The age of trans-regional reorientations: cultural crystallization and transformation in the tenth to thirteenth centuries

BJORN WITTROCK

The half-century preceding the outbreak of World War I stands out as an era of European economic, political, and cultural dominance never achieved before and no longer possible to sustain at the end of the war.

Axial legacies: consequences and antinomies in the first millennium ce

In their conceptualization, the Axial Age - which eventually was understood to encompass the period from 800 bce to 200 bce - was characterized by three central developments in five civilizations: ancient Israel, China, Greece, India, and Iran. First, the great world religions emerged and spread, which created new religious ecumenes, that is, imagined realms of community and belonging that encompassed and linked human beings across vast distances. Second, new forms of political order developed, particularly a new conception of empire and rulership, in which kings and emperors might rule with a Mandate of Heaven or the grace of God but could not legitimately claim to be gods. Third, the new imperial orders helped further regional and trans-regional trade networks and directly contributed to the establishment of trade routes.^[231]

In the centuries from 200 ce to 800 ce, the transformative force of Axial civilizations became more visible. All of these civilizations contained a potential for heterodox interpretations of the religious texts that articulated relationships between cosmological assumptions and mundane order. In some cases these potentials became so closely circumscribed by links between religious practices and imperial order as to entail a clear subordin­ation. However, in the course of the first millennium ce an intensification of some of the dynamic tendencies inherent in all Axial civilizations occurred. As a result it became more difficult to contain religious practices within the frameworks of existing political institutions. Efforts of rulers to contain and to draw on religious-cultural practices became more pronounced but also more fraught with dilemmas and antinomies.

One reason for this intensification is that a number of composite forms of religious-cultural practices emerged that either drew on elements from different Axial traditions or combined Axial and non-Axial elements in new ways.

In China during the Sui and the early years of the Tang dynasties a variety of religious-philosophical-cultural practices generally coexisted that were not only tolerated but often also supported by the political order. However, there were also times of shifting favours and periods of efforts at suppression of some such practices. Thus the Sui dynasty had a tendency to favour Buddhism but also tolerated Daoism and other practices. Much the same can be said for the ensuing Tang dynasty, which in its early history allowed the practice of various Western and Iranian religions, including Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Nestorian Christianity.^[232] In the ninth century, however, Nestorian Christianity and Buddhism were suppressed. As a consequence, Nestorian and other forms of Eastern Christianity would henceforth survive not in China itself but at or outside of the western borders of the Chinese Empire. By contrast, the suppression of Buddhism was temporary and could do little to affect the firm grounding of Buddhism in China which had taken place from the fourth century onwards.

In general, imperial rulers in civilizations in which non-deistic religions and philosophies exerted a dominant influence were perhaps less well placed to draw on Axial religions for instrumental purposes than were those where deistic religions flourished. However, they may have been better placed to avoid some of the major tensions and problems involved in such use, as well as less exposed to the violent outbursts of politically focused zeal that were a potential consequence flowing from the articulation of divergent religious standpoints among adherents of deistic Axial religions.

Despite the intensification of religious-cultural practices, however, polit­ical practices in the centuries from 200 to 800 ce to a large extent constituted efforts to perpetuate, imitate or replicate classical forms of political order. New forms emerged largely as a consequence of resource restrictions. Towards 1000, however, it became gradually more difficult to contain new societal and cultural dynamics within the framework of these classical forms.^[233]

Cultural crystallizations and trans-regional reorientations

This chapter examines transmutations and renovations of complexes of religious-cultural, societal, and political practices that occurred between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries in several civilizations. I shall use the term ‘cultural crystallizations' to designate articulations of new conceptions of cosmology, temporality, agency, and belonging that come to have deep implications for the emergence of new societal arrangements and institu­tions. The Axial Age is a period of cultural crystallization - as is the emergence of the modern world in all its varieties and entanglements.

However, the first centuries of the second millennium ce are yet a third major period of cultural crystallization in world history in the course of the last three millennia. In those centuries, the legacies of the Axial Age, as they had become manifested in the civilizations of the great world religions, were being rearticulated. One may perhaps even speak of an age of cultural rearticulation and renaissance in different civilizations. This occurs against the background of increasing global interactions but also a crisis of societal order in the major civilizations of the Old World. As a result, new insti­tutional arrangements emerged, if sometimes only in rudimentary form, which came to shape the institutional landscape of the societies of that world. The Middle Millennium is a period that has a relatively clearly defined beginning, and an end that also marks the beginning of something new in institutional and political terms.

As has been pointed out by several observers, including Said Amir Arjo- mand and Kenneth Pomeranz, until relatively recently ‘comparative civiliza­tional analysis' had ‘sought to explain the distinctiveness of the Western pattern of development (capitalism and democracy) in terms of the absence of certain preconditions', and has involved a focus on ‘a parting of the paths of development in the High Middle Ages'.^[235] Perhaps the most famous example in the history of social science of a learned and wide-ranging comparative inquiry of the trajectories of different civilizations is that of Max Weber, in his three massive volumes on the sociology of the great world religions first published in 1920-1.^[236] In these volumes, full of empirical synthesis and comparative reflections, Weber's declared purpose is, however, not to engage in a broad comparative analysis per se, but rather to discover, in the study of non-European contexts, points of comparison to ‘our occidental cultural religions'.^[237] This has been true of scholars from Max Weber to Benjamin Nelson and Wolfgang Schluchter.

