Post Classical Period of Mayan History

The Postclassical Period, 500–1500 A. Global and Comparative Dimensions 1. Periodization, 500–1000 During the postclassical period, following the decline of the great classical empires of Asia and the Mediterranean, three major developments stand out in world history and the history of many individual societies: the expansion of civilization to new areas—in Asia, Africa, and Europe, this involved contact with and outreach from the older centers (China, India, the Middle East and North Africa, and Byzantium); the spread of major world religions, including the development of Islam, the most successful single religion during this period; and the intensification of international contacts in the Eastern Hemisphere. These themes were all established in the first part of the postclassical period, 500–1000. Changes in the Islamic world, the rise of new empires spreading from central Asia, new patterns of international contact (involving new policies in China and in Europe), and solidification of the major religions mark the second phase of the postclassical period, 1000–1500. In European history this period coincides with the Middle Ages (See Europe, 461–1500), and the resultant label “medieval” was formerly applied to world history more generally during the postclassical era. 1 The regional civilizations of the Eastern Hemisphere were transformed in this period. The Eastern Hemisphere ecumene continued to expand through trade, the spread of religions, migrations of peoples, and conquests. In the Western Hemisphere, Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations emerged in a context of complex, nonurbanized societies. 2 a. Transformation of Regional Civilizations The major traditions of classical empires ended either through defeat and collapse or transformation. 3 220–960 CHINESE IMPERIAL EXPERIENCE. The end of the Han Empire in 220 created an era of warfare among small rival states. This “period of the Six Dynasties” lasted until the reestablishment of imperial unity by the SUI DYNASTY (589–618) and the TANG DYNASTY (618–907) (See 618–907). The new imperial system was more clearly based on the bureaucratic skills of the scholar-gentry class, with the aristocracy and military playing a less central role than in the classical system. This postclassical style of empire was confirmed by its continuation in the SONG DYNASTY in 960, following a time of instability after the fall of the Tang. 4 476–973 POST-ROMAN WESTERN EUROPE. When Roman rule collapsed in western Europe, a number of states were established by groups that had migrated into the region. The Franks (See The Frankish Kingdom), in the area of modern France and Germany, established a kingdom whose leader, Charles the Great, or CHARLEMAGNE (r. 768–814), was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope in 800. The Carolingian Empire disintegrated, and the later efforts by a German king, OTTO THE GREAT (r. 936–73), also failed to reestablish regional imperial unity. The major sources of unity were the ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH and the teachings of Latin Christianity. 5 527–1025 EASTERN ROMAN EMPIRE AND BYZANTIUM (See The Byzantine Empire). Imperial rule continued in the eastern Roman Empire under the emperors in Constantinople. JUSTINIAN (r. 527–65) reconquered most of the Mediterranean areas of the Roman Empire (See 532), but was unable to recreate broader Roman unity. The postclassical eastern Roman Empire gradually became a powerful Greek imperial monarchy known as the BYZANTINE EMPIRE, identified with the ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN CHURCH. Despite losses to invaders from central Eurasia in the north and to Muslims, it remained a major regional empire. The MACEDONIAN DYNASTY (867–1055) led a resurgence, but following the death of Basil II (1025), internal divisions and territorial losses reduced the empire to a minor state around Constantinople. 6 535–977 POST-GUPTA INDIA. The most successful effort to restore regional imperial unity in India was made by HARSHA (r. 606–47) (See 606–47). However, his empire collapsed at his death, and no later state assumed a dominant position until the end of the 10th century, when Muslim military dynasties from the northwest continued the Muslim conquest of India. Hindu culture provided the foundation for regional civilizational unity without political integration. 7 651–945 EMERGENCE OF THE ISLAMIC MIDDLE EAST. The rise of ISLAM (See Continued Spread of Religions) in the 7th century brought an end to the classical imperial systems of the Middle East. Islam was a continuation of ethical monotheism and is recorded as the revelation to the prophet MUHAMMAD (570–632). Muhammad's successors as leader of the Muslim community, called caliphs, conquered most of the Middle Eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire in 634–43 and brought an end to the Sassanid Empire in 637. Civil wars brought the UMAYYAD CALIPHATE (661–750) and then the ABBASID CALIPHATE (750–1258) to power in an empire that initially continued classical Sassanid and eastern Roman structures. However, the Islamic world became a postclassical society unified by the faith and institutions of Islam. By the mid-10th century, the caliphate imperial structure was replaced by a new style of state based on commanders called sultans (See Overview), who initially gained titles and legitimacy by supporting the then-powerless caliphs. 8
