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Eric somebody or other was the GM there at the time Bill Heywood with his running gag about "Sweatmore Enterprises" was another radio jock that people listened to from the 60s on. I took several dates to the third Farrells in Christown, and before that, Wallace and Ladmo had their Saturday Movie Matinee shows at the Christown theater.
Learning to bowl at Bowl near the Bob's Big Boys. Having a sandwich at nearby Funny Fellows. Buying model airplanes from Webster's Hobby Shop which was near the restaurant that became Lunt Avenue, another place I took dates to. The Peppertree aon 7th Ave. I was the first "bus-girl" hired there, June Met an interesting guy that summer working there. I loved Ch61! I won tickets from them to see Weird Al and rode there on my bike to get them, I thought it was the coolest thing ever LOL. Such great stories, memories!
I learned how to ice skate at Metrocenter. You could climb Squaw Peak at night and see the stars and city lights, Cloud 9 too I think it was part of Biltmore Golf course not sure. There were dollar movies at Valley West Mall, my first job was at the Karmelcorn there, people would come buy popcorn from me and sneak it into the movie.
The neighborhood kids would just migrate from house to house, pool to pool if you had one. I remember when Royal Palm park was called Butler park. I also remember when butler park was a open field lined by orange trees and had horses grazing in it, and belonged to a rancher who had sold off most of his ranch for the subdivision that surrounded him between Dunlap and Northern 15th lane and 7th ave. There were open canals that led from Dunlap to the ranch and we would spend hours traveling down them catching fish and craw-daddies.
Neighborhood Rodeos with all the horse properties in the area. No bridges over the canal to get into Sunnyslope. Had to cross he bride ay 19th ave and Hatcher to go to town of Sunnyslope. Or is is Ave? I can never remember! I believe they just recently closed again. I was born and raised in Phoenix, lived just off of 35th Ave and Peoria.
I remember a lot of these things such as yes, I used Conceived by Nature, the Gemco where my parents bought a tv that swiveled. But what I remember and miss the most are the orange blossoms. How what felt like the entire city smelled of orange blossoms in the spring.
That Meto was "the Mall". And we lost our home because of the flood control. We lived on the canal and were one of the houses that was taken Phoenix back in the day was a wonderful place to grow up and I have such fond memories Thanks for the blog and reminders I remember when Marge was the hostess of Open House on channel 5. It came on at noon and my mom watched it every day. East and West High Schools. Western Auto. Rax Roast Beef. Gino's Pizza. Cine Capri. We used to watch the fireworks at West Town, from our roof.
I worked at the Blair movie theater at Metro Center. Now it is just a cement slab next to the library. Remember Sambo's? I was the graveyard cook! Remember when Thomas mall had big fish tanks, we used to go for feeding time for the piranha, what about the white Quartz mountains, or the Pancho's at Scottsdale mall? Or there were actual stockyards south of Legand City, and the Cudahey meat packing co. Someone posted a comment about remembering a restaurant in Phoenix or Scottsdale that had animatronic birds in cages and served animal-shaped Jello!
It was not around long, maybe years but I am so happy it was a real place! Fun times! Thanks for the memories. It was on Scottsdale Rd. Waylon Jennings played there and there was a huge portrait of him over the bar. I also saw Doug Kershaw there--great place. When Pv mall had a fountain outside the lil food court area then. I can still vaguely picture it Going to the movies at the theater at 32nd and Shea. I remember my moms friend took me there to see ET and then took me to get my ears pierced for my 5th birthday.
When McDonald's play place was McDonald's play land and it was out side -the hamburglar , the fry guys And playing tether ball and four square at school.
Sheesh, no one mentioned swimming at the Flumes out in way west valley, Dangerous and exciting. Or watching classics at Sombrero Playhouse on 7th or waiting in the huge line to see Star Wars at the Cine Capri, the original. Or when Park Central was the only mall in town. But then I remember shopping at department stores downtown before Park Central opened. I remember getting to Shea by driving on "the Dreamy Draw," and 45 cents got 3 scoops at Thrifty.
Remember Humpty Dumpty restaurant north of Camelback on Central. It was not far from Willy and Geurmos. Anyone remember the drive-in movie theater that was located at N Cave Creek Rd. When my parents ran it, it was called the Valley Drive-In. Spent a lot of time there watching movies. Boy, what fun to read all the comments posted. I moved to Phoenix in the late 70's. Remember so many of the places, restaurants, parks, malls.
Loved running around the whole city. Even to Tempe. Many happy memories there. I worked at Long Hair Inc. But my husband worked there full time. There was 3 owners, 3 full time employees, including the chemist.
Loved the conceived by nature hair products. Used to go along on deliveries to the hair salons. What memories this brings back!!! Someone wanted to know the name of the record shop on Central in the 70's.
It was Circles. What about the Sun Club in Tempe? Seen many awesome punk shows there! Grandfather used to watch Rose Mofford play softball when she was young.
Quad riding near 7st and tbird the Pointe hotel was only thing there. Levis from Yellow Front I waited on cars on a unicycle there on fridays when the girls were cheering at the high school. How about the Super Slide next to Mr. Lucky's on Grand Avenue? I spend many a summer night there. You'd slide down on pieces of burlap. We'd always try to "pull up" on the various drop downs and really fly high usually killing ourselves when we landed on the fiberglass slide!
Nelsons swimming pool over on 19th Ave?? Took swim lessons there. Grew up just off Central, between Northern and the canal. I remember my very first rock concert at Compton Terrace, Cheap Trick. Me and a few friends sat there on a blanket on a nice night,sharing a cigarette with other concert goers,not a care at all. And I can remember cruising Metrocenter and getting to meet Paul Westphal. I had so much fun growing up,it couldn't be done in todays world though. So sad:. Thanks for this post.
Brought back a lot of memories I didn't know I still had. Lived in Tempe from '64 to '69, 1st Grade though half of 5th grade at Laird Elementary. Found this post by searching for "Open House tv show Phoenix 60's". I wanted to find out what the the name of the show's theme song was. It was a well known song from that time. Does anyone know? While I'm here, I'll throw in my recollections. We moved to Phoenix from South Florida and stayed in the Valley Ho hotel while we searched for a house.
Went to the Sugar Bowl regularly and another place I've forgotten the name of that served great grilled cheese sandwiches and baskets of fries in those colored plastic baskets. Went to movies at the Kachina sp? Shopped at A. Bayless and Wilco or was it Woolco sp? Loved going to Legend City and doing the bumper cars. Papago Park and the "hole in the rock" were places we'd go frequently. In winter, we would drive up the Beeline Highway to the snow in Payson.
In summer, do a lot of fishing at and around Roosevelt lake. Watched the Suns at the Memorial. Remember that big tile mosaic at one end. Was it of a thunderbird? Can't remember. The Arizona State Fair was a lot of fun.
They had live shows with bands like Buck Owens and they had the cast of the TV show Bonanza there once. I also noticed that my mom laughed at things in the show I didn't think were that funny. Didn't realize till later the show had humor for adults, too. Remember the day a huge haboob dust storm overtook me, my brother and friends while out playing and we thought the world was ending.
How hot it got in the summer; when the sole of our sneakers started sticking to the pavement and made a ripping sound when we ran, it was time to go inside. Also, how low-rise the whole city was.