In this chapter, I shall outline some elements of a comparative civiliza­tional analysis that will focus on common patterns of development across civilizations of the Old World and argue that in the early second half of the Middle Millennium profound redefinitions of macro-societal practices occurred in several parts of the Old World that may be fruitfully analysed

The age of trans-regional reorientations in comparative terms.^[238] Because these transformations occurred in a number of different world regions, I shall refer to this period as an age of trans- regional reorientations. Transformations taking place in this period can be interpreted as different responses to sets of problems that become acute with near simultaneity in several civilizations of the Old World.

These different reinterpretations came to affect a more extensive part of the world than those that had been formed by Axial religions and philoso­phies in the preceding period. In the case of Europe, to take but one example, the area of Christendom nearly doubled, although its practices and rituals became affected by earlier non-Axial cultural practices in the newly Chris­tianized lands in the continent's east and north.

Other historians have also pointed to the period from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries as one of deep-seated change with long-term conse­quences. Thus in a magisterial work on transformations in western, central, and southern Europe, Thomas N. Bisson focuses on ‘lordship' and on processes by which new groupings sought, and often obtained, rights previously reserved for members of an old elite of nobility. These trans­formations involved extensive and pervasive use of coercive power, and the rights obtained were rights to command and to exercise such power. This was a deeply upsetting process, which broke with customs of the old society and opened it up for new types of governing and government. In Bisson's terminology, this is ‘how and why the experience of power became that of government in medieval Europe'.^[239] Looking at analogous developments at the other end of the Old World, Pierre Franςois Souyri has described how within a relatively short period of time in the late twelfth century, Japanese society entered ‘the Age of the Warriors' which in the end left, to quote the title of his book on medieval Japanese society, ‘The World Turned Upside Down'.^[240] Scholars looking at developments in China in the Song-Yuan- Ming transition period or at the late ‘Abbasid Caliphate have highlighted analogous tendencies towards realignments, if with different long-term

outcomes.¹¹ Because the dynamics of the different patterns are so pro­nounced, in fact, some authors have argued that the use of the term ‘early modernities' is justified to designate them.1²

From the point of view of world history, this period stands out as highly significant. First, even if global interactions were limited by the standards of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there was, as argued in the introduction to this volume, an amazing array of long­distance connections across a number of different fields of human activ­ity. Second, the trajectories of different civilizations became more clearly discernible and solidified into premises for macro-societal institutions. These processes involved a reinterpretation and rearticulation of a real or imagined cosmological and cultural heritage and tradition. In this sense it is possible to speak of an age in which profound reorientations of cultural ecumenes in several regions took place. Third, these insti­tutions came to characterize the history of societies in the Old World for most of the rest of the Middle Millennium and beyond. It is possible to view these transformations as processes of deep-seated cultural crystal­lizations. One element in this type of analysis must be an effort to link conceptual change to processes of sociopolitical transformations and upheavals, and another one to explore different varieties of social forma­tions that emerged.

Indeed, it has been argued that it was only in these centuries at the beginning of the second millennium ce - rather than during the Axial Age and the emergence of the great world religions - that the major civilizations of agro-literate societies were distinctly formed and became clearly demar­cated from each other, both in their self-image and in the view of other societies. These were also the centuries when cultural and institutional patterns emerged that were seminal for shaping the later characteristically modern societies. ^[241]

Contexts of change

At the turn of the first millennium ce, the imperial orders that had emerged in the wake of the Axial Age had all withered or been fundamentally transformed. Across the hemisphere, however, processes of challenge and response led to institutional change that involved a questioning as well as a rearticulation of earlier forms of cultural attachment. Leaders in various regions attempted to recreate ecumenical and imperial orders, an attempt often linked to urban and commercial advances. The Song dynasty in China, the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt, the Ottonian Empire in western Europe, and the revival of the Byzantine Empire under the Macedonian dynasty fall within this pattern. In this hemisphere-wide movement, all the high civiliza­tions were confronted not only by practical challenges but also by challenges to deeply held presuppositions and cosmologies. In this process, the different cultural ecumenes came to articulate and synthesize core components of their political and cultural orders in the face of both expansion and challenge.

Some of the cultures - most prominently perhaps China and the Byzantine world and least prominently perhaps Japan and western Europe - were threatened, if not overwhelmed, by their engagement with peoples of neighbouring areas or nomadic regions. Empires that had emerged in the wake of the Axial Age, including the Roman and the Han Empires, but also the Maurya Empire, had long since succumbed. Even the Sasanian Empire, which had overcome and succeeded the Parthian Empire and successfully withstood incursions of Central Asian nomadic peoples, had itself imploded in the face of the armies of Islam.

