From Book: Western Civilization, Volume 1: to 1715, Eight Edition
Author: Jackson J. Spielvogel
ISBN: 978-0-495--91329-0
Chapter: Eight
U-$22-B-0.006065-BE-227
Page 239
1. Charles Martel, the Carolingian mayor of the palace of Austrasia, became the virtual ruler of these territories.
2. When Charles Martel died in 741, his son, Pepin, deposed the Merovingians and assumed the kingship of the Frankish state for himself and his family.
Page 240
3. Pepin's actions, which were approved by the pope, created a new form of Frankish kinship.
4. Pepin (751-768) was crowned king and formally anointed by a representative of the pope with holy oil in imitation of an Old Testament practice.
5. The anointing not only symbolized that the kings had been entrusted with a sacred office but also provides yet another example how a Germanic institution fused with a Christian practice in the Early Middle Ages.
6. Pepin's death in 768 brought his son to the throne Charles the Great or Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus in Latin-hence our word Carolingian).
7. Charlemagne finally accomplished that Saxons convert to Christianity by 804 AD.
Page 241
8. Charlemagne kingdom grew without a public taxation system.
9. To keep the nobles in his service, Charlemagne granted part of the royal lands as lifetime holdings to nobles who assisted him.
10. The Administration of the empire depended on counts.
11. Counts were the king's chief representatives in local areas.
12. Margraves= mark graf, count of the border district
13. Counts were members of the nobility who had already existed under the Merovingians.
14. Counts had come to control public services in their own lands and thus acted as judges, military leaders, and agents of the king.
15. Gradually, as the rule of the Merovingian kings weakened, many counts had simply attached the royal lands and services performed on behalf of the king to their own family possessions.
16. Charlemagne attempted to limit the power of the counts. They were required to serve outside their own family lands and were moved about periodically rather than being permitted to remain in a county for life.
17. By making the offices appointive, Charlemagne tried to prevent the counts' children from automatically inheriting their offices.
18. Charlemagne instituted the missi dominici ("messengers of the lord king"). Two men, one lay lord and one church official, who were sent out to local districts to ensure that the counts were executing the king's wishes.
19. The counts also had assistants, but they were members of their households, not part of a bureaucratic office.
20. What held the system together was personal loyalty to a single ruler who was strong enough to ensure loyalty by force when necessary.
21. Bot Pepin and his son Charlemagne took up the cause of church reform by creating new bishoprics and archbishoprics, restoring old ones, and seeing to it that the clergy accepted the orders of their superiors and executed their duties.
22. Charlemagne also insisted that church officials restore churches that had fallen into disrepair, a clear indication of his close attention to church affairs.
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23. In 800, Charlemagne gains new title of "Emperor of the Romans."
24. In 799, after a rebellion against his authority, Pope Leo III (795-816) managed to escape from Rome and flee to safety to Charlemagne's court.
Page 243
25. Charlemagne offered assistance, and when he went to Rome in November 800 to settle affairs, he was received by the pope like an emperor.
26. On Christmas Day in 800, after Mass, Pope Leo placed a crown on Charlemagne's head and proclaimed him emperor of the Romans.
27. Charlemagne's efforts in providing educated clergy for the church and literate officials for his government led to a revival of learning and culture that some historians have labeled a Carolingian Renaissance, or "rebirth" of learning.
28. Monasteries established scriptoria, or writing rooms, where monks copied not only the works of early Christianity, such as the Bible and the treaties of the church fathers, but also the works of Classical Latin authors.
29. Carolingian's developed new ways of producing books.
30. Carolingian texts were written on pages made of parchment or sheepskin rather than papyrus and then bound in covers decorated with jewels and precious metals.
31. The use of parchment made books very expensive; an entire herd of sheep could be required to make a Bible.
32. Papyrus was longer available because Egypt was in Muslim hands, and the west could no longer afford to import it.
33. Carolingian monastic scribes also developed a new writing style called the Carolingian minuscule.
34. The Carolingian minuscule was really hand printing rather than cursive writing and was far easier to read than the Merovingian script.
35. The production of manuscripts in Carolingian monastic scriptoria was a crucial factor in the preservation of the ancient legacy.
36. About 8,000 manuscripts survive from Carolingian times. Some 90% of the ancient Roman works that exist today is because the Carolingians monks copied them.