1. The Muslim Middle East and North Africa, c. 945–1500 a.
Overview Between the breakup of the Abbasid Empire in the 10th century and the restoration of an imperial hegemony under the Ottomans in the 16th century, the Middle East and North Africa lost any semblance of political unity. Dozens of dynasties ruling over parts of the region came and went, and the boundaries of states shifted endlessly. A broad political division emerged, however, among several territorial units: Iran and Iraq, Egypt and Syria, and North Africa. To these was added the area of Anatolia (Asia Minor), which first came under Muslim rule during this period; after being tied initially to the political destinies of Iran and Iraq, it developed into a distinct political entity that became linked, under the expanding Ottoman state, with the newly conquered Balkan lands. 1 The Muslim advance into Anatolia and Europe brought a final end to the Byzantine Empire, for eight centuries a neighbor and adversary of the Muslim states in the eastern Mediterranean. In the western Mediterranean, however, Muslim states were on the defensive as the Christians reconquered all of Spain and established military outposts on the North African coast. 2 The end of the Abbasid imperial order reduced the caliphate in Baghdad to little more than a symbolic presence; real power was vested in the institution of the sultanate and a new type of regime characteristic of the postimperial era. The bureaucratic, landowning, and merchant elites that had dominated the region gave way to slave soldiers and tribal warriors. Slave armies, composed most commonly of Turks, became the mainstay of dynasties everywhere; in Mamluk Egypt and Syria (1250–1517) the Turkish and Circassian slave soldiers even became the rulers in place of a dynastic order. From the 11th century, large-scale migration of central Asian Turkish nomads into the region overran large territories and brought to power Turkish tribal chieftains. In North Africa, Berber tribal warriors defeated Arab-dominated regimes and established new dynasties. 3 In the midst of this political upheaval, the Middle East endured two major non-Muslim military invasions, by the Crusaders and the Mongols. The onslaught from the east was by far the more consequential for the region and caused unparalleled devastation. The Crusader presence, on the other hand, was more in the nature of a prolonged nuisance; it loomed large only in European annals. In the long term, neither invasion was able to reverse the Muslim hold on the region. 4 The long-term social and economic effects of these movements of tribes and armies across the region were felt most acutely in Iran, Iraq, and Anatolia. The influx of Turkish nomads made large tracts of agricultural land the domain of pastoralists. It also brought into the region a new ethnic element, one that became a formidable presence not only within the political elites. The economic fortune of the lands farther west, especially Egypt and Syria, was generally better, although the Black Death (See Interregional Exchanges) and the recurrent plague epidemics that followed it caused massive dislocations everywhere. The population appears to have suffered an overall decline during the period. 5 Despite the unsettled conditions and political fragmentation, this was a period of remarkable cultural achievement. A unity built on a universal religion and civilization took the place of political unity. The mass conversion to Islam was completed, and the population became almost solidly Muslim. And the faith itself reached maturity as an elaborate system of belief: Islamic law developed into a comprehensive code, with four recognized schools of interpretation; the madrasa came into being as the institution of advanced religious learning; Sufism developed organized orders and became integrated into Islamic thought and worship (See 950–1300); the Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian divide became clearly defined; and a large body of distinguished writing gave definitive form to Islamic tradition and learning. 6 Impressive creativity also marked secular fields of study, ranging from astronomy and algebra to philosophy and history. The period produced some of the region's most celebrated Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literary works, and some of its finest architectural and artistic creations. While religious opinion had its quarrels with philosophy, Islam in general did not seriously oppose or stifle work in the physical and natural sciences, which remained productive into the 15th century. 7 In the sphere of high culture, as in politics and economics, men were dominant. The period reinforced an inherited social order based on the superior rights and power of men. Islamic law, more readily enforced in the cities, did provide women with rights to property, inheritance, and matrimonial support, and these helped them acquire leverage within their families. But in many respects the legal norms and social practice worked in men's favor. In both the city and the countryside, needy women worked outdoors, in menial and lowly professions. The female seclusion associated with Islamic society was an ideal achieved only in the better-off classes. Women's veiling, part of a code of female modesty and sexual segregation, was commonplace, particularly in the cities.
2. 1. The Muslim Middle East and North Africa, c. 945–1500 a. Overview Between the breakup of the Abbasid Empire in the 10th century and the restoration of an imperial hegemony under the Ottomans in the 16th century, the Middle East and North Africa lost any semblance of political unity. Dozens of dynasties ruling over parts of the region came and went, and the boundaries of states shifted endlessly. A broad political division emerged, however, among several territorial units: Iran and Iraq, Egypt and Syria, and North Africa. To these was added the area of Anatolia (Asia Minor), which first came under Muslim rule during this period; after being tied initially to the political destinies of Iran and Iraq, it developed into a distinct political entity that became linked, under the expanding Ottoman state, with the newly conquered Balkan lands. 1 The Muslim advance into Anatolia and Europe brought a final end to the Byzantine Empire, for eight centuries a neighbor and adversary of the Muslim states in the eastern Mediterranean. In the western Mediterranean, however, Muslim states were on the defensive as the Christians reconquered all of Spain and established military outposts on the North African coast. 2 The end of the Abbasid imperial order reduced the caliphate in Baghdad to little more than a symbolic presence; real power was vested in the institution of the sultanate and a new type of regime characteristic of the postimperial era. The bureaucratic, landowning, and merchant elites that had dominated the region gave way to slave soldiers and tribal warriors. Slave armies, composed most commonly of Turks, became the mainstay of dynasties everywhere; in Mamluk Egypt and Syria (1250–1517) the Turkish and Circassian slave soldiers even became the rulers in place of a dynastic order. From the 11th century, large-scale migration of central Asian Turkish nomads into the region overran large territories and brought to power Turkish tribal chieftains. In North Africa, Berber tribal warriors defeated Arab-dominated regimes and established new dynasties. 