In the ninth century the ‘Abbasid Caliphate faced a crisis that entailed a long-term weakening, and in the second half of that century even the Tang dynasty, the dynasty that had brought China to its greatest extension so far, succumbed. Its successor, the Song dynasty, was simultaneously challenged and changing. This period witnessed thriving intellectual life, and also new forms of economic activity that eventually brought China to use new energy sources and to reach a stage near that of an industrial revolution in some branches of the economy. While literati elaborated schemes intended to permit a return to governance in the spirit of Confucian virtues, societal forms changed deeply. This new and dynamic China was finally, in the mid­thirteenth century, overwhelmed by Mongol invaders. These new rulers of the Yuan dynasty, however, rapidly came to embrace the habits and cultural features of their new domain; paradoxically, reform proposals elaborated by literati in the Song dynasty were taken up and implemented by the new rulers. Indeed, it seems possible to speak of a series of continuities extending over the successive dynasties of the Song, the Yuan and, a century later, that of a new Chinese dynasty, the Ming.¹³ Peter Bol has even made a convincing argument that across the transitions from the dynasties of the Song to Yuan to Ming, Neo-Confucianism managed to establish a degree of intellectual and institutional autonomy for the literati and a position to some extent outside of the immediate domination of the powers that be.1⁴ Despite continuities during these transitions, however, forms of political, cultural and philosoph­ical practices emerged that make this a period of profound rearticulation of Chinese culture in a distinctly new societal and global context.

In western Europe, the Carolingian Empire had represented an effort to resurrect an element of imperial rule within contexts that differed radically from those of Roman rule in antiquity. However, even if it left a memory that was to be rearticulated time and again in the ensuing centuries, its actual period of rulership was brief and its position in a global context peripheral. Rather than heralding the return of empire, it led instead to an increasing plurality of political forms and entities that with the passage of time gradually came to be perceived as a particularly virtuous Western route to pluralism and innovation. The process by which this was to happen was, however, a complex and largely inadvertent one, in which one element was a series of intense deliberations and controversies about the relationship between the traditions of Latin Christendom and the philosophical and linguistic trad­itions of classical antiquity.

In China, analogous debates ushered in the Neo-Confucian movement, the reassertion of the virtues of that tradition and, consequently, the preser­vation of Chinese civilization as a cultural and linguistic ecumene. However, whereas the Neo-Confucian movement and the preservation of an all­encompassing political order in China - and here the interlude of the Yuan dynasty represented a rupture only to a marginal extent - entailed the preservation of a single language across the entire ecumene, western Europe and, along a different trajectory, India, experienced the first steps in a secular shift towards a vernacularization of linguistic practices. Even if ecumenical and vernacular linguistic practices would coexist for centuries to come, processes of a fundamentally transforming nature had emerged. In Europe the emergence of religious practices tied to new monastic orders entailed closer links to local communities, but they also served as an instrument for homogenizing efforts within the overall framework of the new ecumenical constellation of extended Latin Christendom. The activities of the Cistercian order in the newly Christianized parts of northern and eastern Europe provide one example of this.¹⁵

In South Asia, the encounter with the cultural and political institutions of Islamic civilization served as one of the sources for reformulations and rearticulations of Hindu traditions before the turn of the first millennium ce. Hindu scholars developed interpretations that entailed claims to universal significance as well as a further strengthening and revitalization of the role of Sanskrit as a language, which formed the basis of a vast array of cultural practices also on the most local level. From the twelfth century onwards a further Islamic expansion occurred across the Indian subcontinent, first involving traders in the south and in Bengal along with Islamic rule in the northwest, and then a consolidation of political rule across northern and central India. The establishment of the Delhi sultanate in the early thirteenth century also created a space in which Islamic and earlier Indian cultures met and intermingled to create forms of Indo-Muslim cultural practices, eventu­ally ushering in the Indo-Muslim world that would flourish in the Mughal Empire from the sixteenth century onwards.1⁶ Here older linguistic and cultural practices, often but not always Sanskrit-based, would meet with and exert mutual influences on practices of Turkic and Arabic origins, including the high culture and poetry of the Persianite cultures of Iran and Central Asia. In addition, as in western Europe, India experienced a shift towards vernacularization of linguistic practices and a localization of religious practices. In both contexts ecumenical and vernacular linguistic practices would coexist for centuries, but processes of a fundamentally transforming nature had emerged.

1 ⁵ See e.g. Gabor Klaniczay, ‘The Birth of New Europe about 1000 ce: Conversion, Transfer of Institutional Models, New Dynamics', in Arnason and Wittrock, Eurasian Transformations, 99-130; and Gabor Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

¹⁶ A wonderfully concise portrait of arguably the greatest Mughal emperor, the sixteenth­century ruler Jalal Ad-Din Akbar, is given by Andre Wink in his volume Akbar (London: Oneworld Publications, 2008).

In Southeast Asia, a cosmopolitan Sanskrit-based cultural ecumene emerged and extended over large areas. It found expression in, to use William McNeill's phrase, ‘the Indianized court civilizations',¹⁷ but also in practices where local experiences were inextricably entangled with general­ized imaginations in Sanskrit-based culture. These imaginations were based not on conceptions of a centre that influences and is imitated by various peripheries, but rather on the trans-spatial nature of the imagery of Hindu culture. This allowed for the unique fusion between cultural-cosmological imaginations and local sites across large areas of Asia far beyond the subcon­tinent itself. It also meant that such cultural practices could survive for centuries after Indianized empires and other political entities had been conquered or transformed.

