and barley to the king; taxes on leased property were reduced; debt slaves who had formerly been free (as against slaves made over from debtor to creditor) were ransomed; and high officials were forbidden on pain of death to press those who held property in fee into harvest work by prepayment of wages. The phrase “because the king gave the land a just order” serves as a rationale for many of these instances. In contrast to the codes, about whose binding force there is much doubt, edicts such as those of Ammiṣaduqa had legal validity since there are references to the edicts of other kings in numerous legal documents of the Old Babylonian period.
Babylonian literature
The literature and the literary languages of Babylonia during the three centuries following Ur III deserve attention. When commenting on literary and historical texts such as the inscriptions of the kings of Akkad, it was pointed out that these were not originals but copies of Old Babylonian vintage. So far, such copies are the main source for Sumerian literature. Yet, while the Old Babylonian period witnessed the creation of much literature (royal hymns of the kings of Isin, Larsa, and Babylon and elegies), it was above all a time of intensive cultivation of traditional literature. The great Sumerian poems, whose origins or first written version, respectively, can now be traced back to about 2600, were copied again and again. After 2000, when Sumerian as a spoken language rapidly receded to isolated regions and eventually disappeared altogether, texts began to be translated, line by line, into Akkadian until there came to be bilingual versions. An important part of this, especially in the instructional program in schools, were the so-called lexicographical texts. Sumerian word lists are almost as old as cuneiform writing itself; they formed the perfect material for those learning to write. In the Old Babylonian period, the individual lexical entries were translated and often annotated with phonetic signs. This led to the creation of “dictionaries,” the value of which to the modern philologist cannot be exaggerated. Since Sumerian had to be taught much more than before, regular “grammatical treatises” also came into being: so far as it was possible, in view of the radically different structures of the two languages, Sumerian pronouns, verb forms, and the like were translated into Akkadian, including entire “paradigms” of individual verbs.
In belles lettres, Sumerian still predominates, although there is no lack of Akkadian masterpieces, including the oldest Akkadian version of the epic of Gilgamesh. The very high prestige still enjoyed by Sumerian should not be underestimated, and it continued to be used for inscriptions on buildings and the yearly dating formulas. Aside from being the language of practical affairs (i.e., letters and contracts), there was a high incidence of Akkadian in soothsaying and divinatory literature. To be sure, the Sumerians also practiced foretelling the future from the examination of animal entrails, but as far as is known they did not write down the results. In Akkadian, on the other hand, there are extensive and “scientifically” arranged compendiums of omens based on the liver (as well as other omens), reflecting the importance that the divination of the future had in religion, in politics, and in all aspects of daily life.
Judging by its increasingly refined juridical thought, its ability to master in writing ever more complicated administrative procedures, its advanced knowledge of mathematics, and the fact that it marks the beginning of the study of astronomy, the Old Babylonian period appears to have been a time of exceedingly active intellectual endeavour—despite, if not because of, its lack of political cohesiveness.
The Hurrians
The Hurrians enter the orbit of ancient Middle Eastern civilization toward the end of the 3rd millennium bce. They arrived in Mesopotamia from the north or the east, but it is not known how long they had lived in the peripheral regions. There is a brief inscription in Hurrian language from the end of the period of Akkad, while that of King Arishen (or Atalshen) of Urkish and Nawar is written in Akkadian. The language of the Hurrians must have belonged to a widespread group of ancient Middle Eastern languages. The relationship between Hurrian and Subarean has already been mentioned, and the language of the Urartians, who played an important role from the end of the 2nd millennium to the 8th century bce, is likewise closely related to Hurrian. According to the Soviet scholars Igor M. Diakonov and Sergei A. Starostin, the Eastern Caucasian languages are an offshoot of the Hurrian-Urartian group.
It is not known whether the migrations of the Hurrians ever took the form of aggressive invasion; 18th-century-bce texts from Mari speak of battles with the Hurrian tribe of Turukku south of Lake Urmia (some 150 miles from the Caspian Sea’s southwest corner), but these were mountain campaigns, not the warding off of an offensive. Proper names in cuneiform texts, their frequency increasing in the period of Ur III, constitute the chief evidence for the presence of Hurrians. Nevertheless, there is no clear indication that the Hurrians had already advanced west of the Tigris at that time. An entirely different picture results from the 18th-century palace archives of Mari and from texts originating near the upper Khābūr River. Northern Mesopotamia, west of the Tigris, and Syria appear settled by a population that is mainly Amorite and Hurrian; and the latter had already reached the Mediterranean littoral, as shown by texts from Alalakh on the Orontes. In Mari, literary texts in Hurrian also have been found, indicating that Hurrian had by then become a fully developed written language as well.
The high point of the Hurrian period was not reached until about the middle of the 2nd millennium. In the 15th century, Alalakh was heavily Hurrianized; and in the empire of Mitanni the Hurrians represented the leading and perhaps the most numerous population group. Dietz O. Edzard
Mesopotamia to the end of the Achaemenian period
The Kassites, the Mitanni, and the rise of Assyria
About 150 years after the death of Hammurabi, his dynasty was destroyed by an invasion of new peoples. Because there are very few written records from this era, the time from about 1560 bce to about 1440 bce (in some areas until 1400 bce) is called the dark ages. The remaining Semitic states, such as the state of Ashur, became minor states within the sphere of influence of the new states of the Kassites and the Hurrians/Mitanni. The languages of the older cultures, Akkadian and Sumerian, continued or were soon reestablished, however. The cuneiform script persisted as the only type of writing in the entire area. Cultural continuity was not broken off, either, particularly in Babylonia. A matter of importance was the emergence of new Semitic leading classes from the ranks of the priesthood and the scribes. These gained increasing power.
The Kassites in Babylonia
The Kassites had settled by 1800 bce in what is now western Iran in the region of Hamadan-Kermanshah. The first to feel their forward thrust was Samsuiluna, who had to repel groups of Kassite invaders. Increasing numbers of Kassites gradually reached Babylonia and other parts of Mesopotamia. There they founded principalities, of which little is known. No inscription or document in the Kassite language has been preserved. Some 300 Kassite words have been found in Babylonian documents. Nor is much known about the social structure of the Kassites or their culture. There seems to have been no hereditary kingdom. Their religion was polytheistic; the names of some 30 gods are known.
The beginning of Kassite rule in Babylonia cannot be dated exactly. A king called Agum II ruled over a state that stretched from western Iran to the middle part of the Euphrates valley; 24 years after the Hittites had carried off the statue of the Babylonian god Marduk, he regained possession of the statue, brought it back to Babylon, and renewed the cult, making the god Marduk the equal of the corresponding Kassite god, Shuqamuna. Meanwhile, native princes continued to reign in southern Babylonia. It may have been Ulamburiash who finally annexed this area around 1450 and began negotiations with Egypt in Syria. Karaindash built a temple with bas-relief tile ornaments in Uruk (Erech) around 1420. A new capital west of Baghdad, Dūr Kurigalzu, competing with Babylon, was founded and named after Kurigalzu I (c. 1400–c. 1375). His successors Kadashman-Enlil I (c. 1375–c. 1360) and Burnaburiash II (c. 1360–c. 1333) were in correspondence with the Egyptian rulers Amenhotep III and Akhenaton (Amenhotep IV). They were interested in trading their lapis lazuli and other items for gold as well as in planning political marriages. Kurigalzu II (c. 1332–c. 1308) fought against the Assyrians but was defeated by them. His successors sought to ally themselves with the Hittites in order to stop the expansion of the Assyrians. During the reign of Kashtiliash IV (c. 1232–c. 1225), Babylonia waged war on two fronts at the same time—against Elam and Assyria—ending in the catastrophic invasion and destruction of Babylon by Tukulti-Ninurta I. Not until the time of the kings Adad-shum-uṣur (c. 1216–c. 1187) and Melishipak (c. 1186–c. 1172) was Babylon able to experience a period of prosperity and peace. Their successors were again forced to fight, facing the conqueror King Shutruk-Nahhunte of Elam (c. 1185–c. 1155). Cruel and fierce, the Elamites finally destroyed the dynasty of the Kassites during these wars (about 1155). Some poetical works lament this catastrophe.
Letters and documents of the time after 1380 show that many things had changed after the Kassites took power. The Kassite upper class, always a small minority, had been largely “Babylonianized.” Babylonian names were to be found even among the royalty, and they predominated among the civil servants and the officers. The new feudal character of the social structure showed the influence of the Kassites. Babylonian town life had revived on the basis of commerce and handicrafts. The Kassitic nobility, however, maintained the upper hand in the rural areas, their wealthiest representatives holding very large landed estates. Many of these holdings came from donations of the king to deserving officers and civil servants, considerable privileges being connected with such grants. From the time of Kurigalzu II these were registered on stone tablets or, more frequently, on boundary stones called kudurrus. After 1200 the number of these increased substantially, because the kings needed a steadily growing retinue of loyal followers. The boundary stones had pictures in bas-relief, very often a multitude of religious symbols, and frequently contained detailed inscriptions giving the borders of the particular estate; sometimes the deserts of the recipient were listed and his privileges recorded; finally, trespassers were threatened with the most terrifying curses. Agriculture and cattle husbandry were the main pursuits on these estates, and horses were raised for the light war chariots of the cavalry. There was an export trade in horses and vehicles in exchange for raw material. As for the king, the idea of the social-minded ruler continued to be valid.
The decline of Babylonian culture at the end of the Old Babylonian period continued for some time under the Kassites. Not until approximately 1420 did the Kassites develop a distinctive style in architecture and sculpture. Kurigalzu I played an important part, especially in Ur, as a patron of the building arts. Poetry and scientific literature developed only gradually after 1400. The existence of earlier work is clear from poetry, philological lists, and collections of omens and signs that were in existence by the 14th century or before and that have been discovered in the Hittite capital of Hattusa, in the Syrian capital of Ugarit, and even as far away as Palestine. Somewhat later, new writings appear: medical diagnoses and recipes, more Sumero-Akkadian word lists, and collections of astrological and other omens and signs with their interpretations. Most of these works are known today only from copies of more recent date. The most important is the Babylonian epic of the creation of the world, Enuma elish. Composed by an unknown poet, probably in the 14th century, it tells the story of the god Marduk. He began as the god of Babylon and was elevated to be king over all other gods after having successfully accomplished the destruction of the powers of chaos. For almost 1,000 years this epic was recited during the New Year’s festival in the spring as part of the Marduk cult in Babylon. The literature of this time contains very few Kassitic words. Many scholars believe that the essential groundwork for the development of the subsequent Babylonian culture was laid during the later epoch of the Kassite era.
The Hurrian and Mitanni kingdoms
The weakening of the Semitic states in Mesopotamia after 1550 enabled the Hurrians to penetrate deeper into this region, where they founded numerous small states in the eastern parts of Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Syria. The Hurrians came from northwestern Iran, but until recently very little was known about their early history. After 1500, isolated dynasties appeared with Indo-Aryan names, but the significance of this is disputed. The presence of Old Indian technical terms in later records about horse breeding and the use of the names of Indian gods (such as, for example, Indra and Varuna) in some compacts of state formerly led several scholars to assume that numerous groups of Aryans, closely related to the Indians, pushed into Anatolia from the northeast. They were also credited with the introduction of the light war chariot with spoked wheels. This conclusion, however, is by no means established fact. So far it has not been possible to appraise the numbers and the political and cultural influence of the Aryans in Anatolia and Mesopotamia relative to those of the Hurrians.
Some time after 1500 the kingdom of Mitanni (or Mittani) arose near the sources of the Khābūr River in Mesopotamia. Since no record or inscription of their kings has been unearthed, little is known about the development and history of the Mitanni kingdom before King Tushratta. The Mitanni empire was known to the Egyptians under the name of Naharina, and Thutmose III fought frequently against it after 1460 bce. By 1420 the domain of the Mitanni king Saustatar (Saushatar) stretched from the Mediterranean all the way to the northern Zagros Mountains, in western Iran, including Alalakh, in northern Syria, as well as Nuzi, Kurrukhanni, and Arrapkha. The northern boundary dividing Mitanni from the Hittites and the other Hurrian states was never fixed, even under Saustatar’s successors Artatama I and Shuttarna II, who married their daughters to the pharaohs Thutmose IV (1400–1390) and Amenhotep III (1390–1353). Tushratta (c. 1365–c. 1330), the son of Shuttarna, was able to maintain the kingdom he had inherited for many years. In his sometimes very long letters—one of them written in Hurrian—to Amenhotep III and Akhenaton (1353–1336), he wrote about commerce, his desire for gold, and marriage. Weakened by internal strife, the Mitanni kingdom eventually became a pawn between the rising kingdoms of the Hittites and the Assyrians.
The kingdom of Mitanni was a feudal state led by a warrior nobility of Aryan or Hurrian origin. Frequently horses were bred on their large landed estates. Documents and contract agreements in Syria often mention a chariot-warrior caste that also constituted the social upper class in the cities. The aristocratic families usually received their landed property as an inalienable fief. Consequently, no documents on the selling of landed property are to be found in the great archives of Akkadian documents and letters discovered in Nuzi, near Kirkūk. The prohibition against selling landed property was often dodged, however, with a stratagem: the previous owner “adopted” a willing buyer against an appropriate sum of money. The wealthy lord Tehiptilla was “adopted” almost 200 times, acquiring tremendous holdings of landed property in this way without interference by the local governmental authorities. He had gained his wealth through trade and commerce and through a productive two-field system of agriculture (in which each field was cultivated only once in two years). For a long time, Prince Shilwa-Teshub was in charge of the royal governmental administration in the district capital. Sheep breeding was the basis for a woolen industry, and textiles collected by the palace were exported on a large scale. Society was highly structured in classes, ranks, and professions. The judiciary, patterned after the Babylonian model, was well organized; the documents place heavy emphasis on correct procedure.
Native sources on the religion of the Hurrians of the Mitanni kingdom are limited; about their mythology, however, much is known from related Hittite and Ugaritic myths. Like the other peoples of the ancient Middle East, the Hurrians worshiped gods of various origins. The king of the gods was the weather god Teshub. According to the myths, he violently deposed his father Kumarbi; in this respect he resembled the Greek god Zeus, who deposed his father Kronos. The war chariot of Teshub was drawn by the bull gods Seris (“Day”) and Hurris (“Night”). Major sanctuaries of Teshub were located at Arrapkha (modern Kirkūk) and at Halab (modern Aleppo) in Syria. In the east his consort was the goddess of love and war Shaushka, and in the west the goddess Hebat (Hepat); both were similar to the Ishtar-Astarte of the Semites.
The sun god Shimegi and the moon god Kushuh, whose consort was Nikkal, the Ningal of the Sumerians, were of lesser rank. More important was the position of the Babylonian god of war and the underworld, Nergal. In northern Syria the god of war Astapi and the goddess of oaths Ishara are attested as early as the 3rd millennium bce.
In addition, a considerable importance was attributed to impersonal numina such as heaven and earth as well as to deities of mountains and rivers. In the myths the terrible aspect of the gods often prevails over indications of a benevolent attitude. The cults ofsacrifices and other rites are similar to those known from the neighbouring countries; many Hurrian rituals were found in Hittite Anatolia. There is abundant evidence for magic and oracles.
Temple monuments of modest dimensions have been unearthed; in all probability, specific local traditions were a factor in their design. The dead were probably buried outside the settlement. Small artifacts, particularly seals, show a peculiar continuation of Babylonian and Assyrian traditions in their preference for the naturalistic representation of figures. There were painted ceramics with finely drawn decorations (white on a dark background). The strong position of the royal house was evident in the large palaces, existing even in district capitals. The palaces were decorated with frescoes. Because only a few Mitanni settlements have been unearthed in Mesopotamia, knowledge of Mitanni arts and culture is as yet insufficient.
The rise of Assyria
Very little can be said about northern Assyria during the 2nd millennium bce. Information on the old capital, Ashur, located in the south of the country, is somewhat more plentiful. The old lists of kings suggest that the same dynasty ruled continuously over Ashur from about 1600. All the names of the kings are given, but little else is known about Ashur before 1420. Almost all the princes had Akkadian names, and it can be assumed that their sphere of influence was rather small. Although Assyria belonged to the kingdom of the Mitanni for a long time, it seems that Ashur retained a certain autonomy. Located close to the boundary with Babylonia, it played that empire off against Mitanni whenever possible. Puzur-Ashur III concluded a border treaty with Babylonia about 1480, as did Ashur-bel-nisheshu about 1405. Ashur-nadin-ahhe II (c. 1392–c. 1383) was even able to obtain support from Egypt, which sent him a consignment of gold.
Ashur-uballiṭ I (c. 1354–c. 1318) was at first subject to King Tushratta of Mitanni. After 1340, however, he attacked Tushratta, presumably together with Suppiluliumas I of the Hittites. Taking away from Mitanni parts of northeastern Mesopotamia, Ashur-uballiṭ now called himself “Great King” and socialized with the king of Egypt on equal terms, arousing the indignation of the king of Babylonia. Ashur-uballiṭ was the first to name Assyria the Land of Ashur, because the old name, Subartu, was often used in a derogatory sense in Babylonia. He ordered his short inscriptions to be partly written in the Babylonian dialect rather than the Assyrian, since this was considered refined. Marrying his daughter to a Babylonian, he intervened there energetically when Kassite nobles murdered his grandson. Future generations came to consider him rightfully as the real founder of the Assyrian empire. His son Enlil-nirari (c. 1326–c. 1318) also fought against Babylonia. Arik-den-ili (c. 1308–c. 1297) turned westward, where he encountered Semitic tribes of the so-called Akhlamu group.
Still greater successes were achieved by Adad-nirari I (c. 1295–c. 1264). Defeating the Kassite king Nazimaruttash, he forced him to retreat. After that he defeated the kings of Mitanni, first Shattuara I, then Wasashatta. This enabled him for a time to incorporate all Mesopotamia into his empire as a province, although in later struggles he lost large parts to the Hittites. In the east, he was satisfied with the defense of his lands against the mountain tribes.
Adad-nirari’s inscriptions were more elaborate than those of his predecessors and were written in the Babylonian dialect. In them he declares that he feels called to these wars by the gods, a statement that was to be repeated by other kings after him. Assuming the old title of great king, he called himself “King of All.” He enlarged the temple and the palace in Ashur and also developed the fortifications there, particularly at the banks of the Tigris River. He worked on large building projects in the provinces.
His son Shalmaneser I (Shulmanu-asharidu; c. 1263–c. 1234) attacked Uruatru (later called Urartu) in southern Armenia, which had allegedly broken away. Shattuara II of Hanigalbat, however, put him into a difficult situation, cutting his forces off from their water supplies. With courage born of despair, the Assyrians fought themselves free. They then set about reducing what was left of the Mitanni kingdom into an Assyrian province. The king claimed to have blinded 14,400 enemies in one eye—psychological warfare of a similar kind was used more and more as time went by. The Hittites tried in vain to save Hanigalbat. Together with the Babylonians they fought a commercial war against Ashur for many years. Like his father, Shalmaneser was a great builder. At the juncture of the Tigris and Great Zab rivers, he founded a strategically situated second capital, Kalakh (biblical Calah; modern Nimrūd).
His son was Tukulti-Ninurta (c. 1233–c. 1197), the Ninus of Greek legends. Gifted but extravagant, he made his nation a great power. He carried off thousands of Hittites from eastern Anatolia. He fought particularly hard against Babylonia, deporting Kashtiliash IV to Assyria. When the Babylonians rebelled again, he plundered the temples in Babylon, an act regarded as a sacrilege, even in Assyria. The relationship between the king and his capital deteriorated steadily. For this reason the king began to build a new city, Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta, on the other side of the Tigris River. Ultimately, even his sons rebelled against him and laid siege to him in his city; in the end he was murdered. His victorious wars against Babylonia were glorified in an epic poem, but his empire broke up soon after his death. Assyrian power declined for a time, while that of Babylonia rose.
Assyria had suffered under the oppression of both the Hurrians and the Mitanni kingdom. Its struggle for liberation and the bitter wars that followed had much to do with its development into a military power. In his capital of Ashur, the king depended on the citizen class and the priesthood, as well as on the landed nobility that furnished him with the war-chariot troops.
Documents and letters show the important role that agriculture played in the development of the state. Assyria was less dependent on artificial irrigation than was Babylonia. The breeding of horses was carried on intensively; remnants of elaborate directions for their training are extant. Trade and commerce also were of notable significance: metals were imported from Anatolia or Armenia, tin from northwestern Iran, and lumber from the west. The opening up of new trade routes was often a cause and the purpose of war.
Assyrian architecture, derived from a combination of Mitannian and Babylonian influences, developed early quite an individual style. The palaces often had colourful wall decorations. The art of seal cutting, taken largely from Mitanni, continued creatively on its own. The schools for scribes, where all the civil servants were trained, taught both the Babylonian and the Assyrian dialects of the Akkadian language. Babylonian works of literature were assimilated into Assyrian, often reworked into a different form. The Hurrian tradition remained strong in the military and political sphere while at the same time influencing the vocabulary of language.
Assyria and Babylonia at the end of the 2nd millennium
Babylonia under the 2nd dynasty of Isin
In a series of heavy wars about which not much is known, Marduk-kabit-ahheshu (c. 1152–c. 1135) established what came to be known as the 2nd dynasty of Isin. His successors were often forced to continue the fighting. The most famous king of the dynasty was Nebuchadrezzar I (Nabu-kudurri-uṣur; c. 1119–c. 1098). He fought mainly against Elam, which had conquered and ravaged a large part of Babylonia. His first attack miscarried because of an epidemic among his troops, but in a later campaign he conquered Susa, the capital of Elam, and returned the previously removed statue of the god Marduk to its proper place. Soon thereafter the king of Elam was assassinated, and his kingdom once again fell apart into small states. This enabled Nebuchadrezzar to turn west, using the later years of peace to start extensive building projects. After him, his son became king, succeeded by his brother Marduk-nadin-ahhe (c. 1093–c. 1076). At first successful in his wars against Assyria, he later experienced heavy defeat. A famine of catastrophic proportions triggered an attack from Aramaean tribes, the ultimate blow. His successors made peace with Assyria, but the country suffered more and more from repeated attacks by Aramaeans and other Semitic nomads. Even though some of the kings still assumed grand titles, they were unable to stem the progressive disintegration of their empire. There followed the era known as the 2nd dynasty of the Sealand (c. 1020–c. 1000), which included three usurpers. The first of these had the Kassitic name of Simbar-Shihu (or Simbar-Shipak; (c. 1020–c. 1003).
Toward the end of its reign, the dynasty of the Kassites became completely Babylonianized. The changeover to the dynasty of Isin, actually a succession of kings from different families, brought no essential transformation of the social structure. The feudal order remained. New landed estates came into existence in many places through grants to deserving officers; many boundary stones (kudurrus) have been found that describe them. The cities of Babylonia retained much of their former autonomy. The border provinces, however, were administered by royally appointed governors with civil and military functions.
In the literary arts this was a period of creativity; thus the later Babylonians with good reason regarded the time of Nebuchadrezzar I as one of the great eras of their history. A heroic epic, modeled upon older epics, celebrates the deeds of Nebuchadrezzar I, but unfortunately little of it is extant. Other material comes from the ancient myths. The poet of the later version of the epic of Gilgamesh, Sin-leqe-unnini (c. 1150–?) of Uruk, is known by name. This version of the epic is known as the Twelve-Tablet Poem; it contains about 3,000 verses. It is distinguished by its greater emphasis on the human qualities of Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu; this quality makes it one of the great works of world literature.
Another poet active at about the same time was the author of a poem of 480 verses called Ludlul bēl nēmeqi (“Let Me Praise the Possessor of Wisdom”). The poem meditates on the workings of divine justice, which sometimes appear strange and inexplicable to suffering human beings; this subject had acquired an increasing importance in the contemporary religion of Babylon. The poem describes the multifarious sufferings of a high official and his subsequent salvation by the god Marduk.
The gradual reduction of the Sumerian pantheon of about 2,000 gods by the identification and integration of originally distinct gods and goddesses of similar functions resulted in a growing number of surnames or compound names for the main gods (Marduk, for example, had about 50 such names) and later in a conception of “the god” and “the goddess” with interchangeable names in the cults of the great temples. There was a theology of identifications of gods, which was documented by god lists in two columns with hundreds of entries in the form “Enzag = Nabû of (the island of) Dilmun,” as well as by many hymns and prayers of the time and by later compositions.
As a consequence of the distinction of an enormous number of multifarious sins, the concept of a universal sinfulness of mankind is increasingly observed in this period and later. All human beings, therefore, were believed to be in need of the forgiveness afforded by the deities to sincere worshipers. Outside of Israel, the concept of sinfulness can be found in ancient times only in Babylonia and Assyria.
Assyria between 1200 and 1000 bce
After a period of decline following Tukulti-Ninurta I, Assyria was consolidated and stabilized under Ashur-dan I (c. 1179–c. 1134) and Ashur-resh-ishi I (c. 1133–c. 1116). Several times forced to fight against Babylonia, the latter was even able to defend himself against an attack by Nebuchadrezzar I. According to the inscriptions, most of his building efforts were in Nineveh, rather than in the old capital of Ashur.
His son Tiglath-pileser I (Tukulti-apil-Esharra; (c. 1115–c. 1077) raised the power of Assyria to new heights. First he turned against a large army of the Mushki that had entered into southern Armenia from Anatolia, defeating them decisively. After this, he forced the small Hurrian states of southern Armenia to pay him tribute. Trained in mountain warfare themselves and helped by capable pioneers, the Assyrians were now able to advance far into the mountain regions. Their main enemies were the Aramaeans, the Semitic Bedouin nomads whose many small states often combined against the Assyrians. Tiglath-pileser I also went to Syria and even reached the Mediterranean, where he took a sea voyage. After 1100 these campaigns led to conflicts with Babylonia. Tiglath-pileser conquered northern Babylonia and plundered Babylon, without decisively defeating Marduk-nadin-ahhe. In his own country the king paid particular attention to agriculture and fruit growing, improved the administrative system, and developed more thorough methods of training scribes.
Three of his sons reigned after Tiglath-pileser, including Ashur-bel-kala (c. 1074–c. 1057). Like his father, he fought in southern Armenia and against the Aramaeans with Babylonia as his ally. Disintegration of the empire could not be delayed, however. The grandson of Tiglath-pileser, Ashurnasirpal I (c. 1050–c. 1032), was sickly and unable to do more than defend Assyria proper against his enemies. Fragments of three of his prayers to Ishtar are preserved; among them is a penitential prayer in which he wonders about the cause of so much adversity. Referring to his many good deeds but admitting his guilt at the same time, he asks for forgiveness and health. According to the king, part of his guilt lay in neglecting to teach his subjects the fear of god. After him, little is known for 100 years.
State and society during the time of Tiglath-pileser were not essentially different from those of the 13th century. Collections of laws, drafts, and edicts of the court exist that go back as far as the 14th century bce. Presumably, most of these remained in effect. One tablet defining the marriage laws shows that the social position of women in Assyria was lower than in Babylonia or Israel or among the Hittites. A man was allowed to send away his wife at his own pleasure with or without divorce money. In the case of adultery, he was permitted to kill or maim her. Outside her house the woman was forced to observe many restrictions, such as the wearing of a veil. It is not clear whether these regulations carried the weight of law, but they seem to have represented a reaction against practices that were more favourable to women. Two somewhat older marriage contracts, for example, granted equal rights to both partners, even in divorce. The women of the king’s harem were subject to severe punishment, including beating, maiming, and death, along with those who guarded and looked after them. The penal laws of the time were generally more severe in Assyria than in other countries of the East. The death penalty was not uncommon. In less serious cases the penalty was forced labour after flogging. In certain cases there was trial by ordeal. One tablet treats the subject of landed property rights. Offenses against the established boundary lines called for extremely severe punishment. A creditor was allowed to force his debtor to work for him, but he could not sell him.
The greater part of Assyrian literature was either taken over from Babylonia or written by the Assyrians in the Babylonian dialect, who modeled their works on Babylonian originals. The Assyrian dialect was used in legal documents, court and temple rituals, and collections of recipes—as, for example, in directions for making perfumes. A new art form was the picture tale: a continuing series of pictures carved on square stelae of stone. The pictures, showing war or hunting scenes, begin at the top of the stela and run down around it, with inscriptions under the pictures explaining them. These and the finely cut seals show that the fine arts of Assyria were beginning to surpass those of Babylonia. Architecture and other forms of the monumental arts also began a further development, such as the double temple with its two towers (ziggurat). Colourful enameled tiles were used to decorate the facades.
Assyria and Babylonia from c. 1000 to c. 750 bce
Assyria and Babylonia until Ashurnasirpal II
The most important factor in the history of Mesopotamia in the 10th century was the continuing threat from the Aramaean seminomads. Again and again, the kings of both Babylonia and Assyria were forced to repel their invasions. Even though the Aramaeans were not able to gain a foothold in the main cities, there are evidences of them in many rural areas. Ashur-dan II (934–912) succeeded in suppressing the Aramaeans and the mountain people, in this way stabilizing the Assyrian boundaries. He reintroduced the use of the Assyrian dialect in his written records.
Adad-nirari II (c. 911–891) left detailed accounts of his wars and his efforts to improve agriculture. He led six campaigns against Aramaean intruders from northern Arabia. In two campaigns against Babylonia he forced Shamash-mudammiq (c. 930–904) to surrender extensive territories. Shamash-mudammiq was murdered, and a treaty with his successor, Nabu-shum-ukin (c. 904–888), secured peace for many years. Tukulti-Ninurta II (c. 890–884), the son of Adad-nirari II, preferred Nineveh to Ashur. He fought campaigns in southern Armenia. He was portrayed on stelae in blue and yellow enamel in the late Hittite style, showing him under a winged sun—a theme adopted from Egyptian art. His son Ashurnasirpal II (883–859) continued the policy of conquest and expansion. He left a detailed account of his campaigns, which were impressive in their cruelty. Defeated enemies were impaled, flayed, or beheaded in great numbers. Mass deportations, however, were found to serve the interests of the growing empire better than terror. Through the systematic exchange of native populations, conquered regions were denationalized. The result was a submissive, mixed population in which the Aramaean element became the majority. This provided the labour force for the various public works in the metropolitan centres of the Assyrian empire. Ashurnasirpal II rebuilt Kalakh, founded by Shalmaneser I, and made it his capital. Ashur remained the centre of the worship of the god Ashur—in whose name all the wars of conquest were fought. A third capital was Nineveh.
Ashurnasirpal II was the first to use cavalry units to any large extent in addition to infantry and war-chariot troops. He also was the first to employ heavy, mobile battering rams and wall breakers in his sieges. Following after the conquering troops came officials from all branches of the civil service, because the king wanted to lose no time in incorporating the new lands into his empire. The supremacy of Assyria over its neighbouring states owed much to the proficiency of the government service under the leadership of the minister Gabbilani-eresh. The campaigns of Ashurnasirpal II led him mainly to southern Armenia and Mesopotamia. After a series of heavy wars, he incorporated Mesopotamia as far as the Euphrates River. A campaign to Syria encountered little resistance. There was no great war against Babylonia. Ashurnasirpal, like other Assyrian kings, may have been moved by religion not to destroy Babylonia, which had almost the same gods as Assyria. Both empires must have profited from mutual trade and cultural exchange. The Babylonians, under the energetic Nabu-apla-iddina (c. 887–855) attacked the Aramaeans in southern Mesopotamia and occupied the valley of the Euphrates River to about the mouth of the Khābūr River.
Ashurnasirpal, so brutal in his wars, was able to inspire architects, structural engineers, and artists and sculptors to heights never before achieved. He built and enlarged temples and palaces in several cities. His most impressive monument was his own palace in Kalakh, covering a space of 269,000 square feet (25,000 square metres). Hundreds of large limestone slabs were used in murals in the staterooms and living quarters. Most of the scenes were done in relief, but painted murals also have been found. Most of them depict mythological themes and symbolic fertility rites, with the king participating. Brutal war pictures were aimed to discourage enemies. The chief god of Kalakh was Ninurta, god of war and the hunt. The tower of the temple dedicated to Ninurta also served as an astronomical observatory. Kalakh soon became the cultural centre of the empire. Ashurnasirpal claimed to have entertained 69,574 guests at the opening ceremonies of his palace.
Shalmaneser III and Shamshi-Adad V of Assyria
The son and successor of Ashurnasirpal was Shalmaneser III (858–824). His father’s equal in both brutality and energy, he was less realistic in his undertakings. His inscriptions, in a peculiar blend of Assyrian and Babylonian, record his considerable achievements but are not always able to conceal his failures. His campaigns were directed mostly against Syria. While he was able to conquer northern Syria and make it a province, in the south he could only weaken the strong state of Damascus and was unable, even after several wars, to eliminate it. In 841 he laid unsuccessful siege to Damascus. Also in 841 King Jehu of Israel was forced to pay tribute. In his invasion of Cilicia, Shalmaneser had only partial success. The same was true of the kingdom of Urartu in Armenia, from which, however, the troops returned with immense quantities of lumber and building stone. The king and, in later years, the general Dayyan-Ashur went several times to western Iran, where they found such states as Mannai in northwestern Iran and, farther away in the southeast, the Persians. They also encountered the Medes during these wars. Horse tribute was collected.
In Babylonia, Marduk-zakir-shumi I ascended the throne about the year 855. His brother Marduk-bel-usati rebelled against him, and in 851 the king was forced to ask Shalmaneser for help. Shalmaneser was only too happy to oblige; when the usurper had been finally eliminated (850), Shalmaneser went to southern Babylonia, which at that time was almost completely dominated by Aramaeans. There he encountered, among others, the Chaldeans, mentioned for the first time in 878 bce, who were to play a leading role in the history of later times; Shalmaneser made them tributaries.
During his long reign he built temples, palaces, and fortifications in Assyria as well as in the other capitals of his provinces. His artists created many statues and stelae. Among the best known is the Black Obelisk, which includes a picture of Jehu of Israel paying tribute. The bronze doors from the town of Imgur-Enlil (Balawat) in Assyria portray the course of his campaigns and other undertakings in rows of pictures, often very lifelike. Hundreds of delicately carved ivories were carried away from Phoenicia, and many of the artists along with them; these later made Kalakh a centre for the art of ivory sculpture.
In the last four years of the reign of Shalmaneser, the crown prince Ashur-da’in-apla led a rebellion. The old king appointed his younger son Shamshi-Adad as the new crown prince. Forced to flee to Babylonia, Shamshi-Adad V (823–811) finally managed to regain the kingship with the help of Marduk-zakir-shumi I under humiliating conditions. As king he campaigned with varying success in southern Armenia and Azerbaijan, later turning against Babylonia. He won several battles against the Babylonian kings Marduk-balassu-iqbi and Baba-aha-iddina (about 818–12) and pushed through to Chaldea. Babylonia remained independent, however.
Adad-nirari III and his successors
Shamshi-Adad V died while Adad-nirari III (810–783) was still a minor. His Babylonian mother, Sammu-ramat, took over the regency, governing with great energy until 806. The Greeks, who called her Semiramis, credited her with legendary accomplishments, but historically little is known about her. Adad-nirari later led several campaigns against the Medes and also against Syria and Palestine. In 804 he reached Gaza, but Damascus proved invincible. He also fought in Babylonia, helping to restore order in the north.
Shalmaneser IV (c. 783–773) fought against Urartu, then at the height of its power under King Argishti (c. 780–755). He successfully defended eastern Mesopotamia against attacks from Armenia. On the other hand, he lost most of Syria after a campaign against Damascus in 773. The reign of Ashur-dan III (772–755) was shadowed by rebellions and by epidemics of plague. Of Ashur-nirari V (754–746) little is known.
In Assyria the feudal structure of society remained largely unchanged. Many of the conquered lands were combined to form large provinces. The governors of these provinces sometimes acquired considerable independence, particularly under the weaker monarchs after Adad-nirari III. Some of them even composed their own inscriptions. The influx of displaced peoples into the cities of Assyria created large metropolitan centres. The spoils of war, together with an expanding trade, favoured the development of a well-to-do commercial class. The dense population of the cities gave rise to social tensions that only the strong kings were able to contain. A number of the former capitals of the conquered lands remained important as capitals of provinces. There was much new building. A standing occupational force was needed in the provinces, and these troops grew steadily in proportion to the total military forces. There are no records on the training of officers or on military logistics. The civil service also expanded, the largest administrative body being the royal court, with thousands of functionaries and craftsmen in the several residential cities.
The cultural decline about the year 1000 was overcome during the reigns of Ashurnasirpal II and Shalmaneser III. The arts in particular experienced a tremendous resurgence. Literary works continued to be written in Assyrian and were seldom of great importance. The literature that had been taken over from Babylonia was further developed with new writings, although one can rarely distinguish between works written in Assyria and works written in Babylonia. In religion, the official cults of Ashur and Ninurta continued, while the religion of the common people went its separate way.
In Babylonia not much was left of the feudal structure; the large landed estates almost everywhere fell prey to the inroads of the Aramaeans, who were at first half nomadic. The leaders of their tribes and clans slowly replaced the former landlords. Agriculture on a large scale was no longer possible except on the outskirts of metropolitan areas. The predominance of the Babylonian schools for scribes may have prevented the emergence of an Aramaean literature. In any case, the Aramaeans seem to have been absorbed into the Babylonian culture. The religious cults in the cities remained essentially the same. The Babylonian empire was slowly reduced to poverty, except perhaps in some of the cities.
In 764, after an epidemic, the Erra epic, the myth of Erra (the god of war and pestilence), was written by Kabti-ilani-Marduk. He invented an original plot, which diverged considerably from the old myths; long discourses of the gods involved in the action form the most important part of the epic. There is a passage in the epic claiming that the text was divinely revealed to the poet during a dream.
The Neo-Assyrian Empire (746–609)
For no other period of Assyrian history is there an abundance of sources comparable to those available for the interval from roughly 745 to 640. Aside from the large number of royal inscriptions, about 2,400 letters, most of them more or less fragmentary, have been published. Usually the senders and recipients of these letters are the king and high government officials. Among them are reports from royal agents about foreign affairs and letters about cultic matters. Treaties, oracles, queries to the sun god about political matters, and prayers of or for kings contain a great deal of additional information. Last but certainly not least are paintings and wall reliefs, which are often very informative.
Tiglath-pileser III and Shalmaneser V
The decline of Assyrian power after 780 was notable; Syria and considerable lands in the north were lost. A military coup deposed King Ashur-nirari V and raised a general to the throne. Under the name of Tiglath-pileser III (745–727), he brought the empire to its greatest expanse. He reduced the size of the provinces in order to break the partial independence of the governors. He also invalidated the tax privileges of cities such as Ashur and Harran in order to distribute the tax load more evenly over the entire realm. Military equipment was improved substantially. In 746 he went to Babylonia to aid Nabu-naṣir (747–734) in his fight against Aramaean tribes. Tiglath-pileser defeated the Aramaeans and then made visits to the large cities of Babylonia. There he tried to secure the support of the priesthood by patronizing their building projects. Babylonia retained its independence.
His next undertaking was to check Urartu. His campaigns in Azerbaijan were designed to drive a wedge between Urartu and the Medes. In 743 he went to Syria, defeating there an army of Urartu. The Syrian city of Arpad, which had formed an alliance with Urartu, did not surrender so easily. It took Tiglath-pileser three years of siege to conquer Arpad, whereupon he massacred the inhabitants and destroyed the city. In 738 a new coalition formed against Assyria under the leadership of Sam’al (modern Zincirli) in northern Syria. It was defeated, and all the princes from Damascus to eastern Anatolia were forced to pay tribute. Another campaign in 735, this time directed against Urartu itself, was only partly successful. In 734 Tiglath-pileser invaded southern Syria and the Philistine territories in Palestine, going as far as the Egyptian border. Damascus and Israel tried to organize resistance against him, seeking to bring Judah into their alliance. Ahaz of Judah, however, asked Tiglath-pileser for help. In 733 Tiglath-pileser devastated Israel and forced it to surrender large territories. In 732 he advanced upon Damascus, first devastating the gardens outside the city and then conquering the capital and killing the king, whom he replaced with a governor. The queen of southern Arabia, Samsil, was now obliged to pay tribute, being permitted in return to use the harbour of the city of Gaza, which was in Assyrian hands.
The death of King Nabonassar of Babylonia caused a chaotic situation to develop there, and the Aramaean Ukin-zer crowned himself king. In 731 Tiglath-pileser fought and beat him and his allies, but he did not capture Ukin-zer until 729. This time he did not appoint a new king for Babylonia but assumed the crown himself under the name Pulu (Pul in the Hebrew Bible). In his old age he abstained from further campaigning, devoting himself to the improvement of his capital, Kalakh. He rebuilt the palace of Shalmaneser III, filled it with treasures from his wars, and decorated the walls with bas-reliefs. The latter were almost all of warlike character, as if designed to intimidate the onlooker with their presentation of gruesome executions. These pictorial narratives on slabs, sometimes painted, have also been found in Syria, at the sites of several provincial capitals of ancient Assyria.
Tiglath-pileser was succeeded by his son Shalmaneser V (726–722), who continued the policy of his father. As king of Babylonia, he called himself Ululai. Almost nothing is known about his enterprises, since his successor destroyed all his inscriptions. The Hebrew Bible relates that he marched against Hoshea of Israel in 724 after Hoshea had rebelled. He was probably assassinated during the long siege of Samaria. His successor maintained that the god Ashur had withdrawn his support of Shalmaneser V for acts of disrespect.
Sargon II (721–705) and Marduk-apal-iddina of Babylonia
It was probably a younger brother of Shalmaneser who ascended the throne of Assyria in 721. Assuming the old name of Sharru-kin (Sargon in the Bible), meaning “Legitimate King,” he assured himself of the support of the priesthood and the merchant class by restoring privileges they had lost, particularly the tax exemptions of the great temples. The change of sovereign in Assyria triggered another crisis in Babylonia. An Aramaean prince from the south, Marduk-apal-iddina II (the biblical Merodach-Baladan), seized power in Babylon in 721 and was able to retain it until 710 with the help of Humbanigash I of Elam. A first attempt by Sargon to recover Babylonia miscarried when Elam defeated him in 721. During the same year the protracted siege of Samaria was brought to a close. The Samarian upper class was deported, and Israel became an Assyrian province. Samaria was repopulated with Syrians and Babylonians. Judah remained independent by paying tribute. In 720 Sargon squelched a rebellion in Syria that had been supported by Egypt. Then he defeated both Hanunu of Gaza and an Egyptian army near the Egyptian border. In 717 and 716 he campaigned in northern Syria, making the hitherto independent state of Carchemish one of his provinces. He also went to Cilicia in an effort to prevent further encroachments of the Phrygians under King Midas (Assyrian: Mitā).
In order to protect his ally, the state of Mannai, in Azerbaijan, Sargon embarked on a campaign in Iran in 719 and incorporated parts of Media as provinces of his empire; however, in 716 another war became necessary. At the same time, he was busy preparing a major attack against Urartu. Under the leadership of the crown prince Sennacherib, armies of agents infiltrated Urartu, which was also threatened from the north by the Cimmerians. Many of their messages and reports have been preserved. The longest inscription ever composed by the Assyrians about a year’s enterprise (430 very long lines) is dedicated to this Urartu campaign of 714. Phrased in the style of a first report to the god Ashur, it is interspersed with stirring descriptions of natural scenery. The strong points of Urartu must have been well fortified. Sargon tried to avoid them by going through the province of Mannai and attacking the Median principalities on the eastern side of Lake Urmia. In the meantime, hoping to surprise the Assyrian troops, Rusa of Urartu had closed the narrow pass lying between Lake Urmia and Sahand Mount. Sargon, anticipating this, led a small band of cavalry in a surprise charge that developed into a great victory for the Assyrians. Rusa fled and died. The Assyrians pushed forward, destroying all the cities, fortifications, and even irrigation works of Urartu. They did not conquer Tushpa (the capital) but took possession of the mountain city of Muṣaṣir. The spoils were immense. The following years saw only small campaigns in Media and eastern Anatolia and against Ashdod, in Palestine. King Midas of Phrygia and some cities on Cyprus were quite ready to pay tribute.
Sargon was now free to settle accounts with Marduk-apal-iddina of Babylonia. Abandoned by his ally Shutruk-Nahhunte II of Elam, Marduk-apal-iddina found it best to flee, first to his native land on the Persian Gulf and later to Elam. Because the Aramaean prince had made himself very unpopular with his subjects, Sargon was hailed as the liberator of Babylonia. He complied with the wishes of the priesthood and at the same time put down the Aramaean nobility. He was satisfied with the modest title of governor of Babylonia.
At first Sargon resided in Kalakh, but he then decided to found an entirely new capital north of Nineveh. He called the city Dur-Sharrukin—“Sargonsburg” (modern Khorsabad, Iraq). He erected his palace on a high terrace in the northeastern part of the city. The temples of the main gods, smaller in size, were built within the palatial rectangle, which was surrounded by a special wall. This arrangement enabled Sargon to supervise the priests better than had been possible in the old, large temple complexes. One consequence of this design was that the figure of the king pushed the gods somewhat into the background, thereby gaining in importance. Desiring that his palace match the vastness of his empire, Sargon planned it in monumental dimensions. Stone reliefs of two winged bulls with human heads flanked the entrance; they were much larger than anything comparable built before. The walls were decorated with long rows of bas-reliefs showing scenes of war and festive processions. A comparison with a well-executed stela of the Babylonian king Marduk-apal-iddina shows that the fine arts of Assyria had far surpassed those of Babylonia. Sargon never completed his capital, though from 713 to 705 bce tens of thousands of labourers and hundreds of artisans worked on the great city. Yet, with the exception of some magnificent buildings for public officials, only a few durable edifices were completed in the residential section. In 705, in a campaign in northwestern Iran, Sargon was ambushed and killed. His corpse remained unburied, to be devoured by birds of prey. Sargon’s son Sennacherib, who had quarreled with his father, was inclined to believe with the priests that his death was a punishment from the neglected gods of the ancient capitals.
Dur Sharrukin, Iraq: Winged BullWinged bull with a human head, guardian figure from the palace at Dur Sharrukin, near Nineveh, Iraq; in the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago.Trjames
Sennacherib
Sennacherib (Assyrian: Sin-ahhe-eriba; 704–681) was well prepared for his position as sovereign. With him Assyria acquired an exceptionally clever and gifted, though often extravagant, ruler. His father, interestingly enough, is not mentioned in any of his many inscriptions. He left the new city of Dur-Sharrukin at once and resided in Ashur for a few years, until in 701 he made Nineveh his capital.
Sennacherib had considerable difficulties with Babylonia. In 703 Marduk-apal-iddina again crowned himself king with the aid of Elam, proceeding at once to ally himself with other enemies of Assyria. After nine months he was forced to withdraw when Sennacherib defeated a coalition army consisting of Babylonians, Aramaeans, and Elamites. The new puppet king of Babylonia was Bel-ibni (702–700), who had been raised in Assyria.
In 702 Sennacherib launched a raid into western Iran. In 701 there followed his most famous campaign, against Syria and Palestine, with the purpose of gaining control over the main road from Syria to Egypt in preparation for later campaigns against Egypt itself. When Sennacherib’s army approached, Sidon immediately expelled its ruler, Luli, who was hostile to Assyria. The other allies either surrendered or were defeated. An Egyptian army was defeated at Eltekeh in Judah. Sennacherib laid siege to Jerusalem, and the king of Judah, Hezekiah, was called upon to surrender, but he did not comply. An Assyrian officer tried to incite the people of Jerusalem against Hezekiah, but his efforts failed. In view of the difficulty of surrounding a mountain stronghold such as Jerusalem, and of the minor importance of this town for the main purpose of the campaign, Sennacherib cut short the attack and left Palestine with his army, which according to the Hebrew Bible (2 Kings 19:35) had been decimated by an epidemic. The number of Assyrian dead is reported to have risen to 185,000. Nevertheless, Hezekiah is reported to have paid tribute to Sennacherib on at least one occasion.
Bel-ibni of Babylonia seceded from the union with Assyria in 700. Sennacherib moved quickly, defeating Bel-ibni and replacing him with Sennacherib’s oldest son, Ashur-nadin-shumi. The next few years were relatively peaceful. Sennacherib used this time to prepare a decisive attack against Elam, which time and again had supported Babylonian rebellions. The overland route to Elam had been cut off and fortified by the Elamites. Sennacherib had ships built in Syria and at Nineveh. The ships from Syria were moved on rollers from the Euphrates to the Tigris. The fleet sailed downstream and was quite successful in the lagoons of the Persian Gulf and along the southern coastline of Elam. The Elamites launched a counteroffensive by land, occupying Babylonia and putting a man of their choice on the throne. Not until 693 were the Assyrians again able to fight their way through to the north. Finally, in 689, Sennacherib had his revenge. Babylon was conquered and completely destroyed, the temples plundered and leveled. The waters of the Arakhtu Canal were diverted over the ruins, and the inner city remained almost totally uninhabited for eight years. Even many Assyrians were indignant at this, believing that the Babylonian god Marduk must be grievously offended at the destruction of his temple and the carrying off of his image. Marduk was also an Assyrian deity, to whom many Assyrians turned in time of need. A political-theological propaganda campaign was launched to explain to the people that what had taken place was in accord with the wish of most of the gods. A story was written in which Marduk, because of a transgression, was captured and brought before a tribunal. Only a part of the commentary to this botched piece of literature is extant. Even the great poem of the creation of the world, the Enuma elish, was altered: the god Marduk was replaced by the god Ashur. Sennacherib’s boundless energies brought no gain to his empire, however, and probably weakened it. The tenacity of this king can be seen in his building projects; for example, when Nineveh needed water for irrigation, Sennacherib had his engineers divert the waters of a tributary of the Great Zab River. The canal had to cross a valley at Jerwan. An aqueduct was constructed, consisting of about two million blocks of limestone, with five huge, pointed archways over the brook in the valley. The bed of the canal on the aqueduct was sealed with cement containing magnesium. Parts of this aqueduct are still standing today. Sennacherib wrote of these and other technological accomplishments in minute detail, with illustrations.
Sennacherib built a huge palace in Nineveh, adorned with reliefs, some of them depicting the transport of colossal bull statues by water and by land. Many of the rooms were decorated with pictorial narratives in bas-relief telling of war and of building activities. Considerable advances can be noted in artistic execution, particularly in the portrayal of landscapes and animals. Outstanding are the depictions of the battles in the lagoons, the life in the military camps, and the deportations.
In 681 bce there was a rebellion. Sennacherib was assassinated by one or two of his sons in the temple of the god Ninurta at Kalakh. This god, along with the god Marduk, had been badly treated by Sennacherib, and the event was widely regarded as punishment of divine origin.
Esarhaddon
Ignoring the claims of his older brothers, an imperial council appointed Esarhaddon (Ashur-aha-iddina; 680–669) as Sennacherib’s successor. The choice is all the more difficult to explain in that Esarhaddon, unlike his father, was friendly toward the Babylonians. It can be assumed that his energetic and designing mother, Zakutu (Naqia), who came from Syria or Judah, used all her influence on his behalf to override the national party of Assyria. The theory that he was a partner in plotting the murder of his father is rather improbable; at any rate, he was able to procure the loyalty of his father’s army. His brothers had to flee to Urartu. In his inscriptions, Esarhaddon always mentions both his father and grandfather.
Defining the destruction of Babylon explicitly as punishment by the god Marduk, the new king soon ordered the reconstruction of the city. He referred to himself only as governor of Babylonia and through his policies obtained the support of the cities of Babylonia. At the beginning of his reign the Aramaean tribes were still allied with Elam against him, but Urtaku of Elam (675–664) signed a peace treaty and freed him for campaigning elsewhere. In 679 he stationed a garrison at the Egyptian border, because Egypt, under the Ethiopian king Taharqa, was planning to intervene in Syria. He put down with great severity a rebellion of the combined forces of Sidon, Tyre, and other Syrian cities. The time was ripe to attack Egypt, which was suffering under the rule of the Ethiopians and was by no means a united country. Esarhaddon’s first attempt in 674–673 miscarried. In 671 bce, however, his forces took Memphis, the Egyptian capital. Assyrian consultants were assigned to assist the princes of the 22 provinces, their main duty being the collection of tribute.
Occasional threats came from the mountainous border regions of eastern Anatolia and Iran. Pushed forward by the Scythians, the Cimmerians in northern Iran and Transcaucasia tried to gain a foothold in Syria and western Iran. Esarhaddon allied himself with the Scythian king Partatua by giving him one of his daughters in marriage. In so doing he checked the movement of the Cimmerians. Nevertheless, the apprehensions of Esarhaddon can be seen in his many offerings, supplications, and requests to the sun god. These were concerned less with his own enterprises than with the plans of enemies and vassals and the reliability of civil servants. The priestesses of Ishtar had to reassure Esarhaddon constantly by calling out to him, “Do not be afraid.” Previous kings, as far as is known, had never needed this kind of encouragement.
At home Esarhaddon was faced with serious difficulties from factions in the court. His oldest son had died early. The national party suspected his second son, Shamash-shum-ukin, of being too friendly with the Babylonians; he may also have been considered unequal to the task of kingship. His third son, Ashurbanipal, was given the succession in 672, Shamash-shum-ukin remaining crown prince of Babylonia. This arrangement caused much dissension, and some farsighted civil servants warned of disastrous effects. Nevertheless, the Assyrian nobles, priests, and city leaders were sworn to just such an adjustment of the royal line; even the vassal princes had to take very detailed oaths of allegiance to Ashurbanipal, with many curses against perjurers.
Another matter of deep concern for Esarhaddon was his failing health. He regarded eclipses of the moon as particularly alarming omens, and, in order to prevent a fatal illness from striking him at these times, he had substitute kings chosen who ruled during the three eclipses that occurred during his 12-year reign. The replacement kings died or were put to death after their brief term of office. During his off-terms Esarhaddon called himself “Mister Peasant.” This practice implied that the gods could not distinguish between the real king and a false one—quite contrary to the usual assumptions of the religion.
Esarhaddon enlarged and improved the temples in both Assyria and Babylonia. He also constructed a palace in Kalakh, using many of the picture slabs of Tiglath-pileser III. The works that remain are not on the level of those of either his predecessors or of Ashurbanipal. He died while on an expedition to put down a revolt in Egypt.
Ashurbanipal (668–627) and Shamash-shum-ukin (668–648)
Although the death of his father occurred far from home, Ashurbanipal assumed the kingship as planned. He may have owed his fortunes to the intercession of his grandmother Zakutu, who had recognized his superior capacities. He tells of his diversified education by the priests and his training in armour-making as well as in other military arts. He may have been the only king in Assyria with a scholarly background. As crown prince he also had studied the administration of the vast empire. The record notes that the gods granted him a record harvest during the first year of his reign. There were also good crops in subsequent years. During these first years he also was successful in foreign policy, and his relationship with his brother in Babylonia was good.
In 668 he put down a rebellion in Egypt and drove out King Taharqa, but in 664 the nephew of Taharqa, Tanutamon, gathered forces for a new rebellion. Ashurbanipal went to Egypt, pursuing the Ethiopian prince far into the south. His decisive victory moved Tyre and other parts of the empire to resume regular payments of tribute. Ashurbanipal installed Psamtik (Greek: Psammetichos) as prince over the Egyptian region of Sais. In 656 Psamtik dislodged the Assyrian garrisons with the aid of Carian and Ionian mercenaries, making Egypt again independent. Ashurbanipal did not attempt to reconquer it. A former ally of Assyria, Gyges of Lydia, had aided Psamtik in his rebellion. In return, Assyria did not help Gyges when he was attacked by the Cimmerians. Gyges lost his throne and his life. His son Ardys decided that the payment of tribute to Assyria was a lesser evil than conquest by the Cimmerians.
Graver difficulties loomed in southern Babylonia, which was attacked by Elam in 664. Another attack came in 653, whereupon Ashurbanipal sent a large army that decisively defeated the Elamites. Their king was killed, and some of the Elamite states were encouraged to secede. Elam was no longer strong enough to assume an active part on the international scene. This victory had serious consequences for Babylonia. Shamash-shum-ukin had grown weary of being patronized by his domineering brother. He formed a secret alliance in 656 with the Iranians, Elamites, Aramaeans, Arabs, and Egyptians, directed against Ashurbanipal. The withdrawal of defeated Elam from this alliance was probably the reason for a premature attack by Shamash-shum-ukin at the end of the year 652, without waiting for the promised assistance from Egypt. Ashurbanipal, taken by surprise, soon pulled his troops together. The Babylonian army was defeated, and Shamash-shum-ukin was surrounded in his fortified city of Babylon. His allies were not able to hold their own against the Assyrians. Reinforcements of Arabian camel troops also were defeated. The city of Babylon was under siege for three years. It fell in 648 amid scenes of horrible carnage, Shamash-shum-ukin dying in his burning palace.
After 648 the Assyrians made a few punitive attacks on the Arabs, breaking the forward thrust of the Arab tribes for a long time to come. The main objective of the Assyrians, however, was a final settlement of their relations with Elam. The refusal of Elam in 647 to extradite an Aramaean prince was used as pretext for a new attack that drove deep into its territory. The assault on the solidly fortified capital of Susa followed, probably in 646. The Assyrians destroyed the city, including its temples and palaces. Vast spoils were taken. As usual, the upper classes of the land were exiled to Assyria and other parts of the empire, and Elam became an Assyrian province. Assyria had now extended its domain to southwestern Iran. Cyrus I of Persia sent tribute and hostages to Nineveh, hoping perhaps to secure protection for his borders with Media. Little is known about the last years of Ashurbanipal’s reign.
Ashurbanipal left more inscriptions than any of his predecessors. His campaigns were not always recorded in chronological order but clustered in groups according to their purpose. The accounts were highly subjective. One of his most remarkable accomplishments was the founding of the great palace library in Nineveh (modern Kuyunjik), which is today one of the most important sources for the study of ancient Mesopotamia. The king himself supervised its construction. Important works were kept in more than one copy, some intended for the king’s personal use. The work of arranging and cataloging drew upon the experience of centuries in the management of collections in huge temple archives such as the one in Ashur. In his inscriptions Ashurbanipal tells of becoming an enthusiastic hunter of big game, acquiring a taste for it during a fight with marauding lions. In his palace at Nineveh the long rows of hunting scenes show what a masterful artist can accomplish in bas-relief; with these reliefs Assyrian art reached its peak. In the series depicting his wars, particularly the wars fought in Elam, the scenes are overloaded with human figures. Those portraying the battles with the Arabian camel troops are magnificent in execution.
One reason for the durability of the Assyrian empire was the practice of deporting large numbers of people from conquered areas and resettling others in their place. This kept many of the conquered nationalities from regaining their power. Equally important was the installation in conquered areas of a highly developed civil service under the leadership of trained officers. The highest ranking civil servant carried the title of tartān, a Hurrian word. The tartāns also represented the king during his absence. In descending rank were the palace overseer, the main cupbearer, the palace administrator, and the governor of Assyria. The generals often held high official positions, particularly in the provinces. The civil service numbered about 100,000, many of them former inhabitants of subjugated provinces. Prisoners became slaves but were later often freed.
No laws are known for the empire, although documents point to the existence of rules and standards for justice. Those who broke contracts were subject to severe penalties, even in cases of minor importance: the sacrifice of a son or the eating of a pound of wool and drinking of a great deal of water afterward, which led to a painful death. The position of women was inferior, except for the queen and some priestesses.
As yet there are no detailed studies of the economic situation during this period. The landed nobility still played an important role, in conjunction with the merchants in the cities. The large increase in the supply of precious metals—received as tribute or taken as spoils—did not disrupt economic stability in many regions. Stimulated by the patronage of the kings and the great temples, the arts and crafts flourished during this period. The policy of resettling Aramaeans and other conquered peoples in Assyria brought many talented artists and artisans into Assyrian cities, where they introduced new styles and techniques. High-ranking provincial civil servants, who were often very powerful, saw to it that the provincial capitals also benefited from this economic and cultural growth.
Harran became the most important city in the western part of the empire; in the neighbouring settlement of Huzirina (modern Sultantepe, in northern Syria), the remains of an important library have been discovered. Very few Aramaic texts from this period have been found; the climate of Mesopotamia is not conducive to the preservation of the papyrus and parchment on which these texts were written. There is no evidence that a literary tradition existed in any of the other languages spoken within the borders of the Assyrian empire at this time, except in peripheral areas of Syria and Palestine.
Culturally and economically, Babylonia lagged behind Assyria in this period. The wars with Assyria—particularly the catastrophic defeats of 689 and 648—together with many smaller tribal wars disrupted trade and agricultural production. The great Babylonian temples fared best during this period, since they continued to enjoy the patronage of the Assyrian monarchs. Only a few documents from the temples have been preserved, however. There is evidence that the scribal schools continued to operate, and “Sumerian” inscriptions were even composed for Shamash-shum-ukin. In comparison with the Assyrian developments, the pictorial arts were neglected, and Babylonian artists may have found work in Assyria.
During this period people began to use the names of ancestors as a kind of family name; this increase in family consciousness is probably an indication that the number of old families was growing smaller. By this time the process of “Aramaicization” had reached even the oldest cities of Babylonia and Assyria.
Apparently this era was not very fruitful for literature either in Babylonia or in Assyria. In Assyria numerous royal inscriptions, some as long as 1,300 lines, were among the most important texts; some of them were diverse in content and well composed. Most of the hymns and prayers were written in the traditional style. Many oracles, often of unusual content, were proclaimed in the Assyrian dialect, most often by the priestesses of the goddess Ishtar of Arbela. In Assyria as in Babylonia, the beginnings of a real historical literature are observed; most of the authors have remained anonymous up to the present.
The many gods of the tradition were worshiped in Babylonia and Assyria in large and small temples, as in earlier times. Very detailed rituals regulated the sacrifices, and the interpretations of the ritual performances in the cultic commentaries were rather different and sometimes very strange.
On some of the temple towers (ziggurats), astronomical observatories were installed. The earliest of these may have been the observatory of the Ninurta temple at Kalakh in Assyria, which dates back to the 9th century bce; it was destroyed with the city in 612. The most important observatory in Babylonia from about 580 was situated on the ziggurat Etemenanki, a temple of Marduk in Babylon. In Assyria the observation of the Sun, Moon, and stars had already reached a rather high level; the periodic recurrence of eclipses was established. After 600, astronomical observation and calculations developed steadily, and they reached their high point after 500, when Babylonian and Greek astronomers began their fruitful collaboration. Incomplete astronomical diaries, beginning in 652 and covering some 600 years, have been preserved.
Decline of the Assyrian empire
Few historical sources remain for the last 30 years of the Assyrian empire. There are no extant inscriptions of Ashurbanipal after 640 bce, and the few surviving inscriptions of his successors contain only vague allusions to political matters. In Babylonia the silence is almost total until 625 bce, when the chronicles resume. The rapid downfall of the Assyrian empire was formerly attributed to military defeat, although it was never clear how the Medes and the Babylonians alone could have accomplished this. More recent work has established that after 635 a civil war occurred, weakening the empire so that it could no longer stand up against a foreign enemy. Ashurbanipal had twin sons. Ashur-etel-ilani was appointed successor to the throne, but his twin brother Sin-shar-ishkun did not recognize him. The fight between them and their supporters forced the old king to withdraw to Harran, in 632 at the latest, perhaps ruling from there over the western part of the empire until his death in 627. Ashur-etel-ilani governed in Assyria from about 633, but a general, Sin-shum-lisher, soon rebelled against him and proclaimed himself counter-king. Some years later (629?) Sin-shar-ishkun finally succeeded in obtaining the kingship. In Babylonian documents dates can be found for all three kings. To add to the confusion, until 626 there are also dates of Ashurbanipal and a king named Kandalanu. In 626 the Chaldean Nabopolassar (Nabu-apal-uṣur) revolted from Uruk and occupied Babylon. There were several changes in government. King Ashur-etel-ilani was forced to withdraw to the west, where he died sometime after 625.
About the year 626 the Scythians laid waste to Syria and Palestine. In 625 the Medes became united under Cyaxares and began to conquer the Iranian provinces of Assyria. One chronicle relates of wars between Sin-shar-ishkun and Nabopolassar in Babylonia in 625–623. It was not long until the Assyrians were driven out of Babylonia. In 616 the Medes struck against Nineveh, but, according to the Greek historian Herodotus, were driven back by the Scythians. In 615, however, the Medes conquered Arrapkha (Kirkūk), and in 614 they took the old capital of Ashur, looting and destroying the city. Now Cyaxares and Nabopolassar made an alliance for the purpose of dividing Assyria. In 612 Kalakh and Nineveh succumbed to the superior strength of the allies. The revenge taken on the Assyrians was terrible: 200 years later Xenophon found the country still sparsely populated.
Sin-shar-ishkun, king of Assyria, found death in his burning palace. The commander of the Assyrian army in the west crowned himself king in the city of Harran, assuming the name of the founder of the empire, Ashur-uballiṭ II (611–609 bce). Ashur-uballiṭ had to face both the Babylonians and the Medes. They conquered Harran in 610, without, however, destroying the city completely. In 609 the remaining Assyrian troops had to capitulate. With this event Assyria disappeared from history. The great empires that succeeded it learned a great deal from the hated Assyrians, both in the arts and in the organization of their states.
The Neo-Babylonian Empire
The Chaldeans, who inhabited the coastal area near the Persian Gulf, had never been entirely pacified by the Assyrians. About 630 Nabopolassar became king of the Chaldeans. In 626 he forced the Assyrians out of Uruk and crowned himself king of Babylonia. He took part in the wars aimed at the destruction of Assyria. At the same time, he began to restore the dilapidated network of canals in the cities of Babylonia, particularly those in Babylon itself. He fought against the Assyrian Ashur-uballiṭ II and then against Egypt, his successes alternating with misfortunes. In 605 Nabopolassar died in Babylon.
Nebuchadrezzar II
Nabopolassar had named his oldest son, Nabu-kudurri-uṣur, after the famous king of the second dynasty of Isin, trained him carefully for his prospective kingship, and shared responsibility with him. When the father died in 605, Nebuchadrezzar was with his army in Syria; he had just crushed the Egyptians near Carchemish in a cruel, bloody battle and pursued them into the south. On receiving the news of his father’s death, Nebuchadrezzar returned immediately to Babylon. In his numerous building inscriptions he tells but rarely of his many wars; most of them end with prayers. The Babylonian chronicle is extant only for the years 605–594, and not much is known from other sources about the later years of this famous king. He went very often to Syria and Palestine, at first to drive out the Egyptians. In 604 he took the Philistine city of Ashkelon. In 601 he tried to push forward into Egypt but was forced to pull back after a bloody, undecided battle and to regroup his army in Babylonia. After smaller incursions against the Arabs of Syria, he attacked Palestine at the end of 598. King Jehoiakim of Judah had rebelled, counting on help from Egypt. According to the chronicle, Jerusalem was taken on March 16, 597. Jehoiakim had died during the siege, and his son, King Johoiachin, together with at least 3,000 Jews, was led into exile in Babylonia. They were treated well there, according to the documents. Zedekiah was appointed the new king. In 596, when danger threatened from the east, Nebuchadrezzar marched to the Tigris River and induced the enemy to withdraw. After a revolt in Babylonia had been crushed with much bloodshed, there were other campaigns in the west.
According to the Hebrew Bible, Judah rebelled again in 589, and Jerusalem was placed under siege. The city fell in 587/586 and was completely destroyed. Many thousands of Jews were forced into “Babylonian exile,” and their country was reduced to a province of the Babylonian empire. The revolt had been caused by an Egyptian invasion that pushed as far as Sidon. Nebuchadrezzar laid siege to Tyre for 13 years without taking the city, because there was no fleet at his disposal. In 568/567 he attacked Egypt, again without much success, but from that time on the Egyptians refrained from further attacks on Palestine. Nebuchadrezzar lived at peace with Media throughout his reign and acted as a mediator after the Median-Lydian war of 590–585.
The Babylonian empire under Nebuchadrezzar extended to the Egyptian border. It had a well-functioning administrative system. Though he had to collect extremely high taxes and tributes in order to maintain his armies and carry out his building projects, Nebuchadrezzar made Babylonia one of the richest lands in western Asia—the more astonishing because it had been rather poor when it was ruled by the Assyrians. Babylon was the largest city of the “civilized world.” Nebuchadrezzar maintained the existing canal systems and built many supplementary canals, making the land even more fertile. Trade and commerce flourished during his reign.
Nebuchadrezzar’s building activities surpassed those of most of the Assyrian kings. He fortified the old double walls of Babylon, adding another triple wall outside the old wall. In addition, he erected another wall, the Median Wall, north of the city between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers. According to Greek estimates, the Median Wall may have been about 100 feet high. He enlarged the old palace and added many wings, so that hundreds of rooms with large inner courts were now at the disposal of the central offices of the empire. Colourful glazed-tile bas-reliefs decorated the walls. Terrace gardens, called the Hanging Gardens in later accounts, were added. Hundreds of thousands of workers must have been required for these projects. The temples were objects of special concern. He devoted himself first and foremost to the completion of Etemenanki, the “Tower of Babel.” Construction of this building began in the time of Nebuchadrezzar I, about 1110. It stood as a “building ruin” until the reign of Esarhaddon of Assyria, who resumed building about 680 but did not finish. Nebuchadrezzar II was able to complete the whole building. The mean dimensions of Etemenanki are to be found in the Esagila Tablet, which has been known since the late 19th century. Its base measured about 300 feet on each side, and it was 300 feet in height. There were five terracelike gradations surmounted by a temple, the whole tower being about twice the height of those of other temples. The wide street used for processions led along the eastern side by the inner city walls and crossed at the enormous Ishtar Gate with its world-renowned bas-relief tiles. Nebuchadrezzar also built many smaller temples throughout the country.
The last kings of Babylonia
Awil-Marduk (called Evil-Merodach in the Hebrew Bible; 561–560), the son of Nebuchadrezzar, was unable to win the support of the priests of Marduk. His reign did not last long, and he was soon eliminated. His brother-in-law and successor, Nergal-shar-uṣur (called Neriglissar in classical sources; 559–556), was a general who undertook a campaign in 557 into the “rough” Cilician land, which may have been under the control of the Medes. His land forces were assisted by a fleet. His still-minor son Labashi-Marduk was murdered not long after that, allegedly because he was not suitable for his job.
The next king was the Aramaean Nabonidus (Nabu-naʾid 556–539) from Harran, one of the most interesting and enigmatic figures of ancient times. His mother, Addagoppe, was a priestess of the god Sin in Harran; she came to Babylon and managed to secure responsible offices for her son at court. The god of the moon rewarded her piety with a long life—she lived to be 103—and she was buried in Harran with all the honours of a queen in 547. It is not clear which powerful faction in Babylon supported the kingship of Nabonidus; it may have been one opposing the priests of Marduk, who had become extremely powerful. Nabonidus raided Cilicia in 555 and secured the surrender of Harran, which had been ruled by the Medes. He concluded a treaty of defense with Astyages of Media against the Persians, who had become a growing threat since 559 under their king Cyrus II. He also devoted himself to the renovation of many temples, taking an especially keen interest in old inscriptions. He gave preference to his god Sin and had powerful enemies in the priesthood of the Marduk temple. Modern excavators have found fragments of propaganda poems written against Nabonidus and also in support of him. Both traditions continued in Judaism.
Internal difficulties and the recognition that the narrow strip of land from the Persian Gulf to Syria could not be defended against a major attack from the east induced Nabonidus to leave Babylonia around 552 and to reside in Taima (Taymāʾ) in northern Arabia. There he organized an Arabian province with the assistance of Jewish mercenaries. His viceroy in Babylonia was his son Bel-shar-uṣur, the Belshazzar of the Book of Daniel in the Bible. Cyrus turned this to his own advantage by annexing Media in 550. Nabonidus, in turn, allied himself with Croesus of Lydia in order to fight Cyrus. Yet, when Cyrus attacked Lydia and annexed it in 546, Nabonidus was not able to help Croesus. Cyrus bode his time. In 542 Nabonidus returned to Babylonia, where his son had been able to maintain good order in external matters but had not overcome a growing internal opposition to his father. Consequently, Nabonidus’s career after his return was short-lived, though he tried hard to regain the support of the Babylonians. He appointed his daughter to be high priestess of the god Sin in Ur, thus returning to the Sumerian-Old Babylonian religious tradition. The priests of Marduk looked to Cyrus, hoping to have better relations with him than with Nabonidus; they promised Cyrus the surrender of Babylon without a fight if he would grant them their privileges in return. In 539 Cyrus attacked northern Babylonia with a large army, defeating Nabonidus, and entered the city of Babylon without a battle. The other cities did not offer any resistance either. Nabonidus surrendered, receiving a small territory in eastern Iran. Tradition has confused him with his great predecessor Nebuchadrezzar II. The Bible refers to him as Nebuchadrezzar in the Book of Daniel.
Babylonia’s peaceful submission to Cyrus saved it from the fate of Assyria. It became a territory under the Persian crown but kept its cultural autonomy. Even the racially mixed western part of the Babylonian empire submitted without resistance.
By 620 the Babylonians had grown tired of Assyrian rule. They were also weary of internal struggle. They were easily persuaded to submit to the order of the Chaldean kings. The result was a surprisingly rapid social and economic consolidation, helped along by the fact that after the fall of Assyria no external enemy threatened Babylonia for more than 60 years. In the cities the temples were an important part of the economy, having vast benefices at their disposal. The business class regained its strength, not only in the trades and commerce but also in the management of agriculture in the metropolitan areas. Livestock breeding—sheep, goats, beef cattle, and horses—flourished, as did poultry farming. The cultivation of corn, dates, and vegetables grew in importance. Much was done to improve communications, both by water and land, with the western provinces of the empire. The collapse of the Assyrian empire had the consequence that many trade arteries were rerouted through Babylonia. Another result of the collapse was that the city of Babylon became a world centre.
The immense amount of documentary material and correspondence that has survived has not yet been fully analyzed. No new system of law or administration seems to have developed during that time. The Babylonian dialect gradually became Aramaicized; it was still written primarily on clay tablets that often bore added material in Aramaic lettering. Parchment and papyrus documents have not survived. In contrast to advances in other fields, there is no evidence of much artistic creativity. Aside from some of the inscriptions of the kings, especially Nabonidus, which were not comparable from a literary standpoint with those of the Assyrians, the main efforts were devoted to the rewriting of old texts. In the fine arts, only a few monuments have any suggestion of new tendencies.
Mesopotamia under the Persians
Cyrus II, the founder of the Achaemenian Empire, united Babylonia with his country in a personal union, assuming the title of “King of Babylonia, King of the Lands.” His son Cambyses was appointed vice-king and resided in Sippar. The Persians relied on the support of the priests and the business class in the cities. In a Babylonian inscription, Cyrus relates with pride his peaceful, bloodless conquest of the city of Babylon. At the same time, he speaks of Marduk as the king of gods. His moderation and restraint were rewarded: Babylonia became the richest province of his empire. There is no indication of any national rebellion in Babylonia under Cyrus and Cambyses (529–522). That there must have been an accumulation of discontent became clear at the ascension to the throne of Darius I (522–486), when a usurper seized the throne of Babylonia under the name of Nebuchadrezzar (III) only to lose both the throne and his life after 10 weeks. Darius waived any punitive action. He had to take more drastic measures in 521, when a new Nebuchadrezzar incited another rebellion. This usurper’s reign lasted two months.Executions and plundering followed; Darius ordered that the inner walls of Babylon be demolished, and he reformed the organization of the state. Babylon, however, remained the capital of the new satrapy and also became the administrative headquarters for the satrapies of Assyria and Syria. One result was that the palace had to be enlarged.
Babylonia remained a wealthy and prosperous land, in contrast to Assyria, which was still a poor country. At the same time, the administration of the kingdom was more and more in the hands of the Persians, and the tax burdens grew heavier. This produced discontent, centring especially on the large temples in Babylon. Xerxes (486–465) had his residence in Babylon while he was crown prince, and he knew the country very well. When he assumed his kingship, he immediately curtailed the autonomy of the satrapies. This, in turn, gave rise to many rebellions. In Babylonia there were two short interim governments of Babylonian pretenders during 484–482. Xerxes retaliated by desecrating and partially destroying the holy places of the god Marduk and the Tower of Babel in the city of Babylon. Priests were executed, and the statue of Marduk was melted down.
The members of the royal family still resided in the palaces of the city of Babylon, but Aramaic became more and more the language of the official administration. One source of information for this period are the clay-tablet archives of the commercial house of Murashu and Sons of Nippur for the years of 455–403, which tell much about the important role the Iranians played in the country. The state domains were largely in their hands. They controlled many minor feudal tenants, grouped into social classes according to ancestry and occupation. The business people were predominantly Babylonians and Aramaeans, but there were also Jews.
The documents become increasingly sparse after 400. The cultural life of Babylon became concentrated in a few central cities, particularly Babylon and Uruk; Ur and Nippur were also important centres. The work of astronomers continued, as evidenced in records of observations. Nabu-rimanni, living and working around 500, and Kidinnu, 5th or 4th century bce, were known to the Greeks; both astronomers are famous for their methods of calculating the courses of the Moon and the planets. In the field of literature, religious poetic works as well as texts of omens and Sumero-Akkadian word lists were constantly copied, often with commentaries.
For additional discussion of the Achaemenians and their successors, see Iran, history of. Wolfram Th. von Soden
Mesopotamia from c. 320 bce to c. 620 ce
The political history of Mesopotamia between about 320 bce and 620 ce is divided among three periods of foreign rule—the Seleucids to 141 bce, the Parthians to 224 ce, and the Sāsānians until the Arab invasions of the 7th century ce. Sources are scarce, consisting mainly of a few notices in the works of classical authors such as Strabo, Pliny, Polybius, and Ptolemy, while the cuneiform sources are mainly incantations, accounts of religious rites, and copies of ancient religious texts.
The Seleucid period
At the end of the Achaemenian Empire, Mesopotamia was partitioned into the satrapy of Babylonia in the south, while the northern part of Mesopotamia was joined with Syria in another satrapy. It is not known how long this division lasted, but, by the death of Alexander the Great in 323 bce, the north was removed from Syria and made a separate satrapy.
Mesopotamia in Seleucid-Parthian times.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
In the wars between the successors of Alexander, Mesopotamia suffered much from the passage and the pillaging of armies. When Alexander’s empire was divided in 321 bce, one of his generals, Seleucus (later Seleucus I Nicator), received the satrapy of Babylonia to rule. From about 315 to about 312 bce, however, Antigonus I Monophthalmus (The “One-Eyed”) took over the satrapy as ruler of all Mesopotamia, and Seleucus had to flee and accept refuge with Ptolemy of Egypt. With the aid of Ptolemy, Seleucus was able to enter Babylon in 312 bce (311 by the Babylonian reckoning) and hold it for a short time against the forces of Antigonus before marching to the east, where he consolidated his power. It is uncertain when he returned to Babylonia and reestablished his rule there; it may have been in 308, but by 305 bce he had assumed the title of king. With the defeat and death of Antigonus at the Battle of Ipsus in 301, Seleucus became the ruler of a large empire stretching from modern Afghanistan to the Mediterranean Sea. He founded a number of cities, the most important of which were Seleucia, on the Tigris, and Antioch, on the Orontes River in Syria. The latter, named after his father or his son, both of whom were called Antiochus, became the principal capital, while Seleucia became the capital of the eastern provinces. The dates of the founding of these two cities are unknown, but presumably Seleucus founded Seleucia after he became king, while Antioch was built after the defeat of Antigonus.
Mesopotamia is scarcely mentioned in the Greek sources relating to the Seleucids, because the Seleucid rulers were occupied with Greece and Anatolia and with wars with the Ptolemies of Egypt in Palestine and Syria. Even the political division of Mesopotamia is uncertain, especially since Alexander, Seleucus, and Seleucus’ son Antiochus I Soter all founded cities that were autonomous, like the Greek polis. The political division of the land into 19 or 20 small satrapies, which is found later, under the Parthians, began under the Seleucids. Geographically, however, Mesopotamia can be divided into four areas: Characene, also called Mesene, in the south; Babylonia, later called Asūristān, in the middle; northern Mesopotamia, where there was later a series of small states such as Gordyene, Osroene, Adiabene, and Garamea; and finally the desert areas of the upper Euphrates, in Sāsānian times called Arabistān. These four areas had different histories down to the Arab conquest in the 7th century, although all of them were subject first to the Seleucids and then to the Parthians and Sāsānians. At times, however, several of the areas were fully independent, in theory as well as in fact, while the relations of certain cities with provincial governments and with the central government varied. From cuneiform sources it is known that traditional religious practices and forms of government as well as other customs continued in Mesopotamia; there were only a few Greek centres, such as Seleucia and the island of Ikaros (modern Faylakah, near Kuwait), where the practices of the Greek polis held sway. Otherwise, native cities had a few Greek officials or garrisons but continued to function as they had in the past.
Seleucia on the Tigris was not only the eastern capital but also an autonomous city ruled by an elected senate, and it replaced Babylon as the administrative and commercial centre of the old province of Babylonia. In the south several cities, such as Furat and Charax, grew rich on the maritime trade with India; Charax became the main entrepôt for trade after the fall of the Seleucids. In the north there was no principal city, but several towns, such as Arbela (modern Irbīl) and Nisibis (modern Nusaybin), later became important centres. In the desert region, “caravan cities” such as Hatra and Palmyra began their rise in the Seleucid period and had their heyday under the Parthians.
The only time that the Seleucid kings lost control of Mesopotamia was from 222 to 220 bce, when Molon, the governor of Media, revolted and marched to the west. When the new Seleucid king, Antiochus III, moved against him from Syria, however, Molon’s forces deserted him, and the revolt ended. The Parthians, under their able king Mithradates I, conquered Seleucid territory in Iran and entered Seleucia in 141 bce. After the death of Mithradates I in 138 bce, Antiochus VII began a campaign to recover the Seleucid domains in the east. This campaign was successful until Antiochus VII lost his life in Iran in 129 bce. His death ended Seleucid rule in Mesopotamia and marked the beginning of small principalities in both the south and north of Mesopotamia.
Seleucid rule brought changes to Mesopotamia, especially in the cities where Greeks and Macedonians were settled. In these cities the king usually made separate agreements with the Greek officials of the city regarding civil and military authority, immunity from taxes or corvée, or the like. Native cities continued with their old systems of local government, much as they had under the Achaemenians. Greek gods were worshiped in temples dedicated to them in the Greek cities, and native Mesopotamian gods had temples dedicated to them in the native cities. In time, however, syncretism and identification of the foreign and local deities developed. Although the policy of Hellenization was not enforced upon the population, Greek ideas did influence the local educated classes, just as local practices were gradually adopted by the Greeks. As in Greece and the lands of the eastern Mediterranean, in Mesopotamia the philosophies of the Stoics and other schools probably had an impact, as did mystery religions; both were hallmarks of the Hellenistic Age. Unfortunately there is no evidence from the east on the popularity of Greek beliefs among the local population, and scholars can only speculate on the basis of the fragmentary notices in authors such as Strabo. The Seleucid rulers respected the native priesthoods of Mesopotamia, and there is no record of any persecutions. On the contrary, the rulers seem to have favoured local religious practices, and ancient forms of worship continued. Cuneiform writing by priests, who copied incantations and old religious texts, continued into the Parthian period.
The administrative institutions of the countryside of Mesopotamia remained even more traditional than those of the cities; the old taxes were simply paid to new masters. The satrapy, much reduced in size from Achaemenian times, was the basis for Seleucid control of the countryside. A satrap or strategus (a military title) headed each satrapy, and the satrapies were divided into hyparchies or eparchies; the sources that use these and other words, such as toparchy, are unclear about the subdivisions of the satrapy. There was a great variety of smaller units of administration. In the capital and in the provincial centres, both Greek and Aramaic were used as the written languages of the government. The use of cuneiform in government documents ceased sometime during the Achaemenian period, but it continued in religious texts until the 1st century of the Common era. The archives were managed both in the capital and in provincial cities by an official called a bibliophylax. There were many financial officials (oikonomoi); some of them oversaw royal possessions, and others managed local taxes and other economic matters. The legal system in the Seleucid empire is not well understood, but presumably both local Mesopotamian laws and Greek laws, which had absorbed or replaced old Achaemenian imperial laws, were in force. Excavations at Seleucia have uncovered thousands of seal impressions on clay, evidence of a developed system of controls and taxes on commodities of trade. Many of the sealings are records of payment of a salt tax. Most of the tolls and tariffs, however, were local assessments rather than royal taxes.
Artistic remains from the Seleucid period are exceedingly scarce, and, in contrast to Achaemenian art, no royal or monumental art has been recovered. One might characterize the objects that can be dated to the Seleucid era as popular or private art, such as seals, statuettes, and clay figurines. Both Greek and local styles are found, with an amalgam of styles prevalent at the end of Seleucid rule, evidence of a syncretism in cultures. The numerous statues and statuettes of Heracles found in the east testify to the great popularity of the Greek deity, in Mesopotamia identified with the local god Nergal.
Aramaic was the “official” written langauge of the Achaemenian Empire; after the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek, the language of the conquerors, replaced Aramaic. Under the Seleucids, however, both Greek and Aramaic were used throughout the empire, although Greek was the principal language of government. Gradually Aramaic underwent changes in different parts of the empire, and in Mesopotamia in the time of the Parthians it evolved into Syriac, with dialectical differences from western Syriac, used in Syria and Palestine. In southern Mesopotamia, other dialects evolved, one of which was Mandaic, the scriptural language of the Mandaean religion.
Literature in local languages is nonexistent, except for copies of ancient religious texts in cuneiform writing and fragments of Aramaic writing. There were authors who wrote in Greek, but little of their work has survived and that only as excerpts in later works. The most important of these authors was Berosus, a Babylonian priest who wrote about the history of his country, probably under Antiochus I (reigned 281–261 bce). Although the excerpts of his work that are preserved deal with the ancient, mythological past and with astrology and astronomy, the fact that they are in Greek is indicative of interest among local Greek colonists in the culture of their neighbours. Another popular author was Apollodorus of Artemita (a town near Seleucia), who wrote under the Parthians a history of Parthia in Greek as well as other works on geography. Greek continued to be a lingua franca used by educated people in Mesopotamia well into the Parthian period.
Under the Seleucid system of dating, as far as is known, a fixed year became the basis for continuous dating for the first time in the Middle East. The year chosen was the year of entry of Seleucus into Babylon, 311 bce according to the Mesopotamian reckoning and 312 bce according to the Syrians. Before this time, dating had been only according to the regnal years of the ruling monarch (e.g., “fourth year of Darius”). The Parthians, following the Seleucids, sought to institute their own system of reckoning based on some event in their past that scholars can only surmise—possibly the assumption of the title of king by the first ruler of the Parthians, Arsaces.
Since Greece was overpopulated at the beginning of Seleucid rule, it was not difficult to persuade colonists to come to the east, especially when they were given plots of land (cleroii) from royal domains that they could pass on to their descendants; if they had no descendants, the land would revert to the king. Theoretically all land belonged to the ruler, but actually local interests prevailed. As time passed, however, the influx of Greek colonists diminished and then ended when the wars of the Hellenistic kings interrupted this movement. Nonetheless, Greek influences continued, and it is fascinating to find in cuneiform documents records of families where the father has a local name and his son a Greek one and vice versa. Inasmuch as Mesopotamia was peaceful under the Seleucids, the processes of accommodation and assimilation among the people appear to have flourished.
The Parthian period
The coming of the Parthians changed Mesopotamia even less than the establishment of the Seleucid kingdom had, for as early as the middle of the 2nd century bce local dynasts had proclaimed their independence. There is no evidence indicating whether the cities of Mesopotamia surrendered piecemeal or all at once or whether they submitted voluntarily or after fighting. In any case, Seleucia was treated better by the Parthians than it had been by the Seleucids, and the local government retained its autonomy. Parthian troops did not occupy Seleucia but remained in a garrison site called Ctesiphon near Seleucia; it later grew into a city and replaced Seleucia as the capital. In Characene in southern Mesopotamia a Seleucid satrap with an Iranian name, Hyspaosines, issued coins about 125 bce, a sign of his independence; the actual date for this may have been earlier. He changed the name of the city Antiochia on the lower Tigris to Spasinou Charax, meaning “The Fort of Hyspaosines,” and made it his capital. All the coins issued from his capital have Greek legends. His troops moved north and occupied Babylon and Seleucia probably sometime in 127 bce, when the Parthians were fighting nomadic invaders in the eastern part of their territory. His rule there must have been short, however, for the Parthian governor of Babylon and the north, Himerus, was back in Seleucia and Babylon by 126. Himerus could not have been a rebel, since he struck coins in the name of the Parthian rulers Phraates II and Artabanus II, both of whom were killed in fighting in eastern Iran. Himerus abused his power and is said to have oppressed the cities of Mesopotamia, plundering them and killing their inhabitants. Cuneiform documents from Babylon stop after this date, indicating that the city did not survive the depredations of Himerus. He vanished, however, and Parthian sovereignty was restored by the ninth Arsacid king, Mithradates II, who came to the throne about 124 bce; he was the son of Artabanus II. Mithradates II recovered all Mesopotamia and conquered Characene, overstriking coins of Hyspaosines and driving him from his capital in 122 or 121 bce. By 113, if not earlier, Dura-Europus on the Euphrates was in Parthian hands. In 95 bce the Armenian Tigranes II, a hostage at the court of Mithradates, was placed on the throne of Armenia by his Parthian overlord, and the small kingdoms of northern Mesopotamia—Adiabene, Gordyene, and Osroene—gave allegiance to Mithradates. Mithradates II died about 87 bce, although he may have died earlier, since the period after 90 bce is dark and a usurper named Gotarzes may have ruled for a few years in Mesopotamia. During the reign of Mithradates II the first contacts with Rome, under Lucius Cornelius Sulla, were made, and portents of future struggles were evident in the lack of any agreement between the two powers. Sulla was sent to the east by the Roman Senate to govern Cilicia in Anatolia. In 92 bce Orobazes, an ambassador from Mithradates II, came to him seeking a treaty, but nothing was concluded, since instructions from Rome did not include negotiations with the Parthian power.
Tigranes II took advantage of struggles between several claimants to the Parthian throne to expand Armenian territory into Mesopotamia, and the small states in the north gave him their allegiance. It was not until 69 bce, when the Roman general Lucius Licinius Lucullus captured Tigranokerta, Tigranes’ capital, that Mesopotamia returned to Parthian rule. Thereafter wars between the Romans and the Parthians were to dominate the political history of Mesopotamia.
The Parthians left the local administrations and rulers intact when they conquered Mesopotamia. According to Pliny the Elder (Natural History VI, 112) the Parthian empire consisted of 18 kingdoms, 11 of which were called the upper kingdoms (or satrapies), while 7 were called lower kingdoms, meaning that they were located on the plains of Mesopotamia. The centre of the lower kingdoms was ancient Babylonia, called Beth Aramaye in Aramaic, and it was governed directly by the Parthian ruler. In the south was Characene, while to the northeast of Ctesiphon, which had supplanted Seleucia as the Parthian capital, was Garamea, with its capital at modern Kirkūk. Adiabene had Arbela as its capital, and farther north was a province called Beth Nuhadra in Aramaic, which seems to have been governed by a general who was directly responsible to the Parthian king, because this province bore the brunt of Roman invasions. Nisibis was the main city of the desert area of Arabistān, but at the end of the Parthian period the desert caravan city of Hatra claimed hegemony over this area. There were other principalities in the northwest: Sophene, where Tigranes’ capital was located; Gordyene and Zabdicene (near modern Çölemerik in eastern Turkey), located to the east of Sophene; and Osroene, with its capital Edessa (modern Urfa, Turkey), which lay inside the Roman sphere of influence. Rule over so many small kingdoms gave Mithradates II the title “King of Kings,” also borne by later Parthian rulers.
The defeat of the Roman legions under Marcus Licinius Crassus by the Parthians at the Battle of Carrhae (Carrhae is the Roman name for Harran) in 53 bce heralded a period of Parthian power and expansion in the Middle East, but the tide turned under Mark Antony in 36–34 bce, and thereafter the power structure in the east remained volatile, with the two great states, Rome and Parthia, contending for predominance in the region. Armenia was a perennial bone of contention between the two powers, each of which sought to put its candidate on the throne.
Parthian rule was not firm over all Mesopotamia; thus, for example, during the reign of Artabanus III (12–38 ce) the Jewish brigands Asinaeus and Anilaeus set up a free state north of Ctesiphon that lasted 15 years before it was overcome by the Parthians. With the end of cuneiform records and with the attention of classical sources turned to the wars between the Romans and the Parthians, information about internal affairs in Mesopotamia becomes almost nonexistent. Hellenism continued to flourish, for many Parthian kings had the epithet “Philhellene” placed on their coins, but during the last two centuries of Parthian rule Greek influences declined in favour of Iranian ones, while central authority suffered from the usurpations of powerful nobles and local kings. From coinage it is known that the city of Seleucia revolted against central control at the end of Artabanus’ reign and maintained its independence for a number of years. Peace was broken by the Roman emperor Nero, who sought to put his client on the throne of Armenia, but, after several years of conflict, peace was arranged in 63. Vologeses I (c. 51–80 ce) founded the city Vologesias, near Seleucia, as his capital, but the whole area (including Ctesiphon and Seleucia) became an urban complex called Māḥōzē in Aramaic and Al-Madāʾin in Arabic; both names mean “The Cities.”
Internal rivalries in the Parthian state gave the Romans an opportunity to attack, and control over Armenia was the casus belli for the Roman emperor Trajan’s advance into Mesopotamia in 116. Adiabene, as well as the entire Tigris-Euphrates basin of northern Mesopotamia, was incorporated as a province into the Roman Empire. Trajan advanced to the Persian Gulf, but he died of illness and his successor Hadrian made peace, abandoning the conquests in Mesopotamia, although client states remained.
The second century of the Common era was a dark period in Parthian history, but it was a time of growth in wealth and influence of the caravan cities of Palmyra, Hatra, and Mesene (formerly Characene, situated at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates). Armenia continued to be a bone of contention between the two great powers, and hostilities occasionally flared up. In 164–165 the Roman general Gaius Avidius Cassius captured the capital cities Ctesiphon and Seleucia, but an epidemic forced the Romans to retreat and peace was restored. Returning soldiers spread the disease throughout the Roman Empire, with devastating consequences. The terms of peace favoured the Romans, who secured control of Nisibis and the Khābūr River valley. The next great war was the invasion of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus to punish the Parthians, who had supported his rival Pescennius Niger and had annexed some territory in Mesopotamia in return for their support. Severus took and sacked Ctesiphon in 198. Because the devastated countryside contained no supplies for the Romans, they were soon compelled to retreat. A siege of Hatra in 199 by Severus failed, and peace was made. Conflict between two claimants to the Parthian throne, Vologeses IV or V and Artabanus V, gave the Roman emperor Caracalla an excuse to invade Adiabene, but in 217 he was assassinated on the road from Edessa to Carrhae, and the Romans made peace. The end of the Parthian kingdom was near, and the advent of the Sāsānians brought a new phase in the history of Mesopotamia.
Parthian rule brought little change in the administration and institutions of Mesopotamia as it had existed under the Seleucids, except for a general weakening of central authority under the feudal Parthians. The Parthians instituted a new era, beginning in 247 bce, but it paralleled rather than replaced the Seleucid era of reckoning, and the Parthian vanished at the end of the dynasty. As far as can be determined, Hellenism was never proscribed under the Parthians, although it grew weaker toward the end of Parthian rule. From archaeological surveys around Susa, located in the kingdom of Elymais in modern Khūzestān, and from the Diyālā plain northeast of Ctesiphon, it seems that the population of the land increased greatly under the Parthians, as did trade and commerce. The coinage of the later Parthian rulers became more and more debased, probably as a result of the many internecine wars and the lack of control by the central authority. Local rulers also issued their own coinages in Persis, Elymais, Mesene, and elsewhere.
Changes took place in the demography of Mesopotamia under the Parthians, and perhaps the most striking development among the population was the increase of Arab infiltration from the desert, which resulted in Arab dynasties in the oasis settlements of Palmyra and Hatra. Similarly, an influx of Armenian settlers in the north changed the composition of the local population. After the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem to the Romans in 70, many Jews fled to Mesopotamia, where they joined their coreligionists; Nehardea, north of Ctesiphon, became a centre of Jewish population. Naturally also many migrants from the east came to Mesopotamia in the wake of the Parthian occupation. With many merchants from east and west passing through or remaining in Mesopotamia, the population became more diverse than it had previously been.
During the Parthian occupation the ancient religion and cults of Mesopotamia came to an end and were replaced by mixed Hellenic and Oriental mystery religions and Iranian cults. Local Semitic cults of Bel, Allat, and other deities flourished alongside temples dedicated to Greek gods such as Apollo. The sun deity Shamash was worshiped at Hatra and elsewhere, but the henotheism of the ancient Middle East was giving way to acceptance of universalist religions, if the prevalent view cannot yet be called one of monotheism. In Mesopotamia, in particular, the influence of Jewish monotheism, with the beginning of rabbinic schools and the organization of the community under a leader, the exilarch (resh galuta in Aramaic), must have had a significant influence on the local population. Toward the end of the reign of Artabanus III, the royal family of Adiabene converted to Judaism. In the first two centuries of the Common era, Christianity and various baptismal sects also began to expand into Mesopotamia. So far no Mithraeums (underground temples for the worship of the god Mithra), such as existed in the Roman Empire, have been found in Mesopotamia, except at Dura-Europus, where Roman troops were stationed. Many local cults and shrines, such as that of the Sabians and their moon deity at Harran, however, continued to exist until the Islamic conquest. Parthian Zoroastrianism reinforced local Zoroastrian communities in Mesopotamia left from the time of the Achaemenians, and one of the gnostic baptismal religions, Mandaeanism, which is still in existence, had its beginning at this time. Although Christian missionaries were active in Mesopotamia in the Parthian period, no centres, such as the one established later at Nisibis, have been reported, and it may be supposed that their activity at first was mainly confined to Jewish communities.
Archaeological evidence indicates that the Parthians had a more marked influence on art and architecture. Local schools of art flourished, and at first Greek ideals predominated, but in the last two centuries of Parthian rule a “Parthian style” is evident in the art recovered from Mesopotamia and other regions. Whereas Achaemenian and Sāsānian art are royal or imperial and monumental, Parthian art, like Seleucid art, can be characterized as “popular.” Parthian works of art reflect the many currents of culture among the populace, and one may say that it is expressionist and stylized, in contrast with Greek and Roman naturalistic or realistic art. The characteristics of Parthian art in Mesopotamia are total frontality (i.e., the representation of figures in full face) in portraits, along with an otherworldly quality. In Middle Eastern art from previous periods, figures were almost always shown in profile. Another new feature of Parthian art is the frequent portrayal of the “flying gallop” in sculpture and painting, not unexpected in view of the importance of cavalry and mounted archers in the Parthian armies. Likewise, Parthian costume, with baggy trousers, became the mode over much of the Middle East and is portrayed in painting and sculpture. In architecture the use of ayvans (arches in porticoes) and domed vaults is attributed to the Parthian period; they may have originated in Mesopotamia. Parthian art influenced that of the Nabataeans in Roman territory, as it did others throughout the Middle East.
Parthian was an Iranian language written in the Aramaic alphabet. It had an enormous number of words and even phrases that were borrowed from Aramaic, and scribal training was necessary to learn these. Syriac, being a Semitic language with emphasis on consonants, evolved several alphabets based on the Aramaic alphabet. The Aramaic alphabet was better suited to Syriac than to Parthian phonology. Parthian was therefore difficult to read and was mainly used by scribes or priests for official or religious writings.
The largest lacuna is in literature from the Parthian period. The largely oral literature of the Parthians, famous for their minstrels and poetry, does not seem to have found many echoes in Mesopotamia, where the settled society contrasted with the heroic, chivalric, and feudal society of the Iranian nomads that continued to dominate Parthian mores even after they had settled in Mesopotamia. Nonetheless, the end of the Parthian period saw the beginning of Syriac literature, which is Christian Aramaic, and some of early Syriac literature, such as the “Song of the Pearl,” contains Parthian elements. In the realm of language, rather than literature, the writing of Aramaic changes to Parthian in the 2nd century ce, as can be seen from a bilingual (Greek and Parthian) inscription on a bronze statue from Seleucia dated 150–151 ce. It tells how Vologeses III defeated the king of Mesene and took over the entire country. After this period one no longer speaks of Aramaic, but of Parthian and Syriac written in a new cursive alphabet.
The Sāsānian period
The Sāsānian period marks the end of the ancient and the beginning of the medieval era in the history of the Middle East. Universalist religions such as Christianity, Manichaeism, and even Zoroastrianism and Judaism absorbed local religions and cults at the beginning of the 3rd century. Both the Sāsānian and the Roman empires ended by adopting an official state religion, Zoroastrianism for the former and Christianity for the latter. In Mesopotamia, however, older cults such as that of the Mandaeans, the moon cult of Harran, and others continued alongside the great religions. The new rulers were not as tolerant as the Seleucids and Parthians had been, and persecutions occurred under Sāsānian rule.
After Ardashīr I, the first of the Sāsānians, consolidated his position in Persis (modern Fārs province), he moved into southern Mesopotamia, and Mesene submitted. In 224 he defeated and killed the last Parthian ruler, Artabanus V, after which Mesopotamia quickly fell before him and Ctesiphon became the main capital of the Sāsānian empire. In 230 Ardashīr besieged Hatra but failed to take it. Hatra called on Roman aid, and in 232 the Roman emperor Severus Alexander launched a campaign that halted Ardashīr’s progress. At the death of Severus Alexander in 235 the Sāsānians took the offensive, and probably in 238 Nisibis and Harran came under their control. Hatra was probably captured in early 240, after which Ardashīr’s son Shāpūr was made coregent; Ardashīr himself died soon afterward. The Roman emperor Gordian III led a large army against Shāpūr I in 243. The Romans retook Harran and Nisibis and defeated the Sāsānians at a battle near Resaina, but at Anbār, renamed Pērōz-Shāpūr (“Victorious Is Shāpūr”), the Sāsānians inflicted a defeat on the Romans, who lost their emperor. His successor, Philip the Arabian, made peace, giving up Roman conquests in northern Mesopotamia. Osroene, however, which had been returned to the local ruling family of Abgar by Gordian, remained a vassal state of the Romans. Shāpūr renewed his attacks and took many towns, including Dura-Europus, in 256 and later moved into northern Syria and Anatolia. The defeat and capture of the Roman emperor Valerian at the gates of Edessa, probably in 259, was the high point of his conquests in the west. On Shāpūr’s return to Ctesiphon the ruler of Palmyra, Septimius Odaenathus (also called Odainath), attacked and defeated his army, seizing booty. Odeanathus took the title of emperor, conquered Harran and Nisibis, and threatened Ctesiphon in 264–266. His murder relieved the Sāsānians, and in 273 the Roman emperor Aurelian sacked Palmyra and restored Roman authority in northern Mesopotamia. Peace between the two empires lasted until 283, when the Roman emperor Carus invaded Mesopotamia and advanced on Ctesiphon, but the Roman army was forced to withdraw after Carus’ sudden death. In 296 Narseh I, the seventh Sāsānian king, took the field and defeated a Roman force near Harran, but in the following year he was defeated and his family was taken captive. As a result, the Romans secured Nisibis and made it their strongest fortress against the Sāsānians. The Roman province of Mesopotamia, which was the land between the Euphrates and Tigris in the northern foothills, became in effect a military area with limes (the fortified frontiers of the Roman Empire) and highly fortified towns.
Under Shāpūr II the Sāsānians again took the offensive, and the first war lasted from 337 to 350; it ended with no result as Nisibis was successfully defended by the Romans. In 359 Shāpūr again invaded Roman territory and captured the Roman fortress Amida after a long and costly siege. In 363 the emperor Julian advanced almost to Ctesiphon, where he died, and his successor Jovian had to give up Nisibis and other territories in the north to the Sāsānians. The next war lasted from 502 to 506 and ended with no change. War broke out again in 527, lasting until 531, and even the Byzantine general Belisarius was not able to prevail; as usual, the boundaries remained unchanged. In 540 the Sāsānian king Khosrow (Chosroes) I invaded Syria and even took Antioch, although many fortresses behind him in northern Mesopotamia remained in Byzantine hands. After much back-and-forth fighting, peace was made in 562. War with the Byzantine Empire resumed 10 years later, and it continued under Khosrow’s successor, Hormizd IV. Only in 591, in return for their assistance in the restoration to the Sāsānian throne of Khosrow II, who had been deposed and had fled to Byzantine territory, did the Byzantines regain territory in northern Mesopotamia. With the murder in 602 of the Byzantine emperor Maurice, who had been Khosrow’s benefactor, and the usurpation of Phocas, Khosrow II saw a golden opportunity to enlarge Sāsānian domains and to take revenge for Maurice. Persian armies took all northern Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Anatolia. By 615, Sāsānian forces were in Chalcedon, opposite Constantinople. The situation changed completely with the new Byzantine emperor Heraclius, who, in a daring expedition into the heart of enemy territory in 623–624, defeated the Sāsānians in Media. In 627–628 he advanced toward Ctesiphon, but, after sacking the royal palaces at Dastagird, northeast of Ctesiphon, he retreated.
After the death of Khosrow II, Mesopotamia was devastated not only by the fighting but also by the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates, by a widespread plague, and by the swift succession of Sāsānian rulers, which caused chaos. Finally in 632 order was restored by the last king, Yazdegerd III, but in the following year the expansion of the Muslim Arabs began and the end of the Sāsānian empire followed a few years afterward.
Unlike the Parthians, the Sāsānians established their own princes as rulers of the small kingdoms they conquered, except on the frontiers, where they accepted vassals or allies because their hold over the frontier regions was insecure. By placing Sāsānian princes over the various parts of the empire, the Sāsānians maintained more control than the Parthians had. The provincial divisions were more systematized, and there was a hierarchy of four units—the satrapy (shahr in Middle Persian), under which came the province (ōstan), then a district (tassug), and finally the village (deh). In Mesopotamia these divisions were changed throughout Sāsānian history, frequently because of Roman invasions.
Many native tax collectors were replaced by Persians, who were more trusted by the rulers. In addition to the many tolls and tariffs, corvée, and the like, the two basic taxes were the land and poll taxes. The latter were not paid by the nobility, soldiers, civil servants, and the priests of the Zoroastrian religion. The land tax was a percentage of the harvest, but it was determined before the collection of the crops, which naturally caused many problems. Khosrow I undertook a new survey of the land and imposed the tax in a prearranged sum based on the amount of cultivable land, the quantity of date palms and olive trees, and the number of people working on the land. Taxes were to be paid three times a year. Abuses were still rampant, but this was better than the old system; at least, if a drought or some other calamity occurred, taxes could be reduced or remitted. Although information is contradictory, it appears that religious communities other than the Zoroastrian one had extra taxes imposed on them from time to time. This was especially true of the growing Christian community, particularly in the time of Shāpūr II, after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Religious communities became fixed under the Sāsānians, and Mesopotamia with its large Jewish and Christian populations experienced changes because of the shift in primary allegiance from the ruler to the head of the religious group. The exilarch of the Jews had legal and tax-collecting authority over the Jews of the Sāsānian empire. Mani, the founder of the Manichaean religion, was born in lower Mesopotamia, and his religion spread quickly both to the east and west, even before his death. In its homeland, Mesopotamia, it came under severe persecution by the priests of the Zoroastrian religion, who viewed Manichaeism as a dangerous heresy. Christianity, however, was viewed not as a heresy but as a separate religion, tolerated until it became the official religion of the enemy Roman Empire; Christians were then regarded as potential traitors to the Sāsānian state. The first large growth of Christianity in Mesopotamia came with the deportation and resettlement of Christians, especially from Antioch with its patriarch, during Shāpūr I’s wars with the Romans. In a synod convened in 325, the metropolitan see of Ctesiphon was made supreme over other sees in the Sāsānian empire, and the first patriarch or catholicos was Papa. In 344 the first persecutions of Christians began; they lasted with varying degrees of severity until 422, when a treaty with the government ended the persecutions.
The earliest contemporary mention of Christians in Mesopotamia is in the inscriptions of Kartēr, the chief Zoroastrian priest after the reign of Shāpūr I. He mentions both Christians and Nazareans, possibly two kinds of Christians, Greek-speaking and Syriac-speaking, or two sects. It is not known which groups are meant, but it is known that followers of the gnostic Christian leaders Bardesanes (Bar Daiṣān) and Marcion were active in Mesopotamia. By the 5th century the Church of the East dominated Mesopotamia, formally constituting itself in 410 at Ctesiphon. It simultaneously adopted the Nicene Creed, which had been formulated in the Roman Empire under the oversight of Emperor Constantine I, but by 424 it was asserting its autonomy from the Roman imperial church. A few years later the imperial church affirmed a dogmatic teaching that Mary was Theotokos (Greek: “birth-giver of God”). While the Church of the East was not directly involved in that debate, its theological tradition maintained a strict separation of the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ, and, therefore, in its view, Mary could have given birth only to his human nature. The theological division between the two entities would prove decisively divisive. After about 485 the Sāsānian government was satisfied that the church in its domains was not loyal to Constantinople. The Church of the East thereafter received at least some support and recognition from the Sāsānian kings, whose divine right to rule was likewise pronounced by its bishops. Further persecutions were not state-inspired but rather prosecuted by the Zoroastrian clergy. At the end of the Sāsānian period, however, the Church of the East was fighting the miaphysites, now called Jacobites, more than the Zoroastrians. The Jacobites had established a network of monasteries, especially in northern Mesopotamia, introducing institutional competition with the Church of the East.
Ethnicity became less important than religious affiliation under the Sāsānians, who thus changed the social structure of Mesopotamia. The Arabs continued to grow in numbers, both as nomads and as settled folk, and Arabic became widely spoken. King Nuʿmān III of the Arab client kingdom of the Lakhmids of Al-Ḥīrah in southern Mesopotamia became a Christian in 580, but in 602 he was deposed by Khosrow II, who made the kingdom a province of the empire. This act removed a barrier against inroads by Arab tribesmen from the desert, and, after the union of Arabs in the peninsula under the banner of Islam, the fate of the Sāsānian empire was sealed. The Muslims, on the whole, were welcomed in Mesopotamia as deliverers from the foreign yoke of the Persians, but the conversion of the mass of the population to Islam did not proceed rapidly, mainly because of the well-organized Christian and Jewish communities. The arrival of Islam, of course, changed the history of Mesopotamia more than any other event in its history. Richard N. Frye
Citation Information
Article Title: History of Mesopotamia
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 05 August 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/Mesopotamia-historical-region-Asia
Access Date: August 22, 2019
Additional Reading
General works
The Cambridge Ancient History contains much relevant information, especially vol. 1–2, 3rd ed. (1970–75), vol. 3–4, 2nd ed. (1982–88), and vol. 6 (1927); they include lengthy and richly documented chapters covering Mesopotamian prehistory to the time of Alexander the Great’s conquest of the region. Chapters on Mesopotamia under the Seleucids, Parthians, and Sāsānians are included in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3 (1983). Robert McC. Adams, The Land Behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plains (1965); Nicholas Postgate, The First Empires (1977); Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, 2nd ed. (1980); Richard N. Frye, The History of Ancient Iran (1984); Seton Lloyd, The Archaeology of Mesopotamia: From the Old Stone Age to the Persian Conquest, rev. ed (1984); and Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East (1990), also provide broad coverage. I.M. Diakonov (ed.), Ancient Mesopotamia: Socio-Economic History, trans. from Russian (1969, reissued 1981), collects representative articles by Diakonov and others on Mesopotamian history, with emphasis on social and economic aspects. A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, rev. ed. completed by Erica Reiner (1977), includes some controversial views.
Prehistory to the Old Babylonian period
A balanced picture of political, social, and economic history may be found in Jean Bottéro, Elena Cassin, and Jean Vercoutter (eds.), The Near East: The Early Civilizations (1968; originally published in German, 3 vol., 1965–67), with contributions on prehistory and protohistory, Akkad, Early Dynastic history, the 3rd dynasty of Ur, and the Old Babylonian period. Adam Falkenstein, The Sumerian Temple City, trans. from French (1974), is a very short work describing the Sumerian temple economy and its political implications. Dietz Otto Edzard, Die zweite Zwischenzeit Babyloniens (1957), offers details on the history of the Old Babylonian period from the 3rd dynasty of Ur to the end of Hammurabi. Mogen Trolle Larsen, The Old Assyrian City-State and Its Colonies (1976), is a standard work on the Old Assyrian trade colonies in Anatolia. Gernot Wilhelm, The Hurrians (1989; originally published in German, 1982), is the best book on the third cultural element in early Mesopotamian history. Fiorella Imparati, I Hurriti (1964), offers a short synopsis. Hans J. Nissen, Mesopotamia Before 5000 Years (1987), includes a comprehensive bibliography for the early periods.
Mesopotamia to the end of the Achaemenian period
Histories of Assyria and Babylonia include Wolfram Von Soden, Einführung in die Altorientalistik (1985); J.A. Brinkman, Prelude to Empire: Babylonian Society and Politics, 747–626 bc (1984); Stefan Zawadzki, The Fall of Assyria and Median-Babylonian Relations (1988); and H.W.F. Saggs, The Might That Was Assyria (1984, reprinted 1990), and The Greatness That Was Babylon: A Survey of the Ancient Civilization of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley (1988). Joan Oates, Babylon, rev. ed. (1986), deals with history and civilization. Wolfram Von Soden, Herrscher im alten Orient (1954), examines Assyrian and Babylonian politics. Standard works, now partly out-of-date, include A.T. Olmstead, History of Assyria (1923, reprinted 1975); and Bruno Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, 2 vol. (1920–25). J.A. Brinkman, A Political History of Post-Kassite Babylonia, 1158–722 bc (1968), is an extensive special study, with complete documentation. Muhammad A. Dandamaev, Slavery in Babylonia: From Nabopolassar to Alexander the Great (626–331 bc), rev. ed. (1984; originally published in Russian, 1974), includes an extensive bibliography. Jacob Neusner, A History of the Jews in Babylonia, 5 vol. (1965–70), studies in detail the history of the Jews in Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamia from c. 320 bc to c. ad 620
Getzel M. Cohen, The Seleucid Colonies: Studies in Founding, Administration, and Organization (1978), discusses the relationship of the central government with provinces and client states. Details of Seleucid rule may be found in Maurice Meuleau, “Mesopotamia Under the Seleucids,” in Pierre Grimal (ed.), Hellenism and the Rise of Rome (1968; originally published in German, 1965), pp. 266–289; and in the essays in Amélie Kuhrt and Susan Sherwin-White (eds.), Hellenism in the East: Interaction of Greek and Non-Greek Civilizations after Alexander’s Conquest (1987). Neilson C. Debevoise, A Political History of Parthia (1938, reissued 1968), is a standard political history of the Arsacid dynasty. Sheldon Arthur Nodelman, “A Preliminary History of Characene,” Berytus, 13(2):83–121 (1960), is the standard history of Characene. Louis Dillemann, Haute Mésopotamie orientale et pays adjacents (1962), offers a historical geography of northern Mesopotamia with many details. J.M. Fie, Assyrie chrétienne, 3 vol. (1965–68), provides a historical geography of the Christian communities of northern Mesopotamia from Syriac sources. Dietz O. Edzard Wolfram Th. von Soden Richard N. Frye
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
Ancient Egypt
Table of Contents
Introduction
Introduction to ancient Egyptian civilization
The Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods
The Old Kingdom (c. 2575–c. 2130 bce) and the First Intermediate period (c. 2130–1938 bce)
The Middle Kingdom (1938–c. 1630 bce) and the Second Intermediate period (c. 1630–1540 bce)
The New Kingdom (c. 1539–1075 bce)
Egypt from 1075 bce to the Macedonian invasion
Macedonian and Ptolemaic Egypt (332–30 bce)
Roman and Byzantine Egypt (30 bce– 642 ce)
Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of KhufuSide view of the Sphinx with the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) rising in the background, Al-Jīzah (Giza), Egypt.© Maksym Gorpenyuk/Shutterstock.comAncient Egypt, civilization in northeastern Africa that dates from the 4th millennium bce. Its many achievements, preserved in its art and monuments, hold a fascination that continues to grow as archaeological finds expose its secrets. This article focuses on Egypt from its prehistory through its unification under Menes (Narmer) in the 3rd millennium bce—sometimes used as a reference point for Egypt’s origin—and up to the Islamic conquest in the 7th century ce. For subsequent history through the contemporary period, see Egypt.
Introduction to ancient Egyptian civilization
Life in ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt can be thought of as an oasis in the desert of northeastern Africa, dependent on the annual inundation of the Nile River to support its agricultural population. The country’s chief wealth came from the fertile floodplain of the Nile valley, where the river flows between bands of limestone hills, and the Nile delta, in which it fans into several branches north of present-day Cairo. Between the floodplain and the hills is a variable band of low desert that supported a certain amount of game. The Nile was Egypt’s sole transportation artery.
The First Cataract at Aswān, where the riverbed is turned into rapids by a belt of granite, was the country’s only well-defined boundary within a populated area. To the south lay the far less hospitable area of Nubia, in which the river flowed through low sandstone hills that in most regions left only a very narrow strip of cultivable land. Nubia was significant for Egypt’s periodic southward expansion and for access to products from farther south. West of the Nile was the arid Sahara, broken by a chain of oases some 125 to 185 miles (200 to 300 km) from the river and lacking in all other resources except for a few minerals. The eastern desert, between the Nile and the Red Sea, was more important, for it supported a small nomadic population and desert game, contained numerous mineral deposits, including gold, and was the route to the Red Sea.
To the northeast was the Isthmus of Suez. It offered the principal route for contact with Sinai, from which came turquoise and possibly copper, and with southwestern Asia, Egypt’s most important area of cultural interaction, from which were received stimuli for technical development and cultivars for crops. Immigrants and ultimately invaders crossed the isthmus into Egypt, attracted by the country’s stability and prosperity. From the late 2nd millennium bce onward, numerous attacks were made by land and sea along the eastern Mediterranean coast.
At first, relatively little cultural contact came by way of the Mediterranean Sea, but from an early date Egypt maintained trading relations with the Lebanese port of Byblos (present-day Jbail). Egypt needed few imports to maintain basic standards of living, but good timber was essential and not available within the country, so it usually was obtained from Lebanon. Minerals such as obsidian and lapis lazuli were imported from as far afield as Anatolia and Afghanistan.
Agriculture centred on the cultivation of cereal crops, chiefly emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare). The fertility of the land and general predictability of the inundation ensured very high productivity from a single annual crop. This productivity made it possible to store large surpluses against crop failures and also formed the chief basis of Egyptian wealth, which was, until the creation of the large empires of the 1st millennium bce, the greatest of any state in the ancient Middle East.
Basin irrigation was achieved by simple means, and multiple cropping was not feasible until much later times, except perhaps in the lakeside area of Al-Fayyūm. As the river deposited alluvial silt, raising the level of the floodplain, and land was reclaimed from marsh, the area available for cultivation in the Nile valley and delta increased, while pastoralism declined slowly. In addition to grain crops, fruit and vegetables were important, the latter being irrigated year-round in small plots. Fish was also vital to the diet. Papyrus, which grew abundantly in marshes, was gathered wild and in later times was cultivated. It may have been used as a food crop, and it certainly was used to make rope, matting, and sandals. Above all, it provided the characteristic Egyptian writing material, which, with cereals, was the country’s chief export in Late period Egyptian and then Greco-Roman times.
Cattle may have been domesticated in northeastern Africa. The Egyptians kept many as draft animals and for their various products, showing some of the interest in breeds and individuals that is found to this day in the Sudan and eastern Africa. The donkey, which was the principal transport animal (the camel did not become common until Roman times), was probably domesticated in the region. The native Egyptian breed of sheep became extinct in the 2nd millennium bce and was replaced by an Asiatic breed. Sheep were primarily a source of meat; their wool was rarely used. Goats were more numerous than sheep. Pigs were also raised and eaten. Ducks and geese were kept for food, and many of the vast numbers of wild and migratory birds found in Egypt were hunted and trapped. Desert game, principally various species of antelope and ibex, were hunted by the elite; it was a royal privilege to hunt lions and wild cattle. Pets included dogs, which were also used for hunting, cats, and monkeys. In addition, the Egyptians had a great interest in, and knowledge of, most species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish in their environment.
Most Egyptians were probably descended from settlers who moved to the Nile valley in prehistoric times, with population increase coming through natural fertility. In various periods there were immigrants from Nubia, Libya, and especially the Middle East. They were historically significant and also may have contributed to population growth, but their numbers are unknown. Most people lived in villages and towns in the Nile valley and delta. Dwellings were normally built of mud brick and have long since disappeared beneath the rising water table or beneath modern town sites, thereby obliterating evidence for settlement patterns. In antiquity, as now, the most favoured location of settlements was on slightly raised ground near the riverbank, where transport and water were easily available and flooding was unlikely. Until the 1st millennium bce, Egypt was not urbanized to the same extent as Mesopotamia. Instead, a few centres, notably Memphis and Thebes, attracted population and particularly the elite, while the rest of the people were relatively evenly spread over the land. The size of the population has been estimated as having risen from 1 to 1.5 million in the 3rd millennium bce to perhaps twice that number in the late 2nd millennium and 1st millennium bce. (Much higher levels of population were reached in Greco-Roman times.)
Nearly all of the people were engaged in agriculture and were probably tied to the land. In theory all the land belonged to the king, although in practice those living on it could not easily be removed and some categories of land could be bought and sold. Land was assigned to high officials to provide them with an income, and most tracts required payment of substantial dues to the state, which had a strong interest in keeping the land in agricultural use. Abandoned land was taken back into state ownership and reassigned for cultivation. The people who lived on and worked the land were not free to leave and were obliged to work it, but they were not slaves; most paid a proportion of their produce to major officials. Free citizens who worked the land on their own behalf did emerge; terms applied to them tended originally to refer to poor people, but these agriculturalists were probably not poor. Slavery was never common, being restricted to captives and foreigners or to people who were forced by poverty or debt to sell themselves into service. Slaves sometimes even married members of their owners’ families, so that in the long term those belonging to households tended to be assimilated into free society. In the New Kingdom (from about 1539 to 1075 bce), large numbers of captive slaves were acquired by major state institutions or incorporated into the army. Punitive treatment of foreign slaves or of native fugitives from their obligations included forced labour, exile (in, for example, the oases of the western desert), or compulsory enlistment in dangerous mining expeditions. Even nonpunitive employment such as quarrying in the desert was hazardous. The official record of one expedition shows a mortality rate of more than 10 percent.
Just as the Egyptians optimized agricultural production with simple means, their crafts and techniques, many of which originally came from Asia, were raised to extraordinary levels of perfection. The Egyptians’ most striking technical achievement, massive stone building, also exploited the potential of a centralized state to mobilize a huge labour force, which was made available by efficient agricultural practices. Some of the technical and organizational skills involved were remarkable. The construction of the great pyramids of the 4th dynasty (c. 2575–c. 2465 bce) has yet to be fully explained and would be a major challenge to this day. This expenditure of skill contrasts with sparse evidence of an essentially neolithic way of living for the rural population of the time, while the use of flint tools persisted even in urban environments at least until the late 2nd millennium bce. Metal was correspondingly scarce, much of it being used for prestige rather than everyday purposes.
In urban and elite contexts, the Egyptian ideal was the nuclear family, but, on the land and even within the central ruling group, there is evidence for extended families. Egyptians were monogamous, and the choice of partners in marriage, for which no formal ceremony or legal sanction is known, did not follow a set pattern. Consanguineous marriage was not practiced during the Dynastic period, except for the occasional marriage of a brother and sister within the royal family, and that practice may have been open only to kings or heirs to the throne. Divorce was in theory easy, but it was costly. Women had a legal status only marginally inferior to that of men. They could own and dispose of property in their own right, and they could initiate divorce and other legal proceedings. They hardly ever held administrative office but increasingly were involved in religious cults as priestesses or “chantresses.” Married women held the title “mistress of the house,” the precise significance of which is unknown. Lower down the social scale, they probably worked on the land as well as in the house.
The uneven distribution of wealth, labour, and technology was related to the only partly urban character of society, especially in the 3rd millennium bce. The country’s resources were not fed into numerous provincial towns but instead were concentrated to great effect around the capital—itself a dispersed string of settlements rather than a city—and focused on the central figure in society, the king. In the 3rd and early 2nd millennia, the elite ideal, expressed in the decoration of private tombs, was manorial and rural. Not until much later did Egyptians develop a more pronouncedly urban character.
The king and ideology: administration, art, and writing
In cosmogonical terms, Egyptian society consisted of a descending hierarchy of the gods, the king, the blessed dead, and humanity (by which was understood chiefly the Egyptians). Of these groups, only the king was single, and hence he was individually more prominent than any of the others. A text that summarizes the king’s role states that he “is on earth for ever and ever, judging mankind and propitiating the gods, and setting order [maʿat, a central concept] in place of disorder. He gives offerings to the gods and mortuary offerings to the spirits [the blessed dead].” The king was imbued with divine essence, but not in any simple or unqualified sense. His divinity accrued to him from his office and was reaffirmed through rituals, but it was vastly inferior to that of major gods; he was god rather than man by virtue of his potential, which was immeasurably greater than that of any human being. To humanity, he manifested the gods on earth, a conception that was elaborated in a complex web of metaphor and doctrine; less directly, he represented humanity to the gods. The text quoted above also gives great prominence to the dead, who were the object of a cult for the living and who could intervene in human affairs; in many periods the chief visible expenditure and focus of display of nonroyal individuals, as of the king, was on provision for the tomb and the next world. Egyptian kings are commonly called pharaohs, following the usage of the Bible. The term pharaoh, however, is derived from the Egyptian per ʿaa (“great estate”) and dates to the designation of the royal palace as an institution. This term for palace was used increasingly from about 1400 bce as a way of referring to the living king; in earlier times it was rare.
Rules of succession to the kingship are poorly understood. The common conception that the heir to the throne had to marry his predecessor’s oldest daughter has been disproved; kingship did not pass through the female line. The choice of queen seems to have been free; often the queen was a close relative of the king, but she also might be unrelated to him. In the New Kingdom, for which evidence is abundant, each king had a queen with distinctive titles, as well as a number of minor wives.
Sons of the chief queen seem to have been the preferred successors to the throne, but other sons could also become king. In many cases the successor was the eldest (surviving) son, and such a pattern of inheritance agrees with more general Egyptian values, but often he was some other relative or was completely unrelated. New Kingdom texts describe, after the event, how kings were appointed heirs either by their predecessors or by divine oracles, and such may have been the pattern when there was no clear successor. Dissent and conflict are suppressed from public sources. From the Late period (664–332 bce), when sources are more diverse and patterns less rigid, numerous usurpations and interruptions to the succession are known; they probably had many forerunners.
The king’s position changed gradually from that of an absolute monarch at the centre of a small ruling group made up mostly of his kin to that of the head of a bureaucratic state—in which his rule was still absolute—based on officeholding and, in theory, on free competition and merit. By the 5th dynasty, fixed institutions had been added to the force of tradition and the regulation of personal contact as brakes on autocracy, but the charismatic and superhuman power of the king remained vital.
The elite of administrative officeholders received their positions and commissions from the king, whose general role as judge over humanity they put into effect. They commemorated their own justice and concern for others, especially their inferiors, and recorded their own exploits and ideal conduct of life in inscriptions for others to see. Thus, the position of the elite was affirmed by reference to the king, to their prestige among their peers, and to their conduct toward their subordinates, justifying to some extent the fact that they—and still more the king—appropriated much of the country’s production.
These attitudes and their potential dissemination through society counterbalanced inequality, but how far they were accepted cannot be known. The core group of wealthy officeholders numbered at most a few hundred, and the administrative class of minor officials and scribes, most of whom could not afford to leave memorials or inscriptions, perhaps 5,000. With their dependents, these two groups formed perhaps 5 percent of the early population. Monuments and inscriptions commemorated no more than one in a thousand people.
According to royal ideology, the king appointed the elite on the basis of merit, and in ancient conditions of high mortality the elite had to be open to recruits from outside. There was, however, also an ideal that a son should succeed his father. In periods of weak central control this principle predominated, and in the Late period the whole society became more rigid and stratified.
Egyptian hieroglyphic numerals.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Egyptian hieratic numerals.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Writing was a major instrument in the centralization of the Egyptian state and its self-presentation. The two basic types of writing—hieroglyphs, which were used for monuments and display, and the cursive form known as hieratic—were invented at much the same time in late predynastic Egypt (c. 3000 bce). Writing was chiefly used for administration, and until about 2650 bce no continuous texts are preserved; the only extant literary texts written before the early Middle Kingdom (c. 1950 bce) seem to have been lists of important traditional information and possibly medical treatises. The use and potential of writing were restricted both by the rate of literacy, which was probably well below 1 percent, and by expectations of what writing might do. Hieroglyphic writing was publicly identified with Egypt. Perhaps because of this association with a single powerful state, its language, and its culture, Egyptian writing was seldom adapted to write other languages; in this it contrasts with the cuneiform script of the relatively uncentralized, multilingual Mesopotamia. Nonetheless, Egyptian hieroglyphs probably served in the middle of the 2nd millennium bce as the model from which the alphabet, ultimately the most widespread of all writing systems, evolved.
The dominant visible legacy of ancient Egypt is in works of architecture and representational art. Until the Middle Kingdom, most of these were mortuary: royal tomb complexes, including pyramids and mortuary temples, and private tombs. There were also temples dedicated to the cult of the gods throughout the country, but most of these were modest structures. From the beginning of the New Kingdom, temples of the gods became the principal monuments; royal palaces and private houses, which are very little known, were less important. Temples and tombs were ideally executed in stone with relief decoration on their walls and were filled with stone and wooden statuary, inscribed and decorated stelae (freestanding small stone monuments), and, in their inner areas, composite works of art in precious materials. The design of the monuments and their decoration dates in essence to the beginning of the historical period and presents an ideal, sanctified cosmos. Little in it is related to the everyday world, and, except in palaces, works of art may have been rare outside temples and tombs. Decoration may record real historical events, rituals, or the official titles and careers of individuals, but its prime significance is the more general assertion of values, and the information presented must be evaluated for its plausibility and compared with other evidence. Some of the events depicted in relief on royal monuments were certainly iconic rather than historically factual.
Egyptian Book of the DeadIllustration from an Egyptian Book of the Dead, c. 1275 bce, showing the jackal-headed god of the dead, Anubis, weighing the soul of the scribe, Ani.Mary Evans Picture Library/age fotostock
The highly distinctive Egyptian method of rendering nature and artistic style was also a creation of early times and can be seen in most works of Egyptian art. In content, these are hierarchically ordered so that the most important figures, the gods and the king, are shown together, while before the New Kingdom gods seldom occur in the same context as humanity. The decoration of a nonroyal tomb characteristically shows the tomb’s owner with his subordinates, who administer his land and present him with its produce. The tomb owner is also typically depicted hunting in the marshes, a favourite pastime of the elite that may additionally symbolize passage into the next world. The king and the gods are absent in nonroyal tombs, and, until the New Kingdom, overtly religious matter is restricted to rare scenes of mortuary rituals and journeys and to textual formulas. Temple reliefs, in which king and gods occur freely, show the king defeating his enemies, hunting, and especially offering to the gods, who in turn confer benefits upon him. Human beings are present at most as minor figures supporting the king. On both royal and nonroyal monuments, an ideal world is represented in which all are beautiful and everything goes well; only minor figures may have physical imperfections.
This artistic presentation of values originated at the same time as writing but before the latter could record continuous texts or complex statements. Some of the earliest continuous texts of the 4th and 5th dynasties show an awareness of an ideal past that the present could only aspire to emulate. A few “biographies” of officials allude to strife, but more-nuanced discussion occurs first in literary texts of the Middle Kingdom. The texts consist of stories, dialogues, lamentations, and especially instructions on how to live a good life, and they supply a rich commentary on the more one-dimensional rhetoric of public inscriptions. Literary works were written in all the main later phases of the Egyptian language—Middle Egyptian; the “classical” form of the Middle and New kingdoms, continuing in copies and inscriptions into Roman times; Late Egyptian, from the 19th dynasty to about 700 bce; and the demotic script from the 4th century bce to the 3rd century ce—but many of the finest and most complex are among the earliest.
Literary works also included treatises on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and magic, as well as various religious texts and canonical lists that classified the categories of creation (probably the earliest genre, dating back to the beginning of the Old Kingdom, c. 2575 bce, or even a little earlier). Among these texts, little is truly systematic, a notable exception being a medical treatise on wounds. The absence of systematic inquiry contrasts with Egyptian practical expertise in such fields as surveying, which was used both for orienting and planning buildings to remarkably fine tolerances and for the regular division of fields after the annual inundation of the Nile; the Egyptians also had surveyed and established the dimensions of their entire country by the beginning of the Middle Kingdom. These precise tasks required both knowledge of astronomy and highly ingenious techniques, but they apparently were achieved with little theoretical analysis.
Whereas in the earliest periods Egypt seems to have been administered almost as the personal estate of the king, by the central Old Kingdom it had been divided into about 35 nomes, or provinces, each with its own officials. Administration was concentrated at the capital, where most of the central elite lived and died. In the nonmonetary Egyptian economy, its essential functions were the collection, storage, and redistribution of produce; the drafting and organization of manpower for specialized labour, probably including irrigation and flood protection works, and major state projects; and thesupervision of legal matters. Administration and law were not fully distinct, and both depended ultimately on the king. The settlement of disputes was in part an administrative task, for which the chief guiding criterion was precedent, while contractual relations were regulated by the use of standard formulas. State and temple both partook in redistribution and held massive reserves of grain; temples were economic as well as religious institutions. In periods of decentralization similar functions were exercised by local grandees. Markets had only a minor role, and craftsmen were employees who normally traded only what they produced in their free time. The wealthiest officials escaped this pattern to some extent by receiving their income in the form of land and maintaining large establishments that included their own specialized workers.
The essential medium of administration was writing, reinforced by personal authority over the nonliterate 99 percent of the population; texts exhorting the young to be scribes emphasize that the scribe commanded while the rest did the work. Most officials (almost all of whom were men) held several offices and accumulated more as they progressed up a complex ranked hierarchy, at the top of which was the vizier, the chief administrator and judge. The vizier reported to the king, who in theory retained certain powers, such as authority to invoke the death penalty, absolutely.
Before the Middle Kingdom, the civil and the military were not sharply distinguished. Military forces consisted of local militias under their own officials and included foreigners, and nonmilitary expeditions to extract minerals from the desert or to transport heavy loads through the country were organized in similar fashion. Until the New Kingdom there was no separate priesthood. Holders of civil office also had priestly titles, and priests had civil titles. Often priesthoods were sinecures: their chief significance was the income they brought. The same was true of the minor civil titles accumulated by high officials. At a lower level, minor priesthoods were held on a rotating basis by “laymen” who served every fourth month in temples. State and temple were so closely interconnected that there was no real tension between them before the late New Kingdom.
Sources, calendars, and chronology
For all but the last century of Egyptian prehistory, whose neolithic and later phases are normally termed “predynastic,” evidence is exclusively archaeological; later native sources have only mythical allusions to such remote times. The Dynastic period of native Egyptian rulers is generally divided into 30 dynasties, following the Aegyptiaca of the Greco-Egyptian writer Manetho of Sebennytos (early 3rd century bce), excerpts of which are preserved in the works of later writers. Manetho apparently organized his dynasties by the capital cities from which they ruled, but several of his divisions also reflect political or dynastic changes—that is, changes of the party holding power. He gave the lengths of reign of kings or of entire dynasties and grouped the dynasties into several periods, but, because of textual corruption and a tendency toward inflation, Manetho’s figures cannot be used to reconstruct chronology without supporting evidence and analysis.
Manetho’s prime sources were earlier Egyptian king lists, the organization of which he imitated. The most significant preserved example of a king list is the Turin Papyrus (Turin Canon), a fragmentary document in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, which originally listed all kings of the 1st through the 17th dynasty, preceded by a mythical dynasty of gods and one of the “spirits, followers of Horus.” Like Manetho’s later work, the Turin document gave reign lengths for individual kings, as well as totals for some dynasties and longer multidynastic periods.
In early periods the kings’ years of reign were not consecutively numbered but were named for salient events, and lists were made of the names. More-extensive details were added to the lists for the 4th and 5th dynasties, when dates were assigned according to biennial cattle censuses numbered through each king’s reign. Fragments of such lists are preserved on the Palermo Stone, an inscribed piece of basalt (at the Regional Museum of Archaeology in Palermo, Italy), and related pieces in the Cairo Museum and University College London; these are probably all parts of a single copy of an original document of the 5th dynasty.
The Palermo Stone, first sideCourtesy of the Regional Museum of Archaeology, Palermo
The Egyptians did not date by eras longer than the reign of a single king, so a historical framework must be created from totals of reign lengths, which are then related to astronomical data that may allow whole periods to be fixed precisely. This is done through references to astronomical events and correlations with the three calendars in use in Egyptian antiquity. All dating was by a civil calendar, derived from the lunar calendar, which was introduced in the first half of the 3rd millennium bce. The civil year had 365 days and started in principle when Sirius, or the Dog Star—also known in Greek as Sothis (Ancient Egyptian: Sopdet)—became visible above the horizon after a period of absence, which at that time occurred some weeks before the Nile began to rise for the inundation. Every 4 years the civil year advanced one day in relation to the solar year (with 3651/4 days), and after a cycle of about 1,460 years it would again agree with the solar calendar. Religious ceremonies were organized according to two lunar calendars that had months of 29 or 30 days, with extra, intercalary months every three years or so.
Five mentions of the rising of Sirius (generally known as Sothic dates) are preserved in texts from the 3rd to the 1st millennium, but by themselves these references cannot yield an absolute chronology. Such a chronology can be computed from larger numbers of lunar dates and cross-checked from solutions for the observations of Sirius. Various chronologies are in use, however, differing by up to 40 years for the 2nd millennium bce and by more than a century for the beginning of the 1st dynasty. The chronologies offered in most publications up to 1985 have been thrown into some doubt for the Middle and New kingdoms by a restudy of the evidence for the Sothic and especially the lunar dates. For the 1st millennium, dates in the Third Intermediate period are approximate; a supposed fixed year of 945 bce, based on links with the Bible, turns out to be variable by a number of years. Late period dates (664–332 bce) are almost completely fixed. Before the 12th dynasty, plausible dates for the 11th can be computed backward, but for earlier times dates are approximate. A total of 955 years for the 1st through the 8th dynasty in the Turin Canon has been used to assign a date of about 3100 bce for the beginning of the 1st dynasty, but this requires excessive average reign lengths, and an estimate of 2925 bce is preferable. Radiocarbon and other scientific dating of samples from Egyptian sites have not improved on, or convincingly contested, computed dates. More-recent work on radiocarbon dates from Egypt does, however, yield results encouragingly close to dates computed in the manner described above.
King lists and astronomy give only a chronological framework. A vast range of archaeological and inscriptional sources for Egyptian history survive, but none of them were produced with the interpretation of history in mind. No consistent political history of ancient Egypt can be written. The evidence is very unevenly distributed; there are gaps of many decades; and in the 3rd millennium bce no continuous royal text recording historical events was inscribed. Private biographical inscriptions of all periods from the 5th dynasty (c. 2465–c. 2325 bce) to the Roman conquest (30 bce) record individual involvement in events but are seldom concerned with their general significance. Royal inscriptions from the 12th dynasty (1938–1756 bce) to Ptolemaic times aim to present a king’s actions according to an overall conception of “history,” in which he is the re-creator of the order of the world and the guarantor of its continued stability or its expansion. The goal of his action is to serve not humanity but the gods, while nonroyal individuals may relate their own successes to the king in the first instance and sometimes to the gods. Only in the decentralized intermediate periods did the nonroyal recount internal strife. Kings did not mention dissent in their texts unless it came at the beginning of a reign or a phase of action and was quickly and triumphantly overcome in a reaffirmation of order. Such a schema often dominates the factual content of texts, and it creates a strong bias toward recording foreign affairs, because in official ideology there is no internal dissent after the initial turmoil is over. “History” is as much a ritual as a process of events; as a ritual, its protagonists are royal and divine. Only in the Late period did these conventions weaken significantly. Even then, they were retained in full for temple reliefs, where they kept their vitality into Roman times.
Despite this idealization, the Egyptians were well aware of history, as is clear from their king lists. They divided the past into periods comparable to those used by Egyptologists and evaluated the rulers not only as the founders of epochs but also in terms of their salient exploits or, especially in folklore, their bad qualities. The Demotic Chronicle, a text of the Ptolemaic period, purports to foretell the bad end that would befall numerous Late period kings as divine retribution for their wicked actions.
The recovery and study of ancient Egypt
European interest in ancient Egypt was strong in Roman times and revived in the Renaissance, when the wealth of Egyptian remains in the city of Rome was supplemented by information provided by visitors to Egypt itself. Views of Egypt were dominated by the classical tradition that it was the land of ancient wisdom; this wisdom was thought to inhere in the hieroglyphic script, which was believed to impart profound symbolic ideas, not—as it in fact does—the sounds and words of texts. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, Egypt had a minor but significant position in general views of antiquity, and its monuments gradually became better known through the work of scholars in Europe and travelers in the country itself; the finest publications of the latter were by Richard Pococke, Frederik Ludwig Norden, and Carsten Niebuhr, all of whose works in the 18th century helped to stimulate an Egyptian revival in European art and architecture. Coptic, the Christian successor of the ancient Egyptian language, was studied from the 17th century, notably by Athanasius Kircher, for its potential to provide the key to Egyptian.
Napoleon I’s expedition to and short-lived conquest of Egypt in 1798 was the culmination of 18th-century interest in the East. The expedition was accompanied by a team of scholars who recorded the ancient and contemporary country, issuing in 1809–28 the Description de l’Égypte, the most comprehensive study to be made before the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script. The renowned Rosetta Stone, which bears a decree of Ptolemy V Epiphanes in hieroglyphs, demotic script, and Greek alphabetic characters, was discovered during the expedition; it was ceded to the British after the French capitulation in Egypt and became the property of the British Museum in London. This document greatly assisted the decipherment, accomplished by Jean-François Champollion in 1822.
Rosetta StoneThe Rosetta Stone, basalt slab from Fort Saint-Julien, Rosetta (Rashīd), Egypt, 196 bce; in the British Museum, London.© Photos.com/Jupiterimages
The Egyptian language revealed by the decipherment and decades of subsequent study is a member of the Afro-Asiatic (formerly Hamito-Semitic) language family. Egyptian is closest to the family’s Semitic branch but is distinctive in many respects. During several millennia it changed greatly. The script does not write vowels, and because Greek forms for royal names were known from Manetho long before the Egyptian forms became available, those used to this day are a mixture of Greek and Egyptian.
In the first half of the 19th century, vast numbers of antiquities were exported from Egypt, forming the nucleus of collections in many major museums. These were removed rather than excavated, inflicting, together with the economic development of the country, colossal damage on ancient sites. At the same time, many travelers and scholars visited the country and recorded the monuments. The most important, and remarkably accurate, record was produced by the Prussian expedition led by Karl Richard Lepsius, in 1842–45, which explored sites as far south as the central Sudan.
In the mid-19th century, Egyptology developed as a subject in France and in Prussia. The Antiquities Service and a museum of Egyptian antiquities were established in Egypt by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, a great excavator who attempted to preserve sites from destruction, and the Prussian Heinrich Brugsch, who made great progress in the interpretation of texts of many periods and published the first major Egyptian dictionary. In 1880 Flinders (later Sir Flinders) Petrie began more than 40 years of methodical excavation, which created an archaeological framework for all the chief periods of Egyptian culture except for remote prehistory. Petrie was the initiator of much in archaeological method, but he was later surpassed by George Andrew Reisner, who excavated for American institutions from 1899 to 1937. The greatest late 19th-century Egyptologist was Adolf Erman of Berlin, who put the understanding of the Egyptian language on a sound basis and wrote general works that for the first time organized what was known about the earlier periods.
Complete facsimile copies of Egyptian monuments have been published since the 1890s, providing a separate record that becomes more vital as the originals decay. The pioneer of this scientific epigraphy was James Henry Breasted of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, who began his work in 1905 and shortly thereafter was joined by others. Many scholars are now engaged in epigraphy.
In the first half of the 20th century, some outstanding archaeological discoveries were made: Howard Carter uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922; Pierre Montet found the tombs of 21st–22nd-dynasty kings at Tanis in 1939–44; and W.B. Emery and L.P. Kirwan found tombs of the Ballānah culture (the 4th through the 6th century ce) in Nubia in 1931–34. The last of these was part of the second survey of Lower Nubia in 1929–34, which preceded the second raising of the Aswān Dam. This was followed in the late 1950s and ’60s by an international campaign to excavate and record sites in Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia before the completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1970. Lower Nubia is now one of the most thoroughly explored archaeological regions of the world. Most of its many temples have been moved, either to higher ground nearby, as happened to Abu Simbel and Philae, or to quite different places, including various foreign museums. The campaign also had the welcome consequence of introducing a wide range of archaeological expertise to Egypt, so that standards of excavation and recording in the country have risen greatly.
Carter, HowardHoward Carter.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Excavation and survey of great importance have continued in many places. For example, at Ṣaqqārah, part of the necropolis of the ancient city of Memphis, new areas of the Sarapeum have been uncovered with rich finds, and a major New Kingdom necropolis is being thoroughly explored. The site of ancient Memphis itself has been systematically surveyed; its position in relation to the ancient course of the Nile has been established; and urban occupation areas have been studied in detail for the first time.
Egyptology is, however, a primarily interpretive subject. There have been outstanding contributions—for example in art, for which Heinrich Schäfer established the principles of the rendering of nature, and in language. New light has been cast on texts, the majority of which are written in a simple metre that can serve as the basis of sophisticated literary works. The physical environment, social structure, kingship, and religion are other fields in which great advances have been made, while the reconstruction of the outline of history is constantly being improved in detail.
The Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods
Predynastic Egypt
Egypt, ancientSites associated with Egypt from Predynastic to Byzantine times.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Egypt, ancientSites associated with Egypt from Predynastic to Byzantine times, Nile delta region.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Egypt, ancientSites associated with Egypt from Predynastic to Byzantine times, Thebes region.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.The peoples of predynastic Egypt were the successors of the Paleolithic inhabitants of northeastern Africa, who had spread over much of its area; during wet phases they had left remains in regions as inhospitable as the Great Sand Sea. The final desiccation of the Sahara was not complete until the end of the 3rd millennium bce; over thousands of years people must have migrated from there to the Nile valley, the environment of which improved as the region dried out. In this process the decisive change from the nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life of Paleolithic times to settled agriculture has not so far been identified. Sometime after 5000 bce the raising of crops was introduced, probably on a horticultural scale, in small local cultures that seem to have penetrated southward through Egypt into the oases and the Sudan. Several of the basic food plants that were grown are native to the Middle East, so the new techniques probably spread from there. No large-scale migration need have been involved, and the cultures were at first largely self-contained. The preserved evidence for them is unrepresentative because it comes from the low desert, where relatively few people lived; as was the case later, most people probably settled in the valley and delta.
The earliest known Neolithic cultures in Egypt have been found at Marimda Banī Salāma, on the southwestern edge of the delta, and farther to the southwest, in Al-Fayyūm. The site at Marimda Banī Salāma, which dates to the 6th–5th millennium bce, gives evidence of settlement and shows that cereals were grown. In Al-Fayyūm, where evidence dates to the 5th millennium bce, the settlements were near the shore of Lake Qārūn, and the settlers engaged in fishing. Marimda is a very large site that was occupied for many centuries. The inhabitants lived in lightly built huts; they may have buried their dead within their houses, but areas where burials have been found may not have been occupied by dwellings at the same time. Pottery was used in both cultures. In addition to these Egyptian Neolithic cultures, others have been identified in the Western Desert, in the Second Cataract area, and north of Khartoum. Some of these are as early as the Egyptian ones, while others overlapped with the succeeding Egyptian predynastic cultures.
In Upper Egypt, between Asyūṭ and Luxor (Al-Uqṣur), have been found the Tasian culture (named for Dayr Tāsā) and the Badarian culture (named for Al-Badārī); these date from the late 5th millennium bce. Most of the evidence for them comes from cemeteries, where the burials included fine black-topped red pottery, ornaments, some copper objects, and glazed steatite beads. The most characteristic predynastic luxury objects, slate palettes for grinding cosmetics, occur for the first time in this period. The burials show little differentiation of wealth and status and seem to belong to a peasant culture without central political organization.
Probably contemporary with both predynastic and dynastic times are thousands of rock drawings of a wide range of motifs, including boats, found throughout the Eastern Desert, in Lower Nubia, and as far west as Mount ʾUwaynāt, which stands near modern Egypt’s borders with Libya and Sudan in the southwest. The drawings show that nomads were common throughout the desert, probably to the late 3rd millennium bce, but they cannot be dated precisely; they may all have been produced by nomads, or inhabitants of the Nile valley may often have penetrated the desert and made drawings.
Naqādah I, named for the major site of Naqādah but also called Amratian for Al-ʿĀmirah, is a distinct phase that succeeded the Badarian. It has been found as far south as Al-Kawm al-Aḥmar (Hierakonpolis; ancient Egyptian Nekhen), near the sandstone barrier of Mount Silsilah, which was the cultural boundary of Egypt in predynastic times. Naqādah I differs from its Badarian predecessor in its density of settlement and the typology of its material culture but hardly at all in the social organization implied by the archaeological finds. Burials were in shallow pits in which the bodies were placed facing to the west, like those of later Egyptians. Notable types of material found in graves are fine pottery decorated with representational designs in white on red, figurines of men and women, and hard stone mace-heads that are the precursors of important late predynastic objects.
Naqādah II, also known as Gerzean for Girza (Jirza), is the most important predynastic culture. The heartland of its development was the same as that of Naqādah I, but it spread gradually throughout the country. South of Mount Silsilah, sites of the culturally similar Nubian A Group are found as far as the Second Cataract of the Nile and beyond; these have a long span, continuing as late as the Egyptian Early Dynastic period. During Naqādah II, large sites developed at Al-Kawm al-Aḥmar, Naqādah, and Abydos (Abīdūs), showing by their size the concentration of settlement, as well as exhibiting increasing differentiation in wealth and status. Few sites have been identified between Asyūṭ and Al-Fayyūm, and this region may have been sparsely settled, perhaps supporting a pastoral rather than agricultural population. Near present-day Cairo—at Al-ʿUmāri, Al-Maʿādi, and Wādī Dijlah and stretching as far south as the latitude of Al-Fayyūm—are sites of a separate, contemporary culture. Al-Maʿādi was an extensive settlement that traded with the Middle East and probably acted as an intermediary for transmitting goods to the south. In this period, imports of lapis lazuli provide evidence that trade networks extended as far afield as Afghanistan.
The material culture of Naqādah II included increasing numbers of prestige objects. The characteristic mortuary pottery is made of buff desert clay, principally from around Qinā, and is decorated in red with pictures of uncertain meaning showing boats, animals, and scenes with human figures. Stone vases, many made of hard stones that come from remote areas of the Eastern Desert, are common and of remarkable quality, and cosmetic palettes display elaborate designs, with outlines in the form of animals, birds, or fish. Flint was worked with extraordinary skill to produce large ceremonial knives of a type that continued in use during dynastic times.
Egyptian clay vesselPainted clay vessel with flamingos and ibexes, Gerzean culture, Egypt, c. 3400–c. 3100 bce; in the Roemer-Pelizaeus Museum, Hildesheim, Germany.Holle Bildarchiv, Baden-Baden
Sites of late Naqādah II (sometimes termed Naqādah III) are found throughout Egypt, including the Memphite area and the delta region, and appear to have replaced the local Lower Egyptian cultures. Links with the Middle East intensified, and some distinctively Mesopotamian motifs and objects were briefly in fashion in Egypt. The cultural unification of the country probably accompanied a political unification, but this must have proceeded in stages and cannot be reconstructed in detail. In an intermediate stage, local states may have formed at Al-Kawm al-Aḥmar, Naqādah, and Abydos and in the delta at such sites as Buto (modern Kawm al-Farāʿīn) and Sais (Ṣā al-Ḥajar). Ultimately, Abydos became preeminent; its late predynastic cemetery of Umm al-Qaʿāb was extended to form the burial place of the kings of the 1st dynasty. In the latest predynastic period, objects bearing written symbols of royalty were deposited throughout the country, and primitive writing also appeared in marks on pottery. Because the basic symbol for the king, a falcon on a decorated palace facade, hardly varies, these objects are thought to have belonged to a single line of kings or a single state, not to a set of small states. This symbol became the royal Horus name, the first element in a king’s titulary, which presented the reigning king as the manifestation of an aspect of the god Horus, the leading god of the country. Over the next few centuries several further definitions of the king’s presence were added to this one.
Thus, at this time Egypt seems to have been a state unified under kings who introduced writing and the first bureaucratic administration. These kings, who could have ruled for more than a century, may correspond with a set of names preserved on the Palermo Stone, but no direct identification can be made between them. The latest was probably Narmer, whose name has been found near Memphis, at Abydos, on a ceremonial palette and mace-head from Al-Kawm al-Aḥmar, and at the Palestinian sites of Tall Gat and ʿArad. The relief scenes on the palette show him wearing the two chief crowns of Egypt and defeating northern enemies, but these probably are stereotyped symbols of the king’s power and role and not records of specific events of his reign. They demonstrate that the position of the king in society and its presentation in mixed pictorial and written form had been elaborated by the early 3rd millennium bce.
During this time Egyptian artistic style and conventions were formulated, together with writing. The process led to a complete and remarkably rapid transformation of material culture, so that many dynastic Egyptian prestige objects hardly resembled their forerunners.
The Early Dynastic period (c. 2925–c. 2575 bce)
The 1st dynasty (c. 2925–c. 2775 bce)
The beginning of the historical period is characterized by the introduction of written records in the form of regnal year names—the records that later were collected in documents such as the Palermo Stone. The first king of Egyptian history, Menes, is therefore a creation of the later record, not the actual unifier of the country; he is known from Egyptian king lists and from classical sources and is credited with irrigation works and with founding the capital, Memphis. On small objects from this time, one of them dated to the important king Narmer but certainly mentioning a different person, there are two possible mentions of a “Men” who may be the king Menes. If these do name Menes, he was probably the same person as Aha, Narmer’s probable successor, who was then the founder of the 1st dynasty. Changes in the naming patterns of kings reinforce the assumption that a new dynasty began with his reign. Aha’s tomb at Abydos is altogether more grandiose than previously built tombs, while the first of a series of massive tombs at Ṣaqqārah, next to Memphis, supports the tradition that the city was founded then as a new capital. This shift from Abydos is the culmination of intensified settlement in the crucial area between the Nile River valley and the delta, but Memphis did not yet overcome the traditional pull of its predecessor: the large tombs at Ṣaqqārah appear to belong to high officials, while the kings were buried at Abydos in tombs whose walled complexes have long since disappeared. Their mortuary cults may have been conducted in designated areas nearer the cultivation.
Figure perhaps representing Menes on a victory tablet of Egyptian King Narmer, c. 2925–c. 2775 bce.Courtesy of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo; photograph, Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich
In the late Predynastic period and the first half of the 1st dynasty, Egypt extended its influence into southern Palestine and probably Sinai and conducted a campaign as far as the Second Cataract. The First Cataract area, with its centre on Elephantine, an island in the Nile opposite the present-day town of Aswān, was permanently incorporated into Egypt, but Lower Nubia was not.
Between late predynastic times and the 4th dynasty—and probably early in the period—the Nubian A Group came to an end. There is some evidence that political centralization was in progress around Qustul, but this did not lead to any further development and may indeed have prompted a preemptive strike by Egypt. For Nubia, the malign proximity of the largest state of the time stifled advancement. During the 1st dynasty, writing spread gradually, but because it was used chiefly for administration, the records, which were kept within the floodplain, have not survived. The artificial writing medium of papyrus was invented by the middle of the 1st dynasty. There was a surge in prosperity, and thousands of tombs of all levels of wealth have been found throughout the country. The richest contained magnificent goods in metal, ivory, and other materials, the most widespread luxury products being extraordinarily fine stone vases. The high point of 1st-dynasty development was the long reign of Den (flourished c. 2850 bce).
During the 1st dynasty three titles were added to the royal Horus name: “Two Ladies,” an epithet presenting the king as making manifest an aspect of the protective goddesses of the south (Upper Egypt) and the north (Lower Egypt); “Golden Horus,” the precise meaning of which is unknown; and “Dual King,” a ranked pairing of the two basic words for king, later associated with Upper and Lower Egypt. These titles were followed by the king’s own birth name, which in later centuries was written in a cartouche.
The 2nd dynasty (c. 2775–c. 2650 bce)
From the end of the 1st dynasty, there is evidence of rival claimants to the throne. One line may have become the 2nd dynasty, whose first king’s Horus name, Hetepsekhemwy, means “peaceful in respect of the two powers” and may allude to the conclusion of strife between two factions or parts of the country, to the antagonistic gods Horus and Seth, or to both. Hetepsekhemwy and his successor, Reneb, moved their burial places to Ṣaqqārah; the tomb of the third king, Nynetjer, has not been found. The second half of the dynasty was a time of conflict and rival lines of kings, some of whose names are preserved on stone vases from the 3rd-dynasty Step Pyramid at Ṣaqqārah or in king lists. Among these contenders, Peribsen took the title of Seth instead of Horus and was probably opposed by Horus Khasekhem, whose name is known only from Kawm al-Aḥmar and who used the programmatic epithet “effective sandal against evil.” The last ruler of the dynasty combined the Horus and Seth titles to form the Horus-and-Seth Khasekhemwy, “arising in respect of the two powers,” to which was added “the two lords are at peace in him.” Khasekhemwy was probably the same person as Khasekhem after the successful defeat of his rivals, principally Peribsen. Both Peribsen and Khasekhemwy had tombs at Abydos, and the latter also built a monumental brick funerary enclosure near the cultivation.
The 3rd dynasty (c. 2650–c. 2575 bce)
There were links of kinship between Khasekhemwy and the 3rd dynasty, but the change between them is marked by a definitive shift of the royal burial place to Memphis. Its first king, Sanakhte, is attested in reliefs from Maghāra in Sinai. His successor, Djoser (Horus name Netjerykhet), was one of the outstanding kings of Egypt. His Step Pyramid at Ṣaqqārah is both the culmination of an epoch and—as the first large all-stone building, many times larger than anything attempted before—the precursor of later achievements. The pyramid is set in a much larger enclosure than that of Khasekhemwy at Abydos and contains reproductions in stone of ritual structures that had previously been built of perishable materials. Architectural details of columns, cornices, and moldings provided many models for later development. The masonry techniques look to brickwork for models and show little concern for the structural potential of stone. The pyramid itself evolved through numerous stages from a flat mastaba (an oblong tomb with a burial chamber dug beneath it, common at earlier nonroyal sites) into a six-stepped, almost square pyramid. There was a second, symbolic tomb with a flat superstructure on the south side of the enclosure; this probably substituted for the traditional royal burial place of Abydos. The king and some of his family were buried deep under the pyramid, where tens of thousands of stone vases were deposited, a number bearing inscriptions of the first two dynasties. Thus, in perpetuating earlier forms in stone and burying this material, Djoser invoked the past in support of his innovations.
Djoser’s name was famous in later times, and his monument was studied in the Late period. Imhotep, whose title as a master sculptor is preserved from the Step Pyramid complex, may have been its architect; he lived on into the next reign. His fame also endured, and in the Late period he was deified and became a god of healing. In Manetho’s history he is associated with reforms of writing, and this may reflect a genuine tradition, for hieroglyphs were simplified and standardized at that time.
Djoser’s successor, Sekhemkhet, planned a still more grandiose step pyramid complex at Ṣaqqārah, and a later king, Khaba, began one at Zawyat al-ʿAryan, a few miles south of Giza. The burial place of the last king of the dynasty, Huni, is unknown. It has often been suggested that he built the pyramid of Maydūm, but this probably was the work of his successor, Snefru. Inscribed material naming 3rd-dynasty kings is known from Maghāra to Elephantine but not from the Middle East or Nubia.
The organizational achievements of the 3rd dynasty are reflected in its principal monument, whose message of centralization and concentration of power is reinforced in a negative sense by the archaeological record. Outside the vicinity of Memphis, the Abydos area continued to be important, and four enormous tombs, probably of high officials, were built at the nearby site of Bayt Khallaf; there were small, nonmortuary step pyramids throughout the country, some of which may date to the 4th dynasty. Otherwise, little evidence comes from the provinces, from which wealth must have flowed to the centre, leaving no rich local elite. By the 3rd dynasty the rigid structure of the later nomes, or provinces, which formed the basis of Old Kingdom administration, had been created, and the imposition of its uniform pattern may have impoverished local centres. Tombs of the elite at Ṣaqqārah, notably those of Hezyre and Khabausokar, contained artistic masterpieces that look forward to the Old Kingdom.
The Old Kingdom (c. 2575–c. 2130 bce) and the First Intermediate period (c. 2130–1938 bce)
The Old Kingdom
The 4th dynasty (c. 2575–c. 2465 bce)
The first king of the 4th dynasty, Snefru, probably built the step pyramid of Maydūm and then modified it to form the first true pyramid. Due west of Maydūm was the small step pyramid of Saylah, in Al-Fayyūm, at which Snefru also worked. He built two pyramids at Dahshūr; the southern of the two is known as the Blunted Pyramid because its upper part has a shallower angle of inclination than its lower part. This difference may be due to structural problems or may have been planned from the start, in which case the resulting profile may reproduce a solar symbol of creation. The northern Dahshūr pyramid, the later of the two, has the same angle of inclination as the upper part of the Blunted Pyramid and a base area exceeded only by that of the Great Pyramid at Giza. All three of Snefru’s pyramids had mortuary complexes attached to them. Snefru’s building achievements were thus at least as great as those of any later king and introduced a century of unparalleled construction.
In a long perspective, the 4th dynasty was an isolated phenomenon, a period when the potential of centralization was realized to its utmost and a disproportionate amount of the state’s resources was used on the kings’ mortuary provisions, almost certainly at the expense of general living standards. No significant 4th-dynasty sites have been found away from the Memphite area. Tomb inscriptions show that high officials were granted estates scattered over many nomes, especially in the delta. This pattern of landholding may have avoided the formation of local centres of influence while encouraging intensive exploitation of the land. People who worked on these estates were not free to move, and they paid a high proportion of their earnings in dues and taxes. The building enterprises must have relied on drafting vast numbers of men, probably after the harvest had been gathered in the early summer and during part of the inundation.
Blunted PyramidThe Blunted, Bent, False, or Rhomboidal Pyramid, so named because of its peculiar double slope, built by King Snefru in the 4th dynasty (c. 2575–c. 2465 bce), Dahshūr, Egypt.© Photos.com/Jupiterimages
Snefru’s was the first king’s name that was regularly written inside the cartouche, an elongated oval that is one of the most characteristic Egyptian symbols. The cartouche itself is older and was shown as a gift bestowed by gods on the king, signifying long duration on the throne. It soon acquired associations with the sun, so that its first use by the builder of the first true pyramid, which is probably also a solar symbol, is not coincidental.
Snefru’s successor, Khufu (Cheops), built the Great Pyramid at Giza (Al-Jīzah), to which were added the slightly smaller second pyramid of one of Khufu’s sons, Khafre (more correctly Rekhaef, the Chephren of Greek sources), and that of Menkaure (Mycerinus). Khufu’s successor, his son Redjedef, began a pyramid at Abū Ruwaysh, and a king of uncertain name began one at Zawyat al-ʿAryan. The last known king of the dynasty (there was probably one more), Shepseskaf, built a monumental mastaba at south Ṣaqqārah and was the only Old Kingdom ruler not to begin a pyramid. These works, especially the Great Pyramid, show a great mastery of monumental stoneworking: individual blocks were large or colossal and were extremely accurately fitted to one another. Surveying and planning also were carried out with remarkable precision.
Apart from the colossal conception of the pyramids themselves, the temple complexes attached to them show great mastery of architectural forms. Khufu’s temple or approach causeway was decorated with impressive reliefs, fragments of which were incorporated in the 12th-dynasty pyramid of Amenemhet I at Al-Lisht. The best known of all Egyptian sculpture, Khafre’s Great Sphinx at Giza and his extraordinary seated statue of Nubian gneiss, date from the middle 4th dynasty.
The Great Sphinx at Giza, Egypt.© vinzo/iStock.com
The Giza pyramids form a group of more or less completed monuments surrounded by many tombs of the royal family and the elite, hierarchically organized and laid out in neat patterns. This arrangement contrasts with that of the reign of Snefru, when important tombs were built at Maydūm and Ṣaqqārah, while the King was probably buried at Dahshūr. Of the Giza tombs, only those of the highest-ranking officials were decorated; except among the immediate entourage of the kings, the freedom of expression of officials was greatly restricted. Most of the highest officials were members of the large royal family, so that power was concentrated by kinship as well as by other means. This did not prevent factional strife: the complex of Redjedef was deliberately and thoroughly destroyed, probably at the instigation of his successor, Khafre.
The Palermo Stone records a campaign to Lower Nubia in the reign of Snefru that may be associated with graffiti in the area itself. The Egyptians founded a settlement at Buhen, at the north end of the Second Cataract, which endured for 200 years; others may have been founded between there and Elephantine. The purposes of this penetration were probably to establish trade farther south and to create a buffer zone. No archaeological traces of a settled population in Lower Nubia have been found for the Old Kingdom period; the oppressive presence of Egypt seems to have robbed the inhabitants of their resources, as the provinces were exploited in favour of the king and the elite.
Snefru and the builders of the Giza pyramids represented a classic age to later times. Snefru was the prototype of a good king, whereas Khufu and Khafre had tyrannical reputations, perhaps only because of the size of their monuments. Little direct evidence for political or other attitudes survives from the dynasty, in part because writing was only just beginning to be used for recording continuous texts. Many great works of art were, however, produced for kings and members of the elite, and these set a pattern for later work. Kings of the 4th dynasty identified themselves, at least from the time of Redjedef, as Son of Re (the sun god); worship of the sun god reached a peak in the 5th dynasty.
The 5th dynasty (c. 2465–c. 2325 bce)
The first two kings of the 5th dynasty, Userkaf and Sahure, were sons of Khentkaues, who was a member of the 4th-dynasty royal family. The third king, Neferirkare, may also have been her son. A story from the Middle Kingdom that makes them all sons of a priest of Re may derive from a tradition that they were true worshipers of the sun god and implies, probably falsely, that the 4th-dynasty kings were not. Six kings of the 5th dynasty displayed their devotion to the sun god by building personal temples to his cult. These temples, of which the two so far identified are sited similarly to pyramids, probably had a mortuary significance for the king as well as honouring the god. The kings’ pyramids should therefore be seen in conjunction with the sun temples, some of which received lavish endowments and were served by many high-ranking officials.
Pyramids have been identified for seven of the nine kings of the dynasty, at Ṣaqqārah (Userkaf and Unas, the last king), Abū Ṣīr (Sahure, Neferirkare, Reneferef, and Neuserre), and south Ṣaqqārah (Djedkare Izezi, the eighth king). The pyramids are smaller and less solidly constructed than those of the 4th dynasty, but the reliefs from their mortuary temples are better preserved and of very fine quality; that of Sahure gives a fair impression of their decorative program. The interiors contained religious scenes relating to provision for Sahure in the next life, while the exteriors presented his “historical” role and relations with the gods. Sea expeditions to Lebanon to acquire timber are depicted, as are aggression against and capture of Libyans. Despite the apparent precision with which captives are named and total figures given, these scenes may not refer to specific events, for the same motifs with the same details were frequently shown over the next 250 years; Sahure’s use of them might not have been the earliest.
Foreign connections were far-flung. Goldwork of the period has been found in Anatolia, while stone vases named for Khafre and Pepi I (6th dynasty) have been found at Tall Mardīkh in Syria (Ebla), which was destroyed around 2250 bce. The absence of 5th-dynasty evidence from the site is probably a matter of chance. Expeditions to the turquoise mines of Sinai continued as before. In Nubia, graffiti and inscribed seals from Buhen document Egyptian presence until late in the dynasty, when control was probably abandoned in the face of immigration from the south and the deserts; later generations of the immigrants are known as the Nubian C Group. From the reign of Sahure on, there are records of trade with Punt, a partly legendary land probably in the region of present-day Eritrea, from which the Egyptians obtained incense and myrrh, as well as exotic African products that had been traded from still farther afield. Thus, the reduced level of royal display in Egypt does not imply a less prominent general role for the country.
High officials of the 5th dynasty were no longer members of the royal family, although a few married princesses. Their offices still depended on the king, and in their biographical inscriptions they presented their exploits as relating to him, but they justified other aspects of their social role in terms of a more general morality. They progressed through their careers by acquiring titles in complex ranked sequences that were manipulated by kings throughout the 5th and 6th dynasties. This institutionalization of officialdom has an archaeological parallel in the distribution of elite tombs, which no longer clustered so closely around pyramids. Many are at Giza, but the largest and finest are at Ṣaqqārah and Abū Ṣīr. The repertory of decorated scenes in them continually expanded, but there was no fundamental change in their subject matter. Toward the end of the 5th dynasty, some officials with strong local ties began to build their tombs in the Nile valley and the delta, in a development that symbolized the elite’s slowly growing independence from royal control.
Something of the working of the central administration is visible in papyri from the mortuary temples of Neferirkare and Reneferef at Abū Ṣīr. These show well-developed methods of accounting and meticulous recordkeeping and document the complicated redistribution of goods and materials between the royal residence, the temples, and officials who held priesthoods. Despite this evidence for detailed organization, the consumption of papyrus was modest and cannot be compared, for example, with that of Greco-Roman times.
The last three kings of the dynasty, Menkauhor, Djedkare Izezi, and Unas, did not have personal names compounded with “-Re,” the name of the sun god (Djedkare is a name assumed on accession); and Izezi and Unas did not build solar temples. Thus, there was a slight shift away from the solar cult. The shift could be linked with the rise of Osiris, the god of the dead, who is first attested from the reign of Neuserre. His origin was, however, probably some centuries earlier. The pyramid of Unas, whose approach causeway was richly decorated with historical and religious scenes, is inscribed inside with spells intended to aid the deceased in the hereafter; varying selections of the spells occur in all later Old Kingdom pyramids. (As a collection, they are known as the Pyramid Texts.) Many of the spells were old when they were inscribed; their presence documents the increasing use of writing rather than a change in beliefs. The Pyramid Texts show the importance of Osiris, at least for the king’s passage into the next world: it was an undertaking that aroused anxiety and had to be assisted by elaborate rituals and spells.
Nekhbet, the vulture goddess, hovering over Menkauhor, Egypt, 25th–24th century bc. Alinari/Art Resource, New York
The 6th dynasty (c. 2325–c. 2150 bce)
No marked change can be discerned between the reigns of Unas and Teti, the first king of the 6th dynasty. Around Teti’s pyramid in the northern portion of Ṣaqqārah was built a cemetery of large tombs, including those of several viziers. Together with tombs near the pyramid of Unas, this is the latest group of private monuments of the Old Kingdom in the Memphite area.
Information on 6th-dynasty political and external affairs is more abundant because inscriptions of high officials were longer. Whether the circumstances they describe were also typical of less loquacious ages is unknown, but the very existence of such inscriptions is evidence of a tendency to greater independence among officials. One, Weni, who lived from the reign of Teti through those of Pepi I and Merenre, was a special judge in the trial of a conspiracy in the royal household, mounted several campaigns against a region east of Egypt or in southern Palestine, and organized two quarrying expeditions. In the absence of a standing army, the Egyptian force was levied from the provinces by officials from local administrative centres and other settlements; there were also contingents from several southern countries and a tribe of the Eastern Desert.
Three biographies of officials from Elephantine record trading expeditions to the south in the reigns of Pepi I and Pepi II. The location of the regions named in them is debated and may have been as far afield as the Butāna, south of the Fifth Cataract. Some of the trade routes ran through the Western Desert, where the Egyptians established an administrative post at Balāṭ in Al-Dākhilah Oasis, some distance west of Al-Khārijah Oasis. Egypt no longer controlled Lower Nubia, which was settled by the C Group and formed into political units of gradually increasing size, possibly as far as Karmah (Kerma), south of the Third Cataract. Karmah was the southern cultural successor of the Nubian A Group and became an urban centre in the late 3rd millennium bce, remaining Egypt’s chief southern neighbour for seven centuries. To the north the Karmah state stretched as far as the Second Cataract and at times farther still. Its southern extent has not been determined, but sites of similar material culture are scattered over vast areas of the central Sudan.
The provincializing tendencies of the late 5th dynasty continued in the 6th, especially during the extremely long reign (up to 94 years) of Pepi II. Increasing numbers of officials resided in the provinces, amassed local offices, and emphasized local concerns, including religious leadership, in their inscriptions. At the capital the size and splendour of the cemeteries decreased, and some tombs of the end of the dynasty were decorated only in their subterranean parts, as if security could not be guaranteed aboveground. The pyramid complex of Pepi II at southern Ṣaqqārah, which was probably completed in the first 30 years of his reign, stands out against this background as the last major monument of the Old Kingdom, comparable to its predecessors in artistic achievement. Three of his queens were buried in small pyramids around his own; these are the only known queens’ monuments inscribed with Pyramid Texts.
The 7th and 8th dynasties (c. 2150–c. 2130 bce)
Pepi II was followed by several ephemeral rulers, who were in turn succeeded by the short-lived 7th dynasty of Manetho’s history (from which no king’s name is known) and the 8th, one of whose kings, Ibi, built a small pyramid at southern Ṣaqqārah. Several 8th-dynasty kings are known from inscriptions found in the temple of Min at Qifṭ (Coptos) in the south; this suggests that their rule was recognized throughout the country. The instability of the throne is, however, a sign of political decay, and the fiction of centralized rule may have been accepted only because there was no alternative style of government to kingship.
With the end of the 8th dynasty, the Old Kingdom system of control collapsed. About that time there were incidents of famine and local violence. The country emerged impoverished and decentralized from this episode, the prime cause of which may have been political failure, environmental disaster, or, more probably, a combination of the two. In that period the desiccation of northeastern Africa reached a peak, producing conditions similar to those of contemporary times, and a related succession of low inundations may have coincided with the decay of central political authority. These environmental changes are, however, only approximately dated, and their relationship with the collapse cannot be proved.
The First Intermediate period
The 9th dynasty (c. 2130–2080 bce)
After the end of the 8th dynasty, the throne passed to kings from Heracleopolis, who made their native city the capital, although Memphis continued to be important. They were acknowledged throughout the country, but inscriptions of nomarchs (chief officials of nomes) in the south show that the kings’ rule was nominal. At Dara, north of Asyūṭ, for example, a local ruler called Khety styled himself in a regal manner and built a pyramid with a surrounding “courtly” cemetery. At Al-Miʿalla, south of Luxor, Ankhtify, the nomarch of the al-Jabalayn region, recorded his annexation of the Idfū nome and extensive raiding in the Theban area. Ankhtify acknowledged an unidentifiable king Neferkare but campaigned with his own troops. Major themes of inscriptions of the period are the nomarch’s provision of food supplies for his people in times of famine and his success in promoting irrigation works. Artificial irrigation had probably long been practiced, but exceptional poverty and crop failure made concern with it worth recording. Inscriptions of Nubian mercenaries employed by local rulers in the south indicate how entrenched military action was.
The 10th (c. 2080–c. 1970 bce) and 11th (2081–1938 bce) dynasties
A period of generalized conflict focused on rival dynasties at Thebes and Heracleopolis. The latter, the 10th, probably continued the line of the 9th. The founder of the 9th or 10th dynasty was named Khety, and the dynasty as a whole was termed the House of Khety. Several Heracleopolitan kings were named Khety; another important name is Merikare. There was intermittent conflict, and the boundary between the two realms shifted around the region of Abydos. As yet, the course of events in this period cannot be reconstructed.
Several major literary texts purport to describe the upheavals of the First Intermediate period—the Instruction for Merikare, for example, being ascribed to one of the kings of Heracleopolis. These texts led earlier Egyptologists to posit a Heracleopolitan literary flowering, but there is now a tendency to date them to the Middle Kingdom, so that they would have been written with enough hindsight to allow a more effective critique of the sacred order.
Until the 11th dynasty made Thebes its capital, Armant (Greek, Hermonthis), on the west bank of the Nile, was the centre of the Theban nome. The dynasty honoured as its ancestor the God’s Father Mentuhotep, probably the father of its first king, Inyotef I (2081–65 bce), whose successors were Inyotef II and Inyotef III (2065–16 and 2016–08 bce, respectively). The fourth king, Mentuhotep II (2008–1957 bce, whose throne name was Nebhepetre), gradually reunited Egypt and ousted the Heracleopolitans, changing his titulary in stages to record his conquests. Around his 20th regnal year he assumed the Horus name Divine of the White Crown, implicitly claiming all of Upper Egypt. By his regnal year 42 this had been changed to Uniter of the Two Lands, a traditional royal epithet that he revived with a literal meaning. In later times Mentuhotep was celebrated as the founder of the epoch now known as the Middle Kingdom. His remarkable mortuary complex at Dayr al-Baḥrī, which seems to have had no pyramid, was the architectural inspiration for Hatshepsut’s later structure built alongside.
In the First Intermediate period, monuments were set up by a slightly larger section of the population, and, in the absence of central control, internal dissent and conflicts of authority became visible in public records. Nonroyal individuals took over some of the privileges of royalty, notably identification with Osiris in the hereafter and the use of the Pyramid Texts; these were incorporated into a more extensive corpus inscribed on coffins (and hence termed the Coffin Texts) and continued to be inscribed during the Middle Kingdom. The unified state of the Middle Kingdom did not reject these acquisitions and so had a broader cultural basis than the Old Kingdom.
The Middle Kingdom (1938–c. 1630 bce) and the Second Intermediate period (c. 1630–1540 bce)
The Middle Kingdom
Mentuhotep II campaigned in Lower Nubia, where he may have been preceded by the Inyotefs. His mortuary complex in Thebes contained some of the earliest known depictions of Amon-Re, the dynastic god of the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom. Mentuhotep II was himself posthumously deified and worshiped, notably in the Aswān area. In administration, he attempted to break the power of the nomarchs, but his policy was unsuccessful in the longer term.
Mentuhotep II’s successors, Mentuhotep III (1957–45 bce) and Mentuhotep IV (1945–38 bce), also ruled from Thebes. The reign of Mentuhotep IV corresponds to seven years marked “missing” in the Turin Canon, and he may later have been deemed illegitimate. Records of a quarrying expedition to the Wadi Ḥammāmāt from his second regnal year were inscribed on the order of his vizier Amenemhet, who almost certainly succeeded to the throne and founded the 12th dynasty. Not all the country welcomed the 11th dynasty, the monuments and self-presentation of which remained local and Theban.
The 12th dynasty (1938–c. 1756 bce)
In a text probably circulated as propaganda during the reign of Amenemhet I (1938–08 bce), the time preceding his reign is depicted as a period of chaos and despair, from which a saviour called Ameny from the extreme south was to emerge. This presentation may well be stereotyped, but there could have been armed struggle before he seized the throne. Nonetheless, his mortuary complex at Al-Lisht contained monuments on which his name was associated with that of his predecessor. In style, his pyramid and mortuary temple looked back to Pepi II of the end of the Old Kingdom, but the pyramid was built of mud brick with a stone casing; consequently, it is now badly ruined.
Amenemhet I moved the capital back to the Memphite area, founding a residence named Itjet-towy, “she who takes possession of the Two Lands,” which was for later times the archetypal royal residence. Itjet-towy was probably situated between Memphis and the pyramids of Amenemhet I and Sesostris I (at modern Al-Lisht), while Memphis remained the centre of population. From later in the dynasty there is the earliest evidence for a royal palace (not a capital) in the eastern delta. The return to the Memphite area was accompanied by a revival of Old Kingdom artistic styles, in a resumption of central traditions that contrasted with the local ones of the 11th dynasty. From the reign of Amenemhet major tombs of the first half of the dynasty, which display considerable local independence, are preserved at several sites, notably Beni Hasan, Meir, and Qau. After the second reign of the dynasty, no more important private tombs were constructed at Thebes, but several kings made benefactions to Theban temples.
In his 20th regnal year, Amenemhet I took his son Sesostris I (or Senwosret, reigned 1908–1875 bce) as his coregent, presumably in order to ensure a smooth transition to the next reign. This practice was followed in the next two reigns and recurred sporadically in later times. During the following 10 years of joint rule, Sesostris undertook campaigns in Lower Nubia that led to its conquest as far as the central area of the Second Cataract. A series of fortresses were begun in the region, and there was a full occupation, but the local C Group population was not integrated culturally with the conquerors.
Sesostris ISesostris I, detail of a limestone statue, Egypt, c. 1900 bce.Courtesy of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo; photograph, Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich
Amenemhet I apparently was murdered during Sesostris’s absence on a campaign to Libya, but Sesostris was able to maintain his hold on the throne without major disorder. He consolidated his father’s achievements, but, in one of the earliest preserved inscriptions recounting royal exploits, he spoke of internal unrest. An inscription of the next reign alludes to campaigns to Syria-Palestine in the time of Sesostris; whether these were raiding expeditions and parades of strength, in what was then a seminomadic region, or whether a conquest was intended or achieved is not known. It is clear, however, that the traditional view that the Middle Kingdom hardly intervened in the Middle East is incorrect.
In the early 12th dynasty the written language was regularized in its classical form of Middle Egyptian, a rather artificial idiom that was probably always somewhat removed from the vernacular. The first datable corpus of literary texts was composed in Middle Egyptian. Two of these relate directly to political affairs and offer fictional justifications for the rule of Amenemhet I and Sesostris I, respectively. Several that are ascribed to Old Kingdom authors or that describe events of the First Intermediate period but are composed in Middle Egyptian probably also date from around this time. The most significant of these is the Instruction for Merikare, a discourse on kingship and moral responsibility. It is often used as a source for the history of the First Intermediate period but may preserve no more than a memory of its events. Most of these texts continued to be copied in the New Kingdom.
Little is known of the reigns of Amenemhet II (1876–42 bce) and Sesostris II (1844–37 bce). These kings built their pyramids in the entrance to Al-Fayyūm while also beginning an intensive exploitation of its agricultural potential that reached a peak in the reign of Amenemhet III (1818–1770 bce). The king of the 12th dynasty with the most enduring reputation was Sesostris III (1836–18 bce), who extended Egyptian conquests to Semna, at the south end of the Second Cataract, while also mounting at least one campaign to Palestine. Sesostris III completed an extensive chain of fortresses in the Second Cataract; at Semna he was worshiped as a god in the New Kingdom.
Frequent campaigns and military occupation, which lasted another 150 years, required a standing army. A force of this type may have been created early in the 12th dynasty but becomes better attested near the end. It was based on “soldiers”—whose title means literally “citizens”—levied by district and officers of several grades and types. It was separate from New Kingdom military organization and seems not to have enjoyed very high status.
The purpose of the occupation of Lower Nubia is disputed, because the size of the fortresses and the level of manpower needed to occupy them might seem disproportionate to local threats. An inscription of Sesostris III set up in the fortresses emphasizes the weakness of the Nubian enemy, while a boundary marker and fragmentary papyri show that the system channeled trade with the south through the central fortress of Mirgissa. The greatest period of the Karmah state to the south was still to come, but for centuries it had probably controlled a vast stretch of territory. The best explanation of the Egyptian presence is that Lower Nubia was annexed by Egypt for purposes of securing the southern trade route, while Karmah was a rival worth respecting and preempting; in addition, the physical scale of the fortresses may have become something of an end in itself. It is not known whether Egypt wished similarly to annex Palestine, but numerous administrative seals of the period have been found there.
Egypt: crownsThe crown of Lower Egypt (left) and the crown of Upper Egypt (right), both worn by King Sesostris III, Egypt, 19th century bce; in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich
Sesostris III reorganized Egypt into four regions corresponding to the northern and southern halves of the Nile valley and the eastern and western delta. Rich evidence for middle-ranking officials from the religious centre of Abydos and for administrative practice in documents from Al-Lāhūn conveys an impression of a pervasive, centralized bureaucracy, which later came to run the country under its own momentum. The prosperity created by peace, conquests, and agricultural development is visible in royal monuments and monuments belonging to the minor elite, but there was no small, powerful, and wealthy group of the sort seen in the Old and New Kingdoms. Sesostris III and his successor, Amenemhet III (1818–c. 1770 bce), left a striking artistic legacy in the form of statuary depicting them as aging, careworn rulers, probably alluding to a conception of the suffering king known from literature of the dynasty. This departure from the bland ideal, which may have sought to bridge the gap between king and subjects in the aftermath of the attack on elite power, was not taken up in later times.
The reigns of Amenemhet III and Amenemhet IV (c. 1770–60 bce) and of Sebeknefru (c. 1760–56 bce), the first certainly attested female monarch, were apparently peaceful, but the accession of a woman marked the end of the dynastic line.
The 13th dynasty (c. 1756–c. 1630 bce)
Despite a continuity of outward forms and of the rhetoric of inscriptions between the 12th and 13th dynasties, there was a complete change in kingship. In little more than a century about 70 kings occupied the throne. Many can have reigned only for months, and there were probably rival claimants to the throne, but in principle the royal residence remained at Itjet-towy and the kings ruled the whole country. Egypt’s hold on Lower Nubia was maintained, as was its position as the leading state in the Middle East. Large numbers of private monuments document the prosperity of the official classes, and a proliferation of titles is evidence of their continued expansion. In government the vizier assumed prime importance, and a single family held the office for much of a century.
Immigration from Asia is known in the late 12th dynasty and became more widespread in the 13th. From the late 18th century bce the northeastern Nile River delta was settled by successive waves of peoples from Palestine, who retained their own material culture. Starting with the Instruction for Merikare, Egyptian texts warn against the dangers of infiltration of this sort, and its occurrence shows a weakening of government. There may also have been a rival dynasty, called the 14th, at Xois in the north-central delta, but this is known only from Manetho’s history and could have had no more than local significance. Toward the end of this period, Egypt lost control of Lower Nubia, where the garrisons—which had been regularly replaced with fresh troops—settled and were partly assimilated. The Karmah state overran and incorporated the region. Some Egyptian officials resident in the Second Cataract area served the new rulers. The site of Karmah has yielded many Egyptian artifacts, including old pieces pillaged from their original contexts. Most were items of trade between the two countries, some probably destined for exchange against goods imported from sub-Saharan Africa. Around the end of the Middle Kingdom and during the Second Intermediate period, Medjay tribesmen from the Eastern Desert settled in the Nile valley from around Memphis to the Third Cataract. Their presence is marked by distinctive shallow graves with black-topped pottery, and they have traditionally been termed the “Pan-grave” culture by archaeologists. They were assimilated culturally in the New Kingdom, but the word Medjay came to mean police or militia; they probably came as mercenaries.
The Second Intermediate period
The increasing competition for power in Egypt and Nubia crystallized in the formation of two new dynasties: the 15th, called the Hyksos (c. 1630–c. 1523 bce), with its capital at Avaris (Tell el-Dabʿa) in the delta, and the 17th (c. 1630–1540 bce), ruling from Thebes. The word Hyksos dates to an Egyptian phrase meaning “ruler of foreign lands” and occurs in Manetho’s narrative cited in the works of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (1st century ce), which depicts the new rulers as sacrilegious invaders who despoiled the land. They presented themselves—with the exception of the title Hyksos—as Egyptian kings and appear to have been accepted as such. The main line of Hyksos was acknowledged throughout Egypt and may have been recognized as overlords in Palestine, but they tolerated other lines of kings, both those of the 17th dynasty and the various minor Hyksos who are termed the 16th dynasty. The 15th dynasty consisted of six kings, the best known being the fifth, Apopis, who reigned for up to 40 years. There were many 17th-dynasty kings, probably belonging to several different families. The northern frontier of the Theban domain was at Al-Qūṣiyyah, but there was trade across the border.
Asiatic rule brought many technical innovations to Egypt, as well as cultural innovations such as new musical instruments and foreign loan words. The changes affected techniques from bronze working and pottery to weaving, and new breeds of animals and new crops were introduced. In warfare, composite bows, new types of daggers and scimitars, and above all the horse and chariot transformed previous practice, although the chariot may ultimately have been as important as a prestige vehicle as for tactical military advantages it conferred. The effect of these changes was to bring Egypt, which had been technologically backward, onto the level of southwestern Asia. Because of these advances and the perspectives it opened up, Hyksos rule was decisive for Egypt’s later empire in the Middle East.
Whereas the 13th dynasty was fairly prosperous, the Second Intermediate period may have been impoverished. The regional centre of the cult of Osiris at Abydos, which has produced the largest quantity of Middle Kingdom monuments, lost importance, but sites such as Thebes, Idfū, and Al-Kawm al-Aḥmar have yielded significant, if sometimes crudely worked, remains. Aside from Avaris itself, virtually no information has come from the north, where the Hyksos ruled, and it is impossible to assess their impact on the economy or on high culture. The Second Intermediate period was the consequence of political fragmentation and immigration and was not associated with economic collapse, as in the early First Intermediate period.
Toward the end of the 17th dynasty (c. 1545 bce), the Theban king Seqenenre challenged Apopis, probably dying in battle against him. Seqenenre’s successor, Kamose, renewed the challenge, stating in an inscription that it was intolerable to share his land with an Asiatic and a Nubian (the Karmah ruler). By the end of his third regnal year, he had made raids as far south as the Second Cataract (and possibly much farther) and in the north to the neighbourhood of Avaris, also intercepting in the Western Desert a letter sent from Apopis to a new Karmah ruler on his accession. By campaigning to the north and to the south, Kamose acted out his implicit claim to the territory ruled by Egypt in the Middle Kingdom. His exploits formed a vital stage in the long struggle to expel the Hyksos. John R. Baines Peter F. Dorman
The New Kingdom (c. 1539–1075 bce)
The 18th dynasty (c. 1539–1292 bce)
Ahmose
Although Ahmose (ruled c. 1539–14 bce) had been preceded by Kamose, who was either his father or his brother, Egyptian tradition regarded Ahmose as the founder of a new dynasty because he was the native ruler who reunified Egypt. Continuing a recently inaugurated practice, he married his full sister Ahmose-Nofretari. The queen was given the title of God’s Wife of Amon. Like her predecessors of the 17th dynasty, Queen Ahmose-Nofretari was influential and highly honoured. A measure of her importance was her posthumous veneration at Thebes, where later pharaohs were depicted offering to her as a goddess among the gods.
Ahmose’s campaigns to expel the Hyksos from the Nile River delta and regain former Egyptian territory to the south probably started around his 10th regnal year. Destroying the Hyksos stronghold at Avaris, in the eastern delta, he finally drove them beyond the eastern frontier and then besieged Sharuḥen (Tell el-Fārʿah) in southern Palestine; the full extent of his conquests may have been much greater. His penetration of the Middle East came at a time when there was no major established power in the region. This political gap facilitated the creation of anEgyptian “empire.”
Ahmose’s officers and soldiers were rewarded with spoil and captives, who became personal slaves. This marked the creation of an influential military class. Like Kamose, Ahmose campaigned as far south as Buhen. For the administration of the regained territory, he created a new office, overseer of southern foreign lands, which ranked second only to the vizier. Its incumbent was accorded the honorific title of king’s son, indicating that he was directly responsible to the king as deputy.
The early New Kingdom bureaucracy was modeled on that of the Middle Kingdom. The vizier was the chief administrator and the highest judge of the realm. By the mid-15th century bce the office had been divided into two, one vizier for Upper and one for Lower Egypt. During the 18th dynasty some young bureaucrats were educated in temple schools, reinforcing the integration of civil and priestly sectors. Early in the dynasty many administrative posts were inherited, but royal appointment of capable officials, often selected from military officers who had served the king on his campaigns, later became the rule. The trend was thus away from bureaucratic families and the inheritance of office.
Amenhotep I
Ahmose’s son and successor, Amenhotep I (ruled c. 1514–1493 bce), pushed the Egyptian frontier southward to the Third Cataract, near the capital of the Karmah (Kerma) state, while also gathering tribute from his Asiatic possessions and perhaps campaigning in Syria. The emerging kingdom of Mitanni in northern Syria, which is first mentioned on a stela of one of Amenhotep’s soldiers and was also known by the name of Nahrin, may have threatened Egypt’s conquests to the north.
Amenhotep ILimestone sculpture of Amenhotep I, Egypt, c. 1500 bce.Reproduced by courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum
The New Kingdom was a time of increased devotion to the state god Amon-Re, whose cult largely benefited as Egypt was enriched by the spoils of war. Riches were turned over to the god’s treasuries, and as a sign of filial piety the king had sacred monuments constructed at Thebes. Under Amenhotep I the pyramidal form of royal tomb was abandoned in favour of a rock-cut tomb, and, except for Akhenaton, all subsequent New Kingdom rulers were buried in concealed tombs in the famous Valley of the Kings in western Thebes. Separated from the tombs, royal mortuary temples were erected at the edge of the desert. Perhaps because of this innovation, Amenhotep I later became the patron deity of the workmen who excavated and decorated the royal tombs. The location of his own tomb is unknown.
Thutmose I and Thutmose II
Lacking a surviving heir, Amenhotep I was succeeded by one of his generals, Thutmose I (ruled 1493–c. 1482 bce), who married his own full sister Ahmose. In the south Thutmose destroyed the Karmah state. He inscribed a rock as a boundary marker, later confirmed by Thutmose III, near Kanisa-Kurgus, north of the Fifth Cataract. He then executed a brilliant campaign into Syria and across the Euphrates River, where he erected a victory stela near Carchemish.
Thus, in the reign of Thutmose I, Egyptian conquests in the Middle East and Africa reached their greatest extent, but they may not yet have been firmly held. His little-known successor, Thutmose II (c. 1482–79 bce), apparently continued his policies.
Hatshepsut and Thutmose III
The ancient Egyptian empire during the rule of Thutmose III (1479–26 bce).Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Egyptian sculpture: head of a queenHead of a queen, brown quartzite sculpture from Egypt, c. 1479–25 bce; in the Brooklyn Museum, New York.Photograph by Trish Mayo. Brooklyn Museum, New York, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 65.134.3At Thutmose II’s death his queen and sister, Hatshepsut, had only a young daughter; but a minor wife had borne him a boy, who was apparently very young at his accession. This son, Thutmose III (ruled 1479–26 bce), later reconquered Egypt’s Asian empire and became an outstanding ruler. During his first few regnal years, Thutmose III theoretically controlled the land, but Hatshepsut governed as regent. Sometime between Thutmose III’s second and seventh regnal years, she assumed the kingship herself. According to one version of the event, the oracle of Amon proclaimed her king at Karnak, where she was crowned. A more propagandistic account, preserved in texts and reliefs of her splendid mortuary temple at Dayr al-Baḥrī, ignores the reign of Thutmose II and asserts that her father, Thutmose I, proclaimed her his successor. Upon becoming king, Hatshepsut became the dominant partner in a joint rule that lasted until her death in about 1458 bce; there are monuments dedicated by Hatshepsut that depict both kings. She had the support of various powerful personalities; the most notable among them was Senenmut, the steward and tutor of her daughter Neferure. In styling herself king, Hatshepsut adopted the royal titulary but avoided the epithet “mighty bull,” regularly employed by other kings. Although in her reliefs she was depicted as a male, pronominal references in the texts usually reflect her womanhood. Similarly, much of her statuary shows her in male form, but there are rarer examples that render her as a woman. In less formal documents she was referred to as “King’s Great Wife”—that is, “Queen”—while Thutmose III was “King.” There is thus a certain ambiguity in the treatment of Hatshepsut as king.
Her temple reliefs depict pacific enterprises, such as the transporting of obelisks for Amon’s temple and a commercial expedition to Punt; her art style looked back to Middle Kingdom ideals. Some warlike scenes are depicted, however, and she may have waged a campaign in Nubia. In one inscription she blamed the Hyksos for the supposedly poor state of the land before her rule, even though they had been expelled from the region more than a generation earlier.
The Temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Dayr al-Baḥrī, Thebes, Egypt, 15th century bce.Katherine Young/Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
During Hatshepsut’s ascendancy Egypt’s position in Asia may have deteriorated because of the expansion of Mitannian power in Syria. Shortly after her death, the prince of Kadesh" class="md-crosslink">the Syrian city of Kadesh, stood with troops of 330 princes of a Syro-Palestinian coalition at Megiddo; such a force was more than merely defensive, and the intention may have been to advance against Egypt. The 330 must have represented all the places of any size in the region that were not subject to Egyptian rule and may be a schematic figure derived from a list of place-names. It is noteworthy that Mitanni itself was not directly involved.
Thutmose III proceeded to Gaza with his army and then to Yehem, subjugating rebellious Palestinian towns along the way. His annals relate how, at a consultation concerning the best route over the Mount Carmel ridge, the king overruled his officers and selected a shorter but more dangerous route through the ʿArūnah Pass and then led the troops himself. The march went smoothly, and, when the Egyptians attacked at dawn, they prevailed over the enemy troops and besieged Megiddo.
Thutmose III meanwhile coordinated the landing of other army divisions on the Syro-Palestinian littoral, whence they proceeded inland, so that the strategy resembled a pincer technique. The siege ended in a treaty by which Syrian princes swore an oath of submission to the king. As was normal in ancient diplomacy and in Egyptian practice, the oath was binding only upon those who swore it, not upon future generations.
By the end of the first campaign, Egyptian domination extended northward to a line linking Byblos and Damascus. Although the prince of Kadesh remained to be vanquished, Assyria sent lapis lazuli as tribute; Asian princes surrendered their weapons, including a large number of horses and chariots. Thutmose III took only a limited number of captives. He appointed Asian princes to govern the towns and took their brothers and sons to Egypt, where they were educated at the court. Most eventually returned home to serve as loyal vassals, though some remained in Egypt at court. In order to ensure the loyalty of Asian city-states, Egypt maintained garrisons that could quell insurrection and supervise the delivery of tribute. There never was an elaborate Egyptian imperial administration in Asia.
Thutmose IIIThutmose III smiting his Asian foes, detail of a limestone relief from the Temple of Amon at Karnak, Egypt, 15th century bce.Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich
Thutmose III conducted numerous subsequent campaigns in Asia. The submission of Kadesh was finally achieved, but Thutmose III’s ultimate aim was the defeat of Mitanni. He used the navy to transport troops to Asian coastal towns, avoiding arduous overland marches from Egypt. His great eighth campaign led him across the Euphrates; although the countryside around Carchemish was ravaged, the city was not taken, and the Mitannian prince was able to flee. The psychological gain of this campaign was perhaps greater than its military success, for Babylonia, Assyria, and the Hittites all sent tribute in recognition of Egyptian dominance. Although Thutmose III never subjugated Mitanni, he placed Egypt’s conquests on a firm footing by constant campaigning that contrasts with the forays of his predecessors. Thutmose III’s annals inscribed in the temple of Karnak are remarkably succinct and accurate, but his other texts, particularly one set in his newly founded Nubian capital of Napata, are more conventional in their rhetoric. He seems to have married three Syrian wives, which may represent diplomatic unions, marking Egypt’s entry into the realm of international affairs of the ancient Middle East.
Thutmose III initiated a truly imperial Egyptian rule in Nubia. Much of the land became estates of institutions in Egypt, while local cultural traits disappear from the archaeological record. Sons of chiefs were educated at the Egyptian court; a few returned to Nubia to serve as administrators, and some were buried there in Egyptian fashion. Nubian fortresses lost their strategic value and became administrative centres. Open towns developed around them, and, in several temples outside their walls, the cult of the divine king was established. Lower Nubia supplied gold from the desert and hard and semiprecious stones. From farther south came tropical African woods, perfumes, oil, ivory, animal skins, and ostrich plumes. There is scarcely any trace of local population from the later New Kingdom, when many more temples were built in Nubia; by the end of the 20th dynasty, the region had almost no prosperous settled population.
Under Thutmose III the wealth of empire became apparent in Egypt. Many temples were built, and vast sums were donated to the estate of Amon-Re. There are many tombs of his high officials at Thebes. The capital had been moved to Memphis, but Thebes remained the religious centre.
The campaigns of kings such as Thutmose III required a large military establishment, including a hierarchy of officers and an expensive chariotry. The king grew up with military companions whose close connection with him enabled them to participate increasingly in government. Military officers were appointed to high civil and religious positions, and by the Ramesside period the influence of such people had come to outweigh that of the traditional bureaucracy.
Amenhotep II
About two years before his death, Thutmose III appointed his 18-year-old son, Amenhotep II (ruled c. 1426–1400 bce), as coregent. Just prior to his father’s death, Amenhotep II set out on a campaign to an area in Syria near Kadesh, whose city-states were now caught up in the power struggle between Egypt and Mitanni; Amenhotep II killed seven princes and shipped their bodies back to Egypt to be suspended from the ramparts of Thebes and Napata. In his seventh and ninth years, Amenhotep II made further campaigns into Asia, where the Mitannian king pursued a more vigorous policy. The revolt of the important coastal city of Ugarit was a serious matter, because Egyptian control over Syria required bases along the littoral for inland operations and the provisioning of the army. Ugarit was pacified, and the fealty of Syrian cities, including Kadesh, was reconfirmed.
Thutmose IV
Amenhotep II’s son Thutmose IV (ruled 1400–1390 bce) sought to establish peaceful relations with the Mitannian king Artatama, who had been successful against the Hittites. Artatama gave his daughter in marriage, the prerequisite for which was probably the Egyptian cession of some Syrian city-states to the Mitannian sphere of influence.
Thutmose IVGray granite sculpture of Thutmose IV, Egypt, 15th century bce.Courtesy of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo; photograph, Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich
Foreign influences during the early 18th dynasty
During the empire period Egypt maintained commercial ties with Phoenicia, Crete, and the Aegean islands. The Egyptians portrayed goods obtained through trade as foreign tribute. In the Theban tombs there are representations of Syrians bearing Aegean products and of Aegeans carrying Syrian bowls and amphorae—indicative of close commercial interconnections between Mediterranean lands. Egyptian ships trading with Phoenicia and Syria journeyed beyond to Crete and the Aegean, a route that explains the occasional confusion of products and ethnic types in Egyptian representations. The most prized raw material from the Aegean world was silver, which was lacking in Egypt, where gold was relatively abundant.
Egypt: tomb paintingDetail of a wall painting from a tomb in Thebes, Egypt, c. 1450 bce.Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum
One result of the expansion of the empire was a new appreciation of foreign culture. Not only were foreign objets d’art imported into Egypt, but Egyptian artisans imitated Aegean wares as well. Imported textiles inspired the ceiling patterns of Theban tomb chapels, and Aegean art with its spiral motifs influenced Egyptian artists. Under Amenhotep II, Asian gods are found in Egypt: Astarte and Resheph became revered for their reputed potency in warfare, and Astarte was honoured also in connection with medicine, love, and fertility. Some Asian gods were eventually identified with similar Egyptian deities; thus, Astarte was associated with Sekhmet, the goddess of pestilence, and Resheph with Mont, the war god. Just as Asians resident in Egypt were incorporated into Egyptian society and could rise to important positions, so their gods, though represented as foreign, were worshiped according to Egyptian cult practices. The breakdown of Egyptian isolationism and an increased cosmopolitanism in religion are also reflected in hymns that praise Amon-Re’s concern for the welfare of Asians.
Amenhotep III
Thutmose IV’s son Amenhotep III (ruled 1390–53 bce) acceded to the throne at about the age of 12. He soon wed Tiy, who became his queen. Earlier in the dynasty military men had served as royal tutors, but Tiy’s father was a commander of the chariotry, and through this link the royal line became even more directly influenced by the military. In his fifth year Amenhotep III claimed a victory over Cushite rebels, but the viceroy of Cush, the southern portion of Nubia, probably actually led the troops. The campaign may have led into the Butāna, west of the ʿAṭbarah River, farther south than any previous Egyptian military expedition had gone. Several temples erected under Amenhotep III in Upper Nubia between the Second and Third cataracts attest to the importance of the region.
Peaceful relations prevailed with Asia, where control of Egypt’s vassals was successfully maintained. A commemorative scarab from the king’s 10th year announced the arrival in Egypt of the Mitannian princess Gilukhepa, along with 317 women; thus, another diplomatic marriage helped maintain friendly relations between Egypt and its former foe. Another Mitannian princess was later received into Amenhotep III’s harem, and during his final illness the Hurrian goddess Ishtar of Nineveh was sent to his aid. At the expense of older bureaucratic families and the principle of inheritance of office, military men acquired high posts in the civil administration. Most influential was the aged scribe and commander of the elite troops, Amenhotep, son of Hapu, whose reputation as a sage survived into the Ptolemaic period.
Amenhotep III sponsored building on a colossal scale, especially in the Theban area. At Karnak he erected the huge third pylon, and at Luxor he dedicated a magnificent new temple to Amon. The king’s own mortuary temple in western Thebes was unrivaled in its size; little remains of it today, but its famous Colossi of Memnon testify to its proportions. He also built a huge harbour and palace complex nearby. Some colossal statues served as objects of public veneration, before which men could appeal to the king’s ka, which represented the transcendent aspect of kingship. In Karnak, statues of Amenhotep, son of Hapu, were placed to act as intermediaries between supplicants and the gods.
Colossi of MemnonThe Colossi of Memnon, stone statues of Amenhotep III, near Thebes, Egypt, 14th century bce.Katherine Young/Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Among the highest-ranking officials at Thebes were men of Lower Egyptian background, who constructed large tombs with highly refined decoration. An eclectic quality is visible in the tombs, certain scenes of which were inspired by Old Kingdom reliefs. The earliest preserved important New Kingdom monuments from Memphis also date from this reign. Antiquarianism is evidenced in Amenhotep III’s celebration of his sed festivals (rituals of renewal celebrated after 30 years of rule), which were performed at his Theban palace in accordance, it was claimed, with ancient writings. Tiy, whose role was much more prominent than that of earlier queens, participated in these ceremonies.
Amenhotep III’s last years were spent in ill health. To judge from his mummy and less formal representations of him from Amarna, he was obese when, in his 38th regnal year, he died and was succeeded by his son Amenhotep IV (ruled 1353–36 bce), the most controversial of all the kings of Egypt.
Amenhotep IV (Akhenaton)
The earliest monuments of Amenhotep IV, who in his fifth regnal year changed his name to Akhenaton (“One Useful to Aton”), are conventional in their iconography and style, but from the first he gave the sun god a didactic title naming Aton, the solar disk. This title was later written inside a pair of cartouches, as a king’s name would be. The king declared his religious allegiance by the unprecedented use of “high priest of the sun god” as one of his own titles. The term Aton had long been in use, but under Thutmose IV the Aton had been referred to as a god, and under Amenhotep III those references became more frequent. Thus, Akhenaton did not create a new god but rather singled out this aspect of the sun god from among others. He also carried further radical tendencies that had recently developed in solar religion, in which the sun god was freed from his traditional mythological context and presented as the sole beneficent provider for the entire world. The king’s own divinity was emphasized: the Aton was said to be his father, of whom he alone had knowledge, and they shared the status of king and celebrated jubilees together.
In his first five regnal years, Akhenaton built many temples to the Aton, of which the most important were in the precinct of the temple of Amon-Re at Karnak. In these open-air structures was developed a new, highly stylized form of relief and sculpture in the round. The Aton was depicted not in anthropomorphic form but as a solar disk from which radiating arms extend the hieroglyph for “life” to the noses of the king and his family. During the construction of these temples, the cult of Amon and other gods was suspended, and the worship of the Aton in an open-air sanctuary superseded that of Amon, who had dwelt in a dark shrine of the Karnak temple. The king’s wife Nefertiti, whom he had married before his accession, was prominent in the reliefs and had a complete shrine dedicated to her that included no images of the king. Her prestige continued to grow for much of the reign.
At about the time that he altered his name to conform with the new religion, the king transferred the capital to a virgin site at Amarna (Tell el-Amarna; Al-ʿAmārinah) in Middle Egypt. There he constructed a well-planned city—Akhetaton (“the Horizon of Aton”)—comprising temples to the Aton, palaces, official buildings, villas for the high ranking, and extensive residential quarters. In the Eastern Desert cliffs surrounding the city, tombs were excavated for the courtiers, and deep within a secluded wadi the royal sepulchre was prepared. Reliefs in these tombs have been invaluable for reconstructing life at Amarna. The tomb reliefs and stelae portray the life of the royal family with an unprecedented degree of intimacy.
In Akhenaton’s ninth year a more monotheistic didactic name was given to the Aton, and an intense persecution of the older gods, especially Amon, was undertaken. Amon’s name was excised from many older monuments throughout the land, and occasionally the word gods was expunged.
Akhenaton’s religious and cultural revolution was highly personal in that he seems to have had a direct hand in devising the precepts of the Aton religion and the conventions of Amarna art. In religion the accent was upon the sun’s life-sustaining power, and naturalistic scenes adorned the walls and even the floors of Amarna buildings. The king’s role in determining the composition of the court is expressed in epithets given to officials he selected from the lesser ranks of society, including the military. Few officials had any connection with the old ruling elite, and some courtiers who had been accepted at the beginning of the reign were purged. Even at Amarna the new religion was not widely accepted below the level of the elite; numerous small objects relating to traditional beliefs have been found at the site.
Akhenaton, Nefertiti, and their daughtersKing Akhenaton (left) with Queen Nefertiti and three of their daughters under the rays of the sun god Aton, Egypt, mid-14th century bce; in the State Museums, Berlin.Foto Marburg/Art Resource, New York
Akhenaton’s revolutionary intent is visible in all of his actions. In representational art, many existing conventions were revised to emphasize the break with the past. Such a procedure is comprehensible because traditional values were consistently incorporated in cultural expression as a whole; in order to change one part, it was necessary to change the whole.
A vital innovation was the introduction of vernacular forms into the written language. This led in later decades to the appearance of current verbal forms in monumental inscriptions. The vernacular form of the New Kingdom, which is now known as Late Egyptian, appears fully developed in letters of the later 19th and 20th dynasties.
Akhenaton’s foreign policy and use of force abroad are less well understood. He mounted one minor campaign in Nubia. In the Middle East, Egypt’s hold on its possessions was not as secure as earlier, but the cuneiform tablets found at Amarna recording his diplomacy are difficult to interpret because the vassals who requested aid from him exaggerated their plight. One reason for unrest in the region was the decline of Mitanni and the resurgence of the Hittites. Between the reign of Akhenaton and the end of the 18th dynasty, Egypt lost control of much territory in Syria.
The aftermath of Amarna
Akhenaton had six daughters by Nefertiti and possibly a son, perhaps by a secondary wife Kiya. Either Nefertiti or the widow of Tutankhamun called on the Hittite king Suppiluliumas to supply a consort because she could find none in Egypt; a prince was sent, but he was murdered as he reached Egypt. Thus, Egypt never had a diplomatic marriage in which a foreign man was received into the country.
After the brief rule of Smenkhkare (1335–32 bce), possibly a son of Akhenaton, Tutankhaten, a nine-year-old child, succeeded and was married to the much older Ankhesenpaaten, Akhenaton’s third daughter. Around his third regnal year, the king moved his capital to Memphis, abandoned the Aton cult, and changed his and the queen’s names to Tutankhamun and Ankhesenamen. In an inscription recording Tutankhamun’s actions for the gods, the Amarna period is described as one of misery and of the withdrawal of the gods from Egypt. This change, made in the name of the young king, was probably the work of high officials. The most influential were Ay, known by the title God’s Father, who served as vizier and regent (his title indicates a close relationship to the royal family), and the general Horemheb, who functioned as royal deputy and whose tomb at Ṣaqqārah contains remarkable scenes of Asiatic captives being presented to the King.
Just as Akhenaton had adapted and transformed the religious thinking that was current in his time, the reaction to the religion of Amarna was influenced by the rejected doctrine. In the new doctrine, all gods were in essence three: Amon, Re, and Ptah (to whom Seth was later added), and in some ultimate sense they too were one. The earliest evidence of this triad is on a trumpet of Tutankhamun and is related to the naming of the three chief army divisions after these gods; religious life and secular life were not separate. This concentration on a small number of essential deities may possibly be related to the piety of the succeeding Ramesside period, because both viewed the cosmos as being thoroughly permeated with the divine.
Tutankhamun: funerary maskGold funerary mask of King Tutankhamun, Thebes, Egypt, 14th century bce; in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.© Lee Boltin
headrest; Tutankhamun tombHeadrest in the form of the god Shu with two crouching lions, from the tomb of Tutankhamun, c. 1340 bce; in the collection of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.Photos.com/ThinkstockUnder Tutankhamun a considerable amount of building was accomplished in Thebes. His Luxor colonnade bears detailed reliefs of the traditional beautiful festival of Opet; he decorated another structure (now only a series of disconnected blocks) with warlike scenes. He affirmed his legitimacy by referring back to Amenhotep III, whom he called his father. Tutankhamun’s modern fame comes from the discovery of his rich burial in the Valley of the Kings. His tomb equipment was superior in quality to the fragments known from other royal burials, and the opulent display—of varying aesthetic value—represents Egyptian wealth at the peak of the country’s power.
Ay and Horemheb
Tutankhamun’s funeral in about 1323 bce was conducted by his successor, the aged Ay (ruled 1323–19 bce), who in turn was succeeded by Horemheb. The latter probably ruled from 1319 to c. 1292 bce, but the length of his poorly attested reign is not certain. Horemheb dismantled many monuments erected by Akhenaton and his successors and used the blocks as fill for huge pylons at Karnak. At Karnak and Luxor he appropriated Tutankhamun’s reliefs by surcharging the latter’s cartouches with his own. Horemheb appointed new officials and priests not from established families but from the army. His policies concentrated on domestic problems. He issued police regulations dealing with the misbehaviour of palace officials and personnel, and he reformed the judicial system, reorganizing the courts and selecting new judges.
Tutankhamun's tomb, Valley of the KingsTutankhamun's tomb (lower left) in the Valley of the Kings, Thebes, Egypt, 14th century bce.© Robert Holmes
The Ramesside period (19th and 20th dynasties) (1292–1075 bce)
Horemheb was the first post-Amarna king to be considered legitimate in the 19th dynasty, which looked to him as the founder of an epoch. The reigns of the Amarna pharaohs were eventually to be subsumed into his own, leaving no official record of what posterity deemed to be an unorthodox and distasteful interlude. Having no son, he selected his general and vizier, Ramses, to succeed him.
Ramses I and Seti I
Ramses I (ruled 1292–90 bce) hailed from the eastern Nile River delta, and with the 19th dynasty there was a political shift into the delta. Ramses I was succeeded by his son and coregent, Seti I, who buried his father and provided him with mortuary buildings at Thebes and Abydos.
temple of Seti IHallway in the temple of Seti I, Thebes, Egypt, 13th century bce.Robert Holmes—Corbis
Seti I (ruled 1290–79 bce) was a successful military leader who reasserted authority over Egypt’s weakened empire in the Middle East. The Mitanni state had been dismembered, and the Hittites had become the dominant Asian power. Before tackling them, Seti laid the groundwork for military operations in Syria by fighting farther south against nomads and Palestinian city-states; then, following the strategy of Thutmose III, he secured the coastal cities and gained Kadesh. Although his engagement with the Hittites was successful, Egypt acquired only temporary control of part of the north Syrian plain. A treaty was concluded with the Hittites, who, however, subsequently pushed farther southward and regained Kadesh by the time of Ramses II. Seti I ended a new threat to Egyptian security when he defeated Libyans attempting to enter the delta. He also mounted a southern campaign, probably to the Fifth Cataract region.
Seti I’s reign looked for its model to the mid-18th dynasty and was a time of considerable prosperity. Seti I restored countless monuments that had been defaced in the Amarna period, and the refined decoration of his monuments, particularly his temple at Abydos, shows a classicizing tendency. He also commissioned striking and novel reliefs showing stages of his campaigns, which are preserved notably on the north wall of the great hypostyle hall at Karnak. This diversity of artistic approach is characteristic of the Ramesside period, which was culturally and ethnically pluralistic.
Ramses II
Well before his death, Seti I appointed his son Ramses II, sometimes called Ramses the Great, as crown prince. During the long reign of Ramses II (1279–13 bce), there was a prodigious amount of building, ranging from religious edifices throughout Egypt and Nubia to a new cosmopolitan capital, Pi Ramesse, in the eastern delta; his cartouches were carved ubiquitously, often on earlier monuments. Ramses II’s penchant for decorating vast temple walls with battle scenes gives the impression of a mighty warrior king. His campaigns were, however, relatively few, and after the first decade his reign was peaceful. The most famous scenes record the battle of Kadesh, fought in his fifth regnal year. These and extensive accompanying texts present the battle as an Egyptian victory, but in fact the opposing Hittite coalition fared at least as well as the Egyptians. After this inconclusive struggle, his officers advised him to make peace, saying, “There is no reproach in reconciliation when you make it.” In succeeding years Ramses II campaigned in Syria; after a decade of stalemate, a treaty in his 21st year was concluded with Hattusilis III, the Hittite king.
Ramses IIDetail of the face of the Colossus of Ramses II, Temple of Luxor, Thebes, Egypt, 13th century bce.© Mypix/Dreamstime.com
The rise of Assyria and unrest in western Anatolia encouraged the Hittites to accept this treaty, while Ramses II may have feared a new Libyan threat to the western delta. Egyptian and Hittite versions of the treaty survive. It contained a renunciation of further hostilities, a mutual alliance against outside attack and internal rebellion, and the extradition of fugitives. The gods of both lands were invoked as witnesses. The treaty was further cemented 13 years later by Ramses II’s marriage to a Hittite princess.
The king had an immense family by his numerous wives, among whom he especially honoured Nefertari. He dedicated a temple to her at Abū Simbel, in Nubia, and built a magnificent tomb for her in the Valley of the Queens.
NefertariWall painting of Queen Nefertari from her tomb in the Valley of the Queens, Thebes, Egypt, 13th century bce.Roger Wood—Corbis
For the first time in more than a millennium, princes were prominently represented on the monuments. Ramses II’s fourth surviving son, Khaemwese, was famous as high priest of Ptah at Memphis. He restored many monuments in the Memphite area, including pyramids and pyramid temples of the Old Kingdom, and had buildings constructed near the Sarapeum at Ṣaqqārah. He was celebrated into Roman times as a sage and magician and became the hero of a cycle of stories.
temple of Abu SimbelEntrance to the temple of Abu Simbel, near Aswān, Egypt, 13th century bce.© Marie Giannola
Merneptah
Ramses II’s 13th son, Merneptah (ruled 1213–04 bce), was his successor. Several of Merneptah’s inscriptions, of unusual literary style, treat an invasion of the western delta in his fifth year by Libyans, supported by groups of Sea Peoples who had traveled from Anatolia to Libya in search of new homes. The Egyptians defeated this confederation and settled captives in military camps to serve as Egyptian mercenaries.
One of the inscriptions concludes with a poem of victory (written about another battle), famous for its words “Israel is desolated and has no seed.” This is the earliest documented mention of Israel; it is generally assumed that the exodus of the Jews from Egypt took place under Ramses II.
Merneptah was able to hold most of Egypt’s possessions, although early in his reign he had to reassert Egyptian suzerainty in Palestine, destroying Gezer in the process. Peaceful relations with the Hittites and respect for the treaty of Ramses II are indicated by Merneptah’s dispatch of grain to them during a famine and by Egyptian military aid in the protection of Hittite possessions in Syria.
Last years of the 19th dynasty
Upon the death of Merneptah, competing factions within the royal family contended for the succession. Merneptah’s son Seti II (ruled 1204–1198 bce) had to face a usurper, Amenmeses, who rebelled in Nubia and was accepted in Upper Egypt. His successor, Siptah, was installed on the throne by a Syrian royal butler, Bay, who had become chancellor of Egypt. Siptah was succeeded by Seti II’s widow Tausert, who ruled as king from 1193 to 1190 bce, counting her regnal years from the death of Seti II, whose name she restored over that of Siptah. A description in a later papyrus of the end of the dynasty alludes to a Syrian usurper, probably Bay, who subjected the land to harsh taxation and treated the gods as mortals with no offerings in their temples.
The early 20th dynasty: Setnakht and Ramses III
Order was restored by a man of obscure origin, Setnakht (ruled 1190–87 bce), the founder of the 20th dynasty, who appropriated Tausert’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. An inscription of Setnakht recounts his struggle to pacify the land, which ended in the second of his three regnal years.
Setnakht’s son Ramses III (ruled 1187–56 bce) was the last great king of the New Kingdom. There are problems in evaluating his achievements because he emulated Ramses II and copied numerous scenes and texts of Ramses II in his mortuary temple at Madīnat Habu, one of the best-preserved temples of the empire period. Thus, the historicity of certain Nubian and Syrian wars depicted as his accomplishments is subject to doubt. He did, however, fight battles that were more decisive than any fought by Ramses II. In his fifth year Ramses III defeated a large-scale Libyan invasion of the delta in a battle in which thousands of the enemy perished.
A greater menace lay to the north, where a confederation of Sea Peoples was progressing by land and sea toward Egypt. This alliance of obscure tribes traveled south in the aftermath of the destruction of the Hittite empire. In his eighth regnal year Ramses III engaged them successfully on two frontiers—a land battle in Palestine and a naval engagement in one of the mouths of the delta. Because of these two victories, Egypt did not undergo the political turmoil or experience the rapid technical advance of the early Iron Age in the Near East. Forced away from the borders of Egypt, the Sea Peoples sailed farther westward, and some of their groups may have given their names to the Sicilians, Sardinians, and Etruscans. The Philistine and Tjekker peoples, who had come by land, were established in the southern Palestinian coastal district in an area where the overland trade route to Syria was threatened by attacks by nomads. Initially settled to protect Egyptian interests, these groups later became independent of Egypt. Ramses III used some of these peoples as mercenaries, even in battle against their own kinfolk. In his 11th year he successfully repulsed another great Libyan invasion by the Meshwesh tribes. Meshwesh prisoners of war, branded with the king’s name, were settled in military camps in Egypt, and in later centuries their descendants became politically important because of their ethnic cohesiveness and their military role.
The economic resources of Egypt were in decline at that time. Under Ramses III the estate of Amon received only one-fifth as much gold as in Thutmose III’s time. Even at the great temple of Madīnat Habu, the quality of the masonry betrays a decline. Toward the end of his reign, administrative inefficiency and the deteriorating economic situation resulted in the government’s failure to deliver grain rations on time to necropolis workers, whose dissatisfaction was expressed in demonstrations and in the first recorded strikes in history. Such demonstrations continued sporadically throughout the dynasty. A different sort of internal trouble originated in the royal harem, where a minor queen plotted unsuccessfully to murder Ramses III so that her son might become king. Involved in the plot were palace and harem personnel, government officials, and army officers. A special court of 12 judges was formed to try the accused, who received the death sentence.
Many literary works date to the Ramesside period. Earlier works in Middle Egyptian were copied in schools and in good papyrus copies, and new texts were composed in Late Egyptian. Notable among the latter are stories, several with mythological or allegorical content, that look to folk models rather than to the elaborate written literary types of the Middle Kingdom.
Ramses IV
Ramses III was succeeded by his son Ramses IV (ruled 1156–50 bce). In an act of piety that also reinforced his legitimacy, Ramses IV saw to the compilation of a long papyrus in which the deceased Ramses III confirmed the temple holdings throughout Egypt; Ramses III had provided the largest benefactions to the Theban temples, in terms of donations of both land and personnel. Most of these probably endorsed earlier donations, to which each king added his own gifts. Of the annual income to temples, 86 percent of the silver and 62 percent of the grain was awarded to Amon. The document demonstrates the economic power of the Theban temples, for the tremendous landholdings of Amon’s estate throughout Egypt involved the labour of a considerable portion of the population; but the ratio of temple to state income is not known, and the two were not administratively separate. In addition, the temple of Amon, which figures prominently in the papyrus, included within its estates the king’s own mortuary temple, for Ramses III was himself deified as a form of Amon-Re, known as Imbued with Eternity.
The later Ramesside kings
The Ramesside period saw a tendency toward the formation of high-priestly families, which kings sometimes tried to counter by appointing outside men to the high priesthood. One such family had developed at Thebes in the second half of the 19th dynasty, and Ramses IV tried to control it by installing Ramessesnakht, the son of a royal steward, as Theban high priest. Ramessesnakht participated in administrative as well as priestly affairs; he personally led an expedition to the Wadi Ḥammāmāt (present-day Wādī Rawḍ ʿĀʾid) quarries in the Eastern Desert, and at Thebes he supervised the distribution of rations to the workmen decorating the royal tomb. Under Ramses V (ruled 1150–45 bce), Ramessesnakht’s son not only served as steward of Amon but also held the post of administrator of royal lands and chief taxing master. Thus, this family acquired extensive authority over the wealth of Amon and over state finances, but to what extent this threatened royal authority is uncertain. Part of the problem in evaluating the evidence is that Ramesside history is viewed from a Theban bias, because Thebes is the major source of information. Evidence from Lower Egypt, where the king normally resided, is meagre because conditions there were unfavourable for preserving monuments or papyri.
A long papyrus from the reign of Ramses V contains valuable information on the ownership of land and taxation. In Ramesside Egypt most of the land belonged to the state and the temples, while most peasants served as tenant farmers. Some scholars interpret this document as indicating that the state retained its right to tax temple property, at an estimated one-tenth of the crop.
Ramses VI (ruled 1145–37 bce), probably a son of Ramses III, usurped much of his two predecessors’ work, including the tomb of Ramses V; a papyrus refers to a possible civil war at Thebes. Following the death of Ramses III and the disrupted migrations of the late Bronze Age, the Asian empire had rapidly withered away, and Ramses VI is the last king whose name appears at the Sinai turquoise mines. The next two Ramses (ruled 1137–26 bce) were obscure rulers, whose sequence has been questioned. During the reigns of Ramses IX (ruled 1126–08 bce) and Ramses X (1108–04 bce), there are frequent references in the papyri to the disruptions of marauding Libyans near the Theban necropolis.
By the time of Ramses IX the Theban high priest had attained great local influence, though he was still outranked by the king. By Ramses XI’s 19th regnal year the new high priest of Amon, Herihor—who seems to have had a military background and also claimed the vizierate and the office of viceroy of Cush—controlled the Theban area. In reliefs at the temple of Khons at Karnak, Herihor was represented as high priest of Amon in scenes adjoining those of Ramses XI. This in itself was unusual, but subsequently he took an even bolder step in having himself depicted as king to the exclusion of the still-reigning Ramses XI. Herihor’s limited kingship was restricted only to Thebes, where those years were referred to as a “repeating of [royal] manifestations,” which lasted a decade.
With the shrinkage of the empire, the supply of silver and copper was cut off, and the amount of gold entering the economy was reduced considerably. During the reign of Ramses IX the inhabitants of western Thebes were found to have pillaged the tombs of kings and nobles (already a common practice in the latter case); the despoiling continued into the reign of Ramses XI, and even the royal mortuary temples were stripped of their valuable furnishings. Nubian troops, called in to restore order at Thebes, themselves contributed to the depredation of monuments. This pillaging brought fresh gold and silver into the economy, and the price of copper rose. The price of grain, which had become inflated, dropped.
The Ramesside growth of priestly power was matched by increasingly overt religiosity. Private tombs, the decoration of which had been mostly secular until then, came to include only religious scenes; oracles were invoked in many kinds of decisions; and private letters contain frequent references to prayer and to regular visits to small temples to perform rituals or consult oracles. The common expression used in letters, “I am all right today; tomorrow is in the hands of god,” reflects the ethos of the age. This fatalism, which emphasizes that the god may be capricious and that his wishes cannot be known, is also typical of late New Kingdom Instruction Texts, which show a marked change from their Middle Kingdom forerunners by moving toward a passivity and quietism that suits a less expensive age.
Some of the religious material of the Ramesside period exhibits changes in conventions of display, and some categories have no parallel in the less abundant earlier record, but the shift is real as well as apparent. In its later periods, Egyptian society, the values of which had previously tended to be centralized, secular, and political, became more locally based and more thoroughly pervaded by religion, looking to the temple as the chief institution.
While Ramses XI was still king, Herihor died and was succeeded as high priest by Piankh, a man of similar military background. A series of letters from Thebes tell of Piankh’s military venture in Nubia against the former viceroy of Cush while Egypt was on the verge of losing control of the south. With the death of Ramses XI, the governor of Tanis, Smendes, became king, founding the 21st dynasty (known as the Tanite).
Egypt from 1075 bce to the Macedonian invasion
The Third Intermediate period (1075–656 bce)
The 21st dynasty
At the end of the New Kingdom, Egypt was divided. The north was inherited by the Tanite 21st dynasty (1075–c. 950 bce), and although much of the southern Nile River valley came under the control of the Theban priests (the northern frontier of their domain was the fortress town of Al-Hība), there is no indication of conflict between the priests and the Tanite kings. Indeed, the dating of documents, even at Thebes, was in terms of the Tanite reigns, and apparently there were close family ties between the kings and the Thebans. Piankh’s son, Pinudjem I, who relinquished the office of high priest and assumed the kingship at Thebes, was probably the father of the Tanite king Psusennes I. Some members of both the Theban priestly and the Tanite royal lines had Libyan names. With the coming of the new dynasty, and possibly a little earlier, the Meshwesh Libyan military elite, which had been settled mainly in the north by Ramses III, penetrated the ruling group, although it did not become dominant until the 22nd dynasty.
Beginning with Herihor and continuing through the 21st dynasty, the high priests’ activities included the pious rewrapping and reburial of New Kingdom royal mummies. The systematic removal of such goods from the royal tombs by royal order during the 20th dynasty necessitated the transfer of the royal remains in stages to two caches—the tomb of Amenhotep II and a cliff tomb at Dayr al-Baḥrī—where they remained undisturbed until modern times. Dockets pertaining to the reburial of these mummies contain important chronological data from the 21st dynasty.
Egyptian sculpture: face from a coffinFace from an Egyptian coffin, wood, gesso, and pigment, probably from Thebes, c. 1070–945 bce; in the Brooklyn Museum, New York.Photograph by Lisa O'Hara. Brooklyn Museum, New York, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.2037E
The burials of King Psusennes I (ruled c. 1045–c. 997 bce) and his successor, Amenemope (ruled c. 998–c. 989 bce), were discovered at Tanis, but little is known of their reigns. This was a period when statuary was usurped and the material of earlier periods was reused. At Karnak, Pinudjem I, who decorated the facade of the Khons temple, usurped a colossal statue of Ramses II, and Psusennes I’s splendid sarcophagus from Tanis had originally been carved for Merneptah at Thebes. Much of the remains from Tanis consists of material transported from other sites, notably from Pi Ramesse.
After the demise of Egypt’s Asian empire, the kingdom of Israel eventually developed under the kings David and Solomon. During David’s reign, Philistia served as a buffer between Egypt and Israel; but after David’s death the next to the last king of the 21st dynasty, Siamon, invaded Philistia and captured Gezer. If Egypt had any intention of attacking Israel, Solomon’s power forestalled Siamon, who presented Gezer to Israel as a dowry in the diplomatic marriage of his daughter to Solomon. This is indicative of the reversal of Egypt’s status in foreign affairs since the time of Amenhotep III, who had written the Babylonian king, “From of old, a daughter of the king of Egypt has not been given to anyone.”
Libyan rule: the 22nd and 23rd dynasties
The fifth king of the 21st dynasty, Osorkon I (ruled c. 979–c. 973 bce), was of Libyan descent and probably was an ancestor of the 22nd dynasty, which followed a generation later. From Osorkon’s time to the 26th dynasty, leading Libyans in Egypt kept their Libyan names and ethnic identity, but in a spirit of ethnicity rather than cultural separatism. Although political institutions were different from those of the New Kingdom, the Libyans were culturally Egyptian, retaining only their group identity, names, and perhaps a military ethos. Toward the end of the 21st dynasty the Libyan leader of Bubastis, the great Meshwesh chief Sheshonk I (the biblical Shishak), secured special privileges from King Psusennes II (ruled c. 964–c. 950 bce) and the oracle of Amon for the mortuary cult of his father at Abydos. The oracle proffered good wishes not only for Sheshonk and his family but, significantly, also for his army. With a strong military backing, Sheshonk eventually took the throne. His reign (c. 950–929 bce) marks the founding of the 22nd dynasty (c. 950–c. 730 bce). Military controls were established, with garrisons under Libyan commandants serving to quell local insurrections, so that the structure of the state became more feudalistic. The dynasty tried to cement relations with Thebes through political marriages with priestly families. King Sheshonk’s son Osorkon married Psusennes II’s daughter, and their son eventually became high priest at Karnak. By installing their sons as high priests and promoting such marriages, kings strove to overcome the administrative division of the country. But frequent conflicts arose over the direct appointment of the Theban high priest from among the sons of Libyan kings and over the inheritance of the post by men of mixed Theban and Libyan descent. This tension took place against a background of Theban resentment of the northern dynasty. During the reign of Takelot II, strife concerning the high priestship led to civil war at Thebes. The king’s son Osorkon was appointed high priest, and he achieved some semblance of order during his visits to Thebes, but he was driven from the post several times.
The initially successful 22nd dynasty revived Egyptian influence in Palestine. After Solomon’s death (c. 936), Sheshonk I entered Palestine and plundered Jerusalem. Prestige from this exploit may have lasted through the reign of Osorkon II (ruled c. 929–c. 914 bce). In the reign of Osorkon III (ruled c. 888–c. 860 bce), Peywed Libyans posed a threat to the western delta, perhaps necessitating a withdrawal from Palestine.
The latter part of the dynasty was marked by fragmentation of the land: Libyan great chiefs ruled numerous local areas, and there were as many as six local rulers in the land at a time. Increased urbanization accompanied this fragmentation, which was most intense in the delta. Meanwhile, in Thebes, a separate 23rd dynasty was recognized.
From the 9th century bce a local Cushite state, which looked to Egyptian traditions from the colonial period of the New Kingdom, arose in the Sudan and developed around the old regional capital of Napata. The earliest ruler of the state known by name was Alara, whose piety toward Amon is mentioned in several inscriptions. His successor, Kashta, proceeded into Upper Egypt, forcing Osorkon IV (ruled c. 777–c. 750 bce) to retire to the delta. Kashta assumed the title of king and compelled Osorkon IV’s daughter Shepenwepe I, the God’s Wife of Amon at Thebes, to adopt his own daughter Amonirdis I as her successor. The Cushites stressed the role of the God’s Wife of Amon, who was virtually the consecrated partner of Amon, and sought to bypass the high priests.
The 24th and 25th dynasties
Meanwhile, the eastern capital in the Nile River delta, Tanis, lost its importance to Sais in the western delta. A Libyan prince of Sais, Tefnakhte, attempting to gain control over all Egypt, proceeded southward to Heracleopolis after acquiring Memphis. This advance was met by the Cushite ruler Piye (now the accepted reading of “Piankhi," ruled c. 750–c. 719 bce), who executed a raid as far north as Memphis and received the submission of the northern rulers (in about 730 bce). In his victory stela, Piye is portrayed as conforming strictly to Egyptian norms and reasserting traditional values against contemporary decay.
After Piye returned to Cush, Tefnakhte reasserted his authority in the north, where, according to Manetho, he was eventually succeeded by his son Bocchoris as the sole king of the 24th dynasty (c. 722–c. 715 bce). Piye’s brother Shabaka meanwhile founded the rival 25th dynasty and brought all Egypt under his rule (c. 719–703 bce). He had Bocchoris burned alive and removed all other claimants to the kingship.
In this period Egypt’s internal politics were affected by the growth of the Assyrian Empire. In Palestine and Syria frequent revolts against Assyria were aided by Egyptian forces. Against the power of Assyria, the Egyptian and Nubian forces met with little success, partly because of their own fragmented politics and divided loyalties.
Although the earlier years of King Taharqa (ruled 690–664 bce), who as second son of Shabaka had succeeded his brother Shebitku (ruled 703–690 bce), were prosperous, the confrontation with Assyria became acute. In 671 bce the Assyrian king Esarhaddon entered Egypt and drove Taharqa into Upper Egypt. Two years later Taharqa regained a battered Memphis, but in 667 bce Esarhaddon’s successor, Ashurbanipal, forced Taharqa to Thebes, where the Cushites held ground. Taharqa’s successor, Tanutamon, defeated at Memphis a coalition of delta princes who supported Assyria, but Ashurbanipal’s reaction to this was to humiliate Thebes, which the Assyrians plundered. By 656 the Cushites had withdrawn from the Egyptian political scene, although Cushite culture survived in the Sudanese Napatan and Meroitic kingdom for another millennium.
The Late period (664–332 bce)
Assyria, unable to maintain a large force in Egypt, supported several delta vassal princes, including the powerful Psamtik I of Sais. But the Assyrians faced serious problems closer to home, and Psamtik (or Psammetichus I, ruled 664–610 bce) was able to assert his independence and extend his authority as king over all Egypt without extensive use of arms, inaugurating the Saite 26th dynasty. In 656 Psamtik I compelled Thebes to submit. He allowed its most powerful man, who was Montemhat, the mayor and the fourth prophet of Amon, to retain his post, and, in order to accommodate pro-Cushite sentiments, he allowed the God’s Wife of Amon and the Votaress of Amon (the sister and daughter of the late king Taharqa) to remain. Psamtik I’s own daughter Nitocris was adopted by the Votaress of Amon and thus became heiress to the position of God’s Wife. Essential to the settling of internal conflicts was the Saite dynasty’s superior army, composed of Libyan soldiers, whom the Greeks called Machimoi (“Warriors”), and Greek and Carian mercenaries, who formed part of the great emigration from the Aegean in the 7th and 6th centuries bce. Greek pirates raiding the Nile delta coast were induced by Psamtik I to serve in his army and were settled like the Machimoi in colonies at the delta’s strategically important northeastern border. Trade developed between Egypt and Greece, and more Greeks settled in Egypt.
The Saite dynasty generally pursued a foreign policy that avoided territorial expansion and tried to preserve the status quo. Assyria’s power was waning. In 655 bce Psamtik I marched into Philistia in pursuit of the Assyrians, and in 620 bce he apparently repulsed Scythians from the Egyptian frontier. During the reign of his son Necho II (610–595 bce), Egypt supported Assyria as a buffer against the potential threat of the Medes and the Babylonians. Necho was successful in Palestine and Syria until 605 bce, when the Babylonian Nebuchadrezzar inflicted a severe defeat on Egyptian forces at Carchemish. After withdrawing his troops from Asia, Necho concentrated on developing Egyptian commerce; the grain that was delivered to Greece was paid for in silver. He also built up the navy and began a canal linking the Nile with the Red Sea. Under Psamtik II (ruled 595–589 bce) there was a campaign through the Napatan kingdom involving the use of Greek and Carian mercenaries who left their inscriptions at Abu Simbel; at the same time, the names of the long-dead Cushite rulers were erased from their monuments in Egypt. Psamtik II also made an expedition to Phoenicia accompanied by priests; whether it was a military or a goodwill mission is unknown.
The next king, Apries (ruled 589–570 bce), tried unsuccessfully to end Babylonian domination of Palestine and Syria. With the withdrawal of Egyptian forces, Nebuchadrezzar destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 586 bc. In the aftermath of his conquest, many Jews fled to Egypt, where some were enlisted as soldiers in the Persian army of occupation. Apries’ army was then defeated in Libya when it attacked the Greek colony at Cyrene, some 620 miles (1,000 km) west of the Nile delta; this led to an army mutiny and to civil war in the delta. A new Saite king, Amasis (or Ahmose II; ruled 570–526 bce), usurped the throne and drove Apries into exile. Two years later Apries invaded Egypt with Babylonian support, but he was defeated and killed by Amasis, who nonetheless buried him with full honours. Amasis returned to a more conservative foreign policy in a long, prosperous reign. To reduce friction between Greeks and Egyptians, especially in the army, Amasis withdrew the Greeks from the military colonies and transferred them to Memphis, where they formed a sort of royal bodyguard. He limited Greek trade in Egypt to Sais, Memphis, and Naukratis, the latter becoming the only port to which Greek wares could be taken, so that taxes on imports and on business could be enforced. Naukratis prospered, and Amasis was seen by the Greeks as a benefactor. In foreign policy he supported a waning Babylonia, now threatened by Persia; but six months after his death in 526 bce the Persian Cambyses II (ruled as pharaoh 525–522 bce) penetrated Egypt, reaching Nubia in 525.
As was common in the Middle East in that period, the Saite kings used foreigners as mercenaries to prevent foreign invasions. An element within Egyptian culture, however, resisted any influence of the resident foreigners and gave rise to a nationalism that provided psychological security in times of political uncertainty. A cultural revival was initiated in the 25th dynasty and continued throughout the 26th. Temples and the priesthood were overtly dominant. In their inscriptions the elite displayed their priestly titles but did not mention the administrative roles that they probably also performed. Throughout the country, people of substance dedicated land to temple endowments that supplemented royal donations. The god Seth, who had been an antithetic element in Egyptian religion, came gradually to be proscribed as the god of foreign lands.
The revival of this period was both economic and cultural, but there is less archaeological evidence preserved than for earlier times because the economic centre of the country was now the delta, where conditions for the preservation of ancient sites were unfavourable. Prosperity increased throughout the 26th dynasty, reaching a high point in the reign of Amasis. Temples throughout the land were enhanced and expanded, often in hard stones carved with great skill. The chief memorials of private individuals were often temple statues, of which many fine examples were dedicated, again mostly in hard stones. In temple and tomb decoration and in statuary, the Late period rejected its immediate predecessors and looked to the great periods of the past for models. There was, however, also significant innovation. In writing, the demotic script, the new cursive form, was introduced from the north and spread gradually through the country. Demotic was used to write a contemporary form of the language, and administrative Late Egyptian disappeared. Hieratic was, however, retained for literary and religious texts, among which very ancient material, such as the Pyramid Texts, was revived and inscribed in tombs and on coffins and sarcophagi.
frieze: feline on falcon headsFeline on falcon heads, limestone relief from Egypt, 664–630 bce; in the Brooklyn Museum, New York.Photograph by Stephen Sandoval. Brooklyn Museum, New York, gift of the Egyptian Antiquities Organization, 80.7.7
The Late period was the time of the greatest development of animal worship in Egypt. This feature of religion, which was the subject of much interest and scorn among classical writers, had always existed but had been of minor importance. In the Late and Ptolemaic periods, it became one of the principal forms of popular religion in an intensely religious society. Many species of animals were mummified and buried, and towns sprang up in the necropolises to cater for the needs of dead animals and their worshipers. At Ṣaqqārah the Apis bull, which had been worshiped since the 1st dynasty, was buried in a huge granite sarcophagus in ceremonies in which royalty might take part. At least 10 species—from ibises, buried by the million, to dogs—were interred by the heterogeneous population of Memphis, Egypt’s largest city.
Egypt under Achaemenid rule
The 27th dynasty
According to the Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt in about 450 bce, Cambyses II’s conquest of Egypt was ruthless and sacrilegious. Contemporary Egyptian sources, however, treat him in a more favourable light. He assumed the full titulary of an Egyptian king and paid honour to the goddess Neith of Sais. His unfavourable later reputation probably resulted from adverse propaganda by Egyptian priests, who resented his reduction of temple income. Darius I, who succeeded Cambyses in 522 bce and ruled as pharaoh until 486 bce, was held in higher esteem because he was concerned with improving the temples and restored part of their income, and because he codified laws as they had been in the time of Amasis. These stances, which aimed to win over priests and learned Egyptians, were elements of his strategy to retain Egypt as a lasting part of the Persian Empire. Egypt, together with the Libyan oases and Cyrenaica, formed the sixth Persian satrapy (province), whose satrap resided at Memphis, while Persian governors under him held posts in cities throughout the land. Under Darius I the tax burden upon Egyptians was relatively light, and Persians aided Egypt’s economy through irrigation projects and improved commerce, enhanced by the completion of the canal to the Red Sea.
Egypt under Persian ruleEgypt as part of Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, 6th–5th century bce.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The Persian defeat by the Athenians at Marathon in 490 bce had significant repercussions in Egypt. On Darius I’s death in 486 bce, a revolt broke out in the delta, perhaps instigated by Libyans of its western region. The result was that the Persian king Xerxes reduced Egypt to the status of a conquered province. Egyptians dubbed him the “criminal Xerxes.” He never visited Egypt and appears not to have utilized Egyptians in high positions in the administration. Xerxes’ murder in 465 bce was the signal for another revolt in the western delta. It was led by a dynast, Inaros, who acquired control over the delta and was supported by Athenian forces against the Persians. Inaros was crucified by the Persians in 454 bce, when they regained control of most of the delta. In the later 5th century bce, under the rule of Artaxerxes I (ruled 465–425 bce) and Darius II Ochus (ruled 423–404 bce), conditions in Egypt were very unsettled, and scarcely any monuments of the period have been identified.
The 28th, 29th, and 30th dynasties
The death of Darius II in 404 bce prompted a successful rebellion in the Nile delta, and the Egyptian Amyrtaeus formed a Saite 28th dynasty, of which he was the sole king (404–399 bce). His rule was recognized in Upper Egypt by 401 bce, at a time when Persia’s troubles elsewhere forestalled an attempt to regain Egypt.
Despite growing prosperity and success in retaining independence, 4th-century Egypt was characterized by continual internal struggle for the throne. After a long period of fighting in the delta, a 29th dynasty (399–380 bce) emerged at Mendes. Achoris (ruled 393–380 bce), its third and final ruler, was especially vigorous, and the prosperity of his reign is indicated by many monuments in Upper and Lower Egypt. Once again Egypt was active in international politics, forming alliances with the opponents of Persia and building up its army and navy. The Egyptian army included Greeks both as mercenaries and as commanders; the mercenaries were not permanent residents of military camps in Egypt but native Greeks seeking payment for their services in gold. Payment was normally made in non-Egyptian coins, because as yet Egypt had no coinage in general circulation; the foreign coins may have been acquired in exchange for exports of grain, papyrus, and linen. Some Egyptian coins were minted in the 4th century, but they do not seem to have gained widespread acceptance.
Aided by the Greek commander Chabrias of Athens and his elite troops, Achoris prevented a Persian invasion; but after Achoris’s death in 380 bce his son Nepherites II lasted only four months before a general, Nectanebo I (Nekhtnebef; ruled 380–362 bce) of Sebennytos, usurped the throne, founding the 30th dynasty (380–343 bce). In 373 bce the Persians attacked Egypt, and, although Egyptian losses were heavy, disagreement between the Persian satrap Pharnabazus and his Greek commander over strategy, combined with a timely inundation of the delta, saved the day for Egypt. With the latent dissolution of the Persian Empire under the weak Artaxerxes II, Egypt was relatively safe from further invasion; it remained prosperous throughout the dynasty.
Egypt had a more aggressive foreign policy under Nectanebo’s son Tachos (ruled c. 365–360 bce). Possessing a strong army and navy composed of Egyptian Machimoi and Greek mercenaries and supported by Chabrias and the Spartan king Agesilaus, Tachos (in Egyptian called Djeho) invaded Palestine. But friction between Tachos and Agesilaus and the cost of financing the venture proved to be Tachos’s undoing. In an attempt to raise funds quickly, he had imposed taxes and seized temple property. Egyptians, especially the priests, resented this burden and supported Tachos’s nephew Nectanebo II (Nekhtharehbe; ruled 360–343 bce) in his usurpation of the throne. The cost of retaining the allegiance of mercenaries proved too high for a nonmonetary economy.