3 In the midst of this political upheaval, the Middle East endured two major non-Muslim military invasions, by the Crusaders and the Mongols. The onslaught from the east was by far the more consequential for the region and caused unparalleled devastation. The Crusader presence, on the other hand, was more in the nature of a prolonged nuisance; it loomed large only in European annals. In the long term, neither invasion was able to reverse the Muslim hold on the region. 4 The long-term social and economic effects of these movements of tribes and armies across the region were felt most acutely in Iran, Iraq, and Anatolia. The influx of Turkish nomads made large tracts of agricultural land the domain of pastoralists. It also brought into the region a new ethnic element, one that became a formidable presence not only within the political elites. The economic fortune of the lands farther west, especially Egypt and Syria, was generally better, although the Black Death (See Interregional Exchanges) and the recurrent plague epidemics that followed it caused massive dislocations everywhere. The population appears to have suffered an overall decline during the period. 5 Despite the unsettled conditions and political fragmentation, this was a period of remarkable cultural achievement. A unity built on a universal religion and civilization took the place of political unity. The mass conversion to Islam was completed, and the population became almost solidly Muslim. And the faith itself reached maturity as an elaborate system of belief: Islamic law developed into a comprehensive code, with four recognized schools of interpretation; the madrasa came into being as the institution of advanced religious learning; Sufism developed organized orders and became integrated into Islamic thought and worship (See 950–1300); the Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian divide became clearly defined; and a large body of distinguished writing gave definitive form to Islamic tradition and learning. 6 Impressive creativity also marked secular fields of study, ranging from astronomy and algebra to philosophy and history. The period produced some of the region's most celebrated Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literary works, and some of its finest architectural and artistic creations. While religious opinion had its quarrels with philosophy, Islam in general did not seriously oppose or stifle work in the physical and natural sciences, which remained productive into the 15th century. 7 In the sphere of high culture, as in politics and economics, men were dominant. The period reinforced an inherited social order based on the superior rights and power of men. Islamic law, more readily enforced in the cities, did provide women with rights to property, inheritance, and matrimonial support, and these helped them acquire leverage within their families. But in many respects the legal norms and social practice worked in men's favor. In both the city and the countryside, needy women worked outdoors, in menial and lowly professions. The female seclusion associated with Islamic society was an ideal achieved only in the better-off classes. Women's veiling, part of a code of female modesty and sexual segregation, was commonplace, particularly in the cities. 8
El Escorial, northwest of Madrid, built by Philip II in the second half of the sixteenth century
1. THE NATIONAL HISTORY of Spain dates back to the fifth century A.D., when the Visigoths established a Germanic successor state in the former Roman diocese of Hispania. Despite a period of internal political disunity during the Middle Ages, Spain nevertheless is one of the oldest nation-states in Europe. In the late fifteenth century, Spain acquired its current borders and was united under a personal union of crowns by Ferdinand of Aragon (Spanish, Aragon) and Isabella of Castile (Spanish, Castilla). For a period in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, Portugal was part of that Iberian federation.
In the sixteenth century, Spain was the foremost European power, and it was deeply involved in European affairs from that period to the eighteenth century. Spain's kings ruled provinces scattered across Europe. The Spanish Empire was global, and the influence of Spanish culture was so pervasive, especially in the Americas, that Spanish is still the native tongue of more than 200 million people outside Spain.
Recurrent political instability, military intervention in politics, frequent breakdowns of civil order, and periods of repressive government have characterized modern Spanish history. In the nineteenth century, Spain had a constitutional framework for parliamentary government, not unlike those of Britain and France, but it was unable to develop institutions capable of surviving the social, economic, and ideological stresses of Spanish society
Ferdinand and Isabella
1. The marriage in 1469 of royal cousins, Ferdinand of Aragon (1452-1516) and Isabella of Castile (1451-1504), eventually brought stability to both kingdoms. Isabella's niece, Juana, had bloodily disputed her succession to the throne in a conflict in which the rival claimants were given assistance by outside powers--Isabella by Aragon and Juana by her suitor, the king of Portugal. The Treaty of Alcaçovas ended the war in September 1479, and as Ferdinand had succeeded his father in Aragon earlier in the same year, it was possible to link Castile with Aragon. Both Isabella and Ferdinand understood the importance of unity; together they effected institutional reform in Castile and left Spain one of the best administered countries in Europe.
Even with the personal union of the Castilian and the Aragonese crowns, Castile, Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia remained constitutionally distinct political entities, and they retained separate councils of state and parliaments. Ferdinand, who had received his political education in federalist Aragon, brought a new emphasis on constitutionalism and a respect for local fueros to Castile, where he was king consort (1479- 1504) and continued as regent after Isabella's death in 1504. Greatly admired by Italian political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), Ferdinand was one of the most skillful diplomats in an age of great diplomats, and he assigned to Castile its predominant role in the dual monarchy.
Ferdinand and Isabella resumed the Reconquest, dormant for more than 200 years, and in 1492 they captured Granada, earning for themselves the title of Catholic Kings. Once Islamic Spain had ceased to exist, attention turned to the internal threat posed by hundreds of thousands of Muslims living in the recently incorporated Granada. "Spanish society drove itself," historian J.H. Elliot writes, "on a ruthless, ultimately self-defeating quest for an unattainable purity."
