Society: hierarchy and solidarity

SUSAN REYNOLDS

This chapter argues that during the Middle Millennium people in all the societies about which enough information can be gleaned were reckoned to be more or less unequal.

The chief problem for a historian of medieval Europe in tackling any aspect of these thousand years of the history of the whole world is, of course, lack of knowledge of so much of it. Paradoxically, however, almost as great is the problem caused by the domination of the historiography of the period by that of Europe.

Other words can also be misleading. ‘Villages' can be nucleated rural settlements, units of exploitation, or units of government. The word ‘guild' is confusing for comparisons. In our period it was sometimes used in northern Europe for associations of craftsmen but more often for various other kinds of associations that generally combined conviviality and mutual help. Many historians, however, apply it chiefly, if not exclusively, to craft associations, even in Italy, where the word was never used. ‘Serf' is also unhelpful as it is used to cover different disabilities and obligations in different bits of European history. People at the bottom of other agricultural societies, however oppressed, may not have been either oppressed in the ways supposedly characteristic of European ‘serfdom' or specifically categor­ized as ‘unfree'.

This borrowing of ideas and words from European history is entirely understandable even if the results are not: the modern kind of critical and professional historiography started in Europe and offered a stimulus to critical and professional history elsewhere. But it inevitably also offers superficial analogies that would hinder attempts at comparison even if some of them had not been based on ideas about medieval Europe that no longer seem to fit the European evidence. This chapter will therefore use words that are as generic, untechnical, and unrelated to particular interpretations of European history, new or old, as possible, in the hope that this may avoid misunderstanding.

Interesting as is the question of the origins of the ‘rise of Europe', this chapter will also try to avoid the teleology of searching for them before 1500. They may be discernible but the search lends itself to contrasting stereotypes, whether of dynamic Europe and the timeless East, or of Western liberties and Oriental Despotism, that do not promote the understanding of this period either in Europe or elsewhere.^[131] The history of different parts of Europe, moreover, varied too much to fit any stereotype, while variations in the national traditions of historiography developed in the last two centur­ies have compounded the difficulty of generalizing about it.

Eurasia, with the addition of North Africa, is by far the best recorded part of the world in the Middle Millennium. This chapter will thus focus primarily on this very large part of the world, and then look more briefly at other areas.

Economic foundations of societies in Eurasia

Mongol conquests loomed large to writers both in China and Europe in the thirteenth century, but that was a time of relatively prolific writing and recording: the Mongols did not open hitherto untravelled roads any more than did Marco Polo's journeys to the east. As well as maritime traffic around coasts and across the Indian Ocean, people, goods, and ideas travelled from centuries before our period almost to its end along what has become known as the Silk Road.

Despite all the contacts and despite more similarities between the societies of Eurasia than traditional stereotypes suggest, there were many differences in economic and social structures and relations. All societies of which there is any record seem, however, to have been more or less unequal. The least unequal, with fewest layers of government, were the smallest and poorest. Some, like the earlier Mongol-Turkic peoples, were pastoral or hunter­gathering, with little or no agriculture. Some, like those attacked by the young Chinggis Khan, were ostensibly egalitarian, making ‘no distinction between great and small, bad and good, high and mean',^[132] so that they were held together simply by ties of kinship. Unwritten genealogies and rules of kinship are, however, always manipulable, while the equality was probably enjoyed only by the senior male householders (or tent-holders). It was they who, with authority legitimized by real or fictive kinship, judged disputes, enforced custom, and made decisions for the community. Since that left out sons living under their fathers' authority, as well, of course, as women, servants, and slaves, their societies were not equal in a modern sense. Some of these small, more or less independent societies lasted throughout our period but many became absorbed in larger economies and polities, espe­cially as agriculture developed within them or in neighbouring areas.

Agriculture brought greater populations, greater wealth, greater inequal­ity and power, greater complexity of government, and therefore more cause for conflict. Though already dominant in some areas long before 500 ce, it was extended thereafter and developed through new crops and techniques, in many areas including irrigation. Sometimes this was organized by rulers or those, including monasteries or temples, to whom they gave land, but their responsibility may have been exaggerated: sometimes, especially while there was still land to spare and forests to be cleared, it was done independently by the people who did the actual farming. Everywhere, as populations grew, land as the source of wealth came to be a commodity, and one controlled more strictly by people at the top of local hierarchies than it was in pastoral societies or in those that practised agriculture but were remote from centres of power. In general this meant the imposition of layers of rights above the cultivators of the land and the increase of rules and records about them.