Agesilaus supported Nectanebo in his defensive foreign policy, and the priests sanctioned the new king’s building activities. Meanwhile, Persia enjoyed a resurgence under Artaxerxes III (Ochus), but a Persian attack on Egypt in 350 bce was repulsed. In 343 bce the Persians once again marched against Egypt. The first battle was fought at Pelusium and proved the superiority of Persia’s strategy. Eventually the whole delta, and then the rest of Egypt, fell to Artaxerxes III, and Nectanebo fled to Nubia.
The 4th century bce was the last flourishing period of an independent Egypt and was a time of notable artistic and literary achievements. The 26th dynasty artistic revival evolved further toward more-complex forms that culminated briefly in a Greco-Egyptian stylistic fusion, as seen in the tomb of Petosiris at Tūnah al-Jabal from the turn of the 3rd century bce. In literature works continued to be transmitted, and possibly composed, in hieratic, but that tradition was to develop no further. Demotic literary works began to appear, including stories set in the distant past, mythological tales, and an acrostic text apparently designed to teach an order of sounds in the Egyptian language.
The second Persian period
Artaxerxes dealt harshly with Egypt, razing city walls, rifling temple treasuries, and removing sacred books. Persia acquired rich booty in its determination to prevent Egypt from further rebelling. After the murder of Artaxerxes III, in 338 bce, there was a brief obscure period during which a Nubian prince, Khabbash, seems to have gained control over Egypt, but Persian domination was reestablished in 335 bce under Darius III Codommanus. It was to last only three years. Edward F. Wente John R. Baines Peter F. Dorman
Macedonian and Ptolemaic Egypt (332–30 bce)
The Macedonian conquest
In the autumn of 332 bce Alexander the Great invaded Egypt with his mixed army of Macedonians and Greeks and found the Egyptians ready to throw off the oppressive control of the Persians. Alexander was welcomed by the Egyptians as a liberator and took the country without a battle. He journeyed to Siwa Oasis in the Western Desert to visit the Oracle of Amon, renowned in the Greek world; it disclosed the information that Alexander was the son of Amon. There may also have been a coronation at the Egyptian capital, Memphis, which, if it occurred, would have placed him firmly in the tradition of the kings (pharaohs). The same purpose may be seen in the later dissemination of the romantic myth that gave him an Egyptian parentage by linking his mother, Olympias, with the last king, Nectanebo II.
Alexander left Egypt in the spring of 331 bce, having divided the military command between Balacrus, son of Amyntas, and Peucestas, son of Makartatos. The earliest known Greek documentary papyrus, found at Ṣaqqārah in 1973, reveals the sensitivity of the latter to Egyptian religious institutions in a notice that reads: “Order of Peucestas. No one is to pass. The chamber is that of a priest.” The civil administration was headed by an official with the Persian title of satrap, one Cleomenes of Naukratis. When Alexander died in 323 bce and his generals divided his empire, the position of satrap was claimed by Ptolemy, son of a Macedonian nobleman named Lagus. The senior general Perdiccas, the holder of Alexander’s royal seal and prospective regent for Alexander’s posthumous son, might well have regretted his failure to take Egypt. He gathered an army and marched from Asia Minor to wrest Egypt from Ptolemy in 321 bce; but Ptolemy had Alexander’s corpse, Perdiccas’s army was not wholehearted in support, and the Nile crocodiles made a good meal from the flesh of the invaders.
The Ptolemaic dynasty
Until the day when he openly assumed an independent kingship as Ptolemy I Soter, on November 7, 305 bce, Ptolemy used only the title satrap of Egypt, but the great hieroglyphic Satrap stela, which he had inscribed in 311bce, indicates a degree of self-confidence that transcends his viceregal role. It reads, “I, Ptolemy the satrap, I restore to Horus, the avenger of his father, the lord of Pe, and to Buto, the lady of Pe and Dep, the territory of Patanut, from this day forth for ever, with all its villages, all its towns, all its inhabitants, all its fields.” The inscription emphasizes Ptolemy’s own role in wresting the land from the Persians (though the epithet of Soter, meaning “Saviour,” resulted not from his actions in Egypt but from the gratitude of the people of Rhodes for his having relieved them from a siege in 315 bce) and links him with Khabbash, who about 338 bce had laid claim to the kingship during the last Persian occupation.
Ptolemy I SoterPortrait of Ptolemy I Soter on a silver tetradrachm coin, Alexandria, Egypt, 3rd century bce.Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum
Egypt was ruled by Ptolemy’s descendants until the death of Cleopatra VII on August 12, 30 bce. The kingdom was one of several that emerged in the aftermath of Alexander’s death and the struggles of his successors. It was the wealthiest, however, and for much of the next 300 years the most powerful politically and culturally, and it was the last to fall directly under Roman dominion. In many respects, the character of the Ptolemaic monarchy in Egypt set a style for other Hellenistic kingdoms; this style emerged from the Greeks’ and Macedonians’ awareness of the need to dominate Egypt, its resources, and its people and at the same time to turn the power of Egypt firmly toward the context of a Mediterranean world that was becoming steadily more Hellenized.
The Ptolemies (305–145 bce)
The first 160 years of the Ptolemaic dynasty are conventionally seen as its most prosperous era. Little is known of the foundations laid in the reign of Ptolemy I Soter (304–282 bce), but the increasing amount of documentary, inscriptional, and archaeological evidence from the reign of his son and successor, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 bce), shows that the kingdom’s administration and economy underwent a thorough reorganization. A remarkable demotic text of the year 258 bce refers to orders for a complete census of the kingdom that was to record the sources of water; the position, quality, and irrigation potential of the land; the state of cultivation; the crops grown; and the extent of priestly and royal landholdings. There were important agricultural innovations in this period. New crops were introduced, and massive irrigation works brought under cultivation a great deal of new land, especially in Al-Fayyūm, where many of the immigrant Greeks were settled.
Hellenistic world, 2nd century bceEgypt as part of the Hellenistic world, c. 188 bce.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The Macedonian-Greek character of the monarchy was vigorously preserved. There is no more emphatic sign of this than the growth and importance of the city of Alexandria. It had been founded, on a date traditionally given as April 7, 331 bce (but often cited as 332 bce), by Alexander the Great on the site of the insignificant Egyptian village of Rakotis in the northwestern Nile River delta, and it ranked as the most important city in the eastern Mediterranean until the foundation of Constantinople in the 4th century ce. The importance of the new Greek city was soon emphasized by contrast to its Egyptian surroundings when the royal capital was transferred, within a few years of Alexander’s death, from Memphis to Alexandria. The Ptolemaic court cultivated extravagant luxury in the Greek style in its magnificent and steadily expanding palace complex, which occupied as much as a third of the city by the early Roman period. Its grandeur was emphasized in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus by the foundation of a quadrennial festival, the Ptolemaieia, which was intended to enjoy a status equal to that of the Olympic Games. The festival was marked by a procession of amazingly elaborate and ingeniously constructed floats, with scenarios illustrating Greek religious cults.
Ptolemy II gave the dynasty another distinctive feature when he married his full sister, Arsinoe II, one of the most powerful and remarkable women of the Hellenistic age. They became, in effect, co-rulers, and both took the epithet Philadelphus (“Brother-Loving” and “Sister-Loving”). The practice of consanguineous marriage was followed by most of their successors and imitated by ordinary Egyptians too, even though it had not been a standard practice in the pharaonic royal houses and had been unknown in the rest of the native Egyptian population. Arsinoe played a prominent role in the formation of royal policy. She was displayed on the coinage and was eventually worshiped, perhaps even before her death, in the distinctively Greek style of ruler cult that developed in this reign.
From the first phase of the wars of Alexander’s successors, the Ptolemies had harboured imperial ambitions. Ptolemy I won control of Cyprus and Cyrene and quarreled with his neighbour over control of Palestine. In the course of the 3rd century a powerful Ptolemaic empire developed, which for much of the period laid claim to sovereignty in the Levant, in many of the cities of the western and southern coast of Asia Minor, in some of the Aegean islands, and in a handful of towns in Thrace, as well as in Cyprus and Cyrene. Family connections and dynastic alliances, especially between the Ptolemies and the neighbouring Seleucids, played an important role in these imperialistic ambitions. Such links were far from able to preserve harmony between the royal houses (between 274 and 200 bce five wars were fought with the Seleucids over possession of territory in Syria and the Levant), but they did keep the ruling houses relatively compact, interconnected, and more true to their Macedonian-Greek origins.
When Ptolemy II Philadelphus died in 246 bce, he left a prosperous kingdom to his successor, Ptolemy III Euergetes (246–221 bce). Euergetes’ reign saw a very successful campaign against the Seleucids in Syria, occasioned by the murder of his sister, Berenice, who had been married to the Seleucid Antiochus II. To avenge Berenice, Euergetes marched into Syria, where he won a great victory. He gained popularity at home by recapturing statues of Egyptian gods originally taken by the Persians. The decree promulgated at Canopus in the delta on March 7, 238 bce, attests both this event and the many great benefactions conferred on Egyptian temples throughout the land. It was during Euergetes’ reign, for instance, that the rebuilding of the great Temple of Horus at Idfū (Apollinopolis Magna) was begun.
Euergetes was succeeded by his son Ptolemy IV Philopator (221–205 bce), whom the Greek historians portray as a weak and corrupt ruler, dominated by a powerful circle of Alexandrian Greek courtiers. The reign was notable for another serious conflict with the Seleucids, which ended in 217 bce in a great Ptolemaic victory at Raphia in southern Palestine. The battle is notable for the fact that large numbers of native Egyptian soldiers fought alongside the Macedonian and Greek contingents. Events surrounding the death of Philopator and the succession of the youthful Ptolemy V Epiphanes (205–180 bce) are obscured by court intrigue. Before Epiphanes had completed his first decade of rule, serious difficulties arose. Native revolts in the south, which had been sporadic in the second half of the 3rd century bce, became serious and weakened the hold of the monarch on a vital part of the kingdom. These revolts, which produced native claimants to the kingship, are generally attributed to the native Egyptians’ realization, after their contribution to the victory at Raphia, of their potential power. Trouble continued to break out for several more decades. By about 196 bce a great portion of the Ptolemaic overseas empire had been permanently lost (though there may have been a brief revival in the Aegean islands in about 165–145 bce). To shore up and advertise the strength of the ruling house at home and abroad, the administration adopted a series of grandiloquent honorific titles for its officers. To conciliate Egyptian feelings, a religious synod that met in 196 bce to crown Epiphanes at Memphis (the first occasion on which a Ptolemy is certainly known to have been crowned at the traditional capital) decreed extensive privileges for the Egyptian temples, as recorded on the Rosetta Stone.
The reign of Ptolemy VI Philometor (180–145 bce), a man of pious and magnanimous character, was marked by renewed conflict with the Seleucids after the death of his mother, Cleopatra I, in 176 bce. In 170/169 bce Antiochus IV of Syria invaded Egypt and established a protectorate; in 168 bce he returned, accepted coronation at Memphis, and installed a Seleucid governor. But he had failed to reckon with the more powerful interests of Rome. In the summer of 168 bce a Roman ambassador, Popillius Laenas, arrived at Antiochus’s headquarters near Pelusium in the delta and staged an awesome display of Roman power. He ordered Antiochus to withdraw from Egypt. Antiochus asked for time to consult his advisers. Laenas drew a circle around the king with his stick and told him to answer before he stepped out of the circle. Only one answer was possible, and by the end of July Antiochus had left Egypt. Philometor’s reign was further troubled by rivalry with his brother, later Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II Physcon. The solution, devised under Roman advice, was to remove Physcon to Cyrene, where he remained until Philometor died in 145 bce. It is noteworthy that in 155 bce Physcon took the step of bequeathing the kingdom of Cyrene to the Romans in the event of his untimely death.
Dynastic strife and decline (145–30 bce)
Physcon was able to rule in Egypt until 116 bce with his sister Cleopatra II (except for a period in 131–130 bce when she was in revolt) and her daughter Cleopatra III. His reign was marked by generous benefactions to the Egyptian temples, but he was detested as a tyrant by the Greeks, and the historical accounts of the reign emphasize his stormy relations with the Alexandrian populace.
During the last century of Ptolemaic rule, Egypt’s independence was exercised under Rome’s protection and at Rome’s discretion. For much of the period, Rome was content to support a dynasty that had no overseas possession except Cyprus after 96 bce (the year in which Cyrene was bequeathed to Rome by Ptolemy Apion) and no ambitions threatening Roman interests or security. After a series of brief and unstable reigns, Ptolemy XII Auletes acceded to the throne in 80 bce. He maintained his hold for 30 years, despite the attractions that Egypt’s legendary wealth held for avaricious Roman politicians. In fact, Auletes had to flee Egypt in 58 bce and was restored by Pompey’s friend Gabinius in 55 bce, no doubt after spending so much in bribes that he had to bring Rabirius Postumus, one of his Roman creditors, to Egypt with him to manage his financial affairs.
In 52 bce, the year before his death, Auletes associated with himself on the throne his daughter Cleopatra VII and his elder son Ptolemy XIII (who died in 47 bce). The reign of Cleopatra was that of a vigorous and exceptionally able queen who was ambitious, among other things, to revive the prestige of the dynasty by cultivating influence with powerful Roman commanders and using their capacity to aggrandize Roman clients and allies. Julius Caesar pursued Pompey to Egypt in 48 bce. After learning of Pompey’s murder at the hands of Egyptian courtiers, Caesar stayed long enough to enjoy a sightseeing tour up the Nile in the queen’s company in the summer of 47 bce. When he left for Rome, Cleopatra was pregnant with a child she claimed was Caesar’s. The child, a son, was named Caesarion (“Little Caesar”). Cleopatra and Caesarion later followed Caesar back to Rome, but, after his assassination in 44 bce, they returned hurriedly to Egypt, and she tried for a while to play a neutral role in the struggles between the Roman generals and their factions.
Cleopatra VIIFragment of a relief of Cleopatra VII, Egypt, c. 1st–c. 3rd century ce.© DeA Picture Library
Her long liaison with Mark Antony began when she visited him at Tarsus in 41 bce and he returned to Egypt with her. Between 36 and 30 bce the famous romance between the Roman general and the eastern queen was exploited to great effect by Antony’s political rival Octavian (the future emperor Augustus). By 34 bce Caesarion was officially co-ruler with Cleopatra, but his rule clearly was an attempt to exploit the popularity of Caesar’s memory. In the autumn Cleopatra and Antony staged an extravagant display in which they made grandiose dispositions of territory in the east to their children, Alexander Helios, Ptolemy, and Cleopatra Selene. Cleopatra and Antony were portrayed to the Roman public as posing for artists in the guise of Dionysus and Isis or whiling away their evenings in rowdy and decadent banquets that kept the citizens of Alexandria awake all night. But this propaganda war was merely the prelude to armed conflict, and the issue was decided in September 31 bce in a naval battle at Actium in western Greece. When the battle was at its height, Cleopatra and her squadron withdrew, and Antony eventually followed suit. They fled to Alexandria but could do little more than await the arrival of the victorious Octavian 10 months later. Alexandria was captured, and Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide—he by falling on his sword, she probably by the bite of an asp—in August of 30 bce. It is reported that when Octavian reached the city, he visited and touched the preserved corpse of Alexander the Great, causing a piece of the nose to fall off. He refused to gaze upon the remains of the Ptolemies, saying “I wished to see a king, not corpses.”
Mark AntonyMark Antony, detail of a marble bust; in the Vatican Museums, Vatican City.Alinari/Art Resource, New York
Government and conditions under the Ptolemies
The changes brought to Egypt by the Ptolemies were momentous; the land’s resources were harnessed with unparalleled efficiency, with the result that Egypt became the wealthiest of the Hellenistic kingdoms. Land under cultivation was increased, and new crops were introduced (especially important was the introduction of naked tetraploid wheat, Triticum durum, to replace the traditional husked emmer, Triticum dicoccum). The population, estimated at perhaps three to four million in the late Dynastic period, may have more than doubled by the early Roman period to a level not reached again until the late 19th century. Some of the increase was due to immigration; particularly during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, many settlers were attracted from cities in Anatolia (Asia Minor) and the Greek islands, and large numbers of Jews came from Palestine. The flow may have decreased later in the Ptolemaic period, and it is often suggested, on slender evidence, that there was a serious decline in prosperity in the 1st century bce. If so, there may have been some reversal of this trend under Cleopatra VII.
Administration
The foundation of the prosperity was the governmental system devised to exploit the country’s economic resources. Directly below the monarch were a handful of powerful officials whose authority extended over the entire land: a chief finance minister, a chief accountant, and a chancery of ministers in charge of records, letters, and decrees. A level below them lay the broadening base of a pyramid of subordinate officials with authority in limited areas, which extended down to the chief administrator of each village (kōmarchēs). Between the chief ministers and the village officials stood those such as the nome steward (oikonomos) and the stratēgoi, whose jurisdiction extended over one of the more than 30 nomes, the long-established geographic divisions of Egypt. In theory, this bureaucracy could regulate and control the economic activities of every subject in the land, its smooth operation guaranteed by the multiplicity of officials capable of checking up on one another. In practice, it is difficult to see a rigid civil service mentality at work, involving clear demarcation of departments; specific functions might well have been performed by different officials according to local need and the availability of a person competent to take appropriate action.
By the same token, rigid lines of separation between military, civil, legal, and administrative matters are difficult to perceive. The same official might perform duties in one or all of these areas. The military was inevitably integrated into civilian life because its soldiers were also farmers who enjoyed royal grants of land, either as Greek cleruchs (holders of allotments) with higher status and generous grants or as native Egyptian machimoi with small plots. Interlocking judiciary institutions, in the form of Greek and Egyptian courts (chrēmatistai and laokritai), provided the means for Greeks and Egyptians to regulate their legal relationships according to the language in which they conducted their business. The bureaucratic power was heavily weighted in favour of the Greek speakers, the dominant elite. Egyptians were nevertheless able to obtain official posts in the bureaucracy, gradually infiltrating to the highest levels, but in order to do so they had to Hellenize.
Economy
The basis of Egypt’s legendary wealth was the highly productive land, which technically remained in royal ownership. A considerable portion was kept under the control of temples, and the remainder was leased out on a theoretically revocable basis to tenant-farmers. A portion also was available to be granted as gifts to leading courtiers; one of these was Apollonius, the finance minister of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who had an estate of 10,000 arourae (about 6,500 acres [2,630 hectares]) at Philadelphia in Al-Fayyūm. Tenants and beneficiaries were able to behave very much as if these leases and grants were private property. The revenues in cash and kind were enormous, and royal control extended to the manufacture and marketing of almost all important products, including papyrus, oil, linen, and beer. An extraordinarily detailed set of revenue laws, promulgated under Ptolemy II Philadelphus, laid down rules for the way in which officials were to monitor the production of such commodities. In fact, the Ptolemaic economy was very much a mixture of direct royal ownership and exploitation by private enterprise under regulated conditions.
One fundamental and far-reaching Ptolemaic innovation was the systematic monetarization of the economy. The monarchy also controlled this from top to bottom by operating a closed monetary system, which permitted only the royal coinage to circulate within Egypt. A sophisticated banking system underpinned this practice, operating again with a mixture of direct royal control and private enterprise and handling both private financial transactions and those that directed money into and out of the royal coffers. One important concomitant of this change was an enormous increase in the volume of trade, both within Egypt and abroad, which eventually reached its climax under the peaceful conditions of Roman rule. There the position and role of Alexandria as the major port and trading entrepôt was crucial: the city handled a great volume of Egypt’s domestic produce, as well as the import and export of luxury goods to and from the East and the cities of the eastern Mediterranean. It developed its own importance as an artistic centre, the products of which found ready markets throughout the Mediterranean. Alexandrian glassware and jewelry were particularly fine, Greek-style sculpture of the late Ptolemaic period shows especial excellence, and it is likely that the city was also the major production centre for high-quality mosaic work.
glass bowlBowl of pressed mosaic glass, believed to be from Alexandria, Egypt, 1st century bce; in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum
Religion
The Ptolemies were powerful supporters of the native Egyptian religious foundations, the economic and political power of which was, however, carefully controlled. A great deal of the late building and restoration work in many of the most important Egyptian temples is Ptolemaic, particularly from the period of about 150–50 bce, and the monarchs appear on temple reliefs in the traditional forms of the Egyptian kings. The native traditions persisted in village temples and local cults, many having particular associations with species of sacred animals or birds. At the same time, the Greeks created their own identifications of Egyptian deities, identifying Amon with Zeus, Horus with Apollo, Ptah with Hephaestus, and so on. They also gave some deities, such as Isis, a more universal significance that ultimately resulted in the spread of her mystery cult throughout the Mediterranean world. The impact of the Greeks is most obvious in two phenomena. One is the formalized royal cult of Alexander and the Ptolemies, which evidently served both a political and a religious purpose. The other is the creation of the cult of Sarapis, which at first was confined to Alexandria but soon became universal. The god was represented as a Hellenized deity and the form of cult is Greek, but its essence is the old Egyptian notion that the sacred Apis bull merged its divinity in some way with the god Osiris when it died.
ApisApis, the ancient Egyptian bull deity, painted on the bottom of a wooden coffin, c. 700 bce; in the Roemer-Pelizaeus Museum, Hildesheim, Germany.Bavaria-Verlag
Culture
The continuing vitality of the native Egyptian artistic tradition is clearly and abundantly expressed in the temple architecture and the sculpture of the Ptolemaic period. The Egyptian language continued to be used in its hieroglyphic and demotic forms until late in the Roman period, and it survived through the Byzantine period and beyond in the form of Coptic. The Egyptian literary tradition flourished vigorously in the Ptolemaic period and produced a large number of works in demotic. The genre most commonly represented is the romantic tale, exemplified by several story cycles, which are typically set in the native, Pharaonic milieu and involve the gods, royal figures, magic, romance, and the trials and combats of heroes. Another important category is the Instruction Text, the best known of the period being that of Ankhsheshonq, which consists of a list of moralizing maxims, composed, as the story goes, when Ankhsheshonq was imprisoned for having failed to inform the king (pharaoh) of an assassination plot. Another example, known as Papyrus Insinger, is a more narrowly moralizing text. But the arrival of a Greek-speaking elite had an enormous impact on cultural patterns. The Egyptian story cycles were probably affected by Greek influence, literary and technical works were translated into Greek, and under royal patronage an Egyptian priest named Manetho of Sebennytos wrote an account of the kings of Egypt in Greek. Most striking is the diffusion of the works of the poets and playwrights of classical Greece among the literate Greeks in the towns and villages of the Nile River valley.
Thus there are clear signs of the existence of two interacting but distinct cultural traditions in Ptolemaic Egypt. This was certainly reflected in a broader social context. The written sources offer little direct evidence of ethnic discrimination by Greeks against Egyptians, but Greek and Egyptian consciousness of the Greeks’ social and economic superiority comes through strongly from time to time; intermarriage was one means, though not the only one, by which Egyptians could better their status and Hellenize. Many native Egyptians learned to speak Greek, some to write it as well; some even went so far as to adopt Greek names in an attempt to assimilate themselves to the elite group.
Alexandria occupied a unique place in the history of literature, ideas, scholarship, and science for almost a millennium after the death of its founder. Under the royal patronage of the Ptolemies and in an environment almost oblivious to its Egyptian surroundings, Greek culture was preserved and developed. Early in the Ptolemaic period, probably in the reign of Ptolemy I Soter, the Alexandrian Museum (Greek: Mouseion, “Seat of the Muses”) was established within the palace complex. The geographer and historian Strabo, who saw it early in the Roman period, described it as having a covered walk, an arcade with recesses and seats, and a large house containing the dining hall of the members of the Museum, who lived a communal existence. The Library of Alexandria (together with its offshoot in the Sarapeum) was indispensable to the functioning of the scholarly community in the Museum. Books were collected voraciously under the Ptolemies, and at its height the library’s collection probably numbered 500,000 or more papyrus rolls, most of them containing more than one work.
The major poets of the Hellenistic period, Theocritus, Callimachus, and Apollonius of Rhodes, all took up residence and wrote there. Scholarship flourished, preserving and ordering the manuscript traditions of much of the classical literature from Homer onward. Librarian-scholars such as Aristophanes of Byzantium and his pupil Aristarchus made critical editions and wrote commentaries and works on grammar. Also notable was the cultural influence of Alexandria’s Jewish community, which is inferred from the fact that the Pentateuch was first translated into Greek at Alexandria during the Ptolemaic period. One by-product of this kind of activity was that Alexandria became the centre of the book trade, and the works of the classical authors were copied there and diffused among a literate Greek readership scattered in the towns and villages of the Nile valley.
The Alexandrian achievement in scientific fields was also enormous. Great advances were made in pure mathematics, mechanics, physics, geography, and medicine. Euclid worked in Alexandria about 300 bce and achieved the systematization of the whole existing corpus of mathematical knowledge and the development of the method of proof by deduction from axioms. Archimedes was there in the 3rd century bce and is said to have invented the Archimedean screw when he was in Egypt. Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference and was the first to attempt a map of the world based on a system of lines of latitude and longitude. The school of medicine founded in the Ptolemaic period retained its leading reputation into the Byzantine era. Late in the Ptolemaic period Alexandria began to develop as a great centre of Greek philosophical studies as well. In fact, there was no field of literary, intellectual, or scientific activity to which Ptolemaic Alexandria failed to make an important contribution. Alan Edouard Samuel Alan K. Bowman
Roman and Byzantine Egypt (30 bce– 642 ce)
Egypt as a province of Rome
“I added Egypt to the empire of the Roman people.” With these words the emperor Augustus (as Octavian was known from 27 bce) summarized the subjection of Cleopatra’s kingdom in the great inscription that records his achievements. The province was to be governed by a viceroy, a prefect with the status of a Roman knight (eques) who was directly responsible to the emperor. The first viceroy was the Roman poet and soldier Gaius Cornelius Gallus, who boasted too vaingloriously of his military achievements in the province and paid for it first with his position and then with his life. Roman senators were not allowed to enter Egypt without the emperor’s permission, because this wealthiest of provinces could be held militarily by a very small force, and the threat implicit in an embargo on the export of grain supplies, vital to the provisioning of the city of Rome and its populace, was obvious. Internal security was guaranteed by the presence of three Roman legions (later reduced to two), each about 6,000 strong, and several cohorts of auxiliaries.
In the first decade of Roman rule the spirit of Augustan imperialism looked farther afield, attempting expansion to the east and to the south. An expedition to Arabia by the prefect Aelius Gallus about 26–25 bce was undermined by the treachery of the Nabataean Syllaeus, who led the Roman fleet astray in uncharted waters. Arabia was to remain an independent though friendly client of Rome until 106 ce, when the emperor Trajan (ruled 98–117 ce) annexed it, making it possible to reopen Ptolemy II’s canal from the Nile to the head of the Gulf of Suez. To the south the Meroitic people beyond the First Cataract had taken advantage of Gallus’s preoccupation with Arabia and mounted an attack on the Thebaid. The next Roman prefect, Petronius, led two expeditions into the Meroitic kingdom (c. 24–22 bce), captured several towns, forced the submission of the formidable queen, who was characterized by Roman writers as “the one-eyed Queen Candace,” and left a Roman garrison at Primis (Qaṣr Ibrīm). But thoughts of maintaining a permanent presence in Lower Nubia were soon abandoned, and within a year or two the limits of Roman occupation had been set at Hiera Sykaminos, some 50 miles (80 km) south of the First Cataract. The mixed character of the region is indicated, however, by the continuing popularity of the goddess Isis among the people of Meroe and by the Roman emperor Augustus’s foundation of a temple at Kalabsha dedicated to the local god Mandulis.
Egypt achieved its greatest prosperity under the shadow of the Roman peace, which, in effect, depoliticized it. Roman emperors or members of their families visited Egypt—Tiberius’s nephew and adopted son, Germanicus; Vespasian and his elder son, Titus; Hadrian; Septimius Severus; Diocletian—to see the famous sights, receive the acclamations of the Alexandrian populace, attempt to ensure the loyalty of their volatile subjects, or initiate administrative reform. Occasionally its potential as a power base was realized. Vespasian, the most successful of the imperial aspirants in the “Year of the Four Emperors,” was first proclaimed emperor at Alexandria on July 1, 69 ce, in a maneuver contrived by the prefect of Egypt, Tiberius Julius Alexander. Others were less successful. Gaius Avidius Cassius, the son of a former prefect of Egypt, revolted against Marcus Aurelius in 175 ce, stimulated by false rumours of Marcus’s death, but his attempted usurpation lasted only three months. For several months in 297/298 ce Egypt was under the dominion of a mysterious usurper named Lucius Domitius Domitianus. The emperor Diocletian was present at the final capitulation of Alexandria after an eight-month siege and swore to take revenge by slaughtering the populace until the river of blood reached his horse’s knees; the threat was mitigated when his mount stumbled as he rode into the city. In gratitude, the citizens of Alexandria erected a statue of the horse.
The only extended period during the turbulent 3rd century ce in which Egypt was lost to the central imperial authority was 270–272, when it fell into the hands of the ruling dynasty of the Syrian city of Palmyra. Fortunately for Rome, the military strength of Palmyra proved to be the major obstacle to the overrunning of the Eastern Empire by the powerful Sāsānian monarchy of Persia.
Internal threats to security were not uncommon but normally were dissipated without major damage to imperial control. These included rioting between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria in the reign of Caligula (Gaius Caesar Germanicus; ruled 37–41 ce), a serious Jewish revolt under Trajan (ruled 98–117 ce), a revolt in the Nile delta in 172 ce that was quelled by Avidius Cassius, and a revolt centred on the town of Coptos (Qifṭ) in 293/294 ce that was put down by Galerius, Diocletian’s imperial colleague.
Administration and economy under Rome
The Romans introduced important changes in the administrative system, aimed at achieving a high level of efficiency and maximizing revenue. The duties of the prefect of Egypt combined responsibility for military security through command of the legions and cohorts, for the organization of finance and taxation, and for the administration of justice. This involved a vast mass of detailed paperwork; one document from 211 ce notes that in a period of three days 1,804 petitions were handed into the prefect’s office. But the prefect was assisted by a hierarchy of subordinate equestrian officials with expertise in particular areas. There were three or four epistratēgoi in charge of regional subdivisions; special officers were in charge of the emperors’ private account, the administration of justice, religious institutions, and so on. Subordinate to them were the local officials in the nomes (stratēgoi and royal scribes) and finally the authorities in the towns and villages.
It was in these growing towns that the Romans made the most far-reaching changes in administration. They introduced colleges of magistrates and officials who were to be responsible for running the internal affairs of their own communities on a theoretically autonomous basis and, at the same time, were to guarantee the collection and payment of tax quotas to the central government. This was backed up by the development of a range of “liturgies,” compulsory public services that were imposed on individuals according to rank and property to ensure the financing and upkeep of local facilities. These institutions were the Egyptian counterpart of the councils and magistrates that oversaw the Greek cities in the eastern Roman provinces. They had been ubiquitous in other Hellenistic kingdoms, but in Ptolemaic Egypt they had existed only in the so-called Greek cities (Alexandria, Ptolemais in Upper Egypt, Naukratis, and later Antinoöpolis, founded by Hadrian in 130 ce). Alexandria lost the right to have a council, probably in the Ptolemaic period. When it recovered its right in 200 ce, the privilege was diluted by being extended to the nome capitals (mētropoleis) as well. This extension of privilege represented an attempt to shift more of the burden and expense of administration onto the local propertied classes, but it was eventually to prove too heavy. The consequences were the impoverishment of many of the councillors and their families and serious problems in administration that led to an increasing degree of central government interference and, eventually, more direct control.
The economic resources that this administration existed to exploit had not changed since the Ptolemaic period, but the development of a much more complex and sophisticated taxation system was a hallmark of Roman rule. Taxes in both cash and kind were assessed on land, and a bewildering variety of small taxes in cash, as well as customs dues and the like, was collected by appointed officials. A massive amount of Egypt’s grain was shipped downriver both to feed the population of Alexandria and for export to Rome. Despite frequent complaints of oppression and extortion from the taxpayers, it is not obvious that official tax rates were all that high. In fact the Roman government had actively encouraged the privatization of land and the increase of private enterprise in manufacture, commerce, and trade, and low tax rates favoured private owners and entrepreneurs. The poorer people gained their livelihood as tenants of state-owned land or of property belonging to the emperor or to wealthy private landlords, and they were relatively much more heavily burdened by rentals, which tended to remain at a fairly high level.
Overall, the degree of monetarization and complexity in the economy, even at the village level, was intense. Goods were moved around and exchanged through the medium of coin on a large scale and, in the towns and the larger villages, a high level of industrial and commercial activity developed in close conjunction with the exploitation of the predominant agricultural base. The volume of trade, both internal and external, reached its peak in the 1st and 2nd centuries ce. However, by the end of the 3rd century ce, major problems were evident. A series of debasements of the imperial currency had undermined confidence in the coinage, and even the government itself was contributing to this by demanding increasing amounts of irregular tax payments in kind, which it channeled directly to the main consumers—army personnel. Local administration by the councils was careless, recalcitrant, and inefficient. The evident need for firm and purposeful reform had to be squarely faced in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine.
Society, religion, and culture
One of the more noticeable effects of Roman rule was the clearer tendency toward classification and social control of the populace. Thus, despite many years of intermarriage between Greeks and Egyptians, lists drawn up in 4/5 ce established the right of certain families to class themselves as Greek by descent and to claim privileges attaching to their status as members of an urban aristocracy, known as the gymnasial class. Members of this group were entitled to lower rates of poll tax, subsidized or free distributions of food, and maintenance at the public expense when they grew old. If they or their descendants were upwardly mobile, they might gain Alexandrian citizenship, Roman citizenship, or even equestrian status, with correspondingly greater prestige and privileges. The preservation of such distinctions was implicit in the spread of Roman law and was reinforced by elaborate codes of social and fiscal regulations such as the Rule-Book of the Emperors’ Special Account. The Rule-Book prescribed conditions under which people of different status might marry, for instance, or bequeath property, and it fixed fines, confiscations, and other penalties for transgression. When an edict of the emperor Caracalla conferred Roman citizenship on practically all of the subjects of the empire in 212 ce, the distinction between citizens and noncitizens became meaningless; however, it was gradually replaced by an equally important distinction between honestiores and humiliores (meaning, roughly, “upper classes” and “lower classes,” respectively), groups that, among other distinctions, were subjected to different penalties in law.
Naturally, it was the Greek-speaking elite that continued to dictate the visibly dominant cultural pattern, though Egyptian culture was not moribund or insignificant. One proof of its continued survival can be seen in its reemergent importance in the context of Coptic Christianity in the Byzantine period. An important reminder of the mixing of the traditions comes from a family of Panopolis in the 4th century, whose members included both teachers of Greek oratory and priests in Egyptian cult tradition. The towns and villages of the Nile valley have preserved thousands of papyri that show what the literate Greeks were reading (e.g., the poems of Homer and the lyric poets, works of the Classical Greek tragedians, and comedies of Menander). The pervasiveness of the Greek literary tradition is strikingly demonstrated by evidence left by an obscure and anonymous clerk at Al-Fayyūm village of Karanis in the 2nd century ce. In copying out a long list of taxpayers, the clerk translated an Egyptian name in the list by an extremely rare Greek word that he could only have known from having read the Alexandrian Hellenistic poet Callimachus; he must have understood the etymology of the Egyptian name as well.
Alexandria continued to develop as a spectacularly beautiful city and to foster Greek culture and intellectual pursuits, though the great days of Ptolemaic court patronage of literary figures had passed. But the flourishing interest in philosophy, particularly Platonic philosophy, had important effects. The great Jewish philosopher and theologian of the 1st century, Philo of Alexandria (Philo Judaeus), brought a training in Greek philosophy to bear on his commentaries on the Bible. This anticipated by a hundred years the period after the virtual annihilation of the great Jewish community of Alexandria in the revolt of 115–117 ce, when the city was the intellectual crucible in which Christianity developed a theology that took it away from the influence of the Jewish exegetical tradition and toward that of Greek philosophical ideas. There the foundations were laid for teaching the heads of the Christian catechetical school, such as Clement of Alexandria. And in the 3rd century there was the vital textual and theological work of Origen, the greatest of the Christian Neoplatonists, without which there would hardly have been a coherent New Testament tradition at all.
Outside the Greek ambience of Alexandria, traditional Egyptian religious institutions continued to flourish in the towns and villages, but the temples were reduced to financial dependence on a state subvention (syntaxis), and they became subject to stringent control by secular bureaucrats. Nevertheless, like the Ptolemies before them, Roman emperors appear in the traditional form as Egyptian kings on temple reliefs until the mid-3rd century, and five professional hieroglyph cutters were still employed at the town of Oxyrhynchus in the 2nd century. The animal cults continued to flourish, despite Augustus’s famous sneer that he was accustomed to worship gods, not cattle. As late as the reign of Diocletian (285–305), religious stelae preserved the fiction that in the cults of sacred bulls (best known at Memphis and at Hermonthis [Armant]) the successor of a dead bull was “installed” by the monarch. Differences between cults of the Greek type and the native Egyptian cults were still highly marked, in the temple architecture and in the status of the priests. Priests of Egyptian cults formed, in effect, a caste distinguished by their special clothing, whereas priestly offices in Greek cults were much more like magistracies and tended to be held by local magnates. Cults of Roman emperors, living and dead, became universal after 30 bce, but their impact is most clearly to be seen in the foundations of Caesarea (Temples of Caesar) and in religious institutions of Greek type, where divine emperors were associated with the resident deities.
One development that did have an important effect on this religious amalgam, though it was not decisive until the 4th century, was the arrival of Christianity. The tradition of the foundation of the church of Alexandria by St. Mark cannot be substantiated, but a fragment of a text of the Gospel According to John provides concrete evidence of Christianity in the Nile valley in the second quarter of the 2nd century ce. Inasmuch as Christianity remained illegal and subject to persecution until the early 4th century, Christians were reluctant to advertise themselves as such, and it is therefore difficult to know how numerous they were, especially because later pro-Christian sources may often be suspected of exaggerating the zeal and the numbers of the early Christian martyrs. But several papyri survive of the libelli—certificates in which people swore that they had performed sacrifices to Greek, Egyptian, or Roman divinities in order to prove that they were not Christians—submitted in the first official state-sponsored persecution of Christians, under the emperor Decius (ruled 249–251). By the 290s, a decade or so before the great persecution under Diocletian, a list of buildings in the sizeable town of Oxyrhynchus, some 125 miles (200 km) south of the apex of the delta, included two Christian churches, probably of the house-chapel type.
Egypt’s role in the Byzantine Empire
Diocletian was the last reigning Roman emperor to visit Egypt, in 302 ce. Within about 10 years of his visit, the persecution of Christians ceased. The end of persecution had such far-reaching effects that from this point on it is necessary to think of the history of Egypt in a very different framework. No single point can be identified as the watershed between the Roman and Byzantine period, as the divide between a brighter era of peace, culture, and prosperity and a darker age, supposedly characterized by more-oppressive state machinery in the throes of decline and fall. The crucial changes occurred in the last decade of the 3rd century and the first three decades of the 4th. With the end of persecution of Christians came the restoration of the property of the church. In 313 a new system of calculating and collecting taxes was introduced, with 15-year tax cycles, called indictions, inaugurated retrospectively from the year 312. Many other important administrative changes had already taken place. In 296 the separation of the Egyptian coinage from that of the rest of the empire had come to an end when the Alexandrian mint stopped producing its tetradrachms, which had been the basis of the closed-currency system.
Byzantine Empire, 6th centuryEgypt as part of the Byzantine Empire, c. 565 ce.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
One other event that had an enormous effect on the political history of Egypt was the founding of Constantinople (now Istanbul) on May 11, 330. First, Constantinople was established as an imperial capital and an eastern counterpart to Rome itself, thus undermining Alexandria’s traditional position as the first city of the Greek-speaking East. Second, it diverted the resources of Egypt away from Rome and the West. Henceforth, part of the surplus of the Egyptian grain supply, which was put at 8 million artabs (about 300 million litres) of wheat (one artab was roughly equivalent to one bushel) in an edict of the emperor Justinian of about 537 or 538, went to feed the growing population of Constantinople, and this created an important political and economic link. The cumulative effect of these changes was to knit Egypt more uniformly into the structure of the empire and to give it, once again, a central role in the political history of the Mediterranean world.
The key to understanding the importance of Egypt in that period lies in seeing how the Christian church came rapidly to dominate secular as well as religious institutions and to acquire a powerful interest and role in every political issue. The corollary of this was that the head of the Egyptian church, the patriarch of Alexandria, became the most influential figure within Egypt, as well as the person who could give the Egyptian clergy a powerful voice in the councils of the Eastern church. During the course of the 4th century, Egypt was divided for administrative purposes into a number of smaller units but the patriarchy was not, and its power thus far outweighed that of any local administrative official. Only the governors of groups of provinces (vicarii of dioceses) were equivalent, and the praetorian prefects and emperors were superior. When a patriarch of Alexandria was given civil authority as well, as happened in the case of Cyrus, the last patriarch under Byzantine rule, the combination was very powerful indeed.
The turbulent history of Egypt in the Byzantine period can largely be understood in terms of the struggles of the successive (or, after 570, coexisting) patriarchs of Alexandria to maintain their position both within their patriarchy and outside it in relation to Constantinople. What linked Egypt and the rest of the Eastern Empire was the way in which the imperial authorities, when strong (as, for instance, in the reign of Justinian), tried to control the Egyptian church from Constantinople, while at the same time assuring the capital’s food supply and, as often as not, waging wars to keep their empire intact. Conversely, when weak they failed to control the church. For the patriarchs of Alexandria, it proved impossible to secure the approval of the imperial authorities in Constantinople and at the same time maintain the support of their power base in Egypt. The two made quite different demands, and the ultimate result was a social, political, and cultural gulf between Alexandria and the rest of Egypt and between Hellenism and native Egyptian culture, which found a powerful new means of expression in Coptic Christianity. The gulf was made more emphatic after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 established the official doctrine that Christ was to be seen as existing in two natures, inseparably united. The council’s decision in effect sent the Egyptian Coptic (now Coptic Orthodox) church off on its own path of monophysitism, which centred around a firm insistence on the singularity of the nature of Christ.
Despite the debilitating effect of internal quarrels between rival churchmen, and despite the threats posed by the hostile tribes of Blemmyes and Nubade in the south (until their conversion to Christianity in the mid-6th century), emperors of Byzantium still could be threatened by the strength of Egypt if it were properly harnessed. The last striking example is the case of the emperor Phocas, a tyrant who was brought down in 609 or 610. Nicetas, the general of the future emperor Heraclius, made for Alexandria from Cyrene, intending to use Egypt as his power base and cut off Constantinople’s grain supply. By the spring of 610 Nicetas’s struggle with Bonosus, the general of Phocas, was won, and the fall of the tyrant duly followed.
The difficulty of defending Egypt from a power base in Constantinople was forcefully illustrated during the last three decades of Byzantine rule. First, the old enemy, the Persians, advanced to the Nile delta and captured Alexandria. Their occupation was completed early in 619 and continued until 628, when Persia and Byzantium agreed to a peace treaty and the Persians withdrew. This had been a decade of violent hostility to the Egyptian Coptic Christians; among other oppressive measures, the Persians are said to have refused to allow the normal ordination of bishops and to have massacred hundreds of monks in their cave monasteries. The Persian withdrawal hardly heralded the return of peace to Egypt.
In Arabia events were taking place that would soon bring momentous changes for Egypt. These were triggered by the flight of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina and by his declaration in 632 ce of a holy war against Byzantium. A decade later, by September 29, 642, the Arab general ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ was able to march into Alexandria, and the Arab conquest of Egypt, which had begun with an invasion three years earlier, ended in peaceful capitulation. The invasion itself had been preceded by several years of vicious persecution of Coptic Christians by Cyrus, the Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria, and it was he who is said to have betrayed Egypt to the forces of Islam.
The Islamic conquest was not bloodless. There was desultory fighting at first in the eastern delta, then Al-Fayyūm was lost in battle in 640, and a great battle took place at Heliopolis (now a suburb of Cairo) in July 640 in which 15,000 Arabs engaged 20,000 Egyptian defenders. The storming and capture of Trajan’s old fortress at Babylon (on the site of the present-day quarter called Old Cairo) on April 6, 641, was crucial. By September 14 Cyrus, who had been recalled from Egypt 10 months earlier by the emperor Heraclius, was back with authority to conclude a peace. Byzantium signed Egypt away on November 8, 641, with provision for an 11-month armistice to allow ratification of the treaty of surrender by the emperor and the caliph. In December 641 heavily laden ships were dispatched to carry Egypt’s wealth to its new masters. Nine months later the last remnants of Byzantine forces left Egypt in ships bound for Cyprus, Rhodes, and Constantinople, and ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ took Alexandria in the name of the caliph. The new domination by the theocratic Islamic caliphate was strikingly different from anything that had happened in Egypt since the arrival of Alexander the Great almost a thousand years earlier.
Byzantine government of Egypt
The reforms of the early 4th century had established the basis for another 250 years of comparative prosperity in Egypt, at a cost of perhaps greater rigidity and more-oppressive state control. Egypt was subdivided for administrative purposes into a number of smaller provinces, and separate civil and military officials were established (the praeses and the dux, respectively). By the middle of the 6th century the emperor Justinian was eventually forced to recognize the failure of this policy and to combine civil and military power in the hands of the dux with a civil deputy (the praeses) as a counterweight to the power of the church authorities. All pretense of local autonomy had by then vanished. The presence of the soldiery was more noticeable, its power and influence more pervasive in the routine of town and village life. Taxes were perhaps not heavier than they had been earlier, but they were collected ruthlessly, and strong measures were sanctioned against those who tried to escape from their fiscal or legal obligations. The wealthier landowners probably enjoyed increased prosperity, especially as a result of the opportunity to buy now state-owned land that had once been sold into private ownership in the early 4th century. The great landlords were powerful enough to offer their peasant tenants a significant degree of collective fiscal protection against the agents of the state, the rapacious tax collector, the officious bureaucrat, or the brutal soldier. But, if the life of the average peasant did not change much, nevertheless the rich probably became richer, and the poor became poorer and more numerous as the moderate landholders were increasingly squeezed out of the picture.
The advance of Christianity
The advance of Christianity had just as profound an effect on the social and cultural fabric of Byzantine Egypt as on the political power structure. It brought to the surface the identity of the native Egyptians in the Coptic church, which found a medium of expression in the development of the Coptic language—basically Egyptian written in Greek letters with the addition of a few characters. Coptic Christianity also developed its own distinctive art, much of it pervaded by the long-familiar motifs of Greek mythology. These motifs coexisted with representations of the Virgin and Child and with Christian parables and were expressed in decorative styles that owed a great deal to both Greek and Egyptian precedents. Although Christianity had made great inroads into the populace by 391 (the year in which the practice of the local polytheistic religions was officially made illegal), it is hardly possible to quantify it or to trace a neat and uniform progression. It engulfed its predecessors slowly and untidily. In the first half of the 5th century a polytheistic literary revival occurred, centred on the town of Panopolis, and there is evidence that fanatical monks in the area attacked non-Christian temples and stole statues and magical texts. Outside the rarefied circles in which doctrinal disputes were discussed in philosophical terms, there was a great heterogeneous mass of commitment and belief. For example, both the gnostics, who believed in redemption through knowledge, and the Manichaeans, followers of the Persian prophet Mani, clearly thought of themselves as Christians. In the 4th century a Christian community, the library of which was discovered at Najʾ Ḥammādī in 1945, was reading both canonical and apocryphal gospels as well as mystical revelatory tracts. At the lower levels of society, magical practices remained ubiquitous and were simply transferred to a Christian context.
By the mid-5th century Egypt’s landscape was dominated by the great churches, such as the magnificent church of St. Menas (Abū Mīna), south of Alexandria, and by the monasteries. The latter were Egypt’s distinctive contribution to the development of Christianity and were particularly important as strongholds of native loyalty to the monophysite church. The origins of Antonian communities, named for the founding father of monasticism, St. Anthony of Egypt (c. 251–356), lay in the desire of individuals to congregate about the person of a celebrated ascetic in a desert location, building their own cells, adding a church and a refectory, and raising towers and walls to enclose the unit. Other monasteries, called Pachomian—for Pachomius, the founder of cenobitic monasticism—were planned from the start as walled complexes with communal facilities. The provision of water cisterns, kitchens, bakeries, oil presses, workshops, stables, and cemeteries and the ownership and cultivation of land in the vicinity made these communities self-sufficient to a high degree, offering their residents peace and protection against the oppression of the tax collector and the brutality of the soldier. But it does not follow that they were divorced from contact with nearby towns and villages. Indeed, many monastics were important local figures, and many monastery churches were probably open to the local public for worship.
The economic and social power of the Christian church in the Nile River valley and delta is the outstanding development of the 5th and 6th centuries. By the time of the Arab invasion, in the mid-7th century, the uncomplicated message of Islam might have seemed attractive and drawn attention to the political and religious rifts that successive and rival patriarchs of the Christian church had so violently created and exploited. But the advent of Arab rule did not suppress Christianity in Egypt. Some areas remained heavily Christian for several more centuries. Alan K. Bowman
Citation Information
Article Title: Ancient Egypt
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 28 February 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/ancient-Egypt
Access Date: August 16, 2019
Additional Reading
From prehistory to the Second Intermediate Period
The most-detailed presentation of Egyptian history, with full bibliographies arranged by subject, is the multivolume Cambridge Ancient History, though vol. 1 and 2 no longer reflect current knowledge. More recent overviews are presented in Ian Shaw (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2003); and Nicolas Grimal, A History of Ancient Egypt (1992; originally published in French, 1988). A more anthropological perspective is found in Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, 2nd ed. (2003). Wolfgang Helck, Eberhard Otto, and Wolhart Westendorf (eds.), Lexikon der Ägyptologie (1975– ), is the basic reference work in Egyptology, of which 6 vol. had appeared by 1986 with an additional volume of corrections and indexes by Wolfgang Helck published in 1992.
Michael A. Hoffman, Egypt Before the Pharaohs: The Prehistoric Foundations of Egyptian Civilization (1979, reissued 1984); and Béatrix Midant-Reynes, The Prehistory of Egypt from the First Egyptians to the First Pharaohs (2000; originally published in French, 1992), are comprehensive general works on prehistory; while Lech Krzyżaniak, Early Farming Cultures on the Lower Nile: The Predynastic Period in Egypt (1977), focuses on the transition to agriculture and on Lower Egypt.
General studies include Cyril Aldred, The Egyptians, rev. ed. (1984); and John Ruffle, Heritage of the Pharaohs: An Introduction to Egyptian Archaeology (1977); as well as other works cited below under the specific periods on which they focus. General histories include B.G. Trigger et al., Ancient Egypt: A Social History (1983), containing four essays on the main periods, concentrating on relations with Africa and including valuable bibliographies; and Sir Alan Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs (1961), a personal history, notable for the use made of ancient Egyptian texts. William W. Hallo and William Kelly Simpson, The Ancient Near East: A History (1971), is a reliable brief introduction; and Étienne Drioton and Jacques Vandier, L’Égypte: des origines à la conquête d’Alexandre, 4th ed. (1962, reprinted 1984), remains valuable for its critical discussions.
A detailed discussion of various historical periods can be found in Toby A.H. Wilkinson, Early Dynastic Egypt (2001; originally published, 1999); Jean Vercoutter, L’Égypte et la vallée du Nil: tome 1, des origines à la fin de l’Ancien Empire 12000–2000 av. J.C. (1992); and Claude Vandersleyen, L’Égypte et la vallée du Nil: tome 2, de la fin de l’Ancien Empire à la fin du Nouvel Empire (1995). John A. Wilson, The Burden of Egypt: An Interpretation of Ancient Egyptian Culture (1951, reprinted 1965), is a selective historical study. William C. Hayes, The Scepter of Egypt, 2 vol. (1953–59), is a detailed cultural history of Egypt to the end of the 20th dynasty, based on the collections in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
Wolfgang Helck, Geschichte des alten Ägypten (1968, reprinted 1981), is still the best general history; his Beziehungen Ägyptens zu Vorderasien im 3. und 2. Jahrtausend v. Chr., 2nd ed. (1971), is the fundamental work on foreign relations, and his Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Alten Ägypten im 3. und 2. Jahrtausend vor Chr. (1975) covers institutions and economics. Rolf Krauss, Sothis- und Monddaten: Studien zur astronomischen und technischen Chronologie Altägyptens (1985), is a vital chronological study for the 2nd and 1st millennia bce; its dates are adopted in this article with minor variations.
John Baines and Jaromír Málek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt (1980), is a concise geographically oriented survey. Hermann Kees, Ancient Egypt: A Cultural Topography (1961, reprinted 1977; originally published in German, 2nd ed., 1958; 3rd German ed., 1977), studies a number of major sites in depth. Karl W. Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: A Study in Cultural Ecology (1976), is a useful discussion of geographic and environmental conditions and their relation to the development of ancient Egyptian civilization.
Claude Vandersleyen et al., Das alte Ägypten (1975), is the most comprehensive survey of Egyptian art. W. Stevenson Smith, The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt, rev. ed., edited by William Kelly Simpson (1981), is an excellent general account; and, for the Old Kingdom, Smith’s History of Egyptian Sculpture and Painting in the Old Kingdom, 2nd ed. (1949), is still a fundamental source.
Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings, 3 vol. (1973–80), offers an excellent collection of texts in translation, covering the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms and the Late Period. A smaller selection of readings is available in William Kelly Simpson (ed.), The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, and Poetry, new ed. (1973); while James B. Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed. (1969), contains a wide selection of Egyptian material in translation.
Studies of administration include Klaus Baer, Rank and Title in the Old Kingdom (1960, reprinted 1974); to which Nigel Strudwick, The Administration of Egypt in the Old Kingdom: The Highest Titles and Their Holders (1985), adds a vast amount of detail. Wolfgang Helck, Zur Verwaltung des Mittleren und Neuen Reichs (1958), with a separately published index volume (1975), is the basic work on the succeeding periods.
From the New Kingdom to 332 bce
The rise of the New Kingdom is treated in Jürgen Von Beckerath, Untersuchungen zur politischen Geschichte der Zweiten Zwischenzeit in Ägypten (1964). Donald B. Redford, History and Chronology of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt: Seven Studies (1967); and Joyce Tyldesley, Hatchepsut: The Female Pharaoh (1996), include a reevaluation of Hatshepsut. An informative account of the New Kingdom empire at its height is David O’Connor and Eric H. Cline (eds.), Amenhotep III: Perspectives on His Reign (1998). For the controversial Amarna period, Rolf Krauss, Das Ende der Amarnazeit: Beitr. zur Geschichte u. Chronologie d. Neuen Reiches (1978); and Donald B. Redford, Akhenaten, the Heretic King (1984), offer strongly contrasting interpretations. Cyril Aldred, Akhenaten, King of Egypt (1988), is a good collection of the overall evidence for the period; and inscriptions of the time are translated by William J. Murnane, Texts from the Amarna Period in Egypt (1995).
For the Ramesside period, K.A. Kitchen, Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II King of Egypt (1982), sets its subject in context, presenting the New Kingdom in general as well as Ramses’ own reign. Edward F. Wente, Late Ramesside Letters (1967), deals with material from the end of the same period. The major work on the economy at that time is J.J. Janssen, Commodity Prices from the Ramessid Period: An Economic Study of the Village of Necropolis Workmen at Thebes (1975). John Romer, Ancient Lives: Daily Life in Egypt of the Pharaohs (1984), presents the life of the same community. T.G.H. James, Pharaoh’s People: Scenes from Life in Imperial Egypt (1984), is concerned with lifestyles of higher ranks of society in the same general period.
K.A. Kitchen, The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt (1100–650 B.C.), 2nd rev. ed. (1986), is the basic work on the period. Hermann Kees, Das Priestertum im ägyptischen Staat, vom neuen Reich bis zur Spätzeit (1953), with an index volume, Indices und Nachträge (1958), is a comprehensive analysis of the Egyptian priesthoods. This fundamental institution of the Late Period is also valuably treated in Serge Sauneron, The Priests of Ancient Egypt (1960, reprinted 1980; originally published in French, 1957). The period from the Saite 26th dynasty until Alexander the Great is addressed in Friedrich K. Kienitz, Die politische Geschichte Ägyptens vom 7. bis 4. Jahrhundert vor der Zeitwende (1953), based on both Egyptian and Classical sources. Alan B. Lloyd, Herodotus, Book II, 2 vol. (1975–76), contains much material on the Late Period. Peter F. Dorman
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
Ancient Greek civilization
historical region, Eurasia
Table of Contents
Introduction
The early Archaic period
The later Archaic periods
Classical Greek civilization
The 4th century
Conclusion
Ancient Greek civilization, the period following Mycenaean civilization, which ended about 1200 bce, to the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 bce. It was a period of political, philosophical, artistic, and scientific achievements that formed a legacy with unparalleled influence on Western civilization.
The early Archaic period
The post-Mycenaean period and Lefkandi
The period between the catastrophic end of the Mycenaean civilization and about 900 bce is often called a Dark Age. It was a time about which Greeks of the Classical age had confused and actually false notions. Thucydides, the great ancient historian of the 5th century bce, wrote a sketch of Greek history from the Trojan War to his own day, in which he notoriously fails, in the appropriate chapter, to signal any kind of dramatic rupture. (He does, however, speak of Greece “settling down gradually” and colonizing Italy, Sicily, and what is now western Turkey. This surely implies that Greece was settling down after something.) Thucydides does indeed display sound knowledge of the series of migrations by which Greece was resettled in the post-Mycenaean period. The most famous of these was the “Dorian invasion,” which the Greeks called, or connected with, the legendary “return of the descendants of Heracles.” Although much about that invasion is problematic—it left little or no archaeological trace at the point in time where tradition puts it—the problems are of no concern here. Important for the understanding of the Archaic and Classical periods, however, is the powerful belief in Dorianism as a linguistic and religious concept. Thucydides casually but significantly mentions soldiers speaking the “Doric dialect” in a narrative about ordinary military matters in the year 426. That is a surprisingly abstract way of looking at the subdivisions of the Greeks, because it would have been more natural for a 5th-century Greek to identify soldiers by home cities. Equally important to the understanding of this period is the hostility to Dorians, usually on the part of Ionians, another linguistic and religious subgroup, whose most-famous city was Athens. So extreme was this hostility that Dorians were prohibited from entering Ionian sanctuaries; extant today is a 5th-century example of such a prohibition, an inscription from the island of Paros.
Ancient Greece.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Phenomena such as the tension between Dorians and Ionians that have their origins in the Dark Age are a reminder that Greek civilization did not emerge either unannounced or uncontaminated by what had gone before. The Dark Age itself is beyond the scope of this article. One is bound to notice, however, that archaeological finds tend to call into question the whole concept of a Dark Age by showing that certain features of Greek civilization once thought not to antedate about 800 bce can actually be pushed back by as much as two centuries. One example, chosen for its relevance to the emergence of the Greek city-state, or polis, will suffice. In 1981 archaeology pulled back the curtain on the “darkest” phase of all, the Protogeometric Period (c. 1075–900 bce), which takes its name from the geometric shapes painted on pottery. A grave, rich by the standards of any period, was uncovered at a site called Lefkandi on Euboea, the island along the eastern flank of Attica (the territory controlled by Athens). The grave, which dates to about 1000 bce, contains the (probably cremated) remains of a man and a woman. The large bronze vessel in which the man’s ashes were deposited came from Cyprus, and the gold items buried with the woman are splendid and sophisticated in their workmanship. Remains of horses were found as well; the animals had been buried with their snaffle bits. The grave was within a large collapsed house, whose form anticipates that of the Greek temples two centuries later. Previously it had been thought that those temples were one of the first manifestations of the “monumentalizing” associated with the beginnings of the city-state. Thus, that find and those made in a set of nearby cemeteries in the years before 1980 attesting further contacts between Egypt and Cyprus between 1000 and 800 bce are important evidence. They show that one corner of one island of Greece, at least, was neither impoverished nor isolated in a period usually thought to have been both. The difficulty is to know just how exceptional Lefkandi was, but in any view it has revised former ideas about what was and what was not possible at the beginning of the 1st millennium bce.
Colonization and city-state formation
The term colonization, although it may be convenient and widely used, is misleading. When applied to Archaic Greece, it should not necessarily be taken to imply the state-sponsored sending out of definite numbers of settlers, as the later Roman origin of the word implies. For one thing, it will be seen that state formation may itself be a product of the colonizing movement.
The Olympic Games
The first “date” in Greek history is 776 bce, the year of the first Olympic Games. It was computed by a 5th-century-bce researcher called Hippias. He was originally from Elis, a place in the western Peloponnese in whose territory Olympia itself is situated. This date and the list of early victors, transmitted by another literary tradition, are likely to be reliable, if only because the list is so unassuming in its early reaches. That is to say, local victors predominate, including some Messenians. Messene lost its independence to neighbouring Sparta during the course of the 8th century, and this fact is an additional guarantee of the reliability of the early Olympic victor list: Messenian victors would hardly have been invented at a time when Messene as a political entity had ceased to exist. Clearly, then, record keeping and organized activity involving more than one community and centring on a sanctuary, such as Olympia, go back to the early 8th century. (Such competitive activity isan example of what has been called “peer-polity interaction.”) Records imply a degree of literacy, and there too the tradition about the 8th century has been confirmed by late 20th-century finds. A cup, bearing the inscription in Greek in the Euboean script “I am the cup of Nestor,” can be securely dated to before 700 bce. It was found at an island site called Pithekoussai (Ischia) on the Bay of Naples.
Overseas projects
The early overseas activity of the Euboeans has already been remarked upon in connection with the discoveries at Lefkandi. They were the prime movers in the more or less organized—or, at any rate, remembered and recorded—phase of Greek overseas settlement, a process known as colonization. (Euboean priority can be taken as absolutely certain because archaeology supports the literary tradition of the Roman historian Livy and others: Euboean pottery has been found both at Pithekoussai to the west and at the Turkish site of Al-Mina to the east.) This more-organized phase began in Italy about 750 and in Sicily in 734 bce; its episodes were remembered, perhaps in writing, by the colonies themselves. The word organized needs to be stressed, because various considerations make it necessary to push back beyond that date the beginning of Greek colonization. First, it is clear from archaeological finds, such as the Lefkandi material, and from other new evidence that the Greeks had already, before 750 or 734, confronted and exchanged goods with the inhabitants of Italy and Sicily. Second, Thucydides says that Dark Age Athens sent colonies to Ionia, and archaeology bears this out—however much one discounts for propagandist exaggeration by the imperial Athens of Thucydides’ own time of its prehistoric colonizing role. However, after the founding of Cumae (a mainland Italian offshoot of the island settlement of Pithekoussai) about 750 bce and of Sicilian Naxos and Syracuse in 734 and 733, respectively, there was an explosion of colonies to all points of the compass. The only exceptions were those areas, such as pharaonic Egypt or inner Anatolia, where the inhabitants were too militarily and politically advanced to be easily overrun.
One may ask why the Greeks suddenly began to launch these overseas projects. It seems that commercial interests, greed, and sheer curiosity were the motivating forces. An older view, according to which Archaic Greece exported its surplus population because of an uncontrollable rise in population, must be regarded as largely discredited. In the first place, the earliest well-documented colonial operations were small-scale affairs, too small to make much difference to the situation of the sending community (the “metropolis,” or mother city). That is certainly true of the colonization of Cyrene, in North Africa, from the island of Thera (Santorin); on this point, an inscription has confirmed the classic account by the 5th-century Greek historian Herodotus. In the second place, population was not uncontrollable in principle: artificial means such as infanticide were available, not to mention more-modern techniques like contraception. Considerations of this kind much reduce the evidential value of discoveries establishing, for example, that the number of graves in Attica and the Argolid (the area round Argos) increased dramatically in the later Dark Age or that there was a serious drought in 8th-century Attica (that is the admitted implication of a number of dried-up wells in the Athenian agora, or civic centre). In fact, no single explanation for the colonizing activity is plausible. Political difficulties at home might sometimes be a factor, as, for instance, at Sparta, which in the 8th century sent out a colony to Taras (Tarentum) in Italy as a way of getting rid of an unwanted half-caste group. Nor can one rule out simple craving for excitement and a desire to see the world. The lyric poetry of the energetic and high-strung poet Archilochus, a 7th-century Parian involved in the colonization of Thasos, shows the kind of lively minded individual who might be involved in the colonizing movement.
So far, the vague term community has been used for places that sent out colonies. Such vagueness is historically appropriate, because those places themselves were scarcely constituted as united entities, such as a city, or polis. For example, it is a curious fact that Corinth, which in 733 colonized Syracuse in Sicily, was itself scarcely a properly constituted polis in 733. (The formation of Corinth as a united entity is to be put in the second half of the 8th century, with precisely the colonization of Syracuse as its first collective act.)
The beginnings of the polis
The name given to polis formation by the Greeks themselves was synoikismos, literally a “gathering together.” Synoikismos could take one or both of two forms—it could be a physical concentration of the population in a single city or an act of purely political unification that allowed the population to continue living in a dispersed way. The classic discussion is by Thucydides, who distinguishes between the two kinds of synoikismos more carefully than do some of his modern critics. He makes the correct point that Attica was politically synoecized at an early date but not physically synoecized until 431 bce when Pericles as part of his war policy brought the large rural population behind the city walls of Athens. A more extreme instance of a polis that was never fully synoecized in the physical sense was Sparta, which, as Thucydides elsewhere says, remained “settled by villages in the old Greek way.” It was an act of conscious arrogance, a way of claiming to be invulnerable from attack and not to need the walls that Thucydides again and again treats as the sign and guarantee of civilized polis life. The urban history of Sparta makes an interesting case history showing that Mycenaean Sparta was not so physically or psychologically secure as its Greek and Roman successors. The administrative centre of Mycenaean Sparta was probably in the Párnon Mountains at the excavated site of the Menelaion. Then Archaic and Classical Sparta moved down to the plain. Byzantine Sparta, more insecure, moved out of the plain again to perch on the site of Mistra on the opposite western mountain, Taygetos. Finally, modern Sparta is situated, once again peacefully and confidently, on its old site on the plain of the river Eurotas.
The enabling factors behind the beginnings of the Greek polis have been the subject of intense discussion. One approach connects the beginnings of the polis with the first monumental buildings, usually temples like the great early 8th-century temple of Hera on the island of Samos. The concentration of resources and effort required for such constructions presupposes the formation of self-conscious polis units and may actually have accelerated it. As stated above, however, the evidence from Lefkandi makes it hard to see the construction of such monumental buildings as a sufficient cause for the emergence of the polis, a process or event nobody has yet tried to date as early as 1000 bce.
Another related theory argues that the birth of the Greek city was signaled by the placing of rural sanctuaries at the margins of the territory that a community sought to define as its own. That theory fits admirably a number of Peloponnesian sanctuaries; for instance, the temple complex of Hera staked out a claim, on the part of relatively distant Argos, to the plain stretching between city and sanctuary, and the Corinthian sanctuary on the promontory of Perachora, also dedicated to Hera, performed the same function. Yet there are difficulties. It seems that the Isthmia sanctuary, which at first sight seems a good candidate for another Corinthian rural sanctuary, was already operational as early as 900 bce, in the Protogeometric Period, and that date is surely too early for polis formation. Nor does the theory easily account for the rural temple of the goddess Aphaea in the middle of Aegina. The sanctuary is admittedly a long way from the town of Aegina, but Aegina is an island, and there is no obvious neighbour against whom territorial claims could plausibly have been asserted. Finally, a theory that has to treat the best-known polis—namely, Athens—and Attica as in every respect exceptional is not satisfactory: there is no Athenian equivalent of the Argive Heraeum.
A third theory attacks the problem of the beginnings of the polis through burial practice. In the 8th century (it is said) formal burial became more generally available, and that “democratization” of burial is evidence for a fundamentally new attitude toward society. The theory seeks to associate the new attitude with the growth of the polis. There is, however, insufficient archaeological and historical evidence for that view (which involves an implausible hypothesis that the process postulated was discontinuous and actually reversed for a brief period at a date later than the 8th century). Moreover, it is vulnerable to the converse objection as that raised against the second theory: the evidence for the third theory is almost exclusively Attic, and so, even if it were true, it would explain Athens and only Athens.
Fourth, one may consider a theory whose unspoken premise is a kind of “geographic determinism.” Perhaps the Greek landscape itself, with its small alluvial plains often surrounded by defensible mountain systems, somehow prompted the formation of small and acrimonious poleis, endlessly going to war over boundaries. That view has its attractions, but the obvious objection is that, when Greeks went to more-open areas such as Italy, Sicily, and North Africa, they seem to have taken their animosities with them. That in turn invites speculations of a psychologically determinist sort; one has to ask, without hope of an answer, whether the Greeks were naturally particularist.
A fifth enabling factor that should be borne in mind is the influence of the colonizing movement itself. The political structure of the metropolis, or sending city, may sometimes have been inchoate. The new colony, however, threatened by hostile native neighbours, rapidly had to “get its act together” if it was to be a viable cell of Hellenism on foreign soil. That effort in turn affected the situation in the metropolis, because Greek colonies often kept close religious and social links with it. A 4th-century inscription, for instance, attests close ties between Miletus and its daughter city Olbia in the Black Sea region. Here, however, as so often in Greek history, generalization is dangerous; some mother-daughter relationships, like that between Corinth and Corcyra (Corfu), were bad virtually from the start.
A related factor is Phoenician influence (related, because the early Phoenicians were great colonizers, who must often have met trading Greeks). The Phoenician coast was settled by communities similar in many respects to the early Greek poleis. It is arguable that Phoenician influence, and Semitic influence generally, on early Greece has been seriously underrated.
Theories such as these are stimulating and may each contain a particle of truth. The better position, however, is that generalization itself is as yet premature; in particular, archaeologically based theoretical reconstructions need much more refining. All one can say in summary is that in roughly the same period—namely, the 8th century—a number of areas, such as Corinth and Megara, began to define their borders, deny autonomy to their constituent villages, and generally act as separate states. Attica’s political synoecism, which occurred a little earlier, was complete perhaps about 900. Tempting though it is to seek a single explanatory model for those very roughly contemporaneous processes, one should perhaps allow that different paths of development were followed in different areas, even in areas next door to each other. After all, the Archaic and Classical histories of mighty democratic imperial Athens, of the miserable polis of Megara which nevertheless colonized Byzantium, of wealthy, oligarchic Corinth, and of federal Boeotia were all very different even though Athens, Megara, Corinth, and Boeotia were close neighbours.
One is perhaps on firmer ground when one examines the evidence for prepolis aggregations of larger units, often religious in character. There are a number of such associations whose origins lie in the Dark Age and whose existence surely promoted some feeling of local and particularist identity among the participants. The Ionians in Anatolia formed themselves into a confederation of 12 communities, the Ionian Dodecapolis, with a common meeting place; and there were comparable groupings among the Dorian Greeks of Anatolia and even among the Carians (partially Hellenized non-Greeks) in the same part of the world. The central location for such organizations was characteristically small and insignificant. One poorly attested but intriguing early Archaic league was the “Calaurian Amphictyony” (an amphictyony was a religious league of “dwellers round about”). Calauria, the small island now called Póros, was not a place of any consequence in itself, but the league’s seven members included Athens and Aegina, two major Greek poleis. The most famous and enduring such amphictyony, however, was the one that, originally from a distance, administered the affairs of the sanctuary of Delphi in central Greece. That sanctuary contained the most-famous, though not the oldest, Greek oracle (the oldest was at Dodona); oracles were a mechanism by which divinely inspired utterances were produced in answer to specific questions. Finally, it is worth noting an adventurous suggestion that Lefkandi itself might have been the centre of some kind of religious amphictyony, but, if so, this would be an exception to the principle that religious centres tended themselves to be insignificant, however mighty their participating members.
Early Archaic Greek civilization
The sources
Before attempting to characterize Archaic Greece, one must admit candidly that the evidence is unsatisfactory. Only for Athens is anything like a proper political tradition known, and Athens’s development toward the democracy of the 5th century was amazingly and untypically rapid by comparison with other states, many of which never became democratic at all. A tiny but salutary scrap of evidence makes this point: Thucydides in Book II of his History of the Peloponnesian War casually mentions a man called Evarchus as “tyrant” of a small northwestern Greek polis called Astacus in the 420s bce. But for this chance mention, one would never have guessed that tyranny could have existed or persisted in such a place so late or so long. Another difficulty is that, while a fair amount about the social structure of Classical Athens is known, some of it must go back to Archaic times; just how much is disputed.
There is a further complication. In both the political and the social spheres, one has to reckon—chiefly at Athens, but elsewhere too—with “invented tradition,” a distorting element for which proper allowance is only now beginning to be made. Thus, it seems that not just Lycurgus, the famous Spartan lawgiver (whose historicity was doubted even in antiquity), but even a reforming figure like Solon of Athens, who certainly existed in the 6th century and large fragments of whose poetry still survive, was in some respects what anthropologists call a “culture hero.” Much was projected onto him anachronistically or just wrongly, and reformers in later generations established their credentials by claiming (if they were reactionaries) that they were trying to “get back to Solon” or (if they were democrats) that Solon was their founding father. Such errors should not induce too much pessimism: at Athens at least, individual aristocratic families preserved oral traditions, which affected the later literary records in ways that can be properly understood with the help of anthropological analogy. That is to say, not all the evidence so preserved is unusable, but it needs handling in special ways.
It has even been argued that social life too was creatively manipulated. Later Greek cities contained, alongside such transparent political institutions as the Popular Assembly and the Deliberative (“Probouleutic”) Council, a more-opaque set of institutions, ostensibly based on kinship groupings. The biggest and most basic of these groupings were the phylae, or “tribes,” according to which the citizen body was subdivided. Thus, all Dorian states had the same three tribes, and there were four Ionian tribes (although Ionian states were less conservative than Dorian, and one finds among them a greater readiness to innovate; late 6th-century Athens, for example, switched from a four-tribe hereditary system of citizenship to a 10-tribe one based on simple residence as well as descent). Smaller subdivisions were the phratry, a word connected with a philological root meaning “brother,” and the genos, a smaller cluster of families (oikoi).
The existence of these groupings in historical times is beyond question; one finds them controlling citizen intake (as in the so-called “Demotionidai” inscription from the Attic village of Decelea, datable to as late as the early 4th century bce) and entering into complicated property arrangements. What has become a matter of debate, however, is the question of just how old they actually were. According to the most-skeptical view, the whole apparatus of tribe and genos was an invention without any Dark Age history to legitimate it. This view, which rests partly on the near absence of the relevant kinship terminology in Homer, is not ultimately convincing in its hypothesis of a kind of complicated collective fraud on posterity. Yet it is right to allow for an element of conscious antiquarianism at certain periods (the 320s in Athens being one), which may well have affected specific traditions.
Society and values
Bacchiadae and Eupatridae
The world of the colonizing states was aristocratic in the sense that a small number of exclusive clans within cities monopolized citizenship and political control. At Corinth, for example, political control was monopolized by the adult males of a single clan, the Bacchiadae. They perhaps numbered no more than a couple of hundred. At Athens there was a general class of Eupatridae, a word that just means “people of good descent”—i.e., aristocrats. (The word may have had a simultaneous but narrower application to one single genos. This, however, is disputed, and, in any event, that hypothetical family was only one among many privileged genē. The case, therefore, is not analogous to that of the Bacchiadae.) It is unlikely that the Eupatridae were as rigidly defined as the Bacchiadae, and the negative tradition that Solon in the early 6th century deprived them of their exclusive claim to political office may just be the excessively formal and precise way in which later ancient commentators described a positive change by which power was made more generally available than it had been before.
With regard to those same early Archaic times, one hears—for example, in the poetry of the 7th-century Boeotian Hesiod—of control, sometimes oppressively exercised, by basileis (singular basileus). That word is usually translated as “kings,” and such titles as the Athenian basileus (an official, or archon, with a defined religious competence, conveniently but less correctly called the archon basileus by modern scholars) are then explained as survivals of an age of monarchy. That account in terms of fossilization certainly eases the awkwardness of explaining why, for instance, the wife of the archon basileus was held to be ritually married to the god Dionysus. The very existence of kingship in Geometric (as opposed to Mycenaean) Greece, however, has been challenged, and a case has been made (though not universally accepted) for seeing most of those Archaic basileis not as kings in any sense but as hereditary nobles. In the latter case, there is no great difference between those basileis and such aristocrats as the Bacchiadae.
Symposia and gymnasia
Life inside the Archaic Greek societies ruled by such families can be reconstructed only impressionistically and only at the top of the social scale; the evidence, to an extent unusual even in Greco-Roman antiquity, is essentially elitist in its bias. Aristocratic values were transmitted both vertically, by family oral traditions, and horizontally, by means of a crucial institution known as the symposium, or feast, for which (many literary scholars now believe) much surviving Archaic poetry was originally written. Perhaps much fine painted pottery was also intended for that market, though the social and artistic significance of such pottery is debated. Some scholars insist that the really wealthy would at all times have used gold and silver vessels, which, however, have not survived in any numbers because they were melted down long ago.
Symposia were eating and dining occasions with a strong ritual element; their existence is reflected in the marked emphasis, in the Homeric poems, on ostentatious feasting and formal banqueting as assertions of status (what have been called “feasts of merit”). Thus, Sarpedon in Homer’s Iliad reminds Glaucus that both of them are honoured with seats of honour and full cups in Lycia and with land (a sacred precinct, or temenos) to finance all the feasting. Symposia were confined to males (a reminder of the military ethos so prevalent in Homer); although when the institution was introduced, along with the vine, to Etruria—where much of the visual evidence comes from—it changed its character and became open to both sexes. The Greek symposium proper can be seen as an instrument of social control; it is a more-tangible unit of social organization, and one with better-attested Homeric antecedents, than the problematic genē or phratries discussed above.
In Classical times, strong homosexual attachments were another way in which values were inculcated, passed on by the older man (the erastes) to the younger eromenos, or beloved. The gymnasium was the venue where such relationships typically developed. As with the symposium, there was an almost ritual element to it all; certain gifts—such as, for example, the gift of a hare—were thought especially appropriate. The date, however, at which Greek homosexuality became a central cultural institution is problematic; it is notoriously absent from the Homeric poems, a fact that some scholars explain as being the result of poetic reticence. The more-plausible view is that homosexuality was in some way connected with the rise of the polis and was part of what has been called the “8th-century renaissance.” If so, Homer’s silence is after all significant: he does not mention it because in his time it was not yet important.
Both symposia and gymnasia in different ways mirrored or were preparatory to warfare (see below). Interpolis athletic competitions (such as the Olympic Games) are another reflection of warfare. Epinician poetry of the Classical period (that is, “victory poetry” like that of Pindar, whose epinician odes celebrate the athletic victories of aristocratic individuals) constantly uses the language of war, fighting, and victory. Indeed, one influential view of organized athletic competitions is that they are a restructuring of the instinct to hunt and kill.
Formal relationships
With the great athletic festivals, which brought Greeks together at set intervals of years to Olympia and later to Delphi, Nemea, and the Isthmus (the four great Panhellenic, or “all-Greek,” games), one passes from the internal organization of individual Greek societies to their interrelationships. Two kinds of powerful interrelationship have already been noted—that between colonizing or mother city and daughter city and the shared membership of an amphictyony. Mythical links between one city and another were maintained and exploited throughout all periods by a process which has been felicitously called “kinship diplomacy.” The most common such link was that between mother and daughter city and involved the stressing of shared ancestry—that is, common descent from some mythical hero or founder figure. Such kinship diplomacy was taken very seriously by all parties and as late as the Hellenistic period was the basis for alliances or other sorts of common action. Modern historians tend to stress the “particularism” of Greek culture—i.e., the separate development and carefully cultivated local identity of the individual polis. Networks of kinship diplomacy were one means by which this particularism was softened in practice.
At the individual level, the basic institution in intercity relationships was that of “guest-friendship,” or xenia. That was another area where ritual elements were present to such a marked degree that the whole institution has been called “ritualized friendship.” The same aristocrats who drank and heard poetry together inside their own communities naturally expected to find comparable groups inside other states. They cemented their ties, which had perhaps been formed on initially casual or trading visits, with formal relationships of xenia. At some point quite early in the Archaic period that institution developed into something still more definite, the proxenia. Proxenoi were citizens of state A living in state A who looked after the interests of citizens of state B. The status of proxenos was surely in origin hereditary, but by Thucydides’ time one hears of “voluntary proxenoi” (etheloproxenoi). The antiquity of the basic institution is not in doubt, however much the 5th-century Athenian empire may have exploited and reshaped it for its own political convenience; a 7th-century inscription from the island of Corcyra mentioning a proxenos from Locris is the earliest attestation of the institution.
Another way of institutionalizing relationships between the nationals of different states was epigamia, an arrangement by which the offspring of marriage were treated as citizens of the wife’s polis if the husband settled there; and so was the husband. Athens, for example, granted epigamia to Euboea as late as the 5th century, a time when Athenian citizenship was fiercely protected. There are still earlier instances: usually one hears of epigamia when for one reason or another it was being suspended or denied. Thus, there was an early arrangement between the islands of Andros and Paros, which, Plutarch says, ended when relations went sour. More interesting is the statement, again by Plutarch, that there was no intermarriage between members of two of the villages, or demes, of Attica, Pallene and Hagnous. Far from being evidence that these places were somehow originally separate states, the prohibition was more like a ban on endogamy: in other words, the two communities were regarded—like members of a family—as being too close to be allowed to intermarry.
Thus, both marriage itself and prohibition of marriage were ways of defining the relations between communities, including communities within a single large state like Attica, and of keeping those relations friendly. One way in which ties of xenia and marriage can now be traced in detail is the scientific study of Greek personal names, because patterns of naming reflect social realities; foreign names enter a city’s name pool as a result of both formal connections and less formal ones, such as temporary residence. Such “onomastic” evidence, as it is called, can now be studied in bulk and in depth, thanks to the computer-aided publication of all known Greek personal names, most of them attested from inscriptions.
The chief vehicle of interaction among poleis, however, was through warfare and through the formal suspension or renunciation of warfare by means of heavily ritualized treaties (one of the most common words for such a treaty is spondai, which literally means “libations” to the guaranteeing gods). The earliest surviving inscriptional peace treaty “for all time” dates from the 6th century and was found at Olympia. Nonetheless, there were surely agreements to limit warfare over strips of boundary land before that date. Archaeology may offer unexpected help in this matter: it is possible and plausible that some frontier zones were by tacit or explicit agreement left fallow. One such zone seems to have been the remote Skourta plain, which separates part of northern Attica from Boeotia; preliminary surface survey (i.e., the estimation of settlement patterns by gathering of potsherds) carried out in and after 1985 suggests that it was—perhaps deliberately—left uncultivated in the Archaic period.
The Lelantine War
An important landmark in interstate military relations of the kind considered here was the Lelantine War. It was the earliest Greek war (after the mythical Trojan War) that had any claim to be considered “general,” in the sense that it involved distant allies on each side. Fought in perhaps the later 8th century between the two main communities of Euboea, Chalcis and Eretria, it took its name from the fertile Lelantine Plain, which separates the cities and includes the site of Lefkandi. (It is an interesting modern suggestion that Lefkandi itself is the site of Old Eretria, abandoned about 700 bce in favour of the classical site Eretria at the east end of the plain, perhaps as a consequence of Eretria’s defeat in the war. This theory, however, needs to account for Herodotus’s statement that at the early 6th-century entertainment of the suitors of Cleisthenes of Sicyon there was one Lysanias from Eretria, “then at the height of its prosperity.”)
Other faraway Greek states were somehow involved in the war; on this point Thucydides agrees with his great predecessor Herodotus. Thus, Samos supported Chalcis and Miletus, Eretria. Given Euboean priority in overseas settlement, it is natural to suppose that the links implied by the traditions about the Lelantine War were the result of Euboean overseas energy, but that energy would hardly have turned casual contacts into actual alliances without a preliminary network of guest-friendships. Whether the oracle at Delphi took sides in the war, as a modern speculation has it, is less certain, though there is no doubt that, by some means wholly mysterious to the 21st century, Delphi often provided updated information about possible sites for settlement and even (as over Cyrene) gave the original stimulus to the emigration.
One can be more confident in denying the thoroughly anachronistic notion that the Lelantine War shows the existence of “trade leagues” at this early date. Religious amphictyonies are one thing, but trade leagues are quite another; the evidence, such as it is, suggests that early trade was carried on by entrepreneurial aristocratic individuals, who no doubt exploited their guest-friendships and formed more such friendships during their travels. It is true, however, that such individuals tended to come from areas where arable land was restricted, and to this extent it is legitimate to speak in a generic way of those areas as having in a sense a more commercially minded population than others. One example of such an area is the Lelantine Plain, an exceptionally good piece of land on a notably barren and mountainous, though large, island. Herodotus described one such trader from the later Archaic period, Sostratus of Aegina, a man of fabulous wealth. Then in the early 1970s a remarkable inscription was found in Etruria—a dedication to Apollo in the name of Sostratus of Aegina. This discovery revealed that the source of his wealth was trade with Etruria and other parts of Italy. Aegina is an island whose estimated Classical population of about 40,000 was supported by land capable of supporting only about 4,000. One may quarrel with the first figure as too large and the second figure as too pessimistic (it makes insufficient allowance for the possibilities of highly intensive land use). Even after adjustment, however, it is clear that Aegina needed to trade in order to live. It is not surprising to find Sostratus’s home city of Aegina included among the Greek communities allowed to trade at Naukratis in pharaonic Egypt; that arrangement is described by Herodotus, and the site has been explored archaeologically. Aegina was the only participating city of Greece proper, as opposed to places in the eastern Aegean.
The later Archaic periods
The rise of the tyrants
Dealings with opulent Asian civilizations were bound to produce disparities in wealth, and hence social conflicts, within the aristocracies of Greece. One function of institutions such as guest-friendship was no doubt to ensure the maintenance of the charmed circle of social and economic privilege. This system, however, presupposed a certain stability, whereas the rapid escalation of overseas activity in and after the 8th century was surely disruptive in that it gave a chance, or at least a grievance, to outsiders with the right go-getting skills and motivation. Not that one should imagine concentration of wealth taking place in the form most familiar to the 21st century—namely, coined money. Since 1951 the date of the earliest coinage has been fairly securely fixed at about 600 bce; the crucial discovery was the excavation and scientific examination of the foundation deposit of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in Anatolia. The first objects recognizably similar to coined money were found there at levels most scholars (there are a few doubters) accept as securely dated.
Coinage did not arrive in Greece proper until well into the 6th century. There were, however, other ways of accumulating precious metals besides collecting it in coined form. Gold and silver can be worked into cups, plates, and vases or just held as bar or bullion. There is no getting round the clear implication of two poems of Solon (early 6th century) that, first, gold and silver were familiar metals and, second, wealth was now in the hands of arrivistes.
The decline of the aristocracy
The first state in which the old aristocratic order began to break up was Corinth. The Bacchiadae had exploited Corinth’s geographic position, which was favourable in ways rivaled only by that of the two Euboean cities already discussed. Like Chalcis, which supervised sea traffic between southern Greece and Macedonia but also had close links with Boeotia and Attica, Corinth controlled both a north-south route (the Isthmus of Corinth, in modern times pierced by the Corinth Canal) and an east-west route. This second route was exploited in a special way. Corinth had two ports, Lechaeum to the west on the Gulf of Corinth and Cenchreae to the east on the Saronic Gulf. Between the two seas there was a haulage system, involving a rightly famous engineering feat, the so-called diolkos (“portage way”). The diolkos, which was excavated in the 1950s, was a line of grooved paving-stones across which goods could be dragged for transshipment (probably not the merchant ships themselves, though there is some evidence that warships, which were lighter, were so moved in emergencies). There is explicit information that the Bacchiadae had profited hugely from the harbour dues. As the Greek world expanded its mental and financial horizons, other Corinthian families grew envious. The result was the first firmly datable and well-authenticated Greek tyranny, or one-man rule by a usurper. This was the tyranny of Cypselus, who was only a partial Bacchiad.
Aristotle, in the 4th century, was to say that tyrannies arise when oligarchies disagree internally, and that analysis makes good sense in the Corinthian context. The evidence of an inscribed Athenian archon list, found in the 1930s and attesting a grandson of Cypselus in the 590s, settled an old debate about the date of Cypselus’s coup: it must have happened about 650 (a conclusion for which there is other evidence) rather than at the much later date indicated by an alternative tradition. Cypselus and his son Periander ruled until about 587 bce; Periander’s nephew and successor did not last long. Precisely what factor in 650 made possible the success of the partial outsider Cypselus is obscure; no Bacchiad foreign policy failure can be dated earlier than 650. General detestation for the Bacchiadae, however, is clear from an oracle preserved by Herodotus that “predicts” that Cypselus will bring dikē, or justice, to Corinth after the rule of the power-monopolizing Bacchiadae. No doubt this oracle was fabricated after the event, but it is interesting as showing that nobody regretted the passing of the Bacchiadae.
Changes in warfare
Modern scholars have tried to look for more general factors behind Cypselus’s success than a desire in a new world of wealth and opportunity to put an end to Bacchiad oppressiveness and exclusivity. One much-favoured explanation is military, but it must be said straightaway that the specific evidence for support of Cypselus by a newly emergent military class is virtually nonexistent. The background to military change, a change whose reality is undoubted, needs a word.
Aristocratic warfare, as described in the Homeric epics, puts much emphasis on individual prowess. Great warriors used chariots almost as a kind of taxi service to transport themselves to and from the battlefield, where they fought on foot with their social peers. The winner gained absolute power over the person and possessions of the vanquished, including the right to carry out ritual acts of corpse mutilation. That general picture is surely right, though it can be protested that Homer’s singling out of individuals may be just literary spotlighting and that the masses played a respectably large part in the fighting described in the epics. There is some force in that objection and in the converse and related objection that in Archaic and Classical hoplite fighting individual duels were more prevalent than is allowed by scholars anxious to stress the collective character of hoplite combat. Still, a change in methods of fighting undoubtedly occurred in the course of the 7th century.
The change was to a block system of fighting, in which infantry soldiers equipped with heavy armour, or hopla (including helmet, breastplate, greaves, sword, spear, and a round shield attached to the left arm by a strap), fought, at least during part of an engagement, in something like coherent formation, each man’s sword arm being guarded by the shield of the man on his right. This last feature produced a consequence commented on by Thucydides—namely, a tendency of the sword bearer to drift to the right in the direction of the protection offered by his neighbour. For this reason the best troops were posted on the far right to act as anchor-men. The system, whose introduction is not commented on by any literary source, is depicted on vases in the course of the 7th century, though it is not possible to say whether it was a sudden technological revolution or something that evolved over decades. The second view seems preferable since the discovery in the 1950s of a fine bronze suit of heavy armour at Argos in a late 8th-century context.
Clearly, the change has social and political implications. Even when one acknowledges some continuation of individual skirmishing, much nonetheless depended on neighbours in the battle line standing their ground. An oath sworn by Athenian military recruits (ephēboi) in the 4th century includes clauses about not disgracing the sacred weapons, not deserting comrades, and not handing down a diminished fatherland (to posterity); the oath and the word ephēbe are 4th-century, but the institutionalizing of hoplite obligations and expectations is surely much older. Early land warfare can, in fact, be thought of as a symbolic expression of the Greek city’s identity. This helps to explain the strong ritual elements in a hoplite battle, which typically began with a sacrifice and taking of omens and ended with victory dedications, often of bronze suits of armour, in some appropriate sanctuary. It is above all the heavily armed troops, not the lightly armed or the sailors in the fleet (nor even the cavalry), who were thought of as in a special sense representing the Classical polis. Thus at Classical Athens the 10-tribe citizen system determined the organization of the hoplite army but is much less important in the manning of the fleet.
The influential “hoplite theory” of the origin of tyranny seeks to explain one general phenomenon of the 7th century—namely, the beginning of tyranny—by reference to another, the introduction of hoplite weapons and tactics with their greater emphasis on a collective, corporatist ethos. Insofar as both phenomena represent reactions against aristocratic rule, it is reasonable loosely to associate the two, but it is important to realize that the theory, however seductive, is in its strict form a modern construction.
In the first place, the connection is never made by intelligent ancient writers interested both in the mechanics and psychology of hoplite warfare on the one hand and in tyranny on the other. Thucydides, for instance, a military historian if ever there was one, saw tyranny primarily in economic terms. Aristotle does indeed say that the extension of the military base of a state is liable to produce a widening of the political franchise, but this comment has nothing specifically to do with tyranny. He explains tyranny elsewhere either as resulting from splits within oligarchies or by an anachronistic 4th-century reference to demagogic leadership, which, when combined with generalship, is liable to turn into tyranny (there he is surely thinking above all of Dionysius I of Syracuse).
In the second place, it is discouraging for the hoplite theory that there is so little support for it in the best-attested case, that of Cypselid Corinth. Attempts have indeed been made to get around the natural implication of the evidence, but they are not convincing. For instance, the ancient statement that Cypselus had no bodyguard ought to be given its natural meaning, which is a denial of the military factor; it ought not to be ingeniously twisted so as to imply that he did not need a bodyguard because (it is argued) he had the support of identifiable army groups. Furthermore, although it is true that Cypselus is called polemarch (which ought to mean a “leader in war”), it is suspicious that his activities in this capacity were entirely civil and judicial. Suspicion increases when one notes that polemarch was indeed the title of a magistrate in Classical Athens.
The early tyrannies
Other tyrannies are equally resistant to general explanations, except by circularity of reasoning. The Corinthian tyranny has been treated first in the present section because its dates are secure. There is, however, a more shadowy figure, Pheidon of Argos, who may have a claim to be earlier still and who has also been invoked as an exemplification of the military factor in the earliest tyrannies. Unfortunately, one ancient writer, Pausanias, puts him in the 8th century, while Herodotus puts him in the 6th. Most modern scholars emend the text of Pausanias and reidentify Herodotus’s Pheidon as the grandson of the great man. This allows them to put Pheidon the tyrant in the 7th century and to associate him with a spectacular Argive defeat of Sparta at Hysiae in 669 bce. His success is then explained as the product of the newly available hoplite method of fighting. (The 8th-century suit of armour from Argos would in fact allow the connection between Pheidon and hoplites even without discarding Pausanias.)
Greek expansion (9th–6th centuries bc).Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
That construction assumes much that needs to be proved, and the hoplite theory is in fact being invoked in order to give substance to Pheidon rather than Pheidon lending independent support to the theory. It is a further cause for disquiet that some of the detail in the literary tradition about Pheidon is suspiciously suggestive of the 4th century; thus, Aristotle’s statement that Pheidon was a king who became a tyrant is strikingly appropriate for Philip II of Macedon, who built up his military autocracy from a hereditary base of a traditional sort and whose dynasty did in fact interestingly claim Argive origins and thus regarded Pheidon as an ancestor.
Two other tyrannies date securely from the 7th century and perhaps happened in imitation of Cypselus; both arose in states immediately adjoining Corinth. Theagenes of Megara makes an appearance in history for three reasons: he slaughtered the flocks of the rich (an action incomprehensible without more background information than is available); he tried about 630 to help his son-in-law Cylon to power at Athens; and he built a fountain house that can still be seen off the “Road of the Spring-House” in modern Megara. The last two items reveal something interesting about the social and cultural character of established tyrannies, but none of the three offers much support for the military or any other general theory of the cause of tyranny.
At Sicyon the Orthagorid tyranny, whose most splendid member was the early 6th-century Cleisthenes, may have exploited the anti-Dorianism already noted as a permanent constituent of the mentality of some Greeks; but since the relevant action—a renaming of tribes—falls in the time of Cleisthenes himself, it is no help with the problem of why the first Sicyonian tyrant came to power at all. In any case, the main object of Cleisthenes’s dislike seems to have been not Dorians in general but Argos in particular: the renaming is said to have been done to spite the Argives.
Notwithstanding the skepticism of what has been said above, some solid general points can be made about the tyrannies mentioned (Athens and Sparta followed peculiar paths of development and must be treated separately). First, those tyrannies have more in common than their roughly 7th-century dates: several of the most famous are situated around or near the Isthmus of Corinth. That surely suggests a partly geographic explanation; that is, there was an influx of new and subversive notions alongside the purely material goods that arrived at this central zone. Places with a more stagnant economic and social life, such as Boeotia and Thessaly, neither colonized nor experienced tyrannies. In fact, some version of Thucydides’ economic account of the rise of tyranny may be right, though there too (as with the origins of the city-state or the motives behind acts of colonization) one must be prepared to accept that different causes work for different states and to allow for the simple influence of fashion and contagion.
Reflection on the places that avoided tyrannies leads to the second general point. Another way of looking at tyranny is to concentrate on its rarity and seek explanations for that. After all, there were hundreds of Greek states, many of them extremely small, which, as far as is known, never had tyrannies. The suggested explanation is that in places with small populations there was enough scope for office holding by most of the city’s ambitious men to make it unnecessary for any of them to aspire to a tyranny. (One can add that certain places are known to have taken positive steps to ensure that regular office did not become a stepping-stone to tyranny. For example, a very early constitutional inscription shows that 7th-century Drerus on Crete prohibited tenure of the office of kosmos—a local magistracy—until 10 years had elapsed since a man’s last tenure.) That is a refreshing approach and surely contains some truth. Nonetheless, the qualification “as far as is known” is important: with regard to many places there is no better reason for saying that they avoided tyranny than for saying that they had it. Moreover, the view that tyranny was widespread may indeed be a misconception, although, if so, it was an ancient one: Thucydides himself says that tyrannies were established in many places. Finally, the psychological argument from satisfaction of ambition is only partly compelling: it was surely more rewarding in every way to be a tyrant than to be a Dreran kosmos.
Sparta and Athens
Sparta
The distinctiveness of Sparta
Prominent among the states that never experienced tyranny was Sparta, a fact remarked on even in antiquity. It was exceptional in that and in many other respects, some of which have already been noted: it sent out few colonies, only to Taras (Tarentum, in southern Italy) in the 8th century and—in the prehistoric period—to the Aegean islands of Thera and Melos. It was unfortified and never fully synoecized in the physical sense. And it succeeded, exceptionally among Greek states, in subduing a comparably sized neighbour by force and holding it down for centuries. The neighbour was Messenia, which lost its independence to Sparta in the 8th century and did not regain it until the 360s. It was the Messenian factor above all that determined the peculiar development of Sparta, because it forced Spartans to adjust their institutions to deal with a permanently hostile subject population.
Despite Sparta’s military prominence among Greek states, which is the primary fact about it, Sparta’s development is especially difficult to trace. That is so partly because there are few Archaic or Classical Spartan inscriptions. Even more important, there is very little genuine Spartan history written by Spartans (there was no Spartan Herodotus or Thucydides, though both men were deeply fascinated by Sparta, as indeed were most Greeks). And partly it is so because—a related point—“invented tradition” had been particularly active at Sparta. As early as the 5th century one finds “laconizers” in other states (the word derives from “Laconia,” the name for the Spartan state, or Lacedaemon, and signifies cultural admiration for Sparta and its institutions).
The Spartan tradition in European thought can be traced through the centuries up to modern times, though it has never amounted to a single easily definable set of ideas. In the intellectual world of the 4th century bce, when many of the most significant myths about Sparta seem to have been concocted, Sparta, chiefly under the influence of idealist philosophers seeking some solution to civic disorder, was virtually turned into a shorthand expression for a pure community free from stasis (internal dissension and fighting) with equality of land ownership and other utopian features that never existed in the historical Sparta or anywhere else. In the Roman period Sparta had become a tourist attraction, a place of uncouth, half-invented rituals. This was also the period when Sparta the living legend consciously traded on and exported fantasies about its great past (in the Hellenistic First Book of Maccabees one even finds the idea seriously put forward that the Jews and Spartans were somehow kin). If more is said about Athens than about Sparta in the present section, that is not because Athens was intrinsically more important but because the amount of usable evidence about it is incomparably greater.
By way of compensation for the lack of evidence about Sparta there are two items of cardinal importance: an extraordinary document about the early Spartan constitution and state, preserved by the Greek writer Plutarch (the “Great Rhetra”), and the poetry of the 7th-century Spartan poet Tyrtaeus. Tyrtaeus wrote poetry in elegiac couplets (alternating hexameter and pentameter lines) intended for symposia. Much of it is military in character and enshrines the hoplite ethic in a developed form at a time when Sparta and Argos were at each other’s throats (a fragment of Tyrtaeus’s poetry published in 1980 definitely disproved modern skepticism about whether Sparta and Argos could have confronted each other militarily as early as the 660s).
Sparta had two kings, or basileis. If it is right that this title merely denotes hereditary nobles with stated prerogatives, this was originally one of its less remarkable aspects. It is odd, however, that the number two should have been so permanently entrenched. In other respects the Sparta that emerged from the Dark Age had many standard features, such as a warrior assembly based on communal eating in “messes,” syssitia (a system analogous to the symposium system), and a council of elders. Magistrates called ephors were unique to Sparta and its offshoots, but there is nothing intrinsically odd about formal magistracies.
The Rhetra
The Rhetra is an alleged response by the Delphic oracle to the lawgiver Lycurgus around the 9th or 8th century bce. The Rhetra purports to define the powers of the various Spartan groups and individuals just mentioned. It begins, however, by saying that the tribes must be “tribed” (or “retained”; the Greek is a kind of pun) and the obes (a word for a locality) must be “obed.” The meaning there is desperately obscure, but in an 8th-century context it ought to refer to some kind of political synoecism (Sparta, as stated, was never physically synoecized). The tribes and obes must be the units of civic organization. The Rhetra demands the setting up of a council with the kings and stipulates regular meetings for the Assembly (something not attested at Athens until far later). A crucial final clause seems to say firmly that the people, or damos, shall have the power. Yet a rider to the Rhetra, associated with the late 8th-century kings Theopompus and Polydorus, says that, if the people choose crookedly, the elders and kings shall be dissolvers. A poem of Tyrtaeus’s has traditionally been thought to echo both parts of that document, rider as well as Rhetra, but that relationship has recently been challenged. Certainly there is some circularity in the usual reconstructions of one crucial corrupt line of the relevant poem.
The Rhetra is a precocious constitutional document, if it really dates to the 9th or early 8th century, and for that and other reasons (Delphi was not active and writing was not common much before the middle of the 8th century) it is common practice to date the whole document or pair of documents a century or two later. On this view, which is not here followed, the Rhetra itself, with its stipulation of powers for the (hoplite) damos, is a 7th-century manifestation of hoplite assertiveness: in fact, it represents a kind of Spartan alternative to tyranny. The references to tribes and obes are then seen as part of a reform of the citizen body and of the army, comparable to and not much earlier than tribal changes elsewhere (see below The reforms of Cleisthenes). The rider then dates from an even later period, when Spartan military reverses called for a reactionary readjustment of the balance of power.
That view—which involves down-dating Theopompus and Polydorus to the 7th century from the 8th and still more arbitrarily attributing to them the activity presupposed by the Rhetra rather than the rider—does too much violence to the best chronological evidence (that of Thucydides and Herodotus), and a view in terms of 8th-century political synoecism should be preferred. As for the alleged army reform, nothing can be said about it in detail. The best reconstruction is hardly more than a creative fabrication from Hellenistic evidence that dealt with a Spartan religious festival but had nothing straightforwardly to do with the army at all.
The helot factor
It was definitely in the 8th century that Sparta took the step which was to make it unique among Greek states. It had already, in the Dark Age, coerced into semisubject, or “perioikic,” status a number of its more immediate neighbours. Then, in the second half of the 8th century, it undertook the wholesale conquest of Messenia (c. 735–715). One consequence, already noted, was the export of an unwanted group, the Partheniai, to Taras. These were sons of Spartan mothers and non-Spartan fathers, procreated during the absence in Messenia of the Spartan warrior elite. A still more important consequence of the conquest of Messenia, “good to plow and good to hoe” as Tyrtaeus put it, was the acquisition of a large tract of fertile land and the creation of a permanently servile labour force, the “helots,” as the conquered Messenians were now called.
The helots were state slaves, held down by force and fear. A 7th-century revolt by the Messenians (the “Second Messenian War”) was put down only after decades of fighting and with the help (surely) of the new hoplite tactics. The relationship of hatred and exploitation (the helots handed over half of their produce to Sparta) was the determining feature in Spartan internal life. Spartan warrior peers (homoioi) were henceforth subjected to a rigorous military training, the agoge, to enable them to deal with the Messenian helots, whose agricultural labours provided the Spartans with the leisure for their military training and life-style—a notoriously vicious circle.
The agoge and the Sparta that it produced can best be understood comparatively by reference to the kind of male initiation ceremonies and rituals found in other warrior societies. Up to the Second Messenian War, Sparta’s political institutions and cultural life had been similar to those in other states. It had an artistic tradition of its own and produced or gave hospitality to such poets as Alcman, Terpander, and Tyrtaeus. But now Spartan institutions received a new, bleak, military orientation. Social sanctions like loss of citizen status were the consequence of cowardice in battle; a system of homosexual pair-bonding maintained the normal hoplite bonds at a level of ferocious intensity; and the economic surplus provided by the lots of land worked by the helots was used to finance the elite institution of the syssitia, with loss of full citizen status for men who could not meet their “mess bill.” The agoge, however, transformed Sparta and set it apart from other states. The difficulties of reconstructing the details of the agoge are acute: “invented tradition” has been unusually busy in that area. But a recent investigator goes too far in seeing the agoge as the work of the 3rd-century Stoic philosopher Sphaerus; the Greek historian Xenophon in the 4th century allows us to glimpse the essentials.
The helot factor affected more than Sparta’s internal life. Again and again modifications were forced on Sparta in the sphere of foreign policy. The Spartans could not risk frequent military activity far from home, because this would entail leaving behind a large population of discontented helots (who outnumbered Spartans by seven to one). A solution, occasionally tried by adventurous Spartan commanders, was selective enfranchisement of helots. Yet this called for nerve that even the Spartans did not have: on one occasion 2,000 helots, who were promised freedom and were led garlanded round the temples, disappeared, and nobody ever found out what had happened to them. Some person or persons evidently had second thoughts. Xenophon, who was no enemy to Sparta, illuminated helot attitudes in his description of an episode called the “Kinadon affair,” which happened at the very beginning of the 4th century; it was suppressed with ruthless and effective speed. The leader Kinadon, according to Xenophon, said that the rebel groups, among whom helots are listed in first place, would have liked to eat the Spartans raw, and incidents such as this one explain why.
Attempts to minimize the importance of that episode as evidence for helot discontent should be firmly resisted. It is a question whether the tension should be seen as Messenian nationalism or as the expression of class struggle, but nationalism cannot be the whole story. One effect of the helot phenomenon was the brutalization of the Spartan elite itself. Spartan violence toward other Greeks, particularly taking the form of threats with or actual use of sticks (bakteriai), is attested with remarkable frequency in the sources, as is the resentment of such treatment by other Greeks. It seems that Spartans of the officer class had a habit of treating other Greeks like the helots by whom they were outnumbered and surrounded at home, and the implied insult and humiliation was deeply resented. The arrogant use of a nonmilitary weapon such as a stick actually added to the degradation.
The Peloponnesian League
After the suppression of the Messenian revolt (perhaps not before 600), Sparta controlled much of the Peloponnese. In the 6th century it extended that control further, into Arcadia to the north, by diplomatic as well as by purely military means. On the diplomatic level, Sparta, the greatest of the Dorian states, deliberately played the anti-Dorian card in the mid-6th century in an attempt to win more allies. Sparta’s Dorianism was unacceptable to some of its still-independent neighbours, whose mythology remembered a time when the Peloponnese had been ruled by Achaean kings such as Atreus, Agamemnon, and his son Orestes (in a period modern scholars would call Mycenaean).
The central symbolic act recorded by tradition was the talismanic bringing home to Sparta of the bones of Orestes himself—a way for Sparta to claim that it was the successor of the old line of Atreus. The result was an alliance with Arcadian Tegea, which in turn inaugurated a network of such alliances, to which has been given the modern name of the Peloponnesian League. A valuable 5th-century inscription found in the 1970s concerning a community in Aetolia (north-central Greece) illuminated the obligations imposed by Sparta on its allies: above all, full military reciprocity—i.e., the requirement to defend Sparta when it was attacked, with similar guarantees offered by Sparta in return. Another, more obviously pragmatic, reason why Sparta attracted to itself allies in areas like Arcadia was surely fear of Argos. Archaic and Classical Argos never forgot the great age of Pheidon, and from time to time the Argives tried to reassert a claim to hegemony in mythical terms of their own. One way of doing so was to back the claim of the Pisatans (rather than the Eleans) to run the Olympic Games.
In the same period (the middle of the 6th century), Sparta drew on its enhanced prestige and popularity in the Peloponnese to take its antipathy to tyranny a stage further: a papyrus fragment of what looks like a lost history supports Plutarch’s statement that Sparta systematically deposed tyrants elsewhere in Greece—the tyrannies in Sicyon, Naxos, and perhaps even the Cypselid at Corinth (though this may be a confusion for a similarly named community called Cerinthus on Euboea).
The most famous deposition was Sparta’s forcible ending of the tyranny at Athens. Finally one must ask, however, what were Sparta’s motives for those interventions. Perhaps part of the motive was genuine ideological dislike of tyranny; Sparta was to exploit this role as late as 431, when it entered the great Peloponnesian War as would-be liberator of Greece from the new “tyranny” in Greece—namely, the Athenian empire. But that theory can be turned on its head: perhaps the Spartans retrojected their antipathy to tyranny into the Archaic period as a way of justifying their moral stance in the late 430s. Or Sparta may have been worried about the ambitions of Argos, with which certain tyrants, like the Athenian, had close connections. Or it may have longsightedly detected sympathy on the part of certain tyrants toward the growing power of Persia: it is true that Sparta made some kind of diplomatic arrangement with the threatened Lydian power of the Anatolian ruler Croesus not long before his defeat by Persia in 546.
If suspicion of Persia was behind the deposition of the tyrants, Sparta was inconsistent in carrying out its anti-Persian policy; it did not help Croesus in his final showdown with Persia, nor did it help anti-Persian elements on Samos, nor did it do much in the years immediately before the great Greek-Persian collision of 480–479 called the Persian War (it sent no help to the general rising of Ionia against Persia in 499 nor to Athens at the preliminary campaign of Marathon in 490). Inconsistency of diplomatic decision making on the part of Sparta is, however, always explicable for a reason already noticed—its helot problem.
Athens
The distinctiveness of Athens
Athens was also highly untypical in many respects, though perhaps what is most untypical about it is the relatively large amount of evidence available both about Athens as a city and imperial centre and about Attica, the territory surrounding and controlled by Athens. (That element presents a particular difficulty when one attempts to pass judgment on the issue of typicality versus untypicality in ancient and especially Archaic Greek history; it often is not known whether a given phenomenon is frequent or merely frequently attested. That kind of thing creates difficulties for what students of modern history call “exceptionalist” theories about particular states.) Even at Athens there is much that is not yet known; for instance, of the 139 villages, or demes, given a political definition by Cleisthenes in 508, only a handful have been properly excavated.
First, it is safe to say that Attica’s huge size and favourable configuration made it unusual by any standards among Greek poleis. Its territory was far larger than that of Corinth or Megara, whereas Boeotia, though in control of a comparable area, resorted to the federal principle as a way of imposing unity. Like Corinth but unlike Thebes (the greatest city of Classical Boeotia), Athens had a splendid acropolis (citadel) that had its own water supply, a natural advantage making for early political centralization. And Athens was protected by four mountain systems offering a first line of defense.
Second, Attica has a very long coastline jutting into the Aegean, a feature that invited it to become a maritime power (one may contrast it with Sparta, whose port of Gythion is far away to the south). That in turn was to compel Athens to import quantities of the ship-building timber it lacked, a major factor in Athenian imperial thinking. (It helps to explain its 5th-century interest in timber-rich Italy, Sicily, and Macedon.)
Third, although Attica was rich in certain natural resources, such as precious metal for coinage—the silver of the Laurium mines in the east of Attica—and marble for building, its soil, suitable though it is for olive growing, is thin by comparison with that of Thessaly or Boeotia. That meant that when Athens’s territory became more densely populated after the post-Mycenaean depopulation, which had affected all Greece, it had to look for outside sources of grain, and, to secure those sources, it had to act imperialistically. Some scholars have attempted to minimize Athens’s dependence on or need for outside sources of grain and to bring down the date at which it began to draw on the granaries of southern Russia via the Black Sea (as it definitely did in the 4th century). Certainly, there were fertile areas of Attica proper, for instance near Marathon, and at many periods Athens directly controlled some politically marginal but economically productive areas such as the Oropus district to the north or the island of Lemnos. A case can also be made for saying that if Athenians had been prepared to eat less wheat and more barley, Athens could have fed itself. Real needs, however, are sometimes less important than perceived needs, and for the understanding of Athenian imperial actions it is more important that its politicians believed (even if modern statisticians would say they were wrong) that internal sources of grain must be endlessly supplemented from abroad. Nor is it entirely plausible to dissociate Athens’s 7th-century acquisition of Sigeum from the provisioning possibilities of the Black Sea region.
Unlike the Peloponnese, with its tradition of Dorian invasion from the north, Athens claimed to be “autochthonous”—that is, its inhabitants had occupied the same land forever. Like any such claim, it was largely fiction, but it helped to make up for Athens’s relative poverty in religion and myth: it has nothing to compare with the great legends of Thebes (the Oedipus story) or the Peloponnese (Heracles; the house of Atreus). There was one hero, however, who could be regarded as specially Athenian, and that was Theseus, to whom the original political synoecism of Attica was attributed even by a hardheaded writer like Thucydides.
Theseus slaying the MinotaurTheseus slaying the Minotaur, detail of a vase (stamnos) painting by the Kleophrades Painter, 6th century bce; in the British Museum. Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum
At whatever date one puts this “Thesean” synoecism, or centralization (perhaps 900 would be safe), it seems that the late Dark Age in Attica saw the opposite process taking place at the physical level; that is, the villages and countryside of Attica were in effect “colonized” from the centre in the course of the 8th century. The process may not have been complete until even later. That explains why Athens was not one of the earliest colonizing powers: the possibility of “internal colonization” within Attica itself was (like Sparta’s expansion into Messenia) an insurance against the kind of short-term food shortages that forced such places as Corinth and Thera to siphon off part of their male population.
In fact, Athens did acquire one notable overseas possession as early as 610 bce, the city of Sigeum on the way to the Black Sea. Yet as long as its neighbour Megara controlled Salamis, a large and strategically important island in the Saronic Gulf, the scope for long-distance Athenian naval operations was restricted; the excellent tripartite natural harbour of Piraeus was not safe for use until Salamis was firmly Athenian. Until then, Athens had to make do with the more open and less satisfactory port facilities of Phalerum, roughly in the region of the modern airport. Thus there was an obvious brake on naval expansion.
By the later 7th century then, Athens was looking abroad, and it is not surprising to find it experiencing some of the strains that in the 8th century had led to tyrannies elsewhere. Indeed, it narrowly escaped a first attempt at tyranny itself, that of Cylon, the Olympic victor (630s). The close connection between athletic success and military values has been noted; there was an equally close connection between athletic and political achievement, and not just in the Archaic age. Cylon was helped by his father-in-law Theagenes of Megara, a fact that underlines, as does Megarian possession of Salamis until the 6th century, the lateness of Athens’s growth to great power status: Classical Megara was a place of small consequence. That Cylon’s attempt was a failure is interesting, but too little is known about his potential following to prove either that Athenian tyranny was an idea whose time had not yet come or that there is social and economic significance merely in the fact of his having made the attempt.
Cylon’s attempt had two consequences for Athenian history. The first is certain but fortuitous: Cylon’s followers were put to death in a treacherous and sacrilegious way, which was held to have incriminated his killers, notably Megacles, a member of the Alcmaeonid genos. Pollution attracted in this way is a slippery conception; it could wake or sleep, as Aeschylus put it. That particular pollution adhered even to persons who were not on their father’s side members of the Alcmaeonid genos, such as the great 5th-century leader Pericles, and was usually “woken up” for deliberate and political ends.
The other consequence may not be a consequence at all but a coincidence in time. It was not many years after the Cylon affair that the Athenian lawgiver Draco gave the city its first comprehensive law code (perhaps 621). Because of the code’s extreme harshness, Draco’s name has become a synonym for legal savagery. But the code (the purely political features of which are irrecoverably lost to the present short of some lucky inscriptional find) was surely intended to define and so ameliorate conditions; the Athenian equivalents of the “bribe-eating basileis” of the Boeotian Hesiod’s poem could still dispense a rough, but no longer arbitrary, justice. Further than that it is not safe to go; Draco’s code, like that of the statesman and poet Solon (c. 630–560), was destroyed by antidemocrats in the late 5th century. A detailed constitution foisted on Draco has survived in the treatise called the Constitution of Athens, attributed to Aristotle and found on papyrus in 1890. That document says much about the psychology of 411 bce and little about the situation in 621.
Solon
Whatever the connection between Cylon and Draco—and one must beware the trap of bringing all the meagre facts about the Archaic period into relation with each other—firmer grounds for postulating economic and social unrest in late 7th-century Attica are to be found in the poetry of Solon. Solon is the first European politician who speaks to the 21st century in a personal voice (Tyrtaeus reflects an ethos and an age). Like the other Archaic poets mentioned, Solon wrote for symposia, and his more frivolous poetry should not be lost sight of in preoccupation with whathe wrote in self-justification. He was a man who enjoyed life and wanted to preserve rather than destroy.
Solon.© Photos.com/Thinkstock
Solon’s laws, passed in 594, were an answer to a crisis that has to be reconstructed largely from his response to it. Most scholars believe that Solon’s laws continued to be available for consultation in the 5th and 4th centuries; that (as noted above) did not prevent distortion and manipulation. In any case, by the 4th century, the age of treatises like the Constitution of Athens and other works by local historians of Attica (“Atthidographers”), much about early Attica had been forgotten or was misunderstood. Above all, there was a crucial failure to understand the dependent status of those who worked on the land of Attica before Solon abolished that status, which was conceived of as a kind of obligation or debt; this abolition, or “shaking off of burdens,” was the single most important thing Solon did. When one divides Solon’s work, as will be done here for convenience, into economic, political, and social components, one may fail to grasp the possibility that there was a unified vision organizing it all and that in this sense no one reform was paramount. Perhaps the poem of Solon’s that sums up best what he stood for is a relatively neglected and not easily elucidated one, but an important one nonetheless, in which he seems to claim that nobody else could have done what he did and still have “kept the cream on the milk.” That is to say, his was, in intention at least, a more just though still a stratified society that sought to retain the cooperation of its elite.
Solon canceled all “debt” (as stated, that cannot yet have been debt incurred in a monetary form). He also abolished enslavement for debt, pulling up the boundary markers, or horoi, which indicated some sort of obligation. The act of pulling up the horoi was a sign that he had “freed the black earth.” The men whose land was designated by those horoi were called “sixth-parters” (hektēmoroi) because they had to hand over one-sixth of their produce to the “few” or “the rich” to whom they were in some sense indebted. Solon’s change was retrospective as well as prospective: he brought back people from overseas slavery who no longer spoke the Attic language (this is the evidence, hinted at above, for thinking that the problems facing Solon went back at least a generation, into the period of Draco or even Cylon).
Enslavement for debt was not an everyday occurrence in the world of Aristotle or Plutarch (although the concept never entirely disappeared in antiquity), and they seem to have misunderstood the nature of the debt or obligation that the horoi indicated. It is not only Aristotle and Plutarch who found the situation bewildering. It has seemed odd to modern scholars that mere defaulting on a conventional debt should result in loss of personal freedom. Hence they have been driven to the hypothesis that land in Archaic Greece was in a strong sense inalienable and thus not available as security for a loan (of perhaps seed-corn or other goods in kind). Only the person of the “debtor” and members of his family could be put up as a kind of security. Incurable damage has, however, been done to this general theory by the independent dismantling of any idea that land in Archaic Greece was in fact inalienable (such Greek prohibitions on alienation as one hears of tend to date from late and semimythical contexts such as the 4th-century literary reworking of tradition about Sparta or from post-Archaic colonial contexts where the object of equal and indivisible land-portions was precisely to avoid the injustices and agricultural buying-up and asset stripping left behind at home).
Evidently then, some new approach is needed, and it can be found in the plausible idea that what Solon got rid of was something fundamentally different from ordinary debt. In fact, hektemorage was a kind of originally voluntary contractual arrangement whereby the small man gave his labour to the great man of the area, forfeiting a sixth of his produce and symbolically recognizing this subordination by accepting the installation of a horos on the land. In return the other perhaps provided physical protection. This would go back historically to the violent and uncertain Dark Age when Attica was being resettled and there was danger from cattle rustlers, pirates (nowhere in Attica is far from the sea), or just greedy neighbours.
Alternatively, hektemorage may simply have been the contractual basis on which powerful men assigned land to cultivators in the 9th and 8th centuries, when Attica was being reclaimed after the previous impoverished period. As the 7th century wore on, however, there was scope in Attica for enrichment of an entirely new sort, involving concentration of precious metal in marketable or at least exchangeable form as a result of contacts with elegant, rich, and sophisticated new worlds across the sea. That produced more violent disparities of wealth and a motive for “cashing” the value of a defaulting labourer. On his part, the labourer may have felt that his low social status, once acceptable or inevitable, was no longer commensurate with his military value in the new hoplite age. So Solon’s abolition of hektemorage was as much a social and political as an economic change.
That theory of the origin of hektemorage is attractive and explains much. It is disconcerting, however, that the best analogies that can be offered for such semi-contractual “servitude for debt” are from older hierarchical civilizations dependent on highly organized exploitation of man-made irrigation systems (so-called “hydraulic economies”). It is hard to see who or what institution, in Geometric Attica, had the authority—in the absence of any kind of priest-king—to impose the hektemorage system generally throughout the large area of Attica. Nonetheless, one can accept that hektemorage was as much a matter of status as of economic obligation.
Solon’s main political changes were first to introduce a Council of 400 members alongside the old “Thesean” council of elders known as the Areopagus, from the Hill of Ares next to the Acropolis, where it met. The functions of this new Council of Solon are uncertain, but that is no reason to doubt its historicity. Solon’s Council is perhaps important not so much for itself as for what it anticipated—the replacement Council of Five Hundred, introduced by Cleisthenes at the end of the 6th century.
Second, Solon allowed appeal to the hēliaia, or popular law court. The composition of this body is the subject of fierce scholarly dispute; one view sees it as a new and wholly separate body of sworn jurors, enjoying even at this date a kind of sovereignty within the state. The more usual view is that the hēliaia was the Assembly in its judicial capacity. The latter view is preferable: neither in Solon’s time nor later is it plausible to posit large juries whose makeup or psychology was distinct from that of the political Assembly. In later times, such appeal to the people was regarded as particularly democratic. But that is just the kind of anachronism one must be careful of when estimating Solon: until pay for juries was introduced in the 460s, such juries could not be a buttress of democracy. Moreover, it would take a courageous peasant (there were no professional lawyers or speech writers as yet) to get up and articulately denounce a bribe-swallowing basileus, especially if—as seems possible—unsuccessful appeal could actually result in increase of sentence.
Third, Solon admitted to the Assembly the lowest economic “class” in the Athenian state, the thētes, whose status was henceforth defined in terms of agricultural produce. The quotes are necessary because investing such fixed economic statuses, or tele, with political significance was an innovation of Solon himself; that is, his fourth political reform was to make eligibility for all political office (not just the bare right of attending the Assembly) dependent on wealth and no longer exclusively on birth (a “timocratic” rather than an “aristocratic” system). Solon’s four classes were the “five-hundred-bushel men,” or pentakosiomedimnoi; the hippeis, or cavalry class; the zeugitai, or hoplites; and the thētes, the class that later provided most of the rowers for the fleet.
Again, the immediate impact of the change need not have been cataclysmic: many of the older aristocracy (whether or not one should think of them as a closely defined group of “eupatridae”—that is, “people of good descent”) would still have been eligible for office even after the change. But there was also a need to cater to men who were outsiders in the technical sense of not belonging to the older genē: the name of one such excluded but high-status category of families has perhaps come down to the present, the so-called orgeones. Nor were Solon’s four classes themselves entirely new (as indeed the Constitution of Athens actually admits in an aside). Thus there were horsemen and even hoplites before Solon, and thētes are mentioned in Homer. The phrase five-hundred-bushel men, which at first sight looks like a prosaic and unimaginative new coinage, acquired in 1968 a 9th-century archaeological analogue: a set of five model granaries was found in a female grave excavated in the Agora. It clearly was a pre-Solonian status symbol (“I was the daughter of a pentakosiomedimnos”). An interesting suggestion sees the four classes as originally religious in character: their members may have had allocated functions in the festivals of the synoecized Athenian state. This is not strictly provable but is plausible because the political and military life of Athens and Attica was at all times seen in religious terms.
Solon’s social legislation seems generally designed to reduce the primacy of the family and increase that of the community, or polis. To that extent it can be regarded as embryonically democratic. For instance, his laws on inheritance made it easier to leave property away from the family. He also legislated to restrict ostentatious mourning at funerals and to prevent spectacular burials (“aggressive funerals,” as they were called by one modern Marxist authority), which were potentially a way for aristocratic families to assert their prestige. (And not just a potential way, either: a great noble called Cimon was buried later in the 6th century in true “Lefkandi style”—that is, close to the horses with which he had won three times at the Olympic Games. That burial was surely in defiance of the Solonian rules.) As can be seen from the Antigone of the 5th-century tragic poet Sophocles, death and funerary ritual were always an area in which the family, and especially the women, had traditional functions. For the state to seek to regulate them was a major shift of emphasis.
The whole thrust of Solon’s reforms was to define and enlarge the sphere of activity of the polis. He was concerned to recognize and increase the power of the ordinary Athenian thēte and hoplite, while containing without destroying the privileges of the aristocratic “cream.” By uprooting the horoi, symbols of a kind of slavery, he created the Attica of independent smallholders one encounters as late as the 4th century. And he gave them political rights to match, “as much as was sufficient,” as a poem of his puts it.
One result of Solon’s reforms cannot have been intentional: the abolition of hektemorage created, in modern terms, a “gap in the work force.” From then on it was beneath the dignity of the emancipated Athenian to work for a master. Some other source of labour had to be found, and it was found in the form of chattel slaves from outside. That means that the whole edifice of culture and politics rested on the labour of men and women who by “right” of purchase or conquest had become mere things, mere domestic, agricultural, or mining equipment, and whose presence in Classical Attica rose into the tens of thousands. For by the 5th century, slave owning was not confined to the aristocratic few but had been extended to the descendants of that very class Solon had liberated from another kind of slavery.
Initially the Solonian solution was an economic failure, however true it is to attribute to him the economic shape of Classical Attica. Solon himself was almost, but not quite, a tyrant. The orthodox Greek tyrant was associated with redistribution of land and cancellation of debts, though this association was to a large extent a mere matter of popular perception because wholesale redistribution of land is extraordinarily rare in Greek history.
Solon did cancel debts. He also redistributed the land in the sense that the former hektēmoroi now had control without encumbrance of the land they had previously worked with strings attached. He did not, however, redistribute all the land, because he left the rich in possession of the land the hektēmoroi had previously worked for them. In this respect Solon’s rule differed from tyranny. It also differed in his simple avoidance of the word; after his year of legislative activity he simply disappeared instead of supervising the implementation of that legislation. That was unfortunate for the former hektēmoroi, who needed to be supported in the early years. Growing olive trees, which were a staple of Attica, was an obvious recourse for the farmer in new possession of his own plot, but it takes 20 years for olive trees to reach maturity. Such farmers could hardly look for charity to their former masters, whose wealth and privilege Solon had curtailed. Instead they looked to a real tyrant, Peisistratus.
The Peisistratid tyranny
It took more than one attempt to establish the Peisistratid tyranny, but in its long final phase it lasted from 546 to 510. After the death of Peisistratus, the tyrant’s son Hippias ruled from 527 to 510 with the assistance if not co-rule of his brother Hipparchus, who was assassinated in 514.
Hostility to the tyrants on the part of 5th-century informants like Herodotus makes it difficult to ascertain the truth about them. That they ruled with the acquiescence of the great nobles of Attica is suggested by a 5th-century archon list discovered in the 1930s, which shows that even the post-Peisistratid reformer Cleisthenes, a member on his father’s side of what Herodotus calls the “tyrant-hating” Alcmaeonid genos, was archon in the 520s. It is also suggested by the fact that Miltiades, a relative of the gorgeously buried Cimon, went out to govern an outpost in the Thracian Chersonese, hardly against the wishes of the tyrants. Furthermore, even the Peisistratids did not confiscate property indiscriminately, though they did levy a tax of 5 percent. That tax enabled them to redistribute wealth to those who now needed it—that is, those who “had joined him through poverty after having their debts removed (by Solon).” Although a formally ambiguous expression, it must in common sense apply to pre-Solonian debtors, not creditors.
How far Peisistratus, who seems to have started as a leader of one geographic faction, specifically mobilized hoplite support at the outset is uncertain, but such military backing is a little more plausible in his century than in the mid-7th century when the “Isthmus tyrants” were seizing power. (Peisistratus’s position was, however, buttressed by bodyguards; here, for once, is a tyrant who in some ways fits Aristotle’s otherwise excessively 4th-century model.) In any case, Peisistratus’s introduction of “deme judges”—that is, judges who traveled round the villages of Attica dispensing something like uniform justice—was an important leveling step, both socially and geographically, and one should imagine that as an appeal to the goodwill of the hoplite and thetic classes. It also, in the longer term, anticipated (as did the well-attested road-building activity of the Peisistratids) the unification of Attica, which Cleisthenes was to carry much further.
PeisistratusPeisistratus, copper engraving, 1832.Interfoto/Alamy
Whether or not Peisistratus climbed to power with hoplite help, he surely strengthened Athens militarily in a way that must have involved hoplites. Indeed, the Peisistratid period ought to count as one of unequivocal military and diplomatic success, and literary suggestions otherwise should be discounted as products of aristocratic malice. In that period should be put the first firm evidence of the tension between Athens and Sparta that was to determine much of Classical Greek history—namely, Athenian alliances not just with Sparta’s enemy Argos but in 519 with Boeotian Plataea. (The Plataeans, faced with coercion from their bigger neighbour Thebes, sued for this alliance at the prompting of Sparta itself; this, however, is evidence of among other things Spartan-Athenian hostility because Sparta’s motive, it was said, was to stir up trouble between Thebes and Athens.) Moreover, it may have been in the Peisistratid period that the sanctuary of Eleusis, near Athens’s western border and always important for defensive and offensive as well as for purely religious reasons, was fortified. But that is controversial.
This is also the period in which Athens began to be an organized naval power: Salamis became definitively Athenian in the course of the 6th century (tradition credits its annexation to both Solon and Peisistratus), with consequences already noted. The island was secured by the installation of what was probably Athens’s first cleruchy, a settlement of Athenians with defense functions. Again, it is then that one finds definite mention of the first Athenian triremes, which formed a small private fleet in possession of Miltiades.
The trireme, a late Archaic invention (the first Greek ones are said to have been built at Corinth), was a formidable weapon of war pulled by 170 rowers and carrying 30 other effectives. A full-sized working trireme, first launched in Greece in 1987 and demonstrated in 1993 on the River Thames in London, proved beyond any further debate that triremes were operated by three banks of oars (rather than by three men to an oar). More generally, its size, technological sophistication, and visual impact make it possible to understand Classical Athens’s psychological and actual domination of the seas. A proper Peisistratid navy is implied by the tradition that Peisistratus intervened on Naxos and “purified” the small but symbolically important island of Delos, a great Ionian centre. This purification involved ritual cleansing ceremonies and the digging up of graves. As with Eleusis, however, this was deliberate exploitation of religion for the purposes of political assertion.
Elsewhere in Attica also, the Peisistratids interested themselves in organized religion. A literary text first published in 1982 states explicitly what was always probable, that Peisistratus actively supported the local cult of Artemis Brauronia (an aspect of Artemis concerned with female transitions) in eastern Attica (the locality from which Peisistratus himself came) and so helped to make it the fully civic cult it is in Aristophanes’ play of 411, Lysistrata. Too much, however, should not be credited to Peisistratus; it has been protested that the relationship between local and city cults in Attica was always one of reciprocity and dialogue. Nevertheless, the explicit evidence about Peisistratus’s care for his home cult of Brauron, and the permanent military importance of Eleusis on the way to Peisistratus’s enemies in the Peloponnese, make it plausible to suppose a heightening of interest in these two particular sanctuaries precisely in the tyrannical period.
Peisistratid religious and artistic propaganda, and in particular the extent to which the evidence of painted pottery can be used by the political historian, is a modern scholarly battlefield. It has been suggested, on the basis of this sort of evidence, that Peisistratus deliberately identified himself with Heracles, the legendary son of Zeus and Alcmene, and that this is reflected on vase paintings. Yet there are problems; it may be wrong, for reasons already noted, to accord to painted pottery the importance required for the theory. Certainly it needs to be proved that potters, not a numerous or powerful group at any time, had the kind of social standing that would give weight to their “views” as represented on vases, which price lists show were dirt-cheap. In addition, there are particular difficulties about supposing that any man, tyrant or not, could at this early date get away with posing as a god.
One is on firmer ground with the Peisistratid building program reflecting not only the tyrant’s concern for the water supply (comparable to that shown by the Megarian tyrant) but including the construction of a colossal temple to Olympian Zeus (completed at the time of Hadrian). That and more conjectural buildings on the Acropolis were a direct anticipation of the 5th-century building program of imperial Athens. Unlike painted pottery, they could be commissioned only as a deliberate act by men with plentiful command of money and muscle.
remains of the Temple of Olympian ZeusRemains of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens, Greece.Brand X Pictures/Jupiterimages
The tyrant Hippias was expelled from Athens by the Spartans in 510. They no doubt hoped to replace him with a more compliant regime, true to their general policy, as described by Thucydides, of supporting oligarchies congenial to themselves. Oligarchy, or rule by the relatively wealthy few, however defined, and tyranny were in 510 the basic alternatives for a Greek state. The newly emancipated Athens of the last decade of the 6th century, however, reacted against its Spartan liberators and added a third member to the list of the political possibilities—democracy. Spartan disappointment at this turn of events expressed itself not merely in unsuccessful armed interventions intended to install a prominent Athenian, Isagoras, as tyrant (506) and even to reinstate Hippias (c. 504) but also in attempts to persuade the world, and possibly themselves, that their relations with the Peisistratids had actually been good (hence another source of distortion in the tradition about the tyrants, who on this account emerged as friends, not enemies, of Sparta).
The reforms of Cleisthenes
In 508, after a short period of old-fashioned aristocratic party struggles, the Athenian state was comprehensively reformed by Cleisthenes, whom Herodotus calls “the man who introduced the tribes and the democracy,” in that order. The order is important. Cleisthenes’ basic reform was to reorganize the entire citizen body into 10 new tribes, each of which was to contain elements drawn from the whole of Attica. These tribes, organized initially on nothing more than residence and not on the old four Ionian tribes based purely on descent, would from then on determine whether or not a man was Athenian and so fix his eligibility for military service.
The tribes were also the key part of the mechanism for choosing the members of a new political and administrative Council of Five Hundred, whose function it was to prepare business for the Assembly. The Council, or Boule, insofar as it was drawn roughly equally from each tribe, could be said to involve all Attica for the first time in the political process: all 140 villages, or demes, were given a quota of councillors—as many as 22 supplied by one superdeme and as few as 1 or 2 by some tiny ones. An interesting case has been made for saying that this political aspect was secondary and that the Cleisthenic changes were in essence and intention a military reform. Herodotus, for example, remarks on the military effectiveness of the infant Cleisthenic state, which had to deal immediately and successfully with Boeotian and Euboean invasions. And there were arguably attempts, within the Cleisthenic system, to align demes from different trittyes" class="md-crosslink">trittyes (tribal thirds) but the same tribe along the arterial roads leading to the city, perhaps with a view to easy tribal mobilization in the city centre. It is right that the political aspects of Cleisthenes (who was in fact far from producing democracy in the full sense) can too easily be overemphasized at the expense of the military; but the better view is that the new system had advantages on more than one level simultaneously.
One military result of Cleisthenes’ changes is not in dispute: from 501 on, military command was vested in 10 stratēgoi, or commanders (the usual translation “generals” obscures the important point that they were expected to command by sea as well as by land). Normally, each of the 10 tribes supplied one of these generals. They were always directly elected. Direct election for the stratēgia remained untouched by the tendency in subsequent decades to move in the general direction of appointment by lot. (Appointment by lot was more democratic than direct election because the outcome was less likely to be the result of manipulation, pressure, or a tendency to “deferential voting.”)
Even the Athenians were not prepared to sacrifice efficiency to democratic principle in this most crucial of areas. The number 10 remained sacrosanct and so (probably) did the “one tribe, one general” principle, though later in the 5th century, and in the 4th, it was possible for one tribe to supply two generals, one of whom was elected at the expense of the tribe whose candidate had polled the fewest votes. Again, the object was to ensure maximum efficiency: there might be two outstanding men in one tribe. Another peculiarity of the stratēgia, to be explained in the same way, was that reelection, or “iteration,” was possible. (Actually it is not quite certain that the stratēgia was unique in this respect; it is possible that iteration was possible for the archonship as well.)
The Cleisthenic system was based on the trittys, or tribal “third.” There were three kinds of trittys to each of the 10 tribes, the kinds being called “inland,” “coastal,” and “city.” There were therefore 30 trittyes in all, and each of the 139 demes belonged to a trittys and a tribe. The numbers of demes in a tribe could and did vary greatly, but the tribes were kept roughly equal in population as far as one can see. (The last words represent an important qualification: it is just possible that the whole system was overhauled in 403 to take account of changes in settlement patterns effected by the great Peloponnesian War. In that case the evidence for deme quotas—evidence which is mostly derived from 4th-century or Hellenistic inscriptions—would not be strictly usable for the 6th or 5th centuries. But in fact there is just enough evidence from the 5th century to make the assumption of continuity plausible.)
Each of the 10 tribes supplied 50 councillors to the new Council. In that way, even the remotest deme was involved in what happened in the city; Cleisthenes’ solution can thus be seen in its political aspect as an attempt to deal with a characteristic problem of ancient states, which were mostly agriculturally based. That problem was to avoid the domination of city assemblies by the urban population. Cleisthenes’ system gave an identity to the deme that it had not had before, even though the word dēmos just means “the people,” hence “where the people live,” hence “village” (the word and concept certainly predate Cleisthenes). Now it had a more precise sense: it was an entity with an identifiable body of demesmen and a right to representation in the Council.
The Cleisthenic deme was the primary unit for virtually all purposes. It was a social unit: to have been introduced to one’s demesmen in an appropriate context was good evidence that one was a citizen. It was the primary agricultural unit—though it is disputed whether all settlement in Attica was “nucleated” (that is, whether all farms were clustered together around demes), as one view holds. In fact, there is much evidence for nonnucleated (i.e., isolated) settlement. It was, as stated, a legal unit—although deme judges were suspended from 510 to the 450s. It was a financial unit: temple accounts from the distant deme of Rhamnus date from well back in the 5th century. It was a political unit: as shown, it supplied councillors to the new Council and enjoyed a vigorous deme life of its own (though it seems that there was little overlap between deme careers and city careers). It was a military unit: not only did tribes train together, but a dedication by the demesmen of Rhamnus may show that they participated as a group in the conquest of Lemnos by Miltiades the Younger about 500 bce. (Another view puts that inscription in the years 475–450 and sees it as a dedication by cleruchs or a garrison.) Above all it was a religious unit: deme religious calendars, some of the most informative of them published in the 1960s and ’70s, show a rich festival life integrated with that of the polis in a careful way so as to avoid overlap of dates. It has been suggested that the worship of Artemis of Brauron, a predominantly female affair, was somehow organized according to the 10-tribe system. Finally, and related to the last, it was a cultural unit: at the deme festival for Dionysus (the “Rural Dionysia”) there were dramatic festivals, subsidized, as inscriptions show, by wealthy demesmen and sometimes even by foreigners (one wealthy Theban is attested).
Cleisthenes seems also to have addressed himself to the definition of the Assembly, or Ecclesia. As seen, Solon admitted thētes to the Assembly, but Cleisthenes fixed the notional number of eligible Athenians (adult free male Athenians, that is) at 30,000. One-fifth of this total, 6,000, was a quorum for certain important purposes, such as grants of citizenship.
Cleisthenes’ ulterior motive in all this must remain obscure in the absence of any corpus of poetry by the man himself, of any biographical tradition, and even of good documentary or historiographic evidence from anywhere near Cleisthenes’ own time (the Constitution of Athens is reasonably full, but it was written nearly 200 years later).
That the tribal aspect of Cleisthenes’ changes was central was recognized even in antiquity, but Herodotus’s explanation, that he was imitating his maternal grandfather, Cleisthenes of Sicyon, does not suffice as an explanation on its own. The question is why he should have been anxious that each Athenian tribe should be a kind of microcosm of all Attica. Politically, the tribe does feature in Athenian public life (for instance, tribal support in lawsuits was valuable, and each of the 10 tribes presided by rotation over the Council for one-tenth of the year. This is the so-called prytany system). But the tribe was not a voting unit like the Roman tribe—Athenian votes were recorded as expressions of individual opinion, not submerged in some larger electoral or legislative bloc—and the later political functions of tribes were not quite numerous enough to explain why Cleisthenes felt it necessary to subdivide them into “thirds” in the way he did.
Cleisthenes’ changes should be seen in their context. First, the Attica he inherited had a relatively small number of militarily experienced fighters, many of them former Peisistratid mercenaries. It was essential that these be distributed among the tribes if the latter were to be militarily effective. (It is a corollary of this that one accepts that at some preliminary stage in Cleisthenes’ reforms there was widespread granting of citizenship to residents of Attica whose status was precarious. There was surely plenty of immigration into prosperous Peisistratid Attica, not all of it military in character.)
Second, in the late Archaic period tribal reform took place in other communities, some far removed from Attica in both character and geography. Cleisthenes’ system looks subtle, theoretical, and innovatory in its decimal approach to political reform and its reorganization of “civic space,” but there were precedents and parallels. For example, at Cyrene, three-quarters of a century after its colonization by Thera, there was stasis (political strife), which Demonax, a reformer who was called in from Mantinea on the mainland, settled by reorganizing Cyrene into three tribes. Again, at tyrannical or possibly posttyrannical Corinth, it seems (the evidence is some boundary markers published in 1968) that there was a tribal reorganization along trittys lines not dissimilar to, but earlier than, Cleisthenes’ system.
Finally, there is the Roman analogy: the new system of tribes and centuries, a system based partly on residence, replaced a purely gentilitial system—i.e., one based only on heredity. The word century is a clue: although the term signifies a voting unit, it is military in character. It is evident that tribal reform was a fairly general Archaic solution to the difficulties experienced by states with large numbers of immigrants. Such states needed the human resources these immigrants represented, but they could not admit them under the old rules. The rules had to be changed.
One may end with religion, which has been called a way of “constructing civic identity” in the ancient world, where religion was something embedded, not distinct. Cleisthenes was a decisive innovator in the social sphere, above all in the new role he allotted to the deme, but he did not dismantle the older social structures with their strong religious resonances. (The phratry, which was associated with Zeus and Apollo, continued to be an important regulator of citizenship; see above on the Demotionidai inscription.) His 10 new tribes were all named after heroes of Athenian or Salaminian myth, and those tribal heroes were objects of very active cult: this is in itself a recognition of a craving for a religiously defined identity. Nor did the old four Ionian tribes altogether disappear as religious entities; they are mentioned in a sacrificial context in a late 5th-century inscription and continued to matter in imperial contexts. (In the period of the 5th-century Athenian empire, some eastern Aegean islands and mainland cities went on using the names of the old four Ionian tribes for their civic subdivisions. That may help to explain the tribes’ importance in the Ion of Euripides, a play written in perhaps 413 bce, a time of imperial crisis.) The Cleisthenic Athenian state was still in many ways traditional, and it is above all in the religious sphere that one sees continuity even after Cleisthenes.
The world of the tyrants
If the earlier Archaic period was an age of hospitality, the later Archaic age was an age of patronage. Instead of individual or small-scale ventures exploiting relationships of xenia (hospitality), there was something like free internationalism. Not that the old xenia ties disappeared—on the contrary, they were solidified, above all by the tyrants themselves.
Intermarriage between the great houses
One very characteristic manifestation of this is intermarriage between the great houses of the tyrannical age, as between Cylon of Athens and Theagenes of Megara or between the family of Miltiades and that of Cypselus of Corinth. The Cypselids also were on good terms with the tyranny of Thrasybulus of Miletus in Anatolia (an indication that the Lelantine War alignments had been reversed, though no explanation for this is available).
The archetypal event of the Archaic age, however, was the 6th-century entertainment by Cleisthenes of Sicyon of the suitors for the hand of his daughter Agariste. That occasion looks back in some respects to the Homeric “suitors” of Penelope in the Odyssey. The novelty is that one is now in the world of the polis, and the suitors were men who had “something to be proud of either in their country or in themselves.” They came from Italy (two of them, one from Sybaris, one from Siris), Epidamnus in northwestern Greece, Aetolia, Arcadia, Argos (the great-grandson of the great Pheidon), Eretria, Thessaly, and many other places. The winner was one of the two Athenians, Megacles the Alcmaeonid (the other Athenian, Hippocleides, had been well in front but lost the girl by dancing on a table with his legs in the air). Megacles’ son by Agariste was the reformer Cleisthenes, named (as so often in Greece) after his grandfather. The suitors were made to perform in the gymnasia (if not too old, Herodotus says), but the decisive “match” at the Trial of the Suitors was held at the final banquet or symposium: proof of the centrality that athletics and communal banqueting had by now assumed.
Although some of the tyrants may (like the Athenian Peisistratids) have retained existing structures such as the archonship and so shown their respect for the status quo, the marriages even of the Peisistratids had politically defiant implications. They were more like pharaonic or Hellenistic sister marriage or like the close intermarrying in aristocratic families of the Roman Republic in that the tyrants had to take their wives only from strains as pure as their own. Yet in the tyrannical world the tyrant had no superiors or equals within his own state. More practically, such ties tended to guarantee political equilibrium. Another related feature that can be explained along similar lines was the practice of multiple marriages (Peisistratus had at least three wives). Breaking the normal social rules in that way had the function of placing the tyrant apart; it is an example of the games princes play.
A third aspect, both cause and consequence, of such intermarriage is internationalism. There also were other factors that contributed to creating something like a common culture or koinē. Some of these factors stemmed from an earlier period, such as that of the great Olympic Games (see above “Colonization” and city-state formation). Patronage of poets and artists was a newer phenomenon that helped to make the Greek world a koinē through the movement of ideas and individuals from one tyrannical court to another. (The general point must not, however, be exaggerated: cities retained their distinctive cultures, and there were sharp differences of style between one tyrant and another. Even in antiquity the Peisistratids and the Lydian tyrant Croesus were distinguished from monsters of cruelty such as Phalaris, tyrant of Sicilian Acragas.)
Poetry and art
The poets Anacreon of Teos and Simonides of Ceos best exemplify the peripatetic life-style of the great cultural figures of the age. Both were summoned to Athens by Hipparchus, the son of Peisistratus (Peisistratus himself did not cultivate the company of poets and musicians in his court, perhaps preferring popular culture like the Great Dionysia and Panathenaic festivals). Anacreon had previously lived at the court of the splendid Polycrates, the 6th-century tyrant of Samos (who also patronized Ibycus, a native of Rhegium near Sicily); when Polycrates fell, Anacreon was dramatically rescued by Hipparchus, who sent a single fast ship to take him away. Simonides, after the fall of the Peisistratids, moved to the court of the Scopad rulers in Thessaly. Pindar and Bacchylides, the writers of 5th-century victory odes (epinicia) for young aristocrats, were the successors of poets like these.
It would be wrong, however, to leave an impression that all the Archaic poets depended on the checkbooks of tyrants; on the contrary, the fragments of Alcaeus of Mytilene on Lesbos (c. 600 bce) include invective against the local tyrant Pittacus (just as the 5th-century Pindar, in one of his Sicilian poems, celebrates liberation from tyranny—i.e., the fall of one of the tyrants whose family he elsewhere extols). And the poetry of Alcaeus’s contemporary from the same island, Sappho, has no political content at all but is delicate and personal in character, concerned with themes of love and nature.
More tangible in their achievements, but less easily identified by name, are the tyrannical architects and sculptors, who imitated each other across long distances. The enormous Peisistratid temple of Olympian Zeus is thought to be a direct response to Polycrates’ rebuilding of the temple of Hera at Samos; other huge efforts from the same period include a temple at Selinus in Sicily. This frenzied monumentalizing is surely competitive in character, and competition presupposes awareness. Again, Peisistratid interest in the water supply had a parallel not just in the activity of Theagenes at Megara but in a great Polycratean aqueduct at Samos, interestingly, built by a Megarian engineer.
Doric temple, SelinusAerial view of the 5th-century Doric temple at Selinus, near Selinunte, Sicily, Italy. Pubbli Aer Foto/DeA Picture Library
International influences
Such eastern Greek influences on thinking in the mainland imply a general Ionian intellectual primacy, which is most obvious in the sphere of speculative thinking. One 6th-century city above all, Miletus in Anatolia, produced a formidable cluster of thinkers (it is best to avoid the metaphor of a series, with its implication that intellectual progress was linear or organized). The cosmological theories of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes are remarkable more for their method—a readiness to work with abstractions, such as water, or the unlimited, to which they accorded explanatory power—than for the actual solutions they reached. It is an interesting modern suggestion that all three were influenced by Persian or even ultimately Indian thought. The suggestion is especially plausible for Heraclitus (fl. 500 bce), because his native city of Ephesus, with its cult of Artemis (a goddess whose worship has features borrowed from that of her native counterpart Anahita) and its large Persian population, was always—down to and including Roman times—especially open to Iranian influences.
That raises the general question of intellectual awareness of the Persian empire, which conquered the Lydian kingdom of Croesus about 546 bce and so inherited Lydian rule over the Greeks of the Asiatic coastal mainland. The poetry of another poet-philosopher, Xenophanes, from the Ionian city of Colophon, addressed itself to problems of religion and concluded that if horses had gods those gods would be horses, just as Ethiopian gods are black-skinned and Thracian gods have blue eyes. Xenophanes’ awareness of the differences between cultures could plausibly be linked to the turnover of empires around him, even if there were no confirmation in the form of a poem describing a symposium at which men “sit drinking sweet wine and chewing chick-pea, and asking each other ‘How old were you when the Mede came?’ ” (The Medes were the predecessors of the Persians, and the Greeks sometimes, as here, conflated the two.) In his “sympotic” aspect—that is, his emphasis on the symposium—Xenophanes was a child of his age; he was more unusual in his rejection, in another poem, of athletic values because of what he thought to be their coarsening effects.
One way in which Persia influenced Greek thought was via individual refugees and refugee communities. Thus, Pherecydes of Syros has been seen as a theologian who emigrated from Anatolia to the west after Cyrus’s arrival. (Whether there was a more general westward diaspora of Magi, members of the Persian religious caste, is disputable.) Whole communities left Anatolia under duress; some of them became famous in later philosophical history, such as Phocaea, which founded Elea in Italy, a place famous for philosophy, and Teos, which founded Abdera in northern Greece, the home of the 5th-century atomists Democritus and Leucippus. Finally, one must allow for a considerable Egyptian and western Semitic influence on Archaic Greek religion, political organization, and thought, though its precise extent and the means by which it was mediated await proper scientific treatment.
The greatest literary stimulus provided by neighbouring cultures like the Persian was in the field of ethnography and history. The “inquiries” (historiai) of Herodotus, from Asiatic Halicarnassus, will be discussed later, but they would not have been possible without the writings of Hecataeus, another Milesian (c. 500 bce), who treated both geography and myth in works that survive today only in fragmentary form. Hecataeus was a “logographer,” a prose writer as opposed to the poets so far considered. The gradual move from verse to prose as an intellectual medium goes together with a shift from oral to written culture; but that second shift was not complete even in Athens until well into the 5th century, and there is a case for thinking that even then and in the “document-minded” 4th century “oral” and “written” attitudes coexisted.
Inquiries of Hecataeus’s kind had a certain practical application: knowledge of the world, in the most literal sense of that phrase, was of obvious usefulness in a city like Miletus with its colonial connections (in the Black Sea region) and its long-distance trade. (A close connection with Sybaris in southern Italy is implied by Herodotus’s story that, when Sybaris was destroyed in 510 bce, the Milesians collectively went into mourning; and Herodotus says that at the beginning of the Ionian revolt, in 500–499, Miletus was at the height of its prosperity.) When the time came to confront Persia politically, after 500, Hecataeus had the standing to suggest initiatives for shared Ionian defense. Surely this standing was conferred as much by what Hecataeus knew as by who he was. On the longer perspective, it was awareness of Persia that helped the Greeks, as it helped the Jews about the same time, to define themselves by opposition. The existence of a great and menacing culture perceived as importantly different was thus a factor in the formation of a common late Archaic Greek culture.
These political and ideological consequences of Archaic Greek thought can be seen as a kind of practical application of theory. The greatest applied scientific achievements of the Archaic period, however, were in the sphere of military technology—the trireme and the hoplite. Some Asian influence can, it is true, be posited for each (Phoenician for the trireme, Assyrian for hoplite armour); but their refinement and effective use was Greek. The victories of the Persian Wars were won as much by the anonymous Archaic developers of the trireme and the hoplite as by the particular Greeks of 490 and 480–479.
Classical Greek civilization
The Persian Wars
Between 500 and 386 bc Persia was for the policy-making classes in the largest Greek states a constant preoccupation. (It is not known, however, how far down the social scale this preoccupation extended in reality.) Persia was never less than a subject for artistic and oratorical reference, and sometimes it actually determined foreign policy decisions.
The situation for the far more numerous smaller states of mainland Greece was different inasmuch as a distinctive policy of their own toward Persia or anybody else was hardly an option for most of the time. However, Eretria, by now a third-class power, had its own unsuccessful “war” with Persia in 490, and some very small cities and islands were proud to record on the “Serpent Column” (the victory dedication to Apollo at Delphi) their participation on the Greek side in the great war of 480–479. But, even at this exalted moment, choice of sides, Greek or Persian, could be seen, as it was by Herodotus, as having been determined either by preference for local masters or by a desire to spite an equal and rival state next door. (He says this explicitly about Thessaly, which “Medized”—i.e., sided with the Persians—and its neighbour and enemy Phocis, which did not.) Nor is it obvious that for small Greek places the change to control by distant Persia would have made much day-to-day difference, judging from the experience of their kinsmen and counterparts in Anatolia or of the Jews (the other articulate Persian subject nation). Modern Western notions of religious tolerance do not apply, however.
It remains true that Persia had no policy of dismantling the social structures of its subject communities or of driving their religions underground (though it has been held that the Persian king Xerxes tried to impose orthodoxy in a way that compelled some Magi to emigrate). Persia certainly had no motive for destroying the economies of the peoples in its empire. Naturally, it expected the ruling groups or individuals to guarantee payment of tribute and generally deferential behaviour, but then the Athenian and Spartan empires expected the same of their dependents. The Athenians, at least, were strikingly realistic and undogmatic about not demanding regimes that resembled their own democracy in more than the name.
The Ionian revolt
But the experience of the Asiatic Greek cities was different again, because it was precisely here that the great confrontation between Greeks and Persians began, about 500 bc. The first phase of that confrontation was the “Ionian revolt” of the Asiatic Greeks against Persia (despite the word Ionian, other Asiatic Greeks joined in, from the Dorian cities to the south and from the so-called Aeolian cities to the north, and the Carians, not Greeks in the full sense at all, fought among the bravest). The puzzle is to explain why the revolt happened when it did, after nearly half a century of rule by the Achaemenid Persian kings (that is, since 546 when Cyrus the Great conquered them; his main successors were Cambyses [530–522], Darius I [522–486], Xerxes I [486–465], Artaxerxes I [465–424], and Darius II [423–404]). Too little is known about the details of Persian rule in Anatolia during the period 546–500 to say definitely that it was not oppressive, but, as stated above, Miletus, the centre of the revolt, was flourishing in 500.
The causes of the Ionian revolt are especially hard to determine because the revolt was a short-term failure. (Concessions were made after it, however, and its longer-term consequence, the Persian Wars proper, resulted in the establishment of a strong Athenian influence in western Anatolia alongside the Persian.) Defeats lead, especially in oral traditions, to recriminations: “Charges are brought on all sides,” Herodotus says despairingly about the difficulty of finding out the truth about the crucial naval battle of Lade (495).
Herodotus himself was contemptuously hostile, regarding the revolt as the “beginning of troubles”—a phrase with a Homeric nuance—between Greeks and Persians. This is odd, because it is inconsistent with the whole thrust of his narrative, which regards the clash as an inevitability from a much earlier date; it is part of his general view that military monarchies like the Persian expand necessarily (hence his earlier inclusion of material about, for instance, Babylonia, Egypt, and Scythia, places previously attacked by Persia). The reasons for Herodotus’ hostility have partly to do with anti-Milesian sentiment specifically in fellow-Ionian Samos, where he gathered some of his material (the Samians seem to have tried to represent the failure as due to the incompetence and ambitions of Milesian individuals), and partly with the generally Ionian character of the revolt (Herodotus’ home town of Halicarnassus was partly Dorian, partly Carian). In addition, he was influenced by defeatist mainland Greek sources, particularly by Athenian informants who resented Athens’ unsuccessful involvement on the rebel side. And he genuinely thought that the Persian-Greek conflict was a horrible thing, although mitigated, in his view, by the fact that Persians and Greeks, particularly Spartans, gradually came to know each other and respect each other’s values. There were always Greeks who were attracted to a Persian life-style.
Causes of the Persian Wars
It should now be clear that Herodotus saw the revolt in terms of the ambitions of individuals (he singles out the Milesians Aristagoras and Histiaeus), and this must be part of the truth. But this must be supplemented by deeper explanations, because the rising was a very general affair.
Economic factors
A simple economic explanation, such as used to be fashionable, is no longer acceptable. Perhaps one should look instead for military causes: Ionians disliked the military service to which they were then compelled (they did not even care much for the naval training they had to undergo, in a better cause, before Lade). Persia not only expected personal military service but punished attempts to evade it, even at high social levels. Its method of organizing defense and of raising occasional large armies (there was no large Persian standing army) was analogous to the method of later feudalism: “fiefs” of land were granted in exchange for political loyalty and for military service when occasion required.
Here perhaps is a clue, which permits the resurrection of the economic explanation in another more sophisticated form. Grants of fiefs in Anatolia are well attested in the 5th and 4th centuries; in the pages of the Greek historian Xenophon (431–350) one finds the descendants of Medizing Greek families still installed on estates granted to their ancestors after 479 (and inscriptions show the same families were still there well into the Hellenistic period). Grants by Persia of good western Anatolian land to politically amenable Greeks, or to Iranians, made good political and military sense. Such gifts, however, were necessarily made at the expense of the poleis in whose territory the land so gifted had lain. In this, surely, were the makings of a serious economic grievance.
Political factors
Politically, the Greeks did not like satrapal control. This seems clear from the proclamations of isonomia (something more or less democratic is implied by this word) made at the beginning of the revolt; these were perhaps influenced by very recent democratic developments back in Athens (see below). Political dislike of satrapal control is also implied by the concessions made after the revolt ended in 494: the Persians Artaphernes and Mardonius granted a degree of autonomy by instituting a system of intercity arbitration; they abstained from financial reprisals and from demanding indemnities and merely exacted former levels of tribute, but after a more precise survey; and above all, Herodotus says, they “put down all the despots throughout Ionia, and in lieu of them established democracies.” The meaning and even the truth of this last concession are alike disputed. Although there certainly were still tyrants in some Persian-held eastern Greek states in 480, some improvement on arbitrary one-man government is surely implied.
Perhaps the answer is to be found in the formula recorded by a later literary source, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (f1. 1st century bc), who wrote that “they gave them back their laws.” (When in 334 Alexander similarly claimed to restore to the Ionian and Aeolian cities their laws and democracies, he was largely indulging in propaganda.) Inscriptions, above all from Persian-occupied Anatolia in the 4th century, show that the cities in question held tribal meetings, enjoyed a measure of control over their own citizen intake, levied city taxes (subject to Persia’s overriding tribute demands), and did indeed operate a system of intercity arbitration.
How different all this was from the situation before 500 is beyond retrieval, but the continuity of civic structures and cults in eastern Greek states from the Archaic period to Classical times implies that in many respects the Persian takeover of 546 was not cataclysmic. For instance, one reads at the very end of Herodotus’ history (concerning the year 479) of a temple on Asian soil to Demeter of Eleusis that had been brought over by the Ionians from Attica in the early Dark Age and was still going strong, presumably without a break. So the improvements introduced after 494 consisted in the increase, not in the outright introduction, of local self-determination within the satrapal framework.
In any case, one is left with the problem of why political unrest boiled over, if boil over it did, in precisely 500. A large part of the answer is to be found in the changes recently made at the Ionian mother city Athens by Cleisthenes. Local arrangements that may have seemed tolerable before the end of the century seemed less so in face of the new political order at Athens, an order that had moreover shown its military effectiveness. The hypothesis that the example of Cleisthenic Athens induced restlessness elsewhere is plausible not just for its kinsmen in Ionia, which can be supposed to have had good “colonial” communications with Athens, but even for the Peloponnese, where in the first half of the 5th century Sparta had to deal with persistent disaffection.
Athenian support of Ionia
Communication between Athens and Ionia in this period is, however, first firmly attested in the other direction, not to Ionia but from it. In 499 the Milesian tyrant Aristagoras arrived in Athens and Sparta (and perhaps at other places too, such as Argos) asking for help. The Athenians agreed, while the Spartans under their king Cleomenes (who ruled from 519 to shortly before 490) did not, thus showing, as Herodotus says, that “it seems indeed to be easier to deceive a multitude than one man.” This is out of line with Herodotus’ otherwise favourable assessment of Cleisthenic democracy and should be put down to particular hostility to the revolt and its consequences for Athens. The Athenians sent 20 ships. This was a major undertaking, considering Athens’ resources and commitments; in 489 (when Athens’ fleet was surely bigger than it had been a decade earlier) Athens had only 70 ships, of which 20 were borrowed from Corinth. The reason Athens had borrowed these ships from Corinth (actually it was a sale at nominal charge) was Athens’ war, or series of wars, with Aegina, which had caused it to build a fleet. Corinth and Athens, both of which had naval outlets in the Saronic Gulf, had a shared interest in containing the power of Aegina, the greatest other power in that gulf, the “star in the Dorian Sea,” as Pindar was to call Aegina. The Athenian-Aeginetan struggle, which may actually have continued after the Battle of Salamis in 480, having begun well back in the late 6th century with a shadowy precursor in the mythical period, meant that the Athenian help sent to Ionia was risky and heroic.
On a longer perspective the struggle against Aegina helped to make Athens a naval power through simple peer-polity pressure. Ancient versions of the Athenian ship-building program, however, put too much onto the Aeginetan factor, usually out of malice against the great Athenian politician Themistocles and reluctance to give him credit for anticipating the eventual arrival of the Persian armada of 480. The better tradition allows Themistocles an archonship in 493, during which he started the walls of the Piraeus, turning it into a defensible harbour, and so first “dared to say that the Athenians must make the sea their domain” (as Thucydides puts it with forgivable exaggeration). The Ionian revolt had failed disastrously, Miletus having been sacked in 494, and it was clear that the Persian finger was now pointed at Athens and that Darius wanted revenge for the assistance it had sent. The result was the Marathon campaign.
The position of Sparta
Sparta’s foreign relations
Sparta did not participate in the Battle of Marathon. Spartan policy toward Persia in particular, and its foreign policy in general in the years 546–490, is at first sight indecisive. Having expelled the pro-Persian Peisistratids, Sparta not only tried to put them back a few years later but declined to help the Ionians in 499. The reason given by Cleomenes on that occasion, after a glance at the position of the Persian capital Susa on the map, was that it was outrageous to ask a Spartan army to go three months’ journey from the sea. This is a colourful way of saying that it was a tall order to ask Sparta to go to the help of distant Greeks, with few of whom it had kinship ties. The Spartans who had made the original, admittedly ineffective, alliance with Croesus against the Persians had not been so timid. But that was when the Persian threat had scarcely appeared over the horizon.
In 490 the reason for Spartan nonappearance at Marathon was a religious scruple: the Spartans had to wait until the Moon was full, probably because this was the sacred month of a festival. There is no good reason to doubt this, though it has been argued that there were special reasons why Sparta’s leadership was halfhearted in the 490s and that it should be related to the scattered evidence for helot trouble at precisely this time.
Cleomenes’ own career ended in disgrace not long before Marathon. It has been suggested that he fell foul of the domestic authorities at Sparta (who always had the power to discipline the kings) because he made promises to the helots: he proposed freedom in exchange for military service. If so, this must have been late in his career; the reply to Aristagoras in 499 looks straightforward. In any case, the theory rests largely on the equally speculative theory that replaces the religious explanation for Spartan absence from Marathon with a political one. To say this is not to deny the permanent threat posed by the helots, still less to deny that Spartan equivocation can often be explained in terms of it.
The role of Cleomenes
Large claims have been made for the statesmanship of Cleomenes, but his vision does not seem to have gone beyond the narrow issue of “What is best for Sparta?” For instance, Cleomenes crushed the old enemy Argos, then resurgent, at the great battle of Sepeia (near Tiryns) in 494. He was too shrewd, however, to destroy it completely, realizing that dislike of Argos was one of the factors that kept Sparta’s Peloponnesian allies loyal. Argos was left to the control of a group described as “slaves” (hardly literally that, perhaps really members of surrounding subject communities), which was thoroughly traditional Spartan behaviour on Cleomenes’ part. He surely does not deserve to rank as a forward-looking “Panhellenist”—that is, as a supra-Spartan enemy of Persia. While it is true that he did act on one occasion against Medizers on Aegina, he did so only at the 11th hour, perhaps as late as 491.
Even by the criterion of Sparta’s local interests, Cleomenes, or more fairly Sparta’s treatment of Cleomenes, had bad results. Cleomenes’ offer of some kind of new deal to the Arcadians (better substantiated than his dealings with the helots) came to nothing with his spectacular death; he went insane (it was alleged), was imprisoned, and committed suicide. One form his alleged insanity took was poking other elite Spartans in the face with his staff; such violence was (as noted) characteristically Spartan, but it was evidently not acceptable to turn it against other Spartans rather than against helots or other Greeks.
Some Arcadian states were certainly disaffected in the 470s and 460s and perhaps even anticipated 4th-century developments by forming a (numismatically attested) league of their own, though the chronology of this is far from secure. It is also tempting to link the new pattern of forces in the Peloponnese, which enabled Argos to recover sufficiently to conquer Mycenae (460s) while Sparta was preoccupied elsewhere, with the activities of Cleomenes toward the end of his life and the expectations he had aroused only to disappoint. (Another plausible factor in Arcadia then, as in Ionia in 500 bc, was the unsettling effect of Cleisthenic democracy at Athens.) At least one can say that Spartan worries about Arcadia were relevant to the “Great Refusal” of leadership in 479, which made possible the Athenian empire.
The Battle of Marathon
Athens was not entirely alone in its fight against the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 bc. Plataea fought beside Athens, true to the alliance of 519, and the Tomb of the Plataeans, excavated in 1966, probably commemorates the place where they fell. Eretria, which had also sent help to the Ionian revolt, had already been pounced on and destroyed. The reasons for the Persian choice of Marathon, as given by Herodotus, were proximity to Eretria (that is, the Persians wanted a short line of communications) and the good cavalry terrain there. He does not add, however, that a third powerful motive was political. The deposed Peisistratid tyrant Hippias, now a bitter old man, accompanied the Persian forces. (The Peisistratids came originally from eastern Attica.) Cleisthenes, in implementing his democratic reforms after the fall of the tyrants, had perhaps tried to break up old sources of political influence in this region. For instance, Rhamnus, a little to the north of Marathon and a vital coastal garrison site in Classical and Hellenistic times, seems to have been anomalously attributed to a city trittys; and an ancient local organization known as the Marathonian “Four Cities,” or Tetrapolis, was broken up among more than one of the new tribes. Reasonably or unreasonably, Hippias was obviously hoping to establish a kind of political bridgehead here by appealing to old bonds of clientship.
The Athenians, however, marched out immediately under Miltiades, who had been recalled a year or two earlier from the Chersonese to help Athens meet the danger. Then, perhaps when the Persian cavalry was temporarily absent, they attacked the Persians “at a run.” This last detail impressed itself on the tradition, as it undoubtedly impressed the waiting Persians, and the discovery of Persian arrowheads in the Athenian burial mound makes it possible to supply the explanation that had eluded Herodotus. The Athenian advance was evidently achieved under a hail of arrows; and the quicker the dangerous ground was covered, the better.
The Athenian victory was overwhelming; there were 6,400 Persian casualties to 192 Athenian. It was an important victory for two reasons. First, it showed what lethal damage hoplites could do to Persian forces; this encouraging message was not missed by the Spartans who arrived to view the corpses and departed with patronizing congratulations to the Athenians. Second and more important, it was a propaganda victory, celebrated in all the available media. Marathon soon became an almost mythical event. The Athenian Treasury at Delphi was built out of the spoils of the battle. An ambitious conjecture seeks to equate the 192 Marathon dead with the 192 equestrian figures on the Parthenon frieze. The horses on the frieze would be a difficulty if the idea was to recall the battle in a literal way, because the battle was definitely not a cavalry affair; but it has been ingeniously suggested that the horses were intended to suggest “heroic” status in the technical sense of “hero,” or demigod. Heroic cult often involved horses (as perhaps at Lefkandi), and heroic funerals regularly included equestrian events. This interpretation, however, poses problems for two reasons: the frieze was partially destroyed in the 17th century and reconstruction depends on old drawings, and the evidence for actual heroization of the Marathonian dead is late. Other, though not necessarily incompatible, interpretations of the Parthenon frieze are available: perhaps it represents the mythical daughters of Erechtheus, who saved the city by sacrificing themselves, a favourite and familiar theme in Athenian myth.
Still, there is no doubting the symbolic significance of Marathon, or the way in which well after the Persian Wars the victory was exploited in epigram and painting. For instance, there was a famous rendition of the Battle of Marathon in the “Painted Colonnade” at Athens (now lost), which was perhaps commissioned by Miltiades’ son Cimon. This was celebratory artistic propaganda, with a far clearer message than that of the Peisitratids. The Battle of Marathon and the Persian Wars must be recognized as an artistic watershed. There was admittedly something splendid about the gesture of sending help to the Ionian revolt, and it has been suggested accordingly that early 5th-century depictions on vases of Theseus attacking the Amazons (inhabitants of Anatolia) may be a coded allusion to Athens’ Asiatic adventure of the 490s. The vindictive Athenian treatment of the playwright Phrynichus for referring in a play to the fall of Athens’ daughter city Miletus shows, however, that the Ionian revolt was a dangerous subject, not lightly to be treated by pot painters. Marathon was the beginning of an epoch that lasted for centuries, during which Athens asserted its claim to uniqueness on the basis of two things: its achievements in the Persian Wars and (in and after the 4th century) its cultural primacy.
Meanwhile the Persians retreated, and Darius died, to be succeeded in 486 by Xerxes. No Greek could have doubted that Marathon, for all its symbolic importance, was not the end of the matter and that Xerxes would return with a much larger invasion force.
The administration of democracy
The appointment of archons
The internal Athenian reaction to this latest military success of the Cleisthenic democracy was to take the development of that democracy a stage further. First, a change was made in the method of appointment to the chief magistracy, the archonship. From then on the archons were appointed by lot from a preliminary elected list instead of being directly elected, as the stratēgoi continued to be. There were nine archons and a secretary. Three of the archons had special functions: the basileus, or “king”; the polemarchos, originally a military commander (though after the institution of the Cleisthenic stratēgoi, military authority passed to this new panel of 10); and the “eponymous archon,” who gave his name to the year. Interpretation of the significance of the change varies according to the view taken of the importance of the archonship itself in the period 508–487; perhaps it was a young man’s office and of no great consequence. The period is patchily documented, however, and in any case it would be eccentric to query the distinction of some of the names preserved. The point has a bearing on the composition and authority of the ancient Council of the Areopagus, which was recruited from former archons. The role of the Areopagus was to be much reduced in the late 460s, and if the archonship was after all not especially prestigious, then the importance of that subsequent attack on the Areopagus would be correspondingly reduced. A more substantial reason for thinking that the archonship mattered less after 508 than it had, for instance, under the Peisistratids lies in the “seesaw” argument that the rise of the stratēgia must have led to a fall in the power and prestige of the archonship.
The reform of 487 was probably the first time that lot or “sortition” had been used, though it is possible that Cleisthenes, or even Solon, used it as a device for distributing posts equitably among basically elected magistrates. This would not be unthinkable in the 6th century, when the Athenian state still contained so many aristocratic features; after all, the Romans used sortition in this way, not as a consciously “democratic” procedure but as a way of resolving the competing claims of ambitious individuals. If so, sortition did not necessarily entail a downgrading of the importance of the office of archon. There is a further slight uncertainty about the system of “sortition from an elected shortlist.” The usual and probably correct view is that this system was discarded, not long after 457, for the archonship and other offices appointed to by lot in favour of unqualified sortition. But there is enough evidence for the survival of the preliminary stage of election to have encouraged a theory that the hybrid system continued in use down to the 4th century. This, if true, would have serious implications for our picture of Athenian democracy, but the best evidence for the hybrid system is in untypically conservative contexts, such as appointment to deme priesthoods.
The system of ostracism
A further novelty of the early 480s was the first ostracism. This was a way of getting rid of a man for 10 years without depriving him of his property. First, a vote was taken as to whether an ostracism should be held in principle; if the voters wanted one, a second vote was taken, and, if the total number of votes now cast exceeded 6,000, the “candidate” whose name appeared on the largest number of potsherds, or ostraca, went into this special sort of exile. An obstinate tradition associates the introduction of ostracism with Cleisthenes, but this hardly matters because the evidence is explicit that no ostracism was actually held until 487. The object of this very unusualpolitical weapon has been much discussed; whereas some ancient writers considered it as a way of preventing a revival of the Peisistratid tyranny (hardly a real threat after 490), modern scholars see it as a device for settling policy disputes—that is, as a kind of ad hominem referendum. It is possible, however, to be too rational about ostracism; of the large numbers of ostraca that survive, not all have been completely published, but one can see that their content is sometimes abusive and sometimes obscene. One accuses Cimon of incest with his sister, another says that Pericles’ father Xanthippus “does most wrong of all the polluted leaders.” The idea of the politician-leader as polluting scapegoat is a recurrent one in Greek political invective, and it is perhaps in terms of invective, or the need for a religious safety valve, that ostracism can best be understood.
The last Persian Wars
Greek preparations for war
Evidently, the Athenian demos was growing more bold, as the Constitution of Athens puts it. This was equally true in foreign affairs. The year after Marathon, Miltiades made an attack on the Aegean island of Paros, which anticipates the more systematic imperialism of the period after 479. And it is possible that the Athenian duel with Aegina continued into the 480s. But the event with the greatest implications for foreign policy was a sudden large increase in the output of the Laurium silver mines (actually in a region called Maronea).
The evidence gives the crucial year as 483, but it is not known whether there was really a dramatic lucky strike just before that or whether this was merely the year when Athens decided how to spend the accumulated yield of several good years. One source does speak of “discovery” of mines, but the mining area had been worked since Mycenaean times, and the mines were certainly operational under the Peisistratids. It was decided to spend the windfall on building more triremes, bringing the total to 200 by 480, from the 70 attested for Miltiades’ Parian expedition of 489. The precise method somehow involved the advancing of money to individuals, an interesting partial anticipation of the Classical system of “trierarchies.”
Trierarchs, who are not specifically attested before the middle of the century, were wealthy individuals who, as a kind of prestige-conferring tax payment, paid for the equipping of a trireme (the state provided the hull). The source of the timber for this huge program is not known; perhaps local Attic or Euboean supplies supplemented Italian timber. Themistocles, who is credited with the essential decision to spend the money on ships rather than on a distribution among the citizens, had western interests that make the Italian hypothesis plausible. If this is right, the feat of transportation should be admired almost as much as the crash building program itself. One consequence of the rapidity of the program was that much of the timber must have been unseasoned; this is relevant to the eventual Greek decision at the Battle of Salamis (480) to fight in narrow waters, where the resulting loss of speed (green timber makes ships heavier and slower) would matter less.
Greek alliances
It was in Athens, then, that the most energetic action was taken. Xerxes had not lost sight of the old revenge motive, a motive that ought to have meant that Athens was the main or only target, but his aim this time was—as Herodotus correctly says—to turn Greece as a whole into another Persian province or satrapy. This called for a concerted Greek plan, and in 481 the key decisions were taken by a general Greek league formed against Persia. Quarrels like that between Athens and Aegina had to be set aside and help sought from distant or colonial Greeks such as the Cretans, Syracusans, and Corcyrans, whose extraordinarily large fleet of 60 ships (possibly developed against Adriatic piracy but also—surely—against Corinth) would be a prime asset. Corcyra, however, waited on events, and Crete stayed out altogether, while Syracuse and Sicily generally had barbarian enemies of their own to cope with, the Carthaginians. (Syracuse and other parts of Sicily were now under the tyranny of Gelon.)
Greek writers found the parallel between the simultaneous threats to eastern and western Hellenism irresistible and represented Carthage as another Persia. It has, however, been suggested that the imperialistic ambitions of Carthage have been generally exaggerated by Greek writers eager to flatter their patrons, such as Gelon. The reality of the Battle of Himera, however, in which Gelon decisively defeated the Carthaginians, is not in doubt; like the Battle of Salamis, it was fought in 480, allegedly on the same day. Gelon did indeed have his own preoccupations. The Greeks may not have been altogether sorry: the tyrant Gelon would have been an ideologically awkward ally in a struggle for Greek freedom from arbitrary one-man rule.
Even without western Greek help, the Greek fleet numbered about 350 vessels, amounting perhaps to a third of the Persian fleet. The size of the Persian land army is reckoned in millions by Herodotus, and all modern scholars can do is replace his guess by far lower ones.Greek unity, though impressive, was not complete; conspicuous among the “Medizers” was Thebes, while Argos’ neutrality amounted, in Herodotus’ view, to Medism.
An inscription found in 1959, the so-called “Decree of Themistocles,” purports to contain further detailed decisions made about this time regarding the evacuation of Attica and the mobilization of the fleet. But the writing is of the 4th century, and the whole text is probably not a re-inscribing of a genuine document but a patriotic concoction of the age in which it was written and erected.
Thermopylae
An initial plan to defend Thessaly was soon abandoned as unrealistic. Instead the Greeks fell back on a zone at the northeastern end of Euboea, where they hoped to defend Thermopylae by land and Artemisium by sea. Herodotus, who is often accused of failing to realize the interconnectedness of these two holding operations, did in fact stress that the two were close enough for each set of defenders to know what was happening to the other.
The Spartans had sent their king Leonidas to Thermopylae with a force of 4,000 Peloponnesians, including 300 full Spartan citizens and perhaps a helot contingent as well. They were joined by some central Greeks, including Boeotians from Thespiae and Thebes. The pass at Thermopylae could not be held indefinitely, as Leonidas surely knew, but he also knew that an oracle had said that Sparta would be devastated unless one of its kings was killed. Leonidas’ exact “strategy” has been debated as if it were a puzzle, but perhaps one should not go beyond the oracle. The king must die.
Leonidas died, with his 300 Spartans (and the helots, Thespians, and Thebans, as should be remembered to the honour of all three). The other groups, Peloponnesians and central Greeks, were all dismissed. The naval action at Artemisium was inconclusive, the real damage to the Persian ships being done by a storm as they rounded Euboea.
Whether or not the Decree of Themistocles is genuine, it is a fact that Attica was evacuated and the Athenian Acropolis sacked by the Persians. This sacrifice of their city, like the victory of Marathon, is one of the cardinal elements in Athenian celebration of the Persian Wars. The Persians destroyed the temples on the Acropolis and carried off the statues of Harmodius and Aristogiton, the two men who had assassinated the tyrant Hippias’ brother Hipparchus in 514. The symbolic importance to Athens of what happened on the Acropolis in 480 is illustrated by the subsequent history of those statues: they were returned to Athens by Alexander the Great a century and a half later as part of his claim to be punishing the Persians for their 5th-century impiety.
Salamis
The Persians entered the narrows of Salamis, where Themistocles had insisted the Greeks should be stationed, and they were comprehensively defeated under the appalled eyes of Xerxes himself. This defeat is a “David and Goliath” encounter only in the general sense that the Persian empire was vastly greater, in size and resources, than the realm of its Greek opponents. It is said that the Greek ships were actually heavier and less easy to maneuver than those of their opponents. Yet this Persian advantage, and that conferred by the greater experience of the Phoenician sailors on the Persian side, were canceled out by the Greek advantages of position: a fight in the narrows would enable them to board and fight hand to hand.
No doubt there was also a propaganda aspect. Themistocles had inscribed on the rocks of Euboea messages imploring the Ionians on the Persian side not to help in enslaving their Ionian kin. This looks forward to Athens’ political exploitation, in the very near future, of its original role as Ionian mother city. For the moment it surely helped sap morale in the Persian fleet. Sound strategy might have dictated a Persian withdrawal, or an attempt to bypass Salamis and press on to the Isthmus of Corinth, before the battle had even begun, but the prestige of the Persian king was visibly at stake.
Plataea
Xerxes returned home, but the Persian general Mardonius remained for a final encounter with the Greeks at Plataea. The Spartans under Pausanias, regent for the underage Spartan king, advanced from the Peloponnese via the Isthmus and Eleusis; there had once been a question of making a stand at the Isthmus for the defense of the Peloponnese, but Salamis had made that unnecessary. Again the Persians were defeated, but this time the battle was primarily won, as Aeschylus was to put it in his play Persians, “under the Dorian spear”—that is, under the leadership of hoplite Sparta. (The army, however, was a truly Pan-Greek one and included a large infantry force of Athenians.)
Substantial fragments of an elegiac poem on papyrus by the great poet Simonides were published as recently as 1992; the poem describes the run-up to the battle of Plataea and more or less explicitly compares Pausanias to Achilles, the Greek leader of the mythical Trojan War. It thus equates the magnitude and importance of the Trojan and Persian wars. This remarkable find provides the missing link between epic, which had not hitherto normally treated recent historical events, and historiography proper. It is thus one of the most exciting literary discoveries in many decades.
As much glory was to attach to Plataea itself as to Sparta. A Hellenistic geographer said with some impatience of the Plataeans that they had nothing to say for themselves except that they were colonists of the Athenians (strictly false, but an illuminating exaggeration) and that the Persians were defeated on Plataean soil. A great commemorative festival was still celebrated at Plataea in Hellenistic and Roman times; a 3rd-century inscription discovered in 1971 mentions “the sacrifice in honour of Zeus the Liberator and the contest which the Greeks celebrate on the tombs of the heroes who fought against the barbarians for the liberty of the Greeks.”
After the residue of the Persian fleet had been defeated at Mycale, on the eastern side of the Aegean, the Greeks were saved—for the moment. The Persians had, after all, returned to Greece after the small-scale humiliation of Marathon in 490; thus there could be no immediate certainty that they would abandon their plans to conquer Greece after the far greater humiliations of 480 and 479. A leader was required in case the Persians returned.
The Athenian empire
The eastern Greeks of the islands and mainland felt themselves particularly vulnerable and appealed to the natural leader, Sparta. The Spartans’ proposed solution was an unacceptable plan to evacuate Ionia and resettle its Greek inhabitants elsewhere; this would have been a remarkable usurpation of Athens’s colonial or pseudocolonial role as well as a traumatic upheaval for the victims. Samos, Chios, Lesbos, and other islanders were received into the Greek alliance. The status of the mainlanders was temporarily left in suspense, though not for long: in early 478 Athens on its own account captured Sestus, still under precarious Persian control hitherto. In doing so it was assisted by “allies from Ionia and the Hellespont”—that is to say, including mainlanders. The authority for this statement, which should not be doubted, is Thucydides, the main guide for most of the next 70 years.
The Athenian empire at its greatest extent.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Emerging Athenian independence
The fortification of Athens
The capture of Sestus was one manifestation of Athenian independence from Spartan leadership, which had gone unquestioned by Athens in the Persian Wars of 480–479, except for one or two uneasy moments when it had seemed that Sparta was reluctant to go north of the Isthmus. Another manifestation was the energetic building in the early 470s of a proper set of walls for the city of Athens, an episode elaborately described by Thucydides to demonstrate the guile of Themistocles, who deceived the Spartans over the affair. Whether the walls were entirely new or a replacement for an Archaic circuit is disputed; Thucydides implies that there was a pre-existing circuit, but no trace of this has been established archaeologically. The Themistoclean circuit, on the other hand, does survive, although the solidity of the socle does not quite bear out Thucydides’ dramatic picture of an impromptu “all hands to the pump” operation carried out with unprofessional materials.
Sparta’s reluctance to see Athens fortified and its anger—concealed but real—after the irreversible event show that even then, despite its cautious attitude to the mainland Ionians, Sparta was not happy to see Athens take over completely its own dominant military role. Or rather, some Spartans were unhappy, for it is a feature of this period that Sparta wobbled between isolationism and imperialism, if that is the right word for a goal pursued with such intermittent energy. This wobbling is best explained in factional terms, the details of which elude the 21st century as they did Thucydides. Thucydides disconcertingly juxtaposes the wall-building episode, with its clear implication of Spartan aggressiveness, with the bland statement that the Spartans were glad to be rid of the Persian war and considered the Athenians up to the job of leadership and well-disposed toward themselves. In fact, there is evidence in other literary sources for the first and more outward-looking policy, such as a report of an internal debate at Sparta about the general question of hegemony, as well as particular acts such as a Spartan attempt to expel Medizers from the Delphic Amphictyony—i.e., pack it with its own supporters.
The ambition of Pausanias
One easily identifiable factor in the formation of Spartan policy is a personal one: the ambitions of Pausanias, a young man flushed from his success at Plataea. Pausanias was one of those Spartans who wanted to see the impetus of the Persian Wars maintained; he conquered much of Cyprus (a temporary conquest) and laid siege to Byzantium. But his arrogance and typically Spartan violence angered the other Greeks, “not least,” Thucydides says, “the Ionians and the newly liberated populations.” Those now approached Athens in virtue of kinship, asking it to lead them.
That was a crucial moment in 5th-century history; the immediate effect was to force the Spartans to recall Pausanias and put him on trial. He was charged with “Medism,” and, though acquitted for the moment, he was replaced by Dorcis. Yet Dorcis and others like him lacked Pausanias’s charisma, and Sparta sent out two more commanders. Pausanias went out again to Byzantium “in a private capacity,” setting himself up as a tyrant to intrigue with Persia, but he was again recalled and starved to death after having taken sanctuary in the temple of Athena of the Brazen House in Sparta. (The end may not have come until late in the 470s.) The charge was again Medism, and there was some truth to it because the rewards given by Persia to Gongylus of Eretria, one of his collaborators, can be shown to have been historical. There was also a suspicion that Pausanias was organizing a rising of the helots, “and it was true,” Thucydides says.
Despite its successes in 479, Sparta, then, was as much a prisoner of the helot problem as ever, and it could not rely on the loyalty of Arcadia or the Peloponnese generally: Mantinea and Elis had sent their contingents to the Battle of Plataea suspiciously late.
The Delian League
The most important consequence of the successful Greek appeal to Athens was the beginning of the Athenian empire, or Delian League (the latter is a modern expression). The appeal to Ionian kinship set the tone for the organization and for much of its subsequent history, though one can fairly complain that this does not emerge strongly enough from Thucydides, who always tends to underreport the religious or sentimental factor in Greek politics.
Paying tribute to Athens
The Athenians first settled which allies should pay tribute in the form of money and which should provide ships; the details of this assessment were entrusted to the Athenian statesman and general Aristides. Tribute, the need for which was assumed rather than explained, was to be stored at Delos, which would also be the site of league meetings, or synods. Thucydides does not add that the choice of Delos, with its associations with Ionian Apollo, was essentially religious in motivation. Nor does he bring out more than the mercenary or revenge motive of the league (to get redress by devastating the king of Persia’s territory).
The “booty” factor was indeed a major motive for much ancient warfare, and this war was no exception. But there is also evidence that the mood at the league’s founding was positive and solemn, with oaths and ceremonies cementing the act of liberation (478–477). It is unlikely that there was much “small print” to which allies had to subscribe. League meetings were to be held, almost certainly, in a single-chamber organization, in which Athens had only a single vote, though a weighty one; there were perhaps undertakings, subsumed in the general oath taking, about not deserting or refusing military contributions.
Unfortunately there are no inscribed stelae, or pillars, as there are for the Second Athenian Confederacy a century later, recording precise pledges by Athens or (equally valuable) listing the members in the order of their enrollment. Apart from the big Ionian islands and some mainlanders, there were in fact Dorian members like Rhodes and Aeolians like Lesbos; there were even some non-Greeks on Cyprus, always a place with a large Semitic component. (Some Cypriot communities probably joined at the outset.) Some Thracian cities were surely enrolled very early. There was no doctrinaire insistence that the league should be exclusively maritime, though the facts of geography gave it this general character automatically. For instance, epigraphy (i.e., the study of inscriptions) suggests that by mid-century (in the period of Athens’s decade of control of Boeotia, 457–446) the land-locked cities of Orchomenus and Akraiphia were in some sense members. Nor was the league necessarily confined to the Aegean: in 413, financial contributions from Rhegium in the south of Italy, among other places, were handled by the imperial “Treasurers of the Greeks.” No inscribed records of tribute exist before 454 bce; after that point, one has the intermittent assistance of the “Athenian Tribute Lists,” actually the record of the one-sixtieth fraction paid to the goddess Athena. It should be stressed that until roughly the late 450s there are virtually no imperial inscriptions at all.
Strains on Greek unity
Such lack of evidence makes it difficult to show in detail the increasing oppressiveness of the Athenian empire in the second half of its existence (450–404), particularly in the 420s when policy was affected by demagogues like the notorious Cleon. There is simply too little comparative material from the first three decades, and, in the absence of documentary material and of detailed information like that provided by Thucydides for the Peloponnesian War of 431–404, one must infer what happened from the very sparse literary account Thucydides gives for the years 479–439 and from supplementary details provided by later writers. Although it is right to protest, against facile talk of the harsh imperialism of Cleon, that imperialism is never soft, an important but sometimes overlooked chapter of Thucydides is nonetheless explicit that Athens suffered a loss of goodwill through its excessive rigour.
By the middle of the 470s, Greek unity had not come too obviously apart, though the reluctant withdrawal of Sparta was ominous. Even so, at the Olympic Games of 476, an unusually political celebration (the first after the last of the Persian Wars and held in the honoured presence of the Athenian Themistocles), there were still victorious competitors from Sparta, as well as from other Dorian states such as Argos and Aegina and from Italy and Sicily.
Mounting Athenian aggression
Cimon’s actions
Athens’s capture of Eion on the Strymon, also in 476, was perfectly in keeping with the ostensibly Panhellenic or anti-Persian program of the Delian League: Eion, an economically and strategically important site in northern Greece, was still held by a Persian commander. That capture, the first act of the league recorded by Thucydides, was undertaken by Cimon, the son of Miltiades the Younger, who had won the Battle of Marathon.
The next act of Cimon and the Athenians, the attack on the island of Scyros, was considerably more dubious. Cimon expelled the “Dolopians” (i.e., the indigenous inhabitants) allegedly because they were pirates. Protection against piracy was surely as real a justification for the Delian League as protection against Persia and more general in its application (vulnerability to Persia was very much a matter of geographic position). That Athens was effective in this respect is suggested by the evidence for recrudescent piracy in the early 4th century, when the Athenians no longer had the power to police the seas. Nonetheless, the treatment of these Dolopians, who were hardly a serious threat to peaceful commerce, certainly appears to have been an act of mere muscle flexing.
The enterprise had a propagandist point as well: Cimon brought back the bones of Theseus from the island to Athens, where they were housed in a shrine built for them, somewhere in or near the Agora—perhaps to the east of it. (The site has not been discovered; the so-called “Theseum” is generally agreed to be a temple to Hephaestus.) That magnificent piece of theatre must have been in imitation of the Spartan treatment of the bones of Orestes; the act is not surprising, because Cimon was perhaps the first identifiable “Laconizer,” or admirer of Spartan values, in Athenian history. Theseus had a special significance not only for Cimon but for the Athenian empire in general. It was Theseus who, according to the myth, had founded the great Ionian festival at Delos called the Delia, which Athens was to revive with much pomp in 426. Such exploitation of the cult of relics was a kind of manifestation of kinship diplomacy, a phenomenon already noted above; the Athenians practiced it again in the early 430s when they founded Amphipolis and made political use of the relics of Rhesus, a local Thracian hero.
Athens’s moves against other Greeks
More Athenian aggression followed, unequivocally directed against other Greeks: Carystus, at the southeastern end of Euboea, was forced to join the league. This was a stepping-up of an Athenian involvement in Euboea that goes back to the 6th century, when Athens installed a cleruchy on Chalcis soon after the Cleisthenic reforms. In the middle of the century inscriptions show that wealthy Athenians possessed land on the Lelantine Plain. Such ownership by individual wealthy Athenians of land in the subject cities of the empire is a telling phenomenon, because the land was usually acquired in defiance of local rules: landowning was normally restricted to nationals of the state in which the land was situated. For Athenians to acquire such land, otherwise than by inheritance as a result of marriage to a non-Athenian, was an abuse, and inheritance of this kind was much less likely after a law of 451 restricting Athenian citizenship to persons of citizen descent on both sides. After 451 “mixed marriages” must have been far less common.
A still more sinister move was the reduction of Naxos, probably in the early 460s. Thucydides equates the inhabitants’ loss of freedom with “enslavement”—a strong metaphor. (The precise chronology of the whole period 479–439, and particularly the first 30 years, is uncertain, because Thucydides gives no absolute dates and there are none from other sources before the events in the northern Aegean of 465. The chronology followed here is the orthodox one, but some scholars seek to down-date the attacks on Eion and Scyros to 469—leaving the 470s implausibly empty of known imperial action—and Naxos later still.)
The anti-Persian aspect of the league had not, however, been forgotten, in spite of all this activity against Greeks. In 467 Cimon won the great Battle of the Eurymedon River in Pamphylia (southern Anatolia), a naval victory that made a great impression both in Greece (where it was celebrated by the dedication of a bronze date palm, or phoinix, at Delphi: a punning reference to the defeated Phoenician fleet) and among waverers, outside Greece proper, who had not yet joined the league. Many new allies were now recruited, such as the trading city of Phaselis on the Lycian-Pamphylian border. A rare early imperial inscription of the late 460s details the judicial privileges accorded to Phaselis.
Athens’s moves northward
Greek success in the east was followed by some mixed achievement under Cimon in the north. A quarrel arose in 465 with the wealthy and fertile northern Aegean island of Thasos about the island’s trading stations and mines along the mainland area just opposite it, and Thasos revolted. The word quarrel is obviously a euphemism for a piece of naked economic aggression by Athens; all ancient states wished to get their hands on as much precious metal for coinage as possible. Thasos was reduced and forced to give up all of its mines and mainland possessions. A further attempt at this time to extend Athenian northern interest, the colonizing expedition sent to the Nine Ways, the site of the later Amphipolis, was less successful. If silver was one coveted commodity, ship-building timber was another, and the desire for the latter was a large part of Athens’s motive for getting a foothold in the Amphipolis region. The Nine Ways operation is a reminder that colonizing activity did not cease with the end of the Archaic period: 10,000 settlers were sent. But the entire force was destroyed at Drabescus. That was probably the occasion for instituting state burial for war dead, a democratic measure that anticipated the reforms at the end of the 460s.
Thasos signaled changes in foreign policy alignments all over Greece. The Thasians had appealed to Sparta for help, asking it to invade Attica, and the Spartans secretly agreed to do so. According to Thucydides, they would have done it had they not been detained by a massive revolt of the helots, who had taken advantage of an earthquake to occupy the strong position of Ithome in Messenia. Ithome, together with the Acrocorinth, the citadel of Corinth, was described by a Hellenistic ruler as one of the “horns of the Peloponnesian ox” that a would-be conqueror had to seize. It is indeed possible that the occupiers of Ithome planned not only an act of secession but, in fact, an attack on the famously unravaged city of Sparta itself. The earthquake not only shook Spartan nerve but must also have had serious demographic effects, though how long-term those were is disputed.
Sparta’s responses
The Spartan response to Thasos looked forward in its anti-Athenian aspect to the great Peloponnesian War of 431–404. It was one of three major episodes in the period up to that war when Sparta moved against Athens. The second was an aborted invasion of Athens under King Pleistoanax in 446. The third episode, in 440, revolved again around the issue of whether to intervene to prevent Athens disciplining a recalcitrant ally, this time Samos. The actual confrontation between Sparta and Athens did not happen in any of these cases. Among the reasons for this—apart from the helot revolt that took a decade for Sparta to put down—was the growing anti-Spartan restlessness in Arcadia.
The Athenian Themistocles, who had fallen from favour at Athens and spent time in the Peloponnese after his ostracism (perhaps 471), might have been behind that movement, though attempts to associate him with particular “synoecizing” developments in the Arcadian cities (i.e., developments whereby small communities coalesced into a single city) are speculative. Nor need such synoecizing (if it happened at that time) necessarily have been democratic and thus evidence that the communities in question were following the Athenian model rather than the Spartan oligarchic one. The evidence of Athenian tragedy (the Suppliants of Aeschylus) cannot be pressed to yield secure allusions to Themistocles.
Another reason was the continued revival of Argos; its population had now recovered from the defeat at Sepeia (494), and the temporarily exiled descendants of the casualties of Sepeia, the “sons of the slain” as Herodotus calls them, a naturally anti-Spartan group, were now back in control (after ousting the slaves). Argos is on record as fighting a battle in perhaps the 470s, together with Arcadian Tegea, against Sparta, which also had to cope with “all the Arcadians except the Mantineans” at a strictly undatable battle of Dipaieis (which, however, should be put earlier than the Ithome revolt).
The “secret” promise to Thasos was followed by a more open rebuff to Athens. Sparta had invited the Athenians to help with the siege of the helots on Ithome, but with its usual catastrophic indecision Sparta then dismissed the Athenian contingent on suspicion of “revolutionary tendencies.” Athens reacted by allying itself with Argos and Thessaly, which was a blow to Spartan ambitions both in its obvious stronghold, the Peloponnese, and in central Greece, an area into which one group of Spartans always seems to have wanted to expand.
The reforms of Ephialtes
Legal reforms
That phase of foreign policy has to be somehow associated with internal change at Athens, the so-called Ephialtic reforms. In 462, together with the young Pericles, the Athenian statesman Ephialtes pushed through the decisive phase of the reforms, namely an assault on the powers of the Areopagus. These powers, except for a residual jurisdiction over homicide and some religious offenses, and perhaps a formal “guardianship of the laws,” were redistributed among the Council of Five Hundred and the popular law courts. This is, in essence, the very bald and unhelpful account of the main source, the Constitution of Athens; there must have been more to it, but the problem is to know how much more. Probably the Areopagus ceased to hear crimes against the state, and such cases were transferred to the popular courts.
Alternative interpretations of the inadequate evidence, however, are possible: there are a handful of recorded treason trials earlier than 462 in which a popular element does admittedly play a prominent part, and, although these can be explained away in various ways, it can be held that the transfer of jurisdictional power to the people occurred earlier than 462. Alternatively, it is possible that Ephialtes’ reforms in that area involved a mere transfer of “first-instance” jurisdiction (i.e., jurisdiction over cases other than those on appeal) from the Areopagus to the Council of Five Hundred. That interpretation requires the assumption of an unattested early 5th-century reform transferring capital appeals to the people.
More radically, and generally, the jurisdiction of magistrates (archons) was much curtailed; they now conducted a mere preliminary hearing, and the main case went to a large popular jury. The authority to conduct inquiries into the qualifications for office of the archons themselves (the dokimasia procedure) and into their behaviour after their terms of office had expired (euthyna procedure) was also taken away from the Areopagus and given to the Council of Five Hundred. The principle of popular accountability seems new, though the statement in Aristotle’s Politics, that the right of popular euthyna goes back in some sense to Solon, has its defenders.
Political reforms
There surely were other reforms. Certain features of the later democracy appeared after the rule of Cleisthenes but were in place by the Peloponnesian War; it is plausible to argue that they were introduced at this time, though there is a risk of circularity in characterizing Ephialtes as a comprehensive reformer by reference to strictly unattributed and undated changes. Thus, sortition for the Council of Five Hundred is not likely to have been earlier than 487, when the archonship ceased to be elective; but Athens imposed sortition for a comparable though smaller council on Ionian Erythrae in 453, surely not before there was sortition for the Council at Athens itself. Similarly, there is evidence for jury pay for the 460s (or less probably for the 450s), which makes it plausible to date Council pay, attested by 411, to the mid-century period also.
Taken together the Ephialtic reforms look like the result of careful thinking by particular individuals with a definite democratic philosophy. A case, however, can be made for seeing them all as part of a 30-year process, with a central action-filled phase, rather than as a single event. After all, the Areopagus was affected indirectly by the changes in the archonship in 487, though the archonship was formally opened to the zeugitai (the hoplite class) only in 457. But despite the great increase in work for the big popular juries and the granting to the courts of the right (which may go back to Ephialtes) to quash or uphold allegedly unconstitutional proposals, it is not likely that then or at any other time Athenians saw themselves as conferring sovereignty on the people’s courts at the expense of the Assembly. The implied psychological distinction between juries of Athenians and political gatherings of the same Athenians is not a plausible one.
The rejection of Cimon
Some of these changes were perhaps already in the air when the Spartans dismissed Cimon and his Athenians at Ithome. Cimon’s absence seems to have given Ephialtes and Pericles their chance: the main Areopagus reform was passed at this time, and in 461 Cimon was ostracized. This rejection of Cimon, however, was a personal matter: he should not be seen as a “conservative” opponent of a reform that gave more power to the people and especially to the thetic class, which manned the fleet. For one thing, Cimon’s victory at the Battle of the Eurymedon River was primarily a naval victory; for another, it was the Sparta-loving Cimon and his hoplites who were dismissed by the Spartans from Ithome for their subversive tendencies.
Most important of all, there is the general point that the interests of hoplites and thētes, now as at other normal times, coincided; both were denied the chance of standing for the archonship before 457 (the hoplites were admitted to it in that year). On the whole, it is the top two “Solonian” groups, the pentakosiomedimnoi and the cavalry class who were bracketed together on the one hand (as by Thucydides in one military context), while the zeugitai and thētes tended to be bracketed together on the other. No built-in class cleavage existed between the hoplite or zeugite class and the thētes, and attempts to exploit one, by advocating or offering a “hoplite franchise,” were short-lived failures. Cimon then should not be seen as champion of “conservative” hoplites against “radical” thētes; that view is wrong because the interests of hoplites and thētes were indissolubly linked.
Athenian expansion
Friction between Athens and Corinth
Athens’s two new alliances, with Argos and Thessaly, were provocative (surely not just defensive), but they did not create direct danger of war. Far more serious was the friction at this time between Athens and Corinth. Corinth had made no move to help Sparta, as far as is known, at the time of the Ithome disaster but seems to have pursued expansionist goals of its own in the Peloponnese, perhaps at Argos’s expense. Now that Athens and Argos were allied, this indirectly tended to damage Corinth’s hitherto good relations with Athens. (Corinth had fought well at Salamis, as even Herodotus was aware, though very different stories were circulating on this topic after 460.) More relevant than this was Athens’s ready reception of a third ally, Megara; like the Argives, the Megarians had also felt pressure from Corinth (one hears of a boundary dispute and a local war) and turned to Athens. That was the cause and beginning of the “violent hatred” between Corinth and Athens, which produced what modern scholars call the First Peloponnesian War.
The First Peloponnesian War (460–446) should probably be seen as essentially a conflict between Athens and Corinth, with occasional interventions by Sparta. Modern disagreement centres on the reasons why Sparta did not play a role: one line of explanation is purely military, invoking the difficulty of invading Attica while the mountains above Megara were policed by Athens; the other and more plausible view is that Sparta simply lacked the will to act consistently. Spartan inactivity should in any case not be exaggerated. There is a pattern to its interventions, which suggests that in this period, as at others, the “central Greek” lobby at Sparta, the closest thing to an identifiably imperialistic group to be found there, could sometimes prevail.
The subjugation of Aegina
The first battle of the war, at Halieis in the Gulf of Argolis, was a Corinthian victory, but the next battle, at Cecryphalea (modern Angistrion), went Athens’s way (459). Aegina, which was attacked and besieged in the same year, was reduced in the following year and forced to pay tribute, though some vague undertaking about autonomy may have been made; the alternative is to suppose a special clause about Aeginetan autonomy, or even a general autonomy clause, in the peace of 446, which ended the war.
The alleged Athenian infringement of the autonomy of Aegina was one of the secondary causes of the main Peloponnesian War. In the meantime, the subjugation of Aegina, a great city of the Archaic age, whose proud Dorianism and traditions of seafaring and hospitality are stressed in lines of great beauty by Pindar in his Nemean Odes and elsewhere, was an event of cardinal importance. The pretense that Athens was merely leading a voluntary association of willing Ionian cities in need of protection could hardly survive the reduction of Aegina.
The scale of Athenian ambition
The real scale of Athenian ambitions is shown by four other developments of this period. First, Athens undertook a great and disastrous expedition to Egypt (460–454), in ostensible continuance of the fight against Persia. Egypt, however, had always been a rich and desirable Persian satrapy, exploited by absentee Persian landowners; and thus an economic motive for Athens cannot be excluded. Second, Athens made an alliance (almost certainly in 457) with an inland half-Greek Sicilian city, Segesta. That alliance prepared the ground for a more tangible western policy in the 440s. Third, Athens now built the Long Walls connecting it to Piraeus and thus the sea and enabling Athens to depend for the future on the produce of its empire if absolutely necessary. The walls, however, should not be thought of as purely defensive in view of the constant connection made by Thucydides between walls and dynamic sea power. Fourth, Athens made an alliance (the inscription is strictly undatable) with the Delphic Amphictyony in the middle of the century. That alliance must be connected with the Athenian alliance made with Thessaly in 461, because Thessaly controlled a majority of Amphictyonic votes (always a reason why other states or rulers, like Philip of Macedon in the next century, were anxious to have a controlling interest in Thessaly).
It is interesting that Athens should thus extend its religious propaganda to include the sanctuary of Apollo of Delphi (Apollo Pythios) as well as that of Apollo of Delos. The oracle was always a distinct entity from the sanctuary, but it cannot be accidental that about now the oracle, normally favourable to Sparta during that period and conspicuously so in 431, declared Athens an “eagle in the clouds for all time.”
The First Peloponnesian War can in fact be seen not as a straightforward political or military struggle but as a struggle for religious influence at certain of the great Panhellenic sanctuaries, above all Delphi and Nemea. The Athenians were vying for influence at Delphi with the Spartans, who significantly exerted themselves only twice during the whole war. The first time was the Tanagra campaign in defense of Doris, which was their mythical “metropolis” and the possessor of vital direct leverage in the amphictyony that controlled the affairs of the Delphic sanctuary. The Spartans themselves had no direct vote in the amphictyony, a detail that explains why Doris mattered so much to them—it was a source of indirect Delphic influence. The second occasion was the so-called Second Sacred War, fought a few years later over control of the Delphic sanctuary. Corresponding to this struggle was a simultaneous struggle between the Corinthians and the Argives for influence over the Nemean Games, which were administered by the people of a small local city, Cleonae. Characteristically, Thucydides does not bring out these religious aspects at all clearly; they have to be reconstructed from other wisps of literary and inscriptional evidence.
Sparta’s resistance
The central Greek line of Athenian expansion was bound to bring a collision with Sparta. It entered the war in 458 in response to an appeal by its “mother city” Doris, the city from which the primeval Dorians were believed to have set out to undertake the invasion of the Peloponnese. This tiny state in central Greece was currently experiencing difficulties with its neighbour Phocis. The religious and sentimental factor in Sparta’s response was not negligible, but Sparta may have had other aims as well. Not only is there the amphictyonic aspect already noted, but there is evidence in Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian of the 1st century bce, though not in Thucydides, that Boeotia was a target.
It was on their return from Doris that the Spartans finally came to blows with Athens at Tanagra in Boeotia (458). The battle was of large scale—one hears of Argive involvement on the Athenian side—but indecisive. The Athenians, however, followed it up with a victory at Oenophyta, which gave them control of Boeotia for a decade, an extremely important development passed over by Thucydides in half a dozen words. There was further aggressive Athenian action, first under the general Tolmides, who circumnavigated the Peloponnese (456) and perhaps settled the large number of Messenians at Naupactus alongside the original Naupactans, and second, under Pericles, who launched military expeditions in the Gulf of Corinth (454?). But the disastrous end to the adventure in Egypt (454) made Athens ready for a truce, and in 451 Athens came to terms with Sparta, while Argos concluded a 30-years’ peace with Sparta on its own account.
Peace with Persia
Athens resumed the war against Persia with hostilities on Cyprus, but Cimon’s death there made diplomacy imperative in this sphere also. This is where one should place the Peace of Callias (449), mentioned by Diodorus but one of Thucydides’ most famous omissions. Thucydides’ subsequent narrative of the Peloponnesian War, however, presupposes it at a number of points, especially in the context of Greek dealings with Persia in 411. More generally, a peace is made likely by the history of the 440s and 430s, which records no more overt Athenian warfare against Persia and a certain restlessness inside the Athenian empire. (This absence of warfare may be due to other factors as well; it is possible that the Treasury of the League, to which various states in the Delian League paid tribute, was moved from Delos to Athens in 454, a centralizing gesture that may have caused alarm. But the move may have happened earlier.)
Nonliterary evidence also points in the direction of a peace: the evidence of inscriptions makes it probable that no tribute was levied in 448. Perhaps it was recognized that the struggle with Persia was over and with it the justification for tribute; if so, the recognition was only momentary, because there was tribute again in 447. Furthermore, an inscription of the 420s appears to refer to a renewal of the peace on the death of Artaxerxes I. Finally, the commissioning of a new Temple of Athena Nike (“Victory”), and perhaps even of the Parthenon, may have been an aspect of the same mood. (The peace could be represented as a victory of a sort because it restricted the Persian king’s naval movements.) Yet the close correlation of architectural with political history is to be avoided; antibarbarian artistic themes on Greek public buildings need no special explanation at any time in the 5th century. Against all this there are a few ancient allegations that the peace was a later forgery, an implausible idea because such diplomacy was a matter of public knowledge.
Despite the truce with Athens in 451, Sparta had not withdrawn into its Peloponnesian shell completely. In addition to its campaign in support of Doris, Sparta successfully intervened in central Greece in a “Second Sacred War” against Phocis, which, with the assistance of Athens, had gained control of Delphi. Sparta handed over Delphi to the Delphians, but this action was promptly neutralized by the Athenians, who restored the sanctuary to Phocis. Catastrophic revolts in Boeotia and Euboea (446), however, soon eroded that Athenian authority in central Greece of which the Delphic intervention was a manifestation.
Revolts of Athens’s tributary states
Economic sources of resentment
The tributary states had much cause to rebel. There was something ominous about the sheer physical scale of the first (in chronological order) of the stone blocks on which were carved, as a permanent record, the tribute payments due to Athena. The block, preserved in the Epigraphic Museum in Athens, is a towering 142 inches (3.61 metres) high and had plenty of room for many years of tribute. Evidently the Athenians of 454 expected the empire to go on indefinitely, despite the failure in Egypt, which must have made many observers reflect that peace with Persia could not be far away. Yet tribute, exactingly collected, as Thucydides says, was not the only grievance. It was not even the only economic grievance. In the period of the early Peloponnesian War there were, as inscriptions show, strict Athenian controls on the traffic of grain from the Black Sea, including “Guardians of the Hellespont.” According to one view, those controls were a purely wartime expedient, but, given the state of the evidence, that charitable view is an abuse of the argument from silence; in any case, a prewar inscription does in fact attest a 10 percent tax on shipping from the Black Sea. Grain bound for Athens itself was probably exempt from this.
Still in the economic sphere, resentment against Athenian ownership of land—whether collectively (the so-called cleruchy system, stepped up at the end of the 450s) or privately, by wealthy individuals—can legitimately be inferred from the self-denying promises made by Athens in the days of its 4th-century confederacy. In that category should be included sacred precincts (temenē) in allied states, marked out by horoi, or boundary stones, which indicated land that might be leased out to other wealthy Athenians. The view that those precincts attest benevolently exported or adopted Athenian cults has been challenged.
Political and legal sources of resentment
Another interference in the internal affairs of tribute-paying allies in the 4th century was the placement of garrisons and garrison commanders, attested as early as the Erythrae decree of 453. The same decree imposed a “democratic” constitution, according to a principle that the literary sources say was general Athenian policy. Yet it would be simplistic to think that such Athenian-influenced constitutions were necessarily a significant upholding of human rights. One must always ask what “democracy” can have meant in a small community.
At Erythrae, not only was the council less democratic than that at Athens, but there also was a property qualification for jurors. And at exceedingly few places other than Athens does inscriptional evidence for amendments from the floor exist. In any case, there are significant exceptions (Samos, Mytilene, Chios, Miletus, Potidaea, and possibly Boeotia) to the generalization that Athens insisted on democracies. What the allies thought of this is inscrutable. A statement by an Athenian speaker in Thucydides that the popular party everywhere supported Athens is matched by the reported view of another Thucydidean speaker that what the allies wanted was freedom from interference of any kind.
In the legal sphere the allies suffered from disabilities (such as the requirement to have certain types of cases heard in Athens). These were firmly maintained even in texts, such as the Phaselis decree, that accord specific limited legal privileges. Full legal privilege and status was reserved for full Athenians, a status whose definition was tightened by the citizenship law of Pericles in 451. Roman commentators pointed to Athenian (and Spartan) failure to integrate their subjects as citizens as the explanation of their more general failures as imperial powers. There is much in this; it is not an answer to say that there is no attested clamour for Athenian citizenship, when the allied view on so many points does not exist. Certainly, among the thousands disfranchised in the 440s by the new rules regarding citizenship, there must have been many immigrants from the empire. Colonial mother cities sometimes offered citizenship wholesale to their daughter communities. Imperial Athens borrowed many features of the colonial relationship, but not that one.
The Euboean revolt
Boeotia revolted in 446 with help from Euboean exiles, and the Athenians were forced to accept this political reversal after a military defeat at Boeotian Coronea. The revolt of Euboea itself followed. Pericles crossed over to deal with it but only precipitated a third revolt, that of Megara. This was a serious military crisis, and it was compounded by a Spartan invasion of Attica: King Pleistoanax got as far as Eleusis and the Thriasian plain, but, as mentioned above, the invasion was not carried through. Pleistoanax and Pericles seem to have struck a deal: Sparta would not interfere in Euboea or invade Attica in exchange for Athens’s acquiescence in the loss of Boeotia, the Megarid, and certain Peloponnesian sites.
An arrangement on these lines was formalized in a Thirty Years’ Peace between Athens and Sparta, but it would be too optimistic to try to list all the terms. An essential undertaking was a renunciation of armed attacks if the other side was prepared to submit to arbitration. The prevalent modern view that the peace involved a formal recognition by the Peloponnesians of the Athenian empire rests on a misinterpretation of a passage in the first speech that Thucydides puts into the mouth of Pericles. Athens could now deal with Euboea, and inscriptions have preserved the terms of the firm settlement imposed on individual communities there.
Greek communities in Italy and Sicily
Athenian buoyancy was not deflated even by these failures. For in 443 the Athenians advertised a big colonial venture to Thurii in Italy and about the same time made alliances with Rhegium in Italy and Leontini in Sicily (alliances renewed a decade later on surviving inscriptions).
ancient GreeceThis map shows the chief cities and divisions of ancient Greece, which included settlements in Asia Minor, the island of Sicily, and southern Italy. Some of these cities have survived into modern times, often under the same name.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Since the Persian Wars the most splendid of the western Greek communities had been tyrannically ruled until the fall of Gelon’s family, the Deinomenids of Syracuse, in 466/467, soon after the death of Gelon’s brother Hieron and the fall of the tyrannical house of Theron at Acragas in 472. Syracuse enjoyed a moderate democracy thereafter, disturbed only by a native rebel, Ducetius, whom it took surprisingly long to put down. In Italy, where Rome was preoccupied with the neighbouring Volsci and Aequi for much of the century, Hellenism maintained itself vigorously: the temples of Paestum dating to the 5th century, like those of Acragas or Segesta, were comparable to anything in mainland Greece, and there were philosophers and the philosophical schools of Croton, Taras, and Elea (Velia), all in southern Italy. At Elea, south of Paestum, interesting portrait statues were discovered in the 1960s, which showed that the philosophical school there had a medical aspect to it: a cult of Apollo Oulios, a healing god, was looked after by a clan of Ouliadai (which was associated with the medical organization, though the exact relationship is obscure), and even the famous Parmenides, better known as a philosopher, is called Ouliades.
Pythagoreanism, a philosophical school and religious brotherhood, flourished in southern Italy. In the early 5th century Pythagorean groups involved themselves in government, ruling Croton for a period. Nonetheless, there were tyrannies in southern Italy too, such as that of Anaxilas at Rhegium. Religious and social links with the Greek mainland were cultivated, above all by contacts with the sanctuary and games at Olympia and by patronage of poets such as Pindar. In his second and third Olympian odes, written for Sicilian patrons, Pindar shows knowledge of the eschatological belief system known as Orphism; there is some reason to think that this particularly flourished in the West.
The Athenian-inspired Thurii project represented a fairly substantial mainland Greek encroachment on western soil; that and a mysterious Athenian colonizing effort in the Bay of Naples region, undertaken perhaps in the early 430s by a western expert, Diotimos, must have caused unease to western-oriented Corinth. (There is even a Spartan aspect: Thurii was soon engaged in warfare with Sparta’s only historical colony, Taras.) Nonetheless, when Samos revolted from Athens in 440, it was Corinth that in a congress of the Peloponnesian League voted against intervention against Athens on behalf of Samos (Corinth’s attitude had no doubt softened with the detachment of Megara from Athens). Sparta, however, seems to have wanted to stop Athens in its tracks, though in the end it was typically unwilling to press this line of policy home. At this point Thucydides’ main narrative stops for five crucial years, at the end of which tension between Corinth and Athens was again high, on the eve of the great Peloponnesian War. In historiographical terms we may call this vital period the Great Gap.
The Peloponnesian War
Causes
The causes of the main Peloponnesian War need to be traced at least to the early 430s—the Great Gap period—although if Thucydides was right in his general explanation for the war, namely Spartan fear of Athenian expansion, the development of the entire 5th century and indeed part of the 6th were relevant.
In the early 430s Pericles led an expedition to the Black Sea, and about the same time Athens made an alliance with a place close to areas of traditional Corinthian influence, Acarnania. (On another view this belongs in the 450s.) In 437 the Athenians fulfilled an old ambition by founding a colony at Amphipolis, no doubt on a large scale, though figures for settlers do not exist. This was disconcertingly close to another outpost of Corinthian influence at Potidaea in the Chalcidice, and there is a possibility that Athens subjected Potidaea itself to financial pressure by the mid-430s. That city was an anomaly in being both tributary to Athens and simultaneously subject to direct rule by magistrates sent out annually by Corinth; it clearly was a sensitive spot in international relations. Thus to the west (Acarnania and other places) and northeast (Amphipolis, Potidaea) Corinth was being indirectly pressured by Athens, and this pressure was also felt in Corinth’s own backyard, at Megara.
Athens passed a series of measures (the “Megarian decrees”) imposing an economic embargo on Megara for violations of sacred land. The religious aspect of the offense was reflected in the exclusions imposed: like murderers, the Megarians were banned from the Athenian marketplace and the harbours in the Athenian empire. But one should not doubt that Athens caused and intended to cause economic hardship as well or that the decrees were the first move in securing Megara as a military asset, a line of policy further pursued in the years 431 to 424. It should further be noted that the Black Sea, to which, as already mentioned, Pericles led a flamboyant expedition in the Great Gap period, was an area of colonial Megarian settlement; there too one can legitimately infer an Athenian desire to pressure Megara, albeit indirectly.
Reactions to all this, within the empire and outside it, are hard to gauge. Athens’ savage reduction of Samos, a member of the Delian League, in 440–439, did not stop Mytilene and most of Lesbos from appealing at some time in the prewar period to Sparta for encouragement in a revolt they were meditating. No encouragement was given: Sparta was standing by the Thirty Years’ Peace and should be given (a little) credit for doing so.
For the period from 433 to 411 a vastly more-detailed narrative is possible than theretofore, but the reader should be warned that this freak of scale is due to one man, Thucydides, who imposed his view of events on posterity. It would, however, be artificial to write as if the information for this unique period were no better than that available for any other.
The main precipitating causes of the war, thought of as a war between Athens and Sparta, actually concerned relations between Sparta’s allies (rather than Sparta itself) and other smaller states with Athenian connections. The two “causes” that occupy the relevant parts of Thucydides’ first, introductory book concern Corcyra and Potidaea. (Thucydides does not let his readers entirely lose sight of two other causes much discussed at the time—the Megarian decrees and the complaints of Aegina about its loss of autonomy. One 4th-century Athenian orator actually dropped a casual remark to the effect that “we went to war in 431 about Aegina.”) Corcyra (present-day Corfu), which had quarreled with Corinth over the Corcyran colony of Epidamnus on the coast of Illyria (a colony in which Corinth also had an interest), appealed to Athens.
Taking very seriously the western dimension to its foreign policy (it was about then that the alliances with Rhegium and Leontini were renewed), Athens voted at first for a purely defensive alliance and after a debate, fully recorded by Thucydides, sent a small peace-keeping force of 10 ships. That force, however, was trebled, as a nervous afterthought; no political background is given for the move, which, moreover, emerges only subsequently and in passing during the narrative of events concerning Corcyra itself. (This is a small illustration of the important point that Thucydides’ presentation unduly influenced modern views on the general issue of Athenian belligerence, as on so many other issues. A different narrative, by emphasizing the escalation of the Athenian commitment and making it the subject of another full debate, might have left a different impression. It is, however, hard to be sure if Thucydides’ postponement of the vital point was prompted by outright political bias in favour of Athens or if it was just a manifestation of a “Homeric” tendency to feed in information only at the point where it becomes most relevant). In fact, Corinthian and Athenian ships had already come to blows before the reinforcements arrived.
Then at Potidaea, a Corinthian colony, the Athenians demanded that the Corinthian magistrates be sent home. Potidaea revolted, and an unofficial Corinthian force went out to help. Potidaea was laid under siege by Athens. None of this yet amounted to war with the Peloponnesian League as a whole, but the temperature was as high as it could be, short of that. A congress of Spartan allies was convoked to discuss grievances against Athens, and the decision was taken for war.
The other Spartan ally seeking to involve Sparta in a private feud with an enemy was Thebes, whose attack on its neighbour Plataea (an Athenian ally) in time of peace was retrospectively recognized by Sparta as an act of war guilt. The Spartans should not have condoned it, nor should they have invaded Attica (despite the fact that the Athenians had placed a garrison in Plataea) so long as the Athenians were offering arbitration, as it seems they were.
The initial phase, 431–425
Pericles
Athenian war strategy and the initial conduct of the war are presented by Thucydides very much in personal terms: the focus is on what Pericles, the dominant figure of this time, did or wanted. That method, like the Homeric emphasis on heroes, is to some extent literary spotlighting, for at no time was Pericles immune from criticism. In the 440s he had to deal with a major rival, Thucydides, son of Melesias (not the historian), who was ostracized in 443. Even after that, in the poorly documented 430s (before Aristophanes and Thucydides provide information about individual figures of second- or third-rate significance), there are suggestions of tension, such as a partial ban on comedy (with its potential for exposure) and indications in the sources that Cleon was really not a successor of Pericles at all but a highly critical contemporary. The reasons for Pericles’ ascendancy remain a secret, and that in itself makes it necessary to allow for a large element of “charismatic” leadership.
In the military sphere Thucydides is surely wrong to present Pericles as a one-man band. He says of Pericles that early in the war “the Athenians reproached him for not leading them out as their general should.” If this sentence had survived in isolation, one would hardly have guessed that Pericles was one of the college of 10, subject to control and threat of deposition by the Assembly (Pericles was indeed deposed temporarily toward the end of his life). On the whole, however, Thucydides minimizes the degree to which Athenian generals enjoyed executive latitude, particularly in wartime; it may be suggested that the reason for this was his own exile, imposed in 424 as a punishment for failing, as commander in the region, to relieve Amphipolis. This impressed him deeply—and unduly—with the impotence and vulnerability of generals other than Pericles.
The reproach of “not leading out the Athenians” provides useful insight into Periclean strategy, revealing it to have been largely reactive. Whereas the Spartans’ goal was to liberate Greece from tyranny, which required them to dismantle the Athenian empire, all the Athenians had to do was to avoid such demolition. In a way that suited neither side: initiative of the kind demanded from Sparta was in short supply there (though never entirely absent). For the Athenians’ part, the famously energetic and meddlesome population did not take kindly to the practical consequences of Periclean strategy that required it to evacuate Attica and move its population behind the fortified walls of Athens, to rely on accumulated capital reserves and on the fleet as an instrument to hold the empire firmly down, and to avoid adding to the empire during wartime. By these means the Athenians would eventually “win through” (the Greek word is neatly ambiguous as between victory and survival).
Actually the Athenian position was not and could not be so simple. For one, the agricultural evacuation of Attica was not as complete as it was to be after 413 when the Spartans occupied Decelea in northern Attica. Nor did Pericles altogether abandon Attica militarily: there were cavalry raids to harass the dispersed foot soldiers of the enemy and to keep up city morale. Holding the empire down and holding onto capital were potentially inconsistent aims in view of the great cost of siege warfare (there was no artillery before the 4th century to facilitate the taking of fortified cities by storm). The destruction of Samos had been expensive—a four-figure sum in talents—and the siege of Potidaea was to cost 2,000. Athens, even with coined reserves of 6,000 talents at the beginning of the war, could not afford many Potidaeas. Pericles can be criticized for not foreseeing this, with the evidence of Samos behind him.
Sparta’s role
Sparta came as a liberator. That too called for money and ships, but the Spartans had neither accumulated reserves like Athens nor a proper fleet. Persia was a possible source for both, but assistance from Persia might compromise Spartan “liberation theology.” This was especially true if Sparta set foot in Anatolia, where there were Greeks with as much desire for liberation (whether from Athens or Persia or both: some communities paid tribute in both directions) as their mainland counterparts. A further difficulty lay in the kind of regime Sparta itself could be expected to impose if successful. One revealing reason for the failure of the big colony at Heraclea founded in 426, a project with a strongly anti-Ionian and propagandist element, was the harsh and positively unjust behaviour of the Spartan governors, who frightened people away. Was the Spartan stick, or bakteria, too much in use by violent Spartan officers with too little self-control?
Again a few qualifications are in order. Money could be obtained from more-acceptable sources than Persia—from the western Dorians, for instance. And subsidized piracy, of which one hears a little in the 420s, was another solution to the naval problem. Against harsh governors like those at Heraclea one has to balance Brasidas, who was as good a fighter in the battle for the hearts and minds as in the conventional sense.
Sparta’s invasion of Attica set the tone of the first half of the Archidamian War (431–421), named after the Spartan king Archidamus II, unfairly in view of the wariness he is said to have expressed at the outset. Athens moved its flocks from Attica across to Euboea, whose economic importance was thus raised further still. As if in recognition that this was a war brought about at the instance of Corinth, much early Athenian naval activity was devoted to stripping Corinth of assets in the northwest—of Sollium, Astacus, and Cephellenia. Yet there was also an Athenian raid on Methone in Messenia (the later Venetian strong point of Modon), foiled by Brasidas; a morale-boosting raid on the Megarid (such raids were repeated twice a year until 424); and some successful diplomacy in the north, where the Odrysian Thracians were won over.
At the end of this first campaigning year, Pericles delivered an austere but moving speech honouring the fallen men, which has become known as the funeral oration of Pericles. This famous oration, however, is largely the work of Thucydides himself; it is a timeless personal tribute to Athenian power and institutional strength but not, as has been argued, a key to unlock Athenian civic ideology. The speech, as preserved, is not peculiarly enthusiastic about democracy as such and has perhaps been over-interpreted in the light of Athens’s later cultural fame. In particular, the Thucydidean Pericles is usually taken to have said that Athens was an education to Greece, but in context he says merely that other Greeks would do well to profit from its political example.
Continuing strife
The second year of the war, 430, began with another invasion of Attica. Thucydides, having scarcely brought the Peloponnesians into Attica, switches styles dramatically to record the outbreak of a dreadful plague at Athens. Although it cannot be securely identified with any known disease, that plague carried off one-third of the 14,000 hoplites and cavalry (there was a recurrence in 427). Pericles himself came down with the disease and died in 429, not, however, before leading a ravaging expedition against Epidaurus and other Peloponnesian places and defending himself against his critics. The speech Thucydides gives him for this occasion is as fine as the funeral speech, which has received so much more attention. It hints loftily at expansion to east and west of the kind that Pericles’ initial strategy had appeared to rule out. It is possible that this speech is historical and that the purpose of attacking Epidaurus was to bar Corinth’s eastern sea-lanes completely; Aegina had already been evacuated and repopulated by cleruchs in 430, perhaps as an initial step toward that end. In the north, Potidaea surrendered, and a cleruchy was installed there too, a further Corinthian setback.
Peloponnesian pressure on Plataea was stepped up in 429. A large expedition in the northwest under the Spartan Cnemus, who used barbarian as well as Greek forces in an effort to win back some of Corinth’s losses, showed that there were adventurous thinkers before the northern operations of Brasidas later in the decade. It was, however, a failure, as was a Peloponnesian embassy to Persia asking for money and alliance. Intercepted by the king of the Odrysians, the ambassadors were handed over to Athens, where they were put to death with no pretense at trial. The Odrysians feature prominently at this time (but perhaps Thucydides’ own family interests in Thrace have distorted the picture): the mass mobilization of a large Odrysian force, ostensibly in the Athenian interest, soon afterward caused general terror in Greece, but it came to nothing. There was more-concrete encouragement for Athens in some naval successes of the great commander Phormion in the Gulf of Corinth.
Mytilene and Plataea
It is perhaps surprising that it was only in 428 that a revolt within the Athenian empire gave Sparta the opportunity to implement its basic war aim of liberating Greece. This was the revolt of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, to which Athens reacted with a prompt blockade. It was a shrewd Spartan move to summon the Mytileneans and other injured Greeks to the Olympic Games at this point, thus emphasizing that one aspect of the war was the tension between Dorians and Ionians. (Athens was hardly formally excluded from the solemnities, but Olympia always had a Dorian flavour.) Alcidas, the Spartan commander sent to assist the Mytileneans, failed, however, to do anything for them. On its surrender (427) the city narrowly escaped the wholesale executions and enslavements Cleon had recommended, but only as a result of second thoughts on the part of the Assembly (those events and decisions form the context of the famous “Mytilene debate”). It is to the Athenians’ credit that some of them were moved by the thought that their original decision was bloodthirsty.
There were no such doubters among the Spartans who supervised the final phase of Plataean 5th-century history. When the remaining Plataeans surrendered (some had already broken out to Athens), they were put to death to a man, after the “brief question” had been put to them, “Have you done anything for Sparta during the war?” It was a question that the Plataeans, despite some moving pleas, could answer only negatively. At least Cleomenes I in the 6th century and Agesilaus II in the 4th, both of whom applied much the same criterion as this in international affairs, made no pretense of being liberators ofGreece. It is impossible for the modern reader to reflect on those two fully reported incidents at Mytilene and Plataea without coming to some general conclusions about Spartan behaviour; and Thucydides too was prompted to generalize in this fashion. His thoughts are attached to an account of civil strife at Corcyra, in the west, in 427. After a bloodbath, the democratic pro-Athenian faction prevailed over the oligarchical pro-Spartan party, with the Athenian commander Eurymedon making no attempt to stop it.
Speculation and unease
About this time the Athenians speculatively pursued their western interests, sending at first an expedition of 20 ships under Laches and Charoeades (c. 427) and then 40 more under Sophocles (not the tragedian), Pythodorus, and Eurymedon (426–425). This was a large force in total, given Athens’s other commitments, but its goals are difficult to assess; both radical and conservative motives are given, such as the desire to give the sailors practice (not a ridiculous motive, but an inadequate one), to cut off grain shipments to the Peloponnese (by which Corinth is presumably meant), or even to see if the whole island of Sicily could be brought under control, whatever exactly that might entail. (In 424, after mostly halfhearted warfare, the Sicilians put aside their internal differences at a conference in Gela, of which the Pan-Sicilian Hermocrates was the hero. The Athenian commanders returned home to an undeserved disgrace: their mandate for outright conquest had hardly been clear, nor were their resources sufficient.) The attempt by the Athenian general Nicias to take Megara by military means (427) had more immediate promise of success.
It is possible that even the Spartans were uneasy at what the main events of 427, at Mytilene and Plataea, had done for their image: they had been ineffective and brutal. Perhaps in partial redress, but also in pursuit of a traditional line of policy, they issued a general invitation to participate in a large (10,000 strong) colony at Heraclea in Trachis at the southern approach to Thessaly. This colonizing effort had intelligible short-term military motives, namely, a felt need to gain a hold on the Thracian region—the only part of the Athenian empire reachable by land—and a desire to deny Athens access to its larder on Euboea. But Thessaly had always featured and was always to feature in ambitious Spartan thinking; and Sparta may already have planned to make use of the amphictyonic vote that one certainly finds Heraclea exercising in the 4th century. That is, the Spartans were seeking to improve the unsatisfactory state of affairs which had led, as noted, to their initial intervention in the First Peloponnesian War—namely, their inability to exert influence in the Delphic amphictyony except indirectly through their metropolis, Doris.
From the propaganda point of view, the exclusion of Ionians, Achaeans, and some others was telling. Sparta was presenting itself as a leader of Dorians, not just as a selfish promoter of Spartan interests. This was the redress offered to a Greek world well-disposed toward Sparta at the beginning of the war but now perhaps dismayed by the way things were going. It was a pity that the brutality and violence of Spartan governors at Heraclea helped to ruin the project.
Athens’s magnificent refounding, also in 426, of the Ionian festival of Apollo on the island of Delos, where the Delian League had been established in 478 bce (see above The Delian League), must surely in part be seen as a response to Dorian Heraclea. (There were other motives too, such as desire for expiation for the plague, which had ravaged Athens a second time in the winter of 427–426.) Of the two great Panhellenic sanctuaries, Olympia had taken an ugly anti-Athenian look in 428, while the oracle of Delphi had actually approved the Heraclea colony. Athens, through Delos, was creating or inflating religious propaganda possibilities of its own. The same is true of an Athenian invitation to the Greeks at large, also (possibly) in the 420s, to bring offerings of firstfruits to Eleusis.
Land operations in the northwest occupied much of the purely military history of 426. They were conducted by one of the finest generals of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian Demosthenes (no relation of Philip’s 4th-century opponent). He was at first spectacularly unsuccessful in some ambitious campaigning, perhaps not sanctioned by the Assembly at all, in Aetolia, where his hoplites were nearly helpless against the light-armed tactics of the locals. He was, however, able to retrieve the position subsequently, in Amphilochia, in circumstances that brought further discredit on Sparta, whose commander deserted his Ambracian allies.
The years 425–421
Spartan calls for peace
The decisive year in the Archidamian War was, on Thucydides’ perhaps over-schematic account, 425. Demosthenes, whose credit with the Assembly must now have been excellent, obtained permission to use a fleet round the Peloponnese. He and his troops used it to occupy the remote Messenian headland of Pylos, a prominence at the north end of the Bay of Navarino, and to fortify it. The Spartans foolishly reacted by landing a hoplite force on Sphacteria, the long island to the south of Pylos. This force of 420 men, about half of them full Spartan citizens, was cut off by the Athenians, who thus acquired a potentially valuable bargaining chip. The Spartans sued for peace without reference to their allies (so much for liberation), but Cleon persuaded Athens to turn the offer down. Cleon made steep demands, including (in effect) the cession of Megara, showing that he—like Nicias in 427 and Demosthenes and Hippocrates in 424—grasped the strategic importance of Megara, even if the historian Thucydides did not.
One development that Thucydides does not report in its place, saving it for later mention, is the recall from exile in 427 or 426 of the Spartan king Pleistoanax, who is known to have favoured peace. Similarly, he notes only just before the Peace of Nicias of 421 that one Spartan worry was the imminent expiry in that year of their 30-year truce with the Argives; they did not want a war against Argos as well as Athens. That factor must in reality have been operative on Spartan minds for some years before 421. Like the return of Pleistoanax, this means that the capture of the Spartans at Pylos was by no means the only consideration making peace desirable at Sparta. Thus, 425 was less decisive than Thucydides sometimes suggests, perhaps because he was preoccupied with the activities of the Athenian Cleon.
Cleon’s influence
Thucydides disliked Cleon, as did another highly articulate contemporary, the playwright Aristophanes (who showed his hand especially in his comedy Knights, of 424). The picture that emerges from their works of Cleon and figures like him as “new politicians,” arising not from among the old or property-holding families but from the people, is largely a literary fiction. It was foisted on posterity by these ancient writers, who exaggerated the contrast between Pericles and his successors because they admired Pericles’ style. In social background, political methods, and particular policies the difference was not great. The real change in Athenian politics came only with the loss of the empire in 404 and the resulting partial breakdown in the “consensus politics” that had prevailed hitherto (because all social classes stood equally to gain from the empire, which financed political pay, provided land for all, and cushioned the rich against the cost of furnishing the fleet).
There are two lines of policy one can safely associate with Cleon from evidence other than that of Thucydides. One is an apparently large theoretical increase in the level of allied tribute (425–424) documented by an inscription. But it is not certain that the increase was sudden (details of the immediately preceding reassessments do not survive) or that it was ever turned into actually collected tribute. The other line of policy is an attempt, attested by Aristophanes, to draw Argos into the war in some way (its peace with Sparta, as mentioned, was due to expire in 421, the year in which, unknown to Cleon in 425, the Archidamian War was to end).
By declining the diplomatic solution, Cleon found himself committed to a military one. He succeeded dramatically, capturing 120 full Spartans and taking them back to Athens. This operation, achieved partly with the use of light-armed troops, ensured that there would be no invasion of Attica in 424. Athens was free to establish a base on the island of Cythera south of Laconia and make a serious and initially successful attempt on Megara.
Spartan recovery
At this point the balance of the war began to tilt again in Sparta’s favour: Brasidas arrived, on his way to the north, and saved Megara by a whisker. Moreover, an ultra-ambitious Athenian attempt to reinstate the mid-century position by annexing Boeotia failed at Delium; this was a major defeat of Athens by a Boeotian army whose key component was Theban. Meanwhile, Brasidas had reached the north, where he had won over Acanthus by a blend of cajolement and threats and where, too quick for Thucydides (the historian) to stop him, he had taken Amphipolis. From there he proceeded to capture Torone. All this adventurous activity looks at first sight uncharacteristically Spartan, but Thucydides’ picture of Brasidas as a romantic loner at odds with the regime back home is somewhat overdone, and there is reason to think that his liberation policies represented official Spartan wishes.
An armistice between Athens and Sparta in 423 did not stop further northern places from falling into Brasidas’s arms—almost literally: at Scione the inhabitants came out to greet him with garlands and generally received him “as though he had been an athlete” (a rare Thucydidean glimpse of a world other than war and politics). He briefly won over Mende as well, but Athens recovered it soon after; Cleon arrived in 422 and won back Torone too. The deaths of both Cleon and Brasidas in a battle for possession of Amphipolis removed two main obstacles to the peace that most Spartans had been wanting for several years—in fact, since Sphacteria or even earlier (the return of Pleistoanax). As noted, the imminent expiry of the Argive peace was another factor, as was the occupation of Cythera, which provided a base for deserting helots (it is surprising that Athens did not make more use of the Spartan fear of their helots, a far from secret weapon of war). The essence of the Peace of Nicias (421) was a return to the prewar situation: most wartime gains were to be returned. Sparta had resoundingly failed to destroy the Athenian empire, and in this sense Athens, whatever its financial and human losses, had won the war.
The Peace of Nicias was seen by Thucydides as an uneasy intermission between two phases of a single war. Corinth and Boeotia rejected the peace from the outset, and an energetic young Athenian politician, Alcibiades, tried to return to what may have been Themistocles’ policy of stirring up trouble for Sparta inside the Peloponnese. Alcibiades’ plans, like those of Themistocles, centred on Argos, once again a factor in Greek international politics after 421 and ambitious to revive mythical Dorian glories. This was a period of low prestige and unhappiness for the Spartans, who were actually excluded from the Olympic Games of 420 by their enemies, the people of Elis; they waited 20 years before extracting revenge for this and other insults (but contrary to most modern views, the Olympic ban almost certainly did not last for the whole intervening two-decade period).
An alliance of Athens, Argos, Elis, and Mantinea fought Sparta in 418 in the territory of Mantinea. Sparta, resolute in war as it was irresolute in politics, scored a crushing victory over its enemies. The shame of the Sphacteria surrender was wiped out in one day, and the Greek world was reminded of Spartan hoplite supremacy. If Athens, whose finances were now strong again, wanted outlets for its aggression, it would have to find them elsewhere than in the Peloponnese. It sought it first in Anatolia, second on Melos, and third in Sicily.
Athenian aggression outside the Peloponnese
Entanglement with Persia
At some point after 425, when there was a routine renewal of the Peace of Callias, Athens began an entanglement in Anatolia with the Persian satrap Pissuthnes and subsequently with his natural son Amorges; it sent mercenary help to Pissuthnes and perhaps Amorges.
If this involvement began while the Archidamian War was still in progress, it was inexplicable provocation to Persia except on the assumption that Athens was too short of cash to pay these troops itself (a 1,000-talent reserve had been set aside at the beginning of the war, but there was resistance to touching it). If the entanglement began in the period of the Peace of Nicias, it was still dangerous adventurism because nobody could say how long the peace with Sparta would last.
Harsh treatment of Melos
Thucydides says nothing about this Persian entanglement in its right place, despite its long-term importance: it was, after all, Persian intervention on the Spartan side that ultimately settled the outcome of the whole war. By contrast, he says a great deal about Athens’s expedition in 416 against ostensibly unoffending Melos. Although militarily trivial, the subjugation and harsh treatment of Melos certainly had moral implications, which Thucydides explores in the famous “Melian Dialogue.” It shows that the Athenians, who had made one attempt on Melos in 427 under Nicias, still wanted to round off their Aegean empire irrespective of the Dorian “ancestry” of Melos. Thucydides’ debate is framed in absolute terms, as if there were no question of provocation by Melos and the only issue were whether the weaker should submit to the stronger, as Melos in the end had to do. Yet there are points to be noted. First, Melos may have contributed to the Spartan war fund as early as 426. Second, Athens had assessed Melos at the high sum of 15 talents in the context of the (admittedly optimistic) general increase of 425; there was a fugitive sense in which Melos, which did not pay this exorbitant sum, could be seen as a recalcitrant subject. This, however, is not a line pursued by Thucydides’ Athenians in the “Melian Dialogue.” Third, some Athenian subject allies joined in coercing Melos in 416, evidence that Ionians and Aeolians could be mobilized against Dorians and perhaps even that they positively approved of all the implications of a notably ruthless action. And fourth, the Melians, unlike some other coerced subjects of the Athenians, were given a chance to submit but declined to take it.
The Sicilian disaster
In 415 Athens turned to the third and most aggressive operation of the period, the great expedition against Sicily of 415–413, better known as the Sicilian disaster. The initial commanders were Alcibiades, Nicias, and Lamachus, but the expedition was weakened by the recall of Alcibiades to stand trial for impiety (he escaped and went to Sparta, which sent help to Syracuse at his suggestion).
Originally conceived in perfectly acceptable terms (a force of 60 ships to help Ionians and non-Greeks against the rising power of Syracuse), the expedition as ultimately sent was too ambitious; it consisted of a huge fleet of 140 ships—100 of them Athenian—reinforced by an additional 60. Thucydides speaks impressively but unspecifically about the cost of the expedition (he does report at one point that the Syracusans had spent 2,000 talents); an Athenian inscription is usually interpreted as showing that in a single transaction 3,000 talents was set aside for Sicily, though this restoration has been challenged.
A major problem was cavalry: Athens sent 250 cavalrymen without horses, but mounts were secured locally in Sicily, bringing the total to 650. (Athens also sent 30 mounted archers.) This total was not bad for a state that had never been a strong cavalry power, but it was scarcely more than half of the 1,200 that Syracuse was able to field. Even Athens’s early successes in the field, and there were some, were neutralized by that disparity: pursuit of the enemy by victorious Athenian infantry became a dangerous matter because of harassment by Syracusan cavalry. When the Spartan Gylippus arrived to help the Syracusans and Athens failed to wall in Syracuse, the Syracusan cavalry made the Athenian position intolerable: those who went out from their camps foraging for food often did not come back. Nicias himself was ill but was kept in post by the Athenians, a great mistake not compensated for by the arrival of first the more energetic Demosthenes and then Eurymedon. (Lamachus had been killed in action.) The final catastrophic sea battle in the Great Harbour of Syracuse was fought in cramped circumstances that did not allow the Athenian fleet enough freedom of maneuver. The expeditionary force was virtually annihilated, including its main commanders.
The second phase of the war, 413–404
The blow to Athens’s morale and prestige was perhaps greater than the strictly military reverse, for, with an astonishing capacity for replacement, Athens managed, after a crash building program, to achieve rough naval parity with the Peloponnesians. This was the more remarkable in view of difficulties at home. Already before the end came in Sicily, Sparta had reopened the Peloponnesian War. On the advice of Alcibiades, the Spartans had fortified Decelea (413) and, as a result, were able to occupy Attica. Athens, embarrassed economically for that and other reasons, decided to impose a 5 percent tax on shipping instead of the tribute (but the tribute seems to have been restored in 410).
Denied the use of Attica, Athens drew more heavily on Euboea for food, and that circumstance is relevant to Euboea’s revolt in 411. By then, however, there had also been revolts in the eastern Aegean and in Anatolia (413–412). As regards Anatolia, another factor is relevant: the king of Persia, angered by the Amorges affair, had decided to back Sparta. Representatives of his satraps Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus, as well as ambassadors from Chios and Erythrae, invited the Spartans to carry the war across to the eastern Aegean. This Sparta did, and in some long drawn-out diplomacy it agreed to abandon all claim to Anatolia as part of a deal for money and a fleet; the money given was hardly lavish, and the fleet did not materialize at all (perhaps, as Thucydides hints, because Tissaphernes wanted to wear down both sides, but perhaps because it was needed for use against Egypt. There is papyrus evidence for a revolt from Persian authority at this time, 411). For Sparta’s part, it is possible that its abandonment of Anatolia was not quite final; a treaty of 408 may have stipulated autonomy for the Ionian Greeks. Despite the reservations on both sides, the possibility of a joint victory of Sparta and Persia over Athens had at least been conjured briefly into existence. For the moment, however, the war went on.
Athens’s military resilience after its defeats in Sicily was remarkable, but the political credibility of the radical democracy had been battered: the rich had lost money, the thētes had lost men, all classes had lost their illusions. This was a situation ready to be exploited by intellectual activists, who disliked the democracy anyway. Thucydides gives a brilliant picture of the oligarchic revolution of 411 (the “Regime of the Four Hundred” oligarchs), but he can perhaps be criticized for not bringing out the importance of the intellectual factor, stressing instead the general atmosphere of suspicion and terror.