37. Alcuin, called by Einhard the "greatest scholar of that day," provided the leadership for the palace school.
38. During Carolingian time, marriage was a civil arrangement, but priest tried to add their blessings and strengthen the concept of a special marriage ceremony.
39. The church tried to serve as the caretaker of marriage by stipulating that a girl over fifteen must give her consent to her guardian's choice of a husband or her marriage would not be valid in the eyes of the church.
Page 246
40. A Frankish church council in 789 stipulated that marriage was an "indissoluble sacrament" and condemned the practice of concubinage and easy divorce.
41. During the reign of Emperor Louis the Pious (814-840), the church finally established the right to prohibit divorce.
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42. The Carolingian Empire began to disintegrate soon after Charlemagne's death.
43. In 843, after their father's, Louis the Pious, death, Louis' three surviving brothers signed the Treaty of Verdum.
44. The Treaty of Verdum
a. divided kingdom into 3 sections
b. Charles the Bald (843-877) obtained the western Frankish lands, which formed the core of the eventual Kingdom of France
c. Louis the German (843-876) took the eastern lands, which became Germany
d. Lothar (840-855) received the title of emperor and a "Middle Kingdom" extending from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, including the Netherlands, the Rhineland, and northern Italy.
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45. 9th Century, inhabitants of the western Frankish area were speaking a Roman language derived from Latin that became French.
46. Eastern Franks spoke a Germanic dialect.
Page 253
47. Sicily was occupied by the Muslims in 827 AD.
48. The Magyars were a people from western Asia. They established themselves on the plains of Hungary and from there made raids into western Europe.
49. The Magyars were finally crushed at the Battle of Lechfeld in Germany in 955. At the end of the 10th century, they were converted to Christianity and settled down to establish the kingdom of Hungary.
50. The Vikings were a Germanic people based in Scandinavia and constitute, in a sense, the final wave of Germanic migration.
Page 255
51. By 850, groups of Norsemen had settled in Ireland, and the Danes occupied an area known as the Danelaw in northeastern England by 878.
52. In 911, the ruler of the western Frankish lands gave one band of Vikings land at the mouth of the Seine River, it became known as Normandy.
53. The Vikings reached Iceland in 874.
54. Erik the Red, a Viking exiled form Iceland, traveled even farther west and discovered Greenland in 985.
55. The only known Viking site in North America was found in Newfoundland.
56. Christianity proved a decisive civilizing force in Europe. Europe and Christianity were becoming virtually synonymous.
Page 256
57. The renewed invasions and the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire led to the emergence of a new type of relationship between free individuals.
58. People wanted a powerful lord to protect them in exchange for service
59. The contract sworn between a lord and his subordinate is the basis of a form of social organization that later generations of historians called feudalism.
60. Feudalism= service exchange for protection
61. Feudalism was never a system, and many historians today prefer to avoid using the term.
62. The practice of vassalage was derived from Germanic society, in which warriors swore an oath of loyalty to their leader.
63. Warriors fought for their chief, and he in turn took care of their needs.
64. By the 8th century, an individual who served a lord in a military capacity was known as a vassal.
65. For almost 500 years, warfare in Europe would be dominated by heavily armored cavalry, or knights, as they came to be called.
66. In the society of the Early Middle Ages, where there was little trade and wealth was based primarily on land ownership, land became the most important gift a lord could give to a vassal in return for military service.
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67. The land or some other type of income granted to a vassal in return for military service came to be known as a fief.
68. In time, many vassals who held such grants of land came to exercise rights of jurisdiction or political and legal authority within their fiefs.
69. In some areas of France, for example, some lords- called castellans- constructed castles and asserted their authority to collect taxes and dispense justice to the local population.
70. Lack of effective central control led to ever-larger numbers of castles and castellans.
71. The new practice of lordship was basically a product of the Carolingian world, but it also spread to England, Germany, and central Europe, and in modified form to Italy.
Page 258
72. A lord's major obligation was to protect his vassal, either by defending him militarily or by taking his side in a court of law if necessary.
73. If a lord acted improperly toward his vassal, the bond between them could be dissolved.
74. If a vassal failed to fulfill his vow of loyalty, he was subject to forfeiture of his fief.
75. The title of duke is derived from the Latin word dux, meaning "leader."
76. In the east Frankish Kingdom, the last Carolingian king died in 911, whereupon local rulers, especially the powerful dukes of the Saxons, Swabians, Bavarians, Thuringians, and Franconians, who exercised much power in their large dukedoms, elected one of their own number, Conrad of Franconia, to serve as king of Germany.