Increased production promoted markets, towns, and trade, both local and long-distance, and with them came more development of more crafts, more movement and mixing of people, both in space and status, and of goods, both everyday and luxury. Local lords and rulers profited from tolls, rents, and taxes. Some towns, like Rome or Qubilai Khan's summer capital at Shangdu (Coleridge's Xanadu) were primarily centres of government and consump­tion rather than wholesale trade or production. But everywhere they were both a result and a cause of economic, social, and political change. They were centres of literacy, learning and numeracy: tally sticks very like those used in the English exchequer in the twelfth century served similar purposes in the Tibetan Empire four centuries earlier. The population of Eurasia, both urban and rural, was larger in 1500 than in 500, but it did not grow continuously or in all areas: plagues that spread, like famines and wars, along trade routes checked it periodically, notably in the sixth and fourteenth centuries.

Hierarchy and government in Eurasia

It is impossible to discuss societies in this period without saying something about their government: information about society often comes from records of government while political and social hierarchies and solidarities appear to have been closely related. The growth and growing complexity of economies spread to other areas the complexities of government and society that had long existed in the empires of China, India, the Middle East, and Rome. Monarchy, which Walter Bagehot called ‘an intelligible constitution',^[133] became the most common form of government. However intelligible, it could cause its subjects anxiety at successions, whether because rules were uncertain or favoured partible inheritance or, in highly organized polities, where central power was worth fighting for. Nevertheless, despite the existence of small states centred on towns, which were sometimes ruled by councils, contemporaries who wrote fiction or treatises seem often to have assumed that some kind of monarchy was the norm. Whether Anglophone historians call rulers emperors, kings, princes, chiefs, lords, leaders, or anything else is a matter of translation and ethnographical and historiograph­ical tradition which reveals little about the different ways independent polities were governed. The use of different words for different societies makes comparisons difficult. I shall refer simply to rulers and to what they ruled as polities or kingdoms, generally avoiding the controversial word ‘state'.

Government in all but the smallest polities came in layers, with authority either delegated through a formal hierarchy of offices over different regions and smaller areas or exercised by people of high status who ruled their own patches within the polity, sometimes, in India and early medieval Europe, with titles translated as ‘king.' It is often difficult to distinguish the two kinds of layers of authority, as when rulers gave land, or authority over land, to monasteries in China and Europe, to temples and high-caste groups in India, or to individual great men in any polity.

From the leading householders of the smallest societies to the monarchs of great polities, all rulers seem to have been supposed to protect their people, do justice to them, and consult with those whose status made them worthy of consultation. The prescriptions of the Arthasdstra, written in India some centuries before 500 ce, that ‘all action [by rulers] should be preceded by consultation' and that ‘in the happiness of the subjects lies the happiness of the king', would have seemed appropriate in any kingdom.^[134] Taking counsel did not mean having to follow it, but references to assemblies or councils of great men suggest a certain constraint: counsellors might, for instance, be responsible for communicating and enforcing decisions, which could involve securing a measure of agreement from them. References to a ruler's obliga­tion to do justice, sometimes explicitly to the poor, and to follow custom or law, suggest something different from Oriental Despotism or even absolut­ism as some historians have envisaged them. Both characterizations seem to derive rather from treatises written to flatter rulers than from evidence about the way government worked in practice. Even some of the treatises that presented their rulers as rulers of the whole world, responsible to gods alone, also suggested that wise rulers ought to take counsel.

Not all rulers conformed to these ideals. Nor did subordinate officials, though they were probably easier to discipline than were their masters at the top of the political hierarchy, who had no superior to control them. The difficulty of controlling rulers was increased by the acceptance of hierarchy and coercive government, as well as by the need evidently felt by writers of the time to flatter the ruler and emphasize the obligation to obey him. Some rulers nevertheless clearly felt an obligation to do what was considered just. Protecting the poor could help a ruler control subjects of higher status, but it seems to have been often, and certainly not only in Christian kingdoms, thought of as the duty of a ruler. As land became more valuable rulers sometimes tried, without much success, to stop powerful subjects from buying land from peasants. Tang rulers in China (618-907) tried giving peasants equal plots in land for life, primarily to promote agriculture and get taxes, but could not stop larger landowners from acquiring the holdings.