If you got 20 feet in the air, you could see forever. Sorry for the The Phoenicians Built Boats Of India stream of consciousness memory dump, but I felt compelled to do it or I would have gone crazy. So, anyway, anyone remember what the theme song to the tv show "Open House" was? More memories from me, the guy who lived in Tempe on Bridalwreath in the 60's: This is something that still confuses my California friends and I have to repeat the explanation: We never watered our yard; instead a man from the water company came out a regular intervals, went into our backyard, opened a manhole-like cover in the middle of the yard and water came gushing out.
It flooded our front and back yards. The water soaked into the ground and that was it until he came again, The school did the same thing, so it was like a big lake with narrow raised dirt berms we would walk on to get to the school buildings. Also, we lived next to the Pima reservation, so for part of the year, Pima kids would attend our school, then they would go somewhere else for the rest of the school year.
For those of you who may know the neighborhood I lived in, it has changed greatly since I was there. It was half built when we moved in. A new neighborhood for young families with kids. Does anyone remember a restaurant in North Phoenix off of Central Ave. Just a small place, limited menu but the best steaks in AZ. I believe there way a motel right behind them and the only way into the restaurant was through the kitchen.
Rocky owned it and Macky was the best bar tender. There were several regulars and always had a great time there. We used to go to Mr. Lucky's our senior year because they would let 18 year old females in the bar at night! Country upstairs, Rock and Roll downstairs. Cruising Central, kickaboo punch at desert parties, Mrs. Fun times How about a 20 dollar bill? Fill your truck up. Pick up your date. Go party and get some Jack in the Box on yer way home.. A 20 would stetch back then Remember when, in order to get to Yuma, you had to take Buckeye Road all the way to where it ended, and then go south, and had to actually drive THRU Buckeye Remember having to drive for what seems like hours, in the middle of nowhere, to get to Rawhide?
Grew up in Phoenix in the 60s. A favorite memory was going to Green Gables Restaurant which had a medieval theme. A knight on horseback met your car and led you to the parking lot. Dorie Ruhe. He is back in Minneapolis running restaurants, which is the family business.
Mike has fond memories of his time in Tempe. I need your help my fellow Phoenicians. I was born in Phoenix in and I remember in the early 70's a mansion that sat on the southwest corner of N. Does anybody remember who owned it or lived there? I remember swimming in the resevoir behind sqwaw peak and skateboarding on the pink sidewalk up to wrigley's mansion. Minder Binders is open again. Great Reading. Thank you to all for the contributions, it has been a nostalgic ride reading all the comments.
My contribution would be "The Monastery" that was tucked off the road at 48th Street and Indian School. Great for beverages, warm bread and cheese, and playing "Pong". It would literally take hours to get through, there were creative folks out selling food, drink, newspapers, to the commuters stuck in the traffic.
Remember when Burger King first opened on Camelback and 21st Ave, and the excitement it created. I'm old also Yep it was in the shorter of the buildings I think. Go figure!!!!!!!!! That was the one where you walked out onto the tarmac and climbed the stair-truck up to the plane, wasn't it? I was there once when the power went out, and they just waved everyone through the metal detectors without any screening. Born in Tempe , lived in Scottsdale until I was 19, plan on retiring in the Valley.
I remember the orange groves and the wonderful smell, playing in the irrigation water when they flooded the school playgrounds, Organ Stop Pizza still there , hanging out at Tower Plaza with my best friend who lived in the apartments right behind it, watching Wallace and Ladmo daily, even the cool kids thought they were funny.
I still have vivid memories of standing in line at Cine Capri for Star Wars. Someone mentioned Curt the Clown, my father knew him and I got to meet him without the makeup, he was a nice guy but I was very shy.
Going to the swap meet at the dog track and finding all sorts of cool stuff. Riding my bike down Scottsdale road and across Curry to hang out with friends in the river bottom under the Mill Avenue bridge. Lots of great memories here. I remember the flumes! We were bad teenagers, we'd go out late at night the night before going out there and look for Big Wheels trikes that kids had left out in their yards, steal them and take them with us to ride down the water slide type of thing they had out there.
Right downstream from there was an aquaduct across a dry wash that was made from a steel half pipe. You had to be brave to float across that because it was so full of bullet holes you could barely touch the bottom without getting cut. I think the one in my neighborhood was a Rexall before it was Revco. I remember taunting the cowboys at my school about being drugstore cowboys, calling them either Rexall Rangers or Revco Roughriders. Fifteen cents a scoop was what I remember too. The Thrifty at 32nd and Cactus was one of the few places we could ride to on our bicycles.
That, and the Taco Bell, and the Jack in the Box. Thx for mentioning Lunt Avenue Marble Club, was dying to remember the name. Also don't forget to mention the Carnation restaurant at Central and Indian School.. Can't forget 40th Street near the airport on Saturday night.. Or cruising hot rods on Central from Camelback to the old library at McDowell. Now, most of the old Gemco stores are Targets.
Not Targets now. Does anyone remember the name of the pizza place just across the street on the north side of Broadway? Did anyone go to Maryland Elementary. I remember skipping school on a bike with a friend and going to Mary Coyle's ice cream parlor.
There was also a Mexican restaurant that had cheese crisps on their menu. They were terrific. I think they were made with flour tortillas and cheese and probably the first nachos or something like that. I loved going to Chris Town. We would also go to some theme park in where you mined for gold. What was that place?? I worked there as a kid and the owner's name was Dick Taggart - does anybody remember? Or know of Dick Taggart? The Suns played at Veterans Memorial Coliseum.
I don't believe that it was ever called Phoenix Memorial Coliseum. It was nice on a hot summer night swimming at the reservoir, which was above the pink sidewalks with friends. The Biltmore security would run us off. I'm pretty sure between Farrells ice cream moving out and the burger place moving in at Metro there was a movie theater there. I want to say it was a Harkins or United Artist. I know the UA theater was on the outer loop of the mall so maybe it was Harkins?
I remember it well! And I hadn't thought of the Blue Goat in years! I think they might have played your place back in the day. They're doing a 40 year reunion thing this year and playing on October 17th. Does anyone else remember the "flumes" out by Lake pleasant? Incredibly dangerous, and someone would get hurt every year, but we were bulletproof back then. The turtle races at Shenanigans, Nite Hawk Diner, the Gold Foxy Lady cards that the owner of both the Fifth National Bank and Bluegrass Country would hand out every year, free drinks and admission to both bars for a year.
God, I loved growing up here, guess that's why I'm not leaving. Used to visit Scottsdale in the mid 70's. Anyone remember a restaurant where you order your food from a phone installed at each booth? I thought that was the coolest thing. We especially liked the fresh strawberry pie. Funny the things you remember sometimes Amazing to hear they're still together after all this time.
Hans Olson always had a crowd that followed him around in those days. He played Newtons on Monday nights and occasionally on Tuesdays also. Our crowd changed from night to night. I remember booking Charles Lewis to play one weekend and after a very slow Friday night he suggested Tempe wasn't a jazz town. We quickly changed back to the rowdy rock bands the city of Tempe was known for. Disco pretty much killed live bands in those years so between rock sets we played Bee Gees and Donna Summers dance tunes.
Kinda schizo but it kept everybody happy and ordering drinks. I'm always pleased when I mention Isaac Newtons and somebody turns and says: "I loved Newtons; met my first wife there! I remember going to Christown as a kid and wondering why men were going down the stairs near the Orange Julius. It was a bar called The Janitors Closet.
One was a Western Savings. When I was little they actually hand wrote your deposit in your saving book. Back then uptown downtown was the place to be. I got my hair cut it long hair incorporated and use the conceived by nature shampoo. I would go swimming at the Maryvale pool. And we met the stuntman Tom Mix in Old Tucson while on vacation. My name is Donald Maxey and I am on Facebook. Does anyone who grew up in Glendale in the 70s remember a tiny hamburger place literally next to Grand Avenue called Joe's Place?
