World History Volume Digital Research and Knowledge Share

AFTER THE BREAKUP OF CHARLEMAGNE’S Empire, France, the western half of the empire, was ruled by a series of weak kings. They were so weak that they were known as the “do-nothing kings,” and indeed, they could do nothing to stop their powerful and greedy nobles from fighting among themselves. Finally the Carolingian line came to an end and the Franks, as the French were then called, elected a new king. He was Hugh Capet, a relative of the famous Count Odo who had directed the defense of Paris against the Vikings. With Hugh began the line of Capetian kings who were to rule France for many generations. The king actually held several positions. He was the sovereign of a vaguely defined nation called France; at the same time he was the feudal lord of his own lands and overlord, of Suzerain, of all other French lords. He was supposed to be defender of the realm, protector of the poor and champion of justice, but he was actually little more than a figurehead, for he had neither soldiers nor money enough to enforce his authority. Like the German monarchs, the Capetian kings faced the problem of winning control of the powerful lords. Also like the Germans, they took the first step by establishing good relations with the Church. In their coronation oath, the French kings swore to defend the Church. In return, for hundreds of years, the Church supported the monarchy against the feudal lords. The hereditary fief of the French kings was the Ile de France, a small, compact area surrounding Paris and it was infested by lawless vassals who terrorized the roads leading to the city. King Louis VI waged war against them. The French nicknamed him Louis the Fat, but his enormous size did not harm his …

THE WINTER of 1077 was one of the coldest on record in Italy. Ice and snow choked the mountain passages in the north and snowdrifts were piled high well into the south — as far south as the castle of Canossa, which was southeast of Parma. The fortified castle belonged to the countess of Tuscany and here Pope Gregory VII had taken refuge, fearing an attack by his enemies. On January 25, a man stood outside the Castle gate, barefoot in spite of the snow and cold. He was no ordinary penitent come to ask forgiveness of the pope. He was Henry IV of Germany, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. He had made a long and perilous journey with his wife, his young son and a few followers. For three days the emperor waited for the pope to pardon him and lift the ban of excommunication. Excommunication was banishment from the Church and was the most terrible punishment that could be given to a believer of the Middle Ages. Excommunication meant that he was deprived of all the privileges of a Christian. He could not attend church services, he was denied the sacraments, he could not be buried in consecrated ground. In excommunicating Henry, Pope Gregory hoped to force him to acknowledge the pope’s authority to appoint his own bishops. Henry knew that until the ban of excommunication was lifted his nobles would not accept him as king; he had little choice but to humiliate himself. Pope Gregory, for his part, knew that Henry would be a dangerous opponent once he was restored to the throne, but Gregory, too, had little choice; it was his Christian duty to take back into the Church anyone who begged so humbly for forgiveness. As Gregory later wrote, Henry “came in person to …

COUNT LEON, lord of the vast domain of Grandpré, stirred and waved away his servants. As he opened his eyes, the first rays of the sun were slanting through the narrow windows of his bedchamber. He stared sleepily at the tapestry hanging on the thick stone wall. It depicted a stag hunt and he enjoyed looking at it, for there were few things in the world he loved more than hunting. For a few minutes he lay there, listening to the sounds drifting up from the courtyard –the clop of horses’ hoofs‚ the creak of leather, the clatter of boots on cobblestones. The castle was coming awake. Some of the count’s people would be going to the fields that lay beyond the castle walls and the moat. As far as the eye could see, the land belonged to Count Leon. Although this castle was his principal residence, he had other holdings as well — manors and manor houses, farmlands and forests. It did not occur to the count to feel grateful for his wealth and position and power. After all, they were his right; he had inherited them from his father, who had in turn inherited them from his father, who had been granted the land as a fief by the king. Getting up from his massive bed, Count Leon began to dress, not bothering to call his servants to attend him. He put on a short shirt over the white linen undergarments he wore even when he slept. He pulled long hose up over his legs, then slipped a tunic over his head and belted it at the waist. Finally, he thrust his feet into soft boots, combed his shoulder-length hair with his fingers and went out the door. The count’s clothes were little different from those worn by …