As war-leaders and their followers acquired resources they turned from mere tribute-taking to more systematic collection of taxes, rents, and tolls, and spent more on their courts, rituals, and patronage. In 500 ce literate, record-keeping administration was only vestigially alive in western Europe but it was well established in Byzantium, Iran, Tibet and, of course, China. At least some kingdoms in India probably belong in that list, but they pose problems for an outsider dependent on secondary works, since historians of India have tended to describe kingdoms as bureaucratic without discussing the evidence of anything like bureaucracy in, for instance, Max Weber's sense. Nevertheless, surviving lists of villages and tolls, together with the evidence of literacy in copper-plate and temple inscriptions, suggest that some Indian kings had professional, record-keeping servants. Islamic govern­ment under the Umayyads (661-750) and even more afterwards, under the ‘ Abbasids, adapted and developed the systems they had inherited from their Byzantine and Iranian predecessors, while various forms of bureaucracy began to transform government from the eighth century in Japan and the twelfth in Europe. Bureaucracy made effective control of larger areas pos­sible, but it was no substitute for courts, rituals, patronage, and force in maintaining a ruler's authority. Nor could it always preserve a polity against external attacks and internal conflicts: Byzantine rulers lost control of much of their empire long before its final collapse. The Carolingian Empire in Europe broke up in 889; the Islamic Empire began to fragment politically long before the ending of the Baghdad Caliphate in 1258; central government in Japan lost authority from the ninth century; China, the most obvious bureaucracy of all, which is traditionally depicted as forming one great empire through history, was divided in various ways through much of our period. Meanwhile effective bureaucracy flourished in city-states and other small polities.

Professional administration affected social and political structures by pro­ducing new elites of officials alongside landowners so as to open a new road to social mobility. Even in China, however, where examinations were famously used from the seventh century on, with variations and intermis­sions, to recruit officials, the extent to which this promoted social mobility is disputed: entry to examinations might need a recommendation from an official whose own son did not need to take the examination. Members of the lower grades of village society would be unlikely to have the basic qualifications to start with. Neither in China nor, for instance, in thirteenth­century France did many officials work their way from the bottom to the top of the system. Land remained the chief source of wealth, status, and power, so that the largest landowners remained the top elite. Although armies, like civil services, became more professional so that men of high status (often called ‘nobles' by historians) served in them less often, those elites might still retain a military ethos. The traditional view of military and civilian elites in China as separate, and of the non-military ethos of the civilians, has recently been questioned. Islamic armies were more separate from the rest of society, at first because Arab garrisons formed their own settlements in conquered towns, and later because ‘slave armies' were recruited largely from outside the empire.

Solidarities within the polities of Eurasia

Beyond the more obvious solidarities of close kin and, in settled societies, of neighbours, the way that units of government were so often referred to as if they were naturally existing collectivities or peoples suggests that they evoked some kind of solidarity. This probably functioned best in relatively small polities. Some, like the nomad polities (generally called empires) of Central Asia, in which the rulers merely took tribute without imposing much government, soon fell apart. Solidarity after the great Islamic conquests belonged at first to the Arab conquerors and apparently never turned into a permanent political, as distinct from religious, unity, which perhaps partly explains the later political fragmentation. Polities that survived in spite of the difficulties of supervision and the strength of local solidarities within them did so less because of despotic power at the centre than because of what looks like acceptance of political unity, hierarchy, and layers of solidarity.

In many polities, both large and small, the legitimation of authority seems to have included an assumed, though fictitious, genealogical connec­tion. Many of these focused on supposed dynasties of rulers but others, most famously that of the Franks, explicitly involved the peoples they ruled, as if they were natural, given communities of descent with distinctive characteristics and customs. Others implicitly subsumed the peoples in the stories of their kings. As more ambitious rulers extended their territories they seem to have often preserved their acquisitions as subordinate units of government so that old solidarities and hierarchies were preserved under the new. The survival of collective (now often called ethnic) names of old units of society and government, whether territorial like the duchies of Germany which had once been kingdoms, or sections of the population like the formerly nomadic groups settled in China under the Mongols, suggests the way that they were taken for granted as having a real and naturally given existence. Language seems to have been less important as a uniting or dividing factor than has often been assumed since the eighteenth century. Assimilation of immigrants or conquered populations, however, became harder when groups had very different economies and cultures (including religions) and when governments ruled them as separate units and kept written records to preserve the memory of difference. This happened, for instance, when the population of China was classified in four ethnic groups with different rights and obligations and the immigrant Mongols had the most privileges. Various kinds of systematic and recorded separation were applied to Jews and Muslims in Europe, non-Muslim groups in the Islamic Empire, and the non-agricultural forest dwellers now known as ‘tribals' in India.