They had that amazing sauce that they would drown the burgers and hot dogs with. And what about the bottled sodas in the water cooler? That was an amazing little place. I wish I could get my hands on that sauce recipe! I remember World Beyond at am every Saturday on Channel 5. Must have seen just about every monster, horror, and B-grade sci-fi movie from the 's through the 's. For a title graphic, they had a psychedelic effect on the "World Beyond" text, complete with a clip from the song Time by Pink Floyd.
I knew it was going to be a weird school year when everyone stood up and said, "Good morning Mr. It was a great ice breaker. That following summer, the summer of the bicentennial was amazing and hot. I went to Big Surf with some friends, told them it was better than the ocean, 'no sharks'.
KRIZ was my favorite station and I knew all the DJ's by their voice although they threw their names out times an hour. I was listening to them until their final night.
Tubing down the Salt River without sunscreen, oh yea, will never forget that. Phoenix was a great place to live to , and I hope it still is. I visit the southwest often as I miss the desert and mountains.
There wasn't a bus depot and all the buses stopped in front of the college front door on Washington. Quite a colorful walk to get to the door.
I lived on 24th and Camelback and remember when the TGI Friday's opened- major event and very popular with the "famous" professional athletes at the time. Does anyone remember the name of the French restaurant in Scottsdale, probably on 5th avenue? Very small and expensive. I think it may have closed in the late '70s. I also remember the Playboy Club on Central Ave. I went there with a date. I was told it was the first Playboy Club to open.
Women in their little pink bunny costumes, white bunny ears, and little white puffy tails. I was 24 and amazed to see the "real thing. Hitching Post Motel, stayed there first night in AZ. June Yellow Front, best place for Levis any where.
Saba's downtown Scottsdale, still there. Straw hat Pizza, watch old movies. Los Olivos Mexican food still in downtown Scottsdale, great grilled pork steak and black beans dinner. The little french restaurant on or around 5th ave in old Scottsdale was La Chaumiere. I haven't thought about that little bistro in 40 years And I think the place with the animatronic birds was on 16th St just south of Camelback.
It was very green - lots of painted "banana plant" leaves on the walls. Could that be the place Amy Hurley is thinking of? ABCO grocery stores. Luckys grocery store at 19th and Bethany. Valley National Bank. La Palma Mexican restaurant in Glendale. The castle allowed a small number of soldiers to defend territory and was also a deterrent to raiders, since it meant that quick plunder might not be possible. Rochester Castle A stone castle built in the twelfth century. Although knights had originally been whichever soldiers had been able to get the equipment to fight, the expense of this equipment and thus the need to control a fief to pay for it meant that knights gradually became a warrior aristocracy, with greater rights than the peasants whose labor they controlled.
Indeed, often the rise of knights and castles meant that many peasants lost their freedom, becoming serfs, unfree peasants who, although not property that could be bought and sold like slaves, were nevertheless bound to their land and subordinate to those who controlled it.
Eleventh-Century Knights. The regions of West Francia controlled by powerful nobles were nearly independent of the crown. The smaller fiefs that made up the territories of these great nobles likewise were under- stood to be held from these nobles; the knight who held a fief was, at least in theory, required to render military service to the lord from whom he held it.
In practice, though, the kingdom of West Francia and other regions of Western Europe where such a system held sway had little cohesion as a state, with most functions of a state like minting money, building roads and bridges, and trying and executing criminals in the hands of the powerful nobles. Thus far, we have discussed feudalism in eleventh-century Western Europe, but a decentralized state dominated by a warrior aristocracy could emerge anywhere that central authority broke down.
A similar system emerged in Heian Japan of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when mounted soldiers in this case samurai rather than knights came to occupy the social role of a warrior aristocracy.
Such an arrangement would emerge at the same time in the Middle East: the Great Saljuq Empire was dominated by mounted warriors in control of iqtas , units of land whose revenues often from taxation would fund these warriors, who in turn held their iqtas from the sultan.
One reason for these beginnings was that in those lands that had been part of the Western Roman Empire, city walls often remained, even if these cities had largely emptied of people. During the chaos and mayhem of the tenth and eleventh centuries, people often gathered in walled settlements for protection. Many of these old walled cities thus came to be re-occupied. Another reason for the growth of towns came with a revival of trade in the eleventh century.
This revival of trade can be traced to several causes. Bishops, the great lords of the Church, had a similar demand. As such, markets grew up in the vicinity of castles and thus caused the formation of towns that served as market centers, while cathedral cities also saw a growth of population.
Moreover, Viking raids had also led to a greater sea-borne trade in the North Sea and Atlantic. Often, Viking-founded markets served as the nucleus of new towns, especially in those lands where the Romans had never established a state and which were not urbanized at all. The Irish city of Dublin, for example, had begun as a Viking trading post. Medieval Market, Fifteenth Century.
Author: Nicole Oreseme. Further south, in the Mediterranean, frequent raids by pirates most of whom were Arab Muslims from North Africa had forced the coastal cities of Italy to build effective navies. One of the most important of these cities was Venice, a city in the swamps and lagoons of northeastern Italy. Over the eleventh century, the city formerly under Byzantine rule but now independent had built up a navy that had cleared the Adriatic Sea of pirates and established itself as a nexus of trade between Constantinople and the rest of Western Europe.
Likewise, on the western side of Italy, the cities of Genoa and Pisa had both built navies from what had been modest fishing fleets and seized the strongholds of Muslim pirates in the islands of Corsica and Sardinia.
This clearing of pirates from the Mediterranean led to an increase in maritime trade and allowed the renewed growth of the old Roman towns that had in many cases remained since the fall of the Western Empire. The cities of Genoa and Venice were able to prosper because they stood at the northernmost points of the Mediterranean, the farthest that goods could be moved by water always cheaper than overland transport in premodern times before going over land to points further north.
As goods moved north and south between the trade zones of the North Sea and the Mediterranean, nobles along that north-south route realized that they could enrich themselves by taxing markets.
They thus sponsored and protected markets in regions of West Francia like Champagne, which themselves would serve as centers of urbanization and economic activity. The people living and working in towns came to be known as the bourgeois , or middle class. These were called a middle class because they were neither peasant farmers nor nobles, but rather a social rank between the two.
Kings and other nobles would frequently give towns the right to self-government, often in exchange for a hefty payment. A self-governing town was often known as a commune. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw a massive expansion of agricultural output in the northern regions of Europe, which led to a corresponding growth in the economy and population.
The same improvement in iron technology that allowed the equipping of armored knights led to more iron tools: axes allowed famers to clear forests and cultivate more land, and the iron share of a heavy plow allowed farmers to plow deeper into the thick soil of Western Europe. In addition, farmers gradually moved to a so-called three field system of agriculture: fields would have one third given over to cereal crops, one third to crops such as legumes which increase fertility in soil , and a third left fallow, i.
More iron tools and new agricultural techniques caused yields to rise from to nearly and in some fertile regions even higher. As a result of both climate and new agricultural tools and techniques, food supplies increased so that Western Europe would go through the majority of the twelfth century without experiencing a major famine.
We should note that at the same time that agricultural yields were rising in Europe, so too were they on the rise in Song China. A Heavy Plow. Author: Unknown. King Otto I of East Francia had defeated the Magyars in , and both Otto and his powerful nobles further subordinated the Slavic peoples to the east to his rule, forcing them either to submit to his direct rule or acknowledge him as their overlord.
