Test revision

This may be too late to be helpful but if you want to make use of a communal discussion in the few short hours before the test here it is:

God the Geometer, Codex Vindobonensis 2554

Details, in case you missed them, are:

• The test takes place in the lecture slot on Monday 21 May.
• It is expected to take about an hour, but you can take up to two if required. 
• It will follow an essay format.
• It will take the form of a statement you must discuss with reference to primary sources.
• Select primary sources will be provided.
• A mock test is available on Blackboard
• The marking criteria are listed in the Unit Guide
• There is no exam in the exam period.
• There is no tutorial in week 12 after the test.
• Please submit outstanding essay hard copies to the SOPHIS essay box (Menzies W604).

It's been a blast, so thanks everyone. And good luck on Monday!
Carol

Week 11: Black Death

BLOG POST CONTRIBUTIONS

1: Europe: A General Picture Before the Black Death (Erica)

2: Timeline of the Black Death (Maia)

3: Political/Economic Effects of the Black Death (Sarah)

4: Religious/Social Effects of the Black Death (Tor)

5: Quarantine: From the Middle Ages to the Modern (Emma)

1. EUROPE BEFORE THE BLACK DEATH

The 1300s before the Black Death was a time of relative prosperity. The money economy had started up again and urban centers like Florence and Venice were flourishing in trade, politics, talent, and wealth enough to begin laying the foundations for the Renaissance. The growth of guilds, the demands for quality goods, and a new search for talent and beauty, for example, led to humanist Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) exclaiming “What in the whole world is so splendid and magnificent as the architecture of Florence?” (see Margaret L. King’s ‘The Renaissance in Europe’)

In Venice, the scattered islands were united into a powerful trading kingdom, so much that the Merchants of Venices’ palaces doubled as warehouses. “Iron, salt, gold and treasure, timber and wine, meat and fish” – these were just some of the goods that passed hands. Venice had the extraordinary position of being accessible to both Western Europe and the Islamic world, and thus it is little surprise that it became so wealthy.

This wealth allowed for much artistic and architectural works to be done, with beautiful buildings, poets, and famous writers abounding such as Dante, Boccacio and Petrarch. And reigning above it all were the despots and tyrants that had gradually seized control after these cities first attempted to become republics.

While many cities at the time were not nearly as wealthy as Florence or Venice, as a whole, the Europe in the years before the Black Death at least generally had strong governance and better trade routes than the decades before. It would be these that would influence the Black Death for better or worse.

Erica Chan

2. TIMELINE OF THE BLACK DEATH

1346-47: Italian rural population already weakened by famine

1347: Bubonic plague, the Black Death, arrives in Messina, Sicily, brought by merchant galleys that had traded in Byzantium and the Crimea

1347-48: Plague travelled in the winter, then flared up again for the summer of 48

1348: Plague sweeps through Italy

The plague returned with decreasing ferocity each generation after 1348. Epidemics recurred in 1361-63, 1371, 1373-74, 1382-83, 1390, 1400, and afterwards with less frequency. The plague occurred in Europe as late as 1720.

Maia Coghlan

3.      POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC EFFECTS OF THE BLACK DEATH

Prior to the Black Death, Italy was an economically prosperous place to live.

Florence and Venice

Florentine bankers became the most famous, and wealthy bankers in all of Europe, profiting on the exchange of money. (In connection with the Church- they collected money for the Pope).

Wool making was the largest part of the Florentine economy, and thus there were two major wool guilds or ‘arti maggiori’. There were many guilds in Florence including; bankers and judges etc. There were also ‘lesser’ guilds, of the less glamorous professions. The individuals in these guilds were elected to maintain the governing body of Florence.

The wealthy merchants of Venice were in charge of the government in the time prior to the Black Death. This merchant class was turned into the hereditary nobility in the late 1200‘s. The state had a great interest in trade, and thus spurred on the mass construction of ships. These ‘factories’ had assembly line efficiency and matched, even exceeded the size of the wool-making industry in Florence.

The Black Death

The Black Death arrived in Italy in 1348. Populations rapidly declined, by rates of two thirds. Florence shrank from approximately 100,000 to 30,000; and Venice went from 120,000 to 84,000. The people had no idea how to treat infections or disease, and thus doctors’ work increased because people were willing to pay large sums of money to be treated, yet some refused to work because they were fearful. Some governments identified households with the plague and declared quarantine for anything crossing into the cities.