The solidarity of whole polities was likely to be felt most strongly by their leading members. For them, even if on occasion broken by jealousy and ambition, it could be fortified by interpersonal relations with the ruler and each other, joint service in armies and councils, patronage, and shared common interests, at least in keeping control of the rest of the population. In Europe members of councils, assemblies, and armies, who formed a very small part of the population of the polity, were often referred to as if they included everyone. Lower down any hierarchy most people probably felt most solidarity with their local communities. The acceptance of inequality and belief in custom and in the necessity of imposed order, together with the hope of protection, seem nevertheless to have generally led to an acceptance, however unconsidered or reluctant, of whatever government was more or less firmly established.

Towns too, despite their internal conflicts, and especially when they had some degree of independence, developed strong senses of solidarity along with myths of origin that belied the sometimes large number of immigrants in their populations. Economic and social hierarchies, except in the largest and richest cities, were lower than those of kingdoms, but urban society, with its servants, day labourers, and (in some cases) slaves, both men and women, was not egalitarian. As in kingdoms, hierarchy and solidarity went together.

Religions in Eurasia

Most societies probably started out with their own gods and religious customs, which might then become liable to influence from those of other societies with which they came into contact. Outside influences are most obvious with the spread of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. How far that spread affected the shape of societies is hard to say: although it obviously affected the cultures of societies as well as individuals within them, religions seem to have adapted themselves in practice to economic and social hier­archies. While Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and some Hindu sects all had egalitarian strands, the societies they inhabited were in practice unequal, with inequality fortified by acceptance of political, social, and religious hierarchy. Churches, monasteries, temples, and mosques, whether in Europe, the Middle East, India, Central Asia, or China, became great landlords and behaved accordingly. People living on lands given to churches, temples or monasteries, sometimes indeed, though perhaps not always, suffered from the change. The most splendid religious buildings and rituals were produced in the more complex and unequal societies. Religious rituals and royal patronage of religious institutions legitimized royal rule, while religious teaching reinforced the obligations to govern justly that seem to have obtained in most societies. Religious sanctions fortified wider political and social norms, notably in the oaths widely used to strengthen obligations.

On the other hand, apart from the economic, fiscal, and political impact of monasteries, the various teachings, cults, and demands of different religions, their festivals, the character of their monks, priests, or hermits, and the degree of their separateness from the rest of society obviously affected the societies in which they were practised. A conflict between church and state has sometimes been seen as peculiar to Europe. The hierarchy of both Roman and Orthodox churches made conflicts between emperors and popes or patriarchs particularly sensational but, though causes of dispute varied, other rulers tangled with local religions too. Chinese rulers and officials worried about the taxes and services they lost to Buddhist monasteries (and fake monasteries) and periodically dissolved some of them and confis­cated their lands. Christianity seems to have been unusual in the persistence and fierceness of its internal conflicts and persecution of heretics, its occasional forcible conversion of neighbouring pagans or expulsions of non-Christians, and its wars against Islam, but this impression may be partly the result of fuller records and more research into them. Although a good many large polities outside Europe and some within, like some city-states and Iberian kingdoms, had populations of mixed religions which rubbed along together much of the time and influenced each other, there were occasional conflicts and persecutions, not only those of Jews by Christians. There were, for instance, conflicts and rivalries between sects in India, where untouchability has been cited as ‘a form of religious persecution'. Some stories of religious hostilities, however, reflect modern ideas rather than those of the time, as do much later elaborations of the story of the plundering of a temple at Somnath (Gujarat, India) by the Muslim sultan Mahmud of Ghazni in 1026, which culminated in nineteenth-century claims that it reflected permanent antagonism between Hindus and Muslims.^[135]

Law in Eurasia

The treatises on law, politics, and theology written by scholars in the literate societies of Eurasia often contain much information about law and the grades of their societies, but they also tend to make rules look both more fixed and more complicated than they may have been in reality. Treatises need to be combined with other evidence and, notably, such records as survive of law in practice. So far as these reflect what the treatises say, that may be as much or more because the authors of treatises started from the assumptions of their societies as because those who judged crimes or disputes knew what the treatises said.