Everywhere in sixteenth-century Europe, it was assumed that religious unity was necessary for political unity, but only in Spain was there such a sense of urgency in enforcing religious conformity. Spain's population was more heterogeneous than that of any other European nation, and it contained significant nonChristian communities. Several of these communities, including in particular some in Granada, harbored a significant element of doubtful loyalty. Moriscos (Granadan Muslims) were given the choice of voluntary exile or conversion to Christianity. Many Jews converted to Christianity, and some of these Conversos filled important government and ecclesiastical posts in Castile and in Aragon for more than 100 years. Many married or purchased their way into the nobility. Muslims in reconquered territory, called Mudejars, also lived quietly for generations as peasant farmers and skilled craftsmen.
After 1525 all residents of Spain were officially Christian, but forced conversion and nominal orthodoxy were not sufficient for complete integration into Spanish society. Purity of blood (pureza de sangre) regulations were imposed on candidates for positions in the government and the church, to prevent Moriscos from becoming a force again in Spain and to eliminate participation by Conversos whose families might have been Christian for generations. Many of Spain's oldest and finest families scrambled to reconstruct family trees.
The Inquisition, a state-controlled Castilian tribunal, authorized by papal bull in 1478, that soon extended throughout Spain, had the task of enforcing uniformity of religious practice. It was originally intended to investigate the sincerity of Conversos, especially those in the clergy, who had been accused of being crypto-Jews. Tomas de Torquemada, a descendant of Conversos, was the most effective and notorious of the Inquisition's prosecutors.
For years religious laws were laxly enforced, particularly in Aragon, and converted Jews and Moriscos continued to observe their previous religions in private. In 1568, however, a serious rebellion broke out among the Moriscos of Andalusia, who sealed their fate by appealing to the Ottoman Empire for aid. The incident led to mass expulsions throughout Spain and to the eventual exodus of hundreds of thousands of Conversos and Moriscos, even those who had apparently become devout Christians.
In the exploration and exploitation of the New World, Spain found an outlet for the crusading energies that the war against the Muslims had stimulated. In the fifteenth century, Portuguese mariners were opening a route around Africa to the East. At the same time as the Castilians, they had planted colonies in the Azores and in the Canary Islands (also Canaries; Spanish, Canarias), the latter of which had been assigned to Spain by papal decree. The conquest of Granada allowed the Catholic Kings to divert their attention to exploration, although Christopher Columbus's first voyage in 1492 was financed by foreign bankers. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, a Catalan) formally approved the division of the unexplored world between Spain and Portugal. The Treaty of Tordesillas, which Spain and Portugal signed one year later, moved the line of division westward and allowed Portugal to claim Brazil.
New discoveries and conquests came in quick succession. Vasco Nunez de Balboa reached the Pacific in 1513, and the survivors of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition completed the circumnavigation of the globe in 1522. In 1519 the conquistador Hernando Cortes subdued the Aztecs in Mexico with a handful of followers, and between 1531 and 1533 Francisco Pizzaro overthrew the empire of the Incas and established Spanish dominion over Peru.
In 1493, when Columbus brought 1,500 colonists with him on his second voyage, a royal administrator had already been appointed for the Indies. The Council of the Indies (Consejo de Indias), established in 1524 acted as an advisory board to the crown on colonial affairs, and the House of Trade (Casa de Contratacion) regulated trade with the colonies. The newly established colonies were not Spanish but Castilian. They were administered as appendages of Castile, and the Aragonese were prohibited from trading or settling there.
Data as of December 1988
Figure 2. The Reconquest: Reconquering Spain from the Moors
1. Resistance to the Muslim invasion in the eighth century had been limited to small groups of Visigoth warriors who took refuge in the mountains of Asturias in the old Suevian kingdom, the least romanized and least Christianized region in Spain. According to tradition, Pelayo (718-37), a king of Oviedo, first rallied the natives to defend themselves, then urged them to take the offensive, beginning the 700-year Reconquest (Spanish, Reconquista), which became the dominant theme in medieval Spanish history (see fig. 2). What began as a matter of survival in Asturias became a crusade to rid Spain of the Muslims and an imperial mission to reconstruct a united monarchy in Spain.
Pelayo's successors, known as the kings of Leon, extended Christian control southward from Asturias, tore away bits of territory, depopulated and fortified them against the Muslims, and then resettled these areas as the frontier was pushed forward. The kingdom's political center moved in the direction of the military frontier.
In the tenth century, strongholds were built as a buffer for the kingdom of Leon along the upper Rio Ebro, in the area that became known as Castile, the "land of castles." The region was populated by men--border warriors and free peasants--who were willing to defend it, and were granted fueros (special privileges and immunities) by the kings of Leon that made them virtually autonomous. Castile developed a distinct society with its own dialect, values, and customs shaped by the hard conditions of the frontier. Castile also produced a caste of hereditary warriors whom the frontier "democratized"; all warriors were equals, and all men were warriors.
In 981 Castile became an independent county, and in 1004 it was raised to the dignity of a kingdom. Castile and Leon were reunited periodically through royal marriages, but their kings had no better plan than to divide their lands again among their heirs. The two kingdoms were, however, permanently joined as a single state in 1230 by Ferdinand III of Castile (d. 1252).