Sarah Bland

4.      RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL EFFECTS OF THE BLACK DEATH

When the Black Death struck, for the people affected, it was an almost total breakdown of society. The author Giovanni Boccaccio describes the plague effects on human and spirit with a passage from the reading.  “The fact was that one citizen avoided another, that almost no-one cared for this neighbour”. This avoiding of others shows that the commandment of “love thy neighbour” which can be argued is what Western society is built on, was discarded due to people’s fear of the illness. Boccaccio also describes that families would abandon each other, that parents would neglect children “as if they were not their own”.

From a total physical perspective, the plague decimated Europe’s population, with estimates putting the death toll between one and two thirds of the continents population. This loss of population meant that there was a lack of labour shortage, but some authors have put his diminished population as a positive because of the land and food shortages that existed in areas before the plague.The plague also changed how people saw their own life, in the portrait by Francesco Traini in the reading, it shows Death as a skeleton, taking lives at will, highlighting people’s sudden realisation with their own fragile morality. Authors and other sources have also claimed that the moral crisis brought upon by the plague was the catalyst for the beginning of the Renaissance and the end of the Middle Ages.

People thought that perhaps the plague was God’s wrath, and sources from the reading describe the coming of the plague as God’s will. The Church gave aid sporadically, sometimes priest would stay, while others would flee the plague affected areas. The death toll was so high that many people went without Last Rites; one of the sacrament’s of Catholicism. Losing a priest in a village meant that either the people went without the services of the church, or the successor lacked experience or the calling of the previous priest. The Church was also said to have lost some authority as the behaviour of clerics at times were seen as lowly for a man of God

Tor Clough-Good

5.      QUARANTINE: FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE MODERN ERA

Quarantine was introduced after the devastating effects of the Black Death that wiped out 30% of Europe’s population. When first introduced, any person coming to the city was left on a nearby island for 30 days to ensure that they did not develop plague-like symptoms during this time. Eventually they increased this to forty days, and this is where the word “quarantine” comes from; it is Italian (quarantena) meaning forty-day period. Eventually Quarantining became a regular event used to prevent lots of diseases such as Leprosy, Yellow Fever, Asiatic cholera and others, with all shipments being quarantined. Crews were left on island for 40 days, and a ships cargo was unpacked and left to air for days.

The Quarantine Act 1710 ensured that the Black Plague would not again deplete Europe’s population. Other countries especially those around England followed in their footsteps and set up their own Quarantine measures.  Today, Australia has the strictest Quarantine policies in the world, as we, as a county have so much more to loose than other countries. We are a fairly new country and many diseases and illnesses have not invaded our shores, our strict quarantine laws insure that this continues.

Emma Gavin

Blog Question

What do you think was the most important impact of the Black Death out of those outlined by King?

We want your feedback

Dear Students,

 

You will have received en email from SETU (Student Evaluation of Teaching and Units), inviting you to evaluate ATS 1316. Please do so! We really want to know what you think.

 

These surveys are taken extremely seriously by the University. They are used when staff members apply for promotion, or for other jobs. They are also used to make changes to the units for next year, drawing on student comments. These blogs, for example, emerged out of comments by students that they sometimes felt disconnected during first year. Hence, we have tried to build community and encourage your readings by running these blogs.

 

So let us know what you think of the unit. YOU ARE VERY POWERFUL!

 

Many thanks, Clare

Week 10: Courtly Culture and Crusaders

INTRODUCTION
We all know the popularised image of the mediæval crusader, portrayed through various forms of entertainment media and often associated with open fields filled with grown men and women brandishing polystyrene swords; but how accurate are they at representing the crusaders and their aspirations? And what has been their lasting impact of the crusades in modern societies today? The mediæval crusades still hold political, religious and cultural significance in contemporary society, often becoming a comparative reference to modern wars. 

 

The War on Terror for example was compared to the act of crusading by the former U.S president George W. Bush in his statement upon the South Lawn of the White House: “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.” Similarly, ’Usāmah ibn Lādin has previously described the decade-long conflict with the Middle East as a “Zionist crusader-war against Islam.” Granted, this has slightly different connotations to its mediæval counterpart, but the terminology still insights reference to these former events. It is interesting then to compare the contexts of these two speakers, and how their references to these mediæval events confer different interpretations of the crusades. Within Ibn Lādin’s statement he portrays the act of crusading as a method of oppression, whereas President Bush (in contrast) refers to the act as a pursuit of justice. This leads to a pertinent question regarding the interpretation of the crusades, and whether they should be perceived as an act of love—as depicted by Riley-Smith—or an act of unrestricted greed, violence and miscommunication. When answering this week’s Blog Question, try to incorporate different historical perspectives, such as how you may have perceived the crusades in 1096 CE as opposed to now. What follows is a deconstruction of the crusades, from each of its significant events to its context, in both religious and societal terms. A brief summary of the set readings are also included to provide historiography in relation to the events and an initial introduction to the different perspectives developed around the crusades.