Conditions and causes

Several interlinked processes affected, if in different degrees, civilizations across the Old World during the period from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, and led to cultural crystallizations and reorientations in many regions. First, there was remarkable demographic growth, more so it appears than in the centuries both before and after this period. This seems to have been true for China, the Indian subcontinent, and Europe. Second, there was pronounced agricultural growth, which resulted from changes in land use but also in production techniques; in Europe these included new types of ploughing and new types of crops.

Third, agricultural growth in turn allowed for the growth of new cities and new types of urban life. Guilds of merchants and artisans appeared, in Chinese cities and in the smaller European cities. Urban developments were furthermore related to efforts at articulating notions of rights both in agricul­ture and in urban life. Fourth, commerce grew. In South and Southeast Asia such growth could draw on old interlinked networks across the Indian Ocean and beyond. In the European context growth occurred predominantly in local and regional commerce, although, as R. I. Moore has argued, trade routes across the Old World were more important than in the Axial Age.1⁸

1 ⁷ William H. McNeill, A World History, 4th edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 274.

1 ⁸ R. I. Moore, ‘The Transformation of Europe as a Eurasian Phenomenon', in Arnason and Wittrock, Eurasian Transformations, 77-98.

Such growth had as one of its backgrounds a somewhat less restricted sphere of action for commercial activities.

Fifth, in most civilizations, elites formed and were contested, with conflicts between traditional, sometimes clan-like, sometimes aristocratic older elites, often with relationships to imperial courts, and emerging and increasingly influential military and clerical elites. Sixth, new types of institutions for the training of clerical and religious elites emerged, capable of articulating an interpretation of often quasi-judicial rules and laws. The emergence of Neo­Confucian academies in China and the growing support for madrasas in many parts of the Islamic world are examples of this. In Europe the first universities were formed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which were integral to the transformation of European societies in this period.

Seventh, the rise of new elites had important implications for the overall social order as well as for the nature and regulation of social interactions outside of the realm of government proper, what might perhaps even be termed new kinds of public spaces. Such spaces arose or were reshaped across the Old World. Eighth, elite contestations tended to focus on what modern social science would describe as processes of state formation but what might better be termed contestation about the nature, rulership and control of political order. In the analysis of Thomas Bisson, for example, European developments should not be thought of in terms of different varieties of government. Rather this was a process whereby efforts were made to create some kind of regulated practices that might serve as a defence against, and in favour of imposing some constraints on, the all-present coercive power inherent in, to use his terminology, lordship. It is out of such efforts that governments and parliaments slowly emerged and were given a form that to some extent could go beyond the immediate expression and exertion of power and coercion of a lord or a king.¹⁹

Jointly these processes set the stage for long-term trajectories of the agro­literate societies of the Old World, and created some of the conditions for the world of intensified global interactions and encounters that was to follow, although historians view one or more of these as particularly important in different regions. In his analysis of the deep-seated transformations of Song China, for example, Paul Jakov Smith notes, ‘The primary engine of this medieval transformation was undoubtedly the shift in the demographic center of gravity' to South China. This stimulated growth and productivity

1⁹ Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century, 578-81. in rice agriculture, which in turn led to a stimulus for trade networks. However, he comments that these changes were also linked to ‘the collapse of the medieval aristocracy of great clans that had dominated China from the fourth to the ninth centuries. These events were shaped by the sequence of incursions from the steppes in the west culminating in the establishment of the Yuan dynasty in the mid-thirteenth century.'^[242]

In his analysis of vernacularization processes in the Sanskrit-based cultural world, Sheldon Pollock also highlights some of the factors identified above. He cautiously argues that ‘whereas we can identify some factors that clearly contributed - reinvigorated trading networks in the early second millennium concentrated wealth in local power centers, the expansion of Islam on its western and eastern frontiers offered new cultural stimuli - a unified explan­ation of the historical origins of vernacularism is improbable'. He concedes, however, that this should not prevent us from using these examples to try to enrich theorizing on culture and power.^[243] Analogously, Thomas Bisson argues that in twelfth-century Europe demographic and economic growth created the conditions for ‘the multiplication of people with the means and will to coerce others' contrary to an older world in which ‘nobles had ruled, and nobles were few'.²²

Diverging patterns and pathways of transformation

The developments discerned by these and other observers suggest the fruitfulness of a comparative analysis that does not shy away from a study of major historical relocations and reorientations but seeks to avoid the implicit, or sometimes explicit, Eurocentrism of much work in the social and historical sciences. The transformations that form the focus of this chapter have, of course, a longer history, with important influences from the civilizations of the so-called Axial Age. The cultural worlds taken up in this chapter are directly or indirectly successors of the Axial civilizations of antiquity that took form in ancient Israel, Greece, China, India, and Iran, although there were, as already argued, few or no unbroken continuities. Furthermore, Axial transformations originated in only some regions of the Old World, while other parts, including the old civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt, were not part of these transformations.

Axial civilizations came to have lasting consequences for wide regions of Eurasia far beyond their places of emergence, however. I will examine some of these in what follows, although it is not possible in one chapter to highlight all the regions in which such influences were a significant factor in shaping the transformations of the tenth to thirteenth centuries. I will first focus on the Indian subcontinent, then China, Japan, and Western Christen­dom, with a few comments on Byzantium. Because of issues of length, this chapter will similarly leave out Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, although these also influenced the cultural evolution of the Mediterranean, and the Indian and Chinese worlds over many centuries.

