The Rise of Islam and Feudalism in Medieval Europe

Posted on Dec 13, 2024 in History

The Bedouins and the Rise of Islam

The Bedouins were nomadic Arab tribes that lived in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. They lived in clans, groups of families. Their principal occupation was herding, and they worshiped spirits that lived in trees and rocks. Because of the wars between the Persians and Byzantines, commerce was interrupted, and trade routes shifted to the south.

Caravans stopped at cities like Mecca, where Muhammad was born around 570.

Muhammad

His parents died when he was little. He went to work for a wealthy widow called Khadija, who owned caravans. He traveled with caravans and spoke to Jews and Christians about God. Muhammad married Khadija and had four children.

When he was 40, he had visions where God spoke to him through the angel Gabriel. He was called to be the messenger or prophet of the one true God, Allah. He would be the last prophet of Islam, preaching obedience to God and against idols.

The wealthy merchants of Mecca feared that Muhammad’s preaching would drive pilgrims away from the Kaaba, a cube-shaped building with a sacred black stone (idols and tribal gods). They thought that he was looking for political and economic power. They started persecuting him and his followers.

In 622, Muhammad traveled from Mecca to Medina, looking for safety. This journey, the Hijra, is so important to Muslims that it marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar. He became a political and religious leader in Medina. He formed an army and launched a successful campaign against his enemies. In 630, he returned to Mecca, taking the idols away from the Kaaba and dedicating it to God.

The Five Pillars of Islam

The essence of Islam, according to Muhammad, is that “there is no God but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” Islam is a monotheistic religion, as are Judaism and Christianity.

The Quran is the Muslim holy book and teaches five duties of a good Muslim, the Five Pillars:

• Make testimony of God.
• Pray 5 times daily, facing Mecca.
• Give money to the poor.
• Fast during daylight hours of Ramadan.
• Make a pilgrimage to Mecca.

It also prohibits some actions:

• Worshiping idols.
• Eating pork.
• Drinking liquor.
• Gambling.

Every believer is equal to every other believer. There was little racism. Christians and Jews who lived in Islamic communities paid a special tax. Slavery continued with polytheists. One Muslim could not enslave another. Muslim women were equal to men in the sight of God. Any property a woman inherited was hers. Muhammad limited men to four wives.

Conquering a Huge Empire

Muhammad governed according to the laws and values that became the Sharia, the law of Islam. He controlled the army.

He died in 632. Within 100 years of the Prophet’s death, most peoples from Spain, Africa, and India were living under Arab Muslim rule.

When Muhammad died, Abu Bakr, his companion on the Hijra, was elected caliph, successor of the prophet. Others wanted Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law, to be the caliph. The ones who wanted Abu Bakr to be caliph were the Sunnis, and the ones who wanted Ali were the Shiites. The Sunnis and the Shiites shared the same beliefs but had different ways of expressing them and didn’t agree on their origins.

The Spread of Islam

“Jihad” is an Arab word that means ‘struggle’, usually translated as ‘holy war’. Early Muslims considered the struggle to convert people a ‘holy war’. In modern times, Muslims tend to call any religious or political movement a ‘holy war’.

The two main causes of the Arab expansion were religious reasons (converting so many people throughout Europe) and demographic reasons (as they had converted so many people, they had to expand their territories because they didn’t fit in the Arabian Desert).

The weakness of their neighbors contributed to the success of Arab armies. The Byzantines and Persians had been fighting each other for centuries, so they put up little resistance to the Arabs. The places the Arabs attacked were Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and Iraq.

Those who fought back were treated more harshly. Non-Arab polytheists were killed, and their children enslaved. Jews and Christians (considered misguided by the Muslims) had to choose between converting to Islam and paying special taxes. Muslims protected them because they worshiped the same God as them, under a different revelation. Non-Arabs were treated as second-class citizens.

The Umayyad Dynasty

The first four caliphs elected in Mecca had all been companions of Muhammad. The expansion of territory gave place to a new kind of ruler: Arab generals and governors of new provinces. With time, they became more powerful than caliphs. In 661, the Arab governor of Syria declared himself caliph and made Damascus his capital. He founded the Umayyad dynasty, which lasted until 750. Under the Umayyad caliphs, the Islamic Empire was born.