A complete analysis of the revolution ought, however, to allow for the influence, on oligarchic leaders like Antiphon and the less-extreme Theramenes, and no doubt on others, of the subversive teaching of the Sophists (rhetorically adept “experts” who professed to impart their knowledge of such politically useful skills as rhetoric, usually in exchange for money). Theramenes is said to have been a pupil of the Sophist Prodicus of Ceos. Thucydides mentions Sophists only once, and then not in the context of 411 at all. The first impetus to the revolution was given by Alcibiades, who certainly was a product of the Sophistic age. His motives, however, were selfish and short-term (he was aiming to achieve his own recall from exile), and he abandoned the oligarchs when he failed to get what he wanted. Nor had Peisander and Phrynichos, two other leading oligarchs, always been hostile to democracy.
It is certain, however, that there were some who held, as a matter of sincere theoretical conviction, that there were merits in a “hoplite franchise”—that is, an undemocratic constitution in which the thētes would be barred from attending the Assembly or serving as jurors). Such a view, insofar as it was elitist, would naturally be attractive to the cavalry class, and it is an appealing suggestion that the original coup d’état was staged at the deme site of Colonus precisely because of its associations with the cult of Poseidon Hippios—that is, “Horsey” Poseidon. But distinctions between extreme and moderate factions among the oligarchy must be made: Theramenes and Cleitophon were among the moderates who sought to justify the new arrangements by reference to Solon and Cleisthenes, who were wrongly represented, at this time, as having excluded the thētes from the Assembly. (Perhaps they used the slogan “ancestral constitution,” but a contemporary Sophist, Thrasymachus, implies that it was on everybody’s lips.) However erroneous such an appeal to Solon was with regard to the facts—it is a good example of “invented tradition”—it is undoubtedly true that members of that group behaved more moderately than some of the other oligarchs (Theramenes helped to overthrow the Four Hundred).
The Law Against Unconstitutional Proposals, a democratic safeguard, was abolished, as was pay for most kinds of political office, and the old Council of Five Hundred was to be replaced by an elected Council of Four Hundred. Those changes and plans did not go unopposed. Despite its losses in Sicily, there was still a fleet, at Samos, which was not at all pleased with what was happening. And the hoplites themselves, whatever theoreticians may have wished for on their behalf, were as enthusiastic for democracy as the thētes. The fleet sent a message to demand that the democracy be restored, and the extreme oligarchs were overthrown in favour of a more-moderate oligarchy, the regime of The Five Thousand. The new regime probably denied to the thētes the right of voting in the Assembly and law courts, though this is controversial. In any case, it lasted a mere 10 months.
Full democracy was restored in 410, and a commission was set up to codify the law: it was evidently felt that constitutional history had been abused in 411 and that the abuse had been made possible through ignorance. Codification was to prevent a recurrence; it was expected to take four months but was still incomplete after six years. A fresh start was to be made in 403.
In 410 Athens had recovered sufficiently to win a battle against the Peloponnesian fleet at Cyzicus (a factor in the downfall of The Five Thousand), and the Spartans may have asked for peace; the offer, however, is not mentioned by Xenophon, who now replaces Thucydides as the main source. That was a remarkable reversal of the position in 413 when a Spartan victory must have seemed in sight. Athens, however, refused to come to terms.
Athenian success continued with further victories in the Hellespontine region, and Alcibiades, who had played a role in these victories, was able to return from exile in 407. He magnificently led the religious procession from Athens to Eleusis, thus atoning for, or giving the lie to, his alleged impiety in 415 when he was held to have joined in profaning the Sacred Mysteries. His subordinate Antiochus, however, lost the Battle of Notium in 406, which effectively ended Alcibiades’ career. Athens managed yet another victory at Arginusae in 406. But the Athenian commanders, who failed to rescue survivors, were executed in an illegal mass trial. This was folly, and so was Athens’s refusal of yet another Spartan peace offer after the battle. In this, as after the Battle of Cyzicus, it followed the advice of the demagogue Cleophon.
That a combination of Persia and Sparta could win the war easily can never have been in much doubt, even after the particular failures of trust and understanding in 411. The extra factor needed to bring it about was a combination of personalities. This happened quite suddenly after 408, with the emergence to prominence of a new Spartan, Lysander, and a new and extremely young Persian, the king’s son Cyrus, sent to fight on Sparta’s side. The two men got on instantly (it surely helped their relationship that Persia had made concessions, if make them it did, about the autonomy of the Greek cities). The result was the victory at the Battle of Notium and then, after the Athenian refusal of the peace offer after Arginusae, a final crushing defeat of Athens at Aegospotami (405). The Athenians were starved into surrender by Lysander (404). The Long Walls were demolished, the fleet was reduced to a token 12 ships, and the empire ceased to exist. Athens was to be governed by a Spartan-imposed oligarchy, the Thirty Tyrants.
Greek civilization in the 5th century
Intellectual achievements
The effect of the Persian Wars on philosophy
The effect of the Persian Wars on literature and art was obvious and immediate; the wars prompted such poetry as the Persians of Aeschylus and a dithyramb of Pindar praising the Athenians for laying the shining foundations of liberty and such art as the Athenian dedications at Delphi or the paintings in the Painted Colonnade at Athens itself.
Less direct was the effect of the Persian Wars on philosophy. It has already been noted that famous centres of philosophy, such as Elea and Abdera, owed their existence to the Persian takeover of Ionia in 546. The thinkers for which those places were famous, Parmenides of Elea and Democritus from Abdera, were, however, products of the 5th century, and the title of “school” has been claimed both for the atomists of Abdera and for the Eleatics, who argued for the unreality of all change. A number of Ionian thinkers arrived at Athens after Xerxes’ invasion perhaps because 5th-century Ionia experienced relative material poverty and was thus no longer an agreeable place or perhaps because they had escaped from the Persian army, into which they had been conscripted. This has been suggested for Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, who impressed Socrates by identifying mind as the governing power of the universe.
Another 5th-century Ionian who found his way to Athens was Hippodamus of Miletus, an eccentric political theorist, who made his own clothes and was famous for a theory of town planning. However, the laying out of cities on “orthogonal,” or rectilinear, principles cannot quite be his invention (though he gave his name to such “Hippodamian” plans): such layouts are already found in Italy in the Archaic period at places like Metapontum. Hippodamus, nevertheless, may have had a hand in the orderly rebuilding of the port of Piraeus after the Persian Wars and even in the new colony at Thurii in 443. (A tradition associating him with the planning of the new city of Rhodes, almost at the end of the century, surely stretches his life span beyond belief.)
The more-theoretical side of Hippodamus’s political thought did not have much detectable effect on the world around him (he thought that communities should be divided into farmers, artisans, and warriors) except perhaps for his suggestion that a city of 10,000 souls, a myriandros polis, was the ideal size. That was the number of colonists allegedly sent out to Heraclea in Trachis by the Spartans, and the concept of the myriandros polis was to be very influential in the 4th century and Hellenistic period.
The rise of democracy
It has been plausibly claimed that there is a general link between the rise of a political system, namely democracy, and the self-critical speculative thinking that characterizes the Greeks in and to some extent before the 5th century. Democracy, it is held, was causally responsible for the growth of philosophy and science, in the sense that an atmosphere of rational political debate conduced to a more-general insistence on argument and proof. To this it has been objected that there are already, in the Homeric poems, remarkable debates constructed on recognizable rhetorical principles and that Nestor in the Iliad defines a good leader as one who is a good speaker of words and doer of deeds, in that order. Great warriors always needed to be persuasive speakers as well. But political accountability was a cardinal principle of the Ephialtic reforms at Athens in the late 460s, and it is certainly attractive to suppose that intellectual accountability was a parallel or consequent development.
A further difficulty in assessing the relationship between intellectual activities consists in the lopsided ways in which the relevant evidence has survived. First, little is extant from any centre other than Athens, and this inevitably means that a treatment of 5th-century culture tends to turn into a treatment of Athenian culture. One can note the problem but not solve it. Second, some literary genres have survived more intact than others. Attic tragedy and comedy survive in relative abundance (the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes). The study of philosophy before Plato is, by contrast, a matter of detective work conducted from fragments preserved by later writers, whose own faithfulness in quotation and transmission may be suspect because of their own prejudices. (Christian apologists have perhaps been too readily trusted in this matter by students of the “pre-Socratics,” or predecessors and contemporaries of Socrates.)
Hippocrates and the fluidity of genres
One set of texts that does survive in bulk and is neither Athenian in origin nor the work of poets is the Hippocratic corpus of medical writings. Hippocrates was a 5th-century native of the Dorian island of Cos, but the writings that have survived are probably not his personal work. Many of them contain references to northern Greek places such as Thasos and Abdera, a reminder that intellectual activity went on outside Athens.
The most-striking feature of these writings, apart from the exactness of their descriptive passages, is their rhetorically conditioned polemical character. It was necessary for the practicing doctor not merely to offer the best prognosis and cure but to disparage his rivals and show by aggressive and competitive argumentation that his own approach was superior. In fact, it seems that on one specific major medical issue the “professional” doctors did not fare as well as an amateur commentator, the historian Thucydides, who in his description of the great plague was aware, as they were not, of the concepts of acquired immunity and contagion. In other words, he thought empirically and they did not. A basically competitive attitude as well as reliance on rhetoric are features of much early prose writing; for example, Hecataeus was criticized by Herodotus, who was in turn criticized by implication, though never named, by Thucydides.
Such shared features are a reminder that the 5th century, before the systematization of the 4th century associated with Aristotle or the organized Alexandrian scholarship of the 3rd, did not yet make clear distinctions between literary genres. A distinction between prose and verse is perhaps implied by Thucydides’ distinction between “poets” and “logographers,” or writers of logoi (tales, accounts), and Pindar may hint at the same distinction. Thucydides’ own writings, however, like those of Herodotus, show an affinity to poetry, specifically to the epic poems of Homer. Indeed, an indebtedness to epic poetry is common both to the writings of Thucydides and to the Attic tragedy of the 5th century (it seems preferable to speak of shared influence of epic poetry on both the writers of tragedy and Thucydides rather than of direct influence of tragedy on Thucydides). And as noted, one now needs, since the discovery of the “new Simonides,” to reckon with the influence on historiography of praise poetry about real military events.
Greek tragedy
Greek tragedy was not itself intended as an immediate contribution to political debate, though in its exploration of issues, sometimes by means of rapid question-and-answer dialogue, its debt to rhetoric is obvious (this is particularly true of some plays by Euripides, such as the Phoenician Women or the Suppliants, but also of some by Sophocles, such as Oedipus the King and Philoctetes). It is true that sometimes the chorēgoi, or rich men appointed by one of the archons to finance a particular play, were themselves politicians and that this is reflected in the plays produced. (Themistocles was chorēgos for Phrynichos, one of whose plays caused a political storm, and Pericles paid for the Persians of Aeschylus.)
One play with a clear contemporary resonance in its choice of the Areopagus as a subtheme, the Eumenides of Aeschylus (458), however, had for its chorēgos a man otherwise unknown; nor is it agreed whether Aeschylus was endorsing the recent reforms or voicing reservations about them. The play treats the theme of the vengeful dead (Orestes is pursued by the Eumenides—Erinyes or Furies—for killing his mother on Apollo’s instructions because she killed his father, Agamemnon). Such preoccupation with the vengeful dead was illuminated by the publication in 1993 of a remarkable mid-5th-century law from Selinus in western Sicily, which mentions the Eumenides and gives Zeus the obviously related but hitherto unattested cult title Zeus Eumenes. The inscription deals with the steps to be taken to cope with pollution after bloodshed.
The Suppliants of Euripides contains much in apparent praise of democratic institutions, but it also includes some harsh words for the kind of politician that the democracy tended to produce. Euripides’ associations with the Sophists (the oligarchs Cleitophon and Theramenes are specifically linked to him) are another reason why it is difficult to treat his Suppliants as a straightforward endorsement of democracy. The political relevance of Suppliants has always been noted; but the Ion of Euripides, produced in perhaps 412, has at least as strong a claim to be regarded as a political play, because it treats and reconciles the two crucial Athenian myths of Ionianism and autochthony—i.e., the essentially anti-Dorian and therefore anti-Spartan idea that the Ionian Athenians were not immigrants (unlike the arriviste Dorians) but had occupied the same land always.
The views, political or otherwise, of playwrights themselves cannot be straightforwardly inferred from what they put into the mouths of their characters. But it must be significant that the festival of the Dionysia, at which the plays were produced, was designed to reinforce civic values and ideology in various ways: war orphans featured prominently in a demonstration of hoplite solidarity, and there was some kind of parade exhibiting the tribute of the subject allies—all this taking place before the plays were actually performed. Not even this, however, entailed that the content of the plays was necessarily expected to reinforce those civic values. The opposite may even (it has been argued) be true of some plays; for example, both the Ajax and the Philoctetes of Sophocles question the ethic of military obedience, and his Antigone stresses the paramount claims of family in the sphere of burial at a time when the polis had made large inroads in this area. In general, however, it is hard to believe that Sophocles, who was a friend of Pericles and served as stratēgos and imperial treasurer, was a kind of subversive malcontent.
The liturgy system
The choragic system is one aspect of a (for this period) very unusual institution by which individuals paid for state projects. The 5th-century Athenian economy, though it continued to draw on the silver of Laurium and was underpinned by the more recently acquired assets of an organized empire, nevertheless looked to individuals to finance both necessary projects like triremes and strictly unnecessary ones like tragedies. It is worth asking whether such distinction between necessary and unnecessary projects is too sharp: there was a sense in which the trireme, a noble achievement of human technē (art or craft), was an object of legitimate pride, which might have its aesthetic aspect. That, at least, is the implication of Thucydides’ unforgettable account of the rivalry between the trierarchs en route to Sicily in 415. Thucydides describes the splendid flotilla, for which publicly and privately no expense had been grudged, racing from Athens as far as Aegina out of sheer pride, joy, and enthusiasm.
The psychology of contributions of this sort, the so-called liturgy system, was complicated. On the one hand, the system differed from the kind of tyrannical or individual patronage the poetry of Pindar shows still existed in, for example, 5th-century Sicily or at Dorian Cyrene, which still had a hereditary monarchy (the Battiads) until the second half of the 5th century. Athenians themselves liked to think that the system was somehow anonymous and that glory was brought on the city. That assumption was true of athletic as well as cultural success: Thucydides makes Alcibiades claim the military command in Sicily because his Olympic chariot victories have brought glory on the city. Consistent with this, Athenian victors in the Panhellenic games were given free meals in the Prytaneium (the town hall), alongside the descendants of the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogiton. The evidence for this is an inscription of the 430s.
On the other hand, the liturgy system was exploited for individual gain. Thus, Alcibiades’ plea for political recognition was an individual and traditional one, recalling the 7th-century Olympic victor Cylon, who also sought political success by his attempted tyrannical coup. It was not altogether surprising that Alcibiades’ contemporaries suspected that he too was aiming at tyranny. Alcibiades, it may be felt, can be written off as an exception and an anachronism. Far-less-famous speakers, however, in tight situations in the lawcourts, made comparable reference to their individual expenditure on behalf of the state, one of them frankly admitting that his motive in spending more than was necessary was to take out a kind of insurance against forensic misfortune. And generally the History of Thucydides does show awareness that athletic success still went hand in hand with political prominence.
Individuals might pay for the equipping of triremes, or even (like Alcibiades) own their own trireme. They might even help finance buildings like the Stoa Poikile of Peisianax (a relative of Cimon). But a building program such as that undertaken after 449 called for the full resources of the imperial state. The architects commissioned, Callicrates, Ictinus, and Mnesicles, worked under the general supervision of the sculptor Phidias; most of these men had personal connections with Pericles himself and with aspects of Periclean policy (Callicrates, for example, was involved in the building of the Long Walls). The main works on the Acropolis were temples, but even the great ceremonial gateway of Mnesicles (the Propylaea) was a lavish and expensive effort, though a secular one. The financial history of these buildings can be reconstructed with the help of inscriptions, though firm evidence for the Parthenon is lacking. Nonetheless, an inscription shows that the chryselephantine (gold and ivory) cult statue of Athena by Phidias cost somewhere between 700 and 1,000 talents, and the Parthenon itself, which housed the statue, may have cost about the same.
The roles of slaves and women
Slaves
From the accounts of the Erechtheum, the temple of Athena on the Acropolis (built 421–405), it is known that highly skilled slaves as well as metics (resident foreigners) participated in the work on the friezes and columns. The slaves, whose work on the building can hardly be distinguished from that of their free coworkers, received payment like the rest (but the money was presumably handed over to their owners). These slaves and those used as agricultural and domestic workers (e.g., the occasional nurse-companions mentioned by 4th-century orators) can be placed at one end of a spectrum. At the other end are the mining slaves working in the thousands under dangerous and deplorable conditions. Their life expectancy was short. It has been held that only condemned criminals were used in the mines, but the evidence for such “condemnation to the mines” is Roman, not Classical Athenian.
Slaves were thus necessary for the working of the economy in its mining and agriculture aspects, and they also provided skills for the architectural glorification of the Acropolis. It is disputed how much chattel slaves were needed as part of the infrastructure of Athenian life in that they provided the political classes, down to and including the thētes, with the leisure for politics and philosophy. The answer depends on population figures, which are far from certain; perhaps the total slave population approached six figures (the adult male population in 431 was 42,000). Probably many thētes did own slaves. Although slaves were used for military purposes only rarely, they might exceptionally have been enrolled in the fleet. Slaves were always considered a dangerous weapon of war, but they occasionally figure prominently in descriptions of political struggle within cities; for example, at Corcyra in 427 the slaves were promised freedom by both sides but went over to the democrats. One cannot adduce this as support for an interpretation of Greek politics in terms of class struggle because the democrats may simply have made the more handsome offers.
Women
One Athenian group that can without absurdity be called an exploited productive class was the women. They were unusually restricted in their property rights even by comparison with the women in other Greek states. To some extent the peculiar Athenian disabilities were due to a desire on the part of the polis to ensure that estates did not become concentrated in few hands, thus undermining the democracy of smallholders. To this social and political end it was necessary that women should not inherit in their own right; an heiress was therefore obliged to marry her nearest male relative unless he found a dowry for her. The prevailing homosexual ethos of the gymnasia and of the symposium helped to reduce the cultural value attached to women and to the marriage bond.
Against all this, one has to place evidence showing that, whatever the rules, women did as a matter of fact make dedications and loans, at Athens as elsewhere, sometimes involving fairly large sums. And the Athenian orators appealed to the informal pressure of domestic female opinion; one 4th-century speaker in effect asked what the men would tell the women of their households if they acquitted a certain woman and declared that she was as worthy to hold a priesthood as they were.
In fact, priesthoods were one area of public activity open to women at Athens; the priestess of Athena Nike was in some sense appointed by lot “from all the Athenian women,” just like some post-Ephialtic magistrate. (Both the inscription appointing the priestess and the epitaph of the first incumbent are extant.) The Athenian priests and priestesses, however, did not have the political influence that their counterparts later had at Rome; only one anecdote attests a priestess as conscientious objector on a political issue (Theano, who refused to curse Alcibiades), and it is suspect. It is true that Athenian women had cults of their own, such as that of Artemis at Brauron, where young Athenian girls served the goddess in a ritual capacity as “little bears.” Such activity, however, can be seen as merely a taming process, preparatory to marriage in the way that military initiation was preparatory to the male world of war and fighting.
Nevertheless, it was arguably in religious associations that the excluded situation of Classical Athenian women at the political level was ameliorated. At Athens and elsewhere, the rules about women and sacrifice seem to show that the political definition of female status was more restricted than the social and religious. As always, however, there is a problem about evidence. Much of it comes from Athens, yet there is reason to suppose that the rules circumscribing Athenian women were exceptional; the “Gortyn code” from mid-5th-century Crete, for example, seems to imply that women held more property there than was usual at Athens in the same period.
Military technology
Military technology remained surprisingly static in the 5th century. The 7th century, by contrast, had witnessed rapid innovations, such as the introduction of the hoplite and the trireme, which still were the basic instruments of war in the 5th. The 4th century was to be another period of military change, although some of the new features were already discernible in the period of the Peloponnesian War (such as the more-intelligent use of light-armed troops, as in the northwest and at Sphacteria in the 420s; the more-extensive use of mercenaries; and the deepened right wing in the formation of the hoplite army used at Delium). But it was the development of artillery that opened an epoch, and this invention did not predate the 4th century. It was first heard of in the context of Sicilian warfare against Carthage in the time of Dionysius I of Syracuse.
The 4th century
To the King’s Peace (386 bce)
Dionysius I of Syracuse
Dionysius I of Syracuse (c. 430–367) can be seen as a transitional figure between the 5th century and the 4th and indeed between Classical and Hellenistic Greece. His career began in 405, after the seven troubled years in Sicily that followed the Athenian surrender in 413. For most of this period there was war with Carthage in North Africa, and there were internal convulsions that Carthage was constantly seeking to exploit. Sicily was always prone to tyranny and political instability, partly because the island was threatened by potentially hostile neighbours ready to encroach and partly because there was a large population of non-Greek indigenous inhabitants such as the forces mobilized by Ducetius.
Stasis, or civil strife, was always specially prevalent in Classical Sicily; the Selinus sacred law already noted may be a response to a particularly violent and bloody bout of stasis. Certainly it is significant that it is in a Sicilian context (in the Greek town of Leontini, 422) that one can find, in the pages of Thucydides, an early mention of the revolutionary slogan “redistribution of land” which in the 4th century and later was often associated with political upheaval of the sort feared by the possessing classes. Polis life in Sicily never struck deep enough roots, and populations tended to be mixed and were too often transplanted. Interesting lead tablets from Syracuse’s daughter city Camarina, published in 1992, appear to indicate that the city reorganized its citizen body about 460, perhaps on “Cleisthenic” Athenian lines.
Immediately after the defeat of Athens, a radical democracy was installed in Syracuse, at the instigation of an extremist called Diocles. The leader of the moderate democrats, Hermocrates, who happened to be absent, was exiled in 410. He tried to return but was killed in 407 in an attempt (his enemies said) to establish a tyranny. Dionysius, who had been one of Hermocrates’ followers (and married his daughter) seized sole power in 406. His tyranny lasted until his death in 367; it was mostly taken up by warfare, fought with fluctuating fortunes, against Carthage. Successes such as the capture of Motya in 397 were hard to consolidate, and none of several peace settlements was lasting. His significance lies elsewhere than in this inconclusive fighting. The first nontorsion artillery (i.e., artillery using mechanical means to winch back, by means of a ratchet, a bow of unusual solidity but of a basically conventional conception) is attested from the Sicily of that period.
Torsion artillery, which used the additional power of twisted substances like sinew or women’s hair to act as strings for the projection of the missile and which did not need the bow element at all, was introduced in the middle of the 4th century. Torsion-powered stone-throwing machines could be huge and could batter down massive and sophisticated fortifications. Lack of torsion artillery prevented Agesilaus in the 390s from taking fortified cities rapidly and so making progress in his invasion of Anatolia; possession of it, by contrast, helped Alexander later in the century to overrun the same area with relative ease. The preliminary discovery of nontorsion artillery in Dionysius’s Sicily, however, was already a notable refinement on traditional siege technique.
In other military respects Dionysius looked to the future; his was essentially a military monarchy based on loyal mercenary power. War, which included large-scale munitions manufacture, was essential to his economy. In addition to taking on the Carthaginians in Sicily, he fought Greeks in Italy, even destroying the city of Rhegium in 386. Dionysius wanted to unite Sicily and southern Italy under his personal rule, and one need look for no subtler motive than the prestige and booty accruing from it. The kind of military monarchy he established was a crucial precedent for later figures such as Jason of Thessalian Pherae or Philip II and Alexander III (the Great) of Macedon.
Dionysius is called archon (an ambiguous title that can mean ruler or magistrate) of Sicily in an Athenian inscription, but he was surely thought of as king or tyrant by his local subjects. In the use of titles he has been compared to the 4th-century “Spartocid” rulers of southern Russia, Leucon I and his son Satyrus II, who (as inscriptions show) called themselves archon when dealing with their Greek subjects but king when describing their authority over the native population.
The Syracuse that produced Dionysius was a late 5th-century polis both in the literal sense and in features, such as appointment to office by lot, that it had adopted from the Athenians whose invasion had just been so vigorously resisted. Dionysius himself was helped to power by Sparta, the polis that above all others remained uncompromisingly “classical” in its repeated refusal, in later times, to come to terms with the victorious Macedonians. It is a striking fact, and a further betrayal of the liberation propaganda with which Sparta had entered the Peloponnesian War, that it ended it by installing at Syracuse a tyrant who was to last for four decades; that fact was not missed by the Athenian writer Isocrates. The particular Spartans sent to help Dionysius are figures of secondary importance, but it is reasonable to see behind them the hand of Lysander, who is attested as having visited Dionysius. (There is no overwhelming reason to doubt that he did so.)
Spartan policy immediately after the Peloponnesian War looks imperialistic in the full sense: one hears of tribute and of “decarchies,” or juntas of 10, imposed by Lysander, as, for example, on Samos. The government of the Thirty Tyrants, actually a Spartan-supported oligarchy, imposed at Athens is characteristic of this short phase. The seizure, by the Athenian democrat Thrasybulus, of the frontier stronghold of Phyle in northern Attica, however, created a focus for refugees, who flocked to join him. The democrats marched south, and the extreme oligarch Critias was killed in fighting in the Piraeus. Opinion at Sparta softened, and Lysander’s tough policy was reversed at Athens and elsewhere (one of the Spartan kings, Pausanias, was instrumental in this, though he himself narrowly escaped condemnation at a trial held in Sparta). This episode perhaps deserves to rank as a rare instance in which moral scruple, or at least a qualm about what the rest of the Greek world might consider unacceptable, determined a foreign policy decision by Sparta. By the end of 403, democracy was restored at Athens.
Arguably, Athenian democracy was not merely restored but comprehensively rethought at this moment. As part of a general codification of the laws, now entering its second phase, it was made harder for the Assembly to legislate; instead the passing of laws (or nomoi), with the important exception of those pertaining to foreign policy, was entrusted to special panels of sworn jurors. The Assembly henceforth passed only decrees. Pay for attendance in the Assembly was introduced at this time, and the hillside meeting place, the Pnyx, was physically remodeled, making it easier to control admission. The Council of Five Hundred also may have been tampered with, if it is right that “bouleutic quotas”—that is, the total of councillors supplied by demes—were now altered to take account of changes in settlement patterns brought about by the Peloponnesian War. The case for discontinuity has, however, not been proved.
Other post-403 changes, some not strictly datable, may be mentioned here. The Assembly no longer heard treason trials after about 350; perhaps this was because jury trial was cheaper now that the Assembly was paid. (Juries also were paid, but Assembly attendances were larger.) For the same financial reason, and perhaps also in the mid-4th century, a limit was imposed on the hitherto unrestricted number of meetings of the Assembly per prytany, or council month lasting one-tenth of the year: the limit imposed was at first three meetings, though this was later increased to four. Generals received more specialist functions in the course of the century, and financial officials, especially those in charge of funds for disbursing state pay, acquired great elected power. The climax of this development was the financial control exercised in the third quarter of the 4th century by first Eubulus and then Lycurgus. All this tended toward efficiency and professionalism but away from democracy. There is no doubt that the Athens of the 4th century was less democratic than the Athens of the 5th.
The Corinthian War
The restored Athenian democracy may have been less democratic in certain respects than that of the 5th century, but it was no less suspicious of, and hostile to, Sparta. Those feelings, along with the straightforward hankering at all social levels for the benefits of empire (a strong and well-attested motive that should be emphasized), were to be exploited by Thebans at Athens in 395 in their appeal to Athens to join in war against Sparta. This war, called the Corinthian War (395–386) because much of it took place on Corinthian territory, was fought against Sparta by a coalition of Athens (with help from Persia), Boeotia, Corinth, and Argos. Sparta eventually won the war, but only after the Persians had switched support from Athens to Sparta. In fact, the winning side was the old combination that had proved victorious in the Peloponnesian War.
Corinthian-style helmetCorinthian-style helmet, bronze, Greek, c. 600–575 bce; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.Photograph by Stephen Sandoval. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Dodge Fund, 1955 (55.11.10)
The causes of the Corinthian War lie in the policies pursued by Sparta after its victory in 404. Persian participation on Athens’s side needs a special explanation, which is to be found in two ultimately related sets of operations conducted by Sparta east of the Aegean. In 401 Lysander’s old friend Cyrus—the younger brother of the new Persian king, Artaxerxes II (reigned 404–359)—made an attempt on the throne with Spartan help. The expedition was a military failure; Cyrus was killed at the Battle of Cunaxa north of Babylon, and the Greek army had to be extricated and brought back to the Black Sea region. It became famous, however, because a participant, first as a soldier of fortune and after Cyrus’s death as a commander of the Greek force, was Xenophon, who made these exploits the basis of his Anabasis or “Upcountry March” of the Ten Thousand. Lysander’s support of Cyrus provided grounds for a change of attitude toward Sparta on the part of the new Persian king. The battle, though a short-term failure, had long-term propaganda importance because it fixed in Greek minds the possibility of a better-organized “march upcountry,” a project that was to be preached by the Athenian orator Isocrates, planned by Philip of Macedon and realized by Alexander the Great.
Cyrus had been given help in the early stages of his revolt by some Greek cities of Anatolia. When the Persian Tissaphernes, the victor of Cunaxa, threatened reprisals against them, they appealed to Sparta, which sent out Thibron (400). That was the beginning of the second Spartan operation in Anatolia, related to the first because the Ten Thousand were eventually able to attach themselves to Thibron, having meanwhile been harried by Tissaphernes.
Thibron’s expedition was followed by that of Dercyllidas (399–397), but the most ambitious of all was led by the new Spartan king, Agesilaus, in 396. At the least (and Xenophon, a great admirer of the Spartan king, attributes to him some very grand ideas indeed) Agesilaus seems to have wanted to establish a zone of rebel satraps in western Anatolia. It is therefore not surprising that in 397 the Persians began to build a new fleet to deal with the menace of a Spartan army in Asia. (Sparta’s help may, however, have had some technical justification if, as is possible, there had been diplomacy in 408 that renegotiated a more favourable position for the Ionian cities than they had been left in at the end of 411.) It may have been a further irritant that Sparta was helping another anti-Persian rebel in Egypt; the fact that Egypt maintained its independence of Persia until the 340s was a serious economic loss to the Persian landowners who had been exploiting it at a distance.
The Greece that Agesilaus had left behind was uneasy under its new Spartan masters, despite the glory of Sparta’s victory over the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami (405), duly commemorated at Delphi, and the personal prestige of Lysander, who may even have received at this time some kind of cult at Samos (though perhaps only after his death in 395). In fact, Sparta was not even secure in its local dominance in Laconia and Messenia: the old helot problem recurred in 399 with the attempted revolt of Cinadon, already noted in its helot aspect. A little farther away, Sparta’s former Peloponnesian and extra-Peloponnesian allies were unhappy with what they saw as alarming extensions of Spartan territorial interests, though in fact some of these were very traditional.
One powerful Spartan enemy was Thebes, which had emerged much strengthened from the Peloponnesian War. After the expulsion of the Athenians in 446, Boeotia had reorganized itself federally; the detailed arrangements are preserved in a valuable papyrus account by the so-called Oxyrhynchus Historian. After the destruction of Plataea in 427, Thebes took over Plataea’s vote and some of its territory; that was one reason for Theban strength. Another lay in the depredations that the Thebans had been able to carry out in Attica as a result of the occupation of Decelea. When Agesilaus prepared to leave for Anatolia, he tried to sacrifice at Aulis “like Agamemnon” before the Trojan War; but the Boeotian federal magistrates stopped him. Although they had little to fear from a Spartan presence in Anatolia, hardly a normal object of Theban ambition, Theban alarm can be explained by developments nearer home.
In central Greece in the early 390s, the Spartans reinforced their position at Heraclea in Trachis and had a garrison at Thessalian Pharsalus. Initially, Lysander seems to have been at the back of this northward encroachment (good evidence connects him with Thrace and the Chalcidice). Yet because that was always a direction in which Sparta expanded if given the chance, Sparta did not pull out of central Greece during Lysander’s temporary eclipse after 403. From the point of view of Thebes and Corinth, there was a risk of encirclement by Sparta. Another factor making for specifically Corinthian resentment may have been Sparta’s interference in Corinth’s colony, Syracuse. Unlike Thebes, Corinth had emerged badly from the Peloponnesian War; its prosperous middle class had been eroded, and that made possible a remarkable turn of events: Corinth and democratic Argos, in a unique if short-lived political experiment, became fully merged at this time. Argos, for its part, never needed much excuse to act against Sparta.
By 395 then, all Sparta’s enemies were ready and willing for war. The precipitating cause was a quarrel between Locris, abetted by Boeotia, and Phocis. When the Phocians appealed to Sparta, Lysander (now back in qualified favour at Sparta) invaded Boeotia. He was immediately killed at the battle of Haliartus, however, a grave military loss to Sparta. Agesilaus returned from Asia and fought two large-scale hoplite battles but could not force the Athenian general Iphicrates out of Corinth, where for several years he established himself with mercenaries and light-armed troops. At sea, more progress was made against Sparta: Pharnabazus and the Athenian commander Conon won a decisive battle off Cnidus (southern Anatolia) in August 394. The war might well have ended at this point, especially since Sparta faced a renewed helot threat as a result of the occupation by Pharnabazus and Conon of the island of Cythera. It was this as much as anything that made Sparta offer peace terms in 392, which would have meant the final abandoning of its claims to Asia. Artaxerxes, however, had not yet forgiven the Spartans for supporting Cyrus, and the war continued. Nor was Athens yet in a mood for peace.
In the years immediately following 392, the Athenians made such nuisances of themselves in Anatolia under Thrasybulus, who revived a number of 5th-century Athenian imperial institutions, that Persia—which was anxious to end rebellions not just in Egypt but also in Cyprus—eventually realized where its true interest lay. Consequently, it changed its support to Sparta. The Spartans under Antalcidas now blockaded the Hellespont with help from Persia and Dionysius of Syracuse, and Athens was once again starved into surrender.
The King’s Peace
The ensuing Peace of Antalcidas, or King’s Peace, of 386 specified that Asia, including Cyprus and Clazomenae, was to belong to the king of Persia. (Ionian Clazomenae was included because Athens had interfered there and also because its status—whether it was an island or part of the mainland—was unclear. It was in fact a peninsular site. Cyprus was included because Athens had been helping the rebel Cypriot king, Evagoras.) The other Greek cities great and small, including the other islands, were to be autonomous, but Athens was allowed to keep Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros, three long-standing cleruchies. Modern argument centres on the question of whether there were additional clauses, not supplied by the main account (that of Xenophon). For instance, the Athenian navy was perhaps ordered to be broken up and the gates on the Piraeus removed, but these may have been consequences, not clauses, of the peace. The same is true of Sparta’s position under the peace, which was certainly much strengthened. There is no agreement, however, that Sparta’s enhanced position was officially recognized by some such description as “champion” of the peace. Argos’s merger with Corinth was cancelled, and, more important (in view of the relative power of the states concerned), Thebes had to relinquish the control of Boeotia that it had been exercising in an unrecognized but progressively real way since 446.
In Anatolia there was little immediate change—the Spartans had after all pulled out of Anatolia some years before, though an inscription (published in 1976) suggests that the Ionian cities may have clung to a precarious autonomy until 386. One difference after 386 lay in the status of possessions up to then held by various Greek islands on the mainland of Anatolia. These possessions had hitherto been anomalous enclaves of Greek control within basically satrapal Asia, but the King’s Peace surely assigned them formally to Persia in general. Anatolia now became the political property of Persia and the satraps for the 50 years until Alexander’s arrival. Occasional adventures, such as Greek flirtation with the Revolt of the Satraps in the 360s, do not seriously affect this generalization.
The activities of those 4th-century satraps (and of dynasts without the satrapal title but recognized by Persia) are of great interest, though documented more by inscriptions and archaeology than by written sources. The most energetic of them was the Hecatomnid dynasty of Caria, which took its name from Hecatomnus, the son of Hyssaldomus. Hecatomnus was appointed satrap of the new separate satrapy of Caria, perhaps in the mid-390s, as a counterpoise to Sparta. He ruled his pocket principality under light Persian authority until 377 and made dedications in Greek script at a number of local sites and sanctuaries. The major Hellenizing force, however, was his son Mausolus (Maussollos on the inscriptions), satrap from 377 to 353, who gave his name to the Mausoleum, the tomb he perhaps commissioned for himself.
The Mausoleum itself, a creation of Greek artists and sculptors but with some barbarian features, has long been known from surviving sculptural fragments and from Greek and Latin literary descriptions. It was constructed at Halicarnassus, which, after a move from inland Mylasa, became the Hecatomnid capital, with palace and harbour built on monarchical lines that surely owed some inspiration to Dionysius of Sicily. The importance of other sites associated with the Hecatomnid dynasty, above all that of Labranda in the hills not far from the family seat of Mylasa, would not have been guessed from the literary sources.
Inscriptions placed in aggressive prominence on fine temples and templelike buildings at Labranda (and published in 1972) attest the wealth and the Hellenizing intentions of the rulers (the dedicants include Mausolus’s brother and eventual successor Idrieus). They also illustrate the range of the family’s diplomatic contacts (for instance with faraway Crete) and their relations with the local communities, both Greek and native Carian. For example, in a text from Labranda, a semi-Greek community called the Plataseis confers tax privileges and citizenship on a man from Cos; the grant is ratified by yet another Hecatomnid brother and satrap, Pixodarus. And a remarkable trilingual inscription in Lycian, Greek, and Aramaic (a Semitic script used for convenience in many parts of the Persian empire), found in 1973, proves the family’s interests to have spread eastward into Lycia; the text illustrates the cultural, social, and religious heterogeneity of southwestern Anatolia in the period before Alexander’s arrival. Hellenization was well under way before he came.
The same conclusion is compelled by such dynastic (rather than strictly satrapal) edifices as the Nereid monument from Lycia (early 4th century) or the caryatids (roof-carrying female sculpted statues) from Lycian Limyra, a place ruled by a Hellenizing prince significantly named Pericles.
Hellenization at the cultural level and tolerance of the social structures of small local places with no military muscle did not necessarily entail favouring the political interests of the Greek states to the west. In fact, Mausolus, despite a brief and cautious insurrectionary moment in the late 360s when he joined the great Revolt of the Satraps (a movement in which there was also tentative Athenian and Spartan participation), is found actively damaging Athenian interest in the Aegean in the 350s.
In 386, however, the political dividing line between Greek and Persian interests looked relatively clean, although it was usually with the help of Greek mercenaries that over the next decades Persia made its series of attempts on the recovery of Egypt, the immediate task in the sequel to the King’s Peace. Unsuccessful there, Persia had better fortune in Cyprus. In Greece, Sparta’s supremacy looked as militarily imposing as in 404, though with the abandonment of Asia its moral authority was much weakened.
From 386 bce to the decline of Sparta
Spartan adventures
The autonomy guaranteed to the Greek cities by the King’s Peace in 386 represented in principle an advance in interstate diplomacy; but then as now the word autonomy was elastic, and Sparta by its behaviour soon made clear its intention to interpret it in the way most favourable to itself. That is, it applied the old criterion of “what is best for Sparta.” Its first move, in 385, was to break up the polis of Mantinea into its four constituent villages. This move was intended to dismantle the physical polis of Mantinea as well as its democracy; in the particular Mantinean context the return to the villages strengthened the political influence of the wealthy and oligarchic landowners, whose estates adjoined the villages. The “troublesome demagogues,” as Xenophon calls them, were expelled. Sparta could perhaps have represented the original 5th- or possibly 6th-century Mantinean synoecism, whereby the villages had been joined into a polis, as a breach of local autonomy (that is, of the right of the separate villages to exist as political units), but it is doubtful that Sparta even bothered to formulate any such justification. It would have been too hollow a reply to the more-obvious interpretation that it was simply exploiting its supremacy to infringe on the autonomy of the Mantinean polis.
Soon after, Sparta responded to an invitation, surely welcome in view of its previous northern and central Greek involvements, to interfere against the rising power of Olynthus in northern Greece. Grown populous and powerful since its synoecism in 432 at the instance of Perdiccas II of Macedon, the city had survived the military reorganization of Macedonia by Perdiccas’s successor Archelaus (413–399). Now another Macedonian king, Amyntas III, who had succeeded to the Macedonian throne about 393 after a series of short, weak reigns, joined two Greek cities, Acanthus and Apollonia, in an appeal to Sparta against Olynthus. The Spartans sent Phoebidas north, but in a momentous development he was asked into Thebes en route by a pro-Spartan faction there. Without reference (naturally) to the authorities at home, Phoebidas installed a garrison on the Cadmea, the Theban acropolis (382).
The occupation of the Cadmea was a famous instance of Spartan high-handedness; indeed, it produced such a revulsion of feeling that Sparta lost its leadership of Greece. Had Phoebidas’s act been promptly disowned by Sparta, the damage could have been contained. King Agesilaus, however, approached the matter solely from the point of view of Spartan advantage; he once again posed the question of whether the action had been good or bad for Sparta, with the result that Phoebidas was punished with a fine but then reemployed elsewhere, and the garrison in Thebes was retained. Meanwhile (380), Olynthus was reduced.
The Second Athenian Confederacy
Agesilaus, however, gave the wrong answer to his own question; the Cadmea episode meant that Sparta would no longer have things its way. When a group of Theban exiles liberated the Cadmea in 379, they were helped by Athens, though at first unofficially. Athens, whose foreign policy in the years 386–380 had been cautious in the extreme, evidently felt it could not risk Spartan reprisals for its help to Thebes without seeking moral and military support from other Greek states. It now made a series of alliances, with Chios, Byzantium, and Methymna on Lesbos, which prefigure the formation of the Second Athenian Confederacy, formally inaugurated in 378. The charter of the new confederacy was issued at the beginning of 377. Athens was right to suspect Spartan anger; an attempted raid on the Piraeus by the Spartan Sphodrias at this time is best seen as a response to the new mood in Athens. The raid failed in its object, whatever exactly that was.Once again Sparta did not pursue the offender.
The aims of the new confederacy are set out on an inscription of cardinal importance, the “charter” document. The enemy singled out is Sparta, while the main ally is Thebes. Hostility toward Sparta, however, though it was certainly the motive shared by Athens and Thebes, does not adequately explain the participation of islanders such as the Rhodians and Chians. In these islands the main fear must have been of encroachment by such Persian satraps as the energetic Mausolus. In this respect the new alliance recalls the early 470s, when alarm felt in eastern Aegean waters about Persia’s intentions had led to the formation of the old Delian League. Yet the charter says nothing about Persia or the satraps in so many words; that would have been too provocative given Athens’s naval weakness at the time. On the contrary, it is likely that a clause actually spelled out an intention to remain within the structure of the King’s Peace. But this is not quite certain because the relevant lines were subsequently erased, probably in a moment of Panhellenist ardour.
Action against Persia may then have been once again envisaged, but in other respects the precedent of the Delian League was explicitly avoided. There was to be freedom and autonomy for all as well as an allied chamber, or synedrion, that could put motions directly before the Athenian Assembly. An inscription from 372 shows that this chamber had an allied president. In other words, an improvement was intended on the old synod of the Delian League, which met (presumably) only when Athens called it and had no way of influencing policy in an immediate or effective way; for instance, there is no sign of allied influence in Thucydides’ detailed account of the preliminaries to the great Peloponnesian War. The synedrion was to decide on the membership of the confederacy, and it had some financial competence. There was to be joint judicial action: although there would not exactly be a joint court, the synedrion was to participate in treason trials alongside the Athenian Assembly and Council. It is possible (according to recent reinterpretation of the relevant inscriptions) that, within the framework of the confederacy, the Athenians operated an enlightened policy of arbitration and used “foreign judges,” thus anticipating sophisticated Hellenistic methods of settling interstate disputes.
The restrictive policies adopted by Athens are interesting as showing awareness of what had been 5th-century grievances. There was to be no tribute, no governors, no garrisons, and no cleruchies. Land outside Attica was not to be cultivated by Athenians, and “unfavourable stelae” (inscribed pillars) were to be taken down. (Perhaps this is a reference to grants of the right to own land in the empire. It does not seem, however, that much or any land had survived in Athenian hands after the end of the empire in 404, and the importance of this clause may be merely symbolic.) Except for the pledge against private cultivation of land outside Attica, every one of these pledges was to be broken sooner or later, mostly sooner. There is even a hint by an orator of a private Athenian estate on the island of Peparethus, and thus one perhaps should make no exceptions at all.
Athens now began to reorganize its public finances and to build ships. A new system of levying taxes by taxation groups (symmoriai, singular symmoria) was introduced. To make sure there were no cash-flow difficulties, rich individuals were expected to produce money for the state from their own resources and then recoup it from their taxation group. The new Athenian navy defeated Sparta in the battle of Naxos (376), a victory won under the command of the Athenian Chabrias. In western waters another great Athenian commander, Timotheus, won the battle of Alyzia. Those successes produced new members for the confederacy (some states had cautiously stood aloof at first). In Boeotia—which Sparta, under King Agesilaus and initially the other king, Cleombrotus I, repeatedly invaded in the years after the liberation—there was a surprising land defeat of some Spartan contingents at the hands of the Theban Sacred Band, an elite military force composed of 150 pairs of lovers. This, the battle of Tegyra (375), anticipated the more-famous Spartan defeat at Leuctra four years later. The very existence of a Sacred Band was militarily significant, indicating that Spartan professionalism was now being copied by others who would soon overtake Sparta.
By 375 these efforts had exhausted all parties, and they were ready to make peace, or rather to accept another King’s Peace. (Greeks felt uncomfortable about their involvement in this kind of Persian-inspired diplomacy, in which the various peaces were “sent down”—i.e., imposed—by the Persian king. As a result, the Persian aspect to this and other initiatives tends to be minimized or ignored by some literary sources, notably the “Panhellenist” Xenophon.) This time Athens’s improved position was acknowledged in a clause specifically giving it the leadership by sea.
Theban expansion
After its expulsion from Thebes, Sparta had steadily lost ground in central Greece. The Thebans energetically centralized Boeotia under their own leadership; for instance, they gained control of Thespiae and—yet again—of the unfortunate Plataea, which must have been resettled at some point, or perhaps just gradually, after the Peloponnesian War. In addition, a new power arose in Thessaly, that of Jason of Pherae, an ally of Thebes and until his assassination in 370 a military despot on the Dionysius model. Sparta was unable to respond to local Thessalian appeals against Jason, proof that Spartan ambition in central Greece had finally come to an end.
Theban expansionism was bound to drive Athens and Sparta together before long. Despite renewed fighting between Athens and Sparta in the west (374 and 373) and despite Thebes’s continued, though increasingly reluctant, contributions to the Athenian navy (373), it was becoming clear that Thebes was the real threat to both Athens and Sparta. In this respect the Second Athenian Confederacy, with its political justification in terms of anti-Spartan sentiment, had already been superseded by events. There were other causes for concern within the confederacy. Tribute by another name had been levied for the western operations of 373, not altogether unreasonably: ships cost money, and Athens did not have great reserves, as it had in the 5th century. Perhaps more disquieting in its implications was the Athenian garrison on Cephallenia, attested by an inscription of 373; there may, however, have been special factors, and it is not known how long the garrison remained.
At a famous peace conference held at Sparta in 371 (which, in fact, resulted in another King’s Peace), Sparta tried to prevent the Thebans from asserting and formalizing their local pretensions by signing on behalf of the whole of Boeotia. After a breach in the negotiations, signaled by a rhetorical duel between Agesilaus and the Theban Epaminondas, “a man famous for culture and philosophy,” as his fellow Boeotian Plutarch described him half a millennium later, the Spartans invaded Boeotia. Twenty days after the peace conference, Sparta was defeated by Thebes on the field of Leuctra, the Theban commander Epaminondas showing more than cultural and philosophical qualities.
That was a major and decisive battle in Greek history. Politically, it was to loosen Sparta’s hold even on its Peloponnesian dependencies and to end its long subjection of Messenia; it introduced a decade of Theban prominence (which was, however, too inconclusive in its results to deserve its usual name of the “Theban hegemony”). Militarily, the battle was innovative in several ways, not only in the sheer professionalism of the Sacred Band. The left wing of the army was deepened to 50 men, in a further development of the Delium arrangement of 424. This provided a flexible “tail,” or reserve force on the left that could be deployed as the course of the battle suggested. The decision about whether, when, and how to deploy it would be the general’s, whose influence on the outcome of the battle was thus greater than had been usual hitherto. By placing the best troops on the left, the Thebans aimed to knock out the best Spartan troops, who were positioned opposite them, occupying the right wing in the traditional hoplite manner. Finally, by marching forward obliquely (rather than straightforwardly, as was customary), the Thebans increased the punch administered by this deepened left.
Perhaps the Spartan defeat needs no explanation other than Theban superiority. The Spartans lost about 1,000 men, 400 of them full Spartan citizens. It is disputed, however, whether manpower problems were the most serious factor in the defeat. Aristotle, on the one hand, explicitly made the connection between the defeat at Leuctra and shortage of men. There were not enough ways for talented or physically vigorous outsiders to acquire Spartan citizenship and too many ways by which full citizens could lose their status. Thus, full citizens might be degraded in status for alleged cowardice in battle, or they might fall into debt through inability to pay their mess bills (these debts often resulted in the takeover of land by women, whose social and economic position was stronger at Sparta than elsewhere). In addition, the number of full citizens was reduced by unavoidable demographic disasters such as the earthquake of 465. On the other hand, it has been replied that non-Spartans (either degraded Spartans, the so-called “inferiors” like Cinadon, or citizens of the surrounding communities) might be and probably were brigaded alongside full Spartans, at least in the 4th century.
After Leuctra there was a second peace of 371, this time at Athens. It is disputed whether Sparta participated, but it is certain that the Thebans were again excluded. It is also certain that the peace included undertakings to accept “the decrees of the Athenian allies”—a possible reference to the Second Athenian Confederacy and in any case a further strengthening of Athens’s position.
Sparta’s position, by contrast, now began visibly to crumble. In Arcadia, not merely did the Mantineans organize themselves into a polis once more, but Arcadia as a whole became a federal state on the initiative of a Mantinean called Lycomedes. (The capital was to be at Megalopolis, the “Great City,” a new foundation made necessary by the ancient rivalry between Tegea and Mantinea.) Both these movements were obviously anti-Spartan, and the Arcadian federation badly needed military support from some powerful quarter. The Arcadians found it at Thebes, after being rejected by Athens (if Athens had responded positively to this appeal, major Peloponnesian developments of the 360s might never have taken place).
Federal Arcadia was in origin a local growth, but there is no doubt that Theban support was crucial for its subsequent success. Theban promotion of federalism there and in central Greece is a notable political contribution, for which the evidence is largely inscriptional. Federations are attested in this decade not just in Arcadia but north of the Gulf of Corinth, in Aetolia, an ally of Thebes since 370, and in western Locris. There was also an intriguing Boeotian federal organization of Aegean states in the 350s, complete with synedrion on the Athenian model. All these federations arguably betray the influence of the Thebans, who evidently sought to export the federal principle long familiar in Boeotia itself. On a skeptical view, however, the development was a natural one and merely approximately simultaneous with the period of maximum Theban power.
In 370–369 Epaminondas invaded the Peloponnese (the first of several such invasions) and weakened Sparta irreparably by refounding Messene as a physical and political polis; the “state-of-the-art” fortifications of 4th-century Messene, an artillery-conscious circuit, stretched for nearly four miles over Mount Ithome. They are the best preserved in mainland Greece except perhaps for Aegosthena at the east end of the Gulf of Corinth; in Anatolia only Heraclea on Latmus, in Mausolus’s Caria, is comparable. The loss of Messene crippled Sparta economically; in particular, Sparta no longer had a helot population to provide the economic surplus necessary for its military life-style. The combined impact of Leuctra, Megalopolis, and Messene was, however, not immediately obvious; in the “Tearless Battle” of 368, Sparta still managed to win a victory over a force of Arcadians. But Sparta was no longer a leading power.
Athens and Thebes
In the 360s the main focus of Greek history shifted from Sparta to the struggle between Athens and Thebes. Neither power was really strong enough to impose a definitive solution, nor were outside forces available to give either side a decisive margin of superiority in the way that Persia had allowed Sparta to prevail in the Peloponnesian War. The 360s were a period of satrapal revolts in the western half of Artaxerxes’ empire, and the subjugation of Egypt continued to elude him. In effect, though there also was some Persian-sponsored inter-Greek diplomacy in this decade, there was even less threat of force behind it than usual (the King’s Peace of the 380s and that of the 370s had not been backed up by Persian men or ships). Dionysius I had added his weight on the Spartan side in 386, and his troops were found operating against Thebes as late as the early 360s. After his death, however, Sicily was not a serious factor in mainland Greek politics. Dionysius’s son Dionysius II did send help to Sparta, enabling it to recover control over some formerly subject communities in 365, but that was about the limit of his interference. Dionysius II ruled precariously in Syracuse and southern Italy; he recovered Syracuse only to be finally driven to exile in Corinth by the Corinthian Timoleon in the 340s. The mid-century period of Syracusan history is of interest because of Plato’s involvement in the politics of the tyranny. Dion, a relative of the older Dionysius by marriage, invited Plato to Syracuse in 367 to tutor Dionysius II in science and philosophy and generally to educate him to become a constitutional king; the visit, however, was not a success.
In central and northern Greece, the energetic rule of Jason (which might have given a push to the plans of his Theban allies) had ended abruptly in 370, and his eventual aims remained and remain an enigma. Macedon was the power of the future, but that was far from obvious in the 360s. After the death of Amyntas in 370, Macedon relapsed into a period of short unstable reigns, as in the 390s. Thus, neither Thessaly nor Macedon was in a position to tilt the balance of power.
Thessaly and Macedon, however, were valuable prizes. Thessaly was not only enormously fertile but also had good harbours and religious influence in the Delphic amphictyony. Macedon had ship-building timber and great natural resources (though few outlets to the sea because Greek colonial poleis stood in the way). Sparta could no longer compete for these assets, but Athens and Thebes could. Not long after the peace of 371, Athens restated an old claim to Amphipolis and added a claim to the Chersonese; in 368 it sent its general Iphicrates to Amphipolis. Thebes reacted to the Athenian claims by sending its other great man of the 4th century, Pelopidas, to Thessaly and Macedon. Theban activity in these areas did not add up to much in the end (one incidental result was that the young Philip, son of Amyntas, spent a period in Thebes as a hostage. The relevance, for Philip’s subsequent army reforms, of his exposure to the methods of the first military state in Greece has often been noted). It did, however, show the Greek world the scale of Theban ambitions.
By 367, affairs in Thessaly and Arcadia were temporarily stalemated, and a peace conference was held at Susa, inside the Persian empire. Pelopidas asked that Sparta be made to give up Messenia formally and (more important, in view of Sparta’s relative impotence at this time) that Athens be requested to give up its fleet. When these proposals inevitably failed, Thebes seized the valuable border territory of Oropus, and Athens was after all obliged to accept what was probably a King’s Peace (366). There was, however, no question of Athens dismantling its navy; on the contrary, its claims to the Chersonese (reachable only by sea) were recognized in exchange, it seems, for acceptance of Theban leadership of Boeotia, including Oropus.
Athens’s pursuit of essentially private Athenian aims, such as control of Amphipolis and the Chersonese, cannot have pleased its allies in the confederacy. It was costly, and it was unsuccessful. (Securing the recognition of Athenian claims in theory was not the same thing as making good those claims in practice.) On the other hand, Athens, shortly after the peace of 366, did send help—a force under Timotheus—to a rebel satrap, Ariobarzanes, in the eastern Aegean; that act showed a perhaps encouraging willingness to defend Greek interests against Persia, especially since Timotheus ejected a Persian garrison he found installed on Samos. The Persian garrison was a violation of Persia’s side of the original King’s Peace. It may seem surprising that Athens should act against Persia so soon if the peace of 366 was really a King’s Peace, but the risk of reprisals just then was slight. In any case, Timotheus’s somewhat contradictory instructions were to keep to the King’s Peace while also helping Ariobarzanes.
Timotheus’s next move, however, the installation of an Athenian cleruchy on Samos, was a capital error. An inscription published in 1995 shows that the Samian cleruchs were indeed resident and that the cleruchy featured a council of 250 members, exactly half the Athenian model or prototype. This was a large and serious influx of Athenian settlers. Timotheus’s action could be technically justified: Samos was not a member of the Athenian Confederacy, and Persia had violated the King’s Peace by installing its garrison; thus, the cleruchy could be seen as a military response to Persian provocation in an area not covered by the rules of the charter of 377. Nonetheless, its effect on Greek opinion was damaging, and the Thebans quickly tried to exploit it.
Some naval interest on the part of Thebes can perhaps already be inferred from its designs on Thessaly, with its good harbours. After 365, however, Theban rivalry with Athens became explicit; Thebes planned a fleet of 100 triremes, lured away Athenian allies such as Rhodes and Byzantium, and induced a revolt on Ceos. That scheme was no more successful in the long run than the Thessalian entanglement, except that the Athenian loss of Byzantium seems to have been permanent; that loss was a serious setback for the Athenian grain supply, given Byzantium’s geographically controlling position. Thebes’s Aegean synedrion may have been founded at this time; Byzantium was certainly a member of it in the 350s.
In Thessaly, Pelopidas was killed in 364 at Cynoscephalae. Although the immediate outcome of the battle was favourable for Thebes and although Thessaly was reorganized in a way that gave Thebes for the first time an absolute majority of votes on the Delphic Amphictyony, active Theban interference in Thessaly was over.
In the meantime the Arcadian federation in the Peloponnese had split in two; the Tegean party appealed for help to the Thebans (who in turn had for allies the Argives and Messenians), and the Mantineans to Athens and Sparta. The great Battle of Mantinea (also called “Second Mantinea” to distinguish it from the events of 418) was a technical victory for Thebes in the strictly military sense, but (as Xenophon noted) it was actually indecisive: Epaminondas’s death permanently crushed Theban hopes of leadership in Greece. The peace after the battle in effect recognized the independence of the Messenians, thus settling at the diplomatic level an issue that in reality had been settled for years. The death of Agesilaus in 360 marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, the age of Philip and Alexander.
The rise of Macedon
In 359 two new strong rulers came to the throne, Artaxerxes III of Persia and Philip II of Macedon. The last decade of the long reign of Artaxerxes II had been blighted by revolts in the western half of his empire—at first sporadic, then concerted. Already in the late 370s Datames, the governor of Cappadocia, had established his independence. Then, by the middle of the decade, Ariobarzanes of Hellespontine Phrygia went into revolt, assisted by Timotheus of Athens and Agesilaus of Sparta. The last and greatest phase of the revolt was led by Orontes, described by the sources as satrap of Mysia. (Possibly an enclave in the Troy region of Anatolia, “Mysia” could, however, also be an error for “Armenia.” If so, the geographic spread of the insurrectionist satraps was still greater.) The other rebelling satraps were Mausolus of Caria (briefly) and Autophradates of Lydia. Some participation by local Greek cities in Anatolia is possible, though perhaps they merely followed the lead of their satrapal overlords; Athens and Sparta seem surreptitiously to have helped.
The aims of the revolt are a matter for speculation, but it looked serious for a long moment: a second and successful Cunaxa was a possibility. (One speculation sees the affair in dynastic terms: Orontes, who was well born, presented a greater danger to Artaxerxes than local men like Mausolus, whose ambitions were by definition limited. No one would follow a native Carian in an attempt on the kingship of Persia; it is significant that Mausolus returned to his allegiance so promptly.) At the date of Artaxerxes’ death in 359, the revolt was over, the traitors’ cause having been ruined by treachery among themselves. Despite setbacks, Artaxerxes II and the empire had weathered the Revolt of the Satraps.
The new king Artaxerxes III promptly ordered the satraps to dismiss their mercenary armies, thus preempting future trouble of the same sort. This was an early indication of the vigour with which he intended to rule and which was to regain Egypt for him.
In Macedon, Amyntas had eventually been succeeded by Perdiccas, the second of his sons by Eurydice. This happened in 365, after a turbulent five-year interval of two brief reigns, those of Alexander II and Ptolemy, and one intervention by a pretender, Pausanias. Perdiccas himself was killed in 359 in a catastrophic battle against the Illyrians, Macedon’s permanent enemies, and his younger brother Philip, the last of Amyntas’s sons by Eurydice, succeeded.
The achievements of Philip’s predecessors have naturally been overshadowed by his own, just as Philip’s were to be eclipsed by Alexander’s. To some extent the historical injustice is beyond redress, because the literary sources gave no systematic attention to Macedon until it was obvious that the activities of its kings were to be the determining factor in Greek history. That realization came later than 359, when Philip’s chances must have looked little better than those of his immediate predecessors; thus, there is not even proper information about Philip’s early consolidation of power.
Fortunately, Thucydides was specially interested in the north, for personal reasons, and he speaks with admiration of the way Archelaus had pulled Macedon together militarily in the last years of the 5th century. Regarding the culture, there is valuable evidence from Herodotus and from excavations, particularly those conducted in the 1970s and ’80s at Macedonian Verghina. The Macedonian kings of the 5th century were sufficiently Hellenized to compete in the Olympic Games (as Herodotus attests) and at the games for Argive Hera (as proved by a dedicated prize tripod found at Verghina). The poets Euripides and Agathon both moved to Macedon at the end of that century, and so evidently did first-rate Greek artists in the course of the next, judging from the paintings discovered in the Verghina tombs. In 1983 investigators discovered, again at Verghina, an inscription in extremely beautiful Greek lettering recording a dedication by Philip’s mother, “Eurydice daughter of Sirras,” which is further proof of the Hellenism of Macedon in this period.
Modern belief in the Greekness of the Macedonian language was strengthened by the publication in 1994 of an important curse tablet from Pella that appears provisionally to indicate that the Macedonian language was a form of northwest Greek. Macedonian religion looks Greek; there are local variations, but that is equally true of incontestably Greek places in, for instance, the Peloponnese. Many Macedonian personal names resemble Greek ones, and it has recently been suggested that such onomastic evidence indicates that the Macedonian settlers originally migrated from northern Thessalian Perrhaibia and the region around Mt. Olympus—as already suggested by a poem ascribed to the Archaic poet Hesiod.
Cultural Hellenization, however, was compatible with a social and military structure that was alien to Greek tradition, resembling instead the feudalism of later societies. (In some respects the contemporary society having most in common with Macedon was Achaemenid Persia.) The 4th-century Macedonian kings made grants of land in exchange for military service; this system is hinted at by literary sources and illustrated by inscriptions. Given the size and fertility of the areas controlled by the Macedonian kings, there was huge potential for military achievement, provided Macedon’s chronic enemies and invaders could be appeased or crushed.
Philip needed to buy time by means of the first method, appeasement, in order to build the army that would enable him to crush where appeasement failed. (Philip always preferred diplomacy to force, dissimilar in that respect to his son Alexander, whose preferences were the reverse.) Although Philip must have seemed unlucky in coming to the throne at so unpromising a moment in Macedonian history, there were in fact compensations, especially if one looks beyond such real but local enemies as the Illyrians and assumes that from the outset Philip’s vision rested on the far horizon. The greatest hoplite power in Greece, namely Sparta, was preoccupied with regaining Messenia, just as Persia was preoccupied with Egypt. Thebes had lost Epaminondas and was soon to overextend itself badly in the Third Sacred War. Athens still had a naval empire of sorts, but it was already showing signs of breakup; in any case, if Philip was to be stopped, it would not be by sea. He could and arguably did time his operations so as to make it impossible for a fleet to get at him (ships could not sail north when the Etesian winds were blowing). On the positive side, the productivity of the silver and gold mines of the Pangaion region would be a huge asset to Philip, and it was thus encouraging that they were currently controlled by a dwarf among imperial powers, Thasos. Although Thasos seems to have been extending its mainland interests remarkably in the 360s, it was not Athens and could be dealt with.
First Philip needed to reorganize his army, which he accomplished by introducing more rigorous training and employing mercenaries. This enabled him to inflict defeats on the Illyrians and other northern enemies. At the same time he made a string of advantageous “marriages,” some more official than others and scarcely amounting to more than politically slanted concubinage; one of these was to an Illyrian princess, Audata. In 357, however, all of these were effectively displaced by his marriage to the formidable Olympias, who on or about July 20, 356, gave birth to Alexander. In 358 Philip made a preliminary visit to the strategically and politically crucial area of Thessaly. He was now poised for a “blitzkrieg” against Amphipolis, which he besieged and captured in 357. Then he moved on to conquer Pydna and the mining city of Crenides, renamed Philippi (356). In 356 he formed an alliance with the Olynthians, who had good reason to be alarmed at Philip’s dazzlingly rapid progress, which continued with the taking of Potidaea in 356 and the successful siege of Methone (355–354). An inscription shows that the Olynthian alliance was recommended by the Delphic oracle, interesting evidence that the oracle was still politically active. The Olynthian alliance is a reminder that Philip was always happy to operate diplomatically if at all possible; in fact, the Athenians had been kept quiet at the time of Philip’s assault on Amphipolis by promises that he would hand it over to them. He never did. The territory of Amphipolis was distributed to Macedonian feoffees.
After the conquest of Methone came some successes in Thrace, which Athens was unable to prevent despite attempts, a little halfhearted and a little late, to strengthen the independent Thracian princes through alliances with itself. Even the great Athenian orator and statesman Demosthenes (384–322) was slow to realize that Athens’s interest required a united, not a divided, Thrace.
Athens had difficulties of its own at this time. In 357 the Social War, the war against its allies, broke out. Already in the 360s, in the aftermath of the Samian cleruchy, trouble had occurred on Ceos and elsewhere. In addition, Mausolus of Caria, once more loyal to Persia and its new king Artaxerxes III, and surely remembering Epaminondas’s example, incited Rhodes, Chios, and Byzantium to revolt against Athens (though, as stated, Byzantium was probably already detached). Dislike of Athens was as much a factor in the outbreak of war as the intriguing of Mausolus, which Demosthenes (naturally) stressed in his search for an outside scapegoat. (Mausolus’s help, however, is a fact and should not be doubted.) To Athens’s costly obsession with Amphipolis and the Chersonese should be added its various breaches of the promises made in 377. (For instance, Athens had, despite the charter, installed garrisons and cleruchies and had even levied tribute under the euphemistic name of “contributions.”) In fact, it did not even respect its most-basic political guarantees: at the end of the 360s, the Athenian commander Chares actually helped an oligarchy to power on Corcyra.
The war went badly for Athens, and it was forced to accept a disadvantageous peace in 355 when the Persian king threatened to intervene on the rebel side. It is disputed how far the inefficiency of the Athenian navy was responsible for the defeat. There are plenty of complaints by contemporary orators to the effect that the trierarchic system was not working properly. Still, there was no absolute shortage of ships, and it has been pointed out that some features denounced by orators, such as the hiring out of trierarchic obligations to third parties, actually tended to promote professionalism, because such hired trierarchs built up expertise.
Macedonian supremacy in Greece
In 353 Philip was in undisputed control of a much-enlarged Macedon. He was brought into Greece itself as a result of the Third Sacred War of 355–346. That war originated in a more or less gratuitous Theban attack on Phocis, which in 362 had refused to send a contingent for the Mantinea campaign. The time lag is to be explained in terms of power politics: the Thebans had suffered a reverse on Euboea in 357, when Theban ascendancy was suddenly and humiliatingly replaced by Athenian, and they were looking for a victim. Phocian behaviour offered an excuse. The Thebans, who since 364 had influence over the preponderance of votes in the Delphic Amphictyony, persuaded it to condemn Phocis (autumn 357) to a huge fine for the usual technical offense, “cultivation of sacred land.” The hope was that if, or rather when, Phocis was unable to pay, Thebes would be awarded the conduct of the ensuing Sacred War. It all went wrong. The Phocians seized the temple treasure in 356 and recruited a mercenary force of such size and efficiency that the Thebans could not defeat them. The Phocian leaders were Philomelus, followed by Onomarchus, Phayllus, and finally Phalaecus. The actual declaration of the Sacred War was delayed until 355, partly because it was only in that year that the relative impotence of one of Phocis’s hitherto most-impressive-looking allies, the Athenians, was revealed by the miserable end to the Social War in the Aegean.
After Philomelus’s death, Onomarchus formed alliances with the rulers of the Thessalian city of Pherae. Thessaly as a whole had been willing enough to declare war on Phocis in keeping with an enmity of immemorial antiquity already remarked on as long-standing by Herodotus in the context of the Persian Wars. Nonetheless, Thessalian unity on the one hand and Theban ability to influence events in Thessaly on the other were both less than complete, and Onomarchus evidently succeeded in exploiting this fluid situation. Yet another city, Larissa, responded by issuing an invitation that was ultimately to be disastrous to Greek, as well as merely to Thessalian, freedom. It called in Philip.
The immediate consequence, a victory for Onomarchus’s Phocians over Philip, his only defeat in the field, was totally unexpected. The Phocians seem to have had a “secret weapon,” in the form of nontorsion artillery. In the following year (352) that defeat was, however, completely reversed at the Battle of the Crocus Field. Philip, who had already perhaps been officially recognized as ruler of Thessaly before the Crocus Field, now took over Thessaly in the full sense, acquiring its ports and its revenues. A further asset was the Thessalian cavalry, which was used to augment Macedon’s own “companion cavalry” in the great battles of Alexander’s early years in Asia.
Southern Thessaly was the gateway to Greece proper, as Thermopylae had illustrated in 480 and the Spartans had recognized by their foundation of Heraclea in Trachis. A probe by Philip on Thermopylae itself was, however, firmly repelled by Athens. Philip could afford to wait and perhaps was obliged to do so by Thracian trouble closer to home (end of 352). When he laid siege to a place called Heraeum Teichos, Athens sent a small contingent in September 351. At some date not long before this, perhaps June 351, Demosthenes delivered his “First Philippic,” a denouncement of Philip and Macedonian imperialism. He decried the Athenian moves to counter Philip as always being too little and coming too late. He also urged the creation of a task force and larger emergency force. It is not clear how influential Demosthenes’ advice was—or how influential, at this stage, it deserved to be: at about the same time, and, perhaps actually after the “First Philippic,” Demosthenes was found advocating, in the “Speech on the Freedom of the Rhodians,” a foolish diversion of resources to the southeastern Aegean against the encroachments of Mausolus’s family. The situation there was, in fact, beyond repair.
In summer 349, with Etesian winds about to blow, Philip, despite the alliance of 356, attacked Olynthus, the centre of the Chalcidic Confederation. Olynthus turned to the only and obvious place for help, Athens. This was the occasion of the three “Olynthiac Orations” of Demosthenes. One of Demosthenes’ pleas was to make the reserves of the so-called Festival, or Theoric, Fund immediately available for military purposes—in fact, to finance an Olynthian expedition. There is no agreement that his stirring patriotism was correct from the point of view of policy; perhaps the decision to build up Athens’s financial resources slowly in preparation for the time when Philip had to be confronted nearer home was right. This unglamorous, though not actually dishonourable, policy is associated with the name of Eubulus, the Athenian leader of the pacifist party, whose caution helped to make possible the prosperous Athens of the time of the statesman and orator Lycurgus.
Olynthus fell in 348, despite the Athenian help that was eventually sent. Many of the inhabitants of the city were sold into slavery. Although Greek warfare always permitted this theoretically, the treatment of Olynthus was, nevertheless, shocking to Greek sentiment. In addition, there was no comfort for Athens from the events on its doorstep; Euboea, which Eubulus and his supporters agreed should always be defended, successfully revolted in 348.
At Athens, it must have seemed that there was no immediate further point in fighting, with Amphipolis and Olynthus gone; Philip, moreover, had been putting out peace feelers for some time. The Sacred War, however, brought Philip back into Greece, when desultory warfare in 347 caused the Boeotians to call him in; in alarm Phocis appealed to Athens and Sparta. The Phocian commander Phalaecus, however, unexpectedly declined to allow the Athenians and Spartans to occupy Thermopylae, and Athens was forced to make peace. This was the notorious Peace of Philocrates—notorious because of the attempts by various leading Athenian orator-politicians to saddle each other with responsibility for what was in fact an inevitability.
The Phocians surrendered to Philip, who received their Amphictyonic votes. Many individual Phocian troops, branded as temple robbers, had already fled; some of them eventually joined Timoleon in Sicily. The cities of Phocis were physically destroyed and the remaining inhabitants distributed among villages. It is doubtful whether Philip ever seriously intended any other solution to the war in its Phocian dimension. Demosthenes was later to allege that Philip at one point had a different plan—namely, to crush Thebes and save the temple robbers in Phocis. This, however, would have been an implausible renunciation of a valuable weapon, the leadership of a Sacred War. Any such threats or promises can have been no more than feints.
Philip was for the moment supreme not merely in Phocis but in Greece. Athens, as its chief concession, had to abandon claims to Amphipolis formally. It also had to enter into an alliance, as well as make peace, with Philip. This raises the interesting question of whether Philip was already thinking of a grand crusade against Persia as early as 346; some of the sources make such a claim, but they may be contaminated by hindsight. He probably was considering such a move. For one thing, the idea of punishing the Persians for their sack of Athens in 480 was not prominent before 346 but was much heard of thereafter. Moreover, Philip had triumphantly ended one religious war and demonstrated his Hellenism and suitability for the leadership of the Greeks. Nothing would be more natural than that he or his propagandists should have hit on the idea of exploiting the still greater moral appeal to the Greeks of an all-out war of revenge for Persian impiety.
In fact, the idea of a Macedonian spillage into Anatolia was a very old one indeed, and a natural one. About half a millennium earlier, the Phrygian kingdom of Midas, the predecessor of the Lydian dynasty of Croesus, had emerged as a result of a mass movement of peoples from Macedon. An Asiatic expedition is an idea that Philip could surely have thought of for himself: he did not need Isocrates to urge him, as he did in his pamphlet called the Philippus of 346, to settle the Persian empire with wandering Greeks (or resettle them: some of these wanderers must have been mercenaries rendered unemployed by Artaxerxes’ demobilization edict of about 359). Information supplied by Artabazus, a satrap who had fled to the Macedonian court at some time in the late 350s, may have been helpful to Philip. Artabazus could have told Philip—and the very young Alexander perhaps—about the complex Persian system of supplies and travel vouchers for high-ranking officials, a system revealed to historians only in 1969, with the publication of the Persepolis Fortification Tablets. In addition, Philip seems to have had contacts elsewhere in western Anatolia, for instance with Hermias of Atarneus, a fascinating minor ruler at whose court Aristotle stayed. Whatever Philip’s plans may have been, the Persian empire was not yet as debilitated or ripe for takeover as it was to be in the 330s; on the contrary, Persia suppressed revolts in Cyprus and Phoenicia in the mid-340s, and, the greatest success of all, in Egypt in 343.
In Athens after 346 there was a group who seemed to want war against Persia, and this entailed good relations with Philip. However, Demosthenes, who constantly worked against that policy, argued that Philip was untrustworthy; he pointed out that in the second half of the 340s Philip was a persistent peacebreaker, as, for instance, in the Peloponnese and on Euboea. In 344 Demosthenes even persuaded the Athenians to reject a proposed renegotiation of the peace terms offered by Philip in the person of an orator from Byzantium called Python.
Philip had preoccupations closer to Macedon in this period, which themselves make it unlikely that he wanted to upset the arrangements of 346—at least not yet. In 345 he had to deal with the Illyrians again, which he did at the expense of a bad leg wound. The strains of his intense military life had by now left their effects on his appearance. He must have looked older than his age, scarcely more than the mid-30s, because he had already lost an eye at Methone. (It is possible that a skull found in Macedonian Verghina bearing traces of a missile wound over the eye may in fact be the actual skull of Philip II of Macedon. That possibility encouraged the forensic reconstruction in 1983 of the entire head, by techniques used for rebuilding the features of unknown crash victims with a view to identification.) Philip’s leg wound of 345 did not incapacitate him completely; in 344 he had the energy to reorganize Thessaly into its four old divisions, or “tetrachies.” It helps to explain, however, why he was relatively inactive in Macedon until 342, when he made another and final move against Thrace, removing the first local recalcitrant, a ruler named Cersebleptes. From the economic as well as the political point of view, subduing the Thracian rulers was well worth the effort: the gorgeous Thracian Treasure from Rogozen in Bulgaria, discovered in 1986, consists of 165 high-grade silver and gilded vessels; one of them is inscribed “Property of Cersebleptes.”
Philip attacked the Greek city of Perinthus in 340. Perinthus was helped by Byzantium and other Greek communities, including Athens, and even by the Persian satraps (which represents the first collision between the two great powers, Macedon and Persia). Despite all Philip’s efforts (and artillery), Perinthus held out. In 340 an exasperated Philip declared war on Athens. He also switched his siege engines from Perinthus against Byzantium, but he made no easy headway there either. It is possible that the reason for Philip’s abandonment of at least the second of these sieges was not military (siege engines were now virtually irresistible when applied to their target over time) but political. Philip’s gaze was now fixed on Athens, the greater enemy and the greater prize.
The pretext for Philip’s final involvement in Greece was trivial: still another (Fourth) Sacred War, declared this time against the petty city of Amphissa. Philip, its designated leader from the first, entered Greece toward the end of 339. This perilous occasion prompted Demosthenes’ famous rallying call to Athens, reported by its author nearly a decade later in the speech “On the Crown.” He urged sending an embassy to Thebes at this moment of danger for Greece as well as for Athens. Thebes responded magnificently, and the joint Greek army took up position at Chaeronea in Boeotia. The battle, fought in August 338, settled the political future of Greece until the second-century Roman conquest. No accurate account survives of the course of the battle, but it ended in a total victory for Philip. Tradition insists (probably rightly) on the valuable contribution of Alexander on the Macedonian left and suggests (perhaps wrongly) that Philip executed a feigned retreat. The Theban Sacred Band had simply ceased to exist. Athens was treated mildly, its prisoners being allowed to return home without ransom.
Philip’s political settlement is illustrated by a speech wrongly attributed to Demosthenes and by an inscription much restored with the help of the speech. The settlement was a masterly construction, the League of Corinth (337). Philip had perhaps waited a little while for the inevitable pro-Macedonian reaction to set in inside the leading Greek cities. Only in Sparta, arrogant but powerless, was there no willingness to adjust. Philip invaded Laconia but did not interfere further than that. Thebes had to receive a garrison. Philip’s overall goal was general acquiescence and cooperation in the war against Persia, which was now a certainty. In fact, he wanted an alliance, and without doubt the arrangements of 337 secured one. To this end most of the great federations of Greece were left intact; only Athens’s naval confederacy was dissolved (though its cleruchy on Samos was retained) and, less certainly, the Aetolian League suppressed in a punitive measure.
Like the King’s Peace and the Second Athenian Confederacy, the new league guaranteed freedom and autonomy. Unlike the Athenian organization, however, the new league put the emphasis on property rights. There were specific bans on “confiscation of property, redistribution of land, cancellation of debts, or freeing of slaves with revolutionary intent.”
The real novelty of the league was the fact that it had a king at its head and garrisons at crucial places, such as Chalcis and Corinth, to maintain the peace. The military requirements made of each state were set out in detail. Philip may have borrowed some of the features of the new arrangement, such as his politic use of titles, from precedents other than the Second Athenian Confederacy. Thus, he may have absorbed a lesson about the politic use of titles in his mother’s kingdom of Epirus; although it had been ruled by kings, the officials in the confederacy over which they presided were given Greek-sounding titles such as secretary. Other examples may have been provided by Dionysius I of Syracuse and Leucon of Bosporus, who took different titles for use in different contexts (indeed, this may have suggested to Philip the expedient of avoiding royal titles when dealing with the Greeks: for them he would be general with full powers).
In fact, the 4th century saw a thorough mixing of political categories, of which Philip’s new league was a sophisticated example. A cruder example is present in a curious decree from Labranda, which begins with the words “It seemed good to Mausolus and Artemisia” (his sister and also his wife). Here, one finds combined a regular formula for a Greek city-state with a highly irregular decision-making body—namely, a Persian satrap and his incestuous wife.
Mixing of political categories, however, was unwelcome at home in Macedon. Perhaps some Macedonian soldiers, who might have preferred Athenian loot to an Athenian alliance, were puzzled about Philip’s motives. Thus, it may have been for the benefit of such doubters that, after planning his Asiatic war and sending an advance force under Attalus and Parmenio, Philip had himself depicted in a domestic Macedonian context (he would surely not have risked such a thing in Greece) as a “13th Olympian god.” (Inscriptional evidence indicates that Philip may have received cult at Philippi, but cult for such founders was well established.) Further speculation about Philip’s motive for this action, which is as remarkable in its way as anything he ever did, is unprofitable. For it was at this moment (336) that he was struck down by an assassin, whose own motives have never been ascertained.
Alexander the Great
Unless Alexander was himself ultimately responsible for his father’s assassination (an implausible view, but one already canvassed in antiquity), he cannot have foreseen the moment of his own succession to a father who, though grizzled, was in the prime of life. His reaction to the turn of events was remarkably swift and cool. Two highly placed suspects were killed immediately. Not many actual rivals had to be eliminated, however, because Alexander’s succession was not in serious doubt. A son of Philip’s brother Perdiccas, Amyntas, was still alive, but there was no reason for Alexander to see him as a threat; in any case, he was probably dead by 335.
Alexander the GreatAlexander the Great, marble bust, 2nd–1st century bce; in the British Museum, London.© Tony Baggett/Fotolia
Alexander and the Greeks
Alexander began his career of conquest in 335. He started with lightning campaigns against the Triballi and Illyrians, which took him across the Danube. Thebes was next: the Thebans had risen in the optimistic belief that Alexander had died in Illyria. He reached Thessaly in seven days and was in Boeotia five days later. Then followed the destruction of Thebes. The blame for this act is differently distributed in the two main literary traditions about Alexander, that of Arrian and that of the vulgate. Arrian, a Greek historian and philosopher of the 2nd century ce, relied on the works of two writers nearly contemporary with Alexander, Ptolemy (subsequently king of Egypt) and the historian Aristobulus. Arrian’s tradition, which is regarded as the more “official” of the two, shifts the blame away from the Macedonians. The tradition of the vulgate, which is often fuller than that of Arrian, can be used to supplement or correct his. Although the vulgate tends toward the sensational, the greater reliability of Arrian can never be lightly assumed. For instance, on the Theban question, the vulgate more credibly puts the responsibility firmly on the Macedonians.
Alexander the GreatAlexander the Great as Zeus Ammon on a silver tetradrachm of Lysimachus, 297–281 bce, thought to be a copy of a portrait by Lysippus; in the British Museum. Diameter 30 mm.Reproduced with permission of the trustees of the British Museum; photograph, Ray Gardner for The Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited
Soon after his accession, Alexander had been voted the leadership of the Persian expedition by the League of Corinth. He set out for Asia in the spring (334). Ancient writers sometimes speak in an implausible way of wars being planned by a father and executed by a son (such as the Macedonian king Perseus’s war against Rome, allegedly planned by his father, Philip V). Alexander’s invasion of Asia, however, is surely a clear case where a son does seem automatically to have taken over a great project, one which had been in the cards since the Battle of Cunaxa at the beginning of the century. Philip had created the army, the prosperity, and the human resources that enabled Alexander to embark on his Asian campaign. He left behind his general Antipater as governor of Greece, with 12,000 foot soldiers and 1,500 cavalry, while taking 40,000 foot soldiers (12,000 of them Macedonians) and more than 6,000 cavalry with him to Asia. To what extent Alexander needed to reorganize the army at the outset of the expedition is unclear. It is certain that he made changes during it; for instance, he incorporated Iranian troops to deal with special circumstances in his eastern campaigning and changed the structure of the cavalry so as to reduce the politically dangerous territorial affiliations of the individual brigades (ilai, squadrons of Macedonian cavalry, were replaced by hipparchies). From the first, however, he must have given thought to problems of reconnaissance and supply. Whereas Greek armies expected to live off the land to some extent, Alexander used wagons, despite a tradition that Philip had forced his soldiers to carry their own provisions and equipment. The core of the infantry was the Macedonian phalanx, armed with the long sarissa, or spear; the pick of the cavalry were the Companions, led by Alexander himself on the right wing. Philip’s great general Parmenio commanded the Thessalian cavalry on the left. In addition, there were lighter armed troops, such as the scouts, and less-coordinated but highly effective contingents of slingers and other irregulars, usually from the parts of Greece where the concept of polis was imperfectly developed. This army was a formidable machine in the metaphorical sense. There also were literal machines—stone-throwing siege engines that could be assembled on the spot. The Thessalian siege engineers associated with Philip certainly continued into Alexander’s reign and enabled him to conquer Anatolia and Phoenicia at comparatively high speed, given the fortified obstacles confronting him.
The Spartan Agesilaus may have hoped merely to construct a belt of rebel satraps, and Philip’s ultimate aims are inscrutable. Alexander, however, as soon as he had crossed the Hellespont, cast his spear into Asian soil and openly declared that he laid claim to all Asia (admittedly a geographically fluid concept). At Troy he visited the tombs of the heroes Achilles and Ajax, paying them due religious honour; this was an early and emphatic statement that he saw himself and his expedition in epic, Homeric terms. The conquest of Asia (in the sense of the Persian empire) was more feasible than it had been in 346: Artaxerxes III had died in 338–337, and the king now reigning was the much weaker Darius III (he succeeded in 336, after the brief reign of Arses, whom the trilingual inscription found at Xanthus in 1973 shows to have borne the title Artaxerxes IV).
It was in this region, at the Granicus River, that Alexander was confronted by a Persian army—not the central army of the Persian king but a very sizable force levied by the satraps from Anatolia itself. Alexander attacked in full daylight (the vulgate tradition of a “dawn attack” should probably be rejected); the Persians lined the opposite riverbank—impressively but suicidally. Alexander’s victory was achieved in part by his own conspicuous example; he led the right wing with a battle cry to the god of battles. Such “heroic leadership” is, indeed, one of Alexander’s main contributions to the history of generalship.
Alexander immediately appointed satraps in the parts of Anatolia thus acquired, thereby giving an early signal that he saw himself as in some sense the successor and continuator of the Achaemenid Persian kings, not merely as an outsider devoted to their overthrow. At the same time, he proclaimed democracy, restored law, and remitted tribute in the Ionian cities. This illustrates how seriously Alexander took the propaganda purpose of the war as revenge for the Persian impieties of 480: it is noticeable that the places he accorded specially favourable treatment in his passage through Anatolia often turn out to be places with a “good” record in the Ionian revolt or the Persian Wars; that is to say, they had been prominent rebels. Alexander felt no scruple about subjecting to direct satrapal rule the tracts of territory outside the poleis. Whether the Greek cities of Anatolia joined the League of Corinth is an intractable question. Some of the islanders certainly did, as, for instance, Chios, where an inscription recording the terms of Alexander’s settlement proclaims bluntly that “the constitution is to be a democracy” and refers to the “decrees of the Greeks.” As for Asiatic cities like Priene, there is no certainty, but the probability is that they joined the league.
Priene was a very old city indeed, one of the Ionian “Dodecapolis,” but it was physically derelict. It is possible that Alexander in some sense refounded this and other western Anatolian Greek cities, such as Heraclea south of Latmus and Smyrna. (There is, however, an almost equally strong case for associating their physical reconstruction with the Carian Hecatomnids, the family of Mausolus). If Alexander was their founder, this would be the first good evidence of the urbanizing that was a marked feature of his policy for the conquered territories to the south and east. In this respect, however, as in others, credit should be given to Philip for his example: Philippi (the renamed Crenides) was not his only city foundation.
At Halicarnassus, Alexander met his most-serious resistance so far from a defended city, in mid-334; Miletus had not delayed him long (nor was it punished very severely—it had after all been the leader of the Ionian revolt). The siege of Halicarnassus was a far tougher operation. The city had good defenses, both natural and artificial, and had been chosen as the local Persian military headquarters. The fighting was severe, though in the apologetic tradition used by Arrian the severity is minimized. At one moment Alexander was forced to the extremity of having to send a herald to ask for the bodies of some Macedonians who had fallen in front of the walls. After the city was taken—the citadels held out for another year or two—Alexander reappointed the native princess Ada as satrap (his earlier satrapal appointees had been Macedonians). She was the sister of the great Mausolus, and her reinstatement prefigures Alexander’s shrewd subsequent policy of allowing local men and women to remain in post (though usually, like Ada herself, under the superintendence of a Macedonian troop commander). A romantic story makes her “adopt” Alexander as her son, a gesture graciously accepted by Alexander. That gesture of conciliation toward the native population was good politics.
After the conquest of Halicarnassus, Alexander moved east, meanwhile sending to Macedon for drafts of reinforcements. The scale of these demands through the whole campaign and their effects on the domestic situation in Macedon are not easy to estimate; the record of the literary sources is too fitful and episodic. According to one view, Alexander’s legacy was one of lasting damage; he had exhausted the manpower of Macedon to such a point that the Macedon of Philip V and Perseus inevitably succumbed to the Romans with their almost infinite capacity for replacement. On the other hand, one must allow in the reckoning for a good deal of voluntary emigration by Macedonians to the armies and cities of the successor kingdoms in the Hellenistic period. Thus, Alexander was not the only culprit; there were more-intangible demographic forces at work.
Alexander’s path took him from Carian Halicarnassus to Lycia and Pamphylia. At about the Lycian-Pamphylian border a strange natural phenomenon occurred that allowed Alexander and those with him to enjoy a freak dry passage along the coastline. This was greeted by his supporters as a portent and a recognition of Alexander’s divinity (the sea “doing obeisance” to the great man). It was the first believable suggestion that special religious status could be claimed for Alexander.
In early 333 Alexander moved through Pisidia, where the nearly impregnable mountain city of Termessus, a remarkably well-preserved site 21 miles northwest of the modern Antalya, managed to hold out (even Alexander’s early years in Asia were not an uninterrupted success story). Morale and self-esteem had to be satisfied with the taking of Sagalassus and some minor places. Thus, it was high time for a piece of propaganda and political theatre, especially since the Aegean he had left behind him was not altogether quiet. A Persian counteroffensive was achieving some notable reconquests (but eventually troop drafts were required by Darius for the campaign that finally took shape at Issus, and the Aegean war shriveled to nothing).
Alexander found his opportunity for propaganda some distance farther north in the Anatolian interior at Gordium, the old capital of the Phrygian kings (themselves, as stated, ultimately of Macedonian origin). There occurred the famous episode of the “cutting of the Gordian knot.” The old prophecy was that whoever unloosed the knot or fastening of an ancient chariot would rule Asia. Alexander cut it instead—or perhaps pulled out the pole pin, as one tradition insisted. Either way, he solved the problem by abolishing it.
The visits to Pisidia and Phrygia had been a huge detour, evidently designed to show that Alexander had conquered Anatolia. That statement raises problems of definition; conquest was a relative term when there were large tracts of Anatolia, such as Cappadocia, that Alexander had scarcely touched, not to mention the mixed achievement at Pisidia.
A more-obvious way of achieving conquest was to defeat the king in open battle. The time had come to face Darius, whose army was already in Cilicia. In fact, Darius got ahead of Alexander, occupying (after a protracted delay) a position to the north of the Macedonians. The numerical advantage at the ensuing Battle of Issus, fought toward the end of 333, was heavily with the Persians, but they were awkwardly squeezed between the sea and the foothills of a mountain range close by. Alexander’s Companion cavalry punched a hole in the Persian infantry, making straight for Darius himself, who took flight. The Persian mercenaries were routed by the Macedonian phalanx. After the battle, Darius’s wife and mother both fell into Alexander’s hands. In an exchange of letters Alexander grandly offered that Darius could have them back—“mother, wife, children, whatever you like”—if he recognized his own claim to be lord of Asia and addressed him as such for the future. Darius, of course, refused the offer.
Alexander did not immediately follow Darius eastward; instead he continued southward in the direction of Phoenicia and eventually Egypt. The Phoenician cities of Byblos and Sidon submitted willingly, but Tyre was a major obstacle. Its walls were not finally breached until summer 332, after various contrivances had been tried, including a huge and elaborate siege mole. The siege of Gaza occupied much of the autumn; when the city at last surrendered, Alexander dishonoured the corpse of Batis, its commander, in the way that Achilles in the Iliad had treated the corpse of Hector. Alexander’s imitation of Homeric heroes had its less-attractive side.
This was the part of the world in which the Jews might have encountered Alexander. No doubt there was some contact, but virtually all the available evidence is unreliable and romantic or even fabricated to give substance to later Jewish claims to political privileges. Alexander’s effect on the Jews was indirect, but no less important for that: he surrounded them with a Greek-speaking world.
Alexander in Egypt
Egypt was taken without a struggle, an indication of the dislike the subject population felt toward Persia. (Even though Egypt had been reconquered by Persia hardly more than a decade before, it is possible that there had been yet another revolt since 343.) Alexander’s period in Egypt was marked by two major events, the founding of Alexandria and the visit to the oracle of the god Amon at Sīwah in the Western Desert. Although the sources disagree about which event came first, the foundation probably preceded the visit to the oracle.
The new city of Alexandria, the first as well as the most famous and successful of many new Alexandrias, was formed by joining a number of Egyptian villages (April 331). Alexander supervised the religious ceremonies of foundation, including Greek-style athletic and musical games (an indication of his intentions to Hellenize those foundations, at least as far as their cultural life was concerned); he thought that the site was an excellent one and hoped for its commercial prosperity. It is quite certain, from an inscription, that early Hellenistic Alexandria possessed a civic council; that and other self-governing institutions such as an assembly probably go back to Alexander’s time. Not all Alexander’s foundations were run on the liberal model, though some were inaugurated with similar symbolic gestures in the direction of Hellenism. One hears of “satraps and generals of the newly founded cities,” a phrase that does not imply much self-government. No doubt some of Alexander’s “new foundations” were little more than military camps, and one should assume that in all the far eastern Alexandrias the native population was forced to perform menial or agricultural tasks.
The oracle of Amon at Sīwah, to which Alexander now made a pilgrimage, was already well known in the Greek world. Pindar had equated Amon with Zeus; the oracle had been consulted by Croesus in the 6th century and Lysander in the 5th; and there was a sanctuary to Amon at Athens in the first half of the 4th. Alexander had a pothos, or yearning, to visit Amon (the word pothos is often used by the sources to describe his motives and is appropriately suggestive of far horizons, even if it does not reflect a usage of Alexander’s own). He wanted to find out more about his own divinity, the implication being that he already had an inkling of it. He was told what he wanted to hear; more than that (some sources offer a great deal more) was probably speculation to fill a gap.
To the Persian Gates
Alexander then crossed Phoenicia again to meet Darius for the second and last time in the open field at Gaugamela (between Nineveh and Arbela) at the beginning of October 331. The tactic was to be the usual one—a leftward charge by Alexander from the right wing toward the centre, while Parmenio held the left wing firm. Parmenio seems, however, to have encountered unusual difficulties and had to summon help from Alexander, who was already in victorious pursuit of Darius. The mechanics of this “summons” are not clear, and the story may be a fabrication intended to discredit Parmenio. Alexander and his troops won the battle, sealing the fate of the Persian empire, but Darius managed to escape. Alexander then moved to Babylon, where in another gesture of conciliation toward the Iranian ruling class he reappointed Mazaeus as satrap, with Macedonians to supervise the garrison and the finances.
That kind of gesture has been much discussed; it can be both overinterpreted and unduly minimized. Ideas that Alexander, then or ever, planned to forge a harmony between nations at a mystical level have no solid basis in the evidence. There is nothing odd, however, in supposing that his intentions toward Persians like Mazaeus (or Abulites, confirmed in the Susa satrapy about the same time) were positive. Also, the idea of such “fusion” was not entirely new. Greeks such as Xenophon earlier in the century had by their writings and actions anticipated Alexander’s policy of fusion, and the cooperation of Cyrus and Lysander was just the most-famous example of mutual understanding between Persian and Greek. Nor is it convincing to interpret Alexander’s policy of integrating army and satrapy as a repressive device. Macedonians like Peucestas (appointed satrap of Persia) learned Persian and were rewarded for it, and Hephaestion’s position of favour with Alexander is largely to be explained by his support of Alexander’s Orientalizing policies. Admittedly, after leaving Iranian territories, Alexander returned to employing Macedonians as, for instance, in the Indus lands, but even there one finds native appointees like the Indian king Porus. Military integration—the use of Iranian horse-javelin men—is first firmly attested soon after the Battle of Gaugamela. This is to be explained in purely military terms: the Companion cavalry on their own were not entirely suited to the more-disorganized warfare lying ahead against the fierce opponents waiting to the east and north of Iran proper.
After some spectacular campaigning in Persis proper, Alexander occupied the palace of Persepolis, where the strong defensive position known as the “Persian Gates” was taken only after an unsuccessful and costly initial assault. The palace of Persepolis was looted and burned (spring 330). The less-creditable tradition of the vulgate maintains that the fire started when a drunken Athenian courtesan called Thais led a revel that got out of hand, and this may well be right. The event, however, could be exploited afterward as a signal to dissident Greeks at home that the “war of revenge” was complete.
To establish securely the propaganda value of the burning of Persepolis would require a more-precise chronology for the phases of that Greek dissidence than is ever likely to be achieved. The last fling of 4th-century Sparta was a revolt led by its king Agis III. It was probably still going on in 330 when it culminated in a narrow victory by the Macedonian general Antipater over the Spartans at Megalopolis. If this is right, the burning of Persepolis at about this time makes good propaganda sense. Athens had not participated in the revolt. The quiescence of Athens in the early years of Alexander’s campaigning is to be explained partly by the policy of civic retrenchment associated with the name of Lycurgus (a phase of Athenian history that included a remarkable building program, the first since the 5th century) and partly by a well-attested grain shortage in Greece, which may have sapped the will to fight.
The conquest of Bactria and the Indus valley
By the middle of 330 Darius had been killed—not by Alexander but by his own entourage. Alexander now adopted symbolic features of Persian royal dress, but one of Darius’s noble followers (and murderers)—Bessus, the satrap of Bactria—also proclaimed himself king. The reckoning with Bessus, however, had to be postponed until the middle of 329. Alexander, who had initially followed Darius north, now moved steadily east, through Hyrcania and Areia, where Satibarzanes was confirmed as satrap; Alexander planned an invasion of Bactria and the elimination of Bessus. Satibarzanes, however, revolted almost instantly, and Alexander turned south again to deal with that rebellion. Having done so (though without taking the satrap himself), he maintained direction southward, toward Arachosia and Drangiana, home satrapies of Barsaentes, another of Darius’s murderers. Barsaentes, however, fled to India.
At Phrada, capital of Drangiana, occurred the most-famous conspiracy of Alexander’s expedition: that of Philotas, the son of Parmenio and a commander of the Companion cavalry. There was little solid evidence for the prosecution to go on, but it is clear that Alexander’s Orientalizing tendencies and the ever-more-personal style of Alexander’s kingship had begun to irk his Macedonian nobility, accustomed as they were to express themselves freely, as in the outspoken court of Philip’s day. Philotas had no doubt spoken very incautiously on some sensitive subjects, such as Alexander’s visit to Amon. The execution of Philotas entailed the execution of his father Parmenio as well, not because there was any serious suggestion that he too had been plotting but as a matter of practical politics; the family group of Parmenio, which can be elucidated by means of prosopography (the investigation of family ties with the help of proper names), had considerable power.
The year 329 saw the final elimination of Satibarzanes and the capture of Bessus in Sogdiana, north of the Oxus River from Bactria. In Sogdiana Alexander founded the city of Alexandreschate (“Alexandria the Farthest”), not far from the site of Cyropolis, a city of Cyrus II the Great, whom Alexander highly admired. This is a reminder that Persian urbanization in Central Asia had not been negligible. (At the interesting Bactrian site of Ai Khanum, which cannot definitely be identified as an Alexandria, there is evidence of Achaemenid irrigation.) Alexandreschate was a prestige foundation, designed, as explicitly stated by Arrian, for both military and commercial success. Alexander had already planted a number of new Alexandrias in central Iran, including Alexandria in Areia (Herat), Alexandria in Arachosia, and almost certainly Qandahār, on the exciting evidence of a metrical inscription found there by a British excavation team in 1978. There was another major foundation called Alexandria in the Caucasus at an important junction of communications in the Hindu Kush.
How far Alexander intended these places to be permanent pockets of Hellenism is not clear. That Hellenism could survive in these regions is shown by the case of Ai Khanum, which had many of the features of a Greek polis, including gymnasia and an agora with an oikist (city-founder) cult; there are even inscribed Delphic religious precepts. Nonetheless, many of Alexander’s Greek colonists in Bactria tried to return home to the mainland immediately after his death out of pothos, or yearning for their Greek way of life. It must be accepted that the ancient literary tradition exaggerated the extent of, and the Hellenizing intentions behind, Alexander’s city foundations. A brilliant recent reconstruction of that literary tradition suggests convincingly that the exaggerations were in the main the work of tendentious scholars and writers in Ptolemaic Alexandria whose aim was to disparage the urbanizing efforts of the Ptolemies’ great rivals the Seleucids by reassigning to Alexander himself many foundations that were actually Seleucid.
Alexander's empire at its greatest extent.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Bessus and Satibarzanes were not the last satraps of eastern Iran to offer resistance. It took fully two years (until spring 327) to suppress Spitamenes of Sogdia and other tribal leaders. The period was full of strain, culminating in the disastrous quarrel between Alexander and Cleitus, one of his senior commanders and the newly appointed satrap of Bactria at the end of 328. The quarrel ended in Alexander’s actually killing Cleitus with his own hands in drunken fury. The issue was a personal one, which, however, merged with a matter of principle:Cleitus had criticized Alexander’s leadership (there had admittedly been at least one military reverse due perhaps to inadequate planning), comparing him unfavourably with his father Philip. Before the army moved in the direction of India, there were two more incidents that widened the gap between Alexander’s conduct and traditional Macedonian attitudes.
First, Alexander attempted to introduce the Persian court ceremonial involving proskynesis, or obeisance. Just what this entailed is disputed; perhaps it amounted to different things in different contexts, ranging from an exchange of kisses to total prostration before the ruler in the way a Muslim says his prayers. What is not in doubt is that for Greeks that behaviour meant adoration of a living human being, something they considered impious as well as ridiculous. It was the court historian Callisthenes who voiced the feeling of the Greeks. The proskynesis experiment was not repeated: Alexander did not in the end insist on it. It is difficult, however, not to connect Callisthenes’ role in this affair with his downfall not long after, allegedly for encouraging the treason of a group of royal pages. This was the second of the two alarming incidents of the period.
India was the objective in 327, though Alexander did not reach the Indus valley until 326, after passing through Swāt Cas from the district of the Kābul River. In 326, at the great Battle of the Hydaspes (Jhelum), he defeated the Indian king Porus in the first major battle in which he faced a force of elephants. How much farther east Alexander might have gone is a question that has fascinated posterity, but the curiosity and patience of his army was exhausted. At the Hyphasis (Beas) River he was obliged to turn back.
Alexander did not, however, retrace his path but took the route southward through the Indus valley toward the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman. He narrowly avoided death at the so-called Malli town, where an arrow seems to have entered his lung. The subsequent march westward in 325 through the desert region of Gedrosia (Balochistan) was a death march; its horrors emerge vividly enough from the literary narratives, but they are certainly understated. Alexander’s motive for ordering the march may have been the desire to outdo the mythical queen Semiramis and the legendary Cyrus the Great; but the scale of the catastrophe does suggest that his judgment was by now badly impaired. Meanwhile, Nearchus led the fleet from the mouth of the Indus to that of the Tigris, a voyage recorded by Arrian in his Indica, using the account of Nearchus himself.
The final phase
In Carmania, to the west of Gedrosia, Alexander first staged a weeklong drunken revel, in which he himself posed as Dionysus, as a release of tension after the preceding nightmare journey. Then he ordered his satraps and generals to disband their mercenary armies, like Artaxerxes III in 359 and perhaps for the same reason, namely, fear of insurrection. This was a period of punitive action against disobedient or negligent satraps. One official who in this atmosphere preferred to abscond rather than brazen out the inquisition was Harpalus, the royal treasurer, who made his way eventually to Athens. The exact fate of the money he took with him was and still is a celebrated mystery. The fact that Harpalus’s activities as treasurer had evidently been quite unsupervised was typical of Alexander’s short and impatient way with administrative problems. (It is most unlikely that he planned an ambitious financial restructuring of the empire, giving special responsibilities to men with the right expertise. One finds men like Cleomenes in Egypt or Philoxenus in Anatolia combining territorial with financial responsibilities, but no general conclusions can be drawn.)
At Susa in 324 Alexander staged a splendid mass marriage of Persians and Macedonians. He himself had already married a Bactrian princess, Rhoxane (Roxane), in 327, but he now took two more wives, a daughter of Darius III called Barsine (or Stateira) and Parysatis, the daughter of Artaxerxes III. This and other demonstrations of “Orientalizing,” including the brigading of Iranian units into the army, overcame a final mutiny at Opis near Babylon. After haranguing the troops, threatening them, and finally sulking, Alexander won back their affections; following this meretricious and emotional performance, he chose to heal the rift symbolically by a more-organized piece of theatre, a great banquet of reconciliation (thus demonstrating for the last time in Archaic and Classical Greek history the usefulness of the banquet, or symposium, as an instrument of social control).
Marriage of Alexander and Roxane, fresco by Sodoma, c. 1511–12; in the Villa Farnesina, Rome.SCALA/Art Resource, New York
Other actions or schemes in this final phase were of the same megalomaniac type: a request for his own deification, sent to the Greek cities; a demand that they take back their exiles; a monstrous funeral pyre for his dear friend Hephaestion (never completed); and a plan of circumnavigation and conquest of Arabia. So much is well documented. Lists of other spectacular last plans survive, but they are hardly needed; the achievements of the last 13 years were extravagant enough. Alexander died at Babylon, after an illness brought on by heavy drinking, in the early evening of June 10, 323.
Greek civilization in the 4th century
Historical writings
The 4th century is in many ways the best-documented period of Greek history. There is, admittedly, a greater number of documents from the 3rd century, when inscriptions and papyri abound (there are virtually no documentary papyri before the time of Alexander). The writings of the 3rd-century prose historians, however, are mostly lost. In the 4th century, by contrast, there is an abundance of evidence of all kinds. Inscriptions are much more common than in the 5th century and begin to appear in quantity from states other than Athens. Forensic oratory from the 5th century has scarcely survived at all, but from the 4th century there are more than 60 speeches attributed to Demosthenes alone. Most of this corpus of oratory is set in an Athenian context, but one speech of Isocrates deals with business affairs on Aegina. Although there is no 4th-century tragedy and no epinicion poetry like that of Pindar, the comedies of Aristophanes from the beginning of the century and those of Menander from toward the end have survived. These are illuminating about social life, as are the prose writings of Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus, especially his Characters. The writings of Plato, in their anxiety to define an ideal polis invulnerable to stasis or civil strife, give evidence of the instability of the 4th-century world in which it could be said that in every city there were two cities, that of the rich and that of the poor. Aristotle’s Politics examines the theoretical conceptions underlying Greek attitudes toward polis life. This is a precious document, although it can be criticized for insufficient awareness of the monarchical and federal developments of the age.
No such criticism can be leveled at the historiography of the age. It is from Xenophon that one learns of the grand plans of Jason of Pherae, and knowledge about Dionysius I is derived, by less-direct routes, from the 4th-century historians of the Greek west Ephorus, Philistus, and (toward the end of the century) Timaeus of Tauromenium. In fact, the process of explaining history in terms of personality already begins with Thucydides, who arguably came to see that a dynamic personality like Alcibiades could by sheer charisma and force of character have an impact on events irrespective of the content of his policies. It was surely this aspect of Thucydides’ work that Aristotle had in mind when he defined history as “what Alcibiades did and suffered.”
Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes began by recording the history of the city-states in a fairly traditional way (which, however, did more justice to the Theban hegemony than had that of Xenophon), but then he joined Alexander’s staff in order to write the Deeds of Alexander. Evidently, history was now seen as what Alexander did and suffered. Even earlier than that, however, the central role of Philip’s personality had been acknowledged by Theopompus of Chios, who (like Callisthenes) moved in the direction of writing history that revolved around the person of a king; he called his history of Greece Philippica (“The Affairs of Philip”). Meanwhile there were local historians of Attica, such as Androtion, who continued to value Athens’s past and even ventured to rewrite (not merely to reinterpret) the facts about it. These men, who are known as Atthidographers, were not simply antiquarians escaping from the monarchic present. On the contrary, the greatest of them, Philochorus, was put to death in the 3rd century by a Macedonian king for his excessive partiality toward King Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt. All these authors were, in different ways, coming to terms with monarchy.
In addition to works of history there are 4th-century treatises that show how Greeks experienced the new military monarchies. Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (“Education of Cyrus”) is a novel about Cyrus the Great, but it is also a tract on kingship and generalship addressed to the class of educated Greek commanders and would-be leaders. (In comparable fashion Isocrates offered advice on kingship to the semi-Hellenized rulers of Cyprus.) The surviving treatise on siege-craft by Aeneas of Stymphalus in Arcadia (known as Aeneas Tacticus) is valuable not only for the evidence it provides about dissensions (stasis) inside a polis—there is an entire section on “plots”—but also for the awareness both of the ruthless methods of men like Dionysius, who figures prominently, and of the new military technology of the age. (The treatise includes, for example, practical advice on how to defend walls against battering rams.) Aeneas Tacticus’s treatise, more than any other surviving prose work of the 4th century, makes the point that this was an age of professionalism.
Many technical monographs are known to have been written in that period but have not survived. For instance, Pythius, who worked on the Mausoleum, also wrote a book about another of his projects, the Temple of Athena Polias at Priene. (There were 5th-century precedents for some of this: Polyclitus of Argos had written a famous treatise on proportion in sculpture and Sophocles a monograph about the chorus.)
Architecture and sculpture
In the sphere of architecture, the 4th century produced no Parthenon, but it was the great age of military structures. Most of what survives of the elegant fortifications of the northwestern frontier demes of Attica stems from the 4th century; inscriptions attest refurbishing work on Phyle in particular at about the time of the Battle of Cheronea. Outside Athens there were big projects, such as the temple at Epidaurus and theMausoleum at Halicarnassus" class="md-crosslink"> Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.
Buildings such as the Mausoleum were commissioned by powerful individuals, further proof that the emergence of commanding personalities is a noticeable feature of the 4th century. In some respects it represents a return to Archaic values: a tyrant like Dionysius has much in common with Peisistratus of Athens or Polycrates of Samos, and Philip II of Macedon can be seen as comparable to Pheidon of Argos, a hereditary monarch who transformed his power base into a military autocracy. Revised attitudes toward such individuals are already detectable near the end of the 5th century. It seems that, when Athens founded Amphipolis in 437, its founder Hagnon, father of the oligarch Theramenes, was given some kind of cult in his lifetime. That is the usually neglected implication of a passage of Thucydides, which definitely records the award of cult honours at Amphipolis to the dead Spartan general Brasidas after 422. In the early 4th century another Spartan, Lysander, received cult at Samos, and later in the century Euphron, a tyrant at Sicyon, was buried in the agora “like a founder.”
At Athens itself, before the request by Alexander for his own deification, there could be no question of divine cult for a living man (although it is possible that Alexander had already arranged some kind of hero cult at Athens for Hephaestion). Nonetheless, even at Athens there was a marked trend toward more-assertive monuments. That is particularly evident in the commemorative choragic monuments built to celebrate victories in the great Athenian festivals. The most famous of these, the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, which used to be called the “Lantern of Demosthenes,” represents a transitional phase; its inscribed dedication falls between the anonymity (actually more pretended than real) of the corporatist benefactions of Classical Athens and the assertiveness of Hellenistic Greece with its emphasis on individual generosity. On the one hand, the inscription makes clear that what is celebrated is victory by the tribe as a whole; on the other, the great prominence of the man’s name stresses individuality, as does the idiosyncratic form of the monument. Clearly, this is an emphatic statement in the first person singular.
Consistent with these developments is the marked tendency toward portraiture in art. Persian satraps such as Tissaphernes issued coinage with what were obviously meant to be realistic depictions of the satrap’s head. Individual rulers were represented by statues in the round, like that of Mausolus from the Mausoleum (which may or may not be an attempt to represent Mausolus himself but which incontrovertibly is a portrait of some powerful individual), or by figures on friezes, as those on the Alexander Sarcophagus in the Archaeological Museums of Istanbul. Although the workmanship is evidently Greek, the ethos is uncompromisingly royal. Alexander created a new visual image for himself: unlike the bearded Philip, Alexander is portrayed as clean-shaven, young, and idealized. Lysippus, in particular, is said to have caught Alexander’s physical qualities in his royal sculpture portraits.
Alexander the GreatAlexander the Great in battle, detail from the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus, marble, c. 310 bce, from Sidon; in the Archaeological Museums of Istanbul.Hirmer Fotoarchiv, Munich
The Athenian empire had given employment to many artists, architects, and sculptors, both from Athens itself and from the subject states of the empire. When the empire collapsed in 404, many of them had to seek employment elsewhere. Some went to the courts of satraps like Mausolus or of military rulers like Dionysius: both of those had money to spend on art, building, and fortifications. Another wealthy court was that of Macedon. One remaining recourse in Athens, however, was funerary art; the most-famous funerary stelae and sculptured monuments found at Kerameikós, the city’s prestigious cemetery, date from this period, before such lavish commissions were outlawed by the Athenian ruler Demetrius of Phaleron after Alexander’s death. Some of those buried were foreigners; for instance, there was a precinct for the Messenians, one for some immigrants from Heraclea on the Black Sea, and one for those from Sinope, also in the Black Sea region. (In the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus there is a monument comparable to another one of a Black Sea immigrant, a reminder of Athens’s commercial connections with this crucial grain-growing area.) In the Kerameikós there is even a grave of a Persian with a larger-than-life torso of a seated man in Persian dress.
Social and commercial exchanges
Whatever the political effects of the King’s Peace of 386, it was evidently not a barrier to social and commercial exchanges. Inscriptions in the corpus of Demosthenes’ speeches frequently mention trade with ports in Phoenicia and Anatolia and occasionally allude casually to piracy, a classic by-product of such trading activity. There is epigraphic evidence for piracy as well: in the 340s Athens honoured Cleomis, tyrant of Methymna on Lesbos, for ransoming a number of Athenians captured by pirates. Lesbos had always enjoyed trading links with the Black Sea region, and in the 4th century more than ever. One should imagine Athenians and metic Athenian traders (i.e., foreigners resident at Athens) going in numbers via Lesbos and the Sea of Marmara to the rich granaries of southern Russia. Some no doubt settled in these regions, though the inscriptional evidence for Athenians abroad in the 4th century (as opposed to evidence for foreigners settling in Athens or Piraeus) is in need of systematic collation.
Immigration and free movement of individuals between one polis and another are typical features of the 4th century. They are best documented for Athens but hardly confined to it, given the attractiveness of the royal and satrapal courts. At Athens itself, the great magnet for immigrants was naturally Piraeus, the city’s densely populated, multilingual, multiracial port. Bilingual inscriptions in the Archaeological Museum of Piraeus, in Greek and Aramaic, testify to the presence of Phoenician traders, who also left more strictly epigraphic traces. (Conversely, Greco-Aramaic stelae in the Archaeological Museums in Istanbul may attest Greek or partially Greek settlements in the Persian empire.) An inscription of the period of Alexander, from the Piraeus, records the response of the Athenian Assembly to the request of some merchants from Cyprus for permission to build a sanctuary to Aphrodite (the goddess, born in the sea, allegedly stepped ashore on Cyprus). The inscription mentions, as a precedent for the request, the Temple of Isis founded by the Egyptian community.
Foreign cults of that kind were not by any means brand-new in the late 5th century; if they seem so, it may be because that period is so much better documented than the early part of the century. But they may have increased in number in Greece as a result of the geographically extensive campaigning of the Peloponnesian War and even the period of the Athenian empire. The cult of Adonis is referred to in Plutarch’s “Life of Nicias,” which also mentions the Amon oracle. Thracian as well as Egyptian cults arrived in Greece in the late 5th century. The cult of the Thracian goddess Bendis at Piraeus features in the first page of Plato’s Republic; Bendis was perhaps a female counterpart to the Thracian Hero. Cults were both imported and exported: one of the vessels from Rogozen depicts the Greek myth of Heracles and Auge, labeled as such. This is a reminder that the old Olympian cults remained strong. In fact, some of the best evidence for traditional Greek religion comes from this period; it was the century of the highly informative and basically conservative Attic deme calendars (i.e., lists of festivals, chronologically arranged through the year) and the period when inscriptional information about the great Panhellenic sanctuaries entered its richest phase.
Mercenary service, as well as organized campaigning, must have helped to raise consciousness of such foreign cults as those of Isis or Bendis. Greeks often served in Thrace in the late 5th and the 4th centuries; Xenophon, for example, was there at the beginning of the 4th century and heard the so-called “Ballad of Sitalces” (a 5th-century Thracian ruler who is featured in Thucydides) sung at a banquet in Paphlagonia.
Mercenaries constituted one category of Greeks who strayed away from their cities; they were a potentially disruptive force, whether from the point of view of polis-minded Greeks or of autocrats like Artaxerxes III or Alexander the Great. Nobody, however, could dispense with them. The Persian kings used Greek mercenaries in their repeated attempts to recover Egypt in the 4th century—but so did the defending Egyptians.
How far inside the Persian empire these Greek mercenaries penetrated is an intriguing question. An inscription first published during World War II appeared to attest a group of Greek mercenaries on an island in the Persian Gulf in the period before Alexander, but it is possible that the text is actually early Hellenistic. Even Spartans like Agesilaus near the end of his life and Thebans like the general Pammenes in the 350s had to hire themselves out to Persian paymasters, whether loyalist or insurrectionist. (It would be better to speak, in this context, not of mercenaries but of “citizen-mercenaries” because these Thebans and Spartans did not cease to belong to their home cities.) The military monarchies of Dionysius and Philip were to some extent propped up by mercenary forces, whose loyalty was not subject to political but only to financial blandishments. That observation leads to the conclusion that the mercenary soldier valued his booty (aposkeue, literally “baggage”) more than he valued his commander. One of the early successors of Alexander the Great, the Greek Eumenes of Cardia, was in effect traded by his troops to a rival for gain. Already under Alexander the elite troops known as “Silver Shields,” or argyraspides, had taken their name from the conquered Persian treasure of precious metal.
Organized settlements
Not all interchange between poleis, or all emigration from the polis into nonpolis areas of settlement, however, was of the haphazard kind caused by mercenary service or the peripatetic life-style of artists and craftsmen. Rather, the poleis themselves promoted much organized activity.
First, old ties might be strengthened by renegotiation, or more-explicit reaffirmation, of old colonial connections. Inscriptions survive from the 4th century that accord rights of citizenship on a footing of mutuality, for instance, between Miletus and Olbia and between Thera and Cyrene. Some old connections of alliance might be inflated into a pseudo-colonial link. Thus, Hellenistic Plataea, as noted earlier, called itself a “colony” of Athens, which strictly it was not. That claim may well go back to the 4th century, and there is good evidence for other such fabricated claims of kinship in the latter part of that century. An inscription, for example, asserts a colonial connection between Argos and Aspendus in Pamphylia. This is certainly unhistorical but can be explained from the greater prominence enjoyed, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, by Argos. The reason was that Argos could itself claim a connection with the Macedon of Alexander, and that kind of connection was desirable for obtaining privileges from him or from his successors.
The founding, building, or synoecizing of new cities was another way in which mobility of population was actually encouraged by the poleis themselves. The process is traditionally (and rightly) associated with Alexander the Great himself, but the emphasis is unjust to some innovatory activity in the later 5th and 4th centuries both by individuals (not least Philip) and by cities.
In the late 5th century Olynthus had been synoecized into existence by Perdiccas of Macedon, and the Rhodians had merged the three cities of their island into a new physical and political entity. The same was done in the 360s by the communities of the Dorian island of Cos. Mausolus’s new capital of Halicarnassus was the result of a synoecism in which Greeks and native Carians (“Lelegians”) were integrated into a new city, which was physically beautified with monumental buildings. Moreover, one can make a case for associating Mausolus with the various refoundations or moving of sites that different kinds of evidence suggest took place at Priene, Erythrae, and Heraclea. Epaminondas’s interventions in the Peloponnese led to major urbanization projects at Messene and Arcadian Megalopolis, where the Spartan defeat at Leuctra in 371 may have given an immediate impetus to the new foundation (the alternative date is about 368 and is less likely).
More-traditional methods of moving people, such as colonization, were also used; at the beginning of the 4th century, Xenophon includes a warm and lyrical description in the Anabasis of a site called Kalpe on the Black Sea, praising its situation, fertility, and relative remoteness from rival and established Greek cities in the vicinity. This gives substance to the suspicion that what Xenophon was really trying to do was found a colony of Archaic type—the Euboeans of the 8th century would have jumped at a site with Kalpe’s advantages of situation. In the 340s Timoleon of Corinth effected a kind of recolonization of Syracuse from the old mother city; he took with him many refugees and brought prosperity back to an island much battered by internal dissension and endless wars with the Carthaginians—against whom he himself scored some notable successes.
Athens sent a colony to the west in the time of Alexander and the wheat shortage; it was led with symbolic or sentimental appropriateness by a man called Miltiades (the name of the 6th-century founder and dynast ruling in the Chersonese), who went to the Adriatic region. The Adriatic seems to have been a favourite colonizing focus in this period: the scale and even reality of Dionysius’s interventions there are controversial, but an inscription gives evidence of a Greek colony on the island of Black Corcyra. The great colonizing surge of the 4th century came, however, in the wake of Alexander; once again, the Ionian Greeks took the lead, just as, on Thucydides’ evidence, they had colonized Ionia itself even before the organized phase of colonizing activity in the 8th century.
Also in the 4th century a great number of citizenships were granted to individuals from whom favours were expected or by whom they had already been conferred, or both. (One standard motive, occasionally made explicit, for the recording of such honours in permanent form was to induce the recipient to continue his generosity.) Most of the evidence is Athenian, but the phenomenon was surely not confined to Athens. Even Persian satraps like Orontes could be enrolled as Athenian citizens, not to mention Macedonians like Menelaus the Pelagonian, a king of the Lyncestians (an independent Macedonian subkingdom until annexed by Philip). Menelaus received citizenship in the 360s because he was reported by the Athenian general Timotheus as helping Athens in its wars in the north. A further and frequent motive for such honours, and one that anticipates the Hellenistic age, is an expression of gratitude for gifts of grain. The Spartocid kings of the Bosporus (southern Russia) were honoured because they had promised to provide Athens with wheat, as their father Leucon had done before them.
That kind of benefaction is called euergetism (the word derives from euergesia, or “doing good deeds”). Now that Athens no longer had the naval power to direct all grain forcibly toward its own harbours, much had to be done by exploiting benefactors. Euergetism of this sort, however, was not entirely new: as early as 444 bce, Egyptian grain in large quantites had been sent by a rebel pharaoh at a time when Athens was certainly not (as it gradually became) a city armed merely with a cultural past and a begging bowl.
Conclusion
No treatment of the main period of Greek civilization should end without emphasizing the continuity both with what went before and with what came after. Continuity is clearest in the sphere of religion, which may be said to have been “embedded” in Greek life. Some of the gods alleged to have been relatively late imports into Greece can in fact be shown to have Mycenaean origins. For instance, one Athenian myth held that Dionysus was a latecomer, having been introduced into Attica from Eleutherae in the 6th century. There is reference to Dionysus (or di-wo-no-so-jo), however, on Linear B tablets from the 2nd millennium bce.
Looking forward, Dionysus’s statue was to be depicted in a grand procession staged in Alexandria in the 3rd century bce by Ptolemy II Philadelphus. (The iconographic significance of the king’s espousal of Dionysus becomes clear in light of the good evidence that in some sense Alexander the Great had identified himself with Dionysus in Carmania.) Nor was classical Dionysus confined to royal exploitation: it has been shown that the festivals of the City Dionysia at Athens and the deme festival of the Rural Dionysia were closely woven into the life of the Athenian empire and the Athenian state. Another Athenian, Euripides, represented Dionysus in a less tame and “official” aspect in the Bacchae; the Euripidean Dionysus has more in common with the liberating Dionysus of Carmania or with the socially disruptive Dionysus whose worship the Romans in 186 bce were to regulate in a famous edict. The longevity and multifaceted character of Dionysus symbolizes the tenacity of the Greek civilization, which Alexander had taken to the banks of the Oxus but which in many respects still carried the marks of its Archaic and even prehistoric origins. Simon Hornblower
Citation Information
Article Title: Ancient Greek civilization
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 20 June 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/ancient-Greece
Access Date: August 10, 2019
Additional Reading
General works
A wealth of information on ancient Greek civilization is provided by the relevant volumes of The Cambridge Ancient History (1923–2005), most of which are in their 2nd edition, some in their 3rd edition. Of special note are John Boardman et al. (eds.), Persia, Greece, and the Western Mediterranean, c. 525–479 B.C., vol. 4, 2nd ed. (1988); D.M. Lewis et al. (eds.), The Fifth Century B.C., vol. 5, 2nd ed. (1992); and D.M. Lewis et al. (eds.), The Fourth Century B.C., vol. 6, 2nd ed. (1994). Note also the excellent accompanying Plates to Volume IV, new ed. (1988), and Plates to Volumes V and VI, new ed. (1994), both ed. by John Boardman. There is a great deal of new and up-to-date material in Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth, and Esther Eidinow (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed. (2012). John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray (eds.), The Oxford History of the Classical World (1986), is also worth consulting. Michael Grant and Rachel Kitzinger (eds.), Civilization of the Ancient Mediterranean: Greece and Rome, 3 vol. (1988), discusses the geography, inhabitants, arts, language, religion, politics, technology, and economy of the area from the early 1st millennium bce to the late 5th century ce. Broad coverage of the physical and cultural settings and of archaeological discoveries is also provided by Peter Levi, Atlas of the Greek World (1980); and Nicholas G.L. Hammond (ed.), Atlas of the Greek and Roman World in Antiquity (1981, reissued 1992). Overviews of the histories of Greek civilization include Nicholas G.L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322 B.C., 3rd ed. (1991); J.B. Bury and Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, 4th ed., with revisions (1991); Oswyn Murray, Early Greece, 2nd ed. (1993); J.K. Davies, Democracy and Classical Greece, 2nd ed. (1993); F.W. Walbank, The Hellenistic World, rev. ed. (1992); Amélie Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East, c. 3000–330 BC, 2 vol. (1995); Robin Osborne, Greece in the Making, 1200–479 BC, 2nd ed. (2009); Simon Hornblower, The Greek World, 479–323 BC, 4th ed. (2011); and Graham Shipley, The Greek World After Alexander, 323–30 B.C. (2000). Many ancient historical sources are available in The Loeb Classical Library series, with original text and parallel English translation; and in the series Translated Documents of Greece and Rome.
The early Archaic period
The Mediterranean world in Classical antiquity is impressively portrayed in Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (2000). John Boardman, The Greeks Overseas: Their Early Colonies and Trade, 4th ed. (1999), is a well-illustrated and fully documented account of Greek colonization. David Ridgway, The First Western Greeks (1992; originally published in Italian, 1984), is also of interest. Skepticism about the word colonization is expressed in Robin Osborne, Greece in the Making (cited above) and in his essay, “Early Greek Colonization?: The Nature of Greek Settlement in the West,” chapter 9 in Nick Fisher and Hans van Wees (eds.), Archaic Greece: New Approaches and New Evidence (1998), pp. 251–269. Interesting new approaches to traditions about colonization are set forth in Irad Malkin, Religion and Colonization in Ancient Greece (1987), Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean (1994, reissued 2003), and The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity (1998). Commercial factors are stressed by Martin Frederiksen, Campania, ed. and with additions by Nicholas Purcell (1984). Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World (1988), is skeptical of the “land-hunger” explanation. Also useful is Robert Sallares, The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World (1991), a discussion of problems of demography and food supply. The importance of rural sanctuaries to the growth of the polis is argued in François de Polignac, Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-State (1995; originally published in French, 1984); Susan E. Alcock and Robin Osborne (eds.), Placing the Gods: Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece (1994, reprinted 2001); and Robin Osborne, Classical Landscape with Figures: The Ancient Greek City and Its Countryside (1987), which also discusses the ways in which the Greek countryside was exploited in different regions. “Monumentalization” is stressed in a good general account of the period, Anthony Snodgrass, Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment (1980). Ian Morris, Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State (1987), discusses burial and the Greek polis. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 3 vol. (1987–2006), is a controversial work about Phoenician influence on Greece. All aspects of the Archaic and Classical Greek polis are addressed in the many volumes produced by the Copenhagen Polis Centre since 1993, most edited or coedited by the centre’s director, Mogens Herman Hansen, and in the series Acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre. Also worth noting are Oswyn Murray and Simon Price (eds.), The Greek City: From Homer to Alexander (1990); and Lynette G. Mitchell and P.J. Rhodes (eds.), The Development of the Polis in Archaic Greece (1997). Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (1997); and Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy (1989), discuss Greek ethnicity.
K.J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, new ed. (1989, reprinted 1997), is a good treatment. The significance of the symposium is argued for by Oswyn Murray, “The Symposion as Social Organisation,” in Robin Hägg (ed.), The Greek Renaissance of the Eighth Century B.C.: Tradition and Innovation (1983), pp. 195–199. Osnyn Murray, Early Greece (cited above) is a readable general history of the period stressing the symposium at a number of points; and Oswyn Murray (ed.), Sympotica: A Symposium on the Symposium (1990), is an important collection of essays. Interstate rivalry expressed by competitive activity at the Panhellenic sanctuaries is detailed in the brilliant book by Catherine Morgan, Athletes and Oracles: The Transformation of Olympia and Delphi in the Eighth Century BC (1990, reissued 2007). Gabriel Herman, Ritualised Friendship and the Greek City (1987, reissued 2002), examines xenia; as does Lynette G. Mitchell, Greeks Bearing Gifts: The Public Use of Private Relationships in the Greek World, 435–323 B.C. (1997, reissued 2002). Other relationships are studied in Christopher P. Jones, Kinship Diplomacy in the Ancient World (1999). A discussion of proxenia may be found in L.H. Jeffery, Archaic Greece: The City-States, c. 700–500 B.C. (1976), an elegant general history arranged regionally. Robert Drews, Basileus: The Evidence for Kingship in Geometric Greece (1985), argues that the early Greek “kings” (basileis) were really just hereditary aristocrats; but Pierre Carlier, La Royauté en Grèce avant Alexandre (1984), offers a differing view. Simon Hornblower and Elaine Matthews (eds.), Greek Personal Names: Their Value as Evidence (2000), is complemented by P.M. Fraser and E. Matthews (eds.), A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (1987– ).
Useful monographs on individual poleis important in the Archaic period include J.B. Salmon, Wealthy Corinth: A History of the City to 338 BC (1984); and Thomas J. Figueira, Aegina: Society and Politics (1981, reprinted 1986). But M.I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (1983, reprinted many times), warns against the dangers of writing histories of particular poleis.
The later Archaic periods
Homeric warfare is treated by Hans van Wees, Status Warriors: Wars, Violence, and Society in Homer and History (1992), and in “The Homeric Way of War: The Iliad and the Hoplite Phalanx,” Greece and Rome, 41:1–18, 131–155, and Classical warfare in “Politics and the Battlefield,” chapter 7 in Anton Powell (ed.), The Greek World (1995), pp. 153–178. The classic exposition of the “hoplite theory” of tyranny is A. Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants (1956, reissued 1974); it is refined by Paul Cartledge, “Hoplites and Heroes: Sparta’s Contribution to the Technique of Ancient Warfare,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 97:11–27 (1977). But G.L. Cawkwell, Philip of Macedon (1978), chapter 10, discusses hoplite fighting as a more individual affair than is sometimes allowed. The ideological implications of hoplite fighting are treated by W.R. Connor, “Early Greek Land Warfare as Symbolic Expression,” Past & Present, 119:3–29 (May 1988); and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World (1986; originally published in French, 1981).
W.G. Forrest, A History of Sparta, 950–192 B.C., 3rd ed. (1995), is a provocative, brief work. Paul Cartledge, Sparta and Lakonia: A Regional History, 1300–362 B.C., 2nd ed. (2002), is also useful. “Laconism” is explored in Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (1969, reissued 1991). Doubts about Tyrtaeus’s relation to the “Rhetra” are set out by Hans van Wees, “Tyrtaeus’ Eunomia: Nothing to Do with the Great Rhetra,” chapter 1 in Stephen Hodkinson and Anton Powell (eds.), Sparta: New Perspectives (1999), pp. 1–41. Extreme skepticism about the agoge is expressed in Nigel M. Kennell, The Gymnasium of Virtue: Education & Culture in Ancient Sparta (1995). The Kinadon affair is addressed by J.F. Lazenby, “The Conspiracy of Kinadon Reconsidered,” Athenaeum, 85 (1997), pp. 437–447, while a reply by Simon Hornblower, “Sticks, Stones, and Spartans: The Sociology of Spartan Violence,” in Hans van Wees (ed.), War and Violence in Ancient Greece (2000), pp. 57–82, considers violent stick-wielding members of the Spartan elite. R.E. Wycherley, The Stones of Athens (1978), discusses Athens’s natural advantages. Attic produce and exports are studied by Signe Isager and Mogens Herman Hansen, Aspects of Athenian Society in the Fourth Century B.C. (1975). Russell Meiggs, Trees and Timber in the Ancient Mediterranean World (1982); and Robert Garland, The Piraeus: From the Fifth to the First Century B.C., 2nd ed. (2001), present naval aspects. Discussion of every aspect of early Athenian political history is contained in P.J. Rhodes, Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia, rev. ed. (1993). Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (1983, reissued with minor corrections 1996), covers Cylon and the religious taint often incurred through some wrongful act or neglect of ritual obligation, and his important Athenian Religion: A History (1996), is now essential reading for Athenian history, as well as for religion, from Solon to Alexander and beyond. M.I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, expanded ed. (1998), investigates the link between Solon and slavery. Richard Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State (1994), analyzes “aggressive funerals.”
A good account of Peisistratid building policy in its competitive aspect is found in T. Leslie Shear, Jr., “Tyrants and Buildings in Archaic Athens,” in Athens Comes of Age: From Solon to Salamis (1978), pp. 1–15. Peisistratid artistic propaganda is summarized in John Boardman, “Archaic Greek Society: Material Culture,” chapter 7c in John Boardman et al. (eds.), The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 4, 2nd ed. (1988), pp. 414–430. R.M. Cook, “Pots and Pisistratan Propaganda,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 107:167–169 (1987), presents another view. John S. Traill, Demos and Trittys: Epigraphical and Topographical Studies in the Organization of Attica (1986), a specialist account of the deme system based on inscriptions, supplements his The Political Organization of Attica: A Study of the Demes, Trittyes, and Phylai, and Their Representation in the Athenian Council (1975). David Whitehead, The Demes of Attica, 508/7–ca. 250 B.C.: A Political and Social Study (1986), is magisterial and reliable. Robin Osborne, Demos: The Discovery of Classical Attika (1985, reissued 2005), is a speculative essay with some interesting suggestions not fully worked out. Emily Kearns, “Change and Continuity in Religious Structures after Kleisthenes,” in Paul Cartledge and F.D. Harvey (eds.), Crux (1985), pp. 189–207, is valuable on the religious aspects of Cleisthenes’s reforms. Philip Brook Manville, The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens (1990; 2nd printing with corrections, 1992), discusses Cleisthenes and citizenship. The modern reconstructed Greek trireme is the subject of J.S. Morrison and J.F. Coates, The Athenian Trireme, 2nd ed. (2000).
Early Greek philosophy is dealt with generally in Edward Hussey, The Presocratics (1972, reissued 1983); and Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, rev. ed. (1982, reissued 1999), a more difficult work; and on Pherecydes in particular in M.L. West, Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (1971, reissued 2000). More works on Greek philosophy and philosophers can be found in the bibliography of the article history of philosophy. Rosalind Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (1989), supersedes all previous studies on literacy, while her Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (1992), extends the study. Also of interest are William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (1989); and Alan Bowman and Greg Woolf (eds.), Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (1994), a collection of interesting essays.
Classical Greek civilization
Information on the Persian empire and the Ionian revolt can be found in J.M. Cook, The Persian Empire (1983, reissued as The Persians, 1999); and a postscript by David M. Lewis in A.R. Burn, Persia and the Greeks, 2nd ed. (1984, reissued as The Persian Wars, 2002). David M. Lewis, Sparta and Persia (1977), analyzes Persian administration. Simon Hornblower, Mausolus (1982), treats satrapally controlled Anatolia. Deborah Boedeker and David Sider (eds.), The New Simonides: Contexts of Praise and Desire (2001), gathers essays on this topic.
General histories of the period 479 bce to Alexander the Great include J.K. Davies, Democracy and Classical Greece, 2nd ed. (1993); and Simon Hornblower, The Greek World, 479–323 BC, 3rd ed. (2002). Russell Meiggs, The Athenian Empire (1972), offers a full scholarly history and analysis. A very different view, in particular denying that there was a mid-century qualitative change in the character of the Athenian empire, is presented by M.I. Finley, “The Fifth-Century Athenian Empire: A Balance-Sheet,” in Peter Garnsey and C.R. Whittaker (eds.), Imperialism in the Ancient World (1978), pp. 103–126. An excellent source book of translations is Robin Osborne (trans. and ed.), The Athenian Empire, 4th ed. (2000). More succinct than Meiggs is the very brief work by P.J. Rhodes, The Athenian Empire (1985). G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests (1981: reissued with corrections, 1989), contains much relevant material. Athenian foreign policy in the period is explored by E. Badian, “The Peace of Callias,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 107:1–39 (1987), with an improved version in From Plataea to Potidaea: Studies in the History and Historiography of the Pentecontaetia (1993), pp. 1–73; also valuable for other points of view are G.L Cawkwell, “The Peace Between Athens and Persia,” Phoenix, 51(2):115–130 (Summer 1997); and David M. Lewis, “The Origins of the First Peloponnesian War,” in Gordon Spencer Shrimpton and David Joseph McCargar (eds.), Classical Contributions (1981), pp. 71–78. Works on Thucydides and his History include W. Robert Connor, Thucydides (1984); Simon Hornblower, Thucydides (1987); Colin Macleod, Collected Essays (1983); Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans. from French by Alan Sheridan (2006); Lisa Kallet-Marx, Money, Expense, and Naval Power in Thucydides’ History 1–5.24 (1993); Tim Rood, Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation (1998, reissued 2004); and A.W. Gomme, A. Andrewes, and K.J. Dover, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, 5 vol. (1945–81). This last work assumes a good knowledge of Greek, but Simon Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides (1991–96), translates all Greek passages that are commented on. It should be noted that, for the 5th century bce, some of the ideas in this article are argued for in the cited commentary.
Mogen Herman Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, updated ed., trans. from Danish (1999); and John Dunn (ed.), Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 508 BC to AD 1993 (1992), treat Classical Athenian democracy. P.J. Rhodes, The Athenian Boule (1972, reissued 1985), discusses an important aspect of internal Athenian history in the 5th century. A full account of constitutional developments is given in Martin Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law (1986). J.K. Davies, Athenian Propertied Families, 600–300 B.C. (1971), is indispensable on individual politicians; it may be supplemented by Davies’s Wealth and the Power of Wealth in Classical Athens (1981). A stimulating treatment of demagogues is given in W. Robert Connor, The New Politicians of Fifth-century Athens (1971, reissued 1992); but Wesley E. Thompson, “Athenian Leadership: Expertise or Charisma?” in Gordon Spencer Shrimpton and David Joseph McCargar (eds.), Classical Contributions (1981), pp. 153–159, argues against all attempts to impute greater professionalism to them. Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (1989), is also on this general topic. Studies on oligarchic sympathizers include L.B. Carter, The Quiet Athenian (1986); Glenn Richard Bugh, The Horsemen of Athens (1988); and Andrew Lintott, Violence, Civil Strife, and Revolution in the Classical City, 750–330 B.C. (1981, reissued 1987).
G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (1972), argues a controversial thesis but is excellent on Sparta. E. Badian, From Plataea to Potidaea (cited above) argues that Thucydides’ presentation has suspiciously pro-Athenian features; but reservations about this are expressed in Christopher Pelling, Literary Texts and the Greek Historian (2000); and in Tim Rood, Thucydides (cited above). Athenian strategy in the war itself is discussed in J.B. Salmon, Wealthy Corinth: A History of the City to 338 BC (also cited above); G.L. Cawkwell, “Thucydides’ Judgment of Periclean Strategy,” Yale Classical Studies, 24:53–70 (1975); and A.J. Holladay, “Athenian Strategy in the Archidamian War,” Historia, 27(3):399–426 (1978). Spartan strategy is examined by P.A. Brunt, “Spartan Policy and Strategy in the Archidamian War,” Phoenix, 19 (4):255–280 (1965). The link between speculative thinking and democracy is argued for by G.E.R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason, and Experience: Studies in the Origin and Development of Greek Science (1979); it is qualified in the epilogue to Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus, 2nd ed. (1983). Also of interest is Cynthia Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The Invention of Politics in Classical Athens (1988). Fifth-century Athenian culture in general is dealt with in the excellent volume by Deborah Boedeker and Kurt A. Raaflaub (eds.), Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-Century Athens (1998, reissued 2003).
The best handbook on Greek art is Martin Robertson, A History of Greek Art, 2 vol. (1975). John Boardman, Greek Art, 4th ed., rev. and expanded (1996), is also worth consulting. John Boardman (ed.), The Oxford History of Classical Art (1993, reissued 2001); and Robin Osborne, Archaic and Classical Greek Art (1998), provide overviews. Greek tragedy is assessed in Brian Vickers, Towards Greek Tragedy: Drama, Myth, Society (1973); and Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (1986), which attempts to put Greek tragedy in its polis framework, and “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 107:58–76 (1987), the latter reprinted in a valuable collection, Nothing to Do with Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, ed. by John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin (1990), pp. 97–129. Other important late 20th-century to early 21st-century works include Froma I. Zeitlin, Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (1996); M.S. Silk (ed.), Tragedy and the Tragic (1996); David Wiles, Tragedy in Athens (1997); and Christopher Pelling (ed.), Greek Tragedy and the Historian (1997). P.E. Easterling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (1997, reissued 2004), is a very useful collection of essays. For the sacred law from Selinus, a valuable reference is Michael H. Jameson, David R. Jordan, and Roy D. Kotansky, A “Lex sacra” from Selinus (1993). The standard work on Attic dramatic festivals is Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2nd ed. rev. by John Gould and David M. Lewis (1988). Fifth-century Athenian building is put in a political context in Johannes Sipko Boersma, Athenian Building Policy from 561/0 to 405/4 B.C. (1970); and the brief and provocative work by Rhys Carpenter, Architects of the Parthenon (1970). The Parthenon frieze is reinterpreted as the mythological king Erechtheus and his family in Joan B. Connelly, “Parthenon and Parthenoi,” American Journal of Archaeology 100(1):53–80 (January 1996).
A useful general book about Greek women in Classical antiquity is Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (1975). Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant, Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation, 3rd ed. (2005), provides a topically organized view of the public and private lives of both Greek and Roman women. The position of Athenian women is discussed in the splendid essay by John Gould, “Law, Custom, and Myth: Aspects of the Social Position of Women in Classical Athens,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 100:38–59 (1980); and by David M. Schaps, Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece (1979). A valuable discussion of female religious life in mostly male-dominated Attica is Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, Studies in Girls’ Transitions: Aspects of the Arkteia and Age Representation in Attic Iconography (1988), which discusses Brauron and the Artemis cult, celebrated there by women and girls. Averil Cameron and Amélie Kuhrt (eds.), Images of Women in Antiquity, rev. ed. (1993), is an interesting collection of papers. Nicholas F. Jones, The Associations of Classical Athens (1999), has interesting implications for women at Athens; as does Robin Osborne, “Women and Sacrifice in Classical Greece,” Classical Quarterly 43(2):392–405 (1993).
Slavery is discussed by M.I. Finley (ed.), Classical Slavery (1987); M.I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, expanded ed., ed. by Brent D. Shawn (1998); Yvon Garlan, Slavery in Ancient Greece, rev. and expanded ed., trans. by Janet Lloyd (1988; originally published in French, 1982); Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (1996); and Peter Hunt, Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians (1998, reissued 2002). The best accounts of ancient Greek military technology are E.W. Marsden, Greek and Roman Artillery, 2 vol. (1969–71); A.W. Lawrence, Greek Aims in Fortification (1979); and Josiah Ober, Fortress Attica: Defense of the Athenian Land Frontier, 404–322 B.C. (1985).
The 4th century
M.I. Finley, Ancient Sicily, rev. ed. (1979), includes discussion of Dionysius I. Oswyn Murray, “Rationality and the Greek City: The Evidence from Kamarina,” in The Polis as an Urban Centre and as a Political Community (1997), pp. 493–504, discusses the lead tablets from Camarina. The study of 4th-century Athenian democracy has been transformed by Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Ecclesia, 2 vol. (1983–89), a collection of essays, and The Athenian Assembly in the Age of Demosthenes (1987; originally published in German, 1984). Additional works include R.K. Sinclair, Democracy and Participation in Athens (1988), an intelligent synoptic account; and Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (cited above). David M. Lewis, “On the Financial Offices of Eubulus and Lycurgus,” chapter 25 in his Selected Papers in Greek and Near Eastern History, ed. by P.J. Rhodes (1997), pp. 212–229, supplies essential background on those figures. Lysander’s role in the causes of the Corinthian war is admirably discussed by A. Andrewes, “Spartan Imperialism?” in Peter Garnsey and C.R. Whittaker (eds.), Imperialism in the Ancient World (1978), pp. 91–102. The whole period from 404 to 360 bce is discussed from a Spartan point of view in Paul Cartledge, Agesilaos and the Crisis of Sparta (cited above). But G.L. Cawkwell, “The Decline of Sparta,” Classical Quarterly, new series, 33(2):385–400 (1983), presents a very different perspective denying that there was any serious shortage of manpower at Sparta in this period. The diplomacy of the period is presented in Timothy T.B. Ryder, Koine Eirene (1965).
Contrasting verdicts on the Second Athenian Confederacy are presented by G.T. Griffith, “Athens in the Fourth Century,” in Peter Garnsey and C.R. Whittaker (eds.), Imperialism in the Ancient World (1978), pp. 127–144; Jack Cargill, The Second Athenian League: Empire or Free Alliance? (1981); and G.L. Cawkwell, “Notes on the Failure of the Second Athenian Confederacy,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 101:40–55 (1981), and “Athenian Naval Power in the Fourth Century,” Classical Quarterly, new series, 34(2):334–345 (1984). Mausolus’s role in its breakup is addressed in Simon Hornblower, Mausolus (cited above).
Studies on the Theban hegemony include J.A.O. Larsen, Greek Federal States: Their Institutions and History (1968); G.L. Cawkwell, “Epaminondas and Thebes,” Classical Quarterly, new series, 22:254–278 (1972); and John Buckler, The Theban Hegemony, 371–362 BC (1980).
Thrace in the Classical period is chronicled by Z.H. Archibald, The Odrysian Kingdom of Thrace (1998). The rise of Macedon is portrayed in N.G.L. Hammond, G.T. Griffith, and F.W. Walbank, A History of Macedonia, 3 vol. (1972–88); and R. Malcolm Errington, A History of Macedonia (1990; originally published in German, 1986). Philip and Alexander are placed into historical context by G.L. Cawkwell, Philip of Macedon (1978); and Miltiades B. Hatzopoulos and Louisa D. Loukopoulos (eds.), Philip of Macedon (1980), which includes good pictures of the Vergina tomb discoveries. The curse-tablet from Pella is mentioned in Olivier Masson, “Macedonian Language,” in Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, Oxford Classical Dictionary (cited above). Macedonian personal names and the origins of the Macedonians are explored by Miltiades B. Hatzopoulos, “‘L’Histoire par les noms’ in Macedonia,” in Simon Hornblower and Elaine Matthews, Greek Personal Names (cited above), pp. 99–117. A.B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (1988), is a masterly study, both scholarly and readable; and Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great (1973, reissued 2005), is a lively work. A.B. Bosworth, A Historical Commentary on Arrian’s History of Alexander (1980), comments on Arrian’s history of Alexander (the essential ancient source) and necessitates a knowledge of ancient Greek, while his From Arrian to Alexander (1988), and Alexander and the East (1996), are also useful. Alexander’s city-foundations and the tendentious literary tradition are treated by P.M. Fraser, Cities of Alexander the Great (1996).
Fourth-century Greek emigration is discussed well by Paul McKechnie, Outsiders in the Greek Cities in the Fourth Century B.C. (1989, reissued 2015). Greek attitudes to foreigners are explored by Arnoldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (1975). M.J. Osborne, Naturalization in Athens, 4 vol. in 3 (1981–83), treats grants of citizenship. “Euergetism” is the subject of Paul Veyne, Le Pain et le cirque: Sociologie historique d’un pluralisme politique (1976), also available in an abridged translation, Bread and Circuses (1990). Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (1985; originally published in German, 1977), is a full and brilliant study. Other works may be found in the bibliography of the article Greek religion; but on myth and religion, special mention may be made of Richard Buxton, Imaginary Greece (1994); and the valuable synoptic work by Simon Price, Religions of the Ancient Greeks (1999). Simon Hornblower
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
Ancient Rome
ancient state, Europe, Africa, and Asia
Table of Contents
Introduction
Rome from its origins to 264 bc
The middle republic (264–133 bc)
The transformation of Rome and Italy during the Middle Republic
The Late Republic (133–31 bc)
Intellectual life of the Late Republic
The Early Roman Empire (31 bc–ad 193)
The Later Roman Empire
Ancient Rome, the state centred on the city of Rome. This article discusses the period from the founding of the city and the regal period, which began in 753 bc, through the events leading to the founding of the republic in 509 bc, the establishment of the empire in 27 bc, and the final eclipse of the Empire of the West in the 5th century ad. For later events of the Empire of the East, see Byzantine Empire.
ancient RomeRuins of the Forum in Rome.© zardo/Fotolia
Rome must be considered one of the most successful imperial powers in history. In the course of centuries Rome grew from a small town on the Tiber River in central Italy into a vast empire that ultimately embraced England, all of continental Europe west of the Rhine and south of the Danube, most of Asia west of the Euphrates, northern Africa, and the islands of the Mediterranean. Unlike the Greeks, who excelled in intellectual and artistic endeavours, the Romans achieved greatness in their military, political, and social institutions. Roman society, during the republic, was governed by a strong military ethos. While this helps to explain the incessant warfare, it does not account for Rome’s success as an imperial power. Unlike Greek city-states, which excluded foreigners and subjected peoples from political participation, Rome from its beginning incorporated conquered peoples into its social and political system. Allies and subjects who adopted Roman ways were eventually granted Roman citizenship. During the principate (see below), the seats in the Senate and even the imperial throne were occupied by persons from the Mediterranean realm outside Italy. The lasting effects of Roman rule in Europe can be seen in the geographic distribution of the Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian), all of which evolved from Latin, the language of the Romans. The Western alphabet of 26 letters and the calendar of 12 months and 365.25 days are only two simple examples of the cultural legacy which Rome has bequeathed Western civilization.
Saturn, Temple ofThe Temple of Saturn, among the ruins of the Roman Forum, Rome.© stefano.pellicciari/Fotolia
Rome from its origins to 264 bc
Early Rome to 509 bc
Early Italy
When Italy emerged into the light of history about 700 bc, it was already inhabited by various peoples of different cultures and languages. Most natives of the country lived in villages or small towns, supported themselves by agriculture or animal husbandry (Italia means “Calf Land”), and spoke an Italic dialect belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. Oscan and Umbrian were closely related Italic dialects spoken by the inhabitants of the Apennines. The other two Italic dialects, Latin and Venetic, were likewise closely related to each other and were spoken, respectively, by the Latins of Latium (a plain of west-central Italy) and the people of northeastern Italy (near modern Venice). Iapyges and Messapii inhabited the southeastern coast. Their language resembled the speech of the Illyrians on the other side of the Adriatic. During the 5th century bc the Po valley of northern Italy (Cisalpine Gaul) was occupied by Gallic tribes who spoke Celtic and who had migrated across the Alps from continental Europe. The Etruscans were the first highly civilized people of Italy and were the only inhabitants who did not speak an Indo-European language. By 700 bc several Greek colonies were established along the southern coast. Both Greeks and Phoenicians were actively engaged in trade with the Italian natives.
Modern historical analysis is making rapid progress in showing how Rome’s early development occurred in a multicultural environment and was particularly influenced by the higher civilizations of the Etruscans to the north and the Greeks to the south. Roman religion was indebted to the beliefs and practices of the Etruscans. The Romans borrowed and adapted the alphabet from the Etruscans, who in turn had borrowed and adapted it from the Greek colonies of Italy. Senior officials of the Roman Republic derived their insignia from the Etruscans: curule chair, purple-bordered toga (toga praetexta), and bundle of rods (fasces). Gladiatorial combats and the military triumph (see below) were other customs adopted from the Etruscans. Rome lay 12 miles inland from the sea on the Tiber River, the border between Latium and Etruria. Because the site commanded a convenient river crossing and lay on a land route from the Apennines to the sea, it formed the meeting point of three distinct peoples: Latins, Etruscans, and Sabines. Though Latin in speech and culture, the Roman population must have been somewhat diverse from earliest times, a circumstance that may help to account for the openness of Roman society in historical times.
Historical sources on early Rome
The regal period (753–509 bc) and the early republic (509–280 bc) are the most poorly documented periods of Roman history because historical accounts of Rome were not written until much later. Greek historians did not take serious notice of Rome until the Pyrrhic War (280–275 bc), when Rome was completing its conquest of Italy and was fighting against the Greek city of Tarentum in southern Italy. Rome’s first native historian, a senator named Quintus Fabius Pictor, lived and wrote even later, during the Second Punic War (218–201 bc). Thus historical writing at Rome did not begin until after Rome had completed its conquest of Italy, had emerged as a major power of the ancient world, and was engaged in a titanic struggle with Carthage for control of the western Mediterranean. Fabius Pictor’s history, which began with the city’s mythical Trojan ancestry and narrated events up to his own day, established the form of subsequent histories of Rome. During the last 200 years bc, 16 other Romans wrote similarly inclusive narratives. All these works are now collectively termed “the Roman annalistic tradition” because many of them attempted to give a year-by-year (or annalistic) account of Roman affairs for the republic.
Although none of these histories are fully preserved, the first 10 books of Livy, one of Rome’s greatest historians, are extant and cover Roman affairs from earliest times to the year 293 bc (extant are also Books 21 to 45 treating the events from 218 bc to 167 bc). Since Livy wrote during the reign of the emperor Augustus (27 bc–ad 14), he was separated by 200 years from Fabius Pictor, who, in turn, had lived long after many of the events his history described. Thus, in writing about early Rome, ancient historians were confronted with great difficulties in ascertaining the truth. They possessed a list of annual magistrates from the beginning of the republic onward (the consular fasti), which formed the chronological framework of their accounts. Religious records and the texts of some laws and treaties provided a bare outline of major events. Ancient historians fleshed out this meagre factual material with both native and Greek folklore. Consequently, over time, historical facts about early Rome often suffered from patriotic or face-saving reinterpretations involving exaggeration of the truth, suppression of embarrassing facts, and invention.
The evidence for the annalistic tradition shows that the Roman histories written during the 2nd century bc were relatively brief resumes of facts and stories. Yet in the course of the 1st century bc Roman writers were increasingly influenced by Greek rhetorical training, with the result that their histories became greatly expanded in length; included in them were fictitious speeches and lengthy narratives of spurious battles and political confrontations, which, however, reflect the military and political conditions and controversies of the late republic rather than accurately portraying the events of early Rome. Livy’s history of early Rome, for example, is a blend of some facts and much fiction. Since it is often difficult to separate fact from fiction in his works and doing so involves personal judgment, modern scholars have disagreed about many aspects of early Roman history and will continue to do so.
Rome’s foundation myth
Although Greek historians did not write seriously about Rome until the Pyrrhic War, they were aware of Rome’s existence long before then. In accordance with their custom of explaining the origin of the foreign peoples they encountered by connecting them with the wanderings of one of their own mythical heroes, such as Jason and the Argonauts, Heracles, or Odysseus, Greek writers from the 5th century bc onward invented at least 25 different myths to account for Rome’s foundation. In one of the earliest accounts (Hellanicus of Lesbos), which became accepted, the Trojan hero Aeneas and some followers escaped the Greek destruction of Troy, and, after wandering about the Mediterranean for some years, they settled in central Italy, where they intermarried with the native population and became the Latins.
Although the connection between Rome and Troy is unhistorical, the Romans of later time were so flattered by this illustrious mythical pedigree that they readily accepted it and incorporated it into their own folklore about the beginning of their city. Roman historians knew that the republic had begun about 500 bc, because their annual list of magistrates went back that far. Before that time, they thought, Rome had been ruled by seven kings in succession. By using Greek methods of genealogical reckoning, they estimated that seven kings would have ruled about 250 years, thus making Rome’s regal period begin in the middle of the 8th century bc. Ancient historians initially differed concerning the precise date of Rome’s foundation, ranging from as early as 814 bc (Timaeus) to as late as 728 bc (Cincius Alimentus). By the end of the republic, it was generally accepted that Rome had been founded in 753 bc and that the republic had begun in 509 bc.
Since the generally accepted date of Troy’s destruction was 1184 bc, Roman historians maintained Troy’s unhistorical connection with Rome by inventing a series of fictitious kings who were supposed to have descended from the Trojan Aeneas and ruled the Latin town of Alba Longa for the intervening 431 years (1184–753 bc) until the last of the royal line, the twin brothers Romulus and Remus, founded their own city, Rome, on the Palatine Hill. According to tradition, the twins, believed to have been the children of the god Mars, were set adrift in a basket on the Tiber by the king of Alba; they survived, however, being nursed by a she-wolf, and lived to overthrow the wicked king. In the course of founding Rome the brothers quarreled, and Romulus slew Remus. This story was a Roman adaptation of a widespread ancient Mediterranean folktale told of many national leaders, such as the Akkadian king Sargon (c. 2300 bc), the biblical Moses, the Persian king Cyrus the Great, the Theban king Oedipus, and the twins Neleus and Pelias of Greek mythology.
The regal period, 753–509 bc
Romulus, Rome’s first king according to tradition, was the invention of later ancient historians. His name, which is not even proper Latin, was designed to explain the origin of Rome’s name. His fictitious reign was filled with deeds expected of an ancient city founder and the son of a war god. Thus he was described as having established Rome’s early political, military, and social institutions and as having waged war against neighbouring states. Romulus was also thought to have shared his royal power for a time with a Sabine named Titus Tatius. The name may be that of an authentic ruler of early Rome, perhaps Rome’s first real king; nothing, however, was known about him in later centuries, and his reign was therefore lumped together with that of Romulus.
The names of the other six kings are authentic and were remembered by the Romans, but few reliable details were known about their reigns. However, since the later Romans wished to have explanations for their early customs and institutions, historians ascribed various innovations to these kings, often in stereotypical and erroneous ways. The three kings after Romulus are still hardly more than names, but the recorded deeds of the last three kings are more historical and can, to some extent, be checked by archaeological evidence.
According to ancient tradition, the warlike founder Romulus was succeeded by the Sabine Numa Pompilius, whose reign was characterized by complete tranquility and peace. Numa was supposed to have created virtually all of Rome’s religious institutions and practices. The tradition of his religiosity probably derives from the erroneous connection by the ancients of his name with the Latin word numen, meaning divine power. Numa was succeeded by Tullus Hostilius, whose reign was filled with warlike exploits, probably because the name Hostilius was later interpreted to suggest hostility and belligerence. Tullus was followed by Ancus Marcius, who was believed to have been the grandson of Numa. His reign combined the characteristics of those of his two predecessors—namely religiousinnovations as well as warfare.
Archaeological evidence for early Rome is scattered and limited because it has proven difficult to conduct extensive excavations at sites still occupied by later buildings. What evidence exists is often ambiguous and cannot be correlated easily to the ancient literary tradition; it can, however, sometimes confirm or contradict aspects of the ancient historical account. For example, it confirms that the earliest settlement was a simple village of thatched huts on the Palatine Hill (one of the seven hills eventually occupied by the city of Rome), but it dates the beginning of the village to the 10th or 9th century bc, not the mid-8th century. Rome therefore cannot have been ruled by a succession of only seven kings down to the end of the 6th century bc. Archaeology also shows that the Esquiline Hill was next inhabited, thus disproving the ancient account which maintained that the Quirinal Hill was settled after the Palatine. Around 670–660 bc the Palatine settlement expanded down into the valley of the later Forum Romanum and became a town of artisans living in houses with stone foundations. The material culture testifies to the existence of some trade as well as to Etruscan and Greek influence. Archaeology of other Latin sites suggests that Rome at this time was a typical Latin community. In another major transition spanning the 6th century the Latin town was gradually transformed into a real city. The swampy Forum valley was drained and paved to become the city’s public centre. There are clear signs of major temple construction. Pottery and architectural remains indicate vigorous trade with the Greeks and Etruscans, as well as local work done under their influence.
Rome’s urban transformation was carried out by its last three kings: Lucius Tarquinius Priscus (Tarquin the Elder), Servius Tullius, and Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud). According to ancient tradition, the two Tarquins were father and son and came from Etruria. One tradition made Servius Tullius a Latin; another described him as an Etruscan named Mastarna. All three kings were supposed to have been great city planners and organizers (a tradition that has been confirmed by archaeology). Their Etruscan origin is rendered plausible by Rome’s proximity to Etruria, Rome’s growing geographic significance, and the public works that were carried out by the kings themselves. The latter were characteristic of contemporary Etruscan cities. It would thus appear that during the 6th century bc some Etruscan adventurers took over the site of Rome and transformed it into a city along Etruscan lines.
Early centuries of the Roman Republic
Foundation of the republic
The ancient historians depicted Rome’s first six kings as benevolent and just rulers but the last one as a cruel tyrant who murdered his predecessor Servius Tullius, usurped the kingship, terrorized the Senate, and oppressed the common people with public works. He supposedly was overthrown by a popular uprising ignited by the rape of a virtuous noblewoman, Lucretia, by the king’s son. The reign of Tarquinius Superbus was described in the stereotypical terms of a Greek tyranny in order to explain the major political transition from the monarchy to the republic in accordance with Greek political theory concerning constitutional evolution from monarchy to tyranny to aristocracy. This explanation provided later Romans with a satisfying patriotic story of despotism giving way to liberty. It is probably unhistorical, however, and merely a Roman adaptation of a well-known Greek story of a love affair in Athens that led to the murder of the tyrant’s brother and the tyrant’s eventual downfall. According to ancient tradition, as soon as the Romans had expelled their last, tyrannical king, Rome was attacked and besieged by the king of the Etruscan city of Clusium, Lars Porsenna. The city was gallantly defended by Horatius Cocles, who sacrificed his life in defense of the bridge across the Tiber, and Mucius Scaevola, who attempted to assassinate Porsenna in his own camp. When arrested before accomplishing the deed, he demonstrated his courage by voluntarily burning off his right hand in a nearby fire. As a result of such Roman heroism, Porsenna was supposed to have made peace with Rome and withdrawn his army.
One prevalent modern view is that the monarchy at Rome was incidentally terminated through military defeat and foreign intervention. This theory sees Rome as a site highly prized by the Etruscans of the 6th century bc, who are known to have extended their power and influence at the time across the Tiber into Latium and even farther south into Campania. Toward the end of the 6th century, Rome may have been involved in a war against King Porsenna of Clusium, who defeated the Romans, seized the city, and expelled its last king. Before Porsenna could establish himself as monarch, he was forced to withdraw, leaving Rome kingless. In fact, Porsenna is known to have suffered a serious defeat at the hands of the combined forces of the other Latins and the Greeks of Campanian Cumae. Rather than restoring Tarquin from exile to power, the Romans replaced the kingship with two annually elected magistrates (originally called praetors, later consuls).
The struggle of the orders
As the Roman state grew in size and power during the early republic (509–280 bc), new offices and institutions were created, and old ones were adapted to cope with the changing military, political, social, and economic needs of the state and its populace. According to the annalistic tradition, all these changes and innovations resulted from a political struggle between two social orders, the patricians and the plebeians, that is thought to have begun during the first years of the republic and lasted for more than 200 years. In the beginning, the patricians were supposed to have enjoyed a monopoly of power (the consulship, the Senate, and all religious offices), whereas the plebeians began with nothing except the right to vote in the assemblies. During the course of the struggle the plebeians, however, were believed to have won concessions gradually from the patricians through political agitation and confrontation, and they eventually attained legal equality with them. Thus ancient historians, such as Livy, explained all aspects of early Rome’s internal political development in terms of a single sustained social movement.
As tradition has it, the distinction between patricians and plebeians was as old as Rome itself and had been instituted by Romulus. The actual historical dating and explanation of this distinction still constitutes the single biggest unsolved problem of early Roman history. The distinction existed during the middle and late republic, but modern scholars do not agree on when or how it arose. They are increasingly inclined to think that it originated and evolved slowly during the early republic. By the time of the middle and late republic, it was largely meaningless. At that point only about one dozen Roman families were patrician, all others being plebeian. Both patrician and plebeian families made up the nobility, which consisted simply of all descendants of consuls. The term “patrician,” therefore, was not synonymous with “noble” and should not be confused with it: the patricians formed only a part of the Roman nobility of the middle and late republic. The only difference between patricians and plebeians in later times was that each group was either entitled to or debarred from holding certain minor offices.
The discrepancies, inconsistencies, and logical fallacies in Livy’s account of the early republic make it evident that the annalistic tradition’s thesis of a struggle of the orders is a gross oversimplification of a highly complex series of events that had no single cause. Tensions certainly existed; no state can experience 200 years of history without some degree of social conflict and economic unrest. In fact, legal sources indicate that the law of debt in early Rome was extremely harsh and must have sometimes created much hardship. Yet it is impossible to believe that all aspects of early Rome’s internal political development resulted from one cause. Early documents, if available, would have told the later annalistic historians little more than that a certain office had been created or some law passed. An explanation of causality could have been supplied only by folklore or by the imagination of the historian himself, neither of which can be relied upon. Livy’s descriptions of early republican political crises evince the political rhetoric and tactics of the late republic and therefore cannot be given credence without justification. For example, early republican agrarian legislation is narrated in late republican terms. Early republican conflicts between plebeian tribunes and the Senate are likewise patterned after the politics of the Optimates and Populares of the late republic. Caution therefore must be exercised in examining early Rome’s internal development. Many of the major innovations recorded in the ancient tradition can be accepted, but the ancient interpretation of these facts cannot go unchallenged.
The consulship
The later Romans viewed the abolition of the kingship and its replacement by the consulship as marking the beginning of the republic. The king’s religious functions were henceforth performed by a priest-king (rex sacrorum), who held office for life. The king’s military power (imperium) was bestowed upon two annually elected magistrates called consuls. They were always regarded as the chief magistrates of the republic, so much so that the names of each pair were given to their year of office for purposes of dating. Thus careful records were kept of these names, which later formed the chronological basis for ancient histories of the republic. The consuls were primarily generals who led Rome’s armies in war. They were therefore elected by the centuriate assembly—that is, the Roman army organized into a voting body. The two consuls possessed equal power. Such collegiality was basic to almost all Roman public offices; it served to check abuses of power because one magistrate’s actions could be obstructed by his colleague.
According to the annalistic tradition, the first plebeian consul was elected for 366 bc. All consuls before that time were thought to have been patrician, and one major aspect of the struggle of the orders was supposed to have been the plebeians’ persistent agitation to make the office open to them. However, if the classification of patrician and plebeian names known for the middle and late republic is applied to the consular list for the years 509–445 bc, plebeian names are well represented (30 percent). It is likely that there never was a prohibition against plebeians holding the consulship. The distinction between patrician and plebeian families may have become fixed only by the middle of the 4th century bc, and the law of that time (367 bc), which specified that one of the consuls was to be plebeian, may have done nothing more than to guarantee legally that both groups of the nobility would have an equal share in the state’s highest office.
The dictatorship
Despite the advantages of consular collegiality, in military emergencies unity of command was sometimes necessary. Rome’s solution to this problem was the appointment of a dictator in place of the consuls. According to ancient tradition, the office of dictator was created in 501 bc, and it was used periodically down to the Second Punic War. The dictator held supreme military command for no longer than six months. He was also termed the master of the army (magister populi), and he appointed a subordinate cavalry commander, the master of horse (magister equitum). The office was thoroughly constitutional and should not be confused with the late republican dictatorships of Sulla and Caesar, which were simply legalizations of autocratic power obtained through military usurpation.
The Senate
The Senate may have existed under the monarchy and served as an advisory council for the king. Its name suggests that it was originally composed of elderly men (senes), whose age and knowledge of traditions must have been highly valued in a preliterate society. During the republic, the Senate was composed of members from the leading families. Its size during the early republic is unknown. Ancient sources indicate that it numbered about 300 during the middle republic. Its members were collectively termed patres et conscripti (“the fathers and the enrolled”), suggesting that the Senate was initially composed of two different groups. Since the term “patrician” was derived from patres and seems to have originally meant “a member of the patres,” the dichotomy probably somehow involved the distinction between patricians and plebeians.
During the republic the Senate advised both magistrates and the Roman people. Although in theory the people were sovereign (see below) and the Senate only offered advice, in actual practice the Senate wielded enormous power because of the collective prestige of its members. It was by far the most important deliberative body in the Roman state, summoned into session by a magistrate who submitted matters to it for discussion and debate. Whatever a majority voted in favour of was termed “the Senate’s advice” (senatus consultum). These advisory decrees were directed to a magistrate or the Roman people. In most instances, they were either implemented by a magistrate or submitted by him to the people for enactment into law.
The popular assemblies
During the republic two different assemblies elected magistrates, exercised legislative power, and made other important decisions. Only adult male Roman citizens could attend the assemblies in Rome and exercise the right to vote. The assemblies were organized according to the principle of the group vote. Although each person cast one vote, he did so within a larger voting unit. The majority vote of the unit became its vote, and a majority of unit votes was needed to decide an issue.
The centuriate assembly (comitia centuriata), as stated, was military in nature and composed of voting groups called centuries (military units). Because of its military character, it always met outside the sacred boundary of the city (pomerium) in the Field of Mars (Campus Martius). It voted on war and peace and elected all magistrates who exercised imperium (consuls, praetors, censors, and curule aediles). Before the creation of criminal courts during the late republic, it sat as a high court and exercised capital jurisdiction. Although it could legislate, this function was usually performed by the tribal assembly.
The centuriate assembly evolved through different stages during the early republic, but information exists only about its final organization. It may have begun as the citizen army meeting under arms to elect its commander and to decide on war or peace. During historical times the assembly had a complex organization. All voting citizens were placed into one of five economic classes according to wealth. Each class was allotted varying numbers of centuries, and the entire assembly consisted of 193 units. The first (and richest) class of citizens was distributed among 80 centuries, and the second, third, and fourth classes were each assigned 20 units. The fifth class, comprising the poorest persons in the army, was allotted 30 centuries. In addition, there were 18 centuries of knights—men wealthy enough to afford a horse for cavalry service—and five other centuries, one of which comprised the proletarii, or landless people too poor to serve in the army. The knights voted together with the first class, and voting proceeded from richest to poorest. Because the knights and the first class controlled 98 units, they were the dominant group in the assembly, though they constituted the smallest portion of the citizen body. The assembly was deliberately designed to give the greater authority to the wealthier element and was responsible for maintaining the political supremacy of the established nobility.
The tribal assembly (comitia tributa) was a nonmilitary civilian assembly. It accordingly met within the city inside the pomerium and elected magistrates who did not exercise imperium (plebeian tribunes, plebeian aediles, and quaestors). It did most of the legislating and sat as a court for serious public offenses involving monetary fines.
The tribal assembly was more democratic in its organization than the centuriate assembly. The territory of the Roman state was divided into geographic districts called tribes, and people voted in these units according to residence. The city was divided into four urban tribes. During the 5th century bc, the surrounding countryside formed 17 rustic tribes. With the expansion of Roman territory in central Italy (387–241 bc), 14 rustic tribes were added, thus gradually increasing the assembly to 35 units, a number never exceeded.
The plebeian tribunate
According to the annalistic tradition, one of the most important events in the struggle of the orders was the creation of the plebeian tribunate. After being worn down by military service, bad economic conditions, and the rigours of early Rome’s debt law, the plebeians in 494 bc seceded in a body from the city to the Sacred Mount, located three miles from Rome. There they pitched camp and elected their own officials for their future protection. Because the state was threatened with an enemy attack, the Senate was forced to allow the plebeians to have their own officials, the tribunes of the plebs.
Initially there were only 2 tribunes of the plebs, but their number increased to 5 in 471 bc and to 10 in 457 bc. They had no insignia of office, like the consuls, but they were regarded as sacrosanct. Whoever physically harmed them could be killed with impunity. They had the right to intercede on a citizen’s behalf against the action of a consul, but their powers were valid only within one mile from the pomerium. They convoked the tribal assembly and submitted bills to it for legislation. Tribunes prosecuted other magistrates before the assembled people for misconduct in office. They could also veto the action of another tribune (veto meaning “I forbid”). Two plebeian aediles served as their assistants in managing the affairs of the city. Although they were thought of as the champions of the people, persons elected to this office came from aristocratic families and generally favoured the status quo. Nevertheless, the office could be and sometimes was used by young aspiring aristocrats to make a name for themselves by taking up populist causes in opposition to the nobility.
Modern scholars disagree about the authenticity of the annalistic account concerning the plebs’ first secession and the creation of the plebeian tribunate. The tradition presented this as the first of three secessions, the other two allegedly occurring in 449 and 287 bc. The second secession is clearly fictitious. Many scholars regard the first one as a later annalistic invention as well, accepting only the last one as historical. Although the first secession is explained in terms resembling the conditions of the later Gracchan agrarian crisis (see below bc]" class="md-crosslink">The reform movement of the Gracchi [133–121 bc]), given the harshness of early Roman debt laws and food shortages recorded by the sources for 492 and 488 bc (information likely to be preserved in contemporary religious records), social and economic unrest could have contributed to the creation of the office. However, the urban-civilian character of the plebeian tribunate complements the extra-urban military nature of the consulship so nicely that the two offices may have originally been designed to function cooperatively to satisfy the needs of the state rather than to be antagonistic to one another.
The Law of the Twelve Tables
The next major episode after the creation of the plebeian tribunate in the annalistic version of the struggle of the orders involved the first systematic codification of Roman law. The plebeians were supposed to have desired a written law code in which consular imperium would be circumscribed to guard against abuses. After years of tribunician agitation the Senate finally agreed. A special board of 10 men (decemviri) was appointed for 451 bc to draw up a law code. Since their task was not done after one year, a second board of 10 was appointed to finish the job, but they became tyrannical and stayed in office beyond their time. They were finally forced out of power when one commissioner’s cruel lust for an innocent maiden named Verginia so outraged the people that they seceded for a second time.
The law code was inscribed upon 12 bronze tablets and publicly displayed in the Forum. Its provisions concerned legal procedure, debt foreclosure, paternal authority over children, property rights, inheritance, funerary regulations, and various major and minor offenses. Although many of its provisions became outmoded and were modified or replaced in later times, the Law of the Twelve Tables formed the basis of all subsequent Roman private law.
Because the law code seems not to have had any specific provisions concerning consular imperium, the annalistic explanation for the codification appears suspect. The story of the second tyrannical board of 10 is an annalistic invention patterned after the 30 tyrants of Athenian history. The tale of Verginia is likewise modeled after the story of Lucretia and the overthrow of Rome’s last king. Thus the second secession, which is an integral part of the story, cannot be regarded as historical. On the basis of existing evidence, one cannot say whether the law code resulted from any social or economic causes. Rome was a growing city and may simply have been in need of a systematic body of law.
Military tribunes with consular power
The creation of the office of military tribunes with consular power in 445 bc was believed to have involved the struggle of the orders. The annalistic tradition portrayed the innovation as resulting from a political compromise between plebeian tribunes, demanding access to the consulship, and the Senate, trying to maintain the patrician monopoly of the office. Henceforth, each year the people were to decide whether to elect two patrician consuls or military tribunes with consular power who could be patricians or plebeians. The list of magistrates for 444 to 367 bc shows that the chief magistracy alternated between consuls and military tribunes. Consuls were more frequently elected down to 426 but rarely thereafter. At first there were three military tribunes, but the number increased to four in 426 and to six in 406. The consular tribunate was abolished in 367 bc and replaced by the consulship.
Livy indicates that according to some sources the consular tribunate was created because Rome was faced with three wars simultaneously. Because there is evidence that there was no prohibition against plebeians becoming consuls, scholars have suggested that the reason for the innovation was the growing military and administrative needs of the Roman state; this view is corroborated by other data. Beginning in 447 bc, two quaestors were elected as financial officials of the consuls, and the number increased to four in 421 bc. Beginning in 443 bc, two censors were elected about every five years and held office for 18 months. They drew up official lists of Roman citizens, assessed the value of their property, and assigned them to their proper tribe and century within the tribal and centuriate assemblies. The increase in the number of military tribunes coincided with Rome’s first two major wars, against Fidenae and Veii. In 366 bc six undifferentiated military tribunes were replaced with five magistrates that had specific functions: two consuls for conducting wars, an urban praetor who handled lawsuits in Rome, and two curule aediles who managed various affairs in the city. In 362 bc the Romans began to elect annually six military tribunes as subordinate officers of the consuls.
Social and economic changes
The law reinstating the consulship was one of three tribunician bills, the so-called Licinio-Sextian Rogations of 367 bc. Another forbade citizens to rent more than 500 iugera (330 acres) of public land, and the third provided for the alleviation of indebtedness. The historicity of the second bill has often been questioned, but the great increase in the size of Roman territory resulting from Rome’s conquest of Veii renders this law plausible. The law concerning indebtedness is probably historical as well, since other data suggest that debt was a problem in mid-4th-century Rome. In 352 bc a five-man commission was appointed to extend public credit in order to reduce private indebtedness. A Genucian law of 342 bc (named after Genucius, tribune of that year) temporarily suspended the charging of interest on loans. In 326 or 313 bc a Poetelian law ameliorated the harsh conditions of the Twelve Tables regarding debt servitude by outlawing the use of chains to confine debt bondsmen.
Rome’s economic advancement is reflected in its replacement of a cumbersome bronze currency with silver coinage adopted from the Greek states of southern Italy, the so-called Romano-Campanian didrachms. The date of this innovation is disputed. Modern estimates range from the First Samnite War to the Pyrrhic War. Rome was no longer a small town of central Italy but rather was quickly becoming the master of the Italian peninsula and was taking its place in the larger Mediterranean world.
The process of expansion is well illustrated by innovations in Roman private law about 300 bc. Since legal business could be conducted only on certain days (dies fasti), knowledge of the calendar was important for litigation. In early times the rex sacrorum at the beginning of each month orally proclaimed in Rome before the assembled people the official calendar for that month. Though suited for a small agricultural community, this parochial procedure became increasingly unsuitable as Roman territory grew and more citizens lived farther from Rome. In 304 bc a curule aedile named Gnaeus Flavius upset conservative opinion but performed a great public service by erecting an inscription of the calendar in the Roman Forum for permanent display. From early times, Roman private law and legal procedure had largely been controlled and developed by the priesthood of pontiffs. In 300 bc the Ogulnian law (after the tribunes Gnaeus and Quintus Ogulnius) ended the patrician monopoly of two priestly colleges by increasing the number of pontiffs from four to eight and the number of augurs from four to nine and by specifying that the new priests were to be plebeian.
In 287 bc the third (and perhaps the only historical) secession of the plebs occurred. Since Livy’s account has not survived, detailed knowledge about this event is lacking. One source suggests that debt caused the secession. Many sources state that the crisis was ended by the passage of the Hortensian law (after Quintus Hortensius, dictator for 287), which was thought to have given enactments of the tribal assembly the same force as resolutions of the centuriate assembly. However, since similar measures were supposed to have been enacted in 449 and 339 bc, doubt persists about the meaning of these laws. It is possible that no difference ever existed in the degree of legal authority of the two assemblies. The three laws could be annalistic misinterpretations of a provision of the Twelve Tables specifying that what the people decided last should be binding. One source indicates that the Hortensian law made all assembly days eligible for legal business. If debt played a role in the secession, the Hortensian law may have been designed to reduce the backlog of lawsuits in the praetor’s court in Rome.
The Latin League
Although the Latins dwelled in politically independent towns, their common language and culture produced cooperation in religion, law, and warfare. All Latins could participate in the cults of commonly worshiped divinities, such as the cult of the Penates of Lavinium, Juno of Lanuvium, and Diana (celebrated at both Aricia and Rome). Latins freely intermarried without legal complications. When visiting another Latin town, they could buy, sell, litigate, and even vote with equal freedom. If a Latin took up permanent residence in another Latin community, he became a full citizen of his new home. Although the Latin states occasionally waged war among themselves, in times of common danger they banded together for mutual defense. Each state contributed military forces according to its strength. The command of all forces was entrusted by common assent to a single person from one of the Latin towns. Sometimes the Latins even founded colonies upon hostile territory as military outposts, which became new, independent Latin states, enjoying the same rights as all the other ones. Modern scholars use the term “Latin League” to describe this collection of rights and duties.
According to ancient tradition, Rome’s last three kings not only transformed Rome into a real city but also made it the leader of the Latin League. There is probably exaggeration in this claim. Roman historians were eager to portray early Rome as destined for future greatness and as more powerful than it actually was. Rome certainly became one of the more important states in Latium during the 6th century, but Tibur, Praeneste, and Tusculum were equally important and long remained so. By the terms of the first treaty between Rome and Carthage (509 bc), recorded by the Greek historian Polybius (c. 150 bc), the Romans (or, perhaps more accurately, the Latins generally) claimed a coastal strip 70 miles south of the Tiber River as their sphere of influence not to be encroached upon by the Carthaginians.
Rome’s rapid rise during the 6th century was the achievement of its Etruscan overlords, and the city quickly declined with the collapse of Etruscan power in Campania and Latium about 500 bc. Immediately after the fall of the Roman monarchy, amid Porsenna’s conquest of Rome, his defeat by the Latins, and his subsequent withdrawal, the plain of Latium began to be threatened by surrounding hill tribes (Sabines, Aequi, and Volsci), who experienced overpopulation and tried to acquire more land. Thus Rome’s external affairs during the 5th century largely revolved around its military assistance to the Latin League to hold back these invaders. Many details in Livy’s account of this fighting are, however, unreliable. In order to have a literary theme worthy of Rome’s later greatness, Livy’s annalistic sources had described these conflicts in the most grandiose terms. Yet the armies, military ranks, castrametation (i.e., techniques in making and fortifying encampments), and tactics described belong to the late republic, not the Rome of the 5th century.
Roman expansion in Italy
Toward the end of the 5th century, while Rome and the Latins were still defending themselves against the Volsci and the Aequi, the Romans began to expand at the expense of Etruscan states. Rome’s incessant warfare and expansion during the republic has spawned modern debate about the nature of Roman imperialism. Ancient Roman historians, who were often patriotic senators, believed that Rome always waged just wars in self-defense, and they wrote their accounts accordingly, distorting or suppressing facts that did not fit this view. The modern thesis of Roman defensive imperialism, which followed this ancient bias, is now largely discredited. Only the fighting in the 5th century bc and the later wars against the Gauls can clearly be so characterized. Rome’s relentless expansion was more often responsible for provoking its neighbours to fight in self-defense. Roman consuls, who led the legions into battle, often advocated war because victory gained them personal glory. Members of the centuriate assembly, which, as noted above, decided war and peace, may sometimes have voted for war in expectation that it would lead to personal enrichment through seizure and distribution of booty. The evidence concerning Roman expansion during the early republic is poor, but the fact that Rome created 14 new rustic tribes during the years 387–241 bc suggests that population growth could have been a driving force. Furthermore, Romans living on the frontier may have strongly favoured war against restless neighbours, such as the Gauls and the Samnites. The animal husbandry of the latter involved seasonal migrations between summer uplands and winter lowlands, which caused friction between them and settled Roman farmers.
Roman expansion in Italy from 298 to 201 bc.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Though the Romans did not wage wars for religious ends, they often used religious means to assist their war effort. The fetial priests were used for the solemn official declaration of war. According to fetial law, Rome could enjoy divine favour only if it waged just wars—that is, wars of self-defense. In later practice, this often simply meant that Rome maneuvered other states into declaring war upon it. Then Rome followed with its declaration, acting technically in self-defense. This strategy had the effect of boosting Roman morale and sometimes swaying international public opinion.
Rome’s first major war against an organized state was fought with Fidenae (437–426 bc), a town located just upstream from Rome. After it had been conquered, its land was annexed to Roman territory. Rome next fought a long and difficult war against Veii, an important Etruscan city not far from Fidenae. Later Roman historians portrayed the war as having lasted 10 years (406–396 bc), patterning it after the mythical Trojan War of the Greeks. After its conquest, Veii’s tutelary goddess, Queen Juno, was solemnly summoned to Rome. The city’s territory was annexed, increasing Roman territory by 84 percent and forming four new rustic tribes. During the wars against Fidenae and Veii, Rome increased the number of military tribunes with consular power from three to four and then from four to six. In 406 bc Rome instituted military pay, and in 403 bc it increased the size of its cavalry. The conquest of Veii opened southern Etruria to further Roman expansion. During the next few years, Rome proceeded to found colonies at Nepet and Sutrium and forced the towns of Falerii and Capena to become its allies. Yet, before Roman strength increased further, a marauding Gallic tribe swept down from the Po River valley, raided Etruria, and descended upon Rome. The Romans were defeated in the battle of the Allia River in 390 bc, and the Gauls captured and sacked the city; they departed only after they had received ransom in gold. Henceforth the Romans greatly feared and respected the potential strength of the Gauls. Later Roman historians, however, told patriotic tales about the commanders Marcus Manlius and Marcus Furius Camillus in order to mitigate the humiliation of the defeat.
Roman power had suffered a great reversal, and 40 years of hard fighting in Latium and Etruria were required to restore it fully. The terms of the second treaty between Rome and Carthage (348 bc) show Rome’s sphere of influence to be about the same as it had been at the time of the first treaty in 509, but Rome’s position in Latium was now far stronger.
The Samnite Wars
During the 40 years after the second treaty with Carthage, Rome rapidly rose to a position of hegemony in Italy south of the Po valley. Much of the fighting during this time consisted of three wars against the Samnites, who initially were not politically unified but coexisted as separate Oscan-speaking tribes of the central and southern Apennines. Rome’s expansion was probably responsible for uniting these tribes militarily to oppose a common enemy. Both the rugged terrain and the tough Samnite soldiers proved to be formidable challenges, which forced Rome to adopt military innovations that were later important for conquering the Mediterranean.
Despite its brevity (343–341 bc), the First Samnite War resulted in the major acquisition to the Roman state of the rich land of Campania with its capital of Capua. Roman historians modeled their description of the war’s beginning on the Greek historian Thucydides’ account of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Nevertheless, they were probably correct in stating that the Campanians, when fighting over the town of Capua with the Samnites, allied themselves with Rome in order to utilize its might to settle the quarrel. If so, this may have been the first of many instances in which Rome went to war after being invited into an alliance by a weaker state already at war. Once invited in, Rome usually absorbed the allied state after defeating its adversary. In any event, Campania now somehow became firmly attached to Rome, and it may have been granted Roman citizenship without the right to vote in Rome (civitas sine suffragio). Campania was a major addition to Rome’s strength and manpower.
The absorption of Campania provoked the Latins to take up arms against Rome to maintain their independence. Since the Gallic sack of Rome in 390 bc, the city had become increasingly dominant within the Latin League. In 381 bc Tusculum was absorbed by being given Roman citizenship. In 358 bc Rome created two more rustic tribes from territory captured along the Volscian coast. The Latin War (340–338 bc) was quickly decided in Rome’s favour. Virtually all of Latium was given Roman citizenship and became Roman territory, but the towns retained their local governments. The large states of Praeneste and Tibur maintained nominal independence by becoming Rome’s military allies. Thus the Latin League was abolished, but the legal rights that the Latins had enjoyed among themselves were retained by Rome as a legal status, the Latin right (ius Latii), and used for centuries as an intermediate step between non-Roman status and full Roman citizenship.
Rome was now the master of central Italy and spent the next decade organizing and pushing forward its frontier through conquest and colonization. The Romans soon confronted the Samnites of the middle Liris (modern Liri) River valley, sparking the Second, or Great, Samnite War (326–304 bc). During the first half of the war Rome suffered serious defeats, but the second half saw Rome’s recovery, reorganization, and ultimate victory. In 321 bc a Roman army was trapped in a narrow canyon near the Caudine Forks and compelled to surrender, and Rome was forced to sign a five-year treaty. Later Roman historians, however, tried to deny this humiliation by inventing stories of Rome’s rejection of the peace and its revenge upon the Samnites. In 315 bc, after the resumption of hostilities, Rome suffered a crushing defeat at Lautulae. Ancient sources state that Rome initially borrowed hoplite tactics from the Etruscans (used during the 6th or 5th centuries bc) but later adopted the manipular system of the Samnites, probably as a result of Samnite success at this time. The manipular formation resembled a checkerboard pattern, in which solid squares of soldiers were separated by empty square spaces. It was far more flexible than the solidly massed hoplite formation, allowing the army to maneuver better on rugged terrain. The system was retained throughout the republic and into the empire. During these same years Rome organized a rudimentary navy, constructed its first military roads (construction of the Via Appia was begun in 312 bc and of the Via Valeria in 306), and increased the size of its annual military levy as seen from the increase of annually elected military tribunes from 6 to 16. During the period 334–295 bc, Rome founded 13 colonies against the Samnites and created six new rustic tribes in annexed territory. During the last years of the war, the Romans also extended their power into northern Etruria and Umbria. Several successful campaigns forced the cities in these areas to become Rome’s allies. The Great Samnite War finally ended in Rome’s victory. During the final phase of this war, Rome, on another front, concluded its third treaty with Carthage (306 bc), in which the Carthaginians acknowledged all of Italy as Rome’s sphere of influence.
The Third Samnite War (298–290 bc) was the last desperate attempt of the Samnites to remain independent. They persuaded the Etruscans, Umbrians, and Gauls to join them. Rome emerged victorious over this formidable coalition at the battle of Sentinum in 295 and spent the remainder of the war putting down lingering Samnite resistance. They henceforth were bound to Rome by a series of alliances.
The Pyrrhic War, 280–275 bc
Rome spent the 280s bc putting down unrest in northern Italy, but its attention was soon directed to the far south as well by a quarrel between the Greek city of Thurii and a Samnite tribe. Thurii called upon the assistance of Rome, whose naval operations in the area provoked a war with the Greek city of Tarentum. As in previous conflicts with Italian peoples, Tarentum summoned military aid from mainland Greece, calling upon King Pyrrhus of Epirus, one of the most brilliant generals of the ancient world. Pyrrhus arrived in southern Italy in 280 bc with 20 elephants and 25,000 highly trained soldiers. After defeating the Romans at Heraclea and stirring up revolt among the Samnites, he offered peace terms that would have confined Roman power to central Italy. When the Senate wavered, Appius Claudius, an aged blind senator, roused their courage and persuaded them to continue fighting. Pyrrhus again defeated the Romans in 279 at Asculum. His losses in the two battles numbered 7,500 (almost one-third of his entire force). When congratulated on his victory, Pyrrhus, according to Plutarch, “replied…that one other such would utterly undo him.” This type of victory has since been referred to as Pyrrhic victory. Pyrrhus then left Italy and aided the Greeks of Sicily against Carthage. He eventually returned to Italy and was defeated by the Romans in 275 bc at Beneventum. He then returned to Greece, while Rome put down resistance in Italy and took Tarentum itself by siege in 272.
Rome was now the unquestioned master of Italy. Roman territory was a broad belt across central Italy, from sea to sea. Latin colonies were scattered throughout the peninsula. The other peoples of Italy were bound to Rome by a series of bilateral alliances that obligated them to provide Rome with military forces in wartime. According to the Roman census of 225 bc, Rome could call upon 700,000 infantry and 70,000 cavalry from its own citizens and allies. The conquest of Italy engendered a strong military ethos among the Roman nobility and citizenry, provided Rome with considerable manpower, and forced it to develop military, political, and legal institutions and practices for conquering and absorbing foreign peoples. The Pyrrhic War demonstrated that Rome’s civilian army could wage a successful war of attrition against highly skilled mercenaries of the Mediterranean world. Gary Edward Forsythe
The middle republic (264–133 bc)
The first two Punic Wars
Rome’s rapidly expanding sphere of hegemony brought it almost immediately into conflict with non-Italian powers. In the south, the main opponent was Carthage. In violation of the treaty of 306, which (historians tend to believe) had placed Sicily in the Carthaginian sphere of influence, Rome crossed the straits of Messana (Messina; between Italy and Sicily) embarking on war. (Rome’s wars with Carthage are known as the “Punic Wars”; the Romans called the Carthaginians Poeni [Phoenicians], from which derived the adjective “Punic.”)
First Punic War (264–241 bc)
Carthage had long enjoyed treaties with Rome. The earliest known, which probably dated from the first year of the Roman Republic, as Polybius believed (508 or 507 by his reckoning), may well have renewed previously made contacts with Etruscan Rome. Such agreements to limit the spheres of interest of the two parties would readily be renewed by Rome, which in the 5th and 4th centuries had no great interest in what went on outside Italy and had no objection to the merchants of Carthage dominating the western Mediterranean. When Rome enrolled some of the Greek cities of south Italy as “naval allies,” a new situation was created, since these cities had trading interests that the farmers of Latium had not enjoyed. Further, the Greek cities in Sicily, especially Syracuse, were being hard pressed by the Carthaginians in the west and centre of the island, while the Syracusans under Hieron II were challenged by the Mamertines, Italian mercenaries who had seized Messana and were plundering northeastern Sicily. The Mamertines appealed to both Rome and Carthage for assistance, and the Carthaginians, unwilling to see Messana and control of the Sicilian straits fall into Hieron’s hands, established a Punic garrison in the town. The Romans, who themselves had expelled another company of mercenaries from Rhegium (Reggio) in the toe of Italy, captured the Carthaginian commander while under a flag of truce and compelled the Punic force to withdraw.
The western Mediterranean during the Punic Wars.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Thus Rome and Carthage were brought face to face across the straits, and a crisis was precipitated by the appeal by Messana. Although some senators hesitated, the Roman people largely supported war with Carthage. Both Rome and Carthage were eager to deny to the other control of the straits, and, even if war had been avoided at this point, it would probably have come in time. A balance of power, such as that which the Hellenistic monarchies in the East, with longer diplomatic experience and a common culture, tried to maintain, was more difficult to achieve in the West.
When the Romans, with Hieron, had occupied eastern Sicily and captured Agrigentum, they were faced with a decision that fundamentally affected their future history. If they decided to try to drive the Carthaginians completely out of Sicily, they would have to smash the Punic navy, and, since they had virtually no ships of their own, they would have to build a fleet. However, they were practical as well as determined, and before long they had over 100 ships ready. More surprising was the success that attended this fleet when it first went into action off Mylae (Milazzo) in 260 and defeated an enemy with centuries of seafaring experience.
A Roman war galley with infantry on deck; in the Vatican Museums.Alinari/Art Resource, New York
After this victory the Romans in 256 boldly sent an expeditionary force to Africa to attack Carthage itself, but this daring adventure under Marcus Atilus Regulus ended in failure. The war dragged on in Sicily, where the Carthaginians were gradually confined to their western fortresses of Drepana (Trapani) and Lilybaeum (Marsala). When their fleet was finally defeated off the Aegadian (Egadi) Islands in 241, they capitulated. By the terms of the settlement they agreed to evacuate Sicily as well as to pay Rome an indemnity, but they remained an independent power.
Second Punic War (218–201 bc)
During the decades between the wars, the Carthaginians had been busy building up an empire in Spain which would help to compensate for the loss of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. The foundations of this dominion were laid by Hamilcar Barca, who had shown great military ability as commander in Sicily during the last stages of the First Punic War. In 237 he crossed to Spain with his nine-year-old son Hannibal, who had been made to swear eternal hatred for Rome. He quickly occupied southern and eastern Spain and managed to dismiss a Roman protest over the expansion of the Punic frontier to the north. When Hamilcar died in 229/228 bc, he was succeeded by his son-in-law Hasdrubal, who established a new base at Carthago Nova (Cartagena). In 226–225 Hasdrubal made a treaty with the Romans, by which he agreed not to cross the Ebro River with an armed force, while the Romans possibly assured him that they would not interfere with his conquests south of the river.
A hundred miles south of the Ebro was the Iberian seaport of Saguntum (Sagunto), with which Rome had made an alliance. If this was negotiated before the Ebro treaty, then presumably the alliance was virtually annulled by the agreement; if Rome accepted the alliance after 226, it infringed the spirit and perhaps the letter of the treaty. Thus, when Hannibal, who succeeded Hasdrubal in 221, decided to regard the conquest of Spain as only preliminary to an attack upon Italy, he could use Saguntum to provoke Rome to action. In 219, therefore, when he was ready to challenge Rome, he attacked Saguntum. Disregarding Roman protests, he finally took it after an eight-month siege. This rendered a rupture with Rome inevitable, while it set his own hands free for further advance.
Even if he had not technically broken any agreement with Rome, Hannibal had deliberately provoked an incident which he knew would lead to war. For some time Barcid policy in Spain had been essentially defensive in regard to Rome, but Hannibal now moved to the offensive, and Rome accepted the challenge. Apart from the unprovoked seizure of Sardinia, Rome’s policy after the First Punic War had not been deliberately aggressive: the Gallic wars were defensive in spirit, and the Illyrian campaigns were a necessary piece of police work. Rather, without pursuing deep-laid plans, Rome dealt with each situation as it arose. If Hannibal chose to question Roman interference in Spain, Rome was willing to face the consequences.
Hannibal’s decision to leave his base in Spain, cross the Alps, and invade northern Italy was crowned with success and culminated in a series of victories at Trebbia, Trasimene, and Cannae. However, although he won over much of southern Italy, including Capua, he failed to break Rome’s determination to fight on, and he failed to undermine the loyalty to Rome of the Latin cities and central Italy. Hence he had to cast his strategic net more widely. This attempt too failed. His ally, Philip V of Macedonia, achieved little; the revolt of Syracuse against Rome was soon crushed; and the defeat of the Scipios in Spain failed to result in the expulsion of the Romans from the peninsula. Hannibal’s own movements and strength in Italy were checked by the delaying strategy of Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, and the breakthrough to Italy by his brother Hasdrubal was foiled at the Metaurus. Finally Rome produced a military genius in Scipio Africanus, who drove the Carthaginians from Spain, persuaded his reluctant countrymen to allow him to invade Africa, won such success there that Hannibal was recalled from Italy to save Carthage, and finally defeated Hannibal at Zama.
By the terms of the peace, Carthage was left as an independent state but had to give up everything outside an area roughly equivalent to that of modern Tunisia, to surrender its fleet, and to pay an indemnity over a period of 50 years. The Numidian prince Masinissa, whose cavalry had rendered Scipio invaluable service at Zama, was rewarded with an increase of territory. As Rome’s ally, he stood watch over his neighbour Carthage, which by the treaty with Rome was forbidden to make war on anyone in Africa without the permission of Rome (and any war at all outside Africa).
The effects of the war on Rome and Italy, on the constitution, on economic and social life, on religion and thought were profound, and it proved to be a turning point not only for them but for the history of the whole ancient world. No contemporary power could endanger the existence of Rome. The Hellenistic monarchies of the east still flourished, but at Rome’s touch they collapsed like a house of cards. German and other barbarian tribes in the north could threaten, and the emergent Parthian empire beyond the Euphrates might at times appear menacing, but for centuries such dangers were held at arms’ length.
The establishment of Roman hegemony in the Mediterranean world
Roman expansion in the eastern Mediterranean
Just before the Second Punic War, Rome had projected its power across the Adriatic Sea against the Illyrians. As noted, Philip V of Macedonia in turn had joined the Carthaginians for a time during the war in an attempt to stem the tide of Roman expansion but had agreed to terms of peace with Rome’s allies, the Aetolians, in 206 and then with Rome in the Peace of Phoenice of 205. Immediately after the Second Punic War the Roman Senate moved to settle affairs with Philip, despite the war-weary centuriate assembly’s initial refusal to declare war. Historians have debated Rome’s reasons for this momentous decision, with suggestions ranging from a desire to protect Athenians and other Greeks from Philip out of philhellenism to fear of a secret alliance between Philip and the Seleucid king Antiochus III. Yet these suggestions are belied by the fact that Rome later treated the Greek cities callously and that no fear is apparent in Rome’s increasing demands on Philip and in its refusal to negotiate seriously with him through the course of the war. Rather, the Second Macedonian War (200–196) fits the long pattern of Roman readiness to go to war in order to force ever more distant neighbours to submit to superior Roman power.
In the winter of 200–199, Roman legions marched into the Balkans under the command of Publius Sulpicius Galba. During the next two years there was no decisive battle, as the Romans gathered allies among the Greeks—not only their previous allies, the Aetolians, but also Philip’s traditional allies, the Achaeans, who recognized Roman military superiority. The consul of 198, Titus Quinctius Flamininus, took over the command and defeated Philip at the battle of Cynoscephalae in 197. The terms of settlement allowed Philip to remain king of Macedonia but stipulated payment of an indemnity and restrictions on campaigning beyond the borders of his kingdom. Flamininus then sought to win the goodwill of the Greeks with his famous proclamation of their liberation at the Isthmian Games of 196. To lend credibility to this proclamation, he successfully argued against senatorial opposition for the withdrawal of Roman troops from all Greece, including the strategically important “Fetters” (the key garrisons of Acrocorinth, Chalcis, and Demetrias).
Even before the Romans withdrew, the seeds had been sown for their reentry into the East. As an active king, Antiochus III set out to recover the ancestral possessions of his kingdom on the western coast of Anatolia and in Thrace. In response to the Roman demand that he stay out of Europe, the king attempted to negotiate. When the Romans showed little interest in compromise, Antiochus accepted the invitation of Rome’s former allies, the Aetolians, who felt they had not been duly rewarded with additional territory after the victory over Philip, to liberate the Greeks. Upon crossing into Greece, however, the king found no enthusiasm among the other Greeks for a war of liberation and was defeated at Thermopylae in 191 by legions under the command of Manius Acilius Glabrio.
Antiochus returned home to gather a larger army. In 190 Lucius Cornelius Scipio was elected consul in Rome and was authorized to recruit a force for a campaign against Antiochus. Accompanying Lucius as a legate was his brother, the great general Scipio Africanus. In an attempt to avert war, Antiochus offered to accept the earlier Roman terms, only to find that the Romans had now extended their demands to keep Antiochus east of the Taurus Mountains of Anatolia. Unable to accept, Antiochus fought and lost to Scipio’s army at Magnesia ad Sipylum in the winter of 190–189. In the following Treaty of Apamea (188), the Seleucid kingdom was limited to Asia east of the Taurus range and was required to pay an indemnity of 15,000 talents and to give up its elephants and all but 10 ships. Rome punished its opponents, the Aetolians, and rewarded its supporters, notably Pergamum and Rhodes, which were granted new territories, including Greek cities, at the expense of “the liberation of the Greeks.” The consul of 189, Gnaeus Manlius Vulso, came east with reinforcements, took command of the legions, and proceeded to plunder the Galatians of Anatolia on the pretext of restoring order.
The withdrawal of Roman legions this time did not entail the withdrawal of a Roman presence from the Hellenistic East. On the contrary, according to Polybius, the Romans now “were displeased if all matters were not referred to them and if everything was not done in accordance with their decision.” Continuing jealousies and disputes in the Greek world offered Rome opportunities to adjudicate and ultimately to intervene once again. In the Peloponnese the Achaean League was at odds with Sparta, wishing to bring Sparta into the league and to suppress the radical social program of its king, Nabis. Flamininus in 195 supported the independence of Sparta, but in 192 the Achaean leader, Philopoemen, induced Sparta to join the league with a promise of no interference in its internal affairs. When an infringement of the promise prompted the Spartans to secede, Philopoemen in 188 led an Achaean army to take Sparta, kill the anti-Achaean leaders, and force the city back into the league. Although the Senate heard complaints, it took no immediate action. Then, in 184, the Senate reasserted its own terms for settlement but was circumvented by Philopoemen, who reached a separate agreement with the Spartans. The independent-minded Philopoemen died the following year in a campaign by the league to suppress a revolt of Messene. His death led to a change of leadership, as the pro-Roman Callicrates (regarded by Polybius as a sycophant) began a policy of obeying Rome’s every wish.
Meanwhile, tensions between Rome and Philip were increasing. Philip had supported Rome’s war with Antiochus in the hope of recovering Thessalian and Thracian territory, but in this he was disappointed by the Romans. They did, however, return Philip’s younger son, Demetrius, taken to Rome as a hostage in 197—a reward with tragic consequences. During his years as a hostage, Demetrius had made senatorial friendships, which aroused suspicions at home that the Romans would prefer to see Demetrius rather than his elder brother, Perseus, succeed Philip. Philip ordered the death of Demetrius in 181 and then died in 179, leaving his throne to Perseus, the last king of Macedonia.
Perseus’s activism started a stream of complaints to the Senate from neighbouring Greek powers from 175 onward. The king’s real intentions are unclear; perhaps Polybius was right that he wished to make the Romans “more cautious about delivering harsh and unjust orders to Macedonians.” The Senate listened to the unfavourable interpretations of Perseus’s enemies, who claimed that the king’s actions revealed an intent to attack Rome. Like his father, Perseus campaigned to extend Macedonian power to the northeast and south and marched through Greece as far as Delphi. He solicited alliances with the Achaean League and other Greek states, which some of the leaders hostile to Rome would have liked to accept. He arranged dynastic marriages with other Hellenistic kings, taking the daughter of Seleucus IV as his wife and giving the hand of his sister to Prusias II of Bithynia. Although these actions could have been viewed as the behaviour expected of a Hellenistic monarch, Eumenes of Pergamum suggested to the Senate that Perseus was preparing for war against Rome. After the Senate decided on war, it sent Quintus Marcius Philippus to propose a truce and to give Perseus false hopes of negotiation in order to allow the consul of 171, Publius Licinius Crassus, to land his army on the Illyrian coast unhindered—a ploy decried by some older senators as “the new wisdom.”
Perseus’s initial success against the Roman army in Thessaly in 171 did not alter the massive imbalance of power, and the Romans again refused the king’s offer to negotiate. Over the next three years Roman commanders devoted more effort to plunder than to the defeat of Perseus. In a notorious incident, the praetor Lucius Hortensius anchored his fleet at Abdera, a city allied with Rome, and demanded supplies. When the Abderitans asked to consult the Senate, Hortensius sacked the town, executed the leading citizens, and enslaved the rest. When complaints reached the Senate, weak attempts were made to force the Roman commanders to make restitution. In 168 the experienced Lucius Aemilius Paullus was reelected consul and sent out to restore discipline. He quickly brought the Third Macedonian War to an end by defeating Perseus in the Battle of Pydna in June 168. Perseus was deposed, and Macedonia was divided into four republics, which were forbidden to have relations with one another; they paid tribute to Rome at half the rate they had previously paid to the king.
In 167 Rome proceeded to punish those who had sided with Perseus (such as the Illyrian Genthius), those whose loyalty had wavered (such as Eumenes), and even those who had contemplated acting as mediators in the war (such as the Rhodians). In Illyria, Paullus, on instructions from the Senate, swept through the countryside enslaving 150,000 inhabitants from 70 Epirote towns. In Achaea, 1,000 leading men suspected of Macedonian sympathies were taken as hostages to Rome. (Among them was Polybius, who befriended the noble Scipionic family and wrote his great history of the rise of Rome with the aid of privileged access to the views of the senatorial leadership.) Eumenes was refused a hearing before the Senate on his visit to Italy. His fall from favour prompted his enemies to dispute his territory, and in 164 a Roman embassy in Anatolia publicly invited complaints against the king. Rhodes had thrived as the leading trade centre of the eastern Mediterranean, using its considerable resources to control piracy, but now Rome undermined its economy and power by making the island of Delos a free port, thereby depriving Rhodes of its income from harbour dues. Territory in Lycia and Caria on the mainland, granted to Rhodes in 189, was now taken away. But the far harsher proposal in the Senate to declare Rhodes an enemy and to destroy it was opposed by senior senators such as Cato the Censor and was voted down. As a result of the weakening of Rhodes, piracy became rampant in the eastern Mediterranean (the young Julius Caesar was captured by pirates). During the next century Roman senators did not find the political will to suppress the piracy, perhaps in part because it served their interests: pirates supplied tens of thousands of slaves for their Italian estates and disrupted the grain trade, thus raising prices for their produce in Rome.
The arrangements of 167 served the Roman policy of weakening the powers of the eastern Mediterranean. In the previous year Rome had also intervened to stop Seleucid expansion into Egypt. In a famous episode, the Roman ambassador Gaius Popillius Laenas delivered to Antiochus IV the Senate’s demand that the king withdraw from Egypt. When the king requested time for consultation, Popillius “drew a circle around the king with a stick he was carrying and told him not to leave the circle until he gave his response. The king was astonished at this occurrence and the display of superiority, but, after a brief time, said he would do all the Romans demanded.”
The power vacuum fostered by the Romans was not ultimately conducive to stability. An adventurer, Andriscus, claiming to be descended from the Macedonian dynasty, was able to enter the Macedonian republics without serious resistance. He was successful enough in raising an army to defeat the first Roman force sent against him in 149 under the command of the praetor Publius Iuventius Thalna (who was killed). A second Roman army under Quintus Caecilius Metellus defeated the pretender in 148. With the death of Callicrates, leadership of the Achaean League passed to Critolaus and Diaeus, outspoken proponents of Greek independence from Rome. In 147 a Roman embassy was sent to intervene in the affairs of the league by supporting the secession of Sparta and also by calling for the detachment of Corinth and Argos from the league. The embassy provoked a violent reply. When further negotiations were blocked by Critolaus, Rome declared war on the Achaeans in 146, citing as reason the ill-treatment of their embassy. Metellus (now with the appellation of “Macedonicus”), having delayed with his army, marched against Critolaus and defeated him in Locris. Then Lucius Mummius Archaicus, consul of 146, took over the command and defeated Diaeus and the remaining Achaeans. The Senate ordered Mummius to teach a lesson to the Greeks: the venerable city of Corinth was sacked, its treasures taken to Rome, and its buildings burned to the ground.
The nature of Roman domination in the East began to change decisively after these wars: in place of influence through embassies, arbitration of disputes, and the occasional military incursion came direct rule. Macedonia was annexed as a province, to be governed and taxed by a Roman proconsul, who also watched over the Greek cities to the south, where the leagues were disbanded. Farther east, the kingdom of Pergamum was added as the province of Asia, as a bequest to the Roman people from Attalus III in 133.
Roman expansion in the western Mediterranean
If Roman military intervention in the east was sporadic in the 2nd century, campaigning in northern Italy and Spain was nearly continuous. During Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, the Insubres and Boii, Gallic peoples in the Po valley, had joined the Carthaginians against Rome. In 200 the Gauls and Ligurians combined forces and sacked the Latin colony of Placentia in an attempt to drive the Romans out of their lands. In the following years consular armies repeatedly attacked the Gauls. In 194 Lucius Valerius Flaccus won a decisive victory over the Insubres, and in 192 the leading Boii under severe pressure went over to the Roman side, signaling the coming defeat of their tribe. Following their victories, the Romans sent thousands of new colonists to the Po valley to reinforce the older colonies of Placentia and Cremona (190) and to establish new colonies, notably Bononia (189) and Aquileia (181).
During the same period the Romans were at war with the Ligurian tribes of the northern Apennines. The serious effort began in 182, when both consular armies and a proconsular army were sent against the Ligurians. The wars continued into the 150s, when victorious generals celebrated two triumphs over the Ligurians. Here also the Romans drove many natives off their land and settled colonies in their stead (e.g., Luna and Luca in the 170s).
As a result of the Second Punic War, Roman legions had marched into Spain against the Carthaginians and remained there after 201. The Romans formalized their rule in 197 by creating two provinces, Nearer and Further Spain. They also exploited the Spanish riches, especially the mines, as the Carthaginians had done. In 197 the legions were withdrawn, but a Spanish revolt against the Roman presence led to the death of one governor and required that the two praetorian governors of 196 be accompanied by a legion each. The situation was serious enough for the consul of 195, Cato the Censor, to be sent to Spain with two legions. From Cato comes the earliest extant firsthand account of Roman conquest. His comments show that he prided himself on his bravery and lack of greed as compared with other Roman commanders. Yet his narrative must overstate the extent and decisiveness of his success because fighting persisted for years to come, as later Roman governors sought to extend Roman control over more Spanish peoples—the Celtiberi of northeastern Spain, the Lusitani of modern-day Portugal, and the Vettones and Vaccaei of northwestern Spain. In 177 Tiiberius Sempronius Gracchus celebrated a triumph over the Celtiberi. The size of the Roman forces was probably then reduced from four to two legions, and from 173 to 155 there was a lull in the regular campaigning. During these decades Spanish peoples brought complaints to Rome about corrupt governors.
Annual warfare resumed in Spain in 154, being perhaps in part a violent reaction to corrupt administration, and dragged on until 133. Labeled a “fiery war” (really wars), these struggles acquired a reputation for extreme cruelty; they brought destruction to the native population (e.g., 20,000 Vaccaei were killed in 151 after giving themselves up to Lucius Licinius Lucullus) and made recruiting legionaries in Italy difficult. In Further Spain the Lusitanian leader Viriathus enjoyed some successes, including the surrender of a Roman army in 141–140 and a favourable treaty with Rome, but the next governor of the province, Quintus Servilius Caepio, arranged for his assassination in 139. Two years later in Nearer Spain, the Numantines also forced the surrender of an army under Gaius Hostilius Mancinus; the Senate later disavowed the agreement of equal terms and handed Mancinus, bound and naked, over to the Spaniards to absolve themselves of responsibility before the gods. The wars in Spain were brought to a conclusion in 133 by Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, who took Numantia after a long siege, enslaved the population, and razed the city.
It was Scipio Aemilianus (born 185/184) who in the previous decade had imposed a similar final solution on Carthage in the Third Punic War (149–146). After the Second Punic War, Carthage had recovered to the point that in 191 it offered to repay the remainder of the 50-year tribute of 200 talents per year in one lump sum. Rome’s refusal of the offer suggests that beyond its monetary value the tribute had the symbolic importance of signifying subjection. Carthage’s neighbour, the Numidian king Masinissa, had been granted as a reward for his support of Rome at the Battle of Zama his paternal kingdom and the western Numidian kingdom ruled by Syphax. During the next half century Masinissa periodically tried to exploit his favour in Rome by encroaching on Carthaginian territory. Initially, the Carthaginians submissively sought the arbitration of Rome in these disputes, but more often than not Roman judgment went in favour of Masinissa. After a series of losses, the Carthaginians in 151 decided to act on their own and raised an army to ward off the Numidian attacks. When a Roman delegation observed the Carthaginian army raised in breach of the treaty of 201, Rome was provided with the casus belli for a declaration of war in 149; Polybius, however, claims that the Senate had decided on this war “long before.” The elderly Cato had been ending his speeches in the Senate since 153 with the notorious exhortation that “Carthage must be destroyed.” Carthage desperately and pathetically tried to make amends, executing the generals of the expedition against the Numidians, surrendering to Rome, and handing over hostages, armour, and artillery. Only then did the Romans deliver their final demand: Carthage must be abandoned and the population moved to a new site inland. Such extreme terms could not be accepted.
The war against Carthage, with its prospects of rich booty, presented no recruiting problems for the Romans: huge land and naval forces were sent out under both consuls of 149, Lucius Marcius Censorinus and Manius Manilius. The imbalance of resources meant that the outcome was never in doubt, but the fortifications of Carthage delayed the Roman victory. The young Scipio Aemilianus was elected consul for 147, and by popular vote he was assigned the task of bringing the war to an end. He blockaded the city by land and sea, inflicting terrible suffering. Finally, in 146, the Roman army took Carthage, enslaved its remaining 50,000 inhabitants, burned the buildings to the ground, and ritually sowed the site with salt to guarantee that nothing would ever grow there again. Carthaginian territory was annexed as the province of Africa.
Explanations of Roman expansion
As one of the decisive developments in western history, Roman expansion has invited continual reinterpretation by historians. Polybius, who wrote his history in order to explain to other Greeks the reasons for Roman success, believed that after their victory over Hannibal the Romans conceived the aim of dominating all before them and set out to achieve it in the Second Macedonian War. If one accepts the Roman view that they fought only “just wars”—that is, only when provoked—then Roman conquest emerges as “one of the most important accidents in European history,” as Rome had to defend itself from threats on all sides. Historians have suggested other motives for empire, such as a desire to profit from war, an interest in commercial expansion, or a love of the Greeks, who asked for protection against Hellenistic monarchs.
Major historical phenomena of this kind rarely receive final, decisive interpretations, but several assertions may be ventured. Some of the interpretations are anachronistic impositions on the ancient world. Ancient testimony, for example, gives no support to commercial or mercantile explanations. Cultural and economic interpretations seem more appropriate. Roman culture placed a high value on success in war: virtus (courage and qualities of leadership) was displayed, above all, in war, and the triumph, a parade through Rome celebrating a major victory over an enemy, was the honour most highly prized by the senatorial generals who guided Roman decisions about war and peace. Moreover, these leaders, and the wholeRoman people, were fully aware of the increasing profits of victory; in the 2nd century commanders and soldiers, as well as the city itself, were enriched by the glittering booty from Africa and the Greek East.
Yet, it is rightly pointed out, Roman intervention in the East was sporadic, not systematic, and the Romans did not annex territory in the Balkans, Anatolia, or North Africa for more than 50 years after their initial victories. The latter point, however, is not telling, since the Romans regarded defeated states allied to them as part of their imperium, whether or not they were under Roman provincial administration. The sporadic timing of the wars would seem to support the Romans’ claim that they only reacted, justly, to provocations. But attention to the individual provocations should not blind the historian to the larger pattern of Roman behaviour. From 218 the Romans annually fielded major armies decade after decade. Rome was able to go to war every year in response to provocations only because it chose to define its interests and make alliances farther and farther afield. Polybius, as noted, reveals how the Romans were the masters of manipulation of circumstances to force opponents to behave in a way they could interpret as provocative. Therefore, the Roman interpretation of “just wars” and the Polybian interpretation of a universal aim to conquer need not be contradictory. The concept of “just war” may have justified any given war but does not explain the perpetual Roman readiness to go to war. For that the historian must look to Polybius’s universal aim or to general political, social, economic, and cultural features of Rome. Finally, it must be remembered that in some instances it was clearly the Roman commander who provoked the war in order to plunder and to win a triumph (e.g., Licinius Lucullus, governor of Nearer Spain, in 151).
Beginnings of provincial administration
Rome dominated its Latin and Italian neighbours by incorporating some into the Roman citizen body and by forming bilateral alliances with most of the Italian city-states. After the Punic Wars, Rome undertook to rule newly acquired territories directly as subject provinces. In 241 Sicily became Rome’s first province, followed by Sardinia-Corsica in 238, and Spain, divided into two provinces, in 197. After a 50-year hiatus, Macedonia and Africa were annexed in 146, and the province of Asia (northwestern Anatolia) in 133. In principle, each province was to be administered in accordance with its lex provinciae, a set of rules drawn up by the conquering commander and a senatorial embassy. The lex provinciae laid down the organization of taxation, which varied from province to province.
The provincial administrative apparatuses were minimal and unprofessional, as the Romans relied heavily on the local elites as mediators. Each year a senatorial magistrate was sent out to govern with nearly unfettered powers. Because initially the governors were usually praetors, the addition of new provinces required the election of more praetors (increased to four in 227 and to six in 197). The assignments to provinces were done by lot. The governor took with him one of the quaestors to oversee the finances of provincial government and senatorial friends and relatives to serve as deputies and advisors (legati). Among the humbler functionaries assisting the governor were scribes to keep records and lictors with fasces (bundles of rods and axes) to symbolize gubernatorial authority and to execute sentences pronounced by the governor in criminal cases.
The governor’s main duties were to maintain order and security and to collect revenues. The former often entailed command of an army to ward off external threats and to suppress internal disorders such as banditry. When not commanding his army, the governor spent his time hearing legal cases and arbitrating disputes. During the republic, revenue collection was left to private companies of publicani, so called because they won by highest bid the contract to collect the revenues. It was the governor’s responsibility to keep the publicani within the bounds of the lex provinciae so that they did not exploit the helpless provincials too mercilessly, but this was difficult. Governors expected to make a profit from their term of office, and some collaborated with the publicani to strip the provinces of their wealth.
The transformation of Rome and Italy during the Middle Republic
The Greek historian Polybius admired Rome’s balanced constitution, discipline, and strict religious observance as the bases of the republic’s success and stability. Yet Rome’s very successes in the 2nd century undermined these features, leading to profound changes in the republic’s politics, culture, economy, and society.
Citizenship and politics in the middle republic
The Romans organized their citizenry in a way that permitted expansion. This was regarded as a source of strength by contemporaries such as Philip V, who noted that Rome replenished its citizen ranks with freed slaves. The extension of citizenship continued in the early 2nd century, as in the grant of full citizen rights to Arpinum, Formiae, and Fundi in 188. Yet Rome’s glittering successes made such openness ever more problematic. For one, the city attracted increasing numbers of Latins and allies, who wished to use their ancient right to migrate and take up Roman citizenship. The depletion of Latin and Italian towns prompted protests, until in 177 Rome took away the right of migration and forced Latin and Italian migrants to return to their hometowns to register for military service. Such measures were sporadically repeated in the following years. In addition, the flood of slaves into Rome from the great conquests increased the flow of foreign-born freedmen into the citizen body. Sempronius Gracchus (father of the famous tribunes) won senatorial approbation as censor in 168 by registering the freedmen in a single urban tribe and thus limiting their electoral influence. Despite these efforts, the nature and meaning of Roman citizenship were bound to change, as the citizen body became ever more diffuse and lived dispersed from Rome, the only place where the right of suffrage could be exercised.
Polybius greatly admired Rome’s balanced constitution, with its elements of monarchy (magistrates), aristocracy (Senate), and democracy (popular assemblies). According to Greek political theory, each form of constitution was believed to be unstable and susceptible to decline until replaced by another. Yet Rome’s system of balance, Polybius thought, was a check on the cycle of decline. By forcing the Roman constitution into the mold of Greek political theory, however, he exaggerated the symmetry of checks and balances. In reality, the Senate enjoyed a period of steady domination through the first two-thirds of the 2nd century, having emerged from the Second Punic War with high prestige. Only occasionally did the developing tensions and contradictions surface during these decades.
Politics during the period was largely a matter of senatorial families competing for high office and the ensuing lucrative commands. Because offices were won in the centuriate and tribal assemblies, senators had to cultivate support among the populus. Yet the system was not as democratic as it might appear. Senators with illustrious names and consular ancestors dominated the election to the highest offices, increasing their share of the consulates from about one-half to two-thirds during the 2nd century. These proportions can be interpreted in two ways: the Senate was not a closed, hereditary aristocracy but was open to new families, who usually rose through the senatorial ranks in the course of generations with the patronal support of established families; yet a small circle of prominent families (e.g., the Aemilii, Claudii, and Cornelii) were disproportionately successful, surprisingly so in view of the popular electoral process. Since the campaigning was not oriented toward issues, the great families were able to maintain their superiority over the centuries by their inherited resources: their famous names, their wealth, and their clienteles of voters.
While aristocratic electoral competition was tradition during the republic, this period began to exhibit the escalation in competitiveness that was later fatal to the republic. For example, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus emerged from the Second Punic War as the Roman whose dignitas (prestige) far surpassed that of his peers. Nonetheless, a number of senators attacked him and his brother Lucius Cornelius with legal charges until he finally retired from Rome to end his life at his Campanian villa at Liternum. For younger senators, however, Scipio’s spectacular achievement was something to emulate. The ambitious young Flamininus moved swiftly through the senatorial cursus honorum (“course of honors”) to win the consulship and command against Philip V at the age of 30. Such cases prompted laws to regulate the senatorial cursus: iteration in the same magistracy was prohibited, the praetorship was made a prerequisite for the consulship, and in 180 the lex Villia annalis (Villian law on minimum ages) set minimum ages for senatorial magistrates and required a two-year interval between offices. The consulship (two elected to it per year) could be held from age 42, the praetorship (six per year) from age 39, and the curule aedileship from 36. Patricians, still privileged in this area, were probably allowed to stand for these offices two years earlier. The senatorial career was preceded by 10 years of military service, from age 17, and formally began with a quaestorship, the most junior senatorial magistracy (eight per year), at age 30 or just under. The offices between the quaestorship and praetorship, the aedileship (four per year) and the plebeian tribunate (10 per year), were not compulsory but provided opportunities to win popularity among the voters by staging aedilician games and supporting popular causes, respectively. Here again, excess elicited restraint, and legal limits were placed on the lavishness of the games. More broadly, from 181 legislation designed to curb electoral bribery was intermittently introduced.
The problems of electoral competition did not disappear. In the late 150s second consulships were prohibited altogether, but within decades the rules were broken. Scipio Aemilianus, grandson by adoption of Scipio Africanus, challenged the system. Returning from the Carthaginian campaign to Rome to stand for the aedileship, he was elected instead to the consulship, even though he was underage and had not held the prerequisite praetorship. He was then elected to a second consulship for 134. Scipio had no subversive intent, but his career set the precedent for circumventing the cursus regulations by appeal to the popular assemblies.
While the 2nd century was a time of heated competition among senators, it was generally a period of quiescence of the plebs and their magistrates, the tribunes. Nevertheless, signs of the upheaval ahead are visible. For one, the long plebeian struggle against arbitrary abuse of magisterial power continued. A series of Porcian laws were passed to protect citizens from summary execution or scourging, asserting the citizen’s right of appeal to the assembly (ius provocationis). A descendant of the Porcian clan later advertised these laws on coins as a victory for freedom. Moreover, the massive annual war effort provoked occasional resistance to military service. In 193 the tribunes started to investigate complaints about overly long military service. Interpreting this as a challenge to magisterial authority, the Senate responded with a declaration of an emergency levy, and the tribunes stopped their activity. In 151 the tribunes tried to protect some citizens from the levy for the unpopular war in Spain. A confrontation between the tribunes and the recruiting consuls ensued, in which the tribunes briefly imprisoned the consuls until a compromise relieved the crisis. The scene of tribunes taking consuls to jail was repeated in 138 during a period of renewed difficulties over recruiting.
Since the Hortensian law of 287, the plebs had the constitutional power to pass laws binding on the entire state without senatorial approval. During the next century and a half few attempts were made to use the power for purposes of major reform against the Senate’s will, in part because the plebeian tribunes, as members of the senatorial order, generally shared the Senate’s interests and in part because the plebeians benefited from Rome’s great successes abroad under senatorial leadership. Yet senatorial fear of unbridled popular legislative power is perceptible in the Aelian and Fufian law of about 150. This law, imperfectly known from later passing references, provided that a magistrate holding a legislative assembly could be prevented from passing a bill on religious grounds by another magistrate claiming to have witnessed unfavourable omens in a procedure called obnuntiatio. In addition, the days of the year on which legislative assemblies could be held were reduced. As conservative senators worked to restrain the democratic element in the political processes, the plebeians sought to expand their freedom. Voting in electoral and judicial assemblies had been public, allowing powerful senators more easily to manage the votes of their clients. The Gabinian law (139) and Cassian law (137) introduced secret written ballots into the assemblies, thus loosening the control of patrons over their clients. Significantly, the reform was supported by Scipio Aemilianus, the sort of senator who stood to benefit by attracting the clients of other patrons through his personal popularity. These reforms, together with the changing composition of the electorate in the city, carried the potential, soon to be realized, for more volatile assemblies.
Culture and religion
Expansion brought Rome into contact with many diverse cultures. The most important of these was the Greek culture in the eastern Mediterranean with its highly refined literature and learning. Rome responded to it with ambivalence: although Greek doctrina was attractive, it was also the culture of the defeated and enslaved. Indeed, much Greek culture was brought to Rome in the aftermath of military victories, as Roman soldiers returned home not only with works of art but also with learned Greeks who had been enslaved. Despite the ambivalence, nearly every facet of Roman culture was influenced by the Greeks, and it was a Greco-Roman culture that the Roman empire bequeathed to later European civilization.
As Roman aristocrats encountered Greeks in southern Italy and in the East in the 3rd century, they learned to speak and write in Greek. Scipio Africanus and Flamininus, for example, are known to have corresponded in Greek. By the late republic it became standard for senators to be bilingual. Many were reared from infancy by Greek-speaking slaves and later tutored by Greek slaves or freedmen. Nonetheless, despite their increasing fluency in Greek, senators continued to insist on Latin as the official language of government; visiting dignitaries from the East addressing the Senate in Greek had their speeches translated—as a mark of their subordination.
Because Greek was the lingua franca of the East, Romans had to use Greek if they wished to reach a wider audience. Thus the first histories by Romans were written in Greek. The patrician Fabius Pictor, who, as noted above, founded the Roman tradition of historiography during the Second Punic War, wrote his annalistic history of Rome in Greek partly in order to influence Greek views in favour of Rome, and he emphasized Rome’s ancient ties to the Greek world by incorporating in his history the legend that the Trojan hero Aeneas had settled in Latium. Because Roman history was about politics and war, the writing of history was always judged by Romans to be a suitable pastime for men of politics—i.e., for senators such as Fabius.
Rome had had a folk tradition of poetry in the native Saturnian verse with a metre based on stress, but not a formal literature. Lucius Livius Andronicus was regarded as the father of Latin literature, a fact that illustrates to what extent the development of Roman literature was bound up with conquest and enslavement. Livius, a native Greek speaker from Tarentum, was brought as a slave to Rome, where he remained until his death (c. 204). Becoming fluent in Latin, he translated the Homeric Odyssey into Latin in Saturnian verse. Thus Latin literature began with a translation from Greek into the native metre. Livius reached wider audiences through his translations of Greek plays for public performance. Gnaeus Naevius, the next major figure (c. 270–c. 201), was again not a native Roman but an Oscan speaker from Campania. In addition to translating Greek drama, he wrote the first major original work in Latin, an epic poem about the First Punic War. Naevius’ successors, Quintus Ennius from Calabria (239–169) and Titus Maccius Plautus from Umbria (c. 254–184), transformed the Latin poetic genres by importing Greek metrical forms based on the length of syllables rather than on stress. Ennius was best known for his epic history of Rome in verse, the Annales, but he also wrote tragedies and satires. Plautus produced comedies adapted from Greek New Comedy. He is the only early author whose work is well represented in the corpus of surviving literature (21 plays judged authentic by Marcus Terentius Varro, Rome’s greatest scholar). None of the plays of his younger contemporaries, Caecilius Statius (c. 210–168) and Marcus Pacuvius (c. 220–130), survive, nor do the once highly esteemed tragedies of Lucius Accius (170–c. 86). The six extant comedies of Terence (Publius Terentius Afer; c. 190–159) provide a sense of the variation in the comic tradition of the 2nd century. These authors also were outsiders, coming from the Celtic Po valley, Brundisium, Umbria, and North Africa, respectively. Thus, while assorted foreigners, some of servile origin, established a Latin literature by adapting Greek genres, metrical forms, and content, native Roman senators began to write history in Greek.
Other forms of Greek learning were slower to take root in Rome. Later Romans remembered that a Greek doctor established a practice in Rome for the first time just before the Second Punic War, but his reputation did little to stimulate Roman interest in the subject. Like doctors, Greek philosophers of the 2nd century were regarded with interest and suspicion. In the early 3rd century Romans had erected in public a statue of Pythagoras, a 6th-century Greek philosopher who had founded communities of philosophers in southern Italy. In the mid-2nd century some senators displayed an interest in philosophy. Scipio Aemilianus, Gaius Laelius (consul 140), and Lucius Furius Philus (consul 136) were among those who listened to the lectures of the three leaders of the Athenian philosophical schools visiting Rome on a diplomatic mission in 155—the academic Carneades, the peripatetic Critolaus, and the stoic Diogenes. On an official visit to the East in 140, Scipio included in his entourage the leading stoic Panaetius. In the same period, another stoic, Blossius of Cumae, was said to have influenced the reforming tribune Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. Yet the philosophical influence should not be exaggerated; none of these senators was a philosopher or even a formal student of philosophy.
Moreover, the sophisticated rhetoric of the philosophers—in 155 Carneades lectured in favour of natural justice one day and against it the next—was perceived by leading Romans such as Cato the Censor as subversive to good morals. At his urging the Senate quickly concluded the diplomatic business of Carneades, Critolaus, and Diogenes in 155 and hurried them out of Rome. This was part of a broader pattern of hostility to philosophy: in 181 the (spurious) Books of Numa, falsely believed to have been influenced by Pythagoras, were burned, and the following decades witnessed several expulsions of philosophers from the city. In comedies of the period, the discipline was held up for ridicule.
The hostility toward philosophy was one aspect of a wider Roman sense of unease about changing mores. Cato, a “new man” (without senatorial ancestors) elected consul (195) and censor (184), represented himself as an austere champion of the old ways and exemplifies the hardening Roman reaction against change under foreign influence. Although Cato knew Greek and could deploy allusions to Greek literature, he advised his son against too deep a knowledge of the literature of that “most worthless and unteachable race.” Cato despised those senatorial colleagues who ineptly imitated Greek manners. He asserted the value of Latin culture in the role of father of Latin prose literature. His treatise on estate management, the De agricultura (c. 160), has survived with its rambling discourse about how to run a 200-iugera (124-acre) farm, including advice on everything from buying and selling slaves to folk medicine. Cato’s greater, historical work, the Origines, survives only in fragments: it challenged the earlier Roman histories insofar as it was written in Latin and emphasized the achievements of the Italian peoples rather than those of the few great senatorial families of Rome (whose names were conspicuously omitted).
Elected censor in 184 to protect Roman mores, Cato vowed “to cut into pieces and burn like a hydra all luxury and voluptuousness.” He expelled seven men from the Senate on various charges of immorality and penalized through taxation the acquisition of such luxuries as expensive clothing, jewelry, carriages, and fancy slaves. The worry about luxury was widespread, as evidenced by the passage of a series of sumptuary laws supported by Cato. During the depths of the Second Punic War the Oppian law (215) was passed to meet the financial crisis by restricting the jewelry and clothing women were allowed to wear; in 195, after the crisis, the law was repealed despite Cato’s protests. Later sumptuary laws were motivated not by military crisis but by a sense of the dangers of luxury: the Orchian law (182) limited the lavishness of banquets; the Fannian law (161) strengthened the Orchian provisions, and the Didian law (143) extended the limits to all Italy. A similar sense of the dangers of wealth may also have prompted the lex Voconia (169), which prohibited Romans of the wealthiest class from naming women as heirs in their wills.
The laws and censorial actions ultimately could not restrain changes in Roman mores. Economic conditions had been irreversibly altered by conquest; the magnitude of conspicuous consumption is suggested by a senatorial decree of 161 that restricted the weight of silver tableware in a banquet to 100 pounds—10 times the weight for which Publius Cornelius Rufinus was punished in 275. Moreover, the very competitiveness that had traditionally marked the senatorial aristocracy ensured the spread of cultural innovations and new forms of conspicuous consumption among the elite. In contrast to the austere Cato, other senators laid claim to prestige by collecting Greek art and books brought back by conquering armies, by staging plays modeled on Greek drama, and by commissioning literary works, public buildings, and private sculptural monuments in a Greek style.
Whereas the influence of Greek high culture was felt principally in a small circle of elite Romans who had the wealth to acquire Greek art and slaves and the leisure and education to read Greek authors, the influence of religions from the eastern Mediterranean was perceived as potentially subversive to a far wider audience. Polybius praised the Romans for their conscientious behaviour toward the gods. Romans were famous for their extreme precision in recitation of vows and performance of sacrifices to the gods, meticulously repeating archaic words and actions centuries after their original meanings had been forgotten. Guiding these state cults were priestly colleges; and priestly offices such as of pontifex and augur were filled by senators, whose dominance in politics was thus replicated in civic religion.
In earlier centuries Rome’s innate religious conservatism was, however, counterbalanced by an openness to foreign gods and cults. As Rome incorporated new peoples of Italy into its citizen body, it accepted their gods and religious practices. Indeed, among the most authoritative religious texts, consulted in times of crisis or doubt, were the prophetic Sibylline Books, written in Greek and imported from Cumae. The receptivity appears most pronounced in the 3rd century: during its final decades temples were built in the city for Venus Erycina from Sicily and for the Magna Mater, or Great Mother, from Pessinus in Anatolia; games were instituted in honour of the Greek god Apollo (212) and the Magna Mater after the war. The new cults were integrated into the traditional structure of the state religion, and the “foreignness” was controlled (i.e., limits were placed on the orgiastic elements in the cult of the Great Mother performed by her eunuch priests).
The openness, never complete or a matter of principle, tilted toward resistance in the early 2nd century. In 186 Roman magistrates, on orders from the Senate, brutally suppressed Bacchic worship in Italy. Associations of worshipers of the Greek god Bacchus (Dionysus) had spread across Italy to Rome. Their members, numbering in the thousands, were initiated into secret mysteries, knowledge of which promised life after death; they also engaged in orgiastic worship. The secrecy soon gave rise to reports of the basest activities, such as uncontrolled drinking, sexual promiscuity, forgery of wills, and poisoning of kin. According to Livy, more than 7,000 were implicated in the wrongdoing; many of them were tried and executed, and the consuls destroyed the places of Bacchic worship throughout Italy. For the future, the (extant) senatorial decree prohibited men from acting as priests in the cult, banned secret meetings, and required the praetor’s and Senate’s authorization of ceremonies to be performed by gatherings of more than five people. The terms of the decree provide a sense of what provoked the harsh senatorial reaction. It was not that the Bacchic cult spread heretical beliefs about the gods—Roman civic religion was never based on theological doctrine with pretensions to exclusive truth; rather, the growing secret cult led by male priests threatened the traditionally dominant position of senators in state religion. The decree did not aim to eliminate Bacchic worship but to bring it under the supervision of senatorial authorities. The following centuries witnessed sporadic official actions against foreign cults; it happens to be recorded that a praetor of 139 removed private altars built in public areas and expelled astrologers and Jews from the city. Thus the reaction to eastern religions paralleled that to Greek philosophy; both were perceived as new ways of thinking that threatened to undermine traditional mores and the relations of authority implicit in them.
Demographic and economic developments
It seems certain that the economy and society of Italy were transformed in the wake of Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean world, even though the changes can be described only incompletely and imprecisely, owing to the dearth of reliable information for the preceding centuries. Romans of the 1st century bc believed that their ancestors had been a people of small farmers in an age uncorrupted by wealth. Even senators who performed heroic feats were said to have been of modest means—men such as Lucius Quinctius Cinncinatus, who was said to have laid down his plow on his tiny farm to serve as dictator in 458 bc. Although such legends present an idealized vision of early Rome, it is probably true that Latium of the 5th and 4th centuries was densely populated by farmers of small plots. Rome’s military strength derived from its superior resources of manpower levied from a pool of small landowning citizens (assidui). A dense population is also suggested by the emigration from Latium of scores of thousands as colonists during the 4th and 3rd centuries. The legends of senators working their own fields seem implausible, but the disparity in wealth was probably much less noticeable than in the late republic. The 4th-century artifacts uncovered by archaeologists display an overall high quality that makes it difficult to distinguish a category of luxury goods from the pottery and terra-cottas made for common use.
War and conquest altered this picture; yet certain fundamental features of the economy remained constant. Until its fall, the Roman Empire retained agriculture as the basis of its economy, with probably four-fifths of the population tilling the soil. This great majority continued to be needed in food production because there were no labour-saving technological breakthroughs. The power driving agricultural and other production was almost entirely supplied by humans and animals, which set modest limits to economic growth. In some areas of Italy, such as the territory of Capena in southern Etruria, archaeologists have found traditional patterns of settlement and land division continuing from the 4th to the end of the 1st century—evidence that the Second Punic War and the following decades did not bring a complete break with the past.
Economic change came as a result of massive population shifts and the social reorganization of labour rather than technological improvement. The Second Punic War, and especially Hannibal’s persistent presence in Italy, inflicted a considerable toll, including loss of life on a staggering scale, movement of rural populations into towns, and destruction of agriculture in some regions. Although the devastation has been overestimated by some historians, partial depopulation of the Italian countryside is evident from the literary and archaeological records: immediately after the war enough land stood vacant in Apulia and Samnium to settle between 30,000 and 40,000 of Scipio’s veterans, while areas of Apulia, Bruttium, southern Campania, and south-central Etruria have yielded no artifacts indicating settlement in the postwar period.
Populations have been known to show great resilience in recovering from wars, but the Italian population was given no peace after 201. In subsequent decades Rome’s annual war effort required a military mobilization unmatched in history for its duration and the proportion of the population involved. During the 150 years after Hannibal’s surrender, the Romans regularly fielded armies of more than 100,000 men, requiring on average about 13 percent of the adult male citizens each year. The attested casualties from 200 to 150 add up to nearly 100,000. The levy took Roman peasants away from their land. Many never returned. Others, perhaps 25,000, were moved in the years before 173 from peninsular Italy to the colonies of the Po valley. Still others, in unknown but considerable numbers, migrated to the cities. By the later 2nd century some Roman leaders perceived the countryside to be depopulated.
To replace the peasants on the land of central and southern Italy, slaves were imported in vast numbers. Slavery was well established as a form of agricultural labour before the Punic Wars (slaves must have produced much of the food during the peak mobilization of citizens from 218 to 201). The scale of slavery, however, increased in the 2nd and 1st centuries as a result of conquests. Enslavement was a common fate for the defeated in ancient warfare: the Romans enslaved 5,000 Macedonians in 197; 5,000 Histri in 177; 150,000 Epirotes in 167; 50,000 Carthaginians in 146; and in 174 an unspecified number of Sardinians, but so many that “Sardinian” became a byword for “cheap” slave. These are only a few examples for which the sources happen to give numbers. More slaves flooded into Italy after Rome destabilized the eastern Mediterranean in 167 and gave pirates and bandits the opportunity to carry off local peoples of Anatolia and sell them on the block at Delos by the thousands. By the end of the republic Italy was a thoroughgoing slave society with well over one million slaves, according to the best estimates. No census figures give numbers of slaves, but slaveholding was more widespread and on a larger scale than in the antebellum American South, where slaves made up about one-third of the population. In effect, Roman soldiers fought in order to capture their own replacements on the land in Italy, although the shift from free to servile labour was only a partial one.
The influx of slaves was accompanied by changes in patterns of landownership, as more Italian land came to be concentrated in fewer hands. One of the punishments meted out to disloyal allies after the Second Punic War was confiscation of all or part of their territories. Most of the ager Campanus and part of the Tarentines’ lands—perhaps two million acres in total—became Roman ager publicus (public land), subject to rent. Some of this property remained in the hands of local peoples, but large tracts in excess of the 500-iugera limit were occupied by wealthy Romans, who were legally possessores (i.e., in possession of the land, although not its owners) and as such paid a nominal rent to the Roman state. The trend toward concentration continued during the 2nd century, propelled by conquests abroad. On the one side, subsistence farmers were always vulnerable in years of poor harvests that could lead to debt and ultimately to the loss of their plots. The vulnerability was exacerbated by army service, which took peasants away from their farms for years at a time. On the other side, the elite orders were enriched by the booty from the eastern kingdoms on a scale previously unimaginable. Some of the vast new wealth was spent on public works and on new forms of luxury and part was invested to secure future income. Land was the preferred form of investment for senators and other honourable men: farming was regarded as safer and more prestigious than manufacture or trade. For senators, the opportunities for trade were limited by the Claudian law of 218 prohibiting them from owning large ships. Wealthy Romans thus used the proceeds of war to buy out their smaller neighbours. As a result of this process of acquisition, most senatorial estates consisted of scattered small farms. The notorious latifundia, the extensive consolidated estates, were not widespread. Given the dispersion of the property, the new landlord was typically absentee. He could leave the working of the farms in the hands of the previous peasant owners as tenants, or he could import slaves.
The best insights into the mentality of the estate-owning class of this period come from Cato’s De agricultura. Although based on Greek handbooks discussing estate management, it reflects the assumptions and thinking of a 2nd-century senator. Cato envisaged a medium-sized, 200-iugera farm with a permanent staff of 11 slaves. As with other Roman enterprises, management of the farm was left to a slave bailiff, who was helped by his slave wife. While Cato, like the later agricultural writers Varro and Lucius Junius Columella, assumed the economic advantage of a slave work force, historians today debate whether estates worked by slaves were indeed more profitable than smaller peasant farms. Cato had his slaves use much the same technology as the peasants, although a larger estate could afford large processing implements, such as grape and olive crushers, which peasants might have to share or do without. Nor did Cato bring to bear any innovative management advice; his suggestions aimed to maximize profits by such commonsense means as keeping the slave work force occupied all year round and buying cheap and selling dear. Nevertheless, larger estates had one significant advantage in that the slave labour could be bought and sold and thus more easily matched to labour needs than was possible on small plots worked by peasant families.
Cato’s farm was a model representing one aspect of the reality of the Italian countryside. Archaeologists have discovered the villas characteristic of the Catonian estate beginning to appear in Campania in the 2nd century and later in other areas. The emergence of slave agriculture did not exclude the continuing existence in the area of peasants as owners of marginal land or as casual day labourers or both. The larger estates and the remaining peasants formed a symbiotic relationship, mentioned by Cato: the estate required extra hands to help during peak seasons, while the peasants needed the extra wages from day labour to supplement the meagre production of their plots. Yet in many areas of Italy the villa system made no inroads during the republic, and traditional peasant farming continued. Other areas, however, underwent a drastic change: the desolation left by the Second Punic War in the central and southern regions opened the way for wealthy Romans to acquire vast tracts of depopulated land to convert to grazing. This form of extensive agriculture produced cattle, sheep, and goats, herded by slaves. These were the true latifundia, decried as wastelands by Roman imperial authors such as the elder Pliny.
The marketplace took on a new importance as both the Catonian estate and the latifundium aimed primarily to produce goods to sell for a profit. In this sense, they represented a change from peasant agriculture, which aimed above all to feed the peasant’s family. The buyers of the new commodities were the growing cities—another facet of the complex economic transformation. Rome was swelled by migrants from the countryside and became the largest city of preindustrial Europe, with a population of about one million in the imperial era; other Italian cities grew to a lesser extent.
The mass of consumers created new, more diverse demands for foodstuffs from the countryside and also for manufactured goods. The market was bipolar, with the poor of the cities able to buy only basic foodstuffs and a few plain manufactured items and the rich demanding increasingly extravagant luxury goods. The limitations of the poor are reflected in the declining quality of humble temple offerings. The craftsmen and traders produced mainly for the rich minority. The trading and artisanal enterprises in Rome were largely worked by slaves and freedmen imported to Rome by the wealthy. Although honourable, freeborn Romans considered it beneath their dignity to participate directly in these businesses, they willingly shared in the profits through ownership of these slaves and through collection of rents on the shops of humbler men. Thus, manufacturing and trading were generally small-scale operations, organized on the basis of household or family. Roman law did not recognize business corporations with the exception of publican companies holding state contracts; nor were there guilds of the medieval type to organize or control production. Unlike some later medieval cities, Rome did not produce for export to support itself; its revenues came from booty, provincial taxes, and the surplus brought from the countryside to the city by aristocratic Roman landlords. Indeed, after 167 provincial revenues were sufficient to allow for the abolition of direct taxes on Roman citizens.