At the beginning of the second millennium ce, all the major civilizations of the Old World were forced to rearticulate notions of power and culture. Sheldon Pollock has noted that ‘across much of Eurasia the world abandoned cosmopolitanism and empire in favor of vernacularity and regional polities'. These ‘transformations in culture and power that began concurrently in India and Europe around the start of the second millennium were consolidated by its midway... the cosmopolitan order in both worlds was almost completely supplanted by the seventeenth century'.^[244] In this process, a growing diver­gence emerged between parts of the Old World, but, as noted by Pollock, there were symmetries and even synchronies in the processes of vernacular- ization in India and Europe, and even in the societal contextualization of this process, for instance in terms of the role of courtly elites. There were also differences, of course not least in terms of a long, unbroken tradition of ‘oral performances on the basis of hand-written texts'.^[245] This type of expressivity was one of several features that enabled the existence during virtually all of the Middle Millennium of a Sanskrit-based ‘vast ecumene extending over a third of Eurasia', with the others being the trans-local, trans-ethnic and grammatically and lexically stable character of the language.^[246] This ecumene extended not only across the Indian subcontinent but also across the main­land and islands of Southeast Asia, creating a cultural community of common outlook and intelligibilities without a political centre and without the type of political orders that started to emerge in Europe in the second half of the Middle Millennium, namely the nascent nation-states, a form of polity ‘unlike anything found in South Asia'.^[247]

In China, the parallel developments of the expansion of agricultural production - linked to a demographic shift towards South China - and the growth of urban centres occurred earlier and on a larger scale than elsewhere in Eurasia. China also experienced the decline of an old elite of aristocratic clans with close ties to imperial rule, and even - as mentioned above - elements of an incipient industrial revolution. These social and economic transformations were contemporaneous with the rise of more organized and increasingly threatening political orders at the western and northern borders of China. As a consequence, processes of elite contestation and state formation - or rather the renewal of political order and the search for more efficient means of resource mobilization - interacted and shaped the condi­tions for social and cultural transformations. One crucial aspect of these transformations was the rise of a clerical elite, based on an ethic that put a premium on service to the political order and on selection via a far more stringent examination than similar groups experienced elsewhere. At the turn of the first millennium, amidst growing territorial threats, this elite of literati came to embrace ever more ambitious and activist policies designed to enact a programme of comprehensive reform.

This so-called Neo-Confucianism, or Learning of the Way (daoxue), ori­ginated earlier, but at the turn of the first millennium ce it became increas­ingly related to the crisis and resentment over the loss of Chinese heartlands and dissatisfaction with imperial and ministerial rule. It also - and here it is difficult not to think of analogies with western Europe at roughly the same time - included a focus on family structure and proposals for inheritance and control of property designed to strengthen patrilineal ties and, conversely, to curtail the situation of women. Ironically, these views on women and property, which were largely new but were claimed as an older tradition, only became realizable and institutionalized after the conquest by the Mongol ‘barbarians', and they became further strengthened during the Ming dynasty.

During the last years of the Southern Song, what had emerged as a movement of critique and reform came to be embraced, if too late to have any immediate impact, by the political centre, and then, after the fall of the Southern Song, survived at the local level to find a place in schools and academies in Southern China. As an effective ideology of the educated elite, Neo-Confucianism became predominant only after the fall of the Song and during the new Mongol dynasty of the Yuan. By then the Chinese educated elite had achieved sufficient autonomy to serve as a carrier of social and political practices irrespective of dynastic order, and hence also to survive as a ruling stratum under the Ming - and subsequently also under the Qing - thereby providing a unique degree of continuity in the exercise of political and bureaucratic power.

Japanese developments in the beginning of the second millennium ce exhibit many of the features characteristic of both Europe and China during this period. Thus in Japan there was also rapid growth in agricultural production, growth of urban life, increasing commerce both domestically and externally (with China), a movement towards restructuring the basis of traditional elites with less reliance on direct imperial patronage, and a deep- seated restructuring of what might be termed public spaces as well of the nature of political order.

Yet there were, as strongly argued by Mikael Adolphson, continuities in the mutually reinforcing relationship between the imperial political elite and religious elites.^[248] The rise of a warrior class out of older elites, more directly tied to the imperial order, was also a gradual development that only in the fifteenth century led to its clear predominance as the ruling class. Rather the persistent pattern is one of continuity between the old imperial order of the Heian period and the power-sharing between imperial political- administrative, religious, and military elites of the Kamakura period (from the late twelfth to the mid-fourteenth centuries). However, rule in the Kamakura period took place within severe financial constraints, and the contributions offered by various elites to the maintenance of the imperial court in Kyoto were on a much lower level than had previously been the case. This reduction in income meant that the expectations of members of the warrior class for rewards, including rewards from service in successfully resisting the two Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century, could not be met. Thus despite a relatively effective and honest system of administration and adjudication, it became gradually more difficult to avoid growing dissatisfaction.