Arab armies moved into the northwest coast of Africa and converted the Berbers to Islam. In 711, Tarik, a Berber commander, with a combined army of Arabs and Berbers, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and attacked the Visigoth kingdom there. Then he continued towards the Frankish empire but was defeated by Charles Martel in the Battle of Tours. This battle was the end of the Islamic conquests in Western Europe. Muslim rule in Spain continued for more than 700 years.

The people of mixed Arab and Berber ancestry were the Moors.

During the golden age of Muslim culture, 900 to 1100, European scholars went to cities like Cordoba and Salamanca to learn Arabic mathematics, medicine, and science.

The Arabs attacked the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, but in 717-718, Constantinople held off the Arab navy by using a deadly Greek fire, an inflammable liquid made from a secret formula. The Umayyads could never conquer the city.

Islamic Contributions

Their desire for trade and their extensive travel promoted a need for more understanding of mathematics and astronomy.

Medicine

Medicine was the best-known of the Muslim achievements.

• Well-equipped hospitals were located in principal cities.
• Some of the finest doctors were Persians, and Jews were also known for their medical knowledge.
• Licensed physicians treated illnesses and performed delicate surgery.
• Druggists had to pass an examination in order to practice.
• In the 8th century, Harun al-Rashid established a large hospital in Baghdad.
• The greatest of all Muslim physicians was al-Razi, who wrote many scientific works in the 9th century.
• In the 10th century, Avicenna, a Persian physician, wrote the Canon of Medicine, which was the standard guide in European and Islamic medicine.

Muslim physicists founded the science of optics, the study of light.

Related to medicine was alchemy, an Arabic word that means ‘the art of mixing metals’. Alchemists worked combining metals to make stronger or more beautiful ones. They searched for a way to change less valuable metals, like lead, into more precious ones, like gold.

Astronomy

Muslims needed to know what time it was in order to say the daily prayers, so they developed a concern for accurate timekeeping.

• Pilgrims needed good ways of finding directions.
• Based on Greek scientists, Arab astronomers made more accurate measurements of the length of the solar year, calculated eclipses, etc.

Mathematics

The rise of mathematics: calculations for determining the positions of the planets and distances across land, as well as the requirements for an advanced banking system.

• Arab mathematicians improved upon the decimal system.
• The Arabs were the first ones to use the symbol x to represent the unknown.
• They developed algebra, ‘putting together something incomplete’.

Architecture

As they conquered lands, they built houses and mosques.

• In Byzantine territories, they built Christian churches.
• Some features of Muslim architecture are domes, minarets, arcades, the horseshoe arch, and the extensive use of colored tiles.
• Damascus had a city water supply.
• Cordoba was the capital of Muslim Spain. It was a splendorous and comfortable city. In the 11th century, street lights and hot and cold running water supplies were installed. There were shops, mosques, schools, a university with a huge library, and a population of around 500,000.
• An ordinary home had wooden doors, a long archway inside, a central courtyard, and a tile floor. The kitchen was in a corner of the first floor, and the sleeping rooms were upstairs.

The Formation of Europe

The lords owned most of the land and ruled by means of a system called feudalism. The great unifying force in western Christendom during the Middle Ages was the Church. In the early Middle Ages, most people lived and worked on manors in the countryside.

Feudalism Developed in Western Christendom

Strong and ambitious nobles forced Charlemagne’s weak successors to grant them special rights. As a result, centralized government gradually disappeared, and local rule again became important.

The Carolingian Empire Declined

Reasons for the breakup of Charlemagne’s empire:

• Lack of an effective tax system left the central government constantly short of money.
• Poor means of communication made it difficult to enforce laws and unify the kingdom.
• Most important, the German practice of dividing landholdings among all surviving sons when a king died led to quarrels and constant small wars that weakened the kingdom.

In 843, Charlemagne’s grandsons signed the Treaty of Verdun, which divided the empire into three parts:

• Charles the Bald received West Frankland (lands west of the Rhone River). It later became France.
• Louis the German received East Frankland (lands east of the Rhine River). It later became modern Germany.
• Lothair was given a narrow strip of land between these two kingdoms.