77. When Conrad died, they elected another king. Henry the Fowler, duke of Saxony, as the new king of Germany (919-936).
78. The best known of the Saxon kings of Germany was Henry's son, Otto I (936-973). He defeated the Magyars at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955 and encouraged an ongoing program of Christianization of both the Slavic and Scandinavian peoples.
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79. In 987, when the Carolingian king died, the western Frankish nobles and chief prelates of the church chose Hugh Capet, count of Orleans and Paris, as the new King (987-996).
80. Capet's family controlled only the Ile-de-France, the region around Paris.
81. The long struggle of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms against the Viking invasion ultimately produced a unified kingdom in Anglo-Saxon England.
82. Alfred the Great, King of Wessex (871-899) played a crucial role. He defeated a Danish army in 879.
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83. By the time of King Edgar (959-975), Anglo-Saxon England had a well-developed and strong monarchical government.
84. The kingship was elective, only descendants of Alfred were chosen for the position.
85. In the counties or shires, the administrative units into which England was divided, the King was assisted by an agent appointed and controlled by him, the shire-reeve or sheriff.
86. A manor was simply an agricultural estate operated by a lord and worked by peasants.
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87. Lords provided protection; peasants gave up their freedom, became tied to the lord's land, and provided labor services for him.
88. Free peasants gave up their freedom, became tied to the lord's land, and provided labor services for him.
89. Free peasants gave up their freedom to the lords of large landed estates in return for protection and use of the lord's land.
90. Although a large class of free peasants continued to exist, increasing numbers of them became bound to the land as serfs.
91. Unlike slaves, serfs could not be bought and sold, but they were subservient to their lords in a variety of ways.
92. By the 9th century, probably 60% of the population of western Europe had become serfs.
93. Demesne= the land retained by the lord
94. Tithe= a tenth of their produce
95. Serfs were legally bound to the lord's land.
96. Serfs could not leave the lord's land without his permission.
97. Although free to marry, serfs could not marry anyone outside their manor without the lord's approval.
98. The lord's political authority enabled him to establish monopolies on certain services that provided additional revenues.
99. Serfs could be required to bring their grain to the lord's mill and pay a fee to have it ground into flour.
100. The rights a lord possessed on his manor gave him virtual control over both the lives and property of his serfs.
101. Great lords possessed many manors and relied on a steward or bailiff to run each estate.
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102. Many from eastern Europe, including captured Slavs, from whom the modern word slave is derived.
103. During the reign of Michael III (842-867), the Byzantine Empire began to experience a revival.
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104. Patriarch Photius condemned the pope as a heretic for accepting a revised form of the Nicene Creed stating that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son instead of "the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father."
105. The Slavic peoples were originally a single people in central Europe who through mass migrations and nomadic invasions were gradually divided into three major groups: the western, southern, and eastern Slavs.
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106. German missionaries had converted the Czechs in Bohemia by the end of the 9th century, and a bishopric eventually occupied by a Czech bishop was established at Prague in the 9th century.
107. The Slavs in Poland were not converted until the reign of Prince Mieszko (c960-992).
108. In 1000, an independent Polish archbishopric was set up at Gniezno by the pope.
109. The non-Slavic kingdom of Hungary, which emerged after Magyars settled down after their defeat at Lechfeld in 955, was also converted to Christianity by German missionaries.
110. Saint Stephen, King of Hungary from 997 to 1038, facilitated the acceptance of Christianity by his people.
111. The Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians all accepted Catholic or western Christianity and became closely tied to the Roman Catholic Church and its Latin culture.
112. The southern Slavic peoples were converted to the Eastern Orthodox Christianity of the Byzantine Empire by two Byzantine missionary brothers, Cyril and Methodius, who began their activities in 863.
113. Cyril and Methodius created a Slavonic (Cyrillic) alphabet, translated the Bible into Slavonic, and developed Slavonic church services.
114. Although the southern Slavic peoples accepted Christianity, a split eventually developed between the Croats, who accepted the Roman church, and the Serbs, who remained loyal to eastern Christianity.
115. Although the Bulgars were originally an Asiatic people who conquered much of the Balkan peninsula, they were eventually absorbed by the larger native southern Slavic population.