Building projects were the largest enterprises in Rome and offered freeborn immigrants jobs as day labourers. In addition to the private building needed to house the growing population, the early and middle 2nd century witnessed public building on a new scale and in new shapes. The leading senatorial families gained publicity by sponsoring major new buildings named after themselves in the Forum and elsewhere. The Basilica Porcia (built during Marcus Porcius Cato’s censorship of 184), the Basilica Aemilia et Fulvia (179), and the Basilica Sempronia (170–169) were constructed out of the traditional tufa blocks but in a Hellenized style.
New infrastructures were required to bring the necessities of life to the growing population. The Porticus Aemilia (193), a warehouse of 300,000 square feet on the banks of the Tiber, illustrates how the new needs were met with a major new building technology, concrete construction. Around 200 bc in central Italy it was discovered that a wet mixture of crushed stone, lime, and sand (especially a volcanic sand called pozzolana) would set into a material of great strength. This construction technique had great advantages of economy and flexibility over the traditional cut-stone technique: the materials were more readily available, the concrete could be molded into desired shapes, and the molds could be reused for repetitive production. The Porticus Aemilia, for example, consisted of a series of roughly identical arches and vaults—the shapes so characteristic of later Roman architecture. The new technology also permitted improvements in the construction of the aqueducts needed to increase the city’s water supply.
The economic development outside of Rome encompassed some fairly large-scale manufacturing enterprises and export trade. At Puteoli on the Bay of Naples the ironworks industry was organized on a scale well beyond that of the household, and its goods were shipped beyond the area. Puteoli flourished during the republic as a port city, handling imports destined for Rome as well as exports of manufactured goods and processed agricultural products. In their search for markets, the large Italian landowners exported wine and olive oil to Cisalpine Gaul and more distant locations. Dressel I amphoras, the three-foot pottery jars carrying these products, have been found in substantial quantities in Africa and Gaul. Yet the magnitude of the economic development should not be exaggerated: the ironworks industry was exceptional, and most pottery production continued to be for local use.
Social changes
Major social changes and dislocations accompanied the demographic shifts and economic development. Relations between rich and poor in Rome had traditionally been structured by the bond existing between patron and client. In the daily morning ritual of the salutatio, humble Romans went to pay their respects in the houses of senators, who were obligated to protect them. These personal relationships lent stability to the social hierarchy. In the 2nd century, however, the disparity between rich and poor citizens grew. While this trend increased the personal power of individual senators, it weakened the social control of the elite as a whole; the poor had become too numerous to be controlled by the traditional bond of patron and client.
Until the end of the 170s the impoverishment of humble citizens had been counterbalanced to some extent by the founding of colonies, because dispossessed peasants were given new lands in outlying regions. During the middle decades of the 2nd century, however, colonization ceased, and the number of dispossessed increased, to judge from the declining number of small landowners in the census. The problem created by a growing proletariat was recognized by a few senators. Gaius Laelius, probably during his consulship of 140, proposed a scheme of land redistribution to renew the class of smallholders, but it was rejected by the Senate.
Some of the dispossessed went to Rome, where, together with the increasing numbers of slaves and freedmen, they contributed to the steadily growing population. This density led to the miseries associated with big cities, which were exacerbated by the absence of regulation. By 200 bc the pressure of numbers necessitated apartment buildings of three stories. Constructed without a building code, these structures were often unsound and prone to collapse. Moreover, closely placed and partly made of wood, they were tinderboxes, ever ready to burst into flame. The population density also increased the vulnerability to food shortages and plagues. In 188 fines were levied against dealers for withholding grain, attesting to problems of supply. The 180s and 170s witnessed repeated outbreaks of plague. The state, which could use its power to increase the grain supply, was helpless against diseases. In general, the republican state developed few new institutions to manage the growing urban problems: until the reign of Augustus matters were left to the traditional authority of urban magistrates, who were unaided by a standing fire brigade or police force. Consequently, Rome held an increasing potential for social discontent and conflicts without a corresponding increase in means of control.
The family, regarded by Romans as a mainstay of the social order, also was affected by the wider economic and social transformations of the 2nd century bc. In the early republic the family had formed a social, economic, and legal unity. The woman generally married into her husband’s family and came under his legal authority (or that of his father if he was still alive), and her dowry merged with the rest of the estate under the ownership of the husband. The husband managed the family’s affairs outside the house, while the wife was custodian within. Marriage was an arrangement for life; divorces were rare and granted only in cases of serious moral infractions, such as adultery or wine-tippling on the part of the wife. The children of the couple were subject to the father’s nearly absolute legal powers (patria potestas), including the power of life and death, corporal punishment, and a monopoly of ownership of all property in the family. The father’s power lasted until his death or, in the case of a daughter, until her marriage. When the father died, his sons, his wife, and his unmarried daughters became legally independent, and all inherited equal shares of the family’s property unless otherwise specified in a will. The imperial authors idealized the early republic as a time of family harmony and stability, which was lost through the corruption of the later republic.
When family life emerged into the full light of history in the 2nd century bc, it had changed in significant ways. A form of marriage, commonly called “free marriage,” was becoming prevalent. Under this form, the wife no longer came into her husband’s power or property regime but remained in that of her father; upon her father’s death she became independent with rights to own and dispose of property. But she was not a member of the family of her husband and children and had no claim to inheritance from them, even though she lived with them in the same house. Because many women inherited part of their fathers’ estates, they could use their independent fortunes to exert influence on husbands, children, and people outside the house. In the same period divorce became far more common; moral infractions were no longer needed to justify divorce, which could be initiated by either side. Frequent divorce and remarriage went hand in hand with the separation of marital property. There is plausibility in the suggestion that these changes were brought on by a desire of the women’s fathers to avoid having their daughters’ portions of the larger family estates slip irrevocably into the hands of their husbands. Although the changes in law and practice were not motivated by any movement to emancipate women, the result was that propertied women of the late republic, always excluded from the public sphere of male citizens, came to enjoy a degree of freedom and social power unusual before the 20th century.
Slaves came to permeate the fabric of family life and altered relationships within the household. They were regularly assigned the tasks of child-rearing, traditionally the domain of the mother, and of education, until then the responsibility of both the father and the mother. Whereas children had acquired the skills needed for their future roles by observing their parents in a kind of apprenticeship, in wealthy houses sons and, to a lesser extent, daughters were now given a specialized education by slaves or freedmen. The management of aristocratic households was entrusted to slaves and freedmen, who served as secretaries, accountants, and managers. The wife was no longer needed as custodian of the household, though domestic guardianship remained an element in the idealization of her role. Later moralists attributed a decline in Roman virtue and discipline to the intrusion of slaves into familial relationships and duties.
Rome and Italy
During the middle republic the peoples of Italy began to coalesce into a fairly homogeneous and cohesive society. Polybius, however, does not give insight into this process, because, living in Rome, he too little appreciated the variety of Italian cultures under Roman sway, from the Gallic peoples in the mountains of the north to the urbane Greeks on the southern coasts. Other evidence, though meagre, nonetheless suggests several processes that contributed to the increasing cohesion.
First, the Romans built a network of roads that facilitated communication across Italy. As stated above, the first great road was the Via Appia, which was laid out by Appius Claudius Caecus in 312 to connect Rome to Capua. Between the First and Second Punic Wars roads were built to the north: the Via Aurelia (241?) along the Tyrrhenian coast, the Via Flaminia (220) through Umbria, and the Via Clodia through Etruria. Then, in the 2nd century, Roman presence in the Po valley was consolidated by the Via Aemilia (187) from Ariminum on the Adriatic coast to the Latin colony of Placentia and by the Via Postumia (148) running through Transpadane Gaul to Aquileia in the east and Genua in the west.
Second, internal migration—Italians moving to Rome and Romans being sent to Latin colonies throughout Italy—promoted social and cultural homogeneity. Some of these colonies were set alongside existing settlements; others were founded on new sites. The colonies re-created the physical and social shape of Rome; the town plans and architecture, with forums including temples to Jupiter, were modeled on those of Rome. The imposition of a Latin colony on the Greek city of Paestum in Lucania (273) entailed the implantation of a Roman-style forum in the centre of the existing city in a way that rudely intruded on the old sanctuary of Hera. The initial system governing the distribution of land to Latin colonists aimed to replicate the Roman social hierarchy differentiated by wealth: it is recorded of the colonists sent to Aquileia in 181 that the 3,000 infantrymen each received 50 iugera (31 acres), the centurions 100 iugera (62 acres), and the cavalrymen 140 iugera (86 acres). The unifying effect of the colonies is evident in Paestum’s notable loyalty to Rome during the Second Punic War.
Third, although Rome did not seek to govern Italy through a regular administration, it influenced local affairs through formal bonds of personal friendship (amicitia) and hospitality (hospitium) between the Roman elite and their local counterparts. Through these ties the leading men of Italy were gradually drawn into the ruling class in Rome. The most prominent example of the 2nd century is that of Gaius Marius of Arpinum, who, only two generations after his town had received full citizen rights, began his meteoric senatorial career under the patronage of the great Roman nobles, the Metelli.
Fourth, the regular military campaigns brought together Romans and Italians of all classes under the command of Roman magistrates. The Italian troops appear to have been levied in a fashion similar to the one used for the Romans, which would have required a Roman-style census as a means of organizing the local citizenries. In the absence of direct administration, military service was the context in which Italians most regularly experienced Roman authority.
Fifth, Rome occasionally deployed its troops in Italy to maintain social order. Rome suppressed an uprising of serfs in Etruscan Volsinii in 265 and a sedition in Patavium in 175. When the massive influx of slaves raised the spectre of rebellions across Italy, Roman troops were deployed to put down uprisings: in 195, 5,000 slaves were executed in Latin Setia; in 196 the praetor was sent with his urban legion to Etruria to fight a pitched battle in which many slaves were killed; and the praetor of 185 dealt with rebellious slaves in Apulia, condemning 7,000 to death. The later slave revolt in Sicily (c. 135–132) was not contained so effectively and grew to include perhaps 70,000. The slaves defeated the first consular army sent in 134; the efforts of two more consuls were required to restore order. The revolts, unusual for their frequency and size, are not to be explained by abolitionist programs (nonexistent in antiquity) nor by maltreatment. The causes lay in the enslavement and importation of entire communities with their native leadership and in the free reign given to slave shepherds who roamed armed around the countryside serving as communication lines between slave plantations. These uprisings made it clear that the social fabric of Italy, put under stress by the transformations brought about by conquest, had to be protected by Roman force.
While the exercise of Roman authority and force was sometimes resented by Italians, Rome’s power made its mores and culture worthy of imitation. The Latin language and Roman political institutions slowly spread. A request from the old Campanian city of Cumae in 180 that it be allowed to change its official language from Oscan to Latin was a sign of things to come. Richard P. Saller
The Late Republic (133–31 bc)
The aftermath of the victories
The fall of Carthage and Corinth did not even mark a temporary end to warfare. War and military glory were an essential part of the Roman aristocratic ethos and, hence, of Roman political life. Apart from major wars still to come, small wars on the frontiers of Roman power—never precisely fixed—continued to provide an essential motive in Roman history: in Spain, Sardinia, Illyria, and Macedonia, barbarians could be defeated and triumphs won. Thus the limits of Roman power were gradually extended and the territories within them pacified, while men of noble stock rivaled the virtus of their ancestors and new men staked their own competing claims, winning glory essential to political advancement and sharing the booty with their officers and soldiers. Cicero could still depict it as a major disgrace for Lucius Piso (consul; 58 bc) that he had won no triumph in the traditionally “triumphal” province of Macedonia. Nonetheless, the coincidence of the capture of Corinth and Carthage was even in antiquity regarded as a turning point in Roman history: it was the end (for the time being) of warfare against civilized powers, in which the danger was felt to be greater and the glory and the booty were superior to those won against barbarian tribes.
Changes in provincial administration
The first immediate effect was on the administration of the empire. The military basis of provincial administration remained: the governor (as he is called) was in Roman eyes a commander with absolute and unappealable powers over all except Roman citizens, within the limits of the territory (his provincia) assigned to him (normally) by the Senate. He was always prepared—and in some provinces expected—to fight and win. But it had been found that those unlimited powers were often abused and that Senate control could not easily be asserted at increasing distances from Rome. For political and perhaps for moral reasons, excessive abuse without hope of a remedy could not be permitted. Hence, when the decision to annex Carthage and Macedonia had been made in principle (149 bc), a permanent court (the quaestio repetundarum) was established at Rome to hear complaints against former commanders and, where necessary, to assure repayment of illegal exactions. No penalty for offenders was provided, and there was no derogation from the commander’s powers during his tenure; nevertheless, the step was a landmark in the recognition of imperial responsibility, and it was also to have important effects on Roman politics.
Another result of the new conquests was a major administrative departure. When Africa and Macedonia became provinciae to be regularly assigned to commanders, it was decided to break with precedent by not increasing the number of senior magistrates (praetors). Instead, prorogation—the device of leaving a magistrate in office pro magistratu (“in place of a magistrate”) after his term had expired, which had hitherto been freely used when emergencies had led to shortages of regular commanders—was established as part of the administrative system: thenceforth, every year at least two praetors would have to be retained as promagistrates. This was the beginning of the dissociation between urban magistracy and foreign command that was to become a cardinal principle of the system of Sulla and of the developed Roman Empire.
Social and economic ills
It is not clear to what extent the temporary end of the age of major wars helped to produce the crisis of the Roman Republic. The general view of thinking Romans was that the relaxation of external pressures led to internal disintegration. (This has happened in other states, and the view is not to be lightly dismissed.) Moreover, the end of large-scale booty led to economic recession in Rome, thus intensifying poverty and discontent. But the underlying crisis had been building up over a long period.
The reform movement of the Gracchi (133–121 bc)
From the state’s point of view, the chief effect was a decline in military manpower. The minimum property qualification for service was lowered and the minimum age (17) ignored; resistance became frequent, especially to the distant and unending guerrilla war in Spain.
The program and career of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus
Tiberius Gracchus, grandson of Scipio Africanus and son of the Gracchus who had conquered the Celtiberi and treated them well, was quaestor in Mancinus’ army when it faced annihilation; on the strength of his family name, he personally negotiated the peace that saved it. When the Senate—on the motion of his cousin Scipio Aemilianus, who later finished the war—renounced the peace, Tiberius felt aggrieved; he joined a group of senior senators hostile to Aemilianus and with ideas on reform. Elected tribune for 133, in Scipio’s absence, Tiberius attempted to find a solution for the social and military crisis, with the political credit to go to himself and his backers. Tiberius had no intention of touching private property; his idea was to enforce the legal but widely ignored limit of 500 iugera (309 acres) on occupation of public land and to use the land thus retrieved for settling landless citizens, who would both regain a secure living and be liable for service. The slave war in Sicily, which had lasted several years and had threatened to spread to Italy, had underlined both the danger of using large numbers of slaves on the land and the need for a major increase in military citizen manpower.
Tiberius’ proposal was bound to meet with opposition in the Senate, which consisted of large landowners. On the advice of his eminent backers, he took his bill—which made various concessions to those asked to obey the law and hand back excess public land—straight to the Assembly of the Plebs, where it found wide support. This procedure was not revolutionary; bills directly concerning the people appear to have been frequently passed in this way. But his opponents persuaded another aristocratic tribune, Marcus Octavius, to veto the bill. Tiberius tried the constitutional riposte: an appeal to the Senate for arbitration. But the Senate was unwilling to help, and Octavius was unwilling to negotiate over his veto—an action apparently unprecedented, though not (strictly speaking) unconstitutional. Tiberius had to improvise a way out of the impasse. He met Octavius’ action with a similarly unprecedented retort and had Octavius deposed by the Assembly. He then passed his bill in a less conciliatory form and had himself, his father-in-law, and his brother appointed commissioners with powers to determine boundaries of public land, confiscate excess acreage, and divide it in inalienable allotments among landless citizens. As it happened, envoys from Pergamum had arrived to inform the Senate that Attalus III had died and made the Roman people his heirs (provided the cities of his kingdom were left free). Tiberius, at whose house the envoys were lodging, anticipated Senate debate and had the inheritance accepted by the people and the money used to finance his agrarian schemes.
Tiberius’ opponents now charged him with aiming at tyranny, a charge that many may well have believed: redistribution of land was connected with demagogic tyranny in Hellenistic states, and Tiberius’ subsequent actions had been high-handed and beyond the flexible borderline of what was regarded as mos majorum (constitutional custom). Fearing prosecution once his term in office was over, he now began to canvass for a second tribunate—another unprecedented act, bound to reinforce fears of tyranny. The elections took place in an atmosphere of violence, with nearly all his tribunician colleagues now opposed to him. When the consul Publius Scaevola, on strict legal grounds, refused to act against him, Publius Scipio Nasica, the chief pontiff, led a number of senators and their clients to the Assembly, and Tiberius was killed in a resulting scuffle. Widespread and bloody repression followed in 132. Thus political murder and political martyrdom were introduced into Roman politics.
The land commission, however, was allowed to continue because it could not easily be stopped. Some evidence of its activities survives. By 129, perhaps running out of available land held by citizens, it began to apply the Gracchan law to public land held by Italian individuals or communities. This had probably not been envisaged by Tiberius, just as he did not include noncitizens among the beneficiaries of distributions. The Senate, on the motion of Scipio Aemilianus, upheld the Italians’ protests, transferring decisions concerning Italian-held land from the commission to a consul. This seriously hampered the commission’s activities. Marcus Fulvius Flaccus, chairman of the commission and consul in 125, tried to solve the problem by offering the Italians the citizenship (or alternatively the right to appeal against Roman executive acts to the Roman people) in return for bringing their holdings of public land under the Gracchan law. This aroused fears of uncontrollable political repercussions. Flaccus was ordered by the Senate to fight a war in southern France (where he gained a triumph) and had to abandon his proposal. There is no sign of widespread Italian interest in it at this time, though the revolt of the Latin colony Fregellae (destroyed 125) may be connected with its failure.
The program and career of Gaius Sempronius Gracchus
In 123 Gaius Gracchus, a younger brother of Tiberius, became tribune. He had served on Tiberius’ land commission and had supported Flaccus’ plan. Making the most of his martyred brother’s name, Gaius embarked on a scheme of general reform in which, for the first time in Rome, Greek theoretical influences may be traced. Among many reforms—including provision for a stable and cheap wheat price and for the foundation of colonies (one on the site of Carthage), to which Italians were admitted—two major ideas stand out: to increase public revenues (both from the empire and from taxes) and pass the benefit on to the people; and to raise the wealthiest nonsenators (particularly the equites, holders of the “public horse”—who received state financial aid for the purchase and upkeep of their horses—and next to senators in social standing) to a position from which, without actually taking part in the process of government, they could watch over senatorial administration and make it more responsible. The idea was evoked by Tiberius’ death. As early as 129 a law compelled senators to surrender the “public horse” (which hitherto they had also held) and possibly in other ways enhanced the group consciousness and privileges of the equites. Regarding the increase of public revenue, Gaius put the publicani (public contractors, hitherto chiefly concerned with army and building contracts and with farming minor taxes) in charge of the main tax of Asia—a rich province formed out of Attalus’ inheritance, which would henceforth provide Rome with the major part of its income. This was expected both to reduce senatorial corruption and to improve efficiency. Gaius also put eminent nonsenators (probably defined by wealth, but perhaps limited to the equites, or equestrian class) in charge of the quaestio repetundarum, whose senatorial members had shown too much leniency to their colleagues, and he imposed severe penalties on senators convicted by that court. Finally, in a second tribunate, he hoped to give citizenship to Latins and Latin rights to other Italians, with the help of Flaccus who, though a distinguished former consul, took the unique step of becoming tribune. But a consul and a tribune of 122 together persuaded the citizen voters that it was against their interests to share the privileges of citizenship: the bill was defeated, and Gaius failed in his attempt to be re-elected once more. In 121, preparing (as private citizens) to use force to oppose the cancellation of some of their laws, Gaius and Flaccus were killed in a riot, and many of their followers were executed.
During the next decade the measures benefiting the people were largely abolished, though the Gracchan land distributions, converted into private property, did temporarily strengthen the Roman citizen peasantry. The provisions giving power to wealthy nonsenators could not be touched, for political reasons, and they survived as the chief effect of Gaius’ tribunates. The court seems to have worked better than before, and, during the next generation, several other standing criminal courts were instituted, as were occasional ad hoc tribunals, always with the same class of jurors. In 106 a law adding senators to the juries was passed, but it remained in force for only a short time.
The republic (c. 121–91 bc)
War against Jugurtha
Since Roman historians were no more interested in internal factional politics than (on the whole) in social or economic developments, the struggles of the aristocratic families must be pieced together from chance information. It would be mere paradox to deny the importance in republican Rome, as in better known aristocratic republics, of family feuds, alliances, and policies, and parts of the picture are known—e.g., the central importance of the family of the Metelli, prominent in politics for a generation after the Gracchi and dominant for part of that time. In foreign affairs the client kingdom of Numidia—loyal ever since its institution by Scipio Africanus—assumed quite unwarranted importance when a succession crisis developed there soon after 120.
After the death of its first ruler, Masinissa (148), Numidia was divided into three parts, each to be ruled by one of Masinissa’s sons. However, two of them soon died, and power fell to the eldest, Micipsa, who himself had two sons. Micipsa also adopted Jugurtha, the natural son of his brother Mastanabal. Following Micipsa’s death in 118, Jugurtha sought to oust his two cousins from their shares of the divided Numidia, relying on his superior ability and aristocratic Roman connections. Rome’s usual diplomatic methods failed to stop Jugurtha from disposing of his cousins, but the massacre of Italian settlers at Cirta by his soldiers forced the Senate to declare war (112). The war was waged reluctantly and ineffectively, with the result that charges of bribery were freely bandied about by demagogic tribunes taking advantage of suspicion of aristocratic political behaviour that had smoldered ever since the Gracchan crisis. Significantly, some eminent men, hated from those days, were now convicted of corruption. The Metelli, however, emerged unscathed, and Quintus Metellus, consul in 109, was entrusted with the war in Africa. He waged it with obvious competence but failed to finish it and thus gave Gaius Marius, a senior officer, his chance.
The career of Gaius Marius
Marius, born of an equestrian family at Arpinum, had attracted the attention of Scipio Aemilianus as a young soldier and, by shrewd political opportunism, had risen to the praetorship and married into the patrician family of the Julii Caesares. Though Marius had deeply offended the Metelli, once his patrons, his considerable military talents had induced Quintus Metellus to take him to Africa as a legatus. Marius intrigued against his commander in order to gain a consulship; he was elected (chiefly with the help of the equites and antiaristocratic tribunes) for 107 and was given charge of the war by special vote of the people. He did little better than Metellus had, but in 105 his quaestor Lucius Sulla, in delicate and dangerous negotiations, brought about the capture of Jugurtha, opportunely winning the war for Marius and Rome.
During the preceding decade a serious threat to Italy had developed in the north. Starting in 125, several Roman commanders (Marcus Flaccus has been noted) had fought against Ligurian and Gallic tribes in southern France and had finally established a Roman sphere of influence there: a road had been built linking Italy with Spain, and some garrison posts probably secured it; finally, a colony was settled at Narbonne, an important road junction (c. 118). But, unwilling to extend administrative responsibilities, the Senate had refused to establish a regular provincia. Then some migrating German tribes, chief of them the Cimbri, after defeating a Roman consul, invaded southern France, attracting native sympathy and finding little effective Roman opposition. Two more consular armies suffered defeat, and in October 105 a consul and proconsul with their forces were destroyed at Orange. There was panic in Rome, allayed only by the firm action of the other consul, Publius Rutilius Rufus.
At this moment news of Marius’ success in Africa arrived, and he was at once dispensed from legal restrictions and again elected consul for 104. After a brilliant triumph that restored Roman morale, he took over the army prepared and trained by Rutilius. He was reelected consul year after year, while the German tribes delayed attacking Italy. Finally, in 102–101, he annihilated them at Aquae Sextiae (Aix-les-Bains) and, with his colleague, Quintus Catulus, on the Campi Raudii (near the Po delta). Another triumph and a sixth consulship (in 101) were his reward.
In his first consulship, Marius had taken a step of great (and probably unrecognized) importance: aware of the difficulties long endemic in the traditional system of recruitment, he had ignored property qualifications in enrolling his army and, as a result, had recruited ample volunteers among men who had nothing to lose. This radical solution was thenceforth generally imitated, and conscription became confined to emergencies (such as the Social and Civil wars). He also enhanced the importance of the legionary eagle (the standard), thus beginning the process that led to each legion’s having a continuing corporate identity. At the same time, Rutilius introduced arms drill and reformed the selection of senior officers. Various tactical reforms in due course led to the increasing prominence of the cohort (one-tenth of a legion) as a tactical unit and the total reliance on non-Roman auxiliaries for light-armed and cavalry service. The precise development of these reforms cannot be traced, but they culminated in the much more effective armies of Pompey and Caesar.
Marius’ African army had been unwilling to engage in another war, and Marius preferred to use newly levied soldiers (no longer difficult to find). But neither he nor the Senate seemed aware of any responsibilities to the veterans. In 103 a tribune, Lucius Saturninus, offered to pass a law providing land in Africa for them in return for Marius’ support for some anti-oligarchic activities of his own. Marius agreed, and the large lots distributed to his veterans (both Roman and Italian) turned out to be the beginning of the Romanization of Africa. In 100, with the German wars ended, Saturninus again proved a welcome ally, arranging for the settlement of Marius’ veterans in Gaul. An incidental effect was the departure of Marius’ old commander and subsequent enemy, Quintus Metellus, who refused to recognize the validity of Saturninus’ law and, choosing martyrdom, went into exile. But this time Saturninus exacted a high price. With his ally, the praetor Gaius Glaucia, he introduced laws to gain the favour of plebs and equites and proceeded to provide for the settlement of veterans of wars in Macedonia and Sicily in the same way as for those of Marius’ war. He planned to seek reelection for 99, with Glaucia illegally gaining the consulship. Violence and even murder were freely used to accomplish these aims.
Marius now had to make a choice. Saturninus and Glaucia might secure him the continuing favour of the plebs and perhaps the equites, though they might also steal it for themselves. But as the saviour of his country and six times consul, he now hoped to become an elder statesman (princeps), accepted and honoured by those who had once looked down on him as an upstart. To this end he had long laboured, dealing out favours to aristocrats who might make useful allies. This was the reward Marius desired for his achievement; he never thought of revolution or tyranny. Hence, when called on to save the state from his revolutionary allies, he could not refuse. He imprisoned them and their armed adherents and did not prevent their being lynched. Yet, having saved the oligarchy from revolution, he receivedlittle reward; he lost the favour of the plebs, while the oligarchs, in view of both his birth and his earlier unscrupulous ambition, refused to accept him as their equal. Metellus was recalled; this was a bitter blow to Marius’ prestige, and he preferred to leave Rome and visit Asia.
Before long a face-saving compromise was found, and Marius returned; but in the 90s he played no major part. Though he held his own when his friends and clients were attacked in the courts, his old aristocratic protégés now found more promising allies. Sulla is typical: closely associated with Marius in his early career, he was by 91 ready to take the lead in attacking Marius and (significantly) found eager support. The oligarchy could not forgive Marius.
Wars and dictatorship (c. 91–80 bc)
Events in Asia
In foreign affairs the 90s were dominated by Asia, Rome’s chief source of income. Mithradates VI, king of Pontus, had built a large empire around the Black Sea and was probing and intriguing in the Roman sphere of influence. Marius had met him and had given him a firm warning, temporarily effective: Mithradates had proper respect for Roman power. Scheming to annex Cappadocia, he had been thwarted by the Senate’s instructing Sulla, as proconsul, to install a pro-Roman king there in 96–95. (It was on this occasion that Sulla received a Parthian embassy—the first contact between the two powers.) But dissatisfaction in the Roman province of Asia gave new hope to Mithradates. Ineffectively organized after annexation and corrupt in its cities’ internal administration, it was soon overrun with Italian businessmen and Roman tax collectors. When the Senate realized the danger, it sent its most distinguished jurist, Quintus Mucius Scaevola (consul in 95 and pontifex maximus), on an unprecedented mission to reorganize Asia (94). He took Publius Rutilius Rufus—jurist, stoic philosopher, and former consul—with him as his senior officer, and after Scaevola’s return Rutilius remained behind, firmly applying the new principles they had established. This caused an outcry from businessmen, whose profits Scaevola had kept within bounds; he was prosecuted for “extortion” in 92 and convicted after a trial in which Roman publicani and businessmen unscrupulously used their power among the class that provided criminal juries. The verdict revealed the breakdown of Gaius Gracchus’ system: the class he had raised to watch over the Senate now held irresponsible power, making orderly administration impossible and endangering the empire. Various leading senators were at once vexatiously prosecuted, and political chaos threatened.
Developments in Italy
The 90s also saw dangerous developments in Italy. In the 2nd century bc, Italians as a whole had shown little desire for Roman citizenship and had been remarkably submissive under exploitation and ill-treatment. The most active of their governing class flourished in overseas business, and the more traditionally minded were content to have their oligarchic rule supported by Rome. Their admission to citizenship had been proposed as a by-product of the Gracchan reforms. By 122 it had become clear that the Roman people agreed with the oligarchy in rejecting it. The sacrifices demanded of Italy in the Numidian and German wars probably increased dissatisfaction among Italians with their patently inferior status. Marius gave citizenship to some as a reward for military distinction—illegally, but his standing (auctoritas) sufficed to defend his actions. Saturninus admitted Italians to veteran settlements and tried to gain citizenship for some by full admission to Roman colonies. The censors of 97–96, aristocrats connected with Marius, shared his ideas and freely placed eminent Italians on the citizen registers. This might have allayed dissatisfaction, but the consuls of 95 passed a law purging the rolls and providing penalties for those guilty of fraudulent arrogation. The result was insecurity and danger for many leading Italians. By 92 there was talk of violence and conspiracy among desperate men.
It was in these circumstances that the eminent young noble, Marcus Livius Drusus, became tribune for 91 and hoped to solve the menacing accumulation of problems by means of a major scheme of reforms. He attracted the support of the poor by agrarian and colonial legislation and tried to have all Italians admitted to citizenship and to solve the jury problem by a compromise: the courts would be transferred to the Senate, and 300 equites would be admitted to it. (To cope with the increase in business it would need this expansion in size.) Some leading senators, frightened at the dangerous situation that had developed, gave weighty support. Had Drusus succeeded, the poor and the Italians might have been satisfied; the equites, deprived of their most ambitious element by promotion, might have acquiesced; and the Senate, always governed by the prestige of the noble principes rather than by votes and divisions, could have returned, little changed by the infusion of new blood, to its leading position in the process of government. But Drusus failed. Some members of each class affected were more conscious of the loss than of the gain; and an active consul, Lucius Philippus, provided leadership for their disparate opposition. After much violence, Drusus’ laws were declared invalid. Finally he himself was assassinated. The Italians now rose in revolt (the Social War), and in Rome a special tribunal, manned by the Gracchan jury class, convicted many of Drusus’ supporters until the Senate succeeded in suspending its sittings because of the military danger.
The first year of the Social War (90) was dangerous: the tribes of central and southern Italy, traditionally among the best soldiers in Rome’s wars, organized in a confederacy for the struggle that had been forced upon them. Fortunately all but one of the Latin cities—related to Rome by blood and tradition and specially favoured by Roman law—remained loyal: their governing class had for some time had the privilege of automatically acquiring Roman citizenship by holding local office. Moreover, Rome now showed its old ability to act quickly and wisely in emergencies: the consul Lucius Caesar passed a law giving citizenship to all Italians who wanted it. The measure came in time to head off major revolts in Umbria and Etruria, which accepted at once.
Civil war and the rule of Lucius Sulla
In 89 the war in central Italy was won, and Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo celebrated a triumph. Attention now turned to the East, where Mithradates had taken advantage of Rome’s troubles to expel the kings of Cappadocia and Bithynia. A Roman embassy restored them, and he withdrew. However, when the envoys incited Bithynian incursions into his territory, Mithradates launched a major offensive; he overran the two kingdoms and invaded Roman territory, where he attracted the sympathy of the natives by executing thousands of Italians and defeating and capturing the Roman commanders in the area.
In Rome, various men, including Marius, had hoped for the Eastern command. But it went to Sulla, elected consul for 88 after distinguished service in the Social War. Publius Sulpicius, a tribune in that year and an old friend of Drusus, tried to continue the latter’s policy of justice to the Italians by abolishing the gerrymandering that in practice deprived the new citizens of an effective vote. Finding the oligarchy firmly opposed, he gained the support of Marius (who still commanded much loyalty) for his plans by having the Eastern command transferred to him. After much street-fighting, the consuls escaped from Rome, and Sulpicius’ bills were passed. Sulla’s response was totally unforeseen: he appealed to the army he had led in the Social War, which was still engaged in mopping-up operations in Campania, and persuaded them to march on Rome. He occupied the city and executed Sulpicius; Marius and others escaped. Significantly, Sulla’s officers left him. It was the first time a private army of citizens had occupied Rome—an effect of Marius’ army reform, which had ended by creating a “client army” loyal chiefly to its commander, and of the Social War, which had made the use of force within Italy seem commonplace. The end of the republic was foreshadowed.
Having cowed Rome into acquiescence and having passed some legislation, Sulla left for the East. Cinna, one of the consuls of 87, at once called for the overthrow of Sulla’s measures. Resisted by his colleague Octavius, he left Rome to collect an army and, with the help of Marius, occupied the city after a siege. Several leading men were killed or condemned to death, Sulla and his supporters were outlawed, and (after Marius’ death early in 86) another commander was sent to Asia. The policy now changed to one of reconciliation: the Social War was wound up, and the government gained wide acceptance until Cinna was killed by mutinous soldiers (84).
Sulla meanwhile easily defeated Mithradates’ forces in two battles in Boeotia, took Athens, which under a revolutionary regime had declared for Mithradates, and cleared the king’s army out of Greece. While negotiating with Cinna’s government, Sulla also entered upon negotiations with Mithradates and, when he heard of Cinna’s death, quickly made peace and an alliance with Mithradates, driving the government’s commander in Asia to suicide. After wintering his troops in the rich cities of Asia, Sulla crossed into Greece and then into Italy, where his veteran army broke all resistance and occupied Rome (82). Sulla was elected dictator and, while Italy and all the provinces except Spain were quickly reduced, began a reign of terror (the “proscriptions”), in which hundreds of his enemies or those of his adherents were killed without trial, while their property went to enrich him and his friends. Wherever in Italy he had met resistance, land was expropriated and given to his soldiers for settlement.
While the terror prevailed, Sulla used his powers to put through a comprehensive program of reform (81). Although he had twice taken Rome with a private proletarian army, he had earlier had connections with the inner circles of the oligarchy, and after Cinna’s death some eminent men who had refused to collaborate with Cinna joined Sulla. By the time Sulla’s success seemed certain, even most of those who had collaborated were on his side, and he was acclaimed as the defender of the nobility who had defeated an illegal revolutionary regime. His reforms aimed chiefly at stabilizing Senate authority by removing alternative centres of power. The tribunate was emasculated; the censors’ powers were reduced; provincial governors were subjected to stricter Senate control; and the equites, who had been purged of Sulla’s opponents by the proscriptions, were deprived of some symbols of dignity and made leaderless by the inclusion of 300 of Sulla’s chief supporters in the Senate. The jury reform of Gaius Gracchus, seen by some leading senators as the prime cause of political disintegration, could now be undone, and the criminal courts could once more become a monopoly of senators.
Sulla’s measures were by no means merely reactionary. His program was basically that of Marcus Drusus. His overriding aim was the restoration of stable government, and this could only come from the Senate, directed by the principes (former consuls and those they chose to consult). Sulla accepted and even extended recent developments where they seemed useful: the Italians retained full citizenship; the system of standing criminal courts was expanded; the practice of praetors normally spending their year of office in Rome and then going to provinces for a second year was extended to consuls and became an integral part of his system. To prevent long command of armies (which might lead to careers like his own), Sulla increased the number of praetors so that, in principle and in normal circumstances, each province might have a new governor every year. As for the overriding problem of poverty, his contribution to solving it was to settle tens of thousands of his veterans on land confiscated from enemies in Italy; having become landowners, the veterans would be ready to defend the social order, in which they now had a stake, against the dispossessed.
At the beginning of 80 Sulla laid down his dictatorship and became merely consul, with the senior Metellus (Quintus Metellus Pius), a relative of his wife, as his colleague. The state of emergency was officially ended. At the end of the year, after seeing to the election of two reliable consuls, Sulla retired to Campania as a private citizen; he hoped that the restored oligarchy would learn to govern the state he had handed over to them. For 78 Marcus Lepidus, an ambitious patrician whom Sulla disliked and distrusted, was elected consul. Sulla did not intervene. Within a few months, Sulla was dead. Lepidus at once attacked his system, using the grievances of the expropriated as a rallying cry and his province of Gaul as a base. But he was easily defeated by his former colleague Quintus Catulus, assisted by young Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey).
The Roman state in the two decades after Sulla (79–60 bc)
The early career of Pompey
Pompey was the son of Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, who had triumphed after the Social War but had incurred general hatred because of cold-blooded duplicity during the troubles of 88 and 87. After Strabo’s death, young Pompey, who had served under him and inherited his dubiously won wealth, was protected by Cinna’s government against his father’s enemies. Following in his father’s footsteps, he deserted the government after Cinna’s death, raised a force among his father’s veterans in central Italy, and helped to conquer Italy and, in a lightning campaign, Sicily and the province of Africa for Sulla. Though not old enough to hold any regular magistracy (he was born in 106), he had, from these military bases, blackmailed Sulla into granting him a triumph (81) and had married into the core of the Sullan oligarchy. Out of pique against Sulla, he had supported Lepidus’ election for 78, but he had too great a stake in the Sullan system to permit Lepidus to overthrow it.
Meanwhile a more serious challenge to the system had arisen in Iberia. Quintus Sertorius, a former praetor of tough Sabine gentry stock, had refused to follow most of his social betters in joining Sulla; instead he had left for Spain, where he claimed to represent the legitimate government. Although acting throughout as a Roman proconsul, with a “counter-Senate” of eminent Roman citizens, Sertorius won the enthusiastic support of the native population by his fairness, honesty, and charisma, and he soon held most of the Iberian Peninsula, defending it successfully even against a large force under Quintus Metellus Pius. When the consuls of 77 would have nothing to do with this war, Pompey was entrusted by the Senate, through the efforts of his eminent friends and sponsors, with the task of assisting Metellus. The war dragged on for years, with little glory for the Roman commanders. Although Sertorius had many sympathizers in Italy, superior numbers and resources finally wore him down, and he was assassinated by a Roman officer. Pompey easily defeated the remnants of Sertorius’ forces in 72.
The death of Nicomedes IV of Bithynia (74) led to another major war. Like Attalus of Pergamum, Nicomedes left his kingdom to Rome, and this provoked Mithradates, who was in contact with Sertorius and knew of Rome’s difficulties, to challenge Rome again. The Eastern command again led to intrigues in Rome. The command finally went to Lucius Lucullus, a relative of Sulla and consul in 74, who hoped to build up a countervailing power in the East.
At the same time, Marcus Antonius, father of the later Triumvir, was given a command against the pirates in the eastern Mediterranean (whom his father had already fought in 102–100), partly, perhaps, as further reinsurance against Pompey. With Italian manpower heavily committed, a minor slave rising led by Spartacus (73) assumed threatening dimensions, until Marcus Crassus (an old Sullan and profiteer in the proscriptions) volunteered to accept a special command and defeated the slaves. At this point (71) Pompey returned from Spain with his army, crucified the remnants of the slave army, and claimed credit for the victory.
Pompey and Crassus
He and Crassus now confronted each other, each demanding the consulship for 70, though Pompey had held no regular magistracy and was not a senator. Agreeing to join forces, both secured it.
During their consulship, the political, though not the administrative, part of the Sullan settlement was repealed. The tribunes’ powers were fully restored; criminal juries were divided between senators and wealthy nonsenators; and, for the first time since Sulla, two censors—both supporters of Pompey—were elected, who purged the Senate and, in compiling the registers, at last fully implemented the Italians’ citizenship. The year 70 also saw the prosecution of Verres (son of a “new man” and Sullan profiteer), who had surpassed the liberal Roman conventions in exploiting his province of Sicily. For future impunity he relied on his aristocratic connections (especially the Metelli and their friends), his fortune, and the known corruptibility of the Sullan senatorial juries. But Verres was unlucky. First, he had ill-treated some of Pompey’s important Sicilian clients, thus incurring Pompey’s displeasure; next, his case coincided with the anti-Sullan reaction of 70; finally, the Sicilians succeeded in persuading Cicero—an ambitious young “new man” from Arpinum hoping to imitate the success of his fellow citizen Marius by means of his rhetorical ability—to undertake the prosecution. Despite obstruction from Verres’ friends, Cicero collected massive evidence against him, presented his case to fit into the political context of the year, and obtained Verres’ conviction as an act of expiation for the shortcomings of the Sullan order.
The year 70 thus marked the loss of control by the Sullan establishment. The nobility (families descended from consuls) continued to gain most of the consulships, with the old patriciate (revived by Sulla after a long decline) stronger than for generations; the Senate still supervised administration and made ordinary political decisions; the system continued to rely essentially on mos majorum (constitutional custom) and auctoritas (prestige)—potent forces in the status society of the Roman Republic. The solid bases of law and power that Sulla had tried to give it had been surrendered, however. The demagogue—tribune or consul—could use the legal machinery of the popular assembly (hence such men are called populares), while the commander could rely on his army in the pursuit of private ambition. The situation that Sulla had tried to remedy now recurred, made worse by his intervention. His massacres and proscriptions had weeded out the defenders of lawful government, and his rewards had gone to the timeservers and the unscrupulous. The large infusion of equites into the Senate had intensified the effect. While eliminating the serious friction between the two classes, which had made the state ungovernable by 91, it had filled the Senate with men whose tradition was the opposite of that sense of mission and public service that had animated the best of the aristocracy. Few men in the new ruling class saw beyond self-interest and self-indulgence.
One result was that massive bribery and civil disorder in the service of ambition became endemic. Laws were repeatedly passed to stop them, but they remained ineffective because few found it in their interest to enforce them. Exploitation of the provinces did not decrease after Verres: governors (still with unlimited powers) feathered their own nests and were expected to provide for all their friends. Extortion cases became a political ritual, with convictions impossible to obtain. Cicero, thenceforth usually counsel for the defense, presented hair-raising behaviour as commonplace and claimed it as acceptable. The Senate’s traditional opposition to annexation faded out. Pompey made Syria into a province and added a large part of Pontus to Bithynia (inherited in 74 and occupied in 70); the demagogue Clodius annexed Cyprus—driving its king to suicide—to pay for his massive grain distributions in Rome; Caesar, finally, conquered Gaul by open aggression and genocide and bled it white for the benefit of his friends and his ambitions. Crassus would have done the same with Parthia, had he succeeded. Opposition to all this in the Senate, where it appeared, was based on personal or political antagonism. If the robber barons were attacked on moral grounds, it was because of the use they made of their power in Rome.
Politically, the 60s lay under the shadow of Pompey. Refusing to take an ordinary province in 69, he waited for his chance. It came in 67 when his adherent Gabinius, as tribune, secured him, against the opposition of all important men, an extraordinary command with unprecedented powers to deal with the pirates. Pompey succeeded within a few months where Antonius and others had failed. The equites and the people were delighted because trade, including Rome’s food imports, would now be secure. Meanwhile Lucullus had driven Mithradates out of Anatolia and into Armenia; but he had offended Roman businessmen by strict control and his own soldiers and officers by strict discipline. Faced with mutinies, he suffered a reverse and became vulnerable to attacks in Rome. In 66 another tribunician law appointed Pompey, fresh from his naval victories, to take over supreme command in the East, which he did at once, studiously insulting his predecessor. He quickly defeated Mithradates and procured his death, then spent some time in a total reorganization of the East, where Asia (the chief source of revenue) was protected by three further provinces and a ring of client states beyond the frontier. The whole of the East now stood in his clientela (clientship), and most of it owed him money as well. He returned by far the wealthiest man in Rome.
Political suspicion and violence
Meanwhile Roman politics had been full of suspicion and violence, much of it stirred up by Crassus who, remembering 71, feared Pompey’s return and tried to make his own power impregnable. There was much material for revolution, with poverty (especially in the country, among families dispossessed by Sulla) and debt (among both the poor and the dissolute rich) providing suitable issues for unscrupulous populares. One such man, the patrician Catiline, after twice failing to gain the consulship by traditional bribery and intrigue, put himself at the head of a movement planning a coup d’état in Rome to coincide with an armed rising in Italy (late 63). Cicero, as consul, defeated these efforts and, relying on the doubtful legality of a Senate vote in support, had Catiline’s eminent Roman associates executed. Catiline himself fell in a desperate battle.
For Cicero—the “new man” who had made his way to the top by his own oratorical and political skill, obliging everyone by unstinting service, representing Pompey’s interests in Rome while avoiding offense to Pompey’s enemies—this was the climax of his life. Like his compatriot Marius, he had saved the state for its rulers: he had taken resolute action when those rulers were weak and vacillating; and, like Marius, he got small thanks for it. Pompey was miffed at having to share his fame with a municipal upstart, and eminent gentlemen could not forgive that upstart for having driven patricians to their death.
Pompey’s return was peaceful. Like Marius, he wanted recognition, not tyranny. He dismissed his army, to the surprise of Crassus and others, and basked in the glory of his triumph and the honours voted to him. But having given up power, he found himself caught in a net of constitutional obstruction woven by his politically experienced enemies and was unable to have either of his principal demands met: land for his veterans and the ratification of his arrangements in the East. It was at this point that Caesar returned from Spain.
Gaius Julius Caesar, descended (as he insisted) from kings and gods, had shown talent and ambition in his youth: he opposed Sulla but without inviting punishment, married into the oligarchy but advocated popular causes, vocally defended Pompey’s interests while aiding Crassus in his intrigues and borrowing a fortune from him, flirted with Catiline but refused to dabble in revolution, then worked to save those whom Cicero executed. In 63 he won a startling success: defeating two distinguished principes, he, who had not yet been praetor, was elected pontifex maximus—a post of supreme dignity, power, and patronage. Despite some cynicism among Roman aristocrats toward the state religion, its ceremonial was kept up and was a recognized means of political manipulation; thus priesthoods could give more lasting power than magistracies, in addition to the cachet of social success. Young Caesar was now head of the hierarchy. After his praetorship (62), Caesar successfully governed Spain, clearing a surplus sufficient to pay off his debts. On returning to Rome, he naturally hoped for the consulship of 59; but his enemies, by legal chicanery, forced him to choose between standing for office and celebrating a triumph. He gave up the triumph and easily became consul.
The final collapse of the Roman Republic (59–44 bc)
Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus
For his consulship Caesar fashioned an improbable alliance: his skill in having won the trust of both Crassus and Pompey enabled him to unite these two enemies in his support. Crassus had the connections, Pompey had the soldiers’ vote, and Caesar was consul and pontifex maximus. The combination (often misleadingly called the “first Triumvirate”) was invincible, especially since the consul Caesar had no scruples about countering legal obstruction with open force. Pompey got what he wanted, and so did Crassus (whose immediate need was a concession to the Asian tax farmers, in whose companies he probably had much of his capital). In return, Caesar got a special command in Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum for five years by vote of the people; the Senate itself, on Pompey’s motion, extended it to Transalpine Gaul. Marriage alliances sealed the compact, chief of them Pompey’s marriage to Caesar’s daughter Julia.
Caesar left for Gaul, but Rome was never the same; the shadow of the alliance hung over it, making the old-style politics impossible. In 58 Publius Clodius, another aristocratic demagogue, was tribune and defended Caesar’s interests. Cicero had incurred Clodius’ enmity and was now sacrificed to him: he was driven into exile as having unlawfully executed citizens in 63. By 57 Caesar’s allies had drifted back into rivalry. Pompey secured Cicero’s return, and Cicero at once tried to break up the alliance by attracting Pompey to the Senate’s side. Just when he seemed about to succeed, the three dynasts secretly met and revived their compact (56). Rome had to bow once more. In 55 Pompey and Crassus were consuls, and the contents of their secret agreement were slowly revealed. Caesar, whom his enemies had made efforts to recall, was prolonged in his command for five years and (it later appeared) had been promised another consulship straight after, to secure him against prosecution and give him a chance of another army command. Pompey was given a special command over all of Spain, which he exercised through deputies while he himself remained just outside Rome to keep an eye on the city. Crassus, who now needed glory and new wealth to equal those of his allies, was to attack Parthia with a large army. Thus the three dynasts would practically monopolize military power for the foreseeable future.
Cicero, among others, had to submit and was thenceforth their loyal spokesman. After his achievement of 63 he had dreamed of leading a coalition of all “right-thinking” men in Italy in defending the traditional oligarchy, but he had found little support among the oligarchy. He now used this fact to rationalize his surrender. His brother took service in Gaul under Caesar.
The dynasts’ pact did not even bring peace. Clodius, as tribune, had created a private army, and there was no state force to counter it. Pompey could have done it by calling his soldiers in, but the Senate did not trust him enough to request this, and Pompey did not wish to parade himself as an unashamed tyrant. Other men formed private armies in opposition to Clodius, and one Milo at last managed to have him killed after a scuffle (52). By then, however, Roman politics had radically and unexpectedly changed.
Political maneuvers
Julia died in 54, breaking the ties between Caesar and Pompey. Caesar pressed Pompey to renew them, but Pompey held off, preserving his freedom of action. Crassus’ Parthian campaign ended in disaster and in Crassus’ death (53). By 52 Pompey and Caesar stood face to face, still nominally friends but with no personal link between them and no common interests. Caesar, by conquering the whole of Gaul, had almost equaled Pompey’s prestige and, by his utterly ruthless way of waging war, Pompey’s wealth. Unlike Pompey, he used his wealth to dispense patronage and buy useful friends. At this point Pompey cautiously offered the oligarchy his support. It had much to give him that he wanted—control of the administrative machine, respectability, and the seal of public approval. Its leaders (even the intransigent young Cato, who had led opposition to the three individually long before their alliance and to their joint oppression of the state ever since) now recognized that acceptance of Pompey’s terms and surrender to his protection was their only chance of survival. Pompey at once turned firmly against Milo, who presented a political threat: if Milo could use the force that had killed Clodius to keep firm control of Rome, he—an ambitious man of known conservative views—might in due course offer an alternative and more trustworthy champion to the oligarchy. But he was not yet ready. Pompey forced them to make their choice at once, and they chose Pompey in preference. He was made sole consul and had Milo convicted by an intimidated court. Meanwhile he had made a marriage alliance with the noblest man in Rome, Quintus Metellus Scipio, who became his colleague in the consulship. The state had captured Pompey (or vice versa), and Caesar stood alone in opposition to both of them. During the next two years there were a series of maneuvers: the Senate leaders, with Pompey’s silent support, worked for Caesar’s recall, which would have meant his instantly sharing the fate of Milo; while Caesar and his agents in Rome tried to strike some bargain that would ensure his safety and his future in politics. Finally, Pompey declared himself, and, early in 49, the Senate voted to outlaw Caesar. Two tribunes supporting him (one of them Mark Antony) had to flee. By the time they reached him, Caesar had already crossed the Rubicon: he now had a cause.
Civil war
Pompey had exuded confidence over the outcome if it came to war. In fact, however, Caesar’s veterans were unbeatable, and both men knew it. To the disgust of his followers, Pompey evacuated Rome, then Italy. His plan was to bottle Caesar up in Italy and starve him out. But Caesar, in a lightning sweep, seized Massilia and Spain from Pompey’s commanders, then crossed into Greece, where a short campaign ended in Pompey’s decisive defeat at Pharsalus (48). Pompey fled to Egypt, where he was assassinated by a man hoping thus to curry Caesar’s favour. This was by no means the end of the war. Almost at once Caesar was nearly trapped at Alexandria, where he had intervened in a succession dispute; but he escaped and installed Cleopatra on the throne, for personal as well as political reasons. In Africa the Pompeian forces and their native allies were not defeated until Caesar himself moved against them and annihilated them at Thapsus. Cato, disdaining the victor’s pardon, committed suicide at Utica (46). In Spain, where Pompey’s name was still powerful, his sons organized a major rising, which Caesar himself again had to defeat at Munda (45) in the bloodiest battle of the war. By the time he returned, he had only a few months to live.
The dictatorship and assassination of Caesar
In Rome the administrative machine had inevitably been disrupted, and Caesar had always remained in control, as consul or as dictator. Those who had feared proscriptions, or hoped for them, were proved wrong. Some of Caesar’s enemies had their property confiscated, but it was sold at fair value; most were pardoned and suffered no loss. One of these was Cicero, who, after much soul-searching, had followed his conscience by joining Pompey before Pharsalus. Poverty and indebtedness were alleviated, but there was no wholesale cancellation of debts or redistribution of property, and many of Caesar’s adherents were disappointed. Nor was there a general reform of the republic. (Caesar’s only major reform was of the calendar: indeed, the Julian calendar proved adequate for centuries.) The number of senators and magistrates was increased, the citizenship was more freely given, and the province of Asia was relieved of some of its tax burden. But Caesar had no plan for reforming the system—not even to the extent that Sulla had tried to do, for Sulla had at least planned for his own retirement. For a time, honourable men, such as Cicero, hoped that the “Dictator for Settling the Constitution” (as Caesar called himself) would produce a real constitution—some return to free institutions. By late 45 that hope was dead. Caesar was everywhere, doing everything to an almost superhuman degree. He had no solution for the crisis of the republic except to embody it in himself and none at all for the hatred of his peers, which he knew this was causing. He began to accept more and more of the honours that a subservient Senate invidiously offered, until finally he reached a position perilously close to kingship (an accursed term in Rome) and even deification. Whether he passed those hazy boundary lines is much debated and not very important. He had put himself in a position in which no Roman ought to have been and which no Roman aristocrat could tolerate. As a loyal friend of his was later to say: “With all his genius, he saw no way out.” To escape the problem or postpone it, he prepared for a Parthian war to avenge Crassus—a project most likely to have ended in similar disaster. Before he could start on it, about 60 men—former friends and old enemies, honourable patriots and men with grievances—struck him down in the Senate on March 15, 44 bc.
The Triumvirate and Octavian’s achievement of sole power
Brutus and Cassius, the organizers of the conspiracy, expected all Romans to rejoice with them in the rebirth of “freedom.” But to the Roman people the freedom of the governing class had never meant very much; the armies (especially in the west) were attached to Caesar; and the Senate was full of Caesarians at all levels, cowed but biding their time. Mark Antony, the surviving consul, whom Brutus had been too scrupulous to assassinate with his master, gradually gained control of the city and the official machinery, and the “liberators” withdrew to the East. But a challenger for the position of leader of the Caesarians soon appeared in the person of Octavian, Caesar’s son by adoption and now his heir. Though not yet 20, Octavian proved an accomplished politician; he attracted loyalty as a Caesarian while cooperating against Antony with the Senate, which, under Cicero’s vigorous leadership, now turned against the consul. Cicero hoped to fragment and thus defeat the Caesarian party, with the help of Brutus and Cassius, who were making good progress in seizing control of the eastern provinces and armies. In 43 the two consuls (both old Caesarian officers) and Octavian defeated Antony at Mutina, and success seemed imminent. But the consuls died, and Octavian demanded and, by armed force, obtained the consulship; and the armies of Italy, Spain, and Gaul soon showed that they would not fight against one another. Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus (the senior Caesarian with an army) now had themselves appointed “Triumvirs for Settling the Constitution” for five years and secured control of Italy by massive proscriptions and confiscations (Cicero, Antony’s chief enemy, was among the first to die). They then defeated and killed Brutus and Cassius at Philippi (42) and divided the Roman world among themselves, with Lepidus, a weak man accidentally thrust into prominence, getting the smallest share. Octavian, who was to control Italy, met armed opposition from Antony’s brother and wife, but they got no help from Antony and were defeated at Perusia (41). Octavian and Antony sealed their alliance with a marriage compact: Antony married Octavia, Octavian’s sister. Octavian then confronted Pompey’s son Sextus Pompeius, who had seized control of the islands off Italy. After much diplomatic maneuvering (including another meeting with Antony), Octavian attacked and defeated Sextus; when Lepidus tried to reassert himself, Octavian crushed him and stripped him of his office of Triumvir (while with conspicuous piety leaving him the chief pontificate, now an office without power). Octavian now controlled the West and Antony the East, still officially as Triumvirs (their term of office had been extended), even though Lepidus had been eliminated in 36.
Each of the two leaders embarked on campaigns and reorganization in his half—Octavian in Illyricum, Antony particularly on the Parthian frontier. But Antony now married Cleopatra and tried to make Egypt his military and political base. In a war of propaganda, Octavian gradually convinced the western provinces, Italy, and most of the Roman upper class that Antony was sacrificing Roman interests, trying to become a Hellenistic king in Alexandria, and planning to rule the Roman world from there with Cleopatra. In 32, though he now held no legal position, Octavian intimidated most of Antony’s remaining aristocratic friends into joining him, made the whole West swear allegiance to himself, and in 31, as consul, crossed into Greece to attack Antony. On September 2 he defeated Antony and Cleopatra in a naval battle at Actium. Though in itself not a major victory, it was followed by the disintegration of Antony’s forces, and Antony and Cleopatra finally committed suicide in Alexandria (30). E. Badian Richard P. Saller
Intellectual life of the Late Republic
The late Roman Republic, despite its turmoil, was a period of remarkable intellectual ferment. Many of the leading political figures were men of serious intellectual interests and literary achievement; foremost among them were Cicero, Caesar, Cato, Pompey, and Varro, all of them senators. The political upheaval itself leavened intellectual life; imperial senators were to look back to the late republic as a time when great political struggles stimulated great oratory, something the more ordered world of the emperors could no longer do.
The seeds of intellectual development had been sown in the late 3rd and early 2nd centuries; the flowering came in the last generation of the republic. As late as the 90s bc the Romans still appear relatively unsophisticated. Greek intellectuals were absorbed in debates among themselves, giving only passing nods to Romans by dedicating untechnical works to them. In 92 the censors issued an edict closing down the schools of Latin rhetoric in Rome. Serious students such as Cicero had to go east in the 80s to receive their higher education from leading Greek philosophers and rhetoricians.
The centre of intellectual life began to shift toward the West after the 90s. As a result of the Mithradatic wars, libraries were brought from the East to Italy. The Hellenistic kingdoms, which had provided the patronage for much intellectual activity, were dismantled by Pompey and Octavian, and Greek intellectuals increasingly joined the retinues of great Roman senators such as Pompey. Private Roman houses, especially senatorial villas on the Bay of Naples, became the focus of intellectual life; it was there that libraries were reassembled and Greek teachers kept as dependents.
Roman traditions favoured the development of certain disciplines, creating a pattern that was distinct from the Greek. Disciplines related to the public life of senators prospered—notably oratory, law, and history; certain fields of study were judged fit for diversions in leisure hours, and still others were considered beneath the dignity of an honourable Roman. Areas such as medicine and architecture were left to Greeks and others of lower status, and mathematics and the sciences aroused little interest. Greek slaves especially played an important role in the intellectual life of the late republic, serving in roles as diverse as teachers, copyists of manuscripts, and oral readers to aristocrats.
By the beginning of the imperial era the maturing of Roman intellectual culture was evident. Caesar had commissioned Varro to organize the first public library in Rome, and Greek scholars such as the geographer Strabo moved west to pursue their studies in Rome.
Grammar and rhetoric
The education of the Roman elite was dominated by training in language skills, grammar, and rhetoric. The grammatici, who taught grammar and literature, were lower-class and often servile dependents. Nevertheless, they helped to develop a Roman consciousness about “proper” spelling and usage that the elite adopted as a means of setting themselves off from humbler men. This interest in language was expressed in Varro’s work on words and grammar, De Lingua Latina (43?), with its prescriptive tone. Rhetoric, though a discipline of higher status, was still taught mainly by Greeks in Greek. The rhetoricians offered rules for composition: how to elaborate a speech with ornamentation and, more important, how to organize a work through the dialectical skills of definition and division of the subject matter into analytical categories. The Romans absorbed these instructions so thoroughly that the last generation of the republic produced an equal of the greatest Greek orators in Cicero. The influence on Roman culture of dialectical thinking, instilled through rhetoric, can hardly be overstated; the result was an increasingly disciplined, well-organized habit of thinking. This development can be seen most clearly in the series of agricultural works by Roman authors: whereas Cato’s 2nd-century De agricultura is rambling and disorganized, Varro’s three books on Res rusticae (37), with their division of soils into 99 types, seem excessively organized.
Law and history
Roman law, though traditional in content, was also deeply influenced by Greek dialectic. For centuries the law had been passed down orally by pontifical priests. It emerged as an intellectual discipline only in the late republic, when men who saw themselves as legal specialists began to write treatises aimed at organizing existing law into a system, defining principles and concepts, and then applying those principles systematically. Quintus Mucius Scaevola was a pivotal figure: a pontifex in the traditional role, he published the first systematic legal treatise, De iure civili, in the 80s. Cicero credited his contemporary Servius Sulpicius Rufus with being the jurist who transformed law into a discipline (ars).
The decisive events of the late republic stimulated the writing of history. The first extant historical works in Latin (rather than in Greek) date from this period: Sallust’s Bellum Iugurtinum (Iugurthine War) and Bellum Catilinae (Catilinarian Conspiracy) and Caesar’s memoirs about his Gallic and civil wars. The rapid changes also prompted antiquarian studies as Roman senators looked back to archaic institutions and religious rituals of the distant past to legitimize or criticize the present. Varro’s 41 books (now lost) on Antiquitates terum humanarum et divinarum (“Antiquities of things human and divine”) were influential in establishing the traditions of early Rome for future generations.
Philosophy and poetry
Philosophy and poetry were suitable as pastimes for senators; few, however, were as serious about philosophy as the younger Cato and Cicero. Even Cicero’s philosophical works were not technical treatises by Greek standards; rather, they were presented as dialogues among leading senators in their leisure. Similarly, Lucretius’ De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things; 50s) offered, in verse, a nontechnical explanation of Epicureanism. The technical philosophical works were written by humbler men and are now lost. A survey of their names and titles, however, shows that stoicism was not yet the dominant philosophical school it later became; more in evidence were the Epicureans, peripatetics, and academics. There also were revivals of Aristotelian and Pythagorean studies in this period.
The best-known poets of the late republican and civil war periods came from well-to-do Italian families. Catullus from Verona (c. 84–c. 54) had a reputation as doctus (learned) for his exquisitely crafted poems full of literary allusions in the Alexandrian style. Far from cumbersome, however, were many of his short, witty poems that challenged traditional Roman mores and deflated senatorial pretensions. Rome’s greatest poets, Virgil (70–19) and Horace (65–8), were born during the republic, came of age during the civil wars, and survived to celebrate the victory of their patron, Augustus. Virgil’s Eclogues one and nine, written during the civil wars, poignantly evoke the suffering of the upheaval that ironically inspired Rome’s highest intellectual and artistic achievements. Richard P. Saller
The Early Roman Empire (31 bc–ad 193)
The consolidation of the empire under the Julio-Claudians
The establishment of the principate under Augustus
Actium left Octavian the master of the Roman world. This supremacy, successfully maintained until his death more than 40 years later, made him the first of the Roman emperors. Suicide removed Antony and Cleopatra and their potential menace in 30 bc, and the annexation of Egypt with its Ptolemaic treasure brought financial independence. With these reassurances Octavian could begin the task of reconstruction.
Roman emperors* *For a list of the Eastern emperors after the fall of Rome, see Byzantine Empire. Augustus (Augustus Caesar) 27 BC–AD 14 Tiberius (Tiberius Caesar Augustus) 14–37 Caligula (Gaius Caesar Germanicus) 37–41 Claudius (Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus) 41–54 Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus) 54–68 Galba (Servius Galba Caesar Augustus) 68–69 Otho (Marcus Otho Caesar Augustus) 69 Vitellius (Aulus Vitellius) 69 Vespasian (Caesar Vespasianus Augustus) 69–79 Titus (Titus Vespasianus Augustus) 79–81 Domitian (Caesar Domitianus Augustus) 81–96 Nerva (Nerva Caesar Augustus) 96–98 Trajan (Caesar Divi Nervae Filius Nerva Traianus Optimus Augustus) 98–117 Hadrian (Caesar Traianus Hadrianus Augustus) 117–138 Antoninus Pius (Caesar Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Augustus Pius) 138–161 Marcus Aurelius (Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus) 161–180 Lucius Verus (Lucius Aurelius Verus) 161–169 Commodus (Caesar Marcus Aurelius Commodus Antoninus Augustus) 177–192 Pertinax (Publius Helvius Pertinax) 193 Didius Severus Julianus (Marcus Didius Severus Julianus) 193 Septimius Severus (Lucius Septimius Severus Pertinax) 193–211 Caracalla (Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus Augustus) 198–217 Septimius Geta (Publius Septimius Geta) 209–212 Macrinus (Caesar Marcus Opellius Severus Macrinus Augustus) 217–218 Elagabalus (Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus) 218–222 Alexander Severus (Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander) 222–235 Maximinus (Gaius Julius Verus Maximinus) 235–238 Gordian I (Marcus Antonius Gordianus Sempronianus Romanus) 238 Gordian II (Marcus Antonius Gordianus Sempronianus Romanus Africanus) 238 Pupienus Maximus (Marcus Clodius Pupienus Maximus) 238 Balbinus (Decius Caelius Calvinus Balbinus) 238 Gordian III (Marcus Antonius Gordianus) 238–244 Philip (Marcus Julius Philippus) 244–249 Decius (Gaius Messius Quintus Trianus Decius) 249–251 Hostilian (Gaius Valens Hostilianus Messius Quintus) 251 Gallus (Gaius Vibius Trebonianus Gallus) 251–253 Aemilian (Marcus Aemilius Aemilianus) 253 Valerian (Publius Licinius Valerianus) 253–260 Gallienus (Publius Licinius Egnatius Gallienus) 253–268 Claudius (II) Gothicus (Marcus Aurelius Claudius Gothicus) 268–270 Quintillus (Marcus Aurelius Claudius Quintillus) 269–270 Aurelian (Lucius Domitius Aurelianus) 270–275 Tacitus (Marcus Claudius Tacitus) 275–276 Florian (Marcus Annius Florianus) 276 Probus (Marcus Aurelius Probus) 276–282 Carus (Marcus Aurelius Carus) 282–283 Carinus (Marcus Aurelius Carinus) 283–285 Numerian (Marcus Aurelius Numerius Numerianus) 283–284 Diocletian (Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus) East only 284–305 Maximian (Marcus Aurelius Valerius Maximianus) West only 286–305
306–308 Galerius (Gaius Galerius Valerius Maximianus) East only 305–311 Constantius I Chlorus (Marcus Flavius Valerius Constantius) West only 305–306 Severus (Flavius Valerius Severus) West only 306–307 Maxentius (Marcus Aurelius Valerius Maxentius) West only 306–312 Licinius (Valerius Licinianus Licinius) East only 308–324 Constantine I (Flavius Valerius Constantinus) 312–337 Constantine II (Flavius Claudius Constantinus) 337–340 Constans I (Flavius Julius Constans) 337–350 Constantius II (Flavius Julius Constantius) 337–361 Magnentius (Flavius Magnus Magnentius) 350–353 Julian (Flavius Claudius Julianus) 361–363 Jovian (Flavius Jovianus) 363–364 Valentinian I (Flavius Valentinianus) West only 364–375 Valens (Flavius Valens) East only 364–378 Procopius East only 365–366 Gratian (Flavius Gratianus Augustus) West only 375–383 Valentinian II (Flavius Valentinianus) West only 375–392 Theodosius I (Flavius Theodosius) 379–395 Arcadius (Flavius Arcadius) East only 395–408 Honorius (Flavius Honorius) West only 395–423 Theodosius II East only 408–450 Constantius III West only 421 Valentinian III (Flavius Placidius Valentinianus) West only 425–455 Marcian (Marcianus) East only 450–457 Petronius Maximus (Flavius Ancius Petronius Maximus) West only 455 Avitus (Flavius Maccilius Eparchius Avitus) West only 455–456 Leo I (Leo Thrax Magnus) East only 457–474 Majorian (Julius Valerius Majorianus) West only 457–461 Libius Severus (Libius Severianus Severus) West only 461–467 Anthemius (Procopius Anthemius) West only 467–472 Olybrius (Anicius Olybrius) West only 472 Glycerius West only 473–474 Julius Nepos West only 474–475 Leo II East only 474 Zeno East only 474–491 Romulus Augustulus (Flavius Momyllus Romulus Augustulus) West only 475–476
Law and order had vanished from the Roman state when its ruling aristocrats refused to curb their individual ambitions, when the most corrupt and violent persons could gain protection for their crimes by promising their support to the ambitious, and when the ambitious and the violent together could thus transform a republic based on disciplined liberty into a turbulent cockpit of murderous rivalries. Good government depended on limits being set to unrestrained aspirations, and Octavian was in a position to impose them. But his military might, though sufficiently strong in 31 bc to guarantee orderly political processes, was itself incompatible with them; nor did he relish the role of military despot. The fate of Julius Caesar, an eagerness to acquire political respectability, and his own esteem for ancestral custom combined to dissuade Octavian from it. He wished to be, in his own words, “the author of the best civilian government possible.” His problem was to regularize his own position so as to make it generally acceptable, without simultaneously reopening the door to violent lawlessness. His pragmatic responses not only ensured stability and continuity but also respected republican forms and traditions so far as possible.
Large-scale demobilization allayed people’s fears; regular consular elections raised their hopes. In 29–28 bc Octavian carried out, with Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, his powerful deputy, the first census of the Roman people since 70; and this involved drawing up an electoral roll for the Centuriate Assembly. Elections followed, and Octavian was inevitably chosen consul. Then, on Jan. 13, 27 bc, he offered to lay down his powers. The Roman Senate rejected this proposal, charging him instead to administer (besides Egypt) Spain, Gaul, and Syria for the next 10 years, while it itself was to supervise the rest of the empire. Three days later, among other honours, it bestowed upon him the name by which he has ever since been known, Augustus.
AugustusAugustus, statue in Rome.© vladacanon/iStock.com
As most of the troops still under arms were in the regions entrusted to Augustus’ charge, the arrangements of 27 bc hardly affected his military strength. Moreover, so long as he was consul (he was reelected every year until 23 bc), he was civilian head of government as well. In other words, he was still preeminent and all-powerful, even if he had, in his own words, placed the res publica at the disposal of the Senate and the Roman people. Augustus particularly wished to conciliate the senatorial class, without whose cooperation civilian government was impossible. But his monopolization of the consulship offended the Senate, making a different arrangement clearly necessary. Accordingly, in 23 Augustus made a change; he vacated the consulship and never held it again (except momentarily in 5 bc and again in 2 bc, for a limited, specific purpose). In its place he received the tribunician power (tribunicia potestas). He could not become an actual plebeian tribune, because Julius Caesar’s action of making him a patrician had disqualified him for the office. But he could acquire the rights and privileges pertaining to the office; and they were conferred upon him, apparently by the Senate, whose action was then ratified by the popular assembly. He had already been enjoying some of a tribune’s privileges since 36; but he now acquired them all and even some additional ones, such as the right to convene the Senate whenever he chose and to enjoy priority in bringing business before it. Through his tribunician power he could also summon the popular assembly and participate fully in its proceedings. Clearly, although no longer consul, he still retained the legal right to authority in civilian affairs.
The arrangement of 23 entailed an additional advantage. The power of the plebeian tribune was traditionally associated with the protection of citizens, and Augustus’ acquisition of it was therefore unlikely to rouse resentment. Indeed, Augustus thenceforth shrewdly propagated the notion that, if his position in the state was exceptional (which it clearly was), it was precisely because of his tribunician power. Although he held it for only one year at a time, it was indefinitely renewable and was pronounced his for life. Thus, it was both annual and perpetual and was a suitable vehicle for numbering the years of his supremacy. His era (and this is true also of later emperors) was counted officially from the year when he acquired the tribunician power.
The year 23 likewise clarified the legal basis for Augustus’ control of his provincia (the region under his jurisdiction) and its armed forces. The Senate invested him with an imperium proconsulare (governorship and high command), and, while this had a time limit, it was automatically renewed whenever it lapsed (usually every 10 years). This proconsular imperium, furthermore, was pronounced valid inside Italy, even inside Rome and the pomerium (the boundary within which only Roman gods could be worshiped and civil magistrates rule), and it was superior (majus) to the imperium of any other proconsul. Thus, Augustus could intervene legally in any province, even in one entrusted to someone else.
The network of favours owed him that Augustus had cultivated within the state, among people of the greatest authority over their own networks, made his position virtually unassailable, but he avoided provoking this high class of his supporters, senatorial and equestrian, by not drawing attention to the most novel and autocratic of the many grants of power he had received, the imperium proconsulare majus. Instead, he paraded the tribunician power as the expression of his supreme position in the state.
After 23 no fundamental change in Augustus’ position occurred. He felt no need to hold offices that in republican times would have conferred exceptional power (e.g., dictatorship, lifetime censorship, or regular consulship), even though these were offered him. Honours, of course, came his way: in 19 bc he received some consular rights and prerogatives, presumably to ensure that his imperium was in no particular inferior to a consul’s; in 12, when Lepidus died, he became pontifex maximus (he had long since been elected into all of the priestly colleges); in 8 bc the 8th month of the year was named after him; in 2 bc he was designated pater patriae (“father of his country”), a distinction that he particularly esteemed because it suggested that he was to all Romans what a paterfamilias was to his own household. He also accepted special commissions from time to time: e.g., the supervision of the supply of grain and water, the maintenance of public buildings (including temples), the regulation of the Tiber, the superintendence of the police and fire-fighting services, and the upkeep of Italy’s roads. Such behaviour advertised his will and capacity to improve the lives of people dependent on him. Of that capacity, manifest on a grand scale, his tribunician power and proconsular imperium were only the formal expression. He was a charismatic leader of unrivaled prestige (auctoritas), whose merest suggestions were binding.
Like an ordinary Roman, he contented himself with three names. His, however, Imperator Caesar Augustus, were absolutely unique, with a magic all their own that caused all later emperors to appropriate them, at first selectively but after ad 69 in their entirety. Thereby they became titles, reserved for the emperor (or, in the case of the name Caesar, for his heir apparent); from them derive the titles emperor, kaiser, and tsar. Yet, as used by Augustus and his first four successors, the words Imperator Caesar Augustus were names, not titles—that is, respectively, praenomen, nomen (in effect), and cognomen. One title that Augustus did have was princeps (prince); this, however, was unofficial—a mere popular label, meaning Rome’s first citizen—and government documents such as inscriptions or coins do not apply it to Augustus. But because of it the system of government he devised is called the principate.
The Roman Senate and the urban magistracies
Augustus regarded the Senate, whose leading member (princeps senatus) he had become in 28, as a body with important functions; it heard fewer overseas embassies than formerly, but otherwise its dignity and authority seemed unimpaired; its members filled the highest offices; its decrees, although not formally called laws, were just as binding; it soon became a high court, whose verdicts were unappealable; it supervised the older provinces and nominally the state finances as well, and it also in effect elected the urban magistrates; formally, even the emperor’s powers derived from the Senate. Nevertheless, it lacked real power. Its provinces contained few troops (and by ad 40 it had ceased to control even these few). Hence, it could hardly dispute Augustus’ wishes. In fact, real power rested with Augustus, who superintended state finances and above all controlled membership in the Senate; every senator’s career depended on his goodwill. But he valued the Senate as the repository of the true Roman spirit and traditions and as the body representing public opinion. He was considerate toward it, shrewdly anticipated its reactions, and generally avoided contention with it. He regularly kept it informed about his activities; and an imperial council (Consilium Principis), which he consulted on matters of policy, in the manner of a republican magistrate seeking the opinion of his advisory committee, consisted of the consuls, certain other magistrates, and 15 senators—not handpicked by him but chosen by lot every six months.
To rid the Senate of unworthy members, he reduced its numbers by successive reviews to about 600 (from the triumviral 1,000 or more). Sons of senators and men of good repute and substance who had served in the army and the vigintiviri (“board of twenty,” minor magistracy) could become members by being elected, at age 25 or over, to the quaestorship. Their subsequent rank in the Senate depended on what other magistracies they managed to win; these were, in ascending order, the aedileship (or plebeian tribunate), the praetorship, and the consulship. No one disliked by Augustus could expect to reach any of them, while anyone whom he nominated or endorsed was sure of election. Despite the emperor’s control, there were usually enough candidates for keen contests. By ad 5 destinatio seems to have been the practice—that is, a special panel of senators and equites selected the praetors and consuls, and the comitia centuriata automatically ratified their choice. In about ad 5, likewise, the consulship was shortened to six months. This not only gratified senators and increased the number of high-ranking qualified officials but also showed that the consuls’ duties were becoming largely ceremonial. This was also true, but to a far lesser degree, of the other unpaid magistrates. A senator really made his mark in between his magistracies, when he served in important salaried posts, military or civilian or both, sometimes far from Rome.
The equestrian order
Senators, however, were either too proud or too few to fill all the posts. Some posts were considered menial and went to the emperor’s freedmen or slaves. Others were entrusted to equites, and the equestrian order soon developed into one of the great institutions of the empire. Augustus decided that membership in the order should be open to Roman citizens of means and reputation but not necessarily of good birth. Ultimately, there were thousands of equites throughout the empire. Although this was a lower aristocracy, a good career was available to them. After tours of duty as an army officer (the so-called militiae equestres), an aspiring eques might serve as the emperor’s agent (procurator) in various capacities and eventually become one of the powerful prefects (of the fleet, of the vigiles, or fire brigade, of the grain supply, of Egypt, or of the Praetorian Guard). This kind of an equestrian career became standardized only under Claudius I; but Augustus began the system and, by his use of equites in responsible posts, founded the imperial civil service, which later was headed chiefly by them. The equites also performed another function: the senatorial order had difficulty in maintaining its numbers from its own ranks and depended on recruitment from below, which meant from the equestrian order. Because this order was not confined to Rome or even to Italy, the Senate gradually acquired a non-Italian element. The western provinces were already supplying senators under Augustus.
Administration of Rome and Italy
Ordinary Roman citizens who were neither senators nor equites were of lesser consequence. Although still used, the old formula senatus populusque Romanus (“the Senate and the Roman people”) had changed its meaning: in effect, its populusque Romanus portion now meant “the emperor.” The “Roman people” had become the “Italian people,” and it was embodied in the person of Augustus, himself the native of an Italian town. To reduce the risk of popular demonstrations in Rome, the emperor provided grain doles, occasional donatives, and various entertainments; but he allowed the populace no real power. After ad 5 the Roman people’s participation in public life consisted in the formality of holding occasional assemblies to ratify decisions made elsewhere. Ultimately, this caused the distinction between the Roman citizens of Italy and the provincial inhabitants of the overseas empire to disappear; under Augustus, however, the primacy of Italy was insistently emphasized.
Indeed, Italy and justice for its inhabitants were Augustus’ first cares. Arbitrary triumviral legislation was pronounced invalid after 29 bc, and ordinary Roman citizens everywhere had access to Augustus’ own court of appeal (his appellate jurisdiction dated from 30 bc and in effect replaced the republican appeal to the people). His praetorian and urban cohorts provided physical security; his officials assured grain supplies; and he himself, with help from such aides as Agrippa, monumentalized Italian towns. The numerous Augustan structures in Italyand Rome (as he boasted, a city of brick before his time and of marble afterward) have mostly perished, but impressive ruins survive (e.g., aqueduct, forum, and mausoleum in Rome; bridge at Narni; arch at Fano; gate at Perugia). Doubtless their construction alleviated unemployment, especially among the proletariat at Rome. But economic considerations did not influence Augustus’ policies much (customs tariffs, for instance, were for fiscal, not protective, purposes), nor did he build harbour works at Ostia, Rome’s port. Italian commerce and industry—notably fine pottery, the so-called terra sigillata, and wine—nevertheless flourished in the conditions he created. Public finances, mints, and coinage issues, chaotic before him, were placed on a sound basis, partly by the introduction of a sales tax and of a new levy (inheritance taxes) on Roman citizens—who hitherto had been subject only to harbour dues and manumission (see below) charges—and partly by means of repeated subventions to the public treasury (aerarium Saturni) from Augustus’ own enormous private resources (patrimonium Caesaris). His many highways also contributed to Italy’s economic betterment.
Augustus’ great achievement in Italy, however, was to restore morale and unify the country. The violence and self-aggrandizement of the 1st century bc had bred apathy and corruption. To reawaken a sense of responsibility, especially in official and administrative circles, Augustus reaffirmed traditional Italian virtues (by laws aimed against adultery, by strengthening family ties, and by stimulating the birth rate) and revived ancestral religion (by repairing temples, building new shrines, and reactivating moribund cults and rituals). To infuse fresh blood and energy into disillusioned Roman society, he promoted the assimilation of Italy: the elite of its municipal towns entered the Roman Senate, and Italy became firmly one with Rome. To keep the citizen body pure, he made manumission of slaves difficult, and from those irregularly manumitted he withheld the citizenship.
Administration of the provinces
Sharply distinguished from Italy were the provinces of the empire. From 27 bc on they were of two types. The Senate supervised the long-established ones, the so-called public provinces: their governors were chosen by lot, usually served for a year, commanded no troops, and were called proconsuls (although only those superintending Asia and Africa were in fact former consuls, the others being former praetors). The emperor supervised all other provinces, and collectively they made up his provincia: he appointed their governors, and these served at his pleasure, none with the title of proconsul because in his own provincia proconsular imperium was wielded by him alone. These imperial provinces might be “unarmed,” but many of them were garrisoned, some quite heavily. Those containing more than one legion were entrusted to former consuls and those with a legion or less to former praetors; in both cases their governors were called legati Augusti pro praetore (“legates of Augustus with authority of a praetor”). There were also some imperial provinces governed not by senators but by equites (usually styled procurators but sometimes prefects); Judaea at the time of Christ’s crucifixion was such an equestrian province, Pontius Pilate being its governor. An entirely exceptional imperial province was Egypt, so jealously guarded that no senator could visit it without express permission; its prefect was unique in being an equestrian in command of legions.
The provinces paid tribute, which helped to pay for the armed services, various benefactions to supporters, a growing palace staff, and the public-works programs. Periodical censuses, carefully listing provincial resources, provided the basis for the two direct taxes: tributum soli, exacted from occupiers of provincial soil, and tributum capitis, paid on other forms of property (it was not a poll tax, except in Egypt and in certain backward areas). In addition, the provinces paid indirect taxes, such as harbour dues. In imperial provinces the direct taxes (tributa) were paid to the emperor’s procurator, an equestrian official largely independent of the governor. In senatorial provinces, quaestors supervised the finances; but, increasingly, imperial procurators also appeared. The indirect taxes (vectigalia) were still collected by publicani, who were now much more rigorously controlled and gradually replaced by imperial civil servants.
To reward his troops after faithful service, Caesar had settled them on lands mostly in the provinces, in veteran towns; and Augustus, for the same reason and to reduce the dangerous military presence in the state generally, resorted to the same procedure on a vast scale. Thus, in the space of a single generation, more than 120 new centres were organized across the empire in an explosion of urbanizing energy never equaled or even approached in later times. In the settlements called coloniae all residents were to be Roman citizens, and the form of government and many other aspects of life specified in their charters bore a thoroughly Roman character. Some coloniae, in further approximation to Italian models, enjoyed exemption from tribute. In the municipia only persons elected as magistrates were awarded Roman citizenship (after Hadrian, in Africa, admission was sometimes extended to the whole of the local senate); but the whole of the local aristocracy in the course of time would be in this way gradually incorporated fully into the state. In municipia, too, charters specified Roman forms of government. Urban centres that were wholly noncitizen, called civitates, enjoyed autonomy in their own affairs, under the governor’s eye; they paid taxes and administered the rural territory around them. In the west, many of them were eventually granted the status of municipia, and they adopted the originally Italian magistracies (duoviri and aediles, collectively quattuorviri) and senate (curia or ordo), normally numbering 100 members. The entire West rapidly came under the administration of urban centres of these three forms, without which the central government could never have done its job. Moreover, these centres radiated economic and cultural influence around them and so had an immense effect, particularly on the way of life of the more backward areas. In the east, however, urban centres, though equally important for government purposes, had already been in existence and long settled into their own culture and forms of government.
The provinces were generally better off under the empire. Appointment over them as governor was now and henceforth generally granted with the emperor’s approval. Because he thought of himself as in some ways the patron and defender of the provincial population, lax or extortionate officials could expect some loss of imperial favour, an end to their careers, or an even more severe punishment.
Emperor worship
For this priceless gift of peace many individuals and even whole communities, in Italy and elsewhere, expressed their thanks spontaneously by worshiping Augustus and his family. Emperor worship was also encouraged officially, however, as a focus of common loyalty for the polyglot empire. In the provinces, to emphasize the superiority of Italy, the official cult was dedicated to Roma et Augustus; to celebrate it, representatives from provincial communities or groups of communities met in an assembly (Consilium Provinciae), which incidentally might air grievances as well as satisfactions. (This system began in the Greek-speaking provinces, long used to wooing their rulers with divine honours. It penetrated the west only slowly, but from 12 bc an assembly for the three imperial Gallic provinces existed at Lugdunum.) In Italy the official cult was to the genius Augusti (the life spirit of his family); it was coupled in Rome with the Lares Compitales (the spirits of his ancestors). Its principal custodians (seviri Augustales) were normally freedmen. Both the Senate and the emperor had central control over the institution. The Senate could withhold a vote of posthumous deification, and the emperor could acknowledge or refuse provincial initiatives in the establishment of emperor worship, in the construction for it, or in its liturgical details. The energy, however, that infused emperor worship was to be found almost wholly among the local nobilities.
The army
It was Augustus’ soldiers, however, not his worshipers, who made him all-powerful. Their allegiance, like the name Caesar, was inherited from his “father,” the deified Julius. The allegiance was to the emperor personally, through a military oath taken in his name every January 1; and the soldiers owed it after his death to his son or chosen successor. This preference of theirs for legitimacy could not be ignored because they were now a standing army, something that the republic had lacked. Demobilization reduced the 60 legions of Actium to 28, a number hardly sufficient but all that Augustus’ prudence or economy would countenance. These became permanent formations, each with its own number and name; the soldiers serving in them were called legionaries. Besides the legionaries there was a somewhat smaller body of auxiliaries, or supporting troops. The two corps together numbered more than a quarter of a million men. To them must be added the garrison of Italy—the praetorian cohorts, or emperor’s bodyguard, about 10,000 strong—and the marines of the imperial fleet, which had its main headquarters at Misenum and Ravenna in Italy and subsidiary stations and flotillas on seas and rivers elsewhere (the marines, however, were not reckoned good combat forces). All these troops were long-service professionals—the praetorians serving 16 years; legionaries, 20; auxiliaries, 25; and marines, 28—with differing pay scales, the praetorians’ being the highest. In addition to their pay, the men received donatives, shares of booty, and retirement bonuses from a special treasury (aerarium militare) established in ad 6 and maintained out of the sales tax and Roman citizens’ death duties. Under Augustus the praetorians were normally Italians, but many legionaries and virtually all auxiliaries were provincials, mainly from the imperial provinces in the west, the legionaries coming from municipal towns and the auxiliaries from tribal areas. The tendency to use provincials grew, and by the year 100 the Roman imperial army was overwhelmingly non-Italian. Nevertheless, it helped greatly to Romanize the empire. The legionaries were Roman citizens from the day they enlisted, if not before, and the auxiliaries (after Claudius anyway) from the day they were discharged; and, though serving soldiers could not legally marry, many had mistresses whose children often became Roman citizens. The troops, other than praetorians and marines, passed their years of service in the “armed” imperial provinces—the auxiliaries in forts near the frontier and the legionaries at some distance from it in camps that showed an increasing tendency, especially after ad 69, to become permanent (some of them, indeed, developed into great European cities). There was no central reserve, because, although desirable for emergencies, it might prove dangerous in peacetime.
The officers were naturally Roman citizens. In the legions those of the highest rank (legati and tribuni) were senators or equites; lower officers (centuriones) might enter directly from Italian or provincial municipalities or might rise through the ranks; by the time they retired, if not sooner, many of them were equites. In the auxiliaries the unit commanders (praefecti) were equites, often of provincial birth. On retirement the soldiers frequently settled in the provinces where they had served, made friends, and perhaps acquired families. Imperial policy favoured this practice. Thus the army, which had done much to introduce into the provinces Romans of all ranks, with their own way of life, through veteran settlements of the 40s, 30s, and 20s bc, continued in the same role on a more modest and casual scale throughout the Augustan reign and for two centuries or so afterward.
Foreign policy
After Actium and on two other occasions, Augustus solemnly closed the gates of the shrine of Janus (a gesture of peace) to show that Rome had peace as well as a princeps. These well-publicized gestures were purely temporary; the gates were swiftly reopened. His proconsular imperium made Augustus the arbiter of peace and war, and an ostensible search for defensible frontiers made his a very warlike reign. While the republic had left the limits of Roman territorial claims rather vague and indefinite, he planned conquests stretching to the boundaries defined by nature (deserts, rivers, and ocean shores), not always, however, with immediate annexation in mind. When annexation did occur, it was followed by the construction of solidly built military roads, paved with thick stone blocks: these also served the official post system (cursus publicus) and were provided with rest stages and overnight lodges at regular intervals.
Areas where subjugation looked arduous and where Romanization seemed problematic were left to client kings, dependent on the emperor’s support and goodwill and under obligation to render military aid to Rome. Such satellite kingdoms spared Augustus the trouble and expense of maintaining strong defenses everywhere; nevertheless, their ultimate and intended destiny was incorporation as soon as it suited their overlord’s convenience. Usually, territory was gained more easily by creating and subsequently incorporating a client kingdom than by launching an expansionist war.
In the south, Augustus found suitable frontiers quickly. In 25 bc an expedition under Aelius Gallus opened the Red Sea to Roman use and simultaneously revealed the Arabian Desert as an unsurpassed and, indeed, unsurpassable boundary. The same year Gaius Petronius, the prefect of Egypt, tightened Rome’s grip as far as the First Cataract and established a broad military zone beyond it. The vast region north of the Sahara and the Atlas Mountains was also secured (c. 25) after a series of punitive raids against native tribes and the annexation of one client kingdom (Numidia) and the creation of another (Mauretania). Three legions, two in Egypt and one in Africa (a senatorial province), policed the southern shore of the Mediterranean.
In the west, consolidation was extended to the Atlantic. Gaul, Julius Caesar’s conquest, was organized as four provinces: senatorial Narbonensis and the imperial three Gauls (Aquitania, Belgica, and Lugdunensis). In Spain, after Agrippa successfully ended in 19 bc the last campaign that Augustus had launched in person in 26, three provinces were formed: senatorial Baetica and imperial Lusitania and Tarraconensis. Three legions enforced Roman authority from Gibraltar to the mouth of the Rhine. Augustus ignored the advice of court poets and others to advance still farther and annex Britain.
In the east, Parthia had demonstrated its power against Crassus and Antony, and Augustus proceeded warily. He retained Antony’s ring of buffer client kingdoms, although he incorporated some, including the most celebrated of them, Judaea; he made it a province in ad 6, respecting, however, some of the customs of its Jewish inhabitants. Augustus stationed four legions in Syria and obviously envisaged the Euphrates River and the northern extension of the Arabian Desert as the desirable frontier with Mesopotamia. Farther north, however, no such natural line existed. North of the Black Sea the client kingdom of the Cimmerian Bosporus, under its successive rulers Asander and Polemo, helped to contain southward and westward thrusts by the Scythians, an Iranian people related to the Parthians, and this provided protection in the north for Anatolia and its provinces (senatorial Asia and Bithynia-Pontus and imperial Cilicia and Galatia, the latter a large new province created in 25 bc out of Amyntas’ client kingdom). By a show of force, Augustus’ stepson Tiberius, in 20 bc, recovered the standards lost at Carrhae and installed Tigranes as client king of Armenia. Although Augustan propaganda depicted this as a famous victory, strategic considerations inevitably obliged the Parthians, once they settled their internal, dynastic dissensions, to dispute Roman control of Armenia. Thus it can hardly be said that Augustus settled the eastern frontier. Missions were sent to the East repeatedly (Agrippa, 17–13 bc; Gaius Caesar, ad 1–4; Germanicus, 18–19), and Armenia remained a problem for Augustus’ successors: Tiberius successfully maintained Roman influence there, but Gaius and Claudius failed to do so, leaving Nero with a difficult situation.
In the north, too, there was difficulty. The Alps and their passes were finally subjugated early in Augustus’ reign. This enabled Tiberius and his brother Drusus between 16 and 8 bc to conquer all the way to the great rivers of central Europe. New provinces were created in the Alps and Tyrol (Maritime and Pennine Alps, Raetia, Noricum) and also farther east (Pannonia, Moesia). Stability along the Danube was precariously maintained, under Augustus and later, by means of periodical alliances with Maroboduus and his successors, who ruled Germanic tribes such as the Marcomanni and Quadi in Bohemia to the north of the river, and by the existence of a Thracian client kingdom to the south of its lowest course. The push across the Rhine began in 12 bc; although it reached the Elbe, consolidation beyond the Rhine proved elusive. A revolt in Pannonia (ad 6–9) interrupted it, and, in ad 9, German tribes under Arminius annihilated Quinctilius Varus and three legions in the Teutoburg Forest. This disaster reduced the number of legions to 25 (it did not reach 28 again until half a century later), and it disheartened Augustus. Old and weary, he withdrew to the Rhine and decided against all further expansion, a policy he urged upon his successor. For the watch on the Rhine the military districts of Upper and Lower Germany were created, containing eight legions between them. Another seven garrisoned the Danubian provinces. These figures reveal imperial anxiety for the northern frontier.
Economic life
Although widespread, Augustus’ wars chiefly affected the frontier districts. Elsewhere, peace prevailed. Indeed, never before had so large an area been free of war for so long. This state of affairs helped trade. The suppression of piracy and the use of military roads, which the frontier warfare itself brought into being, provided safe arteries of commerce. Stable currency also aided economic growth. Activity directly connected with the soil predominated; but there were also many establishments, usually small, engaged in manufacturing, and such products as textiles, pottery, tiles, and papyrus were turned out in surprising quantities. Advanced techniques were also known: glassblowing, for example, dates from the Augustan age. Most products were consumed locally, but the specialties or monopolies from any region usually exceeded local needs, and the surplus was sold elsewhere, generating a brisk interchange of goods. Some traveled great distances, even beyond the empire: trade with India, for example, reached respectable proportions once the nature of the monsoon was understood, and the Red Sea was opened to Roman shipping. Merchants, especially Levantines, traveled everywhere, and fairs were frequent. The Mediterranean world was linked together as never before, and standardization made considerable headway. In Augustus’ day Italy was economically the most important part of the empire. It could afford to import on a large scale, thanks partly to provincial tribute but above all to its own large productivity. The eastern provinces, for their part, recovered rapidly from the depredations of the civil wars and were industrially quite advanced. The other provinces were less developed, but they soon ceased being mere suppliers of raw materials; they learned to exploit their natural resources by using new techniques and then began overtaking the more advanced economies of Italy and the Greek-speaking regions. The importance of trade in unifying the empire should not be underestimated.
Augustan art and literature
In 17 bc Rome held Secular Games, a traditional celebration to announce the entry into a new epoch (saeculum). New it was, for, though Augustus preserved what he could of republican institutions, he added much that was his own. His Rome had become very Italian, and this spirit is reflected in the art and literature of his reign. Its greatest writers were native Italians, and, like the ruler whose program they glorified, they used the traditional as the basis for something new. Virgil, Horace, and Livy, as noted above, imitated the writing of classical Greece, but chiefly in form, their tone and outlook being un-Hellenic. It was the glory of Italy and faith in Rome that inspired Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid, Horace’s Odes, and the first 10 books of Livy’s history.
In Augustan art a similar fusion was achieved between the prevailing Attic and Hellenistic models and Italian naturalism. The sculptured portraits on the Ara Pacis (Altar of the Augustan Peace) of 9 bc, for all their lifelike quality, are yet in harmony with the classical poise of the figures, and they strike a fresh note: the stately converging processions (Rome’s imperial family and magistrates on one side; senators, equites, and citizens on the other) became the prototypes for all later processional reliefs. Augustan painting likewise displays a successful combination of Greek and Roman elements, to judge from the frescoes in the house of Livia on the Palatine. In Augustan architecture, decidedly conservative and Hellenic, the potentialities of curving and vaulted spaces that had been revealed in the earlier 1st century bc were not realized. Building was, however, very active and widespread.
Marble relief on the exterior wall of the Ara Pacis, Rome.© Prapton/Dreamstime.com
The culture of the age undoubtedly attained a high level of excellence, dominated by the personality of the emperor and his accomplishments. Imperial art had already reached full development, a matter of no small moment, because Rome’s political predominance made the spread of its influence inevitable. The Mediterranean world was soon assuming a Roman aspect, and this is a measure of Augustus’ extraordinary achievement. Yet it was an achievement with limitations. His professed aim—to promote stability, peace, security, and prosperity—was irreproachable, but perhaps it was also unexciting. Emphasizing conservatism by precept and his own example, he encouraged the simpler virtues of a less sophisticated age, and his success made this sedate but rather static outlook fashionable. People accepted the routine of his continuing rule, at the cost, however, of some loss of intellectual energy and moral fervour. The great literature, significantly, belongs to the years near Actium, when people’s imagination still nursed heady visions of Roman victory and Italian destiny. After the Secular Games the atmosphere became more commonplace and produced the frivolities of Ovid and the pedestrian later books of Livy.
Appraisal of Augustus
Augustus’ position as princeps cannot be defined simply. He was neither a Roman king (rex) nor a Hellenistic monarch (basileus), nor was he, as the 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen thought, a partner with the Senate in a dyarchy. He posed as the first servant of an empire over which the Roman Senate presided, and it would appear that his claim to have accepted no office inconsistent with ancestral custom was literally true. Proconsular imperium was a republican institution, and, although tribunician power was not, it contained nothing specifically unrepublican. But, while precedents can be cited for Augustus’ various powers, their concentration and tenure were absolutely unparalleled. Under the republic, powers like his would have been distributed among several holders, each serving for a limited period with a colleague. Augustus wielded them all, by himself, simultaneously and without any time limit (in practice, at least). This fact made him an emperor, but it did not necessarily make him a military tyrant.
In discharging both military and civilian functions, Augustus was no different from republican consuls or praetors. Admittedly his military power was overwhelming; but, if he chose not to brandish it, the tone of his reign could remain essentially civilian. Constitutional safeguards were indeed lacking; everything was at the emperor’s discretion, and even Augustus passed legislation that made anti-imperial behaviour, real or suspected, treasonable (men were, in fact, executed for conspiracy during his reign). But there had been no constitutional safeguards in the republic, under Sulla, Pompey, the triumvirs, or even Julius Caesar. Augustus’ improved police services probably made lower-class Romans at least feel safer under him. The senatorial class, however, contained a minority resentful of the sheer undeniable preponderance of the princeps’ power, and he was the target of several unsuccessful plots against his life.
The principate was something personal, what the emperor chose to make it, and the relations prevailing between emperor and Senate usually indicated what a reign was like. In Augustus’ case they reveal a regime that was outwardly constitutional, generally moderate, and certainly effective. But, as he himself implied at the end of his life, he was a skillful actor in life’s comedy. Later emperors lacked his sureness of touch.
When Augustus died, the Senate unhesitatingly pronounced him divus—the deified one who had restored peace, organized a standing army to defend the frontiers, expanded those frontiers farther than any previous Roman, improved administrative practices everywhere, promoted better standards of public and private behaviour, integrated Rome and Italy, embellished Rome, reconciled the provinces, expedited Romanization, and above all maintained law and order while respecting republican traditions.
Augustus’ luck was hardly inferior to his statecraft. Despite indifferent health, he headed the Roman state in one capacity or another for 56 years. His rule, one of the longest in European history, consolidated the principate so firmly that what might have been an episode became an epoch. At his death there was practically no one left with any personal memory of the republic, and Augustus’ wish came true: he had fashioned a lasting as well as constitutional government. The principate endured with only minor changes for about 200 years.
The succession
Like any great Roman magnate, Augustus owed it to his supporters and dependents to maintain the structure of power which they constituted together and which would normally pass from father to son. In accepting the heritage from Caesar, he had only done the right thing, and he was respected for it by his peers. None of them would have advised him later to dismantle what he had since added to it. When, for instance, he was away from Rome, rather than accepting a diminution in his prerogatives of administration, a senator as city prefect was deputed to represent him. Consequently, Augustus began thinking early about who should follow him. The soldiers’ views on legitimacy reinforced his own natural desire to found a dynasty, but he had no son and was therefore obliged to select his successor. Death played havoc with his attempts to do so. His nephew Marcellus, his son-in-law Agrippa, his grandsons Gaius and Lucius (Julia’s children by Agrippa), were groomed in turn; but they all predeceased him. Augustus, finally and reluctantly, chose a member of the republican nobility, his stepson Tiberius, a scion of the ultra-aristocratic Claudii. In ad 4 Augustus adopted Tiberius as his son and had tribunician power and probably proconsular imperium as well conferred upon him. This arrangement was confirmed in 13, and, when Augustus died the following year, Tiberius automatically became emperor.
Tiberius (ruled 14–37), during whose reign Christ was crucified, was a soldier and administrator of proved capability but of a reserved and moody temperament that engendered misunderstanding and unpopularity. Slander blamed him for the death in 19 of his nephew and heir apparent, the popular Germanicus; and, when informers (delatores), who functioned at Rome like public prosecutors, charged notables with treason, Tiberius was thought to encourage them. By concentrating the praetorian cohorts in a camp adjoining Rome, he increased the soldiers’ scope for mischief-making without building any real security, and in 26 he left Rome permanently for the island of Capreae (Capri), entrusting Rome to the care of the city prefect. Tiberius heeded the aged Augustus’ advice and did not extend the empire. (The annexation of Cappadocia, a client kingdom, represented no departure from Augustan policy.) In general he took his duties seriously; however, by administering the empire from Capreae he offended the Senate and was never fully trusted, much less really liked. At his death he was not pronounced divus. His great-nephew, Germanicus’ son Gaius, succeeded him.
Gaius (better known by his nickname, Caligula, meaning Little Boot) ruled from 37 to 41 with the absolutism of an Oriental monarch: his short reign was filled with reckless spending, callous murders, and humiliation of the Senate. Gaius’ foreign policy was inept. Projected annexation proved abortive in Britain; it touched off heavy fighting in Mauretania. In Judaea and Alexandria, Gaius’ contemptuous disregard of Jewish sentiment provoked near rebellion. When assassination ended his tyranny, the Senate contemplated restoration of the republic but was obliged by the Praetorian Guard to recognize Claudius, Germanicus’ brother and therefore Gaius’ uncle, as emperor.
Claudius I (ruled 41–54) went far beyond Augustus and Tiberius in centralizing government administration and, particularly, state finances in the imperial household. His freedmen secretaries consequently acquired great power; they were in effect directors of government bureaus. Claudius himself displayed much interest in the empire overseas; he enlarged it significantly, incorporating client kingdoms (Mauretania in 42; Lycia, 43; Thrace, 46) and, more important, annexing Britain. Conquest of Britain began in 43, Claudius himself participating in the campaign; the southeast was soon overrun, a colonia established at Camulodunum (Colchester) and a municipium at Verulamium (St. Albans), while Londinium (London) burgeoned into an important entrepôt. Claudius also promoted Romanization, especially in the western provinces, by liberally granting Roman citizenship, by founding coloniae, and by inducting provincials directly into the Senate—he became censor in 47 and added to the Senate men he wanted, bestowing appropriate quaestorian or praetorian rank upon them to spare the maturer ones among them the necessity of holding junior magistracies; lest existing senators take offense, he elevated some of them to patrician status (a form of patronage often used by later emperors). Claudius’ provincial policies made the primacy of Italy less pronounced, although that was hardly his aim. In fact, he did much for Italy, improving its harbours, roads, and municipal administration and draining its marshy districts. The execution of many senators and equites, the insolence and venality of his freedmen, the excessive influence of his wives, and even his bodily infirmities combined to make him unpopular. Nevertheless, when he died (murdered probably by his fourth wife, Julia Agrippina, Augustus’ great-granddaughter, who was impatient for the succession of the 16-year-old Nero, her son by an earlier marriage), he was pronounced divus.
Nero (ruled 54–68) left administration to capable advisers for a few years but then asserted himself as a vicious despot. He murdered successively his stepbrother Britannicus, his mother Julia Agrippina, his wife Octavia, and his tutor Seneca. He also executed many Christians, accusing them of starting the great fire of Rome in 64 (this is the first recorded Christian persecution). In Rome his reliance on Oriental favourites and his general misgovernment led to a conspiracy by Gaius Calpurnius Piso in 65, but it was suppressed, leading to yet more executions; the victims included the poet Lucan. The empire was not enlarged under this unwarlike emperor, but it was called upon to put down serious disorders. In Britain in 60–61 the rapacity and brutality of Roman officials provoked a furious uprising under Queen Boudicca; thousands were slaughtered, and Camulodunum, Vernulamium, and Londinium were destroyed. In the east a major military effort under Corbulo, Rome’s foremost general, was required (62–65) to reestablish Roman prestige; a compromise settlement was reached, with the Romans accepting the Parthian nominee in Armenia and the Parthians recognizing him as Rome’s client king. In 66, however, revolt flared in Judaea, fired by Roman cruelty and stupidity, Jewish fanaticism, and communal hatreds; the prefect of Egypt, Julius Alexander, prevented involvement of the Jews of the Diaspora. An army was sent to Judaea under Titus Flavius Vespasianus to restore order; but it had not completed its task when two provincial governors in the west rebelled against Nero—Julius Vindex in Gallia Lugdunensis and Sulpicius Galba in Hispania Tarraconensis. When the praetorians in Rome also renounced their allegiance, Nero lost his nerve and committed suicide. He brought the Julio-Claudian dynasty to an ignominious end by being the first emperor to suffer damnatio memoriae—his reign was officially stricken from the record by order of the Senate.
Growth of the empire under the Flavians and Antonines
The year of the four emperors
Nero’s death ushered in the so-called year of the four emperors. The extinction of the Julio-Claudian imperial house robbed the soldiers of a focus for their allegiance, and civil war between the different armies ensued. The army of Upper Germany, after crushing Vindex, urged its commander, Verginius Rufus, to seize the purple for himself. But he elected to support Galba—scion of a republican patrician family claiming descent from Jupiter and Pasiphae—who was recognized as emperor by the Senate. However, the treasury, emptied by Nero’s extravagance, imposed a stringent economy, and this bred unpopularity for Galba; his age (73) was also against him, and unrest grew. Early in January 69 the Rhineland armies acclaimed Aulus Vitellius, commander in Lower Germany; at Rome the praetorians preferred Marcus Salvius Otho, whom Galba had alienated by choosing a descendant of the old republican aristocracy for his successor. Otho promptly procured Galba’s murder and obtained senatorial recognition; this ended the monopoly of the purple for the republican nobility.
Otho, however, lasted only three months; defeated at Bedriacum, near Cremona in northern Italy, by Vitellius’ powerful Rhineland army, he committed suicide (April 69). The Senate thereupon recognized Vitellius; but the soldiers along the Danube and in the east supported Vespasianus, the commander in Judaea. In a second battle near Bedriacum, the Rhineland troops were defeated in their turn, and on Vitellius’ death soon afterward an accommodating Senate pronounced Vespasian emperor.
The Flavian emperors
On Dec. 22, 69, the Senate conferred all the imperial powers upon Vespasian en bloc with the famous Lex de Imperio Vespasiani (“Law Regulating Vespasian’s authority”), and the Assembly ratified the Senate’s action. This apparently was the first time that such a law was passed; a fragmentary copy of it is preserved on the Capitol in Rome.
Vespasian (ruled 69–79) did not originate from Rome or its aristocracy. His family came from the Sabine municipality Reate, and with his elevation the Italian bourgeoisie came into its own. He and his two sons, both of whom in turn succeeded him, constituted the Flavian dynasty (69–96). Vespasian faced the same difficult task as Augustus—the restoration of peace and stability. The disorders of 69 had taken troops away from the Rhine and Danube frontiers. Thereupon, the Danubian lands were raided by Sarmatians, a combination of tribes who had overwhelmed and replaced the Scythians, their distant kinsmen, in eastern Europe. The assailants were repelled without undue difficulty; but the Sarmatian Iazyges, now firmly in control of the region between the Tisza and Danube rivers, posed a threat for the future.
Developments in the Rhineland were more immediately serious. There in 69 a certain Civilis incited the Batavians serving as auxiliaries in the Roman army to rebel. Gallic tribes joined the movement, and the insurgents boldly overran all but two of the legionary camps along the Rhine. Vespasian sent his relative Petilius Cerealis to deal with the rebels, who, fortunately for Rome, were not united in their aims; by 70 Cerealis had restored order. That same year Vespasian’s elder son, Titus, brought the bloody war in Judaea to its end by besieging, capturing, and destroying Jerusalem.
To rehabilitate the public finances, Vespasian introduced new imposts, including a poll tax on Jews, and practiced stringent economies. With the Senate he was courteous but firm. He allowed it little initiative but used it as a reservoir from which to obtain capable administrators. To that end he assumed the censorship and added senators on a larger scale than Claudius had done, especially from the municipalities of Italy and the western provinces. Already before 69 an aristocracy of service had arisen, and the provincialization of the Roman Senate had begun; thereafter this development made rapid headway. Besides the censorship, Vespasian also often held the consulship, usually with Titus as his colleague. His object presumably was to ensure that his own parvenu Flavian house outranked any other. In this he succeeded; the troops especially were ready to accept the Flavians as the new imperial family. On Vespasian’s death in 79, Titus, long groomed for the succession, became emperor and immediately had his father deified.
Titus (ruled 79–81) had a brief reign, marred by disasters (the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum and another great fire in Rome); but his attempts to alleviate the suffering and his general openhandedness won him such popularity that he was unhesitatingly deified after his early death.
Domitian (ruled 81–96), Titus’ younger brother, had never been formally indicated for the succession; but the praetorians acclaimed him, and the Senate ratified their choice. Throughout his reign Domitian aimed at administrative efficiency, but his methods were high-handed. For him the Senate existed merely to supply imperial servants. He also used equites extensively, more than any previous emperor. He held the consulship repeatedly, was censor perpetuus from 85 on, and demanded other extravagant honours. On the whole, his efficiency promoted the welfare of the empire. Above all, he retained the allegiance of the troops. Although scornful of the Senate’s dignity, he insisted on his own and mercilessly punished any act of disrespect, real or fancied, toward himself. He became even more suspicious and ruthless when Saturninus, commander in Upper Germany, attempted rebellion in 89. He crushed Saturninus; executions and confiscations ensued, and delatores flourished. The tyranny was particularly dangerous to senators, and it ended only with Domitian’s assassination in 96. The Flavian dynasty, like the Julio-Claudian, ended with an emperor whose memory was officially damned.
The disorders in 69 were the cause of some military reforms. Under the Flavians, auxiliaries usually served far from their native hearths under officers of different nationality from themselves. At the same time, the tasks assigned to them came increasingly to resemble those performed by the legionaries. The latter grew less mobile, as camps with stone buildings came to be the rule; and it became common for detachments from a legion (vexillationes), rather than the entire legion, to be used for field operations. This army of a new type proved its mettle in Britain, where the advance halted by Boudicca’s revolt was now resumed. Between 71 and 84 three able governors—Petilius Cerealis, Julius Frontinus, and Julius Agricola, the latter Tacitus’ father-in-law—enlarged the province to include Wales and northern England; Agricola even reached the Scottish highlands before Domitian recalled him.
Along the Rhine, weaknesses revealed by Civilis’ revolt were repaired. Vespasian crossed the river in 74 and annexed the Agri Decumates, the triangle of land between the Rhine, Danube, and Main rivers. To consolidate the position, he and Domitian after him penetrated the Neckar River valley and Taunus mountains, and fortifications began to take shape to the east of the Rhine, a military boundary complete with strongpoints, watchtowers, and, later, a continuous rampart of earthworks and palisades. Once Saturninus’ revolt in 89 had been suppressed, Domitian felt the situation along the Rhine sufficiently stable to warrant conversion of the military districts of Upper and Lower Germany into regular provinces and the transfer of some Rhineland troops to the Danube. To the north of this latter river, the Dacians had been organized into a strong kingdom, ruled by Decebalus and centring on modern Romania; in 85 they raided southward across the Danube, and in the next year they defeated the Roman punitive expedition. Domitian restored the situation in 88, but Saturninus’ rebellion prevented him from following up his success. Domitian and Decebalus thereupon came to terms: Decebalus was to protect the lower Danube against Sarmatian attack, and Domitian was to pay him an annual subsidy in recompense. The Danubian frontier, however, remained disturbed, and Domitian wisely strengthened its garrisons; by the end of his reign it contained nine legions, as against the Rhineland’s six, and Pannonia was soon to become the military centre of gravity of the empire.
The Flavians also took measures to strengthen the eastern frontier. In Asia Minor, Vespasian created a large “armed” province by amalgamating Cappadocia, Lesser Armenia, and Galatia; and the whole area was provided with a network of military roads. South of Asia Minor, Judaea was converted into an “armed” province by getting legionary troops; and two client kingdoms—Commagene and Transjordan—were annexed and added to Syria. Furthermore, the legionary camps seem now to have been established right on the Euphrates at the principal river crossings. This display of military strength kept the empire and Parthia at peace for many years.
The early Antonine emperors: Nerva and Trajan
Marcus Cocceius Nerva, an elderly senator of some distinction, was the choice of Domitian’s assassins for emperor; and the Senate promptly recognized him. The soldiers, however, did so much more reluctantly, and, because the year 69 had revealed that emperors no longer needed to be Roman aristocrats and could be chosen in places other than Rome, their attitude imposed caution.
Nerva, who ruled from 96 to 98, adopted a generally lavish and liberal policy, but it failed to win the soldiers over completely, and he proved unable to save all Domitian’s murderers from their vengeance. Unrest subsided only when, overlooking kinsmen of his own, he adopted an outstanding soldier, Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, who was governor of Upper Germany, as his successor. Nerva himself died a few months later.
Trajan (ruled 98–117) was the first and perhaps the only emperor to be adopted by a predecessor totally unrelated to him by either birth or marriage. He was also the first in a series of “good” rulers who succeeded one another by adoption and for most of the 2nd century provided the empire with internal harmony and careful government; they are collectively, if somewhat loosely, called the Antonine emperors. More significantly still, Trajan, a Spaniard, was also the first princeps to come from the provinces; with the greater number of provincials now in the Senate, the elevation of one of them, sooner or later, was practically inevitable. Throughout his reign, Trajan generally observed constitutional practices. Mindful of the susceptibilities of the Senate, he regularly consulted and reported to it. Modest in his bearing, he did not claim ostentatious honours such as frequent consulships or numerous imperial salutations, and he mixed easily with senators on terms of cordial friendship. This reestablished mutual respect between princeps and Senate. Empire and liberty, in Tacitus’ words, were reconciled, and the atmosphere of suspicion, intrigue, and terror surrounding the court in Domitian’s day disappeared. Trajan endeared himself also to the populace at large with lavish building programs, gladiatorial games, and public distributions of money. Above all, he was popular with the armed forces; he was the soldier-emperor par excellence. Understandably, he received the title Optimus (Best), officially from 114 on (and unofficially for many years earlier).
Yet Trajan was a thoroughgoing autocrat who intervened without hesitation or scruple even in the senatorial sphere, whenever it seemed necessary. His aim was efficiency; his desire was to promote public welfare everywhere. He embellished Rome with splendid and substantial structures, and he showed his care for Italy by refurbishing and enlarging the harbours at Ostia, Centumcellae, and Ancona. He sent officials called curatores to Italian municipalities in financial difficulties and helped to rehabilitate them. He greatly expanded an ingenious charity scheme probably begun by Nerva: money was loaned to farmers on easy terms, and the low interest they paid went into a special fund for supporting indigent children. Nor did Trajan neglect Italy’s highway network: he built a new road (Via Traiana) that soon replaced the Via Appia as the main thoroughfare between Beneventum and Brundisium.
Interest in Italy implied no neglect of the provinces. Curatores were also sent to them; to rescue Achaea and Bithynia, senatorial provinces, from threatened bankruptcy, Trajan made them both temporarily imperial, sending special commissioners of his own to them. His correspondence with his appointee in Bithynia, the younger Pliny, has survived and reveals how conscientiously the emperor responded on even the smallest details. At the same time, it reveals how limited was access to the central government and, consequently, how great a latitude for independent decisions must be left to the governors who lacked some special claim on the emperor’s attention. Trajan’s day was too short to hear every speech of every delegation from the provinces, every recommendation to bestow favour or grant promotion, and every appeal to himself as supreme judiciary. To assist him, he had a “bureaucracy” of only a few hundred in Rome and a few more hundred serving in various capacities in the provinces—to direct the lives of some 60 million people. Clearly, most government must in fact rest in the hands of local aristocracies.
In the military sphere, Trajan’s reign proved a most dynamic one. He decided to strengthen the dangerous Danube frontier by converting Dacia into a salient of Roman territory north of the river in order to dismember the Sarmatian tribes and remove the risk of large, hostile combinations to a safer distance. Bringing to bear a force of 100,000 men, he conquered Decebalus in two hard-fought wars (101–102; 105–106) and annexed Dacia, settling it with people from neighbouring parts of the empire. On the eastern frontier he planned a similar operation, evidently in the conviction, shared by many eminent Romans both before and after him, that only conquest could solve the Parthian problem. Possibly, too, he wished to contain the menace of the Sarmatian Alani in the Caspian region. In a preliminary move, the Nabataean kingdom of Arabia Petraea was annexed in 105–106. Then, in 114, Trajan assembled another large army, incorporated the client kingdom of Armenia, and invaded Parthia.
After spectacular victories in 115 and 116, he created additional provinces (Northern Mesopotamia, Assyria) and reached the Persian Gulf. But he had merely overrun Mesopotamia; he had not consolidated it, and, as his army passed, revolts broke out in its rear. The Jews of the Diaspora and others seized their chance to rebel, and before the end of 116 much of the Middle East besides Parthia was in arms (Cyrene, Egypt, Cyprus, Anatolia). Trajan proceeded resolutely to restore the situation, but death found him still in the East.
Before his last illness he had not formally indicated his successor. But high honours and important posts had been accorded his nearest male relative, Publius Aelius Hadrianus, the governor of Syria; and, according to Trajan’s widow, Hadrian had actually been adopted by Trajan on his deathbed. Accordingly, both Senate and soldiers recognized him. Trajan’s posthumous deification was never in doubt.
Hadrian and the other Antonine emperors
Hadrian (ruled 117–138), also a Spaniard, was an emperor of unusual versatility. Unlike Trajan, he was opposed to territorial expansion. Being himself in the East in 117, he renounced Trajan’s conquests there immediately and contemplated evacuating Dacia as well. Furthermore, four of the consular generals particularly identified with Trajan’s military ventures were arrested and executed “for conspiracy”; Hadrian claimed later that the Senate ordered their deaths against his wishes. The only heavy fighting during his generally peaceful reign occurred in Judaea—or Syria Palaestina, as it was thenceforth called—where Bar Kokhba led a furious, if futile, Jewish revolt (132–135) against Hadrian’s conversion of Jerusalem into a Roman colony named Aelia Capitolina.
Roman EmpireThe extent of the Roman Empire in 117 ce.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Instead of expansion by war, Hadrian sought carefully delimited but well-defended frontiers, with client states beyond them where possible. The frontiers themselves, when not natural barriers, were strongly fortified: in Britain, Hadrian’s Wall, a complex of ditches, mounds, forts, and stone wall, stretched across the island from the Tyne to the Solway; Germany and Raetia had a limes (fortified boundary) running between Mainz on the Rhine and Regensburg on the Danube. Within the frontiers the army was kept at full strength, mostly by local recruiting of legionaries and apparently of auxiliaries, too (so that Vespasian’s system of having the latter serve far from their homelands gradually ceased). Moreover, the tendency for auxiliaries to be assimilated to legionaries continued; even the officers became less distinguishable, because equites now sometimes replaced senators in high posts in the legions. To keep his essentially sedentary army in constant readiness and at peak efficiency (no easy task), Hadrian carried out frequent personal inspections, spending about half his reign in the provinces (121–125; 128–134).
Hadrian also was responsible for significant developments on the civilian side. Under him, equites were no longer required to do military service as an essential step in their career, and many of them were employed in the imperial civil service, more even than under Domitian. By now the formative days of the civil service were over; its bureaucratic phase was beginning, and it offered those equites who had no military aspirations an attractive, purely civilian career. Formal titles now marked the different equestrian grades of dignity: a procurator was vir egregius; an ordinary prefect, vir perfectissimus; a praetorian prefect, vir eminentissimus, the latter title being obviously parallel to the designation vir clarissimus for a senator. Thenceforth, equites replaced freedmen in the imperial household and bureaus, and they even appeared in Hadrian’s imperial council.
Hadrian also improved legal administration. He had his expert jurists codify the edictum perpetuum (the set of rules gradually elaborated by the praetors for the interpretation of the law). He also appointed four former consuls to serve as circuit judges in Italy. This brought Italy close to becoming a province; Hadrian’s intent, however, was not to reduce the status of Italy but to make all parts of the empire important. For one part of his realm, he was exceptionally solicitous: he spent much time in Greece and lavishly embellished Athens.
Hadrian maintained good relations with but was never fully trusted by the Senate. His foreign policy seemed to be unheroic, his cosmopolitanism to be un-Roman, and his reforms to encroach on activities traditionally reserved for senators. Moreover, in his last two years he was sometimes capricious and tyrannous. Like Augustus, he had no son of his own and conducted a frustrating search for a successor. After executing his only male blood relative, his grandnephew, in 136, he adopted Lucius Ceionius Commodus, renaming him Lucius Aelius Caesar. The latter, however, died shortly afterward, whereupon Hadrian in 138 chose a wealthy but sonless senator, the 51-year-old Titus Aurelius Antoninus; but, evidently intent on founding a dynasty, he made Antoninus in his turn adopt two youths, 16 and 7 years old, respectively—they are known to history as Marcus Aurelius (the nephew of Antoninus’ wife) and Lucius Verus (the son of Aelius Caesar). When Hadrian died soon thereafter, Antoninus succeeded and induced a reluctant Senate to deify the deceased emperor. According to some, it was this act of filial piety that won for Antoninus his cognomen, Pius.
Antoninus Pius (ruled 138–161) epitomizes the Roman Empire at its cosmopolitan best. He himself was of Gallic origin; his wife was of Spanish origin. For most men his was a reign of quiet prosperity, and the empire under him deserves the praises lavished upon it by the contemporary writer Aelius Aristides. Unlike Hadrian, Antoninus traveled little; he remained in Italy, where in 148 he celebrated the 900th anniversary of Rome. Princeps and Senate were on excellent terms, and coins with the words tranquillitas and concordia on them in Antoninus’ case mean what they say. Other of his coins not unreasonably proclaim felicitas temporum (“the happiness of the times”). Yet raids and rebellions in many of the borderlands (in Britain, Dacia, Mauretania, Egypt, Palaestina, and elsewhere) were danger symptoms, even though to the empire at large they seemed only faraway bad dreams, to use the expression of Aelius Aristides. Antoninus prudently pushed the Hadrianic frontiers forward in Dacia, the Rhineland, and Britain (where the Antonine Wall from the Firth of Forth to the River Clyde became the new boundary) and carefully groomed his heir apparent for his imperial responsibilities.
Marcus Aurelius (ruled 161–180) succeeded the deified Antoninus and more than honoured Hadrian’s intentions by immediately co-opting Lucius Verus as his full co-emperor. Because Verus’ competence was unproved, this excess of zeal was imprudent. Fortunately, Verus left decision making to Marcus. Marcus’ action was also dangerous for another reason; it represented a long step away from imperial unity and portended the ultimate division of the empire into Greek- and Latin-speaking halves. Nor was this the only foreboding development in Marcus’ reign—formidable barbarian assaults were launched against the frontiers, anticipating those that were later to bring about the disintegration of the empire. Marcus himself was a stoic philosopher; his humanistic, if somewhat pessimistic, Meditations reveal how conscientiously he took his duties. Duty called him to war; he responded to the call and spent far more of his reign in the field than had any previous emperor.
At Marcus’ very accession the Parthians turned aggressive, and he sent Verus to defend Roman interests (162). Verus greedily took credit for any victories but left serious fighting to Avidius Cassius and the army of Syria. Cassius succeeded in overrunning Mesopotamia and even took Ctesiphon, the Parthian capital; he was therefore able to conclude a peace that safeguarded Rome’s eastern provinces and client kingdoms (166). In the process, however, his troops became infected with plague, and they carried it back with them to the west with calamitous results. The Danube frontier, already weakened by the dispatch of large detachments to the East, collapsed under barbarian assault. Pressed on from behind by Goths, Vandals, Lombards, and others, the Germanic Marcomanni and Quadi and the Sarmatian Iazyges poured over the river; the Germans actually crossed Raetia, Noricum, and Pannonia to raid northern Italy and besiege Aquileia. Marcus and Verus relieved the city shortly before Verus’ death (169). Then, making Pannonia his pivot of maneuver, Marcus pushed the invaders back; by 175 they were again beyond the Danube. At that moment, however, a false report of Marcus’ death prompted Avidius Cassius, by now in charge of all eastern provinces, to proclaim himself emperor. The news of this challenge undid Marcus’ achievements along the Danube because it took him to the East and reopened the door to barbarian attacks. Fortunately, Cassius was soon murdered, and Marcus could return to central Europe (177). But he had barely restored the frontier again when he died at Vindobona (Vienna) in 180, bequeathing the empire to his son, the 19-year-old Commodus, who had actually been named coemperor three years earlier.
Commodus (ruled 180–192), like Gaius and Nero, the youthful emperors before him, proved incompetent, conceited, and capricious. Fortunately, the frontiers remained intact, thanks to able provincial governors and to barbarian allies, who had been settled along the Danube with land grants and who gave military service in return. But Commodus abandoned Marcus’ scheme for new trans-Danubian provinces, preferring to devote himself to sensual pleasures and especially to the excitements of the arena in Rome, where he posed as Hercules Romanus and forced the Senate to recognize his godhead officially. He left serious business to his favourites, whose ambitions and intrigues led to plots, treason trials, confiscations, and insensate murders. Commodus’ assassination on the last day of 192 terminated a disastrous reign; thus the Antonines, like the Julio-Claudians, had come to an ignominious end. And there was a similar sequel. Commodus’ damnatio memoriae, like Nero’s, was followed by a year of four emperors.
The empire in the 2nd century
The century and three-quarters after Augustus’ death brought no fundamental changes to the principate, although so long a lapse of time naturally introduced modifications and shifts of emphasis. By Flavian and Antonine times the principate was accepted universally. For the provinces, a return to the republic was utterly unthinkable; for Rome and Italy, the year 69 served as a grim warning of the chaos to be expected if, in the absence of a princeps, the ambitions of a few powerful individuals obtained unfettered scope. A princeps was clearly a necessity, and people were even prepared to tolerate a bad one, although naturally they always hoped for a good one.
The princeps, moreover, did not have to be chosen any longer from the Julio-Claudians. The great achievement of the Flavians was to reconcile the soldiers and the upper classes everywhere to the idea that others were eligible. The Flavians’ frequent tenure of consulship and censorship invested their family, though not of the highest nobility, with the outward trappings of prestige and the aristocratic appearance of an authentic imperial household. The deification of the first two Flavians contributed to the same end, and so did the disappearance of old republican families that might have outranked the reigning house (by 69 most descendants of the republican nobility had either died of natural causes or been exterminated by imperial persecution). After the Flavians, the newness of a man’s senatorial dignity and the obscurity of his ultimate origin, whether it was Italian or otherwise, no longer forbade his possible elevation. Indeed, Domitian’s successors and even Domitian himself in his last years did not need to enhance their own importance by repeated consulships. The Antonine emperors, like the Julio-Claudians, held the office infrequently. They did, however, continue the Flavian practice of emphasizing the loftiness of their families by deifying deceased relatives (Trajan deified his sister, his niece, and his father; Antoninus, his wife; and so forth).
Trend to absolute monarchy
Glorification of the reigning house, together with a document such as Vespasian’s Lex de Imperio, helped to advertise the emperor’s position; and under the Flavians and Antonines the principate became much more like an avowed monarchy. Proconsular imperium began to be reflected in the imperial titulary, and official documents started calling the emperor dominus noster (“our master”).
The development of imperial law-making clearly illustrates the change. From the beginnings of the principate, the emperor had had the power to legislate, although no law is known that formally recognized his right to do so; by Antonine times, legal textbooks stated unequivocally that whatever the emperor ordered was legally binding. The early emperors usually made the Senate their mouthpiece and issued their laws in the form of senatorial decrees; by the 2nd century the emperor was openly replacing whatever other sources of written law had hitherto been permitted to function. After 100 the Assembly never met formally to pass a law, and the Senate often no longer bothered to couch its decrees in legal language, being content to repeat verbatim the speech with which the ruler had advocated the measure in question. After Hadrian, magistrates ceased modifying existing law by their legal interpretations because the praetors’ edictum perpetuum had become a permanent code, which the emperor alone could alter. By 200, learned jurists had lost the right they had enjoyed since the time of Augustus of giving authoritative rulings on disputed points (responsa prudentium). Meanwhile, the emperor more and more was legislating directly by means of edicts, judgments, mandates, and rescripts—collectively known as constitutiones principum. He usually issued such constitutiones only after consulting the “friends” (amici Caesaris) who composed his imperial council. But a constitutio was nevertheless a fiat. The road to the later dominate (after 284) lay open.
Political life
Nevertheless, the autocratic aspect of the Flavian and Antonine regimes should not be overstressed. Augustus himself had been well aware that it was impossible to disguise permanently the supremacy that accumulation of powers gained piecemeal conferred; his deportment in his last years differed little from that of Vespasian, Titus, and the so-called five good emperors who followed them. Nor had other Julio-Claudians hesitated to parade their predominance—Claudius, by centralizing the imperial powers, reduced their apparent diversity to one all-embracing imperium; Gaius and Nero revealed the autocracy implicit in the principate with frank brutality.
What impresses perhaps as much as the undoubtedly autocratic behaviour of the Flavians and Antonines is the markedly civilian character of their reigns. They held supreme power, and some of them were distinguished soldiers; yet they were not military despots. For this the old republican tradition—whereby a state official might serve in both a civilian and a military capacity—was largely responsible. Matters, however, were open to change after Hadrian separated the two realms of service. Actually, the 3rd century soon showed what it meant to have a princeps whose whole experience had been confined to camps and barracks.
As imperial powers became more concentrated, republican institutions decayed; the importance of imperial officials grew, while the authority of urban magistrates declined. Quaestorship, praetorship, and consulship (the last-named now reduced to a two-month sinecure) became mere stepping stones to the great imperial posts that counted most in the life of the empire. Governors of imperial provinces and commanders of legions were Roman senators; but they were equally imperial appointees. Clearly, the emperor was the master of the Senate; and it was disingenuous for him to get impatient, as some emperors did, with the Senate’s lack of initiative and reluctance to take firm decisions of its own. The emperor might not even consult the Senate much, preferring to rely on his imperial council, in which equestrian bureau chiefs over the course of the 2nd century came to constitute an established element.
The Senate, however, at least until the reign of Commodus, was treated courteously by most Flavians and Antonines. They recognized its importance as a lawcourt, as the body that formally appointed a new emperor, and as a sounding board of informed opinion. Senators came increasingly from the provinces, and, although this meant preeminently the western provinces (the Greek-speaking East being underrepresented), the Senate did reflect to some extent the views of the empire at large.
The equites, meanwhile, steadily acquired greater importance as imperial officials. In newly created posts they invariably became the incumbents, and in posts of long standing they replaced freedmen and publicani. During the 2nd century equestrian procurators increased markedly in numbers as the direction of imperial business came to be more tidily subdivided. Four grades of service distinguished by salary were established. While the government assumed a more rational flow and outline, its total number of employees nevertheless remained quite tiny, compared with that of the 4th and later centuries.
Rome and Italy
By the 2nd century the city of Rome had attracted freeborn migrants from all over the empire; it housed, additionally, large numbers of manumitted slaves. These newcomers were all assimilated and diluted the city’s Italian flavour. The vast majority of them were poor, the handful of opulent imperial freedmen being entirely exceptional. But many were energetic, enterprising, and lucky, able to make their way in the world. Freedmen laboured under a social stigma, although some of them managed to become equites. Their sons, however, might overcome discrimination, and their grandsons were even eligible for membership in the Senate.
Inevitably, there was extensive trade and commerce (much of it in freedman hands) in so large a city, which was also the centre of imperial administration. There was little industry, however, and the urban poor had difficulty finding steady employment. Theirs was a precarious existence, dependent on the public grain dole and on the private charity of the wealthy. Large building programs gave Flavian and Antonine emperors the opportunity not only to repair the damage caused by fire and falling buildings (as stated, a frequent hazard among the densely packed and flimsily built accommodations for the urban plebs) but also to relieve widespread urban unemployment. They also made imperial Rome a city of grandeur. Augustus’ building program had been vast but mostly concerned with repairing or rebuilding structures already existing, and his Julio-Claudian successors had built relatively little until the great fire made room for the megalomaniac marvels of Nero’s last years. It was under the Flavians and Antonines that Rome obtained many of its most celebrated structures: the Colosseum, Palatine palaces, Trajan’s Forum, the Pantheon, the Castel Sant’ Angelo (Hadrian’s mausoleum), the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, Aurelius’ Column, as well as the aqueducts whose arches spanned across Campagna to keep the city and its innumerable fountains supplied with water.
Italy was much less cosmopolitan and sophisticated and, according to literary tradition, much more sober and straitlaced than was Rome. It was the mistress of the empire, although the gap between it and the provinces was narrowing. Hadrian’s policies especially helped to reduce its privileged position. His use of circuit judges was resented precisely because with them Italy resembled a province; actually, Italy badly needed them, and their abolition by Antoninus Pius was soon reversed by Marcus Aurelius. Also, in Aurelius’ reign a provincial fate overtook Italy in the form of barbarian invasion; a few years later the country got its first legionary garrison under Septimius Severus.
The economic importance of Italy also declined. By the end of Augustus’ reign, the ascendancy of its wine, oil, marble, and fine pottery in the markets of Gaul and Germany had already begun to yield to the competition of local production in the West; and, by Flavian times, Italy was actually importing heavily not only from Gaul (witness the crates of yet-unpacked Gallic bowls and plates caught in the destruction of Pompeii) but also from Spain. The latter province was especially represented by its extraordinarily popular condiment, garum; its olive oil, too, was a sizable item on Italian tables after ad 100, only to yield its primacy there, by the mid-2nd century, to oil from northern Africa. By then, Spanish, Gallic, and African farm products all outweighed Italian ones in Ostia and Rome. Against such tendencies, the emperors did what they could: Domitian, for example, protected Italian viticulture by restricting vine growing in the provinces; Trajan and his successors forced Roman senators to take an interest in the country, even though it was no longer the homeland of many of them, by investing a high proportion of their capital in Italian land (one-third under Trajan, one-quarter under Aurelius).
Developments in the provinces
The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon’s famous description of the 2nd century as the period when men were happiest and most prosperous is not entirely false. Certainly, by then people had come to take for granted the unique greatness and invincibility of the empire; even the ominous events of Aurelius’ reign failed to shatter their conviction that the empire was impregnable; and the internal disturbances of the preceding reign had not given cause for much alarm. The credit for the empire’s success lay less with what its rulers did and could do than with what they did not do: they did not interfere too much. The empire was a vast congeries of peoples and races with differing religions, customs, and languages, and the emperors were content to let them live their own lives. Imperial policy favoured a veneer of common culture transcending ethnic differences, but there was no deliberate denationalization. Ambitious men striving for a career naturally found it helpful, if not necessary, to become Roman in bearing and conduct and perhaps even in language as well (although speakers of Greek often rose to exalted positions). But local self-government was the general rule, and neither Latin nor Roman ways were imposed on the communities composing the empire. The official attitude to religion illustrates this—in line with the absolutist trend, emperor worship was becoming slowly but progressively more theocratic (Domitian relished the title of god, Commodus demanded it); yet this did not lead to the suppression of non-Roman or even outlandish cults, unless they were thought immoral (like Druidism, with its human sacrifice) or conducive to public disorder (like Christianity, with its uncompromising dismissal of all gods other than its own as mere demons, and wicked and hurtful ones at that—hence its liability to become a target for riots).
While there is no indication that the central authorities consciously opposed the increase of governmental personnel, the number of government employees certainly grew very slowly. Thus the responsibilities of the magnates in provincial cities were correspondingly great. In parts of southern Spain or in the area south of the Black Sea, for example, where the extent of the territories dependent on cities stretched out over many scores of miles into the surrounding landscape, city senators had not only to collect taxes but also to build roads and carry out much rural police work. Within their cities, too, senators had to see to the collection of taxes and tolls; as a group, they had to oversee and assign the income from municipal lands or buildings rented out and from endowments established by generous citizens; they had to authorize the plans and financing of sometimes very elaborate civic structures—an aqueduct, an amphitheatre, or a temple to the imperial family—or of great annual festivals and fairs or of ongoing amenities serving the public baths (free oil for anointing oneself, heating, and upkeep) or the public markets. In the eastern provinces, they had to replenish from time to time the stock of small local bronze coins; and they had to insure that magistracies were effectively staffed, even though there usually was no salary of any sort to attract candidates. Magistrates and city senators generally had to pay handsomely for their election and thereafter make further handsome contributions, as need arose and so far as they could afford, toward the adornment of their community.
What attractedcandidates in adequate numbers were most often three inducements: the feeling of community approval and praise, offered in the most public ways (described by writers of the time with striking psychological penetration); the enhancement of personal influence (meaning power) through the demonstration of great financial means; and finally, the social and political advancement that might follow on local prominence through attracting the attention of a governor or of the emperor himself. It was from the provincial elite that new Roman senators were made.
Cities, through their elite families, competed with each other across entire regions. City rivalries in northern Italy or western Anatolia happen to be especially well reported. Within individual cities, elite families were often in competition as well. In consequence, the standards of municipal beneficence rose, encouraged by a populace who on public occasions assembled in large numbers in the theatre, demanding yet more expenditure from their leaders. The emperors, who realized that the well-being of cities, the jewels of their realm, depended on such munificence, increasingly intervened to insure a continued flow of good things from the rich of a community to their fellow citizens. Legislation might, for example, specify the binding nature of electoral campaign promises or of formerly voluntary contributions connected with public service. As a consequence, in the 2nd century consideration must for the first time be given to the local aristocrat unwilling to serve his city; the series of imperial pronouncements exerting compulsion on such a person to serve was to stretch far into the future, with increasing severity. Attempts to stabilize the benefits arising from ambitious rivalries thus had an oppressive aspect.
As to the lower orders, their voice is rarely heard in surviving sources, except in acclamation. So long as the rich voluntarily covered the bulk of local expenses and so long as they commanded the leisure and knowledge of the world to give to administration unsalaried, the poor could not fairly claim much of a right to determine the city’s choices. Thus they acclaimed the candidacies of the rich and their gifts and otherwise gave vent to their wishes only by shouting in unison in the theatre or amphitheatre (in between spectacles) or through violent mob actions.
As noted above, the poor routinely solved the problems of daily life by appealing to someone of influence locally; this was true whether in Palestine, as indicated in the Talmud, or in Italy, as is evident from Pliny’s correspondence. The higher one looked in society, the more it appeared crisscrossed and interconnected by ties of kinship or of past services exchanged. It was at these higher levels that answers to routine problems were to be sought. Appeal was not directed to one’s peers, even though trade associations, cult groups of social equals, and burial insurance clubs with monthly meetings could be found in every town. Such groups served social, not political or economic, purposes, at least during the principate.
Accordingly, society was ordinarily described by contemporaries simply in terms of two classes, the upper and the lower, rich and poor, powerful and dependent, well known and nameless. The upper classes consisted of little more than 600 Roman senators, 25,000 equites, and 100,000 city senators; hence, a total amounting to 2 percent of the population. This stratum, from the mid-2nd century defined in law as “the more honourable,” honestiores, was minutely subdivided into degrees of dignity, the degrees being well advertised and jealously asserted; the entire stratum, however, was entitled to receive specially tender treatment in the courts. The remaining population was lumped together as “the more lowly,” humiliores, subject to torture when giving witness in court; to beatings, not fines; and to execution (in increasingly savage forms of death) rather than exile for the most serious crimes. Yet because of the existing patterns of power, which directed the humiliores to turn for help to the upper stratum, the lower classes did not form a revolutionary mass but constituted a stable element.
The pyramidal structure of society suggested by the statistics given above is somewhat obscured by the reality and prominence of the urban scene. In the cities the harsh outlines of the distribution of wealth were moderated by a certain degree of social mobility. No class offers more success stories than that of freedmen. Especially in the West, freedmen are astonishingly prominent in the record of inscriptions and proverbial for what the upper classes called unprincipled enterprise and vulgar moneygrubbing. Artisans and tradespeople—lowly folk, in the eyes of someone like Cicero—in fact presented themselves with a certain dignity, even some financial ease. At the bottom, slaves were numerous, constituting perhaps one-tenth of the population in at least the larger towns outside of Italy and considerably more in Italy—as much as one-quarter in Rome. But in the cities many of them at least enjoyed security from starvation and had a good roof over their heads. When one turns to the rural scene, however, one encounters a far larger, harsher world. In the first place, nine-tenths of the empire’s people lived on the land and from its yield. Where details of their lives emerge with any clarity, they most often tell of a changeless and bleak existence. The city looked down on the countryside with elaborate scorn, keeping the rural population at arm’s length. Very often people in the country had their own language—such as Gallic, Syriac, Libyphoenician, or Coptic, which further isolated them—and their own religion, marriage customs, and forms of entertainment. In time, the very term “country dweller,” paganus, set the rural population still further apart from the empire’s Christianized urban population.
The creation of a unified civilization
In the overall context of Western history, the degree to which the Mediterranean world during the period of the empire became one single system, one civilization, is a matter of the greatest importance. Clearly, one must distinguish between the life of the rural masses and that of the urban minority. The former retained many traits of a way of life predating not only Roman conquest but, in the East, the conquests of Alexander the Great centuries earlier. However, the device of organizing conquered territories under cities responsible for their surrounding territory proved as successful under the Romans as under the Greeks. The intent of both conquerors may have been limited to ensuring political control and the yield of tribute; however, in fact, they achieved much more: an approach to uniformity, at least in the cities.
Urban centres
The first thing to strike the traveler’s eye, in any survey of the 2nd-century empire, would have been the physical appearance of urban centres; as already noted, whatever the province, many of the same architectural forms could be observed: the suburbs tended to have aqueducts and racetracks and the cities a central grand market area surrounded by porticoes, temples, a records office, a council hall, a basilica for judicial hearings and public auctions, and a covered market hall of a characteristic shape for perishable foods (a macellum, as in Pompeii, in Perge on the southern coast of modern Turkey, or in North African Lepcis); there also would have been public baths with several separate halls for cold or hot bathing or exercise, a covered or open-air theatre, grand fountains, monumental arches, and honorific statues of local worthies by the dozens or even hundreds. Eastern centres would have gymnasia, occasionally Western ones as well; and Western cities would have amphitheatres, occasionally Eastern ones as well, for the imported institution of gladiatorial combats. Throughout the Western provinces, public buildings were likely to be arranged according to a single plan—more or less the same everywhere—in which a grid of right-angle streets was dominant, at least toward the central part of the city.
The hot room of the imperial baths at Trier, Ger.Fototeca Unione
In the West, as opposed to the East, a great deal of urbanization remained to be done and was accomplished by the Romans. The grid plan, its particular mark, can be detected at the heart of places such as Turin, Banasa (Morocco), and Autun, all Augustan foundations, as well as in Nicopolis (Bulgaria), Budapest, and Silchester, all later ones. As noted above, orthogonal town planning was not a Roman invention, but the Romans introduced it to new regions and with a particular regularity of their own. Moreover, the grid of the central part of the city was matched, and sometimes extended on the same lines, by another grid laid across the surrounding territory. The process, referred to as centuriation, typically made use of squares of 2,330 feet (710 metres) on a side, intended for land distribution to settlers and general purposes of inventory. Signs of it were first detected in northern Africa in the 1830s, through surviving crop marks and roads, and have since (especially through air photography) been traced in the environs of Trier and Homs (Syria) and large areas of northern Italy, Tunisia, and elsewhere. In the placing of cities and roads and property boundaries, the Romans of the empire therefore left a nearly indelible stamp of their organizing energies on the map of Europe; they also established the lives of conquered populations inside their own characteristic framework.
The ancient Roman city of Thamugadi in northeastern Algeria, founded by Trajan in ad 100.Fototeca Unione
Latinization
The special burst of energy in the Augustan colonizing spread abroad not only the visible elements of a ruling civilization but the invisible ones as well. Colonies and municipalities received Roman forms of government according to their charters, they were administered by Roman law in Latin, and they diffused these things throughout the general population within and around them. In frontier areas such lessons in an alien civilization were pressed home by garrison forces through their frequent contacts with their hosts and suppliers. By the 2nd century considerable Latinization had occurred in the West. Modern Spanish, Portuguese, and French show that this was particularly true of the Iberian peninsula, which had been provincial soil ever since the Second Punic War, and of Gaul, where Latin enjoyed the advantage of some relationship to Celtic. In these regions, except in the less accessible rural or mountainous parts, even the lower orders adopted Latin. Today one can find in Romania the tongue that is the closest to its parent, Latin, even at so great a distance from its home. And Latin can be found not only in Romance languages; it has left its mark on languages such as Basque and German.
Inscriptions represent the most frequent testimony to linguistic allegiance; more than a quarter of a million survive in Latin from the period of the empire, the vast majority of them being funerary. The number of inscriptions per year increases slowly during the 1st century and a half ad, thereafter ascending in a steep line to a point in the second decade of the 3rd and then falling off even more steeply. The curve is best explained as reflecting pride in “Romanness”—in possessing not only Latin but full citizenship as well and, thereby, admission to a group for whom commemoration of the deceased was a legal as well as a moral duty. Over the course of time, by individual gift from the emperors, by army service, and by election to magistracies or simply to the city senates of colonies and municipalities, a growing proportion of the empire’s population had gained citizenship; moreover, their children were citizens, whose descendants in turn were Romans in the legal sense. By ad 212 this accelerating process had advanced so far that the emperor Caracalla could offer the gift of incorporation to the entirety of his subjects without much notice being taken of his generosity—it was already in the possession of most of the people who counted and whose reactions might be recorded. Once citizenship was universal, it ceased to constitute a distinction; thus the declaration of it through the custom of funerary commemoration rapidly passed out of favour.
Limits of unification
One great flaw in the picture of the empire as one single civilization by 212, triumphantly unified in culture as in its political form, has already been pointed out: what was achieved within the cities’ walls did not extend with any completeness to the rural population, among whom local ways and native languages persisted. Peasants in 4th-century Syria spoke mostly Syriac, in Egypt mostly Coptic, in Africa often Punic or Libyphoenician, and in the Danube and northwestern provinces other native tongues. There was still another great flaw: the empire was half Roman (or Latin), half Greek. The latter was hardly touched by the former except through what may be called official channels—that is, law, coinage, military presence, imperial cult, and the superposition of an alien structure of power and prestige, to which the elite of the Eastern provinces might aspire. On the other hand, the Roman half was steeped in Greek ways. Apuleius, for example, though born and reared in a small North African town of the 2nd century, was sent to Athens to study rhetoric; on his return he could find not only an audience for his presentations in Greek but ordinary people in the marketplace able to read a letter in that language. In Rome the Christian community used Greek as its liturgical language well into the 3rd century, and the crowds in the Circus Maximus could enjoy a pun in Greek; an aristocrat such as the emperor Marcus Aurelius could be expected to be as bilingual as was Cicero or Caesar before him or even, like the emperor Gallienus, help the Greek philosopher Plotinus found a sort of Institute for Advanced Studies in the Naples area. Greece continued to supply a great deal of sculpture for Western buyers or even the teams of artisans needed for the decoration of public buildings in 3rd-century northern Africa. By such various means the division between the two halves of the empire was for a time covered over.
Cult of the emperors
Among the institutions most important in softening the edges of regional differences was the cult of the emperors. In one sense, it originated in the 4th century bc, when Alexander the Great first received veneration by titles and symbols and forms of address as if he were a superhuman being. Indeed, he must have seemed exactly that to contemporaries in Egypt, where the pharaohs had long been worshiped, and to peoples in the Middle East, for similar reasons of religious custom. Even the Greeks were quite used to the idea that beings who lived a human life of extraordinary accomplishment, as “heroes” in the full sense of the Greek word, would never die but be raised into some higher world; they believed this of heroes such as Achilles, Hercules, Pythagoras, and Dion of Syracuse in the mid-4th century bc. Great Roman commanders, like Hellenistic rulers, had altars, festivals, and special honours voted to them by Greek cities from the start of the 2nd century bc. It was not so strange, then, that a freedman supporter of Caesar’s erected a pillar over the ashes of the dead dictator in the Forum in April 44 bc and offered cult to him as a being now resident among the gods. Many citizens joined in. Within days Caesar’s heir Octavian pressed for the declaration of Caesar as divine—which the Senate granted by its vote in 42. By 25 bc the city of Mytilene had organized annual cult acts honouring Augustus and communicated their forms and impulse to Tarraco in Spain as well as to other Eastern Greek cities; and by 12 bc divine honours to Caesar and Augustus’ genius were established through the emperors’ initiative both in the Gallic capital, Lugdunum, and in the neighbourhood chapels to the crossroads gods in Rome. From these various points and models, emperor worship spread rapidly. Within a few generations, cities everywhere had built in its service new temples that dominated their forums or had assigned old temples to the joint service of a prior god and the imperial family. Such centres served as rallying points for the citizenry to express its devotion to Rome and the emperor. To speak for whole provinces, priests of the cult assembled during their year of office in central shrines, such as Lugdunum, as delegates of their cities, where they formulated for the emperor their complaints or their views on the incumbent governor’s administration. Whether these priests were freedmen in urban neighbourhoods, municipal magnates in local temples, or still grander leaders of the provinces, they perceived the imperial cult as something of high prestige and invested it and Roman rule with glory.
The emotional and political unification of the empire was further promoted by submissive or flattering forms of reference or address, adopted even by the highest personages when speaking of the emperor, and by portraits of the emperors or their families with attendant written messages. Of these two most obvious means of propaganda, the first survives in the texts of many panegyrics delivered to the throne, rhetorical disquisitions on monarchy, and prefatory announcements accompanying the publication of government edicts. They established a tone in which it was proper to think of Roman rule and government. Portraits, the second means of propaganda, included painted ones on general display in cities, sculpted ones, especially in the early years of each reign, based on official models available in a few major cities (hundreds of these survive, including at least one in gold), and engraved ones on coins. Imperial coins offered a more rapidly changing exhibition of images than even postage stamps in the modern world. Because the dies soon wore out, many scores of issues had to be brought out each year, in gold, silver, and bronze. While the images (“types”) and words (“legends”) on them tended to repetition, there was much conscious inculcation of topical messages: for example, in the short and rocky reign of Galba in ad 69, one finds the legends “All’s well that ends well” (bonus eventus), “Rome reborn,” “Peace for Romans,” and “Constitutional government restored” (libertas restituta, with iconographic reference to Brutus’ coins of 43 bc) and superlative portraits of Galba himself; or, in other reigns, the legends, enriched with suitable symbolism, read “the soldiers loyal,” “Italy well fed,” and fecunditas of the royal family and its progeny. So far as it is possible to comprehend the mind of the empire’s populace, there was no significant opposition to the government by the 2nd century; instead, there prevailed a great deal of ready veneration for the principate as an institution.
The economic factor
Economic factors, to the extent that they were favourable, played an obvious part in promoting both cultural and political unity. So far as acculturation was concerned, a limit to its achievement was clearly set by the amount of disposable capital among non-Romanized populations. The cost of such luxuries as schooling in Latin or frescoes on one’s walls were high. But more and more people could afford them as the benefits of Roman occupation were spreading. The rising levels of prosperity did not, however, result from a special benevolence on the part of the conquerors, intent as they were (and often cruelly intent) on the pleasures and profits of physical mastery over the conquered. Rather, they can be explained, first, by the imposition of the Pax Romana, which gave urban centres surer access to the surrounding rural areas and rural producers access in turn to convenient, centralized markets; second, by the sheer attractiveness of imported articles, which intensified efforts to increase the power to buy them; third, by the economic stimulation afforded by taxes, which had to be paid on new earnings but which remained in the provinces where they were raised. In the fourth place, prosperity also rose in the regions least Romanized. This can be explained by the fact that they tended to be heavily garrisoned and the soldiers spent their wages locally. So far as they could, they bought goods and services of a Roman sort and generally attracted concentrations of people likely to develop into cities of a Roman sort. The economic impact of army payrolls was all the greater because of the cash added to them from taxes raised in other, more developed provinces in the East. Much of the urbanization and enrichment of the western and northern provinces can be explained by these four factors.
Until the 1950s or ’60s the sources for studying the economy of the empire were insufficient. The archaeological sources were too scarce and heterogeneous to be of much help, and the written ones contained barely usable amounts of quantified data; economic analysis without quantification, however, is almost a contradiction in terms. Thus discussion was obliged to limit itself to rather general remarks about the obviously wide exchange of goods, the most famous points of production or sale of given articles, techniques of banking, or commercial law. This is still the case with regard to the Eastern half of the Mediterranean world, where excavation has made relatively little headway; but, for the West, archaeological data have greatly increased in recent decades in both quantity and intelligibility. As a result, a growing number of significant statements based on quantification can now be made. They are of special value because they bear on what was economically most important—namely, agriculture. Like any preindustrial economy, that of the empire derived the overwhelming bulk of its gross national product from food production. One would therefore like to know what regions in what periods produced what rough percentage of the chief comestibles—wine, oil, wheat, garum or legumes. Thanks to techniques such as neutron activation analysis or X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, the contents of large samples of amphorae at certain market junctures can be identified, dated by shape of vessel, and occasionally ascribed to certain named producers of the vessel, and the information drawn into a graph; or, the numbers and find-spots of datable fine “china” (so-called Arretine ware or later equivalents) or ceramic oil lamps from named producers can be indicated on a map of, say, Spain or France. The yield of such data underlies statements made above regarding, for example, the supersession of Italy as producer of several essential agricultural products by the mid-1st century ad, the concurrent transformation of Gaul from importer to exporter, and the emergence by the 3rd century of northern Africa as a major exporter of certain very common articles. Information of this general nature provides some sense of the shift in prosperity in the Western provinces.
In the age of the Antonines, Rome’s empire enjoyed an obvious and prosperous tranquility; modern consensus has even settled on about ad 160 as the peak of Roman civilization. Whatever measurement may be used in this identification, however, an economic one does not fit very well. Evidence, as it accumulates in more quantifiable form, does not seem to show any perceptible economic decline in the empire as a whole after roughly 160. Rather, Italy had probably suffered some decrease in disposable wealth in the earlier 1st century. Gaul’s greatest city, Lugdunum, had begun to shrink toward the end of the 2nd, and various other regions in the West suffered setbacks at various times, while all of Greece continued to be poor. Other regions, however, had more wealth to spend, and as is manifest in major urban projects of utility and beautification or in the larger rooms and increasingly expensive decoration of rural villas. Roman rule also brought extraordinary benefits to the economies of Numidia and Britain, to name its two most obvious successes.
To the extent the empire grew richer, modern observers are likely to look for an explanation in technology. As noted above, in Augustus’ reign a new mode of glassblowing spread rapidly from Syria to other production centres; Syria in the 3rd century was also the home of new and more complicated weave patterns. Such rather minor items, however, only show that technical improvements in industry were few and insignificant. The screw press for wine and olive oil was more efficient than the levered variety, but it was not widely adopted, even within Italy. Waterwheels for power, known in Anatolia in Augustus’ reign, were little used; a few examples in Gaul belong only to the later empire. Similarly, the mechanical reaper was found only in Gaul of the 4th century. Perhaps the most significant advances were registered in the selective breeding of strains of grains and domestic animals: for example, the “Roman” sheep (which had originated in the Greek East) spread throughout Europe, banishing the inferior Iron Age species to a merited exile in the Outer Hebrides (the Soay sheep of St. Kilda island). What is vastly more significant, however, than these oddments of technological history is the minute subdivision of productive skills and their transmission from father to son in populations adequate to the demand—for iron ore from Noricum, most notably, or for glass and paper from Alexandria. Specialization in inherited skills produced a remarkably high level of proficiency, requiring only the security of the Pax Romana for the spreading of its products everywhere—transport itself being one of those skills.
The health of the economy no doubt helps to explain the political success of the empire, which was not disturbed by frequent revolts or endemic rural or urban unrest. On the other hand, there were limits in the economy, which expressed themselves through resistance to taxation. Tax levels settled at the enforceable maximum; but revenue fell far short of what one might expect, given the best estimates of the empire’s gross national product. The basic problem was the tiny size of the imperial government and the resulting inefficiency of its processes. Moreover, it could not make good its inadequacies by borrowing in times of special need; Nero’s need to harry his millionaire subjects with false charges of treason in order to pay for his incredibly expensive court and spendthrift impulses reflects the realities of raising revenue. So do the very cautious experiments of Augustus in setting army pay and army size. Ultimately, the military strength of the empire was insufficient—inadequate for emergencies—because of these realities.
The army
The army that enforced the Pax Romana had expanded little beyond the size envisaged for it by Augustus, despite the enlargement of the empire by Claudius, the Flavians, and Trajan. It reached 31 legions momentarily under Trajan, but it usually numbered 28 under the Flavians and Antonines until the onset of the frontier crisis in Aurelius’ reign brought it to 30. Without raising pay rates to attract recruits more easily, a large force was seemingly beyond reach—which probably explains why Hadrian, and later Commodus, halted further expansion.
The army was used not to prop up a militarist government but to defend the frontiers. Shifts in enemy pressures, however, caused the legions to be distributed differently than in Julio-Claudian times. Under Antoninus Pius, the Danubian provinces (Pannonia, Moesia, Dacia) had 10, and the East (Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt) had 9, and both regions also had supporting naval flotillas; of the remaining 9 legions, Britain contained 3 and the Rhineland 4. Tacitus in his Annals (4.5) rates the auxiliary troops near the turn of the era as being about as numerous as the legionaries. But they soon outnumbered them: that is, whereas legions contained somewhat more than 5,000 men each if they were at full strength and thus totaled roughly 150,000 in the mid-2nd century, the auxiliaries numbered 245,000—again, if at full strength. Recent estimates put the actual figure for the entire army at 375,000 to 400,000.
Two reasons, military and financial, explain the growing use of nonlegionaries. Mustered in units mostly of 500, they were easier to move around and could be encouraged to maintain the special native skills of their inheritance—as slingers from the Balearic Islands or Crete, in camel corps from Numidia, or as light cavalry from Thrace. In addition, they could be recruited for lower wages than legionaries. As regards recruitment for the legions, even that higher rate proved less and less attractive. Whereas legions in the early empire could be largely filled with men born in Italy and southern Gaul, by the second half of the 1st century most of the men had to be drawn from the provinces; after Trajan, they were largely natives of the frontier provinces. Young men from the inner parts of the empire, growing up in successive generations of continual peace, no longer looked on military service as a natural part of manhood, and the civilian economy appeared attractive compared to the rewards at some frontier posting. Peace and prosperity thus combined to make the army less and less Roman, less and less of the centre, and more and more nearly barbarous.
The troops’ loyalty did not suffer on that account. The men were no more ready to mutiny or to support a pretender around ad 200 than they had been in the early empire. However, experience especially in the year of the four emperors (ad 69) did suggest the desirability of splitting commands into smaller units, which, in turn, involved splitting up provinces, the number of which was constantly growing; by Hadrian’s day subdivision began to anticipate the fragmentation later carried out by Diocletian.
Cultural life
The literature of the empire is both abundant and competent, for which the emperors’ encouragement and financing of libraries and higher education were perhaps in part responsible. The writers, however, with the possible exception of Christian apologists, were seldom excitingly original and creative. As Tacitus said, the great masters of literature had ceased to be. Perhaps Augustus’ emphasis on tradition affected more than political ideals and practice. At any rate, men of letters, too, looked often backward. At the same time, they clearly reveal the success of the empire in spreading Greco-Roman culture, for the majority of them were natives of neither Italy nor Greece. Of the writers in Latin, the two Senecas, Lucan, Martial, Columella, Hyginus, and Pomponius Mela came from Spain; Fronto, Apuleius, and probably Florus and Aulus Gellius, from Africa. Tacitus was perhaps from Gallia Narbonensis. The Latin writers in general sought their models less in Greece than in Augustus’ Golden Age, when Latin literature had reached maturity. Thus, the poets admired Virgil and imitated Ovid; lacking genuine inspiration, they substituted for it an erudite cleverness, the fruit of an education that stressed oratory of a striking but sterile kind. Authentic eloquence in Latin came to an end when, as Tacitus put it, the principate “pacified” oratory. Under the Flavians and Antonines, an artificial rhetoric, constantly straining after meretricious effects, replaced it. The epigrammatic aphorism (sententia) was especially cultivated; the epics of Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus, and Statius are full of it, and it found a natural outlet in satirical writing, of which the Latin instinct for the mordant always ensured an abundance. In fact, Latin satire excelled: witness Martial’s epigrams, Petronius’ and Juvenal’s pictures of the period, and Persius’ more academic talent. For that matter, Tacitus’ irony and pessimism were not far removed from satire.
In the East the official status of Greek and the favour it enjoyed from such emperors as Hadrian gave new life to Greek literature. It had something in common with its Latin counterpart in that it looked to the past but was chiefly written by authors who were not native to the birthplace of the language. The so-called Second Sophistic reverted to the atticism of an earlier day but often in a Roman spirit; its products from the Asian pens of Dio Chrysostom and Aelius Aristides are sometimes limpid and talented tours de force but rarely great literature. In Greek, too, the best work was in satire, the comic prose dialogues of the Syrian Lucian being the most noteworthy and original literary creations of the period. Among minor writers the charm of Arrian and Pausanias, Asians both, and above all of Plutarch abides (although Plutarch’s talents were mediocre, and his moralizing was shallow, his biographies, like those of his Latin contemporary Suetonius, are full of information and interest).
Imperial encouragement of Greek culture and a conviction, no longer justified, of its artistic and intellectual superiority caused the East to resist Latinization. This attitude was bound to lead to a divided empire, and thoughtful observers must have noted it with misgivings. The split, however, was still far in the future. Meanwhile, there was a more immediate cause for disquiet. The plethora of summaries and anthologies that appeared implies a public progressively indifferent to reading whole works of literature for themselves. In other words, the outlook for letters was poor, and this had an unfortunate effect on the scientific literature of the age, which was in itself of first-class quality. Dioscorides on botany, Galen on medicine, and Ptolemy on mathematics, astronomy, and geography represent expert scholars expounding carefully, systematically, and lucidly the existing knowledge in their respective fields. But their very excellence proved fatal because, as the reading public dwindled, theirs remained standard works for far too long; their inevitable errors became enshrined, and their works acted as brakes on further progress.
Stoicism was the most flourishing philosophy of the age. In the East a sterile scholasticism diligently studied Plato and Aristotle, but Epictetus, the stoic from Anatolia, was the preeminent philosopher. In the West, stoicism permeates Seneca’s work and much of Pliny’s Natural History. Evidently, its advocacy of common morality appealed to the traditional Roman sense of decorum and duty, and its doctrine of a world directed by an all-embracing providence struck a responsive chord in the 2nd-century emperors, though they deeply disapproved of its extremist offshoots, the cynics: Marcus Aurelius, as noted, was himself a stoic.
Imperial art, dealing above all with man and his achievements, excelled in portraits and commemoration of events; Roman sculpture and presumably Roman painting, also, owed much to Greek styles and techniques. It emerged, however, as its own distinctive type. The Augustan age had pointed the way that Roman art would go: Italian taste would be imposed on Hellenic models to produce something original. The reliefs of the Augustan Ara Pacis belong to Rome and Italy, no matter who actually carved them. By Flavian times this Roman artistic instinct had asserted itself and with it the old Roman tendency toward lively and accurate pictorial representation. It can be seen from the reliefs illustrating the triumph over Judaea in the passageway of the Arch of Titus in the Roman Forum. The narrative description dear to Roman art found its best expression in the great spiral frieze on Trajan’s Column, where the emperor can be seen among his soldiers at various times in the Dacian campaigns; the story of the war plays a most important part, although, like most imperial monuments, the column is meant to exalt the leader. Under Hadrian a reaction made sculpture less markedly Italian, as if to be in conformity with the slow decline of Italy toward quasi-provincial status. Also under Hadrian, the figure of the emperor was more prominent—bigger and more frontal than the other figures—as if to illustrate the growing monarchical tone of the principate. This tendency continued under the Antonines, when there was a magnificent flowering of sculpture on panels, columns, and sarcophagi; but its exuberance and splendour foreshadow the end of classical art.
Trajan's ColumnDetail of Trajan's Column, Rome, depicting the Roman emperor's victories beyond the Danube River.© Tiziano Casalta/Dreamstime.com
The artistic currents that flowed in Rome were felt throughout the empire, the less developed areas being influenced most. In the West, provincial sculpture closely resembled Roman, although it sometimes showed variations, in Gaul especially, owing to local influences (the native element, however, is not always easy to identify). The Roman quality of portraits painted on Egyptian mummy cases shows that the Greek-speaking regions were also affected, although generally they maintained their own traditions. But by now the Greek East had become rather barren; much of its production was imitative rather than vitally creative. Greece proper contributed little, the centre of Hellenism having shifted to Anatolia, to places such as Aphrodisias, where there was a flourishing school of sculpture.
In at least one respect the East was heavily influenced by Rome. The use of concrete and cross vault enabled Roman architects and engineers to span wide areas; their technological achievements included the covered vastness of the huge thermal establishments, the massive solidity of the amphitheatres, and the audacity of the soaring bridges and aqueducts. The East was greatly impressed. Admittedly, the agoras and gymnasiums in Greek towns are hardly Roman in aspect, but, for most structures of a practical utilitarian kind, the Greek debt to Rome was heavy. Sometimes Roman influence can be seen not only in the fundamental engineering of such buildings as market gateways, theatres, and amphitheatres but even in such decorative details as composite capitals as well. Roman features abound in exotic Petra, Palmyra, Gerasa, and Baalbek, and even in Athens itself. Edward Togo Salmon Ramsay MacMullen
The Later Roman Empire
The dynasty of the Severi (ad 193–235)
Septimius Severus
After the assassination of Commodus on Dec. 31, ad 192, Helvius Pertinax, the prefect of the city, became emperor. In spite of his modest birth, he was well respected by the Senate, but he was without his own army. He was killed by the praetorians at the end of March 193, after a three-month reign. The praetorians, after much corrupt bargaining, designated as emperor an old general, Didius Julianus, who had promised them the largest donativum (a donation given to each soldier on the emperor’s accession). The action of the praetorians roused the ire of the provincial armies. The army of the Danube, which was the most powerful as well as the closest to Rome, appointed Septimius Severus in May 193. Severus soon had to face two competitors, supported, like himself, by their own troops: Pescennius Niger, the legate of Syria, and Clodius Albinus, legate of Britain. After having temporarily neutralized Albinus by accepting him as Caesar (heir apparent), Septimius marched against Niger, whose troops, having come from Egypt and Syria, were already occupying Byzantium. The Danubian legions were victorious, and Niger was killed at the end of 194; Antioch and Byzantium were pillaged after a long siege. Septimius even invaded Mesopotamia, for the Parthians had supported Niger. But this campaign was quickly interrupted: in the West, Albinus, disappointed at not being associated with the empire, proclaimed himself Augustus in 196 and invaded Gaul. He was supported by the troops, by the population, and even by the senators in Rome. In February 197 he was defeated and killed in a difficult battle near his capital of Lugdunum, which, in turn, was almost devastated. Septimius Severus remained the sole master of the empire, but the pillagings, executions, and confiscations left a painful memory. A few months later, in the summer of 197, he launched a second Mesopotamian campaign, this time against the Parthian king Vologases IV, who had attacked the frontier outpost Nisibis conquered two years previously by the Romans. Septimius Severus was again victorious. Having arrived at the Parthian capitals (Seleucia and Ctesiphon), he was defeated near Hatra but in 198 obtained an advantageous peace: Rome retained a part of Mesopotamia, together with Nisibis, the new province being governed by an eques. After having inspected the East, the emperor returned to Rome in 202. He spent most of his time there until 208, when the incursions of Caledonian rebels called him to Britain, where he carried out a three-year campaign along Hadrian’s Wall. He died at Eboracum (York) in February 211.
Septimius Severus belonged to a Romanized Tripolitan family that had only recently attained honours. He was born in Leptis Magna in North Africa and favoured his native land throughout his reign. He was married to Julia Domna of Emesa, a Syrian woman from an important priestly family, and was surrounded by Easterners. He had pursued a senatorial career and had proved himself a competent general, but he was above all a good administrator and a jurist. Disliking Romans, Italians, and senators, he deliberately relied on the faithful Danubian army that had brought him to power, and he always showed great concern for the provincials and the lower classes. Although he had sought to appropriate the popularity of the Antonines to his own advantage by proclaiming himself the son of Marcus Aurelius and by naming his own son Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, he in fact carried out a totally different policy—a brutal yet realistic policy that opened careers to new social classes. Indifferent to the prestige of the Senate, where he had a great many enemies, he favoured the equites. The army thus became the seedbed of the equestrian order and was the object of all of his attentions. The ready forces were increased by the creation of three new legions commanded by equites, and one of these, the Second Parthica, was installed near Rome. Unlike Vespasian, who also owed his power to the army but who knew how to keep it in its proper place, Septimius Severus, aware of the urgency of external problems, established a sort of military monarchy. The praetorian cohorts doubled their ranks, and the dismissal of the old staff of Italian origin transformed the Praetorian Guard into an imperial guard, in which the elite of the Danube army were the most important element. The auxiliary troops were increased by the creation of 1,000-man units (infantry cohorts) and cavalry troops, sometimes outfitted with mail armour in the Parthian manner. The careers of noncommissioned officers emerging from the ranks now opened onto new horizons: centurions and noncommissioned grades could attain the tribunate and enter into the equestrian order. Thus, a simple Illyrian peasant might attain high posts: this was undoubtedly the most significant aspect of the “Severan revolution.” This “democratization” was not necessarily a barbarization, for the provincial legions had long been Romanized. Their salaries were increased, and donativa were distributed more frequently; thenceforth, soldiers were fed at the expense of the provincials. Veterans received lands, mostly in Syria and Africa. The right of legitimate marriage, previously refused by Augustus, was granted to almost all of the soldiers, and the right to form collegia (private associations) was given to noncommissioned officers. Because more than a century had passed since the last raise in pay for the troops, despite a steady (if slow) rise in the level of prices, Severus increased the legionary’s base rate from 300 to 500 denarii, with, no doubt, corresponding increases in other ranks. The reflection of this step in the content of precious metal in silver coinage recalls a point made earlier: the imperial revenues were constrained within the narrow limits of political and administrative reality.
The administrative accomplishments of Septimius Severus were of great importance: he clearly outlined the powers of the city prefect; he entrusted the praetorian prefecture to first-class jurists, such as Papinian; and he increased the number of procurators, who were recruited for financial posts from among Africans and Easterners and for government posts (praesides) from among Danubian officers. Italy lost its privileges and found itself subjected, like all the other provinces, to the new annona, a tax paid in kind, which assured the maintenance of the army and of the officials. The consequent increase in expenditures—for administration, for the salaries and the donativa of the soldiers, for the maintenance of the Roman plebs, and for construction—obliged the emperor to devalue the denarius in 194. But the confiscations increased his personal fortune, the res privata, which had been previously created by Antoninus.
Severus’ social policy favoured both the provincial recruitment of senators (Easterners, Africans, and even Egyptians), causing a sharp decrease in the percentage of Italian senators, and the elevation of the equestrian order, which began to fill the prince’s council with its jurists. The cities, which had been favoured by the Antonines, were more and more considered as administrative wheels in the service of the state: the richest decuriones (municipal councillors) were financially responsible for levying the taxes, and it was for this purpose that the towns of Egypt finally received a boulē (municipal senate).
The burden of taxes and forced government service was made weightier by numerous transport duties for the army and for the annona service and was regulated by the jurists through financial, personal, or mixed charges. The state was watchful to keep the decuriones in the service of their cities and to provide a control on their administration through the appointment of curatores rei publicae, or officials of the central government. The lower classes were, in principle, protected against the abuses of the rich, but in fact they were placed at the service of the state through the restrictions imposed on shipping and commercial corporations. Membership might entail forced contributions of capital or labour to such public necessities as the supply of food to Rome. The state became more and more a policeman, and the excesses of power of numerous grain merchants (frumentarii) weighed heavily on the little man.
Imperial power, without repudiating the ideological themes of the principate, rested in fact on the army and sought its legitimacy in heredity: the two sons of Septimius Severus, Caracalla and Geta, were first proclaimed Caesars, the former in 196, the latter in 198; later, they were directly associated with imperial power through bestowal of the title of Augustus, in 198 and 209, respectively. Thus, during the last three years of Septimius Severus’ reign, the empire had three Augusti at its head.
Caracalla
Caracalla, the eldest son of Septimius Severus, reigned from 211 to 217, after having assassinated his younger brother, Geta. He was a caricature of his father: violent, megalomaniacal, full of complexes, and, in addition, cruel and debauched. He retained the entourage of the equites and jurists who had governed with his father but enforced to an even greater degree his father’s militaristic and egalitarian policy. He increased the wages of the army even further and, at the same time, began a costly building program that quickly depleted the fortune left him by his father. He forced the senators to pay heavy contributions, doubled the inheritance and emancipation taxes, and often required the aurum coronarium (a contribution in gold), thereby ruining the urban middle classes. To counter the effects of a general upward drift of prices and the larger and better-paid army of his own and his father’s making, he created a new silver coin, the antoninianus. It was intended to replace the basic denarius at double its value, though containing only about one and a half times its worth in precious metal. The only historical source to suggest Caracalla’s motive for his gift of universal citizenship, Dio Cassius, states that it was meant to increase revenues by bringing new elements of the population under tax obligations formerly limited to Romans only.
CaracallaCaracalla, marble, Roman, 212–217 ce; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.Photograph by Katie Chao. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Samuel D. Lee Fund, 1940 (40.11.1a)
Although little endowed with military qualities, Caracalla adopted as his patron Alexander the Great, whom he admired greatly, and embarked on an active external policy. He fought successfully against the Teutonic tribes of the upper Danube, among whom the Alamanni, as well as the Capri of the middle Danube, appeared for the first time; he often prudently mixed military operations with negotiation and gave important subsidies and money (in sound currency) to the barbarians, thus arousing much discontent. His ambition was to triumph in the East like his hero of old and, more recently, Trajan and his own father. He invaded Armenia and Adiabene and annexed Osroëne in northwest Mesopotamia, joining it to the part of Mesopotamia taken by Septimius Severus. In April 217, while pursuing his march on the Tigris, he was assassinated on the order of one of his praetorian prefects, Marcus Opellius Macrinus.
Macrinus
Macrinus was accepted as emperor by the soldiers, who were unaware of the role he had played in the death of his predecessor. For the first time an eques had acceded to the empire after having been no more than a manager of financial affairs. The senators reluctantly accepted this member of the equestrian order, who, nevertheless, proved to be moderate and conciliatory; but the armies despised him as a mere civilian, and the ancient authors were hostile to him. His reign was brief, and little is known of him. He concluded an inglorious peace with the Parthians, which assured Mesopotamia to Rome through the payment of large sums of money. And to make himself popular, he canceled Caracalla’s tax increases and reduced military expenditures. A plot against him was soon organized: two young grandnephews of Septimius Severus were persuaded by their mothers and especially by their grandmother, Julia Maesa, the sister of Julia Domna (who had recently died), to reach for imperial power. The eldest, Bassianus, was presented to the troops of Syria, who had been bought with gold, and was proclaimed in April 218. Shortly afterward, Macrinus was defeated and killed, as was his son (whom he had associated with him on the throne).
Elagabalus and Severus Alexander
The new emperor was presented as the son of Caracalla, whose name he took (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus). He is better known, however, under the name Elagabalus, the god whose high priest he was and whom he quickly and imprudently attempted to impose on the Romans, in spite of his grandmother’s counsel of moderation. Fourteen years old, he caused himself to be detested by his heavy expenditures, his orgies, and the dissolute behaviour of his circle. The praetorians killed him in 222 and proclaimed as emperor his first cousin, Alexianus, who took the name of Severus Alexander.
Although well educated and full of good intentions, Severus Alexander showed some weakness of character by submitting to the counsel of his mother, Mamaea, and of his grandmother, Maesa. The Scriptores historiae Augustae, a collection of biographies of the emperors, attributes to him a complete program of reforms favourable to the Senate, but these reforms are not mentioned elsewhere. As in the time of Septimius Severus, his counselors were equites. Ulpian, the praetorian prefect, was the greatest jurist of this period, and the basic policies of the founder of the dynasty were carried on, but with less energy. This weakening of energy had disastrous results: in Persia, the Arsacids were replaced in 224 by the more ambitious Sāsānid dynasty, who hoped to recover the former possessions of the Achaemenids in the East. Their initial attacks were stopped in 232 by a campaign that was, however, poorly conducted by the emperor and that alienated the army as a result of its ineptitude. In Rome there were frequent disorders, and, as early as 223, Ulpian had been killed by the praetorians. While gathered on the Rhine to fight the Teutons, the soldiers once again revolted and killed Severus Alexander and his mother. A coarse and uneducated but energetic soldier, Maximinus the Thracian, succeeded him without difficulty in March 235. The Severan dynasty had come to an end.
Religious and cultural life in the 3rd century
On the right bank of the Tiber in Rome, in the least fashionable section of town among Lebanese and Jewish labourers, Elagabalus built an elegant temple to his ancestral god; he was no doubt in those precincts very well received when he presided personally at its inauguration. Yet the world that counted, the world of senators and centurions, reacted with indignation. Within the capital the ruler was expected to honour the gods of the capital, the ancient Roman ones. At the same time, it was deemed appropriate that he reverently recognize other gods, in their place; for this reason a biography presenting Severus Alexander for the reader’s admiration records how scrupulously he offered worship on the Capitoline to Jupiter, while also having, in a chapel attached to his domestic quarters, the images of his lares (household gods), of the deified emperors of most beloved memory, and of such superhuman beings as the Greeks would have called “heroes,” including Apollonius the holy man of Tyana, Christ, Abraham, and Orpheus. The furnishing of the chapel is described by a most dubious source; but if it is not history, it is at least revealing of ideals. A Roman ruler was to express not only the piety of the capital and its citizens but also that of all his people throughout his empire. Imperial religion was properly compounded of both Roman and non-Roman piety.
Official religion can hardly be said to have existed in the sense of being pressed on people by the state. But the statement needs qualification. The cults of Rome were certainly official in the city itself; they were supported out of the state treasury and by the devotion of the emperor, at least if he lived up to what everyone felt were his responsibilities. In the army, too, camps had shrines in which portraits of the emperor were displayed for veneration on certain days of the year. A 3rd-century calendar has been found in an Eastern city that specifies for the garrison regiment the religious ceremonies to be carried out during the year, including a number of the oldest and most traditional ones in Rome. Many Western cities accorded special size and prominence to a temple in which Jupiter or the imperial family or both together were worshiped not by orders from on high, it is true, but spontaneously. The ubiquity of the imperial cult has already been emphasized. All these manifestations of piety gave some quality of “Romanness” to the religion of the empire.
On the other hand, the empire had been assembled from a great number of parts, whose peoples already had their own way of life fully matured; they were not about to surrender it nor, in fact, were they ever asked to do so by their conquerors. What characterized the religious life of the empire as a whole was the continued vitality of local cults in combination with a generally reverent awareness of one’s neighbours’ cults. The emperor, for example, might openly offer personal veneration to his favourite god, a god outside the traditional Roman circle, while also practicing a more conventional piety. When he was on his travels, he would offer cult at the chief shrines of all the localities he visited. What was expected of the emperor was expected of everyone: respectful toleration of all components in the religious amalgam. Of course, there were differences according to individual temperament and degree of education; approaches to religion might be literal or philosophical, fervent or relaxed. Rural society was more conservative than urban. But the whole can fairly be called an integrated system.
Just as the special power of the Greek gods had gained recognition among the Etruscans and, subsequently, among the Romans in remote centuries bc or as Serapis in Hellenistic times had come to be worshiped in scattered parts of the Ptolemies’ realm—Macedonia and Ionia, for example—so at last the news of unfamiliar gods was carried by their worshipers to distant places in the Roman Empire where, too, they worked their wonders, attracted reverent attention, and received a pillared lodging, a priesthood, and daily offerings. The Pax Romana encouraged a great deal more than commerce in material objects. It made inevitable the exchange of ideas in a more richly woven and complex fabric than the Mediterranean world had ever seen, in which the Phrygian Cybele was at home also in Gaul and the Italian Silvanus in northern Africa.
Religious developments in the Eastern provinces during the centuries from Augustus to Severus Alexander followed a somewhat different course from those in the West. In the East the further jumbling together of already well-mixed traditions encouraged a tolerance that eroded their edges. It became possible to see predominant similarities in Selene, Artemis, and Isis, in Zeus, Iarhibol, Helios, and Serapis, or in Cybele, Ma, and Bellona. From recognition of basic similarities one might reason to a sort of monotheism, by the lights of which, for persons given to theology, local deities were no more than narrow expressions of greater truths. A juncture was then natural with Neoplatonism, the school of philosophy that later came to be held in high regard.
On the other hand, in Italy, the Danube provinces, and the Western provinces, religious change and development can be more easily seen in the immigration of worshipers of Easter deities. Those took root and became popular—none more so than Mithra, though Isis, Cybele, and Jupiter of Doliche were close behind. Apuleius in the closing chapters of his novel usually called The Golden Ass in English describes how a young man is brought from mere consciousness of Isis as a famous goddess with certain well-known rites and attributes, to a single-minded devotion to her. Aelius Aristides, a famous rhetorician of the time, recounts in his spiritual diary the development of a similar devotion in himself to Asclepius. Both the fictional and the factual account give a central place to benefits miraculously granted. It was by such means that piety was ordinarily warmed to a special fervour, whether or not that process should be called conversion. In any case, it produced the testimonies—votive inscriptions, temples, and so forth—through which it is possible to trace the spread of foreign cults. Eastern cults, however, also introduced to the West complex liturgies, beliefs underlying beliefs that could be explained in especially dramatic ways to special devotees (“mysteries”), and much rich symbolism. Of no cult was this more true than Mithraism, known to the 20th century through excavation of the underground shrines that it preferred.
The rise of Christianity
During the 1st and 2nd centuries, Christianity spread with relative slowness. The doctrines of Jesus, who was crucified about ad 30, first took root among the Jews of Palestine, where a large number of sects were proliferating—orthodox sects, such as the Sadducees and the Pharisees, as well as dissident and sometimes persecuted sects such as the Essenes, whose ascetic practices have been illuminated by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the mid-20th century. At the end of Tiberius’ reign, Christianity had spread to the gentiles as a result of the preaching of St. Paul in Anatolia and in Greece. At the same time, Christianity continued to make progress among the Jews of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Syria and quickly reached even Osroëne and the Parthian towns of the Euphrates, where Jewish colonies were numerous. The Roman authorities at first had difficulty in distinguishing the “Christos” believers from the orthodox Jews, but the religion of the former, on leaving its original milieu, quickly became differentiated.
A familiar charge against the Jews, however, continued to pursue the Christians: that they felt a hatred of mankind. Their expectation of the end of the world aroused a suspicion that that was what they indeed desired; moreover, they were also suspect for their aloofness—they cut themselves off from family and community—and for their meetings, whose purpose was obscure. Their 2nd-century spokesmen had to dispel the belief, often recorded, that they practiced magic involving cannibalism; further, that they indulged in sex orgies, incestuous to boot; and, the most common accusation of all, that they were atheists—people who denied the existence of the gods and rejected accepted cults. This last charge, which was, of course, exactly on the mark, must be set in the context of occasional episodes of mob violence against (non-Christian) atheists or doubters. Here the association of Christians with Jews, equally monotheistic, might have provided some protection for the Christians, but the Jews were faithful to a cult of the greatest antiquity and, moreover, had long made their peace with Caesar, Augustus, and their successors. It was a peace that could not extend to people who had (it would be alleged) apostasized from their own Judaism. Christians did not participate in the Jewish revolt of 66–73, and, under the Flavians, Christianity completely severed itself from its origins.
At this time the East was the centre of the new religion, whose followers grew in numbers from Egypt to the Black Sea and were beginning to be noticed in Bithynia and in Greece. Christians seemed fairly numerous in Rome as early as the end of the 1st century. When the age of the Apostles ended, the age of the church began, with its bishops, presbyters, and deacons, with its catechism, preaching, and celebration of the Eucharist. In the 2nd century, Christianity began to reach the intellectuals. Hellenistic culture offered educated Christians the resources of philosophical dialectic and of sophist rhetoric. The example of Philo of Alexandria had shown in the 1st century that it was possible to reconcile the Bible with the great Platonic ideas. By the 2nd century the Christian “apologists” tried to show that Christianity was in harmony with Greco-Roman humanism and that it was intellectually, and above all morally, superior to paganism.
But the Christians did not succeed in convincing the authorities. The first persecution, that of Nero, was related to a devastating fire in the capital in 64, for which the Christians were blamed or, perhaps, only made the scapegoats. In any case, their position as bad people (mali homines of the sort a governor should try to suppress) had been established, and later suppressions could be justified by reference to “the Neronian practice.” So far as criminal law was concerned, such a precedent had considerable authority, of the sort that Pliny, as governor, was looking for in his handling of the Christians of Bithynia-Pontus in 111. His master, the emperor Trajan, told him not to seek them out but to execute those who, being informed against, refused to abjure their religion. Hadrian and other successors hewed to the same line thereafter. Thus, the persecutions remained localized and sporadic and were the result of private denunciations or of spontaneous popular protests. Under Marcus Aurelius, the difficulties of the times often caused the Christians, who refused to sacrifice to the state gods and to participate in the imperial cult, to be accused of provoking the wrath of the gods: martyrs appeared in the East, in Rome, in Gaul, and in Africa. Commodus’ reign was more favourable to them, perhaps because certain members of his circle, not a very edifying one in other respects, were Christians or Christian sympathizers. This reprieve, however, was short-lived: Septimius Severus inaugurated the first systematic persecution. In 202 an edict forbade Christian (and Jewish) proselytism. Members of extremist sects were persecuted for preaching continence (which violated Augustus’ laws against celibacy), for holding the state in contempt, and especially for refusing military service. Under Caracalla, the situation quieted, and the church continued to progress, favoured perhaps by the relative freedom that the law granted to funerary collegia (whence the first catacombs).
Cultural life from the Antonines to Constantine
Latin literature enjoyed its “Silver Age” under the Antonines, with the majority of great authors, such as Tacitus, Juvenal, and Pliny the Younger, having begun their careers under Domitian. They had no heirs: after Tacitus, Roman history was reduced to biography. It was only in the 4th century that history began to flourish again, with Ammianus Marcellinus, a Greek writing in Latin. Satire, the Roman genre par excellence, came to an end with Juvenal; and Pliny the Younger, a diligent rhetorician but with a lesser degree of talent, had only the mediocre Fronto as a successor. More original was the aforementioned rhetorician, scholar, and picaresque novelist Apuleius of Madauros.
A Greek renaissance, however, took place during the 2nd century. The Second Sophistic school reigned in every area: in rhetoric, history, philosophy, and even in the sciences. Schools of rhetoric and philosophy prospered in the East—in Smyrna, Ephesus, Pergamum, Rhodes, Alexandria, and even in Athens—protected and subsidized by the emperors, from Vespasian to Marcus Aurelius. The great sophists were Herodes Atticus, a multimillionaire from Athens; Polemon; and Aelius Aristides, a valetudinarian devotee of Asclepius. Dio Cassius and Herodian were conscientious and useful historians (first half of the 3rd century), as was later Dexippus the Athenian, whose work survives only in fragments. Science was represented by the mathematician Nicomachus of Gerasa; medicine, by Galen of Pergamum; astronomy, by the Alexandrian Ptolemy. Law remained the only Roman science, exemplified under the Antonines by Salvius Julianus and Gaius (the Institutiones) and rising to its zenith in the 3rd century as a result of the works of three jurists: Papinian, Ulpian, and Modestinus. Philosophy, heavily influenced by rhetoric and ethics, was represented under Domitian and Trajan by Dio (or Chrysostom) of Prusa, who outlined the stoical doctrine of the ideal sovereign. The biographer Plutarch and Lucian of Samosata were more eclectic, especially Lucian, who resembled Voltaire in his caustic skepticism. Under Marcus Aurelius, one of Lucian’s friends, Celsus, wrote the first serious criticism of Christianity, “The True Word,” known through Origen’s refutation of it in the 3rd century. At this time philosophy leaned toward religious mysticism: under the Severans, Ammonius Saccas created the school of Alexandria, and his disciple Plotinus founded the Neoplatonist school, which was to fight bitterly against Christianity. After the apologists and, above all, Tertullian (c. 160–after 222), Christian thought deepened, and theology made its appearance. Clement and Origen (c. 185–c. 254), the greatest theologian of the time, were the luminaries of the church of Alexandria; the Roman church still wrote in Greek and was represented by the slightly old-fashioned Hippolytus; and the church of Africa had a powerful personality, St. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage.
The disappearance of the great lyric and poetic styles, the fossilizing of education as it came to be completely based on rhetoric (paideia), and the growing importance of philosophical and religious polemical literature among both pagans and Christians were the basic traits that, as early as the 3rd century, foreshadowed the intellectual life of the late empire.
Military anarchy and the disintegration of the empire (235–270)
Succession of emperors and usurpers
The period from the death of Severus Alexander to the time of Claudius II Gothicus was marked by usurpations and barbarian invasions. After Maximinus the Thracian, who bravely fought the Alemanni but showed great hostility toward the Senate and the educated elite, the Gordians rose to power as a result of a revolt by wealthy African landowners. A senatorial reaction first imposed civilian emperors, Pupienus and Balbinus together, and then named Gordian III, a youth backed by his father-in-law, the praetorian prefect Timesitheus. Gordian III was murdered by the soldiers during a campaign against the Persians and was replaced, first by Philip the Arabian and then by Decius, both soldiers. Decius tried to restore Roman traditions and also persecuted the Christians, but he was killed by the Goths in 251 in a battle near the Black Sea. From 253 to 268 two Roman senators, Valerian and his son Gallienus, reigned. Valerian revived the persecution of the Christians, but he was captured by the Persians during a disastrous campaign and died in captivity (260; see photograph). His son then reigned alone, facing multiple invasions and several usurpations. He moved constantly between the Rhine and the Danube, achieving brilliant victories (Milan in 262, the Nestus in 267), but the Pannonian army raised several competitors against him (Ingenuus, Regalianus, Aureolus). Too busy to protect the Gauls against the Franks and the Alemanni and the East against the Persians, he had to tolerate the formation of the Gallic empire under the praetorian prefect Marcus Cassianius Postumus (259–268) and the Palmyrene kingdom of Odenathus (260–267). Some of his reforms were a foreshadowing of the future: the senators were practically excluded from the army; the equites received the majority of commands and of provincial governorships; and the composition of the army was modified by the creation of new army corps and especially of a strong cavalry, which was placed under the command of a single leader and charged with closing the breaches that the barbarians were opening along the frontiers. Upon his father’s death Gallienus had put an end to the persecution of the Christians, preferring to fight the new religion through intellectual means; to that end, he favoured the ancient Greek cults (Demeter of Eleusis) and protected the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus. These initiatives increased the number of his enemies, particularly among the patriotic senators and the Pannonian generals. While Gallienus was in Milan besieging the usurper Aureolus, he was killed by his chiefs of staff, who proclaimed Claudius II (268), the first of the Illyrian emperors. The new emperor won a great victory against the Alemanni on the Garda lake and overwhelmed the Goths in Naissus (269) but died of the plague in 270. This fatal period brought to light one of the major defects of the empire: the lack of a legitimate principle of succession and the preponderant role of the army in politics. The structures that had created the strength of the principate were weakened, and the empire required deep reforms. Gallienus had felt their necessity but had been too weak to impose them.
The surrender of the emperor Valerian to the Persian king Shāpūr, rock relief, ad 260, in the province of Fārs, Iran.© lukakikina/Fotolia
The barbarian invasions
The Goths were Germans coming from what is now Sweden and were followed by the Vandals, the Burgundians, and the Gepidae. The aftereffect of their march to the southeast, toward the Black Sea, was to push the Marcomanni, the Quadi, and the Sarmatians onto the Roman limes in Marcus Aurelius’ time. Their presence was brusquely revealed when they attacked the Greek towns on the Black Sea about 238. Timesitheus fought against them under Gordian III, and under Philip and Decius they besieged the towns of Moesia and Thrace, led by their kings, Ostrogotha and Kniva. Beginning in 253, the Crimean Goths and the Heruli appeared and dared to venture on the seas, ravaging the shores of the Black Sea and the Aegean as well as several Greek towns. In 267 Athens was taken and plundered despite a strong defense by the historian Dexippus. After the victories of Gallienus on the Nestus and Claudius at Naissus (Nish), there was for a time less danger. But the countries of the middle Danube were still under pressure by the Marcomanni, Quadi, Iazyges, Sarmatians, and the Carpi of free Dacia, who were later joined by the Roxolani and the Vandals. In spite of stubborn resistance, Dacia was gradually overwhelmed, and it was abandoned by the Roman troops, though not evacuated officially. When Valerian was captured in ad 259/260, the Pannonians were gravely threatened, and Regalianus, one of the usurpers proclaimed by the Pannonian legions, died fighting the invaders. The defense was concentrated around Sirmium and Siscia-Poetovio, the ancient fortresses that had been restored by Gallienus, and many cities were burned.
In the West the invasions were particularly violent. The Germans and the Gauls were driven back several times by the confederated Frankish tribes of the North Sea coast and by the Alemanni from the middle and upper Rhine. Gallienus fought bitterly, concentrating his defense around Mainz and Cologne, but the usurpations in Pannonia prevented him from obtaining any lasting results. In 259–260 the Alemanni came through the Agri Decumates (the territory around the Black Forest), which was now lost to the Romans. Some of the Alemanni headed for Italy across the Alpine passes; others attacked Gaul, devastating the entire eastern part ofthe country. Passing through the Rhône Valley, they eventually reached the Mediterranean; and some bands even continued into Spain. There they joined the Franks, many of whom had come by ship from the North Sea, after having plundered the western part of Gaul. Sailing up the estuaries of the great rivers, they had reached Spain and then, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, had proceeded to Mauretania Tingitana. Gallienus, outflanked, entrusted Gaul and his young son Saloninus to Postumus, who then killed Saloninus and proclaimed himself emperor. The several invasions had so frightened the people that the new emperor was readily accepted, even in Spain and Britain. He devoted himself first to the defense of the country and was finally considered a legitimate emperor, having established himself as a rival to Gallienus, who had tried in vain to eliminate him but finally had to tolerate him. Postumus governed with moderation, and, in good Roman fashion, minted excellent coins. He, too, was killed by his soldiers, but he had successors who lasted until 274.
Difficulties in the East
In the East the frontiers had been fixed by Hadrian at the Euphrates. But under Nero, the Romans had claimed control over the kings of Armenia, and under Caracalla they had annexed Osroëne and Upper Mesopotamia. The Parthian empire had been weak and often troubled, but the Sāsānids were more dangerous. In 241, Shāpūr I (Sapor), an ambitious organizer and statesman, mounted the throne: he united his empire by bringing the Iranian lords into line and by protecting the Zoroastrian religion. He also tolerated the Manichaeans and put an end to the persecutions of the Christians and Jews, thereby gaining the sympathy of these communities. In 252, with a large army at his command, Shāpūr imposed Artavasdes on Armenia, attacked Mesopotamia, and took Nisibis. In 256 his advance troops entered Cappadocia and Syria and plundered Antioch, while Doura-Europus, on the middle Euphrates, was likewise falling to him. Valerian had rushed to its aid, but he could not remedy the situation; and in 259 or 260 he was imprisoned by Shāpūr during operations about which little is known. Mesopotamia was lost and Rome was pushed back to the Euphrates. Cappadocia, Cilicia, and Syria were again plundered, and a puppet emperor was appointed in Antioch. But these victories were transitory: in Osroëne, Edessa had shown resistance, a defense was organized in Cappadocia and Cilicia, and Odenathus, the prince of Palmyra, took Shāpūr by surprise and forced him back to Iran. Having thus aided the Roman cause, Odenathus then began to act in his own interest: he continued the fight against the Persians and took the title “King of Kings.” The Romans officially entrusted him with the defense of the East and conferred on him the governorship of several provinces; the “kingdom” of Palmyra thus extended from Cilicia to Arabia. He was murdered in 267 without ever having severed his ties with Gallienus. His widow Zenobia had her husband’s titles granted to their son Vaballathus. Then in 270, taking advantage of the deaths of Gallienus and Claudius II, she invaded Egypt and a part of Anatolia. This invasion was followed by a rupture with Rome, and in 271 Vaballathus was proclaimed Imperator Caesar Augustus. The latent separatism of the Eastern provinces and, undoubtedly, some commercial advantages caused them to accept Palmyrene domination without difficulty, as they had, in the past, supported Avidius Cassius and Pescennius Niger against the legitimate emperors. In 272 unity was restored by Aurelian, but Mesopotamia was lost, and the Euphrates became the new frontier of the empire.
Economic and social crisis
The invasions and the civil wars worked in combination to disrupt and weaken the empire over a span of half a century. Things were at their worst in the 260s, but the entire period from 235 to 284 brought the empire close to collapse. Many regions were laid waste (northern Gaul, Dacia, Moesia, Thrace, and numerous towns on the Aegean); many important cities had been pillaged or destroyed (Byzantium, Antioch, Olbia, Lugdunum); and northern Italy (Cisalpine Gaul) had been overrun by the Alemanni. During the crisis, the emperor either focused his forces on the defense of one point, inviting attack at another, or he left some embattled frontier altogether to its own devices; any commander who proved successful had the emperorship thrust upon him, on the very heels of his victories over the invaders. Counting several sons and brothers, more than 40 emperors thus established themselves for a reign of some sort, long or (more often) short. The political destabilization fed on itself, but it also was responsible for heavy expenditure of life and treasure. To keep pace with the latter, successive emperors rapidly and radically reduced the percentage of precious metal in the standard silver coins to almost nothing so as to spread it over larger issues. What thus became a fiduciary currency held up not too badly until the 260s, when confidence collapsed and people rushed to turn the money they had into goods of real value. An incredible inflation got under way, lasting for decades.
The severity of damage done to the empire by the political and economic destabilization is not easily estimated since for this period the sources of every sort are extremely poor. Common sense would suggest that commerce was disrupted, taxes collected more harshly and unevenly, homes and harvests destroyed, the value of savings lost to inflation, and the economy in general badly shaken. A severe plague is reported that lasted for years in mid-century, producing terrible casualties. In some western areas, archaeology provides illustration of what one might expect: cities in Gaul were walled, usually in much reduced circuits; villas here and there throughout the Rhine and Danube provinces also were walled; road systems were defended by lines of fortlets in northern Gaul and adjoining Germany; and a few areas, such as Brittany, were abandoned or relapsed into pre-Roman primitiveness. Off the coasts of that peninsula and elsewhere, too, piracy reigned; on land, brigandage occurred on a large scale. The reentrant triangle of land between the upper Danube and upper Rhine had to be permanently abandoned to the barbarians around it in about 260. The Pax Romana had then, in all these manifest ways, been seriously disrupted. On the other hand, in Egypt, where inflation is most amply documented, its harmful effects cannot be detected. The Egyptian economy showed no signs of collapse. Furthermore, some regions—most of Britain, for example—emerged from the half-century of crisis in a more prosperous condition than before. A summary of the effects of crisis can only underline one single fact that is almost self-evident: the wonders of civilization attained under the Antonines required an essentially political base. They required a strong, stable monarchy in command of a strong army. If either or both were seriously disturbed, the economy would suffer, along with the civilization’s ease and brilliance. If, on the other hand, the political base could be restored, the health of the empire as a whole was not beyond recovery.
In the meantime, certain broad changes unconnected with the political and economic crisis were going forward in the 3rd century. Civilians increasingly complained of harassment and extortion by troops stationed among them; exaction of taxes intended for the army also became the target of more frequent complaint; and demands by soldiers to interfere in civilian government, foremost by those stationed in the capital, grew more insolent. The choice of emperor became more and more openly the prerogative of the military, not the Senate; and, as mentioned, in the 260s senators were being largely displaced from high military commands. The equestrian rank, in which persons risen from military careers were often to be found, was the beneficiary of the new policy. In sum, the power of the military, high and low, was asserting itself against that of the civilians. From this change, further, there flowed certain cultural consequences; for, continuing the tendencies detectable even in the 1st century, the army was increasingly recruited from the most backward areas, above all, from the Danubian provinces. Here, too—indeed, throughout the whole northern glacis of the empire—it had been state policy to allow entire tribes of barbarians to immigrate and to settle on vacant lands, where they dwelled, farmed, paid taxes, and offered their sons to the army. Such immigrants, in increasingly large numbers from the reign of Marcus Aurelius on, produced, with the rural population, a very non-Romanized mix. From the midst of just such people, Maximinus mounted to the throne in 235, and later, likewise, Galerius (Caesar from 293). It is quite appropriate aesthetically, from Aurelian on, that these later 3rd-century rulers chose to present themselves to their subjects in their propaganda with stubbly chin, set jaw, and close-cropped hair on a bullet head.
The recovery of the empire and the establishment of the dominate (270–337)
The Illyrian emperors
After Claudius II’s unexpected death, the empire was ruled from 270 to 284 by several “Illyrian” emperors, who were good generals and who tried in an energetic way to restore equilibrium. The most remarkable was Aurelian. He first gained hard-won victories over the Alemanni and the Juthungi, who had invaded the Alpine provinces and northern Italy. To cheer the inhabitants of Rome, who had succumbed to panic, he began construction of the famous rampart known as Aurelian’s Wall. And while crossing the Danubian provinces, before marching against Palmyra, he decided on an orderly evacuation of Dacia, an undefendable region that had been occupied by the barbarians since the time of Gallienus. In the East, he defeated Zenobia’s troops easily and occupied Palmyra in 272. Shortly afterward, an uprising broke out in Egypt under the instigation of a rich merchant, who, like a great part of the population, was a partisan of the Palmyrene queen. In response, Aurelian undertook a second campaign, plundering Palmyra and subjugating Alexandria. These troubles, however, along with the devastation of the great caravan city, were to set back Roman trade seriously in the East. Later, rounding back on the Gallic empire of Postumus’ successors, he easily defeated Tetricus, a peaceful man not very willing to fight, near Cabillonum. The unity of the empire was restored, and Aurelian celebrated a splendid triumph in Rome. He also reestablished discipline in the state, sternly quelled a riot of artisans in the mints of Rome, organized the provisioning of the city by militarizing several corporations (the bakers, the pork merchants), and tried to stop the inflation by minting an antoninianus of sounder value. His religious policy was original: in order to strengthen the moral unity of the empire and his own power, he declared himself to be the protégé of the Sol Invictus (the Invincible Sun) and built a magnificent temple for this god with the Palmyrene spoils. Aurelian was also sometimes officially called dominus et deus: the principate had definitely been succeeded by the “dominate.” In 275 Aurelian was murdered by certain officers who mistakenly believed that their lives were in danger.
For once, his successor, the aged senator Tacitus, was chosen by the Senate—at the army’s request and on short notice; he reigned only for a few months. After him, Probus, another Illyrian general, inherited a fortified empire but had to fight hard in Gaul, where serious invasions occurred in 275–277. Thereafter, Probus devoted himself to economic restoration; he attempted to return abandoned farmland to cultivation and, with the aid of military labour, undertook works of improvement. To remedy the depopulation, he admitted to the empire, as had Aurelian, a great number of defeated Goths, Alemanni, and Franks and permitted them to settle on plots of land in Gaul and in the Danubian provinces. After the assassination of Probus in 282 by soldiers, Carus became emperor and immediately associated with himself his two sons, Carinus and Numerian. Carus and Numerian fought a victorious campaign against the Persians but died under unknown circumstances. Carinus, left behind in the West, was later defeated and killed by Diocletian, who was proclaimed emperor in November 284 by the army of the East.
Diocletian
Diocletian may be considered the real founder of the late empire, though the form of government he established—the tetrarchy, or four persons sharing power simultaneously—was transitory. His reforms, however, lasted longer. Military exigencies, not the desire to apply a preconceived system, explain the successive nomination of Maximian as Caesar and later as Augustus in 286 and of Constantius and Galerius as Caesars in 293. The tetrarchy was a collegium of emperors comprising two groups: at its head, two Augusti, older men who made the decisions; and, in a secondary position, two Caesars, younger, with a more executive role. All four were related either by adoption or by marriage, and all were Illyrians who had attained high commands after a long military career. Of the four, only Diocletian was a statesman. The unity of the empire was safeguarded, despite appearances, for there was no territorial partitioning. Each emperor received troops and a sector of operation: Maximian, Italy and Africa; Constantius, Gaul and Britain; Galerius, the Danubian countries; and Diocletian, the East. Practically all governmental decisions were made by Diocletian, from whom the others had received their power. He legislated, designated consuls, and retained precedence. After 287 he declared his kinship with the god Jupiter (Jove), who Diocletian claimed was his special protector. Diocletian, together with his Caesar Galerius, formed the “Jovii” dynasty, whereas Maximian and Constantius, claiming descent from the mythical hero Hercules, formed the “Herculii.” This “Epiphany of the Tetrarchs” served as the divine foundation of the regime. The ideological recourse to two traditional Roman divinities represented a break with the Orientalizing attempts of Elagabalus and Aurelian. Even though he honoured Mithra equally, Diocletian wanted to be seen as continuing the work of Augustus. In dividing power, Diocletian’s aim was to avoid usurpations, or at least to stifle them quickly—as in the attempt of Carausius, chief of the army of Britain, who was killed (293), as was his successor, Allectus (296), after a landing by Constantius.
The deification of the imperial function, marked by elaborate rituals, tended to set the emperors above the rest of mankind. But it was still necessary to avoid future rivalries and to assure the tetrarchy a legitimate and regular succession. Some time between 300 and 303 Diocletian found an original solution. After the anniversary of their 20-year reign the two Augusti abdicated (Maximian quite unwillingly), and on the same day (May 1, 305) the two Caesars became Augusti. Two new Caesars were chosen, Severus and Maximinus Daia, both friends of Galerius, whose strong personality dominated Constantius. In repudiating the principle of natural heredity (Maximian and Constantius each had an adult son), Diocletian took a great risk: absolute divine monarchy, which Diocletian largely established, implies the hereditary transmission of power, and the future was soon to demonstrate the attachment of the troops and even of the population to the hereditary principle.
In order to create a more efficient unity between subjects and administrators, Diocletian multiplied the number of provinces; even Italy was divided into a dozen small units of the provincial type. Rome, moreover, was no longer the effective capital of the empire, each emperor having his own residence in the part of the empire over which he ruled (Trier, Milan, Sirmium, Nicomedia). Although a few provinces were still governed by senators (proconsuls or consuls), the majority were given to equestrian praesides, usually without any military power but with responsibility for the entirety of civil administration (justice, police, finances, and taxes). The cities lost their autonomy, and the curiales administered and collected the taxes under the governor’s direct control. The breaking up of the provinces was compensated for by their regrouping into a dozen dioceses, under equestrian vicars who were responsible to the emperor alone. The two praetorian prefects had less military power but played an important role in legislative, judicial, and above all, financial matters: the administration of the annona, which had become the basis of the fiscal system, in fact gave them management of the entire economy. Within the central administration the number of offices increased, their managers being civilians who carried out their functions as a regular career. All officials were enrolled in the militia, whose hierarchy was to be outlined during the 4th century.
Great efforts were devoted to strengthening the borders, and the limes were outfitted with fortresses (castella) and small forts (burgi), notably in Syria. The army’s strength was increased to 60 legions (but with reduced personnel); and, in principle, each border province received a garrison of two legions, complemented by subsidiary troops. Adopting one of Gallienus’ ideas, Diocletian created an embryonic tactical army under the direct orders of the emperor whose escort (comitatus) it formed. The troops were most often commanded by duces and praepositi rather than by provincial governors and were mainly recruited from among the sons of soldiers and from barbarians who enlisted individually or by whole tribes. In addition, the landowners had to provide either recruits or a corresponding sum of money. All of these reforms were instituted gradually, during defensive wars whose success demonstrated the regime’s efficiency. Constantius put down Carausius’ attempted usurpation and fought the Alemanni fiercely near Basel; Maximian first hunted down the Bagaudae (gangs of fugitive peasant brigands) in Gaul, then fought the Moorish tribes in Africa, in 296–298, triumphing at Carthage; and on the Danube, Diocletian, and later Galerius, conquered the Bastarnae, the Iazyges, and the Carpi, deporting them in large numbers to the provinces. In the East, however, the opposition of the Persians, led by the enterprising Narses, extended from Egypt to Armenia. The Persians incited uprisings by both the Blemmyes nomads in southern Egypt and the Saracens of the Syrian desert and made use of anti-Roman propaganda by the Manichaeans and Jews. Diocletian succeeded in putting down the revolt in Egypt and fortified the south against the Blemmyes. But in 297, Narses, the heir to Shāpūr’s ambitions, precipitated a war by taking Armenia, Osroëne, and part of Syria. After an initial defeat, Galerius won a great victory over Narses, and in 298 the peace of Nisibis reinstated a Roman protégé in Armenia and gave the empire a part of Upper Mesopotamia that extended even beyond the Tigris. Peace was thus assured for some decades.
The wars, the reforms, and the increase in the number of officials were costly, and inflation reduced the resources of the state. The annona, set up by Septimius Severus, had proved imperfect, and Diocletian now reformed it through the jugatio-capitatio system: henceforth, the land tax, paid in kind by all landowners, would be calculated by the assessment of fiscal units based on extent and quality of land, type of crops grown, number of settlers and cattle, and amount of equipment. The fiscal valuation of each piece of property, estimated in juga and capita (interchangeable terms whose use varied by region and period of time), required a number of declarations and censuses similar to those practiced long before in Egypt. Each year, the government established the rate of tax per fiscal unit; and every 15 years, beginning in 312, taxes were reassessed. This complicated system was not carried out uniformly in every region. Nevertheless, it resulted in an improved accounting of the empire’s resources and a certain progress in fiscal equity, thus making the administration’s heavy demands less unbearable. In addition, Diocletian wished to reorganize the coinage and stabilize inflation. He thus minted improved sterling coins and fixed their value in relation to a gold standard. Nevertheless, inflation again became disturbing by the end of the century, and Diocletian proclaimed his well-known Edictum de Maximis Pretiis, fixing price ceilings for foodstuffs and for goods and services, which could not be exceeded under pain of death. The edict had indifferent results and was scarcely applied, but the inscriptions revealing it have great economic interest.
Diocletian’s reforms adumbrated the principal features of late Roman society: a society defined in all parts that could be useful to the state by laws fixing status and, through status, responsibility. The persons owning grain mills in Rome were (to anticipate developments that continued to unfold throughout the next two or three generations) responsible for the delivery of flour for the dole and could not bequeath or withdraw any part of their capital from their enterprise. Several other labour groups were similarly restricted, such as owners of seagoing vessels that served the supply of Rome, bargees in the Tiber, Ostian grain handlers, distributors of olive oil and pork for the dole, bath managers, and limeburners. A ban on moving to some other home or job along with production quotas were placed on people in trades serving state factories that made imperial court and army garments, cavalry equipment, and arms. Diocletian built a number of such factories, some in his capital Nicomedia, others in cities close to the groups whose needs they served. The laws imposing these obligations affected only labour groups serving the army and the capital (or capitals, plural, after the promotion of Constantinople); and, to identify them, induce them to serve, and hold them in their useful work, emperors as early as Claudius had offered privileges and imposed controls. Diocletian, however, greatly increased the weight and complexity of all these obligations.
Diocletian also changed the administrative districts in Egypt, in keeping with the model found elsewhere, by designating in each a central city to take responsibility for the whole. The last anomalous province was thus brought into line with the others. Everywhere, the imperial government continued to count on the members of the municipal senate to serve it, above all in tax collection but also in the supply of recruits, in rural police work, billeting for troops, or road building. As had been the case for centuries, they had to have a minimum of landed property to serve as surety for the performance of their administrative duties as well as to submit to nomination as senator, if it was so determined by the Senate. There had never been any one law to that effect, but by Diocletian’s time the emperor had at his command a body of long-established custom and numerous imperial decisions that served just as well. Local elites were thus hereditary, compulsory agents of his purpose, exactly like the Tiber bargees.
Two other groups were frozen into their roles in the same fashion: soldiers and farmers. The sons of soldiers were required to take up their fathers’ occupation (a law to that effect was in operation at least by 313); and the natural tendency of tenant farmers (coloni) to renew their lease on land that they, and perhaps their fathers and grandfathers, had worked was confirmed by imperial decisions—to such effect that, in 332, Constantine could speak of tenants on his Sardinian estates as bound to the acres they cultivated. This is the earliest explicit pronouncement on what is called the “colonate.” Soon the institution was extended beyond imperial estates to tie certain categories of tenants to private estates as well. The emperors wanted to ensure tax revenue and, for that, a stable rural labour supply.
The empire, as it is seen in abundant legislation for the period of Diocletian and beyond into the 5th century, has been called a “military dictatorship” or even a sort of totalitarian prison, in which every inhabitant had his own cell and his own shackles. This may well have been the rulers’ intent. By their lights, such a system was needed to repair the weaknesses revealed in the 3rd-century crisis. The principle of hereditary obligations was not, after all, so very strange, set against the natural tendencies of the economy and the practices that had developed in earlier, easier times. Yet Diocletian’s intentions could not be fully realized, given the limits on governmental effectiveness.
After a period of initial indifference toward the Christians, Diocletian ended his reign by unleashing against them, in 303, the last and most violent of their persecutions. It was urged on him by his Caesar Galerius and prolonged in the East for a decade (until 311) by Galerius as Augustus and by other emperors. As in earlier persecutions, the initiative arose at the heart of government; some emperors, as outraged by the Christians as many private citizens, considered it their duty to maintain harmony with the gods, the pax deorum, by which alone the empire flourished. Accordingly, Decius and Valerian in the 250s had dealt severely with the Christians, requiring them to demonstrate their apostasy by offering sacrifice at the local temples, and for the first time had directly struck the church’s clergy and property. There were scores of Christians who preferred death, though the great majority complied or hid themselves. Within a matter of months after he had begun his attacks, however, Decius had died (251), and the bloody phase of Valerian’s attacks also lasted only months (259/260). His son Gallienus had issued an edict of tolerance, and Aurelian was even appealed to by the church of Antioch to settle an internal dispute. Christianity had now become open and established, thanks to the power of its God so often, it seemed, manifested in miraculous acts and to the firmness with which converts were secured in a new life and community. The older slanders—cannibalism and incest—that had troubled the Apologists in the 2nd century no longer commanded credence. A measure of respectability had been won, along with recruits from the upper classes and gifts of land and money. By the end of the 3rd century Christians actually predominated in some of the smaller Eastern towns or districts, and they were well represented in Italy, Gaul, and Africa around Carthage; all told, they numbered perhaps as many as 5 million out of the empire’s total population of 60 million. Occasional meetings on disputed matters might bring together dozens of bishops, and it was this institution or phenomenon that the Great Persecutions sought to defeat. The progress of a religion that could not accept the religious basis of the tetrarchy and certain of whose members were imprudent and provocative, as in the incidents at Nicomedia (where a church was built across from Diocletian’s palace), finally aroused Galerius’ fanaticism. In 303–304 several edicts, each increasingly stringent, ordered the destruction of the churches, the seizure of sacred books, the imprisonment of the clergy, and a sentence of death for all those who refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods. In the East, where Galerius was imposing his ideas more and more on the aging Diocletian, the persecution was extremely violent, especially in Egypt, Palestine, and the Danubian regions. In Italy, Maximian, zealous at the beginning, quickly tired; and in Gaul, Constantius merely destroyed a few churches without carrying reprisals any further. Nevertheless, Christianity could no longer be eradicated, for the people of the empire and even some officials no longer felt the blind hatred for Christians that had typified previous centuries.
Struggle for power
The first tetrarchy had ended on May 1, 305; the second did not last long. After Constantius died at Eboracum in 306, the armies of Britain and Gaul, without observing the rules of the tetrarchic system, had hastened to proclaim Constantine, the young son of Constantius, as Augustus. Young Maxentius, the son of Maximian (who had never wanted to retire), thereupon had himself proclaimed in Rome, recalled his father into service, and got rid of Severus. Thus, in 307–308 there was great confusion. Seven emperors had, or pretended to have, the title of Augustus: Maximian, Galerius, Constantine, Maxentius, Maximinus Daia, Licinius (who had been promoted Augustus in 308 by Galerius against Constantine), and, in Africa, the usurper Domitius Alexander.
This situation was clarified by successive eliminations. In 310, after numerous intrigues, old Maximian was killed by his son-in-law Constantine, and in the following year Alexander was slain by one of Maxentius’ praetorian prefects. In 311 Galerius died of illness a few days after having admitted the failure of his persecutions by proclaiming an edict of tolerance. There remained, in the West, Constantine and Maxentius and in the East, Licinius and Maximinus Daia. Constantine, the best general, invaded Italy with a strong army of faithful Gauls and defeated Maxentius near the Milvian Bridge, not far from Rome. While attempting to escape, Maxentius drowned. Constantine then made an agreement with Licinius, and the two rallied the Eastern Christians to their side by guaranteeing them religious tolerance in the Edict of Milan (313). This left Maximinus Daia, now isolated and regarded as a persecutor, in a weak position; attacked by Licinius near Adrianople, he fell ill and died soon afterward, in 313. This left the empire with two leaders, Constantine and Licinius, allied in outward appearances and now brothers-in-law as a result of Licinius’ marriage to Constantine’s sister.
The reign of Constantine
Constantine and Licinius soon disputed among themselves for the empire. Constantine attacked his adversary for the first time in 316, taking the dioceses of Pannonia and Moesia from him. A truce between them lasted 10 years. In 316 Diocletian died in Salona, which he had never felt a desire to leave despite the collapse of his political creation. Constantine and Licinius then reverted to the principles of heredity, designating three potential Caesars from among their respective sons, all still infants, with the intention of securing their dynasties (two sons of Constantine and one of Licinius). The dynastic concept, however, required the existence of only a single emperor, who imposed his own descendance. Although Constantine favoured the Christians, Licinius resumed the persecutions, and in 324 war erupted once again. Licinius, defeated first at Adrianople and then in Anatolia, was obliged to surrender and, together with his son, was executed. Next, Constantine’s third son, Constantius, was in turn named Caesar, as his two elder brothers, Crispus and Constantine the Younger, had been some time before. The second Flavian dynasty was thus founded, and Constantine let it be believed that his father, Flavius Constantius (Chlorus), was descended from Claudius Gothicus.
Constantine’s conversion to Christianity had a far-reaching effect. Like his father, he had originally been a votary of the Sun; worshiping at the Grand Temple of the Sun in the Vosges Mountains of Gaul, he had had his first vision—albeit a pagan one. During his campaign against Maxentius, he had had a second vision—a lighted cross in the sky—after which he had painted on his men’s shields a figure that was perhaps Christ’s monogram (although he probably had Christ confused with the Sun in his manifestation as summa divinitas [“the highest divinity”]). After his victory he declared himself Christian. His conversion remains somewhat mysterious and his contemporaries—Lactantius and Eusebius of Caesarea—are scarcely enlightening and even rather contradictory on the subject. But it was doubtless a sincere conversion, for Constantine had a religious turn of mind. He was also progressive and greatly influenced by the capable bishops who surrounded him from the very beginning.
Until 320–322 solar symbols appeared on Constantine’s monuments and coins, and he was never a great theologian. Yet his favourable policy toward the Christians never faltered. Christianity was still a minority religion in the empire, especially in the West and in the countryside (and consequently within his own army), thus excluding the possibility of any political calculation on his part. But it was enthusiastically welcomed in the East, and thanks to Constantine the new religion triumphed more rapidly; his official support led to the conversion of numerous pagans, although with doubtful sincerity because they were indifferent in their moral conviction.
The church, so recently persecuted, was now suddenly showered with favours: the construction of magnificent churches (Rome, Constantinople), donations and grants, exemptions from decurial duties for the clergy, juridical competences for the bishops, and exceptional promotions for Christian officials. Pagans were not persecuted, however, and Constantine retained the title of pontifex maximus. But he spoke of the pagan gods with contempt and forbade certain types of worship, principally nocturnal sacrifices. In 331 he ordered an inventory of pagan property, despoiled the temples of their treasure, and finally destroyed a few Eastern sanctuaries on the pretext of immorality.
The churches were soon to feel the burden of imperial solicitude: the “secular arm” (i.e., the government) was placed at the service of a fluctuating orthodoxy, for the emperor was impressionable to arguments of various coteries and became quite lost in theological subtleties. In 314 the Council of Arles had tried in vain to stop the Donatist schism (a nationalistic heretical movement questioning the worthiness of certain church officials) that arose in Africa after Diocletian’s persecutions. The Arian heresy raised even more difficulties: Arius, an Alexandrian priest and disciple of Lucian of Antioch, questioned the dogma of the Trinity and of the Godhead of Christ, and his asceticism, as well as the sharpness of his dialectics, brought him many followers; he was convicted several times, but the disorders continued. Constantine, solicited by both sides and untroubled by doctrinal nuances that were, moreover, foreign to most believers in the West, wished to institute a universal creed; with this in mind he convened the general Council of Nicaea, or Nicene Council, in 325. He condemned Arius and declared, in spite of the Easterners, that Jesus was “of one substance” with God the Father. Nevertheless, the heresy continued to exist, for Constantine changed his mind several times; he was influenced by Arian or semi-Arian bishops and was even baptized on his deathbed, in 337, by one of them, Eusebius of Nicomedia.
Between 325 and 337 Constantine effected important reforms, continuing Diocletian’s work. The division between the limitanei border troops and the tactical troops (comitatenses and imperial guard) led by magistri militum was clarified, and military careers became independent of civil careers. At the same time, however, he lodged an increasing number of troops in or next to cities, a process whose objective was ease and economy of supply; however, training and discipline were harder to enforce because of it, and the men hung about in idleness. It was also under Constantine that a barbarian commander in the Roman army attained a historical significance. He was Crocus the Alaman, who led the movement among the troops that resulted in Constantine’s seizure of the rank of Augustus in 306 immediately after his father Constantius’ death. A similar figure was the great commander Bonitus, a Frank, in the years 316–324; and Constantine credited his victories against Maxentius in 311–312 principally to his barbarian troops, who were honoured on the triumphal Arch of Constantine in Rome. In opposition to him, Licinius mustered drafts of Goths to strengthen his army. Goths were also brought in by Constantine, to the number of 40,000, it is said, to help defend Constantinople in the latter part of his reign, and the palace guard was thenceforward composed mostly of Germans, from among whom a great many high army commands were filled. Dependence on immigrants or first-generation barbarians in war was to increase steadily, at a time when conventional Roman troops were losing military value.
Constantine raised many equestrians to senatorial rank, having in his earlier reign the still rapidly increasing ranks of the civil service to fill—it was at least 50 times the size of the civil service under Caracalla—and having in his later reign a second senate to fill, in Constantinople (see below). A rapid inflation in titles of honour also took place. As a result of these several changes, the equestrian order ceased to have meaning, and a new nobility of imperial service developed. Constantine gave first rank in the central administration to the palace quaestor, the magister officiorum, and the counts of finance (comes sacrarum largitionum, comes rei privatae). The diocesan vicars were made responsible to the praetorian prefects, whose number was increased and whose jurisdictions were now vast territories: the prefectures of Gaul, Italy, Illyricum, and the East. The unification of political power brought with it a corresponding decentralization of administration.
In order to reorganize finances and currency, Constantine minted two new coins: the silver miliarensis and, most importantly, the gold solidus, whose stability was to make it the Byzantine Empire’s basic currency. And by plundering Licinius’ treasury and despoiling the pagan temples, he was able to restore the finances of the state. Even so, he still had to create class taxes: the gleba for senators, and the chrysargyre, which was levied in gold and silver on merchants and craftsmen in the towns.
Constantine’s immortality, however, rests on his founding of Constantinople. This “New Rome,” established in 324 on the site of Byzantium and dedicated in 330, rapidly increased in population as a result of favours granted to immigrants. A large number of churches were also built there, even though former temples were not destroyed; and the city became the administrative capital of the empire, receiving a senate and proconsul. This choice of site was due not to religious considerations, as has been suggested, but rather to reasons that were both strategic (its proximity to the Danube and Euphrates frontiers) and economic (the importance of the straits and of the junction between the great continental road, which went from Boulogne to the Black Sea, and the eastern commercial routes, passing through Anatolia to Antioch and Alexandria). Constantine died on May 22, 337.
The Roman Empire under the 4th-century successors of Constantine
The rule of Constantine’s sons
After some months of confusion, Constantine’s three surviving sons (Crispus, the eldest son, had been executed in mysterious circumstances in 326), supported by the armies faithful to their father’s memory, divided the empire among themselves and had all the other members of their family killed. Constantine II kept the West, Constantius the East, and Constans, the youngest brother, received the central prefecture (Italy, Africa, and Illyricum). In 340 Constantine II tried to take this away from Constans but was killed. For the next 10 years there was peace between the two remaining brothers, and Constans won acceptance for a religious policy favourable to the Nicaeans, whose leader, Athanasius, had received a triumph in Alexandria. In 350 a mutiny broke out in Autun; Constans fled but was killed in Lugdunum by Magnentius, a usurper who was recognized in Gaul, Africa, and Italy. Constantius went out to engage Magnentius, and the Battle of Mursa (351) left the two strongest armies of the empire—those of Gaul and of the Danube—massacred, thus compromising the empire’s defense. Magnentius retreated after his defeat and finally committed suicide in 353.
Thenceforth, Constantius reigned alone as Augustus, aided by a meddlesome bureaucracy in which mission deputies (agentes in rebus), informers, and spies played an important role. He named two Caesars in succession, his two young surviving cousins, Gallus in the East and Julian in Gaul. Constantius eventually had to get rid of Gallus, who proved incompetent and cruel and soon terrorized Antioch. Julian, however, was a magnificent success, a fact that aroused Constantius’ jealousy and led to Julian’s usurpation; for the latter was proclaimed Augustus, in spite of Constantius’ opposition, at Lutetia in 361. Civil war was averted when Constantius died in November 361, leaving the empire to Julian, the last ruler of the Constantinian family.
At the time of his death in 337 Constantine had been preparing to go to war against the Persians. This legacy weighed heavily on the shoulders of Constantius, a military incompetent when compared to the energetic Sāsānian king Shāpūr II. Nearly every year the Persians attacked and pillaged Roman territory; the Mesopotamian towns were besieged, and Nisibis alone resisted. There was a lull between 350 and 357, while Shāpūr was detained by troubles in the eastern regions of his own kingdom. The war resumed, however, and Mesopotamia was partly lost when the emperor had to leave in order to fight Julian. Constantius had fought Shāpūr conscientiously, but his generals were mediocre, except for Urisicinus, and he himself was clumsy. In the meantime, the Rhine and Danube were threatened frequently, because the troops had been withdrawn from there and sent to the East. Constantius, moreover, had made a mistake in sending Chnodomar, the Alemannic king, against Magnentius in 351, for his tribes had gone on to ravage Gaul. Julian, however, soon revealed himself to be a great military leader by winning several well-fought campaigns between 356 and 361, most notably at Strasbourg in 357, and by restoring approximately 70 plundered villages. His abandonment, in 358, of the district of Toxandria, roughly equivalent to modern Belgium, to its barbarian squatters, on condition of their defending it against other invaders, was no doubt a realistic decision. Constantius defeated the Quadi and the Goths on the Danube in 359, but court intrigues, Magnentius’ usurpation, and the interminable war against the Persians allowed the barbarians to wreak great havoc.
Constantius was primarily interested in religious affairs. His interventions created a “caesaro-papism” that was unfavourable to the church, for after the Battle of Mursa the emperor had become violently Arian. The Christological problem had moved to the forefront. In 360 Constantius obtained a new creed by force from the Council of Constantinople, which, rejecting the notion of “substance” as too risky, declared only that the Son was like the Father and thus left the problem unresolved. Pagans as well as orthodox Nicaeans (Homoousians) and extremist Arians (Anomoeans) were persecuted, for in 356–357 several edicts proscribed magic, divination, and sacrifices and ordered that the temples be closed. But when Constantius visited Rome in 357, he was so struck by its pagan grandeur that he apparently suspended the application of these measures.
The reign of Julian
Julian, who had been spared because of his tender age from the family butchering in 337, had been brought up far from the court and was undoubtedly intended for the priesthood. Nevertheless, he had been allowed to take courses in rhetoric and philosophy at Ephesus and later at Athens; he developed a fondness for Hellenic literature, and he secretly apostatized around 351. When he became sole emperor at the end of 361, he proclaimed his pagan faith, ordered the restitution of the temples seized under Constantius, and freed all the bishops who had been banished by the Arians, so as to weaken Christianity through the resumption of doctrinal disputes. The religion he himself espoused was compounded of traditional non-Christian elements of piety and theology, such as might have been found in any fairly intellectual person in the preceding centuries, along with elements of Neoplatonism developed by Porphyry and Iamblichus of two or three generations earlier, and, finally, much of the organization and social ethic of the church. From Neoplatonism he learned the techniques of direct communication with the gods (theurgy) through prayer and invocation; from the church he adopted, as the church itself had adopted from the empire’s civil organization, a hierarchy of powers: provincial, metropolitan, urban, with himself as supreme pontiff. His deep love of traditional higher culture, moreover, provoked his war on Christian intellectuals and teachers who, he protested, had no right to Homer or Plato. Many Christians both before and later concurred with him, being themselves troubled by the relation between Christianity and inherited literature and thought, steeped as both were in pagan beliefs.
In the latter part of his 18-month reign, Julian forbade Christians from teaching, began the rebuilding of the Temple at Jerusalem, restored many pagan shrines, and displayed an exaggerated piety. Whereas Constantine (and his sons to a lesser degree) had introduced a huge number of coreligionists into the upper ranks of the army and government, achieving a rough parity between the members of the two religions, Julian began to reverse the process. Within a short while Julian was successful enough in his undertaking to have aroused the fear and hatred of the Christians, who for a long time thought of him as the Antichrist.
In the political realm, Julian wished to return to the liberal principate of the Antonines—to a time before the reforms of Diocletian and Constantine, whom he detested. He put an end to the terrorism of Constantius’ eunuchs and agentes in rebus and reduced the personnel and expenditures of the court, while he himself lived like an ascetic. In the provinces he lightened the financial burden on individuals by reducing the capitatio, and on cities, by reducing the aurum coronarium and restoring the municipal properties confiscated by Constantius. On the other hand, he increased the number of curiales by reinstating numerous clerks in an attempt to return the ancient lustre to municipal life. Thus, he earned the gratitude of pagan intellectuals, who were enamoured of the past of free Greece; and Ammianus made him the central hero of his history.
Taking up Trajan’s dream, Julian wished to defeat Persia definitively by engaging the empire’s forces in an offensive war that would facilitate a national reconciliation around the gods of paganism. But his army was weak—corrupted perhaps by large numbers of hostile Christians. After a brilliant beginning, he was defeated near Ctesiphon and had to retrace his steps painfully; he was killed in an obscure encounter on June 26, 363.
Julian’s successor, Jovian, chosen by the army’s general staff, was a Christian, but not a fanatic. He negotiated a peace with Shāpūr, by which Rome lost a good part of Galerian’s conquests of 298 (including Nisibis, which had not surrendered) and abandoned Armenia. He also restored tolerance in religious affairs, for he neither espoused any of the heresies nor persecuted pagans. In February 364 he died accidentally.
The reign of Valentinian and Valens
Once again the general staff unanimously chose a Pannonian officer—Valentinian, an energetic patriot and, like Jovian, a moderate Christian—but he had to yield to the rivalry of the armies by dividing authority. Taking the West for himself, Valentinian entrusted the East to his brother Valens, an inexperienced man whom he raised to the rank of Augustus. For the first time the two parts of the empire were truly separate, except for the selection of consuls, in which Valentinian had precedence.
Although he served the state with dedication, Valentinian could be brutal, choleric, and authoritarian. His foreign policy was excellent: all the while he was fighting barbarians (the Alemanni in Gaul, the Sarmatians and Quadi in Pannonia) and putting down revolts in Britain and Africa (notably that of the Berber Firmus) with the aid of his top general, Theodosius the Elder, he was taking care to improve the army’s equipment and to protect Gaul by creating a brilliant fortification. His domestic measures favoured the curiales and the lower classes: from then on, taxes would be collected exclusively by officials; the protection of the poor was entrusted to “defenders of the plebs,” chosen from among retired high officials (honorati). Nevertheless, needs of state obliged him to accentuate social immobility, to reinforce corporation discipline and official hierarchization, and to demand taxes ruthlessly. At first he was benevolent to the Senate of Rome, supervised the provisioning of the city, and legislated in favour of its university, the nursery of officials (law of 370). But beginning in 369, under the influence of Maximin, the prefect of Gaul, he initiated a period of terror, which struck the great senatorial families. Meanwhile, religious peace reigned in the West, tolerance was proclaimed, and after some difficulty, Rome found a great pope in Damasus, who, beginning in 373, actively supported the new bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose, an ardent defender of orthodoxy.
In the East, Valens, who was incapable and suspicious, had fallen under the influence of legists, such as the praetorian prefect Modestus. The beginning of Valens’ reign was shadowed by the attempted usurpation of Procopius (365–366), a pagan relative of Julian’s who failed and was killed by the army, which remained faithful to Valens. Modestus instituted harsh persecutions in Antioch of the educated pagan elite. Valens was a fanatic Arian, who exiled even moderate Nicaean bishops and granted to Arians favours that aroused violent reactions from the orthodox, whose power had increased in the East. Valens’ policies made the East prey to violent religious passions.
On the Danube, Valens fought the Visigoths and made a treaty with their king, Athanaric, in 369; but in 375 the Ostrogoths and the Greutingi appeared on the frontiers, pushed from their home in southern Russia by the powerful Huns. In 376 Valens authorized the starving masses to enter Thrace; but, being exploited and mistreated by the officials, they soon turned to uncontrollable pillaging. Their numbers continually increased by the addition of new bands, until finally they threatened Constantinople itself. Valens sent for aid from the West, but without waiting for it to arrive he joined battle and was killed in the Adrianople disaster of 378, which to some critics foreshadowed the approaching fall of the Roman Empire.
The Goths, who were also stirring up Thrace and Macedonia, could no longer be driven out. The provinces subject to their pillaging soon included Pannonia farther up the Danube, where Gratian agreed with a cluster of three tribal armies to settle them as a unit under their own chiefs on vacant lands (380). By a far more significant arrangement of the same sort two years later, Theodosius assigned to the Goths a large area of Thrace along the Danube as, in effect, their own kingdom; there they enjoyed autonomy as well as a handsome subsidy from the emperor, exactly as tribes beyond the empire had done in previous treaties. They were expected to respond to calls on their manpower if the Roman army needed supplementing, as it routinely did. Although the Goths considered this treaty ended with Theodosius’ death and resumed their lawless wanderings for a while, it nevertheless represented the model for subsequent ones, again struck with the Goths under their king Alaric (from 395; see below) and with later barbarian tribes. The capture of the empire had begun.
The reign of Gratian and Theodosius I
Following Valentinian’s sudden death in 375, the West was governed by his son Gratian, then 16 years old, who had been given the title of Augustus as early as 367. The Pannonian army, rife with intrigue, quickly proclaimed Gratian’s half-brother, Valentinian II, only four years old. The latter received Illyricum under his older brother’s guardianship, and this arrangement satisfied everybody. Valentinian’s advisers were executed: Maximian was sacrificed to the spite of the Senate, and Theodosius the Elder became the victim of personal jealousies. Gratian announced a liberal principate, supported in Gaul by the wealthy family of the Bordeaux poet Ausonius and in Rome by the Symmachi and the Nicomachi Flaviani, representatives of the pagan aristocracy. His generals defeated the Alemanni and the Goths on the Danube but arrived too late to save Valens.
On January 19, 379, before the army, Gratian proclaimed Theodosius, the son of the recently executed general, as Eastern emperor. Theodosius was chosen for his military ability and for his orthodoxy (Gratian, extremely pious, had come under the influence of Damasus and Ambrose). The East was enlarged by the dioceses of Dacia and Macedonia, taken from Valentinian II. Gratian and Theodosius agreed to admit the Goths into the empire, and Gratian applied the policy also to the Salian Franks in Germany. Theodosius soon dominated his weak colleague and entered the battle for the triumph of orthodoxy. In 380 the Arians were relieved of their churches in Constantinople, and in 381 the Nicaean faith was universally imposed by a council whose canons established the authority of the metropolitan bishops over their dioceses and gave the bishop of the capital a primacy similar to that of the bishop of Rome.
In ecclesiastical affairs, the separation between East and West was codified. The Westerners bowed to this policy, satisfied with the triumph of orthodoxy. Gratian then permitted Ambrose and Damasus to deal harshly with the Arians, with the support of the state. Paganism also was hounded: following Theodosius’ lead, Gratian refused the chief priesthood, removed the altar of Victory from the hall of the Roman Senate, and deprived the pagan priests and the Vestal Virgins of their subsidies and privileges. The pagan senators were outraged, but their protests were futile because Gratian was watched over by Ambrose.
This militantly orthodox policy aroused the displeasure of the pagans and of the Western Arians: thus, when Gratian left Trier for Milan, the army of Gaul and Britain proclaimed its leader, Maximus, in 383. He conquered Gaul without difficulty, and Gratian was killed in Lyons. Maximus, who, like Theodosius, was Spanish and extremely orthodox, was recognized by the latter. In the meantime, the third Augustus, Valentinian II, had taken refuge in Milan after suffering defeat in Pannonia. He was effectively under the domination of his mother, Justina, an Arian who sought support for her son among the Arians and pagans of Rome and even among the African Donatists (a Christian heresy). In 388 Maximus, after arriving in Italy, first expelled Valentinian and then prepared to attack Theodosius. The latter, accepting the inevitability of war, strengthened his resolve and gained several victories. Maximus was killed at Aquileia in 388, and thenceforth Theodosius ruled both West and East; he was represented in the East by his son Arcadius, an Augustus since 383. Valentinian II was sent to Trier, accompanied by the Frankish general Arbogast to control him.
After a few years’ respite, during the prefectureships of Nicomachus Flavianus in Rome and Tatian in the East, paganism waged its last fight: Theodosius, influenced by Ambrose, who had dared to inflict public penance on him in 390 after the massacre at Thessalonica, had determined to eliminate the pagans completely. After a few hostile clashes, the law of November 8, 392, proscribed the pagan religion. Then Arbogast, after Valentinian II’s death in 392 under shadowy circumstances, proclaimed as emperor the rhetorician Eugenius. When Theodosius refused to recognize him, Eugenius was thrown into the arms of the pagans of Rome. But this last “pagan reaction” was short-lived; in 394, with his victory at the Frigidus (modern Vipacco) River, between Aquileia and Emona, Theodosius put an end to the hopes of Eugenius and his followers. His intention was to place his son Honorius, proclaimed Augustus in 393, over the West, while returning his eldest son, Arcadius, to the East. But Theodosius’ sudden death in January 395 precipitated the division of the empire.
Theodosius had successfully dealt with the danger of the Goths, although not without taking risks, and had both established a dynasty and imposed the strictest orthodoxy. A compromise peace with the Persians had given Rome, in 387, a small section of Armenia, where he had founded Theodosiopolis (Erzurum). He had survived two pretenders in the West. These military successes were, however, won with armies in which barbarians were in the majority, which was not a good sign. The barbarian presence is reflected in the names of his commanding officers, including such Franks as Richomer, Merovech, and Arbogast, and the half-Vandal Stilicho, who through his marriage to Serena, Theodosius’ niece, had entered the imperial family.
Social and economic conditions
During the 4th century the emperor’s power was theoretically absolute, the traditions of the principate having given way to the necessities of defense.
The emperor was both heir to the Hellenistic basileus (absolute king) and the anointed of the deity. Pagans and Christians alike considered him “emperor by the grace of God,” which, strictly speaking, rendered the imperial cult unnecessary. Indeed, he hardly needed the ceremonies and parade of god-awfulness with which Diocletian and his successors were surrounded. Yet imperial authority had actually lost much of its effectiveness due to the growth and nature of late Roman government. Its ranks can be estimated at more than 30,000 men—perhaps an insignificant number compared with that of modern governments but gigantic when set against the total of only a few hundred a century earlier. The problem, however, lay not in numbers but in the assumption, held throughout both bureaucracy and army, that a position of power ex officio entitled the holder to a rake-off of some sort, to be extracted both from the citizenry with whom he came in contact and from fellow members of the service in ranks below his own. This ethos was not new; but during the principate it had been restrained by higher officers and officials, who operated according to a different, essentially aristocratic, code expressed in patron-dependent relations and mutuality. Its currency was not money but favours and services. Such a code was swept away by the rapid increase in the size of government in the later 3rd century and the rise to high civil and military posts by men recruited from the ranks rather than from the upper classes. As they had bought their own promotions or appointments, so they expected to recoup their expenses (and more besides) by such means as selling exemptions and extortion. The more intrusive and demanding the military tax collection or the state’s control of the rosters of city senates, the more profit there was for a pervasively corrupt administration. Persons close to the emperor could, for a price, generally screen him from knowledge of what was going on. Constantine, for example, complained quite in vain—and the complaint was endlessly repeated by his successors—that the city senates were being “emptied of persons obligated to them by birth, who yet are asking for a government post by petition to the emperor, running off to the legions or various civil offices.” Such posts could easily be bought. A great deal of imperial planning was thus vitiated by sale. Many of the profiteers started life in the urban upper classes, but, as nouveaux riches, they joined the older landed nobility after a term in the emperor’s service.
In a few areas where measurement is possible, one can see that a process of consolidation of landownership had been going on for a long time, bringing the rural population increasingly into dependence on the larger property holders. Diocletian’s new system of property assessment accelerated this process; it was more thorough and thus exposed the poor and ignorant to exploitation by local officialdom. In response, they sought the protection of some influential man to ward off unfair assessments, selling their land to him and becoming his tenants. In areas disturbed by lawlessness, a large landowner offered them safety as well. The strength of rural magnates in their formidable, even fortified, dwellings, with a dependent peasantry of 100 or even 1,000 around them made much trouble for tax collectors, and landowners thus became the target of many laws. Consolidation of ownership, however, was not apparent in northern Africa, and the reverse process has been established for a carefully researched area of Syria.
Regional differences cannot be disregarded. They were responsible for guiding the development of the later empire along quite varied paths. The archaeological data, which reflect these developments most clearly, register such changes as the degree of wealth in public buildings and the use and elegance of carved sarcophagi or of mosaics in private houses. Broadly speaking, a decline is noticeable throughout the European provinces; it tends to affect the cities earlier than the rural areas and is detectable sometimes by 350, generally by 375. In the Danube provinces, the evidence fits neatly with political history following the Battle of Adrianople in 378, after which their condition was continually disturbed by the Visigothic immigrants. There is, however, no such obvious explanation for areas such as Spain or central Gaul. Italy of the 3rd and 4th centuries was not perceptibly worse off than before, though wealth in the Po region was more concentrated in the cities north of the river. Northern Africa seems to have maintained nearly the same level of prosperity as in earlier centuries, if proper weight is given to ecclesiastical building after Constantine. For Egypt, no clear picture emerges; but all the other Eastern provinces enjoyed in the later empire the same level of economic well-being as before or a still higher one, with more disposable wealth and an increasing population. These conditions continued into the 5th century.
The vast differences between the European and the Eastern provinces are best explained by the shifting focus of imperial energies. It can be traced in the locus of heaviest military recruitment, in the lower Danube, as the 3rd century progressed; in the consequent concentration of military expenditure there; and in the siting of the emperors’ residence as it was moved from Rome to Milan in the 260s, then to the lower Danube later in the 3rd century (where much fighting occurred), and subsequently to Nicomedia (Diocletian’s capital). None of the Tetrarchs chose Rome—its days as the imperial centre were over—and when, from among various Eastern cities he considered, Constantine decided on Byzantium as his permanent residence, he simply made permanent a very long-term development. Meanwhile the Rhine frontier and the upper Danube were repeatedly overrun. As can be inferred from the signs of fortification in Pannonia, Gaul, Britain, and Spain, internal policing was neglected. Commercial intercourse, which had been the key to raising the economy and the level of urbanization, became less safe and easy. Villas turned into self-sufficient villages, and the smaller towns also reverted to villages. Only the larger towns, such as Bordeaux, Arles, or Cartagena, maintained their vitality.
Although there was considerable inflation (culminating under Theodosius), in spite of a deflationary fiscal policy, commercial transactions ignored barter and were based instead on currency throughout the empire at the end of the century. The economy was partially under state direction, which was applied to agriculture through bias toward the settler system on imperial estates and to industry through the requisitioning of corporations (artisans, merchants, carriers) and the creation of state workshops (especially for manufacturing military goods). Opinions differ on the intensity of trade, but there was certainly clear progress in comparison to the 3rd century.
The remnants of pagan culture
The spread of Christianity in no way harmed the flourishing of pagan literature. Instruction in the universities (Rome, Milan, Carthage, Bordeaux, Athens, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria) was still based on rhetoric, and literature received the support of senatorial circles, especially in Rome (for example those of the Symmachi and the Nicomachi Flaviani). Latin literature was represented by Symmachus and the poet Ausonius. The last great historian of Rome was Ammianus Marcellinus, a Greek who wrote in Latin for the Roman aristocracy; of his Res gestae, the most completely preserved part describes the period from 353 to 378. The works of Sextus Aurelius Victor and Eutropius, who ably abridged earlier historical works, are fairly accurate and more reliable than the Scriptores historiae Augustae, a collection of imperial biographies of unequal value, undoubtedly composed under Theodosius but for an unknown purpose. Erudition was greatly prized in aristocratic circles, which, enamoured of the past, studied and commented on the classic authors (Virgil) or the ancestral rites (the Saturnalia of Macrobius). Greek literature is represented by the works of philosophers or sophists: Themistius, a political theoretician who advocated absolutism; Himerius of Prusias; and above all Libanius of Antioch, whose correspondence and political discourses from the Theodosian period bear witness to his perspicacity and, often, to his courage.