Most societies started from some kind of unwritten customary law. Because it was unwritten it tended to vary, even within one polity, from place to place and from time to time. Rules about such matters as inheritance and the use of land varied between societies and between classes of people

within them, and were variably enforced, cutting across some of the simple contrasts traditionally drawn between east and west or different countries within either. Some societies allowed individuals to avenge wrongs against themselves or their kin without recourse to outside authorities, but disputes seem often to have been settled in assemblies or courts that also legislated and dealt with wider matters of government. Legal decisions might be announced by the ruler, but if he (or occasionally she) was wise, he would make them after taking advice about what was customary and right. In larger polities many crimes and disputes were probably dealt with locally. In that case judgments might be given by a local lord or royal official but again, if he was wise, after consultation dominated by men of higher status - probably the richer, older, and most established in the area - who were supposed to know the community's custom and judge on its behalf.

Many of the surviving records of law concern rights in land, which landowners in agricultural societies particularly wanted to record. Historians have sometimes thought that all the land under either Oriental Despotism or feudalism belonged to the ruler, so that no one else had anything that can now be called rights of property. But although any kingdom in one sense belonged to its king, the evidence of disputes between subjects in Europe, India, and China, for instance, suggests that individuals had rights enforceable against each other in their houses, gardens, and the land they cultivated. Custom might even allow that some of those who owed rents and services had some rights against the ruler or landlord, hard as they might be to enforce. While rents and services might be owed to rulers and landlords, and all the land in a village might come to be considered as in some sense the landlord's land, during much of this period it was only in some sense his. Rights over land are often divided and come in layers, even in modern societies, but modern legal systems generally distinguish rights of government from rights of property as was seldom done in the past. Appeals to rulers by the humble seldom succeeded, but they were supposed to be allowed and were indeed made.

On the other hand, while some historians have thought that all the land belonged to the king, others have thought that at the level of villages or other agricultural communities, property was originally - and even as late as the beginning of this period - communal. Local communities certainly often had common rights over wastes and pastures and even, under rules, over the land of individuals, but these would now count as rights of government or control. People do not seem to have been constrained by the modern distinction between corporate and unincorporated groups: collective action, even by peasants, was allowed unless it was subversive.

How far either advocates or judges were legal experts is a question that has not been much considered by historians more interested in the content of treatises than in the practice of law. The social impact of law, however, changes when it ceases to be the custom of a community and becomes the preserve of a group with some kind of professional and expert knowledge. The growth of more systematic and bureaucratic government brought more royal judges into local communities, sometimes armed with instructions about the rules they were to enforce and even with knowledge of learned treatises on law, so that they tended to override the customary consensus of local elites. The qadis who judged Muslims under Islamic law were profes­sionals of a kind, with expert knowledge, though their jurisdiction did not extend to crime. In Europe a big change to law, and particularly property law, came with the emergence of professional advocates around the twelfth century. Law at the level they practised thus became the custom of lawyers and tended to favour those who employed lawyers. Whether law elsewhere became professionalized in ways similar to these, or differently from either, deserves further study.

Local society in Eurasia

The combination of solidarity and hierarchy is clear at the local level of society at which most people lived most of the time. Solidarity there was institutional as well as affective, though of course there was plenty of room for likes and dislikes, affections and discords. Local government, with varying degrees of autonomy or supervision from above, was nearly always con­ducted through regional and local assemblies of varying degrees of formality. Some Indian land grants and, notably, the tenth-century constitution drawn up for the South Indian village of Uttaramerur^[136] show that rulers in India, as in Europe, sometimes formally authorized a degree of local autonomy. That did not mean local democracy. In Europe, the richer and more established men of a village, province, or lord's estate, whether or not it had any formal autonomy, seem to have been the effective decision-makers, though their humbler (male) neighbours might be present. The same probably applied to local headmen and landlords' officials in Iran. In the parts of China under the Song (960-1279), local society was officially graded in nine, or later five, grades. Though things probably worked less neatly in practice, official duties like policing, tax-collection, and settling minor disputes fell even more probably to those in the higher grades. Most Indian village assemblies were restricted to higher castes. Despite the supposed immutability of caste, however, categories and rankings were sometimes adjusted, while geneal­ogies from the end of our period show that Indian individuals occasionally changed caste. In Europe, where in the earlier Middle Ages, and for longer in some areas, the humbler peasants, now often called serfs, were held down in various ways by being classified as unfree at law, some of them crossed the barrier by a recognized procedure of emancipation. Movements up and down local hierarchies no doubt occurred in most other societies. So long as there were towns in which to try one's fortune, or uncleared land not brought under governmental control, geographical mobility could be a means to social mobility. Though society in pastoral or hunter-gatherer areas was less unequal, it was not necessarily more free or comfortable for everyone than in areas where agriculture was dominant and government close. Leaving aside women and the problematical category often called serfs, there were people in many societies who had virtually no rights. The conditions of slavery varied, but people sold away from their homes, for instance, however well-fed they might be, certainly look like what are generally considered slaves. Many societies made legal provision for freeing slaves, especially women in concubinage, but more seems to be written on religious teaching on the merits of manumitting slaves than on actual cases from this period.¹¹

