The Peasant's Pre-Emption Right: An Abortive Reform of the Macedonian Emperors

1947 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 117-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Ostrogorsky
Keyword(s):  
Land Tenure ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Centrifugal Forces ◽  
Internal Development ◽  
Actual Existence ◽  
Principal Source ◽  
History Of ◽  
External Power

The struggle which the Byzantine government had to wage in the tenth century to protect small freeholders against the landed aristocracy represents a most interesting and important phase in the internal development of the Byzantine State. It can be said without exaggeration that the issue of the struggle determined the very fate of the Empire. The history of this stubborn, dramatic conflict has been outlined more than once. My intention is not to narrate it again, but to illustrate by a few concrete examples the causes which prevented the Byzantine government from effectively safeguarding the smallholder.The system of land tenure by free peasant proprietors and stratiotai—soldiers settled in the themes—formed the mainstay of the Byzantine Empire from the time of its recovery in the seventh century, as well as its principal source of both internal strength and external power. Naturally, the imperial government intervened in favour of the smallholder when it became clear that peasant and stratiote property was being rapidly absorbed by big landholders, with their former owners becoming serfs on the estates of lay landowners and monasteries. In protecting the smallholder against the encroachments of the feudal landed aristocracy, the State endeavoured to safeguard its soldiers and its best taxpayers, as well as its actual existence; for the development of the centrifugal forces of feudalism constituted a menace to the centralized and autocratic power of the Byzantine emperors.

III. Ancient Arabian Poetry as a Source of Historical Information

1914 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-73
Author(s):  
C. J. Lyall
Keyword(s):  
Seventh Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Military Experience ◽  
Historical Information ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

The conquest of the Persian and half of the Byzantine Empire by the Arabs, under the banner of Islam in the seventh century, was one of the most extraordinary events in the history of the world. On the one side were ranged the forces of two highly-organized military powers, Imperial New Rome and Imperial Persia, which for over three centuries had been engaged in constant conflict with each other. Although this necessarily tended to exhaust the material resources of the combatants, it would naturally be supposed that it must have given them military experience, and their leaders a training in generalship, adequate to enable them to face with confidence of victory enemies hitherto regarded with contempt as mere barbarians. On the other side we see hosts of men, reared in a country where the conditions of life have always been of the hardest and most precarious, divided by tribal feuds and secular hatreds, poorly armed, with no practice in warfare against disciplined foes, and with no allies to swell their legions. Yet from the beginning the progress of the Arabs was one of almost uninterrupted success.

Palestine under the Arabs 650-750: the Crucible of Byzantine Orthodoxy

2000 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 67-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Louth
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
Balkan Peninsula ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Configuration ◽  
The Impact

The period from the beginning of the seventh century to the middle of the ninth was decisive for the history of the Byzantine empire. At the beginning of the seventh century, the idea of the Roman, or Byzantine, empire as the political configuration of the Mediterranean world - something that the Emperor Justinian had done his best to restore - still seemed valid, though there were already significant cracks in the edifice. By the end of the seventh century - let alone the middle of the ninth - that was a dream, though a dream to which the Byzantines obstinately clung. For the early years of the seventh century had seen the temporary Persian conquest of the eastern provinces of the Byzantine empire, soon followed by the Arab conquest which the Byzantines were to prove unable to overturn. The impact on the Byzantine empire of these events and the infiltration into the Balkan peninsula by the Slavs, was profound - politically, economically, culturally, and theologically. But the story of this impact is generally presented, both in the sources and in scholarly accounts, from the point of view of the centre, the Queen City, Constantinople. Central to the Byzantine world view, as it emerged with renewed confidence in the middle of the ninth century, was the idea of the empire, and the Emperor, as the guardian of Christian Orthodoxy, which was symbolized in the proclamation of the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’ with the final overthrow of iconoclasm in 843, a proclamation that became part of the normal ecclesiastical calendar, celebrated thereafter each year on the first Sunday of Lent. But that Orthodoxy, in its final form, had not been nurtured in Constantinople, nor had the wealth of liturgical poetry that came to celebrate it. Constantinople had reacted to the catastrophe of the early seventh century by plunging into heresy: first, the Christological heresy of monenergism, with its refinement, monothelitism, and then the heresy of iconoclasm, also believed - by both iconoclasts and their opponents - to be ultimately a matter of Christology. The Orthodoxy whose triumph was celebrated from 843 onwards had been defined, and celebrated, in Palestine, the province that had been lost for good to the Byzantines in the 630s. Orthodoxy, in fact, achieved its final definition at the periphery - and defeated periphery at that - and from there took over the centre. In this paper, we are not concerned with Christians who visited the Holy Land as pilgrims, but rather with those who belonged there: mainly monks, both natives and those who came to the Holy Land to live in the complex of monasteries in and around Jerusalem. How and why did these Palestinian monks come to play this role in the wider history of the Christian œcumene?

