Major Questions in History - Essay Example

1. The curial order was the local town council. People competed for positions as magistrates as a means of gaining power and prestige. Only citizens could serve in the curial order, and women were generally barred from it, but very wealthy women were able to gain seats. Honestiores were basically those who had served or were serving in the curial order while humiliores referred to everyone else. 2. Some of the religious traditions that were incorporated into Islam include Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Manichaen and Buddism. It preserved the sanctity of the Kaaba, which is a rock put in place, it is believed, by Abraham when he founded Mecca. The quick spread of Islam can also be attributed to the fact that Muhammad had influence over all of the traders and trade routes and his successors granted high positions of power among their followers and provided tax breaks for followers of Islam. 3. The Iconoclasts were a group of very pious Christians who felt that the Christian practice of creating images which were then used as an important part of the church service was in direct opposition to the commandment to make no graven images. This movement began the break between Eastern and Western belief systems where the East still places a great deal of importance on religious icons and helped define the role of art in religion. 4. Early medieval Spain was characterized by an early resistance to Roman Catholicism, unification with the additional power and funds of the Pope when Catholicism was finally adopted and then fragmentation again when the Muslims invaded and took over the Iberian Peninsula. Italy also was largely fragmented through the early middle ages and had to deal with Muslim invasion, particularly in Sicily and Naples, but they did not have the short period of unification experienced in Spain. Britain was also highly fragmented, but its people were geographically divided and the conversion to Christianity was much slower. While Spain and Italy were fragmented by the Muslims, England was nearly overrun by Vikings. 5. Women in the Carolingian society were often able to manage large patriarchic estates and even serve in political roles if they were wealthy, but were more influential in private cultural spheres. Women were not able to take up positions of strong authority within the church, though. Truly public roles were very rare and typically only pertained to the household, however large, of her husband. 6. Agricultural advancements were required as a means of feeding a growing population that was reaching greater ages with better nutrition, one of which was the use of the draft horse as a more efficient worker than oxen in transporting seed and produce and plowing fields. This produced excess food that was taken, by roads and highways, to growing towns where people began to accumulate in greater numbers. This, in turn, enabled the towns and cities to import more food from further away using enhanced vehicles designed with the horse in mind. Crop specialization based on environmental conditions led to the development of specialized trades in developing and marketing these products throughout Europe. 7. Medieval society was much more complex than the simple-sounding division of clergy, nobility and peasantry. Differences existed based upon a variety of factors including wealth and population of region. Women experienced vast differences in their constraints based upon whether they were rich or poor, eldest or youngest within the family structure. Townspeople and Jews were often overlooked. 8. The investiture controversy is the name given to a battle of wills between King Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII. The question was primarily one of just who was given the right by God to be the ultimate ruler on Earth – the Pope or the Emperor. The Pope wished to tell the King what to do in secular matters while the King attempted to assign positions of authority within Church offices. 9. By establishing patron saints, monarchs began creating a national identity and offered a long-term figure citizens of their region could rally around. To keep more of the land under their own control, monarchs began retaining lands in their own hands and appointing officials who had no connection to the land to supervise. Itinerant court brought the laws of the land to the people through feudal channels. All of these measures were implemented to eliminate the risk of division from within. 10. Religious controversy introduced by Berengar in his treatise asserting that Christ was not present in the Eucharist was answered by a return to logic as first Anselm employed logic as a defense and then Abelards applied it to some of the major questions of the scriptures. Although others such as Hildegard of Bingen rejected this intellectual approach to religion, it proved a successful means of addressing some of the doubts that had been introduced. 11. Factors that led to the First Crusade included disintegration of the Macedonian empire, invasion of Macedonia by the Turks, an appeal made to Pope Urban II for mercenary help, concern within Western Europe of Turkish soldiers preventing pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the desire of the Knights to fight someone without the restrictions of the church. 12. The papacy in the high middle ages has an extremely powerful institutional structure in which the Pope held most of the power with the College of Cardinals appointed as a type of Senate. Papal envoys represented the Pope in far-away places and Lateran Councils helped to determine lower church decisions. In addition, the papacy had the power to excommunicate, thus cutting someone completely out of the social hierarchy; to lay an interdiction which forbade most religious practices in a region; or invoke inquisition to discover instances of heresy. 13. Both France and England were working during this period in time to stabilize their governmental structure, but France was working to expand, through a series of wars primarily with England, to reach the Mediterranean Sea while England was simply striving to survive the repeated waves of Vikings. French leaders opted to retain captured lands in the hands of the monarchy while English leaders worked to establish a more democratic-oriented approach of fiefdoms and councils. 14. One of the greatest longstanding causes of the Hundred Years War was the inter-relationships between the monarchies. Both monarchies lost their kings within a year of each other and the countries argued back and forth as to who should be the rightful heir to the throne of France. An immediate cause of the conflict was England Edward III’s insistence that France return French lands lost by his father to France and France’s Philip IV’s insistence upon Edward swearing fealty to him (Philip) as King as a requirement of the fiefdom. It is uncertain just what role Joan of Arc played in the French military triumph. She may have been merely a standard bearer and much-needed inspiration for the flagging army, but there is evidence that she played a major role in changing French tactics from a rather timid and mostly defensive approach to a much more aggressive and proactive one. 15. The Black Death killed a significant proportion of the population in Europe and created large-scale changes. Strict social restrictions began to break down as people found they had to depend upon each other, religious practices became more penitent and economic states shifted dramatically. Changes in the guilds during this time period also ensured that women remained completed dependent upon men for their welfare as only men were provided full-time work. Some guilds existed to protect female workers, but these were rare. 16. Petrarch’s humanism held that all people were essentially equal in God-given graces and that these graces were best explored through the arts, philosophy and the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This entailed the provision of public services to bring these arts to the common people and worked somewhat against the teachings of the church in that it assumed that people were provided with certain rights regardless of whether they had promised themselves to God through the church. 17. During the Renaissance, the artist’s role changed from being a chronicler of individuals and a producer of religious icons to that of interpreters of the world’s and God’s great truths as they were revealed through a more sophisticated means of presentation and informed by the knowledge of the ancients. 18. Desiderius Erasmus was a Dutch humanist who wrote about the essential humanistic element of true Christian worship, that blind faith or simply following the outward expressions of the church was not sufficient for a true faith. This is why it became known as Christian humanism. 19. Castiglione’s advice to the courtier seems to sum up the important elements of life at court very well. There was a lot of art and cultural activities occurring, in which the courtier was expected to both participate and be knowledgeable of, but to be too flashy, too dressy or over anxious was considered ‘bad form’ and rude. 20. There was a very close relationship between the Renaissance artist and the papacy because the papacy provided the artist with necessary support in the form of commissions while the artist provided the papacy with the appropriate art and scale to appropriately illustrate the papacy’s power and influence. Read More