The Christian church
In the last decade of the 4th century the harsh laws against the perpetuation of the old pieties promulgated by Theodosius gave impetus and justification to waves of icon and temple destruction, especially in the East. It is, nonetheless, likely that a majority of the population was still non-Christian in 400, although less so in the cities and in the East and more so in rural and mountainous areas and the West. Efforts by the church to reach them were intermittent and lacked energy. Bishops generally expected rural magnates to do their job for them; and the church leadership was, in any case, of a social class that viewed the peasantry from a great distance and wanted to keep it that way. Except by such unusual figures as Martin of Tours or Marcellus of Apamea, little effort was made to convert people who were hard to reach. As always in antiquity, it was in the cities where changes occurred—with the exception of monasticism.
Only in the reign of Constantine, and about simultaneously in Egypt and Palestine, had monasticism, a religious movement whose followers lived as hermits and pursued a life of extreme asceticism, become more than the little-regarded choice of rare zealots. Near Gaza and in the desert along the eastern side of Jerusalem a number of tiny clusters of cells had been made from caves and taken as residence by ascetics, from whose fame and example that way of life later spread to many other corners of the Levant. The bishop of Jerusalem, Cyril, by mid-century could speak of “regiments of monks.” But it was in the desert on both sides of the Nile that similar ascetic experiments of much greater importance were made, by the hero of the movement, St. Anthony, and others. True monasticism, tempered only by weekly communal worship and organizing, established itself on Anthony’s model and under his inspiration in the first decade of the 4th century; it took root above all in the desert of Scete just west of the base of the Nile delta. Coenobitism, joint life in enclosed communities, was the model preferred by St. Pachomius around 330, vigorously directed and diffused by him until mid-century, when both he and Anthony died. Basil of Caesarea was to establish monastic communities in Cappadocia under the influence of what he saw in Egypt on his visit there in the year of Anthony’s death; and Athanasius was shortly to write a biography of that saint of enormous influence and to carry word of his life to Italy and Gaul during his own exile there. The biography was soon translated into Latin and inspired a scattering of experiments in asceticism or coenobitism in the West—in Vercellae in Italy, for example, by 330, and at Tours in the 370s under Martin’s direction. Tours became the first monastery in the West comparable to those in the East, but development subsequently was slow compared to the 10,000 or more monasteries founded in Egypt by 400.
The most distinct and well-reported phenomenon during the century after the conversion of Constantine was the continued religious rioting and harrying in the cities, both in all the major ones and in dozens of minor ones. The death toll exceeded the toll among Christians at the hands of pagans in earlier persecutions. It was rarely of Jews or pagans at the hands of Christians or of Christians at the hands of pagans, but ordinarily of Christians at each others’ hands in the course of sectarian strife. For a time, no one sect enjoyed a majority among Homoousians, Arians, Donatists, Meletians, and many others. Bishoprics were fiercely contested and appeals often made to armed coercion. The emperors had assumed the right to interfere and often did so; but under Theodosius, Pope Damasus and St. Ambrose reacted: the state was to restrict itself to furnishing the “secular arm,” while the church, in the name of evangelical ethics, claimed the right to judge the emperors, a policy that had grave implications for the future. The “caesaro-papism” of Constantius later gained adherents under the Byzantine emperors. In the meantime, the Goths had been converted to Arianism by Ulfilas during the period of Constantius and Valens, thus presaging conflicts that were to come after the great invasions. Orthodox missionaries had converted Osroëne, Armenia, and even some countries on the Red Sea.
The Christian literature of the 4th century is remarkable. Its first representative is Eusebius of Caesarea, a friend and panegyrist of Constantine and a church historian whose creation of a “political theology” sealed the union between the Christian emperor and the church. St. Athanasius wrote apologetic works and a life of St. Anthony. Also prominent were the great Cappadocians: St. Basil of Caesarea, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. John Chrysostom of Antioch, the greatest preacher of his time. The Westerners, too, had great scholars and brilliant writers: St. Hilary of Poitiers, enemy of the Arians and of Constantius; St. Ambrose, administrator and pastor, whose excessive authority was imposed on Gratian and even on Theodosius; and St. Jerome, a desert monk and confessor of upper-class Roman ladies, a formidable polemicist who knew Greek and Hebrew and made the first faithful translation of the Old and New Testaments (the Vulgate) as well as of a chronicle of world history, which was a translation and continuation of the work of Eusebius. Finally, St. Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, was a great pastor, a vigorous controversialist, a sensitive and passionate writer (the Confessions), and the powerful theologian of The City of God. The century that developed these great minds cannot be considered decadent.
The eclipse of the Roman Empire in the West (c. 395–500) and the German migrations
Invasions in the early 5th century
After the death of Theodosius the Western empire was governed by young Honorius. Stilicho, an experienced statesman and general, was charged with assisting him and maintaining unity with the East, which had been entrusted to Arcadius. The Eastern leaders soon rejected Stilicho’s tutelage. An antibarbarian reaction had developed in Constantinople, which impeded the objectives of the half-Vandal Stilicho. He wanted to intervene on several occasions in the internal affairs at Constantinople but was prevented from doing so by a threat from the Visigoth chieftain Alaric, whom he checked at Pollentia in 402, then by the Ostrogoth Radagaisus’ raid in 406, and finally by the great invasion of the Gauls in 407. The following year he hoped to restore unity by installing a new emperor in Constantinople, Theodosius II, the son of Arcadius, who had died prematurely; but he succumbed to a political and military plot in August 408. The division of the two partes imperii was now a permanent one.
The barbarian invasions.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Honorius, seated in Ravenna, a city easier to defend than Milan, had only incompetent courtiers surrounding him, themselves animated by a violent hatred of the barbarians. Alaric soon reappeared, at the head of his Visigoths, demanding land and money. Tired of the Romans’ double-dealing, he descended on Rome itself. The city was taken and pillaged for three days, thus putting an end to an era of Western history (August 410). An Arian, Alaric spared the churches. He died shortly thereafter in the south; his successor, Athaulf, left the peninsula to march against the Gauls.
Fleeing from the terrifying advance of the Huns, on December 31, 406, the Vandals, Suebi, and Alani, immediately followed by the Burgundians and bands of Alemanni, crossed the frozen Rhine and swept through Gaul, effortlessly throwing back the federated Franks and Alemanni from the frontiers. Between 409 and 415 a great many of these barbarians arrived in Spain and settled in Lusitania (Suebi) and in Baetica (Vandals, whence the name Andalusia). As soon as Gaul had become slightly more peaceful, Athaulf’s Visigoths arrived, establishing themselves in Narbonensis and Aquitania. After recognizing them as “federates,” Honorius asked them to go to Spain to fight theVandals. Meanwhile, the Roman general Constantius eliminated several usurpers in Gaul, confined the Goths in Aquitania, and reorganized the administration (the Gallic assembly of 418). But he was unable to expel the Franks, the Alemanni, and the Burgundians, who had occupied the northern part of the country, nor to eliminate the brigandage of the Bagaudae. He was associated with the empire and was proclaimed Augustus in 421, but he died shortly afterward. His son, Valentinian III, succeeded Honorius in 423 and reigned until 455.
The beginning of Germanic hegemony in the West
During the first half of the 5th century the barbarians gradually installed themselves, in spite of the efforts of the Roman general Aetius at the head of a small army of mercenaries and of Huns. Aetius took back Arles and Narbonne from the Visigoths in 436, either pushed back the Salian and Ripuarian Franks beyond the Rhine or incorporated them as federates, settled the defeated Burgundians in Sapaudia (Savoy), and established the Alani in Orléans. The other provinces were lost: Britain, having been abandoned in 407 and already invaded by the Picts and Scots, fell to the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; a great Suebi kingdom, officially federated but in fact independent, was organized in Spain after the departure of the Vandals, and it allied itself to the Visigoths of Theodoric I, who were settled in the country around the Garonne.
In 428 the Vandal Gaiseric led his people (80,000 persons, including 15,000 warriors) to Africa. St. Augustine died in 430 in besieged Hippo, Carthage fell in 435, and in 442 a treaty gave Gaiseric the rich provinces of Byzacena and Numidia. From there he was able to starve Rome, threaten Sicily, and close off the western basin of the Mediterranean to the Byzantines.
Shortly afterward, in 450, Attila’s Huns invaded the West—first Gaul, where, after having been kept out of Paris, they were defeated by Aetius on the Campus Mauriacus (near Troyes), then Italy, which they evacuated soon after having received tribute from the pope, St. Leo. Attila died shortly afterward; and this invasion, which indeed left more legendary memories than actual ruins, had shown that a solidarity had been created between the Gallo-Romans and their barbarian occupiers, for the Franks, the Alemanni, and even Theodoric’s Visigoths had come to Aetius’ aid.
After the death of Aetius, in 454, and of Valentinian III, in 455, the West became the stake in the intrigues of the German chiefs Ricimer, Orestes, and Odoacer, who maintained real power through puppet emperors. In 457–461 the energetic Majorian reestablished imperial authority in southern Gaul until he was defeated by Gaiseric and assassinated shortly afterward. Finally, in 476, Odoacer deposed the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, had himself proclaimed king in the barbaric fashion, and governed Italy with moderation, being de jure under the emperor of the East. The end of the Roman Empire of the West passed almost unperceived.
Barbarian kingdoms
Several barbarian kingdoms were then set up: in Africa, Gaiseric’s kingdom of the Vandals; in Spain and in Gaul as far as the Loire, the Visigothic kingdom; and farther to the north, the kingdoms of the Salian Franks and the Alemanni. The barbarians were everywhere a small minority. They established themselves on the great estates and divided the land to the benefit of the federates without doing much harm to the lower classes or disturbing the economy. The old inhabitants lived under Roman law, while the barbarians kept their own “personality of laws,” of which the best-known is the judicial composition, the Wergild. Romans and barbarians coexisted but uneasily. Among the obstacles to reconciliation were differences in mores; social and political institutions (personal monarchies, fidelity of man to man); language, although Latin was still used in administration; and above all religion: the Arianism of the barbarians permitted the Roman Catholic bishops to retain their hold over their flocks. The only persecution, however, was under the Vandals, whose domination was the harshest.
Two great kingdoms marked the end of the 5th century. In Gaul, Clovis, the king of the Salian Franks (reigned 481/482–511), expelled Syagrius, the last Roman, from Soissons, took Alsace and the Palatinate from the Alemanni (496), and killed Alaric II, king of the Visigoths, at Vouillé (507). His conversion to Catholicism assured him the support of the bishops, and Frankish domination was established in Gaul. At the same time, Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, reigned in Italy. He had been charged by the emperor Zeno to take back Italy from Odoacer in 488, and in 494 he had himself proclaimed king at Ravenna. His Goths, few in number, were established in the north; elsewhere he preserved the old imperial administration, with senators as prefects. Externally, he kept Clovis from reaching the Mediterranean and extended his state up to the valley of the Rhône. Theodoric died in 526. Ten years later Justinian charged his general Belisarius with the reconquest of Italy, a costly, devastating, and temporary operation that lasted from 535 to 540.
Analysis of the decline and fall
The causes of the fall of the empire have been sought in a great many directions and with a great deal of interest, even urgency, among historians of the West; for it has been natural for them to see or seek parallels between Rome’s fate and that of their own times. In any choice of explanations there is likely to be a hidden sense of priorities determining the definition of “civilization,” or specifically the civilization of “Rome” or of “the classical world.” If, for example, classical civilization is identified with the literature of the ancients at what one conceives to be its best, then “the end” of this civilization has to be set at some point of decline and explanations for its coming to be sought in the preexisting conditions; or if not on literature but on political domination, then some other point in time must be chosen and explained in terms of what seems to have led up to it. There have been endless variations on this search, and there will continue to be more, no doubt, since it is agreed that literature did, in fact, diminish in quality, as did jurisprudence, although at a different date, and oratory, and vigorous political debate in the capital, and powerfully innovative philosophy, and sculpture, and civic patriotism, and the willingness to die for one’s country. “Civilization” turns out to be not one single entity but a web of many strands, each of its own length.
Perhaps the view attracting the most adherents, however, has focused on the ability of the empire to maintain its political and military integrity—that being the strand apparently most central and significant—and the juncture at which that ability is most dramatically challenged and found wanting—the period of “the barbarian invasions,” meaning 407 and roughly the ensuing decade. If this juncture in turn is examined and the antecedents of the empire’s weakness sought in internal developments, they can only be found in the government. Belief in and obedience to the monarch was not lacking, nor military technology at least matching that of the invaders, nor a population large enough to field a large force, nor the force itself (on paper, at least), nor the economic potential adequate to the arming of it. Particular defeats described by contemporaries in reasonable detail are almost uniformly attributable to the rottenness of government as described above, rendering soldiers undisciplined, untrained, frequently on indefinite leave, and without good morale or proper equipment. Soldiers were unpaid because of various abuses in the collection and delivery of supplies and money from taxpayers, and they were distracted from their proper duties by their own and their officers’ extortionate habits in contact with their civilian hosts. For the same basic reason—that is, abuse of power wielded through service in the army or bureaucracy—the administration of the cities no longer enjoyed the efforts of the urban elites, who by 407 had long since fled from active service to some exempt government post or title. For the same reason, finally, corrective measures needed against these systemic weaknesses could not be developed by enlightened men at the centre because they were screened from the truth of things, were at the mercy of incompetent or venal agents, or were unable to maintain themselves in power against the plotters around them. The details of all these charges that can be made against late Roman government are writ large in the great collection of imperial edicts published in 438, the Theodosian Code, as well as in the works of roughly contemporary writers from East and West, such as Synesius, Augustine, Libanius, Themistius, Chrysostom, Symmachus, Bishop Maximus of Turin, and, above all, Ammianus Marcellinus. An empire that could not deliver to a point of need all the defensive force it still possessed could not well stand against the enemy outside. Paul Petit Ramsay MacMullen
Citation Information
Article Title: Ancient Rome
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 02 August 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/ancient-Rome
Access Date: August 25, 2019
Additional Reading
General works
A wealth of information on ancient Roman civilization is provided by the volumes in The Cambridge Ancient History (1923– ), some in newer 2nd and 3rd editions; by N.G.L. Hammond and H.H. Scullard (eds.), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1970, reprinted 1984); and by John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray (eds.), The Oxford History of the Classical World (1986). Michael Grant and Rachel Kitzinger (eds.), Civilization of the Ancient Mediterranean: Greece and Rome, 3 vol. (1988), discusses the geography, inhabitants, arts, language, religion, politics, technology, and economy of the area from the early 1st millennium bc to the late 5th century ad. Broad coverage of the physical and cultural settings and of archaeological discoveries is also provided by Tim Cornell and John Matthews, Atlas of the Roman World (1982); and Nicholas G.L. Hammond (ed.), Atlas of the Greek and Roman World in Antiquity (1981). Overviews of the histories of Roman civilization include M. Cary and H.H. Scullard, A History of Rome Down to the Reign of Constantine, 3rd ed. (1975); and Michael Vickers, The Roman World (1977, reissued 1989). Many ancient historical sources are available in The Loeb Classical Library series, with original text and parallel English translation; in the series Translated Documents of Greece and Rome; and in Naphtali Lewis and Meyer Reinhold (eds.), Roman Civilization: Selected Readings, 3rd ed., 2 vol. (1990). Emily D. Townsend Vermeule Simon Hornblower John Ferguson Nancy Thomson de Grummond Gary Edward Forsythe Richard P. Saller Ramsay MacMullen
Rome from its origins to 264
Archaeological evidence on early Rome is discussed and analyzed by Raymond Bloch, The Origins of Rome, rev. ed. (1963; originally published in French, 1946); T.J. Cornell, “Rome and Latium Vetus,” Archaeological Reports, 26:71–88 (1979–80); and Robert Drews, “The Coming of the City to Central Italy,” American Journal of Ancient History, 6:133–165 (1981). The archaeology of early Italy in general is covered in David Trump, Central and Southern Italy Before Rome (1966). Livy’s work on early Rome is carefully annotated and commented on in part by R.M. Ogilvie, A Commentary on Livy, Books 1–5 (1965, reissued 1984). A good survey of Livy’s annalistic predecessors is E. Badian, “The Early Historians,” in T.A. Dorey (ed.), Latin Historians (1966), pp. 1–38. The single best modern treatment of the regal period and the early republic is Jacques Heurgon, The Rise of Rome to 264 B.C. (1973; originally published in French, 1969). A complete chronological listing of all known magistrates of the Roman Republic with full ancient citations can be found in T. Robert S. Broughton, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, 2 vol. and a supplement (1951–60, reprinted 1984–86). A collection and modern analysis of ancient sources concerning Rome’s economic development is Tenney Frank (ed.), An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome, 6 vol. (1933–40, reprinted 1975). The legal evidence from early Rome is treated by Alan Watson, Rome of the XII Tables: Persons and Property (1975).
The evolution of Rome’s foundation myth is discussed by E.J. Bickerman, “Origines Gentium,” Classical Philology, 47(2):65–81 (April 1952). Bickerman treats a number of important methodological questions on early Rome in “Some Reflections on Early Roman History,” Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione Classica, 97:393–408 (1969). Richard I. Ridley, “Fastenkritik: A Stocktaking,” Athenaeum, 58(3–4):264–298 (1980), surveys various modern views on the reliability of the consular fasti. The single best treatment of the Roman ruling class is Matthias Gelzer, The Roman Nobility (1969; originally published in German, 1912). The Roman assemblies and voting procedures are thoroughly examined by George Willis Botsford, The Roman Assemblies from Their Origin to the End of the Republic (1909, reprinted 1968); and Lily Ross Taylor, Roman Voting Assemblies from the Hannibalic War to the Dictatorship of Caesar (1966). Taylor has also carefully studied the origin and development of the 35 urban and rural voting tribes in The Voting Districts of the Roman Republic (1960). E. Stuart Staveley, “Forschungsbericht: The Constitution of the Roman Republic 1940–1954,” Historia, 5:74–122 (1956), surveys modern scholarship on a number of important constitutional problems of early Roman history. Staveley has discussed the problem of the distinction between patricians and plebians in “The Nature and Aims of the Patriciate,” Historia, 32:24–57 (1983). A collection of essays by different scholars addressing this same problem is Kurt A. Raaflaub (ed.), Social Struggles in Archaic Rome: New Perspectives on the Conflict of the Orders (1986), which contains an excellent bibliography on early Rome. A detailed and novel approach to the problem of patricians and plebeians is Richard E. Mitchell, Patricians and Plebeians: The Origin of the Roman State (1990). The single best treatment of the military tribunes with consular power and related questions is Kurt von Fritz, “The Reorganization of the Roman Government in 366 B.C. and the So-called Licinio-Sextian Laws,” Historia, 1:3–44 (1950).
The best modern discussion of Roman imperialism is William V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 B.C. (1979). Harris’ Rome in Etruria and Umbria (1971), examines Rome’s relations with those two regions. Other informative works on Roman expansion include R.M. Errington, The Dawn of Empire: Rome’s Rise to World Power (1971); Erich S. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, 2 vol. (1984); and E. Badian, Foreign Clientelae, 264–70 B.C. (1958). E.T. Salmon, Roman Colonization Under the Republic (1969), surveys the methods, aims, and consequences of Roman colonization. Gary Edward Forsythe
The middle republic (264–133 bc)
H.H. Scullard, A History of the Roman World: 753–146 BC, 4th ed. (1980), provides a reliable narrative. Gaetano de Sanctis, Storia dei Romani, 4 vol. (1907–65), is more detailed. The standard reference work on Polybius is F.W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius, 3 vol. (1957–79). On the wars with Carthage, Ulrich Kahrstedt, Geschichte der Karthager von 218–146 (1913, reprinted 1975), provides source criticism. Military aspects of this period are presented in Johannes Kromayer and Georg Veith, Antike Schlachtfelder, vol. 3 in 2 parts (1912); Johannes Kromayer and Georg Veith (eds.), Schlachten-Atlas zur antiken Kriegsgeschichte, 5 parts (1922–29); J.H. Thiel, A History of Roman Sea-power Before the Second Punic War (1954), and Studies on the History of Roman Sea-power in Republican Times (1946); J.F. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War: A Military History of the Second Punic War (1978); and H.H. Scullard, Scipio Africanus: Soldier and Politician (1970). Stéphane Gsell, Histoire ancienne de l’Afrique du Nord, 3rd ed., 8 vol. (1928); and B.H. Warmington, Carthage, rev. ed. (1969), deal with Carthage. Works on the provinces include David Magie, Roman Rule in Asia Minor to the End of the Third Century After Christ, 2 vol. (1950, reissued 1988); G.H. Stevenson, Roman Provincial Administration till the Age of the Antonines (1939, reprinted 1975); and C.H.V. Sutherland, The Romans in Spain, 217 B.C.–A.D. 117 (1939, reprinted 1982).
The transformation of Rome and Italy during the middle republic
Citizenship, constitution, and politics are discussed in Theodor Mommsen, Römisches Staatsrecht, 3rd ed., 3 vol. in 5 (1887–88, reprinted 1969); A.N. Sherwin-White, The Roman Citizenship, 2nd ed. (1973, reissued 1987); and C. Nicolet, The World of the Citizen in Republican Rome (1980; originally published in French, 1976). Arnold J. Toynbee, Hannibal’s Legacy: The Hannibalic War’s Effects on Roman Life, 2 vols. (1965); P.A. Brunt, Italian Manpower, 225 B.C.–A.D. 14 (1971, reprinted 1987); and Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (1977), explore the social and economic consequences of Rome’s victories. P.A. Brunt, Social Conflicts in the Roman Republic (1971, reissued 1986), presents an excellent brief account. Many important aspects of second-century politics and culture are covered in Alan E. Astin, Scipio Aemilianus (1967).
The late republic (133–31 bc)
The best outline in English for the late republic is the first half of H.H. Scullard, From the Gracchi to Nero, 5th ed. (1982), with excellent notes and bibliography. The classic reference work is W. Drumann, Geschichte Roms in seinem Übergange von der republikanischen zur monarchischen Verfassung, 2nd ed. edited by P. Groebe, 6 vol. (1899–1929), giving biographies (with full source material) of all prominent figures of the period, arranged by families. Classic interpretations of the fall of the republic are Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (1939, reissued 1987); P.A. Brunt, The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays (1988); Lily Ross Taylor, Party Politics in the Age of Caesar (1949, reissued 1975); Erich S. Gruen, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (1974); and Matthias Gelzer, Caesar: Politician and Statesman (1968; originally published in German, 1940). The army and expansion are analyzed in Emilio Gabba, Republican Rome, the Army, and the Allies (1976; originally published in Italian, 1973); and E. Badian, Roman Imperialism in the Late Republic, 2nd ed. (1968). Aspects of public and social life are dealt with in T.P. Wiseman, New Men in the Roman Senate, 139 B.C.–A.D. 14 (1971); Israël Shatzman, Senatorial Wealth and Roman Politics (1975); Susan Treggiari, Roman Freedmen During the Late Republic (1969); A.W. Lintott, Violence in Republican Rome (1968); and E. Badian, Publicans and Sinners: Private Enterprise in the Service of the Roman Republic (1972, reissued 1983). On cultural development, the standard work is Elizabeth Rawson, Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic (1985); it may be supplemented by J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, Continuity and Change in Roman Religion (1979); Bruce W. Frier, The Rise of the Roman Jurists (1985); and George Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World, 300 B.C.–A.D. 300 (1972). Richard P. Saller
The early Roman Empire (31 bc–ad 193)
Colin Wells, The Roman Empire (1984), is an intelligent short history up through the Severi. The history is carried further by Michael Grant, The Climax of Rome: The Final Achievements of the Ancient World, A.D. 161–337 (1968). Donald Earl, The Age of Augustus (1968, reissued 1980), is useful in providing a little more depth. As to governmental institutions, Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World, 31 BC–AD 337 (1977), offers a monumentally detailed study of the ruler in his capacity as civil governor up through Constantine; and Richard J.A. Talbert, The Senate of Imperial Rome (1984), describes the role and actions of the ruler’s partner. On provincial government, as well as much else, Fergus Millar (ed.), The Roman Empire and Its Neighbours, 2nd ed. (1981; originally published in German, 1966), is informative and readable. Commentary on the economy is supplied by Kevin Greene, The Archaeology of the Roman Economy (1986). Géza Alföldy, The Social History of Rome (1985), on the structure of society; and Ramsay MacMullen, Roman Social Relations, 50 B.C. to A.D. 284 (1974), on the feelings uniting or dividing groups or strata, are complementary works. Provincial history broadly interpreted may be sampled in Sheppard Frere, Britannia: A History of Roman Britain, 3rd ed. rev. (1987); Paul MacKendrick, The North African Stones Speak (1980); and A.H.M. Jones, The Greek City from Alexander to Justinian (1940, reissued 1979), still useful, since archaeology has little touched the eastern end of the Mediterranean world. Bernard Andreae, The Art of Rome (1977; originally published in German, 1973), a large, luxuriously illustrated work with an equally rich scholarly text; and Niels Hannestad, Roman Art and Imperial Policy (1986; originally published in Danish, 1976), deal with their material in quite different ways: the former is conventionally art-historical, the latter uses his material to illuminate its context. Architecture is best approached through W.L. MacDonald, The Architecture of the Roman Empire, rev. ed., 2 vol. (1982–86), a well-written, imaginative account; and through such specialized studies as John Percival, The Roman Villa: An Historical Introduction (1976, reissued 1988). Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby (eds.), A History of Private Life, vol. 1, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, ed. by Paul Veyne (1987; originally published in French, 1985), is a social history in an old-fashioned sense by a master of the most up-to-date approaches. The importance of emperor worship is well argued in the detailed work by Duncan Fishwick, The Imperial Cult in the Latin West, vol. 1 in 2 vol. (1987); and, with more interpretation and for the other half of the empire, by S.R.F. Price, Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (1984). Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (1981), provides a comprehensive view. Military history is made accessible through G.R. Watson, The Roman Soldier (1969, reissued 1985). An explication of a major aspect of culture may be found in the latter half of a work by a notable historian, H.I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity (1956, reprinted 1982; originally published in French, 1948). Albin Lesky, A History of Greek Literature (1966; originally published in German, 2nd ed., 1963), may be paired with H.J. Rose, A Handbook of Latin Literature, from the Earliest Times to the Death of St. Augustine, 3rd ed. (1966); and with the more elegant study by Gordon Williams, Change and Decline: Roman Literature in the Early Empire (1978). On the church, W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity (1984), is readable and comprehensive up through the 6th century.
The later Roman Empire
André Piganiol, L’Empire chrétien (325–395), 2nd ed. updated by André Chastagnol (1972), offers an exceptionally rich and informative narrative among modern works. Diana Bowder, The Age of Constantine and Julian (1978), is good on those two reigns. A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social Economic and Administrative Survey, 2 vol. (1964, reprinted 1986), is extraordinarily clear and detailed on these topics. On a major development, monasticism, Derwas J. Chitty, The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism Under the Christian Empire (1966, reissued 1977), is highly readable. Ramsay MacMullen, Corruption and the Decline of Rome (1988), includes an up-to-date survey of evidence for decline, and also argues a thesis. Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths (1988; originally published in German, 2nd ed., 1980), is a superb study of a crucial player in the 4th to 6th centuries. Walter Goffart, Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418–584: The Techniques of Accommodation (1980), carries the account further. Ramsay MacMullen
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
Byzantine Empire
historical empire, Eurasia
Alternative Title: Byzantium, East Rome, Eastern Roman Empire
Table of Contents
Introduction
The empire to 867
From 867 to the Ottoman conquest
Byzantine emperors
The Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child (centre), Justinian (left) holding a model of the Hagia Sophia, and Constantine (right) holding a model of the city of Constantinople; mosaic from the Hagia Sophia, 9th century.Dumbarton Oaks/Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.
The Byzantine Empire.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Byzantine Empire, the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which survived for a thousand years after the western half had crumbled into various feudal kingdoms and which finally fell to Ottoman Turkish onslaughts in 1453.
The very name Byzantine illustrates the misconceptions to which the empire’s history has often been subject, for its inhabitants would hardly have considered the term appropriate to themselves or to their state. Theirs was, in their view, none other than the Roman Empire, founded shortly before the beginning of the Christian era by God’s grace to unify his people in preparation for the coming of his Son. Proud of that Christian and Roman heritage, convinced that their earthly empire so nearly resembled the heavenly pattern that it could never change, they called themselves Romaioi, or Romans. Modern historians agree with them only in part. The term East Rome accurately described the political unit embracing the Eastern provinces of the old Roman Empire until 476, while there were yet two emperors. The same term may even be used until the last half of the 6th century, as long as men continued to act and think according to patterns not unlike those prevailing in an earlier Roman Empire. During those same centuries, nonetheless, there were changes so profound in their cumulative effect that after the 7th century state and society in the East differed markedly from their earlier forms. In an effort to recognize that distinction, historians traditionally have described the medieval empire as Byzantine.
The latter term is derived from the name Byzantium, borne by a colony of ancient Greek foundation on the European side of the Bosporus, midway between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The city was, by virtue of its location, a natural transit point between Europe and Asia Minor (Anatolia). Refounded as the “new Rome” by the emperor Constantine I in 330, it was endowed by him with the name Constantinople, the city of Constantine. The derivation from Byzantium is suggestive in that it emphasizes a central aspect of Byzantine civilization: the degree to which the empire’s administrative and intellectual life found a focus at Constantinople from 330 to 1453, the year of the city’s last and unsuccessful defense under the 11th (or 12th) Constantine. The circumstances of the last defense are suggestive too, for in 1453 the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds seemed briefly to meet. The last Constantine fell in defense of the new Rome built by the first Constantine. Walls that had held firm in the early Middle Ages against German, Hun, Avar, Slav, and Arab were breached finally by modern artillery, in the mysteries of which European technicians had instructed the most successful of the Central Asian invaders: the Ottoman Turks.
Constantine IMarble head of Constantine I, the only surviving piece of a giant statue that was made about 300 ce.Photos.com/Thinkstock
The fortunes of the empire were thus intimately entwined with those of peoples whose achievements and failures constitute the medieval history of both Europe and Asia. Nor did hostility always characterize the relations between Byzantines and those whom they considered “barbarian.” Even though the Byzantine intellectual firmly believed that civilization ended with the boundaries of his world, he opened it to the barbarian, provided that the latter (with his kin) would accept baptism and render loyalty to the emperor. Thanks to the settlements that resulted from such policies, many a name, seemingly Greek, disguises another of different origin: Slavic, perhaps, or Turkish. Barbarian illiteracy, in consequence, obscures the early generations of more than one family destined to rise to prominence in the empire’s military or civil service. Byzantium was a melting-pot society, characterized during its earlier centuries by a degree of social mobility that belies the stereotype, often applied to it, of an immobile caste-ridden society.
A source of strength in the early Middle Ages, Byzantium’s central geographical position served it ill after the 10th century. The conquests of that age presented new problems of organization and assimilation, and those the emperors had to confront at precisely the time when older questions of economic and social policy pressed for answers in a new and acute form. Satisfactory solutions were never found. Bitter ethnic and religious hostility marked the history of the empire’s later centuries, weakening Byzantium in the face of new enemies descending upon it from east and west. The empire finally collapsed when its administrative structures could no longer support the burden of leadership thrust upon it by military conquests.
The empire to 867
The Roman and Christian background
Unity and diversity in the late Roman Empire
The Roman Empire, the ancestor of the Byzantine, remarkably blended unity and diversity, the former being by far the better known, since its constituents were the predominant features of Roman civilization. The common Latin language, the coinage, the “international” army of the Roman legions, the urban network, the law, and the Greco-Roman heritage of civic culture loomed largest among those bonds that Augustus and his successors hoped would bring unity and peace to a Mediterranean world exhausted by centuries of civil war. To strengthen those sinews of imperial civilization, the emperors hoped that a lively and spontaneous trade might develop between the several provinces. At the pinnacle of that world stood the emperor himself, the man of wisdom who would shelter the state from whatever mishaps fortune had darkly hidden. The emperor alone could provide that protection, since, as the embodiment of all the virtues, he possessed in perfection those qualities displayed only imperfectly by his individual subjects.
The Roman formula of combating fortune with reason and therewith ensuring unity throughout the Mediterranean world worked surprisingly well in view of the pressures for disunity that time was to multiply. Conquest had brought regions of diverse background under Roman rule. The Eastern provinces were ancient and populous centres of that urban life that for millennia had defined the character of Mediterranean civilization. The Western provinces had only lately entered upon their own course of urban development under the not-always-tender ministrations of their Roman masters.
Each of the aspects of unity enumerated above had its other side. Not everyone understood or spoke Latin. Paralleling and sometimes influencing Roman law were local customs and practices, understandably tenacious by reason of their antiquity. Pagan temples, Jewish synagogues, and Christian baptisteries attest to the range of organized religions with which the official forms of the Roman state, including those of emperor worship, could not always peacefully coexist. And far from unifying the Roman world, economic growth often created self-sufficient units in the several regions, provinces, or great estates.
Given the obstacles against which the masters of the Roman state struggled, it is altogether remarkable that Roman patriotism was ever more than an empty formula, that cultivated gentlemen from the Pillars of Hercules to the Black Sea were aware that they had “something” in common. That “something” might be defined as the Greco-Roman civic tradition in the widest sense of its institutional, intellectual, and emotional implications. Grateful for the conditions of peace that fostered it, men of wealth and culture dedicated their time and resources to glorifying that tradition through adornment of the cities that exemplified it and through education of the young who they hoped might perpetuate it.
Upon that world the barbarians descended after about 150 ce. To protect the frontier against them, warrior emperors devoted whatever energies they could spare from the constant struggle to reassert control over provinces where local regimes emerged. In view of the ensuing warfare, the widespread incidence of disease, and the rapid turnover among the occupants of the imperial throne, it would be easy to assume that little was left of either the traditional fabric of Greco-Roman society or the bureaucratic structure designed to support it.
Neither assumption is accurate. Devastation was haphazard, and some regions suffered while others did not. In fact, the economy and society of the empire as a whole during that period was the most diverse it had ever been. Impelled by necessity or lured by profit, people moved from province to province. Social disorder opened avenues to eminence and wealth that the more-stable order of an earlier age had closed to the talented and the ambitious. For personal and dynastic reasons, emperors favoured certain towns and provinces at the expense of others, and the erratic course of succession to the throne, coupled with a resulting constant change among the top administrative officials, largely deprived economic and social policies of recognizable consistency.
The reforms of Diocletian and Constantine
The definition of consistent policy in imperial affairs was the achievement of two great soldier-emperors, Diocletian (ruled 284–305) and Constantine I (sole emperor 324–337), who together ended a century of anarchy and refounded the Roman state. There are many similarities between them, not the least being the range of problems to which they addressed themselves: both had learned from the 3rd-century anarchy that one man alone and unaided could not hope to control the multiform Roman world and protect its frontiers; as soldiers, both considered reform of the army a prime necessity in an age that demanded the utmost mobility in striking power; and both found the old Rome and Italy an unsatisfactory military base for the bulk of the imperial forces. Deeply influenced by the soldier’s penchant for hierarchy, system, and order, a taste that they shared with many of their contemporaries as well as the emperors who preceded them, they were appalled by the lack of system and the disorder characteristic of the economy and the society in which they lived. Both, in consequence, were eager to refine and regularize certain desperate expedients that had been adopted by their rough military predecessors to conduct the affairs of the Roman state. Whatever their personal religious convictions, both, finally, believed that imperial affairs would not prosper unless the emperor’s subjects worshiped the right gods in the right way.
Diocletian's tetrarchy, statue ofStatue of Diocletian's tetrarchy, red porphyry, c. 300 ce, taken to Venice 1258.Alinari/Art Resource, New York
The means they adopted to achieve those ends differ so profoundly that one, Diocletian, looks to the past and ends the history of Rome; the other, Constantine, looks to the future and founds the history of Byzantium. Thus, in the matter of succession to the imperial office, Diocletian adopted precedents he could have found in the practices of the 2nd century ce. He associated with himself a coemperor, or Augustus. Each Augustus then adopted a young colleague, or Caesar, to share in the rule and eventually to succeed the senior partner. That rule of four, or tetrarchy, failed of its purpose, and Constantine replaced it with the dynastic principle of hereditary succession, a procedure generally followed in subsequent centuries. To divide administrative responsibilities, Constantine replaced the single praetorian prefect, who had traditionally exercised both military and civil functions in close proximity to the emperor, with regional prefects established in the provinces and enjoying civil authority alone. In the course of the 4th century, four great “regional prefectures” emerged from those Constantinian beginnings, and the practice of separating civil from military authority persisted until the 7th century.
Gold coin depicting Roman emperor Diocletian.Photos.com/Thinkstock
Contrasts in other areas of imperial policy are equally striking. Diocletian persecuted Christians and sought to revive the ancestral religion. Constantine, a convert to the new faith, raised it to the status of a “permitted religion.” Diocletian established his headquarters at Nicomedia, a city that never rose above the status of a provincial centre during the Middle Ages, whereas Constantinople, the city of Constantine’s foundation, flourished mightily. Diocletian sought to bring order into the economy by controlling wages and prices and by initiating a currency reform based upon a new gold piece, the aureus, struck at the rate of 60 to the pound of gold. The controls failed and the aureus vanished, to be succeeded by Constantine’s gold solidus. The latter piece, struck at the lighter weight of 72 to the gold pound, remained the standard for centuries. For whatever reason, in summary, Constantine’s policies proved extraordinarily fruitful. Some of them—notably hereditary succession, the recognition of Christianity, the currency reform, and the foundation of the capital—determined in a lasting way the several aspects of Byzantine civilization with which they are associated.
Constantine IIGold solidus (coin) depicting Constantine II.CNG coins (http://www.cngcoins.com)
Yet it would be a mistake to consider Constantine a revolutionary or to overlook those areas in which, rather than innovating, he followed precedent. Earlier emperors had sought to constrain groups of men to perform certain tasks that were deemed vital to the survival of the state but that proved unremunerative or repellent to those forced to assume the burden. Such tasks included the tillage of the soil, which was the work of the peasant, or colonus; the transport of cheap bulky goods to the metropolitan centres of Rome or Constantinople, which was the work of the shipmaster, or navicularius; and services rendered by the curiales, members of the municipal senate charged with the assessment and collection of local taxes. Constantine’s laws in many instances extended or even rendered hereditary those enforced responsibilities, thus laying the foundations for the system of collegia, or hereditary state guilds, that was to be so noteworthy a feature of late-Roman social life. Of particular importance, he required the colonus (peasant) to remain in the locality to which the tax lists ascribed him.
The 5th century: Persistence of Greco-Roman civilization in the East
Whether innovative or traditional, Constantine’s measures determined the thrust and direction of imperial policy throughout the 4th century and into the 5th. The state of the empire in 395 may, in fact, be described in terms of the outcome of Constantine’s work. The dynastic principle was established so firmly that the emperor who died in that year, Theodosius I, could bequeath the imperial office jointly to his sons, both of whom were young and incompetent: Arcadius in the East and Honorius in the West. Never again would one man rule over the full extent of the empire in both its halves. Constantinople had probably grown to a population of between 200,000 and 500,000; in the 5th century the emperors sought to restrain rather than promote its growth. After 391 Christianity was far more than one among many religions: from that year onward, imperial decree prohibited all forms of pagan cult, and the temples were closed. Imperial pressure was often manifest at the church councils of the 4th century, with the emperor assuming a role he was destined to fill again during the 5th century in defining and suppressing heresy.
Valentinian IIGold coin depicting Valentinian II (obverse side) and Valentinian II with Theodosius I (reverse side).CNG coins (http://www.cngcoins.com)
Economic and social policies
The empire’s economy had prospered in a spotty fashion. Certain provinces, or parts of provinces such as northern Italy, flourished commercially as well as agriculturally. Constantinople, in particular, influenced urban growth and the exploitation of agricultural frontiers. Balkan towns along the roads leading to the great city prospered, while others not so favoured languished and even disappeared. Untilled land in the hilly regions of northern Syria fell under the plow to supply foodstuffs for the masses of Constantinople. As the 4th century progressed, not only did Constantine’s solidus remain indeed solid gold, but evidence drawn from a wide range of sources suggests that gold in any form was far more abundant than it had been for at least two centuries. It may be that new sources of supply for the precious metal had been discovered: those perhaps were in spoils plundered from pagan temples or perhaps were from mines newly exploited in western Africa and newly available to the lands of the empire, thanks to the appearance of camel-driving nomads who transported the gold across the Sahara to the Mediterranean coastline of North Africa.
The extreme social mobility noted in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries seems less characteristic of the second half of the latter century. Certainly the emperors continued their efforts to bind men collectively to their socially necessary tasks, but the repetition of laws tying the colonus to his estate, the navicularius to his ship, and the curialis to his municipal senate suggests that those edicts had little effect. Indeed, it would be a mistake to conclude from such legislation that Roman society was universally and uniformly organized in castes determined in response to imperial orders. There was always a distinction between what an emperor wanted and what he could obtain, and, as the foregoing survey has suggested, there were distinctions between the provinces as well.
Even before the end of the first quarter of the 5th century, those provincial differences were visible, and in no small degree they help to explain the survival of imperial government and Greco-Roman civilization in the East while both eventually perished in the West. Throughout the Eastern provinces, population levels seem to have remained higher, and the emperors in Constantinople never had to search (at least until the 6th century) for men to fill the ranks of their armies. As might be expected in those eastern lands in which urban civilization was several centuries old, cities persisted and, with them, a merchant class and a monetary economy. Eastern merchants, known in the sources as Syrians, assumed the carrying trade between East and West, often establishing colonies in the beleaguered cities of the latter region.
Most important, the emperor in the East never lost access to, or control over, his sources of manpower and money. An older and probably more-wealthy senatorial class, or aristocracy, in the West consolidated its great estates and assumed a form of protection or patronage over the labouring rural classes, depriving the state of desperately needed military and financial services. The senatorial class in the East seems to have been of more-recent origin, its beginnings to be found among those favourites or parvenus who had followed Constantine to his new capital. By the early 5th century, their wealth seems to have been, individually, much less than the resources at the disposal of their Western counterparts; their estates were far more scattered and their rural dependents less numerous. They were thus less able to challenge the imperial will and less able to interpose themselves between the state on the one hand and its potential soldiers or taxpayers on the other.
Relations with the barbarians
Those differences between Eastern and Western social structures, together with certain geographical features, account for the different reception found by the Germanic invaders of the 4th and 5th centuries in the East and the West. Although the Germanic people had eddied about the Danube and Rhine frontiers of the empire since the 2nd century, their major inroads were made only in the latter half of the 4th century, when the ferocious Huns drove the Ostrogoths and Visigoths to seek refuge within the Danubian frontier of the empire. The initial interaction between Roman and barbarian was far from amicable; the Romans seemed to have exploited their unwelcome guests, and the Goths rose in anger, defeating an East Roman army at Adrianople in 378 and killing the Eastern emperor in command. Emperor Theodosius I (ruled 384–395) adopted a different policy, granting the Goths lands and according them the legal status of allies, or foederati, who fought within the ranks of the Roman armies as autonomous units under their own leaders.
Theodosius I, detail from an embossed and engraved silver disk, late 4th century; in the Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid.Giraudon/Art Resource, New York
Neither in West nor East did Theodosius’s policy of accommodation and alliance prove popular. The Goths—like most Germanic peoples, with the exception of the Franks and the Lombards—had been converted to Arian Christianity. Roman Christians considered Arianism a dangerous heresy, despite occasional imperial support, in the wake of the Council of Nicaea (325) and the Council of Constantinople (381) because of its emphasis upon the uniqueness of God the Father and subordination of the other two persons of the Trinity. The warlike ways of the Germans found little favour with a senatorial aristocracy essentially pacifist in its outlook, and the early 5th century is marked in both halves of the empire by reactions against Germanic leaders in high office. At Constantinople in 400, for example, the citizens rose against the senior officer of the imperial guard (magister militum), Gainas, slaughtering him together with his Gothic followers. Although that particular revolt was, in many respects, less productive of immediate results than similar episodes in the West, and the Germanic leaders later reappeared in roles of command throughout the East, the latter acted thenceforth as individuals without the support of those nearly autonomous groups of soldiers that western barbarian commanders continued to enjoy.
Furthermore, the East made good use of its resources in gold, in native manpower, and in diplomacy while quickly learning how best to play off one enemy against another. In the reign of Theodosius II (408–450), the Huns under their chieftain Attila received subsidies of gold that both kept them in a state of uneasy peace with the Eastern Empire and may have proved profitable to those merchants of Constantinople who traded with the barbarians. When Marcian (ruled 450–457) refused to continue the subsidies, Attila was diverted from revenge by the prospect of conquests in the West. He never returned to challenge the Eastern Empire, and, with his death in 453, his Hunnic empire fell apart. Both Marcian and his successor, Leo I (ruled 457–474), had ruled under the tutelage of Flavius Ardaburius Aspar, but Leo resolved to challenge Aspar’s preeminence and the influence of the Goths elsewhere in the empire by favouring the warlike Isaurians and their chieftain, Tarasicodissa, whom he married to the imperial princess, Ariadne. The Isaurian followers of Tarasicodissa, who was to survive a stormy reign as the Emperor Zeno (474–491), were rough mountain folk from southern Anatolia and culturally probably even more barbarous than the Goths or the other Germans. Yet, in that they were the subjects of the Roman emperor in the East, they were undoubtedly Romans and proved an effective instrument to counter the Gothic challenge at Constantinople. In the prefecture of Illyricum, Zeno ended the menace of Theodoric the Amal by persuading him (488) to venture with his Ostrogoths into Italy. The latter province lay in the hands of the German chieftain Odoacer, who in 476 had deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor in the West. Thus, by suggesting that Theodoric conquer Italy as his Ostrogothic kingdom, Zeno maintained at least a nominal supremacy in that western land while ridding the Eastern Empire of an unruly subordinate.
AttilaAttila, 19th-century painting.Dagli Orti—REX/Shutterstock.com
With Zeno’s death and the accession of the Roman civil servant Anastasius I (ruled 491–518), Isaurian occupation of the imperial office ended, but it was not until 498 that the forces of the new emperor effectively took the measure of Isaurian resistance. After the victory of that year, the loyal subject of the Eastern Roman emperor could breathe easily: Isaurians had been used to beat Germans, but the wild mountain folk had, in their turn, failed to take permanent possession of the imperial office. Imperial authority had maintained its integrity in the East while the Western Empire had dissolved into a number of successor states: the Angles and Saxons had invaded Britain as early as 410; the Visigoths had possessed portions of Spain since 417; the Vandals had entered Africa in 429; the Franks, under Clovis I, had begun their conquest of central and southern Gaul in 481; and Theodoric was destined to rule in Italy until 526.
Anastasius IAnastasius I, portrait on the obverse side of a coin.CNG coins (http://www.cngcoins.com)
Christological controversies
If ethnic hostility within the empire was less a menace about the year 500 than it had often been in the past, dissensions stemming from religious controversy seriously threatened imperial unity, and the political history of the next century cannot be understood without some examination of the so-called Nestorian and monophysite controversies. Following the dispute over Arian Christology (the doctrine of Christ), those disputes became stigmatized as the great heresies to afflict the Eastern Empire. If the Church Fathers of the 4th century quarreled over the relations between God the Father and God the Son, those of the 5th century faced the problem of defining the relationship of the two natures—the human and the divine—within God the Son, Christ Jesus.
After Trinitarian Christianity became widely accepted as orthodoxy, Eastern Christological dispute was centred in two cities: Alexandria and Antioch. The theologians of Alexandria generally held that the divine and human natures were united indistinguishably within a single nature, though the questions of how they were related and whether in fact they were distinguishable were not settled immediately. The theologians of Antioch taught that two natures coexisted separately in Christ, the latter being “the chosen vessel of the Godhead…the man born of Mary.” In the course of the 5th century, those two contrasting theological positions became the subject of a struggle for supremacy between the rival sees of Constantinople, Alexandria, and Rome. When Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople in 428, adopted the Antiochene formula in his argument that the Virgin Mary could not rightly be called Theotokos (literally “God-bearer”), or the mother of Christ’s divine nature, he was perceived as stressing the human nature of Christ to the neglect of the divine. His opponents—first the Alexandrian patriarch, Cyril, and later Cyril’s successor, Dioscorus, and a monk named Eutyches—in reaction stressed Christ’s divinity and its relationship with Christ’s human nature through the Incarnation. Cyril and Dioscorus became exemplary advocates of the Christological position called miaphysitism, which held, in Cyril’s words, that in Christ the human and the divine were incarnated within a single (Greek mia) nature (physis). Eutyches took the more-radical position, in denouncing so-called Nestorianism, that Christ’s divinity was greatly more significant than, and overwhelmed, his human nature. Neither Cyril nor Dioscorus held that position, and with the latter’s approval Eutyches was anathematized. Eutyches soon convinced Dioscorus (apparently via subterfuge) that he had seen the error of his ways and recanted his perspective on Christ’s humanity; Dioscorus subsequently endorsed Eutyches (causing some controversy) for reinstatement to the Christian fold.
Meanwhile, the claim of the Roman church was made by Pope Leo I, who in contrast declared for dyophysitism—i.e., the Christological position that two natures, perfect and perfectly distinct, existed in the single person of Christ. That struggle for power and legitimacy between Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome came to a head at the Council of Chalcedon (451). There the pope’s view triumphed, thanks to the support of Constantinople, which condemned both Nestorius for his extreme emphasis on the human nature of Christ and Eutyches (and, by extension, Dioscorus) for Eutyches’ purported monophysitism.
Leo I, detail of a miniature from the menologion of Basil II, 10th century; in the Vatican Library (Vat. Gr. 1613 folio 412)Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
Chalcedon produced an indelible effect on Christian history beyond its immediate impact upon the purported orthodoxy of the Chalcedonian churches affiliated with Rome and Constantinople. The miaphysite, or non-Chalcedonian, churches—particularly the Coptic (Egyptian) and Syrian churches within the empire—were stigmatized as heretics, a situation that was not resolved until formal discussions in the late 20th century resolved many of the ancient disputes. (Ironically, both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches invoked Cyril in their claims to Christian orthodoxy.)
More important for the purposes of military and political history than the theological details of the conflict was the impact miaphysitism produced on the several regions of the Mediterranean world. Partly because it provided a formula to express resistance to Constantinople’s imperial rule, miaphysitism persisted in Egypt and Syria. Until those two provinces were lost to Islam in the 7th century, each Eastern emperor had to somehow cope with their separatist tendencies as expressed in the heresy. He had either to take arms against miaphysitism and attempt to extirpate it by force, to formulate a creed that would somehow blend it with dyophysitism, or to frankly adopt this position as his own belief. None of those three alternatives proved successful, and religious hostility was not the least of the disaffections that led Egypt and Syria to yield, rather readily, to the Arab conqueror. If ever the East Roman emperor was to reassert his authority in the West, he necessarily had to discover a formula that would satisfy Western orthodoxy while not alienating non-Chalcedonian Christians.
The empire at the end of the 5th century
In the reign of Anastasius I (491–518), all those tendencies of the 5th century found their focus: the sense of Romanitas, which demanded a Roman rather than an Isaurian or a German emperor, the conflict between Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches, and the persisting economic prosperity of the Eastern Roman Empire. Acclaimed and elected as the Roman and Orthodox emperor who would end both the hated hegemony of the Isaurians and the detested activity of the purported monophysites, Anastasius succeeded in the first of those objectives while failing in the second. While he defeated the Isaurians and transported many of them from their Anatolian homeland into Thrace, he gradually came to support non-Chalcedonian Christianity despite the professions of Orthodoxy he had made upon the occasion of his coronation. If his policies won him followers in Egypt and Syria, they alienated his Orthodox subjects and led, finally, to constant unrest and civil war.
Anastasius’s economic policies were far more successful; if they did not provide the basis for the noteworthy achievements of the 6th century in military affairs and the gentler arts of civilization, they at least explain why the Eastern Empire prospered in those respects during the period in question. An inflation of the copper currency, prevailing since the age of Constantine, finally ended with welcome results for those members of the lower classes who conducted their operations in the base metal. Responsibility for the collection of municipal taxes was taken from the members of the local senate and assigned to agents of the praetorian prefect. Trade and industry were probably stimulated by the termination of the chrysargyron, a tax in gold paid by the urban classes. If, by way of compensating for the resulting loss to the state, the rural classes had then to pay the land tax in money rather than kind, the mere fact that gold could be presumed to be available in the countryside is a striking index of rural prosperity. In the East, the economic resurgence of the 4th century had persisted, and it is not surprising that Anastasius enriched the treasury to the extent of 320,000 pounds of gold during the course of his reign.
With such financial resources at their disposal, the emperor’s successors could reasonably hope to reassert Roman authority among the western Germanic successor states, provided they could accomplish two objectives: first, they had to heal the religious discord between their subjects; second, they had to protect the eastern frontier against the threat of Sāsānian Persia. Since there was, in fact, to be concurrent warfare on both fronts during the 6th century, some knowledge of the age-old rivalry between Rome and Persia is essential to an understanding of the problems confronted by the greatest among Anastasius’s successors, Justinian I (ruled 527–565), as he undertook the conquest of the West.
In 224 the ancient Persian empire had passed into the hands of a new dynasty, the Sāsānians, whose regime brought new life to the enfeebled state. Having ensured firm control over the vast lands already subject to them, the Sāsānians took up anew the old struggle with Rome for northern Mesopotamia and its fortress cities of Edessa and Nisibis, lying between the Tigris and the Euphrates. In the course of the 4th century, new sources of hostility emerged as East Rome became a Christian empire. Partly by reaction, Sāsānian Persia strengthened the ecclesiastical organization that served its Zoroastrian religion; intolerance and persecution became the order of the day within Persia, and strife between the empires assumed something of the character of religious warfare. Hostilities were exacerbated when Armenia, lying to the north between the two realms, converted to Christianity and thus seemed to menace the religious integrity of Persia. If small-scale warfare during the 4th and 5th centuries rarely erupted into major expeditions, the threat to Rome nonetheless remained constant, demanding vigilance and the construction of satisfactory fortifications. By 518, the balance might be said to have tipped in the favour of Persia as it won away the cities of Theodosiopolis, Amida, and Nisibis.
The 6th century: from East Rome to Byzantium
The 6th century opened, in effect, with the death of Anastasius and the accession of the Balkan soldier who replaced him, Justin I (ruled 518–527). During most of Justin’s reign, actual power lay in the hands of his nephew and successor, Justinian I. The following account of those more than 40 years of Justinian’s effective rule is based upon the works of Justinian’s contemporary the historian Procopius. The latter wrote a laudatory account of the emperor’s military achievements in his Polemon (Wars) and coupled it in his Anecdota (Secret History) with a venomous threefold attack upon the emperor’s personal life, the character of the empress Theodora, and the conduct of the empire’s internal administration. Justinian’s reign may be divided into three periods: (1) an initial age of conquest and cultural achievement extending until the decade of the 540s; (2) 10 years of crisis and near disaster during the 540s; and (3) the last decade of the reign, in which mood, temper, and social realities more nearly resembled those to be found under Justinian’s successors than those prevailing throughout the first years of his own reign.
Justinian I, 6th-century mosaic at the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy. © A De Gregorio—DeA Picture Library/age fotostock
After 550, it is possible to begin to speak of a medieval Byzantine, rather than an ancient East Roman, empire. Of the four traumas that eventually transformed the one into the other—namely, pestilence, warfare, social upheaval, and the Arab Muslim assault of the 630s—the first two were features of Justinian’s reign.
The years of achievement to 540
Justinian is but one example of the civilizing magic that Constantinople often worked upon the heirs of those who ventured within its walls. Justin, the uncle, was a rude and illiterate soldier; Justinian, the nephew, was a cultivated gentleman, adept at theology, a mighty builder of churches, and a sponsor of the codification of Roman law. All those accomplishments are, in the deepest sense of the word, civilian, and it is easy to forget that Justinian’s empire was almost constantly at war during his reign. The history of East Rome during that period illustrates, in classical fashion, how the impact of war can transform ideas and institutions alike.
The reign opened with external warfare and internal strife. From Lazica to the Arabian Desert, the Persian frontier blazed with action in a series of campaigns in which many of the generals later destined for fame in the West first demonstrated their capacities. The strength of the East Roman armies is revealed in the fact that, while containing Persian might, Justinian could nonetheless dispatch troops to attack the Huns in Crimea and to maintain the Danubian frontier against a host of enemies. In 532 Justinian decided to abandon military operations in favour of diplomacy. He negotiated, at the cost of considerable tribute, an “Endless Peace” with the Persian king, Khosrow, which freed the Roman’s hands for operations in another quarter of the globe. Thus, Justinian succeeded in attaining the first of the objectives needed for reconquest in the West: peace in the East.
Even before his accession, Justinian had aided in the attainment of the second. Shortly after his proclamation as emperor, Justin had summoned a council of bishops at Constantinople. The council reversed the policies of Anastasius, accepted the Christological formula of Chalcedon, and called for negotiations with the pope. Justinian had personally participated in the ensuing discussions, which restored communion between Rome and all the Eastern churches save Egypt. No longer could a barbarian king hope to maintain the loyalties of his Catholic subjects by convincing them that a “Monophysite” emperor ruled in the East.
In the same year of 532, Justinian survived a revolt in Constantinople, stemming from the Nika riot, which initially threatened his life no less than his throne but, in the event, only strengthened his position. To understand the course of events, it is essential to remember that Constantinople, like other great East Roman cities, often had to depend upon its urban militia, or demes, to defend its walls. Coinciding with divisions within the demes were factions organized to support rival charioteers competing in the horse races: the Blues and the Greens. It was originally thought that those two factions were divided by differing political and religious views and that those views were aired to the emperor during the races. More-recent scholarship has shown that the factions were seldom motivated by anything higher than partisan fanaticism for their respective charioteers. The Nika riot—“Nika!” (“Conquer!” or “Win!”) being the slogan shouted during the races—of 532, however, was one of the rare occasions when the factions voiced political opposition to the imperial government. Angered at the severity with which the urban prefect had suppressed a riot, the Blues and the Greens first united and freed their leaders from prison; they insisted then that Justinian dismiss from the office two of his most-unpopular officials: John of Cappadocia and Tribonian. Even though the emperor yielded to their demands, the crowd was not appeased, converted its riot into a revolt, and proclaimed a nephew of Anastasius as emperor. Justinian was saved only because the empress, Theodora, refused to yield. Justinian’s able general, Belisarius, sequestered the rebels in the Hippodrome and slaughtered them to the number of 30,000. The leaders were executed, and their estates passed, at least temporarily, into the emperor’s hands.
Empress Theodora, detail of a wall mosaic, 6th century; in the Church of San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy.© seraficus/iStock.com
After 532 Justinian ruled more firmly than ever before. With the subsequent proclamation of the “Endless Peace,” he could hope to use his earlier-won reputation as a champion of Chalcedonian orthodoxy and appeal to those Western Romans who preferred the rule of a Catholic Roman emperor to that of an Arian German kinglet. In those early years of the 530s, Justinian could indeed pose as the pattern of a Roman and Christian emperor. Latin was his language, and his knowledge of Roman history and antiquities was profound.
In 529 his officials had completed a major collection of the emperors’ laws and decrees promulgated since the reign of Hadrian. Called the Codex Constitutionum and partly founded upon the 5th-century Theodosian Code, it comprised the first of four works compiled between 529 and 565 called the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law), commonly known as the Code of Justinian. That first collection of imperial edicts, however, pales before the Digesta completed under Tribonian’s direction in 533. In the latter work, order and system were found in (or forced upon) the contradictory rulings of the great Roman jurists; to facilitate instruction in the schools of law, a textbook, the Institutiones (533), was designed to accompany the Digesta. The fourth book, the Novellae Constitutiones Post Codicem (commonly called the Novels), consists of collections of Justinian’s edicts promulgated between 534 and 565.
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul.© Digital Vision/Getty Images
Istanbul: Hagia SophiaNight view of the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul.Geoff Tompkinson/GTImage.com (A Britannica Publishing Partner)Meanwhile, architects and builders worked apace to complete the new Church of the Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, designed to replace an older church destroyed in the course of the Nika revolt. In five years they had constructed the edifice, and it stands today as one of the major monuments of architectural history.
In 533 the moment had clearly come to reassert Christian Roman authority in the West, and Vandal North Africa seemed the most-promising theatre of operations. Although a major expedition mounted under Leo I had failed to win back the province, political conditions in the Vandal monarchy had altered to the Eastern emperor’s favour. When King Hilderich was deposed and replaced, Justinian could rightfully protest that action taken against a monarch who had ceased persecution of North African Catholics and had allied himself with Constantinople. The Eastern merchants favoured military action in the West, but Justinian’s generals were reluctant; possibly for that reason, only a small force was dispatched under Belisarius. Success came with surprising ease after two engagements, and in 534 Justinian set about organizing that new addition to the provinces of the Roman Empire.
Those were, in fact, years of major provincial reorganization, and not in North Africa alone. A series of edicts dated in 535 and 536, clearly conceived as part of a master plan by the prefect John of Cappadocia, altered administrative, judicial, and military structures in Thrace and Asia Minor. In general, John sought to provide a simplified and economical administrative structure in which overlapping jurisdictions were abolished, civil and military functions were sometimes combined in violation of Constantinian principles, and a reduced number of officials were provided with greater salaries to secure better personnel and to end the lure of bribery.
In the prefaces to his edicts, Justinian boasted of his reconstituted authority in North Africa, hinted at greater conquests to come, and—in return for the benefits his decrees were to provide—urged his subjects to pay their taxes promptly so that there might be “one harmony between ruler and ruled.” Quite clearly the emperor was organizing the state for the most-strenuous military effort, and, later (possibly in 539), reforms were extended to Egypt, whence the export of grain was absolutely essential for the support of expeditionary armies and Constantinople.
Developments during 534 and 535 in Ostrogothic Italy made it the most likely victim after the fall of Vandal North Africa. When Theodoric died in 526, he was succeeded by a minor grandson for whom Theodoric’s daughter, Amalasuntha, acted as regent. Upon the boy’s death, Amalasuntha attempted to seize power in her own right and connived at the assassination of three of her chief enemies. Her diplomatic relations with the Eastern emperor had always been marked by cordiality and even dependency; thus, when Amalasuntha, in turn, met her death in a blood feud mounted by the slain men’s families, Justinian seized the opportunity to protest the murder.
In 535, as in 533, a small tentative expedition sent to the West—in that instance, to Sicily—met with easy success. At first the Goths negotiated; then they stiffened their resistance, deposed their king, Theodahad, in favour of a stronger man, Witigis, and attempted to block Belisarius’s armies as they entered the Italian peninsula. There the progress of East Roman arms proved slower, and victory did not come until 540 when Belisarius captured Ravenna, the last major stronghold in the north, and, with it, King Witigis, a number of Gothic nobles, and the royal treasure.
All were dispatched to Constantinople, where Justinian was presumably thankful for the termination of hostilities in the West. Throughout the 530s, Justinian’s generals almost constantly had to fight to preserve imperial authority in the new province of North Africa andin the Balkans as well. In 539 a Gothic embassy reached Persia, and the information it provided caused the king, Khosrow, to grow restive under the constraints of the “Endless Peace.” During the next year (the same year [540] that a Bulgar force raided Macedonia and reached the long walls of Constantinople), Khosrow’s armies reached even Antioch in the pursuit of booty and blackmail. They returned unhurt, and 541 witnessed the Persian capture of a fortress in Lazica. In Italy, meanwhile, the Goths chose a new king, Totila, under whose able leadership the military situation in that land was soon to be transformed.
The crisis of mid-century
At last the menace of simultaneous war on two fronts threatened Justinian’s plans. During the 550s, his armies were to prove equal to the challenge, but a major disaster prevented them from so doing between 541 and about 548. The disaster was the bubonic plague of 541–543, the first of those shocks, or traumas, mentioned earlier, that would eventually transform East Rome into the medieval Byzantine Empire. The plague was first noted in Egypt, and from there it passed through Syria and Asia Minor to Constantinople. By 543 it had reached Italy and Africa, and it may also have attacked the Persian armies on campaign in that year. In East Asia the disease persisted into the 20th century, providing medical science with an opportunity to view its causes and course. Transmitted to humans by fleas from infected rodents, the plague attacks the glands and early manifests itself by swellings (buboes) in the armpits and the groin, whence the name bubonic. To judge from Procopius’s description of its symptoms at Constantinople in 542, the disease then appeared in its more-virulent pneumonic form, wherein the bacilli settle in the lungs of the victims. The appearance of the pneumonic form was particularly ominous because it may be transmitted directly from person to person, spreading the infection all the more readily and producing exceptionally high mortality rates. Comparative studies, based upon statistics derived from incidence of the same disease in late-medieval Europe, suggest that between one-third and one-half the population of Constantinople may well have died, while the lesser cities of the empire and the countryside by no means remained immune.
The short-term impact of the plague may be seen in several forms of human activity during the 540s. Justinian’s legislation of those years is understandably preoccupied with wills and intestate succession. Labour was scarce, and workers demanded wages so high that Justinian sought to control them by edict, as the monarchs of France and England were to do during the plague of the 14th century. In military affairs, above all, the record of those years is one of defeat, stagnation, and missed opportunities. Rather than effective Roman opposition, it was Khosrow’s own weariness of an unprofitable war that led him to sign a treaty of peace in 545, accepting tribute from Justinian and preserving Persian conquests in Lazica. Huns, Sclaveni, Antae, and Bulgars ravaged Thrace and Illyricum, meeting only slight opposition from Roman armies. In Africa a garrison diminished by plague nervously faced the threat of Moorish invasion. In Italy, Totila took the offensive, capturing southern Italy and Naples and even forcing his way into Rome (546) despite Belisarius’s efforts to relieve the siege. Desperately, Justinian’s great general called for reinforcements from the East; if ever they came, they were slow in arriving and proved numerically less than adequate to the task confronting them.
The last years of Justinian I
After about 548 Roman fortunes improved, and by the mid-550s Justinian had won victories in most theatres of operation, with the notable and ominous exception of the Balkans. A tour of the frontiers might begin with the East. In 551 the fortress of Petra was recovered from the Persians, but fighting continued in Lazica until a 50 years’ peace, signed in 561, defined relations between the two great empires. On balance, the advantage lay with Justinian. Although Justinian agreed to continue payment of tribute in the amount of 30,000 solidi a year, Khosrow, in return, abandoned his claims to Lazica and undertook to not persecute his Christian subjects.
The treaty also regulated trade between Rome and Persia, since rivalry between the two great powers had always had its economic aspects, focused primarily upon the silk trade. Raw silk reached Constantinople through Persian intermediaries, either by a land route leading from China through Persia or by the agency of Persian merchants in the Indian Ocean. The need to break that Persian monopoly led Justinian to search for new routes and new peoples to serve as intermediaries: in the south, the Ethiopian merchants of the kingdom of Aksum; in the north, the peoples around the Crimean Peninsula and in the Caucasian kingdom of Lazica as well as the Turks of the steppes beyond the Black Sea. Other valuable commodities were exchanged in the Black Sea region, including textiles, jewelry, and wine from East Rome for the furs, leather, and slaves offered by the barbarians, yet silk remained the commodity of prime interest. It was fortunate then that before 561 East Roman agents had smuggled silkworms from China into Constantinople, establishing a silk industry that would liberate the empire from dependence on Persia and become one of medieval Byzantium’s most-important economic operations.
In the West, Justinian’s successes were even more spectacular. By 550 the Moorish threat had ended in North Africa. In 552 the armies of Justinian intervened in a quarrel among the Visigothic rulers of Spain, and the East Roman troops overstayed the invitation extended them, seizing the opportunity to occupy on a more-permanent basis certain towns in the southeastern corner of the Iberian Peninsula. Most important of all, Italy was recovered. Early in the 550s Justinian assembled a vast army composed not only of Romans but also of barbarians, including Lombards, Heruli, and Gepids as well as Persian deserters. Command of that host eventually was given to an unlikely but, as events were to prove, able commander: the eunuch and chamberlain Narses. In two decisive battles (Busta Gallorum and Mons Lactarius), the East Roman general defeated first Totila and then his successor, Teias. The Goths agreed to leave Italy. Despite the continued resistance of certain Gothic garrisons, coupled with the intervention of Franks and Alamanni, after 554 the land was essentially a province of the East Roman Empire.
In view of the wide mixture of peoples that descended upon them, the Balkans present a far-more-complex situation, and the Romans used a wider variety of tactics to contain the barbarians. After the Kutrigur Bulgar attack of 540, Justinian worked to extend a system of fortifications that ran in three zones through the Balkans and as far south as the Pass of Thermopylae. Fortresses, strongholds, and watchtowers were not enough, however. The Slavs plundered Thrace in 545 and returned in 548 to menace Dyrrhachium; in 550 the Sclaveni, a Slavic people, reached a point about 40 miles (65 km) from Constantinople. The major invasion came in 559, when the Kutrigur Bulgars, accompanied by Sclaveni, crossed the Danube and divided their force into three columns. One column reached Thermopylae; the second gained a foothold on the Gallipoli Peninsula near Constantinople; and the third advanced as far as the suburbs of Constantinople itself, which the aged Belisarius had to defend with an unlikely force of civilians, demesmen, and a few veterans. Worried by Roman naval action on the Danube, which seemed to menace the escape route home, the Kutrigurs broke off the attack, returned north, and found themselves under attack from the Utigurs, a people whose support Justinian’s agents had earlier connived at and won by suitable bribes. The two peoples weakened each other in warfare, of which the episode of 559 was not the first instance, and that was precisely the result at which Byzantine diplomacy was aimed.
As long as the financial resources remained adequate, diplomacy proved the most-satisfactory weapon in an age when military manpower was a scarce and precious commodity. Justinian’s subordinates were to perfect it in their relationships with Balkan and south Russian peoples. For, if the Central Asian lands constituted a great reservoir of people, whence a new menace constantly emerged, the very proliferation of enemies meant that one might be used against another through skillful combination of bribery, treaty, and perfidy. East Roman relations in the late 6th century with the Avars, a Mongol people seeking refuge from the Turks, provide an excellent example of that “defensive imperialism.” The Avar ambassadors reached Constantinople in 557, and, although they did not receive the lands they demanded, they were loaded with precious gifts and allied by treaty with the empire. The Avars moved westward from south Russia, subjugating Utigurs, Kutrigurs, and Slavic peoples to the profit of the empire. At the end of Justinian’s reign, they stood on the Danube, a nomadic people hungry for lands and additional subsidies and by no means unskilled themselves in a sort of perfidious diplomacy that would help them pursue their objectives.
No summary of the quiet but ominous last years of Justinian’s reign would be complete without some notice of the continuing attacks of bubonic plague and the impact that they were to continue to produce until the 8th century. As have other societies subjected to devastation from warfare or disease, East Roman society might have compensated for its losses of the 540s had the survivors married early and produced more children in the succeeding generations. Two developments prevented recovery. Monasticism, with its demands for celibacy, grew apace in the 6th century, and the plague returned sporadically to attack those infants who might have replaced fallen members of the older generations.
The resulting shortage of manpower affected several aspects of a state and society that perceptibly were losing their Roman character and assuming their Byzantine. The construction of new churches, so noteworthy a feature of the earlier years, ceased as men did little more than rebuild or add to existing structures. An increasing need for taxes, together with a decreasing number of taxpayers, evoked stringent laws that forced members of a village tax group to assume collective responsibility for vacant or unproductive lands. That, contemporary sources avow, was a burden difficult to assume, in view of the shortage of agricultural workers after the plague. Finally, the armies that won the victories described above in east and west were largely victorious only because Justinian manned them as never before with barbarians: Goths, Armenians, Heruli, Gepids, Saracens, and Persians—to name only the most prominent. It was far from easy to maintain discipline among so motley an army; yet, once the unruly barbarian accepted the quieter life of the garrison soldier, he tended to lose his fighting capacity and prove, once the test came, of little value against the still warlike barbarian facing him beyond the frontier. The army, in short, was a creation of war and kept its quality only by participating in battlefield action, but further expansive warfare could hardly be undertaken by a society chronically short of men and money.
In summary, the East Roman (or better, the Byzantine) state of the late 6th century seemed to confront many of the same threats that had destroyed the Western Empire in the 5th century. Barbarians pressed upon it from beyond the Balkan frontier, and peoples of barbarian origin manned the armies defending it. Wealth accumulated during the 5th century had been expended, and, to satisfy the basic economic and military needs of state and society, there were too few native Romans. If the Byzantine Empire avoided the fate of West Rome, it did so only because it was to combine valour and good luck with certain advantages of institutions, emotions, and attitudes that the older empire had failed to enjoy. One advantage already described, diplomatic skill, blends institutional and attitudinal change, for diplomacy would never have succeeded had not the Byzantine statesmen been far more curious and knowing than Justinian’s 5th-century predecessor about the habits, customs, and movements of the barbarian peoples. The Byzantine’s attitude had changed in yet another way. He was willing to accept the barbarian within his society provided that the latter, in his turn, accept Chalcedonian Christianity and the emperor’s authority. Christianity was often, to be sure, a veneer that cracked in moments of crisis, permitting a very old paganism to emerge, while loyalty to the emperor could be forsworn and often was. Despite those shortcomings, the Christian faith and the ecclesiastical institutions defined in the 6th century proved better instruments by far to unite people and stimulate their morale than the pagan literary culture of the Greco-Roman world.
Christian culture of the Byzantine Empire
Justinian’s legislation dealt with almost every aspect of the Christian life: entrance into it by conversion and baptism, administration of the sacraments that marked its several stages, proper conduct of the laity to avoid the wrath that God would surely visit upon a sinful people, and the standards to be followed by those who lived the particularly holy life of the secular or monastic clergy. Pagans were ordered to attend church and accept baptism, while a purge thinned their ranks in Constantinople, and masses of them were converted by missionaries in Asia Minor. Only the Christian wife might enjoy the privileges of her dowry; Jews and Samaritans were denied, in addition to other civil disabilities, the privilege of testamentary inheritance unless they converted. A woman who worked as an actress might better serve God were she to forswear any oath she had taken, even though before God, to remain in that immoral profession. Blasphemy and sacrilege were forbidden, lest famine, earthquake, and pestilence punish the Christian society. Surely God would take vengeance upon Constantinople, as he had upon Sodom and Gomorrah, should the homosexual persist in his “unnatural” ways.
Istanbul: Hagia SophiaInterior of the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul.Dennis Jarvis (CC-BY-2.0) (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Justinian regulated the size of churches and monasteries, forbade them to profit from the sale of property, and complained of those priests and bishops who were unlearned in the forms of the liturgy. His efforts to improve the quality of the secular clergy, or those who conducted the affairs of the church in the world, were most opportune. The best-possible men were needed, for, in most East Roman cities during the 6th century, imperial and civic officials gradually resigned many of their functions to the bishop, or patriarch. The latter collected taxes, dispensed justice, provided charity, organized commerce, negotiated with barbarians, and even mustered the soldiers. By the early 7th century, the typical Byzantine city, viewed from without, actually or potentially resembled a fortress; viewed from within, it was essentially a religious community under ecclesiastical leadership. Nor did Justinian neglect the monastic clergy, those who had removed themselves from the world. Drawing upon the regulations to be found in the writings of the 4th-century Church Father St. Basil of Caesarea as well as the acts of 4th- and 5th-century church councils, he ordered the cenobitic (or collective) form of monastic life in a fashion so minute that later codes, including the rule of St. Theodore the Studite in the 9th century, only develop the Justinianic foundation.
Probably the least successful of Justinian’s ecclesiastical policies were those adopted in an attempt to reconcile non-Chalcedonian and Chalcedonian Christians. After the success of negotiations that had done so much to conciliate the West during the reign of Justin I, Justinian attempted to win over the moderate non-Chalcedonians, separating them from the extremists. Of the complicated series of events that ensued, only the results need be noted. In developing a creed acceptable to the moderate non-Chalcedonians of the East, Justinian alienated the Chalcedonians of the West and thus sacrificed his earlier gains in that quarter. The extreme non-Chalcedonians refused to yield. Reacting against Justinian’s persecutions, they strengthened their own ecclesiastical organization, with the result that many of the fortress cities noted above, especially those of Egypt and Syria, owed allegiance to non-Chalcedonian ecclesiastical leadership. To his successors, then, Justinian bequeathed the same religious problem he had inherited from Anastasius.
If, in contrast, his regulation of the Christian life proved successful, it was largely because his subjects themselves were ready to accept it. Traditional Greco-Roman culture was, to be sure, surprisingly tenacious and even productive during the 6th century and was always to remain the treasured possession of an intellectual elite in Byzantium, but the same century witnessed the growth of a Christian culture to rival it. Magnificent hymns written by St. Romanos Melodos mark the striking development of the liturgy during Justinian’s reign, a development that was not without its social implications. Whereas traditional pagan culture was literary and its pursuit or enjoyment thereby limited to the leisured and wealthy, the Christian liturgical celebration and its musical component were available to all, regardless of place or position. Biography too became both markedly Christian and markedly popular. Throughout the countryside and the city, holy men appeared in legend or in fact, exorcising demons, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and warding off the invader. Following the pattern used in the 4th century by Athanasius to write the life of St. Anthony, hagiographers recorded the deeds of those extraordinary men, creating in the saint’s life a form of literature that began to flower in the 6th and 7th centuries.
The vitality and pervasiveness of popular Christian culture manifested themselves most strongly in the veneration increasingly accorded the icon, an abstract and simplified image of Christ, the Virgin, or the saints. Notable for the timeless quality that its setting suggested and for the power expressed in the eyes of its subject, the icon seemingly violated the Second Commandment’s explicit injunction against the veneration of any religious images. Since many in the early centuries of the church so believed and in the 8th century the image breakers, or iconoclasts, were to adopt similar views, hostility toward images was nearly as tenacious an aspect of Christianity as it had been of Judaism before it.
The contrasting view—a willingness to accept images as a normal feature of Christian practice—would not have prevailed had it not satisfied certain powerful needs as Christianity spread among Gentiles long accustomed to representations of the divinity and among Hellenized Jews who had themselves earlier broken with the Mosaic commandment. The convert all the more readily accepted use of the image if he had brought into his Christianity, as many did, a heritage of Neoplatonism. The latter school taught that, through contemplation of that which could be seen (i.e., the image of Christ), the mind might rise to contemplation of that which could not be seen (i.e., the essence of Christ). From a belief that the seen suggests the unseen, it is but a short step to a belief that the seen contains the unseen and that the image deserves veneration because divine power somehow resides in it.
Men of the 4th century were encouraged to take such a step, influenced as they were by the analogous veneration that the Romans had long accorded the image of the emperor. Although the first Christians rejected that practice of their pagan contemporaries and refused to adore the image of a pagan emperor, their successors of the 4th century were less hesitant to render such honour to the images of the Christian emperors following Constantine. Since the emperor was God’s vicegerent on earth and his empire reflected the heavenly realm, the Christian must venerate, to an equal or greater degree, Christ and his saints. Thus, the Second Commandment finally lost much of its force. Icons appeared in both private and public use during the last half of the 6th century: as a channel of divinity for the individual and as a talisman to guarantee success in battle. During the dark years following the end of Justinian I’s reign, no other element of popular Christian belief better stimulated that high morale without which the Byzantine Empire would not have survived.
The successors of Justinian: 565–610
Until Heraclius arrived to save the empire in 610, inconsistency and contradiction marked the policies adopted by the emperors, a reflection of their inability to solve the problems Justinian had bequeathed his successors. Justin II (565–578) haughtily refused to continue the payment of tribute to Avar or Persian; he thereby preserved the resources of the treasury, which he further increased by levying new taxes. Praiseworthy as his refusal to submit to blackmail may seem, Justin’s intransigence only increased the menace to the empire. His successor, Tiberius II (578–582), removed the taxes and, choosing between his enemies, awarded subsidies to the Avars while taking military action against the Persians. Although Tiberius’s general, Maurice, led an effective campaign on the eastern frontier, subsidies failed to restrain the Avars. They captured the Balkan fortress of Sirmium in 582, while the Turks began inroads across the Danube that would take them, within 50 years, into Macedonia, Thrace, and Greece.
Byzantine EmpireThe Byzantine Empire at the death of Justinian I in 565 ce.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The accession of Maurice in 582 inaugurated a reign of 20 years marked by success against Persia, a reorganization of Byzantine government in the West, and the practice of economies during his Balkan campaigns that, however unavoidable, would destroy him in 602. Byzantine efforts against Sāsānian Persia were rewarded in 591 by a fortunate accident. The lawful claimant to the Persian throne, Khosrow II, appealed to Maurice for aid against the rebels who had challenged his succession. In gratitude for this support, Khosrow abandoned the frontier cities and the claims to Armenia, the two major sources of contention between Byzantium and Persia. The terms of the treaty gave Byzantium access, in Armenia, to a land rich in the soldiers it desperately needed and, equally important, an opportunity to concentrate on other frontiers where the situation had worsened.
Confronted by a Visigothic resurgence in Spain and by the results of a Lombard invasion of Italy (568)—which was steadily confining Byzantine power to Ravenna, Venice, and Calabria-Sicily in the south—Maurice developed a form of military government throughout the relatively secure province of North Africa and in whatever regions were left in Italy. He abandoned the old principle of separating civil from military powers, placing both in the hands of the generals, or exarchs, located, respectively, at Carthage and Ravenna. Their provinces, or exarchates, were subdivided into duchies composed of garrison centres that were manned not by professional soldiers but by conscript local landholders. The exarchate system of military government seems to have worked well: North Africa was generally quiet despite Moorish threats, and in 597 the ailing Maurice had intended to install his second son as emperor throughout those western possessions in which he had clearly not lost interest.
But the major thrust of his efforts during the last years of his reign was to be found in the Balkans, where, by dint of constant campaigning, his armies had forced the Avars back across the Danube by 602. In the course of those military operations, Maurice made two mistakes: the first weakened him, and the second destroyed him together with his dynasty. Rather than constantly accompanying his armies in the field, as his 7th- and 8th-century successors were to do, Maurice remained for the most part in Constantinople, losing an opportunity to engage the personal loyalty of his troops. He could not count on their obedience when he issued unwelcome commands from afar that decreased their pay in 588, ordered them to accept uniforms and weapons in kind rather than in cash equivalents, and, in 602, required the soldiers to establish winter quarters in enemy lands across the Danube, lest their requirements prove too great a strain on the agricultural and financial resources of the empire’s provinces south of the river. Exasperated by that last demand, the soldiers rose in revolt, put a junior officer named Phocas at their head, and marched on Constantinople. Again becoming politically active, the Blues and the Greens united against Maurice, and the aged emperor watched as his five sons were slaughtered before he himself met a barbarous death.
The ensuing reign of Phocas (602–610) may be described as a disaster. Khosrow seized the opportunity offered him by the murder of his benefactor, Maurice, to initiate a war of revenge that led Persian armies into the Anatolian heartland. Subsidies again failed to restrain the barbarians north of the Danube; after 602 the frontier crumbled, not to be restored save at the cost of centuries of warfare. Lacking a legitimate title, holding his crown only by right of conquest, Phocas found himself confronted by constant revolt and rebellion. To contemporaries, the coincidence of pestilence, endemic warfare, and social upheaval seemed to herald the coming of the Antichrist, the resurrection of the dead, and the end of the world.
But it was a human saviour who appeared, albeit under divine auspices. Heraclius, son of the exarch of Africa, set sail from the western extremes of the empire, placing his fleet under the protection of an icon of the Virgin against Phocas, stigmatized in the sources as the “corrupter of virgins.” In the course of his voyage along the northern shores of the Mediterranean, Heraclius added to his forces and arrived at Constantinople in October 610 to be hailed as a saviour. With the warm support of the Green faction, he quickly bested his enemy, decapitating Phocas and, with him, those Phocas had advanced to high civil and military office. There were, in consequence, few experienced counselors to aid Heraclius, for, among the men of prominence under Phocas—and earlier under Maurice—few survived to greet the new emperor.
The 7th century: the Heraclians and the challenge of Islam
Heraclius and the origin of the themes
The most-threatening problem Heraclius faced was the external menace of the Avars and the Persians, and neither people abated that pressure during the first years of the new reign. The Avars almost captured the emperor in 617 during a conference outside the long walls protecting the capital. The Persians penetrated Asia Minor and then turned to the south, capturing Jerusalem and Alexandria (in Egypt). The great days of the Persian Achaemenid empire seemed to have come again, and there was little in the recent history of the Byzantine emperors that would encourage Heraclius to place much faith in the future. He clearly could not hope to survive unless he kept under arms the troops he had brought with him, yet the fate of Maurice demonstrated that that would be no easy task, given the empire’s lack of financial and agricultural resources.
Heraclius, gold coin; in the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C.Dumbarton Oaks/Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.
Three sources of strength enabled Heraclius to turn defeat into victory. The first was the pattern of military government as he and the nucleus of his army would have known it in the exarchates of North Africa or Ravenna. As it had been in the West, so it now was in the East. Civil problems were inseparable from the military: Heraclius could not hope to dispense justice, collect taxes, protect the church, and ensure the future to his dynasty unless military power reinforced his orders. A system of military government, the exarchate, had accomplished those objectives so well in the West that, in a moment of despair, Heraclius sought to return to the land of his origins. In all likelihood, he applied similar principles of military rule to his possessions throughout Asia Minor, granting his generals (stratēgoi) both civil and military authority over those lands that they occupied with their “themes,” as the army groups, or corps, were called in the first years of the 7th century.
Second, during the social upheaval of the previous decade, the imperial treasury had doubtless seized the estates of prominent individuals who had been executed either during Phocas’s reign of terror or after his death. In consequence, though the treasury lacked money, it nonetheless possessed land in abundance, and Heraclius could easily have supported with grants of land those cavalry soldiers whose expenses in horses and armament he could not hope to meet with cash. If that hypothesis is correct, then, even before 622, themes, or army groups—including the guards (Opsikioi), the Armenians (Armeniakoi), and the Easterners (Anatolikoi)—were given lands and settled throughout Asia Minor in so permanent a fashion that, before the century was out, the lands occupied by those themes were identified by the names of those who occupied them. The Opsikioi were to be found in the Opsikion theme, the Armeniakoi in the Armeniakon, and the Anatolikoi in the Anatolikon. The term theme ceased thereafter to identify an army group and described instead the medieval Byzantine unit of local administration, the theme under the authority of the themal commander, the general (stratēgos).
When Heraclius “went out into the lands of the themes” in 622, thereby undertaking a struggle of seven years’ duration against the Persians, he utilized the third of his sources of strength: religion. The warfare that ensued was nothing less than a holy war: it was partly financed by the treasure placed by the church at the disposal of the state; the emperor’s soldiers called upon God to aid them as they charged into battle; and they took comfort in the miraculous image of Christ that preceded them in their line of march. A brief summary of the campaign unfortunately gives no idea of the difficulties Heraclius encountered as he liberated Asia Minor (622), fought in Armenia with allies found among the Christian Caucasian peoples, the Lazi, the Abasgi, and the Iberians (624), and struggled in far-distant Lazica while Constantinople withstood a combined siege of Avars and Persians (626). An alliance with the Khazars, a Turkic people from north of the Caucasus, proved of material assistance in those years and of lasting import in Byzantine diplomacy. Heraclius finally destroyed the main Persian host at Nineveh in 627 and, after occupying Dastagird in 628, savoured the full flavour of triumph when his enemy, Khosrow, was deposed and murdered. The Byzantine emperor might well have believed that, if the earlier success of the Persians signalized the resurrection of the Achaemenid empire, his own successes had realized the dreams of Caesar, Augustus, and Trajan.
Yet that was a war fought by medieval Byzantium and not by ancient Rome. Its spirit was manifest in 630, when Heraclius triumphantly restored the True Cross to Jerusalem, whence the Persians had stolen it, and—even more—when Constantinople resisted the Avar-Persian assault of 626. During the attack, the patriarch Sergius maintained the morale of the valiant garrison by proceeding about the walls, bearing the image of Christ to ward off fire, and by painting upon the gates of the western walls images of the Virgin and child to ward off attacks launched by the Avars—the “breed of darkness.” The Avars withdrew when Byzantine ships defeated the canoes manned by Slavs, upon whom the nomad Avars depended for their naval strength. The latter never recovered from their defeat. As their empire crumbled, new peoples from the Black Sea to the Balkans emerged to seize power: the Bulgars of Kuvrat, the Slavs under Samo, and the Serbs and Croats whom Heraclius permitted to settle in the northwest Balkans once they had accepted Christianity.
As for the Byzantine defenders of Constantinople, they celebrated their victory by singing Romanos’s great hymn “Akathistos,” with choir and crowd alternating in the chant of the “Alleluia.” The hymn, still sung in a Lenten service, commemorates those days when Constantinople survived as a fortress under ecclesiastical leadership, its defenders protected by the icons and united by their liturgy. This they sang in Greek, as befitted a people whose culture was now Greek and no longer Latin.
The successors of Heraclius: Islam and the Bulgars
In the same year that Heraclius went out into the themes, Muhammad made his withdrawal (hijrah) from Mecca to Medina, where he established the ummah, or Muslim community. Upon the Prophet’s death in 632, the caliphs, or successors, channeled the energies of the Arab Bedouin by launching them upon a purposive and organized plan of conquest. The results were spectacular: a Byzantine army was defeated at the Battle of the Yarmūk River (636), thereby opening Palestine and Syria to Arab Muslim control. Alexandria capitulated in 642, removing forever the province of Egypt from Byzantine authority. The Arabs had, meanwhile, advanced into Mesopotamia, capturing the royal city of Ctesiphon and, eventually, defeating an army under command of the Persian king himself. So ended the long history of Persia under Achaemenids, Parthians, and Sāsānians; further conquests were shortly to initiate that region’s Islamic phase (see Iran, history of: Iran from 640 to the present; Islamic world).
At least three aspects of the contemporary situation of Byzantium and Persia account for the phenomenal ease with which the Arabs overcame their enemies. First, both empires, exhausted by wars, had demobilized before 632. Second, both had ceased to support those client states on the frontiers of the Arabian Peninsula that had restrained the Bedouin of the desert for a century past. Third, and particularly in reference to Byzantium, religious controversy had weakened the loyalties that Syrians and Egyptians rendered to Constantinople. Heraclius had sought in 638 to placate miaphysite sentiment in those two provinces by promulgating the doctrine of monothelitism, holding that Christ, although of two natures, had but one will. Neither in the East nor in the West did that compromise prove successful. The victorious Muslims granted religious freedom to the Christian community in Alexandria, for example, and the Alexandrians quickly recalled their exiled miaphysite patriarch to rule over them, subject only to the ultimate political authority of the conquerors. In such a fashion the city persisted as a religious community under an Arab Muslim domination more welcome and more tolerant than that of Byzantium.
The aging Heraclius was unequal to the task of containing that new menace, and it was left to his successors—Constantine III (ruled February to May 641), Constans II (641–668), Constantine IV (668–685), and Justinian II (685–695, 705–711)—to do so. That bare list of emperors obscures the family conflicts that often imperiled the succession, but gradually the principle was established that, even if brothers ruled as coemperors, the senior’s authority would prevail. Although strife between Blues and Greens persisted throughout the century, internal revolt failed to imperil the dynasty until the reign of Justinian II. The latter was deposed and mutilated in 695. With the aid of the Bulgars, he returned in 705 to reassume rule and wreak a vengeance so terrible that his second deposition, and death, in 711 is surprising only in its delay of six years. From 711 until 717 the fortunes of the empire foundered; in that year Leo, stratēgos of the Anatolikon theme, arrived as a second Heraclius to found a dynasty that would rescue the empire from its new enemies, the Arab Muslims and the Bulgars.
Justinian II, gold solidus, 7th–8th century; in the British Museum.Peter Clayton
Three features distinguish the military history of the years 641–717: first, an increasing use of sea power on the part of the Arabs; second, a renewed threat in the Balkans occasioned by the appearance of the Onogur Huns, known in contemporary sources as the Bulgars; and third, a persisting interest among the emperors in their western possessions, despite the gradual attrition of Byzantine authority in the exarchates of Carthage and Ravenna. Thanks to the control that the Arabs gradually asserted over the sea routes to Constantinople, they climaxed their earlier assaults on Armenia and Asia Minor with a four-year siege of the great city itself (674–678). Defeated in that last attempt by the use of Greek fire, a flammable liquid of uncertain composition, the Arabs signed a 30-year truce, according to which they agreed to pay tribute in money, men, and horses. Lured by the unsettled conditions following Justinian’s second deposition, they renewed their assaults by land and sea, and in 717 the Arabs were again besieging Constantinople.
On the Balkan frontier, meanwhile, the Bulgars assumed the role abdicated by the Avars after 626. A pagan people whom the Khazars had forced toward the Danube Delta in the latter part of the 7th century, they eluded Constantine IV’s attempts to defeat them in 681. By virtue of a treaty signed in that year, as well as others dating from 705 and 716, the Bulgars were recognized as an independent kingdom, occupying (to the humiliation of Byzantium) lands south of the Danube into the Thracian plain. While the Bulgars had thus deprived the empire of control in the north and central Balkans, the Byzantines could take comfort in the expeditions of 658 and 688/689 launched, respectively, by Constans II and Justinian II into Macedonia and in the formation of the themes of Thrace (687) and Hellas (695). Those moves were evidence that Byzantine authority was beginning to prevail along the peninsular coastline and in certain parts of Greece where Slavs had penetrated.
In the West the situation was less reassuring. Monothelitism had evoked a hostile reception among the churches of North Africa and Italy, and the resulting disaffection had encouraged the exarchs of both Carthage (646) and Ravenna (652) to revolt. By the end of the century, Africa had been largely lost to Muslim conquerors who would, in 711, seize the last outpost at Septem. For the moment Sicily and the scattered Italian possessions remained secure. Constans undertook operations against the Lombards, and he apparently intended to move his capital to Sicily, before his assassination ended the career of the last Eastern emperor to venture into the West. In summary, Leo III in 717 ruled over an empire humiliated by the presence of pagan barbarians upon Balkan soil rightfully considered “Roman,” threatened by an attack upon its Anatolian heartland and its capital, and reduced, finally, in the West to Sicily and the remnants of the Ravenna exarchate.
However dismal the military record, institutional and economic developments had permitted the empire to survive and were to provide foundations for greater success in the centuries to come. The themal system had taken root and, with it, probably the institution of soldiers’ properties. Military service was a hereditary occupation: the eldest son assumed the burden of service, supported primarily by revenues from other members of the family who worked the land in the villages. That last was a task easier to accomplish at the end of the 7th century, thanks to the colonies of Slavs and other peoples taken into the empire and settled in the rural areas by Heraclius, Constantine IV, and Justinian II. In the 8th and 9th centuries, other emperors—including Leo III, Constantine V, and Nicephorus I—were to continue the practice, thus ending the population decline that had long eroded the ranks of Byzantine society. There are unmistakable signs of agricultural expansion even before 800, and, at about that time, urban life, which had never vanished in Asia Minor, began to flourish and expand in the Balkans. To judge from the evidence of the Farmer’s Law, dated in the 7th century, the technological base of Byzantine society was more advanced than that of contemporary western Europe: iron tools could be found in the villages; water mills dotted the landscape; and field-sown beans provided a diet rich in protein. None of those advances was to characterize western European agriculture until the 10th century. Byzantine agriculture enjoyed the further advantage of a highly developed tradition of careful farming that persisted even in the darkest days, enabling the peasant to make the most of the soil upon which he worked. The invasions had even provided a form of stimulus to development: having lost first its Egyptian granary and, later, its North African and Sicilian resources, the empire had to live essentially, although not totally, from whatever it could produce in the lands remaining to it. The invasions had also, in all probability, broken up many a large estate, and the small peasant holding seems to have been the “normal” form of rural organization in that period. Although collective village organization persisted in the form of the rural commune and, with it, certain collective agricultural practices, the state seems to have made little or no attempt to bind the peasant to the soil upon which the tax registers had inscribed him. While Byzantium remained a slave-owning society, the colonus of the later Roman Empire had vanished, and a greater degree of freedom and mobility characterized agricultural relationships during the 7th and 8th centuries.
So it was too in trade and commerce. After the loss of Egypt and North Africa, the grain fleets manned by hereditary shipmasters disappeared. In their place there emerged the independent merchant, of sufficient importance to call forth a code of customary law, the Rhodian Sea Law, to regulate his practices. Military and religious hostilities failed to check him as he traded with the Bulgars in Thrace and, through Cyprus, with the Arabs. Despite constant warfare, this was, in short, a healthier society than the late Roman, and its chances of survival were further increased when the sixth general council (680–681) condemned Monothelitism and anathematized its adherents. With Egypt and Syria under Muslim rule, it was no longer necessary to placate Eastern Monophysitism, and it seemed that doctrinal discord would no longer separate Constantinople from the West. Events were to prove otherwise.
The age of Iconoclasm: 717–867
For more than a century after the accession of Leo III (717–741), a persisting theme in Byzantine history may be found in the attempts made by the emperors, often with wide popular support, to eliminate the veneration of icons, a practice that had earlier played a major part in creating the morale essential to survival. The sentiment had grown in intensity during the 7th century, and the Quinisext Council (Council in Trullo) of 692 had decreed that Christ should be represented in human form rather than, symbolically, as the lamb. The reigning emperor, Justinian II, had taken the unprecedented step of placing the image of Christ on his coinage while proclaiming himself the “slave of God.” Evidence of a reaction against such iconodule (or image venerating) doctrines and practices may be found early in the 8th century, but full-fledged Iconoclasm (or destruction of the images) emerged as an imperial policy only when Leo III issued his decrees of 730. Under his son, Constantine V (ruled 741–775), the iconoclastic movement intensified, taking the form of violent persecution of the monastic clergy, the foremost defenders of the iconodule position. The Council of Nicaea in 787 restored iconodule doctrine at the instigation of the empress Irene, but military reversals led Leo V to resurrect in 815 the iconoclastic policies associated with Constantine V, one of Byzantium’s most-successful generals. Not until 843 were the icons definitively restored to their places of worship and icon veneration solemnly proclaimed as Orthodox belief. Even that brief summary suggests that the emperor’s fortunes on the battlefield were of no small moment in determining his attitude toward the icons, those channels whence superhuman power descended to man. An account of the age of Iconoclasm opens appropriately, then, with its military history.
Transfiguration of Christ, mosaic icon, early 13th century; in the Louvre, Paris.Giraudon/Art Resource, New York
The reigns of Leo III (the Isaurian) and Constantine V
Almost immediately upon Leo’s accession, the empire’s fortunes improved markedly. With the aid of the Bulgars, he turned back the Muslim assault in 718 and, in the intervals of warfare during the next 20 years, addressed himself to the task of reorganizing and consolidating the themes in Asia Minor. Thanks to the assistance of the traditional allies, the Khazars, Leo’s reign concluded with a major victory, won again at the expense of the Arabs, at Acroenos (740). His successor, Constantine, had first to fight his way to the throne, suppressing a revolt of the Opsikion and Armeniakon themes launched by his brother-in-law Artavasdos. During the next few years, internal disorder in the Muslim world played into Constantine’s hands as the ʿAbbāsid house fought to seize the caliphate from the Umayyads. With his enemy thus weakened, Constantine won noteworthy victories in northern Syria, transferring the prisoners he had captured there to Thrace in preparation for the wars against the Bulgars that were to occupy him from 756 to 775. In no fewer than nine campaigns, he undermined Bulgar strength so thoroughly that the northern enemy seemed permanently weakened, if not crushed. Even the venom used by the iconodule chroniclers of Constantine’s reign cannot disguise the enormous popularity his victories won him.
Leo III, gold solidus, 8th century; in the British Museum.Peter Clayton
In later centuries, the folk of Constantinople would stand by his tomb, seeking his aid against whatever enemy imperiled the city’s defenses.
Constantine’s weak successors
His successors all but let slip the gains won by the great iconoclast. Constantine’s son Leo IV died prematurely in 780, leaving to succeed him his 10-year-old son, Constantine VI, under the regency of the empress Irene. Not much can be said for Constantine, and Irene’s policies as regent and (after the deposition and blinding of her son at her orders) as sole ruler from 797 to 802 were all but disastrous. Her iconodule policies alienated many among the themal troops, who were still loyal to the memory of the great warrior emperor, Constantine V. In an effort to maintain her popularity among the monkish defenders of the icons and with the population of Constantinople, she rebated taxes to which those groups were subject, and she reduced the customs duties levied outside the port of Constantinople, at Abydos and Hieros. The consequent loss to the treasury weighed all the more severely, since victories won by the Arabs in Asia Minor (781) and by the Bulgars (792) led both peoples to demand and receive tribute as the price of peace. A revolt of the higher palace officials led to Irene’s deposition in 802, and the so-called Isaurian dynasty of Leo III ended with her death, in exile, on the isle of Lesbos.
In the face of the Bulgar menace, none of the following three emperors succeeded in founding a dynasty. Nicephorus I (ruled 802–811), the able finance minister who succeeded Irene, reimposed the taxes that the empress had remitted and instituted other reforms that provide some insight into the financial administration of the empire during the early 9th century. In the tradition of Constantine V, Nicephorus strengthened the fortifications of Thrace by settling, in that theme, colonists from Asia Minor.
Taking arms himself, he led his troops against the new and vigorous Bulgar khan, Krum, only to meet defeat and death at the latter’s hands. His successor, Michael I Rhangabe (811–813), fared little better; internal dissensions broke up his army as it faced Krum near Adrianople, and the resulting defeat cost Michael his throne. In only one respect does he occupy an important place in the annals of the Byzantine Empire. Michael was the first emperor to bear a family name, and his use of the patronymic, Rhangabe, bears witness to the emergence of the great families, whose accumulation of landed properties would soon threaten the integrity of those smallholders upon whom the empire depended for its taxes and its military service. The name Rhangabe seems to be a Hellenized form of a Slav original (rokavu), and, if so, Michael’s ethnic origin and that of his successor, Leo V the Armenian (ruled 813–820), provide evidence enough of the degree to which Byzantium in the 9th century had become not only a melting-pot society but, further, a society in which even the highest office lay open to the man with the wits and stamina to seize it. Leo fell victim to assassination, but before his death events beyond his control had improved the empire’s situation. Krum died suddenly in 814 as he was preparing an attack upon Constantinople, and his son, Omortag, arranged a peace with the Byzantine Empire in order to protect the western frontiers of his Bulgar empire against the pressures exerted by Frankish expansion under Charlemagne and his successors. Since the death of the fifth caliph, Hārūn ar-Rashīd, had resulted in civil war in the Muslim world, hostilities from that quarter ceased. Leo used the breathing space to reconstruct those Thracian cities that the Bulgars had earlier destroyed. His work indicates the degree of gradual Byzantine penetration into the coastal fringes of the Balkan Peninsula, as does the number of themes organized in that same region during the early 9th century: those of Macedonia, Thessalonica, Dyrrhachium, Dalmatia, and the Strymon.
The new emperor, Michael II, was indeed able to establish a dynasty—the Amorian, or Phrygian—his son Theophilus (829–842) and his grandson Michael III (842–867) each occupying the throne in turn, but none would have forecast so happy a future during Michael II’s first years. Thomas the Slavonian, Michael’s former comrade in arms, gave himself out to be the unfortunate Constantine VI and secured his coronation at the hands of the Patriarch of Antioch. That was accomplished with the willing permission of the Muslim caliph under whose jurisdiction Antioch lay. Thomas thereupon marched to Constantinople at the head of a motley force of Caucasian peoples whose sole bonds were to be found in their devotion to iconodule doctrine and their hatred of Michael’s Iconoclasm. Assisted by Omortag and relying upon the defenses of Constantinople, Michael defeated his enemy, but the episode suggests the tensions beneath the surface of Byzantine society: the social malaise, the ethnic hostility, and the persisting discord created by Iconoclasm. All those may explain the weakness displayed throughout Theophilus’s reign, when a Muslim army defeated the emperor himself (838) as a prelude to the capture of the fortress of Amorium in Asia Minor. It may also explain the concurrent decline of Byzantine strength in the Mediterranean, manifest in the capture of Crete by the Arabs (826 or 827) and in the initiation of attacks upon Sicily that secured the island for the world of Islam. Iconoclasm certainly played its part in the further alienation of East from West, and a closer examination of its doctrines will suggest why this may have been.
The Iconoclastic controversy
Iconoclasts and iconodules agreed on one fundamental point: a Christian people could not prosper unless it assumed the right attitude toward the holy images, or icons. They disagreed, of course, on what that attitude should be. Each could discover supporting arguments in the writings of the early church, and it is essential to remember that the debate over images is as old as Christian art. The fundamentals of Iconoclasm were by no means an 8th-century discovery. The ablest defender of the iconodule position was, however, the 8th-century theologian St. John of Damascus. Drawing upon Neoplatonic doctrine, John suggested that the image was but a symbol, and the creation of the icon was justified, since, by virtue of the Incarnation, God had himself become human.
The iconoclasts responded by pointing to the express wording of the Second Commandment. The condemnation therein of idolatry seems to have weighed heavily with Leo III, who may have been influenced by Islam, a religion that strictly prohibited the use of religious images. The latter point is debatable, as is the contention that Iconoclasm was particularly an expression of sentiment to be found in the eastern themes of the empire. Syrian miaphysitism may also have influenced the ideas of Constantine V and, through him, the course of debate during the last half of the 8th century. The Syrian churches gave icons less prominence than did other non-Chalcedonian churches, in part because of the influence of and pressure from Islam but also because of different interpretations of the biblical warrant for making images of Jesus Christ. Still another consideration favouring Iconoclasm may be found in the intimate connection of iconoclastic doctrine with the emperor’s conception of his role as God’s vicegerent on earth. During the late 6th and 7th centuries, iconodule emperors had viewed themselves in a pietistic fashion, emphasizing their devotion and subservience to God. Constantine V, on the other hand, pridefully replaced the icons with imperial portraits and with representations of his own victories. Viewed in that light, Iconoclasm signaled a rebirth of imperial confidence; so deservedly great was Constantine’s reputation, and so dismal were the accomplishments of his successors, that a Leo V, for one, could easily believe that God favoured the iconoclastic battalions.
Under Constantine V, the struggle against the icons became a struggle against their chief defenders, the monastic community. The immediate destruction wrought by Constantine and his zealous subordinates is, however, of less moment than the lasting effect of the persecution on the Orthodox clergy. Briefly put, the church became an institution rent by factions, wherein popular discontent found a means of expression. Intransigent iconodules looked for their leaders among the monks of Studion, the monastery founded by Studius, and they found one in the person of the monastery’s abbot, St. Theodore Studites (759–826). In the patriarch Ignatius (847–858; 867–877) they discovered a spokesman after their own hearts: one drawn from the monastic ranks and contemptuous of all the allurements that the world of secular learning seemed to offer. More significant than the men to be found on the other extreme, iconoclast patriarchs, including Anastasius and John Grammaticus, were the representatives of the moderate party, composed of the patriarchs Tarasius, Nicephorus, Methodius, and Photius. Although iconodule in sympathy, the group enjoyed little rapport with the monastic zealots. Unlike the average monk, they were often educated laymen, trained in the imperial service and ready to compromise with imperial authority.
Not only was Iconoclasm a major episode in the history of the Byzantine, or Orthodox, Church, but it also permanently affected relations between the empire and Roman Catholic Europe. The Lombard advance, it may be remembered, had restricted Byzantine authority in Italy to the exarchate of Ravenna, and to that quarter the popes of the 7th century, themselves ordinarily of Greek or Syrian origin, turned for protection against the common enemy. During the 8th century, two issues alienated Rome from Constantinople: Iconoclasm and quarrels stemming from the question of who should enjoy ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Illyricum and over Calabria in southern Italy. Pope Gregory II refused to accept the iconoclastic doctrines of Leo III, and his successor, Gregory III, had to openly condemn them at a council. Once Ravenna fell to the Lombards, and the exarchate ceased to exist in 751, the papacy had to seek a new protector. That was found in the person of the Frankish leader Pippin III, who sought some form of sanction to legitimize his seizure of the crown from the feeble hands of the last representative of the Merovingian dynasty. Thus, Pope Stephen II (or III) anointed Pippin as king of the Franks in 754, and the latter entered Italy to take arms against the Lombard king. Even the restoration of icon veneration in 787 failed to bridge the differences between Orthodox Byzantium and Catholic Europe, for the advisers of Pippin’s son and successor, Charlemagne, condemned the iconodule position as heartily as an earlier generation had rejected the iconoclast decrees of Leo III. Nor could the men of Charlemagne’s time admit that a woman—the empress Irene—might properly assume the dignity of emperor of the Romans. For all those reasons, Charlemagne, king of the Franks and Lombards by right of conquest, assented to his coronation as emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day, 800, by Pope Leo III. No longer a barbarian king, Charlemagne became, by virtue of the symbolism of the age, a new Constantine. This the Byzantine chancery could not accept, for, if there were one God, one faith, and one truth, then there could be but one empire and one emperor; surely that emperor ruled in Constantinople, not in Charlemagne’s Aachen. Subsequent disputes between Rome and Constantinople seemed often to centre on matters of ecclesiastical discipline. Underlying those differences were two more powerful considerations, neither of which could be ignored. According to theory, there could be but one empire; clearly, there were two. And between Rome and Constantinople there stood two groups of peoples open to conversion: the Slavs of central Europe and the Bulgars in the Balkans. From which of the two jurisdictions would those people accept their Christian discipline? To which, in consequence, would they owe their spiritual allegiance?
The reign of Michael III (ruled 842–867) draws together those and other threads from the past. Veneration of the icons was definitely rehabilitated in 843, and it was done in so diplomatic a fashion that the restoration, in itself, produced no new rifts, although old factionalisms persisted with the appointment of a monk, Ignatius, as patriarch. The latter’s intransigent zealotry found little favour with Caesar Bardas, Michael’s uncle, who had seized power from the empress regent in 856. Two years later Ignatius was deposed and replaced by a moderate: the scholar and layman Photius. No single person better exemplified the new age, nor, indeed, did any other play a larger part in the cultural rebirth and missionary activity among the Slavs, Bulgars, and Russians, which mark the middle of the 9th century. The same aggressive and enterprising spirit is manifest in the military successes won on the Asia Minor frontier, culminating in Petronas’s victory at Poson (863) over the Muslim emir of Melitene.
In Sicily and throughout the Mediterranean, Byzantine arms were less successful, but, thanks to Photius’s diplomatic skill, the see of Constantinople maintained its position against Rome during the so-called Photian Schism. When Pope Nicholas I challenged Photius’s elevation to the patriarchate, deploring as uncanonical the six days’ speed with which he had been advanced through the successive ranks of the hierarchy, the Byzantine patriarch refused to bow. He skillfully persuaded Nicholas’s delegates to a council summoned at Constantinople to investigate the matter that he was the lawful patriarch despite the persisting claims of the rival Ignatian faction. Nicholas, alleging that his men had been bribed, excommunicated Photius; a council at Constantinople responded (867) by excommunicating Nicholas in turn. The immediate issues between the two sees were matters of ecclesiastical supremacy, the liturgy, and clerical discipline; behind those sources of division lay the question of jurisdiction over the converts in Bulgaria. And behind that question may be found centuries of growing separation between the minds and institutions of the eastern and the western Mediterranean worlds, symbolized in the roles assumed by two among the major protagonists in the Photian Schism. It was the supreme spiritual authority, the pope, who hurled anathemas from the West, but it was God’s vicegerent on earth, the emperor Michael III, who presided at the council of 867.
Michael did not long survive that moment of triumph. Later that year he was murdered by his favourite, Basil, who, on his bloody path to the throne, had earlier disposed of Caesar Bardas. As had Heraclius and Leo III before him, Basil came to found a dynasty, in this instance the Macedonian house. Unlike his predecessors, he came not as a saviour but as a peasant adventurer to seize an already sound empire whose next centuries were to be its greatest (see also Eastern Orthodoxy: History). John L. Teall Donald MacGillivray Nicol The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
From 867 to the Ottoman conquest
The Macedonian era: 867–1025
Under the Macedonians, at least until the death of Basil II in 1025, the empire enjoyed a golden age. Its armies regained the initiative against the Arabs in the East, and its missionaries evangelized the Slavs, extending Byzantine influence in Russia and the Balkans. And, despite the rough military character of many of the emperors, there was a renaissance in Byzantine letters and important developments in law and administration. At the same time there were signs of decay: resources were squandered at an alarming rate; there was growing estrangement from the West; and a social revolution in Anatolia was to undermine the economic and military strength of the empire.
The empire was in theory an elective monarchy with no law of succession. But the desire to found and perpetuate a dynasty was strong, and it was often encouraged by popular sentiment. This was especially true in relation to the Macedonian dynasty, the founder, Basil I, having murdered his way to the throne in 867. Probably of Armenian descent, though they had settled in Macedonia, Basil’s family was far from distinguished and can hardly have expected to produce a line of emperors that lasted through six generations and 189 years. But, having acquired the imperial crown, Basil tried to make sure that his family would not lose it and nominated three of his sons as coemperors. Though he was his least favourite, through the scholarly Leo VI, who succeeded him in 886, the succession was at least secure. Even the three soldier-emperors who usurped the throne during the Macedonian era were conscious, in varying degrees, that they were protecting the rights of a legitimate heir during a minority: Romanus I Lecapenus for Constantine VII, the son of Leo VI; and Nicephorus Phocas and John Tzimisces for Basil II, the grandson of Constantine VII.
Military revival
A reassertion of Byzantine military and naval power in the East began with victories over the Arabs by Michael III’s general Petronas in 856. From 863 the initiative lay with the Byzantines. The struggle with the Arabs, which had long been a struggle for survival, became a mounting offensive that reached its brilliant climax in the 10th century. By 867 a well-defined boundary existed between the Byzantine Empire and the territory of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate. Its weakest point was in the Taurus Mountains above Syria and Antioch. Basil I directed his operations against this point, recovered Cyprus for a while, and campaigned against the Paulicians, a Christian sect regarded as heretical by the Byzantines and whose anti-imperial propaganda was effective in Anatolia. But the conflict with Islam was one that concerned the whole empire, in the West as well as in the East, and by sea as well as by land. In 902 the Arabs completed the conquest of Sicily, but they were kept out of the Byzantine province of South Italy, for whose defense Basil I had even made some effort to cooperate with the Western emperor Louis II. The worst damage, however, was done by Arab pirates who had taken over the island of Crete. In 904 they plundered Thessalonica, carrying off quantities of loot and prisoners. Leo VI sent a naval expedition to Crete in 911, but the Muslims drove it off and humiliated the Byzantine navy off Chios in 912.
On the eastern frontier, the Byzantine offensive was sustained with great success during the reign of Romanus I Lecapenus by an Armenian general John Curcuas (Gurgen), who captured Melitene (934) and then Edessa (943), advancing across the Euphrates into the caliph’s territory. It was Curcuas who paved the way for the campaigns of the two soldier-emperors of the next generation. In 961 Nicephorus Phocas, then domestic (commander) of the armies in the West, reconquered Crete and destroyed the Arab fleet that had terrorized the Aegean for 150 years; he thereby restored Byzantine naval supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean. In 962 his strategy achieved unexpected triumphs all along the eastern frontier and culminated in the capture of Aleppo in Syria. When he was proclaimed emperor in March 963, Nicephorus appointed another Armenian general, John Tzimisces, as domestic of the East, though he retained personal command of operations against the Arabs. By 965 he had driven them out of Cyprus and was poised for the reconquest of Syria. The revived morale and confidence of Byzantium in the East showed itself in the crusading zeal of Nicephorus Phocas and John Tzimisces for the reconquest of Syria and the Holy Land. The ground lost to Islam in the 7th century was thus fast being regained; and, although Jerusalem was never reached, the important Christian city of Antioch, seat of one of the patriarchs, was recaptured in 969. These victories were achieved largely by the new cavalry force built up by Nicephorus Phocas. In the areas recovered from the Arabs, land was distributed in military holdings with the interests of the cavalry in mind. But the victories were achieved at the expense of the western provinces, and an attempt to recover Sicily ended in failure in 965.
The campaigns of John Tzimisces, who usurped the throne in 969, were directed against the Emir of Mosul on the Tigris and against the new Fāṭimid caliph of Egypt, who had designs on Syria. By 975 almost all of Syria and Palestine, from Caesarea to Antioch, as well as a large part of Mesopotamia far to the east of the Euphrates, was in Byzantine control. The way seemed open for Tzimisces to advance to the ʿAbbāsid capital of Baghdad on the one hand and to Jerusalem and Egypt on the other. But he died in 976 and his successor, Basil II, the legitimate heir of the Macedonian house, concentrated most of his resources on overcoming the Bulgars in Europe, though he did not abandon the idea of further reconquest in the East. The kingdom of Georgia (Iberia) was incorporated into the empire by treaty. Part of Armenia was annexed, with the rest of it to pass to Byzantium on the death of its king. Basil II personally led two punitive expeditions against the Fāṭimids in Syria, but otherwise his eastern policy was to hold and to consolidate what had already been gained. The gains can be measured by the number of new themes (provinces) created by the early 11th century in the area between Vaspurakan in the Caucasus and Antioch in Syria. The annexation of Armenia, the homeland of many of the great Byzantine emperors and soldiers, helped to solidify the eastern wall of the Byzantine Empire for nearly a century.
John I Tzimisces (left), effigy on a gold coin, 969–976; in a private collection.Peter Clayton
Relations with the Slavs and Bulgars
Although imperial territory in the East could be reclaimed only by military conquest, in the Balkans and in Greece the work of reclamation could be assisted by the diplomatic weapon of evangelization. The Slavs and the Bulgars could be brought within the Byzantine orbit by conversion to Christianity. The conversion of the Slavs was instigated by the patriarch Photius and carried out by the monks Cyril and Methodius from Thessalonica. Their invention of the Slavonic alphabet (Cyrillic and Glagolitic) made possible the translation of the Bible and the Greek liturgy and brought literacy as well as the Christian faith to the Slavic peoples. The work began in the Slavic kingdom of Moravia and spread to Serbia and Bulgaria. Latin missionaries resented what they considered to be Byzantine interference among the northern Slavs, and there were repeated clashes of interest that further damaged relations between the sees of Rome and Constantinople. The conversion of the Bulgars became a competition between the two churches and was ably exploited by the Bulgar king Boris until, in 870, he opted for Eastern Orthodox Christianity on condition of having an archbishop of his own.
Bulgarian wars
The trade with Constantinople that followed the missionaries whetted the appetites of the Slavs and Bulgars for a larger share in the material wealth of Byzantium. Simeon (Symeon) I of Bulgaria, who succeeded his father Boris in 893 and who had been educated at Constantinople, proved to be an even more dangerous enemy than the Arabs. His efforts to become emperor dominated Byzantine history for some 15 years. In 913 he brought his army to the walls of Constantinople, demanding the imperial title. The patriarch, Nicholas Mysticus, appeased Simeon for a time, but it was Romanus Lecapenus who, by patience and diplomacy, undermined the power of the Bulgars and thwarted Simeon’s ambitions. Simeon died in 927, and his son Peter I came to terms with Byzantium and married a granddaughter of Romanus.
Relations with Russia
The Russians lay far outside the Roman jurisdiction. Their warships, sailing down the Dnepr from Kiev to the Black Sea, first attacked Constantinople in 860. They were beaten off, and almost at once Byzantine missionaries were sent into Russia. The Russians were granted trading rights in Constantinople in 911, but in 941 and 944, led by Prince Igor, they returned to the attack. Both assaults were repelled, and Romanus I set about breaking down the hostility and isolationism of the Russians by diplomatic and commercial contacts. In 957 Igor’s widow, Olga, was baptized and paid a state visit to Constantinople during the reign of Constantine VII; her influence enabled Byzantine missionaries to work with greater security in Russia, thus spreading Christianity and Byzantine culture. Olga’s son Svyatoslav was pleased to serve the empire as an ally against the Bulgars from 968 to 969, though his ambition to occupy Bulgaria led to war with Byzantium in which he was defeated and killed. In 971 John Tzimisces accomplished the double feat of humiliating the Russians and reducing Bulgaria to the status of a client kingdom. Byzantine influence over Russia reached its climax when Vladimir of Kiev, who had helped Basil II to gain his throne, received as his reward the hand of the Emperor’s sister in marriage and was baptized in 989. The mass conversion of the Russian people followed, with the establishment of an official Russian Church subordinate to the patriarch of Constantinople.
Bulgar revolt
The Bulgars, however, were not content to be vassals of Byzantium and rebelled under Samuel, youngest of the four sons of a provincial governor in Macedonia. Samuel made his capital at Ochrida and created a Bulgarian empire stretching from the Adriatic to the Black Sea and even, for a while, into Greece, though Thessalonica remained Byzantine. The final settlement of the Bulgar problem was worked out by Basil II in a ruthless and methodical military campaign lasting for some 20 years, until, by 1018, the last resistance was crushed. Samuel’s dominions became an integral part of the Byzantine Empire and were divided into three new themes. At the same time the Slav principalities of Serbia (Rascia and Dioclea) and Croatia became vassal states of Byzantium, and the Adriatic port of Dyrrhachium came under Byzantine control. Not since the days of Justinian had the empire covered so much European territory. But the annexation of Bulgaria meant that the Danube was now the only line of defense against the more northerly tribes, such as the Pechenegs, Cumans, and Magyars.
Estrangement from the West
The extension of Byzantine interests to the Adriatic, furthermore, had raised again the question of Byzantine claims to South Italy and, indeed, to the whole western part of the old Roman Empire. The physical separation of that empire into East and West had been emphasized by the settlement of the Slavs in the Balkan Peninsula and in Greece, and since the 7th century the two worlds had developed in their different ways. Their differences had been manifested in ecclesiastical conflicts, such as the Photian Schism. The conversion of the Slavs had produced bitterness between the agents of therival jurisdictions. But the reestablishment of Byzantine authority in Greece and eastern Europe, added to the gains against the Muslim powers in Asia, reinforced the Byzantine belief in the universality of the empire, to which Italy and the West must surely be reunited in time. Until that time came, the fiction was maintained that the rulers of western Europe, like those of the Slavs, held their authority by virtue of their special relationship with the one true emperor in Constantinople.
It was sometimes suggested that a marriage alliance might bring together the Eastern and Western parts of the empire and so provide for a united defense against the common enemy in Sicily—the Arabs. In 944 Romanus II, son of Constantine VII, married a daughter of Hugh of Provence, the Carolingian claimant to Italy. Constantine VII also kept up diplomatic contact with Otto I, the Saxon king of Germany. But the case was dramatically altered when Otto was crowned emperor of the Romans in 962, for this was a direct affront to the unique position of the Byzantine emperor. Otto tried, and failed, to establish his claim, either by force in the Byzantine province in Italy or by negotiation in Constantinople. His ambassador Liudprand of Cremona wrote an account of his mission to Nicephorus Phocas in 968 and of the Emperor’s scornful rejection of a proposed marriage between Otto’s son and a Byzantine princess. The incident vividly demonstrates the superior attitude of the Byzantines toward the West in the 10th century. John Tzimisces relented to the extent of arranging for one of his own relatives to marry Otto II in 972, though the arrangement implied no recognition of a Western claim to the empire. Basil II agreed that Otto III also should marry a Byzantine princess. But this union was never achieved; and subsequently Basil reorganized the administration of Byzantine Italy and was preparing another campaign against the Arabs in Sicily at the time of his death in 1025. The myth of the universal Roman Empire died hard.
Culture and administration
The Iconoclastic Controversy had aggravated the estrangement of the Byzantine Church and Empire from the West. But it helped to define the tenets of Eastern Orthodoxy, and it had an effect on the character of Byzantine society for the future. On the one hand, the church acquired a new unity and vitality: its missionaries spread the Orthodox faith in new quarters of the world, its monasteries proliferated, and its spiritual tradition was carried forward by the sermons and writings of the patriarch Photius in the 9th century and of Symeon the New Theologian in the 10th and 11th centuries. On the other hand, the empire became more aware of its Greco-Roman heritage. Interest in Classical Greek scholarship revived following the reorganization of the University of Constantinople under Michael III. The revival was fostered and patronized particularly by the scholar-emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, who saw to the compilation of three great works on the administration, the court ceremonies, and the provinces of his empire. He also commissioned a history of the age to which he contributed a biography of his grandfather Basil I. The age produced little original research, but lexicons (such as the 10th-century Suda), anthologies, encyclopaedias, and commentaries (such as the Lexicon and Bibliotheca of Photius) were produced in great number. The soldier-emperors of the 10th century were less interested in intellectual pursuits, but scholarship received a new impetus in the 11th century with Michael Psellus.
The founder of the dynasty, Basil I, and his son Leo VI, made plain their intention to inaugurate a new era by a restatement of the imperial law. Basil hoped to make a complete revision of the legal code, but only a preliminary textbook (Procheiron) with an introduction (Epanagoge) appeared during his reign. Leo VI, however, accomplished the work with the publication of the 60 books of the Basilica, which Hellenized the legal code of Justinian and made it more intelligible and accessible to lawyers. Additions and corrections to meet the needs of the time were incorporated in Leo’s 113 novels (decrees), which represent the last substantial reform of the civil law in Byzantium. Enshrined in this legislation was the principle of the absolute autocracy of the emperor as being himself the law. The Senate, the last vestige of Roman republican institutions, was stripped of its legislative powers, and it lost most of its judicial functions. Only in the matter of the spiritual welfare of his subjects did the emperor recognize any limits to his authority. The ideal relationship of a dyarchy between emperor and patriarch, the body and the soul of the empire, was written into the Epanagoge of Basil I, in a section probably composed by Photius.
The administration in this period was ever more closely centralized in Constantinople, with an increasingly complex and numerous bureaucracy of officials who received their appointments and their salaries from the emperor. The emperor also controlled the elaborate machinery of the foreign and diplomatic service. Some of his civil servants, however, were powerful enough to play the part of kingmakers, notably Basil, the chamberlain who engineered the ascent to the throne of Nicephorus Phocas and John Tzimisces. Order and the regulation of trade, commerce, and industry in the capital were in the hands of the prefect of the city, whose functions are outlined in the 9th-century Book of the Eparch. He was responsible for organizing and controlling the guilds or colleges of craftsmen and retailers, whose legal rights and duties to the state were strictly circumscribed and supervised. The provinces in Europe and Asia were administered according to their territorial division into themes, which, by the 10th century, numbered more than 30. The themes, though subdivided and reduced in size, retained their military character. Their governors, or stratēgoi, combined military and civil authority and were directly answerable to the emperor, who appointed them. The army and the navy were, for the most part, recruited from the ranks of soldier-farmers who held hereditary grants of land within the territory of each theme. The border districts were protected by contingents of frontier troops, led by their own officers or lords of the marches. Their exploits and adventures were romanticized in the 10th-century folk-epic of Digenis Akritas. But warfare was studied and perfected as a science, and it was the subject of treatises such as the Tactica of Leo VI, derived from the Strategicon of the emperor Maurice.
Social and economic change
The wars of reconquest on the eastern frontier in this period and the general military orientation of imperial policy brought to the fore a new class of aristocracy, whose wealth and power were based on land ownership and who held most of the higher military posts. Trade and industry in the cities were so rigidly controlled by the government that almost the only profitable form of investment for private enterprise was the acquisition of landed property. The military aristocracy, therefore, took to buying up the farms of free peasants and soldiers and reducing their owners to varying forms of dependence. As the empire grew stronger, the rich became richer. Given the system of agriculture prevailing in Anatolia and the Balkans, every failure of crops, every famine, drought, or plague produced a quota of destitute peasant-soldiers willing to turn themselves and their land over to the protection of a prosperous and ambitious landlord. The first emperor to see the danger in this development was Romanus I Lecapenus, who, in 922 and 934, passed laws to defend the small landowners against the acquisitive instincts of the “powerful”; for he realized that the economic as well as the military strength of the empire depended on the maintenance within the theme system of the institution of free, yet tax-paying, soldier-farmers and peasants in village communities. (Only freemen owed military service.)
Successive emperors after Romanus I enforced and extended his agrarian legislation. But the cost of the campaigns of reconquest from the Arabs had to be met by higher taxation, which drove many of the poorer peasants to sell their lands and to seek security as tenant farmers. Nicephorus Phocas, who belonged to one of the aristocratic landowning families of Anatolia, was naturally reluctant to act against members of his own class, though he adhered to the principle that the rights of the poor should be safeguarded. His laws about land tenure were particularly directed toward the creation of a more mobile force of heavy-armed cavalry recruited from those who could afford the equipment, which inevitably brought changes in the social structure of the peasant militia. On the other hand, Nicephorus took a firm line to prevent the accumulation of further land by the church, and he forbade any addition to the number of monasteries, whose estates, already extensive, were unproductive to the economy.
The last emperor to attempt to deal with the problem of land ownership seriously was Basil II, whose rise to the throne had involved the empire in a bitter and costly war against the aristocratic Sclerus and Phocas families. In 996 Basil promulgated comprehensive punitive legislation against the landed families, ordering the restitution of land acquired from the peasantry since 922 and requiring proof of title to other land going back in some cases as far as 1,000 years. Further, the system of collective responsibility for the payment of outstanding taxes known as the allelengyon now devolved not on the rest of the village community but on the nearest large landowner, whether lay or ecclesiastical. Basil’s conquest of Bulgaria somewhat altered the social and economic pattern of the empire, for new themes were created there in which there was no long tradition of a landed aristocracy as in Anatolia. After his death in 1025 the powerful hit back, and the government in Constantinople was no longer able to check the absorption of small freeholders by the great landowners and the consequent feudalization of the empire.
This process was particularly disastrous for the military establishment. The success and prestige of the Byzantine Empire in the Macedonian era to a large extent depended on the unrivaled efficiency of its army in Anatolia. A professional force, yet mainly native to the soil and so directly concerned with the defense of that soil, it had no equal in the Western or the Arab world at the time. And yet it was in this institution that the seeds of decay and disintegration took root; for most of the army’s commanders were drawn from the great landowners of Anatolia, who had acquired their riches and their status by undermining the social and economic structure on which its recruitment depended. Basil II had restrained them with such an iron hand that a reaction was inevitable after his death. Indeed, it is doubtful if Byzantine society could have tolerated another Basil II, despite all his triumphs. Soured by long years of civil war at the start of his reign, ascetic and uncultured by nature, Basil embodied the least attractive features of Byzantine autocracy. Some have called him the greatest of all the emperors. But the virtue of philanthropy, which the Byzantines prized and commended in their rulers, was not a part of his greatness; and the qualities that lent refinement to the Byzantine character, among them a love of learning and the arts, were not fostered during his reign. Yet, while Basil was busily earning his title of Bulgaroctonus (“Bulgar Slayer”), St. Symeon the New Theologian was exploring the love of God for man in some of the most poetic homilies in all mystical literature.
Byzantine decline and subjection to Western influences: 1025–1260
Basil II never married. But after his death his relatives remained in possession of the throne until 1056, less because of their efficiency than because of a general feeling among the Byzantine people that the prosperity of the empire was connected with the continuity of the Macedonian dynasty. When Basil’s brother Constantine VIII died in 1028, the line was continued in his two daughters, Zoe and Theodora. Zoe was married three times: to Romanus III Argyrus (ruled 1028–34), to Michael IV (1034–41), and to Constantine IX Monomachus (1042–55), who outlived her. When Constantine IX died in 1055, Zoe’s sister, Theodora, reigned alone as empress until her death a year later.
The Byzantine Empire in 1025.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The great emperors of the golden age, not all of them members of the Macedonian family, molded the history of that age. The successors of Basil II were rather the creatures of circumstances, because they did not make and seldom molded. In the 56 years from 1025 to 1081, there were 13 emperors. An attempt made by Constantine X Ducas to found a new dynasty was disastrously unsuccessful. Not until the rise of Alexius I Comnenus to power, in 1081, was stability restored by an ensured succession in the Comnenus family, who ruled for more than 100 years (1081–1185).
11th-century weakness
The state of the Byzantine Empire in the 11th century may be compared to that of the Roman Empire in the 3rd century, when, after a long period of secure prosperity, new pressures from beyond the frontiers aggravated the latent tensions in society. The brief reigns of Basil II’s heirs reflected, and were often the product of, a division in the Byzantine ruling class, a conflict between the military aristocracy of the provinces and the civilian aristocracy, or bureaucracy, of Constantinople. Each faction put up rival emperors. The sophisticated urban aristocracy favoured rulers who would reverse the militaristic trend of the empire and who would expand the civil service and supply them and their families with lucrative offices and decorative titles. The military families, whose wealth lay not in the capital but in the provinces and who had been penalized by Basil II’s legislation, favoured emperors who were soldiers and not civil servants. In this they were more realistic, for in the latter part of the 11th century it became ever clearer that the empire’s military strength was no longer sufficient to hold back its enemies. The landowners in the provinces appreciated the dangers more readily than the government in Constantinople, and they made those dangers an excuse to enlarge their estates in defiance of all the laws passed in the 10th century. The theme system in Anatolia, which had been the basis of the empire’s defensive and offensive power, was rapidly breaking down at the very moment when its new enemies were gathering their strength.
On the other hand, the urban aristocracy of Constantinople, reacting against the brutalization of war, strove to make the city a centre of culture and sophistication. The university was endowed with a new charter by Constantine IX in 1045, partly to ensure a steady flow of educated civil servants for the bureaucracy. The law school was revived under the jurist John Xiphilinus; the school of philosophy was chaired by Michael Psellus, whose researches into every field of knowledge earned him a reputation for omniscience and a great following of brilliant pupils. Psellus—courtier, statesman, philosopher, and historian—is in himself an advertisement for the liveliness of Byzantine society in the 11th century. What he and others like him failed to take into account was that their empire was more and more expending the resources and living on the reputation built up by the Macedonian emperors.
Arrival of new enemies
The new enemies that emerged in the 11th century, unlike the Arabs or the Bulgars, had no cause to respect that reputation. They appeared almost simultaneously on the northern, the eastern, and the western frontiers. It was nothing new for the Byzantines to have to fight on two fronts at once, but the task required a soldier on the throne. The Pechenegs, a Turkic tribe, had long been known as the northern neighbours of the Bulgars. Constantine VII had thought them to be valuable allies against the Bulgars, Magyars, and Russians. But after the conquest of Bulgaria, the Pechenegs began to raid across the Danube into what was then Byzantine territory. Constantine IX allowed them to settle south of the river, where their numbers and their ambitions increased. By the mid-11th century they were a constant menace to the peace in Thrace and Macedonia, and they encouraged the spirit of revolt in Bulgaria among the Bogomils, who had been denounced as heretics. It was left to Alexius I to avert a crisis by defeating the Pechenegs in battle in 1091.
The new arrivals on the eastern frontier were the Seljuq Turks, whose conquests were to change the whole shape of the Muslim and Byzantine worlds. In 1055, having conquered Persia, they entered Baghdad, and their prince assumed the title of sultan and protector of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate. Before long they asserted their authority to the borders of Fāṭimid Egypt and Byzantine Anatolia. They made their first explorations across the Byzantine frontier into Armenia in 1065 and, in 1067, as far west as Caesarea in central Anatolia. The raiders were inspired by the Muslim idea of jihad (holy war), and there was at first nothing systematic about their invasion. They found it surprisingly easy, however, to plunder the countryside and isolate the cities, owing to the long neglect of the eastern frontier defenses by the emperors in Constantinople. The emergency lent weight to the military aristocracy in Anatolia who, in 1068, finally secured the election of one of their own number, Romanus IV Diogenes, as emperor. Romanus assembled an army to deal with what he saw as a large-scale military operation. It was a sign of the times that his army was mainly composed of foreign mercenaries. In August 1071 it was defeated at Manzikert, near Lake Van in Armenia. Romanus was taken prisoner by the Seljuq sultan, Alp-Arslan. He was allowed to buy his freedom after signing a treaty, but the opposition in Constantinople refused to have him back as emperor and installed their own candidate, Michael VII. Romanus was treacherously blinded. The Seljuqs were thus justified in continuing their raids and were even encouraged to do so. Michael VII invited Alp-Arslan to help him against his rivals, Nicephorus Bryennius and Nicephorus Botaneiates, each of whom proclaimed himself emperor at Adrianople in 1077 and at Nicaea in 1078. In the four years of ensuing civil war there were no troops to defend the eastern frontier. By 1081 the Turks had reached Nicaea. The heart of the empire’s military and economic strength, which the Arabs had never mastered, was now under Turkish rule.
The new enemies in the West were the Normans, who began their conquest of South Italy early in the 11th century. Basil II’s project of recovering Sicily from the Arabs had been almost realized in 1042 by the one great general of the post-Macedonian era, George Maniaces, who was recalled by Constantine IX and killed as a pretender to the throne. The Normans thereafter made steady progress in Italy. Led by Robert Guiscard, they carried all before them; in April 1071, Bari, the last remaining Byzantine stronghold, fell after a three-year siege. Byzantine rule in Italy and the hope of a reconquest of Sicily were at an end.
The disasters at Manzikert and at Bari, in the same year 1071, at opposite extremes of the empire, graphically illustrate the decline of Byzantine power. The final loss of Italy seemed to underline the fact of the permanent division between the Greek East and the Latin West, which was now not only geographical and political but also increasingly cultural and ecclesiastical. In 1054 a state of schism had been declared between the churches of Rome and Constantinople. The political context of the event was the Norman invasion of Italy, which at the time was a matter of as much concern to the papacy as it was to Byzantium. But the event itself, the excommunication of the patriarch Michael Cerularius by Cardinal Humbert in Constantinople, symbolized an irreconcilable difference in ideology. The reform movement in the Roman Church had emphasized an ideal of the universal role of the papacy that was wholly incompatible with Byzantine tradition. Both sides also deliberately aggravated their differences by reviving all the disputed points of theology and ritual that had become battle cries during the Photian Schism in the 9th century. The schism of 1054 passed unnoticed by contemporary Byzantine historians; its significance as a turning point in East-West relations was fully realized only later.
Schism of 1054Map of the Schism of 1054.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc./Kenny Chmielewski
Alexius I and the First Crusade
But even the events of 1071 had not made the decline of Byzantium irretrievable. The shrinking of its boundaries reduced the empire from its status as a dominating world power to that of a small Greek state fighting for survival. That survival now depended on the new political, commercial, and ecclesiastical forces in the West, for it could no longer draw on its former military and economic resources in Anatolia. The civil aristocracy of Constantinople yielded with bad grace. After four years of civil war, the military lords triumphed with the accession of Alexius I Comnenus, the greatest soldier and statesman to hold the throne since Basil II. The history of his reign was written in elegant Greek by his daughter Anna Comnena; and, as she remarks, it began with an empire beset by enemies on all sides. The Normans captured Dyrrhachium (modern Durrës, Albania) in 1082 and planned to advance overland to Thessalonica. Alexius called on the Venetians to help him, but Robert Guiscard’s death in 1085 temporarily eased the Norman problem. The following year the Seljuq sultan died, and the sultanate was split by internal rivalries. Fortune thus played into Alexius’s hands by ridding him of two of his besetting enemies. By his own efforts, however, he defeated the Pechenegs in 1091.
Alexius I Comnenus, detail of an illumination from a Greek manuscript; in the Vatican Library.Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
The Venetians had been pleased to help drive the Normans out of the Adriatic Sea but demanded a heavy price. In 1082 Alexius granted them trading privileges in Constantinople and elsewhere on terms calculated to outbid Byzantine merchants. This charter was the cornerstone of the commercial empire of Venice in the eastern Mediterranean. But it fed the flames of Byzantine resentment against the Latins, and it provoked the rich, who might have been encouraged to invest their capital in shipbuilding and trade, to rely on the more familiar security of landed property.
The terms that Alexius made with his enemies in the first 10 years of his reign were not meant to be permanent. He fully expected to win back Anatolia from the Seljuqs; his plans, however, were not given time to mature, for matters were precipitated by the arrival in the East of the first Crusaders from western Europe (1096). Alexius had undoubtedly solicited the help of mercenary troops from the West but not for the liberation of the Holy Land from the infidels. The urgent need was the protection of Constantinople and the recovery of Anatolia. The Byzantines were more realistic about their Muslim neighbours than the distant popes and princes of the West. Jerusalem had finally been taken by the Seljuqs in 1071, but the most immediate threat to Byzantium came from the Pechenegs and the Normans. Alexius was tactful in his dealings with the pope and ready to discuss the differences between the churches. But neither party foresaw the consequences of Pope Urban II’s appeal in 1095 for recruits to fight a Holy War. The response in western Europe was overwhelming. The motives of those who took the cross as Crusaders ranged from religious enthusiasm to a mere spirit of adventure or a hope of gain, and it was no comfort to Alexius to learn that four of the eight leaders of the First Crusade were Normans—among them Bohemond, the son of Robert Guiscard. Since the Crusade had to pass through Constantinople, however, the Emperor had some control over it. He required its leaders to swear to restore to the empire any towns or territories they might conquer from the Turks on their way to the Holy Land. In return he gave them guides and a military escort. Still, the cost was enormous, for the Crusaders had to be supplied with food or live off the land as they went.
Nicaea fell to them in 1097 and was duly handed over to the Emperor in accord with the agreement. In 1098 they reached and captured Antioch. There the trouble started. Bohemond refused to turn over the city and instead set up his own principality of Antioch. His example was imitated in the establishment of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem (1100), which had fallen to the Crusaders the year before, and of the counties of Edessa and Tripoli. The Crusaders settled down to colonize and defend the coast of Palestine and Syria and to quarrel among themselves. While they did so, Alexius was able to establish a new and more secure boundary between Byzantium and Islām through the middle of Anatolia. Full advantage was taken of the prevailing rivalry between the Seljuq sultans at Konya and the rival dynasty of the Dānishmend emirs at Melitene (near modern Malatya, Turkey), and a limit was set to the westward expansion of the Turks.
The First Crusade thus brought some benefits to Byzantium. But nothing could reconcile the emperor to Bohemond of Antioch. In 1107 Bohemond mounted a new invasion of the empire from Italy. Alexius was ready and defeated him at Dyrrhachium in 1108. Byzantine prestige was higher than it had been for many years, but the empire could barely afford to sustain the cost of being a great power. Alexius reconstituted the army and re-created the fleet, but only by means of stabilizing the gold coinage at one-third of its original value and by imposing a number of supplementary taxes. It became normal practice for taxes to be farmed out, which meant that the collectors recouped their outlay on their own terms. People in the provinces had the added burden of providing materials and labour for defense, communications, and provisions for the army, which now included very large numbers of foreigners. The supply of native soldiers had virtually ceased with the disappearance or absorption of their military holdings. Alexius promoted an alternative source of native manpower by extending the system of granting estates in pronoia (by favour of the emperor) and tying the grant to the military obligation. The recipient of a pronoia was entitled to all the revenues of his estate and to the taxes payable by his tenants (paroikoi), on condition of equipping himself as a mounted cavalryman with a varying number of troops. He was in absolute possession of his property until it reverted to the crown upon his death. Similarly, Alexius tried to promote more profitable development of the estates of the church by granting them to the management of laymen as charistikia, or benefices. As an expedient, the pronoia system had advantages both for the state and for the military aristocracy who were its main beneficiaries. But in the long term it hastened the fragmentation of the empire among the landed families and the breakdown of centralized government that the 10th-century emperors had laboured to avert.
Later Comneni
The policies of Alexius I were continued by his son John II Comnenus (reigned 1118–43) and his grandson Manuel I Comnenus (reigned 1143–80). In the 12th century, there was growing involvement of the Western powers in the affairs of the East as well as an increasingly complex political situation in Europe. In Asia, too, matters were complicated by the conflict between the Seljuqs and the Dānishmends, by the emergence of the kingdom of Lesser Armenia in Cilicia, and by the activities of the Crusader states. Foreign relations and skillful diplomacy became of paramount importance for the Byzantines. John II tried and failed to break what was becoming the Venetian monopoly of Byzantine trade, and he sought to come to terms with the new kingdom of Hungary, to whose ruler he was related by marriage. Alexius I had seen the importance of Hungary, lying between the Western and Byzantine empires, a neighbour of the Venetians and the Serbs. More ominous still was the establishment of the Norman kingdom of Sicily under Roger II in 1130. But John II astutely allied himself with the Western emperor against it.
Panel depicting the Virgin and Child with the emperor John II Comnenus and the empress Irene, c. 1118; in the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul.Andre Held—J.P. Ziolo
Manuel I realized even more clearly that Byzantium could not presume to ignore or offend the new powers in the West, and he went out of his way to understand and to appease them. Certain aspects of the Western way of life appealed to Manuel. His first and second wives were both Westerners, and Latins were welcomed at his court and even granted estates and official appointments. This policy was distasteful to most of his subjects, and it was unfortunate for his intentions that the Second Crusade occurred early in his reign (1147), for it aggravated the bitterness between Greeks and Latins and brought Byzantium deeper than ever into the tangled politics of western Europe. Its leaders were Louis VII of France and the emperor Conrad III, and its failure was blamed on Byzantine treachery. The French king discussed with Roger of Sicily the prospect of attacking Constantinople, and in 1147 Roger invaded Greece. But Manuel retained the personal friendship of and the alliance with Conrad III against the Normans and even planned a joint Byzantine-German campaign against them in Italy.
Manuel I Comnenus, detail of a manuscript; in the Vatican Apostolic Library.Courtesy of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
No such cooperation was possible with Conrad’s successor, Frederick I Barbarossa (after 1152). To Frederick the alliance between the Holy Roman Empire and what he called “the kingdom of the Greeks” was not one between equals. Manuel launched a vain invasion of the Norman kingdom on his own account in 1154, but it was too late for a revival of Byzantine imperialism in the West. It was hard for the Byzantines to accept the fact that their empire might soon become simply one among a number of Christian principalities.
In the Balkans and in the Latin East Manuel was more successful. His armies won back much of the northwest Balkans and almost conquered Hungary, reducing it to a client kingdom of Byzantium. The Serbs, too, under their leader Stefan Nemanja, were kept under control, while Manuel’s dramatic recovery of Antioch in 1159 caused the Crusaders to treat the Emperor with a new respect. But in Anatolia he overreached himself. To forestall the formation of a single Turkish sultanate, Manuel invaded the Seljuq territory of Rūm in 1176. His army was surrounded and annihilated at Myriocephalon. The battle marked the end of the Byzantine counteroffensive against the Turks begun by Alexius I. Its outcome delighted the Western emperor, Frederick I Barbarossa, who had supported the Seljuq sultan of Rūm against Manuel and who now openly threatened to take over the Byzantine Empire by force.
Manuel’s personal relationships with the Crusaders and with other Westerners remained cordial to the end. But his policies had antagonized the Holy Roman Empire, the papacy, the Normans, and, not least, the Venetians. His effort to revive Byzantine prestige in Italy and the Balkans and his treaties with Genoa (1169) and Pisa (1170) roused the suspicions of Venice, and in 1171, following an anti-Latin demonstration in Constantinople, all Venetians in the empire were arrested and their property was confiscated. The Venetians did not forget this episode. They, too, began to think in terms of putting Constantinople under Western control as the only means of securing their interest in Byzantine trade.
Manuel’s policies antagonized many of his own people as well. His favouritism to the Latins was unpopular, as was his lavish granting of estates in pronoia. A reaction set in shortly after his death in 1180, originated by his cousin Andronicus I Comnenus, who ascended to the throne after another anti-Latin riot in Constantinople. Andronicus murdered Manuel’s widow and son Alexius II. He posed as the champion of Byzantine patriotism and of the oppressed peasantry. But to enforce his reforms he behaved like a tyrant. By undermining the power of the aristocracy he weakened the empire’s defenses and undid much of Manuel’s work. The King of Hungary broke his treaty, and Stephen Nemanja of Serbia declared his independence from Byzantium and founded a new Serbian kingdom. Within the empire, too, disintegration proceeded. In 1185 Isaac Comnenus, governor of Cyprus, set himself up as independent ruler of the island. In the same year the Normans again invaded Greece and captured Thessalonica. The news prompted a counterrevolution in Constantinople, and Andronicus was murdered.
He was the last of the Comnenian family to wear the crown. His successor, Isaac II Angelus, was brought to power by the aristocracy. His reign, and, still more, that of his brother Alexius III, saw the collapse of what remained of the centralized machinery of Byzantine government and defense. Isaac tried at least to keep his foreign enemies in check. The Normans were driven out of Greece in 1185. But in 1186 the Bulgars began a rebellion that was to lead to the formation of the Second Bulgarian Empire. Matters were not made easier by the arrival of the Third Crusade, provoked by the loss of Jerusalem to the Muslim leader Saladin in 1187. One of its leaders was Frederick I Barbarossa, whose avowed intention was to conquer Constantinople. He died on his way to Syria. But Richard I the Lion-Heart of England appropriated Cyprus from Isaac Comnenus, and the island never again reverted to Byzantine rule.
The Fourth Crusade and the establishment of the Latin Empire
In 1195 Isaac II was deposed and blinded by his brother Alexius III. The Westerners, who had again blamed the failure of their Crusade on the Byzantines, saw ways of exploiting the situation. The emperor Henry VI had united the Norman kingdom of Sicily with the Holy Roman Empire. He inherited the ambitions of both to master Constantinople, and his brother, Philip of Swabia, was married to a daughter of the dethroned Isaac II. Alexius bought off the danger by paying tribute to Henry, but Henry died in 1197. The idea had now gained ground in the West that the conquest of Constantinople would solve a number of problems and would be of benefit not only to trade but also to the future of the Crusade and the church. In 1198 Innocent III was elected pope. The new rulers of Hungary, Serbia, and Bulgaria all turned to him for the recognition of the sovereignty that Byzantium would not give them.
It was under Innocent’s inspiration that the Fourth Crusade was launched, and it was by the diversion of that Crusade from its purpose and objective that the conquest and colonization of the Byzantine Empire by the West was realized. A multiplicity of causes and coincidences led up to the event, but the ambition of Venice, which supplied the ships, must rank high among them. A plausible excuse was offered by the cause of restoring Isaac II, whose son Alexius IV had escaped to the West to seek help, and who made lavish promises of reward to his benefactors. But when, in 1203, the Crusaders drove Alexius III out of Constantinople, Isaac II and his son proved incapable either of fulfilling the promises or of stifling the anti-Latin prejudice of their people, who proclaimed an emperor of their own in the person of Alexius V. The Venetians and Crusaders therefore felt justified in taking their own reward by conquering and dividing Constantinople and the Byzantine provinces among themselves. The city fell to them in April 1204. They worked off their resentment against the inhabitants in an unparalleled orgy of looting and destruction, which did irreparable damage to the city and immeasurable harm to East–West understanding.
The Venetians, led by their doge, Enrico Dandolo, gained most from the enterprise by appropriating the principal harbours and islands on the trade routes. The Crusaders set about the conquest of the European and Asiatic provinces. The first Latin emperor, Baldwin I, was the suzerain of the feudal principalities that they established in Thrace, Thessalonica, Athens, and the Morea (Peloponnese). He soon came into conflict with the ruler of Bulgaria. Still more serious was the opposition offered by the three provincial centres of Byzantine resistance. At Trebizond (Trabzon) on the Black Sea, two brothers of the Comnenian family laid claim to the imperial title. In Epirus in northwestern Greece Michael Angelus Ducas, a relative of Alexius III, made his capital at Arta and harassed the Crusader states in Thessaly. The third centre of resistance was based on the city of Nicaea in Anatolia, where Theodore I Lascaris, another relative of Alexius III, was crowned as emperor in 1208 by a patriarch of his own making. Of the three, Nicaea lay nearest to Constantinople, between the Latin Empire and the Seljuq sultanate of Rūm; and its emperors proved worthy of the Byzantine traditions of fighting on two fronts at once and of skillful diplomacy. Theodore Lascaris and his son-in-law John III Vatatzes built up at Nicaea a microcosm of the Byzantine Empire and church in exile. The Latins were thus never able to gain a permanent foothold in Anatolia; and even in Europe their position was constantly threatened by the Byzantine rulers of northern Greece, though in the centre and south of the country their conquests were more lasting.
The most successful of the Latin emperors was Baldwin’s brother, Henry of Flanders, after whose death in 1216 the Latin Empire lost the initiative and the recovery of Constantinople became a foreseeable goal for the Byzantines in exile. The Latin regime was prolonged less by its own vitality than by the inability of the successor states of Epirus and Nicaea to cooperate. In 1224 Theodore Ducas of Epirus, who had extended his territories across the north of Greece and far into Bulgaria, wrested Thessalonica from the Latins and was crowned emperor there in defiance of the Emperor in Nicaea. In 1230, however, he was defeated in battle against the Bulgars before reaching Constantinople; and his defeat gave John III Ducas Vatatzes the chance to extend his own empire into Europe, to ally with the Bulgars, and so to encircle Constantinople. Theodore’s successor was made to renounce his imperial title, and Thessalonica surrendered to the empire of Nicaea in 1246. The Mongol invasion of Anatolia, which had meanwhile thrown the East into confusion, was of great benefit to Nicaea, for it weakened the Seljuq sultanate and isolated the rival empire of Trebizond.
John Vatatzes might well have crowned his achievements by taking Constantinople had he not died in 1254. When his son Theodore II Lascaris (1254–58) died in 1258, leaving an infant son, John IV, the regency and then the throne in Nicaea were taken over by Michael VIII Palaeologus (reigned 1259–82). Michael came from one of the aristocratic families of Nicaea whom Theodore II had mistrusted. But it was he who carried the work of the Lascarid emperors to its logical conclusion. The Byzantine state in Epirus had revived under Michael II Ducas, who set his sights on Thessalonica. Despite several efforts to reach a diplomatic settlement, the issue between the rival contenders had finally to be resolved in battle at Pelagonia in Macedonia in 1259. Michael II was supported by William of Villehardouin, the French prince of the Morea, and by Manfred, the Hohenstaufen king of Sicily. The victory went to the army of Nicaea. Two years later a general of that army entered Constantinople. The last of the Latin emperors, Baldwin II, fled to Italy; and the Venetians were dispossessed of their lucrative commercial centre. In August 1261 Michael VIII was crowned as emperor in Constantinople; the boy heir to the throne of Nicaea, John IV Lascaris, was blinded and imprisoned. In this way, the dynasty of Palaeologus, the last to reign in Constantinople, was inaugurated.
The empire under the Palaeologi: 1261–1453
The empire in exile at Nicaea had become a manageable and almost self-sufficient unit, with a thriving economy based on agriculture and, latterly, on trade with the Seljuqs. It had no navy but the land frontiers in Anatolia, policed by well-paid troops, were stronger than they had been since the 12th century. By stretching the frontiers into Europe the empire had not dissipated its strength; for the possession of Thessalonica balanced that of Nicaea. When the seat of government was moved from Nicaea to Constantinople, that balance was upset, the economy was reoriented, and the defense system in Anatolia began to break down. Constantinople was still the New Jerusalem for the Byzantines. To leave it in foreign hands was unthinkable. But after the dismemberment of the empire by the Fourth Crusade, the city was no longer the focal point of an integrated structure. It was more like an immense city-state in the midst of a number of more or less independent provinces. Much of Greece and the islands remained in French or Italian hands. The Byzantine rulers of Epirus and Thessaly, like the emperors in Trebizond, refused to recognize Michael VIII as emperor. His treatment of the Lascarid heir of Nicaea, for which the patriarch Arsenius excommunicated him, appalled many of his own subjects and provoked what was known as the Arsenite schism in the Byzantine Church. Many in Anatolia, loyal to the memory of the Lascarid emperors who had enriched and protected them, condemned Michael VIII as a usurper.
The remnants of the Byzantine Empire in 1265.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Michael VIII
The new dynasty was thus founded in an atmosphere of dissension, but its founder was determined that it should succeed. He took measures for the rehabilitation, repopulation, and defense of Constantinople. He stimulated a revival of trade by granting privileges to Italian merchants. The Genoese, who had agreed to lend him ships for the recovery of the city from their Venetian rivals, were especially favoured; and soon they had built their own commercial colony at Galata opposite Constantinople, and cornered most of what had long been a Venetian monopoly. Inevitably, this led to a conflict between Genoa and Venice, of which the Byzantines were the main victims. Some territory was taken back from the Latins, notably in the Morea and the Greek islands. But little was added to the imperial revenue; and Michael VIII’s campaigns there and against Epirus and Thessaly ate up the resources that had been accumulated by the emperors at Nicaea.
The dominating influence on Byzantine policy for most of Michael’s reign was the threat of reconquest by the Western powers. Charles of Anjou, the brother of the French king Louis IX, displaced Manfred of Sicily and inherited his title in 1266; he then organized a coalition of all parties interested in reestablishing the Latin empire, posing as the pope’s champion to lead a Crusade against the schismatic Greeks. Michael VIII countered this threat by offering to submit the Church of Constantinople to the see of Rome, thereby inviting the pope’s protection and removing the only moral pretext for a repetition of the Fourth Crusade. The offer to reunite the churches had been made as a diplomatic ploy to previous popes by previous emperors, but never in such compelling circumstances. Pope Gregory X accepted it at its face value, and at the second Council of Lyon in 1274 a Byzantine delegation professed obedience to the Holy See in the name of their emperor. Michael’s policy, sincere or not, was violently opposed by most of his people, and he had to persecute and imprison large numbers of them in order to persuade the papacy that the union of the churches was being implemented. Later popes were not convinced by the pretense. In 1281 Charles I (Charles of Anjou) invaded the empire. His army was beaten back in Albania, but he at once prepared a new invasion by sea, supported by Venice, Serbia, Bulgaria, and the separatist rulers of northern Greece. His plans, however, were wrecked in 1282 by a rebellion in Sicily called the Sicilian Vespers and by the intervention of Peter III of Aragon, which the Byzantines encouraged. Michael VIII died at the end of the same year. He had saved his empire from its most persistent enemy, but he died condemned by his church and people as a heretic and a traitor.
Whatever sins he may have committed in the eyes of the Eastern Orthodox Church, it is true that Michael VIII, by concentrating on the danger from the West, neglected, if he did not betray, the eastern provinces where he had come to power. Frontier defense troops in Anatolia were withdrawn to Europe or neglected, and bands of Turkish raiders, driven westward by the upheaval of the Mongol invasion, began to penetrate into Byzantine territory. Like the Seljuqs in the 11th century, the new arrivals found little organized opposition. Some of the local Byzantines even collaborated with them out of their own antipathy to the Emperor in Constantinople. By about 1280 the Turks were plundering the fertile valleys of western Anatolia, cutting communications between the Greek cities, and their emirs were beginning to carve out small principalities. Michael VIII’s network of diplomacy covered the Mongols of Iran and the Golden Horde in Russia, as well as the Mamlūks of Egypt. But diplomacy was ineffective against Muslim Ghazis (warriors inspired by the ideal of holy war); by the time the threat from Italy was removed in 1282, it was almost too late to save Byzantine Anatolia.
Nor was it possible to raise armies to fight in Europe and Asia simultaneously. The native recruitment fostered by the Comnenian emperors had fallen off since 1261. Estates held in pronoia had become hereditary possessions of their landlords, who ignored or were relieved of the obligation to render military service to the government. The knights of the Fourth Crusade had found many familiar elements of feudalism in the social structure of the Byzantine provinces. By the end of the 13th century the development had gone much further. The officers of the Byzantine army were still mostly drawn from the native aristocracy. But the troops were hired, and the cost of maintaining a large army in Europe, added to the lavish subsidies that Michael VIII paid to his friends and allies, crippled the economy.
Andronicus II
Michael’s son Andronicus II (reigned 1282–1328) unwisely attempted to economize by cutting down the size of the army and disbanding the navy. Unemployed Byzantine sailors sold their services to the new Turkish emirs, who were already raiding the Aegean islands. The Genoese became the suppliers and defenders of Constantinople by sea, which excited the jealousy of the Venetians to the pitch of war and led to the first of a series of naval battles off Constantinople in 1296. In reaction against his father’s policy, Andronicus II pursued a line of almost total isolation from the papacy and the West. The union of Lyon was solemnly repudiated and Orthodoxy restored, to the deep satisfaction of most Byzantines. But there were still divisive conflicts in society. The Arsenite schism in the church was not healed until 1310; the rulers of Epirus and Thessaly remained defiant and kept contact with the successors of Charles I in Italy; and the people of Anatolia aired their grievances in rebellion. As the Turks encroached on their land, refugees in growing numbers fled to the coast or to Constantinople, bringing new problems for the government. In 1302 a band of Turkish warriors defeated the Byzantine army near Nicomedia in northwestern Anatolia. Its leader, Osman I, was the founder of the Osmanli, or Ottoman, people, who were soon to overrun the Byzantine Empire in Europe.
In 1303 Andronicus hired a professional army of mercenaries, the Grand Catalan Company. The Catalans made one successful counterattack against the Turks in Anatolia. But they were unruly and unpopular, and when their leader was murdered they turned against their employers. For some years they used the Gallipoli Peninsula as a base from which to ravage Thrace, inviting thousands of Turks to come over and help them. The Catalans finally moved west; in 1311 they conquered Athens from the French and established the Catalan Duchy of Athens and Thebes. The Turks whom they left behind were not ejected from Gallipoli until 1312. The cost of hiring the Catalans, and then of repairing the damage that they had done, had to be met by desperate measures. The face value of the Byzantine gold coin, the hyperpyron, was lowered when its gold content was reduced to a mere 50 percent; and the people had to bear still greater burdens of taxation—some payable in kind by farmers. Inflation and rising prices led to near famine in Constantinople, the population of which was swollen by vast numbers of refugees.
Cultural revival
Materially, the empire seemed almost beyond hope of recovery in the early 14th century, but spiritually and culturally it showed a remarkable vitality. The church, no longer troubled over the question of union with Rome, grew in prestige and authority. The patriarchs of Constantinople commanded the respect of all the Eastern Orthodox churches, even beyond the imperial boundaries. Andronicus II, himself a pious theologian, yielded to the patriarch the ancient right of imperial jurisdiction over the monastic settlement on Mount Athos. There was a new flowering of the Byzantine mystical tradition in a movement known as Hesychasm, whose chief spokesman was Gregory Palamas, a monk from Athos. The theology of the Hesychasts was thought to be heterodox by some theologians, and a controversy arose in the second quarter of the 14th century that had political undertones and was as disruptive to the church and state as the Iconoclastic dispute had been in an earlier age. It was not resolved until 1351.
Interior of the monastery church at Daphne Greece, 11th century, crowned with a Byzantine dome mosaic of Christ Pantocrator.Rene Percheron-J.P. Ziolo
The revival of mystical speculation and the monastic life may have been in part a reaction against the contemporary revival of secular literature and learning. Scholarship of all kinds was patronized by Andronicus II. As in the 11th century, interest was mainly centred on a rediscovery of ancient Greek learning. The scholar Maximus Planudes compiled a famous anthology and translated a number of Latin works into Greek, though knowledge of Latin was rare and most of the Byzantine scholars prided themselves on having in their Hellenic heritage an exclusive possession that set them apart from the Latins. A notable exception was Demetrius Cydones who, like Michael Psellus, managed affairs of state for a number of emperors for close to 50 years. Cydones translated the works of Thomas Aquinas into Greek; he was the forerunner of a minority of Byzantine intellectuals who joined the Roman Church and looked to the West to save their empire from ruin. More typical of his class was Theodore Metochites, the Grand Logothete, or chancellor, of Andronicus II, whose encyclopaedic learning rivaled that of Psellus. His pupil Nicephorus Gregoras, in addition to his researches in philosophy, theology, mathematics, and astronomy, wrote a history of his age. The tradition of Byzantine historiography, maintained by George Acropolites, the historian of the Empire of Nicaea, was continued in the 14th century by George Pachymeres, by Gregoras, and finally by the emperor John VI Cantacuzenus, who wrote his memoirs after his abdication in 1354.
Andronicus III and John Cantacuzenus
The histories they wrote tell more of politics and personalities than of the underlying social and economic tensions in their society that were to find expression in a series of civil wars. Trouble broke out in 1320 when Andronicus II, purely for family reasons, disinherited his grandson Andronicus III. The cause of the young emperor was taken up by his friends, and there was periodic warfare from 1321 to 1328, when the older Andronicus had to yield the throne. It was in some ways a victory for the younger generation of the aristocracy, of whom the leading light was John Cantacuzenus. It was he who guided the empire’s policies during the reign of Andronicus III (1328–41). They were men of greater drive and determination, but the years of fighting had made recovery still more difficult and had given new chances to their enemies. In 1329 they fought and lost a battle at Pelekanon (near Nicomedia) against Osman’s son, Orhan, whose Turkish warriors went on to capture Nicaea in 1331 and Nicomedia in 1337. Northwestern Anatolia, once the heart of the empire, was now lost. There seemed no alternative but to accept the fact and to come to terms with the Ottomans and the other Turkish emirs. By so doing, Andronicus III and Cantacuzenus were able to call on the services of almost limitless numbers of Turkish soldiers to fight for them against their other enemies: the Italians in the Aegean islands and the Serbs and the Bulgars in Macedonia and Thrace.
The power of Serbia, which Andronicus II had managed to control by diplomatic means, grew alarmingly after the accession of Stefan Dušan to the Serbian throne in 1331. Dušan exploited to the full the numerous embarrassments of the Byzantines and in 1346 announced his ambitions by having himself crowned as emperor of the Serbs and Greeks. The greatest practical achievement of Andronicus III was the restoration to Byzantine rule of the long-separated provinces of Epirus and Thessaly. But only a few years later, in 1348, the whole of northern Greece was swallowed up in the Serbian Empire of Stefan Dušan.
When Andronicus III died in 1341, civil war broke out for a second time. The contestants on that occasion were John Cantacuzenus, who had expected to act as regent for the boy-heir John V, and his political rivals led by his former partisan Alexius Apocaucus, the patriarch John Calecas, and the empress mother Anne of Savoy, who held power in Constantinople. Cantacuzenus, befriended and then rejected by Dušan of Serbia, was crowned as Emperor John VI in Thrace in 1346; and, with the help of Turkish troops, he fought his way to victory in the following year. Like Romanus Lecapenus, he protested that he was no more than the protector of the legitimate heir to the throne, John V Palaeologus. His brief reign, from 1347 to 1354, might have turned the tide of Byzantine misfortunes had not the second civil war provoked unprecedented social and political consequences. In the cities of Thrace and Macedonia the people vented their dissatisfaction with the ruling aristocracy by revolution. It was directed mainly against Cantacuzenus and the class that he represented. The movement was most memorable and lasting in Thessalonica, where a faction known as the Zealots seized power in a coup d’état and governed the city as an almost independent commune until 1350.
The second civil war was consequently even more destructive of property and ruinous to the economy than the first. At the same time, in 1347, the Black Death decimated the population of Constantinople and other parts of the empire. John VI Cantacuzenus, nevertheless, did what he could to restore the economy and stability of the empire. To coordinate the scattered fragments of its territory he assigned them as appanages to individual members of the imperial family. His son Manuel took over the province of the Morea in 1349 with the rank of despot and governed it with growing success until his death in 1380; his eldest son, Matthew, was given a principality in Thrace; while the junior emperor John V, who had married a daughter of Cantacuzenus, ruled in Thessalonica after 1351.
Cantacuzenus also tried but failed to weaken the economic stranglehold of the Genoese by rebuilding a Byzantine war fleet and merchant navy. The effort involved him in warfare, first on his own and then as an unwilling partner of the Venetians against the Genoese, from which Byzantium emerged as the loser. The revenue of the Genoese colony at Galata, derived from custom dues, was now far greater than that of Constantinople. The empire’s poverty was reflected in dilapidated buildings and falling standards of luxury. The crown jewels had been pawned to Venice during the civil war, and the Byzantine gold coin, hopelessly devalued, had given place in international trade to the Venetian ducat. More and more, Byzantium was at the mercy of its foreign competitors and enemies, who promoted and exploited the political and family rivalries among the ruling class. John Cantacuzenus was never popular as an emperor, and feeling against him came to a head when some of his Ottoman mercenaries took the occasion of the destruction of Gallipoli by earthquake to occupy and fortify the city in March 1354. It was their first permanent establishment in Europe, at the key point of the crossing from Asia. In November of the same year John V Palaeologus, encouraged by the Anti-Cantacuzenist Party, forced his way into Constantinople. In December Cantacuzenus abdicated and became a monk. Though his son Matthew, who had by then been crowned as coemperor, fought on for a few years, the dynasty of Cantacuzenus was not perpetuated.
Turkish expansion
John Cantacuzenus’ relationship with the Turks had been based on personal friendship with their leaders, among them Orhan, to whom he gave his daughter in marriage. But once the Turks had set up a base on European soil and had seen the possibilities of further conquest, such relationships were no longer practicable. Stefan Dušan, who very nearly realized his ambition to found a new Serbo-Byzantine empire, was the only man who might have prevented the subsequent rapid expansion of the Turks into the Balkans, but he died in 1355 and his empire split up. The new emperor, John V, hoped that the Western world would sense the danger, and in 1355 he addressed an appeal for help to the Pope. The popes were concerned for the fate of the Christian East but guarded in their offers to Constantinople so long as the Byzantine Church remained in schism from Rome. In 1366 John V visited Hungary to beg for help, but in vain. In the same year his cousin Amadeo, count of Savoy, brought a small force to Constantinople and recaptured Gallipoli from the Turks, who had by then advanced far into Thrace. Amadeo persuaded the Emperor to go to Rome and make his personal submission to the Holy See in 1369. On his way home, John was detained at Venice as an insolvent debtor; during his absence the Turks scored their first victory over the successors of Stefan Dušan on the Marica River near Adrianople in 1371. The whole of Macedonia was open to them. The remaining Serbian princes and the ruler of Bulgaria became their vassals, and in 1373 the Emperor was forced to do the same.
The Byzantine Empire in 1355.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Byzantium became a vassal state of the Turks, pledged to pay tribute and to provide military assistance to the Ottoman sultan. The possession of Constantinople thereafter was disputed by the Emperor’s sons and grandsons in a series of revolutions, which were encouraged and sometimes instigated by the Turks, the Genoese, or the Venetians. John V’s son Andronicus IV, aided by the Genoese and the sultan Murad I, mastered the city for three years (1376–79). He rewarded the Turks by giving back Gallipoli to them, and Murad made his first European capital at Adrianople. The Venetians helped John V to regain his throne in 1379, and the empire was once again divided into appanages under his sons. Only his second son, Manuel, showed any independence of action. For nearly five years, from 1382 to 1387, Manuel reigned as emperor at Thessalonica and laboured to make it a rallying point for resistance against the encroaching Turks. But the city fell to Murad’s army in April 1387. When the Turks then drove deeper into Macedonia, the Serbs again organized a counteroffensive but were overwhelmed at Kossovo in 1389.
Manuel II and respite from the Turks
The loss of Thessalonica and the Battle of Kossovo sealed off Constantinople by land. The new sultan Bayezid I (1389–1402) intended to make it his capital; when Manuel II Palaeologus came to that throne at his father’s death in 1391, the Sultan warned him that he was emperor only inside the city walls. The Turks already controlled the rest of Byzantine Europe, except for the south of Greece.
Manuel II Paleologus, detail from a Greek manuscript, 15th century; in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
In 1393 Bayezid completed his conquest of Bulgaria, and soon afterward he laid siege to Constantinople. The blockade was to last for many years. Manuel II, like his father, pinned his hopes of rescue on the West. A great Crusade against the Turks was organized by the King of Hungary, but it was defeated at Nicopolis on the Danube in 1396. In 1399 the French marshal Boucicaut, who had been at Nicopolis and had returned to the relief of Constantinople with a small army, persuaded Manuel to travel to western Europe to put the Byzantine case in person. From the end of 1399 to June 1403 the Emperor visited in Italy, France, and England, leaving his nephew John VII in charge of Constantinople. Manuel’s journey did something to stimulate Western interest in Greek learning. His friend and ambassador in the West, Manuel Chrysoloras, a pupil of Demetrius Cydones, was appointed to teach Greek at Florence. The Pope instituted a defense fund for Constantinople. Interest and sympathy were forthcoming but little in the way of practical help. During Manuel’s absence, however, the Ottomans were defeated at Ankara by the Mongol leader Timur (Tamerlane) in July 1402. Bayezid was captured and his empire in Asia was shattered. His four sons contended with each other to secure possession of the European provinces, which had been little affected by the Mongol invasion, and to reunite the Ottoman dominions. In these wholly unexpected circumstances the Byzantines found themselves the favoured allies first of one Turkish contender, then of another. The blockade of Constantinople was lifted. Thessalonica—with Mount Athos and other places—was restored to Byzantine rule, and the payment of tribute to the sultan was annulled. In 1413 Mehmed I, helped and promoted by the emperor Manuel, triumphed over his rivals and became sultan of the reintegrated Ottoman Empire.
During his reign, from 1413 to 1421, the Byzantines enjoyed their last respite. Manuel II, aware that it could not last, made the most of it by strengthening the defenses and administration of the fragments of his empire. The most flourishing province in the last years was the Despotate of Morea. Its prosperity had been built up first by the sons of John Cantacuzenus (who died there in 1383) and then by the son and grandson of John V—Theodore I and Theodore II Palaeologus. Its capital city of Mistra became a haven for Byzantine scholars and artists and a centre of the last revival of Byzantine culture, packed with churches, monasteries, and palaces. Among its scholars was George Gemistus Plethon, a Platonist who dreamed of a rebirth of Hellenism on Hellenic soil.
Final Turkish assault
When Murad II became sultan, in 1421, the days of Constantinople and of Hellenism were numbered. In 1422 Murad revoked all the privileges accorded to the Byzantines by his father and laid siege to Constantinople. His armies invaded Greece and blockaded Thessalonica. The city was then a possession of Manuel II’s son Andronicus, who in 1423 handed it over to the Venetians. For seven years Thessalonica was a Venetian colony, until, in March 1430, the Sultan assaulted and captured it. Meanwhile, Manuel II had died in 1425, leaving his son John VIII as emperor. John, who had already traveled to Venice and Hungary in search of help, was prepared to reopen negotiations for the union of the churches as a means of stirring the conscience of Western Christendom. His father had been skeptical about the benefits of such a policy, knowing that it would antagonize most of his own people and arouse the suspicion of the Turks. The proposal was made, however, at the Council of Florence in 1439, attended by the emperor John VIII, his patriarch, and many Orthodox bishops and dignitaries. After protracted and difficult discussions, they agreed to submit to the authority of Rome. The union of Florence was badly received by the citizens of Constantinople and by most of the Eastern Orthodox world. But it had its notable adherents, such as the bishops Bessarion of Nicaea and Isidore of Kiev, both of whom retired to Italy as cardinals of the Roman Church. Bessarion’s learning and library helped to encourage further Western interest in Greek scholarship. The union of Florence also helped to stimulate a Crusade against the Turks. Once again it was led by the king of Hungary, Władysław III of Poland, supported by George Branković of Serbia and by János Hunyadi of Transylvania. But there were disagreements among its leaders, and the Christian army was annihilated at Varna in 1444.
The Byzantine collapse and the Ottoman triumph followed swiftly thereafter. In 1448 Constantine XI (or XII), the last emperor, left Mistra for Constantinople when his brother John VIII died without issue. His two other brothers, Thomas and Demetrius, continued to govern the Morea, the last surviving Byzantine province. In 1449 Mehmed II (sultan 1444–46 and 1451–81) began to prepare for the final assault on Constantinople. No further substantial help came from the West, and the formal celebration of the union of the churches in Hagia Sophia in 1452 was greeted with a storm of protest. Even in their extremity, the Byzantines would not buy their freedom at the expense of their Eastern Orthodox faith. They found the prospect of being ruled by the Turks less odious than that of being indebted to the Latins. When the crisis came, however, the Venetians in Constantinople, and a Genoese contingent commanded by Giovanni Giustiniani, wholeheartedly cooperated in the defense of the city. Mehmed II laid siege to the walls in April 1453. His ships were obstructed by a chain that the Byzantines had thrown across the mouth of the Golden Horn. The ships were therefore dragged overland to the harbour from the seaward side, bypassing the defenses. The Sultan’s heavy artillery continually bombarded the land walls until, on May 29, some of his soldiers forced their way in. Giustiniani was mortally wounded. The emperor Constantine was last seen fighting on foot at one of the gates.
The Sultan allowed his victorious troops three days and nights of plunder before he took possession of his new capital. The Ottoman Empire had now superseded the Byzantine Empire; and some Greeks, like the contemporary historian Critobulus of Imbros, recognized the logic of the change by bestowing on the Sultan all the attributes of the emperor. The material structure of the empire, which had long been crumbling, was now under the management of the sultan-basileus. But the Eastern Orthodox faith was less susceptible to change. The Sultan acknowledged the fact that the church had proved to be the most enduring element in the Byzantine world, and he gave the Patriarch of Constantinople an unprecedented measure of temporal authority by making him answerable for all Christians living under Ottoman rule.
Interior of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.© estivillml/iStock.com
The last scattered pockets of Byzantine resistance were eliminated within a decade after 1453. Athens fell to the Turks in 1456–58, and in 1460 the two despots of Morea surrendered. Thomas fled to Italy, Demetrius to the Sultan’s court. In 1461 Trebizond, capital of the last remnant of Greek empire, which had maintained its precarious independence by paying court to Turks and Mongols alike, finally succumbed; the transformation of the Byzantine world into the Ottoman world was at last complete. Donald MacGillivray Nicol The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Byzantine emperors
The table provides a chronological list of the emperors of the Byzantine Empire.
Byzantine emperors* *For emperors of the Eastern Roman Empire (at Constantinople) before the fall of Rome, see Roman Republic and Empire. Zeno 474–491 Anastasius I 491–518 Justin I 518–527 Justinian I 527–565 Justin II 565–578 Tiberius II Constantine 578–582 Maurice 582–602 Phokas 602–610 Heraclius 610–641 Constantine III 641 Heraclonas 641 Constans II 641–668 Constantine IV 668–685 Justinian II 685–695 Leontius 695–698 Tiberius III 698–705 Justinian II (restored) 705–711 Philippikos Vardan 711–713 Anastasios II 713–715 Theodosios III 715–717 Leo III 717–741 Constantine V Copronymus 741–775 Leo IV 775–780 Constantine VI 780–797 Irene 797–802 Nikephoros I 802–811 Stauracius 811 Michael I Rhangabe 811–813 Leo V 813–820 Michael II 820–829 Theophilus 829–842 Michael III 842–867 Basil I 867–886 Leo VI 886–912 Alexander 912–913 Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus 913–959 Romanus I Lecapenus 920–944 Romanus II 959–963 Nicephorus II Phocas 963–969 John I Tzimisces 969–976 href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/basil-ii" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Basil II 976–1025 Constantine VIII 1025–28 Romanos III Argyros 1028–34 Michael IV 1034–41 Michael V 1041–42 Zoe and Theodora 1042 Constantine IX Monomachos 1042–55 Theodora 1055–56 Michael VI 1056–57 Isaac I Komnenos 1057–59 Constantine X Doukas 1059–67 Romanos IV Diogenes 1067–71 Michael VII Doukas 1071–78 Nikephoros III Botaneiates 1078–81 Alexios I Komnenos 1081–1118 John II Komnenos 1118–43 Manuel I Komnenos 1143–80 Alexios II Komnenos 1180–83 Andronikos I Komnenos 1183–85 Isaac II Angelos 1185–95 Alexios III Angelos 1195–1203 Isaac II Angelos (restored) and Alexios IV Angelos (joint ruler) 1203–04 Alexios V Murtzouphlos 1204 Latin emperors of Constantinople Baldwin I 1204–06 Henry 1206–16 Peter 1217 Yolande (empress) 1217–19 Robert 1221–28 Baldwin II 1228–61 John 1231–37 Nicaean emperors Constantine (XI) Lascaris 1204–05? Theodore I Lascaris 1205?–22 John III Ducas Vatatzes 1222–54 Theodore II Lascaris 1254–58 John IV Lascaris 1258–61 Greek emperors restored Michael VIII Palaeologus 1261–82 Andronicus II Palaeologus and Michael IX Palaeologus (joint ruler 1295–1320) 1282–1328 Andronicus III Palaeologus 1328–41 John V Palaeologus 1341–76 John VI Cantacuzenus 1347–54 Andronicus IV Palaeologus 1376–79 John V Palaeologus (restored) 1379–90 John VII Palaeologus 1390 John V Palaeologus (restored) 1390–91 Manuel II Palaeologus and John VIII Palaeologus (joint ruler 1421–25) 1391–1425 John VIII Palaeologus 1425–48 Constantine XI Palaeologus 1449–53
Citation Information
Article Title: Byzantine Empire
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 31 July 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/Byzantine-Empire
Access Date: August 13, 2019
Additional Reading
General works
Alexander P. Kazhdan (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 3 vol. (1991), treats all aspects of Byzantine studies. Donald M. Nicol, A Biographical Dictionary of the Byzantine Empire (1991), is a useful reference work. The geography of the Byzantine Empire is treated in Alfred Philippson, Das byzantinische Reich als geographische Erscheinung (1939); and its church and theology in Hans-Georg Beck, Kirche und theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich, 2nd ed. (1977); and John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 2nd ed. (1979, reissued 1987). Useful collections of translated extracts from primary sources are Ernest Barker, Social and Political Thought in Byzantium: From Justinian I to the Last Palaeologus (1957, reissued 1961); and Deno John Geanakoplos (compiler), Byzantium: Church, Society, and Civilization Seen Through Contemporary Eyes (1984).
The following surveys and analyses provide brief introductions to Byzantine history and civilization: Norman H. Baynes and H.St.L.B. Moss (eds.), Byzantium: An Introduction to East Roman Civilization (1948, reissued 1969); J.M. Hussey, The Byzantine World, 4th ed. (1970); and Philip Whitting (ed.), Byzantium: An Introduction, new ed. (1981). Deeper study of Byzantine history should begin with George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, rev. ed. (1969, reissued 1980; originally published in German, 3rd ed., 1963); The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 4, The Byzantine Empire, 2nd ed., 2 parts (1966–67), which contains extensive bibliographies; and John Julius Norwich, Byzantium, 3 vol. (1988–95). Various aspects of Byzantine history and civilization are discussed in Norman H. Baynes, Byzantine Studies and Other Essays (1955, reprinted 1974); Robert Browning, The Byzantine Empire, rev. ed. (1992); Franz Dölger, Byzanz und die europäische Staatenwelt (1953, reprinted 1976); H.W. Haussig, A History of Byzantine Civilization (1971; originally published in German, 1959); Alexander Kazhdan and Giles Constable, People and Power in Byzantium: An Introduction to Modern Byzantine Studies (1982); Cyril Mango, Byzantium, the Empire of New Rome (1980); and Steven Runciman, Byzantine Civilisation (1933, reissued 1994), and The Byzantine Theocracy (1977). A.A. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, 324–1453, 2nd ed. rev. (1952, reissued 1980; originally published in Russian in different eds., 1917–25), is still of interest, although now somewhat out-of-date.
Ongoing research is found in these periodicals: Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (annual), published in Birmingham; Byzantinische Zeitschrift (semiannual), published in Munich; Byzantion (semiannual), published in Brussels; Byzantinoslavica (semiannual), published in Prague; Dumbarton Oaks Papers (annual), published in Washington, D.C.; Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik (annual), published in Vienna; Revue des Études Byzantines (annual), published in Paris; Travaux et Mémoires (irregular), published in Paris by the Centre de Recherche d’Histoire et Civilisation Byzantines; and Vizantiĭskiĭ Vremennik (annual), published in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The empire to 867
The Roman and Christian background
H.St.L.B. Moss, “The Formation of the East Roman Empire, 330–717,” in The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 4, part 1, 2nd ed. (1966), pp. 1–41, is an introduction to the problems discussed in this section. Further reading might include A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey, 3 vol. (1964, reprinted in 2 vol., 1986); Norman H. Baynes, Constantine the Great and the Christian Church (1930, reprinted 1975); Gilbert Dagron, Naissance d’une capitale: Constantinople et ses institutions de 330 à 451, 2nd ed. (1984); and the survey by Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, ad 150–750 (1971, reissued 1989; also published as The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad, 1971).
The 5th and 6th centuries
J.B. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire from the Death of Theodosius I. to the Death of Justinian (ad 395 to ad 565), 2 vol. (1923, reprinted 1963); and Ernst Stein, Histoire du Bas-Empire, 2 vol. in 3, ed. by Jean-Remy Palanque (1949–59, reprinted 1968; vol. 1 originally published in German, 1928), give extensive and well-documented coverage of the whole period. Other works on the period are Averil Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, ad 395–600 (1993); John W. Barker, Justinian and the Later Roman Empire (1966, reissued 1977); and Robert Browning, Justinian and Theodora, rev. ed. (1987). The role of the demes and factions is analyzed by Alan Cameron, Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium (1976).
The 7th century and the Heraclian reforms
A readable survey of this and the following three centuries is Romilly Jenkins, Byzantium: The Imperial Centuries, A.D. 610–1071 (1966, reissued 1993). A general overview of the 7th century is found in the essays collected in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, vol. 13 (1959, reprinted 1967). Additional studies are John F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture (1990); and Warren Treadgold, The Byzantine Revival, 780–842 (1988). Works on the foundation of the themes and on agrarian problems are Johannes Karayannopulos, Die Entstehung der byzantinischen Themenordnung (1959); and Paul Lemerle, The Agrarian History of Byzantium from the Origins to the Twelfth Century, trans. from French (1979). Byzantium’s relations with eastern Europe are discussed in Dimitri Obolensky, “The Empire and Its Northern Neighbours, 565–1018,” The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 4, part 1, 2nd ed. (1966), pp. 473–518, and in his The Byzantine Commonwealth (1971, reprinted 1982).
The age of iconoclasm (717–867)
The standard survey remains J.B. Bury, A History of the Eastern Roman Empire from the Fall of Irene to the Accession of Basil I, A.D. 802–867 (1912, reissued 1965). A good history of Iconoclasm is Edward James Martin, A History of the Iconoclastic Controversy (1930, reprinted 1978); and various aspects of the matter are treated in Anthony Bryer and Judith Herrin (eds.), Iconoclasm (1977). Of particular importance are the works of F. Dvornik: Les Légendes de Constantin et de Méthode vues de Byzance, 2nd ed. (1969), Les Slaves, Byzance et Rome au IXe siècle (1926, reprinted 1970), The Photian Schism: History and Legend (1948, reprinted 1970), and Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs (1970). H. Grégoire, “The Amorians and Macedonians, 842–1025,” in The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 4, part 1, 2nd ed. (1966), pp. 105–192, is also useful. Relations between Byzantium and the Arabs are discussed in A.A. Vasiliev, Vizantiia i araby, vol. 1, Politicheskiia otnosheniia Vizantii i arabov za vremia Amoriĭskoĭ dinastii (1900), available also in a French translation, Byzance et les Arabes, vol. 1 (1935).
From 867 to the Ottoman conquest
The Macedonian era (867–1025)
Works covering this period include Robert Browning, Byzantium and Bulgaria (1975); J.B. Bury, The Imperial Administrative System in the Ninth Century (1911, reprinted 1970); J.M. Hussey, Church & Learning in the Byzantine Empire, 867–1185 (1937, reissued 1963); Steven Runciman, A History of the First Bulgarian Empire (1930), The Eastern Schism (1955, reprinted 1983), and The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus and His Reign (1929, reissued 1988); Gustave Schlumberger, L’Epopée byzantine à la fin du dixième siècle, 3 vol. (1896–1905, reprinted 1969); A.A. Vasiliev, Vizantiia i araby, vol. 2, Politicheskiia otnosheniia Vizantii i arabov za vremia Makedonskoĭ dinastii (1902), available also in a French translation, Byzance et les Arabes, vol. 2 (1935); Albert Vogt, Basile Ier, empereur de Byzance (867–886) et la civilisation byzantine à la fin du IXe siècle (1908, reprinted 1973); and Arnold Toynbee, Constantine Porphyrogenitus and His World (1973).
Byzantine decline and subjection to Western influences (1025–1260)
The period of decline and renewal (1025–1180) is discussed in Michael Angold, The Byzantine Empire 1025–1204 (1984); Ferdinand Chalandon, Essai sur le règne d’Alexis Ier Comnène (1081–1118) (1900, reissued 1971), and Jean II Comnène, 1118–1143, et Manuel I Comnène, 1143–1180 (1912, reissued in 2 vol., 1971); Michael Angold, Church and Society in Byzantium Under the Comneni, 1081–1261 (1995); Paul Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180 (1993); and Demetrios I. Polemis, The Doukai: A Contribution to Byzantine Prosopography (1968). Works on Byzantium and the Crusades are Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vol. (1951–54, reprinted 1987); Kenneth M. Setton (ed.), A History of the Crusades, vol. 1–3 (1955–75); Ralph-Johannes Lilie, Byzantium and the Crusader States, 1096–1204 (1993; originally published in German, 1981); and Oktawiesz Jurewicz, Andronikos I. Komnenos (1970; originally published in Polish, 1962).
Studies of Byzantine subjection to Western influence (1180–1261) include Michael Angold, A Byzantine Government in Exile: Government and Society Under the Laskarids of Nicaea, 1204–1261 (1975); Charles M. Brand, Byzantium Confronts the West, 1180–1204 (1968, reissued 1992); Alice Gardner, The Lascarids of Nicaea (1912, reissued 1967); John Godfrey, 1204, the Unholy Crusade (1980); and Donald E. Queller, The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople, 1201–1204 (1977).
The empire under the Palaeologi (1261–1453)
A survey of the political and ecclesiastical history of the period is given by Donald M. Nicol, The Last Centuries of Byzantium, 1261–1453, 2nd ed. (1993). Other works on particular periods and topics include Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, 2nd ed. (1992; originally published in German, 1953); John W. Barker, Manuel II Palaeologus (1391–1425): A Study in Late Byzantine Statesmanship (1969); Ursula Victoria Bosch, Kaiser Andronikos III. Palaiologos (1965); Deno John Geanakoplos, Emperor Michael Palaeologus and the West, 1258–1282 (1959, reissued 1973); Herbert Adams Gibbons, The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire (1916, reissued 1968); Joseph Gill, The Council of Florence (1959, reprinted 1982), and Byzantium and the Papacy, 1198–1400 (1979); Oskar Halecki, Un Empereur de Byzance à Rome (1930, reprinted 1972); Angeliki E. Laiou, Constantinople and the Latins: The Foreign Policy of Andronicus II, 1282–1328 (1972); Jean Longnon, L’Empire latin de Constantinople et la principauté de Morée (1949); John Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia (1981); William Miller, The Latins in the Levant: A History of Frankish Greece, 1204–1566 (1908, reprinted 1979), and Trebizond, the Last Greek Empire (1926, reprinted 1969); Donald M. Nicol, The Byzantine Family of Kantakouzenos (Cantacuzenus) ca. 1100–1460 (1968), Church and Society in the Last Centuries of Byzantium (1979), Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations (1988, reissued 1992), The Despotate of Epiros, 1267–1479 (1984), and The Immortal Emperor: The Life and Legend of Constantine Palaiologos, Last Emperor of the Romans (1992); Erich Trapp, Rainer Walther, and Hans-Veit Beyer (eds.), Prosopographisches Lexikon der Palaiologenzeit, 12 vol. (1976–95); Steven Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (1958, reissued 1992), The Fall of Constantinople, 1453 (1965, reissued 1990), The Great Church in Captivity (1968, reissued 1985), and The Last Byzantine Renaissance (1970); Kenneth M. Setton, "The Byzantine Background to the Italian Renaissance,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 100:1–76 (1956), and The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–1571, vol. 1–2 (1976–78); Speros Vryonis, Jr., The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh Through the Fifteenth Century (1971, reissued 1986); Ernst Werner, Die Geburt einer Grossmacht, die Osmanen (1300–1481), 4th rev. ed. (1985); Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (1938, reprinted 1971); Denis A. Zakythinos, Le Despotat grec de Morée, 2 vol., rev. ed. (1975); and John J. Yiannias (ed.), The Byzantine Tradition After the Fall of Constantinople (1991). Donald MacGillivray Nicol
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
History of Europe
Table of Contents
Introduction
Prehistory
The Metal Ages
Greeks, Romans, and barbarians
The Middle Ages
The Renaissance
The emergence of modern Europe, 1500–1648
The great age of monarchy, 1648–1789
Revolution and the growth of industrial society, 1789–1914
European society and culture since 1914
History of Europe, history of European peoples and cultures from prehistoric times to the present. Europe is a more ambiguous term than most geographic expressions. Its etymology is doubtful, as is the physical extent of the area it designates. Its western frontiers seem clearly defined by its coastline, yet the position of the British Isles remains equivocal. To outsiders, they seem clearly part of Europe. To many British and some Irish people, however, “Europe” means essentially continental Europe. To the south, Europe ends on the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Yet, to the Roman Empire, this was mare nostrum (“our sea”), an inland sea rather than a frontier. Even now, some question whether Malta or Cyprus is a European island. The greatest uncertainty lies to the east, where natural frontiers are notoriously elusive. If the Ural Mountains mark the eastern boundary of Europe, where does it lie to the south of them? Can Astrakhan, for instance, be regarded as European? The questions have more than merely geographic significance.
Encyclopædia Britannica: first edition, map of EuropeA map of Europe from the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, 1768–71.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
These questions have acquired new importance as Europe has come to be more than a geographic expression. After World War II, much was heard of “the European idea.” Essentially, this meant the idea of European unity, at first confined to western Europe but by the beginning of the 1990s seeming able at length to embrace central and eastern Europe as well.
Unity in Europe is an ancient ideal. In a sense it was implicitly prefigured by the Roman Empire. In the Middle Ages, it was imperfectly embodied first by Charlemagne’s empire and then by the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic church. Later, a number of political theorists proposed plans for European union, and both Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler tried to unite Europe by conquest.
It was not until after World War II, however, that European statesmen began to seek ways of uniting Europe peacefully on a basis of equality instead of domination by one or more great powers. Their motive was fourfold: to prevent further wars in Europe, in particular by reconciling France and Germany and helping to deter aggression by others; to eschew the protectionism and “beggar-my-neighbour” policies that had been practiced between the wars; to match the political and economic influence of the world’s new superpowers, but on a civilian basis; and to begin to civilize international relations by introducing common rules and institutions that would identify and promote the shared interests of Europe rather than the national interests of its constituent states.
Underlying this policy is the conviction that Europeans have more in common than divides them, especially in the modern world. By comparison with other continents, western Europe is small and immensely varied, divided by rivers and mountains and cut into by inlets and creeks. It is also densely populated—a mosaic of different peoples with a multiplicity of languages. Very broadly and inadequately, its peoples can be sorted into Nordic, Alpine or Celtic, and Mediterranean types, and the bulk of their languages classified as either Romance or Germanic. In this sense, what Europeans chiefly share is their diversity; and it may be this that has made them so energetic and combative. Although uniquely favoured by fertile soils and temperate climates, they have long proved themselves warlike. Successive waves of invasion, mainly from the east, were followed by centuries of rivalry and conflict, both within Europe and overseas. Many of Europe’s fields have been battlefields, and many of Europe’s cities, it has been said, were built on bones.
Yet Europeans have also been in the forefront of intellectual, social, and economic endeavour. As navigators, explorers, and colonists, for a long time they dominated much of the rest of the world and left on it the impress of their values, their technology, their politics, and even their dress. They also exported both nationalism and weaponry.
Then, in the 20th century, Europe came close to destroying itself. World War I cost more than 8 million European lives, World War II more than 18 million in battle, bombing, and systematic Nazi genocide—to say nothing of the 30 million who perished elsewhere.
As well as the dead, the wars left lasting wounds, psychological and physical alike. But, whereas World War I exacerbated nationalism and ideological extremism in Europe, World War II had almost the opposite effect. The burned child fears fire; and Europe had been badly burned. Within five years of the war’s end, the French foreign minister Robert Schuman, prompted by Jean Monnet, proposed to Germany the first practical move toward European unity, and the West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer agreed. Others involved in that first step included the statesmen Alcide De Gasperi and Paul-Henri Spaak. All except Monnet were men from Europe’s linguistic and political frontiers—Schuman from Lorraine, Adenauer from the Rhineland, De Gasperi from northern Italy, Spaak from bilingual Belgium. Europe’s diversity thus helped foster its impulse to unite.
This article treats the history of European society and culture. For a discussion of the physical and human geography of the continent, see Europe. For the histories of individual countries, see specific articles by name. Articles treating specific topics in European history include Byzantine Empire; Steppe, the; World War I; and World War II. For the lives of prominent European figures, see specific biographies by name—e.g., Charlemagne, Erasmus, and Bismarck. Related topics are discussed in such articles as those on religion (e.g., Celtic religion; Greek religion; Germanic religion; Christianity; and Judaism), literature (e.g., English literature, Scandinavian literature, and Russian literature), and the fine arts (e.g., painting, history of; and music, history of). Richard J. Mayne
Prehistory
The appearance of anatomically modern humans in Europe—perhaps as early as about 55,000 bce but certainly by about 35,000 bce—was accompanied by major changes in culture and technology. There was a further period of significant change after the last major Pleistocene glaciation (the Pleistocene Epoch occurred from about 2,600,000 to 11,700 years ago), which included the widespread adoption of farming and the establishment of permanent settlements from the 7th millennium bce. These laid the foundation for all future developments of European civilization.
Knowledge of these early periods of the European past is entirely dependent on archaeology. The evidence, which has almost all been collected since the middle of the 19th century, varies greatly from region to region and is limited by what was deposited and by whether what was deposited has survived. The archaeological evidence has also been disturbed by a range of human and natural processes, from glacial activity to farming and modern development. Modern techniques have greatly increased the amount of information available, but many parts of the story of the past may be difficult or impossible to recover, and the evidence that has been revealed needs to be assessed in the light of all these factors.
Dating depends on scientific methods. Cores through deep ocean-floor sediments and the Arctic ice cap have provided a continuous record of climatic conditions for the last one million years, but individual sites cannot easily be matched to it. Radiocarbon dating is effective to 35,000 years ago, and prior to that other scientific methods can be used with varying degrees of precision. Tree rings give precise dates for wood as early as the 5th millennium bce. Detailed typological studies, especially of pottery and stone tools, can be used to establish the relative sequence of material. The dates cited in this section are based on various scientific methods. For the earliest period, to about 35,000 bce, they are derived from absolute determinations by potassium-argon and thorium-uranium dating, together with correlations to the deep-sea and ice-core sequences; for the later period, they are derived primarily from radiocarbon determinations, calibrated where appropriate to give actual calendar years.
Paleolithic settlement
Earliest developments
The period of human activity to the end of the last major Pleistocene glaciation, about 8300 bce, is termed the Paleolithic Period (Old Stone Age); that part of it from 35,000 to 8300 bce is termed the Upper Paleolithic.
The climatic record shows a cyclic pattern of warmer and colder periods. In the last 750,000 years, there have been eight major cycles, with many shorter episodes. In the colder periods, the Arctic and Alpine ice sheets expanded, and sea levels fell. Some parts of southern Europe may have been little affected by these changes, but the advance and retreat of the ice sheets and accompanying glacial environments had a significant impact on northern Europe; at their maximum advance, they covered most of Scandinavia, the North European Plain, and Russia. Human occupation fluctuated in response to these changing conditions, but continuous settlement north of the Alps required a solution to the problems of living in extremely cold conditions.
By 1,000,000 years ago hominins were widely distributed in Africa and Asia, and some finds in Europe may be that early. The earliest securely dated material is from Isernia la Pineta in southern Italy, where stone tools and animal bones were dated to about 730,000 bce. Thereafter the evidence becomes more plentiful, and by 375,000 bce most areas except Scandinavia, the Alps, and northern Eurasia had been colonized.
Fossil remains of the hominins themselves are rare, and most of the evidence consists of stone tools. The simplest were chopping tools made from pebbles with a few flakes struck off to create an edge. These were replaced by more complex traditions of toolmaking, which produced a range of hand axes and flake tools; these industries are referred to as Acheulean, after the French site of Saint-Acheul. Some of the tools were for woodworking, but only rarely do any tools of organic material, such as wooden spears, survive as evidence of other Paleolithic technologies.
The subsistence economy depended on hunting and gathering. Population densities were necessarily low, and group territories were large. The main evidence is animal bones, which suggest a varied reliance on species such as rhinoceros, red deer, ibex, and horse, but it is difficult to reconstruct how such food was actually acquired. Open confrontation with large animals, such as the rhinoceros, is unlikely, and they were probably killed in vulnerable locations such as lake-edge watering spots; at La Cotte de Sainte Brelade in the Channel Islands, rhinoceroses and mammoths were driven over a cliff edge. Scavenging meat from already dead animals also may have been important. Food resources such as migratory herds and plants were available only seasonally, so an annual strategy for survival was necessary. It is not clear, however, how it was possible to store food acquired at times of plenty; carcasses of dead animals frozen in the snow would have provided a store of food.
From the beginning of the last major Pleistocene glaciation about 120,000 bce, the hominin fossils belong to the Neanderthals, who have been found throughout Europe and western Asia, including the glacial environments of central Europe. They were biologically and culturally adapted to survival in the harsh environments of the north, though they are also found in more moderate climates in southern Europe and Asia. Finds of stone tools from the Russian plains suggest the first certain evidence of colonization there by 80,000 bce. Despite their heavy skeletons and developed brow ridges, Neanderthals were probably little different from modern humans. Some of the skeletal remains appear to be from deliberate burials, the first evidence for such careful behaviour among humans.
Upper Paleolithic developments
From about 35,000 bce, anatomically modern humans—Homo sapiens sapiens, the ancestor of modern populations—were found throughout Europe (though the discovery of a fragment of a skull in Israel in 2008 suggested that humans interbred with Neanderthals in the Levant and that the first modern humans may have arrived in Europe as early as about 55,000 bce). The following period was marked by a series of important technological and cultural changes, in marked contrast to the comparative stability of the preceding hundreds of thousands of years. These changes cannot be simply explained as the result of the sudden appearance of modern, intelligent humans. The preceding Neanderthals differed little in brain size, and some Neanderthal remains are associated with tool assemblages of the new technology as well as with behavioral practices such as burial. The problem of the relationship of the Neanderthals to the sudden appearance of modern humans is difficult; possible explanations include total replacement of Neanderthals by modern populations, interbreeding with an immigrant modern population, or Neanderthals as ancestors of modern humans.
The technological changes of the Upper Paleolithic Period include the disappearance of heavy tools such as hand axes and choppers and the introduction of a much wider range of tools for special purposes, many of them made from long, thin blades. Tools made of antler, bone, and ivory were also widely used, apparently for the first time. After 18,000 bce there were further innovations. Flint was pretreated by heating to alter its structure and make flaking easier, and new tool types included harpoons, needles for sewing fur garments, and small blades for hafting in spears and arrows. The new technologies and more complex and specialized tool types suggest a major change in the pattern of energy expenditure. Much more effort was devoted to the careful use of resources, and tools were prepared in advance and retained, rather than made and discarded expediently.
Sites of this period are found throughout Europe, though at the height of the last major Pleistocene glaciation (about 35,000 to 13,000 bce) much of the North European Plain was abandoned as populations moved south. There is a greatly increased number of sites, many of which show evidence of more permanent structures such as hearths, pavements, and shelters built of skins on a frame of bone or wood. Some of this increase may be due to the greater likelihood of finding sites of this more recent period, but it may also indicate a growing population density and a greater investment of energy in construction.
Subsistence still depended on hunting and gathering, but the role of plant foods is difficult to estimate. As population increased, group territories may have become smaller, and the increasingly harsh environments of the last glaciation necessitated appropriate strategies for survival. Some sites show a concentration on particular large animal species (horse and reindeer in the north and ibex and red deer in the south), but there is also evidence for the increasing use of other food resources, such as rabbits, fish, and shellfish. In comparison with large animals, these produced small amounts of food, but they were an important addition because of their greater reliability. Settlement patterns reflect these social and economic strategies, which allowed most of the population to stay at one location for long periods while others left to procure distant resources.
Some of the most important evidence is for change in social organization and human behaviour. There is increasing evidence for deliberate and careful burial, sometimes with elaborate treatment of the dead. At Sungir in Russia and at Grotta Paglicci in Italy, for instance, the dead were buried with tools and ornaments, indicating a respect for their identity or status. Personal ornaments, especially bracelets, beads, and pendants, are common finds. They were made from a wide variety of materials, including animal teeth, ivory, and shells; some appear to have been sewn onto garments. Such ornamentation not only shows an elaboration of clothing and an interest in display but may also have been used as a means of signaling individual or group identity.
The earliest art objects in Europe also date from this period. There are small figurines of animals and humans made from finely carved bone or ivory. Among the most striking are the so-called Venus figurines, stylized representations of females with large breasts and buttocks, which show a marked degree of similarity from France to Russia. There are also thousands of small stone plaques engraved with representations of humans and animals.
Venus of WillendorfLate Paleolithic figure found at Willendorf, Lower Austria, and known as the Venus of Willendorf, limestone figurine originally coloured with red ochre, 30,000–25,000 bce; in the Natural History Museum, Vienna. © Martin Urbanek—Viewpointmediaat/Dreamstime.com
Art is also found in caves, particularly in France and Spain, in caves such as Lascaux and Altamira, though there is one cave at Kapova in the Urals with decoration in a similar style. In some cases, reliefs of humans or animals are carved on rock walls, but the most spectacular artworks are the paintings, dominated by large animals such as mammoth, horse, or bison; human figures are rare, but there are many other signs and symbols. The precise meaning of this art is impossible to recover, but it appears to have played a significant part in group ceremonial activity; much of it is in almost inaccessible depths of caves and may have been important for rituals of hunting or initiation.
Cave painting of a bull and a horse; in Lascaux Grotto, near Montignac, France.Hans Hinz, Basel
The similarity in style over great distances—seen most clearly in the case of the Venus figurines—is evidence for the existence of extensive social networks throughout Europe. Material items also were transmitted over long distances, especially particular types of flint, fossil shell, and marine mollusks. Such networks were most extensive at the height of the last glaciation and were an important social solution to the problem of surviving in extreme climates; they provided alliances to supply food and other material resources as well as information about a far-flung environment. Human developments during this so-called Ice Age thus included not only technological, economic, and social solutions to the problems of adaptation and survival but also an increased awareness of individual and group identity and a new field of symbolic and artistic activity.
Venus of VěstoniceVenus of Věstonice, clay statuette from Dolní Věstonice, Mikulov, Czech Republic, attributed to the Aurignacian culture, Upper Paleolithic Period; in the Moravian Museum, Brno, Czech Republic.Werner Forman Archive
Mesolithic adaptations
The extreme conditions of the last Pleistocene glaciation began to improve about 13,000 bce as temperatures slowly rose. The Scandinavian Ice Sheet itself started to retreat northward about 8300 bce, and the period between then and the origins of agriculture (at various times in the 7th to 4th millennia, depending on location) was one of great environmental and cultural change. It is termed the Mesolithic Period (Middle Stone Age) to emphasize its transitional importance, but the alternative term Epipaleolithic, used mostly in eastern Europe, stresses the continuity with processes begun earlier.
As the ice sheets retreated, vast areas of new land in northern Europe were opened up for human occupation. Resettlement began in some short warmer episodes at the end of the last glaciation. In the longer term, the melting of the Arctic glaciers produced a rise in sea levels, though this was to some extent offset by a rise in land levels as the weight of the overlying ice was removed. The combined effect of these processes was to flood large areas of land in the Mediterranean and especially in the North Sea basin. Britain was isolated from the continent during the 7th millennium, and the modern coastline was broadly established by the 4th.
The changes in physical landforms were accompanied by similarly major changes in the environment. The rising temperature and humidity led to the increased growth of plant life, including birch and pine as well as smaller trees and bushes that produced nuts and fruit. Continued climatic amelioration meant further environmental change, and the initial open forest progressively gave way to climax forest dominated by oak and elm, which crowded out many of the smaller species. There were similar changes among animals. The large animals of the Ice Age such as bison and mammoth disappeared, either because of climatic change or from overhunting, and reindeer herds moved northward in search of colder conditions. The European forests were dominated by smaller animals, such as wild cattle, pigs, and deer, with ibex in the south.
The evidence for human exploitation of these changing environments varies considerably, depending on the precise range of regionally available resources. As the reindeer moved north, so did some human groups. Others adapted to the new animal and plant resources available. Wild cattle, deer, and pigs were widely hunted, as well as many types of bird. Fish were also caught, including river species such as salmon and carp and many sea species. On the western coasts, shellfish also were exploited. The role of plant foods is difficult to estimate, but there is evidence for the use of many species, including hazelnuts and various berries.
These new patterns of economy needed new technologies. Stone tools increasingly took the form of small blades for tipping or hafting in arrows and spears. Where conditions allow their survival, it is possible to see many new tools and equipment made of organic materials, though some, such as the bow and arrow, may have been made in earlier periods. Hooks, nets, and traps for fishing; birch bark containers; and textiles made from plant fibres are all known. Canoes and paddles also have been found.
Though subsistence was dependent on hunting and gathering seasonally available resources, those resources could be managed in elementary ways. Hunting strategies concentrated on taking adult males, preserving the young and female animals needed to maintain the herds. Dogs were a source of meat and fur, but they may also have been used in hunting. It may have been possible to control the movement of herds by making clearances in the forest, thus attracting animals to the new growth; the evidence for fire and repeated small-scale clearances supports this theory. Plants may have been husbanded. In these ways, human control was exercised over the environment and its resources.
Human occupation expanded throughout Europe, and many areas show a pattern of settlement with base camps occupied by all members of the group for some part of the year and small sites used for the exploitation of some particular resource. Wide social networks continued to exist, as shown by the long-distance exchange of some raw materials such as special types of rock. Mobility may have been important for ensuring an adequate annual subsistence, but some environments, such as the coastal regions of the Baltic and the west, may have allowed the possibility of more permanent settlement. Reliance on fish and shellfish there might be thought a last resort; alternatively, it could have been a purposive choice of resources that would allow permanent residence. Denmark and western France have traditions of deliberate human burial that support this theory.
Thus, the environmental changes were met with a variety of social, economic, and technological responses, but human society did not adapt passively. Opportunities existed to manage the environment more actively and to make choices for social rather than purely survival purposes.
The Neolithic Period
The adoption of farming
From about 7000 bce in Greece, farming economies were progressively adopted in Europe, though areas farther west, such as Britain, were not affected for two millennia and Scandinavia not until even later. The period from the beginning of agriculture to the widespread use of bronze about 2300 bce is called the Neolithic Period (New Stone Age).
Agriculture had developed at an earlier date in the Middle East, and the relationship of Europe to that area and the mechanism of the introduction of agriculture have been variously explained. At one extreme is a model of immigrant colonization from the Middle East, with the agricultural frontier pushing farther westward as population grew and new settlements were founded. A variation of this model denies the uniformity of such a “wave of advance” and stresses the possibility of a more irregular pioneering movement. At the other extreme is a model of agricultural adoption by indigenous Mesolithic groups, with a minimum of reliance on any introduced people or resources.
In favour of the intrusive model is the nature of the crops that formed the basis of early agriculture; the main cereals were emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, and barley, together with other plants such as peas and flax. These had all been domesticated in the Middle East, where their wild progenitors were found. The material culture of the earliest farmers in Greece and southeastern Europe also shows great similarity to that of the Middle East. On the other hand, the animals important to early agriculture are not so clearly introduced; wild sheep and goats may have been available in southern Europe, and cattle were probably domesticated in southeastern Europe at least as early as in the Middle East. There also were definite European contributions; the dog was domesticated in Europe in the Mesolithic Period, and evidence suggests that the horse was first domesticated on the Western Steppe.
The process of agricultural adoption, furthermore, was neither fast nor uniform. It took at least 4,000 years for farming to reach its northern limit in Scandinavia, and there it was the success of fishing and sealing that allowed agriculture as a desirable addition to the economy. In many areas of western Europe, it is likely that domesticated animals were used before the adoption of agricultural plants. It is also possible to argue for a considerable Mesolithic contribution, especially in the north and west. Not only did some areas continue to rely on hunting and gathering in addition to farming but there was also continuity of settlement location and resource use, especially of stone for tools. Despite the disappearance of the small blades previously used for spears and arrows and the appearance of heavy tools for forest clearance, there was some continuity of tool technology.
The adoption of farming is unlikely to have been a simple or uniform process throughout Europe. In some regions, especially Greece, the Balkans, southern Italy, central Europe, and Ukraine, actual colonization by new populations may have been important; elsewhere, especially in the west and north, a gradual process of adaptation by indigenous communities is more likely, though everywhere the pattern would have been mixed.
The consequences of the adoption of farming were important for all later developments. Permanent settlement, population growth, and exploitation of smaller territories all brought about new relationships between people and the environment. Mobility had previously necessitated small populations at low densities and had allowed only material items that could be carried, with little investment in structures; these restraints were removed, and the opportunity was created for many new crafts and technologies.
The earliest evidence for agriculture comes from sites in Greece, such as Knossos and Argissa, soon after 7000 bce. During the 7th millennium, farming was widespread in southeastern Europe. The material culture of this region bears a strong similarity to that of the Middle East. Pottery making was introduced, and a variety of highly decorated vessels was produced. Permanent settlements of small mud-brick houses were established; continuous rebuilding of such villages on the same spot produced large settlement mounds, or tells. Clay figurines, mostly female, are common finds in many houses, and there may also have been special shrines or temples. The precise beliefs cannot be ascertained, but they suggest the importance of ritual and religion in these societies. By the 5th and 4th millennia, some of these sites, such as Sesklo and Dhimini in Greece, were defended. From the early 5th millennium, there is evidence for the development of copper and gold metallurgy, independently of Middle Eastern traditions, and copper mines have been found in the Balkan Peninsula. Metal products included personal ornaments as well as some functional items; the cemetery at Varna, Bulg., contained many gold objects, with large collections in some graves. Control of ritual, technology, and agriculture, as well as the need for defense, all suggest the growing differentiation within Neolithic society.
Neolithic stone toolsVarious Neolithic stone and flint tools made about 2700 to 1800 bce, found in Essex, Eng. The Granger Collection
In the central and western Mediterranean, the clearest evidence is from southern Italy, where a mixed farming economy was established in the 7th millennium. Many large villages, often surrounded by enclosure ditches, have been recognized. Elsewhere in the region, domesticated crops and animals were adopted more slowly into the indigenous economies. New technologies also were adopted; pottery decorated with characteristic impressed patterns was made, and by the 4th millennium copper was being worked in Spain. The major islands of the Mediterranean were colonized. The general picture is one of small-scale regional development. One such regional pattern was on Malta, where a series of massive stone temples was constructed from the early 4th millennium.
In a band across central and western Europe, the earliest farmers from 5400 bce onward are represented by a homogeneous pattern of settlements and material culture, named the LBK Culture (from Linienbandkeramik or Linearbandkeramik), after the typical pottery decorated with linear bands of ornament. The same styles of pottery and other material are found throughout the region, and their settlements show a regular preference for the easily worked and well-drained loess soils. The houses were 20 to 23 feet (6 to 7 metres) wide and up to 150 feet long and possibly included stalling for animals; in some areas they were grouped in large villages, but elsewhere there was a dispersed pattern of small clusters of houses. Some cemeteries are known; they show a concentration of objects deposited with older males. About 4700 bce the cultural homogeneity ended, and regional patterns of settlement and culture appeared as the population grew and new areas were exploited for farming. Some of the best information comes from villages on the edges of lakes in France and Switzerland, where organic material has been preserved in damp conditions.
Farming also spread northeastward into the steppe north of the Black Sea. Before 6000 bce domesticated animals and pottery were found there, but in societies that still relied heavily on hunting and fishing. By about 4500 bce a new pattern of villages, such as at Cucuteni and Tripolye, was established with a mixed farming economy. Some of these villages contained many hundreds of houses in a planned layout, and they were increasingly surrounded by massive fortifications. Farther east across the steppe as far as the southern Urals, pottery, domesticated animals, and cereals were progressively added to an indigenous hunting-and-gathering economy, and the horse was domesticated. Nomadic pastoral economies developed by the 2nd millennium.
Farming extended from central to northern Europe only after a long interval. For a millennium, agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers were in contact and pottery was adopted or exchanged, but domesticated animals and crops were only introduced into northern Germany, Poland, and southern Scandinavia about 4200 bce, apparently after a decline in the availability of marine food resources. Farming was rapidly adopted as the mainstay of subsistence and expanded to its maximum climatic viability in Scandinavia. By the middle of the 4th millennium, large communal tombs were being built, frequently of megalithic (large-stone) construction.
In western Europe, there was a similar delay in the spread of farming. In western France, domesticated animals were added to hunting and gathering in a predominantly stock-based economy, and pottery was also adopted. In Britain and Ireland, forest clearance as early as 4700 bce may represent the beginnings of agriculture, but there is little evidence for settlements or monuments before 4000 bce, and hunting-and-gathering economies survived in places. The construction of large communal tombs and defended enclosures from 4000 bce may mark the growth of agricultural populations and the beginning of competition for resources. Some of the enclosures were attacked and burned, clear evidence of violent warfare. The tombs, of earth and timber or of megalithic construction, contained communal burials and served as markers for claims to farming territories as well as foci for the worship of ancestors. Some, such as the tombs of Brittany and Ireland, contained elaborately decorated stones.
The late Neolithic Period
Agricultural intensification
From the late 4th millennium a number of developments in the agricultural economy became prominent. They did not, however, begin all at once nor were they found everywhere. Some of them may have been in use for some time, and there also are distinct regional variations. Cumulatively, however, they add up to a new phase of agricultural organization.
One of the most important developments was the management of animal herds for purposes other than the provision of meat. In the case of cattle, there is some evidence for milk production earlier, but dairying appears to have taken on a much more significant role from this time. Oxen were raised to provide traction. Sheep were managed not for meat but primarily as a source of manure and wool. Textiles in the early Neolithic Period were predominantly made of flax, but from the early 3rd millennium wool was widely used, and spinning and weaving became important crafts and new ways of exploiting agricultural resources. New crops also were introduced. The most important were the vine and the olive, found in Greece from the early 3rd millennium. These tree crops represented an important addition to the range of agricultural produce and formed the basis for later developments in the Aegean.
There were also new technologies, especially the use of animal traction for the plow and for wheeled vehicles. The earliest evidence for plowing consists of marks preserved in the soil under burial mounds and dated to the end of the 4th millennium. A clay model of a wheeled cart of the same date is known from a grave at Szigetszentmárton, Hung., and actual wheels from northern Europe by 2500 bce. In southeastern Spain, the most arid area of Europe, irrigation systems were probably introduced. These all represent important new technologies applied to agriculture and an intensification of energy expenditure in that field.
Clay model of a wheeled cart, from a grave at Szigetszentmárton, Hung., end of the 4th millennium bce; in the Hungarian National Museum, Budapest.© Hungarian National Museum, Budapest; photograph, Kardos Judit
The innovations outlined above marked the development of early agriculture toward a system more specifically adapted to the European environment and capable of producing a much wider range of outputs, especially of nonfood products. Some, such as wine and cloth, had a particular social significance, and others, especially the wheeled vehicle, led to further developments. The new agricultural regime also showed a better adaptation to the wide variety of regional environments in Europe and permitted expansion into new ecological zones. Whereas the earliest farmers mostly preferred the prime arable soils, such as the loess of central Europe, it was now possible, especially with the use of sheep, to exploit many less fertile soils.
Social change
The period from the late 4th millennium also saw many important social changes. They varied from region to region but laid the foundations for the society of the Bronze Age, which followed.
In southeastern Europe about 3200 bce, there was a major break in material culture and settlement patterns. The old styles of decorated pottery were replaced with new plainer forms, and the evidence for ritual, such as the figurines, ends. Many of the long-occupied tell sites were abandoned; the new settlement pattern shows many smaller sites and some larger ones which may have played a central role. In Greece there were similar changes, with population expansion especially in the south and the emergence of some sites as centres of authority; this period marked the beginning of the Aegean Bronze Age.
Elsewhere in the Mediterranean the changes are most marked in parts of Iberia. At Los Millares in southeastern Spain and in southern Portugal at sites such as Vila Nova de São Pedro, strongly fortified settlements accompanied by cemeteries containing rich collections of prestige goods suggest the appearance of a more hierarchically organized society. Similar trends toward the emergence of sites of central authority took place in southern France, but there is little sign of such developments in Italy.
In central and northern Europe, changes of a different nature began about 2800 bce. The most obvious feature is two phases of new burial rites, comprising individual rather than communal burials with a particular emphasis on the deposition of prestige grave goods with adult males. The first phase, characterized by Corded Ware pottery and stone battle-axes, is found particularly in central and northern Europe. The second phase, dated to 2500–2200 bce, is marked by Bell Beaker pottery and the frequent occurrence of copper daggers in the graves; it is found from Hungary to Britain and as far south as Italy, Spain, and North Africa. At the same time, there was an increase in the exchange of prestige goods such as amber, copper, and tools from particular rock sources.
Both of these burial rites have been attributed to invading population groups. On the other hand, they may also be seen as a new expression of an ideology of social status, emphasizing control of resources rather than ancestral descent. Such an explanation fits better with a picture of slow internal development within European society. The new ideology did not prevail everywhere, however, and in Britain, for instance, the 3rd millennium saw the construction of massive ceremonial monuments such as Avebury and Stonehenge, before the introduction of individual burial rites at the end of the millennium.
The Indo-Europeans
When there is evidence for the languages spoken in Europe at the end of the prehistoric period, it is clear that with few exceptions, such as Basque or Etruscan, they belonged to the Indo-European language group, which also extended to India and Central Asia. This raises the question of when these languages, or their ancestral prototype, were first spoken in Europe. One theory links these languages with a particular population of Indo-Europeans and explains the expansion of the languages as the result of invasion or immigration; their origin is sought in the east, perhaps in the area north of the Black and Caspian seas. The invasion is associated with the new patterns of settlement, economy, material culture, burial, and social organization seen about 3000 bce. These innovations, however, may be better attributed to internal developments. An alternative explanation for the origin of Indo-European languages associates it with the immigration of the first farmers from Anatolia at the beginning of the Neolithic Period, but the spread of farming does not seem to have been a uniform process or to have been achieved everywhere by population migration. There is, however, no single archaeological pattern that might correspond to a migration on an appropriate geographic scale throughout Europe, and all these explanations raise fundamental questions about the development, spread, and adoption of languages, the relationship of language to ethnic groups, and the correspondence of archaeologically recognizable patterns of material culture to either language or ethnicity. Timothy C. Champion
The Metal Ages
The period of the 3rd, the 2nd, and the 1st millennia bce was a time of drastic change in Europe. This has traditionally been defined as the Metal Ages, which may be further divided into stages, of approximate dates as shown: the Bronze Age (2300–700 bce) and the Iron Age (700–1 bce), which followed a less distinctly defined Copper Age (c. 3200–2300 bce). At this time, societies in Europe began consciously to produce metals. Simultaneous with these technological innovations were changes in settlement organization, ritual life, and the interaction between the different societies in Europe. These developments and their remarkable reflections in the material culture make the period appear as a series of dramatic changes.
Local developments were long thought to have been caused by influences from the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East and by migrations. Thus, it was suggested that the segmented faience beads from the rich early Bronze Age graves in Wessex were Mycenaean products or that development of bronze working in central Europe was due to the Aegean civilization’s need for new bronze supplies. New methods of absolute dating, including radiocarbon dating, revolutionized the understanding of this phase in prehistoric Europe. They showed that many supposedly interdependent developments had in fact developed independently and been separated by centuries. The Metal Ages of Europe thus must be understood as indigenous local inventions and as an independent cultural evolution. There were influences from, and contact with, the Middle East, and there were some migrations of people, especially from the Russian steppes; but the Metal Ages in Europe were in general far more locally independent phenomena than had been recognized. They grew out of conditions created in the Neolithic Period and the Copper Age, followed their own trajectory in Europe, and resulted in a range of new expressions in material culture and in new social concerns.
The chronology of the Metal Ages
Changes in metal objects, in styles, and in burial rituals have been used to subdivide the period. The most basic division uses the same criteria as Christian Jürgensen Thomsen’s Three Age system, in which the material used for producing tools and weapons distinguishes an age. This has resulted in a distinction between the Copper, Bronze, and Iron ages, each of which has been further divided. In temperate Europe all these subdivisions consist of relative chronologies, and in such systems synchronizations and comparisons among regions are vital. For the Bronze Age, synchronization is possible, since this was a period of long-distance contacts and trade between different regions. The period had in many ways a remarkable coherence, and it has been likened to the Common Market. On this basis a general chronological framework has been developed that, using the changes in burial rites and metal assemblages, divides the Bronze Age into either Early, Middle, and Late phases or into the Unetician, Tumulus, and Urnfield cultures. Synchronizations of the more detailed local subdivisions, which were based on typology of metal objects and cross-associations, have employed schemes of Paul Reinecke and Oscar Montelius. Oscar Montelius’ chronology was developed on the basis of Scandinavian bronze objects and resulted in a division of the Bronze Age into Montelius I–VI, while Paul Reinecke used south German material to divide it into shorter time sequences known as Bronze Age A–D and Hallstatt (Ha) A–D, with Hallstatt C marking the transition to the Iron Age in central Europe.
The Iron Age chronology is detailed and regional. Although the Iron Age was a Pan-European phenomenon, its regional variability, together with its fragmented and tribalized cultural landscape, makes its chronology complex. In addition to typology and cross-association, the Iron Age chronology is also built upon historical events and Mediterranean imports of known date; the development of artistic styles also plays a major role in its subdivision. It is again central Europe that provided the most commonly used general chronology. The Hallstatt Period, named after an artifact-rich cemetery next to late Bronze and Iron Age salt mines in the Austrian Salzkammergut, is divided into Early (Ha A–B) and Late (Ha C–D) phases, with the former marking the end of the Urnfield Culture in Europe and the latter being the first phase of the Iron Age in areas such as central and southern Europe but the transition to the Iron Age in other regions. The second phase of the Iron Age, when it extended throughout Europe, is named after La Tène, a site at Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland. The exact function of this site is not known, but it contained thousands of swords, spears, shields, fibulae, and tools. These were distinctive in shape and beautifully ornamented in a style different from that of the objects from the Hallstatt period. This, the La Tène style, was found from the 5th to the 1st century bce throughout most of Europe, and its development and change over time are the basis of the chronological division into La Tène A–D. Other evidence, such as southern imports, has increasingly become incorporated into the La Tène chronology, and the time from the end of the Hallstatt Period until the spread of the Roman Empire is divided into a number of short phases, each with distinct material expressions. The stylistic basis of this chronology stresses the common heritage, the Celtic art style, which developed over large areas of Europe during this time.
The transitions between the three phases of the Metal Ages are primarily defined by a change in the metal used, but they also reflect economic changes and transformations of social organization. It is within these larger concerns that the character of this part of European prehistory can be found.
General characteristics
The Copper Age
Also known as the Chalcolithic or Eneolithic Period, the Copper Age was a time of diffuse and sporadic use of copper for a limited number of small tools and personal ornaments. If the age is defined simply as the time when copper first began to be used, then localized Copper Age cultures existed in southeastern Europe from the 5th millennium bce. On the other hand, if it is defined as the time when copper was an established element in the material culture, then it must be dated from about 3200 bce in the Carpathian Basin and southeastern Europe, slightly later in the Aegean, and later still in Iberia.
In these early copper-using societies, copper had no importance in subsistence production, and the tools made could hardly compete with those of flint and stone. The new material had prestige, however, and was used to adorn the deceased. It was at this early stage of metal use that one of its important roles was established: to mark and articulate social prestige and status. The Copper Age as a distinct stage developed only in a few regions; these included groups in areas as far apart as Bulgaria, Bohemia, the Aegean, and southeastern Spain.
One of these remarkable centres of early copper use was in southeastern Spain. Situated in the Almerian lowland, in an area confined by the coast and the mountains, it was a densely settled region with large nucleated and often fortified hilltop settlements of surprising architectural sophistication and with a rich and inventive material culture known as the Millaran Culture, after the site of Los Millares. Like contemporary sites in the region, Los Millares was located so as to overlook a river from a promontory in the foothills of higher mountains. The sides and plateau of the hill were fortified with massive stone walls, regularly placed semicircular bastions, and outlying towers. These created a well-defined and protected space of approximately 12 acres (5 hectares), with several occupation phases and of some complexity. The settlement was townlike, with rows of stone houses, alleys, and a central communal place within the walls. An artificial watercourse may have led to the settlement. There was specialization of production between households. Outside the settlement was a cemetery containing more than 100 megalithic tombs with corbeled chambers used as collective burial places.
The Bronze Age
Simultaneous with such Copper Age cultures were a number of late Neolithic cultures in other regions. The Early Bronze Age had, therefore, various roots. In some areas it developed from the Copper Age, while in others it grew out of late Neolithic cultures. In western and part of central Europe, the Bell Beaker Culture continued into the Early Bronze Age. It had introduced the use of copper for prestigious personal objects, individual burial rites, and possibly also new ideological structures to the Neolithic societies over vast areas of Europe. These new elements were the basis of the transformation that took place during the Early Bronze Age and became prominent within the emerging societies.
In the rest of central and in northern Europe, the Corded Ware Culture was an important component of the late Neolithic, and some local Early Bronze Age characteristics can be traced to these roots. For example, this is seen in terms of burial rituals. Burials of the Corded Ware Culture were usually single graves in pits, with or without a barrow. The deceased was placed in a contracted position, men on their left side, women on their right, both facing south. This differentiation of body position according to sex was maintained in the earliest Bronze Age in many areas, but at times the orientation was reversed, such as at Branč, in Slovakia, where 81 percent of females were on their left side and 61 percent of males on their right. As the period progressed, grave forms began to diversify, and, though inhumation in pits remained the commonest form, it was elaborated in different ways. The position of the body became stretched rather than contracted, and sex and age were not expressed by body position but were reflected through elements such as grave goods or location within the cemetery.
The characteristics of, and the dates for, the Early Bronze Age vary regionally in central Europe. Some areas, such as the Saarland, even appear either to have had continuous Neolithic occupation until as late as 1400 bce or to have been uninhabited during the Early Bronze Age. Most of these areas were enclaves, however, and it was only in Scandinavia, where the Bronze Age began about 1800 bce, that the transition to the Bronze Age was substantially delayed for a whole region.
Such local delay of the earliest Bronze Age cannot simply be seen in terms of retardedcultural development; rather, it reflects that different cultural trajectories were followed by various societies. Scandinavia illustrates this well, since the period preceding the Bronze Age was a time not of devolution but of new flint technologies and new material forms, with a wealth of beautifully manufactured flint daggers and a conspicuous display of local craft. This constituted a distinct local Late Neolithic phase, interspersed between the Corded Ware Culture and the Bronze Age proper. The flint daggers show clear influences from bronze daggers, and examples of flint swords reflect the emulation of new ideas. This indicates the degree of contact with bronze-using societies. When bronze was introduced and incorporated into the local culture, its role in terms of the cultural manners of manufacture and behaviour was rapidly established, and it quickly reflected a distinct local tradition: the Nordic Bronze Age. At this point, the absence of local raw material did not prevent the society from integrating bronze as a basic material in its culture nor did the dependency on trade partners for bronze mean that the local material culture developed without its own distinct character. The Nordic Bronze Age illustrates the ability of local cultures to maintain their independent character in spite of dependency on other, larger systems. This characteristic can be observed in different forms throughout the Metal Ages, and, in an essential manner, this qualifies the impression of an overall common cultural heritage developing during these millennia.
Although the dates and the cultural roots of the Early Bronze Age vary, it is similarly defined by the use of copper alloys for tools throughout Europe. During the Bronze Age, the techniques of metalworking increased in sophistication. A range of new working methods, such as valve molds, cire perdue, and sheet-metal working, were developed. The development of molds made it possible both to mass-produce objects and to produce more elaborate items, including hollow objects. One of the most spectacular objects produced in this fashion was the lur, a musical instrument of great precision and beauty. The later Bronze Age and Iron Age method of sheet working facilitated the production of large objects, such as caldrons and shields, and a similar working method was used for the boss motif of bands of raised circles, which became a favoured element on many Urnfield Period objects such as horse harnesses and situlae (bucket-shaped vessels).
The manner of decorating the objects expressed regional as well as chronological styles. Among these, the most noticeable stylistic developments were the widespread use of the combined sun-bird-ship motif of the Urnfield Culture and the later break in stylistic tradition indicated by La Tène, or so-called Celtic, art. Most important, however, may be the invention of new types of objects. While objects made of ceramics, gold, stone, and organic materials during this period differed from those of previous periods, they did not represent drastic changes in the employment of a particular medium, but this was not true of bronze. Bronze is an artificial material made by alloying copper with different metals, in particular tin, through which a new material with its own distinct properties is produced. The production of bronze was an invention in its true sense, and the potentials of this material were increasingly revealed and exploited during the Bronze Age. The effect of this was a range of new objects, of which some were new shapes for old concepts but others introduced new functions and concepts into the societies.
Among the latter, one of the most important new elements was the invention of the sword. With the sword there was for the first time in European history an object entirely dedicated to fighting and not doubling as a tool. Fighting is evident from earlier periods as well, but during the Bronze Age it was formalized. Toward the Late Bronze Age the warrior emerged, sheathed in an assemblage of defensive items: the armour. To have been a warrior during the Iron Age must have been an established role, and the importance of warfare led to monumental defensive structures and further evolution of swords and shields. The latter development shows changes in the fighting technique, and in the Early Iron Age the stabbing sword of the Bronze Age was replaced by a heavy slashing sword, indicating fighting from horseback. The actual importance of warfare is difficult to establish, and a distinction between the symbolic representation of aggression and real aggression must be kept in mind. The presence of swords and armour does, however, represent a concrete expression of aggression and of the concept of warfare.
The increased importance of fortified settlements and villages further shows that aggression was a major component of life. Professional soldiers, as they were known at the time of the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, are unlikely to have existed at this time, but group warfare existed from the Iron Age onward, and other related professions developed. For example, the location of fortified sites in strategic places, such as near mountain passes and river crossings, suggests that these sites were not primarily defensive but were based on the ability to control certain resources, including access and passage. This is illustrated by the rich Early Bronze Age fortified site at Spišský Štvrtok, Slovakia, strategically located to control the trade routes running through a mountain pass across the Carpathians along the Hornád River, and by the Late Bronze Age Lusatian hilltop site in the Moravian Pforte passes. The development of aggression and its formalization played a role in providing middlemen and entrepreneurs with opportunities and helped to establish them in the position of power they gained in the Iron Age.
The Iron Age
During most of the Middle and Late Bronze Age, iron was present, albeit scarce. It was used for personal ornaments and small knives, for repairs on bronzes, and for bimetallic items. The Iron Age thus did not start with the first appearance of iron but rather at the stage when its distinct functional properties were being exploited and it began to supplant bronze in the production of tools and weapons. This occurred at different times in various parts of Europe, and the transition to the Iron Age is embedded in local cultural developments. The reasons why iron was adopted differed among regions, but generally a similar pattern was followed. After an introductory period, iron quickly supplanted bronze for the making of tools and weapons. It was at this stage that metal, in spite of the earlier presence of bronze tools, replaced stone, flint, and wood in agricultural production. New and more effective tools were developed during the last centuries bce, and subsistence production must have increased drastically. Along with these domestic changes, there were changes in the traditional routes of contact and trade. These routes had been established during the Bronze Age, and through them copper, tin, and other commodities had traveled throughout Europe. With the appearance of the rich Late Hallstatt communities of south-central Europe, the orientation of contact changed. The northern links were increasingly ignored, and trade became concentrated on, and dependent upon, commodities from the south. South and west-central Europe were now included in the periphery of the expanding Mediterranean civilization; and the previous network of contact was broken. In the rest of Europe, regional diversity increased, a tribalized landscape emerged, and new types of social organization developed. During the Iron Age, the roots of historic Europe were planted. Proto-urban settlements, hierarchical social orders, new ideological structures, and writing were parts of this picture. It was also a time during which the difference between the Mediterranean world and temperate Europe became even more pronounced and new degrees and forms of dependency developed in the sociopolitical systems.
Social and economic developments
Control over resources
The Metal Ages were periods of discovery, invention, and exploitation of various metals and metallurgical procedures. New elements were introduced into the societies, which played a role in their further development. In the later 5th and earlier 4th millennia bce, copper from easily worked surface deposits was used for relatively simple items in southeastern Europe and the Carpathian Basin. The Transylvanian copper ores were particularly important. For example, copper was extracted from the quarry at Varna, Bulg., about 4400 bce in an area near a rich Copper Age cemetery. After this initial exploitation, metal objects again became rare until they reappeared in the late 4th millennium bce. The reasons for this change are unknown but may in part relate to the depletion of surface ore deposits. At this early state, the technique of copper manufacture consisted of smelting in an open one-faced mold and hammering. Later, when copper of different compositions from deeper deposits was used, the properties of copper in combination with other metals were explored. The copper sulfide ores from these deep mines were more difficult to procure, since they relied on more sophisticated mining techniques and needed initial roasting before smelting. At the same time, they were more widely available than surface deposits, and there were sources in both central and western Europe—ores in Germany, Austria, and the Czech and Slovak Republics were exploited from the early 3rd millennium bce. This long initial phase of sporadic use of copper was finally replaced by a period of copper alloys, which began about 2500 bce in southeastern Europe, slightly later in the Aegean, and later still in Iberia. Bronze industries were widespread in Europe by 2300 bce, but copper-tin alloys were first used toward the end of the 3rd millennium, with renewal of the centres of metallurgical production in Austria, Germany, and neighbouring areas. The raw material needed was available only in a few regions, and tin, particularly restricted in its distribution, was found only in eastern Portugal, Sardinia, Tuscany, Cornwall, the Isles of Scilly, and the Bohemian Ore Mountains. The latter site, on the border between the Czech Republic and eastern Germany, was one of the rare instances of close proximity between copper and tin. This region, together with the copper areas of the Harz Mountains, the Alps, and central Slovakia, became one of the most important regions of the Early Bronze Age. With the progression of the Bronze Age, local metallurgical traditions developed throughout Europe, including areas lacking both tin and copper sources; but the chief metalworking centres continued to influence the material culture of larger areas. This was an important factor behind the trade and exchange network that came into existence.
The discovery of iron was most likely a by-product of bronze working, and much of the earliest iron use is not culturally distinct from the use of bronze. At its early stage, iron may have been monopolized and produced by those individuals or groups who controlled bronze. Iron, however, is different from bronze in many respects. It is found widely in Europe either as iron ore or as bog iron. To be usable, iron does not need alloying with other metals, and the demands are mainly the fuel and labour needed to smelt or roast the ore. This process involves high temperatures and skilled control of pyrotechnology. To produce a usable iron, the bloom must be hammered while red-hot to reduce the impurities and to change its internal structures. Only then can the shaping of the final object begin. Thus, the production of an iron object consists of several distinct stages, each different from those involved in bronze production.
Iron appeared in Romania about 1700 bce and in Greece shortly after. During the Middle and Late Bronze Age, it occurred infrequently except in Iberia, Britain, and some other parts of western Europe. The earliest iron was used for small knives, pins, and other personal objects and for repairs on bronze items. Only in Romania was iron used for heavy tools during the Bronze Age; toward the end of the Bronze Age, tools and some weapons made of iron appeared generally in Europe. With Ha C, iron swords were being made, and, in the following La Tène Period, iron had clearly become a material important in its own right, being used for a range of new functional items, including plowshares, carpentry tools, and nails. At this point it is likely that the previous monopolies on metal production and trade were severely challenged, and iron became a common material, produced and procured anywhere in Europe.
The intensity of metal use varied regionally, and the centres of innovation and wealth moved over time. During the Metal Ages the communities of Europe can be studied through their reaction to, and adoption of, their inventions. It is a phase in prehistory that raises cultural questions about the nature of innovation and of its consequences for society. Metal brought several important new items to the communities, but, more importantly, it changed the nature of society itself. The production of bronze was an important step in human history, indicating a point at which the limits imposed by natural materials were broken by human invention. The behavioral impact of this cannot be measured, but it was likely substantial. It may have altered attitudes to nature and created the activities that resulted in deep mining of metals and salt and caused experimentation with new materials, such as glass.
Metal also had social impact, and one of its important roles came from its involvement in the articulation of prestige and status and thus its ability to assign power. Scarcity usually implies preciousness, and control over scarce or precious resources often leads to power. The production of both bronze and iron objects involved scarcity of either resources or knowledge or both. Control of metal production was a relevant factor in prehistory, as shown by the location of important Copper Age and Early Bronze Age communities in close proximity to copper or tin ores or by the breakdown of trade alliances that occurred in the Early Iron Age. The wealth and outstanding material culture of the Copper and Early Bronze Age communities were probably related to the trade in, and prestigious value of, copper and bronze. It is also a characteristic of these communities that this wealth was not consolidated by other activities, and some of the centres were short-lived and declined quickly. The lack of ability to invest and rechannel wealth in absolute terms is one of the most basic differences between these communities and those of both the Mediterranean civilizations and the Iron Age. Only some of the Copper Age centres developed into flourishing communities in the earliest Bronze Age. Those that did remain became the Early Bronze Age centres of wealth, contact, and trade, with dense populations. These centres were widely spaced and were internally extremely different, ranging from places such as El Argar in Iberia to Wessex in southern England. Of these, the Argaric Culture in southeastern Iberia comprised nucleated village settlements similar to those from Los Millares but with even greater sophistication and with a changed funerary rite. The deceased, richly adorned with diadems, arm rings, and pins and accompanied by metal tools, were individually entombed in large funerary urns placed under the house floors. At the other extreme was the group of rich Early Bronze Age graves in Wessex. The objects found in them are comparable in wealth to the Argaric ones, and, although the exotic items were unique to each area, they shared a range of tools and some ornaments. There was essential divergence in other respects, however, and at Wessex there was no association with elaborate domestic structures. The rich graves served as the ritual centre for a dispersed community living in relatively simple constructions of wattle and daub and without demarcations of the limits of their settlements. These Early Bronze Age centres developed in different environmental zones, ranging from semiarid to lush temperate, and they are at different distances from copper ore. They all have possible links with areas containing tin ores, however, and they developed in regions that were local centres in the previous period. These two criteria may have been necessary conditions for this development; but such conditions in themselves did not result in rich centres in the Early Bronze Age, nor could they guarantee continuous survival of the centres. As in the case of the earlier Copper Age centres, these were without an additional stable foundation, and they disappeared at different rates and under varying local circumstances. Such situations were plentiful during the Metal Ages. They show not only that the scarce and prestigious resources could be controlled and could give access to power and wealth but also that a multitude of factors influenced whether that power was secured and how it was maintained.
Changing centres of wealth
Societies are dynamic structures that interact with each other. In this interaction, asymmetrical relationships frequently develop between areas or groups, with one partner assuming a central, and the other a peripheral, role. Such relations are not stable, however, and over time their internal asymmetry will change. These changes can be illustrated by two examples from the Metal Ages in western central Europe.
The first is from the Early Bronze Age, where a remarkable shift in cultural initiative took place. The earliest Bronze Age centre, Unetician A, consisted of a complex of flat inhumation graves with modest grave goods in copper and bronze that was found in Slovakia. During Unetician B this complex continued, spreading into Bohemia and much of Germany and Poland. In this process, the original centre was complemented by a number of extremely rich graves on its periphery, such as at Leubingen, Helmsdorf, and Straubing in central Germany and Łęki Małe in southern Poland. These graves were inhumations under large barrows, with elaborate chambers and rich grave goods. Leubingen, for example, was a 28-foot- (8.5-metre-) high barrow with an elaborately constructed 66-foot-wide central stone cairn delineated by a ring ditch. The cairn covered and protected a thatched tentlike wooden structure made of large oak planks with gypsum mortar in the cracks. The skeleton of an old man lay extended on the oak floor, and at a right angle across his hips lay another body, which appeared to be that of an adolescent or child. In the space around the deceased were a number of objects, including, a pot in a setting of stones, bronze halberds and tools, and a group of gold ornaments. These graves show that a new and radically different funerary ceremony had taken place in this area, although the material culture still remained related to that of the previous centre. Thus, this group of barrows constituted a complementary Unetician area on the periphery of the original complex, and it was from this area that much of the impetus for the development of the Tumulus Period came.
The second illustration of change in the relationship between areas is from the earliest Iron Age in southern Germany, as exemplified by the hill fort at Heuneburg and its satellite barrows and secondary sites. These sites show how the central position of southern Germany and Switzerland during the Urnfield Period was transformed in the course of the Late Hallstatt Period into a peripheral role on the edge of the Mediterranean world. Heuneburg had several occupation phases, ranging from the middle of the 2nd millennium bce to the late 1st millennium ce, but the climax of its occupation was in the 6th and early 5th centuries bce, the so-called IV phase. The site, on a promontory overlooking the valley of the upper Danube, consisted of seven acres enclosed within a defensive earthwork. During its IV phase, this defense included bastions and mud-brick walls, both of which were Mediterranean inventions. The site was densely populated, and it shows a range of activities taking place at the interior in workshops for bronze, iron, antler, and coral. Among the imports were Black-Figure shards from Greece, an Etruscan clay mold, and wine amphorae from a Greek colony in southern France. Some of the local pottery, which was among the earliest wheel-thrown pottery in central Europe, shows imitation of Greek ornamentation from southern France, while other examples copy Etruscan bronze vessels.
On the plateau behind Heuneburg are several large barrows with multiple burials, which are among the largest and richest in Europe. There were a number of farmsteads between these and the hill fort itself. This association between an important hill fort and rich graves for male and female leaders was present at other places during the 6th and early 5th centuries bce, particularly in eastern France, Switzerland, and southwestern Germany. Examples include the Hohenasperg oppidum and the rich burials at Kleinaspergle, in southern Germany, and the Mont Lassois oppidum in eastern France and the Vix grave. The latter contained a five-foot-high bronze wine krater of Greco-Etruscan workmanship, a gold diadem, and an exquisite bronze statuette, together with wine-drinking equipment, Greek pottery, a vehicle, and other ornaments. The complexity of the structural buildup in the landscape surrounding these hill forts is amazing. Many of the sites had several phases of occupation but, as with Heuneburg, the Late Hallstatt Period is a distinct phase, and the brief time it took for these centres to come into existence demonstrates the potential for power available at the time. Heuneburg was one of the wealthiest of all these sites, and it is important for many reasons. It provides evidence of emulation of another culture, and it clearly demonstrates the changes in its position vis-à-vis a number of cultural systems. This is shown most clearly in the construction techniques used in phase IV, which copied both plans and building techniques from Greece. The mud bricks were totally unsuited to this part of Europe, but they show the importance of the Mediterranean culture during this period, as does the adoption of wine-drinking ceremonies. Through these evidences of emulation, Heuneburg stands as a key site for appreciating the changes in the Early Iron Age in the relationship between the Classical world and the rest of Europe.
The exceptional concentration of Late Hallstatt chieftain burials on the upper Danube and upper Rhine lasted only to the beginning of the 5th century bce, when decentralization set in, but it had played a role in a period when relations within Europe were transformed. During the Bronze Age, Europe was roughly divided into two worlds: the eastern Mediterranean and temperate Europe, each with a common cultural heritage. With the Iron Age, the fragmentation and diversification of temperate Europe began, while the eastern Mediterranean expanded through a burst of colonial activities that resulted in cultural dominance over an extended but internally diverse area.