116. The Slavic population and the Bulgars formed a largely Slavic Bulgarian Kingdom.
117. The Bulgarians embraced the Slavonic church services earlier developed by Cyril and Methodius.
118. The acceptance of Eastern Orthodoxy by the southern Slavic peoples, the Serbs and Bulgarians, meant that their cultural life was also linked to the Byzantine sate.
119. In the 8th century, Swedish Vikings known to the eastern Slavs as Varangians, moved down the extensive network of rivers into the lands of the eastern Slavs in search of booty and new trade routes.
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120. Rurik secured his ruling dynasty in the Slavic settlement of Novgorod in 862.
121. Rurik and his fellow Vikings were called the Rus, from which the name that eventually became attached to the state they founded, Russia, is derived.
122. Oleg (c873-913) took up residence in Kiev and created the Rus state, a union of eastern Slavic territories known as the principality of Kiev.
123. By the Rus marrying Slavic wives, the Viking ruling mass was gradually assimilated into the Slavic population, a process confirmed by their assumption of Slavic names.
124. One Rus ruler, Vladimir (c980-1015), married the Byzantine emperor's sister and officially accepted Christianity for himself and his people in 987.
125. The Umayyad dynasty of caliphs had established Damascus as the center of an Islamic empire created by Arab expansion in the 7th & 8th centuries.
126. In 762, the Abbasids built a new capital city, Baghdad, on the Tigris River far to the east of Damascus.
127. Under the Abbasids, judges, merchants, and government officials, rather than warriors, were viewed as the ideal citizens.
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128. Harun al-Rashid (786-809) whose reign is often described as the golden age of the Abbasid caliphate.
129. Al-Ma'mun (813-833) son of Harun al-Rashid.
130. Al-Ma'mun founded an astronomical observatory and created a foundation for translating Classical Greek works.
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131. Baghdad became the center of an enormous trade empire that extended into Europe, Asia, and Africa, greatly adding to the wealth of the Islamic world.
132. When Harun al-Rashid died, his two sons fought to succeed him in a struggle that almost destroyed the city of Baghdad.
133. Provincial rulers broke away from the control of the caliphs and established their own independent dynasties.
134. In the 8th century, a separate caliphate had already been established in Spain when Abd al-Rahman of the Umayyad dynasty had fled there.
135. In 756, Abd al-Rahman seized control of southern Spain and then expanded his power into the center of the peninsula.
136. Abd al-Rahman took the title of emir, or commander, and set up the emirate of al-Andalus (the Arabic name of Spain) with its center at Cordoba.
137. In 929, Abd al-Rahman III (912-961) proclaimed himself caliph.
138. The rulers of al-Andalus developed a unique society in which all religions were tolerated.
139. The Fatimid family established a caliphate in Egypt in 973, and an independent dynasty also operated in North Africa.
140. Islamic civilization based on two common bonds, the Qur'an and the Arabic language.
141. Arabic was an International tongue.
142. The Muslims created a brilliant urban culture at a time when western Europe was predominantly a rural world of farming villages.
143. Cordoba was the capital of the Umayyad caliphate in Spain.
144. Cordoba had a population of about 100,000 making it the largest city after Constantinople.
145. Cordoba
a. 70 public libraries
b. large numbers of women served as teachers and librarians
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146. Al-Hakem (961-976) collected books from different parts of the world and then had them translated into Arabic and Latin.
147. Muslims embellished their buildings with a unique decorative art that avoided representation of living things because their religion prohibited the making of graven images.
148. Baghdad had more than 30 libraries and the library in Cairo contained 1.1 million manuscripts.
149. During the first few centuries of the Arab Empire, it was the Islamic world that saved and spread the scientific and philosophical works of ancient civilizations.
150. At a time when the ancient Greek philosophers were largely unknown in Europe, key works by Plato and Aristotle were translated into Arabic.
151. Plato and Aristotle's work were placed in a library called the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.
152. The making of paper was introduced from China in the 8th century, and by the end of that century, paper factories had been established in Baghdad.
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153. The Muslims adopted and passed on the numerical system in India, including the use of the zero.
154. In Europe, it became known as the Arabic system.
155. Al-Khwarizmi, 9th century Persian mathematician, created the discipline of algebra.
156. Muslims scholars also made many new discoveries in Chemistry and developed medicine as a field of scientific study.
157. Ibn Sina (980-1037), known as Avicenna in the west, who wrote a medical encyclopedia that, among other things, stressed the contagious nature of certain diseases and showed how they could be spread by contaminated water supplies.
