Locating Violence in Context

Violence permeated much of social life across the vast geographical space of the European, American, Asian and Islamic worlds and through the broad sweep of what is often termed the Middle Millennium (roughly 500 to 1500).¹ In the chapters that follow, violence is analysed from Japan and China in the east, across Central Asia and North Africa, to western Europe, with chapters on ritualised violence in the Americas before the European conquest.

Violence was a given - an inevitable ingredient, it would seem - of everyday conduct at the individual and domestic levels across cultures. In many socio-cultural settings such violence involved gendered and legal relations. The pater familias imposed authority over the household just as the owner exercised authority over the enslaved, a physical discipline normal­ised by custom and law. Equally, parents used physical discipline on their offspring (legitimate or otherwise), again in ‘normal' and legally sanctioned patterns. We might always assume the pursuance of such violent practices even if they transpired in the shadows nearly always beyond our analytic reach.

It needs be said, too, that taking the precise measure of the incidence and severity of patterns of violence (of any sort) remains an elusive goal. Thus, for example, early enthusiastic efforts in the late twentieth century to utilise computers in producing generalisations about crime and conviction rates, such as in the case of premodern England with its precocious and surviving corpus of royal governmental records, failed to meet expectations.

One faces a similar dilemma in attempting to account for frequency and levels of violence in Near Eastern society in the first centuries of the Islamic period. References in the Qur'an, Hadith (the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad) and early Islamic juridical writings would seem to suggest regular, quotidian patterns of domestic and other forms of ‘low-level' vio­lence but certainly do not offer quantifiable information of any sort. Much the same can be said of the countless references to a variety of types of violence that occur in the voluminous works of adab (‘belles-lettres') and poetry produced over centuries, in a variety of languages, including Arabic, Persian and Turkish, by Near Eastern writers. For the most part, these are works of and about urban society and evince patterns both of criminality and of stern governance (so torture, executions and the like). Political unrest - driven, in cases, by sectarian divisions between Sunnis and Shi‘a, or of an internecine sort within each of these two broad communities - is also a constant in narrative and literary accounts, though again one is at a loss to take a detailed measure of such activity.

Similarly, no unidirectional trend towards greater control over violence can confidently be traced in our sources. Rather, the tension created by the simultaneous need for violence (and praise for its dramatic exercise) existed, across culture and region, side by side with concerns for the realisation of a more peaceful social order.

Given such conditions, agriculture, trade, pilgrimage and other activities could be conducted with some hope of security. Yet these same waxing powers often cherished territorial goals of their own. Such ambitions could only be achieved by the use of armed might which was becoming increas­ingly available through rising capacities of revenue extraction that provided the means for territorial expansion.

Confronting violence was, likewise, an abiding question for all Eurasian religious traditions. The manner in which religious establishments addressed violence and its impact on the socio-moral order varied widely. In Latin Christendom, a predominant view was that one carried out the will of God for social advancement: the spiritual mission had more chance of success in a less violent world. But here, too, violence had to be accommodated. If, at one level, Christian religious elites wearied of losses of landed property and goods to assault and thievery by the rapacious, great or small, at the same time, in a broader sense, they were profoundly caught up in a proud world of power and property. The typical reaction, then, was to support violence by lay patrons or turn themselves to warfare through the articulation of spiritual goals and blessings promised to participating warriors and lay notables. The elite in lay society, for their part, may increasingly have become culturally refined, as their literature, art and architec­ture demonstrates; yet they long showed how much they felt their origins as a warrior elite that settled issues with edged weaponry, their vigorous actions paralleling those in the heroic code they cherished and patronised. They could be confident that such bold and vigorous action would be highly praised and long remembered through song, verse and artistic creations.