Tag: rulership

The princes of [the late Medieval Period] were not territorial in the sense of having a fixed settlement and identification with that locality and its people; that would come later. At this time, the sense of their subjects was too local to be national; and the princes’ sense of themselves and their property was determined by inheritance and to a much lesser extent by solidarity with a particular land or its inhabitants. They were not the monarchs of nations. The Henry V who fought at Agincourt to recover his property on the continent is unlikely to have spoken the sentiments of a nationalist, Renaissance author like Shakespeare in exhorting his men. For Harry, yes; but not necessarily for England and St. George. Nor were these princes of states; rather they governed realms, each with a rudimentary administrative apparatus that was impermanent and fixed only to the person of the prince….

— The Shield of Achilles, p. 78

The problems of the Assyrian kings were really insuperable. They had not only to contend with a writhing mass of subject peoples, ready to revolt at the slightest provocation and always under pressure from states outside the Assyrian empire to defect, but also the kings had to cope with their own bureaucracy where confusion reigned supreme. Every little bureaucrat had his own axe to grind, to curry favor with the king, to put down his rivals, and to do in a half-hearted way the job that his office demanded. In Assyria it was not like the situation in Egypt where centuries of organization had provided a complete job description for each office, and where the kings were dealing with a much more uniform population, well disciplined in its duties.

But all this, as we shall see, was not the sum total of the difficulties. The king must somehow cope with unseen forces, control demons that were ever present, fend off evil portents, and try to keep things on an even keel. It was really too much, and the miracle of it all was that the empire lasted as long as it did.

— People and Communities in the Western World, volume I, pp. 25-27

The feudal system of the Parthians had a Scythian as well as an Achaemenid background, and roughly resembled feudalism as developed in Europe during the “Dark Ages.” Society was headed by seven powerful clans. This upper stratum supported a petty aristocracy of varied socio-economic status who, together with their retainers, enjoyed status well above the peasants and serfs who were native Persians. Loyalty was strongest between the great clan leaders and their small vassals. The king, as a member of one of the clans, could usually command complete loyalty from his own clan and its vassals, less from other Parthians.

— Rome’s Enemies 3, p. 6

The medieval system [of Europe] had been a rights-based system. Each member of that society had a particular place that determined rights, obligations, and a well-defined role. It is a familiar but erroneous portrait of the medieval era that depicts its society as uniform and colorless. Rights-based systems can in fact yield enormous diversity, because though conformity may be enforced by law, it is not necessarily enforced by that most pitiless of masters, the individual ambition; thus such systems often encourage creativity, as the natural exuberance of individuals attempts to circumvent the rigidity of their assigned roles and the received wisdom. Yet these systems often strike us as irrational in practice because they do not attempt to match talent and performance with role….

In the medieval period, there had been a universal system of customary law, based on the rights of inheritance, charters, and grants. Customary law is the common law of practices. We are inclined today to think of common law as generated by courts, but this is really an abbreviation: common law is simply the customary law of the judiciary; it grows and is modified by the exercise of court practices. The medieval period was almost entirely ruled by a kind of common law, but the generating institutions of that law were seldom judicial courts….

Precisely because the inherited institutions were rights-based, they could not promote new arrangements that were violative of the customary methods. A prince alone could not rewrite the constitutional rules of his society’s governance to meet his own needs; that would require an institution that objectified the needs of the prince but was distinct from the prince himself[—the future princely state].

— The Shield of Achilles, pp. 87-88

Emphasis mine.

The Italians drew up the earliest dueling codes to protect and enforce honor; Flos duellatorum came out in 1410 [C.E.] and young gentlemen all over Europe studied its delicate ethical matters and the subtle new swordplay more suited to personal encounters than the slash-and-whack of battle. In 1550, Girolamo Muzio’s Il duello succeeded it and was even more popular. Italians opened fencing schools, attended by eager young gentlemen from all over, and sent fencing masters to the rest of Europe. By 1480, Germany had opened dueling schools called Fechtschulen that enjoyed the special protection of the emperor himself and established a tradition beloved by the military and university students well into the twentieth century—some say the twenty-first.