Author: Jackson J. Spielvogel
ISBN: 978-0-495--91329-0
Chapter: Eight
U-$22-B-0.006065-BE-227
Page 239
1. Charles Martel, the Carolingian mayor of the palace of Austrasia, became the virtual ruler of these territories.
2. When Charles Martel died in 741, his son, Pepin, deposed the Merovingians and assumed the kingship of the Frankish state for himself and his family.
Page 240
3. Pepin's actions, which were approved by the pope, created a new form of Frankish kinship.
4. Pepin (751-768) was crowned king and formally anointed by a representative of the pope with holy oil in imitation of an Old Testament practice.
5. The anointing not only symbolized that the kings had been entrusted with a sacred office but also provides yet another example how a Germanic institution fused with a Christian practice in the Early Middle Ages.
6. Pepin's death in 768 brought his son to the throne Charles the Great or Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus in Latin-hence our word Carolingian).
7. Charlemagne finally accomplished that Saxons convert to Christianity by 804 AD.
Page 241
8. Charlemagne kingdom grew without a public taxation system.
9. To keep the nobles in his service, Charlemagne granted part of the royal lands as lifetime holdings to nobles who assisted him.
10. The Administration of the empire depended on counts.
11. Counts were the king's chief representatives in local areas.
12. Margraves= mark graf, count of the border district
13. Counts were members of the nobility who had already existed under the Merovingians.
14. Counts had come to control public services in their own lands and thus acted as judges, military leaders, and agents of the king.
15. Gradually, as the rule of the Merovingian kings weakened, many counts had simply attached the royal lands and services performed on behalf of the king to their own family possessions.
16. Charlemagne attempted to limit the power of the counts. They were required to serve outside their own family lands and were moved about periodically rather than being permitted to remain in a county for life.
17. By making the offices appointive, Charlemagne tried to prevent the counts' children from automatically inheriting their offices.
18. Charlemagne instituted the missi dominici ("messengers of the lord king"). Two men, one lay lord and one church official, who were sent out to local districts to ensure that the counts were executing the king's wishes.
19. The counts also had assistants, but they were members of their households, not part of a bureaucratic office.
20. What held the system together was personal loyalty to a single ruler who was strong enough to ensure loyalty by force when necessary.
21. Bot Pepin and his son Charlemagne took up the cause of church reform by creating new bishoprics and archbishoprics, restoring old ones, and seeing to it that the clergy accepted the orders of their superiors and executed their duties.
22. Charlemagne also insisted that church officials restore churches that had fallen into disrepair, a clear indication of his close attention to church affairs.
Page 242
23. In 800, Charlemagne gains new title of "Emperor of the Romans."
24. In 799, after a rebellion against his authority, Pope Leo III (795-816) managed to escape from Rome and flee to safety to Charlemagne's court.
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25. Charlemagne offered assistance, and when he went to Rome in November 800 to settle affairs, he was received by the pope like an emperor.
26. On Christmas Day in 800, after Mass, Pope Leo placed a crown on Charlemagne's head and proclaimed him emperor of the Romans.
27. Charlemagne's efforts in providing educated clergy for the church and literate officials for his government led to a revival of learning and culture that some historians have labeled a Carolingian Renaissance, or "rebirth" of learning.
28. Monasteries established scriptoria, or writing rooms, where monks copied not only the works of early Christianity, such as the Bible and the treaties of the church fathers, but also the works of Classical Latin authors.
29. Carolingian's developed new ways of producing books.
30. Carolingian texts were written on pages made of parchment or sheepskin rather than papyrus and then bound in covers decorated with jewels and precious metals.
31. The use of parchment made books very expensive; an entire herd of sheep could be required to make a Bible.
32. Papyrus was longer available because Egypt was in Muslim hands, and the west could no longer afford to import it.
33. Carolingian monastic scribes also developed a new writing style called the Carolingian minuscule.
34. The Carolingian minuscule was really hand printing rather than cursive writing and was far easier to read than the Merovingian script.
35. The production of manuscripts in Carolingian monastic scriptoria was a crucial factor in the preservation of the ancient legacy.
36. About 8,000 manuscripts survive from Carolingian times. Some 90% of the ancient Roman works that exist today is because the Carolingians monks copied them.
37. Alcuin, called by Einhard the "greatest scholar of that day," provided the leadership for the palace school.
38. During Carolingian time, marriage was a civil arrangement, but priest tried to add their blessings and strengthen the concept of a special marriage ceremony.