The traditional belief that European towns were nurseries of democracy, uniquely distinguished by their collective liberties, and that liberties fostered their growth, is only partly true: some large cities, including Paris, had no significant autonomy, while London's liberties were always subject to royal revision. The city-states of Italy and late medieval Germany were exceptional in Europe. Some towns along the Silk Road were intermittently nearly as independent, while many in other parts of Eurasia were in practice left to run much of their own affairs and pay their dues collectively. Some lived under single rulers while others were ruled by councils of leading citizens, merchants, craftsmen, neighbourhoods or quarters. Adherents of different religions, and even the employed (or unemployed) in many parts of Eurasia acted collectively in ways to which governments had to pay attention, and of which they sometimes made use. ^[137]

Class conflict in Eurasia

However strong the impression that social and political hierarchies and solidarities were generally accepted, that can obviously not be the whole story, even in a very short survey. Leaving aside conflicts within the upper classes, which are well attested in written sources, there was plenty of scope in all but the smallest and poorest societies for conflicts of interest between landlords and peasants, employers and employed. Peasants recognized this, as appears from many records of their complaints and grievances and some of outright revolts. Common provocations were new demands for rents and services from landlords or for taxes and labour services from governments, and suffering caused by civil wars. It is difficult to be sure what protesters - or outright rebels - wanted, since virtually all the records are hostile: peasants may well have limited their demands to what they thought they might get. Nevertheless, however hard it is to know what people at the bottom of society thought, the evidence, such as it is, suggests that many of them wanted what was considered justice within the existing system, and appealed to lords and rulers for it according to its rules. The Zanj (East African slaves) who were used to cultivate salinized marshland in south Iraq rebelled twice in the seventh century, and then more successfully in the ninth. The independent government of the area that they maintained from 869 to 894 does not, however, seem to have been significantly different in structure from others of the time. There is apparently no evidence that its leader wanted to do more than improve conditions for the Zanj themselves. In fourteenth-century China the leader of a popular rebellion who made himself emperor then ruled in the normal way. In southern India in 1426-9, new taxes provoked resistance from groups relatively low down the caste hierarchy but not apparently challenging the hierarchy. In Europe the crucial demand was generally for the legal freedom that secured other rights.

Some millenarian movements suggest more revolutionary aspirations. The demands of some of the rebels in the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 included the abolition of all lordship except that of the king, the distribution of church property, and the appointment of only one bishop. The rebels from Kent nevertheless said that they held ‘with kynge Richarde and with the trewe communes'.^[138] As for urban conflicts, most of those that are recorded seem to have been among employers rather than against them as a class. The so-called ‘craft revolution' of later medieval Europe did not empower the poor, though the Florentine revolt of 1378, known as the Tumulto dei Ciompi, came near to doing that and has therefore, like other urban revolts, often been seen as proto-democratic. The government it set up represented workers in the woollen industry and introduced important political and social reforms during the few years it lasted, but even so these did not really amount to a total overthrow of the traditional social hierarchy, which was, after all, supposed to provide justice and protection for the poor. Defective as the evidence is, it seems to show that many, if not most, of the most oppressed accepted the prevailing hierarchies - if only they were justly managed according to the officially accepted rules.

Africa and the Americas

Written sources are so scanty for the rest of the world that it must be discussed more briefly. Archaeology, historical linguistics, and conjectural history deduced from anthropologists' reports about traditions and geneal­ogies all provide clues but these are chronologically uncertain and, while they may suggest the nature of past economies or social or political inequal­ities, they can say little about structures of authority or social and political ideas.