Under the tutelage of the neighboring Franks, a barrier of pocket states formed along the range of the Pyrenees and on the coast of Catalonia to hold the frontier of France against Islamic Spain. Out of this region, called the Spanish March, emerged the kingdom of Aragon and the counties of Catalonia, all of which expanded, as did Leon-Castile, at the expense of the Muslims. (Andorra is the last independent survivor of the March states.)
The most significant of the counties in Catalonia was that held by the counts of Barcelona. They were descendants of Wilfrid the Hairy (874-98), who at the end of the ninth century declared his fief free of the French crown, monopolized lay and ecclesiastical offices on both sides of the Pyrenees, and divided them--according to Frankish custom--among members of the family. By 1100 Barcelona had dominion over all of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands (Spanish, Islas Baleares). Aragon and the Catalan counties were federated in 1137 through the marriage of Ramon Berenguer IV, count of Barcelona, and Petronilla, heiress to the Aragonese throne. Berenguer assumed the title of king of Aragon, but he continued to rule as count in Catalonia. Berenguer and his successors thus ruled over two realms, each with its own government, legal code, currency, and political orientation.
Valencia, seized from its Muslim amir, became federated with Aragon and Catalonia in 1238. With the union of the three crowns, Aragon (the term most commonly used to describe the federation) rivaled Venice and Genoa for control of Mediterranean trade. Aragonese commercial interests extended to the Black Sea, and the ports of Barcelona and Valencia prospered from traffic in textiles, drugs, spices, and slaves.
Weakened by their disunity, the eleventh-century taifas fell piecemeal to the Castilians, who had reason to anticipate the completion of the Reconquest. When Toledo was lost in 1085, the alarmed amirs appealed for aid to the Almoravids, a militant Berber party of strict Muslims, who in a few years had won control of the Maghreb (northwest Africa). The Almoravids incorporated all of Al Andalus, except Zaragoza, into their North African empire. They attempted to stimulate a religious revival based on their own evangelical brand of Islam. In Spain, however, their movement soon lost its missionary fervor. The Almoravid state fell apart by the mid-twelfth century under pressure from another religious group, the Almohads, who extended their control from Morocco to Spain and made Seville their capital. The Almohads shared the crusading instincts of the Almoravids and posed an even greater military threat to the Christian states, but their expansion was stopped decisively in the epic battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), a watershed in the history of the Reconquest. Muslim strength ebbed thereafter. Ferdinand III took Seville in 1248, reducing Al Andalus to the amirate of Granada, which had bought its safety by betraying the Almohads' Spanish capital. Granada remained a Muslim state, but as a dependency of Castile.
Aragon fulfilled its territorial aims in the thirteenth century when it annexed Valencia. The Catalans, however, looked for further expansion abroad, and their economic views prevailed over those of the parochial Aragonese nobility, who were not enthusiastic about foreign entanglements. Peter III, king of Aragon from 1276 until 1285, had been elected to the throne of Sicily when the French Angevins (House of Anjou) were expelled from the island kingdom during an uprising in 1282. Sicily, and later Naples, became part of the federation of Spanish crowns, and Aragon became embroiled in Italian politics, which continued to affect Spain into the eighteenth century.
Castile, which had traditionally turned away from intervention in European affairs, developed a merchant marine in the Atlantic that successfully challenged the Hanseatic League (a peaceful league of merchants of various free German cities) for dominance in the coastal trade with France, England, and the Netherlands. The economic climate necessary for sustained economic development was notably lacking, however, in Castile. The reasons for this situation appear to have been rooted both in the structure of the economy and in the attitude of the Castilians. Restrictive corporations closely regulated all aspects of the economy--production, trade, and even transport. The most powerful of these corporations, the mesta, controlled the production of wool, Castile's chief export. Perhaps a greater obstacle for economic development was that commercial activity enjoyed little social esteem. Noblemen saw business as beneath their station and derived their incomes and prestige from landownership. Successful bourgeois entrepreneurs, who aspired to the petty nobility, invested in land rather than in other sectors of the economy because of the social status attached to owning land. This attitude deprived the economy of needed investments and engendered stagnation rather than growth.
Feudalism, which bound nobles to the king-counts both economically and socially, as tenants to landlords, had been introduced into Aragon and Catalonia from France. It produced a more clearly stratified social structure than that found in Castile, and consequently it generated greater tension among classes. Castilian society was less competitive, more cohesive, and more egalitarian. Castile attempted to compensate through political means, however, for the binding feudal arrangements between crown and nobility that it lacked. The guiding theory behind the Castilian monarchy was that political centralism could be won at the expense of local fueros, but the kings of Castile never succeeded in creating a unitary state. Aragon- Catalonia accepted and developed--not without conflict--the federal principle, and it made no concerted attempt to establish a political union of the Spanish and Italian principalities outside of their personal union under the Aragonese crown. The principal regions of Spain were divided not only by conflicting local loyalties, but also by their political, economic, and social orientations. Catalonia particularly stood apart from the rest of the country.