He followed up on the prestige gained from his victory over the Magyars by exercising influence in Northern Italy, intervening in a dispute between Pope John XII r. Further, Otto deposed Berengar and added Italy to his domains. Europe and the Mediterranean in CE. Otto was the most powerful ruler in Europe besides the Byzantine emperor. His empire covered most of the German-speaking lands of Central Europe: indeed, Otto and its subsequent emperors would be Germans and the power base of this empire would be firmly Central European.
This empire also encompassed northern Italy and much of the territory west of the Rhine. The rulers of this empire would call themselves Roman Emperors and consider themselves the successors to Charlemagne and thus to the Roman Empire. Although its emperors would claim that all Christian kings owed them obedience, most other realms of Western Europe were independent, especially West Francia which we shall hereafter refer to as France. The reader should carefully note that these emperors did not use either of those titles.
They simply referred to themselves as Roman Emperors and their empire as the Roman Empire. We call the Empire the Holy Roman Empire and the emperors Holy Roman Emperors for the convenience of modern readers, so that they will know that they are reading about neither the Roman Empire, which dominated the entirety of the Mediterranean world in ancient times, nor the Byzantine Empire, which remained a regional power in the Eastern Mediterranean for most of the Middle Ages.
Anthropologists speak of secondary state formation, a process by which people who live in a tribe or chiefdom on the periphery of a state will gradually adopt statehood and the ideological trappings associated with statehood.
Oftentimes this state formation happens because a people will need to match the resources of a state for raising armed forces, or because a chief will seek the greater prestige and power that comes from being recognized as a king.
In the late tenth century, the Danes, the Poles a Slavic people , and the Magyars formed the kingdoms of Denmark, Poland, and Hungary, respectively. These kingdoms were often vassal states i. Another key factor in the move from chiefdoms to states was the adoption of Christianity: the Christian religion, as we have seen earlier, often legitimated a king.
We can see this relationship between Christianity and secondary state formation when King Stephen I of Hungary received his crown from the papacy in the year Far to the north, in Norway, a land of narrow fjords and valleys surrounded by pine-covered mountains, King Olaf II was following a similar set of policies.
A Christian who had converted in while fighting in France, he spent his reign as king of Norway � both consolidating Norway into a kingdom that recognized royal authority and converting that kingdom to Christianity. In Northern and Eastern Europe, secondary state formation had gone hand in hand with the adoption of Christianity, which legitimated kings and whose clergy, familiar with the written word, provided the skills of literacy to monarchs.
A similar pattern occurred elsewhere in the world, particularly in the African Sahel. In the Middle Ages, the people of Western Europe did not think of Europe as a geographic and cultural area.
Rather, they thought of Christendom , those peoples and nations of the world that embraced the Christian religion, as a community sharing common ideals and assumptions. We might compare it to the Muslim notion of Dar al-Islam.
And in the eleventh century, Christendom expanded. Not only had the peoples to the north and east embraced Christianity, but also Christian peoples and kingdoms in the Western Mediterranean expanded militarily at the expense of Islam. In Spain, the movement of the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain to expand their territory at the expense of Muslim al-Andalus would come to be known as the Reconquista , the reconquest.
It was known as the re -conquest because there had been a Christian kingdom in Spain in the sixth and seventh centuries that had fallen to Muslim invaders in Christians would thus have assumed that Spain, even though much of it might be Muslim ruled, was rightfully Christian. The effort by the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula to dominate, conquer, and re-Christianize al-Andalus would become a key element in how Spanish Christians understood their identity both as Christians and Spaniards.
How did the Reconquista begin? The result was nearly three decades of civil war. The Cordoba Caliphate collapsed in , fracturing into what we refer to as the taifa states, a set of small, politically weak states. These states were much weaker than the centralized Cordoba Caliphate and so were easy prey for potential conquerors from both the Christian north of the Iberian Peninsula and the Islamic Maghreb.
The Christian kingdoms of Spain had several strengths that enabled them to expand at the expense of the taifa states.
In the first place, the taifa states were not only politically weak, but they were also at odds with each other. In addition, the construction of stone castles in newly-conquered territories allow the Christian kings to secure their conquests.
Moreover, the Christian kingdoms of Spain could draw on much of the rest of Western Europe for manpower. This arrangement meant that Western Europe had many knights who, as younger sons, had not inherited from their fathers inheritance nearly always passed to males.
These landless knights were looking either for employment or fiefs of their own. New conquests along the frontier of Muslim Spain thus gave them the perfect opportunity to seize their own lands. As a result, French knights owed south in a steady stream across the Pyrenees. Twelfth-Century Spanish castle.
In Southern Italy, a group of knights from the region of France known as Normandy and who were thus called Normans had fought in the employ of the Byzantine emperors against the Muslim rulers of North Africa and Sicily. They eventually broke with the Byzantine Emperors and created the Kingdom of Sicily, a kingdom comprised of Sicily and Southern Italy, the lands that they had seized from both the Byzantines and Sicilian Muslims, with the last Muslim territory in Sicily conquered in These knights too had come south to the Mediterranean in search of new lands.
The Christian kingdoms of both Spain and Sicily were relatively tolerant of their Muslim subjects. Although Muslims under Christian rule faced civil disabilities similar to the dhimmi status of Jews and Christians in Muslim-ruled lands, they had a broad array of rights and protections.
Indeed, the Christian kings of Sicily often employed Muslim mercenaries in their military service. These victories by Christian forces over Muslims would be of great interest to the popes, who were seeking to reform the Church and to find ways that knights could be made to serve Christian society.
By the eleventh century, Europe suffered from frequent violence and the Church itself was in a sorry state: Pope John XII, for example, the man who had crowned Otto I, was so infamous for his immorality that it was said that under his rule the papal palace called the Lateran was little better than a brothel. From the mid-eleventh century, both popes and other clergymen would seek to reform both the institutional structures of the Church and Christian society as a whole.
In , he had traveled to Rome to be crowned emperor. When he arrived in the city, he found three men claiming to be pope, each supported by a family of Roman nobles.
The outraged emperor deposed all three and replaced them with his own candidate, Pope Leo IX r. Leo IX would usher in a period in which reformers dominated the papacy. These popes believed that to reform the Church, they would need to do so as its unquestioned leaders and that the institutional Church should be independent from control of laypeople. Such a position was in many ways revolutionary. In the Byzantine Empire, the emperors often directed the affairs of the Church although such attempts frequently went badly wrong as with the Iconoclast Controversy.
Western European kings appointed bishops, and the Holy Roman Emperors believed that they had the right to both appoint and depose popes. To claim the Church was independent of lay control went against centuries of practice. Moreover, not all churchmen recognized the absolute authority of the pope. The pope was one of five churchmen traditionally known as patriarchs , the highest ranking bishops of the Church.
The pope was the patriarch of Rome; the other four were the patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria.
The patriarchs of Constantinople believed that the Roman pope had a place of honor because Peter had resided in Rome, but they did not believe he had any authority over other patriarchs. This difference of opinion as to the authority of the pope would eventually break out in conflict. The church following the pope which we will refer to as the Catholic Church for the sake of convenience , had a creed in its liturgy that said that God the Holy Spirit proceeds both from God the Father and from God the Son.