The notion of a gentleman defending his personal honor, the notion that obsessed the Western world for centuries and spilled many gallons of the bluest blood, now seems as remote as the urge to throw virgins down volcanoes. Nobody now cherishes his personal honor or inspects that of others. Short of indictable felonies, nobody cares. We wouldn’t know how to measure it; the concept has vanished. Military valor still lends some luster, though Vietnam cast a shadow on it, and large amounts of money command universal respect, but the word “honor” survives only in a few state documents yellowing under glass. Jefferson was fond of it.

Whatever honor was, only gentlemen had it. Only gentlemen needed to defend it, which made their lives more perilous than those of the lesser beings, who could shrug and laugh off an insult. If a lesser being sent a challenge to a gentleman, the gentleman also could shrug and laugh it off, or send some lackeys to beat the insolent fellow with cudgels.

“Gentleman” has today become a rather idle compliment rarely invoked. It even carries overtones of the sissy, quite the opposite of its old role. Now any upstart lad can spend a couple of days mastering gentlemanly requirements: use the accepted forms of address, hold the door open for a lady, remember to say “please” and “thank you” in social if not in business situations. Use your napkin, not the tablecloth. Don’t bully the waiter. Don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve. Once he’s learned the rules, he’s accepted as a gentleman with no questions asked, but in former times he’d be a scoundrel of the worst order. Aping his betters. Flying false colors.

Manners had nothing to do with it. You could be as rude, surly, and bad-tempered as you liked, beat your wife, rape your servants, strew illegitimate children far and wide, drink and gamble till the cows came home, and let your bills pile up for decades till your tailor and vintner starved, but you were always a gentleman because you were born one, and so was your son. It came down through your family by way of inherited estates and ancient medieval fiefdoms and service to your king. Its privileges were many; its responsibilities were bloody.

— Gentlemen’s Blood, pp. 24-26

Emphasis mine.

‘Warrior’ and ‘hero’ are synonyms, and the main theme of a warrior culture is constructed on two notes—prowess and honour. The one is the hero’s essential attribute, the other his essential aim. Every value, every judgement, every action, all skills and talents have the function of either defining honour or realizing it. Life itself may not stand in the way. The Homeric heroes loved life fiercely, as they did and felt everything with passion, and no less martyr-like characters could be imagined; but even life must surrender to honour. The two central figures of the Iliad, Achilles and Hector, were both fated to live short lives, and both knew it. They were heroes not because at the call of duty they marched proudly to their deaths, singing hymns to God and country—on the contrary, they railed openly against their doom, and Achilles, at least, did not complain less after he reached Hades—but because at the call of honour they obeyed the code of the hero without flinching and without questioning.

— The World of Odysseus, p. 113

Emphasis mine.

Strategic competition on the Italian peninsula provoked military innovation by Italian cities that were rich but weak. In the armies of the great powers, France, Aragon, and England, the number of soldiers raised by feudal levy was compounded with that raised by hiring mercenaries. Since the fourteenth century [C.E.], however, the Italian cities had relied entirely on privately organized professional armed forces. Single groups—the campagna di ventura—were recruited, supplied, and paid by their commanders, the condottieri, who sold their services to the highest bidder. The necessity for, and later the ambition of, the condottieri was a crucial element in the creation of the first modern states. For it was these mercenaries whose expensive services animated the need for the princely state, and whose ambitions then exploited the legitimating resources of that state, once the transfer of legal personality from the person of the prince to the princely state had occurred.

The condottiere was a contract employee. The word derives from the Italian for “contract,” condotta. The necessity to employ mercenaries became general on the peninsula once a few cities hired such forces because the shifting alliance structure of the region meant that no city could rely on the mercenaries of another. Once the superiority of the professionalized forces of the condottieri became clear, this innovation swept through all the cities of the peninsula as one after another mimicked the innovation lest it be engulfed by it. This necessity forced princes and oligarchs and ruling councils to rely more heavily on a bureaucratic apparatus, first to fund the condotte and later to provide for the acquisition of artillery. The condottieri themselves soon saw the advantage in turning their force on the authorities by whom they had been hired and supplanting them.

To rule the city he had seized, however, the usurping condottiere needed legitimacy. The condottieri took their contracts from a prince or oligarchy and hence from them alone derived the condottiere’s legal status. The princely state, however, once severed from the prince who brought it into being could provide a legal status for the condottiere apart from that of an employee of the prince or ruling council whom he had deposed. Thus this irony gave birth to the modern state and its unique problem, its problematic relation to the elusive status of legitimacy: only a State, however rudimentary, could provide the prince with the infrastructure necessary to maintain expensive mercenaries, but once this infrastructure was erected, it could also provide others with the means of exercising the power they had seized, and legitimate their doing so.