The new commercial and urban elites, which grew as a result of economic developments, were becoming ever wealthier, but they were also consist­ently excluded from political power. Even so, the economic needs of society were such that the interests of merchant and commercial interests had to be continuously taken into account as a major variable by the politically dominant groups throughout the second millennium ce, even during the near-absolutist Tokugawa shogunate from the seventeenth century onwards.

The traditional Weberian interpretation of the emergence of a distinctly European trajectory that explains Europe's path to modernity remains sug­gestive and useful. It emphasizes four coterminous transformations that occurred in the beginning of the second millennium ce.²⁸ First was the increasing recognition, in the wake of the so-called Papal Revolution, of a de facto separation of ecclesiastical and temporal power. In the political praxis of western Europe, this bifurcation excluded two other forms of political order, theocracy and caesaro-papism. It also set the stage for the institutionalization of forms of contestation and pluralism in matters of the utmost importance to a society. Second was what has come to be termed the Feudal Revolution, involving an articulation of a variety of rights and obligations that could be claimed and upheld in various public fora. Thus we may say an incipient society had been created, in which the rule of law had been transformed from oral adjudication - familiar in many European societies, not least the Scandinavian ones - to one in which the idea had taken root that rights and obligations may be textually inscribed and require interpretation, articulation and competent adjudication by legal scholars. Third was growth of urban life, the Urban Revolution, which not only entailed a stimulus for trade and economic activities, but was also associated with wide-ranging municipal self-government. In some parts of the Holy Roman Empire where effective imperial power had become greatly

2⁸ A sophisticated formulation of the Weberian position is provided by Wolfgang Schluchter in his book Paradoxes of Modernity: Culture and Conduct in the Theory of Max Weber (Stanford University Press, 1996), in particular chapter 4, 179-243. In two issues of the journal Daedalus - on the themes of Early Modernities, Summer 1998, vol. 127, No. 3; and Multiple Modernities, Winter 2000, vol. 129, No. ι - results are reported from a long-term research programme that tried to look at global historical developments and to rethink key concepts in contemporary social theory; both issues have subsequently been reprinted in book format as Eisenstadt, Schluchter and Wittrock (eds.), Public Spheres and Collective Identities; and S. N. Eisenstadt (ed.) Multiple Modernities (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 2002), respectively. See also Johann P. Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2003). weakened, such as northern Italy, new forms of urban republican rule took shape. Originally sometimes modelled on an association for common trade purposes, models of urban republican government came to exert a deep influence on notions of political rulership in Europe. This set the stage for the fourth transformation Weber identifies, an intellectual revolution both in scholarly activities themselves and in making possible the existence of multiple fora for intellectual activities, nested in a multiplicity of political and institutional arenas across a Europe that still formed part of one ecu­menical order, that of Western Christendom. Thus universities were formed as a particular type of self-governing corporation with at least partial auton­omy from the church. Along with the emergence of European universities, this revolution was inherent in the synthesis of the traditions of Western Christendom and the philosophy of classical antiquity, and in the growth of monastic orders as significant institutions.

These processes entailed the emergence of political and intellectual plur­alism. They were also related to changes that occurred and that concerned reconceptualizations of notions of cosmology, history, social order and the malleability of worldly existence in terms of human actions. These shifts seem to have been of importance for the economic transformations of Europe, including such shifts as a radical revaluation - or rather devaluation - of the assessment of usury among the mortal sins. In the reading of Douglass North, the institutional changes most of all entailed a reduction in market imperfections.^[249]

In Europe in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, elites that had based their acquisition of power on violent appropriations internally and exter­nally in a context of permeable borders and vaguely defined rules of ownership and inheritance were gradually transforming themselves and seeking to entrench their power more deeply.^[250] In the situation of increas­ing regulation of the rights and borders attached to land and the possibility of an increasing productivity of agriculture, elites transformed themselves into estates with articulated rights. They based their position on extracting revenues from the land and on securing the reproduction of family wealth by laws prescribing primogeniture and patrilineal descent that drastically and suddenly excluded previously legitimate heirs from inheritance, and thereby created a need to tend for daughters and for second and third sons of elite families.

The great geographical expansion of Western Christendom at the turn of the first millennium ce entailed a numerical and spatial enlargement, as well as the pacification of peoples, the Norsemen and Vikings from the north and the Magyars from the east, who had earlier posed a considerable threat to the central and western regions of the continent. It also involved energetic efforts on the part of the papacy to strengthen its relative position through the activities of monastic orders, which were themselves transformed in the process. Similarly and more or less simultaneously, Byzantine Christendom was able to extend its cultural sphere in eastern Europe by conversions of peoples in the Balkans and, perhaps most importantly in the long run, of Kievan Rus'.

In sum, in the Europe of Latin Christendom, a new type of social order emerged, in which landed elites controlled the exercise of violence and in which new rules of marriage, inheritance and chastity guaranteed the preser­vation of profitable estates over time. One element of this transformation was the emergence of a stratum of professional military men, knights, seeking the favour of greater or lesser lords for shorter or longer times. However an ultimately more profound change was the formation of a new kind of governing class, based on clerical skills. All rulership henceforth depended on the competence of new clerical elites who possessed the necessary abilities to count, record and adjudicate, and the institutions that provide the necessary skills and training for this.