Representatives of both churches quarreled over this wording, with the popes attempting to order the Orthodox Churches to state that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son in their creed. In response, the patriarch excommunicated the pope. Catholic and Orthodox churches were now split. In spite of the schism between Catholic and Orthodox Churches, the popes turned to reforming the Church in the Catholic west.
A bishop in medieval Europe was a Church leader, with a cathedral church and a palace. A medieval bishop would also hold lands with fiefs on these lands and military obligations from those who held these fiefs , just like any great noble.
The Holy Roman Emperors believed that they had the right to appoint bishops both because a bishop held lands from the emperor and because the emperors believed themselves to be the leaders of all Christendom. These popes believed that, since their authority as popes came from God, their spiritual authority was superior to the earthly authority of any king or prince.
They further claimed their right to be independent rulers of the Papal States in Central Italy, based on the Donation of Constantine. Pope Gregory VII. Emperor Henry IV. From , their relationship became increasingly adversarial as each claimed the exclusive right to appoint and depose bishops.
Eventually, this conflict burst into open flame when Henry claimed that Gregory was in fact not rightfully pope at all and attempted to appoint his own pope. Without the Church to legitimate Henry IV, his empire collapsed into civil war. As a result, Henry took a small band of followers and, in the dead of winter, crossed the Alps, braving the snowy, ice-covered passes to negotiate with the pope in person. Finally, Pope Gregory forgave the emperor.
In the end, though, after a public ceremony of reconciliation, Henry returned to Central Europe, crushed the rebellion, and then returned to Italy with an army, forcing Gregory VII into exile.
This Investiture Controversy would drag on for another four decades. In the end, the Holy Roman Emperors and popes would reach a compromise with the Concordat of Worms. The compromise was that clergy would choose bishops, but that the emperor could decide disputed elections. A bishop would receive his lands from the emperor in one ceremony, and the emblems of his spiritual authority from the pope in another. Other kings of Western Europe reached similar compromises with the papacy. The results of half a century of papal reform efforts were mixed.
The Catholic and Orthodox Churches had split with one another, and tensions remain between the two to this day. Although the popes failed to achieve everything they sought, they did gain limited independence of the Church, and they succeeded almost completely in ending the practice of simony. Indeed, one contrast between Western Europe and much of the rest of the world is a strong sense of separation between secular and sacred authority.
That separation of Church and state owes much to the troubled years of the Investiture Controversy. William defeated the English army, making himself the king of England: he was thus known as William the Conqueror.
This conquest of England by French-speakers moved the culture, language, and institutions of England closer to those of France. Although England looked more feudal, it nevertheless retained a centralized bureaucratic apparatus. William was able to use this bureaucracy to conduct a nationwide census, a feat of which no European state outside of the Byzantine Empire was capable.
Although England would suffer a civil war of nearly a decade and a half in the twelfth century, for the most part, its monarchs, particularly Henry I r. Author: Anonymous. France had entered the tenth and eleventh centuries as the most loosely-governed kingdom of Europe. In addition, after the Norman conquest of England in , the Norman kings of England were also dukes of large French territories.
Thus, for the first part of the twelfth century, much of France was under the effective control of the English crown. In spite of these challenges, the Capetian monarchs gradually built their kingdom into a functional state. They cultivated a reputation as defenders of Christianity in order to gain legitimacy from the Church. They also sought to enforce the feudal obligations that the powerful nobles owed to the crown, often calling on them to serve militarily so as to create a habit of obedience to the king.
In the early part of the twelfth century, power in the Holy Roman Empire decentralized in the same way that it had in tenth- and eleventh-century France, while the cities of northern Italy were increasingly governing themselves with little direct authority exercised by the Holy Roman Emperors. Northern Italy was a particularly vexing challenge. By the middle of the twelfth century, many of the cities of northern Italy had gradually moved from rule by an urban nobility or bishops to self-government by an elected commune, and these communes were often reluctant to acknowledge imperial authority, especially with respect to the taxes that Barbarossa believed were owed him.
Shortly after beginning his reign, Barbarossa sought to implement this authority. Barbarossa had a great deal of initial success, but eventually the city-states of Northern Italy united into an organization called the Lombard League, and this League allied with the popes, who lent their moral authority to the cause of the northern Italian city-states.
Indeed, part of the difficulties faced by Barbarossa was that any pope would be more likely to try to keep northern and central Italy as far from direct control of the Holy Roman Emperors as possible. Eventually, this coalition of the papacy and Lombard League inflicted a military defeat on Barbarossa at the Battle of Legnano, after which Barbarossa was forced to concede a great deal of self-rule within the Empire to the Italian city-states.
We call this renewal of intellectual activity the Twelfth-Century Renaissance in order to separate it from both the Carolingian Renaissance of the eighth and ninth centuries and the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Both monasteries and cathedrals were centers of education in Western Europe, even during the dark days of the tenth century. Over the eleventh century, thinkers in the monasteries of Western Europe had increasingly sought to apply the tools of logic in particular Aristotelian logic to the study of the Bible.
The twelfth century would see a massive shift, with an immense growth of interest in philosophy on the part of those men and a few women who had a formal education. The spur to this interest would come from events in Southwestern Europe.
Al-Andalus had been a major source of Muslim intellectual activity. Author: Jean-Christophe Benoist. When Toledo fell to Christian armies in , its libraries became available to the larger Christian world. Muslims had translated most of the philosophy of Aristotle into Arabic in addition to writing extensive original works that engaged with the thought of Aristotle and Plato.
Once these books were in Christian hands, Raymond, archbishop of Toledo r. People who spoke Arabic and the Romance languages of Spain would first translate these books into Spanish, and these books would then be translated into Latin, which would thus make Aristotle and Ptolemy as well as the works of Arabic philosophers available to educated people throughout Western Europe. The availability of texts that had been largely known only by reputation to the thinkers of Western Europe spurred an intellectual revolution, as the Christian thinkers sought to understand how to reconcile an understanding of the world based on Christianity with the approach of the non-Christian ancient Greeks.
Christendom thus had access to the writings of Muslim philosophers. This movement saw the translation not only of philosophy, but also of medicine�indeed, in the Muslim world, philosophers often served as physicians�so the medical works of philosophers and physicians such as Ibn Sina whose name Western Europeans pronounced as Avicenna were read avidly by Christians in Western Europe. Philosophy and medicine were not the only fields of study to receive new interest.
Western Europeans were also showing a renewed interest in law. Although the kingdoms that had grown up in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire had incorporated some elements of Roman Law as well as the oral law of the Germanic peoples into their legal systems, law codes were for the most part unsystematic. Starting from the eleventh century, scholars, particularly those based in the schools of Bologna, began subjecting The Justinian Code see Chapter Seven to intense study, using logical analysis to create a body of systematic writing on the interpretation of law.
These men who studied Roman Law would often go to work for kings and emperors, with the result that much European law would often draw its inspiration from Justinian.
Most schools were still attached to cathedral churches�indeed, these schools in which medicine, law, and philosophy flourished as disciplines of study might be compared to the madrassas of the Muslim world�so the chief eld of study in these schools was theology, that is, the interpretation of the Bible.
Eventually, many of these cathedral schools gained the right to organize as self-governing institutions. We call these institutions universities. By the end of the twelfth century, the universities of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford had become self-governing institutions and would serve as the foundation of the university system of the Western world that exists to the present day. The dispute was the same as that which had occupied his grandfather, Frederick Barbarossa.
Like his grandfather, he sought to create an empire that ruled both Italy and central Europe. And for the same reason that the popes had opposed Barbarossa, they, together with the cities of northern Italy, opposed Frederick II.
