Week 2: Faith and War – Medieval Europe and the Islamic World, c. 600 –

1300.Empires we’ve covered this week;

1. Islamic Empire,

2. Byzantine Empire,

3. Carolingian Empire,

4. Holy Roman Empire,

Also; the Franks, Anglo-Saxons, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals and any other really cool barbarian groups.

Y u no pick smaller topic!?

Minor Essay,You must write an essay in response to ONE of the following questions: What factors contributed to the rise of Islam and its subsequent diffusion across Eurasia (570-1258 CE)? OR Who were the Mongols? What accounted for the formation and rapid expansion of the Mongol empire in Eurasia (c. 1200-1400 CE)?

Essays must be 1200 words (not including referencing), with minimum 8 academic sources.

Citations; what to use and how to cite?

Onlines databases:Empire Online: www.empire.amdigital.co.ukJSTOR: www.jstor.orgTaylor & Francis Online: www.tandfonline.com

Books:Through the GU library, but also the local libraries usually have a few good sources. BE PICKY. Check on the online catalogue: https://gcccopac.sirsidynix.net.au/client/goldcoastlibraries

The Dossier!But only 2 readings from the dossier, the other 6+ should preferably be from other texts.

How to cite? USE HARVARD REFERENCING PLEASE.In text: “Now, my story begins in 19-dickety-two. We had to say "dickety" cause that Kaiser had stolen our word "twenty". I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles...” (Simpson, 1996, p.1) OR (Simpson, 1996, pp.1-3)

Bibliography: Flannery Tim, 1994, The Future Eaters, Reed New Holland, New York.

The Readings:

REITBERGEN, Europe: A Cultural History, 2006

• P.115 “Byzantine society was an educated one… for both sexes – a thing unheard of in the Christian west until some 1000 years later”

• P.117 “Methodius and Cyrillus… reputed to have devised an alphabet for the then illiterate Slavs. The so-called ‘Cyrillic writing’ spread over the Balkans and even further, and still retains its use there, mostly in religious culture”

• P.117 “This resulted, in 1054, in a schism between Rome and Constantinople”.

• P.118 “conflict over power between the Islamic caliphate, the Frankish kingdom and the Byzantine Empire – incidentally all engaged in Mediterranean trade – was inevitable, for economic, political and perhaps, religious reasons.”

• P.121 “At the same time, the Crusades were effectively European armed invasions of the Holy Land and the wider Islamic Near East, as well as, sometimes, Christian Byzantium. For two centuries, beginning in 1095, Crusades were undertaken with great regularity”.

UPSHUR, World History, 2005

• P.396 “Another important event of this convulsive period was the creation of the Ottoman state by the Turks of the Anatolian Peninsula… like the Mongols before them and others after them, created “gunpowder empires”. With their technological military superiority, the Ottomans conquered the Balkans and captured Constantinople, thus ending the 1000 year-old Byzantine Empire.”

• P.397 “Under Caliph Harun al-Rashid (reigned 786-809) and his son Mamun (reigned 813-833), the Abbasid Empire reached its zenith of power and wealth.”

• P. 399 “He [Abd al-Rahman III] also encouraged Jewish scholarship at a time when minorities were vigorously persecuted in the rest of Europe.”

• P.408 “The Seljuks sometimes persecuted and extracted heavy taxes from Christian Arab minorities – a reason why some Arab Christians initially were eager to assist the crusaders”.

• P. 409 “The crusaders massacred the civilian population of Jerusalem – mostly eastern Christians and Jews”.

• P.413 “The most important item of trade between the East and West were spices, especially cinnamon from India, cardamom from Arden, and ginger and pepper from Indonesia…”

BULLIET, The Earth and Its Peoples, 2011

• P.229 “Maps, miniature paintings, and, of course, books became increasinly common and inexpensive. With cheaper books came bookstores, and one of the most informative manuscripts of the period of the Islamic caliphate is a Fihrist, or a descriptive catalog, of the books sold at one bookstore in Baghdad.”

• P.230 “The rise in the third centure of a new Iranian state, the Sasanid Empire, continued the old rivalry between Rome and the Parthians along the Euphrates frontier.”

• P.230 “In times of peace, however, exchange between the empires flourished, allowing goods transported over the Silk Road to enter the zone of Mediterranean trade.”

• P.232 “A late-third-century inscription in Iran boasts of the persecutions of Christians, Jews, and Buddhists carried out by the Zoroastrian high priest. Yet sizable Christian and Jewish communities remained, especially in Mesopotamia.”

• P.245 “Initially the new Muslims imitated Arab dress and customs and emulated people they regarded as particularly pious. In the absence of a central religious authority, local variation developed in the way people practiced Islam and in the hadith they attributed to the Prophet. This gave the rapidly growing religion the flexibility to accommodate many different social situations.”

The Roman Empire;• P.111 “The small city of Rome struggled to survive. In 390 BC it

was besieged for seven months by an army of Gauls who finally entered and half-wrecked the city.” (Blainey, 2004)

• P.113 “well-built Roman roads extended along much of the coast of North Africa, around much of the northern coast of the Mediterranean, and to the remote rivers the Danube and Euphrates.” (Blainey, 2004)

• P.15 “The Roman Empire covered 2.2 million square miles and ruled more than 120 million people… to link all its provinces and all its people, the Roman built 50,000 miles of stone-paved roads” (Craughwell, 2008)

• P.298 “The spread of agrarian civilisations around the Mediterranean laid the foundations for a new imperial system, under Rome. Roman expansion beyond Italy began with the conquest of Sicily in 241 BCE and with Rome’s century-long duel with a second regional hub, Carthage, during the Punic Wars (264-146 BCE). At its height, before it split at the end of the fourth century CE, the Roman Empire controlled most of the Mediterranean, as well as huge colonies in the agrarian regions of Europe.” (Christian, 2005)