Prestige and status
The Neolithic was a period of remarkable communal enterprises. Against this background, the emphasis that the Bell Beaker and Corded Ware cultures placed on the individual constituted a radical change. The British archaeologist Colin Renfrew characterized the change as one from “group orientation” to “individualized chiefdom,” and this change was essential for the emerging Early Bronze Age communities. In the Late Neolithic, collective burials disappear from European prehistory in favour of individual graves. The form of the grave and the character of the funerary ceremonies changed substantially during the Bronze and Iron ages. The common and widespread use of cremation introduced by the Urnfield Culture is an important indication of the potential for radical changes within this realm. Throughout the period, the individual remained the focus of the funerary ceremony, and the evidence suggests that prestige and status often were communicated through the wealth and types of objects found in graves. It is debated whether the differences between individuals that this suggests were classlike and absolute, were expressions of sex, age, and lineage differentiation, or were assigned through deeds rather than ascribed at birth. The changes through time suggest increased social differentiation, but there also are periods, such as the Urnfield Culture, in which social differentiations are less obviously expressed in graves. The grave can, therefore, be used mainly to establish relative differentiation within one community rather than pronouncing absolute historical trends. One such study comes from the cemetery at Branč, where 308 inhumation graves spanning 200 to 400 years of the early Unetician Culture were analyzed. Within the graves there was clear evidence of internal differentiation, with some individuals having more elaborate grave goods than others. This suggests that in this type of community there would be leading families, marked by their grave goods, and that wealth and status would tend to be inherited through the male line (since male children had richer grave goods than female children). Females obtained rich costumes during adolescence and young adulthood, possibly at the time of their marriage. The status expressed at this period was to a large extent relational, placing each member of the community according to lineage, sex, and age. This differentiation was not directly based on access to power, possessions, or absolute wealth, and, in most areas of temperate Europe, social differentiation until the 1st millennium bce was likely moderate. The exception to this was short-lived local expressions of individual wealth or, more likely, prestige, such as the Wessex graves and the Leubingen-Helmsdorf group, since they suggest single leaders occupying sociopolitical roles, which were symbolized through emblems of power.
Throughout the Bronze Age, sex and age were the main components organizing the structures of daily life. Outside the Mediterranean area, there were few differences between the size and plan of most of the structures within individual sites, although the sites within a region often were internally ranked in terms of size and complexity, which suggests that they had different functions. Such “tiered” settlement systems came into being in the Early Bronze Age in areas such as southeastern Europe, and they were quite prominent during the Late Bronze Age in the Lusatian Culture of Poland and northeastern Germany as well as in the Urnfield Culture of central Europe. This settlement organization probably continued into the Early Iron Age in some regions, such as England, where the hill forts became central places for an agricultural, and possibly also political, upland.
A clear social and political hierarchy was, however, lacking from the Bronze Age settlement pattern. This was particularly true of northern, western, and central Europe, which saw a variety of settlement organizations during the period. There were extended farmsteads in northern and western Europe with a development of enclosed compounds and elaborate field systems in Britain. In central Europe the extended farmsteads were in time supplemented by both unenclosed villages and defended hilltop sites, as was also the case in the area of the Late Bronze Age Lusatian complex in Poland and neighbouring areas. The fortified settlements were usually large planned enterprises, rather than organic village sprawl, and they were often erected over a few years; an example is the Lusatian defended settlement at Biskupin, Pol., where a settlement of 102–106 houses estimated to shelter some 1,000 to 1,200 people was built in just one year. The fortified sites and enclosed villages of the European Bronze Age show centralized decision making and capacities for planning and constructing grand enterprises. Their concern was the whole community rather than the individual household, and communal features such as paths, gates, and wells were well maintained and planned. The superbly preserved Late Bronze Age sites from the Swiss lakes show these communities vividly. The settlement at Cortallois-Est, on Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland, illustrates the main features of such sites: straight rows of equal-sized houses aligning paths and alleyways, with the whole complex contained within a perimeter fence. Each house had a fireplace with a decorated house-alter, or firedog. The rubbish accumulated in front of the entrance, and various activities took place within the house. The sites were densely inhabited, and minor internal differences of objects and structure existed between the houses; but they were not divided into different classes in terms of their wealth, size, or accessibility, although different crafts and trades may have made up quarters within the village. These Late Bronze Age villages did not contain any structures that could be interpreted as administrative centres or as religious offices.
A different form of organization is found throughout the Early Bronze Age in southeastern Europe and in southeastern Spain. Both areas had nucleated defended settlements during this period, and there appears to have been some differentiation of the houses in terms of function and size. A tendency toward centralization is demonstrated by the Early Bronze Age site at Spišsky Štvrtok. This was a fortified site of economic, administrative, and strategic importance. An oval area, enclosed by a ditch and rampart, was differentiated into an acropolis and a settlement area, with the houses of the acropolis built using a different technique. The amount of gold and bronze objects hidden in chests under the floors of the houses in the settlement area further suggests that there were economic and social distinctions among the inhabitants.
The important exception to this picture is the eastern Mediterranean, which underwent a rapid and dramatic social development during this period, permanently severing its cultural affinity with temperate Europe. At a time of modest stratification in the rest of Europe, the first European civilization—as defined by administration, bookkeeping, writing, urbanism, and the separation of different kinds of power—arose in the Aegean. Its background was the Neolithic cultures of the 3rd millennium bce, which were closely aligned with those of temperate and southeastern Europe. The Neolithic roots alone cannot explain the development in the Aegean, and there is no convincing evidence for external influences behind these changes in Greece nor is there basis for arguing for a migration. Local factors must have caused development to follow a different route in this area.
One of many possible factors was the marked population increase in the south Aegean during the Early Bronze Age. This led to the development of some extensive settlements, although the overall settlement pattern continued to be dispersed, with a majority of small hamlets and farmsteads. This could have caused a degree of settlement hierarchy at this stage, with some sites acting as regional centres. Central places provide opportunity for craft specialization and redistribution of commodities and thus lead to social hierarchy and a type of society known as the complex chiefdom. Another important factor was the change in agricultural production that followed the adoption of vine and olive cultivation during the 3rd millennium bce and the possible increase in the exploitation of sheep. These were commodity-oriented activities, which furthered exchange and redistribution. These products were more suitable for a redistributive economy than for a household economy. Olives, in particular, demand capital investment, since it takes several years before the crop produces. Within this setting, the palace economy, a complex bureaucratic organization based on a redistributive economy, developed. The first state had appeared in Europe.
This process can be followed from 1800 bce onward in Mycenae, in mainland Greece, and on Crete. The character of the society was distinct at each of these centres, but the palace economy distinguished them from the villages and farmsteads of temperate Europe. For reasons not clearly known but possibly related to subsistence crises and over-exploitation of dwindling metal supplies, these centres collapsed suddenly about 1200 bce, and thereafter Greece entered its Dark Ages. After a few centuries of restructuring, about 800 bce this was followed by a remarkable Greek expansion into the western Mediterranean, during which colonies were founded in southern Italy, Mediterranean France (Massalia), and along the southeastern coast of Spain. The Etruscan state, which developed in Italy from about 700 bce, competed for domination of the western Mediterranean, and during the Early Iron Age Etruscan as well as Greek influences reached beyond their Mediterranean neighbours.
During the Iron Age, stratification became common and marked throughout Europe. Differences in wealth and status in terms of both individuals and households were reflected in graves as well as settlements. Settlements reveal internal division of houses according to size and function, and the population of any village was divided by wealth in addition to sex, age, kinship, and personal characteristics. Socially differentiated settlements existed from Scandinavia to Italy and from Ireland to the Russian borders, although they were differently laid out and organized. This period saw the building of permanent fences and enclosures around fields and farms; the development of villages and, within these, increasing differentiation of the sizes of individual buildings; and increased stratification between settlements, with proto-urban centres coming into being. The rate of change varied in different parts of Europe, but toward the end of the 1st millennium bce all areas had undergone these changes. The end of this trend in northern Europe is vividly illustrated by the Hodde village in Denmark, where the community can be followed during the centuries near the end of the 1st millennium, revealing how a few farms within the enclosed village gradually grew bigger at the cost of the others. An unstratified village was replaced by a society divided into rich and poor in only a few centuries. In other parts of temperate Europe, social division was equally clearly present, and proto-urban characteristics such as commerce, administrative centres, and religious offices came into existence on some of these sites. In this process, the defended hilltop settlement of the Early Iron Age was increasingly replaced by more complex sites.
The proto-urban tendencies are particularly strongly suggested by the oppida of western, central, and eastern Europe. These were often densely populated enclosed sites, which housed full-time specialists, such as glassmakers, leather workers, and smiths. Manching, one of the largest oppida in Europe, contained many of these characteristics. The site, located at the junction of the Danube and the Paar rivers, was occupied from about 200 bce and developed rapidly from a small undefended village to a large walled settlement. The defense was an elaborate construction consisting of four-mile-long walls built of timber and stones and including four gateways. Some areas within the defense were never occupied but others (a total of about 500 acres) were densely settled. The organization of the settlement was preplanned, with streets up to 30 feet wide and regular rows of rectangular buildings in front of zones containing pits and working areas; other areas were enclosed for granaries or the stalling of horses. The site was divided into work areas for particular crafts, such as wood, leather, and iron working. Coins were minted and used on the site, and there is evidence of much trade.
A market economy, rather than a redistributive economy, is the hallmark of these sites, and they were important supplements to the regionally dispersed smaller villages and farmsteads. Commodities became direct wealth, and the exchange of different values was monitored through coins. A drastically altered society was the result, but the Roman expansion at the end of the 2nd century bce caused major changes and brought local development to an end. The Romans established their own towns and a new system of government, and the oppida were not given the opportunity of developing on their own into towns, for which they had laid the ground.
The beginning of the Iron Age was in many areas marked by change in burial rites. The extensive use of cremation during the Urnfield Period was replaced by inhumation graves with magnificent displays of wealth. During the Late Hallstatt Period these changes were most dramatically reflected by the group of so-called princely graves in west-central Europe. These were immensely rich burials in large barrows, in which the construction of grave chamber and barrow became monumental enterprises, reminiscent of the late Unetician barrows at Leubingen and Straubing. In each case the grave was a display of power and status, giving emphasis and prestige to an individual or a lineage at a time of overt disruption of the social order. One of these rich Hallstatt graves was Hohmichele, located within the complex around Heuneburg on the Danube. This barrow was one of the satellite graves surrounding the large hill fort. It covered a central grave and 12 secondary burials. The barrow was constructed in several stages, resulting in a large imposing monument on the level land behind the hill fort. The central grave was robbed in antiquity, but it had been an inhumation grave within a wood-lined chamber, which acted as the display area for the wealth of the deceased. The walls seem to have been draped in textiles with thin gold bands, and the deceased, dressed in finery including silk, was placed on a bed next to a four-wheeled wagon. These graves, while commemorating members of the society in a traditional way, also show new elements that had become part of the life of the nobility north of the Alps. The drinking set suggests the adoption and importance of the Greek drinking ceremonies, using the Greek jugs and Schnabelkannen (“beaked pots”) for pouring and serving wine, the kraters for mixing, and the amphorae for storage and transport. The implied wine-drinking ceremony, which was likely restricted to certain sectors of the society, and furniture directly imported from the south show the emulation of southern city life by the central European chiefs.
The rich princely graves were constructed in southwestern Germany during Ha C–D. Thereafter inhumation graves became more widespread in central Europe and neighbouring areas, and they were the main burial form until the 2nd century bce, when formal burial rites disappeared in many regions and cremation was reintroduced in others. The graves of the early La Tène Period remained very rich, but barrows and elaborate grave chambers ceased after their resurrection by the Hallstatt princes and princesses. Regional variations in rites and assemblages became prolific. In France, La Tène cemeteries contained rich flat graves that had two-wheeled wagons rather than the earlier four-wheeled ones. These graves held large amounts of beautifully manufactured Celtic objects such as swords and torques, as well as Roman and Greek imports, and there were clear distinctions drawn between the sexes. In central and eastern Europe a new regional complex had developed northwest of the Black Sea, in which there were both inhumation and cremation graves clustered in large cemeteries. This complex is often attributed to Scythian invaders, and the rich assemblages and warrior graves show their influence. In the area of the lower reaches of the Dnepr, Dnestr, and Don rivers, rich Scythian graves have been excavated in the form of shaft and pit graves; in these, the deceased was accompanied by a number of other humans and by horse burials. In northern Europe and Scandinavia, cremation in large urnfields continued during most of the Iron Age. In this area the social differentiation present in the settlements and the wealth displayed by a few large hoards were not expressed in the graves, and, while large numbers of the population were given formal burials, their social statuses were not explicitly expressed in this ritual. Roman and Greek imports and wine-drinking ceremonies also reached northern Europe, but it was not until the end of the Iron Age, when formal inhumation burials reappeared, that they were being used in ways similar to those in more southerly regions.
In Britain the sequence is even more complicated and shows both a strong indigenous tradition and clear local influences from western Europe. The greatest complication is the disappearance of formal burials in this area in the Late Bronze Age; they did not reappear before the last century bce and then only in a few regions, such as Yorkshire. The Late Iron Age inhumation graves in Yorkshire are almost identical to wagon graves in northern France, and there must have been very specific and personal contacts between the two areas to account for this.
Social differentiation existed throughout the Metal Ages but changed with time and in degree. This was not, however, a smooth process that can easily be followed through the centuries. There were odd kinks in the progression from the minimal ranking of the earliest Bronze Age to the proto-urban state of the Late Iron Age. There were also spatial variabilities and a number of different factors involved in the progression toward greater social complexity. Throughout the Metal Ages in Europe, new social institutions came into being and the relationships between people changed.
The relationship between nature and culture
During the Middle Bronze Age, the landscapes of most parts of Europe were filled in. Nature became cultivated, and this had costs. It seriously affected social organization as the population spread over larger areas and adapted to local conditions. It also affected the environment, which during the later part of the Bronze Age began to change. This was in part due to climatic changes, but it was furthered by human activity. There was overexploitation of marginal lands; people had moved onto the dunes in areas such as Poland and the Netherlands and into the uplands of Britain, France, and Scandinavia. But, even on less marginal land, centuries of agricultural exploitation began to exact a price. Many areas in southeastern Europe were extensively overpopulated in comparison with their agricultural capacities in the Copper and Early Bronze ages. In Hungary, for example, the area around the large Early Bronze Age tell at Tószeg was so densely occupied that the villages were within sight of each other. Overpopulation and overexploitation caused peat formation to begin, heathland to expand, blanket bog to grow over established fields and grazing grounds, and fields to turn into meadows. How the people reacted to this is not known in detail, nor is it easy to establish the rate of change, but it is possible to detect a number of changes during the end of the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age that were associated with the strained economic and ecological conditions. These changes in the environment were not, as previously believed, an environmental catastrophe, but humans had influenced their surroundings to such an extent that they had to change their way of life in order to live with the consequences.
Rituals, religion, and art
Throughout this period there were vivid and striking manifestations of religious beliefs, ritual behaviour, and artistic activities. One of the most remarkable phenomena was hoarding. Objects, usually in large numbers, were deliberately hidden in the ground or deposited in water in the form of a hoard. Hoards were known in a modest form during the Neolithic Period, and in some areas, such as Scandinavia and France, there continued to be a few large hoards in the Iron Age; but it was in the Bronze Age that hoarding became a common phenomenon of great social and economic importance. The contents of the hoards varied; they ranged from two to several hundred items or consisted of only one deliberately deposited object, such as the single swords found in the River Thames. They might contain several objects of the same type or of many different types. They were commonly placed in association with wet areas—such as rivers, bogs, and meadows—or located under or near large stones, including in old megalithic tombs. They were seldom parts of settlements, but they have been found in wells, such as at Berlin-Lichterfelde, in Germany. They also may have come to function as a foundation deposit for a later settlement, as was the case at Danebury, in southern England, where an Iron Age hill fort was placed at the location of a Late Bronze Age hoard. Hoards were relatively infrequent during the earliest part of the Bronze Age, when they were found mainly in southeastern Europe, Bavaria, and Austria and contained flat axes and neck rings. Hoarding reached its peak during the later part of the Early Bronze Age and the Middle Bronze Age, when the activity spread throughout Europe and became an established phenomenon in most of its communities. In the Middle and Late Bronze Age, large numbers of hoards were deposited, and a substantial number of bronze objects were in this way consumed and withdrawn from circulation. Late Bronze Age hoards from Romania, among the largest ever, contained up to four tons of bronze objects. At the same time, large collections of unused tools, newly taken from their molds, were deposited together in France.
Hoarding is one of the more unusual elements of Bronze Age Europe, and it is difficult to explain. The activity consumed large parts of the wealth of these societies without apparent benefits. Traditional explanations have divided them into different types with varying function. The lack of settlement association means that they were not originally foundation deposits, such as are known from the Roman period. They must, therefore, be explained either in terms of metalworking procedures or as having a ritual or religious meaning. Hoards that could have been retrieved from their hiding place have been interpreted, depending on their contents, as hidden treasure, merchants’ stock, or items intended for recycling by the smiths. Hoards that could not possibly have been retrieved must have had ritual or religious significance, or, alternatively, they were acts of conspicuous consumption of wealth in a potlatch ceremony. This would enhance the position of the owner and, incidentally, would also ensure the flow of imports and the value of bronze. But a functional interpretation of hoards as a kind of stock cannot account for why these hoards were so often not retrieved. Thousands of hoards were made during the Bronze Age, and enormous riches were disposed of through these activities. In spite of their internal differences and variations in terms of location, composition, and amounts, it is likely that ritual behaviour and cultural meaning were always major components of this practice. There is, however, only little indication of what that meaning was. The association with water, which became more pronounced through time, could suggest water-related rituals and has been interpreted as relating to fertility rites and agricultural production. Because the location and composition of hoards vary locally as well as through time, however, they may embody more than one meaning.
Only a few areas saw instances of hoarding in the Iron Age, and their forms were distinctly different from those of the Bronze Age. The most obvious example is the votive deposit at Hjortspring, Den., where a large wooden boat equipped for war with wooden shields, spears, and swords was destroyed and deposited in a small bog. The events behind these hoards were known to Classical writers such as Tacitus and Orosius, who gave accounts of war offerings by Germanic and Cimbrian tribes, respectively. They describe how the weaponry confiscated in war was destroyed and deposited in victory ceremonies. The Iron Age hoards of northern Europe had clear associations with war, the types and numbers of objects deposited together are incomparable with the Bronze Age hoards, and the ritual destruction of the entire assemblage was a new element.
The new hoarding ritual contained elements of conspicuous consumption, but its form and focus were different from previous activities. It developed shortly before the end of the 1st millennium, and it continued as a tradition among the Germanic tribes in northern Europe for several centuries. Another area with complex ritual ceremonies during the Iron Age is France. There are not many of these ritual places, but those that existed were large complex sanctuaries with continuous use over several centuries. One of these sites is Gournay-sur-Aronde, in northern France, a sanctuary used from 300 to 50 bce. The site consisted of a square enclosed by a ditch and palisade with a number of large pits for exposing and displaying offerings at its centre and a number of wood-lined ditches along the edges. In the ditches were found the remains of hundreds of iron weapons, all deliberately and systematically destroyed, as well as fibulae and tools. There were also the remains of 208 animals and 12 humans. These remains indicate some of the ceremonial behaviour that had taken place on the site. All cattle had the muzzle cut off during offering, and their skulls were displayed on top of pits and ditches. The humans had been beheaded, and the bones were at some points moved from the central pits to the ditches and rearranged there according to different prescriptions. The archaeology shows that both the Bronze and Iron ages were periods of specific and unique ritual behaviour but also that their beliefs and norms were not uniform throughout each period. As the socioeconomic structures of these societies changed, their ideological structures underwent transformation.
Societies reveal themselves through their art. These expressions are, however, difficult to interpret, and much of this evidence from the past has disappeared. It is at the same time an essential source, giving insight into the artistry and sophistication of the people of these periods. The development of styles can be followed through the decoration of metal objects and ceramics, while a more distinct pictorial art is found in the rock art from many parts of Europe, in the wall paintings from Minoan Crete, and in the odd figures and scenarios engraved on a range of materials. Stylistic developments show the existence of workshops and schools, and the degree of influence they exercised reached into far corners of the Bronze and Iron Age communities. In the stylistic development during the Metal Ages, two phenomena are of particular interest. The first is the development of the sun-bird-ship motif of the Urnfield Culture. The origin of this motif, which featured bird-headed ships embellished with solar disks, is not known, but over a short period about 1400 bce it became common both as incised decoration and as plastic art throughout a vast area of eastern and central Europe. The similarity in execution and composition is remarkable and suggests a shared understanding of its meaning and the intensity of contact between distant areas.
The second point of interest is the change in style between the Hallstatt and La Tène periods. Throughout the Bronze Age and the Late Hallstatt Period, there were two distinct types of decoration in temperate Europe: the dominant geometric design of various compositions, including curvilinear styles, and the less common naturalistic style portraying humans and animals and used, for example, in rock art. At the end of the Hallstatt Period, at the beginning of the second phase of the Iron Age, a new decorative style, the La Tène style developed, and it rapidly replaced the geometric decoration. This style, as abstract as the Bronze Age one, was nonetheless substantially different. It incorporated flowing curved lines of floral designs with zoomorphic motifs filling the surfaces of the objects and increasingly used settings of semiprecious stones and coral. During the Iron Age this style flourished and branched out into different schools of great beauty. The style reached its mature form in the 4th century bce with the Waldalgesheim style, and, after this point, its most interesting branch was found in Britain, which saw a very individual development and where La Tène art continued to flourish after this style had passed its zenith on the Continent. The La Tène style was used on a variety of artifacts, such as gold and silver jewelry, swords and scabbards, shields inlaid with enamel, bronze mirrors, and beautifully executed containers in wood and ceramics.
The origin and spread of the different art styles have been the subject of much debate. Early Bronze Age geometric and linear motifs, in particular the use of double-axe and spirals motifs, looked to be the result of Mycenaean influences. The art of the Urnfield Culture was thought to be the result of an invasion of people from the east, bringing cremation and a new art style into Europe. La Tène art was associated with the Celtic people, and their spread throughout large parts of Europe was assumed to have brought this art to different areas. The genesis of the various artistic developments cannot easily be established; but they were not as unified a phenomenon as has been assumed, and local variations are prolific. Different art styles influenced each other and were spread widely through copies, exchange, and communication; but this was interspersed with periods of greater local diversity and less desire for contact and emulation.
The people of the Metal Ages
The Iron Age is often seen as the time of the appearance in history of the European peoples, the “barbarians” as they were seen by Rome. These people included a number of different tribes and groups, the configuration of which changed over time; all had more or less obvious roots in the Bronze Age. Ethnicity is not easy to establish, however, and the fact that, for example, the Romans ascribed an area to a particular people does not necessarily mean that those inhabiting that area constituted an ethnic and linguistic group. Continuous changes in the composition of tribal formation occurred in the Iron Age as groups bound together through alliances created by gift giving, trade, and aggression. From Greek, and later Roman, writers and from Assyrian texts, historical information about some of these people has been preserved. The main groups presented by these texts are the Celts in western Europe, the Germanic people of northern Europe, the Slavs from eastern Europe, and Cimmerians, Scythians, and, later, Sarmatians coming into southeastern Europe from the Russian Steppe. The texts describe what to their authors appeared as barbarous customs in cultures they did not understand, but they also provide historic insights into the movements of different peoples and tribes during this unrestful period.
It was also during the Iron Age that individually named people appeared for the first time in European sources, and the names of kings, heroes, gods, and goddesses have become known through legendary writers such as Homer. In the main, however, the Metal Ages were before literature began to immortalize individuals, and in general little is known about individual people or even groups from these periods. It remains up to the archaeologist to explain how the people lived and who they were, since they are known only through their art, their actions, and their own physical remains. Their art shows the people through figures and drawings, but always in a stylistic or symbolic way rather than as portraits. This is even the case in the wall paintings from Mycenaean Crete, which show detailed full-figure drawings of women and men in different costumes and involved in various, presumably partly ceremonial, activities. The figurative representations, whether drawings or statues, do not give accurate insight into the appearance, health, and mentality of these people, but evidence of this is provided by their physical remains and the things they made and used.
Their appearance can to some extent be reconstructed on the basis of skeletal materials from graves. Owing to changes in burial rites, these are better preserved from some periods than others, but in general there is good evidence. The people were close to the same height as people living today and were of a similar build. In some areas, as demonstrated by the Early Bronze Age cemetery at Ripa Lui Bodai, in Romania, people of different racial characteristics were buried in a similar manner within one cemetery, suggesting that the population was racially mixed. It is quite likely that such mixture was common in many areas, suggesting that the cultures correspond to social structures rather than ethnic or racial ones.
The mortality rate was high, and the average life expectancy was about 30–40 years, with high infant mortality and few very old members of society. At the Unetician cemetery at Tornice, Pol., the average age at death for men was 31 and for women 20, while that from the Early Bronze Age cemetery at Lerna, Greece, was 31–37 for men and 29–31 for women. Women would have given birth at an early age, and their lower life expectancy was likely due to death in connection with pregnancy or childbirth. The difference in life expectancy may be indirect evidence of girl-child infanticide. Generational time would have been short, and the nature of society was therefore drastically different. As an example, the estimate of the living population at Branč suggests that it consisted of 30 to 40 people, half of them children. This would have influenced social life, kinship systems, and subsistence activities. The bodies often show signs of heavy physical labour, and the wear on the bones suggests that many activities took place in a squatting position.
Generally, social divisions of labour and resources did not in the Bronze Age reach such degrees that this affected the bodies, but this changed with time. Analysis of the human bones from the Early Iron Age cemetery at Mount Magdalenska, Slovenia, shows such divisions. The males of some clans or leading families had more access to animal products than any of the other members of the community, and the women generally had a more restricted and homogeneous diet. With the advent of the Iron Age, the society had become so differentiated that some people lived a life protected from hard labour and physical toils while others worked extensively and had a poor diet.
Throughout the Metal Ages, humans were victims of various diseases, such as rheumatism and arthritis, which complicated life and crippled the body. Tuberculosis also has been observed, as have periodontal disease, caries, and bone tumours. Some of these diseases caused joint changes or vertebral deformities—such as were seen on a Copper Age skeleton found in Hungary—which resulted in restricted working and even walking capacities for the individual concerned. Badly crippled and handicapped people often survived, and they must have been taken care of and fed by other members of their community.
There is also evidence to suggest that people took great care with their appearance. The hairstyles were often sophisticated, with braids, hairnets, and ornaments being used by women or with the hair cut straight at the shoulder in a bob as for the girl in the grave at Egtved, Den. Manicure equipment was common in Late Bronze and Early Iron Age graves, and the mirror was a favoured object among both the Celtic people and Scythian warriors. These objects and evidence from well-preserved graves show people as well-groomed individuals who shaved regularly, braided or cut their hair, and had well-cared-for, manicured hands.
In addition to how the people looked, there is also evidence of the clothing and ornaments they used. There are a few scattered wool textiles from the Neolithic, but the first well-documented evidence of wool textiles dates from the Bronze Age. At times the textiles themselves have been found, but more commonly it is the equipment used in textile production that shows their presence. Spindle whorls, loom weights, and combs became increasingly common components of settlement debris, showing weaving as a household task performed at any settlement. With the Iron Age, new weaving techniques developed, and embroideries, dyes, and more complicated designs were introduced, as were textiles of materials such as linen and silk. At this point, it also became common to have specialist weavers, and in some oppida the weavers lived in certain designated quarters within the settlement. The increase in textile production meant that the raising of sheep intensified in many regions during the Bronze Age. In the Aegean, this happened early in the Bronze Age, and Linear B tablets that give accounts of trade in textiles certify the economic importance of this commodity for this area. In other parts of Europe, it took a little longer, but, toward the end of the Bronze Age, changes in the fleece of sheep in England demonstrate how substantially the use of sheep had grown.
Remains of Bronze Age costumes are limited, but they show various relatively simple wool garments adorned with bronze ornaments and attachments. In many areas, hats of different kinds—possibly with a clear distinction in style between those worn by men and women—were used. Bronze statues show similarly prominent headpieces, and they often gave great attention to depicting hairstyles. In the course of the Early Bronze Age, pins became common elements of costumes, and with the Tumulus Culture they became prominent pieces, at times exceeding 12 to 16 inches (30 to 40 centimetres) in length, with elaborate heads that often reflect regional patterns. At this time, the pins lost much of their original functional role and became primarily display items. Their regional diversity suggests how people used elements of their dress to express their group identity. During the Late Bronze Age, the pin remained in use and of importance. Thousands were found in the Swiss lake sites, but these are small elegant pieces that at times were composed into complex breast pieces by connecting chains and pendants. Iron Age textiles are found much more frequently, and clothing at that time became an elaborate and colourful medium of regional and social variability. Metal attachments became less common, but the fibula (a brooch resembling a safety pin) replaced the pin, and it became an object of fashion widely adopted and undergoing much regional development and elaboration.
These were the people who lived with and created the Metal Ages of prehistoric Europe. The conditions of their lives had undergone considerable changes during the centuries of the Copper, Bronze, and Iron ages; but these were gradual changes initiated and managed largely internally and at a rate dictated from within. Roman expansion into temperate Europe during the last centuries bce changed this, and new social and ideological structures were imposed from above upon local communities. Long-established links of contact and previous cultural affinities were broken, and a new Europe came into being. Marie-Louise Stig Sørensen
Greeks, Romans, and barbarians
The main treatment of Classical Greek and Roman history is given in the articles Aegean civilizations; ancient Greek civilization; Hellenistic Age; ancient Italic people; and ancient Rome. Only a brief cultural overview is offered here, outlining the influence of Greeks and Romans on European history.
Greeks
Of the Indo-European tribes of European origin, the Greeks were foremost as regards both the period at which they developed an advanced culture and their importance in further evolution. The Greeks emerged in the course of the 2nd millennium bce through the superimposition of a branch of the Indo-Europeans on the population of the Mediterranean region during the great migrations of nations that started in the region of the lower Danube. From 1800 bce onward the first early Greeks reached their later areas of settlement between the Ionian and the Aegean seas. The fusion of these earliest Greek-speaking people with their predecessors produced the civilization known as Mycenaean. They penetrated to the sea into the Aegean region and via Crete (approximately 1400 bce) reached Rhodes and even Cyprus and the shores of Anatolia. From 1200 bce onward the Dorians followed from Epirus. They occupied principally parts of the Peloponnese (Sparta and Argolis) and also Crete. Their migration was followed by the Dark Ages—two centuries of chaotic movements of tribes in Greece—at the end of which (c. 900 bce) the distribution of the Greek mainland among the various tribes was on the whole completed.
From about 800 bce there was a further Greek expansion through the founding of colonies overseas. The coasts and islands of Anatolia were occupied from south to north by the Dorians, Ionians, and Aeolians, respectively. In addition, individual colonies were strung out around the shores of the Black Sea in the north and across the eastern Mediterranean to Naukratis on the Nile delta and in Cyrenaica and also in the western Mediterranean in Sicily, lower Italy, and Massalia (Marseille). Thus, the Hellenes, as they called themselves thereafter, came into contact on all sides with the old, advanced cultures of the Middle East and transmitted many features of these cultures to western Europe. This, along with the Greeks’ own achievements, laid the foundations of European civilization.
The position and nature of the country exercised a decisive influence in the evolution of Greek civilization. The proximity of the sea tempted the Greeks to range far and wide exploring it, but the fact of their living on islands or on peninsulas or in valleys separated by mountains on the mainland confined the formation of states to small areas not easily accessible from other parts. This fateful individualism in political development was also a reflection of the Hellenic temperament. Though it prevented Greece from becoming a single unified nation that could rival the strength of the Middle Eastern monarchies, it led to the evolution of the city-state. This was not merely a complex social and economic structure and a centre for crafts and for trade with distant regions; above all it was a tightly knit, self-governing political and religious community whose citizens were prepared to make any sacrifice to maintain their freedom. Colonies, too, started from individual cities and took the form of independent city-states. Fusions of power occurred in the shape of leagues of cities, such as the Peloponnesian League, the Delian League, and the Boeotian League. The efficacy of these leagues depended chiefly upon the hegemony of a leading city (Sparta, Athens, or Thebes), but the desire for self-determination of the others could never be permanently suppressed, and the leagues broke up again and again.
The Hellenes, however, always felt themselves to be one people. They were conscious of a common character and a common language, and they practiced only one religion. Furthermore, the great athletic contests and artistic competitions had a continually renewed unifying effect. The Hellenes possessed a keen intellect, capable of abstraction, and at the same time a supple imagination. They developed, in the form of the belief in the unity of body and soul, a serene, sensuous conception of the world. Their gods were connected only loosely by a theogony that took shape gradually; in the Greek religion there was neither revelation nor dogma to oppose the spirit of inquiry.
The Hellenes benefited greatly from the knowledge and achievement of other countries as regards astronomy, chronology, and mathematics, but it was through their own native abilities that they made their greatest achievements, in becoming the founders of European philosophy and science. Their achievement in representative art and in architecture was no less fundamental. Their striving for an ideal, naturalistic rendering found its fulfillment in the representation of the human body in sculpture in the round. Another considerable achievement was the development of the pillared temple to a greater degree of harmony. In poetry the genius of the Hellenes created both form and content, which have remained a constant source of inspiration in European literature.
The strong political sense of the Greeks produced a variety of systems of government from which their theory of political science abstracted types of constitution that are still in use. On the whole, political development in Greece followed a pattern: first the rule of kings, found as early as the period of Mycenaean civilization; then a feudal period, the oligarchy of noble landowners; and, finally, varying degrees of democracy. Frequently there were periods when individuals seized power in the cities and ruled as tyrants. The tendency for ever-wider sections of the community to participate in the life of the state brought into being the free democratic citizens, but the institution of slavery, upon which Greek society and the Greek economy rested, was untouched by this.
In spite of continual internal disputes, the Greeks succeeded in warding off the threat of Asian despotism. The advance of the Persians into Europe failed (490 and 480–79 bce) because of the resistance of the Greeks and in particular of the Athenians. The 5th century bce saw the highest development of Greek civilization. The Classical period of Athens and its great accomplishments left a lasting impression, but the political cleavages, particularly the struggle between Athens and Sparta, increasingly reduced the political strength of the Greeks. Not until they were conquered by the Macedonians did the Greeks attain a new importance as the cultural leaven of the Hellenistic empires of Alexander the Great and his successors. A new system of colonization spread as far as the Indus city-communities fashioned after the Greek prototype, and Greek education and language came to be of consequence in the world at large.
Greece again asserted its independence through the formation of the Achaean League, which was finally defeated by the Romans in 146 bce. The spirit of Greek civilization subsequently exercised a great influence upon Rome. Greek culture became one of the principal components of Roman imperial culture and together with it spread throughout Europe. When Christian teaching appeared in the Middle East, the Greek world of ideas exercised a decisive influence upon its spiritual evolution. From the time of the partition of the Roman Empire, leadership in the Eastern Empire fell to the Greeks. Their language became the language of the state, and its usage spread to the Balkans. The Byzantine Empire, of which Greece was the core, protected Europe against potential invaders from Anatolia until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. (The main treatment of the Byzantine Empire from about 330 to about 1453 is given in the article Byzantine Empire.)
Romans
The original Mediterranean population of Italy was completely altered by repeated superimpositions of peoples of Indo-European stock. The first Indo-European migrants, who belonged to the Italic tribes, moved across the eastern Alpine passes into the plain of the Po River about 1800 bce. Later they crossed the Apennines and eventually occupied the region of Latium, which included Rome. Before 1000 bce there followed related tribes, which later divided into various groups and gradually moved to central and southern Italy. In Tuscany they were repulsed by the Etruscans, who may have come originally from Anatolia. The next to arrive were Illyrians from the Balkans, who occupied Venetia and Apulia. At the beginning of the historical period, Greek colonists arrived in Italy, and after 400 bce the Celts, who settled in the plain of the Po.
The city of Rome, increasing gradually in power and influence, created through political rule and the spread of the Latin language something like a nation out of this abundance of nationalities. In this the Romans were favoured by their kinship with the other Italic tribes. The Roman and Italic elements in Italy, moreover, were reinforced in the beginning through the founding of colonies by Rome and by other towns in Latium. The Italic element in Roman towns decreased: a process—less racial than cultural—called the Romanization of the provinces. In the 3rd century bce, central and southern Italy were dotted with Roman colonies, and the system was to be extended to ever more distant regions up to imperial times. As its dominion spread throughout Italy and covered the entire Mediterranean basin, Rome received an influx of people of the most varied origins, including eventually vast numbers from Asia and Africa.
The building of an enormous empire was Rome’s greatest achievement. Held together by the military power of one city, in the 2nd century ce the Roman Empire extended throughout northern Africa and western Asia; in Europe it covered all the Mediterranean countries, Spain, Gaul, and southern Britain. This vast region, united under a single authority and a single political and social organization, enjoyed a long period of peaceful development. In Asia, on a narrow front, it bordered the Parthian empire, but elsewhere beyond its perimeter there were only barbarians. Rome brought to the conquered parts of Europe the civilization the Greeks had begun, to which it added its own important contributions in the form of state organization, military institutions, and law. Within the framework of the empire and under the protection of its chain of fortifications, extending uninterrupted the entire length of its frontiers (marked in Europe by the Rhine and the Danube), there began the assimilation of varying types of culture to the Hellenistic-Roman pattern. The army principally, but also Roman administration, the social order, and economic factors, encouraged Romanization. Except around the eastern Mediterranean, where Greek remained dominant, Latin became everywhere the language of commerce and eventually almost the universal language.
The empire formed an interconnected area of free trade, which was afforded a thriving existence by the pax romana (“Roman peace”). Products of rural districts found a market throughout the whole empire, and the advanced technical skills of the central region of the Mediterranean spread outward into the provinces. The most decisivestep toward Romanization was the extension of the city system into these provinces. Rural and tribal institutions were replaced by the civitas form of government, according to which the elected city authority shared in the administration of the surrounding country region; and, as the old idea of the Greek city-state gained ground, a measure of local autonomy appeared. The Romanized upper classes of the provinces began supplying men to fill the higher offices of the state. Ever-larger numbers of people acquired the status of Roman citizens, until in 212 ce the emperor Caracalla bestowed it on all freeborn subjects. The institution of slavery, however, remained.
The enjoyment of equal rights by all Roman citizens did not last. The coercive measures by which alone the state could maintain itself divided the population anew into hereditary classes according to their work; and the barbarians, mainly Germanic, who were admitted into the empire in greater numbers, remained in their own tribal associations either as subjects or as allies. The state created a perfected administrative apparatus, which exercised a strongly unifying effect throughout the empire, but local self-government became less and less effective under pressure from the central authority.
The decline of the late empire was accompanied by a stagnation of spiritual forces, a paralysis of creative power, and a retrograde development in the economy. Much of the empire’s work of civilization was lost in internal and external wars. Equally, barbarization began with the rise of unchecked pagan ways of life and the settlement of Germanic tribes long before the latter shattered the Western Empire and took possession of its parts. Though many features of Roman civilization disappeared, others survived in the customs of peoples in various parts of the empire. Moreover, something of the superstructure of the empire was taken over by the Germanic states, and much valuable literature was preserved in manuscript for later times.
It was under the Roman Empire that the Christian religion penetrated into Europe. By winning recognition as the religion of the state, it added a new basic factor of equality and unification to the imperial civilization and at the same time reintroduced Middle Eastern and Hellenistic elements into the West. Organized within the framework of the empire, the church became a complementary body upholding the state. Moreover, during the period of the decline of secular culture, Christianity and the church were the sole forces to arouse fresh creative strength by assimilating the civilization of the ancient world and transmitting it to the Middle Ages. At the same time, the church in the West showed reserve toward the speculative dogma of the Middle Eastern and Hellenic worlds and directed its attention more toward questions of morality and order. When the Western Empire collapsed and the use of Greek had died there, the division between East and West became still sharper. The name Romaioi remained attached to the Greeks of the Eastern Empire, while in the West the word Roman developed a new meaning in connection with the church and the bishop of Rome. Christianity and a church of a Roman character, the most enduring legacy of the ancient world, became one of the most important features in western European civilization.
Barbarian migrations and invasions
The Germans and Huns
The wanderings of the Germanic peoples, which lasted until the early Middle Ages and destroyed the Western Roman Empire, were, together with the migrations of the Slavs, formative elements of the distribution of peoples in modern Europe. The Germanic peoples originated about 1800 bce from the superimposition, on a population of megalithic culture on the eastern North Sea coast, of Battle-Ax people from the Corded Ware Culture of middle Germany. During the Bronze Age the Germanic peoples spread over southern Scandinavia and penetrated more deeply into Germany between the Weser and Vistula rivers. Contact with the Mediterranean through the amber trade encouraged the development from a purely peasant culture, but during the Iron Age the Germanic peoples were at first cut off from the Mediterranean by the Celts and Illyrians. Their culture declined, and an increasing population, together with worsening climatic conditions, drove them to seek new lands farther south. Thus, the central European Celts and Illyrians found themselves under a growing pressure. Even before 200 bce the first Germanic tribes had reached the lower Danube, where their path was barred by the Macedonian kingdom. Driven by rising floodwaters, at the end of the 2nd century bce, migratory hordes of Cimbri, Teutoni, and Ambrones from Jutland broke through the Celtic-Illyrian zone and reached the edge of the Roman sphere of influence, appearing first in Carinthia (113 bce), then in southern France, and finally in upper Italy. With the violent attacks of the Cimbri, the Germans stepped onto the stage of history.
These migrations were in no way nomadic; they were the gradual expansions of a land-hungry peasantry. Tribes did not always migrate en masse. Usually, because of the loose political structure, groups remained in the original homelands or settled down at points along the migration route. In the course of time, many tribes were depleted and scattered. On the other hand, different tribal groups would sometimes unite before migrating or would take up other wanderers en route. The migrations required skilled leadership, and this promoted the social and political elevation of a noble and kingly class.
In 102 bce the Teutoni were totally defeated by the Romans, who in the following year destroyed the army of the Cimbri. The Swabian tribes, however, moved steadily through central and southern Germany, and the Celts were compelled to retreat to Gaul. When the Germans under Ariovistus crossed the upper Rhine, Julius Caesar arrested their advance and initiated the Roman countermovement with his victory in the Sundgau (58 bce). Under the emperor Augustus, Roman rule was carried as far as the Rhine and the Danube. On the far side of these rivers, the Germans were pushed back only in the small area contained within the Germano-Raetian limes (fortified frontier) from about 70 ce.
The pressure of population was soon evident once more among the German peoples. Tribes that had left Scandinavia earlier (Rugii, Goths, Gepidae, Vandals, Burgundians, and others) pressed on from the lower Vistula and Oder rivers (150 ce onward). The unrest spread to other tribes, and the resulting wars between the Romans and the Marcomanni (166–180) threatened Italy itself. The successful campaigns of Marcus Aurelius resulted in the acquisition by Rome of the provinces of Marcomannia and Sarmatia, but after his death these had to be abandoned and the movement of the Germanic peoples continued. Soon the Alemanni, pushing up the Main River, reached the upper German limes.
To the east the Goths had reached the Black Sea about 200 ce. Year after year Goths and others, either crossing the lower Danube or traveling by sea, penetrated into the Balkan Peninsula and Anatolia as far as Cyprus on plundering expeditions. Only with the Roman victory at Naissus (269) was their advance finally checked. Enriched with booty and constituted imperial mercenaries in return for the payment of a yearly tribute, they became a settled population. The Romans, however, surrendered Dacia beyond the Danube.
In 258 the Alemanni and the Franks broke through the lines and settled on the right bank of the Rhine, continuously infiltrating thereafter toward Gaul and Italy. Everywhere within the empire, towns were fortified, even Rome itself. Franks and Saxons ravaged the coasts of northern Gaul and Britain, and for the next three centuries incursions by Germanic peoples were the scourge of the Western Empire. Nevertheless, it was only with German help that the empire was able to survive as long as it did. The Roman army received an ever-growing number of recruits from the German tribes, which also provided settlers for the land. The Germans soon proved themselves capable of holding the highest ranks in the army. Tribute money to the tribes, pay to individual soldiers, and booty all brought wealth to the Germans, which in turn gave warrior lords the means with which to maintain large followings of retainers.
In the West, however, among the Alemanni and Franks, the beginnings of political union into larger groups did not go beyond loose associations. Only in the East did the Gothic kingdom gather many tribes under a single leadership. Above all, the development of the eastern Germans was stimulated by their undisturbed contact with the frontiers of the ancient world. Their economy, however, was still unable to support the needs of a steadily growing population, and pressure from overpopulation resulted in further incursions into the Roman Empire. The imperial reforms of Diocletian and Constantine the Great brought a period of improvement. The usurpation of the imperial title by a Frankish general in 356 let loose a storm along the length of the Rhine and subsequently on the Danube, but the frontiers were restored by the forces of the emperors Julian and Valentinian I, who repelled attacks by both the Franks and the Alemanni.
At that time, a new force appeared. In 375 the Huns from Central Asia first attacked the Ostrogoths—an event that provoked serious disturbances among the eastern Germans. The Huns remained in the background, gradually subjugating many Germanic and other tribes. The terrified Goths and related tribes burst through the Danube frontier into the Roman Empire, and the Balkans became once again a battlefield for German armies. After the crushing defeat of the Romans at Adrianople (378), the empire was no longer in a position to drive all its enemies from its territories. Tribes that could no longer be expelled were settled within the empire as “allies” ( foederati). They received subsidies and in return supplied troops. The Germanization of the empire progressed, that of the army being nearly completed. None of the tribes, however, that had broken into the Balkans settled there. After the division of the empire in 395, the emperors at Constantinople did all in their power to drive the Germanic tribes away from the vicinity of the capital toward the Western Empire.
From the beginning of the 5th century, the Western Empire was the scene of numerous further migrations. The Visigoths broke out of the Balkans into Italy and in 410 temporarily occupied Rome. In 406–407, Germanic and other tribes (Vandals, Alani, Suebi, and Burgundians) from Silesia and even farther east crossed the Rhine in their flight from the Huns and penetrated as far as Spain. The Vandals subsequently crossed to Africa and set up at Carthage the first independent German state on Roman soil. In the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (451), the Roman commander Aëtius, with German support, defeated Attila, who had united his Huns with some other Germans in a vigorous westward push. The Balkans suffered a third period of terrible raids from the eastern Germans; and Jutes, Angles, and Saxons from the Jutland Peninsula crossed over to Britain. The Franks and the Alemanni finally established themselves on the far side of the Rhine, the Burgundians extended along the Rhône valley, and the Visigoths took possession of nearly all of Spain. In 476 the Germanic soldiery proclaimed Odoacer, a barbarian general, as king of Italy, and, when Odoacer deposed the emperor Romulus Augustulus at Ravenna, the empire in the West was at an end. In the East, imperial rule remained a reality, and Constantinople, also called “New Rome,” survived many sieges until its fall in 1453. In comparison, “Old Rome” declined into an episcopal centre, losing many of its imperial characteristics. Hermann Aubin The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The reconfiguration of the empire
By the end of the 5th century, however, most of the non-Roman peoples settled in the West were adopting Roman customs and Christian belief. Intermarriage with established Roman families, the assumption of imperial titles, and, finally, conversion assisted a process of acculturation among their leaders, for instance, in the case of Clovis, the Frank. Theodoric the Ostrogoth established an impressive “sub-Roman” kingdom based on Ravenna, where public buildings and churches served by an Arian clergy competed with imperial monuments. Increased Roman influence can also be seen in the law codes promulgated by the Visigoths Euric (late 5th century) and Alaric II (the Breviary of 506) and the Burgundians, Bavarians, Ostrogoths, and Franks (Lex Salica, 507–511). Christianity often provided the medium for incorporation into old imperial structures. While the Goths were still in the Danube basin, they had embraced Arian Christianity (which denied that the Son was of the same substance as the Father), and their first bishop, Ulfilas, translated the Bible into Gothic. Given its heretical nature, this religious literature in a written vernacular could not survive, and, with conversion to orthodox (“catholic”) Christianity, the barbarian languages gradually gave way to Latin.
Nonetheless, the Germanic tribes brought into Europe their own tribal institutions, ethnic patterns, and oral and artistic traditions, including a highly developed epic poetry. Their influence was strongest in central Europe, where the Romans had had the least impact; less marked in the northern and western parts, where Romano-British and Gallo-Roman cultures were established; and weakest in the highly Romanized southern regions. Linguistically, Old High German developed in the first zone and Anglo-Saxon in Britain, while farther south medieval Romance languages developed from their common Latin inheritance.
In the southern zone, imperial traditions were reinforced by the reconquest, albeit brief, of North Africa, Italy, and parts of Spain by forces from Constantinople under Justinian’s general Belisarius. Despite the restoration of Roman administration between 533 and 554 (celebrated in the mosaics of Ravenna and the Pragmatic Sanction of 554), imperial forces could not prevent the Lombards from moving inexorably into northern Italy, which they occupied in 568. The reconquered parts of the Western Empire were thus reduced to a narrow strip of territory from the head of the Adriatic to Ravenna, the exarchate, Rome—now governed effectively by its bishop—plus small duchies. In addition, Sicily, Bruttium, and Calabria remained subject to Constantinople and were Greek-speaking for many centuries.
In contrast to previous invaders, from the 6th century onward, newly arrived barbarian forces clung to their pagan culture and resisted assimilation. The Saxons established themselves east of the Rhine in the north. The Avars and their Slav allies, who moved steadily westward from the Vistula and Dnepr river basins, disrupted weak imperial defenses at the Danube and pressed south and west into the Balkans and central Europe. By 567 the Avars established control over the Hungarian plain, where they remained until their defeat by Charlemagne in 796. After successfully besieging Sirmium and Singidunum in the 580s, the eastern Slavs infiltrated the Balkans, while others moved north and west to settle eventually along the Elbe beside the Saxons. The failure of the combined Avaro-Slav siege of Constantinople in 626 ended this pagan expansion. Although Slavs occupied the Balkan Peninsula for two centuries or more, disrupting east-west communication along the ancient Via Egnatia, they were eventually evangelized and absorbed into the Eastern Empire. Judith Eleanor Herrin
The Middle Ages
The period of European history extending from about 500 to 1400–1500 ce is traditionally known as the Middle Ages. The term was first used by 15th-century scholars to designate the period between their own time and the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The period is often considered to have its own internal divisions: either early and late or early, central or high, and late.
Calendar illustration for April from the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, manuscript illuminated by the Limbourg brothers, 1416.Photos.com/Jupiterimages
Although once regarded as a time of uninterrupted ignorance, superstition, and social oppression, the Middle Ages are now understood as a dynamic period during which the idea of Europe as a distinct cultural unit emerged. During late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, political, social, economic, and cultural structures were profoundly reorganized, as Roman imperial traditions gave way to those of the Germanic peoples who established kingdoms in the former Western Empire. New forms of political leadership were introduced, the population of Europe was gradually Christianized, and monasticism was established as the ideal form of religious life. These developments reached their mature form in the 9th century during the reign of Charlemagne and other rulers of the Carolingian dynasty, who oversaw a broad cultural revival known as the Carolingian renaissance.
In the central, or high, Middle Ages, even more dramatic growth occurred. The period was marked by economic and territorial expansion, demographic and urban growth, the emergence of national identity, and the restructuring of secular and ecclesiastical institutions. It was the era of the Crusades, Gothic art and architecture, the papal monarchy, the birth of the university, the recovery of ancient Greek thought, and the soaring intellectual achievements of St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–74).
It has been traditionally held that by the 14th century the dynamic force of medieval civilization had been spent and that the late Middle Ages were characterized by decline and decay. Europe did indeed suffer disasters of war, famine, and pestilence in the 14th century, but many of the underlying social, intellectual, and political structures remained intact. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Europe experienced an intellectual and economic revival, conventionally called the Renaissance, that laid the foundation for the subsequent expansion of European culture throughout the world.
Many historians have questioned the conventional dating of the beginning and end of the Middle Ages, which were never precise in any case and cannot be located in any year or even century. Some scholars have advocated extending the period defined as late antiquity (c. 250–c. 750 ce) into the 10th century or later, and some have proposed a Middle Ages lasting from about 1000 to 1800. Still others argue for the inclusion of the old periods Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation into a single period beginning in late antiquity and ending in the second half of the 16th century. Edward Peters Michael Frassetto
The idea of the Middle Ages
The term and concept before the 18th century
From the 4th to the 15th century, writers of history thought within a linear framework of time derived from the Christian understanding of Scripture—the sequence of Creation, Incarnation, Christ’s Second Coming, and the Last Judgment. In Book XXII of City of God, the great Church Father Augustine of Hippo (354–430) posited six ages of world history, which paralleled the six days of Creation and the six ages of the individual human life span. For Augustine, the six ages of history—from Adam and Eve to the Flood, from the Flood to Abraham, from Abraham to King David, from David to the Babylonian Exile, from the Exile to Jesus Christ, and from Christ to the Second Coming—would be followed by a seventh age, the reign of Christ on earth. World history was conceived as “salvation history”—the course of events from Creation to the Last Judgment—and its purposes were religious and moral. Thus, all the references by Augustine and other early authors to a “middle time” must be understood within the framework of the sixth age of salvation history. Early Christian interpretations of the biblical Book of Daniel (Daniel 2:31–45, 7), especially those of the Church Father Jerome (c. 347–419/420) and the historian Paulus Orosius (flourished 414–417), added the idea of four successive world empires—Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Late writers in this tradition added the idea of the translatio imperii (“translation of empire”): from Alexander the Great to the Romans, from the Romans to the Franks under Charlemagne in 800, and from Charlemagne to the East Frankish emperors and Otto I. A number of early European thinkers built upon the idea of the translation of empire to define European civilization in terms of scholarship and chivalry (the knightly code of conduct). All these ideas were readily compatible with the Augustinian sequence of the six ages of the world.
The single exception to this trend was the work of the late 12th-century Calabrian abbot and scriptural exegete Joachim of Fiore (c. 1130–c. 1201). According to Joachim, there were three ages in human history: that of the Father (before Christ), that of the Son (from Christ to an unknown future date, which some of Joachim’s followers located in the late 13th century), and that of the Holy Spirit (during which all Christendom would turn into a vast church with a universal priesthood of believers). But Joachim’s view was also firmly expressed in terms of salvation history. Many chroniclers and writers of histories, of course, wrote about shorter periods of time and focused their efforts on local affairs, but the great Augustinian metanarrative underlay their work too. From several confessional perspectives, this view still survives.
In the 14th century, however, the literary moralist Petrarch (1304–74), fascinated with ancient Roman history and contemptuous of the time that followed it, including his own century, divided the past into ancient and new—antiquity and recent times—and located the transition between them in the 4th century, when the Roman emperors converted to Christianity. According to Petrarch, what followed was an age of tenebrae (“shadows”), a “sordid middle time” with only the hope of a better age to follow. Although Petrarch’s disapproval of the Christianized Roman and post-Roman world may seem irreligious, he was in fact a devout Christian; his judgment was based on aesthetic, moral, and philological criteria, not Christian ones. Petrarch’s limitless admiration for Rome heralded a novel conception of the European past and established criteria for historical periodization other than those of salvation history or the history of the church, empire, cities, rulers, or noble dynasties. His followers in later centuries focused primarily on the transformation of the arts and letters, seeing a renewal of earlier Roman dignity and achievement beginning with the painter Giotto (1266/67 or 1276–1337) and with Petrarch himself and continuing into the 15th and 16th centuries.
Petrarch, engraving.© Ancient Art & Architecture Collection
In the early 16th century, religious critics and reformers, including both the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus and the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, added another dimension to the new conception and terminology: the idea of an evangelical, apostolic Christian church that had become corrupt when it was absorbed by the Roman Empire and now needed to be reformed, or restored to its earlier apostolic authenticity. The idea of reform had long been built into the Christian worldview. This conception of the period between the 4th and 16th centuries was laid out in the great Protestant history by Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Centuriae Magdeburgensis (1559–74; “The Magdeburg Centuries”), which also introduced the practice of dividing the past into ostensibly neutral centuries. The Roman Catholic version of church history was reflected in the Annales Ecclesiastici (“Ecclesiastical Annals”) of Caesar Baronius (1538–1607), completed by Oderico Rinaldi in 1677. Thus, the historical dimension of both the Protestant and the Catholic reformations of the 16th and 17th centuries added a sharply polemical religious interpretation of the Christian past to Petrarch’s original conception, as church history was put to the service of confessional debate.
Petrarch’s cultural successors, the literary humanists, also used variants of the expression Middle Ages. Among them was media tempestas (“middle time”), first used by Giovanni Andrea, bishop of Aleria, in 1469; others were media antiquitas (“middle antiquity”), media aetas (“middle era”), and media tempora (“middle times”), all first used between 1514 and 1530. The political theorist and historian Melchior Goldast appears to have coined the variation medium aevum (“a middle age”) in 1604; shortly after, in a Latin work of 1610, the English jurist and legal historian John Selden repeated medium aevum, Anglicizing the term in 1614 to middle times and in 1618 to middle ages. In 1641 the French historian Pierre de Marca apparently coined the French vernacular term le moyen âge, which gained authority in the respected lexicographical work Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae latinitatis (1678; “A Glossary for Writers of Middle and Low Latin”), by Charles du Fresne, seigneur du Cange, who emphasized the inferior and “middle” quality of Latin linguistic usage after the 4th century. Other 17th-century historians, including Gisbertus Voetius and Georg Horn, used terms such as media aetas in their histories of the church before the Reformation of the 16th century.
The term and idea circulated even more widely in other historical works. Du Cange’s great dictionary also used the Latin term medium aevum, as did the popular historical textbook The Nucleus of Middle History Between Ancient and Modern (1688), by the German historian Christoph Keller—although Keller observed that in naming the period he was simply following the terminology of earlier and contemporary scholars. By the late 17th century the most commonly used term for the period in Latin was medium aevum, and various equivalents of Middle Ages or Middle Age were used in European vernacular languages.
Enlightenment scorn and Romantic admiration
During the 17th and 18th centuries a number of thinkers argued that western Europe after the 15th century had surpassed even antiquity in its discoveries and technology and had thereby created a distinctively modern world. Their views, which were sharpened by Enlightenment critics of earlier European political and religious structures, did nothing to change the image of the Middle Ages. Voltaire, in his An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV (1756), savaged the Latin Christian and the reformed churches for their clerical obscurantism and earlier rulers for their ruthless and arbitrary use of force. Edward Gibbon, the English historian whose great work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) begins with events in late antiquity and ends with the fall of Constantinople (the capital of the Byzantine Empire) to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, categorically attributed the beginning of that very long “decline and fall” to “the triumph of barbarism and religion,” thus contemptuously characterizing the entire period from the 5th to the 15th century.
Voltaire, bronze by Jean-Antoine Houdon; in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia.Scala/Art Resource, New York
But, as Gibbon’s own work showed, not only had the term and the often pejorative idea of the Middle Ages been shaped in the 16th and 17th centuries, but so had the critical and technical standards of modern historical scholarship. Some Enlightenment thinkers even became interested in earlier periods of European history. Their attraction to the Middle Ages paralleled the respect for and interest in the period shared by many ideologically conservative rulers, nobles, magistrates, and churchmen. But the historians also began to apply critical techniques to their investigation of the Middle Ages. The new scholarship on the period was animated in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by historians imbued with ethnic-national sentiment and with a conception of historically “ethnic” communities—especially in Germany and England—that lacked a recognized past (or had only a peripheral past) in traditional histories of the Greco-Roman world.
During the Romantic era, an affectionate and sentimentalized portrait of the Middle Ages emerged that was usually no more accurate than the polemical characterizations of Enlightenment writers. Such views contributed to the myth that 19th-century nation-states were composed of ethnic groups that had remained unchanged and had occupied the same territory for long periods (or had once occupied territory that was now inhabited by other nation-states). These arguments became powerful and dangerous political forces in the 19th and 20th centuries, although research in the late 20th century dismissed them as political fantasies.
Not all 19th-century historians were appreciative of the Middle Ages. Although the French historian Jules Michelet at first praised the Middle Ages as the time of the birth of France, his increasing political liberalism led him to shift his admiration to the 16th century, virtually coining the term Renaissance in the process of appropriating it for France. In 1860 the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt published his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, a work as widely read and influential as that of Michelet. Despite Romantic nostalgia and increasingly disciplined scholarship, the work of Michelet and Burckhardt served to fix the opposition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in the modern mind, generally to the disadvantage of the former. These views were sharpened by 19th-century anticlericalism, especially anti-Roman Catholicism, although they were countered by equally learned Catholic apologists.
Jules Michelet, detail of an oil painting by Thomas Couture; in the Carnavalet Museum, Paris.Giraudon/Art Resource, New York
The Middle Ages in modern historiography
With the extraordinary growth of the academic discipline of history in the 19th century, the history of the Middle Ages was absorbed into academic curricula of history in Europe and the United States and established in university survey courses and research seminars. Journals of scholarly historical research began publication in Germany (1859), France (1876), England (1886), and the United States (1895), regularly including studies of one aspect or another of the Middle Ages. Historical documents were edited and substantial scholarly literature was produced that brought the history of the Middle Ages into synchronization with other fields of history. The study of the Middle Ages developed chiefly as a part of the national histories of the individual European countries, but it was studied in the United States as a pan-European phenomenon, with a focus after World War I chiefly on English and French history. The growing influence and prestige of the new academic and professional field of medieval history were reflected in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (“Historical Monuments of the Germans”), a research and publication institute founded in 1819 and still in operation in Munich, and in the eight-volume collaborative Cambridge Medieval History (1911–36). (The latter’s replacement, The New Cambridge Medieval History, began to appear in 1998.)
Most scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries accepted the view that history is largely a story of progress, in which occasional periods of decline—such as the Middle Ages—are succeeded by periods of renewal. The most articulate attack on this view was by the American medievalist Charles Homer Haskins in The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927), which applied Michelet’s and Burckhardt’s term Renaissance to the 12th century rather than to the 15th or 16th.
Although the teaching responsibilities of academic historians of the Middle Ages still generally reflect either the original tripartite division of European history or the more recent and more common quadripartite division (ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern), most scholars specialize in only very small parts of a very long period. With the emergence of late antiquity as a distinct field of research and teaching since the mid-20th century, the early part of the conventional Middle Ages has been rethought and rewritten. The distinctive post-Classical period of late antiquity is now considered the medium through which ancient Greco-Roman traditions were passed on to later Europeans. The older image of a Classical antiquity despised by world-rejecting Christians and wiped out by savage barbarians is no longer credible.
Historians in the late 20th and early 21st centuries also debated the existence of a rapid and extensive change in European society at about the turn of the 2nd millennium. Some scholars, following the pioneering lead of the French historian Georges Duby, argued for a rapid mutation, chiefly with regard to the development of new kinds of lay and ecclesiastical power over agricultural labour and the simultaneous restructuring of aristocratic lineages in the 11th century. Others maintained that a gradual transformation of society and culture occurred over a longer period of time, beginning earlier than the 11th century. These debates influenced the concept of a long Middle Ages mentioned above.
With the emergence of the concept of early modern history, roughly from 1400 to 1800, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the scientific revolution were subsumed into a period extending from the late 14th century to the 18th century. The creation of specialized scholarly conferences, historical journals, monograph series, and thematic collections of scholarly essays has reflected these changes in the configuration of the period.
Scholars also rethought the nature of change in different parts of Europe. They recognized the problem of the obvious differences between those European lands in late antiquity that had once been part of the Roman Empire and those that had not and therefore got their Romanism and antiquity secondhand. They also revised their understanding of the relations between the older Mediterranean world (large areas of which entered the Byzantine and Arab-Islamic cultural orbits) and northern Europe. In addition, scholars examined how Roman culture exported itself to peripheries on the north and east through a form of colonization that culminated in the absorption of originally peripheral colonies into an expanded core culture.
Middle Ages remains both a commonplace colloquial term and the name of a subject of academic study. But the history of the term and the current debate about its temporal and spatial application and appropriateness is a reminder that historical periods are cultural and social constructs based on later perceptions of the past, that human life often changes quite rapidly within labeled periods, however designated, and that the dialogue between continuity and change is the historian’s primary intellectual activity.
Chronology
Regardless of the loaded aesthetic, philological, moral, confessional, and philosophical origins of the term Middle Ages, the period it defines is important because it witnessed the emergence of a distinctive European civilization centred in a region that was on the periphery of ancient Mediterranean civilization. Although European civilization appropriated elements of both Greco-Roman antiquity and Judeo-Christian religion and ethics, it emerged just as the ancient Mediterranean ecumenical world was divided into the civilizations of East Rome, or Byzantium, and Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries. Three sibling civilizations, two of them Christian, developed at about the same time. The influence of wider Eurasian and North African history on that of Europe has attracted the attention of increasing numbers of historians since the late 20th century. But such change does not occur in a single year and not even in a single century. To assign any but an approximate date to the beginning of the end of the Middle Ages, as was once the fashion, is pointless. Far more important is the assessment of the nature of change in different areas of life in different periods and different places between the 3rd and the 16th centuries.
The 8th-century English monk and computist Bede (673–735), adapting an invention of the 6th-century theologian Dionysius Exiguus, introduced the method of counting years from the birth of Jesus, anno Domini (“in the year of our Lord”), which formed the basis of the modern notion of the Common Era. The new method superseded older traditions, which included dating by four-year Olympiads, by the number of years since the founding of Rome in 753 bce, by the years of Roman consuls, by the regnal years of emperors, and by the 15-year tax assessment cycle of indictions. Bede’s innovation was taken up by Frankish chroniclers and rulers from the late 8th century and became standard practice in Europe.
The year itself was divided according to a universal Christian calendar that gradually displaced the old Roman calendar, although it retained the Roman names for the months. The liturgical year alternated seasons of penitence and joy, beginning with Advent, the fifth Sunday before Christmas, and culminating in penitential Lent and joyful Easter and its aftermath until Advent returned. Although the unit of the week and the Sabbath were taken over from Jewish usage—displacing the older Roman divisions of the month into Kalendae, Nonae, and Ides and the nine-day market cycle—Christians began to mark time by the seven-day week and moved its holiest day to Sunday during the 4th century.
Late antiquity: the reconfiguration of the Roman world
The Roman Empire of late antiquity was no longer the original empire of its founder, Augustus, nor was it even the 2nd-century entity of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. In the 3rd century the emperor, who was first called princeps (“first citizen”) and then dominus (“lord”), became divus (“divine”). The powerful religious connotations of the imperial office were adopted even by usurpers of the imperial throne, backed by their armies, who then ruled autocratically at the head of a vast bureaucratic and military organization. Internal and external crises during the 3rd and 4th centuries resulted in the division of the empire into an eastern and a western part after 285, with the east possessing a great and flourishing capital built by the emperor Constantine—Constantinople (now Istanbul)—and far more economic, political, and military resources than the western half. The administration of the entire empire was restructured to finance immense military expenditures, giving the western European provinces and frontier areas greater importance but fewer resources. Most of the population of the empire, including soldiers, were frozen hereditarily in their occupations. The Western Empire, whose capital moved north from Rome in the 4th century to a number of provincial cities—Trier, Arles, Milan, and ultimately Ravenna—became less urbanized, more ruralized, and gradually dominated by an aristocracy of landowners and military officials, most of whom lived on large villas and in newly fortified cities. The provincial economy had become increasingly rural and localized and was dominated by the needs of the vast military bases near the frontiers.
The great and small estates were worked by slaves, freedmen, and coloni (“farmers”), who had once been independent but had voluntarily or involuntarily subordinated themselves to the great landowners as their only protection against imperial tax collectors or military conscription. The landowners dispensed local justice and assembled private armies, which were powerful enough to negotiate on their subordinates’ behalf with imperial officials. Mediterranean trade diminished, and the production of more and more goods was undertaken locally, as was the organization of social, devotional, and political life.
Non-Roman peoples from beyond the frontiers—barbari (“barbarians”) or externae gentes (“foreign peoples”), as the Romans called them—had long been allowed to enter the empire individually or in families as provincial farmers and soldiers. But after 375 a number of composite Germanic peoples, many of them only recently assembled and ruled by their own new political and military elites, entered the empire as intact groups, originally by treaty with Rome and later independently. They established themselves as rulers of a number of western provinces, particularly parts of Italy, Iberia, Gaul, and Britain, often in the name of the Roman emperor and with the cooperation of many Roman provincials.
Roman ethnography classified external peoples as distinct and ethnically homogeneous groups with unchanging identities; they were part of the order of nature. Adopting this view, philologists, anthropologists, and historians in the 19th century maintained that the Germanic “tribes” that first appeared in the 3rd century were the ethnic ancestors of the “tribes” of the 5th century and that the ethnic composition of these groups remained unchanged in the interval. Late 20th-century research in ethnogenesis thoroughly demonstrated the unreliability of Roman ethnography, although modern concepts of ethnicity continue to exploit it for political purposes.
The organization of late imperial Christianity
Many Roman provincials were Christian higher clergy. Between the legalization of Christianity by Constantine about 313 and the adoption of Christianity as the legal religion of Rome by the emperor Theodosius I in 380, Christian communities received immense donations of land, labour, and other gifts from emperors and wealthy converts. The Christian clergy, originally a body of community elders and managerial functionaries, gradually acquired sacramental authority and became aligned with the grades of the imperial civil service. Each civitas (community or city), an urban unit and its surrounding district, had its bishop (from the Latin episcopus, “overseer”). Because there had been more Roman civitates in the Italian and provincial European areas, there were more and usually smaller dioceses in these regions than in the distant north and east.
During the 5th and 6th centuries, bishops gradually assumed greater responsibility for supplying the cities and administering their affairs, replacing the local governments that for centuries had underpinned and constituted the local administration of the empire. Two bishops, Ambrose of Milan (339–397) and Gregory I of Rome (pope 590–604), wrote influential guidebooks on episcopal and other clerical duties and responsibilities toward congregations. These works set standards for all later bishops and are still observed in many churches.
Besides the bishops and their subordinates the priests, who tended to the spiritual and material needs of Christians living in the world—the “secular clergy”—there also existed communities of monks and religious women who had fled the world. These communities were independent, although nominally under the control of the local bishop, and they followed diverse rules of life—hence their designation as “regular clergy” (from regula, “rule”). The most influential monastic rule in Latin Christianity after the 8th century was that of Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–c. 547). Benedict’s rule provided for a monastic day of work, prayer, and contemplation, offering psychological balance in the monk’s life. It also elevated the dignity of manual labour in the service of God, long scorned by the elites of antiquity. Benedict’s monastery at Monte Cassino, south of Rome, became one of the greatest centres of Benedictine monasticism.
The origins of monasticism lay in the ascetic practices of Egyptian and Syrian monks, which were transplanted to western Europe through texts such as the 4th-century Latin translation of the Life of Saint Antony (by Patriarch Athanasius of Alexandria) and through widely traveled observers such as the theologian and monk John Cassian (360–435). These Mediterranean-wide influences were among the last examples of the communications network of the older, ecumenical Mediterranean world. Monasticism developed and sustained a powerful ascetic dimension in both Greek and Latin Christianity that increased in importance as monasticism itself came to define the ideal of clerical life in the West.
In the case of Martin (316–397), a former Roman soldier turned wandering holy man, monastic asceticism was combined with the office episcopal, as Martin eventually became bishop of Tours in Gaul. He emphasized the conversion of rural pagans, as well as ministering to the urban and rural elites. In the Iberian Peninsula the work of the monk and bishop Martin of Braga (c. 515–580) was also devoted to the religious instruction of rustics. His work provided an influential model for the later conversion of northern and eastern Europe.
While Greek Christians called their church and religion Orthodox, Latin Christians adopted the term Catholic (from catholicus, “universal”). The term catholic Christianity was originally used to authenticate a normative, orthodox Christian cult (system of religious belief and ritual) on the grounds of its universality and to characterize different beliefs and practices as heterodox on the grounds that they were merely local and did not reflect duration, unanimity, or universality. These three characteristics of Latin orthodoxy were defined by the 5th-century monastic writer Vincent of Lérins (died c. 450) and adopted generally throughout the Latin church.
Devotional movements that differed from the norms of orthodoxy were defined as heterodoxy, or heresy. The earliest of these were several forms of Judaizing Christianity and Gnosticism, a dualist belief in asceticism and spiritual enlightenment. Once Christianity was established throughout the empire, other local movements were also condemned. Donatism, the belief among many North African Christians that Christian leaders who had bowed to pagan imperial persecution before 313 had lost their priestly status and needed to be reordained, was the first major heterodox practice to be considered—and condemned—at an imperial church council (411). Other movements were Arianism, which challenged the divinity of Jesus, and Pelagianism, which denied original sin and emphasized purely human abilities to achieve salvation. Other beliefs, usually those that contradicted increasingly normative doctrines of Trinitarianism (the belief that the Godhead includes three coequal, coeternal, and consubstantial persons) or Christology (the interpretation of the nature of Christ), were also condemned as heresy.
Normative Christianity, which was expressed in imperial legislation, church councils, and the works of influential Christian writers, gradually became the faith of Europe’s new regional rulers. Within that broad, universal ideology, however, many of the new kings and peoples based their claims to legitimacy and a common identity on their own versions of Latin Christianity, as expressed in local law, ritual, saints’ cults, sacred spaces and shrines, and saints’ relics. The cults of saints and their relics served to territorialize devotion, and control over them was a distinctive sign of legitimate power. Although the older empire and the new, nonimperial lands in Europe into which a new culture expanded came to call themselves Christianitas (“Christendom”), they were in practice divided into many self-contained entities that have been called “micro-Christendoms,” each based on the devotional identity of king, clerics, and people.
Kings and peoples
The kings of new peoples ruled as much in Roman style as they could, issuing laws written in Latin for their own peoples and their Roman subjects and striking coins that imitated imperial coinage. They also sponsored the composition of “ethnic” and genealogical histories that attributed to themselves and their peoples, however recently assembled, an identity and antiquity rivaling that of Rome. Although the Romans, who called their own society a populus (“civil people”), used the term rex (“king”) only for rulers of peoples at lower levels of sociocultural development, the political order of kings and peoples became a commonplace in Europe in late antiquity and would remain so until the 19th century. Some of these kingdoms, especially that of the Visigoths in southern Gaul and later in Iberia, also modeled themselves on the ancient Hebrew kingdoms as described in Scripture. They borrowed and adapted some ancient Jewish rituals, such as liturgically anointing the ruler with oil and reminding him in sermons, prayers, and meetings of church councils that he was God’s servant, with spiritual and political responsibilities that legitimized his power.
As the cultures associated with the new kings and peoples spread throughout western Europe from the 5th to the 8th centuries, they influenced political and religious change in areas that the empire had never ruled—initially Ireland, then northern Britain, the lower Rhineland, and trans-Rhenish Europe (the lands east of the Rhine River). The bishop and the monk were two of the most remarkable and longest enduring religious and social inventions of late antiquity; the barbarian kingdoms were a third. Although many of the latter did not survive, their experiments in Christian kingship, as represented in texts, ritual, pictures, and objects, began a long tradition in European political life and thought.
The great commission
The process of expansion was also driven by a missionary mandate. Reflecting a new, literal, and personal understanding of Jesus’ command in the Gospels to baptize and to proclaim the word of God (Matthew 28:19; Mark 16:15), the work of conversion to Christianity was extended to all peoples, not just to those of the empire. Conversion was carried out at first by individual Christians acting on their own, not as agents of an organized church. Greek Christians from Constantinople also undertook missionary work, sometimes individually but also as an increasingly prominent aspect of Byzantine imperial diplomacy in the Balkans and north of the Danube valley and the Black Sea. In the eastern parts of the Byzantine Empire, communities of Nestorian Christians, who stressed the independence of the human and divine persons of Christ, moved beyond the imperial frontiers, first into Persia and then farther east. By the 10th century a long string of such settlements ran along the Silk Road from the Mediterranean to China.
Individual conversion stories were modeled on that of St. Paul the Apostle (Acts of the Apostles 9–10), which itself was echoed in the Confessions of St. Augustine. Individual conversion experiences touched people in all walks of life: Martin of Tours, the soldier turned ascetic and bishop; the Gallo-Roman aristocrats Sulpicius Severus—who wrote the influential life of Martin—and Caesarius of Arles; and the free Romano-Briton St. Patrick, who had been a slave in pagan Ireland and returned to convert his former captors.
But the most widely accepted model of conversion of both religious belief and practice was collective—that of a ruler and his followers together as a new Christian people. In this way, the king and church integrated rulership with clerical teaching and the development of the liturgy and with the definition of sacred space, control of sanctity, and the rituals surrounding key moments in human life, from baptism to death and burial. The most notable of the collective conversions were that of the Visigoths from Arian to Catholic Christianity in 589, that of the Frankish leader Clovis by his Catholic Burgundian wife Clotilda and the Gallo-Roman bishop Remigius of Reims about the turn of the 6th century, and that of Aethelberht of Kent by St. Augustine of Canterbury.
As Romans and non-Romans locally assimilated into new peoples during the 6th and 7th centuries, non-Romans, as had Romans before them, became Christian monks, higher clergy, and sometimes saints. In the late 5th century the conversion of Ireland, the first Christianized territory that had never been part of the Roman Empire, brought the particularly Irish ascetic practice of self-exile to bear on missionary work. In the 6th century the Irish monk Columba (c. 521–597) exiled himself to the island of Iona, from which he began to convert the peoples of southwestern Scotland. Other Irish monk-exiles moved through the Rhine valley, Austria, Bavaria, Switzerland, and northern Italy. Columban (c. 543–615), the most influential of these missionaries, greatly reformed the devotional life of the Frankish nobility and founded monasteries at Sankt Gallen, Luxeuil, and Bobbio. Irish and Scottish devotional practices also influenced England, where Celtic forms of Christianity clashed with Continental, especially Roman, forms—a conflict resolved at the Synod of Whitby in 664, when Roman norms were adopted first for the kingdom of Northumbria and later for other English kingdoms. Irish influence remained strong in the English church, however, especially in matters of learning, church reform, missionary exile, and clerical organization.
From the late 7th century, English pilgrims visited Rome, creating a strong devotional link between Rome and Britain, which was reasserted wherever English missionary activity took place. Benedict Biscop, an English noble, traveled to Rome several times, returning with Roman books and pictures. He founded the twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow (the saintly scholar Bede was a monk of Wearmouth-Jarrow) and escorted the learned Theodore of Tarsus back to England when Theodore was appointed archbishop of Canterbury. Theodore’s pastoral and educational activities greatly enhanced English clerical culture, producing both a network of schools and a missionary consciousness that sent English monks, like their Irish predecessors, to the Continent. The most influential of these figures was Boniface (c. 675–754), the first archbishop of Mainz, who spent much of his adult life in missionary and reform work in and around the edges of the kingdom of the Franks. The letters of Boniface demonstrate his respect for Rome and provide important information about his missionary activities. His great monastery of Fulda played an important role in both reform and conversion.
The bishops of Rome
Throughout their history, the bishops of Rome enjoyed great respect and veneration because of the antiquity of their see, its historical orthodoxy, the relics of its martyrs (including Saints Peter and Paul the Apostles), and the imperial and Christian history of the city of Rome. The material conditions of the 6th and 7th centuries, however, greatly limited any papal exercise of universal authority or influence, and the popes developed relatively little theory about papal authority of any kind over all Christians. Like other bishops, however, the bishops of Rome benefited from the idea of traditio (Latin: “tradition”), which stated that the authority of the Apostles had been passed down to the Christian higher clergy. They also gradually assumed more and more responsibility for the administration of the city itself. Because Rome was Rome and because the properties of the Roman church extended throughout Italy, the papal administration of the city and the invocation of its Christian, rather than imperial, past slowly turned it into the Rome of St. Peter, who accordingly assumed an increasingly important role in medieval spirituality. This Christianized Rome was a place that the diversified societies of western Europe could revere and visit because of its devotional centrality in the Latin Christian world.
Pope Gregory the Great receiving information from the Holy Spirit, represented as a dove, carved ivory book cover, c. 980; in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Between the 5th and the 11th century, many argued that, just as there had been a hierarchy of cities in the old empire, there was a hierarchy of bishops, and the bishop of Rome stood at its head. Although the idea of papal supremacy in Latin Christendom found a number of papal and nonpapal exponents during this period, it did not become dominant until the late 11th century. Even before then, however, the affection and respect for Rome built up in England and in the kingdom of the Franks did much to increase the attractiveness of the papacy.
The Mediterranean world divided
During the 7th and 8th centuries, new invasions of the eastern part of the empire and the emergence of Islam, first in the Arabian Peninsula and then to the west in Egypt and Numidia and to the east in Persia, divided the old Mediterranean ecumenical world into three distinct culture zones: East Rome, or Byzantium; Islam; and Latin Europe. Byzantium and western Europe remained long on the defensive against Islamic pressures, which extended to the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, Sicily in 902, and Anatolia in the 11th century. Each of these three cultures developed its own character based on different uses of and attitudes toward the Roman-Mediterranean ecumenical past. They maintained diplomatic and commercial contact with each other, though sometimes on a much-reduced scale, and continued to influence each other culturally even as they became more distinct. In spite of their increasing distinctiveness, they were never entirely separated, since both trade and the transmission of ideas passed through their porous edges. In addition, large numbers of Jews and Christians continued to live as privileged religious aliens in most of the Muslim world.
The Frankish ascendancy
The Merovingian dynasty
In the late 5th and early 6th centuries, Clovis (c. 466–511), the warrior-leader of one of the groups of peoples collectively known as the Franks, established a strong independent monarchy in what are now the northern part of France and the southwestern part of Belgium. He expanded into southern Gaul, driving the Visigoths across the Pyrenees, and established a strong Frankish presence east of the Rhine. His power was recognized by the eastern emperor Anastasius, who made him a Roman consul (a high-ranking magistrate). In the generations following the death of Clovis, the Frankish kingdom was often divided into the two kingdoms of Neustria and Austrasia, though it was occasionally reunited under Clovis’s successors, the Merovingian dynasty. It was later reunited under the lordship and (after 751) monarchy of the eastern Frankish Arnulfing-Pippinid family (later known as the Carolingian dynasty), which included Pippin II and his successors Charles Martel, Pippin III, and Charlemagne (reigned 768–814). This dynasty brought much of western Europe under Frankish control and established diplomatic relations with Britain, Iberia, Rome, Constantinople, Christians in the Holy Land, and even Hārūn al-Rashīd, the great caliph in Baghdad.
Charlemagne and the Carolingian dynasty
Charlemagne and his successors also patronized a vast project that they and their clerical advisers called correctio—restoring the fragmented western European world to an earlier idealized condition. During the Carolingian Renaissance, as it is called by modern scholars, Frankish rulers supported monastic studies and manuscript production, attempted to standardize monastic practice and rules of life, insisted on high moral and educational standards for clergy, adopted and disseminated standard versions of canon law and the liturgy, and maintained a regular network of communications throughout their dominions.
Mark, St.St. Mark the Evangelist, illuminated manuscript page from the Gospel book of the court school of Charlemagne, c. 810; in the Stadtbibliothek, Trier, Germany.Stadtbibliothek, Trier, Ger.
Charlemagne drew heavily on most of the kingdoms of Christian Europe, even those he conquered, for many of his advisers. Ireland sent Dicuil the geographer. The kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, drawn close to Rome and the Franks during the 8th century, produced the widely circulated works of Bede and the ecclesiastical reformer Boniface. Also from England was the scholar Alcuin, a product of the great school at York, who served as Charlemagne’s chief adviser on ecclesiastical and other matters until becoming abbot of the monastery of St. Martin of Tours. Charlemagne’s relations with the kingdoms in England remained cordial, and his political and intellectual reforms in turn shaped the development of a unified English monarchy and culture under Alfred (reigned 871–899) and his successors in the 9th and 10th centuries.
Although the Visigothic kingdom fell to Arab and Berber armies in 711, the small Christian principalities in the north of the Iberian Peninsula held out. They too produced remarkable scholars, some of whom were eventually judged to hold heretical beliefs. The Christological theology of adoptionism, which held that Christ in his humanity is the adopted son of God, greatly troubled the Carolingian court and generated a substantial literature on both sides before the belief was declared heterodox. But Iberia also produced scholars for Charlemagne’s service, particularly Theodulf of Orleans, one of the emperor’s most influential advisers.
The kingdom of the Lombards, established in northern and central Italy in the later 6th century, was originally Arian but converted to Catholic Christianity in the 7th century. Nevertheless, Lombard opposition to Byzantine forces in northern Italy and Lombard pressure on the bishops of Rome led a number of 8th-century popes to call on the assistance of the Carolingians. Pippin invaded Italy twice in the 750s, and in 774 Charlemagne conquered the Lombard kingdom and assumed its crown. Among the Lombards who migrated for a time to Charlemagne’s court were the grammarian Peter of Pisa and the historian Paul the Deacon.
From 778 to 803 Charlemagne not only stabilized his rule in Frankland and Italy but also conquered and converted the Saxons and established frontier commands, or marches, at the most vulnerable edges of his territories. He built a residence for himself and his court at Aachen, which was called “a second Rome.” He remained on excellent terms with the bishops of Rome, Adrian I (reigned 772–795) and Leo III (reigned 795–816). Scholars began to call Charlemagne “the father of Europe” and “the lighthouse of Europe.” Although the lands under his rule were often referred to as “the kingdom of Europe,” contemporaries recognized them as forming an empire, much of which extended well beyond the imperial frontiers of Rome. Because of its use in reference to the empire, the old geographical term Europe came to be invested with a political and cultural meaning that it did not have in Greco-Roman antiquity.
In 800 Charlemagne extracted Leo III from severe political difficulties in Rome (Leo had been violently attacked by relatives of the former pope and accused of various crimes). On Christmas Day of that year Leo crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Romans, a title that Charlemagne’s successors also adopted. Although the title gave Charlemagne no resources that he did not already possess, it did not please all his subjects, and it greatly displeased the Byzantines. But it survived the Frankish monarchy and remained the most respected title of a lay ruler in Europe until the Holy Roman Empire, as it was known from the mid-12th century, was abolished by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806, a little more than 1,000 years after Charlemagne was crowned. Historians still debate whether the coronation of 800 indicated a backward-looking last manifestation of the older world of late antiquity or a new organization of the elements of what later became Europe.
Charlemagne’s kingdoms, but not the imperial title, were divided after the death of his son Louis I (the Pious) in 840 into the regions of West Francia, the Middle Kingdom, and East Francia. The last of these regions gradually assumed control over the Middle Kingdom north of the Alps. In addition, an independent kingdom of Italy survived into the late 10th century. The imperial title went to one of the rulers of these kingdoms, usually the one who could best protect Rome, until it briefly ceased to be used in the early 10th century.
Carolingian decline and its consequences
After the Carolingian dynasty died out in the male line in East Francia in 911, Conrad I, the first of a series of territorial dukes, was elected king. He was followed by a series of vigorous and ambitious rulers from the Saxon (919–1024) and Salian (1024–1125) dynasties. Otto I (reigned 936–967), the most successful of the Saxon rulers, claimed the crown of the old Lombard kingdom in Italy in 951, defeated an invading Hungarian army at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, and was crowned emperor in Rome in 962. In contrast to the kings of East Francia, the rulers of West Francia, whose last Carolingian ruler was succeeded in 987 by the long-lasting dynasty of Hugh Capet (the Capetian dynasty), had difficulty ruling even their domains in the middle Seine valley, and they were overshadowed by the power of the territorial lords who had established themselves in principalities in the rest of the kingdom.
The end of Carolingian expansion in the early 9th century and the inability of several kings to field sufficiently large armies and reward their followers were two consequences of the division of Charlemagne’s empire. In addition, the empire now shared borders with hostile peoples in the Slavic east and in the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and Iberia. The end of expansion meant that the basis of the economy shifted from mixed forest-agricultural labour and income drawn from plunder and tribute to more-intensive cultivation of lands within the kingdoms. Accordingly, kings were forced to draw on local resources to reward their followers. The consequences of these military and economic changes included a general weakening of royal authority, the transformation of the Carolingian aristocracy into active lords of the land, and a loss of social status for the labourers who worked the land.
In the 9th and early 10th centuries a series of invasions from Scandinavia, the lower Danube valley, and North Africa greatly weakened the Carolingian world. The divisions within the Frankish empire impaired its ability to resist the Viking and Hungarian invasions but did not destroy it. Kings and warlords ultimately either turned back the invaders, as Otto I did in 955, or absorbed them into their territories, as the kings of West Francia did with the Vikings in Normandy. In England the invasions destroyed all of the older kingdoms except Wessex, whose rulers, starting with Alfred, expanded their power until they created a single kingdom of England.
Exhumed Viking ship; in the Viking Ship Museum, Oslo, Norway.age fotostock/SuperStock
Although two kinds of invaders—the Scandinavians and the Hungarians—became acculturated and Christianized during the next several centuries, creating the Christian kingdoms of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Hungary, the Islamic world remained apart, extending from Iberia and Morocco eastward to the western edges of China and Southeast Asia. In the case of western Europe, the attacks of the 9th and 10th centuries were the last outside invasions until the Allied landings during World War II; indeed, for a period of nearly 1,000 years western Europe was the only part of the world that was not invaded. Western Europe developed internally without outside interference, expanded geographically, increased demographically, improved materially, and engaged in cultural, commercial, and technological exchanges with parallel civilizations.
Growth and innovation
Although historians disagree about the extent of the social and material damage caused by the 9th- and 10th-century invasions, they agree that demographic growth began during the 10th century and perhaps earlier. They have also identified signs of the reorganization of lordship and agricultural labour, a process in which members of an order of experienced and determined warriors concentrated control of land in their own hands and coerced a largely free peasantry into subjection. Thus did the idea of the three orders of society—those who fight, those who pray, and those who labour—come into use to describe the results of the ascendancy of the landholding aristocracy and its clerical partners. In cooperation with bishops and ecclesiastical establishments, particularly great monastic foundations such as Cluny (established 910), the nobility of the late 11th and 12th centuries reorganized the agrarian landscape and rural society of western Europe and made it the base of urbanization, which was also well under way in the 11th century.
Peasants sowing and cultivating fields outside a walled town in the Middle Ages.North Wind Picture Archives
Demographic and agricultural growth
It has been estimated that between 1000 and 1340 the population of Europe increased from about 38.5 million people to about 73.5 million, with the greatest proportional increase occurring in northern Europe, which trebled its population. The rate of growth was not so rapid as to create a crisis of overpopulation; it was linked to increased agricultural production, which yielded a sufficient amount of food per capita, permitted the expansion of cultivated land, and enabled some of the population to become nonagricultural workers, thereby creating a new division of labour and greater economic and cultural diversity.
The late Roman countryside and its patterns of life—a social pattern of landlords, free peasants, half-free workers, and slaves and an economic pattern of cultivated fields and orchards and the use of thick forests and their products—survived well into the Carolingian period. In the late 9th century, however, political circumstances led landholders to intensify the cultivation of their lands. They did this by reducing the status of formerly free peasants to dependent servitude and by slowly elevating the status of slaves to the same dependency, creating a rural society of serfs. The old Latin word for slave, servus, now came to designate a category of rural workers who were not chattel property but who were firmly bound to their lord’s land. The new word for slave, sclavus, was derived from the source of many slaves, the Slavic lands of the east.
During the 11th and 12th centuries the chief social distinction in western European society was that between the free and the unfree. For two centuries the status of serfdom was imposed on people whose ancestors had been free and who themselves would become free only when the rise of a money economy in the late 12th century made free, rent-paying peasants more economically attractive to lords than bound serfs. The aristocracy was able to accomplish this because of weakening royal power and generosity and because of its assumption of the bannum (“ban”), the old public and largely royal power to command and punish (now called “banal jurisdiction”). It announced its new claims by calling them “customs” and adjudicated them in local courts.
The aristocracy supervised the clearing of forest for the expansion of cereal cultivation but restricted the remaining forest to itself for hunting. It also forced its dependents to use its mills and local markets, to provide various labour services, and to settle more densely in the villages, which were slowly coordinated with an expanded system of parishes (local churches with lay patrons, to which peasants had to pay the tithe, or one-tenth of their produce). Serfdom was gradually eliminated in western Europe during the 13th and 14th centuries as a result of economic changes that made agricultural labour less financially advantageous to lords. During the same period, however, serfdom increased in eastern Europe, where it lasted until the 19th century.
The new stratification of society into the categories of free and unfree was accompanied by the transformation of the late Carolingian aristocratic family from a widespread association of both paternal and maternal relatives to a narrower lineage, in which paternal ancestry and paternal control of the disposition of inheritance dominated. Family memory restricted itself to a founding paternal ancestor, ignoring the line of maternal ancestors, and the new lineages identified themselves with a principal piece of property, from which they often took a family name. They also patronized religious establishments, which memorialized the families in prayers, enhanced their local prestige, and often provided them burialin their precincts.
The new lords of the land identified themselves primarily as warriors. Because new technologies of warfare, including heavy cavalry, were expensive, fighting men required substantial material resources as well as considerable leisure to train. The economic and political transformation of the countryside filled these two needs. The old armies of free men of different levels of wealth were replaced by new armies of specialist knights. The term knight (Latin miles) came into more frequent use to designate anyone who could satisfy the new military requirements, which included the wealthiest and most powerful lords as well as fighting men from far lower levels of society. The new order gradually developed its own ethos, reflected in the ideal of chivalry, the knight’s code of conduct. The distinction between free and unfree was reinforced by the distinction between those who fought, even at the lowest level, and those who could not. Those who functioned at the lowest level of military service worked hard to distinguish themselves from those who laboured in the fields.
English axman in combat with Norman mounted knight during the Battle of Hastings, detail from the Bayeux Tapestry; in the Musée de la Tapisserie de la Reine-Mathilde, in the former Bishop's Palace, Bayeux, France.Giraudon/Art Resource, New York
Technological innovations
The increases in population and agricultural productivity were accompanied by a technological revolution that introduced new sources of power and a cultural “machine-mindedness,” both of which were incorporated into a wide spectrum of economic enterprises. The chief new sources of power were the horse, the water mill, and the windmill. Europeans began to breed both the specialized warhorse, adding stirrups to provide the mounted warrior a better seat and greater striking force, and the draft horse, now shod with iron horseshoes that protected the hooves from the damp clay soils of northern Europe. The draft horse was faster and more efficient than the ox, the traditional beast of burden. The invention of the new horse collar in the 10th century, a device that pulled from the horse’s shoulders rather than from its neck and windpipe, immeasurably increased the animal’s pulling power.
The extensive network of rivers in western Europe spurred the development of the water mill, not only for grinding grain into flour but also by the 12th century for converting simple rotary motion into reciprocal motion. Where water was not readily available, Europeans constructed windmills, which had been imported from the Middle East, thereby spreading the mill to even more remote locations.
In heavily forested and mountainous parts of western Europe, foresters, charcoal burners, and miners formed separate communities, providing timber, fuel, and metallic ores in abundance. The demands of domestic and public building and shipbuilding threatened to deforest much of Europe as early as the 13th century. Increasingly refined metallurgical technology produced not only well-tempered swords, daggers, and armour for warriors but also elaborate domestic ware. Glazed pottery and glass also appeared even in humble homes, which were increasingly built of stone rather than wood and thatch.
The most striking and familiar examples of the technological revolution are the great Gothic cathedrals and other churches, which were constructed from the 12th century onward. Universally admired for their soaring height and stained-glass windows, they required mathematically precise designs; considerable understanding of the properties of subsoils, stone, and timber; near-professional architectural skills; complex financial planning; and a skilled labour force. They are generally regarded as the most-accomplished engineering feats of the Middle Ages.
Cathedral, completed mid-13th century, in Chartres, France.© Manifestive_Media/iStock.com
Urban growth
The experience of building great churches was replicated in the development of the material fabric of the new and expanded cities. The cities of the Carolingian world were few and small. Their functions were limited to serving the needs of the kings, bishops, or monasteries that inhabited them. Some, especially those that were close to the Mediterranean, were reconfigured Roman cities. In the north a Roman nucleus sometimes became the core of a new city, but just as often cities emerged because of the needs of their lords. The northern cities were established as local market centres and then developed into centres of diversified artisanal production with growing merchant populations. In the 10th and 11th centuries new cities were founded and existing cities increased in area and population. They were usually enclosed within a wall once their inhabitants thought that the city had reached the limits of its expansion; as populations grew and suburbs began to surround the walls, many cities built new and larger walls to enclose the new space. The succession of concentric rings of town walls offers a history of urban growth in many cities. Inhabitants also took pride in their city’s appearance, as evidenced by the elaborate decorations on city gates, fountains, town halls (in northern Italy from the 10th century), and other public spaces. Cities were cultural as well as economic and political centres, and their decoration was as important to their inhabitants as their water systems, defenses, and marketplaces.
The cities attracted people from the countryside, where the increasing productivity of the farms was freeing many peasants from working on the land. Various mercantile and craft guilds were formed beginning in the 10th century to protect their members’ common interests. The merchants’ guilds and other associations also contributed to the emergence of the sworn commune, or the self-regulating city government, originally chartered by a bishop, count, or king. The city distinguished itself from the countryside, even as it extended its influence there. During the 12th century this distinction was recognized culturally, when the Latin word urbanitas (“urbanity”) came to be applied to the idea of acceptable manners and informed Christian belief, while rusticitas (“rusticity”) came to mean inelegance and backwardness. Despite this awareness, cities had to protect their food supplies and their trade and communication routes, and thus in both southern and northern Europe the city and its contado (region surrounding the city) became closely linked.
In some areas of northern Europe, particular kinds of manufacturing became prominent, especially dyeing, weaving, and finishing woolen cloth. Wool production was the economic enterprise in which the cities of the southern Low Countries took pride of place, and other cities developed elaborate manufacturing of metalwork and armaments. Still others became market centres of essential products that could not be produced locally, such as wine. This specialized production led to the proliferation of long-range trade and the creation of communications networks along the rivers of western Europe, where many cities were located. Although some lords, including the kings of England, were reluctant to recognize the towns’ autonomy, most eventually agreed that the rapidly increasing value of the towns as centres of manufacturing and trade was worth the risk of their practical independence.
Originally a product of the agrarian dynamic that shaped society after the year 1000, the growing towns of western Europe became increasingly important, and their citizens acquired great wealth, usually in cooperation rather than conflict with their rulers. The towns helped transform the agrarian world out of which they were originally created into a precapitalist manufacturing and market economy that influenced both urban and rural development.
Reform and renewal
A number of the movements for ecclesiastical reform that emerged in the 11th century attempted to sharpen the distinction between clerical and lay status. Most of these movements drew upon the older Christian ideas of spiritual renewal and reform, which were thought necessary because of the degenerative effects of the passage of time on fallen human nature. They also drew upon standards of monastic conduct, especially those regarding celibacy and devotional rigour, that had been articulated during the Carolingian period and were now extended to all clergy, regular (monks) and secular (priests). Virginity, long seen by Christian thinkers as an equivalent to martyrdom, was now required of all clergy. It has been argued that the requirement of celibacy was established to protect ecclesiastical property, which had greatly increased, from being alienated by the clergy or from becoming the basis of dynastic power. The doctrine of clerical celibacy and freedom from sexual pollution, the idea that the clergy should not be dependent on the laity, and the insistence on the libertas (“liberty”) of the church—the freedom to accomplish its divinely ordained mission without interference from any secular authority—became the basis of the reform movements that took shape during this period. Most of them originated in reforming monasteries in transalpine Europe, which cooperative lay patrons and supporters protected from predatory violence.
By the middle of the 11th century, the reform movements reached Rome itself, when the emperor Henry III intervened in a schism that involved three claimants to the papal throne. At the Synod of Sutri in 1046 he appointed a transalpine candidate of his own—Suidger, archbishop of Bamberg, who became Pope Clement II (1046–47)—and removed the papal office from the influence of the local Roman nobility, which had largely controlled it since the 10th century. A series of popes, including Leo IX (1049–54) and Urban II (1088–99), promoted what is known as Gregorian Reform, named for its most zealous proponent, Pope Gregory VII (1073–85). They urged reform throughout Europe by means of their official correspondence and their sponsorship of regional church councils. They also restructured the hierarchy, placing the papal office at the head of reform efforts and articulating a systematic claim to papal authority over clergy and, in very many matters, over laity as well.
The emotional intensity of ecclesiastical reform led to outbursts of religious enthusiasm from both supporters and opponents. Many laypeople also enthusiastically supported reform; indeed, their support was a key factor in its ultimate success. The increase in lay piety on the side of reform was indicated by the events of 1095, when Urban II called on lay warriors to cease preying on the weak and on each other and to undertake the liberation of the Holy Land from its Muslim conquerors and occupiers. The enormous military expedition that captured Jerusalem in 1099 and established for a century the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, an expedition only much later called the First Crusade, is as dramatic a sign as possible of the vitality and devotion of clerical and lay reformers.
Peter the Hermit leading a Crusade; from Abreviamen de las Estorias, early 14th century, a summary of universal history from the creation of the world to the death of Emperor Henry VII; in the British Library.The British Library (Public Domain)
The First Crusade had other, unintended effects. The success of Genoa, Pisa, and other Italian maritime cities in supplying the Christian outposts in the Holy Land increased their already considerable wealth and political power, which were soon comparable to that of Venice. Proposals for later Crusades often led to searching analyses, not only of specific military, financial, and logistical requirements but also of the social reforms that such ventures would require in the kingdoms of Europe. Finally, by bringing Latin Christians other than pilgrims deeper into western Eurasia than they had ever been before, the Crusade movement led Europeans in the 12th century to a greater interest in distant parts of the world.
The reform movement had a pronounced effect on church and society. It produced an independent clerical order, hierarchically organized under the popes. The clergy claimed both a teaching authority (magisterium) and a disciplinary authority, based on theology and canon law, that defined orthodoxy and heterodoxy and regulated much of lay and all of clerical life. The clergy also expressed its authority through a series of energetic church councils, from the first Lateran Council in 1123 to the fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and greatly enhanced both the ritual and legal authority of the popes.
The reform movement also erupted in a violent conflict, known as the Investiture Controversy, between Gregory VII and the emperor Henry IV (reigned 1056–1105/06). In this struggle the pope claimed extraordinary authority to correct the emperor; he twice declared the emperor deposed before Henry forced him to flee Rome to Salerno, where he died in exile. Despite Gregory’s apparent defeat, the conflicts undermined imperial claims to authority and shattered the Carolingian-Ottonian image of the emperor as the lay equal of the bishop of Rome, responsible for acting in worldly matters to protect the church. The emperor, like any other layman, was now subordinate to the moral discipline of churchmen.
Some later emperors, notably the members of the Hohenstaufen dynasty—including Frederick I Barbarossa (1152–90), his son Henry VI (1190–97), and his grandson Frederick II (1220–50)—reasserted modified claims for imperial authority and intervened in Italy with some success. But Barbarossa’s political ambitions were thwarted by the northern Italian cities of the Lombard League and the forces of Pope Alexander III at the Battle of Legnano in 1176. Both Henry VI and Frederick II, who had united the imperial and Lombard crowns and added to them that of the rich and powerful Norman kingdom of Sicily, were checked by similar resistance. Frederick himself was deposed by Pope Innocent IV in 1245. Succession disputes following Frederick’s death and that of his immediate successors led to the Great Interregnum of 1250–73, when no candidate received enough electoral votes to become emperor. The interregnum ended only with the election of the Habsburg ruler Rudolf I (1273–91), which resulted in the increasing provincialization of the imperial office in favour of Habsburg dynastic and territorial interests. In 1356 the Luxembourg emperor Charles IV (1316–78) issued the Golden Bull, which established the number of imperial electors at seven (three ecclesiastical and four lay princes) and articulated their powers.
Although the emperor possessed the most prestigious of all lay titles, the actual authority of his office was very limited. Both the Habsburgs and their rivals used the office to promote their dynastic self-interests until the Habsburg line ascended the throne permanently with the reign of Frederick III (1442–93), the last emperor to be crowned in Rome. The imperial office and title were abolished when Napoleon dissolved the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.
The consequences of reform
The conflicts between emperors and popes constituted one conspicuous result of the reform movement. The transformation and new institutionalization of learning, the reconstitution of the church, the intensification of ecclesiastical discipline, and the growth of territorial monarchies were four others. Each of these developments was supported by the agricultural, technological, and commercial expansion of the 10th and 11th centuries.
The transformation of thought and learning
The polemics of the papal-imperial debate revealed the importance of establishing a set of canonical texts on the basis of which both sides could argue. A number of academic disciplines, particularly the study of dialectic, had developed considerably between the 9th and 12th centuries. By the 12th century it had become the most widely studied intellectual discipline, in part because it was an effective tool for constructing and refuting arguments. The Gregorian reformers had also based their arguments on canon law, and a number of Gregorian and post-Gregorian collections, particularly that of Ivo of Chartres (c. 1040–1116), pointed the way toward the creation of a commonly accessible canon law. That goal was achieved in about 1140–50 in two successive recensions (perhaps by two different authors) of a lawbook called Concordia discordantium canonum (“Concordance of Discordant Canons”), or Decretum, attributed to Master Gratian. The Decretum became the standard introductory text of ecclesiastical law. Simultaneously, the full text of the 6th-century body of Roman law, later called the Corpus Iuris Civilis (“Body of Civil Law”), began to circulate in northern Italy and was taught in the schools of Bologna. The learned character of the revived Roman law contributed powerfully to the development of legal science throughout Europe in the following centuries.
Early in the 12th century, Hugh of Saint-Victor (1096–1141), schoolmaster of a house of canons just outside Paris, wrote a description of all the subjects of learning, the Didascalicon. Hugh’s contemporary, Peter Abelard (1079–1142), taught dialectic at Paris to crowds of students, many of whom became high officials in ecclesiastical and secular institutions. The teaching methods of scholars such as Gratian, Hugh, Abelard, and others became the foundation of Scholasticism, the method used by the new schools in the teaching of arts, law, medicine, and theology. In theology itself, comparable canonical work was done by Peter Lombard (c. 1100–60) in his Sententiarum libri iv (“Four Books of Sentences”), which became, next to the Bible, the fundamental teaching text of theology.
Peter Abelard with Héloïse, miniature portrait by Jean de Meun, 14th century; in the Musée Condé, Chantilly, France.Courtesy of the Musée Condé, Chantilly, Fr.; photograph, Giraudon/Art Resource, New York
But not all Christians admired the new Scholastic theology. The Scholastic teaching of Scripture replaced the early contemplative monastic style of exegesis with dialectical investigative techniques and speculative theology. Many monks and some outraged laity thought that Scripture was being mishandled, stripped of its dignity and mystery in the service of feeble human logic and cold rationality. They did not, however, stop the tide, as Scholastic theology created a complex, effective, and highly persuasive means of discussing both the complexities of divinity and the moral obligations of Christians on earth.
As groups of teachers organized themselves into guilds in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, they and their students received imperial, papal, and royal privileges. About 1200 these associations, modeling themselves on ecclesiastical corporations, developed into the first universities. During the remainder of the 13th century, clerical teaching authority within the universities was articulated. The first guilds were formed for the teaching of law at several schools in Bologna and for the teaching of arts and theology at Paris and later at Oxford, Cambridge, and other towns. With the foundation of the University of Prague in 1348, the model crossed the Rhine River for the first time. By the 15th century it had become a standard fixture of European learning.
University teachers insisted on the right to define teaching authority. Proclaiming the earliest version of academic freedom, they rejected outside interference and asserted that their professional competence alone entitled them to determine the content of disciplines and the standards for admitting, examining, graduating, and certifying students. They also transformed both the written script and the nature of the material book. Since teaching required a readable script and books whose texts were as close to identical as possible, the distinctive “Gothic” or “black letter” script was developed, which standardized abbreviations and the writing style used in texts.
The presence of universities of teachers and students in western European society was significant in itself. The universities reflected favourably on the cities in which they were located and on the rulers who protected them. The rulers also benefited from the opportunity to recruit increasingly educated public servants and bureaucrats from these institutions. The church benefited too, since the universities produced theologians, canon lawyers, and other officials that the church—even the papal office—now seemed to require.
The universities aided in the recovery and dissemination of Aristotelianism, particularly in the physical sciences and metaphysics. Only the new universities, moreover, could have housed and spread the intellectual work of Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–1274) and Bonaventure (1217–74), the greatest theologians of the 13th century, and of Henry of Segusio (Hostiensis; c. 1200–71) and Sinibaldo Fieschi (later Pope Innocent IV, reigned 1243–54), the greatest canon lawyers of the century.
St. Thomas Aquinas Enthroned Between the Doctors of the Old and New Testaments, with Personifications of the Virtues, Sciences, and Liberal Arts, fresco by Andrea da Firenze, c. 1365; in the Spanish Chapel of the church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence.SCALA/Art Resource, New York
The structure of ecclesiastical and devotional life
Ecclesiastical organization
With the removal of the most offensive instances of lay influence in ecclesiastical affairs, the organization of the universal church and local churches acquired a symmetry and consistency hardly possible before 1100. An 11th-century anonymous text that was accepted by canon law identified two orders of Christians, the clergy and the laity. It considered the clergy largely in a monastic context, indicating that the new attention to the secular clergy had transferred to them the virtues and discipline of monks. Although many monks were not ordained priests, their disciplined, contemplative life was held up for centuries as the ideal clerical model.
The work of the laity was the business of the world. The clergy, however, considered itself far more important than the laity. Members of the clergy themselves were ranked in terms of sacramental orders, minor and major. When a boy or young man entered the clergy, he received the tonsure, symbolizing his new status. He might then move in stages through the minor orders: acolyte, exorcist, lector, and doorkeeper. At the highest of minor orders the candidate could still leave the clergy. Many clerics in minor orders served in the administration of secular and ecclesiastical institutions. They also sometimes caused trouble in secular society, since even they received benefit of clergy, or exemption from trial in secular courts. Ordination to the major orders—subdeacon (elevated to a major order by Pope Innocent III in 1215), deacon, and priest—entailed vows of chastity and conferred sacramental powers on the recipient.
At the head of the Latin Christian church was the pope, whose powers were now articulated in canon law, most of which was made by the popes themselves and by their legal advisers. Not only did popes claim powers over even secular rulers in many instances, but a number of rulers, including King John of England (reigned 1199–1216), submitted their kingdoms to the popes and received them back to govern for their new spiritual and temporal masters. The popes also issued charters of foundation for universities, convened church councils, called Crusades and commissioned preachers to deliver Crusade sermons, and appointed papal judges delegate or subdelegate to investigate specific problems. In all these areas, as in the articulation of canon law, papal authority directly affected the lives of all Christians, as well as the lives of Jews and Muslims in their relations with Christians.
The popes were assisted by the College of Cardinals, which was transformed during the papal-imperial conflict from a group of Roman liturgical assistants into a body of advisers individually appointed by the popes. Among its duties articulated in conciliar and papal decrees of 1059 and 1179—rules still in effect in the Roman Catholic Church today—was to elect the pope. A cardinal could be a cardinal bishop (if the church he was given was outside the city of Rome, whose only bishop, of course, was the pope himself), a cardinal priest, or a cardinal deacon. Cardinals also had different roles. The cardinal bishop of Ostia, for example, always crowned a new pope. For some time the senior cardinal deacon gave the pope his papal name, a practice that began in the 10th century, perhaps in imitation of monastic tradition.
The papacy developed other means to implement its authority. After the Concordat of Worms (1122), which settled some aspects of the Investiture Controversy, popes held regular assemblies of higher clergy in church councils, the first of which was the first Lateran Council in 1123. Conciliar legislation was the means by which reform principles were most efficiently formulated and disseminated to the highest clerical levels. Although councils in the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries were closely controlled by the popes, later councils sometimes opposed papal authority with claims to conciliar authority, a position generally known as conciliarism. Papal legates, judges, and emissaries, widely used by Gregory VII and later popes, were dispatched with full papal authority to deal with issues in distant parts of Europe.
Papal collectors, who received funds owed to the popes for Crusading or other purposes, were also essential components of papal government. The papal chamberlain of Celestine III (1191–98), Cencio Savelli (later Pope Honorius III; 1216–27), produced the Liber Censuum (“The Book of the Census”) in 1192, the first comprehensive account of the sources of papal funding. In this respect, as in the formal communications of the papal chancery, the pope created an influential model, imitated by all other European principalities and kingdoms. Although only four papal registers (collections of important papal letters and decisions) from before 1198 survive more or less intact, all registers since then have been preserved.
The day-to-day work of the popes was carried out by the Roman Curia; the name Curia Romana was first used by Urban II at the end of the 11th century. The Curia consisted of the chancery; the Apostolic Camera, or financial centre; the consistory, or legal office, including the Roman Rota (chief papal court); and the Penitentiary, or spiritual and confessional office. The popes were also the secular rulers of Rome and the Papal States, and accordingly their servants included the rulers and officials of these territories.
The popes ran afoul of local movements for greater independence, including the revolution led by Arnold of Brescia, the priest and religious dissident, in 1143. Revolts continued throughout the 13th century and increased in frequency during the Avignon papacy (1305–78), when the popes resided in Avignon, and during the Great Schism (1378–1417), when there were two and then three claimants for the papal office. (The crisis was resolved in 1415–18 at the Council of Constance, which elected a new pope and restored papal authority over the city of Rome and the Papal States.) When a pope could safely reside in Rome, he worked at the church of St. John Lateran, his cathedral as bishop of the city of Rome, and not at the Vatican, which was chiefly a pilgrimage shrine. Only after Martin V (1417–31), the pope elected at the Council of Constance, found that the papal quarters at the Lateran had fallen into ruins was the papal residence and administration moved to the Vatican.
Lower levels of the clerical hierarchy replicated the papal administration on a smaller scale. The immense dioceses of northern Europe, ruled by prince-archbishops (as in Cologne) or by prince-bishops (as in Durham), were very different from the tiny rural dioceses of southern Italy. Within the secular clergy the highest rank below the pope was that of primate, who was usually the regional head of a group of archbishops. The archbishops, or metropolitans, ruled archdioceses, or provinces, holding provincial synods of clergy under their jurisdiction, ruling administrative courts, and supervising the suffragan bishops (bishops assigned to assist in the administration of the archdiocese). The archbishop was expected to make regular visits to the ecclesiastical institutions in his province and to hear appeals from the verdicts of courts at lower levels.
The archdiocese was divided into dioceses, each ruled by a bishop, who supervised his own administration and episcopal court. In ecclesiastical tradition, bishops were considered the successors of the Apostles, and a strong sense of episcopal collegiality between pope and bishops survived well into the age of increased papal authority. Episcopal courts included a chancery for the use of the bishop’s seal, a judicial court under the direction of the official or the archdeacon, financial officers, and archpriests (priests assigned to special functions). The bishop’s church, the cathedral, was staffed by a chapter (a body of clergy) and headed by a dean, who was specifically charged with administering the cathedral and its property. The chapter was not usually the bishop’s administrative staff and thus sometimes found itself in conflict with the bishop. Struggles between bishop and chapter were frequent and notorious in canon law courts, since they could be appealed, like disputed episcopal elections, all the way to the papal court.
Facade of the cathedral of Siena, Italy, 1285–1377. SCALA/Art Resource, New York
Episcopal powers were extensive: only the bishop could consecrate churches, ordain clergy, license preachers, or appoint teachers in episcopal schools. The bishop’s pastoral responsibilities extended to all Christians in his diocese. Moreover, since canon law touched the lives of all Christians, episcopal legal officials held great power. They visited diocesan institutions and presided over trials of those accused of violating canon law, which concerned many areas that in modern legal systems are subsumed under civil and criminal law, family courts, and moral offenses.
The diocese was divided into deaconries for the archdeacons, which might convoke lesser synods. Deaconries too had their own chancellors, notaries, and judicial officers, as well as archpriests who assisted the deacons. Since the archdeacon or official was usually the point of contact between the laity and ecclesiastical discipline, they were often the butt of satire and complaint. One topic said to have been proposed for debate at a 13th-century university was: Can an archdeacon be saved?
At the lowest level of the clerical hierarchy was the parish, with its priest, suffragan priests, vicars, and chaplains, who together supervised the spiritual life of the majority of European laity. The parish owned its church and the land that provided the priest’s income (the glebe); additional income was derived from tithes collected from all parishioners and often from an endowment. The priest was presented to the bishop for ordination by a layman, cleric, or clerical corporation with proprietary rights over the parish. In many cases, the actual care of souls in a parish was in the hands of a vicar, who was deputed by a patron to perform the priest’s duties when the priest was away studying or occupied in other business. The parish priest also administered the ecclesiastical calendar for his parishioners. Parishioners themselves might belong to spiritual associations, called confraternities, but all were expected to be baptized, to make confession once a year (after the fourth Lateran Council prescribed this in 1215), to take Holy Communion, to marry, and to be buried in the parish churchyard. The parish was the level at which most people learned their Christianity and the level at which most of them lived it.
Devotional life
The popes also supervised the regular clergy, which included the religious orders of monks, canons regular (secular clergy who lived collegiately according to a rule), and mendicants. Each of these orders had a superior, who was advised by a chapter general that comprised representatives of the religious houses of the order. Orders, like dioceses, were organized according to regions, each having a regional superior and holding regional chapters. Individual religious houses were headed by an abbot or abbess (the mendicant orders had a slightly different organization) and administered by a chancellor and chamberlain. Provosts and deans usually supervised the property of each house.
In the 12th century, new devotional movements (movements devoted to Jesus or the saints) led to outbursts of religious dissent (with new forms of ecclesiastical discipline devised to control them) and equally passionate expressions of orthodox devotion. Although monasticism was by then an old institution, one of the great themes of the century was the search for the apostolic life as monks, canons, and laypeople might live it. The canons regular were one result of this movement, as were new monastic orders, particularly the Cistercian Order. But the most dynamic movement was that of the mendicant orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, founded in the early 13th century.
The Order of Friars Minor, founded by the layman Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226) to minister to the spiritual needs of the cities, spread widely and rapidly, as did the Order of Preachers, founded by the canon of Osma, Dominic of Guzmán (c. 1170–1221). These and other devotional movements of laypeople were supported by Pope Innocent III and his successors. The mendicant orders greatly influenced popular piety, because they specialized in preaching in new churches that were built to hold large crowds. Indeed, during this time the sermon came into its own as the most effective mass medium in Europe. The mendicants also increased devotion to the Virgin Mary and to the infant or crucified and suffering Jesus, rather than to the figure of Jesus as regal and remote.
St. Francis of Assisi, detail of a fresco by Cimabue, late 13th century; in the lower church of San Francesco, Assisi, Italy. Alinari—Anderson/Art Resource, New York
Other forms of devotional life took shape during the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries. The Cistercian Order, for example, instituted the status of lay brother, who was usually an adult layman who retired from the world to undertake the management of monastic resources. Still other members of the laity retired to the sequestered life of hermits and recluses, usually under the supervision of a chaplain.
During the 13th and 14th centuries, devotional movements arose that were neither monastic nor clerical in any other sense. The most notable of these was the Beguines, an order of devout women (and occasionally, but more rarely, men, who lived in all-male communities and were called Beghards) who lived together in devotional communities within towns, especially in the Low Countries and the Rhineland, followed no rule, and took no vow. They worked in the towns but lived collectively and might leave for marriage or another form of life at any time. Some of the most important devotional literature of the period was written by and for Beguines.
The vast movements of reform, ecclesiastical organization, and pastoral care of the 12th and 13th centuries reached their greatest intensity in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216). Lothar of Segni, as he was originally known, was the son of a landholding noble family outside Rome; he was educated in the schools of Paris and attached to the Roman Curia in 1187. Innocent issued the strongest and most tightly argued claims for papal authority, and he launched Crusades and instituted the office of papal judge-delegate to combat clerical crimes and heterodox belief. He also supported the new mendicant orders, paid particular attention to the needs of popular devotion, reformed and disciplined the Curia, and assembled the fourth Lateran Council in November 1215. Innocent came as close to realizing the ideals of reform and renewal in ecclesiological practice as any pope before or since.
The organization of normative religion, the formal rules and norms of practice in the faith, was intended to give regularity and order to lived religion. Daily religious life was characterized by the acceptance of tradition and authority and by belief in the saints as patrons of local communities and belief in the parish priest as a conveyor of grace by virtue of his sacramental powers (conferred by ordination) and his legal powers (conferred by the bishop). During the 12th century, institutional structures for official acts of canonization were established, but the enthusiasm for the saints remained an important part of both popular devotion and the official cult of the saints (the system of religious belief and ritual surrounding the saints). The cult of the saints was celebrated by clergy and laity in the observance of feast days and processions, the veneration of saints’ relics, pilgrimages to saints’ shrines, and the rituals of death and burial near the graves of saints. The liturgical dimension of pastoral care regulated the major events of the day, week, season, and Christian year, according to whose rhythms everyone lived. Priests blessed harvests, animals, and ships and liturgically interceded in the face of natural or man-made disasters.
Religious devotion strengthened the presence of normative religion in marriage and the family, the sacred character of the local community and the territorial monarchy, and the moral rules by which lay affairs were conducted. The fourth Lateran Council largely institutionalized the work of the 12th-century moral theologians at Paris, who had begun to apply the principles of doctrine and canon law to the lives of their contemporaries.
From persuasion to coercion: The emergence of a new ecclesiastical discipline
The ecclesiastical reform movements that sharply distinguished clergy from laity also developed a means of sustaining that distinction through intensified ecclesiastical discipline. Clergy were not only freed from most forms of subordination to laypersons but also were granted legal privileges, being triable only in church courts and subject only to penalties deemed suitable by church authorities (benefit of clergy). Laity who injured clerical personnel or property were punished more harshly. But the distinction between clergy and laity also enhanced lay status. Lay authorities could legally perform judicial actions that were forbidden to clergy, like the shedding of blood or other forms of physical punishment. Clerical thinkers greatly legitimated lay activities that earlier monastic Christianity had once scorned, attributing a positive value to commerce, the law, just warfare, marriage, and other roles once considered signs of fallen and weak human nature.
The intensity of the reform movements led to a new and elaborated idea of sin and to categories of sin so grave that they required the harshest punishments, sometimes in cooperation with lay courts. The idea of crime itself, drawing on both older Roman law and earlier ecclesiastical discipline, gradually came to assume a distinctive place in secular law, as more and more conflicts that had once been settled privately came within the purview of lay legal officials. Clerical crime became a major focus of disciplinary concern. The term heresy, loosely used until the 11th century, slowly became better defined and was initially applied to clerical misconduct such as simony (the acceptance of ecclesiastical office from laymen) and nicolaitism (clerical marriage). The increasingly precise exposition of Christian doctrine by 12th-century theologians seemed to many people a displacement of the Christianity that they had always understood and practiced. Legal collections began to treat various forms of doctrinal and devotional dissent as heresy, thus formulating a category that would criminalize a wide variety of beliefs and conduct.
Promoters of the new ecclesiastical doctrine and discipline believed that the increasingly numerous devotional collectives and their charismatic leaders would eventually threaten the order of both clerical and lay society. In the early 13th century the English theologian Robert Grosseteste formulated a definition that accurately reflected the changed understanding of religious dissent: “Heresy is an opinion chosen by human faculties, contrary to sacred scripture, openly taught, and pertinaciously defended.” Criminal heresy involved belief that contradicted orthodox doctrine and was arrived at by purely human capacities. It was also belief that was publicly, and therefore seditiously, proclaimed, even after legitimate instruction by authorized teachers, thereby making the “heretic” contumacious in the eyes of the law.
Like the problem of criminal clergy, the problem of heresy raised procedural questions in law. Legal procedure in criminal cases might be initiated by an accusation by a responsible individual or by a denunciation by a group of specially appointed synodal witnesses. In 1199 Innocent III added a third procedure, that of inquisition, or inquiry by an appropriate authority, which was first used to investigate clerical crimes. Later popes appointed judges delegate as individual inquisitors, although there was not an institutionalized office of inquisition until the royal-papal establishment of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478.
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam
The sacred texts of revealed religions may be eternal and unchanging, but they are understood and applied by human beings living in time. Christians believed not only that the Jews had misunderstood Scripture, thus justifying the Christian reinterpretation of Jewish Scripture, but that all of Jewish Scripture had to be understood as containing only partial truth. The whole truth was comprehensible only when Jewish Scripture was interpreted correctly, in what Christians called a “spiritual” rather than merely a “carnal” manner.
Although early Christian texts and later papal commands had prohibited the persecution and forced conversion of Jews, these doctrines were less carefully observed starting in the 11th century. Heralded by a series of pogroms in both Europe and the Middle East carried out in the course of the First Crusade, a deeper and more widespread anti-Judaism came to characterize much of European history after 1100. There also emerged in this period what some historians have termed “chimeric” anti-Judaism, the conception of the Jew not only as ignorant of spiritual truth and stubbornly resistant to Christian preaching but as actively hostile to Christianity and guilty of ugly crimes against it, such as the ritual murder of Christian children and the desecration of the consecrated host of the mass. This form of anti-Judaism resulted in massacres of Jews, usually at moments of high social tension within Christian communities. One of the best documented of these massacres took place at York, Eng., in 1190.
Before the 11th century the Jews faced little persecution, lived among Christians, and even pursued the same occupations as Christians. The Jews’ restricted status after that time encouraged many of them to turn to moneylending, which only served to increase Christian hostility (Christians were forbidden to lend money to other Christians). Because the Jews often undertook on behalf of rulers work that Christians would not do or were not encouraged to do, such as serving as physicians and financial officers, Jews were hated both for their religion and for their social roles.
Jewish identity was also visually marked. Jews were depicted in particular ways in art, and the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 insisted that Jews wear identifying marks on their clothing. Even when not savagely persecuted, Jews were considered the property of the territorial monarchs of Europe and could be routinely exploited economically and even expelled, as they were from England in 1290, France in 1306, and Spain in 1492.
Yet Christians also believed that it was necessary for the Jews to continue to exist unconverted, because the Apocalypse, or Revelation to John, the last book of the Christian Bible, stated that the Jews would be converted at the end of time. Therefore, a “saving remnant” of Jews needed to exist so that scriptural prophecy would be fulfilled.
Muslims, on the other hand, possessed neither the historical status of Jews nor their place in salvation history (the course of events from Creation to the Last Judgment). To many Christian thinkers, Muslims were former Christian heretics who worshipped Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, and were guilty of occupying the Holy Land and threatening Christendom with military force. The First Crusade had been launched to liberate the Holy Land from Islamic rule, and later Crusades were undertaken to defend the original conquest.
The Crusading movement failed for many reasons but mainly because the material requirements for sustaining a military and political outpost so far from the heartland of western Europe were not met. But as a component of European culture, the Crusade ideal remained prominent, even in the 15th and 16th centuries, when the powerful Ottoman Empire indeed threatened to sweep over Mediterranean and southeastern Europe. Not until the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699 was a stable frontier between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire established.
Contempt for Islam and fear of Muslim military power did not, however, prevent a lively and expansive commercial and technological transfer between the two civilizations or between them and the Byzantine Empire. Commercial and intellectual exchanges between Islamic lands and western Europe were considerable. Muslim maritime, agricultural, and technological innovations, as well as much East Asian technology via the Muslim world, made their way to western Europe in one of the largest technology transfers in world history. What Europeans did not invent they readily borrowed and adapted for their own use. Of the three great civilizations of western Eurasia and North Africa, that of Christian Europe began as the least developed in virtually all aspects of material and intellectual culture, well behind the Islamic states and Byzantium. By the end of the 13th century it had begun to pull even, and by the end of the 15th century it had surpassed both. The late 15th-century voyages of discovery were not something new but a more ambitious continuation of the European interest in distant parts of the world.
From territorial principalities to territorial monarchies
As a result of the Investiture Controversy of the late 11th and early 12th centuries, the office of emperor lost much of its religious character and retained only a nominal universal preeminence over other rulers, though several 12th- and 13th-century emperors reasserted their authority on the basis of their interpretation of Roman law and energetically applied their lordship and pursued their dynastic interests in Germany and northern Italy. But the struggle over investiture and the reform movement also legitimized all secular authorities, partly on the grounds of their obligation to enforce discipline. The most successful rulers of the 12th and 13th centuries were, first, individual lords who created compact and more intensely governed principalities and, second and most important and enduring, kings who successfully asserted their authority over the princes, often with princely cooperation. The monarchies of England, France, León-Castile, Aragon, Scandinavia, Portugal, and elsewhere all acquired their fundamental shape and character in the 12th century.
The office and person of the king
By the 12th century, most European political thinkers agreed that monarchy was the ideal form of governance, since it imitated on earth the model set by God for the universe. It was also the form of government of the ancient Hebrews, the Roman Empire, and the peoples who succeeded Rome after the 4th century. For several centuries, some areas had no monarch, but these were regarded as anomalies. Iceland (until its absorption by Norway in 1262) was governed by an association of free men and heads of households meeting in an annual assembly. Many city-republics in northern Italy—especially Florence, Milan, Genoa, Pisa, and Venice—were in effect independent from the 10th to the 16th century, though they were nominally under the rule of the emperor. Elsewhere in Europe, the prosperous and volatile cities of the Low Countries frequently asserted considerable independence from the counts of Flanders and the dukes of Brabant. In the 15th century the forest cantons of Switzerland won effective independence from their episcopal and lay masters. For the rest of Europe, however, monarchy was both a theoretical norm and a factual reality.
Whereas kings were originally rulers of peoples, from the 11th century they gradually became rulers of peoples in geographic territories, and kingdoms came to designate both ruled peoples and the lands they inhabited. Gradually, inventories of royal resources, royal legislation, and the idea of borders and territorial maps became components of territorial monarchies.
Kings acquired their thrones by inheritance, by election or acclamation (as in the empire), or by conquest. The first two means were considered the most legitimate, unless conquest was carried out at the request or command of a legitimate authority, usually the pope. The king’s position was confirmed by a coronation ceremony, which acknowledged what royal blood claimed: a dynastic right to the throne, borne by a family rather than a designated individual. Inheritance of the throne might involve the successor’s being designated coruler while the previous king still lived (as in France), designation by the will of the predecessor, or simply agreement and acclamation by the most important and powerful royal subjects. When dynasties died out in the male line, the search for a ruler became more complicated; when they died out in the male line and a woman succeeded, there were usually intense debates about the legitimacy of female succession. Liturgical anointing with consecrated oil was accompanied by the ceremonial presentation to the king of objects with symbolic meaning (the crown, the sword of justice, and the helmet, robe, and scepter), by the chanting of prayers dedicated to rulership, and usually by an oath, in which the king swore to protect the church, the weak, and the peace of his kingdom, to administer justice, and to defend the kingdom against its (and his) enemies.
From the very beginning of European history, kings had responsibilities as well as rights and powers. Kings who were thought to have violated their oaths might be considered tyrants or incompetents, and a number of kings were deposed by local factions or papal command, especially in the 13th and 14th centuries. Depositions also required ceremonies that reversed the coronation liturgy.
Instruments of royal governance
Kings ruled through their courts, which were gradually transformed from private households into elaborate bureaucracies. Royal religious needs were served by royal chapels—whose personnel often became bishops in the kingdom—and by clerical chancellors, who were responsible for issuing and sealing royal documents. Royal chanceries, financial offices, and law courts became specialized institutions during the 12th century. They recruited people of skill as well as of respectable birth, and they established programs to ensure uniformity and norms of professional competence, goals that were increasingly aided by the education offered by the new universities.
In some circumstances, kings were expected to seek and follow the advice of the most important men in their kingdoms, and these gatherings were formalized after the 12th century. Kings also sometimes convened larger assemblies of lower-ranking subjects in order to issue their commands or urge approval of financial demands. As kings grew stronger and their bureaucracies more articulated, their costs, particularly for war, also increased. Greater financial needs often determined a king’s use of representative institutions in order to gain widespread acceptance of new direct or indirect taxation.
These assemblies developed differently in different kingdoms. In England the first Parliaments were held in the late 13th century, though they were not powerful institutions until the 16th century. In France the Parlement developed into a royal law court, while the intermittent meetings of the Estates-General (a representative assembly of the three orders of society) served as an instrument of consultation and communication for the kings. Across Europe these representative assemblies were composed differently, functioned differently, and possessed different degrees of influence on the ruler and the rest of the kingdom. Their later role as essential and powerful components of government began only in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The territorial monarchies represented something entirely new in world history. Although they often borrowed from the political literature of antiquity–—from the Greek philosopher Aristotle, the Roman statesman Cicero, and Roman epic poetry—they applied it to a very different world, one whose ideas were shaped by courtiers, professors, and canon lawyers as well as by political philosophers. Incorporating both clergy and laity under vigorous royal dynasties, the kingdoms of Europe grew out of the political experience of the papacy, the north Italian city-republics, and their own internal development. By the 15th century the territorial monarchies had laid the groundwork for the modern state. When, to further their own interests, they began to incorporate successively lower levels of society, they also laid the groundwork for the nation. The combination of these, the nation-state, became the characteristic form of the early modern European and Atlantic polity.
The three orders
In the 11th and 12th centuries thinkers argued that human society consisted of three orders: those who fight, those who pray, and those who labour. The structure of the second order, the clergy, was in place by 1200 and remained intact until the religious reformations of the 16th century. The very general category of those who labour (specifically, those who were not knightly warriors or nobles) diversified rapidly after the 11th century into the lively and energetic worlds of peasants, skilled artisans, merchants, financiers, lay professionals, and entrepreneurs, which together drove the European economy to its greatest achievements. The first order, those who fight, was the rank of the politically powerful, ambitious, and dangerous. Kings took pains to ensure that it did not resist their authority.
The term noble was originally used to refer to members of kinship groups whose names and heroic past were known, respected, and recognized by others (though it was not usually used by members of such groups themselves). Noble groups married into each other, recognizing the importance of both the female and the male lines. Charlemagne used this international nobility to rule his empire, and its descendants became the nobility of the 11th and 12th centuries, though by then the understanding of noble status had changed. During the 11th century, however, some branches of these broad groups began to identify themselves increasingly with the paternal line and based their identity on their possession of a particular territory handed down from generation to generation, forming patriarchal lineages whose consciousness of themselves differed from that of their predecessors. Titles such as count or duke were originally those of royal service and might increase the prestige and wealth of a family but were not originally essential to noble status. Nor were even kings thought to be able to ennoble someone who was not noble by birth. As the status of the free peasant population was diminished, freedom and unfreedom, as noted above, gradually became the most significant social division (see above Demographic and agricultural growth).
The new warrior order encompassed both great nobles and lesser fighting men who depended upon the great nobles for support. This assistance usually took the form of land or income drawn from the lord’s resources, which could also bring the hope of social advancement, even marriage into a lordly family. The acute need on the part of these lower-ranking warriors was to distinguish themselves from peasants—hence the relegation of all who were not warriors to the vague category of those who labour.
Some nobles asserted their nobility by seizing territory, controlling it and its inhabitants from a castle, surviving as local powers over several generations, marrying well, achieving recognition from their neighbours, and dispensing ecclesiastical patronage to nearby monasteries. The greatest and wealthiest of the nobles controlled vast areas of land, which they received by inheritance or through a grant from the king. Some of them developed closely governed territorial principalities which, in France, were eventually absorbed and redistributed by the crown to members of the royal family or their favourites. Despite the extreme diversity between knights, lesser nobility, and greater nobility, their common warrior-culture, expressed in the literature and ideology of chivalry, served as an effective social bond, excluding all those who did not share it.
The stone keep of Cardiff Castle in Wales. © Gail Johnson/Dreamstime.com
As the territorial monarchies gradually increased in both prestige and power, the higher nobility adjusted by accepting more royal offices, titles, and patronage, developing an elaborate vocabulary of noble status, and restricting access to its ranks even though kings could now ennoble whomever they chose. The culture of chivalry served the ambitions of the lower-ranking nobility, but it also reflected the spectrum of different levels of nobility, all subordinated to the ruler. The culture and power of the European aristocracy lasted until the end of the 18th century.
Crisis, recovery, and resilience: Did the Middle Ages end?
Both ancient and modern historians have often conceived the existence of civilizations and historical periods in terms of the biological stages of human life: birth, development, maturity, and decay. Once the Middle Ages was identified as a distinct historical period, historians in the 15th and 16th centuries began to describe it as enduring in a sequence of stages from youthful vigour to maturity (in the 12th and 13th centuries) and then sinking into old age (in the 14th and 15th centuries). Much of the evidence used to support this view was based on the series of apparently great disasters that struck Europe in the 14th century: the Mongol invasions, the great famine of 1315, the Black Death of 1348 and subsequent years, the financial collapse of the great Italian banking houses in the early 14th century, and the vastly increased costs and devastating effects of larger-scale warfare. For a long time historians considered these disasters dramatic signs of the end of an age, especially because they already believed that the Renaissance had emerged following the collapse of medieval civilization.
Mongol warriors, miniature from Rashīd al-Dīn's History of the World, 1307; in the Edinburgh University Library, Scotland.Courtesy of the Edinburgh University Library, Scotland
Reconsideration of the Europe of the 14th and 15th centuries, however, does not reveal decline or decay but rather a remarkable resilience that enabled it to recover from disaster and reconstitute itself by means of most of the same institutions it had possessed in 1300. Only from a highly selective and partial historical perspective was there ever, as the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga once termed it, a “waning,” “autumn,” or “end” of the Middle Ages.
The process of rural and urban expansion and development indeed paused in the 14th century as famine, epidemic disease, intensified and prolonged warfare, and financial collapse brought growth to a halt and reduced the population for a time to about half of the 70 million people who had inhabited Europe in 1300. But the resources that had created the Europe of the 12th and 13th centuries survived these crises: first the European countryside and then the cities were rapidly repopulated. It is the resiliency of Europe, not its weakness, that explains the patterns of recovery in the late 14th and 15th centuries. That recovery continued through the 16th and 17th centuries.
The missionary mandate reached out across Mongol-dominated Asia as far east as China, where a Christian bishop took up his seat in 1307. The Mongol opening of Eurasia also relocated Europe in the minds of its inhabitants. No longer were its edges simply its borders with the Islamic world. Improved techniques in both navigation and marine engineering led Europeans from the 13th century to cross and map first their local seas, then the west African coasts, then the Atlantic and Pacific. From the late 15th century Europe began to export itself once more, as it once had to the north and east from the 10th to the 15th century, this time over vast oceans and to continents that had been unknown to the Greeks and Romans.
Neither the crises of the 14th century nor the voyages and discoveries of the 15th suggest the end of a historical period or an exhausted medieval Europe. The resilience and capacity for innovation of 14th- and 15th-century Europe, the hopeful, determined, and often passionate search for salvation on the part of ordinary people leading ordinary lives, even the inability of governments to weigh down their subjects without fierce displays of resistance—all indicate the strength of a European society and culture that men and women had shaped from the 8th century. Edward Peters
The Renaissance
Few historians are comfortable with the triumphalist and western Europe-centred image of the Renaissance as the irresistible march of modernity and progress. A sharp break with medieval values and institutions, a new awareness of the individual, an awakened interest in the material world and nature, and a recovery of the cultural heritage of ancient Greece and Rome—these were once understood to be the major achievements of the Renaissance. Today, every particular of this formula is under suspicion if not altogether repudiated. Nevertheless, the term Renaissance remains a widely recognized label for the multifaceted period between the heyday of medieval universalism, as embodied in the papacy and Holy Roman Empire, and the convulsions and sweeping transformations of the 17th century.
In addition to Classical scholarship, the systematic investigation of the physical world, and commercial enterprise based on private capital, other important innovations of the Middle Ages that came into their own in the period included the revival of urban life, banking, the formation of states, and vernacular literatures. In religious life, the Renaissance was a time of the broadening and institutionalizing of earlier initiatives in lay piety and lay-sponsored clerical reforms, rather than the abandonment of traditional beliefs. In government, city-states and regional and national principalities supplanted the fading hegemony of the empire and the papacy and obliterated many of the local feudal jurisdictions that had covered Europe, although within states power continued to be monopolized by elites drawing their strength from both landed and mercantile wealth. If there was a Renaissance “rediscovery of the world and of man,” as the 19th-century historians Jules Michelet (in the seventh volume of his History of France) and Jacob Burckhardt (in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [1860]) asserted, it can be found mainly in literature and art, influenced by the latest and most successful of a long series of medieval Classical revivals. For all but exceptional individuals and a few marginal groups, the standards of behaviour continued to arise from traditional social and moral codes. Identity derived from class, family, occupation, and community, although each of these social forms was itself undergoing significant modification. Thus, for example, while there is no substance to Burckhardt’s notion that in Italy women enjoyed perfect equality with men, the economic and structural features of Renaissance patrician families may have enhanced the scope of activity and influence of women of that class. Finally, the older view of the Renaissance centred too exclusively on Italy, and within Italy on a few cities—Florence, Venice, and Rome. By discarding false dichotomies—Renaissance versus Middle Ages, Classical versus Gothic, modern versus feudal—one is able to grasp more fully the interrelatedness of Italy with the rest of Europe and to investigate the extent to which the great centres of Renaissance learning and art were nourished and influenced by less exalted towns and by changes in the pattern of rural life.
For additional treatment of Renaissance thought and intellectual activity, see humanism and classical scholarship.
The Italian Renaissance
Urban growth
Although town revival was a general feature of 10th- and 11th-century Europe (associated with an upsurge in population that is not completely understood), in Italy the urban imprint of Roman times had never been erased. By the 11th century, the towers of new towns, and, more commonly, of old towns newly revived, began to dot the spiny Italian landscape—eye-catching creations of a burgeoning population literally brimming with new energy due to improved diets. As in Roman times, the medieval Italian town lived in close relation to its surrounding rural area, or contado; Italian city folk seldom relinquished their ties to the land from which they and their families had sprung. Rare was the successful tradesman or banker who did not invest some of his profits in the family farm or a rural noble who did not spend part of the year in his house inside city walls. In Italian towns, knights, merchants, rentiers, and skilled craftsmen lived and worked side by side, fought in the same militia, and married into each other’s families. Social hierarchy there was, but it was a tangled system with no simple division between noble and commoner, between landed and commercial wealth. That landed magnates took part in civic affairs helps explain the early militancy of the townsfolk in resisting the local bishop, who was usually the principal claimant to lordship in the community. Political action against a common enemy tended to infuse townspeople with a sense of community and civic loyalty. By the end of the 11th century, civic patriotism began to express itself in literature; city chronicles combined fact and legend to stress a city’s Roman origins and, in some cases, its inheritance of Rome’s special mission to rule. Such motifs reflect the cities’ achievement of autonomy from their respective episcopal or secular feudal overlords and, probably, the growth of rivalries between neighbouring communities.
Rivalry between towns was part of the expansion into the neighbouring countryside, with the smaller and weaker towns submitting to the domination of the larger and stronger. As the activity of the towns became more complex, sporadic collective action was replaced by permanent civic institutions. Typically, the first of these was an executive magistracy, named the consulate (to stress the continuity with republican Rome). In the late 11th and early 12th centuries, this process—consisting of the establishment of juridical autonomy, the emergence of a permanent officialdom, and the spread of power beyond the walls of the city to the contado and neighbouring towns—was well under way in about a dozen Italian centres and evident in dozens more; the loose urban community was becoming a corporate entity, or commune; the city was becoming a city-state.
The typical 13th-century city-state was a republic administering a territory of dependent towns; whether it was a democracy is a question of definition. The idea of popular sovereignty existed in political thought and was reflected in the practice of calling a parlamento, or mass meeting, of the populace in times of emergency; but in none of the republics were the people as a whole admitted to regular participation in government. On the other hand, the 13th century saw the establishment, after considerable struggle, of assemblies in which some portion of the male citizenry, restricted by property and other qualifications, took part in debate, legislation, and the selection of officials. Most offices were filled by men serving on a rotating, short-term basis. If the almost universal obligation of service in the civic militia is also considered, it becomes clear that participation in the public life of the commune was shared by a considerable part of the male population, although the degree of participation varied from one commune to another and tended to decline. Most of the city republics were small enough (in 1300 Florence, one of the largest, had perhaps 100,000 people; Padua, nearer the average, had about 15,000) so that public business was conducted by and for citizens who knew each other, and civic issues were a matter of widespread and intense personal concern.
Giotto: frescoes in Arena ChapelGiotto painted frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy, about 1305–06.A. Dagli Orti/DeA Picture Library
The darker side of this intense community life was conflict. It became a cliché of contemporary observers that when townsmen were not fighting their neighbours they were fighting each other. Machiavelli explained this as the result of the natural enmity between nobles and “the people—the former desiring to command, the latter unwilling to obey.” This contains an essential truth: a basic problem was the unequal distribution of power and privilege, but the class division was further complicated by factional rivalry within the ruling groups and by ideological differences—Guelfism, or loyalty to the pope, versus Ghibellinism, or vassalage to the German emperors (see Guelf and Ghibelline). The continuing leadership of the old knightly class, with its violent feudal ways and the persistence of a winner-take-all conception of politics, guaranteed bloody and devastating conflict. Losers could expect to be condemned to exile, with their houses burned and their property confiscated. Winners had to be forever vigilant against the unending conspiracies of exiles yearning to return to their homes and families.
Machiavelli, NiccolòNiccolò Machiavelli, oil painting by Santi di Tito; in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.Mondadori Portfolio/age fotostock
Leaning Tower of Pisa (left) and the cathedral, Pisa, Italy.Photos.com/Thinkstock
Cathedral of San Martino, Lucca, ItalySCALA/Art Resource, New YorkDuring the 14th century a number of cities, despairing of finding a solution to the problem of civic strife, were turning from republicanism to signoria, the rule of one man. The signore, or lord, was usually a member of a local feudal family that was also a power in the commune; thus, lordship did not appear to be an abnormal development, particularly if the signore chose, as most did, to rule through existing republican institutions. Sometimes a signoria was established as the result of one noble faction’s victory over another, while in a few cases a feudal noble who had been hired by the republic as its condottiere, or military captain, became its master. Whatever the process, hereditary lordship had become the common condition and free republicanism the exception by the late 14th century. Contrary to what Burckhardt believed, Italy in the 14th century had not shaken off feudalism. In the south, feudalism was entrenched in the loosely centralized Kingdom of Naples, successor state to the Hohenstaufen and Norman kingdoms. In central and northern Italy, feudal lordship and knightly values merged with medieval communal institutions to produce the typical state of the Renaissance. Where the nobles were excluded by law from political participation in the commune, as in the Tuscan cities of Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Lucca, parliamentary republicanism had a longer life; but even these bastions of liberty had intervals ofdisguised or open lordship. The great maritime republic of Venice reversed the usual process by increasing the powers of its councils at the expense of the doge (from Latin dux, “leader”). However, Venice never had a feudal nobility, only a merchant aristocracy that called itself noble and jealously guarded its hereditary sovereignty against incursions from below.
Wars of expansion
There were new as well as traditional elements in the Renaissance city-state. Changes in the political and economic situation affected the evolution of government, while the growth of the humanist movement influenced developing conceptions of citizenship, patriotism, and civic history. The decline in the ability of both the empire and the papacy to dominate Italian affairs as they had done in the past left each state free to pursue its own goals within the limits of its resources. These goals were, invariably, the security and power of each state vis-à-vis its neighbours.Diplomacy became a skilled game of experts; rivalries were deadly, and warfare was endemic. Because the costs of war were all-consuming, particularly as mercenary troops replaced citizen militias, the states had to find new sources of revenue and develop methods of securing public credit. Governments borrowed from moneylenders (stimulating the development of banking), imposed customs duties, and levied fines; but, as their costs continued to exceed revenues, they came up with new solutions such as the forced loan, funded debt, and taxes on property and income. New officials with special skills were required to take property censuses (the catasto), calculate assessments, and manage budgets, as well as to provision troops, take minutes of council meetings, administer justice, write to other governments, and send instructions to envoys and other agents. All this required public space—council, judicial, and secretarial rooms, storage space for bulging archives, and both closed and open-air ceremonial settings where officials interacted with the citizenry and received foreign visitors. As secular needs joined and blended with religious ones, towns took their place alongside the church and the monasteries as patrons of builders, painters, and sculptors (often the same persons). In the late 13th century, great programs of public building and decoration were begun that were intended to symbolize and portray images of civic power and beneficence and to communicate the values of “the common good.” Thus, the expansion of the functions of the city-state was accompanied by the development of a public ideology and a civic rhetoric intended to make people conscious of their blessings and responsibilities as citizens.
The city-state tended to subsume many of the protective and associative functions and loyalties connected with clan, family, guild, and party. Whether it fostered individualism by replacing traditional forms of association—as Burckhardt, Alfred von Martin, and other historians have claimed—is problematic. The Renaissance “discovery of the individual” is a nebulous concept, lending itself to many different meanings. It could be argued, for example, that the development of communal law, with its strong Roman influence, enhanced individual property rights or that participatory government promoted a consciousness of individual value. It could also be argued, however, that the city-state was a more effective controller of the loyalty and property of its members than were feudal jurisdictions and voluntary associations. In some respects the great merchants and bankers of the Renaissance, operating in international markets, had more freedom than local tradespeople, who were subject to guild restrictions, communal price and quality controls, and usury laws; but the economic ideal of Renaissance states was mercantilism, not free private enterprise.
Initial letter of the Magnificat, from the Book of Hours of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, illuminated manuscript page by Giovannino de' Grassi, c. 1385; in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence (Fondo Landau-Finaly MS. 22, fol. 147 v).SCALA/Art Resource
Cosimo de' Medici.Stock Montage/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesAmid the confusion of medieval Italian politics, a new pattern of relations emerged by the 14th century. No longer revolving in the papal or in the imperial orbit, the stronger states were free to assert their hegemony over the weaker, and a system of regional power centres evolved. From time to time the more ambitious states, especially those that had brought domestic conflict under control, made a bid for a wider hegemony in the peninsula, such as Milan attempted under the lordship of the Visconti family. In the 1380s and ’90s Gian Galeazzo Visconti pushed Milanese power eastward as far as Padua, at the very doorstep of Venice, and southward to the Tuscan cities of Lucca, Pisa, and Siena and even to Perugia in papal territory. Some believed that Gian Galeazzo meant to be king of Italy; whether or not this is true, he would probably have overrun Florence, the last outpost of resistance in central Italy, had he not died suddenly in 1402, leaving a divided inheritance and much confusion. In the 1420s, under Filippo Maria, Milan began to expand again; but by then Venice, with territorial ambitions of its own, had joined with Florence to block Milan’s advance, while the other Italian states took sides or remained neutral according to their own interests. The mid-15th century saw the Italian peninsula embroiled in a turmoil of intrigues, plots, revolts, wars, and shifting alliances, of which the most sensational was the reversal that brought the two old enemies, Florence and Milan, together against Venetian expansion. This “diplomatic revolution,” supported by Cosimo de’ Medici, the unofficial head of the Florentine republic, is the most significant illustration of the emergence of balance-of-power diplomacy in Renaissance Italy.
Italian humanism
The notion that ancient wisdom and eloquence lay slumbering in the Dark Ages until awakened in the Renaissance was the creation of the Renaissance itself. The idea of the revival of Classical antiquity is one of those great myths, comparable to the idea of the universal civilizing mission of imperial Rome or to the idea of progress in a modern industrial society, by which an era defines itself in history. Like all such myths, it is a blend of fact and invention. Classical thought and style permeated medieval culture in ways past counting. Most of the authors known to the Renaissance were known to the Middle Ages as well, while the Classical texts “discovered” by the humanists were often not originals but medieval copies preserved in monastic or cathedral libraries. Moreover, the Middle Ages had produced at least two earlier revivals of Classical antiquity. The so-called Carolingian Renaissance of the late 8th and 9th centuries saved many ancient works from destruction or oblivion, passing them down to posterity in its beautiful minuscule script (which influenced the humanist scripts of the Renaissance). A 12th-century Renaissance saw the revival of Roman law, Latin poetry, and Greek science, including almost the whole corpus of Aristotelian writings known today.
Growth of literacy
Nevertheless, the Classical revival of the Italian Renaissance was so different from these earlier movements in spirit and substance that the humanists might justifiably claim that it was original and unique. During most of the Middle Ages, Classical studies and virtually all intellectual activities were carried on by churchmen, usually members of the monastic orders. In the Italian cities, this monopoly was partially breached by the growth of a literate laity with some taste and need for literary culture. New professions reflected the growth of both literary and specialized lay education—the dictatores, or teachers of practical rhetoric, lawyers, and the ever-present notary (a combination of solicitor and public recorder). These, and not Burckhardt’s wandering scholar-clerics, were the true predecessors of the humanists.
In Padua a kind of early humanism emerged, flourished, and declined between the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Paduan classicism was a product of the vigorous republican life of the commune, and its decline coincided with the loss of the city’s liberty. A group of Paduan jurists, lawyers, and notaries—all trained as dictatores—developed a taste for Classical literature that probably stemmed from their professional interest in Roman law and their affinity for the history of the Roman Republic. The most famous of these Paduan classicists was Albertino Mussato, a poet, historian, and playwright, as well as lawyer and politician, whose play Ecerinis, modeled on the work of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, has been called the first Renaissance tragedy. By reviving several types of ancient literary forms and by promoting the use of Classical models for poetry and rhetoric, the Paduan humanists helped make the 14th-century Italians more conscious of their Classical heritage; in other respects, however, they remained close to their medieval antecedents, showing little comprehension of the vast cultural and historical gulf that separated them from the ancients.
Language and eloquence
It was Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, who first understood fully that antiquity was a civilization apart and, understanding it, outlined a program of Classically oriented studies that would lay bare its spirit. The focus of Petrarch’s insight was language: if Classical antiquity was to be understood in its own terms, it would be through the speech with which the ancients had communicated their thoughts. This meant that the languages of antiquity had to be studied as the ancients had used them and not as vehicles for carrying modern thoughts. Thus, grammar, which included the reading and careful imitation of ancient authors from a linguistic point of view, was the basis of Petrarch’s entire program.
From the mastery of language, one moved on to the attainment of eloquence. For Petrarch, as for Cicero, eloquence was not merely the possession of an elegant style, nor yet the power of persuasion, but the union of elegance and power together with virtue. One who studied language and rhetoric in the tradition of the great orators of antiquity did so for a moral purpose—to persuade men and women to the good life—for, said Petrarch in a dictum that could stand as the slogan of Renaissance humanism, “it is better to will the good than to know the truth.”
The humanities
To will the good, one must first know it, and so there could be no true eloquence without wisdom. According to Leonardo Bruni, a leading humanist of the next generation, Petrarch “opened the way for us to show in what manner we might acquire learning.” Petrarch’s union of rhetoric and philosophy, modeled on the Classical ideal of eloquence, provided the humanists with an intellectual dignity and a moral ethos lacking to the medieval dictatores and classicists. It also pointed the way toward a program of studies—the studia humanitatis—by which the ideal might be achieved. As elaborated by Bruni, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and others, the notion of the humanities was based on Classical models—the tradition of a liberal arts curriculum conceived by the Greeks and elaborated by Cicero and Quintilian. Medieval scholars had been fascinated by the notion that there were seven liberal arts, no more and no less, although they did not always agree as to which they were. The humanists had their own favourites, which invariably included grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy, and history, with a nod or two toward music and mathematics. They also had their own ideas about methods of teaching and study. They insisted upon the mastery of Classical Latin and, where possible, Greek, which began to be studied again in the West in 1397, when the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras was invited to lecture in Florence. They also insisted upon the study of Classical authors at first hand, banishing the medieval textbooks and compendiums from their schools. This greatly increased the demand for Classical texts, which was first met by copying manuscript books in the newly developed humanistic scripts and then, after the mid-15th century, by the method of printing with movable type, first developed in Germany and rapidly adopted in Italy and elsewhere. Thus, while it is true that most of the ancient authors were already known in the Middle Ages, there was an all-important difference between circulating a book in many copies to a reading public and jealously guarding a single exemplar as a prized possession in some remote monastery library.
Chrysoloras, detail of a drawing by an unknown artist, c. 1400; in the Bibliothèque Nationale, ParisJ.P. Ziolo, Paris
The term humanist (Italian umanista, Latin humanista) first occurs in 15th-century documents to refer to a teacher of the humanities. Humanists taught in a variety of ways. Some founded their own schools—as Vittorino da Feltre did in Mantua in 1423 and Guarino Veronese in Ferrara in 1429—where students could study the new curriculum at both elementary and advanced levels. Some humanists taught in universities, which, while remaining strongholds of specialization in law, medicine, and theology, had begun to make a place for the new disciplines by the late 14th century. Still others were employed in private households, as was the poet and scholar Politian (Angelo Poliziano), who was tutor to the Medici children as well as a university professor.
Politian, detail from Zaccharias and the Angel, by Domenico Ghirlandaio, 1490–94; in Santa Maria Novella, Florence.Alinari/Art Resource, New York
Formal education was only one of several ways in which the humanists shaped the minds of their age. Many were themselves fine literary artists who exemplified the eloquence they were trying to foster in their students. Renaissance Latin poetry, for example, nowadays dismissed—usually unread—as imitative and formalistic, contains much graceful and lyrical expression by such humanists as Politian, Giovanni Pontano, and Jacopo Sannazzaro. In drama, Politian, Pontano, and Pietro Bembo were important innovators, and the humanists were in their element in the composition of elegant letters, dialogues, and discourses. By the late 15th century, humanists were beginning to apply their ideas about language and literature to composition in Italian as well as in Latin, demonstrating that Vulgar Latin could be as supple and as elegant in poetry and prose as was Classical Latin.
Pontano, GiovanniGiovanni Pontano.
Classical scholarship
Not every humanist was a poet, but most were classical scholars. Classical scholarship consisted of a set of related, specialized techniques by which the cultural heritage of antiquity was made available for convenient use. Essentially, in addition to searching out and authenticating ancient authors and works, this meant editing—comparing variant manuscripts of a work, correcting faulty or doubtful passages, and commenting in notes or in separate treatises on the style, meaning, and context of an author’s thought. Obviously, this demanded not only superb mastery of the languages involved and a command of Classical literature but also a knowledge of the culture that formed the ancient author’s mind and influenced his writing. Consequently, the humanists created a vast scholarly literature devoted to these matters and instructive in the critical techniques of classical philology, the study of ancient texts.
Arts and letters
Classicism and the literary impulse went hand in hand. From Lovato Lovati and Albertino Mussato to Politian and Pontano, humanists wrote Latin poetry and drama with considerable grace and power (Politian wrote in Greek as well), while others composed epistles, essays, dialogues, treatises, and histories on Classical models. In fact, it is fair to say that the development of elegant prose was the major literary achievement of humanism and that the epistle was its typical form. Petrarch’s practice of collecting, reordering, and even rewriting his letters—of treating them as works of art—was widely imitated.
Raphael: portrait of Baldassare CastiglioneBaldassare Castiglione, portrait by Raphael, 1514–15; in the Louvre, Paris.Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York
Ludovico Ariosto wearing a laurel crown, engraving.© Photos.com/ThinkstockFor lengthier discussions, the humanist was likely to compose a formal treatise or a dialogue—a Classical form that provided the opportunity to combine literary imagination with the discussion of weighty matters. The most famous example of this type is The Courtier, published by Baldassare Castiglione in 1528; a graceful discussion of love, courtly manners, and the ideal education for a perfect gentleman, it had enormous influence throughout Europe. Castiglione had a humanist education, but he wrote The Courtier in Italian, the language Bembo chose for his dialogue on love, Gli Asolani (1505), and Ludovico Ariosto chose for his delightful epic, Orlando furioso, completed in 1516. The vernacular was coming of age as a literary medium.
According to some, a life-and-death struggle between Latin and Italian began in the 14th century, while the mortal enemies of Italian were the humanists, who impeded the natural growth of the vernacular after its brilliant beginning with Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. In this view, the choice of Italian by such great 16th-century writers as Castiglione, Ariosto, and Machiavelli represents the final “triumph” of the vernacular and the restoration of contact between Renaissance culture and its native roots. The reality is somewhat less dramatic and more complicated. Most Italian writers regarded Latin as being as much a part of their culture as the vernacular, and most of them wrote in both languages. It should also be remembered that Italy was a land of powerful regional dialect traditions; until the late 13th century, Latin was the only language common to all Italians. By the end of that century, however, Tuscan was emerging as the primary vernacular, and Dante’s choice of it for his The Divine Comedy ensured its preeminence. Of lyric poets writing in Tuscan (hereafter called Italian), the greatest was Petrarch. His canzoni, or songs, and sonnets in praise of Laura are revealing studies of the effect of love upon the lover; his Italia mia is a plea for peace that evokes the beauties of his native land; his religious songs reveal his deep spiritual feeling.
Charon, illustration by Gustave Doré for an 1861 edition of Dante's Inferno (The Divine Comedy).© Photos.com/Thinkstock
Petrarch’s friend and admirer Giovanni Boccaccio is best known for his Decameron; but he pioneered in adapting Classical forms to Italian usage, including the hunting poem, romance, idyll, and pastoral, whereas some of his themes, most notably the story of Troilus and Cressida, were borrowed by other poets, including Geoffrey Chaucer and Torquato Tasso.
Torquato Tasso, detail of an oil painting by Federico Zuccari, 1594; in a private collectionCourtesy of L. Locatelli-Milesi-Tombini, Bergamo, Italy
The scarcity of first-rate Italian poetry throughout most of the 15th century has caused a number of historians to regret the passing of il buon secolo, the great age of the language, which supposedly came to an end with the ascendancy of humanist Classicism. For every humanist who disdained the vernacular, however, there was a Leonardo Bruni to maintain its excellence or a Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini to prove it in his own Italian writings. Indeed, there was an absence of first-rate Latin poets until the late 15th century, which suggests a general lack of poetic creativity in this period and not of Italian poetry alone. It may be that both Italian and Latin poets needed time to absorb and assimilate the various new tendencies of the preceding period. Tuscan was as much a new language for many as was Classical Latin, and there was a variety of literary forms to be mastered.
Poggio Bracciolini, Gian FrancescoGian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini.Vita di Poggio Bracciolini by William Shepherd, 1825
With Lorenzo de’ Medici the period of tutelage came to an end. The Magnificent Lorenzo, virtual ruler of Florence in the late 15th century, was one of the fine poets of his time. His sonnets show Petrarch’s influence but transformed with his own genius. His poetry epitomizes the Renaissance ideal of l’uomo universale (the renaissance man), the many-sided man. Love of nature, love of women, and love of life are the principal themes. The woodland settings and hunting scenes of Lorenzo’s poems suggest how he found relief from a busy public life; his love songs to his mistresses and his bawdy carnival ballads show the other face of a devoted father and affectionate husband. The celebration of youth in his most famous poem was etched with the sad realization of the brevity of life. His own ended at age 43.
Lorenzo de' Medici, painted terra-cotta bust, probably after a model by Andrea del Verrocchio and Orsino Benintendi, 1478/1521; in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 65.8 × 59.1 × 32.7 cm.Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1943.4.92
Oh, how fair is youth, and yet how fleeting! Let yourself be joyous if you feel it: Of tomorrow there is no certainty—
Florence was only one centre of the flowering of the vernacular. Ferrara saw literature and art flourish under the patronage of the ruling Este family and before the end of the 15th century counted at least one major poet, Matteo Boiardo, author of the Orlando innamorato, an epic of Roland. A blending of the Arthurian and Carolingian epic traditions (see La Chanson de Roland), Boiardo’s Orlando inspired Ludovico Ariosto to take up the same themes. The result was the finest of all Italian epics, Orlando furioso. The ability of the medieval epic and folk traditions to inspire the poets of such sophisticated centres as Florence and Ferrara suggests that, humanist disdain for the Dark Ages notwithstanding, Renaissance Italians did not allow Classicism to cut them off from their medieval roots.
Renaissance thought
While the humanists were not primarily philosophers and belonged to no single school of formal thought, they had a great deal of influence upon philosophy. They searched out and copied the works of ancient authors, developed critical tools for establishing accurate texts from variant manuscripts, made translations from Latin and Greek, and wrote commentaries that reflected their broad learning and their new standards and points of view. Aristotle’s authority remained preeminent, especially in logic and physics, but humanists were instrumental in the revival of other Greek scientists and other ancient philosophies, including stoicism, skepticism, and various forms of Platonism, as, for example, the eclectic Neoplatonist and gnostic doctrines of the Alexandrian schools known as Hermetic philosophy. All of these were to have far-reaching effects on the subsequent development of European thought. While humanists had a variety of intellectual and scholarly aims, it is fair to say that, like the ancient Romans, they preferred moral philosophy to metaphysics. Their faith in the moral benefits of poetry and rhetoric inspired generations of scholars and educators. Their emphasis upon eloquence, worldly achievement, and fame brought them readers and patrons among merchants and princes and employment in government chancelleries and embassies.
Humanists were secularists in the sense that language, literature, politics, and history, rather than “sacred subjects,” were their central interests. They defended themselves against charges from conservatives that their preference for Classical authors was ruining Christian morals and faith, arguing that a solid grounding in the classics was the best preparation for the Christian life. This was already a perennial debate, almost as old as Christianity itself, with neither side able to prove its case. There seems to have been little atheism or dechristianization among the humanists or their pupils, although there were efforts to redefine the relationship between religious and secular culture. Petrarch struggled with the problem in his book Secretum meum (1342–43, revised 1353–58), in which he imagines himself chastised by St. Augustine for his pursuit of worldly fame. Even the most celebrated of Renaissance themes, the “dignity of man,” best known in the Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, was derived in part from the Church Fathers. Created in the image and likeness of God, people were free to shape their destiny, but human destiny was defined within a Christian Neoplatonic context of contemplative thought.
You will have the power to sink to the lower forms of life, which are brutish. You will have the power, through your own judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.
Perhaps because Italian politics were so intense and innovative, the tension between traditional Christian teachings and actual behaviour was more frankly acknowledged in political thought than in most other fields. The leading spokesman of the new approach to politics was Machiavelli" class="md-crosslink">Niccolò Machiavelli. Best known as the author of The Prince (1513), a short treatise on how to acquire power, create a state, and keep it, Machiavelli dared to argue that success in politics had its own rules. This so shocked his readers that they coined his name into synonyms for the Devil (“Old Nick”) and for crafty, unscrupulous tactics (Machiavellian). No other name, except perhaps that of the Borgias, so readily evokes the image of the wicked Renaissance, and, indeed, Cesare Borgia was one of Machiavelli’s chief models for The Prince.
Borgia, CesareCesare Borgia, oil painting; in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.Alinari/Art Resource, New York
Machiavelli began with the not unchristian axiom that people are immoderate in their ambitions and desires and likely to oppress each other whenever free to do so. To get them to limit their selfishness and act for the common good should be the lofty, almost holy, purpose of governments. How to establish and maintain governments that do this was the central problem of politics, made acute for Machiavelli by the twin disasters of his time, the decline of free government in the city-states and the overrunning of Italy by French, German, and Spanish armies. In The Prince he advocated his emergency solution: Italy needed a new leader, who would unify the people, drive out “the barbarians,” and reestablish civic virtue. But in the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (1517), a more detached and extended discussion, he analyzed the foundations and practice of republican government, still trying to explain how stubborn and defective human material was transformed into political community.
Machiavelli was influenced by humanist culture in many ways, including his reverence for Classical antiquity, his concern with politics, and his effort to evaluate the impact of fortune as against free choice in human life. The “new path” in politics that he announced in The Prince was an effort to provide a guide for political action based on the lessons of history and his own experience as a foreign secretary in Florence. In his passionate republicanism he showed himself to be the heir of the great humanists of a century earlier who had expounded the ideals of free citizenship and explored the uses of Classicism for the public life.
At the beginning of the 15th century, when the Visconti rulers of Milan were threatening to overrun Florence, the humanist chancellor Coluccio Salutati had rallied the Florentines by reminding them that their city was “the daughter of Rome” and the legatee of Roman justice and liberty. Salutati’s pupil, Leonardo Bruni, who also served as chancellor, took up this line in his panegyrics of Florence and in his Historiarum Florentini populi libri XII (“Twelve Books of Histories of the Florentine People”). Even before the rise of Rome, according to Bruni, the Etruscans had founded free cities in Tuscany, so the roots of Florentine liberty went very deep. There equality was recognized in justice and opportunity for all citizens, and the claims of individual excellence were rewarded in public offices and public honours. This close relation between freedom and achievement, argued Bruni, explained Florence’s superiority in culture as well as in politics. Florence was the home of Italy’s greatest poets, the pioneer in both vernacular and Latin literature, and the seat of the Greek revival and of eloquence. In short, Florence was the centre of the studia humanitatis.
As political rhetoric, Bruni’s version of Florentine superiority was magnificent and no doubt effective. It inspired the Florentines to hold out against Milanese aggression and to reshape their identity as the seat of “the rebirth of letters” and the champions of freedom; but, as a theory of political culture, this “civic humanism,” as Hans Baron has called it, represented the ideal rather than the reality of 15th-century communal history. Even in Florence, where after 1434 the Medici family held a grip on the city’s republican government, opportunities for the active life began to fade. The emphasis in thought began to shift from civic humanism to Neoplatonist idealism and to the kind of utopian mysticism represented by Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. At the end of the century, Florentines briefly put themselves into the hands of the millennialist Dominican preacher Fra Girolamo Savonarola, who envisioned the city as the “New Jerusalem” rather than as a reincarnation of ancient Rome. Still, even Savonarola borrowed from the civic tradition of the humanists for his political reforms (and for his idea of Florentine superiority) and in so doing created a bridge between the republican past and the crisis years of the early 16th century. Machiavelli got his first job in the Florentine chancellery in 1498, the year of Savonarola’s fall from power. Dismissing the friar as one of history’s “unarmed prophets” who are bound to fail, Machiavelli was convinced that the precepts of Christianity had helped make the Italian states sluggish and weak. He regarded religion as an indispensable component of human life, but statecraft as a discipline based on its own rules and no more to be subordinated to Christianity than were jurisprudence or medicine. The simplest example of the difference between Christian and political morality is provided by warfare, where the use of deception, so detestable in every other kind of action, is necessary, praiseworthy, even glorious. In the Discourses, Machiavelli commented upon a Roman defeat:
Savonarola, painting by Fra Bartolomeo; in the Museo di S. Marco, FlorenceAlinari/Art Resource, New York
This is worth noting by every citizen who is called upon to give counsel to his country, for when the very safety of the country is at stake there should be no question of justice or injustice, of mercy or cruelty, of honour or disgrace, but putting every other consideration aside, that course should be followed which will save her life and liberty.
Machiavelli’s own country was Florence; when he wrote that he loved his country more than he loved his soul, he was consciously forsaking Christian ethics for the morality of civic virtue. His friend and countryman Francesco Guicciardini shared his political morality and his concern for politics but lacked his faith that a knowledge of ancient political wisdom would redeem the liberty of Italy. Guicciardini was an upper-class Florentine who chose a career in public administration and devoted his leisure to writing history and reflecting on politics. He was steeped in the humanist traditions of Florence and was a dedicated republican, notwithstanding the fact—or perhaps because of it—that he spent his entire career in the service of the Medici and rose to high positions under them. But Guicciardini, more skeptical and aristocratic than Machiavelli, was also half a generation younger, and he was schooled in an age that was already witnessing the decline of Italian autonomy.
In 1527 Florence revolted against the Medici a second time and established a republic. As a confidant of the Medici, Guicciardini was passed over for public office and retired to his estate. One of the fruits of this enforced leisure was the so-called Cose fiorentine (Florentine Affairs), an unfinished manuscript on Florentine history. While it generally follows the classic form of humanist civic history, the fragment contains some significant departures from this tradition. No longer is the history of the city treated in isolation; Guicciardini was becoming aware that the political fortunes of Florence were interwoven with those of Italy as a whole and that the French invasion of Italy in 1494 was a turning point in Italian history. He returned to public life with the restoration of the Medici in 1530 and was involved in the events leading to the tightening of the imperial grip upon Italy, the humbling of the papacy, and the final transformation of the republic of Florence into a hereditary Medici dukedom. Frustrated in his efforts to influence the rulers of Florence, he again retired to his villa to write; but, instead of taking up the unfinished manuscript on Florentine history, he chose a subject commensurate with his changed perspective on Italian affairs. The result was his History of Italy. Though still in the humanist form and style, it was in substance a fulfillment of the new tendencies already evident in the earlier work—criticism of sources, great attention to detail, avoidance of moral generalizations, shrewd analysis of character and motive.
The History of Italy has rightly been called a tragedy by the American historian Felix Gilbert, for it demonstrates how, out of stupidity and weakness, people make mistakes that gradually narrow the range of their freedom to choose alternative courses and thus to influence events until, finally, they are trapped in the web of fortune. This view of history was already far from the world of Machiavelli, not to mention that of the civic humanists. Where Machiavelli believed that virtù—bold and intelligent initiative—could shape, if not totally control, fortuna—the play of external forces—Guicciardini was skeptical about men’s ability to learn from the past and pessimistic about the individual’s power to shape the course of events. All that was left, he believed, was to understand. Guicciardini wrote his histories of Florence and of Italy to show what people were like and to explain how they had reached their present circumstances. Human dignity, then, consisted not in the exercise of will to shape destiny but in the use of reason to contemplate and perhaps to tolerate fate. In taking a new, hard look at the human condition, Guicciardini represents the decline of humanist optimism.
The northern Renaissance
Political, economic, and social background
In 1494 King Charles VIII of France led an army southward over the Alps, seeking the Neapolitan crown and glory. Many believed that this barely literate gnome of a man, hunched over his horse, was the Second Charlemagne, whose coming had been long predicted by French and Italian prophets. Apparently, Charles himself believed this; it is recorded that, when he was chastised by Savonarola for delaying his divine mission of reform and crusade in Florence, the king burst into tears and soon went on his way. He found the Kingdom of Naples easy to take and impossible to hold; frightened by local uprisings, by a new Italian coalition, and by the massing of Spanish troops in Sicily, he left Naples in the spring of 1495, bound not for the Holy Land, as the prophecies had predicted, but for home, never to return to Italy. In 1498 Savonarola was tortured, hanged, and burned as a false prophet for predicting that Charles would complete his mission. Conceived amid dreams of chivalric glory and crusade, the Italian expedition of Charles VIII was the venture of a medieval king—romantic, poorly planned, and totally irrelevant to the real needs of his subjects.
Charles VIII, portrait by an unknown artist; in the Uffizi, FlorenceAlinari/Art Resource, New York
The French invasion of Italy marked the beginning of a new phase of European politics, during which the Valois kings of France and the Habsburgs of Germany fought each other, with the Italian states as their reluctant pawns. For the next 60 years the dream of Italian conquest was pursued by every French king, none of them having learned anything from Charles VIII’s misadventure except that the road southward was open and paved with easy victories. For even longer Italy would be the keystone of the arch that the Habsburgs tried to erect across Europe from the Danube to the Strait of Gibraltar in order to link the Spanish and German inheritance of the emperor Charles V. In destroying the autonomy of Italian politics, the invasions also ended the Italian state system, which was absorbed into the larger European system that now took shape. Its members adopted the balance-of-power diplomacy first evolved by the Italians as well as the Italian practice of using resident ambassadors who combined diplomacy with the gathering of intelligence by fair means or foul. In the art of war, also, the Italians were innovators in the use of mercenary troops, cannonry, bastioned fortresses, and field fortification. French artillery was already the best in Europe by 1494, whereas the Spaniards developed the tercio, an infantry unit that combined the most effective field fortifications and weaponry of the Italians and Swiss.
Thus, old and new ways were fused in the bloody crucible of the Italian Wars. Rulers who lived by medieval codes of chivalry adopted Renaissance techniques of diplomacy and warfare to satisfy their lust for glory and dynastic power. Even the lure of Italy was an old obsession; but the size and vigour of the 16th-century expeditions were new. Rulers were now able to command vast quantities of men and resources because they were becoming masters of their own domains. The nature and degree of this mastery varied according to local circumstances; but throughout Europe the New Monarchs, as they are called, were reasserting kingship as the dominant form of political leadership after a long period of floundering and uncertainty.
By the end of the 15th century, the Valois kings of France had expelled the English from all their soil except the port of Calais, concluding the Hundred Years’ War (1453); had incorporated the fertile lands of the duchy of Burgundy to the east and of Brittany to the north; and had extended the French kingdom from the Atlantic and the English Channel to the Pyrenees and the Rhine. To rule this vast territory, they created a professional machinery of state, converting wartime taxing privileges into permanent prerogative, freeing their royal council from supervision by the Estates-General, appointing a host of officials who crisscrossed the kingdom in the service of the crown, and establishing their right to appoint and tax the French clergy. They did not achieve anything like complete centralization, but in 1576 Jean Bodin was able to write, in his Six Books of the Commonweal, that the king of France had absolute sovereignty because he alone in the kingdom had the power to give law unto all of his subjects in general and to every one of them in particular.
Battle of Poitiers, oil on canvas by Eugène Delacroix, 1830.Art Media/Heritage-Images
Bodin might also have made his case by citing the example of another impressive autocrat of his time, Philip II of Spain. Though descended from warrior kings, Philip spent his days at his writing desk poring over dispatches from his governors in the Low Countries, Sicily, Naples, Milan, Peru, Mexico, and the Philippines and drafting his orders to them in letters signed “I the King.” The founding of this mighty empire went back more than a century to 1469, when Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile brought two great Hispanic kingdoms together under a single dynasty. Castile, an arid land of sheepherders, great landowning churchmen, and crusading knights, and Aragon, with its Catalan miners and its strong ties to Mediterranean Europe, made uneasy partners; but a series of rapid and energetic actions forced the process of national consolidation and catapulted the new nation into a position of world prominence for which it was poorly prepared. Within the last decade of the 15th century, the Spaniards took the kingdom of Navarre in the north; stormed the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, the kingdom of Granada; and launched a campaign of religious unification by pressing tens of thousands of Muslims and Jews to choose between baptism and expulsion, at the same time establishing a new Inquisition under royal control. They also sent Columbus on voyages of discovery to the Western Hemisphere, thereby opening a new frontier just as the domestic frontier of reconquest was closing. Finally, the crown linked its destinies with the Habsburgs by a double marriage, thus projecting Spain into the heart of European politics. In the following decades, Castilian hidalgos (lower nobles), whose fathers had crusaded against the Moors in Spain, streamed across the Atlantic to make their fortunes out of the land and sweat of the Native Americans, while others marched in the armies and sailed in the ships of their king, Charles I, who, as Charles V, was elected Holy Roman emperor in 1519 at the age of 19. In this youth, the vast dual inheritance of the Spanish and Habsburg empires came together. The grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella on his mother’s side and of the emperor Maximilian I on his father’s, Charles was duke of Burgundy, head of five Austrian dukedoms (which he ceded to his brother), king of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, and claimant to the duchy of Milan as well as king of Aragon and Castile and German king and emperor. To administer this enormous legacy, he presided over an ever-increasing bureaucracy of viceroys, governors, judges, military captains, and an army of clerks. The New World lands were governed by a separate Council of the Indies after 1524, which, like Charles’ other royal councils, combined judicial, legislative, military, and fiscal functions.
Columbus, ChristopherChristopher Columbus requesting support from Isabella I and Ferdinand II of Spain, chromolithograph after a painting by Václav Brožík, c. 1884.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-pga-03133)
The yield in American treasure was enormous, especially after the opening of the silver mines of Mexico and what is now Bolivia halfway through the 16th century. The crown skimmed off a lion’s share—usually a fifth—which it paid out immediately to its creditors because everything Charles could raise by taxing or borrowing was sucked up by his wars against the French in Italy and Burgundy, the Protestant princes in Germany, the Turks on the Austrian border, and the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean. By 1555 both Charles and his credit were exhausted, and he began to relinquish his titles—Spain and the Netherlands to his son Philip, Germany and the imperial title to his brother Ferdinand I. American silver did little for Spain except to pay the wages of soldiers and sailors; the goods and services that kept the Spanish armies in the field and the ships afloat were largely supplied by foreigners, who reaped the profits. Yet, for the rest of the century, Spain continued to dazzle the world, and few could see the chinks in the armour; this was an age of kings, in which bold deeds, not balance sheets, made history.
The growth of centralized monarchy claiming absolute sovereignty over its subjects may be observed in other places, from the England of Henry VIII on the extreme west of Europe to the Muscovite tsardom of Ivan III (the Great) on its eastern edge, for the New Monarchy was one aspect of a more general phenomenon—a great recovery that surged through Europe in the 15th century. No single cause can be adduced to explain it. Some historians believe it was simply the upturn in the natural cycle of growth: the great medieval population boom had overextended Europe’s productive capacities; the depression of the 14th and early 15th centuries had corrected this condition through famines and epidemics, leading to depopulation; now the cycle of growth was beginning again.
Holbein, Hans, the Younger: portrait of Henry VIIIHenry VIII, painting by Hans Holbein the Younger, c. 1540.© duncan1890/iStock.com
Once more, growing numbers of people, burgeoning cities, and ambitious governments were demanding food, goods, and services—a demand that was met by both old and new methods of production. In agriculture, the shift toward commercial crops such as wool and grains, the investment of capital, and the emancipation of servile labour completed the transformation of the manorial system already in decline. (In eastern Europe, however, the formerly free peasantry was now forced into serfdom by an alliance between the monarchy and the landed gentry, as huge agrarian estates were formed to raise grain for an expanding Western market.) Manufacturing boomed, especially of those goods used in the outfitting of armies and fleets—cloth, armour, weapons, and ships. New mining and metalworking technology made possible the profitable exploitation of the rich iron, copper, gold, and silver deposits of central Germany, Hungary, and Austria, affording the opportunity for large-scale investment of capital.
Guildhalls in the Grote Markt, Antwerp, Belg.Steve Allen/Getty Images
Portuguese caravels departing Lisbon for Brazil, the West Indies, and America; from an engraving after Theodor de Bry's Americae Tertia Pars, 1562.Giraudon/Art Resource, New YorkOne index of Europe’s recovery is the spectacular growth of certain cities. Antwerp, for example, more than doubled its population in the second half of the 15th century and doubled it again by 1560. Under Habsburg patronage, Antwerp became the chief European entrepôt for English cloth, the hub of an international banking network, and the principal Western market for German copper and silver, Portuguese spices, and Italian alum. By 1500 the Antwerp Bourse was the central money market for much of Europe. Other cities profited from their special circumstances, too: Lisbon as the home port for the Portuguese maritime empire; Sevilla (Seville), the Spaniards’ gateway to the New World; London, the capital of the Tudors and gathering point for England’s cloth-making and banking activity; Lyon, favoured by the French kings as a market centre and capital of the silk industry; and Augsburg, the principal north-south trade route in Germany and the home city of the Fugger merchant-bankers. (For further discussion, see below The emergence of modern Europe: Economy and society.)
Northern humanism
Cities were also markets for culture. The resumption of urban growth in the second half of the 15th century coincided with the diffusion of Renaissance ideas and educational values. Humanism offered linguistic and rhetorical skills that were becoming indispensable for nobles and commoners seeking careers in diplomacy and government administration, while the Renaissance ideal of the perfect gentleman was a cultural style that had great appeal in this age of growing courtly refinement. At first many who wanted a humanist education went to Italy, and many foreign names appear on the rosters of the Italian universities. By the end of the century, however, such northern cities as London, Paris, Antwerp, and Augsburg were becoming centres of humanist activity rivaling Italy’s. The development of printing, by making books cheaper and more plentiful, also quickened the diffusion of humanism.
A textbook convention, heavily armoured against truth by constant reiteration, states that northern humanism—i.e., humanism outside Italy—was essentially Christian in spirit and purpose, in contrast to the essentially secular nature of Italian humanism. In fact, however, the program of Christian humanism had been laid out by Italian humanists of the stamp of Lorenzo Valla, one of the founders of classical philology, who showed how the critical methods used to study the classics ought to be applied to problems of biblical exegesis and translation as well as church history. That this program only began to be carried out in the 16th century, particularly in the countries of northern Europe (and Spain), is a matter of chronology rather than of geography. In the 15th century, the necessary skills, particularly the knowledge of Greek, were possessed by a few scholars; a century later, Greek was a regular part of the humanist curriculum, and Hebrew was becoming much better known, particularly after Johannes Reuchlin published his Hebrew grammar in 1506. Here, too, printing was a crucial factor, for it made available a host of lexicographical and grammatical handbooks and allowed the establishment of normative biblical texts and the comparison of different versions of the Bible.
Reuchlin, Johannes Statue of Johannes Reuchlin, Pforzheim, Ger.Michael Hild
Christian humanism was more than a program of scholarship, however; it was fundamentally a conception of the Christian life that was grounded in the rhetorical, historical, and ethical orientation of humanism itself. That it came to the fore in the early 16th century was the result of a variety of factors, including the spiritual stresses of rapid social change and the inability of the ecclesiastical establishment to cope with the religious needs of an increasingly literate and self-confident laity. By restoring the gospel to the centre of Christian piety, the humanists believed they were better serving the needs of ordinary people. They attacked scholastic theology as an arid intellectualization of simple faith, and they deplored the tendency of religion to become a ritual practiced vicariously through a priest. They also despised the whole late-medieval apparatus of relic mongering, hagiology, indulgences, and image worship, and they ridiculed it in their writings, sometimes with devastating effect. According to the Christian humanists, the fundamental law of Christianity was the law of love as revealed by Jesus Christ in the Gospel. Love, peace, and simplicity should be the aims of the good Christian, and the life of Christ his perfect model. The chief spokesman for this point of view was Desiderius Erasmus, the most influential humanist of his day. Erasmus and his colleagues were uninterested in dogmatic differences and were early champions of religious toleration. In this they were not in tune with the changing times, for the outbreak of the Reformation polarized European society along confessional lines, with the paradoxical result that the Christian humanists, who had done so much to lay the groundwork for religious reform, ended by being suspect on both sides—by the Roman Catholics as subversives who (as it was said of Erasmus) had “laid the egg that Luther hatched” and by the Protestants as hypocrites who had abandoned the cause of reformation out of cowardice or ambition. Toleration belonged to the future, after the killing in the name of Christ sickened and passions had cooled.
Erasmus, DesideriusDesiderius Erasmus.Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Christian mystics
The quickening of the religious impulse that gave rise to Christian humanism was also manifested in a variety of forms of religious devotion among the laity, including mysticism. In the 14th century a wave of mystical ardour seemed to course down the valley of the Rhine, enveloping men and women in the rapture of intense, direct experience of the divine Spirit. It centred in the houses of the Dominican order, where friars and nuns practiced the mystical way of their great teacher, Meister Eckhart. This wave of Rhenish mysticism radiated beyond convent walls to the marketplaces and hearths of the laity. Eckhart had the gift of making his abstruse doctrines understandable to a wider public than was usual for mystics; moreover, he was fortunate in having some disciples of a genius almost equal to his own—the great preacher of practical piety, Johann Tauler, and Heinrich Suso, whose devotional books, such as The Little Book of Truth and The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, reached eager lay readers hungry for spiritual consolation and religious excitement. Some found it by joining the Dominicans; others, remaining in the everyday world, joined with like-spirited brothers and sisters in groups known collectively as the Friends of God, where they practiced methodical contemplation, or, as it was widely known, mental prayer. Probably few reached, or even hoped to reach, the ecstasy of mystical union, which was limited to those with the appropriate psychological or spiritual gifts. Out of these circles came the anonymous German Theology, from which, Luther was to say, he had learned more about man and God than from any book except the Bible and the writings of St. Augustine.
In the Netherlands the mystical impulse awakened chiefly under the stimulus of another great teacher, Gerhard Groote. Not a monk nor even a priest, Groote gave the mystical movement a different direction by teaching that true spiritual communion must be combined with moral action, for this was the whole lesson of the Gospel. At his death a group of followers formed the Brethren of the Common Life. These were laymen and laywomen, married and single, earning their livings in the world but united by a simple rule that required them to pool their earnings and devote themselves to spiritual works, teaching, and charity. Houses of Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life spread through the cities and towns of the Netherlands and Germany, and a monastic counterpart was founded in the order of Canons Regular of St. Augustine, known as the Windesheim Congregation, which in the second half of the 15th century numbered some 82 priories. The Brethren were particularly successful as schoolmasters, combining some of the new linguistic methods of the humanists with a strong emphasis upon Bible study. Among the generations of children who absorbed the new piety (devotio moderna) in their schools were Erasmus and, briefly, Luther. In the ambience of the devotio moderna appeared one of the most influential books of piety ever written, The Imitation of Christ, attributed to Thomas à Kempis, a monk of the Windesheim Congregation.
One man whose life was changed by The Imitation was the 16th-century Spaniard Ignatius of Loyola. After reading it, Loyola founded the Society of Jesus and wrote his own book of methodical prayer, Spiritual Exercises. Thus, Spanish piety was in some ways connected with that of the Netherlands, but the extraordinary outburst of mystical and contemplative activity in 16th-century Spain was mainly an expression of the intense religious exaltation of the Spanish people themselves as they confronted the tasks of reform, Counter-Reformation, and world leadership. Spanish mysticism belies the usual picture of the mystic as a withdrawn contemplative, with his or her head in the clouds. Not only Loyola but also St. Teresa of Avila and her disciple, St. John of the Cross, were tough, activist Reformers who regarded their mystical experiences as means of fortifying themselves for their practical tasks. They were also prolific writers who could communicate their experiences and analyze them for the benefit of others. This is especially true of St. John of the Cross, whose mystical poetry is one of the glories of Spanish literature.
Loyola, St. Ignatius ofSt. Ignatius of Loyola.Photos.com/Jupiterimages
The growth of vernacular literature
Le Miroir de humaine saluation (“The Mirror of Human Salvation”) by Ludolf of Saxony (supposed author), c. 1455; the French manuscript is an example of western European Christian scripture written in the vernacular.The Newberry Library, Louis H. Silver Collection, 1964 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Geoffrey Chaucer, from the 15th-century Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales. Photos.com/Jupiterimages
Portrait of François Villon, woodcut from the first edition of Villon's works published by Pierre Levet, 1489; the ballade “Faulce beaulte” (“Fausse beaute”), printed below the portrait, is an acrostic, i.e., the initial letter of each line read top to bottom forms the poet's first name, Francoys.Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, ParisIn literature, medieval forms continued to dominate the artistic imagination throughout the 15th century. Besides the vast devotional literature of the period—the ars moriendi, or books on the art of dying well, the saints’ lives, and manuals of methodical prayer and spiritual consolation—the most popular reading of noble and burgher alike was a 13th-century love allegory, the Roman de la rose. Despite a promising start in the late Middle Ages, literary creativity suffered from the domination of Latin as the language of “serious” expression, with the result that, if the vernacular attracted writers, they tended to overload it with Latinisms and artificially applied rhetorical forms. This was the case with the so-called grands rhetoriqueurs of Burgundy and France. One exception is 14th-century England, where a national literature made a brilliant showing in the works of William Langland, John Gower, and, above all, Geoffrey Chaucer. The troubled 15th century, however, produced only feeble imitations. Another exception is the vigorous tradition of chronicle writing in French, distinguished by such eminently readable works as the chronicle of Jean Froissart and the memoirs of Philippe de Commynes. In France, too, about the middle of the 15th century there lived the vagabond François Villon, a great poet about whom next to nothing is known. In Germany Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools) by Sebastian Brant was a lone masterpiece.
The 16th century saw a true renaissance of national literatures. In Protestant countries the Reformation had an enormous impact upon the quantity and quality of literary output. If Luther’s rebellion destroyed the chances of unifying the nation politically—because religious division exacerbated political division and made Lutherans intolerant of the Catholic Habsburgs—his translation of the Bible into German created a national language. Biblical translations, vernacular liturgies, hymns, and sacred drama had analogous effects elsewhere. For Roman Catholics, especially in Spain, the Reformation was a time of deep religious emotion expressed in art and literature. On all sides of the religious controversy, chroniclers and historians writing in the vernacular were recording their versions for posterity.
Bronze statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in front of a stone sculpture of Miguel de Cervantes, Madrid, Spain.© Hemera/Thinkstock
Shakespeare, WilliamWilliam Shakespeare.© Archive PhotosWhile the Reformation was providing a subject matter, the Italian Renaissance was providing literary methods and models. The Petrarchan sonnet inspired French, English, and Spanish poets, while the Renaissance neoclassical drama finally began to end the reign of the medieval mystery play. Ultimately, of course, the works of real genius were the result of a crossing of native traditions and new forms. The Frenchman François Rabelais assimilated the themes of his day—and mocked them all—in his story of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel. The Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes, in Don Quixote, drew a composite portrait of his countrymen, which caught their exact mixture of idealism and realism. In England Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare used Renaissance drama to probe the deeper levels of their countrymen’s character and experiences.
Renaissance science and technology
According to medieval scientists, matter was composed of four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—whose combinations and permutations made up the world of visible objects. The cosmos was a series of concentric spheres in motion, the farther ones carrying the stars around in their daily courses. At the centre was the globe of Earth, heavy and static. Motion was either perfectly circular, as in the heavens, or irregular and naturally downward, as on Earth. The Earth had three landmasses—Europe, Asia, and Africa—and was unknown and uninhabitable in its southern zones. Human beings, the object of all creation, were composed of four humours—black and yellow bile, blood, and phlegm—and the body’s health was determined by the relative proportions of each. The cosmos was alive with a universal consciousness with which people could interact in various ways, and the heavenly bodies were generally believed to influence human character and events, although theologians worried about free will.
Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 world mapWorld map by Martin Waldseemüller, 1507.Geography and Map Division/The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Digital File Number: g3200 ct000725)
These views were an amalgam of Classical and Christian thought and, from what can be inferred from written sources, shaped the way educated people experienced and interpreted phenomena. What people who did not read or write books understood about nature is more difficult to tell, except that belief in magic, good and evil spirits, witchcraft, and forecasting the future was universal. The church might prefer that Christians seek their well-being through faith, the sacraments, and the intercession of Mary and the saints, but distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable belief in hidden powers were difficult to make or to maintain. Most clergy shared the common beliefs in occult forces and lent their authority to them. The collaboration of formal doctrine and popular belief had some of its most terrible consequences during the Renaissance, such as pogroms against Jews and witch-hunts, in which the church provided the doctrines of Satanic conspiracy and the inquisitorial agents and popular prejudice supplied the victims, predominantly women and marginal people.
Copernicus, Nicolaus: heliocentric systemEngraving of the solar system from Nicolaus Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri VI, 2nd ed. (1566; “Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs”), the first published illustration of Copernicus's heliocentric system.The Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum, Chicago, Illinois
Newton, Sir IsaacSir Isaac Newton, portrait by John Vanderbank, c. 1725; in the collection of the Royal Astronomical Society, London. Photos.com/ThinkstockAmong the formally educated, if not among the general population, traditional science was transformed by the new heliocentric, mechanistic, and mathematical conceptions of Copernicus, Harvey, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. Historians of science are increasingly reluctant to describe these changes as a revolution, since this implies too sudden and complete an overthrow of the earlier model. Aristotle’s authority gave way very slowly, and only the first of the great scientists mentioned above did his work in the period under consideration. Still, the Renaissance made some important contributions toward the process of paradigm shift, as the 20th-century historian of science Thomas Kuhn called major innovations in science. Humanist scholarship provided both originals and translations of ancient Greek scientific works—which enormously increased the fund of knowledge in physics, astronomy, medicine, botany, and other disciplines—and presented as well alternative theories to those of Ptolemy and Aristotle. Thus, the revival of ancient science brought heliocentric astronomy to the fore again after almost two millennia. Renaissance philosophers, most notably Jacopo Zabarella, analyzed and formulated the rules of the deductive and inductive methods by which scientists worked, while certain ancient philosophies enriched the ways in which scientists conceived of phenomena. Pythagoreanism, for example, conveyed a vision of a harmonious geometric universe that helped form the mind of Copernicus.
In mathematics the Renaissance made its greatest contribution to the rise of modern science. Humanists included arithmetic and geometry in the liberal arts curriculum, artists furthered the geometrization of space in their work on perspective, and Leonardo da Vinci perceived, however faintly, that the world was ruled by “number.” The interest in algebra in the Renaissance universities, according to the 20th-century historian of science George Alfred Leon Sarton, “was creating a kind of fever.” It produced some mathematical theorists of the first rank, including Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia and Girolamo Cardano. If they had done nothing else, Renaissance scholars would have made a great contribution to mathematics by translating and publishing, in 1544, some previously unknown works of Archimedes, perhaps the most important of the ancients in this field.
Cardano, GirolamoGirolamo Cardano.A history of electricity: the intellectual rise in electricity from antiquity to the days of Benjamin Franklin by Park Benjamin (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1898)
If the Renaissance role in the rise of modern science was more that of midwife than of parent, in the realm of technology the proper image is the Renaissance magus, manipulator of the hidden forces of nature. Working with medieval perceptions of natural processes, engineers and technicians of the 15th and 16th centuries achieved remarkable results and pushed the traditional cosmology to the limit of its explanatory powers. This may have had more to do with changing social needs than with changes in scientific theory. Warfare was one catalyst of practical change that stimulated new theoretical questions. With the spread of the use of artillery, for example, questions about the motion of bodies in space became more insistent, and mathematical calculation more critical. The manufacture of guns also stimulated metallurgy and fortification; town planning and reforms in the standards of measurement were related to problems of geometry. The Renaissance preoccupation with alchemy, the parent of chemistry, was certainly stimulated by the shortage of precious metals, made more acute by the expansion of government and expenditures on war.
The most important technological advance of all, because it underlay progress in so many other fields, strictly speaking, had little to do with nature. This was the development of printing, with movable metal type, about the mid-15th century in Germany. Johannes Gutenberg is usually called its inventor, but in fact many people and many steps were involved. Block printing on wood came to the West from China between 1250 and 1350, papermaking came from China by way of the Arabs to 12th-century Spain, whereas the Flemish technique of oil painting was the origin of the new printers’ ink. Three men of Mainz—Gutenberg and his contemporaries Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer—seem to have taken the final steps, casting metal type and locking it into a wooden press. The invention spread like the wind, reaching Italy by 1467, Hungary and Poland in the 1470s, and Scandinavia by 1483. By 1500 the presses of Europe had produced some six million books. Without the printing press it is impossible to conceive that the Reformation would have ever been more than a monkish quarrel or that the rise of a new science, which was a cooperative effort of an international community, would have occurred at all. In short, the development of printing amounted to a communications revolution of the order of the invention of writing; and, like that prehistoric discovery, it transformed the conditions of life. The communications revolution immeasurably enhanced human opportunities for enlightenment and pleasure on one hand and created previously undreamed-of possibilities for manipulation and control on the other. The consideration of such contradictory effects may guard us against a ready acceptance of triumphalist conceptions of the Renaissance or of historical change in general.
An artist's visualization of Johannes Gutenberg in his workshop, showing his first proof sheet.Fine Art Images/Heritage Image/age fotostock
Donald Weinstein
The emergence of modern Europe, 1500–1648
Economy and society
The 16th century was a period of vigorous economic expansion. This expansion in turn played a major role in the many other transformations—social, political, and cultural—of the early modern age.
By 1500 the population in most areas of Europe was increasing after two centuries of decline or stagnation. The bonds of commerce within Europe tightened, and the “wheels of commerce” (in the phrase of the 20th-century French historian Fernand Braudel) spun ever faster. The great geographic discoveries then in process were integrating Europe into a world economic system. New commodities, many of them imported from recently discovered lands, enriched material life. Not only trade but also the production of goods increased as a result of new ways of organizing production. Merchants, entrepreneurs, and bankers accumulated and manipulated capital in unprecedented volume. Most historians locate in the 16th century the beginning, or at least the maturing, of Western capitalism. Capital assumed a major role not only in economic organization but also in political life and international relations. Culturally, new values—many of them associated with the Renaissance and Reformation—diffused through Europe and changed the ways in which people acted and the perspectives by which they viewed themselves and the world.
This world of early capitalism, however, can hardly be regarded as stable or uniformly prosperous. Financial crashes were common; the Spanish crown, the heaviest borrower in Europe, suffered repeated bankruptcies (in 1557, 1575–77, 1596, 1607, 1627, and 1647). The poor and destitute in society became, if not more numerous, at least more visible. Even as capitalism advanced in the West, the once-free peasants of central and eastern Europe slipped into serfdom. The apparent prosperity of the 16th century gave way in the middle and late periods of the 17th century to a “general crisis” in many European regions. Politically, the new centralized states insisted on new levels ofcultural conformity on the part of their subjects. Several states expelled Jews, and almost all of them refused to tolerate religious dissenters. Culturally, in spite of the revival of ancient learning and the reform of the churches, a hysterical fear of witches grasped large segments of the population, including the learned. Understandably, historians have had difficulty defining the exact place of this complex century in the course of European development.
The economic background
The century’s economic expansion owed much to powerful changes that were already under way by 1500. At that time, Europe comprised only between one-third and one-half the population it had possessed about 1300. The infamous Black Death of 1347–50 principally accounts for the huge losses, but plagues were recurrent, famines frequent, wars incessant, and social tensions high as the Middle Ages ended. The late medieval disasters radically transformed the structures of European society—the ways by which it produced food and goods, distributed income, organized its society and state, and looked at the world.
The huge human losses altered the old balances among the classical “factors of production”—labour, land, and capital. The fall in population forced up wages in the towns and depressed rents in the countryside, as the fewer workers remaining could command a higher “scarcity value.” In contrast, the costs of land and capital fell; both grew relatively more abundant and cheaper as human numbers shrank. Expensive labour and cheap land and capital encouraged “factor substitution,” the replacement of the costly factor (labour) by the cheaper ones (land and capital). This substitution of land and capital for labour can be seen, for example, in the widespread conversions of arable land to pastures; a few shepherds, supplied with capital (sheep) and extensive pastures, could generate a higher return than plowland, intensively farmed by many well-paid labourers.
Capital could also support the technology required to develop new tools, enabling labourers to work more productively. The late Middle Ages was accordingly a period of significant technological advances linked with high capital investment in labour-saving devices. The development of printing by movable metal type substituted an expensive machine, the press, for many human copyists. Gunpowder and firearms gave smaller armies greater fighting power. Changes in shipbuilding and in the development of navigational aids allowed bigger ships to sail with smaller crews over longer distances. By 1500 Europe achieved what it had never possessed before: a technological edge over all other civilizations. Europe was thus equipped for worldwide expansion.
Social changes also were pervasive. With a falling population, the cost of basic foodstuffs (notably wheat) declined. With cheaper food, people in both countryside and city could use their higher earnings to diversify and improve their diets—to consume more meat, dairy products, and beverages. They also could afford more manufactured products from the towns, to the benefit of the urban economies. The 14th century is rightly regarded as the golden age of working people.
Economic historians have traditionally envisioned the falling costs of the basic foodstuffs (cereals) and the continuing firm price of manufactures as two blades of a pair of open scissors. These price scissors diverted income from countryside to town. The late medieval price movements thus favoured urban artisans over peasants and merchants over landlords. Towns achieved a new weight in society; the number of towns counting more than 10,000 inhabitants increased from 125 in about 1300 to 154 in 1500, even as the total population was dropping. These changes undermined the leadership of the landholding nobility and enhanced the power and influence of the great merchants and bankers of the cities. The 16th would be a “bourgeois century.”
Culturally, the disasters of the late Middle Ages had the effect of altering attitudes and in particular of undermining the medieval faith that speculative reason could master the secrets of the universe. In an age of ferocious and unpredictable epidemics, the accidental and the unexpected, chance or fate, rather than immutable laws, seemed to dominate the course of human affairs. In an uncertain world, the surest, safest philosophical stance was empiricism. In formal philosophy, this new priority given to the concrete and the observable over and against the abstract and the speculative was known as nominalism. In social life, there was evident a novel emphasis on close observation, on the need to study each changing situation to arrive at a basis for action.
The 16th century thus owed much to trends originating in the late Middle Ages. It would, however, be wrong to view its history simply as a playing out of earlier movements. New developments proper to the century also shaped its achievements. Those developments affected population; money and prices; agriculture, trade, manufacturing, and banking; social and political institutions; and cultural attitudes. Historians differ widely in the manner in which they structure and relate these various developments; they argue over what should be regarded as causes and what as effects. But they are reasonably agreed concerning the general nature of these trends.
Demographics
For the continent as a whole, the population growth under way by 1500 continued over the “long” 16th century until the second or third decade of the 17th century. A recent estimate by the American historian Jan De Vries set Europe’s population (excluding Russia and the Ottoman Empire) at 61.6 million in 1500, 70.2 million in 1550, and 78.0 million in 1600; it then lapsed back to 74.6 million in 1650. The distribution of population across the continent was also shifting. Northwestern Europe (especially the Low Countries and the British Isles) witnessed the most vigorous expansion; England’s population more than doubled between 1500, when it stood at an estimated 2.6 million, and 1650, when it probably attained 5.6 million. Northwestern Europe also largely escaped the demographic downturn of the mid-17th century, which was especially pronounced in Germany, Italy, and Spain. In Germany, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) may have cost the country, according to different estimates, between 25 and 40 percent of its population.
Cities also grew, though slowly at first. The proportion of Europeans living in cities with 10,000 or more residents increased from 5.6 percent of the total population in 1500 to only 6.3 percent in 1550. The towns of England continued to suffer a kind of depression, now often called “urban decay,” in the first half of the century. The process of urbanization then accelerated, placing 7.6 percent of the population in cities by 1600, and even continued during the 17th-century crisis. The proportion of population in cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants reached 8.3 percent in 1650.
More remarkable than the slow growth in the number of urban residents was the formation of cities of a size never achieved in the medieval period. These large cities were of two principal types. Capitals and administrative centres—such as Naples, Rome, Madrid, Paris, Vienna, and Moscow—give testimony to the new powers of the state and its ability to mobilize society’s resources in support of courts and bureaucracies. Naples, one of Europe’s largest cities in 1550, was also one of its poorest. The demographic historian J.C. Russell theorized that Naples’ swollen size was indicative of the community’s “loss of control” over its numbers. Already in the 16th century, Naples was a prototype of the big, slum-ridden, semiparasitic cities to be found in many poorer regions of the world in the late 20th century.
Commercial ports, which might also have been capitals, formed a second set of large cities: examples include Venice, Livorno, Sevilla (Seville), Lisbon, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, Bremen, and Hamburg. About 1550, Antwerp was the chief port of the north. In 1510, the Portuguese moved their trading station from Brugge to Antwerp, making it the chief northern market for the spices they were importing from India. The Antwerp bourse, or exchange, simultaneously became the leading money market of the north. At its heyday in mid-century, the city counted 90,000 inhabitants. The revolt of the Low Countries against Spanish rule (from 1568) ruined Antwerp’s prosperity. Amsterdam, which replaced it as the greatest northern port, grew from 30,000 in 1550 to 65,000 in 1600 and 175,000 in 1650. The mid-17th century—a period of recession in many European regions—was Holland’s golden age. Late in the century, Amsterdam faced the growing challenge of another northern port, which was also the capital of a powerful national state—London. With 400,000 residents by 1650 and growing rapidly, London then ranked below only Paris (440,000) as Europe’s largest city. Urban concentrations of such magnitude were unprecedented; in the Middle Ages, the largest size attained was roughly 220,000, reached by a single city, Paris, about 1328.
Another novelty of the 16th century was the appearance of urban systems, or hierarchies of cities linked together by their political or commercial functions. Most European cities had been founded in medieval or even in ancient times, but they long remained intensely competitive, duplicated each other’s functions, and never coalesced during the Middle Ages into tight urban systems. The more intensive, more far-flung commerce of the early modern age required a clearer distribution of functions and cooperation as much as competition. The centralization of governments in the 16th century also demanded clearly defined lines of authority and firm divisions of functions between national and regional capitals.
Trade and the “Atlantic revolution”
The new importance of northwestern Europe in terms of overall population and concentration of large cities reflects in part the “Atlantic revolution,” the redirection of trade routes brought about by the great geographic discoveries. The Atlantic revolution, however, did not so much replace the old lines of medieval commerce as build upon them. In the Middle Ages, Italian ports—Venice and Genoa in particular—dominated trade with the Middle East and supplied Europe with Eastern wares and spices. In the north, German cities, organized into a loose federation known as the Hanseatic League, similarly dominated Baltic trade. When the Portuguese in 1498 opened direct maritime links with India, Venice faced the competition of the Atlantic ports, first Lisbon and Antwerp. Nonetheless, Venice effectively responded to the new competition and attained in the 16th century its apogee of commercial importance; in most of its surviving monuments, this beautiful city still reflects its 16th-century prosperity. Genoa was not well placed to take advantage of the Atlantic discoveries, but Genoese bankers played a central role in the finances of Spain’s overseas empire and in its military ventures in Europe. Italians did not quickly relinquish the prominence as merchants and bankers that had distinguished them in the Middle Ages.
In the north, the Hanseatic towns faced intensified competition from the Dutch, who from about 1580 introduced a new ship design (the fluitschip, a sturdy, cheaply built cargo vessel) and new techniques of shipbuilding, including wind-powered saws. Freight charges dropped and the size of the Dutch merchant marine soared; by the mid-17th century, it probably exceeded in number of vessels all the other mercantile fleets of Europe combined. The English competed for a share in the Baltic trade, though they long remained well behind the Dutch.
In absolute terms, Baltic trade was booming. In 1497 the ships passing through the Sound separating Denmark from Sweden numbered 795; 100 years later the number registered by the toll collectors reached 6,673. The percentage represented by Hanseatic ships rose over the same century from roughly 20 to 23–25 percent; the Germans were not yet routed from these eastern waters.
In terms of maritime trade, the Atlantic revolution may well have stimulated rather than injured the older exchanges. At the same time, new competition from the western ports left both Hanseatics and Italians vulnerable to the economic downturn of the 17th century. For both the Hanseatic and Italian cities, the 17th—and not the 16th—century was the age of decline. At Lübeck in 1628, at the last meeting of the Hanseatic towns, only 11 cities were represented, and later attempts to call a general meeting ended in failure.
Prices and inflation
In historical accounts, the glamour of the overseas discoveries tends to overshadow the intensification of exchanges within the continent. Intensified exchanges led to the formation of large integrated markets for at least some commodities. Differences in the price of wheat in the various European regions leveled out as the century progressed, and prices everywhere tended to fluctuate in the same direction. The similar price movements over large areas mark the emergence of a single integrated market in cereals. Certain regions came to specialize in wheat production and to sell their harvests to distant consumers. In particular, the lands of the Vistula basin, southern Poland, and Ruthenia (western Ukraine) became regular suppliers of grain to Flanders, Holland, western Germany, and, in years of poor harvests, even England and Spain. In times of famine, Italian states also imported cereals from the far-off Baltic breadbasket. From about 1520, Hungary emerged as a principal supplier of livestock to Austria, southern Germany, and northern Italy.
Changes in price levels in the 16th century profoundly affected every economic sector, but in ways that are disputed. The period witnessed a general inflation, known traditionally as the “price revolution.” It was rooted in part in frequent monetary debasements; the French kings, for example, debased or altered their chief coinage, the livre tournois, in 1519, 1532, 1549, 1561, 1571–75 (four mutations), and 1577. Probably more significant (though even this is questioned) was the infusion of new stocks of precious metal, especially silver, into the money supply. The medieval economy had suffered from a chronic shortage of precious metals. From the late 15th century, however, silver output, especially from German mines, increased and remained high through the 1530s. New techniques of sinking and draining shafts, extracting ore, and refining silver made mining a booming industry. From 1550 “American treasure,” chiefly from the great silver mine at Potosí in Peru (now in Bolivia), arrived in huge volumes in Spain, and from Spain it flowed to the many European regions where Spain had significant military or political engagements. Experts estimate (albeit on shaky grounds) that the stock of monetized silver increased by three or three and a half times during the 16th century.
At the same time, the growing numbers of people who had to be fed, clothed, and housed assured that coins would circulate rapidly. In monetary theory, the level of prices varies directly with the volume of money and the velocity of its circulation. New sources of silver and new numbers of people thus launched (or at least reinforced) pervasive inflation. According to one calculation, prices rose during the century in nominal terms by a factor of six and in real terms by a factor of three. The rate is low by modern standards, but it struck a society accustomed to stability. As early as 1568 the French political theorist Jean Bodin perceptively attributed the inflation to the growing volume of circulating coin, but many others, especially those victimized by inflation, chose to blame it on the greed of monopolists. Inflation contributed no small part to the period’s social tensions.
Inflation always redistributes wealth; it penalizes creditors and those who live on fixed rents or revenues; it rewards debtors and entrepreneurs who can take immediate advantage of rising prices. Moreover, prices tend to rise faster than wages. For the employer, costs (chiefly wages) lag behind receipts (set by prices), and this forms what is classically known as “profit inflation.” This profit inflation has attracted the interest of economists as well as historians; especially notable among the former is the great British economic theorist John Maynard Keynes. In a treatise on money published in 1930, he attributed to the 16th-century price revolution and profit inflation a crucial role in the primitive accumulation of capital and in the birth of capitalism itself. His analysis has attracted much criticism. Wages lagged not so much behind the prices of manufactured goods as of agricultural commodities, and inflation may not have increased profits at all. Then, too, inflation in Spain (particularly pronounced in the 1520s), or later in France, did not lead to a burst of enterprise. There is no mechanical connection between price structures and behaviour.
On the other hand, the price revolution certainly stimulated the economy. It clearly penalized the inactive. Those who wished to do no more than maintain their traditional standard of living had, nonetheless, to assume an active economic stance. The increased supply of money seems further to have lowered interest rates—another advantage for the entrepreneur. The price revolution by itself did not assure capital accumulation and the birth of capitalism, but it did bring about increased outlays of entrepreneurial energy.
Landlords and peasants
The growing population in the 16th century and the larger concentrations of urban dwellers required abundant supplies of food. In the course of the century, wheat prices steadily rose; the blades of late medieval price scissors once more converged. Money again flowed into the countryside to pay for food, especially wheat. But the social repercussions of the rising price of wheat varied in the different European regions.
In eastern Germany (with the exception of electoral Saxony), Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Lithuania, and even eventually Russia, the crucial change was the formation of a new type of great property, called traditionally in the German literature the Gutsherrschaft (ownership of an estate). The estate was divided into two principal parts: the landlord’s demesne, from which he took all the harvest, and the farms of the peasants, who supplied the labour needed to work the demesne. The peasants (and their children after them) were legally serfs, bound to the soil. These bipartite, serf-run estates superficially resemble the classic manors of the early Middle Ages but differ from them in that the new estates were producing primarily for commercial markets. The binding of the peasants of eastern Europe to the soil and the imposition of heavy labour services constitute, in another traditional term, the “second serfdom.”
In the contemporary west (and in the east before the 16th century), the characteristic form of great property was the Grundherrschaft (“ownership of land”). This was an aggregation of rent-paying properties. The lord might also be a cultivator, but he worked his land through hired labourers.
What explains the formation of the Gutsherrschaft in early modern eastern Europe? Historians distinguish two phases in its appearance. The nobility and gentry, even without planning to do so, accumulated large tracts of abandoned land during the late medieval population collapse. However, depopulation also meant that landlords could not easily find the labour to work their extensive holdings. Population, as previously mentioned, was growing again by 1500, and prices (especially the price of cereals) steadily advanced. Inflation threatened the standard of living of the landlords; to counter its effects, they needed to raise their incomes. They accordingly sought to win larger harvests from their lands, but the lingering shortage of labourers was a major obstacle. As competition for their labour remained high, peasants were prone to move from one estate to another, in search of better terms. Moreover, the landlords had little capital to hire salaried hands and, in the largely rural east, there were few sources of capital. They had, however, one recourse. They dominated the weak governments of the region, and even a comparatively strong ruler, like the Russian tsar, wished to accommodate the demands of the gentry. In 1497 the Polish gentry won the right to export their grain without paying duty. Further legislation bound the peasants to the soil and obligated them to work the lord’s demesne. The second serfdom gradually spread over eastern Europe; it was established in Poland as early as 1520; in Russia it was legally imposed in the Ulozhenie (Law Code) of 1649. At least in Poland, the western market for cereals was a principal factor in reviving serfdom, in bringing back a seemingly primitive form of labour organization.
No second serfdom developed in western Europe, even though the stimulus of high wheat prices was equally powerful. Harassed landlords, pressed to raise their revenues, had more options than their eastern counterparts. They might look to a profession or even a trade or, more commonly, seek at court an appointment paying a salary or a pension. The western princes did not want local magnates to dominate their communities, as this would erode their own authority. They consequently defended the peasants against the encroachments of the gentry. Finally, landlords in the west could readily find capital. They could use the money either to hire workers or to improve their leased properties, in expectation of gaining higher rents. The availability of capital in the west and its scarcity in the east were probably the chief reasons why the agrarian institutions of eastern and western Europe diverged so dramatically in the 16th century.
In the west, in areas of plow agriculture, the small property remained the most common productive unit. However, the terms under which it was held and worked differed widely from one European region to another. In the Middle Ages, peasants were typically subject to a great variety of charges laid upon both their persons and the land. They had to pay special marriage and inheritance taxes; they were further required to provide tithes to the parish churches. These charges were often small—sometimes only recognitive—and were fixed by custom. They are often regarded as “feudal” as distinct from “capitalist” rents, in that they were customary and not negotiated; the lord, moreover, provided nothing—no help or capital improvements—in return for the payments.
The 16th century witnessed a conversion—widespread though never complete—from systems of feudal to capitalist rents. The late medieval population collapse increased the mobility of the peasant population; a peasant who settled for one year and one day in a “free village” or town received perpetual immunity from personal charges. Personal dues thus eroded rapidly; dues weighing upon the land persisted longer but could not be raised. It was therefore in the landlord’s interest to convert feudal tenures into leaseholds, and this required capital.
In England upon the former manors, farmers (the original meaning of the term was leaseholder or rent payer), who held land under long-term leases, gradually replaced copyholders, or tenants subject only to feudal dues. These farmers constituted the free English yeomanry, and their appearance marks the demise of the last vestiges of medieval serfdom. In the Low Countries, urban investors bought up the valuable lands near towns and converted them into leaseholds, which were leased for high rents over long terms. The heavy infusions of urban capital into Low Country agriculture helped make it technically the most advanced in Europe, a model for improving landlords elsewhere. In central and southern France and in central Italy, urban investment in the land was closely linked to a special type of sharecropping lease, called the métayage in France and the mezzadria in Italy. The landlord (typically a wealthy townsman) purchased plots, consolidated them into a farm, built a house upon it, and rented it. Often, he also provided the implements needed to work the land, livestock, and fertilizer. The tenant gave as rent half of the harvest. The spread of this type of sharecropping in the vicinity of towns had begun in the late Middle Ages and was carried vigorously forward in the 16th century. Nonetheless, the older forms of feudal tenure, and even some personal charges, also persisted, especially in Europe’s remote and poorer regions. The early modern countryside presents an infinitely complex mixture of old and new ways of holding and working the land.
Two further changes in the countryside are worth noting. In adopting Protestantism, the North German states, Holland, the Scandinavian countries, and England confiscated and sold, in whole or in part, ecclesiastical properties. Sweden, for example, did so in 1526–27, England in 1534–36. It is difficult to assess the exact economic repercussions of these secularizations, but the placing of numerous properties upon the land market almost surely encouraged the infusion of capital into (and the spread of capitalist forms of agrarian organization in) the countryside.
Second, the high price of wheat did not everywhere make cereal cultivation the most remunerative use of the land. The price of wool continued to be buoyant, and this, linked with the availability of cheap wheat from the east, sustained the conversion of plowland into pastures that also had begun in the late Middle Ages. In England this movement is called “enclosure.” In the typical medieval village, peasants held the cultivated soil in unfenced strips, and they also enjoyed the right of grazing a set number of animals upon the village commons. Enclosure meant both the consolidating of the strips into fenced fields and the division of the commons among the individual villagers. As poorer villagers often received plots too small to work, they often had little choice but to sell their share to their richer neighbours and leave the village. In 16th-century England, enclosure almost always meant the conversion of plowland and commons into fenced meadows or pastures. To many outspoken observers, clergy and humanists in particular, enclosures were destroying villages, uprooting the rural population, and multiplying beggars on the road and paupers in the towns. Sheep were devouring the people—“Where there have been many householders and inhabitants,” the English bishop Hugh Latimer lamented, “there is now but a shepherd and his dog.” In light of recent research, these 16th-century enclosures were far less extensive than such strictures imply. Nonetheless, enclosures are an example of the power of capital to transform the rhythms of everyday life; at the least, they were an omen of things to come.
In Spain, sheep and people also entered into destructive competition. Since the 13th century, sheepherding had fallen under the control of a guild known as the Mesta; the guild was in turn dominated by a few grandees. The Mesta practiced transhumance (alternation of winter and spring pastures); the flocks themselves moved seasonally along great trailways called cañadas. The government, which collected a tax on exported wool, was anxious to raise output and favoured the Mesta with many privileges. Cultivators along the cañadas were forbidden to fence their fields, lest the barriers impede the migrating sheep. Moreover, the government imposed ceiling prices on wheat in 1539. Damage from the flocks and the low price of wheat eventually crippled cereal cultivation, provoked widespread desertion of the countryside and overall population decline, and was a significant factor in Spain’s 17th-century decline. High cereal prices primarily benefited not the peasants but the landlords. The landlords in turn spent their increased revenues on the amenities and luxuries supplied by towns. In spite of high food costs, town economies fared well.
Protoindustrialization
Historians favour the term “protoindustrialization” to describe the form of industrial organization that emerged in the 16th century. The word was initially applied to cottage industries in the countryside. In spite of the opposition of urban guilds, rural residents were performing many industrial tasks. Agricultural labour did not occupy the peasants during the entire year, and they devoted their free hours to such activities as spinning wool or weaving and washing cloth. Peasants usually worked for lower remuneration than urban artisans. Protoindustrialization gave rural residents supplementary income, which conferred a certain immunity from harvest failures; it enabled them to marry younger and rear larger families; it prepared them, socially and psychologically, for eventual industrialization. The efforts of urban guilds to limit rural work enjoyed only limited success; in England, for example, the restrictions seem rarely to have been enforced. Cottage industries certainly existed in the Middle Ages, but the economic expansion of the 16th century diffused them over much larger areas of the European countryside, perhaps most visibly in England and western Germany.
More recently, historians have stressed the role of towns in this early form of industrial organization. Towns remained the centres from which the raw materials were distributed in the countryside. Moreover, urban entrepreneurs coordinated the efforts of the rural workers and marketed their finished products. Certain processes—usually the most highly skilled and the most remunerative—remained centred in cities. Not only the extension of industry into rural areas but also the greater integration of city and countryside in regional economies was the principal achievement of 16th-century industry.
This manner of organizing manufactures is known as the “putting-out system,” an awkward translation of the German Verlagssystem. The key to its operation was the entrepreneur, who purchased the raw materials, distributed them among the working families, passed the semifinished products from one artisan to another, and marketed the finished products. He was typically a great merchant resident in the town. As trade routes grew longer, the small artisan was placed at ever-greater distances from sources of supply and from markets. Typically, the small artisan would not have the knowledge of distant markets or of the preferences of distant purchasers and rarely had the money to purchase needed raw materials. The size of the trading networks and the volume of merchandise moving within them made the services of the entrepreneur indispensable and subordinated the workers to his authority.
The production of fabric remained everywhere the chief European industry, but two developments, both of them continuations of medieval changes, are noteworthy. In southern Europe the making of silk cloth, stimulated by the luxurious tastes of the age, gained unprecedented prominence. Lucca, Bologna, and Venice in Italy and Sevilla and Granada in Spain gained flourishing industries. Even more spectacular in its rise as a centre of silk manufacture was the city and region of Lyon in central France. Lyon was also a principal fair town, where goods of northern and southern Europe were exchanged. It was ideally placed to obtain silk cocoons or thread from the south and to market the finished cloth to northern purchasers. The silk industry is also notable in that most of the workers it employed were women.
Northern industry continued to concentrate on woolens but partially turned its efforts to producing a new type of cloth, worsteds. Unlike woolens, worsteds were woven from yarn spun from long-haired wool; moreover, the cloth is not fulled (that is, washed, mixed with fuller’s earth, and pounded in order to mat the weave). Worsteds were lighter and cheaper to make than woolens and did not require the services of a mill, which might have to be located near running water. Under the name of “new draperies,” worsteds had come to dominate the Flemish wool industry in the late Middle Ages. In the 16th century, several factors—the growth of population and of markets, the revolt of the Low Countries against Spain, and religious persecutions, which led many skilled Protestant workers to seek refuge among their coreligionists—stimulated the worsted industry in England. England had developed a vigorous woolens industry in the late Middle Ages, and the spread of worsted manufacture made it a European leader in fabric production.
Another major innovation in 16th-century industrial history was the growing use of coal as fuel. England, with rich coal mines located close to the sea, could take particular advantage of this cheap mineral fuel. The port of Newcastle in Northumbria emerged in the 16th century as a principal supplier of coal to London consumers. As yet, coal could not be used for the direct smelting of iron, but it found wide application in glassmaking, brick baking, brewing, and the heating of homes. The use of coal eased the demand on England’s rapidly diminishing forests and contributed to the growth of a coal technology that would make a crucial contribution to the later Industrial Revolution.
In industry, the 16th century was not so much an age of dramatic technological departures; rather, it witnessed the steady improvement of older technological traditions—in shipbuilding, mining and metallurgy, glassmaking, silk production, clock and instrument making, firearms, and others. Europe slowly widened its technological edge over non-European civilizations. Most economic historians further believe that protoindustrialization, and the commerce that supplied and sustained it, best explains the early accumulations of capital and the birth of a capitalist economy.
Growth of banking and finance
Perhaps the most spectacular changes in the 16th-century economy were in the fields of international banking and finance. To be sure, medieval bankers such as the Florentine Bardi and Peruzzi in the 14th century and the Medici in the 15th had operated on an international scale, but the full development of an international money market with supporting institutions awaited the 16th century. Its earliest architects were South German banking houses, from Augsburg and Nürnberg in particular, who were well situated to serve as financial intermediaries between such southern capitals as Rome (or commercial centres such as Venice) and the northern financial centre at Antwerp. Through letters of exchange drawn on the various bourses that were growing throughout Europe, these bankers were able to mobilize capital in fabulous amounts. In 1519 Jakob II Fugger the Rich of Augsburg amassed nearly two million florins for the Habsburg king of Spain, Charles I, who used the money to bribe the imperial electors (he was successfully elected Holy Roman emperor as Charles V). Money was shaping the politics of Europe.
The subsequent bankruptcies of the Spanish crown injured the German bankers; from 1580 or even earlier, the Genoese became the chief financiers of the Spanish government and empire. Through the central fair at Lyon and through letters of exchange and a complex variant known as the asiento, the Genoese transferred great sums from Spain to the Low Countries to pay the soldiers of the Spanish armies. In the mid-16th century, dissatisfied with Lyon, the Genoese set up a fictional fair, known as Bisenzone (Besançon), as a centre of their fiscal operations. Changing sites several times, “Bisenzone” from 1579 settled at Piacenza in Italy.
Political and cultural influences on the economy
The centralized state of the early modern age exerted a decisive influence on the development of financial institutions and in other economic sectors as well. To maintain its power both within its borders and within the international system, the state supported a large royal or princely court, a bureaucracy, and an army. It was the major purchaser of weapons and war matériel. Its authority affected class balances. Over the century’s course, the prince expanded his authority to make appointments and grant pensions. His control of resources softened the divisions among classes and facilitated social mobility. Several great merchants and bankers, the Fuggers among them, eventually were ennobled. Yet, in spending huge sums on war, the early modern state may also have injured the economy. The floating debt of the French crown came close to 10 million ecus (the ecu was worth slightly less than a gold florin), that of the Spanish, 20 million. These sums probably equaled the worth of the circulating coin in the two kingdoms. Only in England did the public debt remain at relatively modest proportions, about 200,000 gold ducats. Governments, with the exception of the English, were absorbing a huge part of the national wealth. The Spanish bankruptcies were also sure proof that Spain had insufficient resources to realize its ambitious imperial goals.
The effort to control the economy in the interest of enhancing state power is the essence of the political philosophy known as mercantilism. Many of the policies of 16th-century states affecting trade, manufactures, or money can be regarded as mercantilistic, but as yet they did not represent a coherent economic theory. The true age of mercantilism postdates 1650.
Cultural changes also worked to legitimate, even to inspire, the early modern spirit of enterprise. In a famous thesis, the German sociologist Max Weber and, later, the English historian Richard Henry Tawney posited a direct link between the Protestant ethic, specifically in its Calvinist form, and the capitalist motivation. Medieval ethics had supposedly condemned the profit motive, and teachings about usury and the just price had shackled the growth of capitalist practices. Calvinism made the successful merchant God’s elect. Today, this thesis appears too simple. Many movements contributed to a reassessment of the mercantile or business life, and the rival religious confessions influenced one another. Calvinism did not really view commercial success as a sign of God’s favour until the 17th century, but 16th-century Roman Catholic scholastics (as the humanists before them) had come to regard the operations of the marketplace as natural; it was good for the merchant to participate in them. Martin Luther, in emphasizing that every Christian had received a calling (Berufung) from God, gave new dignity to all secular employments. Roman Catholics developed their own theory of the “vocation” to both secular and religious callings in what was a close imitation of the Lutheran Berufung.
Aspects of early modern society
To examine the psychology of merchants is to stay within a narrow social elite. Historians, in what is sometimes called “the new social history,” have paid close attention to the common people of Europe and to hitherto neglected social groups—women, the nonconformists, and minorities.
Two fundamental changes affected the status of early modern women. Women under protoindustrialization were valued domestic workers, but they also had little economic independence; the male head of the household, the father or husband, gained the chief fruits of their labour. A second change, perhaps related to the first, was the advancing age of first marriage for women. Medieval girls were very young at first marriage, barely past puberty; these young girls were given to mature grooms who were in their middle or late 20s. By the late 16th century, parish marriage registers show that brides were nearly the same age as their grooms and both were mature persons, usually in their middle 20s. This is, in effect, what demographers call the modern, western European marriage pattern. Comparatively late ages at first marriage also indicate that significant numbers of both men and women would not marry at all. Though the origins of this pattern remain obscure, it may be that families, recognizing the economic value of daughters, were anxious to retain their services as long as possible. European marriages were overwhelmingly patrilocal—that is, the bride almost always joined her husband’s household. Thus, the contribution that daughters made to the household economy exerted an upward pressure on their ages of marriage. Whatever the explanation for the new marriage pattern, the near equality of ages between the marriage partners at least opened the possibility that the two would become true friends as well as spouses; this was harder to achieve when brides were young girls and their husbands mature and experienced.
In investigating what might be called the cultural underground of the early modern age, historians now take full advantage of a distinctive type of source. The established religions of Europe, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, zealously sought to assure uniformity of belief in the regions they dominated. The courts inspired by them actively pursued not only the heterodox but also witches, the insane, and anyone who maintained an unusual style of life. The special papal court known as the Inquisition operated in many (though not all) Catholic states. Its judges carefully interrogated witnesses and kept good records. These records permit rare views into the depths of early modern society. They show how widespread was the belief in magic and the practice of witchcraft and how far popular culture diverged from the officially sanctioned ideologies. The variety and strange nature of popular beliefs have convinced some historians that Christianity had never really won the minds of rural people during the Middle Ages. Only the aggressive and reformed churches of the 16th century succeeded in converting the peasants to formal Christianity. This thesis may be doubted, but it cannot be doubted that the European countryside sheltered deep wells of popular culture which the documentation of the age leaves largely in darkness.
Witchcraft presents special problems. Witches were hunted in the 16th century with a relentlessness never seen before. Were they becoming more numerous, their services more in demand? It may be that the two reformations, Protestant and Catholic, purged Europe of the magical aura that the medieval church had hung over it. It may be that the abiding thirst for enchantment could be slaked only in the cultural underground, only through popular magic. But it may also be that the new determination and efficiency of the reformed religions and the early modern states simply exposed persons long a fixture in village life: the woman healer, who knew the ancient, time-honoured cures; the old wife, who through charms or potions could induce conception or sterility, love or hate. It is hard even to reconstruct the character of early modern witchcraft. Terrorized witnesses tended to respond in ways they thought would please their interrogators; thus, they reinforced stereotypes rather than revealing what they truly believed or did. Court records of this kind are not flawless sources, but they remain a rich vein of cultural history. Ironically, the court officials saved for history the thoughts and values they had hoped to extirpate.
The 16th century also witnessed a continuing deterioration in the status of western Jews. They had been expelled from England in 1290 and from France in 1306 (the first of several expulsions and readmissions). Riots and killings accompanying the Black Death (the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells) had pushed the centres of German Jewry (the Ashkenazim) to the east, into Poland, Lithuania, and, eventually, the Russian Empire. In 1492 the Jews of Spain (the Sephardim), who had formed the largest and most culturally accomplished western community, were given the choice of conversion or expulsion. Many chose to leave for Portugal (whence they would also be subsequently expelled), the Low Countries, Italy, or the Ottoman Empire. Those who remained and ostensibly converted were called “New Christians,” or Marranos, and many of these later chose to emigrate to more hospitable lands. Many Marranos continued to live as Jews while professing Christianity; accusations against them were commonly heard by the Inquisition in both Spain and Italy. Their position was especially distressing. Often, both Jews and Christians rejected them, the former for their ostensible conversion, the latter for secretly practicing Judaism.
The communities of exiles had different experiences. Jews in Holland made a major contribution to the country’s great prosperity. The Italian states, papal Rome included, accepted the exiles, hoping to profit from their commercial and financial expertise. Yet the Jews were also subject to increasingly severe restrictions. The Jewish community at Venice, which absorbed large numbers of Iberian Jews and Marranos, formed the first ghetto (the word itself is Venetian, first used in 1516). The practice of confining Jews into walled quarters, locked at night, became the common social practice of early modern states, at least in the central and eastern parts of the continent. The Sephardim, who continued to speak a form of Spanish known as Ladino, established large and prosperous colonies in Ottoman cities—Salonika, Istanbul, and Cairo among them. On balance, however, the early modern period in Europe was socially and culturally a dark age for Jewry.
Is there a single factor that can explain the social history of Europe’s 16th century? Many have been proposed: population growth, overseas discoveries, the emergence of a world economic system, American treasure, profit inflation, capital accumulation, protoindustrialization, the Renaissance or Reformation. Perhaps the most decisive change was progress toward more integrated systems of social organization and action and toward wider and tighter social networks. The western monarchies overcame much of the political localism of the medieval world and set a model that even divided Italy and Germany would eventually emulate. Economic integration advanced even more rapidly; markets in foodstuffs, spices, luxuries, and money extended throughout the continent: The skilled banker could marshal funds from all the continent’s money markets; silks from Lucca were sold in Poland. Cities formed into hierarchies, still on a regional basis but surpassing in their effectiveness the loose associations of medieval urban places. To be sure, competition among the centralized states often led to destructive wars and terrible waste of resources; and the quest for unity brought shameful persecution upon those who could not or would not conform to the dominant culture. David Herlihy
Politics and diplomacy
The state of European politics
In the 15th century, changes in the structure of European polity, accompanied by a new intellectual temper, suggested to such observers as the philosopher and clerical statesman Nicholas of Cusa that the “Middle Age” had attained its conclusion and a new era had begun. The Papacy, the symbol of the spiritual unity of Christendom, lost much of its prestige in the Great Western Schism and the conciliar movement and became infected with the lay ideals prevailing in the Italian peninsula. In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation reacted against the worldliness and corruption of the Holy See, and the Roman Catholic church responded in its turn by a revival of piety known as the Counter-Reformation. While the forces that were to erupt in the Protestant movement were gathering strength, the narrow horizons of the Old World were widened by the expansion of Europe to America and the East. (This section treats the political, diplomatic, and military history of Europe from the Reformation to the Peace of Westphalia. For a discussion of the religious history of this period, see Christianity, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism. The expansion of European culture to new lands is covered in colonialism.)
In western Europe, nation-states emerged under the aegis of strong monarchical governments, breaking down local immunities and destroying the unity of the European respublica Christiana. Centralized bureaucracy came to replace medieval government. Underlying economic changes affected social stability. Secular values prevailed in politics, and the concept of a balance of power came to dominate international relations. Diplomacy and warfare were conducted by new methods. Permanent embassies were accredited between sovereigns, and on the battlefield standing armies of professional and mercenary soldiers took the place of the feudal array that had reflected the social structure of the past. At the same time, scientific discoveries cast doubt on the traditional cosmology. The systems of Aristotle and Ptolemy, which had long been sanctified by clerical approval, were undermined by Copernicus, Mercator, Galileo, and Kepler.
Discovery of the New World
In the Iberian Peninsula the impetus of the counteroffensive against the Moors carried the Portuguese to probe the West African coastline and the Spanish to attempt the expulsion of Islam from the western Mediterranean. In the last years of the 15th century, Portuguese navigators established the sea route to India and within a decade had secured control of the trade routes in the Indian Ocean and its approaches. Mercantile interests, crusading and missionary zeal, and scientific curiosity were intermingled as the motives for this epic achievement. Similar hopes inspired Spanish exploitation of the discovery by Christopher Columbus of the Caribbean outposts of the American continent in 1492. The Treaties of Tordesillas and Saragossa in 1494 and 1529 defined the limits of westward Spanish exploration and the eastern ventures of Portugal. The two states acting as the vanguard of the expansion of Europe had thus divided the newly discovered sea lanes of the world between them.
By the time of the Treaty of Saragossa, when Portugal secured the exclusion of Spain from the East Indies, Spain had begun the conquest of Central and South America. In 1519, the year in which Ferdinand Magellan embarked on the westward circumnavigation of the globe, Hernán Cortés launched his expedition against Mexico. The seizure of Peru by Francisco Pizarro and the enforcement of Portuguese claims to Brazil completed the major steps in the Iberian occupation of the continent. By the middle of the century, the age of the conquistadores was replaced by an era of colonization, based both on the procurement of precious metal by Indian labour and on pastoral and plantation economies using imported African slaves. The influx of bullion into Europe became significant in the late 1520s, and from about 1550 it began to produce a profound effect upon the economy of the Old World.
Nation-states and dynastic rivalries
The organization of expansion overseas reflected in economic terms the political nationalism of the European states. This political development took place through processes of internal unification and the abolition of local privileges by the centralizing force of dynastic monarchies. In Spain the union of Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia under John II of Aragon was extended to association with Castile through the marriage of his son Ferdinand with the Castilian heiress Isabella. The alliance grew toward union after the accession of the two sovereigns to their thrones in 1479 and 1474, respectively, and with joint action against the Moors of Granada, the French in Italy, and the independent kingdom of Navarre. Yet, at the same time, provincial institutions long survived the dynastic union, and the representative assembly (Cortes) of Aragon continued to cling to its privileges when its Castilian counterpart had ceased to play any effective part. Castilian interest in the New World and Aragonese ties in Italy, moreover, resulted in the ambivalent nature of Spanish 16th-century policy, with its uneasy alternation between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The monarchy increased the central power by the absorption of military orders and the adaptation of the Hermandad, or police organization, and the Inquisition for political purposes. During the reign of Charles I (the emperor Charles V) centralization was quickened by the importation of Burgundian conciliar methods of government, and in the reign of his son Philip II Spain was in practice an autocracy.
Other European monarchies imitated the system devised by Roman-law jurists and administrators in the Burgundian dominions along the eastern borders of France. In England and France the Hundred Years’ War (conventionally 1337–1453) had reduced the strength of the aristocracies, the principal opponents of monarchical authority. The pursuit of strong, efficient government by the Tudors in England, following the example of their Yorkist predecessors, found a parallel in France under Louis XI and Francis I. In both countries revision of the administrative and judicial system proceeded through conciliar institutions, although in neither case did it result in the unification of different systems of law. A rising class of professional administrators came to fulfill the role of the king’s executive. The creation of a central treasury under Francis I brought an order into French finances already achieved in England through Henry VII’s adaptation of the machinery of the royal household. Henry VIII’s minister, Thomas Cromwell, introduced an aspect of modernity into English fiscal administration by the creation of courts of revenue on bureaucratic lines. In both countries, the monarchy extended its influence over the government of the church. The unrestricted ability to make law was established by the English crown in partnership with Parliament. In France the representative Estates-General lost its authority, and sovereignty reposed in the king in council. Supreme courts (parlements) possessing the right to register royal edicts imposed a slight and ineffective limitation on the absolutism of the Valois kings. The most able exponent of the reform of the judicial machinery of the French monarch was Charles IX’s chancellor, Michel de L’Hôpital, but his reforms in the 1560s were frustrated by the anarchy of the religious wars. In France the middle class aspired to ennoblement in the royal administration and mortgaged their future to the monarchy by investment in office and the royal finances. In England, on the other hand, a greater flexibility in social relations was preserved, and the middle class engaged in bolder commercial and industrial ventures.
Territorial unity under the French crown was attained through the recovery of feudal appanages (alienated to cadet branches of the royal dynasty) and, as in Spain, through marriage alliances. Brittany was regained in this way, although the first of the three Valois marriages with Breton heiresses also set in train the dynastic rivalry of Valois and Habsburg. When Charles VIII of France married Anne of Brittany, he stole the bride of the Austrian archduke and future emperor Maximilian I and also broke his own engagement to Margaret of Austria, Maximilian’s daughter by Mary of Burgundy. Margaret’s brother Philip, however, married Joan, heiress of Castile and Aragon, so that their son eventually inherited not only Habsburg Germany and the Burgundian Netherlands but also Spain, Spanish Italy, and America. The dominions of Charles V thus encircled France and incorporated the wealth of Spain overseas. Even after the division of this vast inheritance between his son, Philip II of Spain, and his brother, the emperor Ferdinand I, the conflict between the Habsburgs and the French crown dominated the diplomacy of Europe for more than a century.
The principal dynastic conflict of the age was less unequal than it seemed, for the greater resources of Charles V were offset by their cumbrous disunity and by local independence. In the Low Countries he was able to complete the Seventeen Provinces by new acquisitions, but, although the coordinating machinery of the Burgundian dukes remained in formal existence, Charles’s regents were obliged to respect local privileges and to act through constitutional forms. In Germany, where his grandfather Maximilian I had unsuccessfully tried to reform the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles V could do little to overcome the independence of the lay and ecclesiastical princes, the imperial knights, and the free cities. The revolts of the knights (1522) and the peasantry (1525), together with the political disaggregation imposed by the Reformation, rendered the empire a source of weakness. Even in Spain, where the rebellion of the comuneros took place in 1520–21, his authority was sometimes flouted. His allies, England and the papacy, at times supported France to procure their own profit. France, for its part, possessed the advantages of internal lines of communication and a relatively compact territory, while its alliance with the Ottoman Empire maintained pressure on the Habsburg defenses in southeast Europe and the Mediterranean. Francis I, however, like his predecessors Charles VIII and Louis XII, made the strategic error of wasting his strength in Italy, where the major campaigns were fought in the first half of the century. Only under Henry II was it appreciated that the most suitable area for French expansion lay toward the Rhine.
Turkey and eastern Europe
A contemporary who rivaled the power and prestige of Francis I and Charles V was the ruler of the Ottoman Empire, the sultan Süleyman I the Magnificent (1520–66). With their infantry corps d’élite (the Janissaries), their artillery, and their cavalry, or sipahis, the Ottomans were the foremost military power in Europe, and it was fortunate for their Christian adversaries that Eastern preoccupations prevented them from taking full advantage of Western disunity. A counterpoise was provided by the rise of the powerful military order of the Ṣafavids in Persia—hostile to the orthodox Ottomans through their acceptance of the heretical Islamic cult of the Shīʿites. Ottoman strength was further dissipated by the need to enforce the allegiance of Turkmen begs in Anatolia and of the chieftains of the Caucasus and Kurdistan and to maintain the conquest of the sultanate of Syria and Egypt by Süleyman’s predecessor, Selim I. Süleyman himself overran Iraq and even challenged Portuguese dominion of the Indian Ocean from his bases in Suez and Basra. The Crimean Tatars acknowledged his suzerainty, as did the corsair powers of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. His armies conquered Hungary in 1526 and threatened Vienna in 1529. With the expansion of his authority along the North African coast and the Adriatic littoral, it seemed for a time as if the Mediterranean, like the Black Sea and the Aegean, might become an Ottoman lake.
Though it observed the forms of an Islamic legal code, Turkish rule was an unlimited despotism, suffering from none of the financial and constitutional weaknesses of Western states. With its disciplined standing army and its tributary populations, the Ottoman Empire feared no internal threat except during the periods of disputed succession, which continued to occur despite a law empowering the reigning sultan to put to death collateral heirs. It was not unusual for the sultan to content himself with the overlordship of frontier provinces. Moldavia and Walachia were for a time held in this fashion, and in Transylvania the vaivode John Zápolya gladly accepted Süleyman as his master in return for support against Ferdinand of Austria.
Despite the expeditions of Charles V against Algiers and Tunis, and the inspired resistance of Venice and Genoa in the war of 1537–40, the Ottomans retained the initiative in the Mediterranean until several years after the death of Süleyman. The Knights of St. John were driven from Rhodes and Tripoli and barely succeeded in retaining Malta. Even after Spain, the papacy, Venice, and Genoa had crushed the Turkish armament in 1571 in the Battle of Lepanto, the Ottomans took Cyprus and recovered Tunis from the garrison installed by the allied commander, Don John of Austria. North Africa remained an outpost of Islam and its corsairs continued to harry Christian shipping, but the Ottoman Empire did not again threaten Europe by land and sea until late in the 17th century.
Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia, and Hungary were all loosely associated at the close of the 15th century under rulers of the Jagiellon dynasty. In 1569, three years before the death of the last Jagiellon king of Lithuania-Poland, these two countries merged their separate institutions by the Union of Lublin. Thereafter the Polish nobility and the Roman Catholic faith dominated the Orthodox lands of Lithuania and held the frontiers against Muscovy, the Cossacks, and the Tatars. Bohemia and the vestiges of independent Hungary were regained by the Habsburgs as a result of dynastic marriages, which the emperor Maximilian I planned as successfully in the east as he did in the west. When Louis II of Hungary died fighting the Ottomans at Mohács in 1526, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria obtained both crowns and endeavoured to affirm the hereditary authority of his dynasty against aristocratic insistence on the principle of election. In 1619, Habsburg claims in Bohemia became the ostensible cause of the Thirty Years’ War, when the Diet of Prague momentarily succeeded in deposing Ferdinand II.
In the 16th century, eastern Europe displayed the opposite tendency to the advance of princely absolutism in the West. West of the Carpathians and in the lands drained by the Vistula and the Dnestr, the landowning class achieved a political independence that weakened the power of monarchy. The towns entered a period of decline, and the propertied class, though divided by rivalry between the magnates and the lesser gentry, everywhere reduced their peasantry to servitude. In Poland and Bohemia the peasants were reduced to serfdom in 1493 and 1497, respectively, and in free Hungary the last peasant rights were suppressed after the rising of 1514. The gentry, or szlachta, controlled Polish policy in the Sejm (parliament), and, when the first Vasa king, Sigismund III, tried to reassert the authority of the crown after his election in 1587, the opportunity had passed. Yet, despite the anarchic quality of Polish politics, the aristocracy maintained and even extended the boundaries of the state. In 1525 they compelled the submission of the secularized Teutonic Order in East Prussia, resisted the pressure of Muscovy, and pressed to the southeast, where communications with the Black Sea had been closed by the Ottomans and their tributaries.
Farther to the east the grand principality of Moscow emerged as a new and powerful despotism. Muscovy, and not Poland, became the heir to Kiev during the reign of Ivan III the Great in the second half of the 15th century. By his marriage with the Byzantine princess Sofia (Zoë) Palaeologus, Ivan also laid claim to the traditions of Constantinople. His capture of Novgorod and repudiation of Tatar overlordship began a movement of Muscovite expansion, which was continued by the seizure of Smolensk by his son Vasily (Basil) III and by the campaigns of his grandson Ivan IV the Terrible (1533–84). The latter destroyed the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan and reached the Baltic by his conquest of Livonia from Poland and the Knights of the Sword. He was the first to use the title of tsar, and his arbitrary exercise of power was more ruthless and less predictable than that of the Ottoman sultan. After his death Muscovy was engulfed in the Time of Troubles, when Polish, Swedish, and Cossack armies devastated the land. The accession of the Romanov dynasty in 1613 heralded a period of gradual recovery. Except for occasional embassies, the importation of a few Western artisans, and the reception of Tudor trading missions, Muscovy remained isolated from the West. Despite its relationship with Greek civilization, it knew nothing of the Renaissance. Though it experienced a schism within its own Orthodox faith, it was equally untouched by Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the consequences of which convulsed western Europe in the late 16th century.