— The Shield of Achilles, pp. 81-82

The monarch was the supreme human being in Assyrian thought, since he was god’s anointed, but he was a mere mortal all the same, and this is in contrast again to Sumer and Babylonia where deification of the ruler was known. The Assyrians were, of course, aware of this southern phenomenon, and they flirted with the idea of the apotheosis of their own king, but it never achieved full official recognition in Assyria. It surfaces, nonetheless, in various forms. In the royal epithets there is sometimes ambiguity as to whether the king or the deity is described, and there were titles and adjectives (such as dandannu, ‘almighty’) which were applied only to god or monarch. The royal images (salmu), statues and reliefs of the king, are another case in point; in texts where these images are mentioned the word salmu is preceded by the divine determinative, and the personal name ‘The-Divine-Image-of-the-King-Has-Commanded’…is well attested. This last fact brings to mind the custom practised at Guzanu (Tell Halat) of concluding contracts before the images of gods including the ‘divine image of the king’. None of this evidence justifies a conclusion that official sanction was given to the worship of the Assyrian king or his images, but it does underline the fact that he was generally regarded as being on a plane closer to the gods than other mortals. In popular thought no doubt people went one step further and regarded the king as at least partially divine, and uneducated Assyrians probably believed that the offerings placed on a table before a royal image in a temple were offerings to the image itself rather than offerings to be presented by the king portrayed to the god.

— The Cambridge Ancient History, volume III, part 2, p. 195

The basis of the [Persian military and political] system [circa 500 B.C.E.] was the spirit, skill, and resourcefulness of the Persians. An important weapon was the bow, used effectively by both cavalry and infantry. Insofar as possible the Persians avoided close-quarters infantry combat until their foes had been thoroughly disorganized by swarms of foot archers from the front, and the daring onrushes of horse archers against flanks and rear. The Persians were versatile in adapting their methods of warfare to all conditions of terrain. They respected the shock action of the Lydian cavalry lancers, and incorporated this concept into their mounted tactics.

Subject peoples were required to render military service. The garrisons scattered throughout the empire were principally composed of unit from other regions…but always contained a Persian contingent. Imperial expeditionary forces were also multinational. The Persians received a surprisingly high standard of loyalty from these diverse peoples, due largely to their policies of leniency toward the conquered, and of carefully supervised but decentralized administration.

— The Encyclopedia of Military History, p. 22

We can dimly make out what seems to have been an agricultural revolution in al-Andalus during this period [circa 1000 C.E.]. An increase in productivity was made possible by more intense exploitation of the land. Irrigation, in particular, enlarged the growing season of the year—you can raise four vegetable crops a year on well-tended irrigated land in Mediterranean Spain—and eased dependence on unpredictables such as the weather. Higher and more stable incomes were the result, and with greater prosperity came greater confidence….

More varied crops did more than just diversify gastronomy. (Think of the bleakness of a world without lemons or spinach.) A better, more varied diet means a healthier population. Hard wheat, the main constituent of pasta, grows in drier conditions than soft (bread) wheat and stores for a prodigiously long time because of the low water content of the grain. Al-Razi (d. 955) tells us that around Toledo it would keep in store without decay for upwards of sixty years; it was transmitted in inheritance from father to son like other property. Crops such as this helped to stave off the threat of famine. Prosperity meant earlier marriage, larger families, diversification, opportunity, leisure.

— The Quest for El Cid, pp. 19-20

The Seljuk empire depended for its functioning on the granting of land, or the revenue that could be raised from that land, in return for annual tribute or military service to the Sultan. The fief, or iqta as it was called, was seen by the ruler as payment for services rendered and the grant was nothing like so absolute as in Western feudalism. The fiefs could be swapped around and all that mattered was that the changes should not be brought about in a way to cause anyone to lose face or, what amounted to much the same thing, money.