39. The church tried to serve as the caretaker of marriage by stipulating that a girl over fifteen must give her consent to her guardian's choice of a husband or her marriage would not be valid in the eyes of the church.
Page 246
40. A Frankish church council in 789 stipulated that marriage was an "indissoluble sacrament" and condemned the practice of concubinage and easy divorce.
41. During the reign of Emperor Louis the Pious (814-840), the church finally established the right to prohibit divorce.
Page 251
42. The Carolingian Empire began to disintegrate soon after Charlemagne's death.
43. In 843, after their father's, Louis the Pious, death, Louis' three surviving brothers signed the Treaty of Verdum.
44. The Treaty of Verdum
a. divided kingdom into 3 sections
b. Charles the Bald (843-877) obtained the western Frankish lands, which formed the core of the eventual Kingdom of France
c. Louis the German (843-876) took the eastern lands, which became Germany
d. Lothar (840-855) received the title of emperor and a "Middle Kingdom" extending from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, including the Netherlands, the Rhineland, and northern Italy.
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45. 9th Century, inhabitants of the western Frankish area were speaking a Roman language derived from Latin that became French.
46. Eastern Franks spoke a Germanic dialect.
Page 253
47. Sicily was occupied by the Muslims in 827 AD.
48. The Magyars were a people from western Asia. They established themselves on the plains of Hungary and from there made raids into western Europe.
49. The Magyars were finally crushed at the Battle of Lechfeld in Germany in 955. At the end of the 10th century, they were converted to Christianity and settled down to establish the kingdom of Hungary.
50. The Vikings were a Germanic people based in Scandinavia and constitute, in a sense, the final wave of Germanic migration.
Page 255
51. By 850, groups of Norsemen had settled in Ireland, and the Danes occupied an area known as the Danelaw in northeastern England by 878.
52. In 911, the ruler of the western Frankish lands gave one band of Vikings land at the mouth of the Seine River, it became known as Normandy.
53. The Vikings reached Iceland in 874.
54. Erik the Red, a Viking exiled form Iceland, traveled even farther west and discovered Greenland in 985.
55. The only known Viking site in North America was found in Newfoundland.
56. Christianity proved a decisive civilizing force in Europe. Europe and Christianity were becoming virtually synonymous.
Page 256
57. The renewed invasions and the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire led to the emergence of a new type of relationship between free individuals.
58. People wanted a powerful lord to protect them in exchange for service
59. The contract sworn between a lord and his subordinate is the basis of a form of social organization that later generations of historians called feudalism.
60. Feudalism= service exchange for protection
61. Feudalism was never a system, and many historians today prefer to avoid using the term.
62. The practice of vassalage was derived from Germanic society, in which warriors swore an oath of loyalty to their leader.
63. Warriors fought for their chief, and he in turn took care of their needs.
64. By the 8th century, an individual who served a lord in a military capacity was known as a vassal.
65. For almost 500 years, warfare in Europe would be dominated by heavily armored cavalry, or knights, as they came to be called.
66. In the society of the Early Middle Ages, where there was little trade and wealth was based primarily on land ownership, land became the most important gift a lord could give to a vassal in return for military service.
Page 257
67. The land or some other type of income granted to a vassal in return for military service came to be known as a fief.
68. In time, many vassals who held such grants of land came to exercise rights of jurisdiction or political and legal authority within their fiefs.
69. In some areas of France, for example, some lords- called castellans- constructed castles and asserted their authority to collect taxes and dispense justice to the local population.
70. Lack of effective central control led to ever-larger numbers of castles and castellans.
71. The new practice of lordship was basically a product of the Carolingian world, but it also spread to England, Germany, and central Europe, and in modified form to Italy.
Page 258
72. A lord's major obligation was to protect his vassal, either by defending him militarily or by taking his side in a court of law if necessary.
73. If a lord acted improperly toward his vassal, the bond between them could be dissolved.
74. If a vassal failed to fulfill his vow of loyalty, he was subject to forfeiture of his fief.
75. The title of duke is derived from the Latin word dux, meaning "leader."
76. In the east Frankish Kingdom, the last Carolingian king died in 911, whereupon local rulers, especially the powerful dukes of the Saxons, Swabians, Bavarians, Thuringians, and Franconians, who exercised much power in their large dukedoms, elected one of their own number, Conrad of Franconia, to serve as king of Germany.