In the end, when Frederick died, the Holy Roman Empire collapsed as a unitary state. To the northeast, Christendom continued to expand. In the forests and bogs around the Baltic Sea, German-speaking crusaders as well as Danes conquered the heathen 3 peoples, converting them to Christianity and settling the territory with Germans and Danes. By the end of the thirteenth century, all of Europe except for Lithuania was Christian.
The kingdom of Lithuania would remain resolutely heathen and militarily resist German Crusaders until , at which time the Lithuanian kings finally converted to Christianity when their kingdom was combined with Poland. In thirteenth-century Spain, the most significant accomplishment of the Christian monarchs was that, on 16 July , at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, the combined armies of Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and Navarre met those of the Almohad Caliphate and won a victory so crushing that the power of the Almohads was forever broken.
Perhaps the most successful thirteenth-century monarchs were the Capetian kings of France. In the years between and , King Philip Augustus managed to dispossess the English king of almost all of his territory held in France. He was also increasingly successful in using a set of recognized laws to enhance his legitimacy. Likewise, he created a royal court that was a court of final appeal�and that meant that, even in parts of the kingdom where great lords exercised their own justice, the king had increasing authority.
In , Pope Innocent III had called a crusade against the semi-independent territories of southern France because of the presence there of a group of heretics known as the Cathars. In the resulting crusade called the Albigensian Crusade because much of the fighting happened around the town of Albi , crusaders from the north crushed the power of the great nobles of southern France. He continued the process of establishing the royal courts as supreme in the kingdom.
Author: Guillaume de Saint-Pathus Source:. Wikimedia Commons. One temporary treaty of this civil war, a treaty known as Magna Carta signed in , would have a much further-reaching impact than anyone who had drafted it could have foreseen. One particular provision of Magna Carta was that if the king wanted to raise new taxes on the people of England, then he needed to get the consent of the community of the realm by convening a council.
The convening of such councils, known as parliaments , would come to be systematized over the course of the thirteenth century, until, by the reign of Edward I r. Parliaments were not unique to England, however. As more and more works of ancient Greek and Muslim philosophy became available to Western European Christians, the question of how to understand the world acquired more urgency. The philosophers of the ancient Greek and Muslim worlds were known to have produced much useful knowledge.
But they had not been Christians. How, asked many thinkers, were Christians to understand the world: through divine revelation, as it appeared in the Bible, or through the human reason of philosophers? Indeed, this question was reminiscent of similar questions taking place in the Islamic world, when thinkers such as al-Ghazali questioned how useful the tools of logic and philosophy were in understanding the Quran.
Thomas Aquinas � Author: Benozzo Gozzoli. Thomas was a Dominican friar. Friars were those churchmen who, like monks, took vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience.
These friars, whose two major groups were the Franciscans and Dominicans, had schools in most major universities of Western Europe by the early thirteenth century. Aquinas, a philosopher in the Dominican school of the University of Paris, had argued that human reason and divine revelation were in perfect harmony. He did so based on the techniques of the disputed question. He would raise a point, raise its objection, then provide an answer, and this answer would always be based on a logical argument.
Aquinas was only part of a larger movement in the universities of Western Europe. We generally call the movement to reconcile Christian theology with human reason through the use of logic scholasticism. Aquinas and the scholastics can be compared to Zhu Xi and the neo-Confucians of Song China discussed later in this chapter.
Just as Zhu Xi had sought to integrate Confucian thought with Buddhist and Daoist philosophy, so also Aquinas sought to integrate both Aristotelian logic and Christian theology.
The period not only saw successes in the field of speculative philosophy and theology, but also in the practical application of science. Gothic cathedrals were well known for their use of pointed arches which may have been copied from Middle Eastern styles that allowed taller buildings and for stained-glass windows that admitted a dazzling array of light. Lincoln Cathedral in England, built in the Gothic style in the thirteenth century Note the pointed arches and the stained glass.
The seats in the church were added in modern times: medieval worshipers stood. Author: Andrew Reeves. Thirteenth-century Europe showed other developments in technology as well. In , Pierre of Harincourt first came to understand the principles of magnetic poles based on an analysis of the magnetic compass in use since the twelfth century. At the same time, between and , based on the pre-existing technology of lens-grinding much of which had come from the Muslim world , Western Europeans invented eyeglasses.
Water clocks had been known throughout the world since ancient times, but, in the years between and , Western Europeans invented the mechanical clock. Late medieval eyeglasses. Author: Conrad von Soest. In the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, Western Europeans gradually adapted the art of alchemy , the art of attempting to change one element into another, from the Muslim world.
Eventually, alchemists and natural philosophers who studied alchemy would find new techniques of refining and compounding chemicals, although their ultimate goal, the ability to turn base metals into gold, would never succeed.
They often lived in villages in one- or two-room houses with separate space for livestock. Only the richest of peasants�and some free peasants did prosper�could afford a bed. Most people slept in straw. The most furniture in a peasant household might be a table and stool. The peasant diet was mainly grain, both bread and porridge, and peasants got their protein from both legumes and eggs. The occasional meat came from chickens, those sheep that were too old for shearing, and sometimes pigs.
Beef was reserved for nobles. Nobles often lived in large rural houses. They were sometimes attached to castles, but many castles were unoccupied in times of peace. The noble diet was heavy in meat; indeed, nobles often suffered from gout, a painful swelling of the joints from too much meat in the diet. Meat dishes were lavishly cooked in spices, like cardamom, cinnamon, cumin, pepper, and saffron chilies were unknown in the Eastern Hemisphere in pre-modern times.
Peasant recreation might include ball games, wrestling, and, of course, drinking. The best quality wines were a luxury, with nobles throughout Europe drinking the wines of Italy and southern France. Peasants Keeping Pigs. Noble recreation included chess introduced from the Muslim world around the eleventh century , hunting usually forbidden to peasants , and the tournament , in which knights would form into teams and fight each other, sometimes with blunted weapons, but sometimes with regular weapons, relying on their armor to protect them.
Accidental fatalities in hunting and tournaments were common. Paris, whose streets King Philip Augustus had ordered paved and lined with ditches to carry away waste water, was the exception rather than the rule. Likewise, although London had a network of pipes to carry water from springs by , the inhabitants of most cities got water from wells, and these were often contaminated. Indeed, the disease from parasites and contaminated water meant that cities were population sinks , with more people dying than were born.
Their population increased largely because of people migrating from the countryside, since by the twelfth century, most towns of Western Europe recognized a runaway serf as legally free if he or she had resided within the walls of a town for a year and a day. Medieval Europe remained a patriarchal culture. The division of labor in peasant, middle- class, and noble households, however, meant that women played an active part in economic life.
Women peasants would often labor alongside men in the fields, and women often ran taverns. Likewise, among nobles, women usually managed the household and might direct the economic activity of the great agricultural estates. But women remained subordinate. Although they could be nuns, women could not be ordained as clergy. Legally, a woman was subordinate to her husband.
And even though nobles increasingly read love poetry that placed women in a position of honor and devotion and this poetry may originally have been modeled on the Arabic love poetry common in al-Andalus , this very devotion emphasized the woman as a prize to be sought after rather than as a partner. It dominated the Eastern Mediterranean, with its emperors reigning from Constantinople, a city full of magnificent churches, splendid palaces, and centuries-old monuments of an ancient empire.
The Eastern Mediterranean in CE. But these outward signs of strength concealed several weaknesses. In the first place, the theme system had begun to break down. The plots of land used to equip soldiers had gradually given way to large estates held by powerful aristocrats.