— Saladin In His Time, p. 28

Ashur was the king of gods, a reflection of the ancient beginnings of Assyria in the city-state of Ashur. He was the official god of the Assyrian nation, all of which belonged to him, and he appointed the Assyrian monarch as his vice-regent to rule on his behalf. The king attributed all his accomplishments, and especially his military victories, to the god Ashur, for not only his authority but his intelligence and resources were granted to him by divine favour. Ashur ruled the gods, mankind, and the universe as sovereign, lord, father, creator, sage, and warrior, these being the general categories into which his epithets fall. He was not a deity of the people at large and his presence was manifest only on state occasions and in official documents.

— The Cambridge Ancient History, volume III, part 2, p. 222

Emphasis mine.

In [the] provincial government [of the Ottoman Empire] no distinction was drawn between civil and military authority. The administration of large cities like Damascus or great provinces like Egypt was entrusted to pashas, this being a title, not an office, indicating that its holder had been admitted to the highest ruling circle of the empire and membership of the Divan, or State Council. These officials were regularly transferred from one post to another, to prevent them from developing local loyalties or building personal systems of patronage and power. Practice was somewhat different in the conquered territories of Balkan Europe…where senior officials normally retained office for long periods of time. European Turkey was considered to be an administrative unity called the Eyalet of Rumeli, whose supreme governor was the Beglierbeg; during the 1540’s [C.E.] two new Hungarian beglierbegliks were created, with their capitals at Buda and Temesvar. The area was subdivided during the fifteenth century into sanjaks, most of which were reorganized during the sixteenth century into twenty-four pashaliks, governed, as their name implies, by officers of the rank of pasha, who were, however, as in other frontier regions of the empire, entitled begs.

— The Ottoman Impact on Europe, pp. 43-44

Emphasis mine.

Xenograg’s title of bey is a cultural variant of beg.

During the period of anarchy in the public affairs of al-Andalus between 1008 and 1031 [C.E.], as the centre failed to hold, Spain’s centrifugal, fissile tendencies were able to develop unchecked. The poet al-Shaqundi, looking back at this process from the early thirteenth century [C.E.], wrote of “the breaking of the necklace and the scattering of its pearls.” The frail unity of al-Andalus disintegrated into a number of regional successor-states known to historians as the taifa kingdoms—the name is derived from the Arabic word ta’ifa, which means “faction” or “party”. The ruler of one of these states, ‘Abd Allah of Granada, has left us a description in his remarkable book of memoirs of what happened:

When the Amirid dynasty [i.e. Almanzor’s] came to an end and the people were left without an imam [the use of this word recalls the divine sanction claimed by the Umayyad caliphs] every military commander rose up in his own town and entrenched himself behind the walls of his own fortress, having first secured his own position, created his own army, and amassed his own resources. These persons vied with one another for worldly power, and each sought to subdue the other.

Each taifa kingdom was typically based on a town which had previously been the capital of a province or march, such as Seville or Zaragoza, where there already existed a machinery of local administration and a degree of regional solidarity which an opportunist could exploit; Initially, in the period of maximum confusion down to about 1040 [C.E.] or so, there existed some three dozen of these petty principalities. But the big fish swallowed the little ones, and by the mid-century half-a-dozen larger states stood out as pre-eminent: Seville and Granada in the south, Badajoz to the west, Toledo in the centre, Valencia on the east coast, and Zaragoza in the northeast. We are presented with a political scene in mid-eleventh century Spain, the age of [El] Cid‘s boyhood and youth, in some ways reminiscent of pre-Alexandrian Greece or Renaissance Italy or the Germany of the Enlightenment: diverse principalities in a state of constant rivalry with one another.

— The Quest for El Cid, pp. 27-28

Emphasis mine.

Like the Chinese, the Romans divided the world into civilisation and the lands beyond its sway, and while they sometimes of necessity resorted to diplomacy (in their dealings with the Armenians and other old-established kingdoms, for example), they did so for reasons of expediency alone, not as one state treating with its equivalent. There was, indeed, no reason for them to do so….

— A History of Warfare, pp. 278-79

According to the Spanish Moslem Ibn Jubayr, who had already visited Cairo and Bagdad, Damascus was, in spite of its secondary status in the Caliphate, the most populous city in the world. Behind the city walls the streets were narrow and dark, lined with three-storey houses of mud and reeds (fire was a constant danger), the bazaars noisy with metal workers and fragrant with spices, thronged with a great mixture of racial types. The many hot baths were an inheritance from Roman times. There was a large free hospital, twenty colleges for students of law and religion, convents where Sufis (the mystics of Islam) used music and dance to arouse ecstacy. The Orthodox Christian church, St. Mary’s, was brilliant with mosaics, and worshippers there were freely allowed to follow their religion. The rich Jewish community of some 3000, many of them refugees from the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, ran their own university. Two race tracks lined with poplar trees were “like rolls of green brocade.”