Reformation and Counter-Reformation
In a sense, the Reformation was a protest against the secular values of the Renaissance. No Italian despots better represented the profligacy, the materialism, and the intellectual hedonism that accompanied these values than did the three Renaissance popes, Alexander VI, Julius II, and Leo X. Among those precursors of the reformers who were conscious of the betrayal of Christian ideals were figures so diverse as the Ferraran monk Savonarola, the Spanish statesman Cardinal Jiménez, and the humanist scholar Erasmus.
The corruption of the religious orders and the cynical abuse of the fiscal machinery of the church provoked a movement that at first demanded reform from within and ultimately chose the path of separation. When the Augustinian monk Martin Luther protested against the sale of indulgences in 1517, he found himself obliged to extend his doctrinal arguments until his stand led him to deny the authority of the pope. In the past, as in the controversies between pope and emperor, such challenges had resulted in mere temporary disunity. In the age of nation-states, the political implications of the dispute resulted in the irreparable fragmentation of clerical authority.
Luther had chosen to attack a lucrative source of papal revenue, and his intractable spirit obliged Leo X to excommunicate him. The problem became of as much concern to the emperor as it was to the pope, for Luther’s eloquent writings evoked a wave of enthusiasm throughout Germany. The reformer was by instinct a social conservative and supported existing secular authority against the upthrust of the lower orders. Although the Diet of Worms accepted the excommunication in 1521, Luther found protection among the princes. In 1529 the rulers of electoral Saxony, Brandenburg, Hessen, Lüneberg, and Anhalt signed the “protest” against an attempt to enforce obedience. By this time, Charles V had resolved to suppress Protestantism and to abandon conciliation. In 1527 his mutinous troops had sacked Rome and secured the person of Pope Clement VII, who had deserted the imperial cause in favour of Francis I after the latter’s defeat at the Battle of Pavia. The sack of Rome proved a turning point both for the emperor and the humanist movement that he had patronized. The humanist scholars were dispersed, and the initiative for reform then lay in the hands of the more violent and uncompromising party. Charles V himself experienced a revulsion of conscience that placed him at the head of the Roman Catholic reaction. The empire he ruled in name was now divided into hostile camps. The Catholic princes of Germany had discussed measures for joint action at Regensburg in 1524; in 1530 the Protestants formed a defensive league at Schmalkalden. Reconciliation was attempted in 1541 and 1548, but the German rift could no longer be healed.
Lutheranism laid its emphasis doctrinally on justification by faith and politically on the God-given powers of the secular ruler. Other Protestants reached different conclusions and diverged widely from one another in their interpretation of the sacraments. In Geneva, Calvinism enforced a stern moral code and preached the mystery of grace with predestinarian conviction. It proclaimed the separation of church and state, but in practice its organization tended to produce a type of theocracy. Huldrych Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger in Zürich taught a theology not unlike Calvin’s but preferred to see government in terms of the godly magistrate. On the left wing of these movements were the Anabaptists, whose pacifism and mystic detachment were paradoxically associated with violent upheavals.
Lutheranism established itself in northern Germany and Scandinavia and for a time exercised a wide influence both in eastern Europe and in the west. Where it was not officially adopted by the ruling prince, however, the more militant Calvinist faith tended to take its place. Calvinism spread northward from the upper Rhine and established itself firmly in Scotland and in southern and western France. Friction between Rome and nationalist tendencies within the Catholic church facilitated the spread of Protestantism. In France the Gallican church was traditionally nationalist and antipapal in outlook, while in England the Reformation in its early stages took the form of the preservation of Catholic doctrine and the denial of papal jurisdiction. After periods of Calvinist and then of Roman Catholic reaction, the Church of England achieved a measure of stability with the Elizabethan religious settlement.
In the years between the papal confirmation of the Jesuit order in 1540 and the formal dissolution of the Council of Trent in 1563, the Roman Catholic church responded to the Protestant challenge by purging itself of the abuses and ambiguities that had opened the way to revolt. Thus prepared, the Counter-Reformation embarked upon recovery of the schismatic branches of Western Christianity. Foremost in this crusade were the Jesuits, established as a well-educated and disciplined arm of the papacy by Ignatius Loyola. Their work was made easier by the Council of Trent, which did not, like earlier councils, result in the diminution of papal authority. The council condemned such abuses as pluralism, affirmed the traditional practice in questions of clerical marriage and the use of the Bible, and clarified doctrine on issues such as the nature of the Eucharist, divine grace, and justification by faith. The church thus made it clear that it was not prepared to compromise; and, with the aid of the Inquisition and the material resources of the Habsburgs, it set out to reestablish its universal authority. It was of vital importance to this task that the popes of the Counter-Reformation were men of sincere conviction and initiative who skillfully employed diplomacy, persuasion, and force against heresy. In Italy, Spain, Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia, Poland, and the southern Netherlands (the future Belgium), Protestant influence was destroyed. John Hearsey McMillan Salmon
Diplomacy in the age of the Reformation
This was a golden era for diplomats and international lawyers. To the network of alliances that became established throughout Europe during the Renaissance, the Reformation added confessional pacts. Unfortunately, however, the two systems were not always compatible. The traditional amity between Castile and England, for example, was fatally undermined when the Tudor dynasty embraced Protestantism after 1532; and the “auld alliance” between Scotland and France was likewise wrecked by the progress of the Reformation in Scotland after 1560. Moreover, in many countries, the confessional divisions of Christendom after Luther created powerful religious minorities who were prepared to look abroad for guarantees of protection and solidarity: for example, the English Catholics to Spain and the French, German, and Dutch Calvinists to England.
These developments created a situation of chronic political instability. On the one hand, the leaders of countries which themselves avoided religious fragmentation (such as Spain) were often unsure whether to frame their foreign policy according to confessional or political advantage. On the other hand, the foreign policy of religiously divided states, such as France, England, and the Dutch Republic, oscillated often and markedly because there was no consensus among the political elite concerning the correct principles upon which foreign policy should be based.
The complexity of the diplomatic scene called for unusual skills among the rulers of post-Reformation Europe. Seldom has the importance of personality in shaping events been so great. The quixotic temperaments and mercurial designs of even minor potentates exerted a disproportionate influence on the course of events. Nevertheless, behind the complicated interplay of individuals and events, two constants may be detected. First, statesmen and churchmen alike consistently identified politics and religion as two sides of the same coin. Supporters of the Bohemian rebellion of 1618, for example, frequently stated that “religion and liberty stand or fall together”: that is, a failure to defend and maintain religious liberty would necessarily lead to the loss of political freedom. The position of Emperor Ferdinand II (1619–37) was exactly the same. “God’s blessing cannot be received,” he informed his subjects, “by a land in which prince and vassals do not both fervently uphold the one true Catholic faith.”
These two views, precisely because they were identical, were totally incompatible. That their inevitable collision should have so often produced prolonged wars, however, was due to the second “constant”: the desire of political leaders everywhere, even on the periphery of Europe, to secure a balance of power on the continent favourable to their interests. It is scarcely surprising that, when any struggle became deadlocked, the local rulers should look about for foreign support; it is more noteworthy that their neighbours were normally ready and eager to provide it. Queen Elizabeth I of England (1558–1603) offered substantial support after 1585 to the Dutch rebels against Philip II and after 1589 to the Protestant Henry IV of France against his more powerful Catholic subjects; Philip II of Spain (1556–98), for his part, sent troops and treasure to the French Catholics, while his son Philip III (1598–1621) did the same for the German Catholics.
This willingness to assist arose because every court in Europe believed in a sort of domino theory, which argued that, if one side won a local war, the rest of Europe would inevitably be affected. The Spanish version of the theory was expressed in a letter from Archduchess Isabella, regent of the Spanish Netherlands, to her master Philip IV in 1623: “It would not be in the interests of Your Majesty to allow the Emperor or the Catholic cause to go down, because of theharm it would do to the possessions of Your Majesty in the Netherlands and Italy.” Thus, the religious tensions released by the Reformation eventually pitted two incompatible ideologies against each other; this in turn initiated civil wars that lasted 30 years (in the case of France and Germany) and even 80 years (in the Netherlands), largely because all the courts of Europe saw that the outcome of each confrontation would affect the balance of power for a decade, a generation, perhaps forever. N. Geoffrey Parker
The Wars of Religion
Germany, France, and the Netherlands each achieved a settlement of the religious problem by means of war, and in each case the solution contained original aspects. In Germany the territorial formula of cuius regio, eius religio applied—that is, in each petty state the population had to conform to the religion of the ruler. In France, the Edict of Nantes in 1598 embraced the provisions of previous treaties and accorded the Protestant Huguenots toleration within the state, together with the political and military means of defending the privileges that they had exacted. The southern Netherlands remained Catholic and Spanish, but the Dutch provinces formed an independent Protestant federation in which republican and dynastic influences were nicely balanced. Nowhere was toleration accepted as a positive moral principle, and seldom was it granted except through political necessity.
There were occasions when the Wars of Religion assumed the guise of a supranational conflict between Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Spanish, Savoyard, and papal troops supported the Catholic cause in France against Huguenots aided by Protestant princes in England and Germany. In the Low Countries, English, French, and German armies intervened; and at sea Dutch, Huguenot, and English corsairs fought the Battle of the Atlantic against the Spanish champion of the Counter-Reformation. In 1588 the destruction of the Spanish Armada against England was intimately connected with the progress of the struggles in France and the Netherlands.
Behind this ideological grouping of the powers, national, dynastic, and mercenary interests generally prevailed. The Lutheran duke Maurice of Saxony assisted Charles V in the first Schmalkaldic War in 1547 in order to win the Saxon electoral dignity from his Protestant cousin, John Frederick; while the Catholic king Henry II of France supported the Lutheran cause in the second Schmalkaldic War in 1552 to secure French bases in Lorraine. John Casimir of the Palatinate, the Calvinist champion of Protestantism in France and the Low Countries, maintained an understanding with the neighbouring princes of Lorraine, who led the ultra-Catholic Holy League in France. In the French conflicts, Lutheran German princes served against the Huguenots, and mercenary armies on either side often fought against the defenders of their own religion. On the one hand, deep divisions separated Calvinist from Lutheran; and, on the other hand, political considerations persuaded the moderate Catholic faction, the Politiques, to oppose the Holy League. The national and religious aspects of the foreign policy of Philip II of Spain were not always in accord. Mutual distrust existed between him and his French allies, the family of Guise, because of their ambitions for their niece Mary Stuart. His desire to perpetuate French weakness through civil war led him at one point to negotiate with the Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre (afterward Henry IV of France). His policy of religious uniformity in the Netherlands alienated the most wealthy and prosperous part of his dominions. Finally, his ambition to make England and France the satellites of Spain weakened his ability to suppress Protestantism in both countries.
In 1562, seven years after the Peace of Augsburg had established a truce in Germany on the basis of territorialism, France became the centre of religious wars which endured, with brief intermissions, for 36 years. The political interests of the aristocracy and the vacillating policy of balance pursued by Henry II’s widow, Catherine de Médicis, prolonged these conflicts. After a period of warfare and massacre, in which the atrocities of St. Bartholomew’s Day (1572) were symptomatic of the fanaticism of the age, Huguenot resistance to the crown was replaced by Catholic opposition to the monarchy’s policy of conciliation to Protestants at home and anti-Spanish alliances abroad. The revolt of the Holy League against the prospect of a Protestant king in the person of Henry of Navarre released new forces among the Catholic lower classes, which the aristocratic leadership was unable to control. Eventually Henry won his way to the throne after the extinction of the Valois line, overcame separatist tendencies in the provinces, and secured peace by accepting Catholicism. The policy of the Bourbon dynasty resumed the tradition of Francis I, and under the later guidance of Cardinal Richelieu the potential authority of the monarchy was realized.
In the Netherlands the wise Burgundian policies of Charles V were largely abandoned by Philip II and his lieutenants. Taxation, the Inquisition, and the suppression of privileges for a time provoked the combined resistance of Catholic and Protestant. The house of Orange, represented by William I the Silent and Louis of Nassau, acted as the focus of the revolt; and, in the undogmatic and flexible personality of William, the rebels found leadership in many ways similar to that of Henry of Navarre. The sack of the city of Antwerp by mutinous Spanish soldiery in 1576 (three years after the dismissal of Philip II’s autocratic and capable governor, the duke de Alba) completed the commercial decline of Spain’s greatest economic asset. In 1579 Alessandro Farnese, duke di Parma, succeeded in recovering the allegiance of the Catholic provinces, while the Protestant north declared its independence. French and English intervention failed to secure the defeat of Spain, but the dispersal of the Armada and the diversion of Parma’s resources to aid the Holy League in France enabled the United Provinces of the Netherlands to survive. A 12-year truce was negotiated in 1609, and when the campaign began again it merged into the general conflict of the Thirty Years’ War, which, like the other wars of religion of this period, was fought mainly for confessional security and political gain. John Hearsey McMillan Salmon
The Thirty Years’ War
The crisis in Germany
The war originated with dual crises at the continent’s centre: one in the Rhineland and the other in Bohemia, both part of the Holy Roman Empire.
The Thirty Years' War.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
“The dear old Holy Roman Empire, How does it stay together?”
asked the tavern drinkers in Goethe’s Faust—and the answer is no easier to find today than in the late 18th, or early 17th, century. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was a land of many polities. In the empire there were some 1,000 separate, semiautonomous political units, many of them very small—such as the Imperial Knights, direct vassals of the emperor and particularly numerous in the southwest, who might each own only part of one village—and others comparable in size with smaller independent states elsewhere, such as Scotland or the Dutch Republic. At the top came the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs, covering the elective kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary, as well as Austria, the Tyrol, and Alsace, with about 8,000,000 inhabitants; next came electoral Saxony, Brandenburg, and Bavaria, with more than 1,000,000 subjects each; and then the Palatinate, Hesse, Trier, and Württemberg, with about 500,000 each.
These were large polities, indeed, but they were weakened by three factors. First, they did not accept primogeniture: Hesse had been divided into four portions at the death of Landgrave Philip the Magnanimous, Luther’s patron, in 1567; the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs were partitioned in 1564 and again in 1576. Second, many of the states were geographically fragmented: thus, the Palatinate was divided into an Upper County, adjoining the borders of both Bohemia and Bavaria, and a Lower County, on the middle Rhine. These factors had, in the course of time, created in Germany a balance of power between the states. The territorial strength of the Habsburgs may have brought them a monopoly of the imperial title from 1438 onward, but they could do no more: the other princes, when threatened, were able to form alliances whose military strength was equal to that of the emperor himself. However, the third weakness—the religious upheaval of the 16th century—changed all that: princes who had formerly stood together were now divided by religion. Swabia, for example, more or less equal in area to modern Switzerland, included 68 secular and 40 spiritual princes and also 32 imperial free cities. By 1618 more than half of these rulers and almost exactly half of the population were Catholic; the rest were Protestant. Neither bloc was prepared to let the other mobilize an army. Similar paralysis was to be found in most other regions: the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had separated Germany into hostile but evenly balanced confessional camps.
The Religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555 had put an end to 30 years of sporadic confessional warfare in Germany between Catholics and Lutherans by creating a layered structure of legal securities for the people of the empire. At the top was the right (known as cuius regio, eius religio) of every secular ruler, from the seven electors down to the imperial knights, to dictate whether their subjects’ religion was to be Lutheran or Catholic (the only officially permitted creeds). The only exceptions to this rule were the imperial free cities, where both Lutherans and Catholics were to enjoy freedom of worship, and the Catholic ecclesiastical states, where bishops and abbots who wished to become Lutherans were obliged to resign first. The latter provision, known as the reservatum ecclesiasticum, gave rise to a war in 1583–88 when the archbishop of Cologne declared himself a Protestant but refused to resign: in the end a coalition of Catholic princes, led by the duke of Bavaria, forced him out.
This “War of Cologne” was a turning point in the religious history of Germany. Until then, the Catholics had been on the defensive, losing ground steadily to the Protestants. Even the decrees of the Council of Trent, which animated Catholics elsewhere, failed to strengthen the position of the Roman church in Germany. After the successful struggle to retain Cologne, however, Catholic princes began to enforce the cuius regio principle with rigour. In Bavaria, as well as in Würzburg, Bamberg, and other ecclesiastical states, Protestants were given the choice of either conversion or exile. Most of those affected were adherents of the Lutheran church, already weakened by defections to Calvinism, a new creed that had scarcely a German adherent at the time of the Religious Peace of Augsburg. The rulers of the Palatinate (1560), Nassau (1578), Hesse-Kassel (1603), and Brandenburg (1613) all abandoned Lutheranism for the new confession, as did many lesser rulers and several towns. Small wonder that the Lutherans came to detest the Calvinists even more than they loathed the Catholics.
These religious divisions created a complex confessional pattern in Germany. By the first decade of the 17th century, the Catholics were firmly entrenched south of the Danube and the Lutherans northeast of the Elbe; but the areas in between were a patchwork quilt of Calvinist, Lutheran, and Catholic, and in some places one could find all three. One such was Donauwörth, an independent city just across the Danube from Bavaria, obliged (by the Peace of Augsburg) to tolerate both Catholics and Protestants. But for years the Catholic minority had not been permitted full rights of public worship. When in 1606 the priests tried to hold a procession through the streets, they were beaten and their relics and banners were desecrated. Shortly afterward, an Italian Capuchin, Fray Lorenzo da Brindisi, later canonized, arrived in the city and was himself mobbed by a Lutheran crowd chanting “Capuchin, Capuchin, scum, scum.” He heard from the local clergy of their plight and promised to find redress. Within a year, Fray Lorenzo had secured promises of aid from Duke Maximilian of Bavaria and Emperor Rudolf II. When the Lutheran magistrates of Donauwörth flatly refused to permit their Catholic subjects freedom of worship, the Bavarians marched into the city and restored Catholic worship by force (December 1607). Maximilian’s men also banned Protestant worship and set up an occupation government that eventually transferred the city to direct Bavarian rule.
These dramatic events thoroughly alarmed Protestants elsewhere in Germany. Was this, they wondered, the first step in a new Catholic offensive against heresy? Elector Frederick IV of the Palatinate took the lead. On May 14, 1608, he formed the Evangelical, or Protestant, Union, an association to last for 10 years, for self-defense. At first, membership remained restricted to Germany, although the elector’s leading adviser, Christian of Anhalt, wished to extend it, but before long a new crisis rocked the empire and turned the German union into a Protestant International.
The new crisis began with the death of John William, the childless duke of Cleves-Jülich, in March 1609. His duchies, occupying a strategic position in the Lower Rhineland, had both Protestant and Catholic subjects, but both of the main claimants to the inheritance were Protestants; under the cuius regio principle, their succession would lead to the expulsion of the Catholics. The emperor therefore refused to recognize the Protestant princes’ claim. Since both were members of the Union, they solicited, and received, promises of military aid from their colleagues; they also received, via Christian of Anhalt, similar promises from the kings of France and England. This sudden accretion in Protestant strength caused the German Catholics to take countermeasures: a Catholic League was formed between Duke Maximilian of Bavaria and his neighbours on July 10, 1609, soon to be joined by the ecclesiastical rulers of the Rhineland and receiving support from Spain and the Papacy. Again, reinforcement for one side provoked countermeasures. The Union leaders signed a defensive treaty with England in 1612 (cemented by the marriage of the Union’s director, the young Frederick V of the Palatine, to the king of England’s daughter) and with the Dutch Republic in 1613.
At first sight, this resembles the pyramid of alliances, patiently constructed by the statesmen of Europe 300 years later, which plunged the continent into World War I. But whereas the motive of diplomats before 1914 was fear of political domination, before 1618 it was fear of religious extirpation. The Union members were convinced of the existence of a Catholic conspiracy aimed at rooting out all traces of Protestantism from the empire. This view was shared by the Union’s foreign supporters. At the time of the Cleves-Jülich succession crisis, Sir Ralph Winwood, an English diplomat at the heart of affairs, wrote to his masters that, although “the issue of this whole business, if slightly considered, may seem trivial and ordinary,” in reality its outcome would “uphold or cast down the greatness of the house of Austria and the church of Rome in these quarters.” Such fears were probably unjustified at this time. In 1609 the unity of purpose between pope and emperor was in fact far from perfect, and the last thing Maximilian of Bavaria wished to see was Habsburg participation in the League: rather than suffer it, in 1614 he formed a separate association of his own and in 1616 he resigned from the League altogether. This reduction in the Catholic threat was enough to produce reciprocal moves among the Protestants. Although there was renewed fighting in 1614 over Cleves-Jülich, the members of the Protestant Union had abandoned their militant stance by 1618, when the treaty of alliance came up for renewal. They declared that they would no longer become involved in the territorial wrangles of individual members, and they resolved to prolong their association for only three years more.
Although, to some extent, war came to Germany after 1618 because of the existence of these militant confessional alliances, the continuity must not be exaggerated. Both Union and League were the products of fear; but the grounds for fear seemed to be receding. The English ambassador in Turin, Isaac Wake, was sanguine: “The gates of Janus have been shut,” he exulted in late 1617, promising “calm and Halcyonian days not only unto the inhabitants of this province of Italye, but to the greatest part of Christendome.” That Wake was so soon proved wrong was due largely to events in the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs over the winter of 1617–18.
The crisis in the Habsburg lands
While the Cleves-Jülich crisis held the attention of western Europe in 1609, the eyes of observers farther east were on Prague, the capital of Bohemia. That elective kingdom (which also included Silesia, Lusatia, and Moravia), together with Hungary, had come to the Habsburg family in 1526. At first they were ruled jointly with Austria by Ferdinand I (brother of Emperor Charles V), but after his death in 1564 the inheritance was divided into three portions: Alsace and Tyrol (known as “Further Austria”) went to one of his younger sons; Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola (known as “Inner Austria”) went to a second; only the remainder was left for his successor as emperor, Maximilian II.
By 1609 fragmentation had advanced even further: Maximilian’s eldest son, Rudolf II (emperor, 1576–1611), ruled only Bohemia; all the rest of his father’s territories had been acquired, the previous year, by a younger son, Matthias. The new ruler had come to power not through strength or talent, however, but by the exploitation of the religious divisions of his subjects. During the 1570s the Protestants of Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary had used their strength of numbers and control of local representative assemblies to force the Habsburgs to grant freedom of worship to their Protestant subjects. This was clearly against the cuius regio principle, and everyone knew it. In 1599 the ruler of Inner Austria, Archduke Ferdinand, began a campaign of forcible re-Catholicization among his subjects, which proved entirely successful. But, when Rudolf II launched the same policy in Hungary shortly afterward, there was a revolt, and the rebels offered the Hungarian crown to Matthias in return for guarantees of toleration. The Bohemians decided to exploit Rudolf’s temporary embarrassment by pressing him to grant similarly far-reaching concessions to the non-Catholic majority of that kingdom. The “Letter of Majesty” (Majestätsbrief) signed by Rudolf on July 9, 1609, granted full toleration to Protestants and created a standing committee of the Estates, known as “the Defensors,” to ensure that the settlement would be respected.
Rudolf II—a recluse who hid in a world of fantasy and alchemy in his Hradčany palace above Prague, a manic depressive who tried to take his own life on at least one occasion—proved to be incapable of keeping to the same policy for long. In 1611 he tried to revoke the Letter of Majesty and to depose the Defensors by sending a small Habsburg army into Prague, but a force of superior strength was mobilized against the invaders and the Estates resolved to depose Rudolf and offer their crown to Matthias. The emperor, broken in mind and body, died in January 1612. All his territories were then ruled by his brother, who also succeeded him as Holy Roman emperor later in the year. The alliance with the Protestant Estates that brought about Matthias’s elevation, however, did not long continue once he was in power. The new ruler sought to undo the concessions he had made, and he looked for support to his closest Habsburg relatives: his brother Albert, ruler of the Spanish Netherlands; his cousin Ferdinand, ruler of Inner Austria; and his nephew Philip III, king of Spain. All three, however, turned him down.
Albert had in 1609 succeeded in bringing the war between Spain and the Dutch Republic to a temporary close with the Twelve Years’ Truce. The last thing he wanted was to involve his ravaged country in supplying men and money to Vienna, perhaps provoking countermeasures from Protestants nearer home. Archduke Ferdinand, although willing to aid Matthias to uphold his authority (not least because he regarded himself as heir presumptive to the childless Matthias), was prevented from doing so by the outbreak of war between his Croatian subjects and the neighbouring republic of Venice (the Uskok War, 1615–18). Philip of Spain was also involved in war: in 1613–15 and 1616–17, Spanish forces in Lombardy fought the troops of the duke of Savoy over the succession to the childless duke of Mantua. Spain could therefore aid neither Matthias nor Ferdinand.
In 1617, however, papal diplomats secured a temporary settlement of the Mantuan question, and Spanish troops hastened to the aid of Ferdinand. Before long, Venice made overtures for peace, and the archduke was able to leave his capital at Graz in order to join Matthias. The emperor, old and infirm, was anxious to establish Ferdinand as his heir, and, in the autumn of 1617, the Estates of both Bohemia and Hungary were persuaded to recognize the archduke unconditionally as king-designate. On the strength of this, Ferdinand proceeded over the winter of 1617–18 to halt the concessions being made to Protestants. He created a council of regency for Bohemia that was overwhelmingly Catholic, and it soon began to censor works printed in Prague and to prevent non-Catholics from holding government office. More inflammatory still, the regents ordered Protestant worship to stop in towns on church lands (which they claimed were not included in the Letter of Majesty).
The Defensors created by the Letter of Majesty expressed strong objection to these measures and summoned the Estates of the realm to meet in May 1618. When the regents declared the meeting illegal, the Estates invaded the council chamber and threw two Catholic regents, together with their secretary, from the window. Next, a provisional government (known as the Directors) was created and a small army was raised.
Apart from the famous “defenestration,” the events in Prague in May 1618 were, superficially, little different from those in 1609 and 1611. Yet no 30-year struggle arose from those earlier crises. The crucial difference lay in the involvement of foreign powers: in 1609 and 1611 the Habsburgs, represented by Rudolf and Matthias, had given in to their subjects’ demands; in 1618, led by Ferdinand, they did not. At first his defiant stance achieved nothing, for the army of the rebels expelled loyal troops from almost every part of the kingdom while their diplomats secured declarations of support from Silesia, Lusatia, and Upper Austria almost at once and from Moravia and Lower Austria shortly afterward. In May 1619 the rebel army even laid siege to Ferdinand in Vienna. Within weeks, however, they were forced to withdraw because a major Spanish army, partly financed by the pope, invaded Bohemia.
The appearance of Spanish troops and papal gold in eastern Europe immediately reawakened the fears of the Protestant rulers of the empire. To the government of Philip III, led by the former ambassador in Vienna, Don Balthasar de Zúñiga, the choice had seemed clear: “Your Majesty should consider,” wrote one minister, “which will be of the greater service to you: the loss of these provinces [to the house of Habsburg], or the dispatch of an army of 15 to 20 thousand men to settle the matter.” Seen in these terms, Spain could scarcely avoid military intervention in favour of Ferdinand; but to Protestant observers the logic of Spanish intervention seemed aggressive rather than defensive. Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador to the Dutch Republic, observed that the new emperor “flatters himself with prophesies of extirpating the Reformed religion and restoring the Roman church to the ancient greatness” and accurately predicted that, if the Protestant cause were to be “neglected and by consequence suppressed, the Protestant princes adjoining [Bohemia] are like to bear the burden of a victorious army.”
This same argument carried weight with the director of the Protestant Union, Frederick V of the Palatinate, parts of whose territories adjoined Bohemia. So, when in the summer of 1619 the Bohemians deposed Ferdinand and offered the crown to Frederick, he was favourably disposed. Some of the elector’s advisers favoured rejecting this offer, since “acceptance would surely begin a general religious war”; but others pointed out that such a war was inevitable anyway when the Twelve Years’ Truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic expired in April 1621 and argued that allowing the Bohemian cause to fail would merely ensure that the conflict in the Netherlands would be resolved in Spain’s favour later, making a concerted Habsburg attack on the Protestants of the empire both ineluctable and irresistible.
Frederick accepted the Bohemian crown and in so doing rekindled the worst fears of the German Catholics. The Catholic League was re-created, and in December 1619 its leaders authorized the levy of an army of 25,000 men to be used as Maximilian of Bavaria thought fit. At the same time, Philip III and Archduke Albert each promised to send a new army into Germany to assist Ferdinand (who had succeeded the late Matthias as Holy Roman emperor). The crisis was now apparent, and, as the Palatine diplomat Count John Albert Solms warned his master,
If it is true that the Bohemians are about to depose Ferdinand and elect another king, let everyone prepare at once for a war lasting twenty, thirty or forty years. The Spaniards and the House of Austria will deploy all their worldly goods to recover Bohemia.
The underlying cause for the outbreak of a war that would last 30 years was thus the pathological fear of a Catholic conspiracy among the Protestants and the equally entrenched suspicion of a Protestant conspiracy among the Catholics. As a Bohemian noblewoman, Polyxena Lobkovic, perceptively observed from the vantage point of Prague: “Things are now swiftly coming to the pass where either the papists will settle their score with the Protestants, or the Protestants with the papists.”
The triumph of the Catholics, 1619–29
Frederick V entered Prague and was crowned king by the rebel Estates in October 1619, but already the Catholic net was closing around him. The axis linking Vienna with Munich, Brussels, and Madrid enjoyed widespread support: subsidies came from Rome and Genoa, while Tuscany and Poland sent troops. Equally serious, states favourable to Frederick’s cause were persuaded to remain neutral: Spanish diplomacy kept England out of the war, while French efforts persuaded the Protestant Union to remain aloof from the Bohemian adventure of their leader. The Dutch Republic also did nothing, so that in the summer of 1620 a Spanish army was able to cross from the Netherlands and occupy the Rhine Palatinate. Meanwhile, the armies of the emperor and League, reinforced with Spanish and Italian contingents, invaded the rebel heartland. On November 8, in the first significant battle of the war, at the White Mountain outside Prague, Frederick’s forces were routed. The unfortunate prince fled northward, abandoning his subjects to the mercy of the victorious Ferdinand.
This was total victory, and it might have remained the last word but for events in the Low Countries. Once the Twelve Years’ Truce expired in April 1621, the Dutch, fearing a concerted attack by both Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, decided to provide an asylum for the defeated Frederick and to supply diplomatic and, eventually, military assistance to his cause. In 1622 and again in 1623, armies were raised for Frederick with Dutch money, but they were defeated. Worse, the shattered armies retreated toward the Netherlands, drawing the Catholic forces behind them. It began to seem that a joint Habsburg invasion of the republic was inevitable after all.
The emperor’s political position, however, weakened considerably in the course of 1623. Although his armies won impressive victories in the field, they were only able to do so thanks to massive financial and military support from the Catholic League, controlled by Maximilian of Bavaria. Ferdinand II, thanks to the Spanish and papal subsidies, maintained some 15,000 men himself, but the League provided him with perhaps 50,000. Thus, Maximilian’s armies had, in effect, won Ferdinand’s victories and, now that all common enemies had been defeated, Maximilian requested his reward: the lands and electoral title of the outlawed Frederick of the Palatinate. Don Balthasar de Zúñiga, chief minister of Ferdinand’s other major ally, Spain, warned that the consequences of acceding to this demand could be serious, but in October 1622 he died, and no one else in Madrid—least of all his successor as principal minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares—had practical experience of German affairs; so in January 1623 the emperor felt able to proceed with the investiture of Maximilian as elector Palatine.
Zúñiga, however, had been right: the electoral transfer provoked an enormous outcry, for it was clearly unconstitutional. The Golden Bull of 1356, which was universally regarded in Germany as the fundamental and immutable law of the empire, ordained that the electorate should remain in the Palatine house in perpetuity. The transfer of 1623 thus undermined a cornerstone of the Constitution, which many regarded as their only true safeguard against absolute rule. Inside Germany, a pamphlet war against Maximilian and Ferdinand began; outside, sympathy for Frederick at last created that international body of support for his cause which had previously been so conspicuously lacking. The Dutch and the Palatine exiles found little difficulty in engineering an alliance involving France, England, Savoy, Sweden, and Denmark that was dedicated to the restoration of Frederick to his forfeited lands and titles (the Hague Alliance, Dec. 9, 1624). Its leader was Christian IV of Denmark (1588–1648), one of the richest rulers in Christendom, who saw a chance to extend his influence in northern Germany under cover of defending “the Protestant cause.” He invaded the empire in June 1625.
The Protestants’ diplomatic campaign had not gone unnoticed, however. Maximilian’s field commander, Count Tilly, warned that his forces alone would be no match for a coalition army and asked that the emperor send reinforcements. Ferdinand obliged: in the spring of 1625 he authorized Albrecht von Wallenstein, military governor of Prague, to raise an imperial army of 25,000 men and to move it northward to meet the Danish threat. Wallenstein’s approach forced Christian to withdraw; when the Danes invaded again the following year, they were routed at the Battle of Lutter (Aug. 26, 1626). The joint armies of Tilly and Wallenstein pursued the defeated forces: first they occupied the lands of North German rulers who had declared support for the invasion, then they conquered the Danish mainland itself. Christian made peace in 1629, promising never again to intervene in the empire. His allies had long since withdrawn from the struggle.
The White Mountain delivered the Bohemian rebels into the emperor’s grasp; Lutter delivered the rebels’ German supporters. After the victories, important new policies were initiated by Ferdinand which aimed at exalting the Catholic religion and his own authority. In the Habsburg provinces there was widespread confiscation of land—perhaps two-thirds of the kingdom of Bohemia changed hands during the 1620s—and a new class of loyal landowners—like Wallenstein—was established. At the same time, the power of the Estates was curtailed and freedom of worship for Protestants was restricted (in some territories) or abolished (in most of the rest). Even a rebellion in Upper Austria in 1626, provoked principally by the persecution of Protestants, failed to change Ferdinand’s mind. Indeed, fortified by his success in the Habsburg lands, he decided to implement new policies in the empire. First, disloyal rulers were replaced (the Palatinate went to Maximilian, Mecklenburg to Wallenstein, and so on). Next, serious steps were taken to reclaim church lands that had fallen into Protestant hands. At first this was done on a piecemeal basis, but on March 28, 1629, an Edict of Restitution was issued which declared unilaterally that all church lands secularized since 1552 must be returned at once, that Calvinism was an illegal creed in the empire, and that ecclesiastical princes had the same right as secular ones to insist that their subjects should be of the same religion as their ruler. The last clause, at least, was clearly contrary to the terms of the Peace of Augsburg, which Protestants regarded as a central pillar of the Constitution. There was, however, no opportunity for argument, for the imperial edict was enforced immediately, brutally, by the armies of Wallenstein and Tilly, which now numbered some 200,000 men. The people of the empire seemed threatened with an arbitrary rule against which they had no defense. It was this fear, skillfully exploited once again by Protestant propagandists, which ensured that the war in Germany did not end in 1629 with the defeat of Denmark. Ferdinand may have won numerous military victories, but in doing so he had suffered a serious political defeat. The pens of his enemies proved mightier than the sword.
The crisis of the war, 1629–35
If Maximilian of Bavaria desired the title of elector as his reward for supporting Ferdinand, Spain (for its part) required imperial support for its war against the Dutch. When repeated requests for a direct invasion by Wallenstein’s army remained unanswered (largely due to Bavarian opposition), Spain began to think of creating a Baltic navy, with imperial assistance, which would cleanse the inland sea of Dutch shipping and thus administer a body blow to the republic’s economy. But the plan aborted, for the imperial army failed in 1628 to conquer the port of Stralsund, selected as the base for the new fleet. Now, with Denmark defeated, Madrid again pleaded for the loan of an imperial army, and this time the request was granted. In the end, however, the troops did not march to the Netherlands: instead, they went to Italy.
The death of the last native ruler of the strategic states of Mantua and Montferrat in December 1627 created dangers in Italy that the Spaniards were unable to ignore and temptations that they were unable to resist. Hoping to forestall intervention by others, Spanish forces from Lombardy launched an invasion, but the garrisons of Mantua and Montferrat declared for the late duke’s relative, the French-born duke of Nevers. Nevers lacked the resources to withstand the forces of Spain alone, and he appealed to France for support. Louis XIII (1610–43) and Cardinal Richelieu (chief minister 1624–42) were, however, engaged in a desperate war against their Calvinist subjects; only when the rebels had been defeated, early in 1629, was it possible for the king and his chief minister to cross the Mount Cenis Pass and enter Italy. It was to meet this threat that the emperor was asked by Philip IV of Spain (1621–65) to send his troops to Italy rather than to the Netherlands. When Louis XIII launched a second invasion in 1630, some 50,000 imperial troops were brought south to oppose them, reducing the war for Mantua to a stalemate but delivering the Dutch Republic from immediate danger and weakening the emperor’s hold on Germany.
Gustav II Adolf of Sweden (1611–32) had spent most of the 1620s at war with Poland, seeking to acquire territory on the southern shore of the Baltic. By the Truce of Altmark (Sept. 26, 1629), with the aid of French and British mediators, Poland made numerous concessions in return for a six-year truce. Gustav lost no time in redeploying his forces: on July 6, 1630, he led a Swedish expeditionary force ashore near Stralsund with the declared intention of saving the “liberties of the empire” and preserving the security of the Baltic.
Despite the defeat of the German Protestants and their allies, Sweden’s position was far more favourable than that of Denmark five years earlier. Instead of the two armies that had faced Christian IV, Gustav was opposed by only one, for in the summer of 1630 the emperor’s Catholic allies in Germany—led by Maximilian of Bavaria—demanded the dismissal of Wallenstein and the drastic reduction of his expensive army. It was an ultimatum that Ferdinand, with the bulk of his forces tied down in the war of Mantua, could not ignore, even though he thereby lost the services of the one man who might conceivably have retained all the imperial gains of the previous decade and united Germany under a strong monarchy.
The emperor and his German allies, nevertheless, did remain united over the Edict of Restitution: there were to be no concessions in matters of religion and no restoration of forfeited lands. As a result, the German Protestants were driven reluctantly into the arms of Sweden, whose army was increased with the aid of subsidies secured from France and the Dutch. In September 1631 Gustav at last felt strong enough to challenge the emperor’s forces in battle: at Breitenfeld, just outside Leipzig in Saxony, he was totally victorious. The main Catholic field army was destroyed, and the Swedish Protestant host overran most of central Germany and Bohemia in the winter of 1631–32. The next summer they occupied Bavaria. Although Gustav died in battle at Lützen on Nov. 16, 1632, his forces were again victorious and his cause was directed with equal skill by his chief adviser, Axel Oxenstierna. In the east, Sweden managed to engineer a Russian invasion of Poland in the autumn of 1632 that tied down the forces of both powers for almost two years. Meanwhile, in Germany, Oxenstierna crafted a military alliance that transferred much of the cost of the war onto the shoulders of the German Protestant states (the Heilbronn League, April 23, 1633). Swedish ascendancy, however, was destroyed in 1634 when Russia made peace with Poland (at Polyanov, June 4) and Spain sent a large army across the Alps from Lombardy to join the imperial forces at the Battle of Nördlingen (September 6). This time the Swedes were decisively beaten and were obliged to withdraw their forces in haste from most of southern Germany.
Yet Sweden, under Oxenstierna’s skillful direction, fought on. Certainly its motives included a desire to defend the Protestant cause in Germany and to restore deposed princes to their thrones; but more important by far was the fear that, if the German Protestants were finally defeated, the imperialists would turn the Baltic into a Habsburg lake and might perhaps invade Sweden. The Stockholm government therefore desired a settlement that would atomize the empire into a jumble of independent, weak states incapable of threatening the security of Sweden or its hold on the Baltic. Furthermore, to guarantee this fragmentation, Oxenstierna desired the transfer to his country of sovereignty over certain strategic areas of the empire—particularly the duchy of Pomerania on the Baltic coast and the electorate of Mainz on the Rhine.
These, however, were not at all the goals of Sweden’s German allies. They aimed rather at the restoration of the prewar situation—in which there had been no place for Sweden—and it soon became clear that they were prepared to make a separate settlement with the emperor in order to achieve it. No sooner was Gustav dead than the elector of Saxony, as “foremost Lutheran prince of the Empire,” put out peace feelers toward Vienna. At first John George (1611–56) was adamant about the need to abolish the Edict of Restitution and to secure a full amnesty for all as preconditions for a settlement; but the imperial victory at Nördlingen made him less demanding. The insistence on an amnesty for Frederick V was dropped, and it was accepted that the edict would be applied in all areas recovered by Catholic forces before November 1627 (roughly speaking, this affected all lands south of the Elbe, but not the Lutheran heartland of Saxony and Brandenburg). The elector might have been required to make even more concessions but for the fact that, over the winter of 1634–35, French troops began to mass along the borders of Germany. As the papal nuncio in Vienna observed: “If the French intervene in Germany, the emperor will be forced to conclude peace with Saxony on whatever terms he can.” So the Peace of Prague was signed between the emperor and the Saxons on May 30, 1635, and within a year most other German Lutherans also changed their allegiance from Stockholm to Vienna.
The European war in Germany, 1635–45
This partial settlement of the issues behind the war led many in Germany to look forward to a general peace. Certainly the exhaustion of many areas of the empire was a powerful incentive to end the war. The population of Lutheran Württemberg, for example, which was occupied by the imperialists between 1634 and 1638, fell from 450,000 to 100,000; material damage was estimated at 34 million thalers. Mecklenburg and Pomerania, occupied by the Swedes, had suffered in proportion. Even a city like Dresden, the capital of Saxony, which was neither besieged nor occupied, saw its demographic balance change from 121 baptisms for every 100 burials in the 1620s to 39 baptisms for every 100 burials in the 1630s. Amid such catastrophes an overwhelming sense of war-weariness engulfed Germany. The English physician William Harvey (discoverer of the circulation of blood), while visiting Germany in 1636, wrote:
The necessity they have here is of making peace on any condition, where there is no more means of making war and scarce of subsistence.…This warfare in Germany…threatens, in the end, anarchy and confusion.
Attempts were made to convert the Peace of Prague into a general settlement. At a meeting of the electors held at Regensburg in 1636–37, Ferdinand II agreed to pardon any prince who submitted to him and promised to begin talks with the foreign powers to discover their terms for peace. But the emperor’s death immediately after the meeting ended this initiative. Efforts by Pope Urban VIII (1623–44) to convene a general conference at Cologne were similarly unavailing. Then, in 1640, the new emperor, Ferdinand III (1637–57), assembled the Imperial Diet for the first time since 1613 in order to solve at least the outstanding German problems of the amnesty question and the restitution of church lands. He met with little success and could not prevent first Brandenburg (1641) and then Brunswick (1642) from making a separate agreement with Sweden. The problem was that none of these attempts at peace were acceptable to France and Sweden, yet no lasting settlement could be made without them.
After the Peace of Prague, the nature of the Thirty Years’ War was transformed. Instead of being principally a struggle between the emperor and his own subjects, with some foreign aid, it became a war of the emperor against foreign powers whose German supporters were, at most times, few in number and limited in resources. Sweden, as noted above, had distinct and fairly consistent war aims: to secure some bases in the empire, both as guarantees of influence in the postwar era and as some recompense for coming to the rescue of the Protestants, and to create a system of checks and balances in Germany, which would mean that no single power would ever again become dominant. If those aims could be achieved, Oxenstierna was prepared to quit. As he wrote:
We must let this German business be left to the Germans, who will be the only people to get any good out of it (if there is any), and therefore not spend any more men or money, but rather try by all means to wriggle out of it.
But how could these objectives be best achieved? The Heilbronn League did not long survive the Battle of Nördlingen and the Peace of Prague, and so it became necessary to find an alternative source of support. The only one available was France. Louis XIII and Richelieu, fresh from their triumph in Italy, had been subsidizing Sweden’s war effort for some time. In 1635, in the wake of Nördlingen, they signed an offensive and defensive alliance with the Dutch Republic (February 8), with Sweden (April 28), and with Savoy (July 11); they sent an army into the Alps to occupy the Valtelline, a strategic military link between the possessions of the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs (March); and they mediated a 20-year truce between Sweden and Poland (September 12). Finally, on May 19, 1635, they declared war on Spain.
The aims of France were very different from those of Sweden and its German allies. France wished to defeat Spain, its rival for more than a century, and its early campaigns in Germany were intended more to prevent Ferdinand from sending aid to his Spanish cousins than to impose a Bourbon solution on Germany—indeed, France only declared war on Ferdinand in March 1636. Sweden at first therefore avoided a firm commitment to France, leaving the way clear for a separate peace should the military situation improve sufficiently to permit the achievement of its own particular aims. The war, however, did not go in favour of the allies. French and Swedish forces, operating separately, totally failed to reverse the verdict of Nördlingen: despite the Swedish victory at Wittstock (Oct. 4, 1636) and French gains in Alsace and the middle Rhine (1638), the Habsburgs always seemed able to even up the score. Thus, in 1641 Oxenstierna abandoned his attempt to maintain independence and threw in his lot with France. By the terms of the Treaty of Hamburg (March 15, 1641), the two sides promised not to make a separate peace. Instead, joint negotiations with the emperor and the German princes for the satisfaction of the allies’ claims were to begin in the Westphalian towns of Münster and Osnabrück. And, while the talks proceeded, the war was to continue.
The Treaty of Hamburg had at last created a coalition capable of destroying the power both of Ferdinand III and of Maximilian of Bavaria. On the whole, France attacked Bavaria, and Sweden fought the emperor; but there was considerable interchange of forces and a carefully coordinated strategy. On Nov. 2, 1642, the Habsburgs’ army was routed in Saxony at the Second Battle of Breitenfeld, and the emperor was saved from further defeat only by the outbreak of war between Denmark and Sweden (May 1643–August 1645). Yet, even before Denmark’s final surrender, the Swedes were back in Bohemia, and at Jankov (March 6, 1645) they totally destroyed another imperial army. The emperor and his family fled to Graz, while the Swedes advanced to the Danube and threatened Vienna. Reinforcements were also sent to assist the French campaign against Bavaria, and on August 3 Maximilian’s forces were decisively defeated at Allerheim.
Jankov and Allerheim were two of the truly decisive battles of the war, because they destroyed all possibility of the Catholics’ obtaining a favourable peace settlement. In September 1645 the elector of Saxony made a separate peace with Sweden and so—like Brandenburg and Brunswick before him—in effect withdrew from the war. Meanwhile, at the peace conference in session in Westphalia, the imperial delegation began to make major concessions: Oxenstierna noted with satisfaction that, since Jankov, “the enemy begins to talk more politely and pleasantly.” He was confident that peace was just around the corner. He was wrong.
Making peace, 1645–48
One hundred and ninety-four European rulers, great and small, were represented at the Congress of Westphalia, and talks went on constantly from the spring of 1643 until the autumn of l648. The outstanding issues of the war were solved in two phases: the first, which lasted from November 1645 until June 1647, saw the chief imperial negotiator, Maximilian, Count Trauttmannsdorf, settle most issues; the second, which continued from then until the treaty of peace was signed in October 1648, saw France try to sabotage the agreements already made.
The purely German problems were resolved first, partly because they were already near solution and partly because the foreign diplomats realized that it was best (in the words of the count d’Avaux, the French envoy)
to place first on the table the items concerning public peace and the liberties of the Empire…because if the German rulers do not yet truly wish for peace, it would be…damaging to us if the talks broke down over our own particular demands.
So in 1645 and 1646, with the aid of French and Swedish mediation, the territorial rulers were granted a large degree of sovereignty (Landeshoheit), a general amnesty was issued to all German princes, an eighth electorate was created for the son of Frederick V (so that both he and Maximilian possessed the coveted dignity), the Edict of Restitution was finally abandoned, and Calvinism within the empire was granted official toleration. The last two points were the most bitterly argued and led to the division of the German rulers at the Congress into two blocs: the Corpus Catholicorum and the Corpus Evangelicorum. Neither was monolithic or wholly united, but eventually the Catholics split into those who were prepared to make religious concessions in order to have peace and those who were not. A coalition of Protestants and pragmatic Catholics then succeeded in securing the acceptance of a formula that recognized as Protestant all church lands in secular hands by Jan. 1, 1624 (that is, before the gains made by Wallenstein and Tilly), and granted freedom of worship to religious minorities where these had existed by the same date. The Augsburg settlement of 1555 was thus entirely overthrown, and it was agreed that any change to the new formula must be achieved only through the “amicable composition” of the Catholic and Protestant blocs, not by a simple majority.
The amicable composition principle was finally accepted by all parties early in l648, thus solving the last German problem. That this did not lead to immediate peace was due to the difficulty of satisfying the foreign powers involved. Apart from France and Sweden, representatives from the Dutch Republic, Spain, and many other non-German participants in the war were present, each of them eager to secure the best settlement they could. The war in the Netherlands was the first to be ended: on Jan. 30, 1648, Philip IV of Spain signed a peace that recognized the Dutch Republic as independent and agreed to liberalize trade between the Netherlands and the Iberian world. The French government, led since Richelieu’s death (Dec. 4, 1642) by Jules Cardinal Mazarin (Giulio Mazzarino), was bitterly opposed to this settlement, since it left Spain free to deploy all its forces in the Low Countries against France; as a consequence, France devoted all its efforts to perpetuating the war in Germany. Although Mazarin had already signed a preliminary agreement with the emperor in September 1646, which conveyed parts of Alsace and Lorraine to France, in 1647–48 he started a new campaign in Germany in order to secure more. On May 17, l648, another Bavarian army was destroyed at Zusmarshausen, near Nördlingen, and Maximilian’s lands were occupied by the French.
Mazarin’s desire to keep on fighting was thwarted by two developments. On the one hand, the pressure of the war on French taxpayers created tensions that in June l648 erupted into the revolt known as the Fronde. On the other hand, Sweden made a separate peace with the emperor. The Stockholm government, still directed by Oxenstierna, was offered half of Pomerania, most of Mecklenburg, and the secularized bishoprics of Bremen and Verden; it was to receive a seat in the Imperial Diet; and the territories of the empire promised to pay five million thalers to the Swedish army for its wage arrears. With so many tangible gains, and with Germany so prostrated that there was no risk of any further imperial attack, it was clearly time to wriggle out of the war, even without France; peace was thus signed on August 6.
Without Sweden, Mazarin realized that France needed to make peace at the earliest opportunity. He informed his representatives at the Congress:
It is almost a miracle that…we can keep our affairs going, and even make them prosper; but prudence dictates that we should not place all our trust in this miracle continuing for long.
Mazarin therefore settled with the emperor on easy terms: France gained only the transfer of a bundle of rights and territories in Alsace and Lorraine and little else. Mazarin could, nevertheless, derive satisfaction from the fact that, when the ink dried on the final treaty of Oct. 24, l648, the emperor was firmly excluded from the empire and was under oath to provide no further aid to Spain. Mazarin settled down to suppress the Fronde revolt and to win the war against Philip IV.
Problems not solved by the war
Some historians have sought to diminish the achievements of the Thirty Years’ War, and the peace that ended it, because not all of Europe’s outstanding problems were settled. The British historian C.V. Wedgwood, for example, in a classic study of the war first published in 1938, stated baldly:
The war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous.…It is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.
It is true that the struggle between France and Spain continued with unabated bitterness until 1659 and that, within a decade of the Westphalian settlement, Sweden was at war with Poland (1655–60), Russia (1656–58), and Denmark (1657–58). It is also true that, in the east, a war broke out in 1654 between Poland and Russia that was to last until 1667, while tension between the Habsburgs and the Turks increased until war came in 1663. Even within the empire, there were disputes over the partition of Cleves-Jülich, still a battle zone after almost a half-century, which caused minor hostilities in 1651. Lorraine remained a theatre of war until the duke signed a final peace with France in 1661. But to expect a single conflict in early modern times to have solved all of Europe’s problems is anachronistic: the continent was not the single political system that it later became. It is wrong to judge the Congress of Westphalia by the standard of the Congress of Vienna (1815). Examined more closely, the peace conference that ended the Thirty Years’ War settled a remarkable number of crucial issues.
Problems solved by the war
The principal Swedish diplomat at Westphalia, Johann Adler Salvius, complained to his government in 1646 that
people are beginning to see the power of Sweden as dangerous to the balance of power. Their first rule of politics here is that the security of all depends upon the equilibrium of the individuals. When one ruler begins to become powerful…the others place themselves, through unions or alliances, into the opposite balance in order to maintain the equipoise.
It was the beginning of a new order in Europe, and Sweden, for all her military power, was forced to respect it. The system depended on channeling the aggression of German princes from thoughts of conquering their neighbours to dreams of weakening them; and it proved so successful that, for more than a century, the settlement of l648 was widely regarded as the principal guarantee of order and peace in central Europe. In 1761 Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in praise of the “balance of power” in Europe which, he believed, was anchored in the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire
which takes from conquerors the means and the will to conquer.…Despite its imperfections, this Imperial constitution will certainly, while it lasts, maintain the balance in Europe. No prince need fear lest another dethrone him. The peace of Westphalia may well remain the foundation of our political system for ever.
As late as 1866, the French statesman Adolphe Thiers claimed that
Germany should continue to be composed of independent states connected only by a slender federative thread. That was the principle proclaimed by all Europe at the Congress of Westphalia.
It was indeed: the balance of power with its fulcrum in Germany, created by the Thirty Years’ War and prolonged by the Peace of Westphalia, was a major achievement. It may not have lasted, as Rousseau rashly prophesied, forever, but it certainly endured for more than a century.
It was, for example, almost a century before German rulers went to war with each other again—a strong contrast with the hundred years before 1618, which had been full of armed neutrality and actual conflict. The reason for the contrast was simple: the Thirty Years’ War had settled both of the crises which had so disturbed the peace in the decades before it began.
In the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs, there were now no powerful estates and no Protestant worship (except in Hungary), and, despite all the efforts of the Swedish diplomats at Westphalia, there was no restoration of the lands confiscated from rebels and others. The Habsburg Monarchy, born of disparate units but now entirely under the authority of the king-emperor, had become a powerful state in its own right. Purged of political and religious dissidents and cut off from its western neighbours and from Spain, the compact private territories of the Holy Roman emperor were still large enough to guarantee him a place among the foremost rulers of Europe. In the empire, by contrast, the new stability rested upon division rather than unity. Although the territorial rulers had acquired, at Westphalia, supreme power in their localities and collective power in the Diet to regulate common taxation, defense, laws, and public affairs without imperial intervention, the “amicable composition” formula prevented in fact any changes being made to the status quo. The originality of this compromise (enshrined in Article V, paragraph 52, of the Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugense) has not always been appreciated. An age that normally revered the majority principle sanctioned an alternative method—parity between two unequal groups (known as itio in partes)—for reaching decisions.
Looked at more pragmatically, what the itio in partes formula achieved was to remove religion as a likely precipitant of political conflict. Although religion remained a matter of high political importance (for instance, in cementing an alliance against Louis XIV after 1685 or in unseating James II of England in 1688), it no longer determined international relations as it once had done.
When one of the diplomats at the Congress of Westphalia observed that “reason of state is a wonderful animal, for it chases away all other reasons,” he in fact paid tribute to the secularization that had taken place in European politics since 1618. But when, precisely, did it happen? Perhaps with the growing preponderance of non-German rulers among the enemies of the emperor. Without question, those German princes who took up arms against Ferdinand II were strongly influenced by confessional considerations, and, as long as these men dominated the anti-Habsburg cause, so too did the issue of religion. Frederick of the Palatine and Christian of Anhalt, however, failed to secure a lasting settlement. Gradually the task of defending the Protestant cause fell into the hands of Lutherans, less militant and less intransigent than the Calvinists; and the Lutherans were prepared to ally, if necessary, with Anglican England, Catholic France, and even Orthodox Russia in order to create a coalition capable of defeating the Habsburgs. Naturally such states had their own reasons for fighting; and, although upholding the Protestant cause may have been among them, it seldom predominated. After 1625, therefore, the role of religious issues in European politics steadily receded. This was, perhaps, the greatest achievement of the war, for it thus eliminated the major destabilizing influence in European politics, which had both undermined the internal cohesion of many states and overturned the diplomatic balance of power created during the Renaissance. N. Geoffrey Parker
The great age of monarchy, 1648–1789
Order from disorder
By the 17th century there was already a tradition and awareness of Europe: a reality stronger than that of an area bounded by sea, mountains, grassy plains, steppes, or deserts where Europe clearly ended and Asia began—“that geographical expression” which in the 19th century Otto von Bismarck was to see as counting for little against the interests of nations. In the two centuries before the French Revolution and the triumph of nationalism as a divisive force, Europe exhibited a greater degree of unity than appeared on the mosaic of its political surface. With appreciation of the separate interests that Bismarck would identify as “real” went diplomatic, legal, and religious concerns which involved states in common action and contributed to the notion of a single Europe. King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden saw one aspect when he wrote: “All the wars that are afoot in Europe have become as one.”
A European identity took shape in the work of Hugo Grotius, whose De Jure Belli et Pacis (1625; On the Law of War and Peace) was a plea for the spirit of law in international relations. It gained substance in the work of the great congresses (starting with those of Münster and Osnabrück before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) that met not only to determine rights and frontiers, taking into account the verdict of battle and resources of states, but also to settle larger questions of justice and religion. By 1700 statesmen had begun to speak of Europe as an interest to be defended against the ambitions of particular states. Europe represented an audience for those who wrote about the great issues of faith, morals, politics, and, increasingly, science: Descartes did not write only for Frenchmen, nor Leibniz for Germans. The use of Latin as the language of diplomacy and scholarship and the ubiquity, alongside local systems and customs, of Roman law were two manifestations of the unity of Christendom.
As a spiritual inheritance and dynamic idea greater than the sum of the policies of which it was composed, “Christendom” best represents Europe as envisaged by those who thought and wrote about it. The existence of vigorous Jewish communities—at times persecuted, as in Poland in 1648, but in places such as Amsterdam secure, prosperous, and creative—only serves to emphasize the essential fact: Europe and Christendom were interchangeable terms. The 16th century had experienced schism, and the development of separate confessions had shredded “the seamless robe,” but it had done so without destroying the idea of catholicism to which the Roman church gave institutional form. The word catholic survived in the creeds of Protestant churches, such as that of England. Calvin had thought in catholic, not sectarian, terms when he mourned for the Body of Christ, “bleeding, its members severed.” Deeper than quarrels about articles of belief or modes of worship lay the mentality conditioned by centuries of war against pagan and infidel, as by the Reconquista in Spain, which had produced a strong idea of a distinctive European character. The Renaissance, long-evolving and coloured by local conditions, had promoted attitudes still traceable to the common inheritance. The Hellenic spirit of inquiry, the Roman sense of order, and the purposive force of Judaism had contributed to a cultural synthesis and within it an article of faith whose potential was to be realized in the intellectual revolution of the 17th century—namely, that man was an agent in a historical process which he could aspire both to understand and to influence.
By 1600 the outcome of that process was the complex system of rights and values comprised in feudalism, chivalry, the crusading ideal, scholasticism, and humanism. Even to name them is to indicate the rich diversity of the European idea, whether inspiring adventures of sword and spirit or imposing restraints upon individuals inclined to change. The forces making for change were formidable. The Protestant and Roman Catholic Reformations brought passionate debate of an unsettling kind. Discoveries and settlement overseas extended mental as well as geographic horizons, brought new wealth, and posed questions about the rights of indigenous peoples and Christian duty toward them. Printing gave larger scope to authors of religious or political propaganda. The rise of the state brought reactions from those who believed they lost by it or saw others benefit exceedingly from new sources of patronage.
Meanwhile, the stakes were raised by price inflation, reflecting the higher demand attributable to a rise in the population of about 25 percent between 1500 and 1600 and the inflow of silver from the New World; the expansion of both reached a peak by 1600. Thereafter, for a century, the population rose only slightly above 100 million and pulled back repeatedly to that figure, which seemed to represent a natural limit. The annual percentage rate of increase in the amount of bullion in circulation in Europe, which had been 3.8 in 1550 and 1 in 1600, was, by 1700, 0.5. The extent to which these facts, with attendant phenomena—notably the leveling out from about 1620, and thereafter the lowering, of demand, prices, and rents before the resumption of growth about 1720—influenced the course of events must remain uncertain. Controversy has centred around the cluster of social, political, and religious conflicts and revolts that coincided with the deepening of the recession toward mid-century. Some historians have seen there not particular crises but a “general crisis.” Most influential in the debate have been the Marxist view that it was a crisis of production and the liberal political view that it was a general reaction to the concentration of power at the centre.
Any single explanation of the general crisis may be doomed to fail. That is not to say that there was no connection between different features of the period. These arose from an economic malaise that induced an introspective mentality, which tended to pessimism and led to repressive policies but which also was expressed more positively in a yearning and search for order. So appear rationalists following René Descartes in adopting mathematical principles in a culture dominated by tradition; artists and writers accepting rules such as those imposed by the French Academy (founded 1635); statesmen looking for new principles to validate authority; economic theorists (later labeled “mercantilists”) justifying the need to protect and foster native manufactures and fight for an apparently fixed volume of trade; the clergy, Catholic and Protestant alike, seeking uniformity and tending to persecution; witch-hunters rooting out irregularities in the form of supposed dealings with Satan; even gardeners trying to impose order on unruly nature. Whether strands in a single pattern or distinct phenomena that happen to exhibit certain common principles, each has lent itself to a wider perception of the 17th century as classical, baroque, absolutist, or mercantilist.
There is sufficient evidence from tolls, rents, taxes, riots, and famines to justify arguments for something more dire than a downturn in economic activity. There are, however, other factors to be weighed: prolonged wars fought by larger armies, involving more matériel, and having wider political repercussions; more efficient states, able to draw more wealth from taxpayers; and even, at certain times (such as the years 1647–51), particularly adverse weather, as part of a general deterioration in climatic conditions. There are also continuities that cast doubt on some aspects of the general picture. For example, the drive for conformity can be traced at least to the Council of Trent, whose final sessions were in 1563; but it was visibly losing impetus, despite Louis XIV’s intolerant policy leading to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), after the Peace of Westphalia. Puritanism, which has been seen as a significant reflection of a contracting economy, was not a prime feature of the second half of the century, though mercantilism was. Then there are exceptions even to economic generalizations: England and, outstandingly, the United Provinces of the Netherlands. Insights and perspectives gain from the search for general causes. But truth requires an untidy picture of Europe in which discrepancies abound, in which men subscribe to a common civilization while cherishing specific rights; in which countries evolved along distinctive paths; and in which much depended on the idiom of a community, on the ability of ruler or minister, on skills deployed and choices made.
Complementing the search for order and for valid authority in other fields, and arising out of the assertion of rights and the drive to control, a feature of the 17th century was the clarification of ideas about the physical bounds of the world. In 1600 “Europe” still lacked exact political significance. Where, for example, in the eastern plains before the Ural Mountains or the Black Sea were reached, could any line have meaning? Were Christian peoples—Serbs, Romanians, Greeks, or Bulgarians—living under Turkish rule properly Europeans? The tendency everywhere was to envisage boundaries in terms of estates and lordships. Where the legacy of feudalism was islands of territory either subject to different rulers or simply independent, or where, as in Dalmatia or Podolia (lands vulnerable to Turkish raids), the frontier was represented by disputed, inherently unstable zones, a linear frontier could emerge only out of war and diplomacy. The process can be seen in the wars of France and Sweden. Both countries were seen by their neighbours as aggressive, yet they were concerned as much with a defensible frontier as with the acquisition of new resources. Those objectives inspired the expansionist policies of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV and—with the added incentives of fighting the infidel and recovering a patrimony lost since the defeat at Mohács in 1526—the reconquest of Hungary, which led to the Treaty of Carlowitz (1699). The frontier then drawn was sufficiently definite—despite modifications, as after the loss of Belgrade (1739)—to make possible effective government within its perimeter.
Another feature of the period was the drawing into the central diplomatic orbit of countries that had been absorbed hitherto in questions of little consequence. Although Henry of Valois had been elected king of Poland before he inherited the French throne (1574) and James VI of Scotland (later James I of England, 1603–25) had married Anne of Denmark, whose country had a footing in Germany through its duchy of Holstein, it was still usual for western statesmen to treat the Baltic states as belonging to a separate northern system. Trading interests and military adventures that forged links, for example, with the United Provinces—as when Sweden intervened in the German war in 1630—complicated already tangled diplomatic questions.
Travelers who ventured beyond Warsaw, Kraków, and the “black earth” area of Mazovia, thence toward the Pripet Marshes, might not know when they left Polish lands and entered those of the tsar. The line between Orthodox Russia and the rest of Christian Europe had never been so sharp as that which divided Christendom and Islam. Uncertainties engendered by the nature of Russian religion, rule, society, and manners perpetuated former ambivalent attitudes toward Byzantium. Unmapped spaces, where Europe petered out in marshes, steppes, and forests of birch and alder, removed the beleaguered though periodically expanding Muscovite state from the concern of all but neighbouring Sweden and Poland. The establishment of a native dynasty with the accession of Michael Romanov in 1613, the successful outcome of the war against Poland that followed the fateful revolt in 1648 of the Ukraine against Polish overlordship, the acquisition of huge territories including Smolensk and Kiev (Treaty of Andrusovo, 1667), and, above all, the successful drive of Peter I the Great to secure a footing in the Baltic were to transform the picture. By the time of Peter’s death in 1725, Russia was a European state: still with some Asian characteristics, still colonizing rather than assimilating southern and eastern lands up to and beyond the Urals, but interlocked with the diplomatic system of the West. A larger Europe, approximating to the modern idea, began to take shape.
The human condition
Population
For most inhabitants of Europe, the highest aim was to survive in a hazardous world. They were contained in an inelastic frame by their inability to produce more than a certain amount of food or to make goods except by hand or by relatively simple tools and machines. In this natural, or preindustrial, economy, population played the main part in determining production and demand through the amount of labour available for field, mill, and workshop and through the number of consumers. Jean Bodin (writing toward the end of an age of rising population) stated what was to become the truism of the anxious 17th century when he wrote that men were “the only strength and wealth.” The 16th century had seen the last phase in recovery from the Black Death, which had killed about a third of Europe’s people. The 1590s brought a sharp check: dearth and disorder were especially severe in France and Spain. There were particular reasons: the effect of civil wars andSpanish invasion in France, the load placed on the Castilian economy by the imperialist policies of Philip II. France made a speedy, if superficial, recovery during the reign of Henry IV, but the truce between Spain and the United Provinces (1609) presented the Dutch with an open market from which they proceeded to drive out the native producers. Meanwhile, virulent outbreaks of plague had contributed to Spain’s loss of more than a million people.
A feature of the late 16th century had been the growth of cities. Those that had flourished most from expansion of trade or government offered sustenance of a kind for refugees from stricken villages. Meanwhile, peasants were paying the price for the intensified cultivation necessitated by the 16th century’s growth in population. The subdivision of holdings, the cultivation of marginal land, and the inevitable preference for cereal production at the cost of grazing, with consequent loss of the main fertilizer, animal dung, depressed crop yields. The nature of the trap that closed around the poor can be found in the statistics of life expectancy, averaging 25 years but nearer 20 in the larger towns. It took three times as many births to maintain the level of population as it did at the end of the 20th century.
There also were large fluctuations, such as that caused by the loss of at least 5 of Germany’s 20 million during the Thirty Years’ War. The “vital revolution” is an apt description of the start of a process that has continued to the present day. Until 1800, when the total European population was about 180 million, growth was modest and uneven: relatively slow in France (from 20 to 27 million), Spain (from 7 to 9 million), and Italy (from 13 to 17 million) and nonexistent in war-torn Poland until 1772, when the first of three partitions anticipated its demise as a political entity. Significantly, the rise in population was the most marked in Britain, where agriculture, manufacturing, and trade benefited from investment and innovation, and in Russia, which was technologically backward but which colonized near-empty lands. Among the causes were improvements in housing, diet, and hygiene.
Climate
Given man’s dependence on nature, the deterioration of the climate during the Little Ice Age of the 17th century should be considered as a demographic factor. The absence of sunspots after 1645 was noted by astronomers using the recently invented telescope; the aurora borealis (caused by high-energy particles from the Sun entering the Earth’s atmosphere) was so rarely visible that it was thought ominous when it did appear; measurement of tree rings shows them to be relatively thin in this period but containing heavy deposits of radioactive carbon-14, associated with the decline of solar energy; snow lines were observed to be lower; and glaciers advanced into Alpine valleys, reaching their farthest point about 1670. All of these phenomena support plentiful anecdotal evidence for a period of unfavourable climate characterized by cold winters and wet summers. A decrease of about 1 percent in solar radiation meant a growing season shorter by three weeks and the altitude at which crops would ripen lowered by 500 feet. With most of the population living near subsistence level and depending upon cereal crops, the effect was most severe on those who farmed marginal land, especially on northerners for whom the growing season was already short. They were not the only ones who suffered, for freakish conditions were possible then as now. Around Toledo—where until the late 17th century the plains and sierras of New Castile provided a bare living from wheat, vines, and olives—disastrous frosts resulted in mass emigration. Drought also brought deprivation. During 1683 no rain fell in Andalusia until November; the cattle had to be killed, the crops were dry stalks, and thousands starved. In the great winter of 1708–09, rivers froze, even the swift-flowing Rhône, and wolves roamed the French countryside; after late frosts, which killed vines and olive trees, the harvest was a catastrophe: by December the price of bread had quadrupled.
Less spectacular, but more deadly, were the sequences of cold springs and wet summers. From the great mortalities such as those of 1647–52 and 1691–95 in France the population was slow to recover; women were rendered infertile, marriages were delayed, and births were avoided. They were times of fear for masters and shameful resort to beggary, abortion, and infanticide for the common people. It was also a hard time for the government and its tax-collectors. The disastrous harvest of the previous year was the direct cause of the revolt of the Sicilians in 1648. The connection between the outbreak of the Fronde in the same year and harvest failure is less direct: some revolt would probably have occurred in any case. There is a clear link, however, between the wet Swedish summer of 1649 and the constitutional crisis of the following year.
War
The period between the revolt of Bohemia (1618) and the peace of Nystad (1721), which coincides with the check to growth and subsequent recession, also saw prolonged warfare. Developments within states and leagues between them made possible the mustering of larger armies than ever before. How important then was war as an influence on economic and social conditions? The discrepancy between the high aspirations of sovereigns and the brutal practice of largely mercenary soldiers gave the Thirty Years’ War a nightmarish character. It is, however, hard to be precise about the consequences of this general melee. As hostilities ended, rulers exaggerated losses to strengthen claims for compensation; refugees returned, families emerged from woods and cellars and reappeared on tax rolls; ruined villages were rebuilt and wastelands were tilled; a smaller population was healthier and readily procreative. The devastation was patchy. Northwestern Germany, for example, was little affected; some cities, such as Hamburg, actually flourished, while others, such as Leipzig and Nürnberg, quickly responded to commercial demand. The preindustrial economy proved to be as resilient as it was vulnerable. Yet the German population did not rise to prewar levels until the end of the 17th century.
The causes of this demographic disaster lie in the random nature of operations and the way in which armies, disciplined only on the battlefield, lived off the land. Casualties in battle were not the prime factor. In the warfare of the 17th and 18th centuries, mortal sickness in the armies exceeded death in action in the proportion of five to one. Disease spread in the camps and peasant communities deprived by pillage of their livelihood. The cost to the home country of operations abroad could be comparatively small, as it was to Sweden, at least until 1700 and the Great Northern War, which developed into a struggle for survival. Special factors—notably naval and commercial strength, the ability to prey on the enemy’s commerce and colonies, and immigration from the occupied south—enabled the United Provinces to grow richer from their wars against Spain (1572–1609 and 1621–48). By contrast, those living in the main theatres of war and occupation were vulnerable: the Spanish southern provinces of the Netherlands, Lorraine (open to French troops), Pomerania and Mecklenberg (to Swedish troops), and Württemberg (to Austrian and French) were among those who paid the highest bills of war.
The ability of states to bring their armies under control meant that operations after 1648 were better regulated and had less effect on civilians. Lands were ravaged deliberately to narrow a front or to deprive the enemy of base and food: such was the fate of the Palatinate, sacked by the French under Marshall René Tessé in 1689. Meanwhile, warfare in the north and east continued to be savage, largely unrestrained by conventions that were gaining hold in the west. The war of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) ran parallel with the Great Northern War (1700–21) and the war of Austria (allied with Venice and sometimes Poland) against the Turks, which had begun with the relief of Vienna in 1683 and continued intermittently until the peace of Passarowitz in 1718. In brutal campaigning over the plains of Poland and Hungary, the peasants were the chief sufferers. For the Hungarians, long inured to border war, liberation by the Habsburgs meant a stricter landowning regime. In one year, 1706, the Swedes gutted 140 villages on the estates of one of Augustus II’s followers. The Russians never subscribed to the stricter rules that were making western warfare look like a deadly game of chess. The later years of Frederick the Great were largely devoted to the restoration of Prussia, despoiled during the Russian occupation of 1760–62.
Such exceptions apart, it seems that most people were little affected by military operations after 1648. The Flemish peasant plowed the fields in peace within miles of Marlborough’s encampments; his uniformed troops received regular pay and looting was punished. That was the norm for armies of the 18th century. This improvement was a factor in the rise of population in that century, but not the main one. At worst, war only exacerbated the conditions of an underdeveloped society.
Health and sickness
By the dislocation of markets and communications and the destruction of shipping, and by diverting toward destructive ends an excessive proportion of government funds, war tended to sap the wealth of the community and narrow the scope for governments and individuals to plan and invest for greater production. The constructive reforms of the French statesman Jean-Baptiste Colbert in the 1660s, for example, would have been unthinkable in the 1640s or ’50s; they were checked by the renewal of war after 1672 and were largely undone by the further sequence of wars after his death. War determined the evolution of states, but it was not the principal factor affecting the lives of people. Disease was ever present, ready to take advantage of feeble defense systems operating without the benefit of science. The 20th-century French historian Robert Mandrou wrote of “the chronic morbidity” of the entire population. There is plenty of material on diseases, particularly in accounts of symptoms and “cures,” but the language is often vague. Christian of Brunswick was consumed in 1626 “by a gigantic worm”; Charles II of Spain, dying in 1700, was held to be bewitched; men suffered from “the falling sickness” and “distemper.”
There are no reliable statistics about height and weight. It is difficult even to define what people regarded as normal good health. The average person was smaller than today. Even if courtiers flattered Louis XIV, deemed to be tall at 5 feet 4 inches (1.6 metres), the evidence of portraits and clothes shows that a Frenchman of 6 feet (1.8 metres) was exceptionally tall; the same goes for most southern and central Europeans. Scandinavians, Dutch, and North Germans were generally larger; protein in meat, fish, and cheese was probably as important as their ethnic stock. Even where there were advances in medicine, treatment of illness remained primitive. The majority who relied on the simples or charms of the local wise woman may have been no worse off than those for whom more learned advice was available. Court doctors could not prevent the death of the duke de Bourgogne, his wife, and his eldest son in 1712 from what was probably scarlet fever; the younger son, the future Louis XV, may have been saved by his nurse’s removing him from their ministrations.
The work of William Harvey, concerning the circulation of the blood; of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, observing through his microscope blood circulating in minute capillaries or spermatozoa in water; of Francesco Redi, developing by experiment (in a book of 1668) Harvey’s principle that “all living things come from an egg”; or of Hermann Boerhaave, professor of chemistry, medicine, and botany at Leiden, carrying out public dissections of human bodies, reveals the first approaches to modern knowledge and understanding. A striking example of what could be achieved was the efficacy of vaccine against the rampant smallpox after the discoveries of Edward Jenner and others, but vaccination was not much used until the beginning of the 19th century. As in other scientific fields, there was a long pause between pioneering research and regular practice. Trained by book, taking no account of organic life, envisaging illness as a foreign element lodged in the sick person’s body, even tending to identify disease with sin, doctors prescribed, dosed, and bled, leaning on pedantic scholarship blended with primitive psychology. Therapy was concerned mainly with moderating symptoms. For this purpose mercury, digitalis, ipecac root, and, especially, opium were used; the latter was addictive but afforded relief from pain. The wisest navigators in this frozen sea were those who knew the limitations of their craft, like William Cullen, an Edinburgh physician who wrote: “We know nothing of the nature of contagion that can lead us to any measures for removing or correcting it. We know only its effects.”
To peer in imagination into the hovels of the poor or to walk down streets with open drains between houses decayed into crowded tenements, to visit shanty towns outside the walls, such as London’s Bethnal Green or Paris’s Faubourg Saint-Marcel, to learn that the latter city’s great open sewer was not covered until 1740, is to understand why mortality rates among the poor were so high. In town and country they lived in one or two rooms, often under the same roof as their animals, sleeping on straw, eating with their fingers or with a knife and spoon, washing infrequently, and tolerating lice and fleas. Outside, dung and refuse attracted flies and rodents. Luckier people, particularly in the north, might have had glass in their windows, but light was less important than warmth. In airless rooms, thick with the odours of dampness, defecation, smoke, and unwashed bodies, rheumatic or bronchial ailments might be the least of troubles. Deficient diet in childhood could mean rickety legs. Crude methods of delivery might cause permanent damage to both mothers and children who survived the attentions of the local midwife. The baby who survived (one in four died in the first year of life) was launched on a hazardous journey.
Some diseases, such as measles, seem to have been more virulent then than now. Typhus, spread by lice and fleas, and typhoid, waterborne, killed many. Tuberculosis was less common than it was to become. Cancer, though hard to recognize from contemporary accounts, was certainly rare: with relatively little smoking and with so many other diseases competing for the vulnerable body, that is not surprising. There were few illnesses, mental or physical, of the kind today caused by stress. Alcoholism was less common, despite the increase in the drinking of spirits that debauched city dwellers: cheap gin became a significant social problem in William Hogarth’s London. Abnormalities resulting from inbreeding were frequent in mountain valleys or on remote coasts.
Syphilis had been a growing menace since its introduction in the 16th century, and it was rife among prostitutes and their patrons: it was a common cause of blindness in children. Women, hapless victims of male-dominated morality, were frequently denied the chance of early mercury treatment because of the stigma attached to the disease. Scrofula, a gangrenous tubercular condition of the lymph glands, was known as “the king’s evil” because it was thought to be curable by the king’s touch: Louis XIV practiced the ceremony conscientiously. Malaria was endemic in some swampy areas. Though drainage schemes were taken up by enlightened sovereigns, prevention awaited inexpensive quinine. Nor could doctors do more than let smallpox take its course before the general introduction of vaccines. The plague, chiefly an urban disease that was deadliest in summer and dreaded as a sentence of death, could be combated only by measures of quarantine such as those enforced around Marseille in 1720, when it made its last appearance in France. Its last European visitation was at Messina in 1740. Deliverance from plague was not the least reason for Europeans of the Enlightenment to believe that they were entering a happier age.
Poverty
Though its extent might vary with current economic trends, poverty was a constant state. It is hard to define since material expectations vary among generations, social groups, and countries. If those with sufficient land or a wage large enough to allow for the replacement of tools and stock are held to be above the poverty line, then at least a quarter of Europe’s inhabitants were below it. They were the bas peuple whom the French engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban observed in the 1690s, “three-fourths of them…dressed in nothing but half-rotting, tattered linen”; a century later the philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet described those who “possess neither goods nor chattels [and are] destined to fall into misery at the least accident.” That could be illness or injury to a breadwinner, the failure of a crop or death of a cow, fire or flood, or the death or bankruptcy of an employer. Sometimes poverty showed itself in a whole community demoralized through sickness—as by malaria in Italy’s Pontine Marshes and goitre in Alpine valleys—or through the sapping of vitality when the young left to find work. Factors could be the unequal struggle with a poor soil or the exactions of a landowner: so the agricultural writer Arthur Young, at Combourg, wondered that the seigneur, “this Monsieur de Chateaubriant, …has nerves strung for such a residence amidst such filth and poverty.” Many were victims of an imprisoning socioeconomic regime, such as Castilian latifundia or Polish serfdom. A trade depression, a change of fashion, or an invention that made traditional manufacturing obsolete could bring destitution to busy cities such as Leiden, Lyon, Florence, or Norwich or to specialized communities such as the silk weavers of 18th-century England’s Spitalfields.
Taxes, on top of rents and dues, might be the decisive factor in the slide from sufficiency to destitution. A member of the Castilian Cortes of 1621 described the results: “Numerous places have become depopulated and disappeared from the map. …The vassals who formerly cultivated them now wander the roads with their wives and children.” Some had always been beyond the reach of the collector of taxes and rents, such as the bracchianti (day labourers) described by a Mantuan doctor as “without a scrap of land, without homes, lacking everything except a great brood of children…with a humble train of a few sheep and baggage consisting of a tattered bedstead, a mouldy cask, some rustic tools and a few pots and pans.”
Moneylenders were pivotal figures in village society. In southern Italy, merchants advanced money on wheat in contratti alla voce (oral agreements). The difference between the arranged price and that at harvest time, when the loan was repaid, represented their profit. Throughout Europe, land changed hands between lender and borrower: foreclosure and forfeit is an aspect of primitive capitalism often overlooked in the focus on trade and manufacturing. Society, even in long-settled areas, revealed a constant flux. As the 20th-century French historian Marc Bloch pointed out, hierarchy was always present in some degree, even in districts where sharecropping meant dependence on the owner’s seed and stock. In the typical village of western Europe, there were gradations between the well-to-do farmer, for whom others worked and whose strips would grow if he continued to be thrifty, and the day labourer, who lived on casual labour, hedging, ditching, thatching, repairing terraces, pruning vines, or making roads.
Urban poverty posed the biggest threat to governments. The situation became alarming after 1750 because the rise in population forced food prices up, while the employers’ advantage in the labour market depressed wages. Between 1730 and 1789, living costs in France rose by 62 percent; in Germany the price of rye for the staple black bread rose by up to 30 percent while wages fell. In Italian cities the poor depended on the authorities’ control of markets, prices, and food supplies. The riots of Genoa in 1746 show what was liable to happen if they failed. The causes of riots varied. In England, in 1766, grievances included the Irish, Roman Catholics, the press-gang, and gin taxes. The source was almost invariably poverty measured against a vague conception of a “fair wage,” fanned by rumours about hoarding and the creating of false prices. Paris was not uniquely dangerous. Before 1789, when the fury of the mob acquired political importance, the Gordon Riots (1780) had shown the way in which London could be taken over by a mob. The problem originated in rural poverty. Improvements in agriculture, such as enclosure, did not necessarily provide more work. Where there were no improvements or old abuses continued—such as the short-term leases of southern Italy, which encouraged tenants to over-crop and so exhaust the soil—the city provided the only hope. Naples, with the greatest profusion of beggars in the streets, was the most swollen of cities: at 438,000 in 1797, the population had risen by 25 percent in 30 years.
The typical relationship of mutual support was between poor hill country and large town; Edinburgh or Glasgow provided support for the Scots Highlanders, Vienna or Marseille for the Alpine poor. In Marseille a settled population of 100,000 supported 30,000 immigrants. Younger sons from the European fringes went for bread to the big armies: Croats to the Austrian, Finns to the Swedish, Scots and Irish everywhere. Women were usually left behind with the old men and children to look after the harvest in areas of seasonal migration. Domestic service drew many girls to towns with a large bourgeois population. Certain other occupations, notably lacemaking, were traditionally reserved for women. Miserably paid, young Frenchwomen risked their eyesight in fine work to earn enough for dowry and marriage. In a society where contraception was little known, except through abstinence, and irregular liaisons were frowned upon, the tendency to marry late was an indication of poverty. Almost half the women of western Europe married after 25; between 10 and 15 percent did not marry at all. The prevalence of abortion and infanticide is painfully significant: it was clearly not confined to unmarried couples. In 18th-century Brussels, more than 2,000 babies were abandoned annually to be looked after by charitable institutions. Repairs to a drain in Rennes in the 1720s revealed the tiny skeletons of 50 babies. Every major city had large numbers of prostitutes. There were approximately 20,000 in Paris, and, more surprisingly, in staid, episcopally governed Mainz, it was estimated that a third of the women in the poorer districts were prostitutes. Victims and outcasts, with the beggars and derelicts of crowded tenements, they helped create the amoral ambience in which criminals could expect tolerance and shelter.
Naturally associated with poverty, crime was also the product of war, even the very maintenance of armies. Desertion led to a man’s living an outlaw’s life. Despite ferocious penalties (having the nose and one ear cut off) the Prussian army lost 30,000 deserters between 1713 and 1740. The soldier’s life might not equip a man for settled work. It was hard, in unsettled times, to distinguish between overtly treasonous acts, as of leaders in revolts, and the persistent banditry that accompanied and outlasted them. Another gray area surrounded the arbitrary actions of officials—for example, billeting troops, sometimes, as in the dragonnades employed by Louis XIV against the Huguenots, for political reasons. Tax collection often involved violence and chicanery. The notorious Mandrin, whose prowess Tobias Smollett recorded, had also been a tax collector. Leader of a gang of some 500, he used his knowledge of the system to construct a regime of extortion. Eventually betrayed and broken on the wheel, he remained a local hero.
Banditry was a way of life on the Cossack and Balkan marches, but it was not only there that roads were unsafe. Barred by magistrates from the towns, gangs of beggars terrorized country districts. Children, pursuing victims with sorry tales, were keen trainees in the school of crime, picking pockets, cutting horsetails, soliciting for “sisters,” and abetting smuggling. The enlargement of the role of the state, with tariffs as the main weapon in protectionist strategies, encouraged evasion and smuggling. Just as few country districts were without robbers, few coasts were without smuggling gangs. A Norman seaman could make more by one clandestine Channel crossing than by a year’s fishing. Only the approval of the poor could make romantic figures of such criminals as Dick Turpin or Marion de Fouet.
The savagery of punishments was in proportion to the inadequacy of enforcement. To traditional methods—hanging, dismemberment, flogging, and branding—the possession of colonies added a new resort toward the end of the 18th century, that of transportation. By then, notably in the German and Italian lands of the Habsburg brothers Joseph II and Leopold II, who were influenced by arguments of reason and humanity, crime was fought at the source by measures to liberate trade, moderate punishments, and increase provision for the poor.
A central theme in Christian teaching was the blessed state of the poor. Holy poverty was the friars’ ideal; ardent reformers ensured that some returned to it. The ascetic Father Joseph, personal agent of Cardinal Richelieu, and Abraham Sancta Clara, preacher at the court of Leopold I, were representative figures. With the acceptance of poverty went awareness of a Christian’s duty to relieve it. Alms for the poor figured largely in wills and were a duty of most religious orders. Corporate charity had a larger place in Counter-Reformation Catholicism than in the thinking of Protestants, who stressed private virtues and endowments. The secularization of church property that accompanied the Reformation reduced levels of relief. However, meticulous church elders in Holland and parish overseers in England were empowered to raise poor rates. In Brandenburg a law of 1696 authorized parishes to provide work for the deserving poor and punishment for others. In Denmark the government pronounced in 1683 that the pauper had the legal right to relief: he could work in land reclamation or road building. Different was the approach of Vincent de Paul (1581–1660), whose instructions to the Sisters of Charity, founded to help “our lords the poor,” were both compassionate and practical. His idea of the hôpital général, a privately funded institution for the aged, crippled, and orphaned, was taken over in 1662: an edict commended the institution of hôpitaux throughout the land. Care for the poor was tinged with concern for their souls: beggars and prostitutes were carefully segregated.
With emphasis on the rights of the individual, the French Revolution did not lead to improvement in poor relief but to the reverse. Nor was the record of the Enlightenment impressive in this area. Impatient with tradition and anticlerical, the philosophes tended to be more fluent in criticism of existing systems than practical in proposals for better ones. The new breed of economists, the physiocrats, were opposed to any interference with the laws of nature, especially to any support that did not show a productive return. The threat of social disorder did alarm the upper class, however, and contributed to the revival in Britain of Evangelical religion, which stressed elementary education for the poor, reform of prisons, and abolition of the slave trade and slavery. Meanwhile, the Holy Roman emperor Joseph II had harnessed new funds for orphanages, hospitals, medical schools, and special institutions for the blind and the insane. In 1785 the Vienna General Hospital had 2,000 beds. There was provision for deprived children of all sorts. Graduated charges and free medical care for paupers were among features of a policy that represented the utilitarian spirit at its most humane.
The organization of society
Corporate society
The political history of Europe is inevitably the history of privileged minorities. In states of the eastern and northern fringes, “the political nation”—comprising those individuals who had some notion of loyalties beyond the parish and civil duties, if only at a local level, at the occasional diet, or in the army—hardly extended beyond the ranks of the gentry. Where they were numerous (a tenth of the population in Poland, for example), many would maintain themselves as clients of a magnate; even when theoretically independent, they would be likely to envisage the state in terms of sectional interest. The political life of England and Holland and the growing administration of France, Spain, and some German states opened doors to more sophisticated citizenship. Generally, however, political concerns were beyond the ken of peasants or ordinary townspeople for whom the state existed remotely, in the person of the prince, or directly, in that of the tax collector or billeting officer. It does not follow that it is futile to portray the people as a whole. First, however, it is necessary to identify certain characteristics of their world.
It was a Christian society which accepted, in and over the animist world where magic held many in thrall, the sovereignty of God and his laws. A priest might use folklore to convey the Christian message and expect allegiance so long as he endorsed paramount loyalties to family and parish. He might lose them if he objected too strongly to vendetta, charivari, and other forms of collective violence or simply to his parishioners’ preference for tavern over church. Catholic or Protestant, he might preach against superstition, but he was as likely to denounce the witch as to curb her persecutors. He might see no end to his war against ignorance and sin; and he might falter in assurance of the love of God for suffering humanity. No more than any layperson was he immune to doubt and despair. But the evidence is unambiguous: the framework was hardly shaken. It was Christian doubt or Christian pessimism, all under the judgment of God. The priest in the confessional or the Protestant minister, Bible in hand, could look to that transcendent idea to support his vision of heaven’s joys or hell’s torments, of the infinite glory of God and the angels as portrayed by artists in the new Baroque style and of the machinations of the Devil and his minions.
The churches were the grandest expression of the corporate ideal, which shaped life at all levels and which can be seen in the Christian rites invariably used to enforce rules and cement fellowship. It also informed the guilds, corporations, and colleges that served the needs of craftsmen and tradesmen, inhabitants of cities, and scholars. The idea that society was composed of orders was given perhaps excessively precise form by the lawyer Charles Loyseau in his Traité des Ordres (1610), but it serves to stress the significance of precedence. It was assumed that society was hierarchical and that each order had divine sanction. Wherever man found himself, at prayer or study, under arms or at work, there were collective rights and duties that had evolved as a strategy for survival. With them went the sense of belonging to a family of mutual obligations that had been a civilizing aspect of feudal society.
Feudalism, as a set of political arrangements, was dead by 1600. But aspects of feudal society survived, notably in the countryside. Various forms of personal service were owed by peasants to landowners and, in armies and courts, assumption of office and terms of service reflected the dealings of earlier times when power lay in the ownership of land. At the highest, providing cohesion in the intermediate phase between feudal and bureaucratic regimes, the patron-client relationship contained an idea of service that was nearer to medieval allegiance than to modern contract. Liveries might be out of use, but loyalty was owed to “my lord and master”: a powerful man such as Richelieu could thus describe his service to a greater patron, Louis XIII, and would expect the same from his dependents. Envisaging such a society, the reader must dismiss the idea of natural rights, which was not current until the last decades of the 18th century. Rights accrued by virtue of belonging, in two ways: first, as the subject of a prince or equivalent authority—for example, magistrates of a free town or the bishop of an ecclesiastical principality; second, as the member of a community or corporation, in which one had rights depending on the rank into which one was born or on one’s craft or profession. Whatever the formula by which such rights were expressed, it would be defended with tenacity as the means of ensuring the best possible life.
Christian, corporate, feudal: each label goes only some way to defining elusive mentalities in preindustrial society. The elements of organization that they represent look artificial unless the domestic basis is taken into account. The family was the lifeblood of all associations, giving purpose and identity to people who were rarely in crowds and knew nothing like the large, impersonal organization of modern times. To stress the family is not to sentimentalize it but to provide a key to understanding a near-vanished society. The intimacies of domestic life could not anesthetize against pain and hunger: life was not softened and death was a familiar visitor. Children were especially vulnerable but enjoyed no special status. Valued as an extra pair of hands or deplored as an extra mouth to feed, the child belonged to no privileged realm of play and protection from life’s responsibilities. The family might be extended by numerous relations living nearby; in Mediterranean lands it was common for grandparents or brothers and sisters, married or single, to share a house or farm. Especially in more isolated communities, inbreeding added genetic hazards to the struggle for life. Everywhere the hold of the family, and of the father over the family, strengthened by laws of property and inheritance, curtained life’s narrow windows from glimpses of a freer world. It affected marriage, since land, business, and dowry were customarily of more weight than the feelings of the bride and groom. But into dowries and ceremonies long saved for would go the display required to sustain the family name. Pride of family was one aspect of the craving for office. Providing status as well as security in a hierarchical society, it was significantly weaker in the countries, notably the United Provinces and England, where trading opportunities were greatest.
Nobles and gentlemen
Between persistent poverty and the prevailing aristocratic spirit several connections can be made. The strong appeal of noble status and values was a force working generally against the pursuit of wealth and the investment that was to lead, precociously and exceptionally in Britain, to the Industrial Revolution. In France a nobleman could lose rank (dérogeance) by working, which inhibited him from engaging in any but a few specified enterprises. The typical relationship between landed gentleman and peasant producer was still feudal; whether represented by a range of rights and dues or by the more rigorous form of serfdom, it encouraged acceptance of the status quo in agriculture. Every state in Europe, except some Swiss cantons, recognized some form of nobility whose privileges were protected by law. Possession of land was a characteristic mark and aspiration of the elites.
The use of the two terms nobleman and gentleman indicates the difficulty of definition. The terms were loosely used to mark the essential distinction between members of an upper class and the rest. In France, above knights and esquires without distinctive title, ranged barons, viscounts, counts, and marquises, until the summit was reached with dukes and princes of the blood. In Britain, by contrast, only peers of the realm, whether entitled duke, marquess, earl, or baron, had corporate status: numbering under 200, they enjoyed few special privileges beyond membership of the House of Lords. The gentry, however, with assured social position, knighthoods, armorial bearings, and estates, were the equivalent of Continental nobles. With the nobility, they owned more than three-quarters of the land: in contrast, in France by 1789 the nobility owned barely a third. In northern and eastern Europe, where the social structure was generally simpler than in the west, nobles—dvoriane in Russia, szlachta in Poland and Hungary—were numerous. In these countries, many of those technically noble were in reality of little importance and might even, like the “barefoot szlachta,” have no land.
Such differences apart, there were rights and privileges that most Continental nobles possessed and values to which most subscribed. The right to wear a sword, to bear a crested coat of arms, to retain a special pew in church, to enjoy such precedence on formal occasions as rank prescribed, and to have if necessary a privileged form of trial would all seem to the noble inherent and natural. As landowner he enjoyed rights over peasants, not least as judge in his own court. In France, parts of Germany, Italy, and Spain, even if he did not own the land, he could as lord still benefit from feudal dues. He could hope for special favours from his sovereign or other patron in the form of a pension or office. There were vital exemptions, as from billeting soldiers and—most valuable—from taxation. The effectiveness of governments can be measured by the extent to which they breached this principle: in France, for example, in the 18th century by the dixième and vingtième taxes, effectively on income; belatedly, in Poland, where nobles paid no tax until the chimney tax of 1775. Generally they could expect favourable treatment: special schools, privileges at university, preferment in the church, commissions in the army. They could assume that a sovereign, while encroaching on their rights, would yet share their values. Richelieu’s policy exemplifies such ambivalence. A noble himself, Richelieu sought to promote the interests of his class while directing it toward royal service and clipping the wings of the over-powerful. Frederick II the Great of Prussia was not concerned about faction. Since “most commoners think meanly,” he believed that nobles were best suited to serve in the government and the army. Such admiration for noble virtues did not usually extend to the political role. The decline of Continental estates and diets, with the growth of bureaucracies, largely recruited from commoners, did not mean, however, even in the west, that nobility was in retreat before the rise of the bourgeoisie. Through social preeminence, nobles maintained—and in the 18th century even tightened—their hold on the commanding heights in church and state.
Within all countries there was a distinction between higher and lower levels within the caste: in some, not only between those who were titled and the rest but, as in Spain and France, between titulos and grandees, a small group upon which royal blood or the achievement of some ancestor conferred privileges of a self-perpetuating kind. “The grandeeship of the counts of Lemos was made by God and time,” observed the head of the family to the new Bourbon king Philip V. No less pretentious were the Condés or the Montmorencys of France. There was a tendency everywhere to the aggrandizement of estates through arranged marriage, a sovereign’s favour, or the opportunities provided by war, as in Bohemia after the suppression of the revolt of 1618 or in England with the rise of the Whig families of Russell and Cavendish. In Britain, the principle of primogeniture ensured succession to the eldest son (promoting social mobility as younger sons made their way in professions or trades). Peter I the Great of Russia legislated for the entail (1714), but without success: it was abandoned by Anna (1731) in favour of the traditional law of inheritance. However, mayorazgo in Castile and fideicommissum in parts of Italy kept vast estates together. Where the colonization of new lands was not restrained by central government, families like the Radziwiłłs and Wiśniowieckis of Poland acquired huge estates. The szlachta of Hungary also cherished privileges as descendants of warriors and liberators. There, Prince Miklós Esterházy, patron of a private orchestra and of Joseph Haydn, excelled all by the end of the 17th century with his annual revenue of 700,000 florins. In Russia, where wealth was measured in serfs, Prince Cherkanski was reckoned in 1690 to have 9,000 peasant households.
Status increasingly signified economic circumstances. In France, where subtle nuances escaped the outsider, one trend is revealing. The old distinction between “sword” and “gown” lost much importance. Age of title came to mean more for antiquarians and purists than for men of fashion who would not scorn a mésalliance if it “manured the land.” Most daughters of 18th-century tax farmers married the sons of nobles. The class was open to new creations, usually through purchase of an office conferring nobility. When, in a regulation of 1760, the year 1400 was made a test of antiquity, fewer than 1,000 families were eligible. The tendency was toward the formation of a plutocracy. Nobles came to dominate the church and the army, even to penetrate government, from which it had been the policy of the early Bourbons to exclude them. The noble order numbered about 120,000 families by 1789. By then the nobles, particularly those of the country who seldom came to court, had brought their rearguard action to a climax to preserve their privileges—for example, by Ségur’s ordinance of 1781, reserving army commissions to nobles of at least four generations. This “feudal reaction” contributed to the problems of government in the years before the Revolution. In Russia, at the height of the conservative reaction that had already secured the abolition (1762) of the service obligation imposed by Peter I, Catherine II the Great was forced to abandon liberal reforms. The Pugachov rising (1773–74) alerted landowners to the dangers of serfdom, but it was reckoned that three-fifths of all landowners owned fewer than 20 serfs. The census of 1687 showed that there were half a million nobles in Spain. But hidalguia might mean little more than a Spaniard’s estimation of himself. Without a substantial señorio (estate), the hidalgo was insignificant.
When “living nobly” meant not working and hidalgos or szlachta attached themselves to a great house for a coat and a loaf, faction became more dangerous and aristocratic interests more resistant to change. It took courage for a sovereign to tackle the entrenched power of nobility in diets, as did the Habsburg queen Maria Theresa (1740–80) in her Austrian and Bohemian lands. Nowhere in Europe did nobles take themselves more seriously, but they were the readier to accept curtailment of their political rights because they enjoyed a healthy economic position. Vienna’s cosmopolitan culture and Baroque palaces were evidence of not only the success of the regime in drawing nobles to the capital but also the rise in manorial rents. Nobles played a decorative role in the most ceremonious court in 18th-century Europe. Charles VI (1711–40) had provided 40,000 posts for noble clients. Maria Theresa, concerned about expense, reduced the number of chamberlains to 1,500. It was left to her son Joseph II to attack noble privileges at every point, right up to the abolition of serfdom. There was a correlation between the advance of government and the curtailment of noble privilege. Inevitably it was an uneven process, depending much on the resolution of a ruler. In Sweden it was to the poor gentlemen, a high proportion of its 10,000 nobles, that Charles XI had appealed in his successful promotion of absolutist reforms in the 1680s. After 1718 the same conservative force militated against royal government. The aristocratic reaction of the age of liberty saw the reassertion of the traditional principle that the nobility were the guardians of the country’s liberties. So the Swedish upper class arrived at the position of their British counterparts and obtained that power, not divorced from responsibility, which was envied and extolled by the philosophes who regretted its absence from France and sought consolation in the works of Montesquieu. A central idea of his L’Esprit des lois (1748; The Spirit of Laws) was that noble privilege was the surest guarantee of the laws against despotism. That could not be said of Prussia, although a Junker’s privilege was wedded to a subject’s duty. In exchange for the loss of political rights, Junkers had been confirmed in their social and fiscal privileges: with the full rigour of serfdom (Leibeigenschaft) and rights of jurisdiction over tenants went a secure hold over local government. Under the pressure of war and following his own taste for aristocratic manners, Frederick II taught them to regard the army or civil service as a career. But Frederick disappointed the philosophes who expected him to protect the peasantry. The nobles meanwhile acquired a pride in militarism that was to be potent in the creation of the 19th-century German state. The class became more numerous but remained relatively poor: Junkers often had to sell land to supplement meagre pay. Frederick’s working nobility sealed the achievements of his capable predecessors. The price paid indicates the difficulties inherent in any attempt to reconcile the interests of the dominant class to the needs of society.
Nobility also had a civilizing role. Europe would be immeasurably poorer without the music, literature, and architecture of the age of aristocracy. The virtues of classical taste were to some extent those of aristocracy: splendour restrained by formal rules and love of beauty uninhibited by utilitarian considerations. There was much that was absurd in the pretensions of some patrons; illusions of grandeur are rarely the best basis for the conceiving of great art. The importance of bourgeois patronage should not be overlooked, otherwise no account would be taken of Holland’s golden age. Where taste was unaffected by the need for display (as could not be said of Louis XIV’s Versailles) or where a wise patron put his trust in the reputedly best architect, art could triumph. Civilizing trends were prominent, as in England, where there was a free intellectual life. New money, as lavished by the duke of Chandos, builder of the great house of Canons and patron of the composer George Frideric Handel, could be fruitful. Also important was the fusion of aristocratic style with ecclesiastical patronage, as could occur where noblemen enjoyed the best preferment and abbots lived like nobles: the glories of the German Baroque at Melk, Ottobeuren, and Vierzehnheiligen speak as much of aristocracy as of the Christian Gospel.
In contrast with Sweden, where, in the 18th century, talent was recognized and the scientists Carolus Linnaeus and Emanuel Swedenborg were ennobled, or France, where the plutocracy encountered the Enlightenment without discomfort, the most sterile ground for aristocratic culture was to be found where there was an enforced isolation, as in Spain or Europe’s poor marches and remotest western shores. Visitors to Spain were startled by the ignorance of the men and the passivity of the women. Life in Poland, Hungary, and Ireland resolved itself for many of the gentry into a simple round of hunting and carousing. The urban aspect of noble culture needs stress, which is not surprising when its Classical inspiration is recalled. Even in England, where educated men favoured country life and did not despise the country town, society would have been poorer without the intense activity of London. All the greater was the importance of the capital cities—Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Budapest, and Dublin—in countries that might not otherwise have generated fine art or architecture.
The aristocratic spirit transcended frontiers. For the nobleman Europe was the homeland. Italian plasterers and painters, German musicians, and French cabinetmakers traveled for high commissions. There were variations reflecting local traditions: the Baroque style was interpreted distinctively in Austria, Italy, Spain, and France. But high style reveals certain underlying principles and convictions. The same is true of the intellectual life of Europe, reflecting as it did two main sources, French and English. It was especially to France that the two most powerful rulers of eastern Europe, Frederick II and Catherine II, looked for mentors in thought and style. The French language, deliberately purified from the time of Richelieu and the foundation of the Academy, was well adapted to the clear expression of ideas. The salons stimulated the discussion of ideas and engendered a distinctive style. Feminine insights there contributed to a rational culture that was also responsive to the claims of sensibility.
The bourgeoisie
The European bourgeoisie presents faces so different that common traits can be discerned only at the simplest level: the possession of property with the desire and means to increase it, emancipation from past precepts about investment, a readiness to work for a living, and a sense of being superior to town workers or peasants. With their social values—sobriety, discretion, and economy—went a tendency to imitate the style of their social superiors. In France the expectations of the bourgeoisie were roused by education and relative affluence to the point at which they could be a revolutionary force once the breakdown of royal government and its recourse to a representative assembly had given them the voice they had lacked. Everywhere the Enlightenment was creating a tendency to be critical of established institutions (notably, in Roman Catholic countries, the church), together with a hunger for knowledge as a tool of progress.
Such dynamic characteristics, conducive to social mobility, should not obscure the essential feature of bourgeois life: conservativism within a corporate frame. In 1600 a town of more than 100,000 would have been thought enormous: only London, Paris, Naples, Sevilla (Seville), Venice, Rome, and Constantinople came into that class. Half in Asia but enmeshed in the European economic system, Constantinople was unique: it was a megalopolis, a gigantic consumer of the produce of subject lands. London’s growth was more significant for the future: it was a seaport and capital, but with a solid base in manufacturing, trade, and finance. Like Naples, it was a magnet for the unemployed and restless. In 1700 there were only 48 towns in Europe with a population of more than 40,000; all were regarded as important places. Even a smaller city might have influence in the country, offering a range of services and amenities; such was Amiens, with 30,000 inhabitants and 36 guilds, including bleachers, dyers, and finishers of the cloth that was woven in nearby villages but sent far afield. Most towns had fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, and a fair number only about 1,000; most towns remained static or declined. Some grew, however: between 1600 and 1750 the proportion of the population living in towns of more than 20,000 doubled from 4 to 8 percent, representing about half the total urban population.
A universal phenomenon was the growth of capital cities, which benefited from the expansion of government, particularly if, as was usual, the court was within the city. Growth could acquire its own momentum, irrespective of the condition of the country: besides clients and servants of all kinds, artisans, shopkeepers, and other providers of services swelled the ranks. Warsaw’s size doubled during Poland’s century of distress to stand at 120,000 by 1772. St. Petersburg, in 1700 a swamp, acquired 218,000 inhabitants by 1800. Berlin, the simple electoral capital of some 6,000 inhabitants in 1648, rose with the success of the Hohenzollerns to a population of 150,000 by 1786. By then the population of Vienna—home of the imperial court, a growing professional class, a renowned university and other schools, and hospitals—had reached 220,000. The population of Turin, capital of relatively small Savoy, also doubled in the 18th century. Rome did not suffer too obviously from the retreat of the popes from a leading political role, but the Holy City (140,000 inhabitants in 1700) was top-heavy, with little in the way of manufacturing. All these cities owed their growth to their strategic place in the government rather than to their economic importance.
Other cities grew around specialized industries or from opportunities for a wider trade than was possible where markets were limited by the range of horse and mule. Growth was likely to be slow where, as in Lyon, Rouen, and Dresden, production continued to be along traditional lines or, in ports such as Danzig, Königsberg, or Hamburg, where trading patterns remained essentially the same. Enterprise, by contrast, brought remarkable growth in Britain, where Manchester and Birmingham both moved up from modest beginnings to the 100,000-population mark during the 18th century. Atlantic ports thrived during the same period with the increase in colonial trade: into this category fall Bordeaux, Nantes, Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow. Marseille recovered quickly from the plague of 1720 and grew on the grain import trade; more typical of Mediterranean cities were stagnant Genoa, Venice, and Palermo, where Austrian policy in the 18th century, favouring Milan, was an adverse factor.
A typical urban experience, where there was no special factor at work, was therefore one of stability. The burgher of 1600 would have felt at home in the town of his descendant five generations later. There might have been calamities along the way: at worst, siege or assault, plague, a particularly serious recession, or a fire, such as destroyed Rennes in 1720. Some building or refacing of houses would have occurred, mainly within the walls. In more fortunate cities, where there was continuing economic stability or strong corporate identity—as in the siege victims La Rochelle (1628) or Magdeburg (1631)—recovery even from the worst of war experiences could be rapid. The professions, notably the church and law, were tough, having large interests in the town and in the property in and around it. Guild discipline, inhibiting in fair years, was a strength in foul ones. Not all towns were so resilient, however. Some Polish towns never recovered from the effects of the Great Northern War; others throughout northern and eastern Europe were victims of the rise of the self-sufficient estate, which supplied needs such as brewing that the town had previously offered. Some Italian and Spanish towns, such as Cremona, Toledo, and Burgos, were affected by the decline of manufacturing and the shift of trade to the Atlantic economies.
It was possible for a town that had a special importance in the sphere of church or law (Angers, Salzburg, or Trier, for example) to enjoy a quiet prosperity, but there was a special kind of deadness about towns that had no other raison d’être than to be host to numerous clergy. Valladolid contained 53 religious houses “made up principally of consumers” according to a report of 1683. Most numerous were the quiet places that had never grown from their basic function of providing a market. England’s archaic electoral system provided graphic evidence of such decay, leaving its residue of “rotten boroughs.”
Between these extremes lay the mass of towns of middling size, each supervised by a mayor and corporation, dignified by one large church and probably several others serving ward or parish (and, if Catholic, by a religious house of some kind), and including a law court, guildhall, school, and, of course, market. With its bourgeois crust of clerics, lawyers, officials, merchants, and shopkeepers and master craftsmen catering for special needs—fine fabrics, clothing, hats, wigs, gloves, eyeglasses, engravings if not paintings, china, silver, glassware, locks, and clocks—the city was a world apart from the peasant. The contrast was emphasized by the walls, the gates that closed at night, the cobbles or setts of the roads, the different speech and intonation, the well-fed look of some citizens, and above all the fine houses, suggesting as much an ordered way of life as the wealth that supported it. The differences were blurred, however, by the pursuits of the urban landowners; by ubiquitous animals, whether bound for market or belonging to the citizens; by the familiar poverty and filth of the streets and the reek of the tannery and the shambles.
It is easier to recreate the physical frame than the mentalities of townspeople. Letters, journals, government reports and statistics, wills, and contracts reveal salient features. The preference for safe kinds of investment could be exploited by governments for revenue, as notably by the French: in 1661 Colbert found that, of 46,000 offices of justice and finance, 40,000 were unnecessary. There was an inclination to buy land for status and security. Around cities like Dijon, most of the surrounding land was owned by the bourgeois or the recently ennobled. Custom and ceremony were informed by a keen sense of hierarchy, as in minutely ordered processions. The instinct to regulate was stiffened by the need to restrain servants and journeymen and to ensure that apprentices waited for the reward of their training. Religion maintained its hold more firmly in the smaller towns, while the law was respected as the mainstay of social order and the road to office in courts or administration even where, as in Italy, it was palpably corruptible. There were certain communal dreads, military requisitioning and billeting high among them. There was generally a resolve to ward off beggars, to maintain grain stores, to close the gates to the famished when crops failed, and to enforce quarantine.
Within towns, popular forms of government were abandoned as power was monopolized by groups of wealthy men. This process can be studied in the Dutch towns in the years after 1648 when regents gained control. Everywhere elites were composed of those who had no business role. Among other labels for this period, when a profession seemed to be more desirable than trade, “a time of lawyers” might be appropriate. Trained to contend, responsive to new ideas, at least dipping into the waters of the Enlightenment, those lawyers who were cheated, by sheer numbers, of the opportunity to rise might become a dissident element, especially in countries where political avenues were blocked and the economy was growing too slowly to sustain them. Sometimes the state moved in to control municipal affairs, as in France where intendants were given wide powers toward the end of Louis XIV’s reign. In Spain, towns came into the hands of local magnates.
A more serious threat to the old urban regime lay in another area where discontents bred radicalism: the guilds. Not until the French Revolution and the radical actions of Joseph II of Austria were guilds anywhere abolished. They had long displayed a tendency to oligarchic control by hereditary masters. They became more restrictive in the face of competition and growing numbers of would-be members and so drove industries, particularly those suited to dispersed production, back to the countryside. For this reason, such cities as Leiden, Rouen, Cologne, and Nürnberg actually lost population in the 18th century. To compensate for falling production, masters tended to put pressure on the relatively unskilled level, where there were always more workers than work. Journeymen’s associations sought to improve their situation, sometimes through strikes. The building trade was notorious for its secret societies. The decline of the guilds was only one symptom of the rise in population. Another was the rise in urban poverty, as pressure on resources led to price increases that outstripped wages. In late 18th-century Berlin, which was solidly based on bureaucracy, garrison, and numerous crafts, a third of the population still lacked regular work. The plight of the poor was emphasized by the affluence of increasing numbers of fellow citizens. However class conflict is interpreted, it is clear that its basic elements were by that time present and active.
The peasantry
In 1700 only 15 percent of Europe’s population lived in towns, but that figure concealed wide variations: at the two extremes by 1800 were Britain with 40 percent and Russia with 4 percent. Most Europeans were peasants, dependent on agriculture. The majority of them lived in nucleated settlements and within recognized boundaries, those of parish or manor, but some, in the way characteristic of the hill farmer, lived in single farms or hamlets. The type of settlement reflected its origins: pioneers who had cleared forests or drained swamps, Germans who had pressed eastward into Slav lands, Russians who had replaced conquered Mongols, Spaniards who had expelled the Moors. Each brought distinctive characteristics. Discounting the nomad fringe, there remains a fundamental difference between serfs and those who had more freedom, whether as owners or tenants paying some form of rent but both liable to seigneurial dues. There were about one million serfs in eastern France and some free peasants in Russia, so the pattern is untidy; but broadly it represents the difference between eastern and western Europe.
The Russian was less attached to a particular site than his western counterparts living in more densely populated countries and had to be held down by a government determined to secure taxes and soldiers. The imposition of serfdom was outlined in the Ulozhenie, the legal code of 1649, which included barschina (forced labour). One consequence was the decline of the mir, the village community, with its fellowship and practical services; another was the tightening of the ties of mutual interest that bound tsar and landowner. Poles, Germans (mainly those of the east and north), Bohemians, and Hungarians were subject to a serfdom less extreme only in that they were treated as part of the estate and could not be sold separately; the Russian serf, who could, was more akin to a slave. Russian state peasants, an increasingly numerous class in the 18th century, were not necessarily secure; they were sent out to farm new lands. Catherine the Great transferred 800,000 serfs to private ownership. The serf could not marry, move, or take up a trade without his lord’s leave. He owed labour (robot) in the Habsburg lands for at least three days a week and dues that could amount to 20 percent of his produce. The Thirty Years’ War hastened the process of subjection, already fed by the west’s demand for grain; peasants returning to ruined homesteads found that their rights had vanished. The process was resisted by some rulers, notably those of Saxony and Brunswick: independent peasants were a source of revenue. Denmark saw an increase in German-style serfdom in the 18th century, but most Swedish peasants were free—their enemies were climate and hunger, rather than the landowner. Uniquely, they had representation in their own Estate in the Riksdag.
Through much of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal there was some form of rent or sharecropping. Feudalism survived in varying degrees of rigour, with an array of dues and services representing seigneurial rights. It was a regime that about half of Europe’s inhabitants had known since the Middle Ages. In England all but a few insignificant forms had gone, though feudal spirit lingered in deference to the squire. Enclosures were reducing the yeoman to the condition of a tenant farmer or, for most, a dependent, landless labourer. Although alodial tenures (absolute ownership) ensured freedom from dues in some southern provinces, France provides the best model for understanding the relationship of lord and peasant. The seigneur was generally, but not invariably, noble: a seigneury could be bought by a commoner. It had two parts. The domaine was the house with its grounds: there were usually a church and a mill, but not necessarily fields and woods, for those might have been sold. The censives, lands subject to the seigneur, still owed dues even if no longer owned by him. The cens, paid annually, was significant because it represented the obligations of the peasant: free to buy and sell land, he still endured burdens that varied from the trivial or merely vexatious to those detrimental to good husbandry. They were likely to include banalités, monopoly rights over the mill, wine press, or oven; saisine and lods et ventes, respectively a levy on the assets of a censitaire on death and a purchase tax on property sold; champart, a seigneurial tithe, payable in kind; monopolies of hunting, shooting, river use, and pigeon rearing; the privilege of the first harvest, for example, droit de banvin, by which the seigneur could gather his grapes and sell his wine first; and the corvées, obligatory labour services. Seigneurial rule had benevolent aspects, and justice in the seigneurial court could be even-handed; seigneurs could be protectors of the community against the state’s taxes and troops. But the regime was damaging, as much to the practice of farming as to the life of the peasants, who were harassed and schooled in resistance and concealment. To identify an 18th-century feudal reaction—as some historians have called the tendency to apply business principles to the management of dues—is not to obscure the fact that for many seigneurs the system was becoming unprofitable. By 1789 in most provinces there was little hesitation: the National Assembly abolished feudal dues by decree at one sitting because the peasants had already taken the law into their own hands. Some rights were won back, but there could be no wholesale restoration.
Besides priest or minister, the principal authority in most peasants’ lives was that of the lord. The collective will of the community also counted for much, as in arrangements for plowing, sowing, and reaping, and even in some places the allocation of land. The range of the peasant’s world was that of a day’s travel on foot or, more likely, by donkey, mule, or pony. He would have little sense of a community larger than he could see or visit. His struggle against nature or the demands of his superiors was waged in countless little pockets. When peasants came together in insurgent bands, as in Valencia in 1693, there was likely to be some agitation or leadership from outside the peasant community—in that case from José Navarro, a surgeon. There needed to be some exceptional provocation, like the new tax that roused Brittany in 1675. After the revolt had been suppressed, the parlement of Rennes was exiled to a smaller town for 14 years: clearly government understood the danger of bourgeois complicity. Rumour was always potent, especially when tinged with fantasy, as in Stenka Razin’s rising in southern Russia, which evolved between 1667 and 1671 from banditry into a vast protest against serfdom. Generally, cooperation between villages was less common than feuding, the product of centuries of uneasy proximity and conflict over disputed lands.
The peasant’s life was conditioned by mundane factors: soil, water supplies, communications, and above all the site itself in relation to river, sea, frontier, or strategic route. The community could be virtually self-sufficient. Its environment was formed by what could be bred, fed, sown, gathered, and worked within the bounds of the parish. Fields and beasts provided food and clothing; wood came from the fringe of wasteland. Except in districts where stone was available and easy to work, houses were usually made of wood or a cob of clay and straw. Intended to provide shelter from the elements, they can be envisaged as a refinement of the barn, with certain amenities for their human occupants: hearth, table, and benches with mats and rushes strewn on a floor of beaten earth or rough stone. Generally there would be a single story, with a raised space for beds and an attic for grain. For his own warmth and their security the peasant slept close to his animals, under the same roof. Cooking required an iron pot, sometimes the only utensil named in peasant inventories. Meals were eaten off wood or earthenware. Fuel was normally wood, which was becoming scarce in some intensively cultivated parts of northern Europe, particularly Holland, where much of the land was reclaimed from sea or marsh. Peat and dried dung also were used, but rarely coal. Corn was ground at the village mill, a place of potential conflict: only one man had the necessary expertise, and his clients were poorly placed to bargain. Women and girls spun and wove for the itinerant merchants who supplied the wool or simply for the household, for breeches, shirts, tunics, smocks, and gowns. Clothes served elemental needs: they were usually thick for protection against damp and cold and loose-fitting for ease of movement. Shoes were likely to be wooden clogs, as leather was needed for harnesses. Farm implements—plows (except for the share), carts, harrows, and many of the craftsman’s tools—were made of wood, seasoned, split or rough-hewn. Few possessed saws; in Russia they were unknown before 1700. Iron was little used and was likely to be of poor quality. Though it might be less true of eastern Europe where, as in Bohemia, villages tended to be smaller, the community would usually have craftsmen—a smith or a carpenter, for example—to satisfy most needs. More intricate skills were provided by traveling tinkers.
The isolated villager might hear of the outside world from such men. Those living around the main routes would fare better and gather news, at least indirectly, from merchants, students, pilgrims, and government officials or, less reputably, from beggars, gypsies, or deserters (a numerous class in most states). He might buy broadsheets, almanacs, and romances, produced by enterprising printers at centres such as Troyes, to be hawked around wherever there were a few who could read. So were kept alive what became a later generation’s fairy tales, along with the magic and astrology that they were not reluctant to believe. Inn and church provided the setting for business, gossip, and rumour. Official reports and requirements were posted and village affairs were conducted in the church. The innkeeper might benefit from the cash of wayfarers but like others who provided a service, he relied chiefly on the produce of his own land. Thus, the rural economy consisted of innumerable self-sufficient units incapable of generating adequate demand for the development of large-scale manufactures. Each cluster of communities was isolated within its own market economy, proud, and suspicious of outsiders. Even where circumstances fostered liberty, peasants were pitifully inadequate in finding original solutions to age-old problems but were well-versed in strategies of survival, for they could draw on stores of empirical wisdom. They feared change just as they feared the night for its unknown terrors. Their customs and attitudes were those of people who lived on the brink: more babies might be born but there would be no increase in the food supply.
In the subsistence economy there was much payment and exchange in kind; money was hoarded for the occasional purchase, to the frustration of tax collectors and the detriment of economic growth. Demand was limited by the slow or nonexistent improvement in methods of farming. There was no lack of variety in the agricultural landscape. Between the temporary cultivation of parts of Russia and Scandinavia, where slash-and-burn was encouraged by the extent of forest land, and the rotation of cereal and fodder crops of Flanders and eastern England, 11 different methods of tillage have been identified. Most common was some version of the three-course rotation that Arthur Young denounced when he traveled in France in 1788. He observed the subdivision and wide dispersal of holdings that provided a further obstacle to the diversification of crops and selective breeding. The loss of land by enclosure pauperized many English labourers. But the development in lowland England of the enclosed, compact economic unit—the central feature of the agrarian revolution—enabled large landowners to prosper and invest and small farmers to survive. They were not trapped, like many Continental peasants, between the need to cultivate more land and the declining yields of their crops, which followed from the loss of pasture and of fertilizing manure. Without capital accumulation and with persisting low demand for goods, economic growth was inhibited. The work force was therefore tied to agriculture in numbers that depressed wage rates, discouraged innovation, and tempted landowners to compensate by some form of exploitation of labour, rights, and dues. Eighteenth-century reformers condemned serfdom and other forms of feudalism, but they were as much the consequence as the cause of the agricultural malaise.
The economic environment
Innovation and development
Every country had challenges to overcome before its resources could be developed. The possession of a coastline with safe harbours or of a navigable river was an important asset and, as by Brandenburg and Russia, keenly fought for; so were large mineral deposits, forests, and fertile soil. But communications were primitive and transport slow and costly even in favoured lands. Napoleon moved at the same speed as Julius Caesar. By horse, coach, or ship, it was reckoned that 24 hours was necessary to travel 60 miles. In one area, however, innovation had proceeded at such a pace as to justify terms such as “intellectual” or “scientific” revolution; yet there remained a yawning gap between developments in theoretical science and technology. In the age of Newton the frontiers of science were shifting fast, and there was widespread interest in experiment and demonstration, but one effect was tocomplete the separation of a distinctive intellectual elite: the more advanced the ideas, the more difficult their transmission and application. There was a movement of thought rather than a scientific movement, a culture of inquiry rather than of enterprise. Only in the long term was the one to lead to the other, through the growing belief that material progress was possible. Meanwhile, advances were piecemeal, usually the work of individuals, often having no connection with business. Missing was not only that association of interests that characterizes industrial society but also the educational ground: schools and universities were wedded to traditional courses. Typical inventors of the early industrial age were untutored craftsmen, such as Richard Arkwright, James Watt, or John Wilkinson. Between advances in technology there could be long delays.
As those names suggest, Britain was the country that experienced the breakthrough to higher levels of production. The description “Industrial Revolution” is misleading if applied to the economy as a whole, but innovations in techniques and organization led to such growth in iron, woolens, and, above all, cotton textiles in the second half of the 18th century that Britain established a significant lead. It was sustained by massive investment and by the wars following the French Revolution, which shut the Continent off from developments that in Britain were stimulated by war. Factors involved in the unique experience of a country that contained only 1 in 20 of Europe’s inhabitants expose certain contrasting features of the European economy. The accumulation of capital had been assisted by agricultural improvement, the acquisition of colonies, the operation of chartered companies (notably the East India Company), trade-oriented policies of governments (notably that of William Pitt during the Seven Years’ War), and the development of colonial markets. There existed a relatively advanced financial system, based on the successful Bank of England (founded 1694), and interest rates were consistently lower than those of European rivals. This was particularly important in the financing of road and canal building, where large private investment was needed before profit was realized. Further advantages included plentiful coal and iron ore and swift-flowing streams in the hilly northwest where the moist climate was suited to cotton spinning. The labour force was supplemented by Irish immigrants. A society that cherished political and legal institutions characteristic of the ancien régime also exhibited a free and tolerant spirit, tending to value fortune as much as birth. Comparison with Britain’s chief rival in the successive wars of 1740–48, 1756–63, and 1778–83 is strengthened by the consequences of those wars: for France the slide toward bankruptcy, for Britain a larger debt that could still be funded without difficulty.
Yet the French enjoyed an eightfold growth in colonial trade between 1714 and 1789, considerably larger than that of the British. The Dutch still had the financial strength, colonies, trading connections, and at least some of the entrepreneurial spirit that had characterized them in the 17th century. Enlightened statesmen such as the Marquês de Pombal in Portugal, Charles III of Spain, and Joseph II of Austria backed measures designed to promote agriculture and manufacturing. The question of why other countries lagged behind Britain leads to consideration of material and physical conditions, collective attitudes, and government policies. It should not distort the picture of Europe as a whole or obscure the changes that affected the demand for goods and the ability of manufacturers and traders to respond.
The mercantilist theory—which still appealed to a statesman like Frederick the Great, as it had to his great-grandfather—was grounded on the assumption that markets were limited: to increase trade, new markets had to be found. Mobility within society and increased spending by common folk, who were not expected to live luxuriously, were treated as symptoms of disorder. Mercantilists were concerned lest the state be stripped of its treasure and proper distinctions of status be undermined. The moral context is important: mercantilism belongs to the world of the city-state, the guilds, and the church; its ethical teaching is anchored in the medieval situation. By 1600 the doctrine that usury was sinful was already weakened beyond recovery by evasion and example. Needy princes borrowed, but prejudice against banks lingered, reinforced by periodic demonstrations of their fallibility, as in the failure of John Law’s Banque Générale in Paris in 1720. Productive activity was not necessarily assumed to be a good thing. Yet it is possible, throughout the period, to identify dynamic features characteristic of capitalism in its developed, industrial phase.
Early capitalism
Two broad trends can be discerned. The shift from the Mediterranean and its hinterlands to the Atlantic seaboard continued, although there was still vigorous entrepreneurial activity in certain Mediterranean regions; Venice stood still, but Marseille and Barcelona prospered. More striking was the growing gap between the economic systems of the east, where capital remained largely locked up in the large estates, and the west, where conditions were more favourable to enterprise. With more widespread adoption of utilitarian criteria for management went a sterner view of the obligation of workers. Respect for the clock, with regular hours and the reduction of holidays for saints’ days (already achieved in Protestant countries), was preparing the way psychologically for the discipline of the factory and mill. Handsome streets and squares of merchants’ houses witnessed to the prosperity of Atlantic ports such as Bordeaux, Nantes, and Bristol, which benefited from the reorientation of trade. Above all, Amsterdam and London reflected the mutually beneficial activity of trade and services. From shipbuilding, so demanding in skills and raw materials, a network of suppliers reached back to forests, fields, and forges, where timber, iron, canvas, and rope were first worked. Chandlering, insurance, brokerage, and credit-trading facilitated international dealing and amassing of capital. Fairs had long counteracted the isolation of regional economies: Lyon on the Rhône, Hamburg on the Elbe, and Danzig on the Vistula had become centres of exchange, where sales were facilitated by price lists, auctions, and specialization in certain commodities. Retailing acquired a modern look with shops catering to those who could afford coffee from Brazil or tobacco from Virginia; unlike earlier retailing, the goods offered for sale were not the products of work carried out on the premises. The dissemination of news was another strand in the pattern. By 1753 the sale of newspapers exceeded seven million: the emphasis was on news, not opinion, and price lists were carried with the news that affected them. Seamen were assisted by the dredging of harbours and improved docks and by more accurate navigational instruments and charts. In 1600 there were 18 lighthouses on or off the shores of Europe; in 1750 there were 82. The state also improved roads and made them safe for travelers; by 1789 France had 7,500 miles of fine roads, built largely by forced labour. By 1660 nearly every Dutch city was linked by canals. Following their example, Elector Frederick William in Brandenburg and Peter the Great in Russia linked rivers to facilitate trade. In France Colbert’s plan for the Languedoc canal (completed 1682) involved private as well as state capital. England’s canal builders, notably the duke of Bridgewater, had to find their own resources: consequently, capital was applied to the best effect to serve mines and factories. The general survival of tolls and the resistance of interested parties to their removal imposed constraints on most governments. The abolition of internal customs was therefore a priority for enlightened reformers such as Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot in France and Joseph II in Austria. Germany’s many princes had taken advantage of weak imperial authority to impose the tolls, which produced revenue at the cost of long-distance trade. Numerous external tariffs remained an obstacle to the growth of trade. Radical action, however, could be dangerous. Turgot’s attempt to liberate the grain trade in France led to shortages, price rises, and his own downfall. The free trade treaty of 1786 of the French foreign minister, the count de Vergennes, also had unfortunate consequences: France was flooded by cheap English textiles, peasant weavers were distressed, and the ground was prepared for the popular risings of 1789.
One important development was the adoption in western Europe of the existing Italian practice of using bills of exchange as negotiable instruments; it was legalized in Holland in 1651 and in England in 1704. Bankers who bought bills, at a discount to cover risk, thereby released credit that would otherwise have been immobilized. The other aspect of the financial revolution was the growth of banking facilities. In 1660 there had been little advance in a century, since princes and magnates, after raising money too easily, had reneged on debts and damaged the fragile system. Great houses, such as the Fuggers, had been ruined. The high interest rates demanded by survivors contributed to the recession of the 17th century. There were some municipal institutions, such as the Bank of Hamburg and the great Bank of Amsterdam, which played a crucial part in Dutch economic growth by bringing order to the currency and facilitating transfers. They provided the model for the Bank of England, which was founded in 1694 as a private company and was soon to have a relationship of mutual dependence with the state. The first state bank was that founded in Sweden in 1656; to provide a substitute for Sweden’s copper currency, it issued the first bank notes. Overproduced and not properly secured, they soon lost value. Law’s ambitious scheme for a royal bank in France foundered in 1720 because it was linked to his Louisiana company and its inflated prospects. After its failure tax farmers resumed their hold over state finance, and as a result interest rates remained higher than those of Britain because there was no secure central agency of investment. Law’s opponents were shortsighted: in Britain, where a central bank was successful, a large expansion of private banking also took place.
Meanwhile silver, everywhere the basic unit of value, remained in short supply. One-sided trade with the east meant a continuous drain. Insufficient silver was mined; declining imports from the New World did not affect only Spain. Governments tried to prevent the clipping of coins and so revalued. The deficiency remained, providing evidence for mercantilist policies. Negotiable paper in one form or other went some way to meet the shortage of specie. Stock exchanges, commercial in their original function, dealt increasingly in government stocks. Joint-stock companies became a common device for attracting money and spreading risk. By the mid-18th century the operations of commerce, manufacturing, and public finance were linked in one general system; a military defeat or economic setback affecting credit in one area might undermine confidence throughout the entire investing community.
The old industrial order
Operations of high finance represented the future of capitalist Europe. The economy as a whole was still closer in most respects to the Middle Ages. Midland and northern England, a belt along the Urals, Catalonia, the Po valley, and Flanders were scenes of exceptionally large-scale operations during the 18th century. The mines, quarries, mills, and factories of entrepreneurs such as Josse van Robais, the Dutch industrialist brought in by Colbert to produce textiles in Abbeville, only emphasized, by contrast, the primitive conditions of most manufacturing enterprise. Technology relied on limited equipment. Peter the Great saw it at its most impressive when he visited Holland in 1697. In villages along the Zaan River were lumber saws powered by 500 windmills and yards equipped with cranes and stacked with timber cut to set lengths to build fluitschips to a standard design.
The typical unit of production, however, was the domestic enterprise, with apprentices and journeymen living with family and servants. The merchant played a vital part in the provision of capital. When metalworkers made knives or needles for a local market, they could remain their own masters. For a larger market, they had to rely on businessmen for fuel, ore, wages, and transport. In textiles the capital and marketing skills of the entrepreneur were essential to cottagers. This putting-out system spread as merchants saw the advantages of evading guild control. When the cotton industry was developed around Rouen and Barcelona, it was organized in the same way as woolen textiles. In the old industrial order, output could be increased only in proportion to the number of workers involved. In England the new order was evolving, and ranks of machines in barracklike mills were producing for a mass market. The need to produce economically could transform an industry, as in Brabant, where peasants moved into the weaving side of the linen trade and then established bleaching works that ruined traditionally dominant Haarlem. It also altered the social balance, as in electoral Saxony where, between 1550 and 1750, the proportion of peasants who made most of their living by industry rose from 5 to 30 percent of the population. With such change came the dependence on capital and the market that was to make the worker so vulnerable.
Inevitably the expansion of domestic manufactures brought problems of control, which were eventually resolved by concentration in factories and by technical advances large enough to justify investment in machinery. Starting with the Lombe brothers’ silk mills, their exploitation of secrets acquired from Italy (1733), and John Kaye’s flying shuttle, British inventions set textile production on a dizzy path of growth. Abraham Darby’s process of coke smelting was perhaps the most important single improvement, since it liberated the iron founder from dependence on charcoal. The shortage of timber, a source of anxiety everywhere except in Russia and Scandinavia, proved to be a stimulus to invention and progress. Technical development on the Continent was less remarkable. The nine volumes of the Theatrum Machinarum (1724), Jakob Leupold’s description of engineering, records steady development reflecting the craftsman’s empirical outlook. Improvement could be modest indeed. A miller could grind 37 pounds (17 kilograms) of flour each day in the 12th century; by 1700 it might have been 55 pounds. In some areas there were long intervals between theoretical advances and technological application. Galileo, Evangelista Torricelli, Otto von Guericke, and Blaise Pascal worked on the vacuum in the first half of the 17th century, and Denis Papin later experimented with steam engines; however, it was not until 1711 that Thomas Newcomen produced a model that was of any practical use despite the great need for power. Mining, already well advanced, was held back by difficulties of drainage. In the Rohrerbuhel copper mines in the Tyrol, the Heiliger Geist shaft, at 2,900 feet (886 metres), remained the deepest in the world until 1872; a third of its labour force was employed in draining. Increases in productivity were generally found in those manufacturing activities where, as in the part-time production of linen in Silesia, the skills required were modest and the raw material could be produced locally.
Specialized manufacturing, evolving to meet the rising demand generated by the enrichment of the upper classes, showed significant growth. Wherever technical ingenuity was challenged by the needs of the market, results could be impressive. Printing was of seminal importance, since the advance of knowledge depended on it. Improvements in type molds and founding contributed to a threefold increase between 1600 and 1700 in the number of pages printed in a day. The Hollander, a pulverizing machine (c. 1670), could produce more pulp for paper than eight stamping mills. The connection between technical innovation and style is illustrated by improvements in glassmaking that made possible not only the casting of large sheets for mirrors but also, by 1700, the larger panes required for the sash windows that were replacing the leaded panes of casements. Venice lost its dominant position in the manufacture of glass as rulers set up works to save expensive imports. A new product sometimes followed a single discovery, as when the Saxons Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus and Johann Friedrich Böttger successfully imitated Chinese hard paste and created the porcelain of Meissen. A way of life could be affected by one invention. The pendulum clock of the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens introduced an age of reliable timekeeping. Clocks were produced in great numbers, and Geneva’s production of 5,000 timepieces a year was overtaken by 1680 by the clockmakers of both London and Paris. With groups of workers each responsible for a particular task, such as the making of wheels or the decoration of dials, specialization led to enhanced production, and in these elegant products of traditional craftsmanship the division of labour appeared.
Absolutism
Sovereigns and estates
Among European states of the High Renaissance, the republic of Venice provided the only important exception to princely rule. Following the court of Burgundy, where chivalric ideals vied with the self-indulgence of feast, joust, and hunt, Charles V, Francis I, and Henry VIII acted out the rites of kingship in sumptuous courts. Enormous Poland, particularly during the reign of Sigismund I (1506–48), and the miniature realms of Germany and Italy experienced the same type of regime and subscribed to the same enduring values that were to determine the principles of absolute monarchy. Appeal to God justified the valuable rights that the kings of France and Spain enjoyed over their churches and added sanction to hereditary right and constitutional authority. Henry VIII moved further when he broke with Rome and took to himself complete sovereignty.
Rebellion was always a threat. The skill of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) helped prevent England being torn apart by Roman Catholic and Puritan factions. Philip II (1555–98) failed to repress the continuing rebellion of what became a new state formed out of the northern Burgundian provinces. Neither Charles IX (1560–74) nor Henry III (1574–89) could stop the civil wars in which the Huguenots created an unassailable state within France. The failure of Maximilian I (1493–1519) to implement reforms had left the empire in poor shape to withstand the religious and political challenges of the Reformation. Such power as Charles V (1519–56) enjoyed in Germany was never enough to do more than contain schism within the bounds confirmed by the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555. Most of Hungary had been lost after the Turkish victory at Mohács in 1526. Imperial authority waned further under Maximilian II (1564–76) and Rudolf II (1576–1612). The terms of Augsburg were flouted as further church lands were secularized and Calvinism gained adherents, some in restless Bohemia. In these ways the stage was set for the subsequent wars and political developments.
With the tendency, characteristic of the Renaissance period, for sovereigns to enlarge their authority and assume new rights in justice and finance, went larger revenues, credit, and patronage. Princes fought with as little regard for economic consequences as their medieval precursors had shown. Ominously, the Italian wars had become part of a larger conflict, centring on the dynastic ambitions of the houses of Habsburg and Valois; similarly, the Reformation led to the formation of alliances whose objectives were not religious. The scale and expertise of diplomacy grew with the pretensions of sovereignty. The professional diplomat and permanent embassy, the regular soldier and standing army, served princes still generally free to act in their traditional spheres. But beyond them, in finance and government, what would be the balance of powers? From the answer to this question will come definition of the absolutism that is commonly seen as characteristic of the age.
The authority of a sovereign was exercised in a society of orders and corporations, each having duties and privileges. St. Paul’s image of the Christian body was not difficult for a 17th-century European to understand; the organic society was a commonplace of political debate. The orders, as represented in estates or diets, were, first, the clergy; second, the nobility (represented with the lords spiritual in the English House of Lords); and, third, commoners. There were variations: upper and lower nobles were sometimes divided; certain towns represented the Third Estate, as in the Castilian Cortes; in Sweden, uniquely, there was an estate of peasants, whose successful effort to maintain their privilege was one component of Queen Christina’s crisis of 1650. When, as in the 16th century, such institutions flourished, estates were held to represent not the whole population as individuals but the important elements—the “political nation.” Even then the nobility tended to dominate. Their claim to represent all who dwelled on their estates was sounder in law and popular understanding than may appear to those accustomed to the idea of individual political rights.
In the empire, the estates were influential because they controlled the purse. Wherever monarchy was weak in relation to local elites, the diet tended to be used to further their interests. The Cortes of Aragon maintained into the 17th century the virtual immunity from taxation that was a significant factor in Spanish weakness. The strength of the representative institution was proportionate to that of the crown, which depended largely on the conditions of accession. The elective principle might be preserved in form, as in the English coronation service, but generally it had withered as the principle of heredity had been established. Where a succession was disputed, as between branches of the house of Vasa in Sweden after 1595, the need to gain the support of the privileged classes usually led to concessions being made to the body that they controlled. In Poland, where monarchy was elective, the Sejm exercised such power that successive kings, bound by conditions imposed at accession, found it hard to muster forces to defend their frontiers. The constitution remained unshakable even during the reign of John Sobieski (1674–96), hero of the relief of Vienna, who failed to secure the succession of his son. Under the Saxon kings Augustus II (1697–1733) and Augustus III (1734–63), foreign interference led to civil wars, but repeated and factious exercise of the veto rendered abortive all attempts to reform. It required the threat—and in 1772, the reality—of partition to give Stanisław II August Poniatowski (1764–95) sufficient support to effect reforms, but this came too late to save Poland.
At the other extreme were the Russian zemsky sobor, which fulfilled a last service to the tsars in expressing the landowners’ demand for stricter laws after the disorders of 1648, and the Estates-General of France, where the size of the country meant that rulers preferred to deal with the smaller assemblies of provinces (pays d’états) lately incorporated into the realm, such as Languedoc and Brittany. They met regularly and had a permanent staff for raising taxes on property. With respect to the other provinces (pays d’élection), the crown had enjoyed the crucial advantage of an annual tax since 1439, when Charles VII successfully asserted the right to levy the personal taille without consent. When Richelieu tried to abolish one of the pays d’état, the Dauphiné, he met with resistance sufficient to deter him and successive ministers from tampering with this form of fiscal privilege. It survived until the Revolution: to ministers it was a deformity, to critics of the régime it provided at least one guarantee against arbitrary rule. The zemsky sobor had always been the creature of the ruler, characteristic of a society that knew nothing of fundamental laws or corporate rights. When it disappeared, the tsarist government was truly the despotism that the French feared but did not, except in particular cases, experience. When, in 1789, the Estates-General met for the first time since 1614, it abolished the privileged estates and corporations in the name of the freedom that they had claimed to protect. The age of natural human rights had dawned.
The experience of England, where Parliament played a vital part in the Reformation proceedings of Henry VIII’s reign and thus gained in authority, shows that power could be shared between princes and representative bodies. On the Continent it was generally a different story. The Estates-General had been discredited because it had come to be seen as the instrument of faction. Religious differences had stimulated debate about the nature of authority, but extreme interpretations of the right of resistance, such as those that provoked the assassinations of William I the Silent, stadtholder of the Netherlands, in 1584 and Henry III of France in 1589, not only exposed the doctrine of tyrannicide but also pointed to the need for a regime strong enough to impose a religious solution. One such was the Edict of Nantes of 1598, which conceded to the Huguenots not only freedom of worship but also their own schools, law courts, and fortified towns. From the start the Edict constituted a challenge to monarchy and a test of its ability to govern. Richelieu’s capture of La Rochelle, the most powerful Huguenot fortress and epicentre of disturbance, after a 14-month siege (1627–28) was therefore a landmark in the making of absolute monarchy, crucial for France and, because of its increasing power, for Europe as a whole.
Major forms of absolutism
France
Certain assumptions influenced the way in which the French state developed. The sovereign held power from God. He ruled in accordance with divine and natural justice and had an obligation to preserve the customary rights and liberties of his subjects. The diversity of laws and taxes meant that royal authority rested on a set of quasi-contractual relationships with the orders and bodies of the realm. Pervading all was a legalistic concern for form, precedence, and the customs that, according to the French jurist Guy Coquille, were the true civil laws. The efforts of successive ministers to create the semblance of a unitary state came less from dogma than from the need to overcome obstacles to government and taxation. Absolutism was never a complete system to match the philosophy and rhetoric that set the king above the law, subject only to God, whom he represented on earth. For 60 years after the Fronde there was no serious challenge to the authority of the crown from either nobles or parlement. The idea of divine right, eloquently propounded by Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and embodied in the palace and system of Versailles, may have strengthened the political consensus, but it did little to assist royal agents trying to please both Versailles and their own communities. Absolutism on the ground amounted to a series of running battles for political control. In the front line were the intendants (administrative officials), first used extensively by Richelieu, then, after their abolition during the Fronde, more systematically and with ever-widening responsibilities, by Louis XIV and his successors until 1789.
Throughout the ancien régime the absolutist ideal was flawed, its evolution stunted through persisting contradictions. The fiscal demands of the crown were incompatible with the constant need to stimulate trade and manufacturing enterprise; and only a resolute minister operating in peacetime, such as Colbert in the 1660s and Philibert Orry in the 1730s, could hope to achieve significant reforms. There was tension between the Roman Catholic ideal of uniformity and pragmatic views of the state’s interest. In 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, a harsh if logical resolution of the question. It was what his Catholic subjects expected of him, but it proved damaging to the economy and to France’s reputation. A further contradiction lay between measures to overcome the hostility of the nobles to the aggrandizement of the state and the need not to compromise state authority by conceding too much. Richelieu’s actions, including the execution of the duke de Montmorency for treason (1632), taught the lesson that no subject was beyond the reach of the law. Louis XIV’s brilliant court drew the magnates to Versailles, where social eminence, patronage, and pensions compensated for loss of the power for which they had contended during the Fronde. It merely fortified the regime of privilege that defied fundamental reform to the end. There was another side to the politically advantageous sale of office. Capital was diverted that might better have been employed in business, and there was a vested interest in the status quo. For the mass of the nobility the enlargement of the army, quadrupled in the 17th century, provided an honourable career, but it also encouraged militarism and tempted the king and ministers to neglect the interests of the navy, commerce, and the colonies. When France intervened in the War of the Austrian Succession in 1741, the economic consequences undermined the regime. The achievements of the Bourbon government, with able ministers working in small, flexible councils, were impressive, even when undermined by weak kings such as Louis XV (1715–74) and Louis XVI (1774–92). In the 18th century, France acquired a fine network of roads, new harbours were built, and trade expanded; a lively culture was promoted by a prosperous bourgeoisie. It is an irony that the country that nurtured the philosophes was the least affected by the reforms they proposed, but it would have been a remarkable king who could have ruled with the courage and wisdom to enable his servants to overcome obstacles to government that were inherent in the system.
The empire
The character of Austrian absolutism was derived from a dual situation: with the exception of Maria Theresa, who was debarred by the Salic Law of Succession, the head of the house was also Holy Roman emperor. He directly ruled the family lands, comprising different parts of Austria stretching from Alpine valleys to the Danubian plain, which were mainly Roman Catholic and German; Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, which were mainly Slavic in race and language; a fraction of Hungary after the reconquest following the failure of the Turkish Siege of Vienna (1683); and Belgium and Milan (by the Peace of Rastatt in 1714). Each region provided a title and rights pertaining to that state, with an authority limited by the particular rights of its subjects. As an elected emperor, his sovereignty was of a different kind. In effect, the empire was a German confederation, though Bohemia was in and Prussia was outside it; the Mantuan succession affair (1627–31), when the emperor sought to arbitrate, recalls an obsolete Italian dimension. Each German state was self-governing and free to negotiate with foreign powers. Princes, both ecclesiastical and secular, enjoyed the right of representation in the Reichstag. The first of the three curiae in the Reichstag was the college of electors, who elected the emperor; the second comprised princes, counts, barons, and the ecclesiastical princes; and the third, the imperial free cities. The 45 dynastic principalities had 80 percent of the land and population; the 60 dynastic counties and lordships comprised only 3 percent. Some of the 60 imperial free cities were but villages. A thousand imperial knights, often landless, each claimed rights of landlordship amounting to sovereignty and owed allegiance only to the emperor in his capacity as president of the Reichstag. Numbers varied through wastage or amalgamation, but they convey the amorphous character of a confederation in which the emperor could only act effectively in concert with the princes, either individually or organized in administrative circles (Kreis). Bound by weak ties of allegiance and strong sentiment of nationality, this empire represented the world of medieval universalism with some aspects of the early modern state, without belonging wholly to either. Religious schism had created new frontiers and criteria for policy, such as could justify the elector palatine’s decision to accept the crown of Bohemia from the rebels who precipitated the Thirty Years’ War. The failure of the emperor Ferdinand II to enlarge his authority or enforce conformity led to the settlements of Westphalia in which his son, Ferdinand III, was forced to concede again the cuius regio, eius religio principle. Thereafter he and his successor, Leopold I, devoted their energies to increasing their authority over the family lands. It would be wrong, however, to assume that they, or even the 18th-century emperors, were powerless.
The political climate in which the empire operated was affected by the way universities dominated intellectual life and by trends within universities, in particular the development of doctrines of natural law and cameralism. German rulers respected the universities because the majority of their students became civil servants. With earnest religious spirit went an emphasis on the duty to work and obey. Even in Catholic states the spirit of the Aufklärung (Enlightenment) was pious and practical. Exponents of natural law, such as the philosopher-scientist Christian Wolff, advocated religious toleration but saw no need for constitutional safeguards: the ideal ruler was absolute. Such commitment to civic virtue explains both the development of the German state and the survival of the empire as a working institution. Territorial fragmentation meant a prince’s combining his executive role with that of representative within the Reich: there could be no stimulus to the development of constitutional ideas. The German associated political liberty with the authority of his ruler. He was loyal to his own state, which was the “fatherland”; “abroad” was another state. When judgment was required, the prince would still go to the imperial court, the Reichskammergericht. There were limits to his loyalty. The emperor was expected to lead but could not always do so. So the authorities were ineffective, for example, in the face of Louis XIV’s seizure of Strasbourg in 1681. Yet Louis found that German opinion was not to be underestimated; it contributed to his defeat in the War of the Grand Alliance.
Religious animosities persisted into the age of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), but his rational approach and quest for religious unity corresponded to the popular yearning for stability. When interests were so delicately balanced, arbitration was preferable to aggression. The mechanism of the Reichskammergericht saved the counties of Isenburg and Solms from annexation by the ruler of Hesse-Darmstadt. More than a court of law, the Reichskammergericht functioned as a federal executive in matters of police, debts, bankruptcies, and tax claims. Small states such as Mainz could manage their affairs so as to turn enlightened ideas to good use, but it was the rulers of the larger states who held the keys to Germany’s future, and they took note of the emperor; thus, his ambivalent position was crucial. Frederick William I of Prussia accepted the ruling of Emperor Charles VI, confirming his right of succession to Berg. In return, the king guaranteed the Pragmatic Sanction, asserting the right of the emperor’s daughter to succeed. Charles repudiated Prussia’s claim, however, in 1738 when he made a treaty with France. In 1740, when both sovereigns died, Frederick II made Austria pay for this slight to his father. The War of the Austrian Succession followed his invasion of Silesia; that valuable Bohemian province remained at the heart of the Austro-Prussian conflict. Its final loss taught Maria Theresa and her advisers, notably Friedrich Haugwitz and Wenzel von Kaunitz, that they must imitate what they could not defeat. She created, in place of separate Austrian and Bohemian chancelleries, a more effective central administration based on the Direktorium, which her son Joseph (coruler from 1765, when he became emperor; sole ruler 1780–90) would develop in ruthless fashion. Maria Theresa respected the Roman Catholic tradition of her house, even while curtailing the powers of the church. Joseph pursued his mother’s interests in education and a more productive economy and was concerned with equality of rights and the unity of his domains. Yet he joined in the partition of Poland for the reward of Galicia and showed so little regard for the rules of the empire that he was challenged by Frederick II over the Bavarian succession, which he had sought to manipulate to his advantage. After the ensuing Potato War (1778), the empire’s days were numbered, though it required the contemptuous pragmatism of Napoleon to abolish it (1806).
Prussia
Frederick II had inherited a style of absolute government that owed much to the peculiar circumstances of Brandenburg-Prussia as it emerged from the Thirty Years’ War. Lacking natural frontiers and war-ravaged when Frederick William inherited the electorate in 1640, Brandenburg had little more than the prestige of the ancient house of Hohenzollern. The diplomacy of Jules Cardinal Mazarin contributed to the acquisition (1648) of East Pomerania, Magdeburg, and Minden, and war between Sweden and Poland brought sovereignty over East Prussia, formerly held as a fief from Poland. A deal with the Junkers at the Recess of 1653, which secured a regular subsidy in return for a guarantee of their social rights, was the foundation of an increasingly absolute rule. He overcame by force the resistance of the diet of Prussia in 1660: as he became more secure economically, militarily, and bureaucratically, he depended less on his diets. So was established the Prussian model: an aristocracy of service and a bureaucracy harnessed to military needs. The Great Elector’s son became King Frederick I of Prussia when he pledged support to the emperor’s cause (1701). His son, Frederick William (1713–40), completed the centralization of authority and created an army sustained by careful stewardship of the economy. Personally directing a larger army in wars of aggression and survival, Frederick the Great (1740–86) came close to ruining his state; its survival testifies to the success of his father. Of course Frederick left his own impress on government. He should not be judged by his essays in enlightened philosophy or even by new mechanisms of government, but by the spirit he inspired. He lived out his precept that the sovereign should be the first servant of the state. All was ordered so as to eliminate obstacles to the executive will. Much was achieved: the restoration of Prussia and the establishment of an industrial base, in particular the exploitation of the new Silesian resources. Legal rights and freedom of thought were secure so long as they did not conflict with the interest of the state. A monument to his reign, completed five years after his death in 1786, was the Allgemeine Landrecht, the greatest codification of German law. Perhaps his greatest civil achievement was the stability that made such a striking contrast with the turbulence in Habsburg lands under Joseph II.
Variations on the absolutist theme
Sweden
In Sweden the Konungaförsäkran (“King’s Assurance”), which was imposed at the accession of the young Gustav II Adolf in 1611 and which formally made him dependent for all important decisions on the Råd (council) and Riksdag (diet), was no hindrance to him and his chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, in executing a bold foreign policy and important domestic reforms. Queen Christina, a minor until 1644, experienced a constitutional crisis (1650) in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, from which Sweden had gained German lands, notably West Pomerania and Bremen. She extricated herself with finesse, then abdicated (1654). Charles X sought a military solution to the threat of encirclement by invading Poland and, more successfully, Denmark, but he left the kingdom to his four-year-old son (1660) with problems of political authority unresolved. When he came of age, Charles XI won respect for his courage in war and established an absolutism beyond doubt or precedent by persuading the Riksdag to accept an extreme definition of his powers (1680). Then he carried out the drastic recovery of alienated royal lands. With novel powers went military strength based on a corps of farmer-soldiers from the recovered land. Tempting authority awaited Charles XII (1697–1718), but there was also a menacing coalition. Perhaps decline was inevitable, for Sweden’s greatness had been a tour de force, but Charles XII’s onslaughts on Poland and Russia risked the state as well as the army which he commanded so brilliantly. Even after the Russian victory at Poltava (1709) and Charles’s exile in Turkey, Sweden’s resistance testified to the soundness of government. When Charles died fighting in Norway, Sweden had lost its place in Germany and a third of its adult population. An aristocratic reaction led to a period of limited monarchy. Decisions were made by committees of the Riksdag, influenced by party struggle, like that of the Hats and Caps at mid-century. Gustav III carried out a coup in 1774 that restored greater power to the sovereign, but there was no break in two great traditions: conscientious sovereign and responsible nobility.
Denmark
Denmark also had turned in the absolutist direction. Enforced withdrawal from the Thirty Years’ War (in 1629) may not have been a disaster for Denmark, but the loss of the Scanian provinces to Sweden (1658) was—loss of control of the Sound was a standing temptation to go to war again. Events in Denmark exemplify on a small scale what was happening throughout Europe when princes built from war’s wreckage, exploiting the yearning for direction and benefiting from the decay of a society that no longer provided good order. The smaller the country, the stronger the ruler’s prospect of asserting his will. As if responding to Hobbes’s formula for absolute monarchy, the estates declared King Frederick III supreme head on earth, elevated above all human laws (1661). Reforms followed under the statesmen Hannibal Sehested and Peter Schumacker: a new code of law was promulgated; mercantilist measures fostered trade; and Copenhagen flourished. Danes accepted with docility the autocratic rule of the house of Oldenburg, but the peasantry suffered from the spread of a German style of landownership. Frederick IV cared much about their souls, and his son Christian VI provided for their schooling, but a decree of 1733 tied peasants to their estates from the age of 14 to 36. Frederick V was fortunate to have capable ministers, notably Andreas Bernstorff, who was mainly responsible for the acquisition of long-disputed Schleswig and Holstein. His son Christian VII ruled until 1808; yet his reign is best known for his confinement under Johan Struensee and for the latter’s liberal reforms. In the two years before his downfall in 1772, more than 1,000 laws were passed, including measures that have left their mark on Danish society to this day. The episode showed the perils as well as benefits of enlightened absolutism when a king or his subject acquired the power to do as he pleased.
Spain
The Iberian Peninsula provides further illustration of the absolutist theme. Historians do not agree about the nature or precise extent of Spain’s decline, but there is agreement that it did occur, that it was most pronounced at mid-century, and that its causes may be traced not only to the reign of Philip II (1556–98), the overextended champion of Roman Catholic and Spanish hegemony, but also to the social and political structure of the Spanish states of Castile, Aragon, Portugal, Milan, Naples, the Netherlands, and Franche-Comté. The constitutions of these states reflected the personal nature of the original union of crowns (1479) and of subsequent acquisitions. Castile received the largest share of the prosperity that came with silver bullion from the New World but suffered the worst consequences when Mexico and Peru became self-sufficient. Bullion imports fell sharply; trade with the rest of Europe was severely imbalanced; and the weight of taxation fell largely on Castile. The effort of Philip IV’s chief minister, the count de Olivares, to ensure greater equality of contribution through the union of arms was one factor in the revolts of Catalonia and Portugal (1640). In 1659 Spain had to cede Roussillon, Cerdagne, and Artois to France; and in 1667–68 the Flemish forts could put up no fight against the invading French. Despite a partial recovery in the 1680s under the intelligent direction of the duke de Medinaceli and Manuel Oropesa, Spain was the object of humiliating partition treaties. In 1700 Charles II had bequeathed the entire inheritance to Philip of Anjou, Louis XIV’s grandson. A foundation for recovery was laid early in the reign of Philip V, when outlying provinces lost their privileges and acquired a tax system based on ability to pay and a French-style intendente to enforce it. The pace of reform accelerated with the accession of Charles III in 1759. He was no radical, but he backed ministers who were, such as the count de Floridablanca and the count de Campomanes. A national bank, agricultural improvements, and new roads, factories, and hospitals witnessed to the efforts of this benevolent autocrat to overcome the Spanish habit of condemning everything new.
Portugal
Neighbouring Portugal acquired independence in 1668 after revolt and war protracted by the stubborn determination of Philip IV to maintain his patrimony. This small country had suffered since 1580 from its Spanish connection. Resentment at the loss of part of Brazil and most of its Far Eastern colonies had been a major cause of the revolt. The Portuguese did not see their interests as lying with Spain’s in partnership with Austria and war against France and Holland. The reorientation of foreign policy and alliance with England by the Methuen Treaty (1703) brought respite rather than restoration. When Sebastien Pombal became the virtual dictator of Portugal as chief minister of Joseph I, he instituted drastic change. If the rebuilding of Lisbon after the great earthquake of 1755 is his memorial, he is also remembered for his assault on the Jesuits; Spain, France, and Austria followed his lead in expelling the powerful religious order, whose grip on education seemed to “enlightened” minds to obstruct progress.
Britain
The Marquês de Pombal was inspired by what he had seen in London, and it was in Great Britain (as it became after the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707) that the entrepreneurial spirit was least restricted and most influential in government and society. By the accession of James I in 1603, there had already been a significant divergence from the Continental pattern. The 17th century saw recurring conflict between the crown—more absolute in language than in action—and Parliament. Elected on a narrow, uneven suffrage, it represented privileged interests rather than individuals; it was much concerned with legal precedents and rights. Charles I tried to rule without Parliament from 1629 to 1639, but he alienated powerful interests and, by trying to impose the Anglican prayer book on Scotland, blundered into a civil war that resulted in his overthrow and subsequent execution (1649). Experiments in parliamentary rule culminated in the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell; after his death (1658), Charles II was restored (1660) on financial terms intended to restrict his freedom of maneuver. After a crisis (1678–81) in which the Whigs, led by Lord Shaftesbury, exploited popular prejudice against Roman Catholicism and France to check his absolutist tendency, he recovered the initiative. However, the brief reign of James II (1685–88) justified the fears of those who had sought to exclude him. Policies designed to relieve Roman Catholics antagonized the leaders of the monarchist Anglican church as well as the families who thought that they had the right to manage the state. The Glorious Revolution brought the Dutch stadtholder to the throne as William III (1689–1702). The intense political struggle left a fund of theory and experience on which 18th-century statesmen could draw. There was, however, no written constitution and only a few statutory limitations. Monarchy retained the power to appoint ministers, make foreign policy, and to manage and direct the army. The Bill of Rights (1689) effectively abolished the suspending and dispensing powers, but William III pursued his European policy with an enlarged army, funded by a new land tax and by loans. Conflict grew between the Whigs and Tories, intensified by the controversy over “Marlborough’s war” in the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14). The Triennial Act (1694) ensured elections every three years, and the Act of Settlement (1701) sealed the supremacy of the common law by limiting the king’s power to dismiss judges. The accession of George I in 1714 did not lead immediately to stability. The union with Scotland (1707) had created strains; and Jacobitism remained a threat after the defeat of James Edward Stuart’s rising of 1715—until the defeat of his son Charles Edward at Culloden in 1746, it was a focus for the discontented. But investors in government funds had a growing stake in the survival of the dynasty.
When George I gave up attending Cabinet meetings, he cleared the way for the Privy Council’s displacement by the small cabinet council, and the evolution, in the person of Robert Walpole, first lord of the Treasury from 1721 to 1742, of a “prime minister.” Relations between minister and king amounted to a dialogue between the concepts of ministerial responsibility and royal prerogative. Ministers exercised powers legally vested in the monarch; they also were accountable to Parliament. Yet the king could still appoint and dismiss them. Inevitably tensions resulted. The prime minister’s right to select fellow ministers did not go unchallenged, but the reluctance of both George I and George II to master the intricacies of patronage, and the skill of Walpole and Newcastle in political management, ensured that the shift in the balance of power in 1688 was irreversible. A centralized legislature coexisted with a decentralized administration. The theme of centre versus provinces, characteristic of other countries, took on a new form as court patronage became the prime element in political management. Most legislation was concerned not with legal or moral principles but with administrative details. Policy tended to emerge from agreement between king and ministers. The royal veto on legislation was never employed after 1708, no government lost a general election, and nearly every Parliament lasted its full term. Locke’s dictum that government has no other end but the preservation of property was an apt text for the British ancien régime, which was dominated by the church and the aristocracy. Even those 200,000 Englishmen who had the vote could be disfranchised by the common practice of an arranged election. In 1747 only three county and 62 borough elections were contested. The tone was set by the Septennial Act (1716), which doubled the life of Parliaments and the value of patronage.
Holland
The English ambassador Sir George Downing in 1664 described the constitution of the United Provinces as “such a shattered and divided thing.” Louis XIV assumed wrongly, in 1672, that the mercantile republic would prove no match for his armies. Experience had taught the English to respect Dutch naval strength as much as they envied its commercial wealth. Foreign attitudes were ambivalent because this small state was not only the newest but also the richest per capita and quite different from any other. The nation of seamen and merchants was also the nation of Rembrandt, Huygens, and Spinoza; culture and the trading empire were inseparable. After 1572 the Dutch proved that they could hold their own in war. Criticism of the structure of government seems therefore to be wide of the mark. In the development of Amsterdam, private enterprise and civic regulation coexisted in creative harmony; so too the state was effective without impinging on the quality of individual lives. The federal republic, so the Dutch believed, guarded religion, lands, and liberties. The price was paid by the Spanish southern provinces, which were drained of vitality by emigration to the north, and by the decay of the trade and manufacturing that had given Antwerp a commanding financial position.
The constitution of the United Provinces reflected its Burgundian antecedents in civic pride and its concern for form and precedence. Sovereignty lay with the seven provinces separately; in each the States ruled, and in the States the representatives of the towns were dominant. Since action required a unanimous vote, issues were commonly referred back to town corporations. Only in Friesland did peasants have a voice. The States-General dealt with diplomatic and military measures and with taxes. Its members were ambassadors, closely tied by their instructions. Like contemporary Poles and Germans, the Dutch were separatists at heart, but what was lacking in those countries existed in the United Provinces—one province to lead the rest. Holland assumed, and because of its wealth the rest could not deny, that right. War was again the crucial factor.
One side of the balance was represented by the house of Orange. Maurice of Nassau (1584–1625) and Frederick Henry (1625–47) controlled policy and military campaigns through their virtual monopoly of the office of stadtholder in separate provinces. Monarchs without title, they intermarried with the Protestant dynasties: William III, the grandson of Charles I of England and great-grandson of Henry IV of France, married Mary Stuart and became, with her, joint sovereign of England in 1689. The other side, vigilant for peace, trade, and lower taxes, was represented at its best by Johan de Witt, pensionary of Holland (1653–72). He was murdered during the French invasion of 1672, which brought William III to power. Enlightened oligarchy had little appeal for the poor or tolerance for the Calvinist clergy. Such violence exposed underlying tensions. In 1619 the veteran statesman Johann van Oldenbarneveldt was executed, as much because of the political implications of his liberal stance as for his Arminian views. Holland’s open society depended on the commercial values of a magistracy versed in finance and state policy. In 1650 the young stadtholder William II attempted a coup against Amsterdam, the outcome of which was uncertain. His sudden death settled the issue in favour of a period of rule without stadtholders. In 1689 William III’s elevation led to consolidation of the republican regime. In 1747, William IV enjoyed popular support for a program of civic reform. As stadtholder of all seven provinces he had concentrated powers, but little was achieved. Not until 1815 was the logical conclusion reached with the establishment of William I as king.
Russia
Successive elective kings of Poland failed to overcome the inherent weaknesses of the state, and the belated reforms of Stanisław II served only to provoke the final dismemberments of 1793 and 1795. Russia was a prime beneficiary, having long shown that vast size was not incompatible with strong rule. Such an outcome would not have seemed probable in 1648, when revolt in the Ukraine led to Russian “protection” and the beginning of that process of expansion which was to create an empire. The open character of Russia’s boundless lands militated against two processes characteristic of Western society—the growth of cherished rights in distinct, rooted communities and that of central authority, adept in the techniques of government. The validity of the state depended on its ability to make the peasant cultivate the soil. If the nobility were to serve the state, they must be served on the land. Serfdom was a logical development in a society that knew nothing of rights. The feudal concept of fealty, the validity of contract, and the idea of liberty as the creation of law were unknown. German immigrants found no provincial estates, municipal corporations, or craft guilds. Merchants were state functionaries. Absolutism was implicit in the physical conditions and early evolution of Russian society. It could only become a force for building a state comparable to those of the West under a ruler strong enough to challenge traditional ways. This was to be the role of Alexis I (1645–76) and then, more violently, of Peter I (1689–1725).
When the Romanov dynasty emerged in 1613 with Tsar Michael, the formula for continued power was similar to that of the Great Elector in Brandenburg: the common interest of ruler and gentry enabled Alexis to dispense with the zemsky sobor. The great code of 1649 affirmed the rights of the state over a society that was to be frozen in its existing shape. The tsars were haunted by the fear that the state would disintegrate. The acquisition of the Ukraine led directly to the revolt of Stenka Razin (1670), which flared up because of the discontent of the serfs. The Russian people had been driven underground; their passivity could not be assumed. There was also a threatening religious dimension in the shape of the Old Believers. Rallying in reaction to the minor reforms of the patriarch Nikon, they came to express a general attachment to old Russia. This was as dangerous to the state when it inspired passive resistance to change as when it provoked revolt, such as that of the streltsy, the privileged household troops, whom Peter purged in 1698. Peter’s reforms of Russian government must be set against the military weakness revealed by the Swedish victory at Narva (1700), the grotesque disorder of government as exercised by more than 40 councils, the lack of an educated class of potential bureaucrats, and a primitive economy untouched by Western technology. His domestic policies can then be seen as expedients informed by a patchy vision of Western methods and manners. Catherine II studied his papers and said, “He did not know what laws were necessary for the state.” Yet, without Peter’s relentless drive to create a military power based on compulsory service, Catherine might have been in no position to carry out any reforms herself. His Table of Ranks (1722) graded society in three categories—court, government, and army. The first eight military grades, all commissioned officers, automatically became gentry. Obligatory service was modified by later rulers and abolished by Peter III (1762). By then the army had sufficient attraction: the officer caste was secure.
Meanwhile, the bureaucracy exemplified the style of a military police. The uniformed official, rule book in hand, was typical of St. Petersburg government until 1917. Peter’s new capital, an outrageous defiance of Muscovite tradition, symbolized the chasm that separated the Westernized elite from the illiterate masses. It housed the senate, set up in 1711, and the nine colleges that replaced the 40 councils. There also was the oberprokuror, responsible for the Most Holy Synod, which exercised authority over the church in place of the patriarch. Peter could control the institution; to touch the souls or change the manners of his people was another matter. A Russian was reluctant to lose his beard because God had a beard; a townsman could be executed for leaving his ward; a nobleman could not marry without producing a certificate to show that he could read. With a punitive tax, Peter might persuade Russians to shave and adopt Western breeches and jacket, but he could not trust the free spirit that he admired in England nor expect market, capital, or skills to grow by themselves. So a stream of edicts commanded and explained. State action could be effective—iron foundries, utilizing Russia’s greatest natural resource, timber, contributed to the country’s favourable trade balance—but nearly all Peter’s schools collapsed after his death, and his navy rotted at its moorings.
After Peter there were six rulers in 37 years. Two of the predecessors of Catherine II (1762–95) had been deposed—one of them, her husband Peter III, with her connivance. Along with the instability exemplified by the palace coup of 1741, when the guards regiments brought Elizabeth to the throne, went an aristocratic reaction against centralist government, particularly loathsome as exercised under Anna (1730–40). Elizabeth’s tendency to delegate power to favoured grandees encouraged aristocratic pretension, though it did lead to some enlightened measures. With the accession of the German-born Catherine, Russians encountered the Enlightenment as a set of ideas and a program of reforms. Since the latter were mostly shelved, questions arise about the sincerity of the royal author of the Nakaz, instructions for the members of the Legislative Commission (1767–68). If Catherine still hoped that enlightened reforms, even the abolition of serfdom, were possible after the Commission’s muddle, the revolt of Yemelyan Pugachov (1773–75) brought her back to the fundamental questions of security. His challenge to the autocracy was countered by military might, but not before 3,000,000 peasants had become involved and 3,000 officials and gentry had been murdered. The underlying problem remained. The tired soil of old Russia would not long be able to feed the growing population. Trapped between the low yield of agriculture and their rising debts, the gentry wanted to increase dues. The drive for new lands, culminating in the acquisition of Crimea (1783), increased the difficulties of control. Empirical and authoritarian, Catherine sought to strengthen government while giving the gentry a share and a voice. The Great Reform of 1775 divided the country into 50 guberni. The dvoriane were allowed some high posts, by election, on the boards set up to manage local schools and hospitals. They were allowed to meet in assembly. It was more than most French nobles could do: indeed, French demands for assemblies were a prelude to revolution. But as in the case of towns, by the Municipal Reform (1785), she gave only the appearance of self-government. Governors were left with almost unbounded powers. Like Frederick the Great, Catherine disappointed the philosophes, but the development of Russia took place within a framework of order. European events in the last years of Catherine’s life and Russian history, before and since, testify to the magnitude of her achievement.
Absolute monarchy had evolved out of conflicts within and challenges outside the state, notably that of war, whose recurring pressures had a self-reinforcing effect. The absolutist ideal was potent, and the rhetoric voiced genuine feeling. The sovereign who envisaged himself as God’s Lieutenant or First Servant of the State was responding to those who had found traditional constitutions wanting and whose classical education and religious upbringing had schooled them to look for strong rule within a hierarchical system. For more than 150 years, the upper classes of continental Europe were disposed to accept the ethos of absolutism. They would continue to do so only if the tensions within the system could be resolved and if the state were to prove able to accommodate the expectations of the rising bourgeoisie and the potentially unsettling ideas of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment was both a movement and a state of mind. The term represents a phase in the intellectual history of Europe, but it also serves to define programs of reform in which influential literati, inspired by a common faith in the possibility of a better world, outlined specific targets for criticism and proposals for action. The special significance of the Enlightenment lies in its combination of principle and pragmatism. Consequently, it still engenders controversy about its character and achievements. Two main questions and, relating to each, two schools of thought can be identified. Was the Enlightenment the preserve of an elite, centred on Paris, or a broad current of opinion that the philosophes, to some extent, represented and led? Was it primarily a French movement, having therefore a degree of coherence, or an international phenomenon, having as many facets as there were countries affected? Although most modern interpreters incline to the latter view in both cases, there is still a case for the French emphasis, given the genius of a number of the philosophes and their associates. Unlike other terms applied by historians to describe a phenomenon that they see more clearly than could contemporaries, it was used and cherished by those who believed in the power of mind to liberate and improve. Bernard de Fontenelle, popularizer of the scientific discoveries that contributed to the climate of optimism, wrote in 1702 anticipating “a century which will become more enlightened day by day, so that all previous centuries will be lost in darkness by comparison.” Reviewing the experience in 1784, Immanuel Kant saw an emancipation from superstition and ignorance as having been the essential characteristic of the Enlightenment.
Before Kant’s death the spirit of the siècle des Lumières (literally, “century of the Enlightened”) had been spurned by Romantic idealists, its confidence in man’s sense of what was right and good mocked by revolutionary terror and dictatorship, and its rationalism decried as being complacent or downright inhumane. Even its achievements were critically endangered by the militant nationalism of the 19th century. Yet much of the tenor of the Enlightenment did survive in the liberalism, toleration, and respect for law that have persisted in European society. There was therefore no abrupt end or reversal of enlightened values.
Nor had there been such a sudden beginning as is conveyed by the critic Paul Hazard’s celebrated aphorism: “One moment the French thought like Bossuet; the next moment like Voltaire.” The perceptions and propaganda of the philosophes have led historians to locate the Age of Reason within the 18th century or, more comprehensively, between the two revolutions—the English of 1688 and the French of 1789—but in conception it should be traced to the humanism of the Renaissance, which encouraged scholarly interest in Classical texts and values. It was formed by the complementary methods of the Scientific Revolution, the rational and the empirical. Its adolescence belongs to the two decades before and after 1700 when writers such as Jonathan Swift were employing “the artillery of words” to impress the secular intelligentsia created by the growth in affluence, literacy, and publishing. Ideas and beliefs were tested wherever reason and research could challenge traditional authority.
Sources of Enlightenment thought
In a cosmopolitan culture it was the preeminence of the French language that enabled Frenchmen of the 17th century to lay the foundations of cultural ascendancy and encouraged the philosophes to act as the tutors of 18th-century Europe. The notion of a realm of philosophy superior to sectarian or national concerns facilitated the transmission of ideas. “I flatter myself,” wrote Denis Diderot to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, “that I am, like you, citizen of the great city of the world.” “A philosopher,” wrote Edward Gibbon, “may consider Europe as a great republic, whose various inhabitants have attained almost the same level of politeness and cultivation.” This magisterial pronouncement by the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) recalls the common source: the knowledge of Classical literature.
The scholars of the Enlightenment recognized a joint inheritance, Christian as well as Classical. In rejecting, or at least reinterpreting, the one and plundering the other, they had the confidence of those who believed they were masters of their destiny. They felt an affinity with the Classical world and saluted the achievement of the Greeks, who discovered a regularity in nature and its governing principle, the reasoning mind, as well as that of the Romans, who adopted Hellenic culture while contributing a new order and style: on their law was founded much of church and civil law. Steeped in the ideas and language of the classics but unsettled in beliefs, some Enlightenment thinkers found an alternative to Christian faith in the form of a neo-paganism. The morality was based on reason; the literature, art, and architecture were already supplying rules and standards for educated taste.
The first chapter of Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV specified the “four happy ages”: the centuries of Pericles and Plato, of Cicero and Caesar, of the Medicean Renaissance, and, appositely, of Louis XIV. The contrast is with “the ages of belief,” which were wretched and backward. Whether denouncing Gothic taste or clerical fanaticism, writers of the Enlightenment constantly resort to images of relapse and revival. Typically, Jean d’Alembert wrote in the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie of a revival of letters, regeneration of ideas, and return to reason and good taste. The philosophes knew enough to be sure that they were entering a new golden age through rediscovery of the old but not enough to have misgivings about a reading of history which, being grounded in a culture that had self-evident value, provided ammunition for the secular crusade.
The role of science and mathematics
“The new philosophy puts all in doubt,” wrote the poet John Donne. Early 17th-century poetry and drama abounded in expressions of confusion and dismay about the world, God, and man. The gently questioning essays of the 16th-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, musing on human folly and fanaticism, continued to be popular long after his time, for they were no less relevant to the generation that suffered from the Thirty Years’ War. Unsettling scientific views were gaining a hold. As the new astronomy of Copernicus and Galileo, with its heliocentric view, was accepted, the firm association between religious beliefs, moral principles, and the traditional scheme of nature was shaken. In this process, mathematics occupied the central position. It was, in the words of René Descartes, “the general science which should explain all that can be known about quantity and measure, considered independently of any application to a particular subject.” It enabled its practitioners to bridge gaps between speculation and reasonable certainty: Johannes Kepler thus proceeded from his study of conic sections to the laws of planetary motion. When, however, Fontenelle wrote of Descartes, “Sometimes one man gives the tone to a whole century,” it was not merely of his mathematics that he was thinking. It was the system and philosophy that Descartes derived from the application of mathematical reasoning to the mysteries of the world—all that is meant by Cartesianism—which was so influential. The method expounded in his Discourse on Method (1637) was one of doubt: all was uncertain until established by reasoning from self-evident propositions, on principles analogous to those of geometry. It was serviceable in all areas of study. There was a mechanistic model for all living things.
A different track had been pursued by Francis Bacon, the great English lawyer and savant, whose influence eventually proved as great as that of Descartes. He called for a new science, to be based on organized and collaborative experiment with a systematic recording of results. General laws could be established only when research had produced enough data and then by inductive reasoning, which, as described in his Novum Organum (1620), derives from “particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all.” These must be tried and proved by further experiments. Bacon’s method could lead to the accumulation of knowledge. It also was self-correcting. Indeed, it was in some ways modern in its practical emphasis. Significantly, whereas the devout humanist Thomas More had placed his Utopia in a remote setting, Bacon put New Atlantis (1627) in the future. “Knowledge is power,” he said, perhaps unoriginally but with the conviction that went with a vision of mankind gaining mastery over nature. Thus were established the two poles of scientific endeavour, the rational and the empirical, between which enlightened man was to map the ground for a better world.
Bacon’s inductive method is flawed through his insufficient emphasis on hypothesis. Descartes was on strong ground when he maintained that philosophy must proceed from what is definable to what is complex and uncertain. He wrote in French rather than the customary Latin so as to exploit its value as a vehicle for clear and logical expression and to reach a wider audience. Cartesian rationalism, as applied to theology, for example by Nicholas Malebranche, who set out to refute the pantheism of Benedict de Spinoza, was a powerful solvent of traditional belief: God was made subservient to reason. While Descartes maintained his hold on French opinion, across the Channel Isaac Newton, a prodigious mathematician and a resourceful and disciplined experimenter, was mounting a crucial challenge. His Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687; Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) ranks with the Discourse on Method in authority and influence as a peak in the 17th-century quest for truth. Newton did not break completely with Descartes and remained faithful to the latter’s fundamental idea of the universe as a machine. But Newton’s machine operated according to a series of laws, the essence of which was that the principle of gravitation was everywhere present and efficient. The onus was on theCartesians to show not only that their mechanics gave a truer explanation but also that their methods were sounder. Christiaan Huygens was both a loyal disciple of Descartes and a formidable mathematician and inventor in his own right, who had worked out the first tenable theory of centrifugal force. His dilemma is instructive. He acknowledged that Newton’s assumption of forces acting between members of the solar system was justified by the correct conclusions he drew from it, but he would not go on to accept that attraction was affecting every pair of particles, however minute. When Newton identified gravitation as a property inherent in corporeal matter, Huygens thought that absurd and looked for an agent acting constantly according to certain laws. Some believed that Newton was returning to “occult” qualities. Eccentricities apart, his views were not easy to grasp; those who actually read the Principia found it painfully difficult. Cartesianism was more accessible and appealing.
Gradually, however, Newton’s work won understanding. One medium, ironically, was an outstanding textbook of Cartesian physics, Jacques Rohault’s Traité de physique (1671), with detailed notes setting out Newton’s case. In 1732 Pierre-Louis de Mauperthuis put the Cartesians on the defensive by his defense of Newton’s right to employ a principle the cause of which was yet unknown. In 1734, in his Philosophical Letters, Voltaire introduced Newton as the “destroyer of the system of Descartes.” His authority clinched the issue. Newton’s physics was justified by its successful application in different fields. The return of Halley’s comet was accurately predicted. Charles Coulomb’s torsion balance proved that Newton’s law of inverse squares was valid for electromagnetic attraction. Cartesianism reduced nature to a set of habits within a world of rules; the new attitude took note of accidents and circumstances. Observation and experiment revealed nature as untidy, unpredictable—a tangle of conflicting forces. In classical theory, reason was presumed to be common to all human beings and its laws immutable. In Enlightenment Europe, however, there was a growing impatience with systems. The most creative of scientists, such as Boyle, Harvey, and Leeuwenhoek, found sufficient momentum for discovery on science’s front line. The controversy was creative because both rational and empirical methods were essential to progress. Like the literary battle between the “ancients” and the “moderns” or the theological battle between Jesuits and Jansenists, the scientific debate was a school of advocacy.
If Newton was supremely important among those who contributed to the climate of the Enlightenment, it is because his new system offered certainties in a world of doubts. The belief spread that Newton had explained forever how the universe worked. This cautious, devout empiricist lent the imprint of genius to the great idea of the Enlightenment: that man, guided by the light of reason, could explain all natural phenomena and could embark on the study of his own place in a world that was no longer mysterious. Yet he might otherwise have been aware more of disintegration than of progress or of theories demolished than of truths established. This was true even within the expanding field of the physical sciences. To gauge the mood of the world of intellect and fashion, of French salons or of such institutions as the Royal Society, it is essential to understand what constituted the crisis in the European mind of the late 17th century.
At the heart of the crisis was the critical examination of Christian faith, its foundations in the Bible, and the authority embodied in the church. In 1647 Pierre Gassendi had revived the atomistic philosophy of Lucretius, as outlined in On the Nature of Things. He insisted on the Divine Providence behind Epicurus’ atoms and voids. Critical examination could not fail to be unsettling because the Christian view was not confined to questions of personal belief and morals, or even history, but comprehended the entire nature of God’s world. The impact of scientific research must be weighed in the wider context of an intellectual revolution. Different kinds of learning were not then as sharply distinguished, because of their appropriate disciplines and terminology, as they are in an age of specialization. At that time philomaths could still be polymaths. Newton’s contemporary, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—whose principal contribution to philosophy was that substance exists only in the form of monads, each of which obeys the laws of its own self-determined development while remaining in complete accord with all the rest—influenced his age by concluding that since God contrived the universal harmony this world must be the best of all possible worlds. He also proposed legal reforms, invented a calculating machine, devised a method of the calculus independent of Newton’s, improved the drainage of mines, and laboured for the reunification of the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches.
The influence of Locke
The writing of John Locke, familiar to the French long before the eventual victory of his kind of empiricism, further reveals the range of interests that an educated man might pursue and its value in the outcome: discrimination, shrewdness, and originality. The journal of Locke’s travels in France (1675–79) is studded with notes on botany, zoology, medicine, weather, instruments of all kinds, and statistics, especially those concerned with prices and taxes. It is a telling introduction to the world of the Enlightenment, in which the possible was always as important as the ideal and physics could be more important than metaphysics. Locke spent the years from 1683 to 1689 in Holland, in refuge from high royalism. There he associated with other literary exiles, who were united in abhorrence of Louis XIV’s religious policies, which culminated in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and the flight of more than 200,000 Huguenots. During this time Locke wrote the Essay on Toleration (1689). The coincidence of the Huguenot dispersion with the English revolution of 1688–89 meant a cross-fertilizing debate in a society that had lost its bearings. The avant-garde accepted Locke’s idea that the people had a sovereign power and that the prince was merely a delegate. His Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) offered a theoretical justification for a contractual view of monarchy on the basis of a revocable agreement between ruler and ruled. It was, however, his writings about education, toleration, and morality that were most influential among the philosophes, for whom his political theories could be only of academic interest. Locke was the first to treat philosophy as purely critical inquiry, having its own problems but essentially similar to other sciences. Voltaire admired what Locke called his “historical plain method” because he had not written “a romance of the soul” but offered “a history of it.” The avowed object of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was “to inquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge; together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent.” For Locke, the mind derives the materials of reason and knowledge from experience. Unlike Descartes’ view that man could have innate ideas, in Locke’s system knowledge consists of ideas imprinted on the mind through observation of external objects and reflection on the evidence provided by the senses. Moral values, Locke held, are derived from sensations of pleasure or pain, the mind labeling good what experience shows to give pleasure. There are no innate ideas; there is no innate depravity.
Though he suggested that souls were born without the idea of God, Locke did not reject Christianity. Sensationalism, he held, was a God-given principle that, properly followed, would lead to conduct that was ethically sound. He had, however, opened a way to disciples who proceeded to conclusions that might have been far from the master’s mind. One such was the Irish bishop George Berkeley who affirmed, in his Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), that there was no proof that matter existed beyond the idea of it in the mind. Most philosophers after Descartes decided the question of the dualism of mind and matter by adopting a materialist position; whereas they eliminated mind, Berkeley eliminated matter—and he was therefore neglected. Locke was perhaps more scientific and certainly more in tune with the intellectual and practical concerns of the age. Voltaire presented Locke as the advocate of rational faith and of sensationalist psychology; Locke’s posthumous success was assured. In the debate over moral values, Locke provided a new argument for toleration. Beliefs, like other human differences, were largely the product of environment. Did it not therefore follow that moral improvement should be the responsibility of society? Finally, since human irrationality was the consequence of false ideas, instilled by faulty schooling, should not education be a prime concern of rulers? To pose those questions is to anticipate the agenda of the Enlightenment.
The proto-Enlightenment
If Locke was the most influential philosopher in the swirling debates of fin de siècle Holland, the most prolific writer and educator was Pierre Bayle, whom Voltaire called “the first of the skeptical philosophers.” He might also be called the first of the encyclopaedists, for he was more publicist than philosopher, eclectic in his interests, information, and ideas. The title Nouvelles de la république des lettres (1684–87) conveys the method and ideal of this superior form of journalism. Bayle’s Historical Dictionary (1697) exposed the fallacies and deceits of the past by the plausible method of biographical articles. “The grounds of doubting are themselves doubtful; we must therefore doubt whether we ought to doubt.” Lacking a sound criterion of truth or a system by which evidence could be tested but hating dogma and mistrusting authority, Bayle was concerned with the present state of knowledge. He may have been as much concerned with exposing the limitations of human reason as with attacking superstition. Translated and abridged, as, for example, by order of Frederick II of Prussia, the Dictionary became the skeptic’s bible. The effect of Bayle’s work and that of others less scrupulous, pouring from the presses of the Netherlands and Rhineland and easily penetrating French censorship, could not fail to be broadly subversive.
Bayle’s seminal role in the cultural exchange of his time points to the importance of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. Because Holland contributed little to science, philosophy, or even art at the time of the philosophes, though enviable enough in the tranquil lives of many of its citizens, its golden 17th century tends to be overlooked in traditional accounts of the Enlightenment. Wealth derived from trade, shipping, and finance and the toleration that attracted Sephardic Jews, Protestants from Flanders and France, and other refugees or simply those who sought a relatively open society combined to create a climate singularly favourable to enterprise and creativity. It was urban, centring on Amsterdam, and it was characterized by a rich artistic life created by painters who worked to please patrons who shared their values. It was pervaded by a scientific spirit. Pieter de Hooch’s search for new ways of portraying light, Spinoza’s pursuit of a rational system that would comprehend all spiritual truth. Antony van Leeuwenhoek’s use of the microscope to reveal the hidden and minute, Hermann Boerhaave’s dissection of the human corpse, Jan Blaeuw’s accuracy in the making of maps or Huygens’ in the new pendulum clock—each represents that passion for discovery that put 17th-century Holland in a central position between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, with some of the creative traits of both periods. Its spirit is epitomized in the university of Leiden, which attracted students from throughout Europe by its excellence in medicine and law and its relative freedom from ecclesiastical authority.
It was fitting, therefore, that much of the writing that helped form the Enlightenment emanated from the printing presses of the Huguenot emigré Louis Elsevier at Amsterdam and Leiden. Bayle’s skepticism belongs to the time when dust was still rising from the collapsing structures of the past, obscuring such patterns of thought as would eventually emerge. There was no lack of material for them. Not only did learning flourish in the cultural common market that served the needs of those who led or followed intellectual fashions; also important, though harder to measure, was the influence of the new relativism, grounded in observable facts about an ever-widening world. It was corrosive alike of Cartesian method, classical regulation, and traditional theology. Of Descartes, Huygens had written that he had substituted for old ideas “causes for which one can comprehend all that there is in nature.”
Allied to that confidence in the power of reason was a prejudice against knowledge that might distort argument. Blaise Pascal had perfectly exemplified that rationalist frame of mind prone to introspection, which in his case—that of mathematical genius and literary sensibility in rare combination—produced some of the finest writing of his day. But the author of the Pensées (1669) was reluctant to travel: “All the ills that affect a man proceed from one cause, namely that he has not learned to sit quietly and contentedly in one room.” Again, the object of the protagonists of the prevailing classicism had been to establish rules: for language (the main role of the Académie), for painting (as in the work of Nicolas Poussin), even for the theatre, where Jean Racine’s plays of heightened feeling and pure conflict of ideal or personality gain effect by being constrained within the framework of their Greek archetypes.
History and social thought
Order, purity, clarity: such were the Classical ideals. They had dominated traditional theology as represented by its last great master, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet. His Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Écriture sainte (“Statecraft Drawn from the Very Words of the Holy Scriptures”) and Discours sur l’histoire universelle offered a worldview and a history based on the Old Testament. Bossuet believed in the unity of knowledge as so many branches of Christian truth. His compelling logic and magisterial writing had a strong influence. When, however, the hypotheses were tested and found wanting, the very comprehensiveness of the system ensured that its collapse was complete. Bossuet had encouraged Richard Simon when he set out to refute Protestantism through historical study of the Bible but was shocked when he saw where it led. Inevitably, scholarship revealed inconsistencies and raised questions about the way that the Bible should be treated: if unreliable as history, then how sound was the basis for theology? Simon’s works were banned in 1678, but Dutch printers ensured their circulation. No censorship could prevent the development of historical method, which was making a place for itself in the comprehensive search for truth. With Edward Gibbon (himself following the example of the 17th-century giants of church history), Jean Mabillon, and Louis Tillemont historians were to become more skilled and scrupulous in the use of evidence. The philosophes characteristically believed that history was becoming a science because it was subject to philosophical method. It also was subject to the prevailing materialist bias, which is why, scholarly though individual writers like David Hume might be, the Enlightenment was in some respects vulnerable to fresh insights about man—such as those of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, who believed that human beings could be molded for their own good—and further research into the past—which, for Claude-Adrien Helvétius, was simply the worthless veneration of ancient laws and customs.
In 1703 Baron de Lahontan introduced the idea of the “noble savage,” who led a moral life in the light of natural religion. In relative terms, the uniquely God-given character of European values was questioned; Louis XIV’s persecution of the Huguenots and Jansenists offered an unappealing example. Philosophers were provided, through the device of voyages imaginaires, with new insights and standards of reference. As Archbishop Fénelon was to show in Télémaque (1699)—where the population of his imaginary republic of Salente was engaged in farming and the ruler, renouncing war, sought to increase the wealth of the kingdom—a utopian idyll could be a vehicle for criticism of contemporary institutions. A bishop and sentimental aristocrat, heir to the tradition of Christian agrarianism, might seem an unlikely figure to appear in the pantheon of the Enlightenment. But his readers encountered views about the obligations as well as rights of subjects that plainly anticipate its universalism, as in the Dialogue des morts: “Each individual owes incomparably more to the human race, the great fatherland, than to the country in which he is born.”
The language of the Enlightenment
It is easier to identify intellectual trends than to define enlightened views, even where, as in France, there was a distinct and self-conscious movement, which had by mid-century the characteristics of a party. Clues can be found in the use commonly made of certain closely related cult words such as Reason, Nature, and Providence. From having a sharp, almost technical sense in the work of Descartes, Pascal, and Spinoza, reason came to mean something like common sense, along with strongly pejorative assumptions about things not reasonable. For Voltaire, the reasonable were those who believed in progress: he lived “in curious times and amid astonishing contrasts: reason on the one hand, the most absurd fanaticism on the other.” Nature in the post-Newtonian world became a system of intelligible forces that grew as the complexity of matter was explored and the diversity of particular species discovered. It led to the pantheism of the Irish writer John Toland, for whom nature replaced God, and to the absolute doubt of Julien La Mettrie, who in L’Homme machine (1747) took the position that nothing about nature or its causes was known. In England, in the writing of Lord Shaftesbury and David Hartley, nature served the cause of sound morals and rational faith. One of the foremost theologians, Joseph Butler, author of the Analogy of Religion (1736), tested revelation against nature and in so doing erased the troublesome distinction in a manner wholly satisfying to those who looked for assurance that God could be active in the world without breaking the laws of its being. Finally, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, nature—the word that had proved so useful to advocates of an undogmatic faith, of universal principles of law or even, in the hands of the physiocrats, the “natural,” or market, economy—acquired a new resonance. In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), he wrote: “We cannot desire or fear anything, except from the idea of it, or from the simple impulse of nature.” Nature had become the primal condition of innocence in which man was whole—not perfect, but imbued with virtues that reflected the absence of restraints.
Along with the new view of the universe grew belief in the idea of a benign Providence, which could be trusted because it was visibly active in the world. Writers sought to express their sense of God’s benevolent intention as manifest in creation. To the Abbé Pluche domestic animals were not merely docile but naturally loved humanity. Voltaire, equally implausibly, observed of mountain ranges that they were “a chain of high and continuous aqueducts which, by their apertures allow the rivers and arms of the sea the space which they need to irrigate the land.” The idea of Providence could degenerate into the fatuous complacency that Voltaire himself was to deride and against which—in particular, the idea that the universe was just a vast theatre for the divine message—Samuel Taylor Coleridge was memorably to rebel. Faith, wrote the English poet, “could not be intellectually more evident without being morally less effective; without counteracting its own end by sacrificing the life of faith to the cold mechanism of a worthless because compulsory assent.” So the Enlightenment can be seen to be carrying the seeds of its own disintegration. The providential idea was based on unscientific assumptions in an age in which scientists, favoured by a truce with men of religion, were free to pursue researches that revealed an untidier, therefore less comforting, world. Newton had argued, from such problems as irregularities in the orbit of planets, that divine intervention was necessary to keep the solar system operating regularly. D’Alembert found, however, that such problems were self-correcting. From being the divine mechanic had God now become the divine spectator?
No less unsettling were the findings of geologists. Jean-Étienne Guettard concluded that the evidence of fossils found in the volcanic hills of the Puy de Dôme in south-central France conflicted with the time scheme of the Old Testament. Whether, like the count de Buffon, they attributed to matter a form of life, speculated about life as a constant, shapeless flux, or postulated a history of the world that had evolved over an immensely long time, scientists were dispensing with God as a necessary factor in their calculations. Some theologians sought compromise, while others retreated, looking to a separate world of intuitive understanding for the justification of faith. Joseph Butler pointed to conscience, the voice of God speaking to the human soul. He deplored the enthusiasm that characterized the tireless preaching of John Wesley and his message of the love of God manifested in Christ. “A true and living faith in God,” Butler declared, “is inseparable from a sense of pardon from all past and freedom from all present sins.” It was not the freedom understood by the philosophes, but it touched hearts and altered lives. Meanwhile the path of reason was open for the avowed atheism of Baron d’Holbach, who declared in his Système de la nature (1770; “The System of Nature”) that there was no divine purpose: “The whole cannot have an object for outside itself there is nothing towards which it can tend.” Another approach was taken by David Hume, author of Treatise on Human Nature (1739) and the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). The notion of miracles was repugnant to reason, but he was content to leave religion as a mystery, to be a skeptic about skepticism, and to deny that man could reach objective knowledge of any kind.
These may appear to have been intellectual games for the few. It could only be a privileged, relatively leisured minority, even among the educated, who actively participated in debate or could even follow the reasoning. The impact was delayed; it was also uneven. In Dr. Johnson’s England the independence bestowed by the Anglican clergyman’s freehold and the willingness of the established church to countenance rational theology created a shock absorber in the form of the Broad Church. In Protestant countries criticism tended to be directed toward amending existing structures: there was a pious as well as an impious Enlightenment. Among Roman Catholic countries France’s situation was in some ways unique. Even there orthodox doctrines remained entrenched in such institutions as the Sorbonne; some bishops might be worldly but others were conscientious; monasteries decayed but parish life was vital and curés (parish priests) well trained. Nor was theology neglected: in 1770, French publishers brought out 70 books in defense of the faith. Of course the philosophes, endowed with the talents and the means to mount sustained campaigns, ensured that the question of religion remained high on the agenda. There was also a ready sale for writers who sought to apply the rational and experimental methods to what Hume was to call the science of man.
Man and society
Chief among them was Charles de Secondat de Montesquieu. His presidency in the parlement of Bordeaux supported the career of a litterateur, scholarly but shrewd in judgment of men and issues. In the Persian Letters (1721), he had used the supposed correspondence of a Persian visitor to Paris to satirize both the church (under that “magician” the pope) and the society upon which it appeared to impose so fraudulently. His masterpiece, The Spirit of Laws, appeared in 22 editions within 18 months of publication in 1748. For this historically minded lawyer, laws were not abstract rules but were necessary relationships derived from nature. Accepting completely Locke’s sensationalist psychology, he pursued the line of the Sicilian Giambattista Vico, the innovative author of The New Science (1725), toward the idea that human values are the evolving product of society itself. Among social factors, he listed climate, religion, laws, the principles of government, the example of the past, and social practices and manners and concluded that from these a general spirit is formed. Montesquieu’s concern with knowledge as a factor in shaping society is characteristic of the Enlightenment. Nor was he alone in his Anglophile tendency, though it did not prevent him from misinterpreting the English constitution as being based on the separation of powers. The idea that moral freedom could be realized only in a regime whose laws were enacted by an elected legislature, administered by a separate executive, and enforced by an independent judiciary was to be more influential in the New World than in the Old. His theories reflected a Newtonian view of the static equilibrium of forces and were influenced by his perception of the French government as increasingly arbitrary and centralist; they were conceived as much as a safeguard against despotism as an instrument of progress.
Montesquieu’s political conservatism belonged to a world different from that of the younger generation of philosophes, for whom the main obstacle to progress was privilege; they put their trust in “the enlightened autocrat” and in his mandate for social engineering. They might fear, like Claude Helvétius, that his theories would please the aristocracy. Helvétius—a financier, amateur philosopher, and author of the influential De l’esprit (1759; “On the Mind”)—advocated enlightened self-interest in a way that found an echo in physiocratic economic theory and argued that each individual, in seeking his own good, contributed to the general good. Laws, being man-made, should be changed so as to be more useful. The spirit of the Enlightenment is well conveyed by his suggestion that experimental ethics should be constructed in the same way as experimental physics. By contrast, Montesquieu, whose special concern was the sanctity of human law, saw the problem of right conduct as one of adapting to circumstances. The function of reason was to bring about accord between human and natural law. While the objective nature of his inquiry encouraged those who trusted in the power of reason to solve human problems, it was left to those who saw the Enlightenment in more positive terms to work for change.
François-Marie Arouet, whose nom de plume Voltaire was to become almost synonymous with the Enlightenment, was a pupil of the Jesuits at their celebrated college of Louis-le-Grand; his political education included 11 months in the Bastille. The contrast between the arbitrary injustice epitomized by the lettre de cachet that brought about his imprisonment, without trial, for insulting a nobleman and the free society he subsequently enjoyed in England was to inspire a life’s commitment to the principles of reason, liberty, justice, and toleration. Voltaire at times played the role of adviser to princes (notably Frederick II) but learned that it was easier to criticize than to change institutions and laws. Like other philosophes living under a regime that denied political opportunity, he was no politician. Nor was he truly a philosopher in the way that Locke, Hume, or even Montesquieu can be so described. His importance was primarily as an advocate at the bar of public opinion. The case for the reform of archaic laws and the war against superstition was presented with passion and authority, as notably in his Philosophical Dictionary. Candide (1759) shows his elegant command of language, whose potential for satire and argument had been demonstrated by Pascal’s Provincial Letters of a century before. With astute judgment, he worked on the reader’s sensibilities. “The most useful books,” he wrote, “are those to which the readers themselves contribute half; they develop the idea of which the author has presented the seed.” He could lift an episode—the execution of Admiral Byng (1757) for failing to win a battle; of Jean Calas, seemingly, for being a Huguenot (1762); or of the Chevalier de la Barre, after torture, for alleged blasphemy (1766)—to the level at which it exemplified the injustices committed when man would not listen to the voice of reason or could not do so because of archaic laws. In Candide, he presented the debate between the optimistic Dr. Pangloss and Martin, who believes in the reality of evil, in a way that highlights the issues and is as significant now as then.
title page of Voltaire's CandideTitle page of an early printed version of Voltaire's Candide published in London, 1759.The Newberry Library, Louis H. Silver Collection purchase, 1964 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Voltaire mounted his campaigns from a comfortable base, his large estate at Ferney. He was vain enough to relish his status as a literary lion and freedom’s champion. He could be vindictive and was often impatient with differing views. In his reluctance to follow ideas through or consider their practical implications and in his patrician disregard for the material concerns of ordinary people, he epitomized faults with which the philosophes can be charged, the more because they were so censorious of others. He was generous chiefly in imaginative energy, in the indignation expressed in the celebrated war cry “Écrasez l’infâme” (literally “crush infamy,” signifying for Voltaire the intolerance of the church), and in the time he devoted to the causes of wronged individuals with whose plight he could identify. He had little to put in place of the religion he abused and offered no alternative vision. He did succeed notably in making people think about important questions—indeed, his questions were usually clearer than his answers.
The Encyclopédie
The Marquis de Condorcet, a mathematician and one of the more radical of his group, described his fellow philosophes as “a class of men less concerned with discovering truth than with propagating it.” That was the spirit which animated the great Encyclopédie, the most ambitious publishing enterprise of the century. It appeared in 17 volumes between 1751 and 1765, after checks and delays that would have disheartened anyone less committed than its publisher, André-François le Breton, or its chief editor and presiding genius, Denis Diderot. Its publishing history is rich in incident and in what it reveals of the ambience of the Enlightenment. The critical point was reached in 1759, when French defeats made the authorities sensitive to anything that implied criticism of the regime. The publication of Helvétius’ De l’esprit, together with doubts about the orthodoxy of another contributor, the Abbé de Prades, and concern about the growth of Freemasonry, convinced government ministers that they faced a plot to subvert authority. If they had been as united as the officials of the church, the Encyclopédie would have been throttled. It was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, and a ban of excommunication was pronounced on any who should read it; but even Rome was equivocal. The knowledge that Pope Benedict XIV was privately sympathetic lessened the impact of the ban; Malesherbes, from 1750 to 1763 director of the Librairie, whose sanction was required for publication, eased the passage of volumes he was supposed to censor. Production continued, but without Rousseau, an early contributor, who became increasingly hostile to the encyclopaedists and their utilitarian philosophy.
Diderot’s coeditor, the mathematician Jean le Rond d’Alembert, had, in his preface, presented history as the record of progress through learning. The title page proclaimed the authors’ intention to outline the present state of knowledge about the sciences, arts, and crafts. Among its contributors were craftsmen who provided the details for the technical articles. Pervading all was Diderot’s moral theme: through knowledge “our children, better instructed than we, may at the same time become more virtuous and happy.” Such utilitarianism, closely related to Locke’s environmentalism, was one aspect of what d’Alembert called “the philosophic spirit.” If it had been only that, it would have been as useful as Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (1727), which it set out to emulate. Instead, it became the textbook for the thoughtful—predominantly officeholders, professionals, the bourgeoisie, and particularly the young, who might appreciate Diderot’s idea of the Encyclopédie as the means by which to change the common way of thinking. In the cause, Diderot sustained imprisonment in the jail at Vincennes (1749) and had to endure the condemnation and burning of one of his books, Philosophic Thoughts (1746). There was nothing narrow about his secular mission. Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature (1753) advanced the idea of nature as a creative process of which man was an integral part. But his greatest achievement was the Encyclopédie. Most of the important thinkers of the time contributed to it. Differences were to be expected, but there was enough unanimity in principles to endow the new gospel of scientific empiricism with the authority that Scripture was losing. It was also to provide a unique source for reformers. Catherine II of Russia wrote to the German critic Friedrich Melchior Grimm for suggestions as to a system of education for young people. Meanwhile, she said she would “flip through the Encyclopédie; I shall certainly find in it everything I should and should not do.”
Rousseau and his followers
Diderot prefigured the unconventional style that found its archetype in Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his novel of the 1760s, Rameau’s Nephew, Diderot’s eccentric hero persuades his bourgeois uncle, who professes virtue, to confess to actions so cynical as to be a complete reversal of accepted values. Rousseau was close to this stance when he ridiculed those who derived right action from right thinking. He understood the interests of the people, which the philosophes tended to neglect and which Thomas Paine considered in the Rights of Man (1791). If virtue were dependent on culture and culture the prerogative of a privileged minority, what was the prospect for the rest: “We have physicians, geometricians, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians and painters in plenty; but no longer a citizen among us.” Rousseau is thus of the Enlightenment yet against it, at least as represented by the mechanistic determinism of Condillac or the elitism of Diderot, who boasted that he wrote only for those to whom he could talk—i.e., for philosophers. Rousseau challenged the privileged republic of letters, its premises, and its principles. His Confessions depicted a well-intentioned man forced to become a rogue and outcast by the artificiality of society. His first essay, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), suggested the contradiction between the exterior world of appearances and the inner world of feeling. With his view of culture now went emphasis on the value of emotions. Seminal use of concepts—such as “citizen” to indicate the rights proper to a member of a free society—strengthened signals that could otherwise confuse as much as inspire.
Dealing with the basic relations of life, Rousseau introduced the prophetic note that was to sound through democratic rhetoric. The state of nature was a hypothesis rather than an ideal: man must seek to recover wholeness at a higher level of existence. For this to be possible he must have a new kind of education and humanity a new political constitution. Émile (1762) proposed an education to foster natural growth. His Social Contract (1762) was banned, and this lent glamour to proposals for a constitution to enable the individual to develop without offending against the principle of social equality. The crucial question concerned legitimate authority. Rousseau rejected both natural law and force as its basis. He sought a form of association that would allow both security and the natural freedom in which “each man, giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody.” It is realized in the form of the general will, expressed in laws to which all submit. More than the sum of individual wills, it is general in that it represents the public spirit seeking the common good, which Rousseau defined as liberty and equality, the latter because liberty cannot subsist without it. He advocated the total sovereignty of the state, a political formula which depended on the assumption that the state would be guided by the general will. Rousseau’s good society was a democratic and egalitarian republic. Geneva, his birthplace, was to prove boundless in inspiration. Rousseau’s influence may have been slight in his lifetime, though some were proud to be numbered among admirers. His eloquence touched men of sensibility on both sides of the Atlantic.
The French writer Morelly in the Code de la nature (1755), attacked property as the parent of crime and proposed that every man should contribute according to ability and receive according to need. Two decades later, another radical abbé, Gabriel de Mably, started with equality as the law of nature and argued that the introduction of property had destroyed the golden age of man. In England, William Godwin, following Holbach in obeisance to reason, condemned not only property but even the state of marriage: according to Godwin, man freed from the ties of custom and authority could devote himself to the pursuit of universal benevolence. To the young poets William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley it was a beguiling vision; those less radical might fear for social consequences, such as the draftsmen of the Declaration of Rights of 1789, who were careful to proclaim the sacred right of property. Thomas Jefferson made the rights of man the foundation of his political philosophy as well as of the U.S. Constitution, but he remained a slave owner. The idea of “de-natured” man was as potent for the unsettling of the ancien régime as loss of the sense of God had been for the generation of Luther and Ignatius. It struck home to the educated young who might identify with Rousseau’s self-estrangement and read into the image of “man everywhere in chains” their own perception of the privilege that thwarted talent. Such were Maximilien Robespierre, the young lawyer of Arras; Aleksandr Radischev, who advocated the emancipation of Russian serfs, or the Germans who felt restricted in regimented, often minuscule states. Both the severe rationalism of Kant and the idealism of Sturm und Drang found inspiration in Rousseau. Yet Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and the sentimental hero portrayed by Goethe in his Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) mark the end of the Enlightenment. “It came upon us so gray, so cimmerian, so corpse-like that we could hardly endure its ghost,” wrote Goethe, speaking for the Romantic generation and pronouncing valediction.
In France the Enlightenment touched government circles only through individuals, such as Anne-Robert Turgot, a physiocrat, finance minister (1774–76), and frustrated reformer. The physiocrats, taking their cue from such writers as François Quesnay, author of Tableau économique (1758), advocated the removal of artificial obstacles to the growth of the natural economic order of a free market for the produce of the land. Even Adam Smith, who wrote the Wealth of Nations (1776) with a capitalist economy in mind, could see his avowed disciple William Pitt move only cautiously in the direction of free trade. Though the visionary William Blake could be adduced to show that there was powerful resistance to the new industrial society, the physician and scientist Erasmus Darwin was—with his fellow luminaries of the Lunar Society, Josiah Wedgwood and Matthew Boulton—at the heart of the entrepreneurial culture: there was no deep divide separating the English philosophes, with their sanctification of private property and individual interests, from the values and programs of government. In dirigiste France, where there was no internal common market and much to inhibit private investment, physiocratic ideas were politically naive: the gap between theory and implementation only illustrates the way in which the Enlightenment undermined confidence in the regime. Operating in a political vacuum, the philosophes could only hope that they would, like Diderot with Catherine the Great, exercise such influence abroad as might fulfill their sense of mission. In both Germany and Italy, however, circumstances favoured emphasis on the practical reforms that appealed as much to the rulers as to their advisers.
The Aufklärung
In Germany the Aufklärung found its highest expression in a science of government. One explanation lies in the importance of universities. There were nearly 50 by 1800 (24 founded since 1600); they were usually the product of a prince’s need to have trained civil servants rather than of a patron’s zeal for higher learning. Not all were as vigorous as Halle (1694) or Göttingen (1737), but others, such as Vienna in the last quarter of the 18th century, were inspired to emulate them. In general, the universities dominated intellectual and cultural life. Rulers valued them, and their teachers were influential, because they served the state by educating those who would serve. Leading academic figures held posts, enabling them to advise the government: the political economist Joseph von Sonnenfels was an adviser to the Habsburgs on the serf question. Lutheranism was another important factor in the evolution of the attitude to authority that makes the German Enlightenment so markedly different from the French. In the 18th century it was further influenced by Pietism, which was essentially a devotional movement though imbued with a reforming spirit. Nor was the earnest religious spirit confined to the Protestant confessions. In Maria Theresa’s Austria, Jansenism, which penetrated Viennese circles from Austrian Flanders, was as important in influencing reforms in church and education as it was in sharpening disputes with the Papacy. But there was nothing comparable, even in the Catholic south and Rhineland, to the revolt of western intellectuals against traditional dogma. Amid all his speculations, Leibniz, who more than any other influenced German thought, had held to the idea of a personal God not subject to the limitations of a material universe. It was devotion, not indifference, that made him, with Bossuet, seek ground for Christian reunion.
Leibniz’s disciple, Christian Wolff, a leading figure of the Aufklärung, was opposed to the Pietists, who secured his expulsion from Halle in 1723. Yet, though he believed that reason and revelation could be reconciled, he shared with the Pietists fundamental Christian tenets. In Halle there emerged a synthesis of Wolffism and Pietism, a scientific theology that was progressive but orthodox. Pervading all was respect for the ruler, reflecting the acceptance of the cuius regio, eius religio principle; it reduced the scope for internal conflicts, which elsewhere bred doubts about authority. In translating conservative attitudes into political doctrines, the contribution of the lawyers and the nature of the law they taught were crucial. In place of the moral vacuum in which the single reality was the power of the individual ruler, there had come into being a body of law, articulated preeminently by Hugo Grotius in On the Law of War and Peace. It was grounded not only in proven principles of private law but also in the Christian spirit, though it was strengthened by Grotius’ separation of natural law from its religious aspects. As expounded by Wolff and the historiographer Samuel Pufendorf, natural law endorsed absolutism. They did not wholly neglect civil rights, they advocated religious toleration, and they opposed torture, but, living in a world far removed from that of Locke or Montesquieu, they saw no need to stipulate constitutional safeguards. Wolff declared that “he who exercises the civil power has the right to establish everything that appears to him to serve the public good.” Such a sovereign, comprising legislative, executive, and judicial functions, was also, as defined in Wolff’s Rational Thoughts on the Social Life of Mankind (1756), a positive force, benevolent: he was Luther’s “godly prince” in 18th-century dress, serving his people’s needs. Cameralwissenschaft—the science and practice of administration—would serve the ruler by increasing the revenue and also improve the lot of the people.
Envisaging progress under the sovereign who created the schools, hospitals, and orphanages and provided officials to run them, Wolff was only one among numerous writers who contributed to the ideal of benevolent bureaucratic absolutism, or Wohlfahrstaat. Though also influenced by the local school of cameralists and 17th-century writers such as Philippe Wilhelm von Hörnigk and Johann Joachim Becher, the emperor Joseph II, having the largest area to rule and the most earnest commitment to its principles, came to exemplify the Aufklärung. By his time, however, there was a growing reaction against the soulless rationality of the natural lawyers. With the exception of the Prussian critic Johann Gottfried Herder, whose ideal Volk-state would have a republican constitution, political thought was unaffected by the emphasis of the literary giants of Romanticism on freedom and spontaneity. His contemporary Kant, an anticameralist, believed in a degree of popular participation but would not allow even the theoretical right of revolution. In Was ist Aufklärung? Kant drew a vital distinction between the public and private use of one’s reason. With Frederick the Great in mind, he advanced the paradox that can be taken as a text for the Enlightenment as well as for German history. The ruler with a well-disciplined and large army could provide more liberty than a republic.
A high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people’s intellectual freedom, yet also sets up insuperable barriers to it. Conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent.
The Enlightenment throughout Europe
Foreigners who came to see the monuments of Italy, or perhaps to listen to the music that they might recognize as the inspiration of some of the best of their own, were likely to return convinced that the country was backward. Its intellectual life might remain a closed book. As elsewhere, the Enlightenment consisted of small, isolated groups; measured by impact on governments, they had little obvious effect. Where there was important change, it was usually the work of a ruler, such as Leopold of Tuscany, or a minister, such as Bernardo Tanucci in Naples. The power of the church, symbolized by the listing of Galileo, a century after his condemnation, on the Index of Forbidden Books; the survival, particularly in the south, of an oppressive feudal power; and the restrictive power of the guilds were among the targets for liberals and humanitarians. Universities like Bologna, Padua, and Naples had preserved traditions of scholarship and still provided a stimulating base for such original thinkers as Giambattista Vico and Antonio Genovesi, a devout priest, professor of philosophy, and pioneer in ethical studies and economic theory. The distinctive feature of the Italian Enlightenment, however, as befitted the country that produced such scientists as Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta, was its practical tendency—as if speculation were a luxury amid so much disorder and poverty. Its proponents introduced to political philosophy utilitarianism’s slogan “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” They also felt the passion of patriots seeking to rouse their countrymen. The greatest representative of the Italian Enlightenment was Cesare Beccaria, whose work included Of Crimes and Punishments (1764); in his lifetime it was translated into 22 languages. His pupils and imitators included Catherine II of Russia and Jeremy Bentham, the most influential figure in the long-delayed reform of English law. “Newtoncino,” as Beccaria was called by admirers, claimed to apply the geometric spirit to the study of criminal law. There was indeed no mystique about his idea of justice. “That bond which is necessary to keep the interest of individuals united, without which men would return to their original state of barbarity,” may recall the pessimism of Hobbes, but his formula for penalties answered to the enlightened ruler’s search for what was both rational and practical: “Punishments which exceed the necessity of preserving this bond are in their nature unjust.” So Beccaria condemned torture and capital punishment, questioned the treatment of sins as crimes, and stressed the value of equality before the law and of prevention having priority over punishment. Much of the best enlightened thought comes together in Beccaria’s work, in which the link between philosophy and reform is clearly evident.
The Enlightenment was a European phenomenon: examples of enlightened thought and writing can be found in every country. There were important reforms in late 18th-century Spain under the benevolent rule of Charles III. There was little originality, however, about the Luces and its disciples. The spirit of acceptance was stronger than that of inquiry; Spain apparently was a casebook example of the philosophes’ belief that religion stifled freedom of thought. It was a priest, Benito Feijóo y Montenegro, who did as much as any man to prepare for the Spanish Enlightenment, preaching the criterion of social utility in a society still obsessed with honour and display. Conservatism was, however, well entrenched, whether expressed in the pedantic procedures of the Inquisition or in the crude mob destroying the marqués de Squillace’s new street lamps in Madrid in 1766. “It is an old habit in Spain,” wrote the count de Campomanes, “to condemn everything that is new.”
So the accent in Spain was utilitarian—more Colbertiste than philosophe—as in other countries where local circumstances and needs dictated certain courses of action. Johann Struensee’s liberal reforms in Denmark (1771–72) represented, besides his own eccentricity, justifiable resentment at an oppressive Pietist regime. The constitutional changes that followed the first partition of Poland in 1772 were dictated as much by the need to survive as by the imaginative idealism of King Stanisław. Despite her interest in abstract ideals, reforms in law and government in Catherine the Great’s vast Russian lands represented the overriding imperative, the security of the state. In Portugal, Pombal, the rebuilder of post-earthquake Lisbon, was motivated chiefly by the need to restore vitality to a country with a pioneering maritime past. Leopold of Tuscany was able to draw on a rich humanist tradition and civic pride. Everywhere the preferences of the ruler had an idiosyncratic effect, as in the Margrave Charles Frederick of Baden’s unsuccessful attempt in 1770 to introduce a land tax (the impôt unique advocated by the physiocrats), or in Pombal’s campaign to expel the Jesuits (copied supinely by other Catholic rulers).
Overall it may seem as easy to define the Enlightenment by what it opposed as by what it advocated. Along with some superficiality in thought and cynical expediency in action, this is the basis for conservative criticism: When reason is little more than common sense and utilitarianism so infects attitudes that progress can be measured only by material standards, then Edmund Burke’s lament about the age of “sophisters, economists, and calculators” is held to be justified. Some historians have followed Burke in ascribing not only Jacobin authoritarianism but even 20th-century totalitarianism to tendencies within the Enlightenment. Indeed, it may be that the movement that helped to free man from the past and its “self-incurred tutelage” (Kant) failed to prevent the development of new systems and techniques of tyranny. This intellectual odyssey, following Shaftesbury’s “mighty light which spreads itself over the world,” should, however, be seen to be related to the growth of the state, the advance of science, and the subsequent development of an industrial society. For their ill effects, the Enlightenment cannot be held to be mainly responsible. Rather it should be viewed as an integral part of a broader historical process. In this light it is easier to appraise the achievements that are its singular glory. To be challenged to think harder, with greater chance of discovering truth; to be able to write, speak, and worship freely; and to experience equality under the law and relatively humane treatment if one offended against it was to be able to live a fuller life. Geoffrey Russell Richards Treasure
Revolution and the growth of industrial society, 1789–1914
Developments in 19th-century Europe are bounded by two great events. The French Revolution broke out in 1789, and its effects reverberated throughout much of Europe for many decades. World War I began in 1914. Its inception resulted from many trends in European society, culture, and diplomacy during the late 19th century. In between these boundaries—the one opening a new set of trends, the other bringing long-standing tensions to a head—much of modern Europe was defined.
Europe during this 125-year span was both united and deeply divided. A number of basic cultural trends, including new literary styles and the spread of science, ran through the entire continent. European states were increasingly locked in diplomatic interaction, culminating in continentwide alliance systems after 1871. At the same time, this was a century of growing nationalism, in which individual states jealously protected their identities and indeed established more rigorous border controls than ever before. Finally, the European continent was to an extent divided between two zones of differential development. Changes such as the Industrial Revolution and political liberalization spread first and fastest in western Europe—Britain, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and, to an extent, Germany and Italy. Eastern and southern Europe, more rural at the outset of the period, changed more slowly and in somewhat different ways.
Europe witnessed important common patterns and increasing interconnections, but these developments must be assessed in terms of nation-state divisions and, even more, of larger regional differences. Some trends, including the ongoing impact of the French Revolution, ran through virtually the entire 19th century. Other characteristics, however, had a shorter life span.
Some historians prefer to divide 19th-century history into relatively small chunks. Thus, 1789–1815 is defined by the French Revolution and Napoleon; 1815–48 forms a period of reaction and adjustment; 1848–71 is dominated by a new round of revolution and the unifications of the German and Italian nations; and 1871–1914, an age of imperialism, is shaped by new kinds of political debate and the pressures that culminated in war. Overriding these important markers, however, a simpler division can also be useful. Between 1789 and 1849 Europe dealt with the forces of political revolution and the first impact of the Industrial Revolution. Between 1849 and 1914 a fuller industrial society emerged, including new forms of states and of diplomatic and military alignments. The mid-19th century, in either formulation, looms as a particularly important point of transition within the extended 19th century.
The Industrial Revolution
Economic effects
Undergirding the development of modern Europe between the 1780s and 1849 was an unprecedented economic transformation that embraced the first stages of the great Industrial Revolution and a still more general expansion of commercial activity. Articulate Europeans were initially more impressed by the screaming political news generated by the French Revolution and ensuing Napoleonic Wars, but in retrospect the economic upheaval, which related in any event to political and diplomatic trends, has proved more fundamental.
Major economic change was spurred by western Europe’s tremendous population growth during the late 18th century, extending well into the 19th century itself. Between 1750 and 1800, the populations of major countries increased between 50 and 100 percent, chiefly as a result of the use of new food crops (such as the potato) and a temporary decline in epidemic disease. Population growth of this magnitude compelled change. Peasant and artisanal children found their paths to inheritance blocked by sheer numbers and thus had to seek new forms of paying labour. Families of businessmen and landlords also had to innovate to take care of unexpectedly large surviving broods. These pressures occurred in a society already attuned to market transactions, possessed of an active merchant class, and blessed with considerable capital and access to overseas markets as a result of existing dominance in world trade.
Heightened commercialization showed in a number of areas. Vigorous peasants increased their landholdings, often at the expense of their less fortunate neighbours, who swelled the growing ranks of the near-propertyless. These peasants, in turn, produced food for sale in growing urban markets. Domestic manufacturing soared, as hundreds of thousands of rural producers worked full- or part-time to make thread and cloth, nails and tools under the sponsorship of urban merchants. Craft work in the cities began to shift toward production for distant markets, which encouraged artisan-owners to treat their journeymen less as fellow workers and more as wage labourers. Europe’s social structure changed toward a basic division, both rural and urban, between owners and nonowners. Production expanded, leading by the end of the 18th century to a first wave of consumerism as rural wage earners began to purchase new kinds of commercially produced clothing, while urban middle-class families began to indulge in new tastes, such as uplifting books and educational toys for children.
In this context an outright industrial revolution took shape, led by Britain, which retained leadership in industrialization well past the middle of the 19th century. In 1840, British steam engines were generating 620,000 horsepower out of a European total of 860,000. Nevertheless, though delayed by the chaos of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, many western European nations soon followed suit; thus, by 1860 British steam-generated horsepower made up less than half the European total, with France, Germany, and Belgium gaining ground rapidly. Governments and private entrepreneurs worked hard to imitate British technologies after 1820, by which time an intense industrial revolution was taking shape in many parts of western Europe, particularly in coal-rich regions such as Belgium, northern France, and the Ruhr area of Germany. German pig iron production, a mere 40,000 tons in 1825, soared to 150,000 tons a decade later and reached 250,000 tons by the early 1850s. French coal and iron output doubled in the same span—huge changes in national capacities and the material bases of life.
Technological change soon spilled over from manufacturing into other areas. Increased production heightened demands on the transportation system to move raw materials and finished products. Massive road and canal building programs were one response, but steam engines also were directly applied as a result of inventions in Britain and the United States. Steam shipping plied major waterways soon after 1800 and by the 1840s spread to oceanic transport. Railroad systems, first developed to haul coal from mines, were developed for intercity transport during the 1820s; the first commercial line opened between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. During the 1830s local rail networks fanned out in most western European countries, and national systems were planned in the following decade, to be completed by about 1870. In communication, the invention of the telegraph allowed faster exchange of news and commercial information than ever before.
New organization of business and labour was intimately linked to the new technologies. Workers in the industrialized sectors laboured in factories rather than in scattered shops or homes. Steam and water power required a concentration of labour close to the power source. Concentration of labour also allowed new discipline and specialization, which increased productivity.
The new machinery was expensive, and businessmen setting up even modest factories had to accumulate substantial capital through partnerships, loans from banks, or joint-stock ventures. While relatively small firms still predominated, and managerial bureaucracies were limited save in a few heavy industrial giants, a tendency toward expansion of the business unit was already noteworthy. Commerce was affected in similar ways, for new forms had to be devised to dispose of growing levels of production. Small shops replaced itinerant peddlers in villages and small towns. In Paris, the department store, introduced in the 1830s, ushered in an age of big business in the trading sector.
Urbanization was a vital result of growing commercialization and new industrial technology. Factory centres such as Manchester grew from villages into cities of hundreds of thousands in a few short decades. The percentage of the total population located in cities expanded steadily, and big cities tended to displace more scattered centres in western Europe’s urban map. Rapid city growth produced new hardships, for housing stock and sanitary facilities could not keep pace, though innovation responded, if slowly. Gas lighting improved street conditions in the better neighbourhoods from the 1830s onward, and sanitary reformers pressed for underground sewage systems at about this time. For the better-off, rapid suburban growth allowed some escape from the worst urban miseries.
Rural life changed less dramatically. A full-scale technological revolution in the countryside occurred only after the 1850s. Nevertheless, factory-made tools spread widely even before this time, as scythes replaced sickles for harvesting, allowing a substantial improvement in productivity. Larger estates, particularly in commercially minded Britain, began to introduce newer equipment, such as seed drills for planting. Crop rotation, involving the use of nitrogen-fixing plants, displaced the age-old practice of leaving some land fallow, while better seeds and livestock and, from the 1830s, chemical fertilizers improved yields as well. Rising agricultural production and market specialization were central to the growth of cities and factories.
The speed of western Europe’s Industrial Revolution should not be exaggerated. By 1850 in Britain, far and away the leader still, only half the total population lived in cities, and there were as many urban craft producers as there were factory hands. Relatively traditional economic sectors, in other words, did not disappear and even expanded in response to new needs for housing construction or food production. Nevertheless, the new economic sectors grew most rapidly, and even other branches displayed important new features as part of the general process of commercialization.
Geographic disparities complicate the picture as well. Belgium and, from the 1840s, many of the German states were well launched on an industrial revolution that brought them steadily closer to British levels. France, poorer in coal, concentrated somewhat more on increasing production in craft sectors, converting furniture making, for example, from an artistic endeavour to standardized output in advance of outright factory forms. Scandinavia and the Netherlands joined the industrial parade seriously only after 1850.
Southern and eastern Europe, while importing a few model factories and setting up some local rail lines, generally operated in a different economic orbit. City growth and technological change were both modest until much later in the 19th century, save in pockets of northern Italy and northern Spain. In eastern areas, western Europe’s industrialization had its greatest impact in encouraging growing conversion to market agriculture, as Russia, Poland, and Hungary responded to grain import needs, particularly in the British Isles. As in eastern Prussia, the temptation was to impose new obligations on peasant serfs labouring on large estates, increasing the work requirements in order to meet export possibilities without fundamental technical change and without challenging the hold of the landlord class.
Social upheaval
In western Europe, economic change produced massive social consequences during the first half of the 19th century. Basic aspects of daily life changed, and work was increasingly redefined. The intensity of change varied, of course—with factory workers affected most keenly, labourers on the land least—but some of the pressures were widespread.
For wage labourers, the autonomy of work declined; more people worked under the daily direction of others. Early textile and metallurgical factories set shop rules, which urged workers to be on time, to stay at their machines rather than wandering around, and to avoid idle singing or chatter (difficult in any event given the noise of the equipment). These rules were increasingly enforced by foremen, who mediated between owners and ordinary labourers. Work speeded up. Machines set the pace, and workers were supposed to keep up: one French factory owner, who each week decorated the most productive machine (not its operators) with a garland of flowers, suggested where the priorities lay. Work, in other words, was to be fast, coordinated, and intense, without the admixture of distractions common in preindustrial labour. Some of these pressures spilled over to nonfactory settings as well, as craft directors tried to urge a higher productivity on journeymen artisans. Duration of work everywhere remained long, up to 14 hours a day, which was traditional but could be oppressive when work was more intense and walking time had to be added to reach the factories in the first place. Women and children were widely used for the less skilled operations; again, this was no novelty, but it was newly troubling now that work was located outside the home and was often more dangerous, given the hazards of unprotected machinery.
The nature of work shifted in the propertied classes as well. Middle-class people, not only factory owners but also merchants and professionals, began to trumpet a new work ethic. According to this ethic, work was the basic human good. He who worked was meritorious and should prosper, he who suffered did so because he did not work. Idleness and frivolity were officially frowned upon. Middle-class stories, for children and adults alike, were filled with uplifting tales of poor people who, by dint of assiduous work, managed to better themselves. In Britain, Samuel Smiles authored this kind of mobility literature, which was widely popular between the 1830s and 1860s. Between 1780 and 1840, Prussian school reading shifted increasingly toward praise of hard work as a means of social improvement, with corresponding scorn for laziness.
Shifts in work context had important implications for leisure. Businessmen who internalized the new work ethic felt literally uncomfortable when not on the job. Overall, the European middle class strove to redefine leisure tastes toward personal improvement and family cohesion; recreation that did not conduce to these ends was dubious. Family reading was a common pastime. Daughters were encouraged to learn piano playing, for music could draw the family together and demonstrate the refinement of its women. Through piano teaching, in turn, a new class of professional musicians began to emerge in the large cities. Middle-class people, newly wealthy, were willing to join in sponsorship of certain cultural events outside the home, such as symphony concerts. Book buying and newspaper reading also were supported, with a tendency to favour serious newspapers that focused on political and economic issues and books that had a certain classic status. Middle-class people also attended informative public lectures and night courses that might develop new work skills in such areas as applied science or management.
Middle-class pressures by no means totally reshaped popular urban leisure habits. Workers had limited time and means for play, but many absented themselves from the factories when they could afford to (often preferring free time over higher earnings, to the despair of their managers). The sheer intensity of work constrained leisure nevertheless. Furthermore, city administrations tried to limit other traditional popular amusements, ranging from gambling to animal contests (bear-baiting, cockfighting) to popular festivals. Leisure of this sort was viewed as unproductive, crude, and—insofar as it massed urban crowds—dangerous to political order. Urban police forces, created during the 1820s in cities like London to provide more professional control over crime and public behaviour, spent much of their time combating popular leisure impulses during the middle decades of the 19th century. Popular habits did not fully accommodate to middle-class standards. Drinking, though disapproved of by middle-class critics, was an important recreational outlet, bringing men together in a semblance of community structure. Bars sprouted throughout working-class sections of town. On the whole, however, the early decades of the Industrial Revolution saw a massive decline of popular leisure traditions; even in the countryside, festivals were diluted by importing paid entertainers from the cities. Leisure did not disappear, but it was increasingly reshaped toward respectable family pastimes or spectatorship at inexpensive concerts or circuses, where large numbers of people paid professional entertainers to take their minds away from the everyday routine.
The growth of cities and industry had a vital impact on family life. The family declined as a production unit as work moved away from home settings. This was true not only for workers but also for middle-class people. Many businessmen setting up a new store or factory in the 1820s initially assumed that their wives would assist them, in the time-honoured fashion in which all family members were expected to pitch in. After the first generation, however, this impulse faded, in part because fashionable homes were located at some distance from commercial sections and needed separate attention. In general, most urban groups tended to respond to the separation of home and work by redefining gender roles, so that married men became the family breadwinners (aided, in the working class, by older children) and women were the domestic specialists.
In the typical working-class family, women were expected to work from their early teens through marriage a decade or so later. The majority of women workers in the cities went into domestic service in middle-class households, but an important minority laboured in factories; another minority became prostitutes. Some women continued working outside the home after marriage, but most pulled back to tasks, such as laundering, that could be done domestically. Their other activities concentrated on shopping for the family (an arduous task on limited budgets), caring for children, and maintaining contacts with other relatives who might support the family socially and provide aid during economic hardships.
Few middle-class women worked in paid employment at any point in their lives. Managing a middle-class household was complex, even with a servant present. Standards of child rearing urged increased maternal attention, and women were also supposed to provide a graceful and comfortable tone for family life. Middle-class ideals held the family to be a sacred place and women its chief agents because of their innate morality and domestic devotion. Men owed the family good manners and the provision of economic security, but their daily interactions became increasingly peripheral. Many middle-class families also began, in the early 19th century, to limit their birth rate, mainly through increasing sexual abstinence. Having too many children could complicate the family’s economic well-being and prevent the necessary attention and support for the children who were desired. The middle class thus pioneered a new definition of family size that would ultimately become more widespread in European society.
New family arrangements, both for workers and for middle-class people, suggested new courtship patterns. As wage earners having no access to property, urban workers were increasingly able to form liaisons early in life without waiting for inheritance and without close supervision by a watchful community. Sexual activity began earlier in life than had been standard before the 1780s. Marriage did notnecessarily follow, for many workers moved from job to job and some unquestionably exploited female partners who were eager for more durable arrangements. Rates of illegitimate births began to rise rapidly throughout western Europe from about 1780 (from 2 to 4 up to 10 percent of total births) among young rural as well as urban workers. Sexual pleasure, or its quest, became more important for young adults. Similar symptoms developed among some middle-class men, who exploited female servants or the growing numbers of brothels that dotted the large cities and that often did exceptional business during school holidays. Respectable young middle-class women held back from these trends. They were, however, increasingly drawn to beliefs in a romantic marriage, which became part of the new family ideal. Marriage age for middle-class women also dropped, creating an age disparity between men and women in the families of this class. Economic criteria for family formation remained important in many social sectors, but young people enjoyed more freedom in courtship, and other factors, sexual or emotional or both, gained increasing legitimacy.
Changes in family life, rooted in shifts in modes of livelihood and methods of work, had substantial impact on all family members. Older people gained new roles, particularly in working-class families, where they helped out as baby-sitters for grandchildren. Women’s economic power in the family decreased. Many groups of men argued vigorously that women should stick to family concerns. By the 1830s and ’40s one result was the inception of laws that regulated women’s hours of work (while leaving men free from protection or constraints); this was a humanitarian move to protect women’s family roles, but it also reduced women’s economic opportunities on grounds of their special frailty. The position of children also began to be redefined. Middle-class ideals held that children were innocents, to be educated and nurtured. Most working-class families urged a more traditional view of children as contributors to the family economy, but they too could see advantages in sending their children to school where possible and restricting their work in dangerous factories. Again, after the first decades of industrialization, reform laws began to respond. Legislation in Britain, France, and Prussia during the 1830s restricted the employment of young children in the factories and encouraged school attendance.
Along with its impact on daily patterns of life and family institutions, economic change began to shift Europe’s social structure and create new antagonisms among urban social classes. The key division lay between the members of the middle class, who owned businesses or acquired professional education, and those of the working class, who depended on the sale of labour for a wage. Neither group was homogeneous. Many middle-class people criticized the profit-seeking behaviour of the new factory owners. Artisans often shunned factory workers and drew distinctions based on their traditional prestige and (usually) greater literacy. Some skilled workers, earning good wages, emulated middle-class people, seeking education and acquiring domestic trappings such as pianos.
Nevertheless, the social divide was considerable. It increasingly affected residential patterns, as wealthier classes moved away from the crowded slums of the poor, in contrast to the greater mixture in the quarters of preindustrial cities. Middle-class people deplored the work and sexual habits of many workers, arguing that their bad behaviour was the root cause of poverty. City governments enacted harsh measures against beggars, while new national laws attempted to make charity harder to obtain. The British Poor Law Reform of 1834, in particular, tightened the limits on relief in hopes of forcing able-bodied workers to fend for themselves.
Class divisions manifested themselves in protest movements. Middle-class people joined political protests hoping to win new rights against aristocratic monopoly. Workers increasingly organized on their own despite the fact that new laws banned craft organizations and outlawed unions and strikes. Some workers attacked the reliance on machinery in the name of older, more humane traditions of work. Luddite protests of this sort began in Britain during the decade 1810–20. More numerous were groups of craft workers, and some factory hands, who formed incipient trade unions to demand better conditions as well as to provide mutual aid in cases of sickness or other setbacks. National union movements arose in Britain during the 1820s, though they ultimately failed. Huge strikes in the silk industry around Lyon, France, in 1831 and 1834 sought a living minimum wage for all workers. The most ambitious worker movements tended to emphasize a desire to turn back the clock to older work systems where there was greater equality and a greater commitment to craft skill, but most failed. Smaller, local unions did achieve some success in preserving the conditions of the traditional systems. Social protest was largely intermittent because many workers were too poor or too disoriented to mount a larger effort, but it clearly signaled important tensions in the new economic order.
The age of revolution
During the decades of economic and social transformation, western Europe also experienced massive political change. The central event throughout much of the Continent was the French Revolution (1789–99) and its aftermath. This was followed by a concerted effort at political reaction and a renewed series of revolutions from 1820 through 1848.
Connections between political change and socioeconomic upheaval were real but complex. Economic grievances associated with early industrialization fed into later revolutions, particularly the outbursts in 1848, but the newest social classes were not prime bearers of the revolutionary message. Revolutions also resulted from new political ideas directed against the institutions and social arrangements of the preindustrial order. Their results facilitated further economic change, but this was not necessarily their intent. Political unrest must be seen as a discrete factor shaping a new Europe along with fundamental economic forces.
The French Revolution
Revolution exploded in France in the summer of 1789, after many decades of ideological ferment, political decline, and social unrest. Ideologically, thinkers of the Enlightenment urged that governments should promote the greatest good of all people, not the narrow interests of a particular elite. They were hostile to the political power of the Roman Catholic church as well as to the tax exemptions and landed power of the aristocracy. Their remedies were diverse, ranging from outright democracy to a more efficient monarchy, but they joined in insisting on greater religious and cultural freedom, some kind of parliamentary institution, and greater equality under the law. Enlightenment writings were widely disseminated, reaching many urban groups in France and elsewhere. The monarchy was in bad shape even aside from new attacks. Its finances were severely pressed, particularly after the wars of the mid-18th century and French involvement against Britain during the American Revolution. Efforts to reform the tax structure foundered against the opposition of the aristocracy. Finally, various groups in France were pressed by economic and social change. Aristocrats wanted new political rights against royal power. Middle-class people sought a political voice to match their commercial importance and a government more friendly to their interests. The peasant majority, pressed by population growth, sought access to the lands of the aristocracy and the church, an end to remaining manorial dues and services, and relief from taxation.
These various discontents came to a head when King Louis XVI called the Estates-General in 1789 to consider new taxes. This body had not met since 1614, and its calling released all the pressures building during recent decades, exacerbated by economic hardships resulting from bad harvests in 1787–88. Reform leaders, joined by some aristocrats and clergy, insisted that the Third Estate, representing elements of the urban middle class, be granted double the membership of the church and aristocratic estates and that the entire body of Estates-General vote as a unit—they insisted, in other words, on a new kind of parliament. The king yielded, and the new National Assembly began to plan a constitution. Riots in the summer of 1789 included a symbolic attack on the Bastille, a royal prison, and a series of risings in the countryside that forced repeal of the remnants of manorialism and a proclamation of equality under the laws. A Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen trumpeted religious freedom and liberty of press and assembly, while reaffirming property rights. Church lands were seized, however, creating a rift between revolutionary and Roman Catholic sentiment. Guilds were outlawed (in 1791), as the revolution promoted middle-class beliefs in individual initiative and freedom for technological change. A 1791 constitution retained the monarchy but created a strong parliament, elected by about half of France’s adult males—those with property.
This liberal phase of the French Revolution was followed, between 1792 and 1794, by a more radical period. Economic conditions deteriorated, prompting new urban riots. Roman Catholic and other groups rose in opposition to the revolution, resulting in forceful suppression and a corresponding growing insistence on loyalty to revolutionary principles. Monarchs in neighbouring countries—notably Britain, Austria, and Prussia—challenged the revolution and threatened invasion, which added foreign war to the unstable mix by 1792. Radical leaders, under the banners of the Jacobin party, took over the government, proclaiming a republic and executing the king and many other leaders of the old regime. Governmental centralization increased; the decimal system was introduced. Mass military conscription was organized for the first time in European history, with the argument that, now that the government belonged to the people, the people must serve it loyally. A new constitution proclaimed universal manhood suffrage, and reforms in education and other areas were widely discussed. The radical phase of the revolution brought increasing military success to revolutionary troops in effectively reorganized armies, which conquered parts of the Low Countries and Germany and carried revolutionary laws in their wake. The revolution was beginning to become a European phenomenon.
Jacobin rule was replaced by a more moderate consolidation after 1795, during which, however, military expansion continued in several directions, notably in parts of Italy. The needs of war, along with recurrent domestic unrest, prompted a final revolutionary regime change, in 1799, that brought General Napoleon Bonaparte to power.
The Napoleonic era
Napoleon ruled for 15 years, closing out the quarter-century so dominated by the French Revolution. His own ambitions were to establish a solid dynasty within France and to create a French-dominated empire in Europe. To this end he moved steadily to consolidate his personal power, proclaiming himself emperor and sketching a new aristocracy. He was almost constantly at war, with Britain his most dogged opponent but Prussia and Austria also joining successive coalitions. Until 1812, his campaigns were usually successful. Although he frequently made errors in strategy—especially in the concentration of troops and the deployment of artillery—he was a master tactician, repeatedly snatching victory from initial defeat in the major battles. Napoleonic France directly annexed territories in the Low Countries and western Germany, applying revolutionary legislation in full. Satellite kingdoms were set up in other parts of Germany and Italy, in Spain, and in Poland. Only after 1810 did Napoleon clearly overreach himself. His empire stirred enmity widely, and in conquered Spain an important guerrilla movement harassed his forces. Russia, briefly allied, turned hostile, and an 1812 invasion attempt failed miserably in the cold Russian winter. A new alliance formed among the other great powers in 1813. France fell to the invading forces of this coalition in 1814, and Napoleon was exiled. He returned dramatically, only to be defeated at Waterloo in 1815; his reign had finally ended.
The greatest extent of Napoleon I's First Empire (1812).Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Napoleon’s regime produced three major accomplishments, aside from its many military episodes. First, it confirmed many revolutionary changes within France itself. Napoleon was a dictator, maintaining only a sham parliament and rigorously policing press and assembly. Though some key liberal principles were in fact ignored, equality under the law was for the most part enhanced through Napoleon’s sweeping new law codes; hereditary privileges among adult males became a thing of the past. A strongly centralized government recruited bureaucrats according to their abilities. New educational institutions, under state control, provided access to bureaucratic and specialized technical training. Religious freedom survived, despite some conciliations of Roman Catholic opinion. Freedom of internal trade and encouragements to technical innovation allied the state with commercial growth. Sales of church land were confirmed, and rural France emerged as a nation of strongly independent peasant proprietors.
Napoleon’s conquests cemented the spread of French revolutionary legislation to much of western Europe. The powers of the Roman Catholic church, guilds, and manorial aristocracy came under the gun. The old regime was dead in Belgium, western Germany, and northern Italy.
Finally, wider conquests permanently altered the European map. Napoleon’s kingdoms consolidated scattered territories in Germany and Italy, and the welter of divided states was never restored. These developments, but also resentment at Napoleonic rule, sparked growing nationalism in these regions and also in Spain and Poland. Prussia and Russia, less touched by new ideologies, nevertheless introduced important political reforms as a means of strengthening the state to resist the Napoleonic war machine. Prussia expanded its school system and modified serfdom; it also began to recruit larger armies. Britain was less affected, protected by its powerful navy and an expanding industrial economy that ultimately helped wear Napoleon down; but, even in Britain, French revolutionary example spurred a new wave of democratic agitation.
In 1814–15 the victorious powers convened at the Congress of Vienna to try to put Europe back together, though there was no thought of literally restoring the world that had existed before 1789. Regional German and Italian states were confirmed as a buffer to any future French expansion. Prussia gained new territories in western Germany. Russia took over most of Poland (previously divided, in the late 18th century, until Napoleon’s brief incursion). Britain acquired some former French, Spanish, and Dutch colonies (including South Africa). The Bourbon dynasty was restored to the French throne in the person of Louis XVIII, but revolutionary laws were not repealed, and a parliament, though based on very narrow suffrage, proclaimed a constitutional monarchy. The Treaty of Vienna disappointed nationalists, who had hoped for a new Germany and Italy, and it certainly daunted democrats and liberals. However, it was not reactionary, nor was it punitive as far as France was concerned. Overall, the treaty strove to reestablish a balance of power in Europe and to emphasize a conservative political order tempered by concessions to new realities. The former was remarkably successful, preserving the peace for more than half a century, the latter effort less so.
The conservative reaction
Conservatism did dominate the European political agenda through the mid-1820s. Major governments, even in Britain, used police agents to ferret out agitators. The prestige of the Roman Catholic church soared in France and elsewhere. Europe’s conservative leader was Prince von Metternich, chief minister of the Habsburg monarchy. Metternich realized the fragility of Habsburg rule, not only wedded to church and monarchy but also, as a polyglot combination of German, Hungarian, and Slavic peoples, vulnerable to any nationalist sentiment. He sedulously avoided significant change in his own lands and encouraged the international status quo as well. He sponsored congresses at several points through the early 1820s to discuss intervention against political unrest. He was particularly eager to promote conservatism in the German states and in Italy, where Austrian administration of northern provinces gave his regime a new stake.
Nevertheless, in 1820 revolutionary agitation broke out in fringe areas. Risings in several Italian states were put down. A rebellion in Spain was also suppressed, though only after several years, foreshadowing more than a century of recurrent political instability; the revolution also confirmed Spain’s loss of most of its American colonies, which had first risen during the Napoleonic occupation. A Greek revolution against Ottoman control fared better, for Greek nationalists appealed to European sympathy for a Christian nation struggling against Muslim dominance. With French, British, and Russian backing, Greece finally won its independence in 1829.
Liberal agitation began to revive in Britain, France, and the Low Countries by the mid-1820s. Liberals wanted stronger parliaments and wider protection of individual rights. They also sought a vote for the propertied classes. They wanted commercial legislation that would favour business growth, which in Britain meant attacking Corn Law tariffs that protected landlord interests and kept food prices (and so wages) artificially high. Belgian liberals also had a nationalist grievance, for the Treaty of Vienna had placed their country under Dutch rule.
Liberal concerns fueled a new round of revolution in 1830, sparked by a new uprising in Paris. The French monarchy had tightened regulation of the press and of university professors, producing classic liberal issues. Artisans, eager for more political rights, also rose widely against economic hardship and the principles of the new commercial economy. This combination chased the Bourbon king, producing a new and slightly more liberal monarchy, an expanded middle-class voting system, and some transient protections for freedom of the press; the new regime also cut back the influence of the church. Revolution spread to some German and Italian states and also to Belgium, where after several years an independent nation with a liberal monarchy was proclaimed. Britain was spared outright revolution, but massive agitation forced a Reform Bill in 1832 that effectively enfranchised all middle-class males and set the framework for additional liberal legislation, including repeal of the Corn Laws and municipal government reform, during the next decade.