Both Castile and Aragon suffered from political instability in the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries. The House of Trastamara acquired the Castilian throne in 1369 and created a new aristocracy to which it granted significant authority. Court favorites, or validos (sing., valido), often dominated their Castilian kings, and, because the kings were weak, nobles competed for control of the government. Important government offices, formerly held by members of the professional class of civil servants who had urban, and frequently Jewish, backgrounds, came into the possession of aristocratic families who eventually held them by hereditary right. The social disruption and the decay of institutions common to much of Europe in the late Middle Ages also affected Aragon, where another branch of the Trastamaras succeeded to the throne in 1416. For long periods, the overextended Aragonese kings resided in Naples, leaving their Spanish realms with weak, vulnerable governments. Economic dislocation, caused by recurring plagues and by the commercial decline of Catalonia, was the occasion for repeated revolts by regional nobility, town corporations, peasants, and, in Barcelona, by the urban proletariat.
Spain
1. Spain in Decline
The seventeenth century was a period of unremitting political, military, economic, and social decline. Neither Philip III (r. 1598-1621) nor Philip IV (r. 1621-65) was competent to give the kind of clear direction that Philip II had provided. Responsibility passed to aristocratic advisers. Gaspar de Guzman, count-duke of Olivares, attempted and failed to establish the centralized administration that his famous contemporary, Cardinal Richelieu, had introduced in France. In reaction to Guzman's bureaucratic absolutism, Catalonia revolted and was virtually annexed by France. Portugal, with English aid, reasserted its independence in 1640, and an attempt was made to separate Andalusia from Spain. In 1648, at the Peace of Westphalia, Spain assented to the emperor's accommodation with the German Protestants, and in 1654 it recognized the independence of the northern Netherlands.
During the long regency for Charles II (1665-1700), the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, validos milked Spain's treasury, and Spain's government operated principally as a dispenser of patronage. Plague, famine, floods, drought, and renewed war with France wasted the country. The Peace of the Pyrenees (1659) ended fifty years of warfare with France, whose king, Louis XIV, found the temptation to exploit weakened Spain too great. As part of the peace settlement, the Spanish infanta Maria Teresa, had become the wife of Louis XIV. Using Spain's failure to pay her dowry as a pretext, Louis instigated the War of Devolution (1667- 68) to acquire the Spanish Netherlands in lieu of the dowery. Most of the European powers were ultimately involved in the wars that Louis fought in the Netherlands.
Spain
1. IBERIA
The people who were later named Iberians (or dwellers along the Rio Ebro) by the Greeks, migrated to Spain in the third millennium B.C. The origin of the Iberians is not certain, but archaeological evidence of their metallurgical and agricultural skills supports a theory that they came from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The Iberians lived in small, tightly knit, sedentary tribal groups that were geographically isolated from one another. Each group developed distinct regional and political identities, and intertribal warfare was endemic. Other peoples of Mediterranean origin also settled in the peninsula during the same period and, together with the Iberians, mixed with the diverse inhabitants.
Celts crossed the Pyrenees into Spain in two major migrations in the ninth and the seventh centuries B.C. The Celts settled for the most part north of the Rio Duero and the Rio Ebro, where they mixed with the Iberians to form groups called Celtiberians. The Celtiberians were farmers and herders who also excelled in metalworking crafts, which the Celts had brought from their Danubian homeland by way of Italy and southern France. Celtic influence dominated Celtiberian culture. The Celtiberians appear to have had no social or political organization larger than their matriarchal, collective, and independent clans.
Another distinct ethnic group in the western Pyrenees, the Basques, predate the arrival of the Iberians. Their pre-Indo- European language has no links with any other language, and attempts to identify it with pre-Latin Iberian have not been convincing. The Romans called them Vascones, from which Basque is derived.
The Iberians shared in the Bronze Age revival (1900 to 1600 B.C.) common throughout the Mediterranean basin. In the east and the south of the Iberian Peninsula, a system of city-states was established, possibly through the amalgamation of tribal units into urban settlements. Their governments followed the older tribal pattern, and they were despotically governed by warrior and priestly castes. A sophisticated urban society emerged with an economy based on gold and silver exports and on trade in tin and copper (which were plentiful in Spain) for bronze.
Phoenicians, Greeks, and Carthaginians competed with the Iberians for control of Spain's coastline and the resources of the interior. Merchants from Tyre may have established an outpost at Cadiz, "the walled enclosure," as early as 1100 B.C. as the westernmost link in what became a chain of settlements lining the peninsula's southern coast. If the accepted date of its founding is accurate, Cadiz is the oldest city in Western Europe, and it is even older than Carthage in North Africa. It was the most significant of the Phoenician colonies. From Cadiz, Phoenician seamen explored the west coast of Africa as far as Senegal, and they reputedly ventured far out on the Atlantic.
Greek pioneers from the island of Rhodes landed in Spain in the eighth century B.C. The Greek colony at Massilia (later Marseilles) maintained commercial ties with the Celtiberians in what is now Catalonia (Spanish, Cataluna; Catalan, Catalunya). In the sixth century B.C., Massilians founded a polis at Ampurias, the first of several established on the Mediterranean coast of the peninsula.