— Saladin In His Time, p. 35

The wealth of the taifa kings [of Moorish Spain] enabled them to indulge the activity for which they are best remembered, the patronage of literature, learning and art. Of course, other factors alongside wealth were influential in this context. Patronage was the traditional princely activity, shedding lustre on the patron and his court. Competition grew up between courts: which prince could attract the most gifted poets or the most learned scholars, commission the most lavish palace, lay out the most elegant gardens? We should also reckon with the pressure of the distant past. Ibn Ghalib of Cordoba (d. 1044 [C.E.]) wrote a work called “Contentment of the soul in the contemplation of the ancient remains found in al-Andalus.” Contentment for the antiquarian perhaps, but not necessarily for the ruler. Near Seville there still stood the fourth largest amphitheatre of the Roman world.… By what monuments was an eleventh-century ruler to be remembered? There was also the pressure of a more recent past. ‘Abd al-Rahman III‘s palace outside Cordoba might have been razed to the ground, but everyone still remembered its splendor. Emulation of the past was a spur to princely patronage in the eleventh century. There was a sense too in which the passing of the [Umayyad] caliphate released provincial energies. Cultural as well as political life had been centralized in the tenth century. In the eleventh, the removal of that heavy hand which had sought to direct artistic endeavor towards Cordoba released a surge of creative energy in the provinces. By a happy chance the conditions were propitious for a flowering of the arts in Spanish Islam such as had never occurred before and was never to occur again.

— The Quest for El Cid, pp. 30-31

Emphasis mine.

…The Roman Empire had a well-formulated ideology and institutions of monarchy, and by the late Empire this was an absolute monarchy. Emperors could not always do just what they wanted to do, of course, but the system operated as though the imperial will were all-powerful; no constitutitional mechanism existed to frustrate or modify it. In any premodern absolute monarchy, effective limitations were set by primitive communications networks and by the small size of the civil service, which frequently made it impossible to implement the royal will even when it was accepted as law. The ideology of absolute monarchy was developed out of a Roman law, based on Hellenistic and Oriental traditions, that held that the people had surrendered the natural powers to the monarch and could never revoke the surrender.

— Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, pp. 104-105

Ottoman society revolved around and was shaped by the central institution of the sultanate. Historically the institution of monarchy has a three-fold root: in the monarch’s role as leader in battle, as law-giver, and as ecclesiastical official. Ottoman sultans functioned in all these capacities.

— The Ottoman Impact on Europe, p. 34

The Mesopotamian civilization was based on cities. From the earliest phases there were at least a dozen large population centers. They ranged from in size from 40-50 hectares to the colossal 450 hectares occupied by Uruk in the early third millennium [B.C.E.]. They were surrounded by often massive city walls, enclosed heavily built-up areas of streets and houses and large centrally placed public buildings, usually in their own separate enclosures.

The public buildings fall into two main categories, temples and palaces, which represent two major institutions. The buildings were truly monumental. The temple was the first institution of the two. Temples varied in form but generally shared a number of features. They were usually set in an enclosure, were often elaborately decorated in a variety of techniques, and frequently were built on an elevated platform. By the later third millennium [B.C.E.], the temple on its platform had developed into the true ziggurat or staged temple tower for which Mesopotamia is famous.

The Mesopotamian temple was not simply the religious center of the city, it was the economic and administrative center. The temple was run as a household with the god or goddess at its head; every citizen belonged to a temple and was regarded as one of the people of the god or goddess. The temple community comprised food-producers, officials, priests, merchants, craftsmen, and people involved in running the temple establishment itself (bakers, brewers, gardners, etc., and a considerable number of slaves). The temple was itself a major landowner, and it served as a center for the accumulation and redistribution of most of the food produce of the land. It was also a center for the concentration and redistribution of raw materials from foreign trade. Equally important, it was a center for the concentration and organization of labor, which made possible large-scale works beyond the scope of small communities, such as the building of the temples themselves and the construction and maintenance of the irrigation canals.

— The Making Of Civilization, p. 12-13