77. When Conrad died, they elected another king. Henry the Fowler, duke of Saxony, as the new king of Germany (919-936).
78. The best known of the Saxon kings of Germany was Henry's son, Otto I (936-973). He defeated the Magyars at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955 and encouraged an ongoing program of Christianization of both the Slavic and Scandinavian peoples.
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79. In 987, when the Carolingian king died, the western Frankish nobles and chief prelates of the church chose Hugh Capet, count of Orleans and Paris, as the new King (987-996).
80. Capet's family controlled only the Ile-de-France, the region around Paris.
81. The long struggle of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms against the Viking invasion ultimately produced a unified kingdom in Anglo-Saxon England.
82. Alfred the Great, King of Wessex (871-899) played a crucial role. He defeated a Danish army in 879.
Page 260
83. By the time of King Edgar (959-975), Anglo-Saxon England had a well-developed and strong monarchical government.
84. The kingship was elective, only descendants of Alfred were chosen for the position.
85. In the counties or shires, the administrative units into which England was divided, the King was assisted by an agent appointed and controlled by him, the shire-reeve or sheriff.
86. A manor was simply an agricultural estate operated by a lord and worked by peasants.
Page 261
87. Lords provided protection; peasants gave up their freedom, became tied to the lord's land, and provided labor services for him.
88. Free peasants gave up their freedom, became tied to the lord's land, and provided labor services for him.
89. Free peasants gave up their freedom to the lords of large landed estates in return for protection and use of the lord's land.
90. Although a large class of free peasants continued to exist, increasing numbers of them became bound to the land as serfs.
91. Unlike slaves, serfs could not be bought and sold, but they were subservient to their lords in a variety of ways.
92. By the 9th century, probably 60% of the population of western Europe had become serfs.
93. Demesne= the land retained by the lord
94. Tithe= a tenth of their produce
95. Serfs were legally bound to the lord's land.
96. Serfs could not leave the lord's land without his permission.
97. Although free to marry, serfs could not marry anyone outside their manor without the lord's approval.
98. The lord's political authority enabled him to establish monopolies on certain services that provided additional revenues.
99. Serfs could be required to bring their grain to the lord's mill and pay a fee to have it ground into flour.
100. The rights a lord possessed on his manor gave him virtual control over both the lives and property of his serfs.
101. Great lords possessed many manors and relied on a steward or bailiff to run each estate.
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102. Many from eastern Europe, including captured Slavs, from whom the modern word slave is derived.
103. During the reign of Michael III (842-867), the Byzantine Empire began to experience a revival.
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104. Patriarch Photius condemned the pope as a heretic for accepting a revised form of the Nicene Creed stating that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son instead of "the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father."
105. The Slavic peoples were originally a single people in central Europe who through mass migrations and nomadic invasions were gradually divided into three major groups: the western, southern, and eastern Slavs.
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106. German missionaries had converted the Czechs in Bohemia by the end of the 9th century, and a bishopric eventually occupied by a Czech bishop was established at Prague in the 9th century.
107. The Slavs in Poland were not converted until the reign of Prince Mieszko (c960-992).
108. In 1000, an independent Polish archbishopric was set up at Gniezno by the pope.
109. The non-Slavic kingdom of Hungary, which emerged after Magyars settled down after their defeat at Lechfeld in 955, was also converted to Christianity by German missionaries.
110. Saint Stephen, King of Hungary from 997 to 1038, facilitated the acceptance of Christianity by his people.
111. The Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians all accepted Catholic or western Christianity and became closely tied to the Roman Catholic Church and its Latin culture.
112. The southern Slavic peoples were converted to the Eastern Orthodox Christianity of the Byzantine Empire by two Byzantine missionary brothers, Cyril and Methodius, who began their activities in 863.
113. Cyril and Methodius created a Slavonic (Cyrillic) alphabet, translated the Bible into Slavonic, and developed Slavonic church services.
114. Although the southern Slavic peoples accepted Christianity, a split eventually developed between the Croats, who accepted the Roman church, and the Serbs, who remained loyal to eastern Christianity.
115. Although the Bulgars were originally an Asiatic people who conquered much of the Balkan peninsula, they were eventually absorbed by the larger native southern Slavic population.
