A Short History of the Middle Ages Fourth Edition

rather than the Orthodox principality that Rus’ became. Given its geographic location, it was anyone’s guess how Rus’ would go: ...

Map 4.4: Fragmentation of the Islamic World, c.1000 The key cause of the weakness of the Abbasid caliphate was lack of revenue. ...

tenth century, most were relatively new converts to Islam. Bolstered by long-festering local discontent, one of them became “com ...

gather revenues and pay their troops. As we shall see, this was a bit like the Western European institution of the fief. It mean ...

is known. It is the science of logic.... [It is also] concerned with the different kinds of valid, invalid, and near valid infer ...

Informal family networks offered them many of the same advantages as branch offices: friends and family in Iran shipped the Tust ...

Map 4.5: Viking, Muslim, and Hungarian Invasions, Ninth and Tenth Centuries Vikings ...

Around the same time as they made forays eastward toward Novgorod, some Scandinavians were traveling to western shores. Their ki ...

Thereafter the pressure of invasion eased as Alfred reorganized his army, set up strongholds of his own (called burhs), and crea ...

centuries. Originally nomads who raised (and rode) horses, the Magyars spoke a language unrelated to any other in Europe (except ...

The key to tenth- and eleventh-century society was personal dependency. This took many forms. Of the three traditional “orders” ...

Indeed, the upper classes barely noticed the peasants—except as sources of labor and revenue. In the tenth century, the three-fi ...

were “castellans.” Guillem Guifred, a castellan in Catalonia (and a bishop, too, for good measure), for example, received “half ...

bishops and lay nobles were similar: bishops were men of property, lords of vassals, and faithful to patrons, such as kings, who ...

Cities and Merchants These clerics were, in part, reacting to new developments in the secular realm: the growing importance of u ...

KINGSHIPS IN AN AGE OF FRAGMENTATION In such a world, what did kings do? At the least, they stood for tradition, serving as symb ...

Map 4.6: Europe, c.1050 Those “certain books” included the Psalter and writings by the Church Fathers. Soon Anglo-Saxon was bein ...

administrative purposes as well, in royal “writs” that kings and queens directed to their officials. England was not alone in it ...

Genealogy 4.1: Alfred and His Progeny From the point of view of control, however, Æthelstan had nowhere near the power over Engl ...

The dynatoi might sometimes chafe at the emperor’s directives and rebel, but the emperor had his Varangian guard to put them dow ...