“. . FROM THE FURY OF THE NORTHMEN, Good Lord, deliver us.” Until recent times, this line was included in the prayer book used by the Church of England. The raids of the Norse Vikings on Britain were so terrible that the victims never forgot them. For generations the memory of the savage Norsemen was kept alive and Englishmen repeated this prayer for more than a thousand years. It was not only Britain that felt the fury of the Norsemen; they raided the European continent as well. The Norsemen’s ships themselves seemed to threaten terror. The hull of a Viking ship was long and narrow, bristling with sweeping oars and studded with round, brightly painted shields. The square sail was painted with coloured stripes and the towering bow was carved into a dragon’s head. When the ships reached shore, their threat of terror proved to be no empty one. A swarm of blond, heavily bearded warriors leaped from the decks and stormed inland, looting, burning, killing. A French chronicler, writing of the Viking invasions, said, “They destroyed houses and razed monasteries and churches to the ground and brought to their death the servants of our holy religion by famine and sword, or sold them beyond the sea. They killed the dwellers in the land and none could resist them. . . . The Northmen ceased not to take Christian people captive and to kill them and to destroy churches and houses and burn villages. Through the streets lay bodies of the clergy, of laymen, nobles and others, of women, children and suckling babes. There was no road nor place where the dead did not lie; and all who saw Christian people slaughtered were filled with sorrow and despair.” The Norsemen, or Northmen, came from the Scandinavian lands which would later …

IT WAS COLD INSIDE the great cathedral of St. Peter in Rome on Christmas day, in the year 800. The breath of the closely packed worshipers rose like steam. Although their heads were bowed in prayer, many of the worshipers stole a quick glance at the man kneeling near the high altar. He was tall and heavy, with fair hair and a flowing mustache; he was dressed in a simple tunic and a fur-trimmed cloak. When the devotions came to an end, the tall man started to rise. At that moment, Pope Leo III, Splendid in his gold-encrusted vestments, stepped forward quickly. Placing a gold Crown on the tall man’s head, the pope said in a loud voice, “To Charles Augustus, crowned of God, great and pacific emperor of the Romans — life and victory!” The crowd in the cathedral cheered‚ just as Roman crowds had cheered so many times in the past at the coronations of the Caesars. The new emperor was no Caesar; in fact, he was not even a Roman. He was a German and the king of the Franks. His name was Charles and at the time of his coronation he was called Charlemagne, which meant “Charles the Great” in French. Charlemagne was born in the year 742, the eldest son of Pepin the Short and the grandson of Charles Martel. In 752, when Charlemagne was ten years old, his father became king of the Franks. Charlemagne and his younger brother, Carloman, were proclaimed King Pepin’s rightful heirs and after Pepin died in 768, his realm was divided between them. Carloman died three years later and Charlemagne was sole ruler of the Franks. He immediately began the first of the many wars that marked his reign. Altogether, he conducted fifty-four campaigns — against the Lombards, the …

THE FIRST SIGN of the approaching Roman army was a thin column of dust. It rose like smoke from behind the jagged Thracian hills of Northern Greece, which sheltered the Visigoths’ encampment. Moments later, the Visigoths, or German barbarians, as the Romans called them, could feel the ground tremble with the tread of the imperial legions. The Romans were advancing, forty thousand strong, under the personal command of the Emperor Valens. Within the Visigoths’ barricade of wagons, all was confusion. Chieftains bellowed, calling their clans together. Sturdy Visigothic warriors dragged the wagons closer together in a protective circle. Horses neighed and whinnied as their riders leaped astride them; swords were unsheathed and lances brandished. A courier spurred away from camp to summon the main body of Visigothic cavalry, foraging at some distance. It was A.D. 378 and the battle of Adrianople was about to begin. Trumpets blared and the close-packed Romans marched straight toward the barbarian enemy. Suddenly, there was a thunder of hooves on the left. A great swarm of Visigothic horsemen, summoned from their foraging expedition, galloped over the hillside. They swooped down on the Romans, as an eyewitness described it, “like a thunderbolt which strikes on a mountain top and dashes away all that stands in its path.” More horsemen poured in from the right and the front, pressing the tightly massed Romans into a death trap. The men of the legions could scarcely raise their arms to strike a blow. Again and again the horsemen charged, brandishing lance and sword. When night fell, forty thousand Roman soldiers lay dead upon the field, together with the grand master of the infantry and cavalry, the count of the palace, thirty-five commanders of horse and foot corps and the Emperor Valens himself. This great defeat was to mark the …

Go-Daigo had found refuge in a place in the mountains called Yoshino. Japan now had two emperors, one in Kyoto and the other in Yoshino. Takauji set out to simplify matters. As a first step, he had his puppet, the Kyoto emperor, appoint him shogun. In this way, Takauji became the founder of a new line of shoguns who were called, after their family name, the Ashikaga shoguns. Their shogunate lasted from 1336 to 1573, nearly twice as long as the Kamakura shogunate. Takauji and his successors did not rule anywhere near as firmly as Yorimoto and the Hojo family. They never controlled all of Japan or even much of it. Most of the time, they could not even keep order in the areas they supposedly did control. The Ashikaga shogunate went through three stages. The first stage, from 1136 to 1392, was marked by constant fighting between supporters of the rival emperors. It ended when the shogun lured the Yoshino emperor to Kyoto by promising to let his branch of the imperial family take turns with the other branch on the throne. The Ashikagas broke their promise, for no descendant of Go-Daigo ever became emperor. At least Japan had only one emperor. The middle stage of the shogunate, from 1392 to 1467, was the only time when the Ashikagas really seemed to rule. The last stage, from 1467 to 1573, was disastrous for the family. It began with a ruinous war between two groups of power-hungry warlords. In the fighting, Kyoto was devastated and the shogunate was finished as a force in government. The shoguns hung on to their post for another century, mainly because no one bothered to take it from them. When the last Ashikaga shogun was stripped of his title in 1573, the shogun had become …