116. The Slavic population and the Bulgars formed a largely Slavic Bulgarian Kingdom.
117. The Bulgarians embraced the Slavonic church services earlier developed by Cyril and Methodius.
118. The acceptance of Eastern Orthodoxy by the southern Slavic peoples, the Serbs and Bulgarians, meant that their cultural life was also linked to the Byzantine sate.
119. In the 8th century, Swedish Vikings known to the eastern Slavs as Varangians, moved down the extensive network of rivers into the lands of the eastern Slavs in search of booty and new trade routes.
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120. Rurik secured his ruling dynasty in the Slavic settlement of Novgorod in 862.
121. Rurik and his fellow Vikings were called the Rus, from which the name that eventually became attached to the state they founded, Russia, is derived.
122. Oleg (c873-913) took up residence in Kiev and created the Rus state, a union of eastern Slavic territories known as the principality of Kiev.
123. By the Rus marrying Slavic wives, the Viking ruling mass was gradually assimilated into the Slavic population, a process confirmed by their assumption of Slavic names.
124. One Rus ruler, Vladimir (c980-1015), married the Byzantine emperor's sister and officially accepted Christianity for himself and his people in 987.
125. The Umayyad dynasty of caliphs had established Damascus as the center of an Islamic empire created by Arab expansion in the 7th & 8th centuries.
126. In 762, the Abbasids built a new capital city, Baghdad, on the Tigris River far to the east of Damascus.
127. Under the Abbasids, judges, merchants, and government officials, rather than warriors, were viewed as the ideal citizens.
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128. Harun al-Rashid (786-809) whose reign is often described as the golden age of the Abbasid caliphate.
129. Al-Ma'mun (813-833) son of Harun al-Rashid.
130. Al-Ma'mun founded an astronomical observatory and created a foundation for translating Classical Greek works.
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131. Baghdad became the center of an enormous trade empire that extended into Europe, Asia, and Africa, greatly adding to the wealth of the Islamic world.
132. When Harun al-Rashid died, his two sons fought to succeed him in a struggle that almost destroyed the city of Baghdad.
133. Provincial rulers broke away from the control of the caliphs and established their own independent dynasties.
134. In the 8th century, a separate caliphate had already been established in Spain when Abd al-Rahman of the Umayyad dynasty had fled there.
135. In 756, Abd al-Rahman seized control of southern Spain and then expanded his power into the center of the peninsula.
136. Abd al-Rahman took the title of emir, or commander, and set up the emirate of al-Andalus (the Arabic name of Spain) with its center at Cordoba.
137. In 929, Abd al-Rahman III (912-961) proclaimed himself caliph.
138. The rulers of al-Andalus developed a unique society in which all religions were tolerated.
139. The Fatimid family established a caliphate in Egypt in 973, and an independent dynasty also operated in North Africa.
140. Islamic civilization based on two common bonds, the Qur'an and the Arabic language.
141. Arabic was an International tongue.
142. The Muslims created a brilliant urban culture at a time when western Europe was predominantly a rural world of farming villages.
143. Cordoba was the capital of the Umayyad caliphate in Spain.
144. Cordoba had a population of about 100,000 making it the largest city after Constantinople.
145. Cordoba
a. 70 public libraries
b. large numbers of women served as teachers and librarians
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146. Al-Hakem (961-976) collected books from different parts of the world and then had them translated into Arabic and Latin.
147. Muslims embellished their buildings with a unique decorative art that avoided representation of living things because their religion prohibited the making of graven images.
148. Baghdad had more than 30 libraries and the library in Cairo contained 1.1 million manuscripts.
149. During the first few centuries of the Arab Empire, it was the Islamic world that saved and spread the scientific and philosophical works of ancient civilizations.
150. At a time when the ancient Greek philosophers were largely unknown in Europe, key works by Plato and Aristotle were translated into Arabic.
151. Plato and Aristotle's work were placed in a library called the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.
152. The making of paper was introduced from China in the 8th century, and by the end of that century, paper factories had been established in Baghdad.
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153. The Muslims adopted and passed on the numerical system in India, including the use of the zero.
154. In Europe, it became known as the Arabic system.
155. Al-Khwarizmi, 9th century Persian mathematician, created the discipline of algebra.
156. Muslims scholars also made many new discoveries in Chemistry and developed medicine as a field of scientific study.
157. Ibn Sina (980-1037), known as Avicenna in the west, who wrote a medical encyclopedia that, among other things, stressed the contagious nature of certain diseases and showed how they could be spread by contaminated water supplies.
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