~ Jake Scott

WHAT IS A CRUSADE?

The term ‘Crusade’ was the title given to the Holy Wars that occurred between the 11th and 13th centuries in Mediæval Europe. It is derivative from the French word croisade, which literally means ‘marking with the cross’ or ‘taking the cross’. In essence, the crusades were religious expeditionary wars conducted on behalf of Christendom to defend the ‘Byzantine’ Roman Empire and recapture the Holy Land in Palestine from Türco-Muslim forces.

Subsequent to the proclamation by Pope Urban II for the first Crusade in 1095, a series of nine Crusades occurred:

1096-1099 CE – First Crusade (led by Count Raymond IV of Toulouse)

1144-1155 CE – Second Crusade (led by Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III and King Louis VII of France)

1187-1192 CE – Third Crusade (led by Richard the Lionheart of England, Philip II of France, and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I)

1202-1204 CE – Fourth Crusade (led by Fulk of Neuil; Latin conquest of Constantinople)

1212 CE – The Children's Crusade (led by a French peasant boy, Stephen of Cloyes)

1217-1221 CE – Fifth Crusade (led by King Andrew II of Hungary, Duke Leopold VI of Austria, and John of Brienne)

1228-1229 CE – Sixth Crusade (led by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II)

1248-1254 CE – Seventh Crusade (led by Louis IX of France)

1270 CE – Eighth Crusade (led by Louis IX)

1271-1272 CE – Ninth Crusade (led by Prince Edward (later Edward I) of England)

~ Micheline Erbes

WHAT WAS THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT? 

11th Century Western Europe was characterized by expansion and organization, as the growing population of the Continent cleared forests and drained marshlands in order make way for cultivation and agriculture, spurred in turn by the growth of towns and urban environments. Although the majority of the denizens of Western Europe were serfs and peasants (many of whom were living under Feudalism), the 11th Century saw the rapid growth of trade and industry. This was particularly the case in the Italian Peninsula, where mercantile city-states such as Genoa and Pisa were systematically eradicating the predatory presence of Barbary-Muslim corsairs from the Western Mediterranean. Arab-Muslim forces were also being driven out of Sicily by Norman expeditions from Northern France, who had also conquered England and established an independent Norman kingdom on the island. France proper was under the domination of the Capetian Dynasty, whilst Germany was loosely controlled by the so-called Holy Roman Empire. Further east, the Magyars of Hungary had been unified into a single, coherent Kingdom and converted to Latin Christianity, whilst the ‘Byzantine’ Romans annexed the Bulgar Empire and reasserted their supremacy over the Balkan Peninsula.

 

Unlike Western Europe (which was experiencing growth and expansion militarily, economically, commercially, etc), the Near East was in a state of anarchy and decline. By the Late 11th Century CE, the Levant was a “vast war zone” torn between the Fātimid Imāmate of Egypt and the crumbling remnants of the Selçūkid Sultānate, now divided amongst petty Türkish warlords. In a sense, the Levant was a reflection of the political situation surrounding the religion of Islām, and a microcosm of the Middle East as a whole:  The Fātimids were Shī‘ites whilst the Türks were Sunnīs, two distinct sects of Islām with a long history of violence and animosity towards each other. The once dominant Selçūkid Sultānate had now fallen apart, its former territories ruled by minor Türkish dynasties fighting with each other as they had following the decline of the Arab-Muslim Empire several centuries earlier.

Thusly, by 1096, Western Europe was characterized by economic growth, population growth, increased urbanization, agricultural expansion and military expansion; the Levant, however, was in a state of chaos, as religious (Shī‘a-Sunnī) and political (Türco-Fātimid) sectarianism tore the region asunder.

~ Joshua Little

WHEN DID THEY BEGIN AND END? 

The Crusades were initiated by a speech given at the Cathedral of Clermont in the Auvergne, France, in 1095. Pope Urban II spoke outside the cathedral to a large crowd of knights, men, archbishops, bishops and abbots, to persuade them on the notion that the ‘Byzantine’ Roman Empire needed to be defended, and Jerusalem needed to be reclaimed from the Türco-Muslims occupying the Holy Land. 