BY THE middle of the twelfth century, Kyoto was no longer the real center of power in Japan. The old forms of government were kept unchanged. The emperor was still, supposedly, the source of all authority. The aristocrats wanted to enjoy the excitement of the Fujiwara court and they left their poorer relatives at home to manage their estates. The young men who were given this responsibility did not mind. Indeed, they welcomed it, for it was their only chance to get rich. So the Japanese aristocracy was divided between great nobles at the court and lesser nobles in the country. While the great nobles led lives of pleasure, the lesser nobles led a more useful existence. At the court, what mattered was to wear the right clothes, to talk wittily and to invent clever verses. In the country, the main thing was to get as much rice as possible out of the land. To do this, the estate managers had to win the loyalty of their farmers. Thus loyalty came to be the most honored of all virtues in rural Japan. Next to loyalty came bravery, for the estate managers often tried to add to their holdings by making war on their neighbours and their success depended on how bravely their men fought. The most important fighters wore armour and rode on horseback. They were much like the knights who were fighting in far-off Europe at that time. Japanese knights used bows and arrows  and swords. Each knight was attended by a few followers on foot. He was called a samurai. To the refined ladies and gentlemen of the court, the battles which raged in the countryside throughout the Fujiwara Period seemed too brutal and too far away for them to take any notice. They were in for a …

BETWEEN THE ninth and twelfth centuries, Japan developed at a slower pace. It was as if the people knew that they needed time to digest what they had learned. After 838, the government sent no more official missions to China. The Japanese continued to value Chinese civilization as highly as ever, but they went about things in their own way. Slowly, Japan became thoroughly Japanese. Prince Shotoku’s dream of a strong central government had come true. In time, however, the same evils that plagued Chinese dynasties in their later stages began to plague Japan. Thanks to their high positions at court, the noble landowners did not have to pay taxes. As a result, they grew richer and were able to buy more land. Although more Japanese land was being farmed all the time, less and less of it could be taxed. The government’s income fell while its expenses rose. Naturally, the government tried to make the landowners pay taxes. This move was bound to fail, for the officials who were supposed to carry out the order were the very men who profited most from not having to pay taxes. It was like asking them to pick their own pockets. Failing in this attempt, the government raised the taxes of landowning peasants instead. To escape paying these taxes, some peasants put themselves under the protection of the nearest great landowners, while the more adventurous headed north for the thinly settled Ainu country of North Honshu. Either way, their taxes were lost to the government, which became weaker and weaker. In China, a foreign invader or a rebel leader would have overthrown the sickly government and made himself ruler. In Japan, nothing of the sort happened. For one thing, there was no enemy at Japan’s borders, only miles and miles of empty …

PRINCE SHOTOKU was pleased to see his fellow aristocrats take to his chosen faith so enthusiastically. He wanted them to adopt other ways of living from China, too. Having seen how the Sui emperors had reunified China after three and a half centuries of disorder, he was particularly eager for Japan to copy their strong central government. In 603 and 604, Shotoku adopted the Chinese calendar, issued a constitution and set up a new civil service system. In the constitution, he left no room for doubt as to the emperor’s supreme position. “A country does not have two lords,” he wrote, “and the people do not have two masters.” His civil service plan, or “court rank system,” was revolutionary. It did away with the government posts held by noblemen who had inherited them from their fathers. In their place it set up twelve ranks of officials to be appointed by the emperor from among the most worthy noblemen he could find. Each rank was named after one of the virtues which Confucius had praised: harmony, sincerity, diligence, and so on. To make his countrymen thoroughly familiar with Chinese ways, the prince sent missions to the Sui court in 607, 608 and 614. The first group carried a message from “the Son of Heaven in the the land where the sun rises” to “the Son of Heaven in the land where the sun sets.” The next group bore greetings from “the Emperor of the East” to “the Emperor of the West.” Such language struck the Sui emperors as highly impudent, coming from a race of “dwarfs.” Their successors, the T’ang emperors, felt the same way, but the Japanese kept sending missions. Although Prince Shotoku died in 622, thirteen more missions went to China between 630 and 838. Most of the missions …