Spain
1. AL ANDALUS
Early in the eighth century, armies from North Africa began probing the Visigothic defenses of Spain and ultimately they initiated the Moorish epoch that would last for centuries. The people who became known to West Europeans as Moors were the Arabs, who had swept across North Africa from their Middle Eastern homeland, and the Berbers, inhabitants of Morocco who had been conquered by the Arabs and converted to Islam.
In 711 Tariq ibn Ziyad, a Berber governor of Tangier, crossed into Spain with an army of 12,000 (landing at a promontory that was later named, in his honor, Jabal Tariq, or Mount Tariq, from which the name, Gibraltar, is derived). They came at the invitation of a Visigothic clan to assist it in rising against King Roderic. Roderic died in battle, and Spain was left without a leader. Tariq returned to Morocco, but the next year (712) Musa ibn Nusair, the Muslim governor in North Africa, led the best of his Arab troops to Spain with the intention of staying. In three years he had subdued all but the mountainous region in the extreme north and had initiated forays into France, which were stemmed at Poitiers in 732.
Al Andalus, as Islamic Spain was called, was organized under the civil and religious leadership of the caliph of Damascus. Governors in Spain were generally Syrians, whose political frame of reference was deeply influenced by Byzantine practices.
Nevertheless, the largest contingent of Moors in Spain consisted of the North African Berbers, recent converts to Islam, who were hostile to the sophisticated Arab governors and bureaucrats and were given to a religious enthusiasm and fundamentalism that were to set the standard for the Islamic community in Spain. Berber settlers fanned out through the country and made up as much as 20 percent of the population of the occupied territory. The Arabs constituted an aristocracy in the revived cities and on the latifundios that they had inherited from the Romans and the Visigoths.
Most members of the Visigothic nobility converted to Islam, and they retained their privileged position in the new society. The countryside, only nominally Christian, was also successfully Islamized. Nevertheless, an Hispano-Roman Christian community survived in the cities. Moreover, Jews, who constituted more than 5 percent of the population, continued to play an important role in commerce, scholarship, and the professions.
The Arab-dominated Umayyad dynasty at Damascus was overthrown in 756 by the Abbasids, who moved the caliphate to Baghdad. One Umayyad prince fled to Spain and, under the name of Abd al Rahman (r. 756-88), founded a politically independent amirate (the Caliphate of Cordoba), which was then the farthest extremity of the Islamic world. His dynasty flourished for 250 years. Nothing in Europe compared with the wealth, the power, and the sheer brilliance of Al Andalus during this period.
In 929 Abd al Rahman III (r. 912-61), who was half European-- as were many of the ruling caste, elevated the amirate to the status of a caliphate. This action cut Spain's last ties with Baghdad and established that thereafter Al Andalus's rulers would enjoy complete religious and political sovereignty.
When Hisham II, grandson of Abd al Rahman, inherited the throne in 976 at age twelve, the royal vizier, Ibn Abi Amir (known as Al Mansur), became regent (981-1002) and established himself as virtual dictator. For the next twenty-six years, the caliph was no more than a figurehead, and Al Mansur was the actual ruler. Al Mansur wanted the caliphate to symbolize the ideal of religious and political unity as insurance against any renewal of civil strife. Notwithstanding his employment of Christian mercenaries, Al Mansur preached jihad, or holy war, against the Christian states on the frontier, undertaking annual summer campaigns against them, which served not only to unite Spanish Muslims in a common cause but also to extend temporary Muslim control in the north.
The caliphate of Cordoba did not long survive Al Mansur's dictatorship. Rival claimants to the throne, local aristocrats, and army commanders who staked out taifas (sing., taifa), or independent regional city-states, tore the caliphate apart. Some taifas, such as Seville (Spanish, Sevilla), Granada, Valencia, and Zaragoza, became strong amirates, but all faced frequent political upheavals, war among themselves, and long-term accommodations to emerging Christian states.
Peaceful relations among Arabs, Berbers, and Spanish converts to Islam were not easily maintained. To hold together such a heterogeneous population, Spanish Islam stressed ethics and legalism. Pressure from the puritanical Berbers also led to crackdowns on Mozarabs (name for Christians in Al Andalus: literally, Arab-like) and Jews.
Mozarabs were considered a separate caste even though there were no real differences between them and the converts to Islam except for religion and liability to taxation, which fell heavily on the Christian community. They were essentially urban merchants and artisans. Their church was permitted to exist with few restrictions, but it was prohibited from flourishing. The episcopal and monastic structure remained intact, but teaching was curbed and intellectual initiative was lost.
In the ninth century, Mozarabs in Cordoba, led by their bishop, invited martyrdom by publicly denouncing the Prophet Muhammad in public. Nevertheless, violence against the Mozarabs was rare until the eleventh century, when the Christian states became a serious threat to the security of Al Andalus. Many Mozarabs fled to the Christian north.
Roman aqueduct, Segovia Courtesy Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
1. After its defeat by the Romans in the First Punic War (264-41 B.C.), Carthage compensated for its loss of Sicily by rebuilding a commercial empire in Spain. The country became the staging ground for Hannibal's epic invasion of Italy during the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.). Roman armies also invaded Spain and used it as a training ground for officers and as a proving ground for tactics during campaigns against the Carthaginians and the Iberians. Iberian resistance was fierce and prolonged, however, and it was not until 19 B.C. that the Roman emperor Augustus (r. 27 B.C.-A.D. 14) was able to complete the conquest of Spain.