The Byzantine Empire;• p.316 “The “Plague of Justinian” which struck Byzantium in 542 –

43, was almost certainly bubonic plague, as we have a detailed account of it from the historian Procopius. The plague recurred for at least the next two centuries”. (Christian, 2005)

• P.96 “In 533, when the Emperor Justinian sent an army to Carthage, the Vandals’ African subjects rushed to the aid of the Byzantines. Within six months, the Vandal kingdom collapsed, most of the Vandals were dead or in hiding, and the last Vandal king, Gelimer, was captured and banished to a remote corner of Asia.” (Craughwell, 2008)

• P. 23 “After 312, when Emperor Constantine put an end to the persecution of the Christians, the Goths began to convert, although heretical Arian bishops and priests got to them before the Catholics could. The Goths even volunteered for th Roman army, and in many cases these barbarian legions were led by Goth officers”. (Craughwell, 2008)

The Holy Roman Empire; “By founding an empire, Charlemagne consolidated a

multitude of tiny, fragmented kingdoms and principalities into a political, military, and cultural powerhouse that brought stability to western Europe and served as a counterbalance to the Byzantine Empire in eastern Europe.” (Caughwell, 2008, p.120)

“In western Europe, unlike in Mesopotamia or China, no new tributary empires emerged after the collapse of those that had ruled the region in the classical era. The Holy Roman Empire aspired to but failed to achieve this role. As a result, western Europe emerged during the postclassical Malthusian cycle as a region of many small states, in constant competition and close to the major trading routes of the Mediterranean world.” (Christian, 2005, p.391)

The Franks;

“Perhaps as early as the time of Julius Caesar, Franks served in the Roman army. By the year 350, three Franks held very influential positions in the Roman military” (Caughwell, 2008, p.114)

“As a nation that over the years had benefited from its tied to Rome, the Franks were not nearly as destructive to Roman society in Gaul as the Huns, Goths, or Vandals would be in other parts of the empire. And wereas the Goths and Vandals converted to the Arian form of Christianity, which did not recognise the spiritual authority of the pope, when the Franks embraced Christianity they became Catholics” (Caughwell, 2008, p.115)

“Not all the Franks served Rome. Around the year 275, Franks invaded Gaul and ravaged seventy Roman cities and towns” (Caughwell, 2008, p.122)

Barbarians; Visigoths and Ostrogoths

• “Technically there were two branches of this barbarian nation [the Goths] that originated in southern Sweden in the area known as Götaland. The Western Goths, also known as the Visigoths, was the branch that Alaric led against Rome. They would eventually carve out a kingdom for themselves that extended from central France to the southern coast of Spain.

• The Eastern Goths, or Ostrogoths, took power in Italy in the sixth century… their impact on the Roman Empire was minimal” (Caughwell, 2008, p.23)

The Vandals

“The Roman historian Tacitus (c. 56 – 117) wrote that in his day the Vandals were an agrresive nation famous for their skill as night fighters. To slip among their enemies undetected, they blackened their faces and hands, as well as their shields and weapons. At some point, either in the region of central Polan that was their homeland, or in Germany where they scrambled to escape the Huns, the Vandals fell on hard times.” (Caughwell, 2008, p.67)

“During the fourth and fifth centuries, the Vandals evolved from a weak, frightened tribe of refugees to a mighty nation with dreams of an empire. They were the only barbarian people to learn how to build ships and form a navy.” (Caughwell, 2008, p.67)

“During the dozen years or so that they had occupied southern Spain they learned from the local people around the port of Cartagena how to build and sail ships.” (Caughwell, 2008, p.74)

An “exodus began in 429 with approximately 80,000 Vandals making the crossing… They crossed at the Straits of Gibraltar, where scarcely seven miles of water seperates Europe from Africa, landing at modern-day Ceuta, on the Moroccan coast.” (Caughwell, 2008, p.74)

The Angles,Saxons, Jutes and Frisians In the fifth century, three ships of Fermanic warriors came ashore on the

eastern coast of England. “The warriors represented three tribes – the Angles and Saxons from the area of northern Germany known as Schleswig, and the Jutes from southern Denmark. There may have also been Frisians, a Germanic tribe from Holland among them too. The Britons referred to all these tribes simple as “the Saxons””. (Caughwell, 2008, p.100)

“For the Britons, who lived in the territory that would become known as England, and the Romans, who had come as colonists beginning in the first century AD, the Germanic invasion was an unmitigated disaster that destroyed their civilization, took countless lives, and compelled the survivors to look for safety in the most remote corners of the island.” (Caughwell, 2008, p.100)

“597: St. Augustine leads the first Christian mission to Anglo-Saxon England” (Caughwell, 2008, p.101)

“It is tranditional to point to 360 as the year when we can chart the begininng of the end of Roman Britain. In that year the Picts swarmed over Hadrian’s Wall and raided Yorkshire, while Irish pirates attached the towns and villas along Britain’s western coast, carrying off hundreds of civilians to sell into slavery.” (Caughwell, 2008, p.103)

That was so many more words than I intended, have a video.

Crash Course: Islamhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpcbfxtdoI8&list=PLBDA2E52FB1EF80C9&index=13

Crash Course: Christianityhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG55ErfdaeY

Crash Course: The Fall of Romehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PszVWZNWVA

Crash Course: The Crusadeshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0zudTQelzI

Assassins Creed and Historical Accuracieshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8Bu63xVZXQ

KhanAcademy podcast about Charlemagne:https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/history/ancient-medieval/medieval/v/charlemagne-an-introduction