ch 10 responses 1

Chapter 10 Margin Questions
In what respects did Byzantium continue the patterns of the classical Roman Empire? In what ways did it diverge from those patterns? Continuance can be seen in Byzantium’s roads, military structures, centralized administration, imperial court, laws, and Christian organization. It can also be seen in Byzantium’s pursuit of the long-term Roman struggle with the Persian Empire. Byzantium diverged through the development of a reformed administrative system that gave appointed generals civil authority in the empire’s provinces and allowed them to raise armies from the landowning peasants of the region. It also diverged through the new ideas encompassed in caesaropapism that defined the relationship between the state and the Church.

How did Eastern Orthodox Christianity differ from Roman Catholicism? Unlike Western Europe, where the Catholic Church maintained some degree of independence from political authorities, in Byzantium the emperor assumed something of the role of both “Caesar,” as head of state, and the pope, as head of the Church. Thus the Byzantine emperor appointed the patriarch of the Orthodox Church, sometimes made decisions about doctrine, called church councils into session, and generally treated the Church as a government department. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, Greek became the language of religious practice instead of the Latin used in the Roman Catholic Church. More so than in the West, Byzantine thinkers sought to formulate Christian doctrine in terms of Greek philosophical concepts. The Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches disagreed on a number of doctrinal issues, including the nature of the Trinity, the relative importance of faith and reason, and the veneration of icons. Priests in Byzantium allowed their beards to grow long and were permitted to marry, while priests in the West shaved and, after 1050 or so, were supposed to remain celibate. Orthodox ritual called for using bread leavened with yeast in the mass, but Catholics used unleavened bread. Eastern Orthodox leaders sharply rejected the growing claims of Roman popes to be the sole and final authority for all Christians everywhere.
In what ways was the Byzantine Empire linked to a wider world? On a political and military level, Byzantium continued the long-term Roman struggle with the Persian Empire. Economically, the Byzantine Empire was a central player in the long-distance trade of Eurasia, with commercial links to Western Europe, Russia, Central Asia, the Islamic world, and China. Culturally, Byzantium preserved much of ancient Greek learning and transmitted this classical heritage to both the Islamic world and the Christian West. • Byzantine religious culture spread widely among Slavic-speaking peoples in the Balkans and Russia.

How did links to Byzantium transform the new civilization of Kievan Rus? Kievan Rus borrowed Byzantium architectural styles, the Cyrillic alphabet, the extensive use of icons, a monastic tradition stressing prayer and service, and political ideals of imperial control of the Church. What replaced the Roman order in Western Europe? Politically, the Roman imperial order collapsed, to be replaced by a series of regional kingdoms ruled by Germanic warlords. But these states maintained some Roman features, including written Roman law and the use of fines and penalties to provide order and justice. Some of the larger Germanic kingdoms, including the Carolingian Empire and the empire of Otto I of Saxony, also had aspirations to re-create something of the unity of the Roman Empire, although these kingdoms were short-lived and unsuccessful in reviving anything approaching Roman authority. In the West, a social system developed that was based on reciprocal ties between greater and lesser lords among the warrior elites, which replaced the Roman social structure. Roman slavery gave way to the practice of serfdom. The Roman Catholic Church increased its influence over society. In what ways was European civilization changing after 1000? The population grew rapidly. New lands were opened for cultivation. Long-distance trade was revived and expanded. The population of towns grew and attracted new professional groupings that introduced a new and more productive division of labor into European society. Women found substantial new opportunities because of economic growth and urbanization, but by the fifteenth century, many of these opportunities were declining. Territorial states grew in this period and established more effective institutions of government, commanding the loyalty or at least the obedience of their subjects. The Roman Catholic Church expanded the area in which Roman Catholicism was practiced into Eastern Europe and Islamic Spain. What was the impact of the Crusades in world history? They marked an expansion of the influence of Western Christendom at the same time that Eastern Christendom and Byzantium were declining. They stimulated the demand for Asian luxury goods in Europe. They also allowed Europeans to learn techniques for producing sugar on large plantations using slave labor, which had incalculable consequences in later centuries when Europeans transferred the plantation system to the Americas. Muslim scholarship, together with the Greek learning that it incorporated, flowed into Europe. The Crusades hardened cultural barriers between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Moreover, Christian anti-Semitism was exacerbated. European empire building, especially in the Americas, continued the crusading notion that “God wills it.” The Crusades have also on many occasions proved politically or ideologically significant when the worlds of Europe and Islam have collided over the past two centuries.
In what ways did borrowing from abroad shape European civilization after 1000? Borrowing from abroad played a critical role in establishing a significant tradition of technological innovation that allowed Europe by 1500 to catch up with, and in some areas perhaps to surpass, China and the Islamic world. A more efficient horse collar, which probably originated in China or central Asia, contributed to European efforts to plow the heavy soils of northern Europe. Gunpowder from China, combined with cannons developed in Western Europe, gave Europeans a military edge over other civilizations. Improvements in shipbuilding and navigational techniques, including the magnetic compass and sternpost rudder from China and adaptations of the Arab lateen sail, enabled Europeans to build advanced ships for oceanic voyages.
Why was Europe unable to achieve the kind of political unity that China experienced? What impact did this have on the subsequent history of Europe? Geographic barriers, ethnic and linguistic diversity, and the shifting balances of power among Europe’s many states prevented the emergence of a single European empire like that of China. As a result, European nations engaged in many conflicts and Europe was unable to achieve domestic peace for many centuries.
In what different ways did classical Greek philosophy and science have an impact in the West, in Byzantium, and in the Islamic world? In the West after 1000 c.e., a belief in the ability of human reason to penetrate divine mysteries and to grasp the operation of the natural order took shape, and that in turn stimulated a renewed interest in Greek philosophy and science. During this period, European scholars obtained copies of Greek texts from both the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world. At first this new confidence in human reason was applied primarily to theology, but increasingly it was also applied to the scientific study of nature, known as “natural philosophy,” which ultimately became a foundation for the Scientific Revolution. In the Byzantine Empire, scholars kept the classical tradition alive, but their primary interest lay in the humanities and theology rather than in the natural sciences or medicine. The Orthodox Church had serious reservations about classical Greek learning, sometimes persecuting scholars who were too enamored with the ancients. Those who studied Greek philosophy and science did so in a conservative spirit, concerned to preserve and transmit the classical heritage rather than using it as a springboard for creating new knowledge. The Islamic world undertook a massive translation project in the ninth and tenth centuries that made many Greek texts available in Arabic. This contributed to a flowering of Arab scholarship, especially in the sciences and natural philosophy, between roughly 800 and 1200 c.e. But it also stimulated debate among Muslim thinkers about faith and reason. Unlike church authorities in Western Europe, learned opinion in the Islamic world did not come to regard natural philosophy as a wholly legitimate enterprise. Because of this, the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, while never completely disappearing, receded from Islamic scholarship after the thirteenth century, and natural philosophy did not become a central concern for Islamic higher education as it did in Western Europe.