For sub-Saharan Africa, there are some written sources about Ethiopia and areas visited, settled, or mentioned by Muslims. These, combined with what modern scholars have deduced from other sorts of evidence, suggest varying patterns of hierarchy in different areas and periods. In most of the continent, agriculture, despite regional variations but all apparently without ploughs, was not productive enough to produce social and economic complexity as it did in Eurasia. Cattle may in some areas have done more, but trade was the greatest stimulus. Even before the arrival of Muslim traders, East African ports sustained traffic across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Jenne-jeno in Mali, though settled earlier, had probably become an exchange point for trans-Saharan trade by the ninth century. Evidence of iron- and other metalworking and of other crafts at lesser sites suggests more widespread links. Gold and salt may have been the first long-distance commodities, with ivory and slaves later. The masterpieces of sculpture known as the ‘bronze' heads of Ife (Nigeria), presumably portraying rulers and other elite people, suggest a population big and rich enough to develop specialized skills. Fewer important urban sites have been found in the centre or south, apart from Great Zimbabwe, which is thought to have profited from trade along the Limpopo. Elaborate terracing in Nyanga (Zimbabwe), with some stone buildings, suggests a well-organized society, though with little evidence of either towns or hierarchy.

Discussion of social and political structures in Africa is hindered by the customary vocabulary of tribes and chiefs. Europeans got their idea of tribes as groups united by both descent and culture from Roman history and the Bible, but did not use forms of the word to denote ‘primitive' independent polities until the late eighteenth century. It was first applied then to indigen­ous North Americans and later to Africans.^{[139] [140]} People in the many small and economically relatively undifferentiated African societies and polities of our period may have identified themselves by their society or polity, perhaps using kinship terms. Given the malleability of polities, genealogies, and descent myths, these may well have functioned as metaphors, as they did elsewhere, but they do not seem to have generally coincided with modern tribal names. As for the word ‘chief, which is often used to mean something less grand than king, prince, or emperor, it joins the other words for rulers already rejected in this chapter in favour of the undifferentiated ‘ruler': some African ‘chiefs' look like some early medieval European ‘kings'.

Many small African societies, even without single rulers (‘chiefs'), may have had enough inequality and enough coercive controls not to be unam­biguously ‘stateless'. Real equality (including women and servants, with no slaves) was probably rare, though on the rash premise that some African hunter-gatherers between 500 and 1500 ce lived like some in the twentieth century, they could have been pretty equal, living in small groups between which individuals (including women) could move at will.1⁴ Some societies before 1500, however, notably those with recorded or excavated towns or fortresses surrounded by humbler dwellings, had governments that are dignified by historians with the title of kingdoms (as grander than ‘chiefdoms'). In some the rulers may have done little but take tribute, but in Ethiopia local government and tax collection were delegated to individuals or monasteries. Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) says that tales of the wealth, generos­ity, and just rule of Mansa Musa of Mali, who made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324-5, were still being told, along with stories of the tyranny of a later ruler of Mali, who had been deposed by another just one.^[141] Mali, like the other polities which dominated West Africa before and after it, was rich enough to support a fairly complex hierarchy and perhaps a corresponding solidarity. Political solidarity was probably stronger in smaller societies, whether with or without ‘chiefs', but saying more about them would involve conjectural extrapolation from Eurasia or from the findings of twentieth­century historical linguists and anthropologists.

In North America, Australasia, and the Pacific islands, most societies and polities were smallish and poorish, presumably with relatively low hierarch­ies. That does not mean that they were egalitarian in the sense that they believed in equality any more than did similar societies in Eurasia. While there were many such societies in Central and South America too, both areas in this period also developed some that were large, complex, and definitely hierarchical. In parts of both areas farmers, despite the absence of iron, ploughs, wheels, or draft animals, developed suitable crops and used terracing, irrigation, and drainage to produce enough food to support spe­cialized crafts as well as large governmental hierarchies. Neither area had coinage but there were apparently markets in Central America where cacao beans and other commodities served as currency. How exchanges between regions and localities worked in South America is obscure, but it apparently went on, presumably by barter, and not only in the Inca state with its system of labour services and storage of food. Central America had writing, though little has survived except in the many (though only partially deciphered) inscriptions. Even though the Inca kingdom, like other South American societies, had no writing, it kept statistical records of tribute, population, and herds on knotted cords. Late in the period both the Aztec and Inca polities kept records that suggest elements of Weberian bureaucracy.