Romanization of the Iberians proceeded quickly after their conquest. Called Hispania by the Romans, Spain was not one political entity but was divided into three separately governed provinces (nine provinces by the fourth century A.D.). More important, Spain was for more than 400 years part of a cosmopolitan world empire bound together by law, language, and the Roman road.
Iberian tribal leaders and urban oligarchs were admitted into the Roman aristocratic class, and they participated in governing Spain and the empire. The latifundios (sing., latifundio), large estates controlled by the aristocracy, were superimposed on the existing Iberian landholding system.
The Romans improved existing cities, established Zaragoza, Merida, and Valencia, and provided amenities throughout the empire. Spain's economy expanded under Roman tutelage. Spain, along with North Africa, served as a granary for the Roman market, and its harbors exported gold, wool, olive oil, and wine. Agricultural production increased with the introduction of irrigation projects, some of which remain in use. The HispanoRomans --the romanized Iberians and the Iberian-born descendants of Roman soldiers and colonists--had all achieved the status of full Roman citizenship by the end of the first century A.D. The emperors Trajan (r. 98-117), Hadrian (r. 117-38), and Marcus Aurelius (r. 161-80) were born in Spain.
Christianity was introduced into Spain in the first century, and it became popular in the cities in the second century. Little headway was made in the countryside, however, until the late fourth century, by which time Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire. Some heretical sects emerged in Spain, but the Spanish church remained subordinate to the Bishop of Rome. Bishops who had official civil, as well as ecclesiastical, status in the late empire continued to exercise their authority to maintain order when civil governments broke down in Spain in the fifth century. The Council of Bishops became an important instrument of stability during the ascendancy of the Visigoths, a Germanic tribe.
In 405 two Germanic tribes, the Vandals and the Suevi, crossed the Rhine and ravaged Gaul until the Visigoths, drove them into Spain. The Suevi established a kingdom in the remote northwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula. The hardier Vandals, never exceeding 80,000, occupied the region that bears their name--Andalusia (Spanish, Andalucia).
Because large parts of Spain were outside his control, the western Roman emperor, Honorius (r. 395-423), commissioned his sister, Galla Placidia, and her husband Ataulf, the Visigoth king, to restore order in the Iberian Peninsula, and he gave them the rights to settle in and to govern the area in return for defending it. The highly romanized Visigoths managed to subdue the Suevi and to compel the Vandals to sail for North Africa. In 484 they established Toledo as the capital of their Spanish monarchy. The Visigothic occupation was in no sense a barbarian invasion, however. Successive Visigothic kings ruled Spain as patricians who held imperial commissions to govern in the name of the Roman emperor.
There were no more than 300,000 Germanic people in Spain, which had a population of 4 million, and their overall influence on Spanish history is generally seen as minimal. They were a privileged warrior elite, though many of them lived as herders and farmers in the valley of the Rio Tajo and on the central plateau. Hispano-Romans continued to run the civil administration, and Latin continued to be the language of government and of commerce.
Under the Visigoths, lay culture was not so highly developed as it had been under the Romans, and the task of maintaining formal education and government shifted decisively to the church because its Hispano-Roman clergy alone were qualified to manage higher administration. As elsewhere in early medieval Europe, the church in Spain stood as society's most cohesive institution, and it embodied the continuity of Roman order.
Religion was the most persistent source of friction between the Roman Catholic Hispano-Romans and their Arian Visigoth overlords, whom they considered heretical. At times this tension invited open rebellion, and restive factions within the Visigothic aristocracy exploited it to weaken the monarchy. In 589 Recared, a Visigoth ruler, renounced his Arianism before the Council of Bishops at Toledo and accepted Catholicism, thus assuring an alliance between the Visigothic monarchy and the Hispano-Romans. This alliance would not mark the last time in Spanish history that political unity would be sought through religious unity.
Court ceremonials--from Constantinople--that proclaimed the imperial sovereignty and unity of the Visigothic state were introduced at Toledo. Still, civil war, royal assassinations, and usurpation were commonplace, and warlords and great landholders assumed wide discretionary powers. Bloody family feuds went unchecked. The Visigoths had acquired and cultivated the apparatus of the Roman state, but not the ability to make it operate to their advantage. In the absence of a well-defined hereditary system of succession to the throne, rival factions encouraged foreign intervention by the Greeks, the Franks, and, finally, the Muslims in internal disputes and in royal elections.
The word Aztec was invented by a 19th century writer; perhaps the word was used to sanitize or distance the historical people from their progeny. The people encountered by Cortez were known as the Mexica, leaders of the Triple Alliance. They were the most powerful of many ethnic groups that made the valley of Mexico their home. We know a great deal about them from the early ethnographic works of Sahagun and other Spanish priests.
1. There are several documents that have spanish commentary and frequently nahuatl glosses accompanying picture writing used by the natives. There are many other documents to explore written purely in Nahuatl or other Uto-Aztecan languages using european characters, but those will have to wait to be explored on another page.
What follows herein is a loose aggregation of information about surviving examples of Aztec writing that follow a pre-conquest pictorial tradition, dating primarily from the 16th century.