The Albanian Chronicle of Maxit'ar Goš

1958 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 472-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.J.F. Dowsett
Keyword(s):  
Tenth Century ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Principal Source ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
Source Of Information

The land of the Ahiank‘ or Caucasian Albania, whose geography and customs already attracted the attention of Strabo and Pliny, represents the easternmost part of the Armenian sphere of influence. The historical events which took place in this region were described by the ancient Armenian historians P'awstos Biwzandai, Lazar P'arpei, Elišē Vardapet, Movsēs Xorenai, etc., and their works were subsequently drawn upon by Movsēs Kalankatuai or Dasxuranci for the compilation called the History of the Aluank' which remains our principal source of information on the country down to the tenth century.

The Formation of Greek City-States: Status, Class, and Land Tenure Systems

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (04) ◽  
pp. 615-657
Author(s):  
Julien Zurbach
Keyword(s):  
Land Tenure ◽  
Essential Feature ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Greek City ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
City States ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The City

Recent scholarship has often remarked on the opposition between two conceptions of Archaic Greek societies, relating either to a legal and static definition of status or to a notion of status as personal and fluid, linked to diversified strategies for obtaining social distinction. This article seeks to move beyond this opposition by examining the history of status groups in the Archaic period. After analyzing the key stages within the complex historiography devoted to this subject, it goes on to provide a history of status groups during the formative period of the city-states. The creation of new status groups was an essential feature of the city-states’ history and was primarily linked to indebtedness and war. Although statuses were collective and often imposed from the outside, they nevertheless display a historical development that is central to the formation of city-states. In the seventh century BCE, new groups were created in response to the aristocracy’s need for a workforce. The resulting conflict led to an evolution of the systems regulating access to land and food. This reorganization of entitlement, which was how communities responded to the social and economic crisis they faced, was in turn based on the creation of new status groups. Social conflict led to the definition of a new system of status groups.

The Abbey of St. Gall

2020 ◽  
pp. 804-812
Author(s):  
Anna A. Grotans
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Lake Constance ◽  
Middle High German ◽  
Old High German ◽  
German Studies ◽  
Music School ◽  
History Of

This chapter surveys the history of the Abbey of St. Gall, on the shores of Lake Constance, from its founding in the seventh century by Gallus to its cultural highpoints from the Carolingian period through the eleventh century. The library’s great treasures, including manuscripts of the fourth or fifth century, the famous Irish books, important Middle High German texts, are mentioned, and the as is the dispersal of St. Gall books at various periods. The ninth- and tenth-century St. Gall school is discussed, as are the Old High German studies of the monks, the music school, and some of the abbeys important writers (Notker, Ekkehard, Walahfrid).

Æthelwold's translation of theRegula Sancti Benedictiand its Latin exemplar

1974 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 125-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mechthild Gretsch
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Language ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
English Word ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Benedictine Reform ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