Solidarity is harder to deduce from the available evidence cited in second­ary works, but the ceremonial visits of Inca rulers to different regions, dressed in appropriate local fashions, were obviously intended to promote it. So were the ceremonies depicted in temples and other monuments, as well as described by Spanish invaders, reluctant as one may be to envisage human sacrifice as promoting togetherness. War no doubt also strengthened the solidarity of polities here as in the Old World. Though myths of origin may reflect the expectations of Spanish writers, those that told about whole peoples as they were at the time of telling, as well as about rulers or nobles, may reflect political solidarities as did those of Europe. There seems to be little information about councils and consultation, but there is no obvious reason to think that rulers were any more ‘absolute' and free of obligation to take counsel than were rulers elsewhere. Anthropologists and archaeologists indeed stress reciprocal relations between rulers and subjects as forming an apparently distinctive system of ordering relationships. But though reci­procity is particularly obvious in the labour services and provision of food in the Inca polity, the principle of reciprocal, mutual duties of rulers and subjects seems to have underlain the government of Old World societies too. Rulers and others at the top of hierarchies everywhere were supposed to be just as well as generous.

Conclusion

This chapter has not been intended to suggest that everywhere was the same. There were many differences both between continents and between and inside the societies and polities within them. Many derived from geography and the different economies it imposed and were compounded by the ways that custom developed in different societies and parts of societies. Historians of individual societies have studied many of these customs, ranging from rules of kinship, marriage and gender relations, inheritance, and rights of property to rituals, games, and pastimes. What is suggested here is that some of the apparent differences, as well as some apparent similarities, derive from lack of comparison with other societies in the same period or from comparison only with stereotypes such as that contrasting Europe with the Rest. European history of the period needs comparisons as much, or more, than does non-European history: the search for the origins of the modern world distorts the history of Europe between 500 and 1500 as much as it distorts that of other areas. At the end of the period some - untypical - Europeans gained an increasing mastery of the sea so as to ‘discover' areas they had not known, or had known only slightly or at second hand, although these ‘discoveries' were, of course, already known to those who lived there. But these were not the most important of the changes that had taken place or were still taking place. Populations had risen and fallen, and people had been moving, whether in large or small groups, for short or long distances, though most often, for individuals, relatively short. People in many societies had been learning new technologies and new ideas from others or had developed them for themselves. New religions had spread, whether to whole populations or parts of them, and influenced the societies to which they went, though they perhaps influenced them less than their adherents thought and think. Looking at what changed and what did not may illuminate societies of the time more if one resists the temptation to look at what was to come and award marks to any country, region, or period.

This chapter suggests that assumptions about hierarchy and solidarity were apparently similar everywhere. Hierarchies came in different shapes and layers, but they all assumed political and social inequalities. The smaller and poorer societies were less unequal but not, apparently, because they embodied egalitarian ideas embracing women, children, servants or slaves, and foreigners. Religions that asserted the value of each individual do not seem to have applied the idea to the here and now. Political and social ideas and assumptions seem to have started, not with equal individuals in a state of nature but with given, existing communities. From this followed some kind of solidarity within polities, which was made easier by the acceptance of inequality and hierarchy. All human societies appear to have conflicts, between individuals and between groups. The richer and more complex societies of this period were liable to have more conflicts of interest between economic (and political) classes. Some of these were recognized, if implicitly, by requirements that rulers should protect the poor and weak against the rich and strong. Rulers were sometimes explicitly told to rule according to custom and after consultation with their great men. The necessity of advice and consent from people who represent the community has since 1789 often been taken to be a new progressive idea connected with equality and democracy in contrast to the absolutism of the Old Regime. But that does not make sense for the period studied here. Hier­archy seems to have imposed duties, however often unfulfilled, on the people at the top. Consultation was not at all incompatible with inequality and hierarchy.

Many people at the bottom of hierarchies must, at least intermittently, have felt the injustice of their lot, but it is improbable that they felt about their grievances in the way that they would have if, like white men in the last two centuries (and women and non-whites more recently) they had been told that they were equal citizens with equal rights to participate in politics. The tentative conclusion of this chapter is that societies between 500 and 1500 can be understood better if they are seen against a background of the political assumptions of their time, however little we may share them, not of ours.

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