Vikings, Magyars, and Muslims Attacked the Empire

During and after Charlemagne’s rule, the empire was invaded by bands of Scandinavian pirates and warriors. Vikings raided Russia, England, and coastal cities in Western Europe and the Mediterranean. Vikings burned towns and carried off movable wealth. To stop Viking attacks, the Frankish king (in the year 911) granted the invaders a territory in West Frankland on the condition that the newcomers accept Christianity. Those Vikings were known as Normans, and the area they settled became known as Normandy.

At the end of the 9th century, another group of invaders, the nomadic Magyars, from the region west of the Ural Mountains, attacked central Europe. By the late 10th century, they had settled down, adopted Christianity, and built a new state known as Hungary.

From their bases in Spain and North Africa, the Muslims pushed into southern Italy and the southern coast of West Frankland, where they sacked towns and sold their captives in the slave markets of North Africa.

During all these invasions, the Carolingian kings provided little protection to their people.

Feudalism, a New Form of Government, Emerged

A new system of government based on land ownership and personal loyalty developed as the Carolingian kings lost power: known as feudalism. Under feudalism, ruling power is held by private lords. These lords were landowners, and the people they ruled were dependent on them for livelihood. Things that contributed to the development of feudalism:

• Feudalism began during the rule of the Roman Empire. In the 3rd and 4th centuries, when agricultural production declined sharply, the Roman government bound many agricultural laborers to the land as serfs.
• German chiefs divided the spoils of war among their warriors in return for pledges of loyalty and military service. The warriors thus became lords. In turn, these lords granted lands to followers for the same pledges.

A vassal is the person who received land from a lord. A feudal contract between the lord and the vassal laid out the rights and duties of each.

Although fiefs and vassal services were not supposed to be hereditary, it soon became customary for the son of a vassal who had died to take over his father’s land and obligations. Over time, ownership of fiefs did become hereditary by law.

Feudalism was an awkward system of governing just because it divided Western Europe into thousands of small political territories. Even a king, with many vassals of his own, might become the vassal of another king.

The Church Entered into Feudal Contracts

If a clergyman, a priest, was given fiefs, he was both a servant of the people and the vassal of a lord. The priests were sometimes in conflict as to whom they owed first loyalty – the Church or the lord who owned the fief. When a clergyman died, lands passed directly to the Church. That’s how the Church expanded throughout all of Western Europe.

Medieval Society Had Fixed Classes

Medieval society had fixed classes: nobility, clergy, and peasants.

The nobility was obviously made up of nobles, which were the kings, vassals, and lesser lords. The status of nobles was inherited.

The clergy, or church officials, were generally the only group educated in subjects other than warfare. Bishops lived much like wealthy lords. Village priests usually came from the lower classes and often had little education.

Peasants were the lowest class and were also by far the largest group; all peasants were serfs. As serfs, they did not own their land but were allowed to live off some of the harvest. The land worked by serfs belonged to a lord.

A serf could never become a noble, although a person from the peasant class might become a priest and rise within the Church.

The villeins were a small group of people who worked the land and had a status slightly higher than serfs but much lower than nobility. They could hire someone to work the land for them, and they could also leave to work elsewhere if they found a tenant to replace them.

The Feudal System

The most important type of soldier was the mounted knight. King William would not be safe unless he could call on a large number of mounted knights. One way of getting knights was to have them live as part of his household. The problem was William would then be responsible for feeding them and providing all the equipment and horses they would use, and this would be far too expensive.

The feudal system was the way that William and the later Norman kings solved this problem.

The Battle of Hastings, between the Anglo-Saxons and Normans, occurred in 1066. All the land, no matter who had owned it before this battle, was part of his prize for winning.

Each of William’s most important followers became a tenant-in-chief, also called a baron, who were the mounted knights. In return for land, each baron owed the king military service. The baron would have to provide a number of knights for forty days if William wished to raise an army and go to war. The tenants-in-chief could raise the number of knights they owed the king either by having them live in their household and paying for them or by having sub-tenants. The sub-tenant was a knight who, in return for part of the baron’s land, would agree to be one of that baron’s knights for a set number of days in the year.

KING ——-> Tenants-in-chief (Barons) ——-> Sub-tenants (Knights)

The king gave land to the barons, the barons gave land to the knights, the knights gave soldiers to the barons, and the barons gave soldiers to the king.