St Benedict wrote his Rule for monastic communities in the first half of the sixth century. It must have reached England in the course of the seventh century and was translated into Old English prose by Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester, in about 970 at the request of King Edgar and Qeen Ælfthryth. Æhelwold was one of the leaders of the tenth-century Benedictine reform in England and his translation of the Rule is among his major contributions to the reform movement. Moreover the Old English Rule holds a key position in the history of the development of Old English language and literature. Manuscripts of the text must have been numerous from the tenth century to the twelfth century and even the thirteenth. Scholars like William of Malmesbury, Lawrence Nowell, John Jocelyn and Francis Junius took an interest in the Old English Rule, but, except for a chapter printed from BM Cotton Faustina A.x by Thomas Wright in 1842, the text was not easily accessible until Arnold Schröer published his edition in 1885, followed in 1888 by his introduction discussing date and authorship, the relationship between the manuscripts and some linguistic points. Comparatively little work seems to have been done on the Old English Rule since then except for Rohr's Bonn Dissertation of 1912 and Professor Gneuss's supplement to the 1964 reprint of Schröer's edition. Rohr, in an investigation of the phonology and the inflexional morphology of the manuscripts of the Old English Rule, was able to show that the language of all of them is basically late West Saxon, while Gneuss gave a survey of what is known about the Old English Rule and the Latin Rule in Anglo-Saxon England; he also pointed out the difficulties involved in an attempt to identify or reconstruct the Latin exemplar which Æthelwold used. In this article I shall consider four topics which seem to me essential for our understanding of the Old English Rule: the question of Æthelwold's exemplar; the relationship between the manuscripts of the Old English Rule; Æthelwold's aims and techniques in his translation; and the vocabulary of the Old English Rule, with special reference to recent research in Old English word geography.

The Byzantine Empire in the Eleventh Century: Some Different Interpretations

1950 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 71-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Hussey
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of

I was originally provoked into a consideration of this particular problem by reading Ostrogorsky's Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates. A long-needed and courageous attempt to reconstruct the history of the empire and characterized by acute and penetrating analysis, this book is nevertheless marked by a certain unevenness of treatment. Side by side with brilliant sections on the achievements of the tenth century and the complications of the fourteenth (this latter perhaps the finest part of the book) must be set the brief and inadequate account of the years 1025–1081. Ostrogorsky is not alone. Misstatements and omissions continue, and often in unexpected places. Recent much used general histories, as for instance the third volume of the medieval section of the Glotz Histoire générale, still repeat the old emphasis on 1081 as the dividingline between a time of painful disaster and the new era of Comnenian glory.

The History of the Judahite Bench Tomb

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Suriano
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Mortuary Practices ◽  
Iron Age Ii ◽  
Gradual Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Insight Into

The history of the Judahite bench tomb provides important insight into the meaning of mortuary practices, and by extension, death in the Hebrew Bible. The bench tomb appeared in Judah during Iron Age II. Although it included certain burial features that appear earlier in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, such as burial benches, and the use of caves for extramural burials, the Judahite bench tomb uniquely incorporated these features into a specific plan that emulated domestic structures and facilitated multigenerational burials. During the seventh century, and continuing into the sixth, the bench tombs become popular in Jerusalem. The history of this type of burial shows a gradual development of cultural practices that were meant to control death and contain the dead. It is possible to observe within these cultural practices the tomb as a means of constructing identity for both the dead and the living.

The Growth of Historical Method in Tang China

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Hartman ◽  
Anthony DeBlasi
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Daily Production ◽  
Successor State ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Official History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Over Time

This chapter discusses how the full emergence of the centralized, aristocratic state in the seventh century brought about an official historiography that was part of the bureaucracy of that state. Beginning in the Tang, each dynastic court maintained an office of historiography. Over time, a regularized process evolved that, in theory and often in reality, turned the daily production of court bureaucratic documents into an official history of the dynasty. Although this process was ongoing throughout the dynasty, the final, standard ‘dynastic history’ was usually completed after the dynasty's demise by its successor state. Indeed, the very concept of a series of dynastic histories that, taken together, would present an official history of successive, legitimate Chinese states, dates from the eleventh century.

Capitalisms

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Tenth Century ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Commodity Production ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Small Producers ◽  
Circulation Of Knowledge ◽  
Industrial Revolutions

Conventional accounts often conceive the genesis of capitalism in Europe within the conjunctures of agricultural, commercial, and industrial revolutions. Challenging this widely believed cliché, this volume traces the history of capitalism across civilizations, tenth century onwards, and argues that capitalism was neither a monolithic entity nor exclusively an economic phenomenon confined to the West. Looking at regions as diverse as England, South America, Russia, North Africa, and East, South, West, and Southeast Asia, the book explores the plurality of developments across time and space. The chapters analyse aspects such as historical conjunctures, commodity production and distribution, circulation of knowledge and personnel, and the role of mercantile capital, small producers, and force—all the while stressing the necessity to think beyond present-day national boundaries. The book argues that the multiple histories of capitalism can be better understood from a trans-regional, intercontinental, and interconnected perspective.

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