These powerful aristocrats often paid less and less in taxes, starving the state of key resources. The theme soldiers themselves were used less often and when they did fight, they were often poorly trained and equipped , with the emperors relying on mercenaries for most of their fighting. The civilian aristocracy and the military were often at loggerheads. The Byzantine emperors of the later eleventh century were nevertheless able to hold their own against external threats until the arrival of the Saljuq Turks in the Middle East see Chapters Eight and Eleven.
Both the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV r. Control of this route was especially important as the steppes served as a source from which the Turks in the Middle East could recruit more fighters. Byzantine and Turk finally clashed. Romanos sought to break the Turkish threat on his eastern flank and so mustered an immense army. This army consisted both of soldiers of the themes and mercenary units drawn from many different peoples: Western Europeans, Cumans and Pechenegs from the steppes, Scandinavians, and Turks.
The Byzantine field army was annihilated. The emperor himself was surrounded and taken captive after his elite guard of Norse mercenaries went down fighting in his defense. The result was a catastrophe for the Empire. Alexios Komnenos. Eventually, Alexios Komnenos r. Alexios was an able and clever military commander who also possessed good long-term sense. These indigenous soldiers were often granted out blocks of lands known as pronoiai singular pronoia whose revenues they would use to equip themselves and their soldiers; a pronoia was similar to a fief in Western Europe.
He also recruited steppe peoples, such as the Cumans and Pechenegs, into his forces. Another group of peoples from which he recruited mercenaries was Western Europeans, particularly from the Holy Roman Empire and West Francia. In March of , he sent a request to the pope for military assistance.
The long-term consequences of this request would be earth-shaking. Churchmen seeking to reform society had looked to quell the violence that was often frequent in Western Europe especially in France : this violence was usually the work of knights. These reformers were considering how knights could turn their aggression to pursuits that were useful to Christian society rather than preying upon civilians. By the eleventh century, certain churchmen had further formulated this idea into one of Holy War , that is to say, that a war fought in defense of the Church was not only morally right, but even meritorious.
The city of Jerusalem was where Jesus Christ was said to have been crucified, to have died, and to have risen from the dead see Chapter Six. The city remained important to Christians, however, and, even while it was under Muslim rule, they had traveled to it as pilgrims , that is, travelers undertaking a journey for religious purposes.
Pope Urban thus conceived of the idea of turning the military force of Western Europe to both shore up the strength of the flagging Byzantine Empire a Christian state , and return Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to Christian rule after four centuries of Muslim domination. On 27 November , he gathered several of the major nobles of Western Europe as well as many lower-ranked knights to an open-air sermon at Clermont, where he was presiding over a Church council. In this sermon, he proclaimed that it was the duty of these warrior aristocrats, as Christians, to defend the Byzantine Empire and to put the city of Jerusalem under Christian rule.
This movement of the knights of most of Western Europe to fight against Muslims in the Middle East is generally known as the first of a series of Crusades. A crusade was a war declared by the papacy against those perceived to be enemies of the Christian faith usually, but not always, Muslims. Participating in a crusade would grant a Christian forgiveness of sins. We ought to note that such a concept in many ways superficially resembled the Muslim notion of the Lesser Jihad.
As these forces mustered and marched south and east, the religious enthusiasm accompanying them often spilled out into aggression against non-Christians other than Muslims. One group of Crusaders in the area around the Rhine engaged in a series of massacres of Jewish civilians, traveling from city to city while killing Jews and looting their possessions before this armed gang was forced to disperse. The Crusaders traveled in two main waves. The first traveled to the Byzantine Empire, and was ferried across the Bosporus but was wiped out by a Turkish army.
The second wave, however, was better planned and coordinated, and, upon its arrival in the Byzantine Empire, reached an uneasy truce with the Alexios Komnenos who had been expecting a modest force of mercenaries and not the armed might of most of Western Europe. The Crusaders were fortunate. When the Crusaders marched east in , they encountered not a uni ed Great Saljuq Empire, but a collection of independent and semi-independent sultans and emirs.
The Crusaders moved east, winning a string of victories in Asia Minor: when they could not be outmaneuvered, the armored knights of Western Europe often stood at an advantage against the lightly armored or unarmored mounted archers that mostly made up the bulk of Turkish forces.
Following the path of the crusading army, Alexios was able to restore much of western Asia Minor to the control of the Byzantine Empire, although the central Anatolian plateau would remain under the dominion of the Saljuq Turks.
The Crusaders advanced on Antioch, the largest and most prosperous city of the Levant, and, after a siege of nearly a year, both seized control of the city and defeated a Turkish army that attempted to relieve it. Venice and Genoa, meanwhile, transported supplies to the Crusaders by sea. The Crusaders rejected Fatimid overtures for a negotiated settlement and, in June of , arrived outside the walls of Jerusalem.
We must note that there was nothing particularly unique about this massacre. The custom among most pre-modern peoples was that if a city resisted an attacking army, then it would be subject to sack and massacre of its population were it to fall.
After the fall of Jerusalem, the Crusaders established four states in the Levant: the County of Edessa, in northern Mesopotamia, the Principality of Antioch, centered on the city of Antioch and its environs; the County of Tripoli, in what is roughly Lebanon today; and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which occupied Palestine and whose capital was the city of Jerusalem. These states were ruled by men and often women who were Catholic in religion and ethnically Western European.
The religion and institutions of these Crusader States were nearly the same as those of Western Europe. These states attracted some settlers, in both their warrior aristocracy and even merchants and peasants. But many of the subjects of the Christian rulers of these kingdoms were Muslims or Christian Arabs, who had special privileges over their Muslim counterparts, but fewer rights than Catholic, ethnically Western European Christians.
Indeed, the Crusader States would consistently suffer from a lack of manpower: although the pope had spoken of rich lands for the taking in Palestine, most of the knights who had gone on the First Crusade and survived returned to Western Europe. The Crusader States relied on extensive networks of heavily fortified stone castles for defense.
They were fortunate that the Middle East was politically fragmented and Fatimid Egypt was weak. Whether these states would be sustainable in the face of stronger Muslim powers remained to be seen.
The County of Edessa would fall to Muslim forces in , which brought about the disastrous Second Crusade , in which European kings led a failed effort to recapture Edessa. The broader Muslim counterattack to the Crusaders eventually came under the direction of Salah al-Din Saladin d. Salah al-Din set off in his twenties to fight battles for his uncle, Shirkuh, a Zengid general. His uncle dying soon thereafter, Salah al-Din eventually became the vizier, or senior minister, to Nur al-Din in Then Nur al-Din died in Damascus in , leaving no clear successor.
In the absence of a formal heir to Nur al-Din, Salah al-Din established the Ayyubid Dynasty � , named after his father, Ayyub, a provincial governor for the Zengid Dynasty, a family of Oghuz Turks who served as vassals of the Seljuq Empire.
Once in power, Salah al-Din established a Sunni government and insisted that the mosque of al-Azhar preach his brand of Islam. He used the concept of jihad to unify the Middle East under the banner of Islam in order to defeat the Christians, but he did not principally direct jihad towards them. It was as champions of Sunni Islam that they purposely recruited leading Muslim scholars from abroad, ultimately culminating in Egypt becoming the preeminent state in the Islamic world.