All of these areas - India, China, Japan and western Europe - present both striking analogies and elements of divergence, that came to have radically different consequences. For example, there are striking differences in the formation of collective identities, in the nature of public spheres, and in the development of linguistic practices. In Europe there was a slow but secular growth in the use of vernacular languages and a concomitant shift from imperial towards more nationally conceived forms of political order. In the different parts of the Indian subcontinent, Indologists also identify a growth of secular literature, although this complemented rather than replaced San­skrit literature. However, as argued by Pollock,³¹ there was no emergence of

³¹ SheldonPollock, ‘Transformation'. clearly territorially bounded, not to speak of national, forms of polities, at least in a European sense of the term. In East Asia both classical Chinese and the form and ideal of imperial order were maintained in spite of the vagaries and turmoil over these centuries.

An age of trans-regional reorientations

The period from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries was a time of crisis, but also of the reassertion of cultural legacies in the major civilizations and agro­literate societies of the Old World. In terms of institutional developments, interlinked processes of agricultural expansion, urban and commercial growth and changes in military technology gave rise to elite contestations and efforts at rearrangements of the structure of the political order. These processes tended to be legitimated and interpreted in the light of long­standing cultural legacies within different civilizations. What occurred in these centuries was not a mere shift in ideas, but the articulation and insti­tutional entrenchment of different deep-seated cultural legacies across the Eurasian hemisphere.

The degree of cultural pluralism varied across, and within, civilizations. On the whole the degree of toleration of cultural and religious pluralism was probably lower throughout this period in both Western and Eastern Chris­tendom, than it was in China, Japan or India and later in the Mongol Empire; in the central part of the realm of Islam, toleration diminished under the Mamluks. In China, Confucianism and Daoism had been part of the Chinese cultural ecumene since the Axial Age and in the first half of the first millennium ce were joined by Buddhism in its Mahayana variety and others, not least Lamaism. It is hardly coincidental that the most well-known and popular literary work in the Chinese world up until today is the famous tale from the Tang period about a journey to the West, that is, to India. During some periods - and the Yuan dynasty is one of them - ‘Iranian' religions, including Nestorian Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, also played a fully accepted and sometimes prominent role.

Generally, however, what tended to happen towards the end of the first millennium and the beginning of the second millennium ce was that even in the most tolerant contexts, cultural and religious ideas and schools with their roots elsewhere became subject to processes of domestication and integration into the cultural mainstream of a given civilization. In this respect, Japanese developments provide interesting examples of the reinterpretation of Chinese variants of schools of Buddhism and their transposition into forms that appear as distinctly Japanese, of which Zen Buddhism is but one.

In institutional terms, the rise of new types of clerical elites meant that two potential cleavages were of central importance. One had to do with the nature of the relationship between clerical and political elites, in particular the degree of autonomy in the formation of the clerical elites. The other had to do with the relationship between the social and political order, in particu­lar the degree to which social groupings were included or excluded from wielding power in the political arena.

If we compare the major civilizations across Eurasia in terms of the first dimension, it seems clear that western Europe and China were both civiliza­tions in which clerical elites became subject to a demanding formal training and yet enjoyed a high degree of autonomy from political power during their formation. In Constantinople, efforts to train new clerical elites at the beginning of the second millennium ce were tried but seem to have failed largely because ties between these elites and traditional social elites remained too close to allow for a degree of autonomy comparable to what was achieved in the eastern and western parts of Eurasia. Equally important perhaps, the already strained resource base of the Byzantine Empire became drastically limited in the late twelfth century with the loss of most of the mainland of Asia Minor. InJapan, the entourages of the imperial court and of local lords seem to have enjoyed a no more subjugated position than their peers in Europe. However institutionalized autonomy for the formation of clerical elites did not exist to the same degree as in western Europe or in China.

The second dimension concerns relationships between social and political order. In western Europe, there was a real sharing and, to some extent, a spatially defined division of power between different social groupings, including new urban elites and traditional elites, as well as the absence of a long-standing imperial political order. To some extent the church repre­sented the heritage of empire, but it could never assert a generally accepted claim to such a position. Perhaps we can say that western Europe came to represent an institutionalized articulation of what Eisenstadt always saw as the most important characteristic of an Axial civilization, namely a belief in the existence of a chasm between a transcendental and a worldly sphere. In practice such a chasm became institutionally articulated in the division between a domain of the church and another of the secular political order, as well as in a continuing coexistence of institutional pluralism.

The standard view of the European trajectory tends to focus on this emerging pluralism of the western European political order as unique and crucial for the future ascendancy of Europe. However, such accounts tend to overlook vitally important characteristics of other trajectories. In the case of China, to take a prominent counter-example, although the overt position of imperial rule remained paramount, there can be little doubt that the Chinese cultural order had long been characterized by a high, if varying, degree of pluralism and openness towards a range of religious and cultural traditions of different origins but all of which could be accommodated within a Chinese cultural ecumene. Furthermore, even if the Chinese political order was unitary and hierarchical, the cosmological underpinnings of political order were explicitly conditional: while service to the incumbent holder of the Mandate of Heaven was seen as obligatory in Confucian tradition, this Mandate could also be forfeited and an unworthy or inefficient holder of it could invoke no further transcendental legitimacy.^[251] What happened at the turn of the first millennium ce is that these elements of conditionality, pluralism and contestability become entrenched in institutional terms through the growing autonomy of the clerical class of literati. In this respect, it is of importance that the Mongol conquest and the establishment of the Yuan dynasty deeply influenced the nature of this basic pattern, but did not come to cause an irreparable rupture in it.^[252]

