Download Pre-seventeenth century

Pre-seventeenth century
The Roman Empire
• From republic to empire: city-state was not
strong enough to hold an empire (31 B.C)
• Two centuries of peace and order in the
Mediterranean region
• Prosperity to citizens
• Latin culture; unification of the Latin and
Greek world: Classical culture
Flaws in the Empire
• Administrative bureaucracies and armies
• 3th century: high taxes, civil war, unrest, Greek
east and Latin West began to diverge
• 5th century: Middle ages
• Christian religion emerged as the dominant faith
Early Middle Ages (476-1000)
• The Breakup of the empire: 5th century
• East was more prosperous: economy, urban
centres, population (Constantinople)
• Germans in the Roman empire
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–
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Not to dismantle, take refuge within it
Visigoths: pushed by Huns of Mongolia
They are admitted as special allies in Const.
Then they plundered the city of Rome
Middle Ages
• The collapse of cities; the depriving of scholars
and culture
• One institution survived such devastation ?
Why, and how?
Christian clergy
• Holding authority
• Monasteries taking the place of cities: literacy,
schools and libraries
• Not depended on state support, so survived!
Germans in the Empire
• Aiming to replace the collapsed Roman empire
• Franks (note that they are one of the Germanic
groups) aimed to establish a new European state
• Try to establish a state in France (similar to the
recent territorial boundaries of that country), but
intra-group struggle did not allow achieving their
aims.
• 8th century: Carolingians (Frank dynasty):
Charlemagne united a large territory
More attacks from East and South
• Vikings and Magyars, Muslims: 8th and 9th
century
• Carolingians could not respond to such
scattered attacks. So, what happened?
• People sought for help from local warlords
for protection. This is what we call led to the
emergence of feudalism
FEUDALISM
• A decentralized form of government led by a
military aristocracy
• Economic system during the Middle Ages:
manorialism.
• “A manor was a community of peasant farmers
who were tied to land and who bartered a
portion of their labor for the protection
provided a local warrior.”
Source: Wikipedia
Source. Pinterest.com
More on Feudalism
• Warrior nobility: Lords, vassals, and fiefs
– Lord holds the land
– The lord grants this land to a vassal, who is a person, in
order to be protected.
– The land is a fief (vassal uses the land and protects the
lord)
• Three estates of the realm: the nobility, the clergy, and
the peasantry (under manorialism) )”Marc Bloch”
• The word was started to be used during 18th century
What about the East?
• Little impact
• But, a Greek Christian (Byzantine) culture
developed
• More eastern influence on this culture
• The rise of the Muslim empire
Feudal society
• Marx: mode of production
– Ruling class (aristocracy); ruled (peasantry)
Between 1000-1300
• Feudal system created some sort of stability
• Some European nations began to emerge
(England and France, but not Germany and Italy)
• Germans’ made a wrong decision: claimed the
imperial title to Italy
– Popes rejected, but this led to the fragmentation of
political authority in both countries
– The Church lost its spiritual authority
High Middle Ages: Peoples, towns and
Universities
• Farming
• Crusaders (Constantinople and Syria)
• The emergence of a middle class between
peasantry and the nobility: artisans and
merchants
– Commerce, industry, and contributed to the
development of arts
– Contact with the eastern civilization
• Invention of universities by 1300: Europe only
had 20 of them
• From Romanesque style to Gothic
The Late Middle Ages
• The Age Adversity
– Plagues and wars
• Overpopulation
• Black death, killing one third of whole
population: implications on religion
• The century long war between French and
English (from 1337 onwards ): (in French
territory)
• Resentment by propertied class to the costs of
war: (the king should consult them in
parliament when he would need taxation)
• Clash between the pope and kings
• 16th century: Protestant revolution
Renaissance and Discovery
• 14th centry: cultural revival
• Humanistic values: ind,; political liberty, selfrealization
• The invention of printing press
Italy: wealthy norther city-states; Mediterranean
trade
1453, the fall of Const and the end of Italy’s
commercial supremacy
Colonialism started:
An overview of 16th century
• Central monarchies getting power
– Spain, England, ad France
– Italy was shrinking
– Germany, a collection small states
– Holy Roman Empire, led by Habsburgs, Austria
Reformationa
• Started in the 16th century in Saxony
(Germany)
• Martin Luther King (Diet of Worms, 1521)
• Political implications: social justice
• Henry VIII denied the power of the papacy