Initially, Salah al-Din displayed no particular interest in the Crusader states. But the Crusaders ultimately brokered an armistice with Salah al-Din. Eventually, Raynald broke their truce when he started attacking Muslim pilgrims and trade caravans in the s. Ensuing skirmishes between the forces of Salah al-Din and Guy de Lusignan, the new King of Jerusalem, presaged a forthcoming battle.
In , the two sides met near Tiberias, in modern day Israel. Salah al-Din intentionally attacked the fortress of Tiberius in order to lure the Crusaders away from their well-watered stronghold. His plan worked, and the Christians quickly ran out of water. On the night before the battle, Salah al-Din set brush res to exacerbate their thirst. Salah al-Din bottlenecked the Crusader forces, with the double hill of Hattin acting as a choke point. Map of the Battle of Hattin. The Battle of Hattin represented a smashing victory for Salah al-Din and a major loss for the Crusaders.
Tradition dictated that Salah al-Din hold most of the leaders for ransom. Unlike the Crusaders, he treated the defenders of cities with understanding. He showed tolerance of minorities, and even established a committee to partition Jerusalem amongst all the interested religious groups.
In this way, he proved his moral superiority to the Crusaders. The result shocked the Christian world, and Pope Gregory VIII quickly issued the bull that is, an official papal pronouncement Audita tremendi , which called on the Christian world to retake Jerusalem.
As usual, the Christians of Iberia took little part in crusades in the Levant, as their efforts focused on the Reconquista. Europe and the Mediterranean in the Third Crusade. Although Frederick Barbarossa died en route he drowned in a stream in the mountains of Anatolia , both Richard I and Philip Augustus eventually arrived in the Levant by sea.
Although Philip soon returned to France, King Richard battled Saladin over the course of two years, to results that were mostly inconclusive.
The crusading army seized most of the castles and cities on the coast, and these became the center for a restored, but smaller Kingdom of Jerusalem, but the Crusaders ultimately failed to take Jerusalem itself. The Crusade finally ended in a truce in which both parties ratified this state of a airs, with Christian pilgrims allowed to visit the city of Jerusalem, even though it remained under Muslim rule. In the year of his election, he issued a call to crusade that ended up as a disaster.
Between and , the Byzantine Empire had drastically weakened. After the death of Manuel Komnenos with his heir still a child, the Empire faced a string of catastrophes.
The child-emperor was murdered, his successor was eventually overthrown, and the next emperor after that was likewise overthrown. In addition, the chain of emperors, regents, and usurpers reigning between and had allowed the Byzantine navy to gradually disintegrate.
When these crusaders proved unable to pay, the Venetian government requested their military assistance. The son of the deposed emperor whose eyes had been gouged out approached the crusaders and Venetians.
He offered the crusaders military and financial assistance and for Venice to gain trading privileges in the Empire if crusaders and Venetians would help him regain his throne. The end result was that, in , after a series of misadventures, a crusader army stormed the walls of Constantinople and put the city to a brutal sack; then, the crusaders parceled out much of the territory of the Byzantine Empire amongst themselves.
The most advantageous ports went to Venice, which would use them as the basis of a Mediterranean trading empire that would endure for centuries. The Crusades, which had begun as a result of an appeal for help by the Byzantine Empire, ultimately resulted in its destruction. Although the Byzantine Empire had been broken up, three states survived that claimed to be legitimate heirs to the Byzantine State. One was established in Western Anatolia with its capital in Nicaea, another, in Epirus, in what is today the country of Albania, while the third was based on the city of Trebizond, on the northern coast of Anatolia.
The Nicene Empire would eventually retake Constantinople in , although the restored state would never be the regional power that the Empire had once been.
After the Third Crusade, the re-established Crusader States managed to survive and even expand in power for the next several decades.
The Crusader States in CE. In the s, however, forces far from the Levant brought down the Kingdom of Jerusalem. As the Mongols gradually conquered Central Asia as will be discussed later in the chapter , the Khwarazmian Turks were driven from their realm in the steppes into Syria and northern Iraq.
Jerusalem fell under Muslim rule, under which it would remain until While it had contingents from other Western European kingdoms, this effort was primarily an effort of the French crown. Although King Louis IX was able to manage the impressive logistical feat of organizing and equipping an army that seized the northern Egyptian port of Damietta, the effort to take all of Egypt was ultimately unsuccessful.
Over the course of , the French army was surrounded in the swamps of the Nile Delta outside of Cairo and forced to surrender, with Louis himself captured. Although Popes would still call crusades for military efforts against Muslim forces and indeed, still make calls to retake the city of Jerusalem , crusading had failed.
In the end, the Crusades failed, and their greatest long-term impacts were the destruction of the Byzantine Empire and the growth of the sea power of Genoa and Venice, whose ships and sailors had transported people and supplies between Europe and the Crusader States.
The history of ancient India concludes with the decline of the Gupta Empire. The next major period, which lasts for roughly seven centuries c. During these centuries, kingdoms in both the north and south proliferated and regularly turned over. Therefore, at any one time, India was fragmented by numerous regional kingdoms. As the rulers of these warred and formed alliances, they employed the system of paramountcy and subordination begun during the Gupta era, with some rulers being overlords and others vassals.
Also, successful rulers demonstrated their power by granting land to officers, Brahmins, and temples. The outcome was a political pattern labeled Indian feudalism. These rulers also demonstrated their power�and enhanced it�by patronizing Hindu institutions and developing local traditions in the regions where their courts resided. They adopted titles showing their devotion to the great Hindu deities, declared their intent to uphold dharma, built fabulous Hindu temples in urban centers, and charged Brahmins with attending to them and serving at their courts.
One outstanding example of a feudal kingdom is the Chola Kingdom of southern India. Lastly, at the end of this age, a new force appeared on the Indian scene. Feudalism is a term historians first used to describe the political, social, and economic system of the European Middle Ages. That system was the world of lords, vassal knights, and serfs characteristic of Europe from the tenth to thirteenth centuries.
In exchange for homage and military service, vassals received land from their lords. These lands became their manors, and serfs worked them.
The lords and their vassals constituted a privileged nobility, while the serfs lived in a state of servitude. Historians also use feudalism to describe India during the early medieval age. But the usefulness of this term is much debated, because conditions on the ground varied from place to place, not only in Europe but also in India. Therefore, historians now only use the term in a general sense while also describing specific variations. In general, feudalism designates a political and economic scene characterized by fragmented authority, a set of obligations between lords and vassals, and grants of land including those who work it by rulers in exchange for some kind of service.
Authority on the early medieval Indian subcontinent was indeed fragmented, not only by the many regional kingdoms that existed at any one time but also, more importantly, within kingdoms. Because kingdoms incessantly warred with one another, their boundaries were fluid. Rulers usually closely administered a core area near the capital with a civil administration, while granting feudatories on the periphery.
Having defeated the ruling lineage of a powerful neighboring state�such as a king, prince, or chief, victorious kings might allow them to retain noble titles and their lands, on the condition that they demonstrate allegiance to him and even supply tribute and military service.
Additionally, aside from granting these feudatories, medieval rulers also issued land grants to important persons and institutions in their realms, such as Brahmins, high officials, or temples. As opposed to receiving a cash salary, these recipients were permitted to retain revenue from villages on this land, as well as to exercise some level of judicial authority.
So rulers often generously gifted land to them or to the magnificent temple complexes rulers built. Medieval India, then, consisted of a multitude of kingdoms, each of which governed a part of their realms through feudal arrangements, by granting feudatories and issuing land grants to nobility or prestigious religious and political leaders, in exchange for allegiance and assisting the ruler in demonstrating his being worthy of his sacred role.
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