Although the consequences of Mongol conquest may not appear to be so different in the Chinese and the Islamic worlds in terms of the length of conquest - or rather perhaps in the brevity of time before the conquerors had become converted or assimilated into the regional religious and cultural ecumenes - they were significantly different in terms of impact. While both worlds came to preserve their ecumenical cultural languages, it is only in the Chinese context that it is possible to speak also of a continuity in the nature of the political order. One unforeseen effect of the Mongol conquest of Baghdad and central lands of the Islamic world was that the relative benevo­lence of the Mongols towards the then still substantial Nestorian and Mono- physite Christian populations came to engender suspicion and distrust among Muslims. After the collapse of the Mongol Empire, measures to encourage conversion or out-migration of Christian populations increased, which led to the numerical decline of Christian minority populations in this region.

Like China, Japan possessed a cultural order with different layers of tradition and religious practice integrated into a coherent unity, but this was characterized at the beginning of the second millennium ce by import­ant shifts in the social and political order. These shifts generally meant that the political order became shaped by contests among three parallel hierarch­ies, one imperial, another military and a third religious. These hierarchies themselves also become more structured in ways that for some of the classics of social science seemed reminiscent of the structuring of feudal rights in Europe. Another feature that was somewhat reminiscent of Europe was the concomitant emergence of what might be termed a new kind of public space, where commercial and urban interests came to play an important role socially and culturally while - in contrast to Europe - being excluded from real political power for centuries to come.

What happened then about the turn of the first millennium ce was that new articulations emerged in some of the major civilizations of the Old World that made new practices and institutions conceivable. Different conceptualizations of time and belonging ultimately made possible new ways of being and intervening in the world. In many regions of the Old World, these new articulations were directly related to processes of urban and commercial growth and they were linked to the reinterpretation of religious or cosmological accounts. Similarly the emergence of a new clerical class, autonomously formed, was only possible once the interpret­ability of different textual accounts was seen as a legitimate and institution­alized procedure.

This process in turn was related to the gradual formation of new types of political order. Instead of the imaginations of empire, in Europe these new types of political order emerged out of the realities of city republics, territor­ial proto-monarchies and assemblies representing the new societal groupings that had emerged. This entailed a need for sustained reflection on the nature and legitimacy of these new forms of domination. In the Sanskrit-based cultural world, the very notion of a close and necessary tie between the political order and religious, much less ethnic, identities came to be seen as increasingly contingent.

Thus some of the most fundamental assumptions behind the conditions for humans living together and ordering their public affairs at the eastern, western, and southern ends of the Old World became distinctly different from one another through separate processes of cultural crystallization and reorientation. However, curiosity and interest in other regions con­tinued and grew. Thus in the early modern period, theorizing about the polity at the western end of Eurasia was deeply influenced by imagin­ations of how such matters were handled in for instance China and Japan, not to speak of the three great Islamic empires of the Mughals, the Safavids and the Ottomans. Some of the institutional practices and the trajectories of different ecumenes of the world came to diverge in this age of trans-regional reorientations, but the entanglements and encounters of these cultural worlds also became ever closer and were destined to become increasingly so, and in subsequent periods involved far more glaring asymmetries of power and coercion.

FURTHER READING

Adolphson, Mikael S. The Gates of Power: Monks, Courtiers, and Warriors in Premodern Japan. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000.

Arnason, Johann P. The Peripheral Centre: Essays on Japanese History and Civilization. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2002.

Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions. Leiden: Brill, 2003.

Arnason, Johann P. and Bjorn Wittrock (eds.). Eurasian Transformations, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries: Crystallizations, Divergences, Renaissances. Leiden: Brill, 2004.

Bartlett, Robert. The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350. London: AUen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1993.

Bisson, Thomas N. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government. Princeton University Press, 2009.

Bol, Peter K. Neo-Confucianism in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center and Harvard University Press, 2008.

Colish, Marcia L. Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.

Eisenstadt, S. N. Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities: A Collection of Essays by S. N. Eisenstadt, vol. I. Leiden: Brill, 2003.

Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View. The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

(ed.) Multiple Modernities, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 2002: originally published as ‘Multiple Modernities', special issue of Daedalus, 129:1 (Winter 2000).

Eisenstadt, S. N., Wolfgang Schluchter and Bjorn Wittrock (eds.). Public Spheres and Collective Identities, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 2001: originally published as ‘Early Modernities', special issue of Daedalus 127:3 (Summer 1998).

Klaniczay, Gabor. Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Lewis, Mark Edward. China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty. Cambridge, MA: The BeIknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.

Pollock, Sheldon. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006.

Schluchter, Wolfgang. Paradoxes of Modernity: Culture and Conduct in the Theory of Max Weber. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Souyri, Pierre Francois. The World Turned Upside Down: Medieval Japanese Society. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, Asia Perspectives, 2001.