  The crowd was so inspired by Urban II’s speech that soon after this, the First Crusade was launched. During the Crusades, there were some Crusading activities that were not condoned by the church, and committed in religious passion, such as attacks on Jews led by Peter the Hermit. Therefore, the first official Crusader armies did not leave for battle until 1096, and arrived in Constantinople in 1097. They then moved on to Nicaea where the first siege took place in June 1097, followed by the siege of Antioch from October 1097 to June 1098, with the armies finally reaching Jerusalem in June 1099. 

 In July, the Crusaders attacked Jerusalem and took the city. The Christians created a military base in the city, whereupon—their mission complete—most of the soldiers returned home. However, the end date of the Crusades was not until nearly two-hundred years later.

These many decades of conflict saw the capturing and recapturing of cities and land in battles between the Muslims and the Christians until the 13th Century, when the Crusades had transformed into a major war. After a continuation of more battles throughout the 13th Century, the Crusades came to an end after Mamlūk-Muslim forces defeated the Christians in the city of Acre in 1291. After seeing that victory was impossible, the Christians tried to escape the city, which was then destroyed by the Muslims. Following the disaster at Acre, the Christians left all other cities on Muslim land which they had previously occupied. Thusly, after August 1291, the Christians had failed in their cause, Muslims once again owned Jerusalem and the Holy Lands, and the Crusades had come to an end.

~ Sanja Stapar

READINGS SUMMARY:

Crusading as an Act of Love – Jonathan S. C. Riley-Smith:

Jonathan Riley-Smith describes crusading as an “act of love.” Much of the propaganda from the time used the same message to legitimize the crusades. Riley-Smith examines how the scholars of the time justified it and how accurately the statement could be interpreted. His examinations of Pope Urban II and Alexander III reveal a one-dimensional view of love as motivation for the crusades. Further examination reveals that scholars like St Augustine had far more reasoned and in-depth analysis of the idea of love in relation to crusading. Rather than just loving the Christians in the east as was being propagated at the time, Augustine claimed that death was preferable to sin and crusaders were ultimately helping those they killed. Riley-Smith concludes that, even though the major popes and cardinals preaching for the crusades knew about these superior arguments for crusading as an act of love, they still chose to preach a one dimensional argument of loving God, retrieving his land, loving other Christians and saving them from Muslims. The final reasoning for this choice was—in the opinion of Riley-Smith—that these were far more relatable circumstances, and that it was easier to convince a crowd of would-be crusaders with these simple justifications of love rather than with the deep, philosophical arguments of scholars and theologians.

Byzantium and the Crusades – Steven Runciman:

Steven Runciman’s essay examines the history of Byzantium throughout the period of the crusades. He begins with its initial alliance with the pope and the call for help in defending it against the Selçūkid Türks. He positions himself and the reader in a position of sympathy for Byzantium, the misunderstanding with the first crusaders, the gradual loss of trade and property to Venetian merchants and the numerous attacks on the city by various factions. The essay details many accounts of political failings and military mistakes, and Runciman summarizes the problems that beset the city as “embarrassment and worry caused to Byzantium”. Most of this was due to the Pope, who set out with noble intentions and goodwill but misunderstood a great deal of what was required of him, which led to a whole chain of unfortunate blunders.

The Crusades: A Reader – Sarah J. Allen and Emilie Amt:

The selected passages outline three separate recounts of events during the crusades.

The first is the recount of Pope Innocent III announcing the Fourth Crusade, and the related tax increases that would accompany the costs of funding said crusade. He is stated as having described the charity of paying the new tax as a sort of tribute to God, and the sins of those who payed would be absolved in light of their new services the church and its representative warriors.

The second recount outlines the debt crisis that the Fourth Crusade’s participants entered into when they entreated the Venetian Doge to assist them in transporting their army. By requesting the transportation of far more troops than they could afford, they ended up irreconcilably in debt to the Doge. Eventually, in order to settle some of this debt, they resorted to attacking the nearby city of Zara. Zara was a rival trade city, so in order to remove their competition the Venetians took advantage of the power they had over the Crusader armies, forcing them to take the city in their name.

The final passage refers to the sacking of Constantinople by the same army that attacked Zara. After having been excommunicated by Innocent III following the conquest of Zara (at Venetian behest), the sacking of Constantinople bought the crusaders back into favour with the Pope. The only lamentable part of the attack (as stated by a Greek historian from the period) was that the army was overly violent in their attack, ransacking churches and stealing a number of relics. This violence was undertaken by many of the crusaders, but the success of the attack on Constantinople overshadowed the shame of the fighters themselves.

~ James Smallridge

BLOG COMMENT QUESTION:  

Were the intentions behind the Crusades ‘good’ or ‘bad’? Also, were the practical occurrences and outcomes of the Crusades ‘good’ or ‘bad’?