Europe was now divided between a liberal west and a conservative centre and east. Russia, indeed, seemed largely exempt from the political currents swirling in the rest of the continent, partly because of the absence of significant social and economic change. A revolt by some liberal-minded army officers in 1825 (the Decembrist revolt) was put down with ease, and a new tsar, Nicholas I, installed a more rigorous system of political police and censorship. Nationalist revolt in Poland, a part of the 1830 movement, was suppressed with great force. Russian diplomatic interests continued to follow largely traditional lines, with recurrent warfare with the Ottoman Empire in an effort to gain territory to the south. Only after 1850 did the Russian regime seriously rethink its adamantly conservative stance.
This pattern could not prevail elsewhere in Europe. Scandinavian governments moved toward increasing liberalism by expanding the power of parliaments, a development that was completed in the late 1840s; the Dutch monarchy did the same. Elsewhere, the next major step resulted once again from a series of revolutions in 1848, which proved to be western Europe’s final revolutionary round.
The Revolutions of 1848
After adopting reforms in the 1830s and the early 1840s, Louis-Philippe of France rejected further change and thereby spurred new liberal agitation. Artisan concerns also had quickened, against their loss of status and shifts in work conditions following from rapid economic change; a major recession in 1846–47 added to popular unrest. Some socialist ideas spread among artisan leaders, who urged a regime in which workers could control their own small firms and labour in harmony and equality. A major propaganda campaign for wider suffrage and political reform brought police action in February 1848, which in turn prompted a classic street rising that chased the monarchy (never to return) and briefly established a republican regime based on universal manhood suffrage.
Revolt quickly spread to Austria, Prussia, Hungary, Bohemia, and various parts of Italy. These risings included most of the ingredients present in France, but also serious peasant grievances against manorial obligations and a strong nationalist current that sought national unification in Italy and Germany and Hungarian independence or Slavic autonomy in the Habsburg lands. New regimes were set up in many areas, while a national assembly convened in Frankfurt to discuss German unity.
The major rebellions were put down in 1849. Austrian revolutionaries were divided over nationalist issues, with German liberals opposed to minority nationalisms; this helped the Habsburg regime maintain control of its army and move against rebels in Bohemia, Italy, and Hungary (in the last case, aided by Russian troops). Parisian revolutionaries divided between those who sought only political change and artisans who wanted job protection and other gains from the state. In a bloody clash in June 1848, the artisans were put down and the republican regime moved steadily toward the right, ultimately electing a nephew of Napoleon I as president; he, in turn (true to family form), soon established a new empire, claiming the title Napoleon III. The Prussian monarch turned down a chance to head a liberal united Germany and instead used his army to chase the revolutionary governments, aided by divisions between liberals and working-class radicals (including the socialist Karl Marx, who had set up a newspaper in Cologne).
Despite the defeat of the revolutions, however, important changes resulted from the 1848 rising. Manorialism was permanently abolished throughout Germany and the Habsburg lands, giving peasants new rights. Democracy ruled in France, even under the new empire and despite considerable manipulation; universal manhood suffrage had been permanently installed. Prussia, again in conservative hands, nevertheless established a parliament, based on a limited vote, as a gesture to liberal opinion. The Habsburg monarchy installed a rationalized bureaucratic structure to replace localized landlord rule. A new generation of conservatives came to the fore—Metternich had been exiled by revolution—who were eager to compromise with and utilize new political forces rather than oppose them down the line. Finally, some new political currents had been sketched. Socialism, though wounded by the failure of the revolutions, was on Europe’s political agenda, and some feminist agitation had surfaced in France and Germany. The stage was set for rapid political evolution after 1850, in a process that made literal revolution increasingly difficult.
The years between 1815 and 1850 had not seen major diplomatic activity on the part of most European powers, Russia excepted. Exhaustion after the Napoleonic Wars combined with a desire to use diplomacy as a weapon of internal politics. Britain continued to expand its colonial hold, most notably introducing more direct control over its empire in India. France and Britain, though still wary of each other, joined in resisting Russian gains in the Middle East. France also began to acquire new colonial holdings, notably by invading Algeria in 1829. Seeds were being planted for more rapid colonial expansion after mid-century, but the period remained, on the surface, rather quiet, in marked contrast to the ferment of revolution and reaction during the same decades. Peter N. Stearns
Romanticism and Realism
The legacy of the French Revolution
To make the story of 19th-century culture start in the year of the French Revolution is at once convenient and accurate, even though nothing in history “starts” at a precise moment. For although the revolution itself had its beginnings in ideas and conditions preceding that date, it is clear that the events of 1789 brought together and crystallized a multitude of hopes, fears, and desires into something visible, potent, and irreversible. To say that in 1789 reform becomes revolt is to record a positive change, a genuine starting point. One who lived through the change, the duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, was even sharper in his vision when (as the story goes) he answered Louis XVI, who had asked whether the tumult outside was a revolt: “No, sire, it is a revolution.” In cultural history as in political, significance is properly said to reside in events; that is, in the acts of certain men or the appearance of certain works that not only embody the feelings of the hour but also prevent other acts or works from having importance or effect. To list some examples: the year 1790 saw the appearance of Goethe’s Faust, a Fragment, of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In these works are found the Romanticist view of human destiny, of the state, of moral energy, and of aesthetics. The remainder of the decade goes on to show that it belongs to a new age; it gave the world Goya’s “Caprichos” and the portrait of the Duchess de Alba, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C Minor (Pathétique), Hölderlin’s Hyperion, the beginning of August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck’s translation of Shakespeare into German, Schelling’s Nature Philosophy, Herder’s Letters on the Progress of Mankind, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, Schiller’s Wallenstein, and Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. These are so many evidences of a new direction in thought and culture.
To say, then, that the cultural history of the later modern age—1789 to the present—begins with the French Revolution is to discuss that revolution’s ideas rather than the details of its onward march during its first 10 years. These ideas are the recognition of individual rights, the sovereignty of the people, and the universal applicability of this pair of propositions. In politics the powerful combination of all three brings about a permanent state of affairs: “the revolution” as defined here has not yet stopped. It continues to move the minds of men, in the West and beyond. The revolution is “dynamic” because it does not simply change rulers or codes of law but also arouses a demand and a hope in every individual and every people. When the daily paper tells of another new nation born by breaking away, violently or not, from some other group, the revolutionary doctrine of the sovereignty of the people may be observed still at work after two centuries.
Cultural nationalism
The counterpart of this political idea in the 19th century is cultural nationalism. The phrase denotes the belief that each nation in Europe had from its earliest formation developed a culture of its own, with features as unique as its language, even though its language and culture might have near relatives over the frontier. Europe was thus seen as a bouquet of diverse flowers harmoniously bunched, rather than as a uniform upper-class civilization stretching from Paris to St. Petersburg, from London to Rome, and from Berlin to Lisbon—wherever “polite society” could be found, a society acknowledging the same artistic ideals, speaking French, and taking its lead from the French court and culture. In still other words, the revolutionary idea of the people as the source of power ended the idea of a cosmopolitan Europe.
The “uniform” conception presupposed a class or elite transcending boundaries; the “diverse” implied a number of distinct nations made up of citizens attached to their native soil and having an inborn and exclusive understanding of all that had been produced on it. In each nation it is the people as a whole, not just the educated class, that is deemed the creator and repository of culture; and that culture is not a conscious product fashioned by the court artists of the moment: it is the slow growth of centuries. This view of Europe explains one of the great intellectual forces of the postrevolutionary era—the passion for history. An emotion that may be called cultural populism replaced the devotion to a single horizontal, Europe-wide, and “sophisticated” civilization. These vertical national cultures were “popular” not only in their scope but also in their simplicity.
This new outlook, though propagated by the revolution, began as one of those subdued feelings mentioned earlier, as undercurrents beneath Enlightenment doctrine. In England and Germany especially, a taste developed for folk literature—the border ballads, the legends and love songs of the people, their dialects and superstitions. Educated gentlemen collected and published these materials; poets and storytellers imitated them. Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto, Macpherson in Ossian, Chatterton in his forgeries of early verse, and Goethe in his lyrics exploited this new vein of picturesque sentiment. A scholar such as Herder or a poet-dramatist such as Schiller drew lessons of moral, psychological, and philosophical import from the wisdom found in the subculture of das Volk. The folk or people was not as yet very clearly defined, but the revolution would shortly take care of this omission.
In France, where the revolution occurred, the situation was somewhat different. There were no collectors of border ballads or exploiters of Gothic superstitions. France by 1789 had been for more than a century the cultural dictator of Europe, and it is clear that in England and Germany the search for native sources of art was stimulated by the desire to break the tyranny of the French language and literature. The rediscovery of Shakespeare, for example, was in part a move in the liberation from French classical tragedy and its rigid limitations of subject matter and form.
Simplicity and truth
Yet cultural nationalism was also the expression of a genuine desire for truth. This in turn implied the release of feelings that the confidence of the Enlightenment in the power of reason had tended to suppress. Two 18th-century figures tapped this fount of emotion, Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The novels of Richardson, in which innocent girls are portrayed as withstanding the artful seductions of titled gentlemen, might be said to foreshadow in symbolic form the struggle between high cosmopolitan culture and the new popular simplicity. These novels were best-sellers in France, and Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse followed in their wake, as did the bourgeois dramas of Diderot, Beaumarchais’s satirical comedies about the plebeian Figaro, and the peasant narratives of Restif de la Bretonne, to mention only the most striking exemplars of the new simplicity.
At the very centre of sophistication the simple life became a fad, the French court (including Marie-Antoinette) dressing up and playing at the rustic existence of milkmaids and shepherds. However silly the symptoms, the underlying passion was real. It was the periodic urge of complex civilizations to strip off the social mask and recover the happiness imagined as still dwelling among the humble. What was held up to admiration was honesty and sincerity, the strong and pure feelings of people unspoiled by court and city life. Literature therefore came to express an acute sensitivity to scenes of undeserved misfortune, of heroic self-sacrifice, of virtue unexpectedly rewarded—a sensitivity marked by tearfulness, actual or “literary.”
This surge of self-consciousness about sophisticated culture has often been confused with an idealization of primitive man and attributed to Rousseau. But contrary to common opinion, the so-called back-to-nature movement does not at all echo the noble-savage doctrine of the 17th century. Rousseau’s attack on “civilization,” which evoked such a powerful response in the latent feelings of his contemporaries, goes with a characterization of the savage as stupid, coarse, and amoral. In Rousseau and his abettors, what is preached is the simple life. What nature and the natural really are remains to be found by trial and error—the fit methods and forms of religion, marriage, child rearing, hygiene, and daily work.
Populism
It is easy to see in these beliefs and sentiments (which often passed into sentimentality) additional materials for the populism that the revolution fostered. Revolution, to begin with, is also an urge to simplify. The revolutionary style was necessarily populist—Marat’s newspaper was called L’Ami du peuple (“The Friend of the People”). The visible signs that a revolution had occurred included the wearing of natural hair instead of wigs and of common workmen’s trousers instead of silk breeches, as well as the use of the title of citoyen instead of Monsieur or any other term of rank. Now, equality coupled with sincerity and simplicity logically leads to fraternity, just as honest feeling coupled with devotion to the people leads to puritanism: a good and true citizen behaves like a moral man. He is, under the revolutionary principles, a responsible unit in the nation, a conscious particle of the will of the sovereign people, and as such his most compelling obligation is love of country—patriotism.
With this last word the circle of ideas making up the cultural ambient of the French Revolution might seem to be complete. However, in the effort to trace back and interweave the strands of feeling and opinion that make up populism, one must not overlook the first political axiom of revolutionary thought, which is the recognition of individual rights. Their source and extent is a subject for political theory. The recognition of the individual goes with the assertion that his freedom rests on natural law, a potent idea, as we know who have witnessed the vast extension of rights far beyond their first, political meaning. Here the concern is with their cultural role, which can be simply stated: individual rights generate individualism and magnify it. That -ism denotes both an attitude and a doctrine, which together amount to a passionate belief: every human being is an object of primary interest to himself and in himself; he is an end in himself, not a means to the welfare of class or state or to other group purposes. Further, the truly valuable part of each individual is his uniqueness, which he is entitled to develop to the utmost, free of oppression from the government or from his neighbours. That is why the state guarantees the citizen rights as against itself and other citizens. Again, this power accrues to him for himself because he is inherently important—not because he is son or father, peasant or overlord, member of a clan or a guild.
These ideas shift the emphasis of several thousand years of social beliefs and let loose innumerable consequences. Individualism lowers the value of tradition and puts a premium on originality; it leads to the now familiar “cult of the new”—in art, manners, technology, and social and political organization. True, the individual soul had long been held unique and precious by Christian theology, but Christian society had not extended the doctrine to every man’s mundane comings and goings. Nor were his practical rights and powers attached to him as a man but, rather, to his status. Now the human being as such was being officially considered self-contained and self-propelling; it was a new regime and its name was liberty.
Nature of the changes
The contents and implications of these powerful words—liberty, equality, and fraternity, individualism and populism, simplicity and naturalness—enable us to delineate the cultural situation of Europe at the dawn of the era under review. Yet these continuing ideas necessarily modified each other and in different times and countries were subject to still other influences.
For example, the active phase of the revolution in France—say, 1789 to 1804—was influenced by the classical education of most of its public men. They had been brought up on Roman history and the tales of Plutarch’s republican heroes, so that when catapulted into a republic of their own making, the symbols and myths of Rome were often their most natural means of expression. The eloquence of the successive national assemblies is full of Roman allusions. Later, when General Bonaparte let it be seen that he meant to rule France, he was denounced in the Chamber as a Caesar; when he succeeded, he took care to make himself consul (a title of the ancient Roman Republic), flanked by two other consuls of lesser rank. The title was meant to show that no Caesar was in prospect.
In the fine arts this Roman symbolism facilitated a thorough change of taste and technique. The former “grand style” of painting had been derived from royal and aristocratic elegance, and its allusions to the ancient Classical past were gentle and distant, architectural and mythological. Now, under the leadership of the painter David, the great dramatic scenes of ancient history were portrayed in sharp, uncompromising outlines that struck the beholder as the utmost realism of the day.
In David’s Death of Socrates and Oath of the Horatii civic and military courage are the respective subjects; in his pencil sketches of the victims of the Terror as they were led to execution, reportorial realism dominates; and, in his designs for the setting of huge popular festivals, David, in collaboration with the musicians Méhul and Grétry, provided the first examples of an art in scale with the new populism: the courtly taste for intimate elegance and subtle manners gave way to the more striking, less polished large-scale feelings of a proud nation.
Oath of the Horatii, oil painting by Jacques-Louis David, 1784; in the Louvre, Paris.Giraudon/Art Resource, New York
It must be added, however, that except for a few canvases and a few tunes (including the “Marseillaise”) the quality of French Revolutionary art was not on a par with its aspirations. Literature in particular showed the limitations under which revolutionary artists must work: political doctrine takes precedence over truth, and the broad effects required to move the masses encourage banality. There is no French poetry in this period except the odes of Chénier, whom the revolution promptly guillotined, as it did France’s greatest scientist, Lavoisier. The French stage was flourishing but not with plays that can still be read. The revolutionary playwrights only increased the dose of sentiment and melodrama that had characterized plays at the close of the old regime. The aim was to hold up priests and kings to execration and to portray examples of superhuman courage and virtue. Modern operagoers who know the plot of Beethoven’s Fidelio can judge from that sample what the French theatre of the revolutionary years thrived on. Others can imagine for themselves Molière’s Misanthrope rewritten so as to make Alceste a pure patriot and hero, undermined by the intrigues of the vile courtier Philinte.
It may seem odd that once the revolution was under way there should be such persistent indignation and protest against courtiers, priests, and kings and such fulsome homage paid to virtue and patriotism. What accounts for it is the difficulty of transforming culture overnight. People have to be persuaded out of old habits—and must keep on persuading themselves. Even politically, the revolution proceeded by phases and experienced regressions. Manners and customs themselves did not change uniformly, as one can see from portraits of Robespierre at the height of his power wearing a short wig and knee breeches, republican and Rousseauist though he was.
Napoleon’s influence
After Bonaparte’s coup d’état, tension eased as the high revolutionary ideals dropped to a more workaday level, just as the puritanism was replaced by moral license. The general’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 before his self-elevation to power introduced a new style competing with the ancient Roman in costume and furnishings; the Middle East became fashionable and out of the cultural contact came the new science of Egyptology. The Roman idea itself shifted from republic to empire as the successful general and consul Bonaparte made himself into the emperor Napoleon in 1804.
The emperor had an extraordinary capacity for attending to all things, and he was concerned that his regime should be distinguished in the arts. He accordingly gave them a sustained patronage such as a revolutionary party rent by internal struggles could not provide. Napoleon, nonetheless, had tastes of his own, and he had to control public opinion besides. In literature (he had been a poet and writer of novels in his youth), he relished the Celtic legends of Ossian and encouraged his official composer Lesueur in the composition of the opera Ossian ou les Bardes. In painting, he favoured the surviving David and the younger men Gros and Géricault, both “realists” concerned with perpetuating the colour and drama of imperial life. But to depict matters of contemporary importance on the stage (except perhaps in the ballet, which was flourishing) did not prove possible, for the stage must present genuine moral conflict if it is to produce great works, and moral issues are not discussable under a political censorship.
The paradox of the Napoleonic period is that its most lasting cultural contributions were side effects and not the result of imperial intentions. Two of these contributions were books. One, Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity (1802), was a long tract designed to make the author’s peace with the ruler and revigorate Roman Catholic faith. The other, Madame de Staël’s Germany (1810), was a description of the new and thriving literature, philosophy, and popular culture in Germany. Napoleon prohibited the circulation of the book in France, but its message percolated French public opinion nonetheless. Two other sources of future light were the Idéologues, a group of philosophers who were scientific materialists particularly concerned with abnormal psychology, and Napoleon Bonaparte himself, or rather the figure of Napoleon as seen by his age after Waterloo.
General character of the Romantic movement
The mention of Waterloo (1815) suggests the need to make clear a number of chronological discrepancies. It has been possible so far to discuss the general shift in the temper of European life without naming fixed points. It sufficed to say “before or after 1789” or “from 1789 to the Napoleonic empire.” However, from now on the generations of culture makers and the dates of some of their works must be duly situated, without on that account losing sight of unities and similarities in the onward march of artistic and intellectual movements. If, for example, one considers the poets called Romantic or Romanticist, one finds that Goethe came to maturity in the 1770s, when the English Romantics were just beginning to be born. Their French, Italian, Russian, Polish, and Spanish counterparts were, in turn, born about the year 1800, when the English were already in mid-career. The same irregularity in the onset of Romanticism is found in the other arts, and it is complicated (at least superficially) by the names given to various movements and persons in the different countries of Europe. Thus, in Germany the term Romantismus is applied to only a small group of writers, and Goethe and Schiller are called classic. In Poland and in Russia, classic is likewise the label for the great writers whose characteristics in fact align them with the Romantics elsewhere.
All these accidents of birth and nomenclature can be taken in stride by remembering the patterns found in each country or decade and the reasons for their appearance at that time and place. Within the slightly more than half century between 1789 and 1848, the phenomenon of Romanticism occurred and developed its first phase. Those who made it may have come early or late, belonged to this or that nationality, proved to be originators or synthesizers of existing elements—all such considerations appertain to individual biography or the history of a particular art or nation. What matters in the evolution of European culture considered as a whole is the orchestration of all the voices as they come in to swell the ensemble.
The main purport of the Romantic movement is commonly said to be a revolt against 18th-century rationalism and a resulting variety of new attitudes and activities: a turning in upon the self, a love of nature, the rediscovery of the Middle Ages, the cult of art, a taste for the exotic, a return to religion, a fresh sense of history, a yearning for the infinite, a maudlin sentimentality, an overvaluing of emotion as such, a liberal outlook in politics, a conservative outlook, a reactionary outlook, a socialist-utopian outlook, and several other “characteristic features.”
It is clear that not all these can be equally true, characteristic, or important, since some contradict the others. At the same time it was inevitable that so sweeping a cultural revolution as Romanticism should contain incompatible elements. For instance, the political opinions enumerated above did in fact win the allegiance of different groups among the Romantic artists and thinkers for a longer or shorter time. But—to take note of other supposed definitions—not all Romanticists returned to religion: Goethe and Berlioz were pantheists; Byron and Heine, atheists; and Victor Hugo, a sort of Swedenborgian. As for sentimentality, its occurrence was rather a hangover from the 18th century than a new fashion of feeling, for the Romantic cult of art and of strong emotion goes dead against the weak sentimental mood. Similarly, the taste for history, for the Middle Ages, and for the exotic shows a strong curiosity about the particulars of what is real though ignored by previous conventions. All critics, however, are agreed upon one Romantic trait: individualism. And it is here that the figure of Napoleon plays its cultural role.
Napoleon, or more exactly Bonaparte, the revolutionary general, the overthrower of old monarchies and creator of new national republics, the organizing genius who rescued France from chaos and who held off the reactionary forces leagued against him throughout Europe—that figure is the one that inspired Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, Balzac’s and Stendhal’s heroes, and the poems, paintings, and compositions of many others. Here was the model of the new man. He was the self-made man and the man of genius. His career was the manifestation of will and intelligence overcoming the greatest imaginable resistance. He typified the individual challenging the world and subduing it by his genius. A movement that numbered as many artists and geniuses as did Romanticism was bound to find in Napoleon the individual par excellence or, as might be said in modern jargon, a supremely autonomous personality. This perception explains why nearly all the great names of the first half of the 19th century are found on the roster of those who praised Napoleon—from Beethoven and Byron to Hazlitt and Stendhal and Manzoni. Some who were politically his enemies—Sir Walter Scott, for example—nonetheless respected and pondered over the miracle of his achievements. No comparable attention has been paid to the dictators of the 20th century, a fact sufficiently explained by the real difference between them and Napoleon. Stendhal, who as a military intendant took part in the Russian campaign of 1812, stated that difference: Napoleon was a man of thought and vision, and not merely a successful soldier and politician. In everything he touched, he showed originality of conception, a stupendous grasp of detail in execution, and the utmost speed in acting out his vision. This sequence, translated to other realms, was the very pattern of the artist-creator’s imagination. It also seemed the vindication of individualism as a philosophy of life: open the world to the individual and the world will witness marvels unimagined before.
These remarks about Napoleon should convey a sense of the Romantics’ attitude toward themselves and their situation. It is true that culturally they stood in opposition to their immediate forebears. All generations do the same; yet it is not always true that out of the conflict comes great art. The Romanticists had an advantage in undergoing or being emotionally close to a quarter century of violent change. Besides being a stimulus, the tumult of battle and political overturns did its share to clear the ground for artistic innovation. When habits and expectations are repeatedly upset and frustrated in the broad public realm, the general mind opens up to novelty offered in other realms. That is one avenue of cultural, stylistic, and emotional change. When Stendhal was expounding Romanticism to the French in 1822, he argued that to go on writing in the Neoclassic vein was “to provide literary pleasure for one’s grandfather.” His remark was readily understood—at least by his young readers. Mighty events had dug a chasm between past and present, making plain the remoteness of the 18th century.
And yet a paradox remains. When a Romantic artist first published his innovative work—say Wordsworth with the Lyrical Ballads of 1798—he had to wait a good while for a hearing, though he might have expected that readers would share his conviction that the style and forms of 18th-century Neoclassicism were dead. Already in 1783 Blake had written of contemporary English verse that “The sound is forced, the notes are few.” But these two poets’ estimate was, so to speak, the professional’s view of the state of the art. The public, no longer the small, concentrated court-and-town coterie, lagged behind this perception. It is a cliché that such artists are ahead of their time. It would be more accurate to say that it is the public which lags behind its own time.
This phenomenon is characteristic of the modern period generally, because through social and educational emancipation the audience for things artistic and intellectual has steadily grown larger. That fact complicates the study of the Romantic movement: When did it conquer public opinion in different countries and why at different times? In England and Germany one can point to the 1790s: Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge; Goethe (with the first fragment of Faust), Schiller, Herder, Jean Paul (Richter), Beethoven, Tieck, Wackenroder, Hölderlin, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and the “rediscovery” of Shakespeare mark the advent of the new age.
In Italy, France, and Russia, the decisive years opened in 1820. They are signalized in Russia by the abundant poetic output of Pushkin, in Italy by the work of Manzoni and Leopardi and by the surrounding discussions of literary theory, and in France by the poems of Lamartine, Vigny, Musset, Victor Hugo, and Mme Desbordes-Valmore. The paintings of Delacroix, the first compositions of Berlioz, and Balzac’s Chouans show that a new spirit was at work. Finally, in the 1830s, Poland—through its poet and novelist Mickiewicz—and Spain—through the works of Rivas, Espronceda, José de Larra, and Zorrilla—joined the rest of Europe in its richest artistic flowering since the Renaissance: the leading nations can boast one or more Romantic artists of the first magnitude.
Romanticism in literature and the arts
The fundamental Romantic purpose was to grasp and render the many kinds of experience that Classicism had neglected or had stylized. Romanticism was the first upsurge of realism—exploratory and imaginative as to subject matter and inventive as to forms and techniques. The exploration of reality surveyed both the external world of peoples and places and the internal world of man. The Scottish and medieval novels of Sir Walter Scott, beginning with Waverley in 1814, illustrate the range of the new curiosity, for Scotland was a “wild” place, outside the centres of civilization, and the Middle Ages were similarly “barbarous” and distant in time. When Byron or Chateaubriand went to the Middle East or Goethe to Italy, it was not in the tradition of gentlemen’s tourism; it was in the spirit of the cultural explorer. Byron, for one, by using “the Isles of Greece” and the Mediterranean as settings for his wildly popular narrative poems, was developing in the Western mind a new interest, a new sense that the “exotic” was as real, as important, as Paris or London. In all these writers, factual detail is essential to the new sort of effect: the scenery is observably true, and so is the history, given through local colour. As Byron said when criticized: “I don’t care two lumps of sugar for my poetry, but my costume is correct.” Blake, 20 years earlier, had taken a stand against Sir Joshua Reynold’s academic doctrine that the highest form of painting depicted the broadest general truth. Said Blake: “To particularize is the only merit.”
Particulars, moreover, are all equally proper for the artist; the use he makes of them is what matters. When Wordsworth and Coleridge sought to revivify English poetry, they hit upon two divergent kinds of subject: Coleridge took superstition and the folk tale and wrote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in the form of an old ballad; Wordsworth took the modern street ballad—a kind of rhymed newspaper—and produced his versified incidents of common life in common speech. In France, where the division of the vocabulary into “noble” and “common” (i.e., unfit for poetry) had been made and recorded in dictionaries, the Romantics led by Hugo used the prohibited words whenever they saw fit. Hugo’s verse drama Hernani (1830) created a scandal in the audience when the heroine was heard to speak of her handkerchief and when a character did not use a roundabout phrase about “the march of the hours” to say: “It is midnight.”
The importance of such details can hardly be exaggerated and can perhaps be best understood by recalling what the rediscovery of Shakespeare meant to the Romantics. His rise from grudging esteem, even in England, to European idolatry by 1830 had a significance beyond the one already mentioned of serving to put down French classical tragedy and, with it, French cultural tyranny. The German scholar, critic, and playwright Lessing was among the first to use Shakespeare for that purpose, but the arguments in his theatre reviews, called Hamburgische Dramaturgie, sprang from critical genius and not mere national resentment. Shakespeare spelled freedom from narrow conventions—the set verse form in couplets, the lofty language and long declamations, the adherence to verse throughout, the exclusion of low characters, comic effects, and violent action—or, in a word, from royal and artistic etiquette.
What the rediscovery and idolization of Shakespeare meant (and not to poets and playwrights alone—witness his enormous influence on Berlioz) was the right of the artist to adapt or invent forms to suit contents, to use words formerly excluded from poetic diction, loosen the joints of grammar and metric (or the canons of any art), follow the promptings of his spirit (tragic or gay, vulgar or mysterious, but in any case venturesome), and see where this emancipation from artificial rules led the muse. There was danger in freedom, as always; the conventions ensure safety. The aim of the Romantic genius, however, was not to play safe or even to succeed; it was to explore and invent, multiply modes of feeling and truth, and thereby breathe new life into a dead or dying culture. The motto was not common sense but courage. This resolve explains why the men who came to worship Shakespeare also rediscovered Rabelais and Villon and revalued Spinoza, the lone dissenter who had revered a God pervading the cosmos; Benvenuto Cellini, the fearless artist at grips with the principalities and powers; and “Rameau’s Nephew,” the ambiguous hero of Diderot’s posthumous dialogue, a strange figure disturbingly in touch with the dark forces of the creative unconscious.
Drama
With so much feeling astir and so many novel ideas being agitated, it might seem logical to expect a flourishing school of Romantic drama. Yet only a few isolated works, more interesting than irreplaceable, compose the dramatic output of the Romanticists—Shelley’s Cenci, Byron’s Manfred, and Kleist’s brilliant pieces in several genres. Ironically, Shakespeare’s new role as emancipator had a curiously paralyzing effect on the theatre down to the middle of the century and beyond. In England, poet after poet tried his hand at poetic drama, only to fail from too anxious a desire to be Shakespearean. On the Continent, various misconceptions about him and old habits of Classical tragedy prevented a new drama from coming to life. Victor Hugo’s plays contained brilliant verse, and their form influenced grand opera (Wagner’s no less than Verdi’s), but the fact remained: the dramatic quality could be found everywhere in Romanticist art except on the stage.
Reflection on this point suggests that, quite apart from Shakespeare, the very concern of the Romantics with exploring the inner and outer worlds simultaneously hampered the playwright. Perhaps great drama requires that one or the other world be taken as settled so that conflict, which is the essence of drama, develops between a strong new force and a solid resistance. Be that as it may, the Romantics found themselves in an age when both inner and outer worlds were in flux and from that double uncertainty derived their creative impetus.
Painting
This generality holds for the painters as well; their “reality,” too, was by no means “given,” so that the notation of fresh detail and the study of new means to transmute the visible into art occupied all those who came after David. Goya led the way in Spain by depicting the vulgarity of court figures and the horrors of the Peninsular War. In England, Constable painted country scenes with a vividness at first unacceptable to connoisseurs. He had to argue with his patron, Sir George Beaumont, about the actual colour of grass. To prove that it was not of the conventional brownish tint used by academicians, he seized a violin, ran out of the room with it, and laid it on the lawn, forcing the unaccustomed eye to perceive the difference between chlorophyll and old varnish. At the same time, Géricault astonished the Parisians by painting, in harrowing detail, The Raft of the Medusa, not an antique and noble subject but a recent event: the survivors of a shipwreck adrift and starving on a raft.
The young Delacroix was emboldened by the example and, inspired also by the work of his English friend Bonington, began to paint contemporary scenes of vivid realism—e.g., the Turkish massacre of the Greek peasants at Chios. Later, Delacroix was to visit Morocco (exoticism again) and to discover there the secret of coloured shadows and other pre-Impressionist techniques. His English counterpart, J.M.W. Turner, was pursuing the same goal of realistic truth, though along a different path that nonetheless also led to Impressionism—and beyond. When asked one day why he had pasted a scrap of black paper on a portion of his canvas, he replied that ordinary pigment was not black enough. And he added: “If I could find something even blacker, I would use that.”
Sculpture and architecture
No similar transformations of the visual occurred in sculpture or architecture. Canova and Thorvaldsen continued to produce figures and busts on Neoclassical lines; and only Barye, the great sculptor of animals, and Rude, the creator of the Marseillaise panel on the Arc de Triomphe, showed any signs of the new passions. As for architecture, it may have been the love of history that prevented distinctive work. Pugin and Viollet-le-Duc did grasp the principles of what a new style should be, the former’s love of Gothic reinstating the merit of framework construction and the latter’s breadth of vision as a restorer leading him to predict that iron construction would one day pass from mere utility to high art.
It was actually in railway construction that the seeds of a new architecture were sown. Tunnels and bridges and terminals were needed as early as the mid-1830s, and unassuming engineers such as the Brunels and Robert Stephenson set to work to design them. All they had for solving the new and awkward problems of topography, speed, and cost were the ideas they drew from machinery and the vulgar materials, chiefly wood and iron, that they had learned how to handle in industry. The results were often remarkable, and they remained to inspire the makers of 20th-century steel and concrete architecture.
Music
It may seem as if the art of music by its nature would not lend itself to the exploration and expression of reality characteristic of Romanticism, but that is not so. True, music does not tell stories or paint pictures, but it stirs feelings and evokes moods, through both of which various kinds of reality can be suggested or expressed. It was in the rationalist 18th century that musicians rather mechanically attempted to reproduce stories and subjects in sound. These literal renderings naturally failed, and the Romanticists profited from the error. Their discovery of new realms of experience proved communicable in the first place because they were in touch with the spirit of renovation, particularly through poetry. What Goethe meant to Beethoven and Berlioz and what German folk tales and contemporary lyricists meant to Weber, Schumann, and Schubert are familiar to all who are acquainted with the music of these men.
There is, of course, no way to demonstrate that Beethoven’s Egmont music—or, indeed, its overture alone—corresponds to Goethe’s drama and thereby enlarges the hearer’s consciousness of it; but it cannot be an accident or an aberration that the greatest composers of the period employed the resources of their art for the creation of works expressly related to such lyrical and dramatic subjects. Similarly, the love of nature stirred Beethoven, Weber, and Berlioz, and here too the correspondence is felt and persuades the fit listener that his own experience is being expanded. The words of the creators themselves record this new comprehensiveness. Beethoven referred to his activity of mingled contemplation and composition as dichten, making a poem; and Berlioz tells in his Mémoires of the impetus given to his genius by the music of Beethoven and Weber, by the poetry of Goethe and Shakespeare, and not least by the spectacle of nature. Nor did the public that ultimately understood their works gainsay their claims.
It must be added that the Romantic musicians—including Chopin, Mendelssohn, Glinka, and Liszt—had at their disposal greatly improved instruments. The beginning of the 19th century produced the modern piano, of greater range and dynamics than theretofore, and made all wind instruments more exact and powerful by the use of keys and valves. The modern full orchestra was the result. Berlioz, whose classic treatise on instrumentation and orchestration helped to give it definitive form, was also the first to exploit its resources to the full, in the Symphonie fantastique of 1830. This work, besides its technical significance just mentioned, can also be regarded as uniting the characteristics of Romanticism in music: it is both lyrical and dramatic, and, although it makes use of a “story,” that use is not to describe the scenes but to connect them; its slow movement is a “nature poem” in the Beethovenian manner; the second, fourth, and fifth movements include “realistic” detail of the most vivid kind; and the opening one is an introspective reverie.
Self-analysis
In this Romantic investigation of the self, some critics have seen little more than excessive ego or, in modern terms, a tiresome narcissism. No doubt certain Romantic works arouse boredom or disgust with hairsplitting analysis. The boredom, however, is often due to the fact that after a hundred years the discoveries have staled. When fresh, they came as a revelation; in the works of the great poets and novelists, in Hazlitt’s essays and Jean Paul’s fictions, and the irony of Byron’s letters or Heine’s journalism, the truth has not grown dim or platitudinous.
It was in any case desirable that this extensive analysis of the self should be attempted then, for only an age in which individualism was both theoretical and passionate could see the logic of the undertaking and act upon it. The logic was this: given the autonomous and unique individual, a search by himself into his moods, motives, fears, and loves must bring forth data otherwise unobtainable. Add these results together, and one has a repertoire of clues to the inner life of mankind as a whole. For the uniqueness of each individual is bounded by traits he shares with his fellows, and this common element enables the psychologist to connect and organize the reports of the self-searchers. It is on this hypothesis, incidentally, that the demand for originality in art has continued unabated since the Romanticists. Forget the “model,” for there is no such thing; avoid conformity; discover your true self, the buried child; be authentic and sincere—these precepts, which still govern art and criticism, are the legacy of Romantic individualism.
Introspection naturally implies an inner life worth looking into, and most Romantic artists brought forth extraordinary findings. They form the groundwork of modern thought. One cannot easily imagine Freud or Joyce, much less the degree of self-consciousness shared by Westerners today, without the deliverances of Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Leopardi, Stendhal, Constant, Sainte-Beuve, Heine, and innumerable other writers of the early 19th century. And towering above them as the creator of the prototype of Romantic introspection is Goethe with his Faust.
Faust was the figure in which a whole age recognized its mind and soul; and the adjective Faustian, as Spengler’s use of it makes clear, still describes tendencies at work in culture today. The principal one, already mentioned, self-consciousness—the identity crisis—remains. The belief, moreover, that movement, activity, is better than repose and that striving is better than achieving is clearly the great postulate of contemporary civilization. Faust himself ends by giving his life to practical works in behalf of his fellow man; however, he sets himself on that path only after a slow and deep analysis of his divided soul, which has been ruled in turn by despair, lust, superstition and the forces of the unconscious, the love of innocence, the conviction of sin and crime, the horrors of hypocrisy and conventional life, the temptations of wealth and power, the disgust with pedantry and established religion, and the yearning for infinite knowledge, in the hopes of attaining by it wisdom and peace. Faust, in short, traverses the whole cosmos, made up of the inner and outer worlds, to find in the act of self-dedication to humanity the justification of his existence.
Early 19th-century social and political thought
The Romantics who studied society through the novel or discoursed about it in essays and pamphlets were no less devoted to this “cause of humanity,” but they arrived at politically different conclusions from Goethe’s and from one another’s. Scott and Disraeli were forerunners of Tory democracy as Burke was of liberal conservatism. Dickens, a passionate humanitarian, stirred the masses with his examples of the law’s stupid cruelty, but he proposed no agency of betterment, content to despise Parliament, the law courts, and the complacency of the wealthy. Balzac wrote his huge array of novels as a “social zoology” that was to show what a bloody jungle society becomes without the church and the monarchy to restrain human passions.
Stendhal noted the same reality but was more concerned with the free play of individual genius; he resigned himself to the social struggle, provided not too many stupid individuals ran the inevitably heavy-handed regimes. Freedom might be found by the happy few through the loopholes of a mixed government such as England’s, whereas in the ostensibly free United States there was no protection against social pressure and no likelihood of genius in art or in politics.
The great authority on American democracy was Tocqueville, whose astonishing survey in two volumes contained many true predictions and is still packed with useful lessons. Tocqueville confirmed Stendhal’s low estimate of freedom of thought in America, but he foresaw in the United States the first example of a type of democracy that would surely overtake the Western world. He found in such a future many good things and many defects; he predicted a day when slavery would threaten disaster to America; he foretold what kind of poetry a democracy would produce and delineated the art of Walt Whitman; he apprehended the complication of laws and the declining quality of justice; but he was reconciled to what must be.
Postrevolutionary thinking
What lay behind all 19th-century writings on politics and society was the shadow of the French Revolution. In the 1790s the revolution had aroused Burke to write his famous Reflections and Joseph de Maistre his Considérations sur la France. They differed on many points, but what both saw, like their successors, was that revolution was self-perpetuating. There is no way to stop it because liberty and equality can be endlessly claimed by group after group that feels deprived or degraded. And the idea that these principles are universally applicable removes any braking power that national tradition or circumstance might afford.
Proof that the revolution marched on, slow or fast, could be read (as it still can be) in every issue of the daily paper since 1789. In the early 19th century the greatest pressure came from the liberals, whether students, bankers, manufacturers, or workmen enlisted in their cause. They wanted written constitutions, an extension of the suffrage, civil rights, a free-market economy, and from time to time wars of national liberation or aggrandizement in the name of cultural and linguistic unity. For example, all the intellect of western Europe sided with Greece in the 1820s when it began its war of emancipation from Turkey. Byron himself died at Missolonghi while helping the Greeks. Poets wrote odes that musicians set to music, and painters painted scenes of war. Between this liberalism and the nationalism that sought freedom from foreign rule the line could not be clearly drawn. In Italy, Germany, Poland, Russia, Spain, Portugal, and South America, revolt in the name of liberty was endemic until the middle of the century. Only England escaped by a timely reform of Parliament in 1832, but it averted revolution only by a hair’s breadth, after protracted threats of civil war and many violent incidents expressing the same animus as elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the first disturbances resulting from machine industry—sabotage, strikes, and conspiracies (for trade unions were generally held illegal)—reinforced the revolutionary momentum, not only in fact but also in theory. As early as 1810 the business cycle, the doctrine of the exploitation of the worker, and the degradation of life in industrial societies had been noted and discussed. By 1825 the writings of the count de Saint-Simon, which proposed a reorganization of society to cure these evils, had won adherents; by 1830 the Saint-Simonians were an acknowledged party with sympathizers abroad, and by 1832 the words socialism and socialist were in use.
The Saint-Simonian doctrine proposed a benevolent dictatorship of industrialists and scientists to remove the inequities of the free-for-all liberal system. Other reformers, such as the practical Robert Owen, who organized successful communities in Scotland and the United States, depended on a strong leader using ad hoc methods. Still others, such as Leroux and Cabet, were communists of divergent kinds seeking to carry out elaborate blueprints of the perfect state. Proudhon denounced the state, as such, and all private property. As a philosophical anarchist, he wished to substitute free association and contract for all legal compulsions. In England, the school of Bentham and Mill—utilitarians or philosophical radicals—attacked existing institutions in the name of the greatest good of the greatest number, and by their arguments they succeeded in reforming the top-heavy legal system. Without doctrine but moved by a similar sense of wrong, Thomas Carlyle fought theutilitarians for their materialistic expediency and himself sought light on the common problem by pondering the lessons of the French Revolution and publishing in 1837 what is still the greatest account of its catastrophic course. Later, Carlyle gave in Past and Present a suggestive picture of what he deemed a true community: quasi-medieval, based on the Faustian joy of work, and relying for its cohesion on its leader’s genius and strength of soul.
In the Germanies, repeated outbreaks changed little the system imposed from Vienna by Metternich—censorship, spying on students and intellectuals, repression of group activities at the first sign of political or social advocacy. This drove original thought underground or abroad in the persons of refugees such as the poet Heine and later Karl Marx. At home, the prevailing mood was despair. Max Stirner in his book The Ego and His Own (1845) recommended, instead of social reform, a ruthless individualism that should seek satisfaction by any means and at whatever risk. A small group of other individualists, Die Freien (“The Free”), found that satisfaction of the ego through total disillusion and radical repudiation: nothing is true or good—the state is a monster, society sheer hypocrisy, religion a fraud, for God is dead (1840).
Elsewhere the struggle went on, taking shape as reform or revolt as occasion arose. In Italy and France, secret societies carried on propaganda for programs that might be liberal, nationalist, or socialist, but all revolutionary. One irony about the socialists is that the tag that has clung to them is utopian. It suggests purely theoretical notions, whereas the historical fact is that a great many were tried out in practice, and some lasted for a considerable time. As in Carlyle’s book, the force of character of one man (Owen was a striking example) usually proved to be the efficient cause of success. Throughout this social theorizing, whatever the means or ends proposed, two assumptions hold: one is that individuals have a duty to change European society, to purge it of its evils; the other is that individuals can change society—they need only come together and decide what form the change shall take. These axioms by themselves, without the memory of 1789, were enough to keep alive in European culture the hope and the threat of continuing revolution.
The principle of evolution
Yet it should not be imagined that revolution by force or radical remodeling inspired every thinking European. Even if liberals and reactionaries were still ready to take to the barricades to achieve their ends, the conservatives were not, except in self-defense. The conservative philosophy, stemming from Burke and reinforced by modern historical studies, maintained the contrary principle of evolution. Evolution indeed swayed as many 19th-century minds as its rival, and it was sometimes the same minds.
Evolution was the belief that lasting and beneficial change comes about by slow and small degrees. It is often imperceptible and therefore congenial to human habits. It breaks no heads and spills no blood; it is natural, organic. The idea of evolution is patterned on biology—the slow growth and decay of living things. More than that, evolution in the zoological sense of “descent with modification” had been a recognized speculation among men of science since 1750, when Buffon included it in his Histoire naturelle. Lamarck had elaborated the idea at the turn of the 18th century, while Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, had by 1796 worked out for himself a compendious theory of similar import. In 1830–33 the geologist Lyell, setting forth the corresponding notion that changes in the Earth take place through the operation of constant and not cataclysmic causes, devoted a chapter to Lamarckian biology—to the evolution of species by imperceptible steps.
As if these teachings were not enough to implant a form of thought, the revival of interest in history made easy and obvious the transition from the world of nature to that of man. It seemed logical to think of both as evolutions and even to liken the state to an organism. Certainly the student of institutions finds them steadily and profoundly altered by minute incidents and variations. Compared to these causes, the violent breaks made by war and revolution seem more superficial and less permanent.
The evolutionary scheme encouraged several other beliefs while also furnishing fresh arguments and convenient principles. Anyone who had inherited from the previous era a faith in progress could now attach it to this new motive power, evolution. Anyone who wished to classify nations or institutions by rank could place them as he thought proper on an evolutionary scale. Anyone who resisted change or wished to speed it up could be admonished with the aid of some evolutionary yardstick. Finally, anyone who intended to write a work of history or propaganda found the organizing principle ready-made. In the first half of the 19th century, every subject of interest, from costume to the criminal law, was presented in innumerable studies as proceeding majestically at an evolutionary pace.
Another way of stating the influence of this great idea is to say that the mind of Europe had experienced the “biological revolution.” Whereas in the 17th century Newtonian physics and its description of the cosmos had imposed the model of mechanics and mathematics, what impressed itself on the 19th century as the universal pattern was the living organism—change and variety as against fixity and regularity. The logic of preferring “biology” to “mechanics” in an age of individualism, of realism about concrete particulars, and of passionate imagination and introspection need only be stated to be evident.
Science
This is not to say that the science of physics stood still during the Romanticist period. It was the time when the conservation of energy was established and the mechanical equivalent of heat demonstrated. There also prevailed the “physical” pseudo-science of phrenology, which professed to relate individual attributes to bumps and hollows in the skull and which led to the physical anthropology that defined 3, 10, 20, and 100 different races of man by the end of the century. Still, the 19th was more emphatically the century that furnished the theory of the cell (Schleiden and Schwann, 1838–39), which led ultimately to the notion of microscopic creatures responsible for putrefaction and disease and, later still, to cytology and genetics.
It is noteworthy, too, that the 19th century saw the establishment of chemistry on the Daltonian hypothesis of the atom, but it was coloured by the “biological” notion of elective affinities to explain compounds. Goethe, who was an early evolutionist and the scientific expositor of the metamorphosis of plants, called his last novel of human love Elective Affinities.
On the surface the poetic mind of the age seemed hostile to both science and technology. Wordsworth looks like an enemy of science when he says: “We murder to dissect” and deprecates the man who is willing to “peep and botanize upon his mother’s grave.” Yet reflection shows that the animus here is not so much against science in general as for the science of life and the reality of human thought and feeling. To understand this temper of the times one must remember how uncertain the intellectual status of physical science still was. Eighteenth-century philosophy had ended in materialism and skepticism. Some writers, such as d’Holbach, had reduced all phenomena to the interaction of hard and unfeeling particles; others, such as Hume, had “proved” that man can know nothing beyond his impressions and therefore can have no certainty about the truth of cause and effect, on which scientific statements depend. The Romanticist generations could neither agree that life was a concourse of unfeeling atoms nor trust the physicists’ assertions based on a law of causation that the most acute thinkers had discredited.
Such were the iron constraints within which the famous “crises of the soul” and conversions to religions new or old took place in the 1820s and ’30s. Carlyle, Mill, Lamennais, and many others described these crises in famous autobiographical works. The choice seemed to be between a blind and meaningless universe and human life conceived as a brief, pointless exception to the mechanical play of forces. Even if the latter scheme “explained,” it was vulnerable to Hume’s irrefutable doubts.
Early 19th-century philosophy
What enabled 19th-century culture to pursue the scientific quest and regain confidence in spiritual truth was the work of the German idealist philosophers, beginning with Immanuel Kant.
Kant
Kant took up Hume’s challenge and showed that, although we may never know “things as they are,” we can know truthfully and reliably the data of experience. The reason for this certitude is that the mind imposes its categories of time and space and causation on the flowing stream and gives it shape. Science, therefore, is not a guess, nor is human knowledge a dream. Both are solid and verifiable. Indeed, certainty, according to Kant, extends as far as morals and aesthetics. The essence of morals is the commandment not to perform any act that one would not want to become a precedent for all human action and always to consider an individual as an end in himself, not as the instrument of another’s purpose. The fusion in Kant of ideas stemming from Rousseau and the Enlightenment with ideas fitting the needs of the coming century (Kant died in 1804) made him the fountainhead of European philosophy for 50 years.
Kant’s disciples
His disciples—Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer—twisted or amplified his teachings. Coleridge in England and Victor Cousin in France adapted to home use what seemed fitting. The school as a whole was known as German idealism because it relied on the distinction between the thinking subject and the perceived object; “idea” and “thing” were unlike, but idea (or the mind) played a role in shaping the reality of things, from which derived all stability and regularity in the universe.
Stability was desirable as a guarantor of natural science, but in the social world it was obviously contradicted by events, especially by those since the French Revolution. By 1840 many historians had told the story of the past 50 years, and the lesson they drew from it was almost uniformly that of pessimism. Deprived of Providence and the explanation it used to supply by its “mysterious workings,” history seemed neither morally rational nor humanly tolerable.
The German philosopher Hegel, however, drew a different conclusion. Coming after Kant and having witnessed Napoleon’s victory at Jena in 1806, he conceived the world as ruled by a new logic, no longer a logic of things static but of things in movement. He saw the forces of history in perpetual battle. Neither side wins, but the upshot of their struggle is an amalgam of their rival intentions. Hegel called the pros and the cons and their survivors thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Human affairs are ever in dialectic (dialoguing) progression. At times a “world-historical figure” (Luther, Napoleon) embodies the aspirations of the masses and gives them effect through war, revolution, or religious reformation. Yet throughout the succession of events, what is taking place is the unfolding of Spirit or Idea taking on itself the concrete forms of the real. Hegel’s was another version of evolution and progress, for he foretold the extension of liberty to all men as the fulfillment of history. It is interesting to note that until 1848 or 1850 Hegel was generally considered a dangerous revolutionary, a believer in an irresistible progress that mankind must earn by blood and battle. Karl Marx, as a younger Hegelian, was to carry out Hegel’s unspoken promise on a different base.
Other branches of the all-powerful German philosophy deserve attention but can be spoken of only as they relate to high Romantic themes. Fichte’s modification of Kant made the ego the “creator” of the world, an extreme extension or generalization of individualism. At the other extreme, but more in tune with contemporary science and art, Schelling made nature the source of all energy, from which individual consciousness takes off to become the observer of the universe. Nature is a work of art and man is, so to say, its critic, and because human consciousness results from an act of self-limitation, it perceives moral duty and feels the need to worship.
Religion and its alternatives
That need made itself felt ecumenically throughout Europe from the beginning of the 19th century. It had indeed been prepared by the writings of Rousseau as early as 1762 and in England by the even earlier preaching of John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism. The surviving atheism and materialism of the 18th-century philosophes was in truth a greater stimulus to the religious revival of the early 19th century than anything the French Revolution had done, briefly, to replace the established religions. When in the 1800s the Roman Catholic writings of Chateaubriand and Lamennais in France, the neo-Catholic Tractarian movement in England, and the writings of Schleiermacher and his followers in Germany began to take effect, their success was due to the same conditions that made Romanticist art, German idealism, and all the “biological” analogies succeed: the great thirst caused by dry abstractions in the Age of Reason needed quenching. Religious fervour, artistic passion, and “gothic” systems of philosophy filled a void created by the previous simple and mechanical formulas.
The religious revivals, Catholic or Protestant, also aimed at political ends. Their participants feared the continuation in the 19th century of secularism and wholly material plans. In every country the liberals proposed to set up in the name of tolerance (“indifference,” said the Christian believers) governments that would serve exclusively practical (indeed commercial) interests. Church and state were to be separated, education was to be secular, which would really mean antireligious. National traditions would be broken, forgotten, and youth would grow into “economic man,” Benthamite utilitarian man, with no intuition of unseen realities, no sensitivity to art or nature, no humility, and no inbred morals or sanction for their dictates.
Scientific positivism
This desire for renewed faith and passion, however, found alternative goals. One was scientific positivism; the other was the cult of art. The name positivism is the creation of Auguste Comte, a French thinker of a mathematical cast of mind who in 1824 began to supply a philosophy of the natural sciences opposed to all metaphysics. Science, according to Comte, delivers unshakable truth by limiting itself to the statement of relations among phenomena. It does not explain but describes—and that is all mankind needs to know. From the physical sciences rise the social and mental sciences in regular gradation (Comte coined the word sociology), and from these man will learn, in time, how to live in society.
Having elaborated this austere system, Comte discovered the softer emotions through a woman’s love, and he amended his scheme to provide a “religion of humanity” with the worship of secular saints, under a political arrangement that the sympathetic Mill nonetheless described as “the government of a beleaguered town.” Comte did not attract many orthodox disciples, but the influence of his positivism was very great down to recent times. Not alone in Europe but also in South America it formed a certain type of mind that survives to this day among some scientists and many engineers.
The cult of art
The second “religious” alternative, the cult of art, has had even greater potency, being at the present time the main outlet for spirituality among Western intellectuals. In the Romantic period this fervour was allied with the love of nature and the idolatrous admiration of the man of genius, beginning with Napoleon. A writer as sober as Scott, a thinker as cogent as Hegel, and an artist as skeptical as Berlioz could all say that to them art and its masters were a religion; and they were not alone. At the death of Goethe in 1832, Heine inveighed against the great man’s followers who made art the only reality. In the second and third Romantic generations, born about 1820, the religion of art grew still more pronounced and took on an antisocial tone that became more and more emphatic as time passed. “Art for art’s sake” ended by signifying, among other things, “art the judge of society and the state.” This doctrine was expounded in full detail by the Romantic poet Gautier as early as 1835 in the preface to his entertaining and sexually daring novel Mademoiselle de Maupin. In those pages the familiar argument against bourgeois philistinism, against practical utility, against the prevailing dullness, ugliness, and wrongness of daily life was set forth with much wit and that spirit of defiance which one usually thinks of as belonging to the 1890s or the present day. Its occurrence then is but another proof that Romanticism was the comprehensive culture from which later styles, thoughts, and isms have sprung.
The middle 19th century
During the half century when Romanticism was deploying its talents and ideas, the political minds inside or outside Romanticist culture were engaged in the effort to settle—each party or group or theory in its own way—the legacy of 1789. There were at least half a dozen great issues claiming attention and arousing passion. One was the fulfillment of the revolutionary promise to give all Europe political liberty—the vote for all men, a free press, a parliament, and a written constitution. Between 1815 and 1848 many outbreaks occurred for this cause. Steadily successful in France and England, they were put down in central and eastern Europe under the repressive system of Metternich.
A second issue was the maintenance of the territorial arrangements of the treaties that closed the Napoleonic Wars at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Metternich’s spies and generals also worked to keep this part of the post-Napoleonic world intact; that is, the boundaries that often linked (or separated) national groups in order to buttress dynastic interests. Except in Belgium, the surge of national, as distinct from liberal, aspirations throughout Europe was unsuccessful in the 1830s. Defeats only strengthened resolve, particularly in Germany and Italy, where the repeated invasions by the French during the revolutionary period had led to reforms and stimulated alike royal and popular ambitions. In these two regions, liberalism and nationalism merged into one unceasing agitation that involved not merely the politically militant but the intellectual elite. Poets and musicians, students and lawyers joined with journalists, artisans, and good bourgeois in open or secret societies working for independence: they were all patriots and all more or less imbued with a Romanticist regard for the people as the originator of the living culture, which the nation was to enshrine and protect.
To be sure, this patriotic union of hearts did not mean agreement on the details of future political states, and the same disunion existed to the west, in England and France, where liberals, only half satisfied by the compromises of 1830 and 1832, felt the push of new radical demands from the socialists, communists, and anarchists. Reinforcing these pressures was the unrest caused by industrialization—the workingman’s claims on society, expressed in strikes, trade unions, or (in England) the Chartists’ demanding “the Charter” of a fully democratic Parliament. This cluster of parties agitated for a change that went well beyond what the advanced liberals themselves had not yet won. Add to these movements those that purposed to stand still or to restore former systems of monarchy, religion, or aristocracy, and it is not hard to understand why the great revolutionary furnace of 1848–52 was a catastrophe for European culture. The four years of war, exile, deportation, betrayals, coups d’état, and summary executions shattered not only lives and regimes but also the heart and will of the survivors. The hoped-for evolution of each nation and would-be nation, as well as the desire for a Europe at peace, was broken and, with all other hopes and imaginings, rendered ridiculous. The search began for new ways to achieve, on the one side, stability and, on the opposite, the final desperate revolution that would usher in the good society.
For although they seemed decisive, the battles of ’48 and after did not, in fact, test the worth of any one idea. Nationalism won and lost in different parts of Europe. Liberalism gained in Italy and Switzerland, but was set back in Germany and France. English Chartism seemed to collapse, yet its demands began to be carried out. The socialist experiment in France (Louis Blanc’s national workshops) also seemed discredited; yet the ensuing regime of Napoleon III made attempts, however clumsy, to deal with poverty by welfare methods. There was peace, but war was imminent; and subversive groups continued to plot and frighten the bourgeois, to try to kill royal heads of state, while machine industry and the resulting urbanization contributed their gains at the cost of the now familiar miseries and sordor.
In these circumstances the mind of Europe suffered an eclipse, followed by a protracted mood of despondency. Many established or emerging artists and thinkers had been killed or torn from their homes or deprived of their livelihood: Wagner fleeing Dresden, where he conducted the opera; Chopin and Berlioz at loose ends in London, because in Paris music other than opera was moribund; Verdi going back to Milan with high patriotic hopes and returning to Paris in a few months, utterly disillusioned; and Hugo in exile in Belgium and later in Guernsey—all typify the vicissitudes in which men of reputation found themselves in mid-career. For the young and unknown, such as the poet Baudelaire or the English painters who formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, it was no time to invite the public to admire boldness and accept innovation. Critics and public alike were all nerves and hostility to subversion. To read Flaubert’s masterpiece, Sentimental Education (1869), is to understand the atmosphere in which the first phase of Romanticism ended and its ramified sequels came into being.
Realism and Realpolitik
The dominant feeling was that high hopes had perished in gunfire, and this realization bred the thought that hope itself was an error. Any new effort must therefore stay close to the possible, the “real.” Realism with a capital R and Realpolitik together sink their roots in a distrust of man’s imagination. This grim caution born of harsh experience coincided with a sense of fatigue that made Romanticist work seem like the foolishness of youth.
The appropriate cultural note must no longer be the infinite or heroic or colourful but rather their opposites. If the commonly accepted term Realism for this reaction of the 1850s is used, it must be with these presuppositions in mind. For the Romantic passion for the particular and exact was a realism, too; it was what Dr. Johnson much earlier had called “vehement real life.” The Realism of the disillusioned ’50s dropped the vehement, the passionate and, in order to run no risk of further disillusion, limited what it called real to what could be readily seen and felt: the commonplace, the normal, the workaday, and often the sordid.
In the same spirit Realpolitik rejected principles. The word did not mean “real” in the English sense; in German it connotes “things”—hence a politics of adaptation to existing facts, pursuing plain objects, admitting no obligation to ideals. In this light we can understand the unexpected epithet “scientific” that Marx and his followers bestowed on their brand of socialism. It was a science not merely because it was presumably based on the laws of history but even more because in its view the advent of the socialist state was to result from the interaction of things (classes, means of production, and economic necessity) and not, as in earlier socialism, from the will (that is, the imaginative efforts of thinking men). The “objective” appearance given to the new politics of things, socialist or other, generated that tough, no-nonsense atmosphere, which people then wanted as a source of reassurance in all their dealings.
Scientific materialism
This search for certainty went with a swinging back of the pendulum in science itself from the vitalism of the previous period to the materialism of the mid-century. German philosophers derided idealism and taught the equivalence of consciousness and chemistry: “without phosphorus, no thinking.” The machine once more became the great model of thought and analogy—and nowhere more vividly and persuasively than in biology, where Darwin’s advocacy of natural selection won the day because it provided a mechanical means for the march of evolution. The struggle for life (Spencer’s phrase of 1850, adopted by Darwin in the subtitle of his book) obviously had the requisite “toughness” to convince and, like Realpolitik, it followed no principle—whoever survived survived. That Darwin to the very last included other factors in his theory of evolution—Lamarckian “use and disuse” as well as direct environmental forces—carried no weight with a generation bent upon machine certainty. These secondary explanations were ignored, in the usual way of cultural single-mindedness, and for 30 years after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, an orthodoxy of universal mechanism reigned over all departments of thought.
It prevented the recognition of Mendel’s work on genetics; it put religious, philosophical, and ethical thought on the defensive—only what was “positive” (i.e., material) held a presumption of being real and true. The same reasoning produced a school of social Darwinists who saw war between nations and economic struggle among individuals as beneficent competition leading to the survival of “favoured races”—another phrase from Darwin’s subtitle. And by a final twist of logic, the creed of materialism reinforced the moral gloom of the period by casting doubt on both the permanence and the validity of all that was being redefined as “really real.” For on the one side, the second law of thermodynamics guaranteed the cooling of the Sun and the pulverization of the cosmos into cold and motionless bits of matter; and, on the other, orthodox “machine-ism” brought its leading prophets, Huxley and Tyndall, to consider people and animals as automatons moved as helplessly as atoms and planets. Consciousness is an epiphenomenon—in plain words, an illusion—precisely as in Karl Marx consciousness and culture are illusions floating above the reality of economic relations.
Victorian morality
To be sure, not everybody in Europe believed or worried about these affirmations. And although ideas long debated do in the end filter down to the least intellectual layers of the population, the time and place of triumph for a philosophy are limited by this cultural lag—a fortunate delay, without which whole societies might collapse soon after the publication of a single book. What kept mid-19th-century civilization whole was a subdued faith in the reality of all the things Realism and materialistic science denied: religious belief, civic and social habits, the dogma of moral responsibility, and the hope that consciousness and will did exist.
The sum of these invisible forces is conveniently known as the Victorian ethos or Victorian morality, a formula applicable to the Continent as well as Britain and one whose meaning antedates not only the mid-century revolutions but also the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837. Like Romanticism, this powerful moralism had its roots in the late 18th century—in Wesleyan Methodism and the Evangelical movement, in Rousseau, Schiller, and Kant. Its earnestness was of popular origin; it was antiaristocratic in manners, and it sought the good and the true in a simple, direct, unhesitating way. Perceiving with warm feeling that all men are brothers under God, the moral man saw that slavery was wrong; and having so concluded, he proceeded to have it abolished by act of Parliament (Britain, 1833).
Such fervent convictions when widely shared exert tremendous power, and this concentration of belief and emotion made Victorian morality long impregnable. As Chesterton said of the Victorian painter Watts:
He has the one great certainty which marks off all the great Victorians from those who have come after them: he may not be certain that he is successful, or certain that he is great, or certain that he is good, or certain that he is capable: but he is certain that he is right.
The sense of rightness generated a sense of power, which the Victorians applied to the monumental task of keeping order in a postrevolutionary society.
Partly by taking thought and partly by instinct, they perceived that the drive to revolution and the sexual urge were somehow linked. Therefore they repressed sexuality; that is, repressed it in themselves and their literature, while containing it within specified limits in society. Further, they knew that the successful working of the vast industrial machine required a strict, inhuman discipline. The idolatry of respectability was the answer to natural waywardness. To pay one’s bills, wear dark clothes, stifle individual fancy, go to church regularly, and turn aggression upon oneself in the form of worry about salvation became the approved common modes of pursuing the pilgrimage of life.
It could not be expected that everybody would or could conform. From its beginning to the end, the Victorian age numbered a galaxy of dissenters and critics who scorned the conformity, called the religion a sham, and viewed respectability as mere hypocrisy. Yet the front held, and the massed forces behind it were at their strongest after the multiplied assaults of 1848.
Nothing gives a better idea of the astonishing moral structure called Victorianism than the development of the London Metropolitan Police, begun under Sir Robert Peel in 1829. A lawyer and a former captain who had fought in the Peninsular War were the first joint commissioners and creators of the force. At first they had to weed out the drunks and the bullies who had been the main types of recruit in earlier attempts at policing cities. At first, too, the people both ridiculed and fought with the new police. Gradually, the “peelers” came to be trusted; they remained unarmed regardless of circumstances; they learned to handle rioters without shedding blood; and in the putting down of crime they finally enlisted the public on their side. For something less than a century this unique relationship lasted, in which “law-abiding” and “police” were terms of respect—correlative terms, since the peelers (later “bobbies”) could not have become what they were without the self-discipline and moral cohesion of the “respectable.”
The upheavals of the mid-century, cultural as well as political, put Victorianism to a severe test, for after wars and civil disorders laxity is natural, and ensuing despair induces a reckless fatalism. There was cause indeed for apprehension. When the Great Exhibition of 1851 was planned on a scale theretofore unattempted, many expressed the fear that to allow tens of thousands from all over Europe to come together under the Crystal Palace was to invite massive riots. Ministers and heads of state would be assassinated. In the event, no protracted assembly of common people and their leaders was ever so quiet and orderly. The moral machinery worked as efficiently as that which was on display under the glass dome.
The advance of democracy
Yet, while a stringent moralism held in check endemic subversion and anarchy, Darwinism and the machine analogy stimulated endless forms of self-consciousness. If man could fashion and continually improve these engines, perhaps he could also engineer an improved society. Because evolution was at last “proved,” thanks to Darwin, perhaps it also gave warrant for social and political progress by gradual steps. Spencer’s all-inclusive philosophy, likened then to Aristotle’s, foresaw an inevitable movement from the simple and undifferentiated to the complex and specialized—as in modern life. Clearly, whether automatons or not, people kept thinking and having purposes; and among evolutionists and scientific socialists alike, thought and purpose included the hastening by voluntary action of what was sure to come by force of natural laws. These and other desires acting in the light of Realism and taking shape in the increasing organization of the toiling masses brought Europe to accept democracy as inevitable.
The word democracy is used here in a cultural sense. It does not imply a set of political institutions so much as the signs and the agencies that herald the coming populist state of our day: for example, the extension of the franchise, in parliamentary or plebiscite form; the secret ballot; the legalization of trade unions; the rise of a Roman Catholic social movement; the passage of education acts providing free, public, and compulsory schooling; the formulation of the paternalistic Tory democracy as a cure for the evils of free-for-all economic liberalism; the beginnings of welfare legislation (in France under Napoleon III, in Germany under Bismarck); the secularization of life by state action, by the prestige of science, and also by the liberal movements within the churches themselves; and finally, after a decade or so of public education, the great extension and popularization of the press. At the passage of the Reform Act of 1867 in Britain, which gave the vote to urban workingmen, Robert Lowe had said, “Now we must educate our masters.” In a parliamentary system the means to that education cannot be the schools alone. The adult “common man” must continually be informed and appealed to for his own satisfaction as well as for coherent policy in government. The instrument for this purpose was the new journalism. The quarterlies of the early 19th century gave way to the monthlies in the 1860s and they in turn to the weeklies, while the daily papers, costing now but a penny and simplifying all they touched, began to reach the millions.
Realism in the arts and philosophy
In the period of so-called Realism, the arts and philosophy as usual supplied—at least for the educated elite—form and substance to the prevailing fears and desires. The mood of soberness and objectivity was alone acceptable, and what art presented to the public confirmed the reasonableness of the mood.
Literature
This interaction accounts for such things as the marked change of tone in Dickens’ novels that occurs between David Copperfield (1850) and Bleak House (1853). The temper expressed in most concentrated form the very next year in Hard Times now dominates Dickens’ mind and works to the end: life is a dreary sort of underworld; happy endings are artificially contrived and not to be believed.
The same mood explains why Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), which ranks today as the realistic novel par excellence and is on all counts grim enough in its rendering of boredom and vulgar misery, was judged “too artistic” by some contemporary critics, not close enough to the most common of realities, that of common speech. At the same time, the sought-for effect could be achieved in poetry by juxtaposing the ideal, or simply the decent, with the dreary and disgusting, especially the occurrence of these in the now hateful urban life. This is what Baudelaire did in a volume of poems called The Flowers of Evil (1857). The attack this time came not from critics who found the work insufficiently real, but from the “respectable” readers who found it indecent and immoral.
Yet the evolution of Flaubert’s mind remains instructive for an understanding of Realism as a literary creed. Flaubert had begun by writing a highly coloured, imaginative story on The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1848), which the author’s friends advised him to burn, tone down, or rewrite. Flaubert put it aside and began the novel that became Madame Bovary. Its setting was the provincial world around him, not the Egyptian desert; the characters were of the most ordinary type, not an improbable Christian ascetic haunted by visions. Yet, even in the working out of his plain tale, Flaubert had to subdue his lyrical Romantic genius to the discipline he had adopted. The description of a rainstorm, for instance, had to be done over and over again so that it would not stand out and be “interesting” by virtue of the observer’s mind. It had to be made ordinary and the observer kept outside, just as in science. Madame Bovary, begun as a magazine serial, was soon censored by the editor and then prosecuted as immoral by the state. For Flaubert’s Realism had gone so far as to portray in no flattering colours the dreary lives and motives of average provincials of both sexes, and the picture violated the rules of the indispensable moralism. What is more, the fate of Flaubert’s unhappy heroine symbolized what had happened to the more daring and poetic-glorious time before 1848: as Flaubert said, Emma Bovary was himself.
His novel is thus simultaneously a model and a critique of the new genre—a critique, too, of the state of Europe that produced it. Many other writers between 1850 and 1890 pursued matter-of-factness without this ulterior effect and rendered the details of middling life with such impassiveness and fidelity that to this day many use “realistic” as a synonym for dreary or sordid and regard “the novel” as a reliable historical source. On the precise definition of Realism, George Gissing gave, through a character in one of his own novels, a brilliant commentary: the character is at work on a novel which shall be so true to the dullness of daily life that no one will be able to read it.
Painting and sculpture
The term Realism applies no less to the plastic arts than to literature, but in painting and sculpture it proved difficult to give form overnight to the change of attitude just noticed in literature and political life. The transition between the passionate poetry and drama of Géricault and Delacroix and the Realism of Courbet and Manet was gradual. It came by way of the “open-air” school of Barbizon, whose landscapes seemed arid (at least to the classically trained academic painters of the day) and pointless in the sense that they depicted the commonplace. Still, when the full shock of Realism inflicted by the works of Courbet and Manet occurred, it was severe: here were coarseness and violence in manner and subject. Courbet’s backgrounds are thick and his people drab; Manet’s nude “Olympia” is no goddess nor even a beautiful woman; she is a prostitute, and her name seems like a piece of irony. The portrait of his parents is a painful representation of simple poverty unrelieved by any glow of spirit or intelligence—yet the work itself is beautiful: such was, throughout, the aim and achievement of Realism.
In England, by an historical accident, pictorial realism was embodied in subjects that seem far removed from the commonplace. The school that took up the challenge against academic painting and modified the vision of Constable and Turner called itself Pre-Raphaelite. Its members were Holman Hunt, John Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the name they took for their “brotherhood” expressed their resolve to paint like the masters who came before the imitators of Raphael. It is necessary to put it in this clumsy way in order to make clear that Raphael himself was not being condemned, but only his academic followers who introduced “unreality.”
To be a Pre-Raphaelite was to see the world with a sharp eye and an undistorting mind and to render it with intense application to solidity of form, bright colour, and natural pose and grouping. All this was to be understood from the motto “Death to Slosh!” In order to make the new virtues vividly clear and also because the Pre-Raphaelites were reared on great literature, their subjects tended to draw upon legend, or Dante, or the New Testament. It was the conception and treatment that constituted the innovation. Everybody could see it, because it went against the habit of “pretty-pretty” illustration. In fact the nominal subject dropped out of sight in the startled response to form and colour. Paradoxically, then, the commonplace subjects of the French Realists and the legendary ones of the English Pre-Raphaelites were alike insignificant when compared with the effort to re-create by art the texture and “feel” of actuality—and nothing more. Such was precisely the goal Flaubert pursued and reached in Madame Bovary. His final version of the St. Anthony story (1874) made the same point with a legendary subject, like the Pre-Raphaelites.
Popular art
It hardly needs to be added that this conscious purpose of high art could interest but a relatively small portion of the public and that, for the growing mass of readers of fiction and viewers of art, other kinds of satisfaction were necessary. The ordinary three-volume novel from the lending library and the continued serial in the magazine or newspaper supplied the demand by aping, adapting, and diluting not one but half a dozen literary tendencies, old and new. The number of novels produced in all languages in the 19th century has never been estimated, but it surely must be on the order of astronomical magnitudes. And the whole output was realistic in the sense that it professed to impart the real truth about life. It was contemporary in setting and speech, took the form of a history, and taught its readers how other people lived. The pictorial counterpart was the “chromo,” the cheap colour lithograph that illustrated either fiction or news stories in forms which, however false they must seem to a critical eye, again gave the illusion of commonplace reality.
Music
At first sight, it would seem as if music were a medium in its nature resistant to Realism, but that is to reckon without the obvious use that music has always made of sounds directly associated with life—church bells, hunting horns, military bands, and the like. In an age when Realism was at a premium, the opera would be the form where these and other associations easily found their place. So it was in mid-century Europe, where Meyerbeer and others provided the effects to suit the fussily “real” staging of all plays, musical or not. Clocks, tables, animals, waterfalls, and especially costume could be relied on to be genuine up to the limit of the possible: live bullets for real deaths were shied away from, and real lightning was out of reach.
A genius who is often mistakenly grouped with the Romantics, Richard Wagner, supplied this ultimate deficiency—and by musical means. As critics have pointed out, Wagner’s system of leitmotivs, or musical tags that denoted an object, a person, or an idea, was consciously or unconsciously an accommodation of Realist intent to operatic understanding. This is true not simply because the musical notes “wave” up and down as Isolde waves her scarf at Tristan—a trivial enough device of a sort found in many composers; it is also true in the deeper sense, which constitutes Wagner’s unique genius, namely that he was able to compose great music that was steadily and precisely denotative of items in the story by repeating and interweaving their assigned musical tags.
Summary
Looking back from the perspective of Modernism, which is characteristic of 20th-century culture, it is clear that its predecessor, Romanticism, did not stop in the middle of the 19th. Rather, it evolved and branched out into the phases known as Realism, Neo-Classicism, Naturalism, and Symbolism. All the tendencies and techniques that gave passing unity to these actions and reactions are found in germ in the original flowering of art and thought that dates from about 1790.
By concentrating on one purpose, by specializing as it were in one affirmation, the succeeding movements after 1848 made their emphatic mark, until the original inspiration was exhausted. It is thus that cultural movements end—in sterile imitation and pointlessness—and thereby earn the scorn of the next generation. This in turn explains why in the decade before World War I one finds, besides a fresh surge of energy and shocking creations, the driving force of anti-Romanticism, anti-Victorianism, anti-everything that was not some form of the new and “Modern.” Jacques Barzun
A maturing industrial society
The “second industrial revolution”
As during the previous half century, much of the framework for Europe’s history following 1850 was set by rapidly changing social and economic patterns, which extended to virtually the entire continent. In western Europe, shifts were less dramatic than they had been at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, but they posed important challenges to older traditions and to early industrial behaviours alike. In Russia, initial industrialization contributed to literally revolutionary tensions soon after 1900.
The geographic spread of the Industrial Revolution was important in its own right. Germany’s industrial output began to surpass that of Britain by the 1870s, especially in heavy industry. The United States became a major industrial power, competing actively with Europe; American agriculture also began to compete as steamships, canning, and refrigeration altered the terms of international trade in foodstuffs. Russia and Japan, though less vibrant competitors by 1900, entered the lists, while significant industrialization began in parts of Italy, Austria, and Scandinavia. These developments were compatible with increased economic growth in older industrial centres, but they did produce an atmosphere of rivalry and uncertainty even in prosperous years.
Throughout the most-advanced industrial zone (from Britain through Germany) the second half of the 19th century was also marked by a new round of technological change. New processes of iron smelting such as that involving the use of the Bessemer converter (invented in 1856) expanded steel production by allowing more automatic introduction of alloys and in general increased the scale of heavy industrial operations. The development of electrical and internal combustion engines allowed transmission of power even outside factory centres. The result was a rise of sweatshop industries that used sewing machines for clothing manufacturing; the spread of powered equipment to artisanal production, on construction sites, in bakeries and other food-processing centres (some of which saw the advent of factories); and the use of powered equipment on the larger agricultural estates and for processes such as cream separation in the dairy industry. In factories themselves, a new round of innovation by the 1890s brought larger looms to the textile industry and automatic processes to shoe manufacture and machine- and shipbuilding (through automatic riveters) that reduced skill requirements and greatly increased per capita production. Technological transformation was virtually universal in industrial societies. Work speeded up still further, semi-skilled operatives became increasingly characteristic, and, on the plus side, production and thus prosperity reached new heights.
Organizational changes matched the “second industrial revolution” in technology. More expensive equipment, plus economies made possible by increasing scale, promoted the formation of larger businesses. All western European countries eased limits on the formation of joint-stock corporations from the 1850s, and the rate of corporate growth was breathtaking by the end of the century. Giant corporations grouped together to influence the terms of trade, especially in countries such as Germany, where cartels controlled as much as 90 percent of production in the electrical equipment and chemical industries. Big business techniques had a direct impact on labour. Increasingly, engineers set production quotas, displacing not only individual workers but also foremen by introducing time-and-motion procedures designed to maximize efficiency.
Modifications in social structure
Developments in technology and organization reshaped social structure. A recognizable peasantry continued to exist in western Europe, but it increasingly had to adapt to new methods. In many areas (most notably, the Netherlands and Denmark) a cooperative movement spread to allow peasants to market dairy goods and other specialties to the growing urban areas without abandoning individual landownership. Many peasants began to achieve new levels of education and to adopt innovations such as new crops, better seeds, and fertilizers; they also began to innovate politically, learning to press governments to protect their agricultural interests.
In the cities the working classes continued to expand, and distinctions between artisans and factory workers, though real, began to fade. A new urban class emerged as sales outlets proliferated and growing managerial bureaucracies (both private and public) created the need for secretaries, bank tellers, and other clerical workers. A lower middle class, composed of salaried personnel who could boast a certain level of education—indeed, whose jobs depended on literacy—and who worked in conditions different from manufacturing labourers, added an important ingredient to European society and politics. Though their material conditions differed little from those of some factory workers, though they too were subject to bosses and to challenging new technologies such as typewriters and cash registers, most white-collar workers shunned association with blue-collar ranks. Big business employers encouraged this separation by setting up separate payment systems and benefit programs, for they were eager to avoid a union of interests that might augment labour unrest.
At the top of European society a new upper class formed as big business took shape, representing a partial amalgam of aristocratic landowners and corporate magnates. This upper class wielded immense political influence, for example, in supporting government armaments buildups that provided markets for heavy industrial goods and jobs for aristocratic military officers.
Along with modifications in social structure came important shifts in popular behaviour, some of them cutting across class lines. As a result of growing production, prosperity increased throughout most of western Europe. Major economic recessions interrupted this prosperity, as factory output could outstrip demand and as investment speculation could, relatedly, outstrip real economic gains. Speculative bank crises and economic downturns occurred in the mid-1850s and particularly in the middle years of both the 1870s and ’90s, causing substantial hardship and even wider uncertainty. Nevertheless, the general trend in standards of living for most groups was upward, allowing ordinary people to improve their diets and housing and maintain a small margin for additional purchases. The success of mass newspapers, for example, which reached several million subscribers by the 1890s, depended on the ability to pay as well as on literacy. A bicycle craze, beginning among the middle classes in the 1880s and gradually spreading downward, represented a consumer passion for a more expensive item. Improvement in standards of living was aided by a general reduction in the birth rate, which developed rapidly among urban workers and even peasants. Families increasingly regarded children as an expense, to be weighed against other possibilities, and altered traditional behaviour accordingly. Reduction in the birth rate was achieved in part by sexual abstinence but also by the use of birth control devices, which had been widely available since the vulcanization of rubber in the 1840s, and by illegal abortions, while infanticide continued in rural areas. Completing the installation of a new demographic regime was a rapid decline in infant mortality after 1880.
Rising living standards were accompanied by increased leisure time. Workers pressed for a workday of 12, then 10 hours, and shortly after 1900 a few groups began to demand an even shorter period. Scattered vacation days also were introduced, and the “English weekend,” which allowed time off on Saturday afternoons as well as Sundays, spread widely. Middle-class groups, for their part, loosened their previous work ethic in order to accommodate a wider range of leisure activities.
The second half of the 19th century witnessed the birth of modern leisure in western Europe and, to an extent, beyond. Team sports were played in middle-class schools and through a variety of amateur and professional teams. Many sports, such as soccer (football), had originated in traditional games but now gained standardized rules, increasing specialization among players, and the impassioned record-keeping appropriate to an industrial age. Sports commanded widespread participation among various social groups and served as the basis for extensive commercial operations. Huge stadiums and professional leagues signaled the advent of a new level of spectatorship. While many sports primarily focused on male interests, women began to participate in tennis and entire families in pastimes such as croquet and bicycling.
Leisure options were by no means confined to sports. Mass newspapers emphasized entertaining feature stories rather than politics. Parks and museums open to the public became standard urban features. Train excursions to beaches won wide patronage from factory workers as well as middle-class vacationers. A popular theatre expanded in the cities; British music-hall, typical of the genre, combined song and satire, poking fun at life’s tribulations and providing an escapist emphasis on pleasure-seeking. After 1900, similar themes spilled into the new visual technology that soon coalesced into early motion pictures.
The rise of organized labour and mass protests
Mass leisure coexisted interestingly with the final major social development of the later 19th century, the escalating forms of class conflict. Pressed by the rapid pace and often dulling routine of work, antagonized by a faceless corporate management structure seemingly bent on efficiency at all costs, workers in various categories developed more active protest modes in the later 19th century. They were aided by their growing familiarity with basic industrial conditions, which facilitated the formation of relevant demands and made organization more feasible. Legal changes, spreading widely in western Europe after 1870, reduced political barriers to unionization and strikes, though clashes with government forces remained a common part of labour unrest.
Not surprisingly, given the mood of reaction following the failures of the 1848 revolutions, the 1850s constituted a period of relative placidity in labour relations. Skilled workers in Britain formed a conservative craft union movement, known as New Model Unionism, that urged calm negotiation and respectability; a number of durable trade unions were formed as a result, and a minority of workers gained experience in national organization. Miners and factory workers rose in strikes occasionally, signaling a class-based tension with management in many areas, but no consistent pattern developed.
The depression of the 1870s, which brought new hardship and reminded workers of the uncertainty of their lot, encouraged a wider range of agitation, and by the 1890s mass unionism surfaced throughout western Europe. Not only artisans but also factory workers and relatively unskilled groups, such as dockers, showed a growing ability to form national unions that made use of the sheer power of numbers, even in default of special skills, to press for gains. Strike rates increased steadily. In 1892 French workers struck 261 times against 500 companies; most of the efforts remained small and local, and only 50,000 workers were involved. By 1906, the peak French strike year before 1914, 1,309 strikes brought 438,000 workers off the job. British and German strike rates were higher still; in Britain, more than 2,000,000 workers struck between 1909 and 1913. A number of nationwide strikes showed labour’s new muscle.
Unionization formed the second prong of the new labour surge. Along with mass unions in individual industries, general federations formed at the national level, such as the British Trades Union Congress and the French and Italian general confederations of labour. Unions provided social and material benefits for members along with their protest action; in many industries they managed to win collective bargaining procedures with employers, though this was far from a uniform pattern in an atmosphere of bitter competition over management rights; and they could influence governmental decisions in the labour area.
The rise of organized labour signaled an unprecedented development in the history of European popular protest. Never before had so many people been formally organized; never before had withdrawal of labour served as the chief protest weapon. Many workers joined a sweeping ideological fervor to their protest. Many were socialists, and a number of trade union movements were tightly linked to the rising socialist parties; this was particularly true in Germany and Austria. In other areas, especially France and Italy, an alternative syndicalist ideology won many adherents in the union movement; syndicalists urged that direct action through strikes should topple governments and usher in a new age in which organizations of workers would control production. Against these varied revolutionary currents, many workers saw in unions and strikes primarily a means to compensate for changes in their work environment, through higher pay (as a reward for less pleasant labour) and shorter hours. Even here, there was an ability to seek new ends rather than appealing to past standards. Overall, pragmatism battled with ideology in most labour movements, and in point of fact none of the large organizations aimed primarily at revolution.
Labour unrest was not the only form of protest in the later 19th century. In many continental nations (but not in Britain or Scandinavia), nationalist organizations drew the attention of discontented shopkeepers and others in the lower middle class who felt pressed by new business forms, such as department stores and elaborate managerial bureaucracies, but who were also hostile to socialism and the union movement. Nationalist riots surfaced periodically in many countries around such issues as setbacks in imperialist competition or internal political scandals. Some of the riots and accompanying organizations were also anti-Semitic, holding Jews responsible for big business and socialism alike. France witnessed the most important agitation from the radical right, through organizations like the Action Française; but anti-Semitic political movements also developed in Germany and Austria.
Important women’s movements completed the new roster of mass protests. The basic conditions of women did not change greatly in western Europe during the second half of the 19th century, with the significant exception of the rapidly declining birth rate. The steady spread of primary education increased female literacy, bringing it nearly equal to male levels by 1900. A growing minority of middle-class women also entered secondary schools, and by the 1870s a handful reached universities and professional schools. Several separate women’s colleges were founded in centres such as Oxford and Cambridge, and, against heavy resistance, a few women became doctors and lawyers. For somewhat larger numbers of women, new jobs in the service sector of the economy, such as telephone operators, primary-school teachers, and nurses, provided opportunities for work before marriage. Gradually some older sectors of employment, such as domestic service, began to decline. Nevertheless, emphasis on a domestic sphere for women changed little. Public schools, while teaching literacy, also taught the importance of household skills and support for a working husband.
These were the circumstances that produced increasingly active feminist movements, sometimes independently and sometimes in association with socialist parties. Feminist leaders sought greater equality under the law, an attack on a double-standard sexuality that advantaged men. Above all, they came to concentrate on winning the vote. Massive petitions in Britain, accompanied by considerable violence after 1900, signaled Europe’s most active feminist movement, drawing mainly on middle-class ranks. Feminists in Scandinavia were successful in winning voting rights after 1900. Almost everywhere, feminist pressures added to the new variety of mass protest action.
Conditions in eastern Europe
Social conditions in eastern and southern Europe differed substantially from those of the west, but there were some common elements. Middle- and upper-class women in Russia, for example, surged into new educational and professional opportunities in some numbers. Growing cities and factories produced some trade union activity, on the part of skilled groups such as the printers and metalworkers, that resembled efforts elsewhere.
Rural conditions, however, were vastly different from those in western Europe. Eastern and southern Europe remained dominated by the peasantry, as urbanization, though rapid, was at a far earlier stage. Peasant conditions were generally poor. Amid growing population pressure, many peasants suffered from a lack of land in areas dominated by large estates. One result was rapid emigration, to the Americas and elsewhere, from Spain, southern Italy, and eastern Europe. Another result was recurrent unrest. Peasants in southern Spain, loosely organized under anarchist banners, rose almost once a decade in the late 19th century, seizing land and burning estate records.
The social and economic situation was most complex in Russia. Stung by the loss of the Crimean War (1854–56) to Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire, literally in their own backyard, Russian leaders decided on a modernization program. The key ingredient was an end to the rigid manorial system, and in 1861 Alexander II, a reform-minded tsar, issued the Emancipation Manifesto, freeing the serfs. This act sought to produce a freer labour market but also to protect the status of the nobility. As a result, noble landlords retained some of the best land and were paid for the loss of their servile labour; in turn, serfs, though technically in control of most land, owed redemption payments to the state. This arrangement produced important changes in the countryside. Peasants did develop some commercial habits, aided by gradually spreading education and literacy. More and more peasants migrated, temporarily or permanently, to cities, where they swelled the manufacturing labour force and also the ranks of urban poor. Rural unrest continued, however, as peasants resented their taxes and payments and the large estates that remained.
From the 1870s the Russian government also launched a program of industrial development, beginning with the construction of a national rail network capped by the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Factory industry was encouraged; much of it was held under foreign ownership, though a native entrepreneurial class emerged. Large factories developed to produce textiles and to process metals. Conditions remained poor, however, and combined with the unfamiliar pace of factory work and rural grievances to spur recurrent worker unrest. Illegal strikes and unions became increasingly prominent after 1900. A minority of urban workers, especially in St. Petersburg and Moscow, were won to socialist doctrines, and a well-organized Marxist movement arose, its leadership after 1900 increasingly dominated by Vladimir Ilich Lenin, a creative theorist who adapted Marxist theory to the Russian situation and who concentrated single-mindedly on creating the network of underground cells that could foment outright revolution. Russia was embarked on a genuine industrial revolution; with its massive size and resources, it ranked among world leaders in many categories of production by 1900. However, it operated in an exceptionally unstable social and political climate.
The emergence of the industrial state
Political patterns
During the second half of the 19th century, politics and socioeconomic conditions became increasingly intertwined in Europe, producing a new definition of government functions, including a greatly expanded state and a new political spectrum. Linkage to cultural trends also showed through an interest in hard-headed realism. Predictably, political conditions in eastern Europe, though mirroring some of the general developments, remained distinctive.
The decades between 1850 and 1870 served as a crucial turning point in European politics and diplomacy, somewhat surprisingly given the apparent victory of conservative forces over the revolutions of 1848. Reactionary impulses did surface during these years. A Conservative Party eager to hold the line against further change emerged in Prussia. A number of governments made new arrangements with the Roman Catholic church to encourage religion against political attacks. Pope Pius IX, who had been chased from Rome during the final surge of agitation in 1848, turned adamantly against new political ideas. In the Syllabus of Errors accompanying the encyclical Quanta cura (“With What Great Care,” 1864), he denounced liberalism and nationalism and insisted on the duty of Roman Catholic rulers to protect the established church, even against religious toleration. The proclamation of papal infallibility (1870) was widely seen as another move to firm up church authority against change.
Europe, 1871–1914.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Many conservative leaders, however, saw the victory over revolution as a chance to innovate within the framework of the established order. They were aided by a pragmatic current among liberals, many of whom were convinced that compromise, not revolution, was the only way to win reform. Thus, in Britain Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservative leader in the House of Commons, in 1867 sponsored a new suffrage measure, which granted the vote to most urban workers; Disraeli hoped that the new voters would support his party, and some of them did so. In France Emperor Napoleon III, who had insisted on an authoritarian regime during the 1850s, began to sponsor major industrial development while maintaining an active foreign policy, designed to win growing support for the state. In the 1860s, pressed by diplomatic setbacks, Napoleon also granted liberal concessions, expanding parliamentary power and tolerating more freedom of press and speech. The Habsburg monarchy promoted an efficient, largely German bureaucracy to replace the defunct manorial regime and in the 1860s sought to make peace with the leading nationalist movement. In the Ausgleich (“Compromise”) of 1867, Hungary was granted substantial autonomy, and separate parliaments, though based on limited suffrage, were established in Austria and Hungary. This result enraged Slavic nationalists, but it signaled an important departure from previous policies bent on holding the line against any dilution of imperial power.
The key centres of dynamic conservatism, however, were Italy and Germany. In the Italian state of Piedmont during the early 1850s, the able prime minister, Camillo di Cavour, conciliated liberals by sponsoring economic development and granting new personal freedoms. Cavour worked especially to capture the current of Italian nationalism. By a series of diplomatic maneuvers, he won an alliance with France against Austria and, in a war fought in 1859, drove Austria from the province of Lombardy. Nationalist risings followed elsewhere in Italy, and Cavour was able to join these to a new Italian state under the Piedmontese king. The resultant new state had a parliament, and it vigorously attacked the power of the Roman Catholic church in a liberal-nationalist combination that could win support from various political groups.
Inspired in part by Italian example, a young chief minister in Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, began a still more important campaign of limited political reform and nationalist aggrandizement. The goal was to unite Germany under Prussia and to defuse liberal and radical agitation. In a series of carefully calculated wars during the 1860s, Bismarck first defeated Denmark and won control over German-speaking provinces. He then provoked Austria, Prussia’s chief rival in Germany, and to general surprise won handily, relying on Prussia’s well-organized military might. A Prussian-dominated union of northern German states was formed. A final war with France, in 1870–71, again resulted in Prussian victory. This time the prize was the province of Alsace and part of Lorraine and agreement with the southern German states to form a single German empire under the Prussian ruler. This new state had a national parliament with a lower house based on universal manhood suffrage but an upper house dominated by Prussia, whose own parliament was elected by a voting system that assured the political power of the wealthiest elements of society. As in Italy, appointment of ministers lay with the crown, not parliament. Freedoms of press and speech were extended and religious liberty expanded to include Jews, but the government periodically intervened against dissident political groups.
These developments radically changed Europe’s map, eliminating two traditional vacuums of power that had been dominated by a welter of smaller states. Nationalism was triumphant in central Europe. At the same time, regimes had been created that, buoyed by nationalist success, appealed to moderate liberal and conservative elements alike while fully contenting neither group. The old regime, attacked for so many decades, was gone, as parliamentary politics and a party system predominated through western and central Europe. Concurrently, important powers for throne and aristocracy remained, as liberals either compromised their policies or went into sullen, usually ineffective, opposition.
A slightly different version of the politics of compromise emerged in France in the 1870s. Defeated by Prussia, the empire of Napoleon III collapsed. A variety of political forces, including various monarchist groups, contended for succession after a radical rising, the Paris Commune, failed in 1871. Eventually, through a piecemeal series of laws, conservative republicans triumphed, winning a parliamentary majority through elections and proclaiming the Third Republic. This was a clearly liberal regime, in which parliament dominated the executive branch amid frequent changes of ministry. Freedoms of press, speech, and association were widely upheld, and the regime attacked the powers of the church in education and other areas. At the same time, dominant liberals pledged to avoid significant social change, winning peasant and middle-class support on this basis.
With the emergence of the Third Republic, the constitutional structure of western Europe was largely set for the remainder of the 19th century. All the major nations (except Spain, which continued to oscillate between periods of liberalism and conservative authoritarianism) had parliaments and a multiparty system, and most had granted universal manhood suffrage. Britain completed this process by a final electoral reform in the mid-1880s. Belgium, Italy, and Austria held out for a longer time, experiencing considerable popular unrest as a result, though voting reforms for men were completed before 1914. Important political crises still surfaced. Bismarck warred with the Roman Catholic church and the Catholic Centre Party during the 1870s before reaching a compromise agreement. He then tried virtually to outlaw the socialist party, which remained on the defensive until a liberalization after he fell from power in 1890. During the 1890s, France faced a major constitutional crisis in the Dreyfus affair. The imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer falsely accused of treason, triggered a battle between conservative, Catholic, and military forces, all bent on defending the authority of army and state, and a more radical republican group joined by socialists, who saw the future of the republic at stake. The winning pro-Dreyfus forces forced the separation of church and state by 1905, reducing Catholicism’s claims on the French government and limiting the role of religion as a political issue.
The politics of compromise also affected organized religion, partly because of attacks from various states. A number of Protestant leaders took up social issues, seeking new ways to reach the urban poor and to alleviate distress. The Salvation Army, founded in Britain in 1878, expressed the social mission idea, whereby practical measures were used in the service of God. Under a new pope, Leo XIII, the Roman Catholic church moved more formally to accommodate to modernpolitics. The encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things,” 1891) urged Catholics to accept political institutions such as parliaments and universal suffrage; it proclaimed sympathy for working people against the excesses of capitalism, justifying moderate trade union action though vigorously denouncing socialism. Steps such as this muted religious issues in politics, while on the whole relegating organized religion to a more modest public role.
In general, the resolution of major constitutional issues led to an alternation of moderate conservative and liberal forces in power between 1870 and 1914. Conservatives, when in charge, tended to push a more openly nationalistic foreign policy than did liberals; liberals, as the Dreyfus affair suggested in France, tended to be more concerned about limiting the role of religion in political life. Both movements, however, agreed on many basic goals, including political structure itself. Both were capable of promoting some modest social reforms, though neither wished to go too far. In Italy, conservatives and liberals were so similar that commentators noted a process of transformism (trasformismo), by which parliamentary deputies, regardless of their electoral platforms, were transformed into virtually identical power seekers once in Rome.
As the range of dispute between conservatives and liberals narrowed (save for fringe movements of the radical right that distrusted parliamentary politics altogether), the most striking innovation in the political spectrum was the rise of socialist parties, based primarily on working-class support though with scattered rural and middle-class backing as well. Formal socialist parties began to take shape in the 1860s. They differed from previous socialist movements in focusing primarily on winning electoral support; earlier socialist leaders either had been openly revolutionary or had favoured setting up model communities that, they thought, would produce change through example. Most of the socialist parties established in the 1860s and ’70s derived their inspiration from Karl Marx. They argued that revolution was essential and that capitalists and workers were locked in a historic battle that must affect all social institutions. The goal of socialist action was to seize the state, establishing proletarian control and unseating the exploitative powers of capitalism. In practice, however, most socialist parties worked through the political process (with support for trade union activities), diluting orthodox Marxism. Universal manhood suffrage created a climate ripe for socialist gains, especially since, in most countries, these parties were the first to realize the nature of mass politics. They set up permanent organizations to woo support even apart from election campaigns and sponsored impassioned political rallies rather than working behind the scenes to manipulate voters. Newspapers, educational efforts, and social activities supplemented the formal political message.
By the 1880s the German socialist party was clearly winning working-class support away from the liberal movement despite Bismarck’s antisocialist laws. By 1900 the party was a major political force, gaining about two million votes in key elections and seating a large minority of parliamentary deputies. By 1913 the German party was polling four million votes in national elections and was the largest single political force in the nation. Socialist parties in Austria, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries won similar success. Socialism in France and Italy, divided among various ideological factions, was somewhat slower to coalesce, but it too gained ground steadily. In 1899 a socialist entered the French Cabinet as part of the Dreyfusard coalition, shocking orthodox Marxists who argued against collaboration with bourgeois politicians. By 1913 the French party had more than a hundred delegates in parliament. British socialism grew later and with less attention to formal ideology. The Labour Party was formed in the 1890s with strong trade union connections; it long lagged behind the Liberals in winning workers’ votes. Nevertheless, even in Britain the party was a strong third force by 1914. In many countries socialists not only formed a large national minority capable of pressing government coalitions but also won control of many municipal governments, where they increased welfare benefits and regulated urban conditions for the benefit of their constituents.
The rise of socialism put what was called “the social question” at the forefront of domestic policy in the late 19th century, replacing debates about formal constitutional structure. Fear of socialism strengthened the hand of ruling conservative or liberal coalitions. At the same time, success mellowed many socialist leaders. In Germany about 1900 a revisionist movement arose that judged that revolution was not necessary; it was thought that Marxism should be modified to allow for piecemeal political gains and cooperation with middle-class reformers. Most parties officially denounced revisionism in favour of stricter Marxism, but in fact they behaved in a revisionist fashion.
Changes in government functions
Shifts in the political spectrum and larger issues of industrial society prompted important changes in government functions through the second half of the 19th century. Mass education headed the list. Building on earlier precedents, most governments in western Europe established universal public schooling in the 1870s and ’80s, requiring attendance at least at the primary levels. Education was seen as essential to provide basic skills such as literacy and numeracy. It also was a vital means of conditioning citizens to loyalty to the national government. All the educational systems vigorously pushed nationalism in their history and literature courses. They tried to standardize language, as against minority dialects and languages (opposing Polish in Germany, for example, or Breton in France).
A second extension of government functions involved peacetime military conscription, which was resisted only in Great Britain. Prussia’s success in war during the 1860s convinced other continental powers that military service was essential, and conscription, along with steadily growing armaments expenditures, enhanced the military readiness of most governments.
Governments also expanded their record-keeping functions, replacing church officials. Requirements for civil marriages (in addition to religious ceremonies where desired), census-taking, and other activities steadily expanded state impact in these areas. Regulatory efforts increased from the 1850s. Central governments inspected food-processing facilities and housing. Inspectors checked to make sure that safety provisions and rules on work hours and the employment of women and children were observed. Other functionaries carefully patrolled borders, requiring passports for entry. Most countries (Britain again was an exception) increased tariff regulations in the 1890s, seeking to conciliate agriculturalists and industrialists alike; while not a new function, this signaled the state’s activist role in basic economic policy. Most European governments ran all or part of the railroad system and set up telephone services as part of postal operations.
Educator, record-keeper, military recruiter, major economic actor—the state also entered the welfare field during the 1880s. Bismarck pioneered with three social insurance laws between 1883 and 1889—part of his abortive effort to beat down socialism—that set up rudimentary schemes for protection in illness, accident, and old age. Austria and Scandinavia imitated the German system, while the French and Italian governments established somewhat more voluntary programs. Britain enacted a major welfare insurance scheme under a Liberal administration in 1906, and in 1911 it became the first country to institute state-run unemployment insurance. All these measures were limited in scope, providing modest benefits at best, but they marked the beginnings of a full-fledged welfare state.
The growth of government, and the explosion of its range of services, was reflected in the rapid expansion of state bureaucracies. Most countries installed formal civil service procedures by the 1870s, with examinations designed to assure employment and seniority by merit rather than favouritism. State-run secondary schools, designed to train aspiring bureaucrats, slowly increased their output of graduates. Taxation increased as well, and just before the outbreak of war in 1914, several nations installed income tax provisions to provide additional revenue. Quietly, amid many national variants, a new kind of state was constructed during the late 19th century, with far more elaborate and intimate contacts with the citizenry than ever before in European history.
Reform and reaction in eastern Europe
Political patterns in Spain, the smaller nations of southeastern Europe, and, above all, Russia followed a rather different rhythm. Parliamentary institutions were installed in some cases after 1900, but these were carefully controlled. Censorship severely limited political expression.
Russia continued a reformist mode for several years after the emancipation of the serfs. New local governments were created to replace manorial rule, and local assemblies helped regulate their activities, giving outlet for political expression to many professional people who served these governments as doctors, teachers, and jurists. Law codes were standardized and punishments lightened. The military was reformed and became an important force in providing basic education to conscripts. No national representative body existed, however, as tsarist authority was maintained. Further, after Alexander II’s assassination by anarchists in 1881, the government reversed its reformist tendencies. Police powers expanded. Official campaigns lashed out brutally at Jews and other national minorities. Agitation continued at various levels, among intellectuals (many of whom were anarchists) and among workers and peasants. A small liberal current took shape within the expanding middle class as well.
Economic recession early in the 1900s was followed by a shocking loss in a war with Japan (1904–05). These conditions led to outright revolution in 1905, as worker strikes and peasant rioting spread through the country. Nicholas II responded with a number of concessions. Redemption payments were eased on peasants, and enterprising farmers gained new rights to acquire land, creating a successful though widely resented kulak class in the countryside. Rural unrest eased as a result. On the political front a national parliament, or Duma, was established. Socialist candidates, however, were not allowed to run, and the Duma soon became a mere rubber stamp, unable to take any significant initiative. Repression returned and with it substantial popular unrest, including growing illegal trade unions. Russia did not make the turn to compromise politics, and in the judgment of some historians renewed revolution loomed even aside from the outbreak of war in 1914.
Diplomatic entanglements
Many features of Europe’s evolution in the late 19th century turned renewed attention to the diplomatic and military arena. Advancing industrialization heightened competition among individual nations and created a massive power disparity between Europe and most of the rest of the world. Wealth allowed new international ventures. Specific inventions such as steamships (capable of rapid oceanic transit and travel upstream in such previously unnavigable waters as the rivers of Africa), machine guns, and new medicines provided fresh opportunities for world domination. The changes in Europe’s map caused by Italian and German unification inevitably prompted diplomatic reshufflings. The politics of compromise encouraged governments to rely on diplomatic goals as a means of pleasing the new and somewhat unpredictable electorate.
During the 1870s and ’80s Europe itself remained relatively calm. Bismarck, by far the ablest statesman on the scene, professed the newly united Germany to be a satisfied power, interested only in maintaining the European status quo. His most obvious opponent was recently defeated France, and he carefully constructed a diplomatic network that would make French enmity impotent. Peacetime alliances were an innovation in European diplomacy, but for a time they had the desired stabilizing effect. Bismarck conciliated the Habsburg regime, forming an arrangement in 1879 between the two emperors. In 1882 he joined Italy to this understanding, completing a Triple Alliance on the basis of assurances of mutual aid against outside attack. Beyond this, Bismarck negotiated a separate understanding with Russia in 1887. These linkages required sensitive juggling, because they loosely grouped some potential opponents (such as Russia and the Habsburgs). They did offer a means of isolating France, especially since Bismarck also cultivated good relations with Britain, which was interested primarily in colonial expansion where France was its most obvious rival.
Even before it was fully constructed, Bismarck’s plan to stabilize Europe faced an important challenge. Revolts in the Balkans, in areas nominally under Ottoman control, called attention to what was then Europe’s most volatile area. Effective Ottoman dominion over this region had been declining steadily along with the vigour of the government more generally, and nationalist fervor, spreading from western Europe, had galvanized many ethnic groups. Revolts in Serbia and Romania won partial independence earlier in the 19th century, and Greece had gained national status outright. In the 1870s rioting broke out in several regions, and Serbia and another small nation, Montenegro, declared war on the Ottoman empire. Russia joined in, to protect its Slavic “brethren” and to gain new territory at Turkey’s expense. Easy victories followed, and a large new Bulgarian state was proclaimed, along with Russian acquisitions along the Black Sea. At this point Austria-Hungary and Britain, both interested in stability in the region, intervened. Bismarck, anxious for peace, called a Berlin Congress in 1878 to win an acceptable compromise. The result was a smaller Bulgaria, full independence for Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania, and Austrian occupation of the Slavic provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Britain gained the island of Cyprus, which gave it a closer watchdog position over its routes to India, and France was encouraged to take over Tunisia. The great loser at the Congress of Berlin was Russia, which left resentful that its enormous gains were nullified. Although Bismarck claimed that Germany had acted as an honest broker, the Russians believed that he had favoured Austria-Hungary. Germany would not be able to conciliate Russia for almost a decade. In the meantime, Bismarck’s alliance system unfolded in the wake of the Congress of Berlin with Germany siding first with Austria-Hungary because both countries faced Russian enmity.
The scramble for colonies
The most obvious result of the Congress and of nationalist yearnings, juxtaposed with a more structured European map, was a new and general scramble for colonies in other parts of the world. Even before the 1870s some new gains had occurred. French explorers fanned out in equatorial Africa, and a French mission began the conquest of Indochina in the 1860s. Many European nations exhibited a growing interest in colonies as sources of raw materials and new markets and as potential outlets for excess population and for administrators who could not be accommodated at home. Opportunities for individual adventurism and profit also ran high. Overriding motivations for the climactic imperialist scramble involved a desire to appeal to domestic nationalism and an interest in maintaining or gaining place as world powers. New nations such as Italy and Germany sought empires to prove their status; France sought expansion to compensate for its humiliating defeat at Germany’s hands; Britain pressed outward in order to protect existing colonies. Russia, and at the century’s end the United States and Japan, also joined the competition.
Between 1880 and 1900 much of Asia was divided. Britain held Burma; Britain, Germany, France, and the United States divided the Pacific islands of Polynesia. All the major European powers save Italy took advantage of China’s weakness to acquire long-term leases on port cities and surrounding regions, easily putting down the Chinese Boxer Rebellion against Western encroachments in 1899–1900. Germany gained new advisory and investment roles within the Ottoman Empire, while Britain and Russia divided spheres of influence in Afghanistan; Britain also effectively controlled several small states on the Persian Gulf.
The dismemberment of Africa was even more complete. Portugal expanded its control over Angola and Mozambique, Belgium took over the giant Congo region, and Germany gained new colonies in southern Africa. Britain and France, the big winners, gained new territory in West Africa, and Britain built a network of colonies in East Africa running from South Africa to Egypt. The French occupation of Morocco and the Italian conquest of Tripoli, after 1900, completed the process. Only Ethiopia remained fully free, defeating an Italian force in 1896.
Prewar diplomacy
By the early years of the 20th century the major imperialist gains had been completed, but some of the excitement that the process had generated remained, to spill back into European diplomacy. Germany had begun construction of a large navy, for example, in the late 1890s, in part to assure its place as an imperialist power; but this development, along with Germany’s rapid industrial surge, threatened Britain. France ran a massive empire, but its nationalistic yearnings were not fully satisfied and the humiliating loss of Alsace-Lorraine had not been avenged. Russia encountered a new opponent in the Far East in the rise of Japan. The Japanese, fearful of Russian expansion in northern China, defeated the tsarist forces in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–05, winning Korea in the process. The unstable Russian regime looked for compensatory gains in the hothouse of the Balkans rather than in the distant reaches of Asia. The stage was set for intensification of European conflicts.
Furthermore, the complex alliance system developed by Bismarck came unraveled following the statesman’s removal from power in 1890 at the hands of a new emperor, William II. Germany did not renew its alliance with Russia, and during the 1890s an alliance developed between Russia and France, both fearful of Germany’s might. Britain, also wary of German power, swallowed its traditional enmity and colonial rivalries with France, forming a loose Entente Cordiale in 1904; Russia joined this understanding in 1907. Europe stood divided between two alliance systems.
In 1908 Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was eager to strike a blow against South Slavic nationalism, which threatened the multinational Habsburg empire. This move antagonized Russia and Serbia, the latter claiming these territories as part of its own national domain. In 1912 Russia aided several of the Balkan states in a new attack on the Ottoman Empire, with the allies hoping to obtain Macedonia. The Balkan nations won, but they quarreled with each other in the Second Balkan War in 1913. Further bitterness resulted in the Balkan region, with Serbia, though a winner in both wars, eager to take on Austria-Hungary directly.
On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist, assassinated the Austrian archduke and apparent heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand. Austria-Hungary resolved to crush the Serbian threat in response. Germany supported its Austrian ally, partly because it feared that its most reliable partner needed a victory and partly because many leaders judged that war had become inevitable and was preferable sooner than later, given ongoing military modernizations in France and Russia. Russia refused to abandon Serbia, and France hewed to its alliance with Russia. Last-minute negotiations, led by Britain, failed. Russia began a general mobilization following Austria’s July 28 attack on Serbia. Germany, eager to take advantage of Russia’s slowness by striking a lightning blow in the west, then invaded neutral Belgium and pushed into northern France. Britain, briefly hesitant, was committed by treaty to defend Belgium and entered the fray on August 4, and World War I was under way.
The patterns of European diplomacy in the late 19th century are not an unrelieved story of nationalist rivalries. From the 1850s onward European nations signed a number of constructive international agreements designed to link postal systems, regularize principles of international commercial law, and even install some humanitarian agreements in the event of war. The International Red Cross was one fruit of these activities, as was the establishment of a World Court, in the Netherlands, to help settle international disputes. But efforts to negotiate a reduction of armaments, in a series of conferences beginning in 1899, failed completely amid growing national military buildups. Britain and Germany, in particular, refused to abandon their naval race, which took a new turn in 1906 with the development of the massive British battleship HMS Dreadnought.
World War I, a bloody struggle that served to reduce Europe’s world role, resulted not only from escalating international tensions but also from domestic strains. Russia and Austria-Hungary, internally pressed by social and nationalist strife, looked to diplomatic successes, even at the cost of war, as a means of diverting internal discontents, and the alliance system trapped more stable nations into following suit. Germany, Britain, and France, beleaguered by growing socialist gains that frightened a conservative leadership and urged on by intense popular nationalism, also accepted war not only as a diplomatic tool but also as a means of countering internal disarray. Cultural emphasis on irrationality, spontaneity, and despair contributed to the context as well. War thus resulted from a number of basic developments in 19th-century Europe, just as its catastrophic impact resulted from the military technologies that the 19th-century industrial revolution had created. Peter N. Stearns
Modern culture
In the last quarter of the 19th century European thought and art became a prey to self-doubt and the fear, as well as the pleasures, of decadence. Writers as different as Baudelaire and Matthew Arnold, Henry Adams and Flaubert, Ruskin and Nietzsche had begun from the mid-century onward to express their revulsion from the banality and smugness of surrounding humanity, debased—they felt—by “progress.” It seemed as if with the onset of positivism and science, Realpolitik and Darwinism, realistic art and popular culture, all noble thought and true emotion had been suffocated. The only things that stood out from banality and smugness were their own appalling extremes—vulgarity and arrogance—against which all the weapons of the mind seemed powerless.
Such intellectuals and artists were hopelessly outnumbered not only in the literal sense but also in the means of influencing culture. A newspaper that reached half a million readers with its clichés, its serial story, and its garish illustrations “educated” the people in a fashion that actively prevented any understanding of high culture. The barrier was far more insurmountable than mere ignorance or illiteracy, and it was cutting off not just the populace but also—to use Arnold’s terms—the barbarian upper class and the Philistine middle class. Similarly, Nietzsche anatomized what he called the culture-Philistine; that is, the person whose mind fed on middling ideas and “genteel” tastes halfway between those of the populace and those of the genuinely cultivated. Numerous artists and writers, high in repute and believed then to be the leaders of modern civilization, provided the materials for these conscientious consumers of art, literature, and “sound opinion” in every field. In other words, the prudent, self-limiting impulse of Realism after 1848 had generated the middlebrow, while the evolution of industrial democracy had generated the mass man. By the late 1880s the gap between this compact army with its honoured officers and common soldiers and the hostile, half-visible avant-garde was a permanent feature of cultural evolution.
Out of the uneven conflict came increasingly violent expressions of hatred and disgust, and the age that had defined Realism as the commonplace and average gradually succumbed to a variety of proffered opposites. Their forms and tendencies can be grouped into half a dozen kinds, not all on the same intellectual or artistic plane, nor all distinctly named then or now. One discerns first a retreat from the ugly world into a species of Neoclassicism. Such were the French poets known as Parnassians. Strict form, antique subjects, and the pose of impassivity constitute their hallmark. In painting, the work of Puvis de Chavannes stands in parallel.
In music, the explicit revolt against Wagner and Liszt, of which Brahms was made the torchbearer, offers similarities, particularly in the desire to learn and employ the “purer” forms of an earlier time. Likewise, the shift in tone and temper of the later poems of Tennyson, Arnold, or Gautier; the resurgence of Thomist orthodoxy in Roman Catholic thought; the haughty detachment in the plays of Becque and those of Ibsen’s middle period, all suggest a search for stability, for a fixed point from which to judge and condemn contemporary “progress.”
Symbolism and Impressionism
Next, it appeared that those who wanted to withdraw from vulgar actuality were making of art with a capital A an independent region of thought and feeling into which to escape, by which to reduce the pain of living. Steady contemplation of “the beautiful” created a “truer” world than the one accepted by ordinary people as real. Walter Pater, a critic writing from the shelter of Oxford, gave eloquent expression to this conception of life, in which every possible minute must be charged with fine and rare sensation. His brilliant disciple Oscar Wilde made the doctrine so clear and persuasive that it generated a characteristic atmosphere, now known as Aestheticism, or more simply as “the Nineties.”
This creed of self-redemption through art is related to the movements known as Symbolism and Impressionism. It is noteworthy that the Impressionist painters were able to take as subjects some of the sights that most depressed their fellow man and by recomposing them in brilliant, shimmering colour to create a refreshing world of new sensation. Subject once again mercifully disappeared. As Monet said: “The principal subject in a painting is light.”
The Symbolists in literature had a more difficult task than the painters, because their medium, words, must be shared with all those who speak the language for ordinary purposes. To disinfect grammar and vocabulary for poetry and “art prose” required severe measures. All set phrases had to be broken up, unusual words revived or common ones used in archaic or etymological senses; syntax had to be bent to permit fresh juxtapositions from which new meanings might emerge; above all, the familiar rhetoric and rhythms had to be avoided, until the literary work, poetry or prose, created the desired “new world.” It is a world difficult to access but worth exploring, all its tangible parts being the symbols of a radiant reality beyond—in short, the antithesis of a newspaper editorial.
In music there was no need of any indirect device to establish the mood of Impressionism. It was already to be found here and there in the great Romantics, and when the new generation began to compose on themes drawn from contemporary literature, the hints and opportunities needed only a delicate genius to develop them into a style. Debussy was that genius, soon followed by Ravel, Delius, Hugo Wolf, and others. Alike, yet independently of one another, they replaced eloquence, melodic clarity, and harmonic consecutiveness by capricious melodic contour and pointillist chord progressions to produce the shimmer and mystery of musical Impressionism.
Aestheticism
To those who dedicated their lives to Symbolist literature and criticism the name of aesthetes is often given, for it was at this time, from 1870 to the end of the century, that questions of aesthetics became the intense concern of artists, critics, and a portion of the public. The phrase “art for art’s sake,” which the Romanticists had toyed with, was revived and made the hallmark of high art. Whatever claimed the attention of the intellectual elite must receive this authentication, which guaranteed that no ulterior motive, such as propaganda, and no appeal to the middlebrow audience was discernible in the poem, painting, or musical composition. Common subject matter, ease of understanding, accessibility were signs of compromise with vulgar taste. Having cut loose from evil society, art repudiated its former role of moral teacher and even of communicator; it was—or was to be—completely “autonomous,” else it could not serve its devotees as a refuge from intolerable workaday existence.
Yet Aestheticism was by no means as languid and fatalistic as it tried to appear. Writers such as Oscar Wilde, George Moore, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Edmond and Jules Goncourt, though promoting the idea of art as spiritual shelter, took an active part in current affairs. Moore wrote naturalistic novels; Mallarmé gave interviews to the press and wrote advertisements for perfume and other luxuries; and Wilde, whom it is easy, because of his notoriety on many counts, to dismiss as colourful but ephemeral, was an effective propagandist in the assault on the Victorian ethos. He was not a symptom but the representative man. His book reviewing and critical essays, his story The Picture of Dorian Gray, his great Ballad of Reading Gaol, the autobiographical De Profundis, and the greatest farce in the language, The Importance of Being Earnest, together form a kind of sourcebook for the period and have also lasted as literature. What Wilde accomplished through these works was the liberation of English literature from ancestral (and not merely Victorian) preconceptions. He reconnected England with the Continent artistically by phrasing with finality their different assumptions. He showed that art could be morally responsible only by discarding moralism. In a word, he played again in 1890 the role Gautier had played in France in 1835 with his anti-bourgeois diatribe in Mademoiselle de Maupin. Whoever, starting with Wilde or Gautier, wishes to follow the historical sequence and recapture the atmosphere in which this activity went on will find no better source than the Journal of the Goncourts, who were the inventors of a mannered “art prose,” of contemporary lives, characters, and gossip.
The reader of their voluminous pages will also find there references to the movement called Naturalism, which does not merely parallel but also intermingles with Symbolism and Impressionism. The Goncourts themselves wrote a number of Naturalistic novels; their friend Zola was the theorist and greatest master of the genre; another novelist, Joris-Karl Huysmans, passed from Naturalism to Symbolism, as did several other writers. In the poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, as later in the Irish Yeats, the elements of the two tendencies alternated or mixed.
Naturalism
The name Naturalism suggests the philosophy of science, and the connection is genuine. Zola thought that in his great series of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart, he was studying the “natural and social history” of a family during the time of Napoleon III. The claim was bolstered by the method Zola used of gathering data like a scientist—every material fact could be proved by reference to actuality or statistics. Naturalism would thus appear to be an intensification of Realism, as indeed it was—more “research.” It differed markedly in spirit, however. Realism professed to be depiction of the commonplace in a mood of stoicism or indifference—a photographic plate from a camera held almost at random in front of unselected mediocrity; it was, as Flaubert was the first to say, a refusal to share previous Romanticist hopes and interests. Naturalism, on the contrary, readmitted purpose and selectivity. Each novel was a “study” designed to exhibit and denounce the dismal truths of social existence, for which purpose the worst are the best. Zola’s novels throb with a passionate love of life, a life which he showed as tortured and twisted by character and condition. In the end he defined his scientific or “experimental” novel as “a corner of nature seen through a temperament.” The aim of the Naturalists was not only to show but to show up; they meant to teach the great prosperous middle class how those beneath them lived and even beyond that to disgust the sensitive with the human condition, whatever its social embodiment. In this effort it shares with the aesthetes the animus of denunciation.
In the plastic arts, a plausible counterpart of Naturalism is the work of those known as Postimpressionists, notably Cézanne and van Gogh in painting, Rodin and Maillol in sculpture. Their various styles and aims had a common result in restoring solidity and “weight” to the visual object after the fluidity and lightness of Impressionism.
Musical naturalism was, by contrast, an attempt at dramatic literalness. Richard Strauss boasted that he could render a soup spoon. Actually, he could not and did not. The noises of his Sinfonia Domestica are standard orchestral sounds fitted with a preliminary explanation, like the libretto or synopsis of a Wagnerian or other opera. When the sheep bleat in Strauss’s Don Quixote, the clarinets play notes that are decorative on their own account and do not in the least suggest wool. It is rather the thickness of Strauss’s orchestration and chromatic harmony that connect him with naturalist doctrine—the headlong embrace with matter. And so it is also in the operas of Bruneau or Charpentier or in the verismo of Puccini and the late Italian school generally. Music remains atmospheric; never, except in Wagner’s system, denotative.
This definition of Naturalism, coupled with the aesthetic, or “art for art’s sake,” impetus in Symbolism and with the Impressionists’ transmutation of concreteness into light, justifies the name of Neoromanticism that has been given to the cultural temper with which the 19th century ended. After the glum self-repression of the middle period, it was an outburst of vehement self-assertion, whether directed inward or outward. “Art for art’s sake” and Naturalism are indeed but twin branches of one doctrine: art for life’s sake.
The new century
In 1895 George Bernard Shaw said: “France is certainly decadent if she thinks she is.” The remark is characteristic of Shaw, but it is also indicative of a new wave of energy. From under the despair and decadence, the scattered retreats and the violent nihilism, the same human strength that produced Symbolist and Naturalist art was trying to reshape the civilization that all found so unsatisfactory.
In England, the Fabians, of whom Shaw was one, were preaching the “inevitableness of gradualism” toward the socialist state. It was they, seconded by the growing strength of the trade unions after a spectacular dock strike of 1889, who paved the way to Labour governments and the British welfare state. Throughout Europe, socialism was no longer the creed of a lunatic fringe but was the ideal of many among the masses and the intellectuals. The original fight for liberty and democracy in political action had turned into a fight for economic democracy—freedom from want. Laissez-faire liberalism had turned inside out, and the liberal imagination at work in the many brands of socialism now demanded state interference to remove the appalling conditions causing all the despair.
Arts and Crafts movement
Among the socialists belonging to no party, Ruskin and William Morris worked also to effect immediate changes in the quality of their surroundings: they started the so-called Arts and Crafts movement, whose aim was to make objects once again beautiful. Because machine industry produced only the “cheap and nasty” (as it was commonly called), they tried to produce by hand the cheap and handsome—good furniture, hangings, and household articles; fast dyes of good colour; well-printed books on good paper; and jewelry and ornaments of all kinds that showed visual talent as well as manual skill. In a word, the movement reinstated the ideal of design and succeeded in forcing it on machine industry itself. Within two decades manufacturers began to hire artists as designers, and by 1910 the 20th-century omnipresence of design, from clothes to print and from gadgetry to packaging, was a fait accompli. The visual revolution can be seen easily by looking back with modern eyes to a page of advertising at the turn of the century.
New trends in technology and science
In parallel with the new craftsmanship, the new technology of the 1900s began to give hope of wider improvements. The use and transmission of electric power suggested the possibility of the clean factory, all glass and white tile. Better machines, new materials and alloys, a greatly expanded chemical industry—all supplied more exact, more functional, less hazardous objects of use and consumption, while the application of science to medicine nourished the hope of greatly reducing the physical ills of mankind. Those closest to all these developments were certainly not among the despairers and fugitives from the world. Like all those who struggle successfully with practical difficulties, they were inspirited by what they knew to be demonstrable progress along their chosen lines.
The same outlook animated workers in the natural and social sciences. It was for both a time of transformation, and genuine novelty exerted its usual invigorating effect. From the 1880s onward it had been clear that simple mechanistic explanations based on “dead” matter were inadequate. The Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 had given the coup de grace to the mere push-pull principle by showing that, though light consisted of waves, the waves were not in or of anything, such as the ether, which did not exist. Even earlier, James Clerk Maxwell’s attempt to work out the facts of electromagnetism on Newtonian principles had failed. And on the philosophic front, the notion of natural “laws” was being radically modified by thinkers such as Poincaré, Boutroux, Ernst Mach, Bergson, and William James. All this prepared the ground for the twin revolutions of relativity and quantum theory on which the 20th-century scientific regime is based.
The decline of the machine analogy had its counterpart in the biological sciences. With narrow Darwinian dogmas in abeyance, the genetics of Gregor Mendel were rediscovered, and a new science was born. The fixity of species was again regarded as important (Bateson), while the phenomenon of large mutations (de Vries) caught the public imagination, just as the slow, small changes had done 60 years earlier. The elusive “fitness of the environment” was being considered of as much importance in the march of evolution as the fitness of the creature. Vitalism once more reasserted its claims, as it seems bound to do in an eternal seesaw with mechanism.
The social sciences
Finally, in the social sciences, fresh starts were made on new premises. Anthropology dropped its concern with physique and race and turned to “culture” as the proper unit of scientific study. Similarly in sociology, Durkheim, seconded by Tönnies, Weber, Tarde, and Le Bon, concentrated on “the social fact” as an independent and measurable reality equivalent to a physical datum. Psychology, also long under the exclusive sway of physics and physiology, now established at the hands of William James that the irreducible element of its subject matter was the “stream of consciousness”—not a compound of atomized “ideas” or “impressions” or “mind-stuff” but a live force in which image and feeling, subconscious drive and purposive interest, were not separable except abstractly. A last domain of research was mythology, to the significance of which James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough gave massive witness, thereby exerting proportional influence on literature and criticism.
Reexamination of the universe
The net effect of these innovations in the sciences of man and of nature was liberating. Whatever each specialty or subspecialty meant to its practitioners, the persons who carry in their minds the general culture of an age took the new message to mean that the universe, formerly closed and complete like a machine, had been reopened and shown to be more alive than dead—and by the same token more mysterious, full of questions to be resolved by new research and new sciences. The term astrophysics, replacing astronomy, symbolized the change of perspective from Newton’s cosmology to Einstein’s. In turn, these conclusions furnished a new opportunity for the exercise of individual thought and will in the realm of mind and spirit, of ethics and religion. Man was no longer deemed an automaton, he had free choice in the all-important matters that lay outside physical science.
In philosophy, politics, and criticism this reexamination may be called the pragmatic revolution; in social and moral life, the liquidation of Victorianism. But the Pragmatic Revolution must not be thought of as being only the work of those who, like James, called themselves pragmatists. Nietzsche, Samuel Butler, Shaw, Bergson, and others constitute the headwaters of the stream of thought that issues in present-day existentialism. The common features are the turning away from absolutes and unities to pluralisms and the method of testing by consequences. Subjective and objective tests looking to future thought and action—not authority or antecedents—are to decide what is true, good, and beautiful.
Such an outlook, of which the refinements are, like the defects, beyond the scope of this article, is the logical and appropriate one for an age of reconstruction. It boils down to trying all things new and holding fast to that which is good; but it presupposes the creation of new things to try, and here it is allied to the liquidation of Victorianism. In morals the work of destruction generally begins by affirming the opposite of the accepted rule. An excellent source book for this attitude is Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, written in 1885 but not published until 1903. The Victorian Tennyson had said: “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Butler said: “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.” This inversion of values—don’t weep over loss; there are plenty of loves to be had and the more the merrier—is but an indication of method. At first the denial was uttered as humour and paradox: Butler’s Note-books, Shaw’s Arms and the Man (the soldier wants chocolate, not ammunition), Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Jarry’s Ubu roi, Strindberg’s tragicomedies—to cite but a few subverters of the Victorian—all used derision and topsy-turviness to make their point.
Underneath the joke was the new purpose, which soon found open expression in positive utterance and action. In the plays of Hauptmann and Brieux, the novels and anticipations of H.G. Wells, the essays of Tolstoy, Péguy, Georges Sorel, Ellen Key, Havelock Ellis, Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, or Shaw, the new modes of feeling and the new scale of virtues and vices are set forth with as much earnestness and vigour as the old Victorian kind.
Nor did action wait until all the books were out. From the onset of the overturn, say 1885 onward, the rebellion was a biographical fact. Individuals braved public opinion and got divorced, lived together unmarried, practiced and preached contraception, studied the psychology of sex, and defended homosexuality. Or again, the sons of the rich turned socialist, became labour leaders, and fomented syndicalist (i.e., direct-action) strikes, while the daughters demanded the vote as suffragists, assaulted policemen, and went to jail for chaining themselves to the door handles of government offices. Meanwhile, students rioted about international incidents or university affairs; schools were subjected to the devastation of the softer pedagogies; “rational clothing” exhibited itself in spite of derision, like the bicycle and the newfangled automobile; and new cults multiplied like mushrooms—outdoor sports, nudism, Theosophy, Esoteric Buddhism, Rosicrucianism, New Thought, the Society for Psychical Research, Christian Science, the Salvation Army, and the “Maximinism” of Stefan George.
woman suffrage: Buckingham Palace demonstration ,1914British suffragette under arrest after participating in an attack on Buckingham Palace, London, in 1914.BBC Hutton Picture Library
Of these, hardly any need explanation here. But a word must be added about Theosophy if only because of its historical importance in developing Yeats’s genius and for expressing once again the attraction that the “wisdom of the East” has for Westerners. Not that the doctrine elaborated by Madame Blavatsky rested on any exact knowledge of Hindu religion and philosophy. That is not its point. The point is rather that Theosophy supplied the need for quietude, mystery, transcendence, and immortality in the wearied souls of Europeans. In Theosophy the doctrine of reincarnation offers satisfaction of immortal longings and inspires to wisdom, the demands of which are periodically revealed by mahatmas, or holy men.
As for the poet Stefan George’s worship of his young friend Maximin, who died at age 15, it answers a similar impulse to permanent truth but with the additional urge to abolish (rather than escape) “contemporary materialism.” George was but one among many European writers who wanted to found a new society in place of the actual one. What has fitly been called the politics of cultural despair fastened on a great many saviours as the new hope—monarchy, “integral nationalism,” a new aristocracy (usually tinged with intellect), technocracy (rule by science and the engineers), the proletariat (in syndicalist “cells” or communist collectives), trade and professional guilds federated in a corporate state, or again the mystic unity of “blood” and “race.” In all these creeds, at least at their beginnings, the thirst for the ideal is evident; together they formed a new utopianism, of which the later fruits are familiar but quite other than those predicted: Soviet and Chinese communism, Italian fascism, German National Socialism. As the 20th century ends, the echoes and offshoots of this earlier wave of cultist thought are found in many places. Attitudes and practices derived from the East (Zen, Yoga, meditation) are taken for granted as permanent elements of Western pluralist culture, part of the broad offering of “life-styles.”
In one country, as the 19th century passed into the 20th, all the violent rival energies seeking an ideal found an unexpected outlet. The occasion for battle was the conviction of a French officer for espionage; i.e., the Dreyfus affair. Its cultural suggestiveness is apparent: on one side, the ideal of justice and the regard for the individual as an end in himself; on the other, the social or collective ideal typified by the army and the nation; throughout, the ideal of truth—the facts—pursued, lost, and found again in an embittered struggle that threw up a host of endemic prejudices—about race, about class, for and against intellect—to say nothing of individual egotisms and obsessions that had been charged with the force of pent-up aggression.
The prewar period
The same universal aggressiveness was to have its field day in the coming war of nations, but in the intervening decade (1905–14) occurred the remarkable outburst of a creativeness, which, for the first time since 1789, had its source elsewhere than in Romanticism. The “Cubist decade” (as it has been conveniently called) gave the models and the methods of a new art, just as the natural and social sciences had begun to do for themselves a little earlier. Cubism in painting defined itself as a new Classicism, but it was obviously not Neoclassical. In painting and sculpture, in music and poetry, and in architecture especially, the new qualities were simplicity, abstraction, and the importance of mass.
This truly modern art evidently meant to reconnect itself to contemporary life. To define it in one word, it was Constructivist. As such, it valued the products of technology, which embodied the artist’s rediscovered love of matter and from which he drew suggestions of form. In the style of interior furnishing known as Art Deco, geometric angularity, smooth surfaces, plain glass, and strong colours not only matched the unadorned outside of buildings in the new International Style but also resembled the creations of the industrial engineers. Indeed, it was not unusual to see on the mantelpiece of an Art Deco living room a set of gears or some other portion of a modern machine. The latest sculptures on western streets are but a further fragmentation of the new taste for solidity, clarity, volume, and mass.
To this many-sided, original, and buoyant productiveness the war of 1914 put an instantaneous stop. It was a war of a sort Europe had not known since 1815—the nation in arms. And at that earlier time, the absence of large industry had precluded the involvement, physical and mental, of every adult citizen simultaneously throughout Europe. In 1914 Beethoven and Goethe, Wordsworth and Delacroix would have been in the trenches.
The cessation of cultural activities; their replacement everywhere by a propaganda of hate; the rapid decimation of talent and genius in the murderous warfare of bombardment and infantry assault; the gradual demoralization through four years of less and less intelligible war aims; and after the Armistice, the long sequel of horrors—starvation, dispersion, disease, and massacre—together shattered the high civilization born of the Renaissance and based on the idea of the national state. Too many able men and women had been killed for the continuity of culture. Too many intimate faiths and civil traditions had been ground down for any recovery of self-confidence and public hope to be possible. Jacques Barzun
European society and culture since 1914
“If it works, it’s obsolete.” First reported in or about 1950, the saying neatly expressed that period’s sense of the headlong speed at which technology was changing. But equally rapid change is the hallmark of many aspects of life since 1914, and nowhere has it been more apparent than in Europe. Photographs from 1914 preserve a period appearance ever more archaic: statesmen in frock coats and top hats; early automobiles that fit their contemporary description as “horseless carriages”; biplane “flying machines” with open cockpits; long, voluminous bathing costumes. The young 20th century, its advent celebrated in such enterprises as The New Century Library—pocket editions of classics recently out of copyright—appears in such images more and more like a mere continuation of the century before.
The 19th century had itself seen the culmination of the Industrial Revolution that had begun in the 18th, but the transformation wrought by steam power, steel, machine-made textiles, and rail communications was only the beginning. Still more rapid and spectacular changes came with further advances in science and technology: electricity, telegraphy and telephony, radio and television, subatomic physics, oil and petrochemicals, plastics, jet engines, computers, telematics, and bioengineering.
The development of technology, in particular, would not have been possible without a more skilled and better educated work force. In most European countries during this period, education was extended both to more of the population and to a later age, and the numbers entering higher education greatly increased. Women began to gain access to more of the opportunities hitherto monopolized by men.
If this was a process of social leveling upward, the same process began to affect the social classes themselves. While European society remained more hierarchical than that in the United States, there began to be both greater social mobility and fewer blatant class differences as expressed in clothes, behaviour, and speech. A “mass society” began to share mass pleasures. Apparent homogeneity, both vertically within societies and horizontally between them, was accelerated by the cinema, radio, and television, each offering attractive role models to be imitated or, by older generations, deplored. Some referred to this process as “the Americanization of Europe.”
Alongside these changes, and in some instances spurring them, the period since 1914 in Europe has been marked by major economic and political upheavals. The most cataclysmic were the two world wars. The second of these resulted from the rise of dictatorship in Italy and Germany; but the period also saw dictatorships in Spain and Portugal, as well as in the U.S.S.R., where the 1917 revolution was followed by the totalitarian rule of Joseph Stalin.
The two wars, of 1914–18 and 1939–45, brought the old Europe of the balance of power to the brink of destruction. Europeans were thenceforth spectators at or minor actors in the global balance of terror between the United States and the U.S.S.R. This convinced a number of European statesmen that their peace, prosperity, and position in the world could be safeguarded only if Europeans united. For much of the period after 1945, Europe remained divided between East and West, and it was only in the West that unity began to be practicable. At length, however, political changes in central and eastern Europe gradually revived old hopes of “Paneuropa.”
This section describes—on a European rather than a national basis—the social, economic, intellectual, and cultural implications of these and other developments in Europe. For a complete discussion of the diplomatic events and military course of World Wars I and II, see World War I and World War II. For further treatment of the diplomatic history of 20th-century Europe, see international relations.
The Great War and its aftermath
The shock of World War I
The year 1914 witnessed not only the outbreak of World War I but also such very different events as the publication of James Joyce’s short stories Dubliners, André Gide’s novel Les Caves du Vatican, and D.H. Lawrence’s story The Prussian Officer. It was also the year of Pablo Picasso’s painting “The Small Table,” Igor Stravinsky’s Rossignol, Serge Diaghilev’s ballet version of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’or, and the founding of the Vorticist movement in Britain by the painter and writer Percy Wyndham Lewis.
All these, in their various ways, were characteristically “modern” phenomena. The new century had already produced some fairly self-conscious attempts to criticize or repudiate the past. In 1901 the novelist Thomas Mann had chronicled in Buddenbrooks the decline of a Lübeck business family as it became more “refined,” while in Sweden the playwright August Strindberg had savagely dissected in The Dance of Death a love-hate relationship on the eve of a silver wedding anniversary.
In 1903 Samuel Butler’s bitter semi-autobiographical The Way of All Flesh had been posthumously published. In 1904 Frank Wedekind had fiercely attacked social and sexual hypocrisy in his play Pandora’s Box. In 1905, Thomas Mann’s brother Heinrich had shown a tyrannical schoolmaster ruined by an affair with a nightclub singer in Professor Unrat (better known in its 1928 film version as The Blue Angel). In 1907 the respectable writer and critic Edmund Gosse had anonymously published Father and Son, an autobiography recording what he called “a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs.”
In that same year (1907), Picasso and Georges Braque had founded the Cubist movement, with its slogan, “Paint not what you see but what you know is there.” In 1909 La Nouvelle Revue française had been inaugurated as a forum for younger writers. In 1910 Wassily Kandinsky had produced a Postimpressionist painting defiantly entitled First Abstract Work; the Russian authorities had banned Rimsky-Korsakov’s two-year-old Le Coq d’or because of its satire on government; and Sir Norman Angell had published The Great Illusion—an attempt to demonstrate the futility of war, even for the supposed victors. The year 1913, finally, had seen the publication of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poems Alcoöls and the beginning of Marcel Proust’s great novel Remembrance of Things Past.
The 20th century had begun, then, with what might be termed cultural parricide—an attack on the paternalistic, stuffily religious, and sexually repressive features of the century before. Younger writers and artists such as Joyce, Lawrence, Gide, Picasso, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot formed what the novelist Ford Madox Ford called “a proud and haughty generation,” determined, in Pound’s words, to “make it new.” Yet, looking back in 1937, Wyndham Lewis wrote ruefully:
We are not only “the last men of an epoch” (as Mr Edmund Wilson and others have said): we are more than that, or we are that in a different way to what is most often asserted. We are the first men of a Future that has not materialised.
What had blocked that future was war—“The Great War,” as its stunned contemporaries called it. Not for nothing did the poet and novelist Robert Graves call his 1929 war reminiscences Good-bye to All That. He was bidding farewell to his prewar schooldays and to his first marriage; but what stuck in the minds of his readers was the cause of the leave-taking—the horror of life and death in the trenches of the Western Front. Graves was by no means the only writer to experience and report that visceral shock. In 1914, despite Angell’s warnings, the idea of war had still borne vestiges of glamour. Idealistic young poets such as Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell had gone to war, initially, with eager innocence. After the slaughter on the Somme and the stalemate of trench warfare, the key word became Disenchantment, the apt title of C.E. Montague’s account of the process. It pervaded the work of Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen in Britain, of Henri Barbusse (author of Under Fire) in France, and of Erich Maria Remarque (author of All Quiet on the Western Front) in Germany.
Through conscription, and, to a lesser extent, through air raids, the war had involved and affected far more of the population than any previous international conflict. By the time of the Armistice, in November 1918, there was widespread weariness in Europe and a sense of disillusion that gave the years before the war a retrospective autumn radiance, as if a dream had died.
Real deaths, indeed, had been numbered in millions. In the whole of the previous century, from the Napoleonic Wars to the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, Europe had lost fewer than 4.5 million men. Now, at least 8 million had died in four years, while more than twice as many had been wounded, some of them crippled for life. Millions more had succumbed to the worldwide influenza epidemic that had ended in 1918. The outcome, in all countries, was imbalance between the sexes—a shortage of men that at the time was sometimes called “the problem of surplus women.” During the war, women had had to be recruited into the civilian work force—in factories “for the duration,” in offices sometimes for good. The net result was to encourage women’s emancipation. In 1918, British women over the age of 30 were given the vote—although women’s suffrage was delayed until 1944 in France and 1945 in Italy. The year 1921, moreover, saw the opening of the first birth control clinic in Britain.
Wartime comradeship helped to reduce not only barriers between the sexes but also rigidities of class. Government control of the war economy—known in Germany as Kriegssozialismus, or war socialism—was also a general phenomenon that left a permanent mark, especially encouraging economic nationalism. Nowhere was this process more intense than in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, where it was known as “war communism.”
Nationalism had been a feature of Europe since at least the French Revolution. Napoleon had embodied its classic, democratic, or Gallic variety—the nation as a people bearing arms. Equally powerful, and more deeply rooted in history, was Romantic, cultural, or Germanic nationalism—the nation as an entity based on age-old racial and linguistic allegiance. Both forms of nationalism were encouraged by the war and its aftermath; and the latter was especially furthered by some of the provisions in the Treaty of Versailles.
The mood of Versailles
The peace conference that met in Paris from January 1919 to January 1920 and which produced, among other things, the Treaty of Versailles was both vengeful and idealistic.
Public opinion in France and Britain wished to impose harsh terms, especially on Germany. French military circles sought not only to recover Alsace and Lorraine and to occupy the Saar but also to detach the Rhineland from Germany. Members of the British Parliament lobbied to increase the reparations Germany was to pay, despite the objections of several farsighted economists, including John Maynard Keynes.
The Versailles treaty, signed on June 28, 1919, met most of these demands. It also stripped Germany of its colonies and imposed severe restrictions on the rebuilding of its army and fleet. In these ways, the peace settlement could be seen as punishing the defeated enemy, as well as reducing its status and strength. Not unnaturally, this caused resentment among the Germans and helped to stimulate the quest for revenge.
At the same time, however, Versailles was imbued with more constructive aims and hopes. In January 1918 the U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, set out his peace proposals in the “Fourteen Points.” The general principles were open covenants openly arrived at, freedom of navigation, equality of trading conditions, the reduction of armaments, and the adjustment of colonial claims. Wilson also proposed “a general association,” which became the League of Nations, but his more specific suggestions were concerned less with unity among nations than with national self-determination. His aim, in effect, was to secure justice, peace, and democracy by making the countries of Europe more perfect nation-states.
Among other measures, this involved readjusting Germany’s borders. Alsace-Lorraine was duly returned to France and Eupen-Malmédy to Belgium, while Germany also lost territory to the east. But the Versailles and associated settlements went further still in dealing with central Europe. They broke up the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they created or re-created sovereign states, and they sought to make frontiers coincide with the boundaries between ethnic, linguistic, and cultural groups. This consecration of nationalism proved a highly equivocal legacy; for example, in Northern Ireland or in the German-speaking Sudetenland of Bohemia.
In succession to the Habsburg empire, Austria and Hungary became small, separate, landlocked states. Poland was restored and acquired new territory; so did Greece, Italy, and Romania, which doubled its former size. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia came into existence as composite states. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania won independence from Russia.
Parallel to the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a further result of the war was the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Most of its eastern Mediterranean territory, together with Iraq, was placed under mandate to France and to Britain, which backed a ring of Arab sheikdoms around the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. Turkey was reduced to a mere 300,000 square miles. The peace terms initially agreed upon by the Treaty of Sèvres were rejected by the sultan until British troops occupied Istanbul, and even then the National Assembly in Ankara organized resistance. A war with Greece in 1921–22 ended in the Peace of Lausanne, giving Turkey better terms than those decided at Sèvres. Soon, however, the secular sultanate and the religious caliphate were abolished, and Kemal Atatürk became president of a new, secular republic, which, among other Westernizing measures, adopted the Latin alphabet in place of Arabic script.
The drawing of new frontiers could never definitively satisfy those who lived on either side of them, and the problem of minorities became an important factor in the instability that marked Europe after World War I. The new composite state of Czechoslovakia, for instance, included not only industrialized Bohemia, formerly Austrian, but also rustic Slovakia and Ruthenia, formerly Hungarian. Romania similarly comprised both Transylvania, formerly Hungarian, and Bessarabia, formerly Russian. Reconstituted Poland was equally an amalgam, and in 1921, after Józef Piłsudski’s campaign against the U.S.S.R., it moved its eastern frontier more than 100 miles beyond the so-called Curzon Line established in 1920. Yugoslavia, finally, was based mainly on Serbia; but it also included Westernized Croatia, formerly Austro-Hungarian, and part of Easternized Macedonia, formerly Turkish, as well as other territories. The rest of Macedonia was now Greek; but an exchange of minorities between Greece and Bulgaria put many Macedonians under Bulgarian rule, sparking off an armed rebellion. Similar turbulence agitated Albania. Altogether, the Balkans became a synonym for violent nationalistic unrest.
Two global developments, moreover, formed an ominous backdrop to Europe’s territorial disputes. One was the Russian Revolution of 1917, which inspired a few idealists but mainly aroused fear throughout the rest of Europe lest bolshevism spread westward. The other was the active intervention of the United States, which had entered the war—decisively—in 1917 and played a determinant role in shaping the peace.
The interwar years
Hopes in Geneva
Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a general association of nations took shape in the League of Nations, founded in 1920. Its basic constitution was the Covenant—Wilson’s word, chosen, as he said, “because I am an old Presbyterian.” The Covenant was embodied in the Versailles and other peace treaties. The League’s institutions, established in Geneva, consisted of an Assembly, in which each member country had a veto and an equal vote, and a smaller Council of four permanent members and four (later six, then nine) temporary members chosen by the Assembly.
Europe, 1920–38.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The basic principle of the League was collective security, whereby its signatories were pledged both to seek peaceful solutions to disputes and to assist each other against aggression. As such, it was novel and potentially far-reaching; it could have developed into a powerful instrument for peace. It did indeed settle a number of practical disputes—between Finland and Sweden, Albania and Yugoslavia, Poland and Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. It also set up subordinate bodies to deal with particular problems, among them the status of Danzig and the Saar, narcotics, refugees, and leprosy. It was complemented by a Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague and by the International Labor Organization.
Yet the League of Nations disappointed its founders’ hopes. From the start it lacked teeth, and most of its members were unwilling to see it develop. It thus became little more than a permanent version of the congresses (of Vienna, etc.) that had founded the old-style Concert of Europe.
Its first weakness was the veto: all its decisions had to be unanimous, or at least unopposed. Secondly, when in March 1920 the U.S. Congress failed to ratify the Versailles treaty by the necessary two-thirds majority, the United States was debarred from joining the League. Nor, at that time, were Germany and Russia among its members. Germany belonged from 1926 to 1933, and the U.S.S.R. from 1934 to 1939. Turkey joined in 1932, but Brazil withdrew in 1926, Japan in 1933, and Italy in 1937.
American suspicion of the League, reflecting general isolationism, centred on Article 10 of the Covenant. This called on member states
to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all the Members of the League. In case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled.
The means envisaged were known as sanctions—an economic boycott authorized under Article 16 of the Covenant and invoked in October 1935 against Italy for invading Abyssinia. However, as a conciliatory gesture, the League excluded oil, iron, and steel from the boycott, making the sanctions ineffective. Within less than a year they were lifted, and they were not applied at all when Germany sent troops into the Rhineland in 1936.
Nevertheless, the League did witness one effort to go beyond mere cooperation between governments. It proved abortive, but in retrospect it was highly significant. This was the proposal for European unity made by the French statesman Aristide Briand.
When taking office as foreign minister in 1925 he had declared his ambition to establish “a United States of Europe,” and on Sept. 9, 1929, he made a speech to the then 27 European members of the League in which he proposed a federal union. Seven months later, on May 1, 1930, he laid before them a closely and cogently argued “Memorandum from the French Government on the Organization of a Regime of European Federal Union.” The text was elegantly worded; its actual author was the secretary-general of the French Foreign Ministry, Alexis Léger—better known to readers of poetry under his pen name Saint-John Perse and later a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Briand’s proposal evoked “the very real feeling of collective responsibility in the face of the danger that threatens the peace of Europe,” and the need to counter Europe’s “territorial fragmentation” by a “bond of solidarity which would enable European nations at last to take account of Europe’s geographical unity.” To this end, Briand proposed a pact establishing a European Conference within the League of Nations, with a permanent political committee and a small secretariat, putting politics before economics in this European community, but nevertheless working toward a “common market” in which “the movement of goods, capital, and people” would be gradually liberalized and simplified. The practical details, Briand suggested, should be worked out by the governments concerned.
Briand’s Memorandum was careful to specify that agreement between the European nations must be reached on the basis of “absolute sovereignty and total political independence.”
Is it not the genius of each nation to be able to affirm itself still more consciously by co-operating in the collective effort within a federal union that fully respects the traditions and characteristics of each of its constituent peoples?
Despite these precautions, the other members of the League did little to implement the French initiative. Except for Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and (with some reservations) Czechoslovakia, Greece, and Norway, their general response was at best skeptical and at worst politely hostile. None save the Netherlands saw any need to limit or pool national sovereignty. Many—including Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom—expressed fears for the integrity of the League. Several saw no point in setting up new institutions. Some wanted to recruit other European nations such as the U.S.S.R. and Turkey, which were not then members of the League; others insisted on their own world responsibilities, as did the United Kingdom. A large number—understandably, after the Wall Street crash—thought that Europe’s really urgent tasks were economic, not political.
Briand defended his paper with vigour, but on Sept. 8, 1930, the European members of the League effectively buried it, with a few rhetorical flowers—“close collaboration,” “in full agreement with the League of Nations,” “respecting all the principles of the Pact”—by voting to put it on the agenda of the plenary Assembly. All that followed was a series of meetings, which ended withBriand’s death in 1932.
Earlier, Briand had worked closely with the German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann, with whom he had negotiated the Locarno Treaties of 1925, confirming, among other things, the new western frontiers of Germany. A fervent nationalist during the war, Stresemann had come to the conclusion that Germany must respect the Versailles treaty, however harsh its provisions, though initially he had hoped to revise it. As a champion of peace (for which he had won the Nobel Prize in 1926), he would surely have supported Briand’s federal union plan. But Stresemann died in 1929, and Chancellor Heinrich Brüning of the Catholic Centre Party proved no less negative than most of his colleagues elsewhere. By that time, too, Germany’s fragile postwar Weimar Republic was under growing threat of collapse.
The lottery in Weimar
Germany’s Weimar Republic was born of defeat, revolution, and civil war. It was plagued by political violence but distinguished by cosmopolitan culture that influenced both Europe and the wider world.
On Oct. 28, 1918, the sailors at the Kiel naval base mutinied, and on November 8 the Independent Socialist Kurt Eisner declared Bavaria a republic. On the following day the chancellor, Prince Maximilian von Baden, resigned in favour of the Social Democrat leader Friedrich Ebert and announced the abdication of the emperor William II. That same day, November 9, the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed all of Germany a republic. Two days later, on November 11, Germany concluded the armistice that ended World War I.
The new republic was soon under pressure from both left and right. Left-wing socialists and Marxist “Spartacists,” led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, fomented strikes and founded Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils like those in the U.S.S.R., but on Jan. 15, 1919, both revolutionaries were arrested and brutally killed. On the right, meanwhile, ex-officers and others formed the paramilitary Freikorps. In the event, it was from the right that the deadliest challenges came.
Elections to a constitutional convention, or assembly, were held on Jan. 19, 1919. They gave the Social Democrats 163 seats, the Catholic Centre Party 89, and the new and progressive Democratic Party 75; other parties won smaller numbers of seats. These three groups were like-minded enough to form a coalition and powerful enough—for the present—to dominate the new republic. Their rivals on the right were the old conservatives (now called the National People’s Party), with 42 seats, and the new People’s Party, with 21. On the left, the Independent Socialists had 22 seats.
The National Assembly met on Feb. 6, 1919, at Weimar on the Ilm River. The choice of venue was only partly a tribute to the city’s historic associations with Goethe, Schiller, and Herder; the main concern was to avoid the danger of violence in Berlin. Not until the spring of 1920 did the new republic’s Parliament (still called the Reichstag, or “Imperial Diet”) meet in the German capital. By then, the name Weimar Republic had stuck.
Its constitution, completed on July 31, 1919, was the most modern and democratic imaginable, based on universal suffrage, proportional representation, and referenda. But it was a flimsy cap over a political volcano.
The first sign of trouble, in March 1920, was an attempted monarchist coup d’état. It failed, but the elections that followed in June marked a defeat for the republicans. The centrist Democrats lost almost two-thirds of their strength and the Social Democrats almost half of theirs. The right-wing parties and the left-wing Independent Socialists, plus various splinter groups, made heavy gains. The Weimar coalition no longer had a majority. Within the Parliament, the extremists had triumphed. Outside it, violence was on the increase.
On Aug. 26, 1921, two ex-officers shot and killed Matthias Erzberger, a Catholic Centre Party deputy who had negotiated the peace terms. On June 24, 1922, three right-wing students shot dead Walther Rathenau, the newly appointed foreign minister, who was Jewish. On Nov. 8–9, 1923, an extremist group staged an abortive putsch in Munich. The conspirators included Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler.
Racked by economic problems, shaken by internal crises and shifting alliances, reviled by the far left and the far right, successive centrist governments struggled ahead for another 10 years. Although politically precarious, the Weimar Republic nonetheless witnessed and helped to foster an extraordinary explosion of creative talent, notably in the arts.
Wassily Kandinsky and Max Ernst in painting, Bruno Walter in music, Bertolt Brecht and Max Reinhardt in the theatre, Walter Gropius in architecture, Albert Einstein in physics, Erwin Panofsky in art history, Ernst Cassirer in philosophy, Paul Tillich in theology, Wolfgang Köhler in psychology, Fritz Lang in films—all these became household names, partly because every one of them took refuge abroad after Hitler came to power in 1933.
All, in their various ways, were part of the cosmopolitan “Modern movement” that pervaded the whole of Europe. Kandinsky was a typical example. Born in Russia, he learned a great deal from French Fauves such as André Derain and Henri Matisse, then settled in Munich, where he developed his own characteristic style. German Expressionist theatre and cinema, likewise, drew inspiration from abroad, in particular from Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. Germany was equally influenced by Austrians: Sigmund Freud in psychiatry, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler in the theatre, and Karl Kraus in the press. In architecture the clean, functional lines of Gropius’ Bauhaus school found imitators throughout Europe.
Like all such phenomena, the Modern movement was not wholly novel. Many of its practitioners and their artifacts had predated or coincided with World War I. Even Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurism, so dominant in 1920s Italy, was a relic of the prewar past.
But the mood after 1918 was no longer so euphoric as at the beginning of the century. Before the war, the French novelist André Gide and the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke had exchanged letters in leisurely French like two survivors from the 18th century. After it, following a six-year silence, Rilke wrote of “the crumbling of a world,” and both complained of the complications caused by passports and frontier formalities, looking back nostalgically to the carefree “journeys of long ago.”
The postwar world, as seen by writers and other artists, had the fragmentary, disillusioned quality of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922. It was self-conscious and introspective, as in Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author. It was more open to the unconscious, as in Dada and Surrealism. It was more aware of man’s dark fears and instincts, as in Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926). It was more responsive to the appeal of “the primitive,” whether in African sculpture or in jazz—the quintessential art of the 1920s, which also influenced mainstream music, notably in the Austrian composer Ernst Krenek’s 1927 opera Jonny spielt auf (“Johnny Strikes up the Band”).
No less pervasive, however, was the brittle hedonism typified by the gossip-column antics of the “Bright Young Things.” They were not wholly isolated. Already in 1918 Thomas Mann had published his Reflections by an Unpolitical Man; this was a mental label thankfully worn by many who, after the rigours of war, were eager to pursue private happiness, whether in metropolitan society or in placid suburbia. The Europe of Weimar also was the Europe of the detective story and the crossword puzzle. Both were analgesics at a time of political uncertainty and economic disquiet.
The impact of the slump
Economically, Europe emerged from World War I much weakened, partly by the purchases that had had to be made in the United States. Even in 1914 the United States had been the world’s leading economic power. By 1918 profits had enabled it to invest more than $9 billion abroad, compared with $2.5 billion before the war. The Allies, meanwhile, had used up much of the capital they had invested in the United States and had accumulated large public debts, many of them to the U.S. Treasury.
American financial dominance and European debt overshadowed economic relations in the first decade after the war. The debts included those owed by the Allies to each other, especially to Britain, as well as those owed, especially by Britain, to the United States. A third baneful factor was reparations, the financial penalties imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles.
Keynes described reparations as morally detestable, politically foolish, and economically nonsensical. Winston Churchill called them “a sad story of complicated idiocy.” Essentially, they meant demanding from Germany either goods—which would have dislocated industry in the recipient countries—or money. This the Germans could obtain only by contracting vast and almost unrepayable loans in the United States—to whom the European recipients of reparations promptly returned much of the cash in an effort to settle their own transatlantic debts.
In April 1921 the Allied Reparations Committee set Germany’s reparations bill at 132 billion gold marks, to be increased later if the Germans proved able to pay more. The first installment of one billion gold marks was due by the end of May.
Understandably resentful, the Germans wavered between two possible responses: refusal to pay, as urged by ultra-nationalists and some industrialists, and the so-called Erfüllungspolitik, or “policy of fulfillment,” advocated by Rathenau and Stresemann. They proposed to meet initial demands for reparations so as to reestablish trust and then negotiate for better terms. This was the policy adopted by the Weimar Republic.
Even so, Germany paid the first tranche only in August 1921, in response to a threat to occupy the Ruhr, and the money had to come from a bank loan raised in London. Thereafter, it paid in kind but not in cash, until at the beginning of 1923 it announced that payments must cease. The French and the Belgians, backed by Italy but opposed by the United States and Britain, thereupon occupied the whole of the Ruhr.
With the German government’s connivance, Ruhr industrialists and workers brought production to a virtual halt, and the Treasury printed a reckless flood of paper money. By 1924 the mark was almost worthless, enriching speculators and owners of real property but ruining rentier savers and others on fixed incomes. This removed an important stabilizer from German society, making it all the easier for extremism to triumph in the Nazi victory 10 years later.
For the moment, however, the Allies formed a committee of financial experts, chaired by the American Charles G. Dawes, to find a lasting solution to the reparations problem. It proposed, and the governments accepted, a two-year moratorium, the return of the Ruhr to Germany, a foreign loan of 800 million marks, and a new rate for reparation payments: 1–2.5 billion gold marks annually, which continued for five years. In 1929 a further committee, chaired by Owen D. Young, revised the Dawes Plan. Germany was to have a new loan of 1.2 billion marks and to spread reparations over the next 59 years. Although the German Parliament and people (by referendum) reluctantly agreed to the Young Plan, reparations finally ceased in 1932.
Germany’s was an extreme case, but it was not the only European country to suffer after World War I. The Allies also experienced inflation and were saddled with debts. While the United States was willing in the long run to write off the political debts of reparations, it would not do the same with the commercial debts contracted by Britain, Italy, and France: one by one, they had to sign agreements to pay.
Despite these obligations, Europe in the 1920s enjoyed a modicum of the economic growth that was so rapid and spectacular in the United States. In 1913, Britain’s income had been £2.021 billion. By 1921, it had fallen to £1.804 billion; but by 1929 it had risen again, this time to £2.319 billion. The corresponding figures for France (in 1938 francs) were 328 billion, 250 billion, and 453 billion. Even Germany, whose 1914 income had been 45.7 billion gold marks, had recovered enough by 1931 to be earning 57.5 billion.
Yet postwar prosperity was precarious. The American boom was a speculative affair. Fueled by optimism, production was soaring. To shift the accumulating goods, customers were urged to buy on credit or to borrow from the banks, which thereby earned large profits. The stock market was riding high. But at any sign of a credit squeeze or a loss of confidence, everything was likely to collapse. Demand would fall, goods would pile up, and prices would plummet. This was precisely what happened on “Black Tuesday,” Oct. 24, 1929, the day of the Wall Street crash.
Its first foreign victims were in Latin America, which was dependent on the American market for selling raw materials. Europe was not affected immediately; American loans and investments there dwindled only slowly. By 1931, however, the flow of capital had virtually ceased, and direct investment dried up in the following year. Worse still, to pay their own debts, Americans repatriated huge sums of money. Germany, Austria, and Britain were the hardest hit. Between the end of May and the middle of July in 1931, the German central bank, the Reichsbank, lost $2 billion in gold and foreign currency. To compound Europe’s problems, on June 17, 1930, the United States enacted the protective Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, increasing the average import duty level to about 50 percent.
The combined results were catastrophic. Highly respected banks failed, first among them the great Kreditanstalt of Vienna, which collapsed in May 1931. The Bank of England, at that time, was losing gold at the rate of £2.5 million a day. Everywhere, industrial production fell: by 40 percent in Germany, 14 percent in Britain, and 29 percent in France.
On June 20, 1931, U.S. President Herbert Hoover announced a year’s moratorium on all government debts. When it expired in June 1932, the secretary of state, Henry Stimson, proposed a year’s extension, but Hoover refused. The Europeans had meanwhile agreed to cancel their claims on German reparations but not to ratify this decision unless the United States wrote off their war debts. The Americans, seeing this as a European conspiracy, demanded continued payment. At this, all the European nations except Finland dug their heels in, exacerbating U.S. isolationism and making a global solution of the crisis still more unlikely.
In June 1933, nevertheless, a World Economic Conference met in London. Hoover’s successor as president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, made his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, the head of the U.S. delegation. Hull was a free-trader, but in July 1933 Roosevelt sent a message to the conference insisting that its main concern must be monetary exchanges, and in January 1934 the United States passed the Johnson Act, forbidding even private loans to countries that had not paid their war debts.
So there was no global solution: it was every man for himself. Some European countries—Germany in 1930–32, France until 1936—responded by deflation; they maintained the external value of their currencies but reduced their export prices by cutting wages and costs. The result was social unrest. In Germany, Chancellor Brüning’s 1930 decrees of the dissolution of the Reichstag and government by presidential order led to 107 Nazis and 77 communists being elected to Parliament that September. In France, Pierre Laval’s decrees led to the 1936 success of the left-wing Popular Front.
Other countries took to devaluation, leaving the gold standard to which Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland still clung from 1931 to 1935. Britain devalued in September 1931, the United States in April 1933, and France in September 1936. This had the effect of making exports cheaper, but since it made imports more expensive it worked only if they could be discouraged by high tariffs (as in the United States) or if the country in question had access to cheap raw materials (as in Britain’s system of imperial preference).
A third option was to impose exchange controls to cut the economy off from world markets. This was the solution adopted by Germany in 1932 and by most of central Europe and the Balkans. It had the effect of creating German hegemony, since those central European and Balkan countries that needed to sell to the large German market were unable to repatriate their earnings and had to buy German goods. In 1932 Germany saw exchange controls and their effects as a temporary expedient. For Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, however, they became part of a settled and sinister policy.
The trappings of dictatorship
Totalitarian dictatorship was a phenomenon first localized in 20th-century Europe. A number of developments made it possible. Since the 19th century the machine gun had greatly facilitated drastic crowd control. Public address systems, radio, and, later, television made it easy for an individual orator to move a multitude. Films offered new scope for propaganda. Psychology and pharmaceuticals lent themselves to brainwashing. Miniature cameras and electronic listening devices simplified surveillance. Heavy artillery, aircraft, and fast armoured vehicles provided the means for waging a Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war.” Bullies and brutality, of course, there had always been.
The European dictatorships were far from identical. They differed in their historical roots, their social contexts, their ideologies, and their trappings. But they bore a family resemblance. Political analysis may underplay it; to their victims, it was all too obvious.
Europe’s first practical dictatorship was established in Russia by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Its emblem, the hammer and sickle, represented physical labour in factory or field; there was no symbol for the scientist, the statesman, or the scholar. The aims of the revolution—liquidating the capitalist economic system, increasing public wealth, raising the material and cultural standard of working people—had wide appeal. But in its concern to industrialize and modernize a huge, backward union of republics with a long cultural legacy of tsarist domination that had been replaced by a centralizing socialist ideology, it relied on a one-party state, heavy censorship, the suppression of individual liberty, and the murder of awkward opponents. Theoretically, it foresaw “the withering away of the state.” For the time being, it embodied “the dictatorship of the proletariat”—or rather of a single leader, first Vladimir Ilich Lenin, then Joseph Stalin.
Two years after the Russian Revolution, in 1919, Benito Mussolini founded the fascist party in Italy. Its emblem, the fasces (a bundle of rods with an axe in the centre), was a symbol of state power adopted from ancient Rome. Explicitly anticommunist, it was as opposed to the withering away of the state as it was to individualistic liberalism. “For the Fascist,” wrote Mussolini, “everything is the State.” His own regime, partially established in 1924 and completed in 1928–29, had its bullyboys and castor-oil torture, its murders and aggressive wars. But, for sociological and cultural, as well as political, reasons, it was both less systematic and less brutal than some other European dictatorships. Italy had a long tradition of regional diversity that resisted uniformity, and Italian society was permeated—in complex, sometimes contradictory ways—by the ubiquitous influence of the Roman Catholic church.
Forms of fascism took root in other Latin countries. In Spain in 1923 General Miguel Primo de Rivera seized power with the approval of the king. He dissolved Parliament, imprisoned democratic leaders, suspended trial by jury, censored the press, and placed the country under martial law. He tried to establish a fully fascist regime based on “Country, Religion, and the Monarchy,” but he met resistance from students and workers and abandoned the attempt in 1925, although he remained prime minister until 1930. In 1931 a republic was proclaimed, headed by a provisional government of republicans and socialists.
Meanwhile, in neighbouring Portugal, António de Oliveira Salazar, a professor of economics, had been made finance minister after a military coup d’état in 1926; and, although he had resigned soon afterward, he had been recalled in 1928. After reorganizing the Portuguese budget, in 1932 he was offered the premiership. His conception of what he called the “Estado Novo,” or “New State,” was corporatist and fascist. Its authoritarian constitution, endorsed by plebiscite in 1933, allowed only one political party, the National Union (União Nacional).
In 1936 a general election in Spain gave a clear majority to the left. On May 10, Manuel Azaña, the Popular Front leader, was elected president, but two months later a group of army officers led by General Francisco Franco staged a fascist revolt. Supplied with arms, air power, and “volunteers” by Mussolini and Hitler, Franco’s forces won the ensuing Spanish Civil War—although it dragged on until 1939, when the U.S.S.R. finally cut off the aid it had given to the Republican government. The French and British governments pursued a policy of nonintervention, although an International Brigade of private volunteers fought alongside the Republicans. One significant feature of the Spanish Civil War was its use by Nazi pilots as a training ground for the dive-bombing tactics they later employed in World War II.
Nazi Germany, in fact, was Europe’s most elaborately developed dictatorship. Characteristically, Hitler took great care with the design of its emblem, a black swastika in a white circle on a red background; as iconography, it has long survived its regime. The swastika, originally the obverse of the Nazi version, was an Eastern mystic symbol brought into Europe in the 6th century—and Nazi ideology was no less mystical. It differed from fascism in at least two respects. It regarded the state as a means, rather than an end in itself; and the end it envisaged was the supremacy of what Hitler believed to be “the Aryan master race.” The final result—Hitler’s so-called Final Solution—was the systematic slaughter of at least six million Jews and millions of others whom the Nazis referred to as inferior peoples.
Born in Austria, Hitler had fought in World War I in the Bavarian infantry, twice winning the Iron Cross. In September 1919, six months after Mussolini founded the Italian fascist party, Hitler joined a German nationalist group that took the name of National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), nicknamed “Nazi,” a truncation of Nationalsozialistische. Its policies included anti-Semitism and fierce opposition to the Treaty of Versailles. After his abortive Munich coup in 1923, Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, of which he served nine months. While in prison, he wrote his autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf.
In 1930, with 107 seats, the Nazis became the second largest party in Parliament. On Jan. 30, 1933, after three ineffectual chancellors, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler to the post, believing that the vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, would counterbalance any Nazi excess.
Four weeks later the Reichstag building in Berlin was gutted by a fire probably started by a foolish young Dutch communist, but certainly exploited by the Nazis as evidence of an alleged communist plot. Hitler used the excuse to enact decrees that gave his party totalitarian powers. In the following June he eliminated most potential rivals, and when Hindenburg died on Aug. 2, 1934, Hitler was proclaimed Führer, or leader of the German Reich.
Hitler’s foreign policy triumphs followed: the reoccupation of the Rhineland and the alliance with Mussolini in 1936; the Anschluss (“union”) with Austria and the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938–39; and in 1939 the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Until Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September of that year, it sometimes seemed as if Europe’s democracies could only look on, prevaricate, and tremble.
The phony peace
The early months of World War II, marked by no major hostilities, came to be known as “the Phony War.” The 1930s, marked by war in Spain and the fear of war throughout Europe, might as aptly be called “the Phony Peace.”
Economically, that decade saw a gradual revival of prosperity in most of Europe. For the middle classes in some countries, indeed, it was a slightly hollow golden age. Many could still afford servants, often drawn from the ranks of unmarried girls from poor families with few skills to sell. “Ribbon development” of suburbs was providing new houses on the cleaner outskirts of cities, served by expanding urban transport systems. Every suburb had one or more palatial cinemas showing talking pictures, some of them even in colour. Gramophones and records were improving their quality, radio sets were growing more compact and versatile, and, toward the end of the decade, television began. Cheaper automobiles were appearing on the market, telephones and refrigerators were becoming general, and some homes began to boast washing machines. Air travel was still a rarity but was no longer unheard of. The cheap franc made France a playground for tourists from countries with harder currencies.
For those less privileged, daily life was far less benign. Deference was still deeply ingrained in European society. The humbler classes dressed differently, ate differently, and spoke differently; they even walked and stood differently. They certainly had different homes, often lacking a bathroom or an indoor lavatory. Unemployment was still widespread. In Britain, in the Tyneside town of Jarrow, starting point of the 1936 protest march to Westminster, almost 70 percent of the work force was out of a job. Those in work still faced long hours; dirty, noisy, and dangerous conditions; and monotonous, repetitive assembly-line tasks. Some of the workers were women, but, despite their “liberation” during World War I, many had returned to domesticity, which to some seemed drudgery. Young people had yet to acquire the affluence that later gave them such independence and self-assurance as an economic and cultural group.
Beneath the placid surface, moreover, there were undercurrents of unease. On the right, especially in France and Germany, there was still much fear of bolshevism. Some, for this reason, saw merits in Mussolini, while a few were attracted by Hitler. On the left, conversely, many admired the U.S.S.R.—although some, such as the French writer André Gide, changed their minds when they had seen it. But left, right, and centre in most of the democracies had one thing in common, though they differed radically about how to deal with it. What they shared was a growing fear of war. Having fought and won, with American help, “the war to end war,” were they now to face the same peril all over again?
This fear became acute toward the end of the decade, as Hitler’s ambitions grew more and more plain. But underlying it was a broader, deeper, and less specific disquiet, especially in continental Europe.
In 1918 the German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler published Der Untergang des Abendlandes, translated in 1926–28 as The Decline of the West. In 1920 the French geographer Albert Demangeon produced The Decline of Europe. In 1927 Julien Benda published his classic study The Great Betrayal, and in 1930 José Ortega y Gasset produced The Revolt of the Masses. All these works—and many others—evoked what the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga called, in the title of a book published in 1928, The Crisis of Civilisation. That same year, coincidentally, saw René Guenon’s The Crisis of the Modern World. Similar concerns were voiced in Britain almost a decade later, when the French-born Roman Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc published The Crisis of Our Civilization.
Many such writers were pessimistic. Paul Valéry, in Glimpses of the Modern World (1931), warned Europeans against abandoning intellectual discipline and embracing chauvinism, fanaticism, and war. Thomas Mann, in Warning Europe (1938), asked: “Has European humanism become incapable of resurrection?” “For the moment,” wrote Carl J. Burckhardt, “it…seems that the world will be destroyed before one of the great nations of Europe gives up its demand for supremacy.”
At Munich in September 1938 the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and his French counterpart Édouard Daladier bought time with “appeasement”—betraying Czechoslovakia and handing the Sudetenland to Hitler. Millions cheered the empty pledge they brought back with them: “Peace for our time.” Within 11 months Hitler had invaded Poland and World War II had begun.
The blast of World War II
World War II was the most destructive war in history. Estimates of those killed vary from 35 million to 60 million. The total for Europe alone was 15 million to 20 million—more than twice as many as in World War I. At least 6 million Jewish men, women, and children, and millions of others, died in Hitler’s extermination camps. Nor were the Germans themselves spared. By 1945, in a population of some 70 million, there were 7 million more German women than men.
One after another, most of the countries in continental Europe had been invaded and occupied: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Yugoslavia, and the U.S.S.R. and then, when the tide turned, Italy and Germany. Many countries had been fought over twice.
The resulting devastation had turned much of Europe into a moonscape: cities laid waste or consumed by firestorms, the countryside charred and blackened, roads pitted with shell holes or bomb craters, railways out of action, bridges destroyed or truncated, harbours filled with sunken, listing ships. “Berlin,” said General Lucius D. Clay, the deputy military governor in the U.S. zone of postwar Germany, “was like a city of the dead.”
Between 1939 and 1945, moreover, at least 60 million European civilians had been uprooted from their homes; 27 million had left their own countries or been driven out by force. Four and a half million had been deported by the Nazis for forced labour; many thousands more had been sent to Siberia by the Russians. When the war ended, 2.5 million Poles and Czechs were transferred to the U.S.S.R., and more than 12 million Germans fled or were expelled from eastern Europe. At one period in 1945, 40,000 refugees a week poured into northwestern Germany.
Death, destruction, and mass displacements—all had demonstrated how fragile and vulnerable Europe’s proud nations had become. In most earlier conflicts the state’s defenses had been its frontiers or its front line: its armies had been a carapace protecting the civilians within. Now, even more than in World War I, this was no longer so. Air raids, rockets, mass conscription, blitzkrieg invasion, commando raids, parachute drops, Resistance sabotage, and guerrilla warfare had put everyone, as the phrase went, “in the front line.” More accurately, national frontiers had shown how flimsy they were, and the “front line” metaphor had lost its force. Even the distinction between civilians and soldiers had become blurred. Civilians had fought in Resistance circuits—and been shot, sometimes as hostages, and when the Allies or the Axis practiced area bombing, civilians were the main victims. The most extreme instances were the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. They not only ignored the civilian-military distinction; they utterly transformed the nature of war.
Hitler’s death camps, likewise, made World War II unique. The appalling product of spurious science, evil fanaticism, blind bureaucratic obedience, sadistic perversion, and pedantic callousness, they left an unhealing wound. They reminded humanity of the depths to which human beings can sink and of the vital need to expunge racism of all kinds—including the reflex, understandable at the time, of regarding the Germans as solely capable of committing Nazi-type crimes.
The Nürnberg trials were a further unique feature of World War II (although war trials were written into the treaties following World War I). By arraigning and punishing major surviving Nazi leaders, they undoubtedly supplied a salutary form of catharsis, if nothing else. They proved beyond a doubt the wickedness of Hitler’s regime; at one point, when films of the death camps were shown, they actually sickened and shamed the defendants. In some eyes, however, the trials were tainted. Although scrupulously conducted, they smacked slightly of show trials, with the victorious Allies playing both prosecutor and judge. Given the purges of millions under Stalin, the participation of Soviet judges seemed especially hypocritical. The charges included not only war crimes, of which many of the accused were manifestly guilty, but also “waging aggressive war”—a novel addition to the statute book. Finally, a number of war criminals certainly slipped through the Nürnberg net. The overall intention, however, was surely honourable: to establish once and for all that international affairs were not immune from ethical considerations and that international law—unlike the League of Nations—was growing teeth.
In two further respects, World War II left a lasting mark on Europe. The first and most obvious was its division between East and West. Both U.S. and Soviet troops, from opposite directions, had helped to liberate Europe, and on April 25, 1945, they met on the Elbe River. They toasted each other and posed for the photographers; then the Soviets dug themselves into new defensive positions, still facing west.
It was not a confrontation, but it was symbolic. Stalin had long made clear that he sought to recover the three Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, as well as the part of Poland that the Poles had seized after Versailles. He also expected a free hand in exerting influence on the rest of eastern Europe. At a meeting in Moscow in October 1944, Churchill had largely conceded this principle, proposing 90 percent Soviet influence in Romania, 90 percent British influence in Greece, 75 percent Soviet influence in Bulgaria, and a 50–50 split in Yugoslavia and Hungary. Cynical as this might seem, it was a tacit recognition of strategic and military facts. Similar considerations determined the East-West zonal division of Germany, which endured in the form of two German republics until their reunification in October 1990.
The fact that the U.S.S.R. and the United States now faced each other in Europe along the so-called “Iron Curtain” denounced by Churchill in his Fulton, Mo., speech on March 5, 1946, dramatized Europe’s final legacy from World War II. This was a drastic reduction in wealth, status, and power.
In financial terms, World War II had cost more than the combined total of all European wars since the Middle Ages. Even Britain, which had been spared invasion, had been transformed from the world’s biggest creditor to the world’s biggest debtor, and much of continental Europe was obliged to continue living on credit and aid. Economically, all Europe’s once great powers were dwarfed by the world’s superpowers. Their status was diminished still further when their remaining colonies were freed.
Postwar Europe
Planning the peace
International planning for peace after World War II took place on a world scale. Within five years, in an extraordinary burst of energy and imagination, statesmen endowed the world with almost all its existing network of global institutions: the United Nations (UN), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Monetary Fund (the IMF), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the IBRD, or World Bank), the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), the International Court of Justice, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the International Refugee Organization (IRO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Some of these, especially the UN, were to reveal limitations. But they embodied serious efforts to replace outdated national and bilateral diplomacy with permanent multilateral institutions.
Europe, 1945–90.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Domestically, many people’s first instinct after World War II was to return to normal: to restore law and order after the euphoric anarchy of liberation; to repatriate prisoners and demobilize soldiers; to reopen the bombed Teatro alla Scala, Milan, and have Arturo Toscanini conduct there again; and to bring back long dresses with Christian Dior’s “New Look.” At the same time, however, there was deep eagerness for change. Even more than World War I, World War II had been a democratic war, fought against dictatorship as much as against aggression. Like many wars, it had brought forth military and other leaders from the rank and file. For many the aim was to inaugurate a new and more just society within nation-states that were pledged to work together for peace. “From Resistance to Revolution” was the masthead slogan of Combat, the left-wing French Resistance newspaper founded in 1941 but after the war edited as a Paris daily by the novelist Albert Camus. The words could well have been endorsed by others, especially the radical Action Party in Italy and many socialists there and elsewhere.
No less innovative, if less radical, were the Christian Democrat parties springing up or being revived: the Christian Democrats in Italy, the Christian Democratic Union in Germany, the Dutch People’s Movement in the Netherlands, the Popular Republican Movement in France. At that time, most such Roman Catholic parties had a more left-of-centre tone than was later the case.
Britain had no Christian Democrat party, and its Labour Party had less in common with continental socialist ideology than with nonconformism and the trade union movement. Yet the British people shared the general impatience for change, as they showed when they voted in large numbers for Labour in the 1945 general election, roundly defeating the Conservatives under Winston Churchill, who had led the country so memorably during the war.
In its election manifesto, the Labour Party proposed a program of nationalization of the Bank of England, of fuel and power, of iron and steel, and of inland waterways. It endorsed the Education Act already steered through by the moderate Conservative R.A. Butler. It proposed a national health service and a social security system, and it called for physical controls to allocate raw materials, limit food prices, provide new homes, and direct the location of industry.
Similar reforms were envisaged throughout western Europe. They embraced more equality, fairer shares, and better social conditions—full employment, higher wages, fairer taxes, more trade union rights, antitrust provisions, government-funded social security, and (where necessary) land reform. Such measures also implied far more central control of the economy.
“Planning” was now a common objective. In Italy it was the responsibility of the Institute of Industrial Reconstruction. In Britain the government maintained the machinery of statutory controls that it had used in wartime. In Germany the banks played a major role in forecasting, steering, and assisting investment. But in France it was the extraordinary Jean Monnet who made planning a concerted national effort rather than a set of directives from above.
Between the wars Monnet had been deputy secretary-general of the League of Nations, a private banker, and a negotiator for the French government. In the United States during World War II he had helped to spur Roosevelt’s Victory Program of aircraft for the Allies. Subsequently, in Algiers, he had helped to reconcile General Charles de Gaulle with his American-backed rival General Henri Giraud. It was to de Gaulle, who shortly became premier of France, that Monnet proposed a planning commissariat, attached only to the prime minister’s office and bringing together for the first time in France industrialists, labour unions, and senior civil servants to discuss production targets, supplies, bottlenecks, and urgent action in key sectors of the economy. Revolutionary at the time, the plan was highly successful and was soon imitated elsewhere.
National planning alone, however, could not solve Europe’s problems. Joint action was needed, as was help from the United States. In 1947, two years after the end of the war, many Europeans were still leading a Spartan existence. Everywhere, food continued to be rationed. Dimmed lights, brownouts, and power cuts were still common. A hard winter and waves of strikes added to the general misery. Underlying it was the stark fact that the countries of Europe were in serious financial trouble.
They had long been living on handouts. By October 1945 the United States had advanced some $46 billion in nonrepayable “lend-lease” loans. When the war ended, so did lend-lease—to be replaced by huge stopgap loans on ordinary terms. Britain received $3.75 billion, but only on condition that it make sterling freely convertible. As soon as it did, there was a run on the pound. The entire loan, it was reckoned, would have melted away in two and a half months if Britain had not suspended convertibility. As it was, a third of the credit was wiped out by price increases in the United States.
Britain, in fact, was overextended. In 1946 it had spent $60 million to help feed the German people, and it still had one and a half million troops trying to police the globe. Already, on Feb. 21, 1947, Britain had warned the United States that it would soon have to cancel economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey. It was this message that triggered a rescue operation for the whole of western Europe.
The United States to the rescue
Greece and Turkey, in the Cold War conditions of 1947, were strategically vital and highly vulnerable Western outposts on the southern flank of the U.S.S.R. and its satellite states. Turkey was especially exposed. In Greece, the mainly communist National Liberation Front (EAM) had failed in its violent bid for power, but guerrilla units were still fighting in the Pindus Mountains and the Peloponnese, and the Greek economy was near collapse.
The news that Britain was to pull out of the Balkans horrified Washington. Dean Acheson, the under secretary of state, called the British messages “shockers.” With George Marshall, the secretary of state, he lost no time in tackling the problem. After conferring with them, President Harry S. Truman called in the Congressional leaders—and managed to win to his cause the influential Republican senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, theretofore a notorious isolationist. With his support secured, Acheson felt able to quote to the British ambassador the motto of the Seabees: “We do the difficult at once; the impossible takes a little longer.”
On March 12, 1947, less than three weeks after Britain’s plea for help, Truman announced to Congress what came to be called the Truman Doctrine: U.S. support for free peoples against armed subjugation, primarily through economic and financial aid. By May 22 he had been empowered to sign the Greek-Turkish Aid Act.
Reports from Europe, however, showed that other countries were equally in need of American help. On June 5, 1947, Marshall gave a 10-minute commencement address at Harvard University and thereby launched the Marshall Plan. This and the Truman Doctrine, Truman remarked later, were “two halves of the same walnut.” Marshall told his audience,
Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help.
Without it, the economic, social, and political outcome could be “very grave.”
Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world at large and the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.
Marshall added three conditions. First, aid must be systematic, not piecemeal. Second, the countries of Europe must work out their needs and plans together. Third, public opinion must endorse the policy.
Hearing the news of Marshall’s speech and a commentary by a specially briefed British journalist, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin “grabbed the proposals,” as he said later, “with both hands.” With French foreign minister Georges Bidault, he invited their colleague from the U.S.S.R., Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov, to join in a collective response to the Marshall offer. Molotov refused, attacking the plan as a violation of sovereignty. Later the U.S.S.R. prevented Czechoslovakia from taking it up.
So it was that the Marshall Plan was confined to western Europe. On July 12, 1947, the representatives of 16 nations met in Paris: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Four days later they set up a temporary Committee of European Economic Co-operation under Sir Oliver Franks. By the third week in September it had produced a draft four-year recovery plan, which was subsequently much revised. Under powerful U.S. pressure, the Europeans reluctantly agreed to establish a permanent body in place of the temporary committee. It was finally inaugurated as the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) on April 16, 1948.
By then the U.S. Congress had approved the European Recovery Program, and Truman had appointed Paul Hoffman to administer it. Within two weeks of his appointment, the freighter John H. Quick sailed for Europe from Galveston, Texas, with 9,000 tons of wheat. It was the first of many, carrying every kind of commodity from spiced ham to tractors, from powdered eggs to machine tools. Within Europe, Marshall aid made possible some spectacular projects. They ranged from land reclamation in Italy and the Netherlands to a dam in Austria harnessing water power from melting glaciers. In all, the European Recovery Program brought Europe grants and credits totaling $13.15 billion—5 percent of the national income of the United States. At the same time, private relief parcels amounted to over $500 million—more than $3.00, on average, from every American man, woman, and child.
The United States’ timely generosity saved Europe from imminent economic ruin and laid firm foundations for later economic growth. By 1950 trade within western Europe had recovered to its prewar volume, two years ahead of expectations; and by 1951 European industrial output was 43 percent greater than before the war. U.S. insistence on a coordinated approach to recovery supplied the incentive and the institutions for permanent mutual consultations; in the process, the OEEC gradually reduced the quantitative and monetary barriers that had hamstrung intra-European trade. It failed, however, to remove tariffs. U.S. pressure for a European customs union eventually came to nothing; although willing to consult and cooperate, Europeans were not yet ready for economic integration, still less political union.
This made difficult a relationship of equals between European countries and the United States. But, short of that, the Marshall Plan did lead to much closer transatlantic ties. Under W. Averell Harriman, its Paris-based chief representative, U.S. experts worked throughout Europe. “They swooped down here,” said one German businessman, “like birds on a field.” By 1952 the U.S. embassy in Paris was responsible for 2,500 U.S. officials, plus 5,000 family members. Within a decade, 40,000 private American businessmen had settled in Europe, working for 3,000 American companies, whose European investments had quadrupled in that time.
War and peace had brought Europeans and Americans closer together than at any time since the mass migrations from the Old World to the New. Their mutual relations were complex and ambivalent: a blend of European gratitude, envy, and slight resentment combined with American impatience, fascination, and missionary zeal. As time went on, some Europeans complained of “Americanization”; what this often meant was merely that innovations had reached the United States first. But, for all their differences, Americans and western Europeans had one great common commitment—to a free and democratic way of life, which in eastern Europe had been progressively suppressed.
A climate of fear
By the time that Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had held their Yalta Conference in February 1945, Europe was already divided between East and West; Yalta, therefore, was not to blame for the division. On the contrary, it could in theory have reunited Europe, since all three powers had pledged themselves to help any liberated or former Axis satellite state form an interim government broadly representing all democratic elements, followed as soon as possible by free elections. The Western Allies kept their Yalta promise; Stalin did not.
One after another, Stalin subjected all but two of the eastern European countries to a similar takeover process. It was described frankly, in retrospect, in a textbook published between 1948 and 1950 by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia: How Parliament Can Play a Revolutionary Part in the Transition to Socialism and the Role of the Popular Masses. First, communist ministers were imposed upon the existing coalition government, if possible in key posts such as the Ministry of the Interior. Then, the party gradually established or infiltrated power centres outside parliament; for instance, by arming the proletariat, setting up action committees, or expanding the secret police. This would create “a pincer movement operating from above and below.” The end product was an antidemocratic coup; even if the bourgeoisie still retained some support in the country, a short period of “people’s democratic government” would soon achieve “the disintegration of the political army upon which the bourgeoisie could formerly count.”
The exceptions to this routine were Finland and Yugoslavia, each favoured by geography and supported by a powerful patriotic army. While both, in 1945, acquired left-wing, Marxist governments, both felt strong enough to resist domination by the U.S.S.R. This was not the case in Albania, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—all of which succumbed to the “pincer movement” or “salami tactics” of the Czechoslovak textbook.
In Albania there was not even a preliminary coalition. At the first postwar elections in December 1945, voters faced a single list of candidates without opposition. Not surprisingly, it won an 86 percent majority. Subsequent referenda, designed to sidestep the high rate of illiteracy, gave voters a ball to drop into a “Yes” or a “No” slot. Through the former, it fell silently into a sack; through the latter, it rattled into a can.
In Poland the postwar coalition included a minority of members returned from wartime exile in London, but a majority were their rivals, backed by the U.S.S.R., who held such key positions as the Ministry of Public Security and resorted to censorship, threats, and murder against the bourgeois parties and the press. The eventual election, held under a reign of terror in January 1947, gave a landslide victory to left-wing socialists and communists. Already in the previous September they had agreed with Stalin and Molotov on the composition of the future government.
In Bulgaria’s coalition government, formed in 1944, communists held the Ministries of Interior and Justice. Purges, intimidation, and the imprisonment of opposition leaders made the eventual election a mockery. When Georgi Dimitrov (who had been one of the defendants in the German Reichstag fire trial) became prime minister of a fresh coalition in 1946, his Cabinet included nine communist ministers, making the coalition a mere façade.
In Romania in 1945, the U.S.S.R. insisted that King Michael, who had set up a coalition government, should accept in it communist ministers of the interior and of justice. In the subsequent 1946 election campaign, the communists broke up rival meetings, persuaded printers to boycott opposition literature, and imprisoned or killed political opponents.
In Hungary the 1944 coalition included only two communist ministers, and in the 1945 election the moderate-liberal Smallholders’ Party led the poll. The communists threatened to quit the government, leaving it as a minority, unless they were given the Ministry of the Interior. They organized demonstrations and insisted on the dismissal of 22 Smallholders’ representatives. In December 1946 the communist ministers of defense and of the interior made widespread arrests. In August 1947, 35 percent of the electorate still voted for the opposition, closely linked with the Roman Catholic church. However, in 1949, after the arrest and imprisonment of József Cardinal Mindszenty, the government staged a single-list election and claimed 90 percent of the votes.
In Czechoslovakia the 1945 coalition provisional government had communists at the Ministries of the Interior, Education, Agriculture, and Information. In the 1946 election of a Constituent Assembly the communists and their Social Democratic allies held a slender majority, and for two years the country prospered. But, as the 1948 election approached, the communists prepared for a takeover. The minister of the interior dismissed eight noncommunist police commanders in Prague, replacing them with party men. In the ensuing protest in the Cabinet, the non-Marxist ministers resigned, but the Social Democrats unexpectedly remained and kept the government in place. When the ex-ministers tried to return, they were ejected. The communists, assured of backing by the U.S.S.R., staged strikes, armed workers’ rallies, and a violent putsch. Their most illustrious victim was Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister, son of the republic’s founder, who died on the night of March 9, 1948. Czechoslovak democracy died with him—and would not be resurrected for 40 years.
With communist ministers in the postwar governments of Belgium, France, and Italy, and with communists fomenting political strikes, some feared similar takeovers in the West. Germany, however, was the scene of the sharpest clash. For several years, by a leapfrog process of move and countermove, the eastern and western occupation zones of Germany had gradually been solidifying into separate entities. When in June 1948 the Western authorities issued a new western deutsche mark, the U.S.S.R. retaliated by imposing a land blockade on Berlin, which was jointly administered by the four occupation powers but was physically an enclave within the Soviet zone. The West responded with a massive 11-month airlift of food, goods, and raw materials. Meanwhile, 12 Western countries—Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United States—negotiated and signed on April 4, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty, agreeing “that an armed attack against one or more of them…shall be considered an attack against them all.” Almost immediately, the U.S.S.R. called off the Berlin blockade.
Within a few weeks, Germany was formally divided into two rival republics. The Cold War had reached a climax. Western Europe had drawn even closer to the United States.
Affluence and its underside
The West German currency reform that produced the western deutsche mark was a courageous act. It exchanged one deutsche mark for 10 obsolete reichsmarks; later the rate was slightly reduced. In one respect, the result was similar to that of Weimar’s hyperinflation; paper savings were suddenly devalued. This time, however, there was a limit to any losses. What was more, quite small quantities of the new currency would actually buy goods. When Ludwig Erhard, the economic director who had undertaken the reform, also dismantled price and other controls, the scene was set for the so-called Wirtschaftswunder, the German “economic miracle,” fueled by freedom and competition and the energy they released.
By 1950 West Germany’s gross national product had caught up with the 1936 figure. Between 1950 and 1955 the national income rose by 12 percent a year, while exports grew even faster. From a small deficit in 1950, gold and foreign currency reserves increased to nearly 13 billion deutsche marks by 1955, while unemployment fell from 2.5 million to 900,000. Per capita income nearly doubled. New homes were built at the rate of 500,000 a year. By 1955 West Germany had more than 100,000 television sets. Bombed cities had been rebuilt. Every other family seemed to possess a Volkswagen “beetle” car.
West Germany’s was not the only economic miracle. France, spurred by the bright young graduates of grandes écoles like the Polytechnique, was modernizing rapidly—electrifying railways, launching new power projects, discovering natural gas, building nuclear reactors, mechanizing coal mines, and designing the Caravelle jet airplane. In 1948 France’s total output had been only just above the 1936 level. By 1955 it was half again as high. Between 1955 and 1958 French productivity increased by 8 percent a year, faster than anywhere else in Europe.
Italy, however, was not to be left behind. With a comparatively low starting point, plentiful labour, and new discoveries of oil and, especially, natural gas, it was able to increase the gross national product by 32.9 percent between 1950 and 1954. In Italian industry between 1950 and 1958, the average annual growth rate was 9 percent. As in West Germany, the transformation was visible: better clothes; smarter shop fronts; higher meat consumption; bicycles replaced by motor scooters and later by small cars.
In Britain, although there was no economic miracle, there were industrial success stories in chemicals, quality cars, nuclear energy, and aviation. It was a British airline that in 1952 inaugurated the world’s first purely jet airline service. By the end of the decade, Heathrow in London was the busiest airport in the world.
By 1955 all western European countries were producing more than in the 1930s. Abroad, from 1952 onward, western Europe was earning more than it spent. Between 1950 and 1955, average productivity in Europe increased by 26 percent. Although British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was both misunderstood and mocked when he made the remark, he had some justification for telling an audience on July 20, 1957: “Most of our people have never had it so good.”
The benefits, for ordinary Europeans, took many forms. There was easier access to higher education and cheaper mass travel. There was more varied food; there was better health, preserved by better medicine. There were new synthetic materials, more plentiful housing, and wider automobile ownership. There were stereophonic recordings, colour television, high-fidelity audio equipment, and cheap paperback editions of serious books. There were new, more classless eating-houses, pedestrian precincts, supermarkets, and shopping malls. What its critics called “Americanization” had arrived.
But affluence had a downside, in Europe as elsewhere. It often harmed the environment: more cars meant more roads, and more yachts meant more marinas. It multiplied the production of waste, not all of it biodegradable. It sometimes seemed to glorify greed and snobbery, especially when it passed some people by. It troubled the young and the thoughtful: their material needs sated, they might be left asking, “So what?” With money more plentiful, it was easier to be spendthrift. With greater prosperity, drug abuse and alcoholism became more common; so, paradoxically, did hooliganism and casual crime. One of the by-products of the affluent society was self-doubt and self-questioning—the kind of critique of “consumer values” that was voiced by student rebels in and around 1968. It left many Europeans unsure of their deeper objectives and, still more, of their role in a bewildering world.
The reflux of empire
One major change in the world during the decades that followed World War II was the emergence of more than 50 new sovereign states. Essentially, this was the result of decolonization.
Before World War II the countries of western Europe had ruled, controlled, or powerfully influenced vast tracts of territory overseas. The main exceptions were Spain, which had long since lost its empire, and Germany, whose colonies had been confiscated after World War I. Otherwise, Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Portugal remained imperial powers, holding direct or indirect sway over most of Southeast Asia, parts of the West Indies, nearly all of Africa, and much of the Middle East.
Gradually, what had once been colonies, protectorates, or client states won their independence. Some 800 million people were now responsible for their own affairs. Few were richer or more secure. Many retained links with Europe—linguistic, cultural, economic or commercial; many depended on European investment and aid. But they were free of their colonial masters. Painfully, and sometimes violently, the old order had been superseded, and new relationships had to be built.
The Italian colonies in North and East Africa, like the Japanese empire in East Asia, were dismantled fairly quickly. Independence likewise came early to various Middle Eastern countries, although for many years European influence there continued. Egypt had become formally independent in 1922, Iraq in 1932, and Lebanon and Syria in 1941. Iran’s independence was guaranteed by Britain and the U.S.S.R. in 1942. The year 1946 saw Jordan’s independence, and 1948 the proclamation of Israel. Historical ties (including the memory of Hitler’s Holocaust), strategic pressures, and the need for Middle Eastern oil kept Europe deeply involved in the area long after most of its countries’ formal independence had become much more real. The Suez expedition of 1956 actually brought down a British government; oil price rises in the 1970s caused a European recession; and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 for a time seemed to threaten the risk of world war.
British and Dutch decolonization in East Asia began in 1947 with the independence of India and the creation of Pakistan. Burma and Ceylon followed in 1948, and the Dutch East Indies in 1949. Malaya’s independence was delayed until 1957 by a communist campaign of terror, quelled by both a sophisticated antiguerrilla campaign and a serious effort to win what the British General Sir Gerald Templer called “the hearts and minds of the Malayan people.”
French decolonization proved more troublesome. France had given the name “Indo-China” to a million square miles in Southeast Asia, an area nearly 10 times the size of the mother country, which it had colonized in the 19th century—a union of settlements and dependencies in Tonkin, Annam, Laos, Cambodia, and Cochinchina around Saigon. As early as 1925, the Vietnam Revolutionary Party had been founded to fight for the unity and independence of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina. In 1945 it proclaimed a democratic republic and fought the French for eight years. Following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Vietnam became independent and was partitioned between Hanoi and Saigon. When communist North Vietnam began threatening and attacking the South, the United States was drawn into 10 years of unsuccessful and divisive hostilities, at a heavy cost in human life and political credibility.
France faced similar problems in North Africa. Morocco and Tunisia obtained independence in 1956, but Algeria, legally part of the French republic, aroused far fiercer passions and led to another eight-year war, from 1954 to 1962. Whereas Dien Bien Phu had brought down a French government, the Algerian War caused the downfall of the French Fourth Republic and the accession to power of de Gaulle, who had been in retirement (his second) since 1951. French settlers in Algeria cheered him when he told them: “I have understood you.” Only later did they realize that his understanding embraced the need to grant Algeria independence and to crush attempted coups on the part of the settlers’ right wing.
In sub-Saharan Africa, what Harold Macmillan called “the wind of change” blew less stormily. There were violent incidents and atrocities, as in the former Belgian Congo; and there were tribal and civil wars. Some white settlers hotly resisted decolonization, as in Rhodesia and South Africa. But by the 1990s only South Africa maintained white supremacy, and even there the apartheid system was dismantled by 1994. Europeans were aghast at Africa’s recurrent famines and concerned at the persistence of apartheid. Yet no aspect of Africa’s development seemed likely to affect Europe as deeply as Indochina and Algeria had affected France.
One feature of the postcolonial period, however, was the reflux into Europe of emigrants from the former colonies. Some, civil servants and business people, had little difficulty in settling themselves. Others faced latent racism. In Britain the first such immigrant groups, from the West Indies, were broadly welcomed. But between 1950 and 1957 Britain’s immigrant population doubled, to 200,000; and the busy diligence of Indian and Pakistani shopkeepers, though welcomed by many, also aroused envy and hostility, as it had in Uganda, whence some of them had fled. In France, too, there was racial hostility, directed more often against North Africans than against black immigrants. Neither France nor Britain seemed to have studied the careful preparations that the Netherlands had made to meet similar problems with immigrants from East Asia.
In eastern Europe there was also pressure for independence from quasi-colonial rule. Signs of unrest had begun in Poland, where in June and July 1956 strikes and riots in Poznań had ended with the deaths of 53 workers. In October of that year in Hungary, there was a full-scale revolt, finally quelled on November 4 by Soviet tanks. A similar fate ended the “Prague Spring” of 1968 in Czechoslovakia. For a long time, it seemed as if eastern Europe would never be free.
Yet there too the winds of change were blowing. The accession to power of Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1985 marked a real turning point in the U.S.S.R.: glasnost (“openness”) replaced compulsive secrecy, and attempts at perestroika (“restructuring”) sought to replace with efficiency the dead hand of state control. Already in Poland the workers’ leader Lech Wałęsa had rallied supporters round the union banner of Solidarity; in Poland and elsewhere, as the 1980s ended, a new era began. Victims were rehabilitated; oppressive regimes were overthrown; dictators were executed; and free elections were held. For many, the most moving moment was on the night of Nov. 9–10, 1989, when the Berlin Wall was breached. Erected by the East German authorities in 1961 to prevent their citizens from fleeing to the West, the Wall was a concrete symbol of the division of Berlin, of Germany, and of Europe. Less than a year later, on Oct. 3, 1990, Germany and Berlin were both formally reunited. How long would it be before Europe was reunited too?
Ever closer union?
Discussed by philosophers for centuries, actively promoted from the 1920s onward by Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-European Movement, and officially proposed in 1929 by Aristide Briand on behalf of France, the idea of uniting Europe was revived again as World War II approached. In Britain a small private group that called itself Federal Union—in close touch with others at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House)—began to campaign for unity in Europe as a last frail hope of preventing war. Some of the papers produced by its distinguished supporters, including work by Lord Lothian and Lionel Robbins, found their way to another group of activists in the Italian Resistance, led by, among others, Altiero Spinelli. One of the most stubborn of Mussolini’s political prisoners, he was freed in 1943 from confinement on an island off the coast between Rome and Naples. Admiring what he called “the clean, precise thinking of the English federalists,” he echoed it in the declaration he drafted for a secret grouping of Resistance leaders from eight other countries, including Germany. Britain thus contributed to Continental developments that British governments shunned for many years.
Support for European unity came from the right as well as the left, from liberals as well as dirigistes, from clerics as well as anticlericals, from “Atlanticists” as well as those who saw Europe as a “Third Force” between East and West. It even received official support, overt as well as implicit.
In 1939 the British Labour Party leader Clement Attlee declared: “Europe must federate or perish.” In 1940, prompted by Jean Monnet, Churchill’s government, in agreement with General de Gaulle, proposed a political union between Britain and France. In 1943 Churchill called for a Council of Europe after the war, and de Gaulle’s colleague René Mayer suggested an economic federation. In 1944 the exiled governments of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg signed the Benelux Convention for a future customs union. Pope Pius XII, meanwhile, had envisaged a close union of European states.
Individual supporters of European unity included not only statesmen such as Paul-Henri Spaak from Belgium, Alcide De Gasperi from Italy, Robert Schuman from France, Johan Willem Beyen from the Netherlands, Konrad Adenauer from Germany, and Joseph Bech from Luxembourg but also such well-known writers as Albert Camus, Raymond Aron, George Orwell, Denis de Rougemont, and Ignazio Silone. All urged, and many helped to organize, what Winston Churchill called in 1946 “a kind of United States of Europe.”
In 1948 a number of activist organizations, coordinated by Joseph Retinger, former assistant to the late General Władysław Sikorski, head of the wartime Polish government-in-exile in London, staged a full-scale Congress of Europe in The Hague. Attended by 750 statesmen from throughout western Europe, including Spaak, De Gasperi, Churchill, Schuman, Adenauer, and a young French Resistance worker named François Mitterrand, it called for political and economic union, a European Assembly, and a European Court of Human Rights.
Some governments responded sympathetically. The postwar constitutions of France, West Germany, and Italy all envisaged limiting national sovereignty: the German text specifically looked forward to a united Europe. The British, however, were skeptical; and when in response to proposals by the French foreign minister Georges Bidault (who had attended The Hague Congress) the governments took action, it was of limited scope. In May 1949 they set up the Council of Europe, consisting of a Committee of Ministers and a Consultative Assembly.
To the activists, it was something; but it was not enough. The Council of Europe’s main achievement, apart from useful studies and discussions, was to produce the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights (1950), effectively backed by a court and a commission. But the Consultative Assembly was just that: it had no power, and the Committee of Ministers had a veto.
The initiative to go further came from Monnet. His opportunity came when France was at loggerheads with Britain and the United States, both of which sought to remove the postwar restraints preventing German heavy industry from making its full contribution to the prosperity of the West. Monnet proposed to sidestep the dilemma by pooling coal and steel production in western Europe, including West Germany’s, under common institutions to replace with a light and shared rein the heavy control that the International Ruhr Authority had imposed on West Germany alone.
This was the essence of what became the Schuman Plan in 1950 when Robert Schuman, by then the French foreign minister, accepted it after Georges Bidault,the prime minister, had neglected to take it up. Its end product, initially embracing only six nations, was the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community, which began work in 1952.
Monnet and Schuman saw this as only a first step on the way to a European federation. Monnet followed it by proposing to René Pleven a similar solution to the problem of German rearmament: a European Defense Community. When that eventually failed, he proposed to Spaak and Beyen what became by 1957–58 the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), a similar organization for the peaceful use of nuclear energy. The three institutions were ultimately merged to become the European Communities (EC) in 1967. With a Council of Ministers to make essential decisions (if need be by majority vote), a Commission to propose policy, and a European Parliament and Court of Justice to exert, respectively, legislative and judicial control, the EC had the embryo of a federal constitution, limited to economic and social affairs.
It also had the potential for crises, growth, and enlargement. Its first major crisis, indeed, concerned enlargement, when President de Gaulle vetoed the first British application to join, in 1963. The second crisis, two years later, was also provoked by de Gaulle, who objected to the extension of majority voting. Richard J. Mayne
Weathering both crises, the EC proceeded to broaden its scope and to expand beyond the organization’s original six members—France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands. First came Britain, Ireland, and Denmark (1973), followed by Greece (1981) and then Spain and Portugal (1986). The Single European Act, promulgated July 1, 1987, built upon ongoing efforts at further social and economic cohesion and established a timetable for the completion of a common market. The Maastricht Treaty (Treaty on European Union), signed on Feb. 7, 1992, created the European Union (EU), comprising three main components: a common foreign and security policy, an enhanced cooperation in domestic affairs, and the EC, renamed the European Community, which became the anchor of the EU with broader authority. Moreover, the treaty established EU citizenship, which allowed citizens, regardless of nationality, to vote and run for office in elections in the country of their residence both for local office and for the organization’s increasingly important legislative body, the European Parliament. Enthusiasm for the EU in the member countries was not universal (it took two referendums for Danish voters to approve their country’s involvement, and the referendum on membership was barely approved by the French electorate), but the treaty officially took effect on Nov. 1, 1993. ‘‘Convergence criteria’’ (relating to levels of government spending, inflation, public debt, and exchange-rate stability) were established for participation in a common European currency. Although some countries failed to qualify (Greece) or chose to remain outside the system (Britain, Denmark, and Sweden, the last having joined the EU in 1995 along with Austria and Finland), 11 countries on Jan. 1, 1999, relinquished control over their exchange rates and began a transition to the replacement of their national currencies with a single monetary unit, the euro.
Meanwhile, members of the EU began acting collectively in foreign policy, notably attempting to bring peace to the countries of the former federation of Yugoslavia, which splintered violently, beginning with the secession of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991 and that of Macedonia (later called North Macedonia) in 1992. Ethnic civil war was more protracted in Bosnia and Herzegovina (sparking UN intervention), and EU members helped halt the fighting there through participation in the brokering of the Dayton Accords. Acting under the aegis of NATO, a number of EU countries intervened militarily in the conflict in Kosovo (1998–99), between that region’s ethnic Albanian majority and Serb minority and the government of the rump Yugoslavian state (comprising Serbia and Montenegro), and again in Afghanistan, where the Taliban regime had provided a home for the radical Islamists responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001. Terrorist bombings by Islamist radicals also struck Europe, in Madrid in March 2004 and in London in July 2005.
In 2004 the EU admitted 10 more countries: the Czech Republic and Slovakia (independent states formed by the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1992), as well as Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, and Slovenia. Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007. Other than Cyprus and Malta, the 21st-century additions were all former members of the communist bloc. To the consternation of Russia, many of them also joined NATO. In 2008 Russia showed its support for Serbia (a solitary country after the split in 2006 of Serbia and Montenegro, the renamed loose successor state to Yugoslavia), when Kosovo declared its independence despite Serbian opposition. Russia’s relations with the EU and NATO, particularly those organizations’ former communist members, were sometimes tense, as when Russia objected strenuously to U.S. plans to deploy a missile-defense radar system in the Czech Republic and Poland.
Efforts begun in 2002 to draft a constitution for the enlarged EU led to the signing of a document in 2004 that failed to be ratified by French and Dutch voters in 2005. A reform version of the failed constitution, stewarded by Germany, resulted in the Lisbon Treaty of December 2007; however, it too was scuttled, at least temporarily, when Irish voters rejected it in 2008. In October 2009 Ireland approved the treaty in a second referendum, and Poland completed its ratification process as well. That November the Czech Republic became the final country to ratify the treaty, which entered into force on Dec. 1, 2009.
The EC was founded in response to a checkered half-century of European history, when some of the world’s most civilized countries had plumbed depths of savagery, folly, tyranny, and genocide that in a work of science fiction would be hard to believe. The EC’s most obvious purpose had been to reconcile former enemies and prevent war. Its second aim was to avoid the economic errors Europeans had made in the 1930s, when, instead of collaborating on a global recovery policy in response to the Great Depression, they worsened the crisis through economic nationalism that was the breeding ground for dictatorship. Moreover, Europe’s individual countries, once great powers, were dwarfed numerically, politically, and militarily by the United States and the Soviet Union (until its dissolution in 1991–92) and economically by the United States and Japan. By the early 21st century the gigantic countries of India and China had also become economic rivals for the European Union and for a Europe that increasingly saw greater cohesiveness as the path not only to holding its own vis-à-vis political and economic superpowers but also to maximizing its power to meet its wider responsibilities in the world. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Citation Information
Article Title: History of Europe
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 19 July 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Europe
Access Date: August 16, 2019
Additional Reading
Prehistory
A comprehensive introduction to European prehistory is offered in Timothy Champion et al., Prehistoric Europe (1984). Specific periods are covered in Clive Gamble, The Palaeolithic Settlement of Europe (1986); Clive Bonsall (ed.), The Mesolithic in Europe (1989); and Alasdair Whittle, Neolithic Europe: A Survey (1985). Among studies of economy and subsistence, Robin Dennell, European Economic Prehistory: A New Approach (1983), deals particularly with hunter-gatherers; Marek Zvelebil (ed.), Hunters in Transition: Mesolithic Societies of Temperate Eurasia and Their Transition to Farming (1986), includes regional studies of postglacial hunter-gatherers and the beginnings of agriculture; and Graeme Barker, Prehistoric Farming in Europe (1985), is a detailed study of early agriculture. John M. Coles and Andrew J. Lawson (eds.), European Wetlands in Prehistory (1987), contains information on the unusually well-preserved archaeological finds in various European countries. N.K. Sandars, Prehistoric Art in Europe, 2nd ed. (1985), is a well-illustrated introductory survey; other useful studies of prehistoric art are Peter J. Ucko and Andrée Rosenfeld, Palaeolithic Cave Art (1967); and André Leroi-Gourhan, The Dawn of European Art: An Introduction to Palaeolithic Cave Painting (1982; originally published in Italian, 1981). For the Indo-European question, the best account of the theory of invasions is J.P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth (1989). Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (1987), considers the issues and argues for the spread of the language with early agriculture. Timothy C. Champion
The Metal Ages
General surveys include Patricia Phillips, The Prehistory of Europe (1980); Herbert Schutz, The Prehistory of Germanic Europe (1983); and A.F. Harding (ed.), Climatic Change in Later Prehistory (1982). Jacques Briard, The Bronze Age in Barbarian Europe: From the Megaliths to the Celts (1979; originally published in French, 1976), describes the main discoveries; J.M. Coles and A.F. Harding, The Bronze Age in Europe: An Introduction to the Prehistory of Europe, c. 2000–700 BC (1979), offers a comprehensive account for different parts of Europe and an extensive bibliography; and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and Roger Thomas (eds.), The Bronze Age–Iron Age Transition in Europe: Aspects of Continuity and Change in European Societies, c. 1200 to 500 B.C., 2 vol. (1989), is a collection of scholarly articles.
John Collis, The European Iron Age (1984), focuses on the links between the Mediterranean and the Iron Age culture of central Europe, and his Oppida: Earliest Towns North of the Alps (1984), discusses early urban settlements. Barry Cunliffe, Greeks, Romans, and Barbarians: Spheres of Interaction (1988), explores the influence of Classical civilization and commerce on the cultures of central and western Europe. Harold Haefner (ed.), Frühes Eisen in Europa (1981), is a collection of papers on the origin of iron technology in Europe. A.M. Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece: An Archaeological Survey of the Eleventh to the Eighth Centuries BC (1971), examines the changes characterizing early Iron Age Greece.
Social, economic, and cultural developments are studied in Richard Bradley, The Social Foundations of Prehistoric Britain: Themes and Variations in the Archaeology of Power (1984); Robert Chapman, Emerging Complexity: The Later Prehistory of South-East Spain, Iberia, and the West Mediterranean (1990), an analysis of the cultural sequence focusing on social complexity; Peter S. Wells, Farms, Villages, and Cities: Commerce and Urban Origins in Late Prehistoric Europe (1984), a survey of the settlement structure of the Iron Age; J.V.S. Megaw, Art of the European Iron Age: A Study of the Elusive Image (1970), an illustrated interpretive survey of motifs and imagery; and Peter S. Wells, Culture Contact and Culture Change: Early Iron Age Central Europe and the Mediterranean World (1980), analyzing the cultural relationship between central Europe and the Mediterranean. Marie-Louise Stig Sørensen
Greeks, Romans, and barbarians
Appropriate volumes of the multivolume series Cambridge Ancient History (1923– ) survey the development and interaction of the civilizations. Emily Vermeule, Greece in the Bronze Age (1964, reprinted 1972), is a standard work on Aegean civilization. Other detailed treatments include Chester G. Starr, The Origins of Greek Civilization, 1100–650 B.C. (1961); N.G.L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322 B.C., 3rd ed. (1986); J.B. Bury and Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, 4th ed. (1975); and Oswyn Murray, Early Greece (1980). John Boardman, The Greek Overseas: Their Early Colonies and Trade, new ed. (1980), provides an overview of commercial expansion; and Erich S. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, 2 vol. (1984), is a history of the Roman conquest of the Hellenistic states.
H.H. Scullard, A History of the Roman World: 753–146 BC, 4th ed. (1980), is a standard comprehensive survey. Other relevant histories are Jacques Heurgon, The Rise of Rome to 264 B.C. (1973; originally published in French, 1969); Kurt A. Raaflaub (ed.), Social Struggles in Archaic Rome: New Perspectives on the Conflict of the Orders (1986), focusing on the social life, customs, and class structure of republican Rome; William V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 B.C. (1979, reprinted 1985), on Roman expansion; Joseph Vogt, The Decline of Rome: The Metamorphosis of Ancient Civilization (1967; originally published in German, 1965); and A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social Economic and Administrative Survey, 2 vol. (1964, reprinted 1986). Michael Grant and Rachel Kitzinger (eds.), Civilization of the Ancient Mediterranean: Greece and Rome, 3 vol. (1988), is a comprehensive collection of essays on cultural, economic, and social life in the Classical world.
Brief illustrated surveys of 600 years of post-Classical history are presented in Gerald Simons, Barbarian Europe (1968); and Philip Dixon, Barbarian Europe (1976). Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (1973), offers a scholarly examination of the development of early Europe. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Middle Ages
Useful reference works are The New Cambridge Medieval History, 7 vol. (1995–2005); Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 13 vol. (1982–89); and Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, 2 vol. (2000). A good outline of events in the Middle Ages is R.L. Storey, Chronology of the Medieval World, 800–1491 (1973). Biographies of some important historians can be found in Helen Damico and Joseph Zavadil (eds.), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies in the Formation of a Discipline, 3 vol. (1995–99). Two important volumes that represent scholarly perspectives of the late 20th and early 21st century are Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson, The Medieval World (2001); and Lester K. Little and Barbara Rosenwein (eds.), Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings (1998).
Terminology and periodization are discussed in Fred C. Robinson, “Medieval, the Middle Ages,” Speculum, 59(4):745–756 (October 1984); William A. Green, “Periodization in European and World History,” Journal of World History, 3(1):13–53 (Spring 1992); Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (1970); Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (1968); Jacques Le Goff, “The Several Middle Ages of Jules Michelet,” in his Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (1980), pp. 3–28; Jacques Heers, Le Moyen Âge, une imposture (1992); Timothy Reuter, “Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?,” The Medieval History Journal, 1(1):25–45 (1998), and other articles in the same number. Stuart Airlie, “Strange Eventful Histories: The Middle Ages in the Cinema,” chapter 10 in Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson, The Medieval World (2001), pp. 163–183, provides an introduction to depictions of the Middle Ages in film.
A discussion of late antiquity is G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar (eds.), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (1999). Discussions of the “long Middle Ages” include Dietrich Gerhard, Old Europe: A Study of Continuity, 1000–1800 (1981); Jacques Le Goff, “For an Extended Middle Ages,” in his The Medieval Imagination (1988; originally published in French), pp. 18–23; Howard Kaminsky, “From Lateness to Waning to Crisis: The Burden of the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Early Modern History, 4(1):85–125 (November 2000); Elizabeth R. Brown, “On 1500,” chapter 29 in Linehan and Nelson’s The Medieval World (above), pp. 691–710.
Surveys (cited here in reverse chronological sequence) include Eamon Duffy, Saints & Sinners: A History of the Popes, 3rd ed. (2006); Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity AD 200–1000, 2nd ed. (2003); Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Early Middle Ages: Europe, 400–1000 (2001); R.I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (2000); David Nicholas, The Transformation of Europe 1300–1600 (1999); Marcia L. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400 (1998, reprinted 2002); R.N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–c. 1515 (1995); Thomas A. Brady, Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (eds.), Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, 2 vol. (1994–95); Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (1993); Joseph H. Lynch, The Medieval Church (1992); Patrick J. Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (1988); J.H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350–c. 1450 (1988; reissued 1997); Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150–1650 (1982); Francis Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (1979, reissued 1987); and R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (1953, reissued 1998).
The classic work describing the older idea of decay is that of Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1996). A useful counterpoint is Kaminsky’s “From Lateness to Waning to Crisis” (above). Edward Peters
The Renaissance
Historiographical problems
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1890; originally published in German, 1860), is a classic work, elegant and stimulating, available in many later editions, but its thesis, that 14th-century Italians broke sharply with their medieval past to create modern states and a highly individualistic secular society and culture, has been heavily modified by most modern specialists. Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (1948, reprinted 1981), offers an excellent introduction, but recent scholarship has expanded the range and depth of knowledge and dissolved such interpretive consensus as still existed when Ferguson wrote. E.F. Jacob (ed.), Italian Renaissance Studies (1960); Tinsley Helton (ed.), The Renaissance: A Reconsideration of the Theories and Interpretations of the Age (1961, reprinted 1980); and Denys Hay, The Italian Renaissance in Its Historical Background, 2nd ed. (1977), characterize the interpretations of the 1960s. At present most Renaissance historians do not make the sweeping characterizations of the “spirit of an age” that once came so easily. An excellent historiographical and bibliographical guide to works about Europe outside Italy is Steven Ozment (ed.), Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research (1982), not really limited to the Reformation.
The Italian Renaissance
Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (1979, reissued 1988), provides an informative survey. Florentine history is authoritatively surveyed in Gene Brucker, Renaissance Florence (1969, reissued 1983). Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes (1973), ventures beyond the fall of the Florentine republic. Venetian history is ably treated in D.S. Chambers, The Imperial Age of Venice, 1380–1580 (1970); William H. McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 1081-1797 (1974, reprinted 1986); and Robert Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice (1980). Social and cultural conditions and religious life are approached in Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State, to 1620 (1971); Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (1980); David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (1985; originally published in French, 1978); Ronald F.E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (1982); Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (1981); and Donald E. Queller, The Venetian Patriciate: Reality Versus Myth (1986). Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in her Women, History & Theory (1984), challenged Burckhardt’s thesis that women achieved equality with men in Renaissance Italy. Other good studies on women in the Renaissance include Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (1980); Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. from French (1985); and Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (eds.), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (1986). Samuel Kline Cohn, Jr., The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence (1980), is a controversial groundbreaking study.
A good starting point for the study of Renaissance intellectual history is Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanistic Strains, rev. ed. (1961), and Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts (1965, reissued 1980). Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. from Italian (1965, reprinted 1975); and Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, rev. ed. (1966), treat humanism as a civic ethos as well as a scholarly and educational movement; while Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vol. (1970), disproves the notion of humanism as primarily secular. Ernest H. Wilkins, Life of Petrarch (1961), provides information on the acknowledged founder of Renaissance humanism. Ronald G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (1983), is an excellent study of a figure second only to Petrarch in importance. George Holmes, Florence, Rome, and the Origins of the Renaissance (1986), revives an old thesis attributing the origins of the Renaissance to the age of Dante. Studies of humanist culture outside Florence include J.K. Hyde, Padua in the Age of Dante (1966); John F. D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation (1983); Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (1985); Jerry H. Bentley, Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples (1987); and Margaret L. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (1986). A lively revisionist view that challenges basic assumptions about the history of Renaissance humanism is presented in Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (1986). Albert Rabil, Jr. (ed.), Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, 3 vol. (1988); Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City States in Renaissance Italy (1988); and Donald Kelley, Renaissance Humanism (1991), discuss the current state of studies on humanism.
The classic account of the development of diplomacy is Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (1955, reprinted 1988); the subject is also discussed in Joycelyne G. Russell, Peacemaking in the Renaissance (1986). Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and Their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (1974), is a study of war in the Renaissance. Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (1965, reprinted 1984), provides the political and cultural context of the thought of two leading Renaissance political scholars. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975), traces the Renaissance heritage to modern times. Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (1989), is a fresh, lively intellectual biography of the great Florentine.
Science and technology
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vol. (1979), and The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983), make a strong case for the revolutionary impact of Renaissance print technology upon culture. The concept of a “scientific revolution” is upheld in such standard works as Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science: 1300–1800, rev. ed. (1957, reprinted 1982); I. Bernard Cohen, From Leonardo to Lavoisier, 1450–1800 (1980); and A. Rupert Hall, The Revolution in Science, 1500–1750, 3rd ed. (1983); while the continuities with medieval science are stressed in A.C. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science, 2nd rev. ed. (1959, reissued 1967). Feminist theorists have made some influential contributions to revisionist perspectives deploring the “triumphalism” with which scientific advance has been treated: for example, Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (1985); Margaret Jacobs and James Jacobs, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (1988); and Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex: Women in the Origins of Modern Science (1989).
The Renaissance outside Italy
New areas of investigation in social history, including the history of the lower classes, women, the family, and popular religion, are exemplified in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (1974; originally published in French, 1966); Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: Further Explored, 3rd. ed. (1984); Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975, reissued 1987); Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978, reprinted 1988); Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500 (1976); Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (1983); Joseph Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts (1985); and Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (1987).
In religious history there has been a tendency to reconstruct the bridges between the late medieval and Reformation piety and thought. Among the most influential examples of this effort are Heiko Augustinus Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (1963, reissued 1983); and Heiko Augustinus Oberman (ed.), Forerunners of the Reformation: The Shape of Late Medieval Thought (1966, reissued 1981). Other important studies include Steven E. Ozment (ed.), The Reformation in Medieval Perspective (1971); and Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (1977). Another, not necessarily contradictory, tendency has been that of seeing the history of late medieval and Renaissance religion on its own terms, rather than as the prelude to the Reformation; this approach is taken by Charles Trinkaus and Heiko Augustinus Oberman (eds.), The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion (1974); and Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (1984). An original and valuable, if sometimes debatable, overview is John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (1985). Donald Weinstein
The emergence of modern Europe
The economic backgound is discussed in a variety of studies. Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700, 2nd ed. (1980; originally published in Italian, 1974), offers a treatment of the economy focusing not so much on history as on social structures. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vol. (1974–89), covers the period from the 16th to the mid-19th century, emphasizing spatial division of the early capitalistic world among core areas, semiperipheries, and peripheries. Another broad, rich, and learned reconstruction of the world of early capitalism is offered in Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, 3 vol. (1982–84; originally published in French, 1979).
Comprehensive works include Rondo Cameron, A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present (1989); Harry A. Miskimin, The Economy of Later Renaissance Europe, 1460–1600 (1977), stressing concepts of law as a critical factor in economic development; E.E. Rich and C.H. Wilson (eds.), The Economy of Expanding Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1967); Jan De Vries, Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–1750 (1976), exploring the 17th-century unraveling of the 16th-century world, and European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (1984), a broader survey; Witold Kula, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System: Towards a Model of the Polish Economy, 1500–1800, new ed. (1976, reissued 1987; originally published in Polish, 1962), an analysis of a particular 16th-century economy; and Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (1989; originally published in Italian, 1980), an exploration of malnutrition with an impressive picture of some unpalatable food and the symbolism of its consumption.
Important demographic studies are Josiah Cox Russell, The Control of Late Ancient and Medieval Population (1985), a historical study of European communities; and E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (1981), utilizing new techniques of reconstruction and backward projection of census data.
Studies of protoindustrialization include Peter Kriedte et al., Industrialization Before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism (1981; originally published in German, 1977), in a German context; John U. Nef, Industry and Government in France and England, 1540–1640 (1940, reprinted 1968), still informative and focusing on the interaction of power; and Paul Sweezy et al., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (1976), a collection of Marxist debates as to what capitalism really was and when it began.
Matters concerning finance are studied in Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (1934, reprinted 1977), a classic that launched a continuing debate. Political and cultural influences are the subject of Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974), a Marxist view of the role of the state in the birth of modern capitalism; Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987), a lengthy and entertaining exploration; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), on the impact of the culture of Reformation; and R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926, reissued 1984), a classic study of Calvinism and the capitalistic ethos.
A broader approach to early modern society is offered summarily in Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (1987), focusing on detail rather than central movements of early modern culture; Roger Chartier (ed.), Passions of the Renaissance (1989; originally published in French, 1986), a volume of essays dealing with the period from the Renaissance to Enlightenment, from the series A History of Private Life; Brian Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550–1670 (1983), an often poignant examination of ethnic relations; and Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (1980; originally published in Italian, 1976), an excellent social history based on the story of an eccentric miller and his cosmological views.
Politics and diplomacy are dealt with in many general histories of the period. Narrative and analytical accounts, with detailed bibliographies, are offered in J.R. Hale, Renaissance Europe, 1480–1520 (1971, reprinted 1985); G.R. Elton, Reformation Europe, 1517–1559 (1963); J.H. Elliott, Europe Divided, 1559–1598 (1968, reprinted 1985); and Geoffrey Parker, Europe in Crisis, 1598–1648 (1979), all four in the Fontana History of Europe series. G.R. Potter (ed.), The Renaissance, 1493–1520 (1957); G.R. Elton (ed.), The Reformation, 1520–1559, 2nd ed. (1990); R.B. Wernham (ed.), The Counter-Reformation and Price Revolution, 1559–1610 (1968); and J.P. Cooper (ed.), The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War, 1609–48/59 (1970), the first four volumes in The New Cambridge Modern History series, offer a sequence of chapters by various authors, thematically organized. H.G. Koenigsberger, George L. Mosse, and G.Q. Bowler, Europe in the Sixteenth Century, 2nd ed. (1989), treats the earlier part of the period. The last 50 years of the period, dominated by the genesis and course of continental war, are best approached through Geoffrey Parker (ed.), The Thirty Years’ War, rev. ed. (1987). David Herlihy N. Geoffrey Parker
The age of absolutism, 1648–1789
Gordon East, An Historical Geography of Europe, 5th ed. (1966), provides an informative introduction to geographic features influencing the history of the period. H.D. Schmidt, “The Establishment of ‘Europe’ as a Political Expression,” The Historical Journal, 9(2):172–178 (1966), discusses the question of definition. Main themes are covered in the essays of G.N. Clark, The Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (1947, reprinted 1981); and the appropriate volumes of The New Cambridge Modern History series (1957– ). General surveys include E.N. Williams, The Ancien Régime in Europe: Government and Society in the Major States, 1648–1789 (1970); D.H. Pennington, Seventeenth-Century Europe (1970); Geoffrey Treasure, The Making of Modern Europe, 1648–1780 (1985); M.S. Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 1713–1783, 3rd ed. (1987); and William Doyle, The Old European Order, 1660–1800 (1978, reprinted 1984). Specific social and demographic questions are explored in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000 (1971, reissued 1988; originally published in French, 1967); Michael W. Flinn, The European Demographic System, 1500–1820 (1981); Lucien Paul Victor Febvre, A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, trans. from French, ed. by Peter Burke (1973); Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France, 1500–1640: An Essay in Historical Psychology (1975; originally published in French, 1961); Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1962, reissued 1979; originally published in French, 1960); John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death Among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (1981); James C. Riley, The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease (1987); and Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (1983; also published as Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800, 1983). Olwen H. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789 (1974), a study of poverty with much about women; Michael R. Weisser, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Europe (1979); and E.J. Hobsbawm, Bandits, rev. ed. (1981), provide important insights into early modern social history.
Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics (1966, reprinted 1978; originally published in French, 1931); Jack M. Potter, May N. Diaz, and George M. Foster (eds.), Peasant Society (1967); Pierre Goubert, The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century (1986; originally published in French, 1982); and Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (1961, reprinted 1971), are important studies of peasant life. The economic and social conditions in the urban areas are the subject of Gaston Roupnel, La Ville et la campagne au XVIIe siècle: étude sur les populations du pays dijonnais (1955); Orest Ranum, Paris in the Age of Absolutism (1968, reprinted 1979); and Gerald L. Burke, The Making of Dutch Towns: A Study in Urban Development from the Tenth to the Seventeenth Centuries (1956). The early modern aristocracy is studied in A. Goodwin (ed.), The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: Studies of the Nobilities of the Major European States in the Pre-Reform Era, 2nd ed. (1967); and Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment (1985; originally published in French, 1976). Economic questions are examined in the appropriate volumes of The Cambridge Economic History of Europe series (1966– ); Peter Earle (ed.), Essays in European Economic History, 1500–1800 (1974); and B.H. Slicher Van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, A.D. 500–1850 (1963). G.N. Clark, Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton, 2nd ed. (1949, reissued 1970), looks at the connections between science and technology. Commerce and trade and their significance as characteristics of the home countries are discussed in D.C. Coleman (ed.), Revisions in Mercantilism (1969); Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (1973); J.H. Parry, Trade and Dominion: The European Oversea Empires in the Eighteenth Century (1971); and C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (1965, reprinted 1977).
Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648–1789 (1960, reprinted 1985), provides a concise overview of the subject; a comprehensive treatment is offered in E. Préclin and E. Jarry, Les Luttes politiques et doctrinales aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 2 vol. (1955–56). Specific significant topics in church history are surveyed in A.G. Dickens, The Counter Reformation (1968, reissued 1979); Jean Delumeau, Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation (1977, originally published in French, 1971); Émile G. Léonard, A History of Protestantism: The Reformation (1965; originally published in French, 1961); Robert O. Crummey, The Old Believers & the World of Antichrist: The Vyg Community & the Russian State, 1694–1855 (1970); Jean Orcibal, Louis XIV et les Protestants: la cabale des accommodeurs de religion, la caisse des conversions, la révocation de l’Édit de Nantes (1951); Mack Holt, The French Wars of Religion (1993); Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (1991); James Brodrick, The Progress of the Jesuits, 1556–79 (1947, reprinted 1986); Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (1965, reissued 1976); Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (1997); and John McManners, French Ecclesiastical Society Under the Ancien Régime: A Study of Angers in the Eighteenth Century (1960).
Political questions are discussed in Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (1975); J.H. Shennan, The Origins of the Modern European State, 1450–1725 (1974); and A.R. Myers, Parliaments and Estates in Europe to 1789 (1975). Ragnhild Hatton (ed.), Louis XIV and Absolutism (1976), is a collection of articles, mostly translated from French. William F. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (1973), is another study of absolutism. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vol. (1978), is a political history. Trevor Aston (ed.), Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660 (1965, reissued 1975); Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith (eds.), The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (1978); Perez Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 1500–1660, 2 vol. (1982); and Roland Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia, and China (1971; originally published in French, 1967), are studies of resistance and revolts.
Diplomacy tends to be subsumed into general histories. Albert Sorel, Europe and the French Revolution: The Political Traditions of the Old Régime (1969; originally published in French, 1885); Jill Lisk, The Struggle for Supremacy in the Baltic, 1600–1725 (1967); Derek McKay and H.M. Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers, 1648–1815 (1983); Ragnhild Hatton (ed.), Louis XIV and Europe (1976); J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands in Europe and Asia (1968); and Mark A. Thomson et al., William III and Louis XIV: Essays 1680–1720 (1968), examine the main outlines of early modern diplomacy. A starting point for the study of war is Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution, 1560–1660 (1956). A later contribution to the ensuing debate is Geoffrey Parker, Spain and the Netherlands, 1559–1659, rev. ed. (1990). The effects of war are treated in G.N. Clark, War and Society in the Seventeenth Century (1958, reprinted 1985); André Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494–1789 (1979; originally published in French, 1976); H.W. Koch, The Rise of Modern Warfare, 1618–1815 (1981); John Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe, 1648–1789 (1982); Christopher Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great (1974); and Jeremy Black, European Warfare, 1660–1815 (1994), and A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society, 1550–1800 (1991).
The Enlightenment
The vast literature on the Enlightenment encompasses a variety of historiographical approaches. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, an Interpretation, 2 vol. (1966–69, reprinted 1996), is a magisterial work that has long served as one of the pillars of the study of the subject. Among the most-rewarding considerations of the Enlightenment that are grounded in social history is J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vol. (1999–2015), a multivolume study of historian Edward Gibbon, whom Pocock uses as a foundation upon which to construct wider discussions of the nature of the Enlightenment that are contextualized in a careful characterization of the law, religion, and society of the period. Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768–1776: The First Crisis, trans. from Italian by R. Burr Litchfield (1989), and Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, trans. from Italian by Susan Corsi (1972), take a similar social historical approach.
A number of historians have argued that, rather than a single Enlightenment, there were many separate national enlightenments, including John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (2005), which focuses on the development of the discipline of political economy in Scotland and southern Italy. Surveying popular discourse ranging from journalism to rumour mongering, Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (1979), The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982), and George Washington’s False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century (2003), investigate the “low” Enlightenment, partly shaped by ideas that filtered down from the philosophes. James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (2001), also studies Enlightenment manifestations in the broader society.
Returning to a focus on intellectual history, Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (2001), Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity. and the Emancipation of Man (2006), and A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (2010), differentiate between “Counter-Enlightenment,” the “moderate mainstream” Enlightenment of Locke, Hobbes, Descartes, and Voltaire—which was willing to compromise with the church and the monarchial power structure—and the atheist, democratic, “radical” Enlightenment of Benedict de Spinoza and his intellectual disciples. Likewise, Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (2013), concentrates on high intellectual history as it finds cosmopolitanism to be the defining contribution of the Enlightenment
Other useful works include Edward Andrew, Patrons of Enlightenment (2006); Liana Vardi, The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment (2012); A. Rupert Hall, From Galileo to Newton, 1630–1720 (1963, reprinted 1981); Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (1968, reprinted 2009), Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957, reissued 1985); Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (1968, reprinted 1990); Paul Hazard, The European Mind: The Critical Years, 1680–1715 (1953, reissued 2013; originally published in French, 1935); Alan Charles Kors and Paul J. Korshin (eds.), Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany (1987); and Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment (1971, reissued 2015).
Compressed summaries are given in Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, 2nd ed. (2005); Margaret C. Jacob, The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents (2001); Paul Hyland, Olga Gomez, and Francesca Greensides (eds), The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader (2003); Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment, new ed. (1990); and Robert Anchor, The Enlightenment Tradition (1967, reissued 1979). A broader picture is presented in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds.), The Enlightenment in National Context (1981). Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951, reissued 2009; originally published in German, 1932), considers the metaphysical basis of 18th-century thought. Important studies of individual thinkers include Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle (1963–64, reissued 1985); Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (1961, reprinted 1970); Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Development of Voltaire (1969); Ronald Grimsley, The Philosophy of Rousseau (1973); Roy Porter, Edward Gibbon: Making History (1988); and S.C. Brown (ed.), Philosophers of the Enlightenment (1979). Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (1964, reissued 1971), is a good introduction to the philosophes.
Intellectual life in its broader aspects is explored in Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter (eds.), Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (2000); Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society, new ed. (2009); and Alfred Cobban, In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History (1960). The production and distribution of the Encyclopédie is examined in J.L. Talmon, The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (1952, reprinted 1985), which sees the Enlightenment as hostile to the idea of freedom; also iconoclastic is Lester G. Crocker, An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century French Thought (1959). George Boas, “In Search of the Age of Reason,” pp. 1–19 in Earl R. Wasserman (ed.), Aspects of the Eighteenth Century (1965, reprinted 1967), discusses difficulties in interpreting words such as “reason” and “nature.” R.R. Palmer, Catholics & Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France (1939, reissued 1970), describes the religious counterattack against the Enlightenment. Other views are expressed in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The French Revolution in Culture (1989); and Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994).
Good general accounts of the experience of other countries include Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (eds.), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (1983, reissued 1985); Walter H. Bruford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century (1935, reissued 1971); Henri Brunschwig, Enlightenment and Romanticism in Eighteenth-Century Prussia (1974; originally published in French, 1947); Stuart J. Woolf, A History of Italy, 1700–1860: The Social Constraints of Political Change (1979, reprinted 1986); Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (1958, reprinted 1973); and Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (1976). Interaction of thinkers and “enlightened” absolutism is explored in C.B.A. Behrens, Society, Government, and the Enlightenment: The Experiences of Eighteenth-Century France and Prussia (1985); Leonard Krieger, Kings and Philosophers, 1689–1789 (1970); and H.M. Scott (ed.), Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe (1990). Geoffrey Russell Richards Treasure
Revolution and the growth of industrial society, 1789–1914
Robin W. Winks and Thomas Kaiser, Europe, 1648–1815: From the Old Regime to the Age of Revolution (2004); T.C.W. Blanning (ed.), The Nineteenth Century: Europe, 1789–1914 (2000); and Theodore S. Hamerow, The Birth of a New Europe: State and Society in the Nineteenth Century (1983), provide excellent introductions to the period. Comprehensive coverage is offered in E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (1962), The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (1975, reissued 1984), and The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (1987). Treatments of the Industrial Revolution and related social developments include Lenard R. Berlanstein (ed.), The Industrial Revolution and Work in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1992); Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution, 2nd ed. (1979), an economic history; David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (1969), more comprehensive and less quantitative, on society; Peter N. Stearns, European Society in Upheaval: Social History Since 1750, 2nd ed. (1975); Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe, 1760–1970 (1981); and William L. Blackwell, The Industrialization of Russia: An Historical Perspective, 2nd ed. (1982).
Women’s history is reviewed in Susan G. Bell and Karen M. Offen (eds.), Women, the Family, and Freedom, 2 vol. (1983); Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (1978, reissued 1987); Bonnie G. Smith, Changing Lives: Women in European History since 1700 (1989); and Richard J. Evans, The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America, and Australasia, 1840–1920 (1977), an overview of feminism. Important special topics in family history are covered in Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (1975); John R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770–Present (1981); Peter N. Stearns, Old Age in European Society: The Case of France (1976); and Angus McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England (1992), and Sexuality and Social Order (1983); and Rachel Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris (1992). Analysis of major social classes is provided in Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (1976); and E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, new ed. (1968, reissued 1980). Charles Tilly, The Contentious French (1986), studies popular protest patterns. Other important studies include Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution: c. 1780–c. 1880 (1980); and Harvey J. Graff (ed.), Literacy and Social Development in the West (1981).
Patterns of revolution are the subject of R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vol. (1959–64, reprinted 1974); Owen Connelly, French Revolution, Napoleonic Era (1979); and Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984). Developments at mid-century are studied in Peter N. Stearns, 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe (1974); and Robin W. Winks and Joan Neuberger, Europe and the Making of Modernity, 1815–1914 (2005). Political trends can be followed in several excellent national histories, including Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times: From the Enlightenment to the Present, 4th ed. (1987); Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (1978); and Asa Briggs, The Making of Modern England, 1783–1867 (1965). Albert S. Lindemann, A History of European Socialism (1983), examines the vital political trend. Overviews of imperialism can be found in Toni Smith, The Pattern of Imperialism: The United States, Great Britain, and the Late-Industrializing World Since 1815 (1981); and Winfried Baumgart, Imperialism: The Idea and Reality of British and French Colonial Expansion, 1880–1914, rev. ed. (1982; originally published in German, 1975). A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (1954, reprinted 1971); and Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (1981), interpret internal European diplomatic patterns. Readable accounts of the origins of the First World War include Laurence Lafore, The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I, 2nd ed. (1971); Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914 (1966); and James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (1984). The studies by Fritz Fischer are crucial: Germany’s Aims in the First World War (1967; originally published in German, 1961), and The War of Illusions (1975; originally published in German, 1969). Peter N. Stearns
The historical role of Romanticism and Realism in philosophical, cultural, social, and political thought and the development of the modern culture of which they were the precursors is the focus of Eugen Weber, Paths to the Present: Aspects of European Thought from Romanticism to Existentialism (1960); Harold T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (1937, reprinted 1965); Crane Brinton, The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (1962); Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic, and Modern, 2nd rev. ed. (1975); and Nicholas Roe (ed.), Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (2005). Frederic Ewen, Heroic Imagination: The Creative Genius of Europe from Waterloo (1815) to the Revolution of 1848 (1984), gives a broad summary with interpretive detail. Ernst Behler (ed.), Philosophy of German Idealism (1987), supplies both a review of common traits and comparative evaluations. Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff (eds.), The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition (1987), offers contrasting views on Romantic literature to 1850. Robert C. Binkley, Realism and Nationalism: 1852–1871 (1935, reprinted 1963); and Carlton J.H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, 1871–1900 (1941, reprinted 1983), add to the understanding of political and economic characteristics of the period and interpret its culture. William W. Stowe, Balzac, James, and the Realistic Novel (1983), considers the development of the genre from its inception to its modern transformations.
Bruce Bernard (ed.), The Impressionist Revolution (1986), interprets the broadest aspects of artistic innovation. Maly Gerhardus and Dietfried Gerhardus, Symbolism and Art Nouveau: Sense of Impending Crisis, Refinement of Sensibility, and Life Reborn in Beauty (1979; originally published in German, 1977), covers the last two decades of the 19th century in this excellently illustrated volume. Yvonne Brunhammer, The Art Deco Style (1983), examines the radical change in design characteristic of the new century. Lewis Mumford et al., The Arts in Renewal (1951, reprinted 1969), is a collection of interpretive studies on the historical establishment of modernism in various artistic genres. Henry R. Hitchcock, Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (1929, reprinted 1972), offers a prospect and retrospect after a generation of the “International Style.” Jacques Barzun
European society since 1914
The scope and volume of literature on the period is so vast that no comprehensive bibliography can be suggested here. Most of the following works, however, contain significant bibliographies of their own. General historical surveys include Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (1964); Michael D. Biddiss, The Age of the Masses: Ideas and Society in Europe Since 1870 (1977); Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Europe: A History of Its People (1990; originally published in French, 1990); H. Stuart Hughes and James Wilkinson, Contemporary Europe: A History, 7th ed. (1991); James Joll, Europe Since 1870: An International History, 3rd ed. (1983); and David Thomson, Europe Since Napoleon, 2nd ed. (1962, reprinted 1981). World War I is examined in Spencer Tucker, The Great War, 1914–1918 (1998); C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, A History of the Great War, 1914–1918, 2nd ed. (1936, reissued 1982); J.E. Edmonds, A Short History of World War I (1951, reprinted 1968); Cyril B. Falls, The First World War (1960); and Bernadotte Schmitt and Harold Vedeler, The World in the Crucible, 1914–1939 (1984). Accounts of the Treaty of Versailles are found in H.W.V. Temperley (ed.), A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, 6 vol. (1920–24, reissued 1969); Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking, 1919: Being Reminiscences of the Paris Peace Conference (1933, reissued 1984); John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919, reissued 1988); Étienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace; or, The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes (1946, reprinted 1978); Arno Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (1967); and Marc Trachtenberg, Reparation in World Politics (1980).
David Clay Large, Between Two Fires: Europe’s Path in the 1930s (1990), provides a general overview of the interwar period. Special studies include Charles Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (1975); Benjamin Martin, France and the Après Guerre, 1918–1924 (1999); Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years (1994); Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968, reprinted 1981); H.W. Hodson, Slump and Recovery, 1929–1937: A Survey of World Economic Affairs (1938, reprinted 1983), on the Great Depression; Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, rev. ed. (1962); Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (1981), on dictatorial leadership; Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 3rd rev. ed. (1986); and F.P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations, 2 vol. (1952, reprinted in 1 vol., 1986), on the political realities confronted by this organization.
The approach and developments of World War II are summarized in A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (1961, reissued 1983); Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–1939 (1989); Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint, and John Pritchard, Total War: The Causes and Courses of the Second World War, 2nd rev. ed. (1989); Martin Gilbert, The Second World War: A Complete History (1989); Gordon Wright, The Ordeal of Total War, 1939–1945 (1968); Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (1987); and Raoul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (1961).
The postwar situation is examined in Richard Mayne, The Recovery of Europe: From Devastation to Unity (1970), and Postwar: The Dawn of Today’s Europe (1983); Roger Morgan, West European Politics Since 1945: The Shaping of the European Community (1972); Derek W. Urwin, Western Europe Since 1945: A Political History, 4th ed. (1989); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (1994); and Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1992 (1993). Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969, reprinted 1987), discusses, among other things, the Marshall Plan. Henry L. Roberts, Eastern Europe: Politics, Revolution & Diplomacy (1970); and W.W. Rostow, The Division of Europe After World War II, 1946 (1981), focus on the forces that developed the Cold War. Hugh Seton-Watson, The East European Revolution, 3rd ed. (1956), and From Lenin to Khrushchev: The History of World Communism, new ed. (1985), examine developments in eastern Europe and the communist world. V.G. Kiernan, European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 1815–1960 (1982), examines the dynamics of colonialism. T. Iván Berend, An Economic History of Twentieth-Century Europe: Economic Regimes from Laissez-Faire to Globalization (2006), offers an economic perspective.
The development of European unity is discussed in Sidney Pollard, European Economic Integration, 1815–1970 (1974); Walter Lipgens, A History of European Integration: 1945–1947, trans. from German (1982); Jean Monnet, Memoirs (1978; originally published in French, 1976); R.C. Mowat, Creating the European Community (1973); Miriam Camps, Britain and the European Community, 1955–1963 (1964); and Richard Mayne and John Pinder, Federal Union: The Pioneers (1990). Further insights into the European Union are provided by Desmond Dinan, Ever Closer Union: An Introduction to European Integration, 3rd ed. (2005); and John McCormick, The European Union: Politics and Policies, 4th ed. (2008). Richard J. Mayne
Последние комментарии
44 минут 28 секунд назад
2 часов 24 минут назад
1 день 8 часов назад
1 день 14 часов назад
1 день 14 часов назад
1 день 15 часов назад