The Four Contexts

The four contexts in which to read the contributions to the volume, again, cover most of the most common manifestations of collective violence across the specified regions and cultures of the global stage.

War, raiding and conquest typically informed relations between nomadic and agro-urban peoples. Patterns of assault, plunder and enslavement acted frequently as a prelude to episodes of more systematic violence. Chinese- Inner Asian relations over centuries were subject to ever-mounting pressures exerted in both directions by Chinese imperial forces on the one hand and Turkic and other nomadic/frontier forces on the other.^[3] If confrontation was mitigated by commercial ties, diplomacy and cultural exchange - patterns better understood today by historians - the fact of organised violence persisted. Similarly, in the late antique Near East, ‘Saracens', a term used by Byzantine writers for southern peripheral Near Eastern peoples, preyed on the Byzantine and Sasanid realms over generations, often with slave traffick­ing as a central motivation.^[4] In time, in the sixth and seventh centuries, in an effort to mitigate the violence and elicit the support of local intermediaries, Rome and Byzantium recruited Arabian and Syrian frontier tribes as clients. The experience - a sustained exposure to the ‘lessons' of imperial state conduct - probably played a part in setting the stage for the Arab/Islamic invasions that followed upon the initial expansion of the ‘Medinan state' under the Prophet Muhammad (570-632) and his immediate successors, notably Umar I, later known as the ‘rightly guided' caliphs (632-61).^[5]

Peoples of peripheries - steppe, deserts and seas - attacked China, Iran, Byzantium and other complex agrarian regions. In nearly all cases, on land, military forces were mounted, highly mobile and lightly armoured, relying on the horse and/or camel and the deployment of the bow and lance, pitted against often more encumbered and less flexible central armies.

War and conquest were also instruments of the legitimate state. The point at which warfare, especially in Europe, no longer was the privilege of aristocrats bent on proving their honour and turned into the duty of peasants pressed into service by the state is a marker of how violence became integral to socio­political aims. The Hundred Years War in fourteenth-century England was a case of war waged to preserve the realm rather than the king's personal honour, and thus indicative of how the obligations that subjects owed their monarch became a matter of public scrutiny. State-sanctioned violence justified war and conquest while unsanctioned violence often transpired in the aftermath of victory, with the winner eliminating his potential rivals.

A significant historiographical challenge arises here.^[6] Few nomadic societies left written records, and with the relative scarcity of archaeological evidence, historians rely, in accounting for the upheaval and ruin these peoples engen­dered, on records produced either by the vanquished or, at subsequent stages of socio-political development, by the victors themselves in the context of imperial state governance. In the Americas, pre-Columbian writings survived only for the Mesoamerican culture area. To make sense of the seventh-century Arab/Islamic invasions of the Near East, Egypt and North Africa, historians have on hand a number of contemporary accounts produced by Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian and pagan writers on the one hand, and the much later accounts of Muslim Arabic writers, on the other.

At issue in part is our ability to reconstruct the many elements that informed state-sponsored violence and the effort to impose central monopoly over the use of force: patterns of recruitment and training; the shaping of command structures; and the ‘mundane' activities of feeding, housing and compensating troops. Scholarship on the long history of relations between Byzantium and the Sasanid empire - the third to the sixth centuries - argues over the extent to which they were informed by military confrontation.^[7] Questions also sur­round, for example, the turn in the early Abbasid period to a so-called ‘slave military' option. The phenomenon can be traced to Abbasid Ifriqiya (modern- day Tunisia), governed at that point by the Aghlabids (800-909), whose armies contained black ‘slave' units, and, almost simultaneously, Khurasan, governed at that point by the future caliph, al-Ma'mun (r. 813-33). His brother, Abu Ishaq al-Mu‘tasim (r. 833-42), took up the effort of recruiting Turkic and other Inner Asian fighters, forming in the process a substantial new armed force in Abbasid Iraq.^[8] The option of the ‘slave military' remained to later Islamic-era dynasties, though modern scholars have been careful to note that most such polities, among them the Ghaznavids (977-1186), Seljuqs (1040-1194) and Ayyubids (1169-c.

The Mamluk sultanate, as a ‘slave military' state, poses a problem of explanation: is it right to consider the arming of slaves as a ‘thousand-year' episode, spanning, in other words, the length of Near Eastern/Islamic his­tory? A remarkably durable state (1250-1517), the sultanate confronted early in its history the Mongols in Syria and crusader forces along the Palestinian coast, and, over its history, sustained a formidable military state that drew significantly on a trafficking in Turkic and then at a later stage Circassian recruits. In much the same fashion as the Abbasid, Fatimid and Seljuq states, to name but a few other dynastic powers of Islamic history, the Mamluk administration relied on extensive local security and intelligence networks in assuring law and order. The effort, which included sustained use of social monitoring, surveillance and public killings, relied throughout as much on the constant ‘promise' of violence by the state as on its execution.

Western European states built on Carolingian foundations and linked cen­tral governments with local administration in various ways. In England each county sheriff was a royal official and law and administration was supervised by itinerant justices (the eyre) and regular audits of sheriffs' accounts by the Exchequer. French governments placed royal officials (baillis and senechaux) over local prevotts, and relied on a system of appeals to central royal courts by those dissatisfied with local justice. Public punishment of those found guilty of crimes was dramatic, even though chopping off limbs gave way by the early thirteenth century to hanging.

This is to see dynasties and states as typical agents of violence. In 581, when the Sui dynasty (581-618) took political power over all of China, the regime burned and razed to the ground the thriving city ofJiankang (the future site of Nanjing), a city with nearly a million residents and a booming entrepot for domestic and imported goods, as well as a centre for Buddhists (both Chinese and foreign), for fear of its reclaiming adherents to former local regimes.^[9] And it is to see dynasties and states as victims of violence. Regicide - the killings of the early caliphs (Umar I, Uthman and Ali ibn Abi Talib) and the later beheading of the Abbasid caliph al-Amin (813) are among many examples - and assassination, that of the Seljuq vizier and regent Nizam al-Mulk (1092) the subject of much fascination, coloured Near Eastern political history. European warriors, encouraged by papal theological innovations, launched crusades first against the Islamic world in the eleventh century. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, kings levied taxes to support crusades and led their warriors not only against the Islamic world, but also against Germanic pagans and even fellow Christians.

And violence, in the early and medieval Islamic period, as across European and Asian history, surged from ‘below' as well. The Jacquerie of fourteenth­century France, as well as the the Irmandinos rising in fifteenth-century Galicia and the rebellion of the Remences in fifteenth-century Catalonia, saw commoners brutally attack knights and nobles in a response against chivalric social violence.

Rebels, as in the case of the Zanj, could and did frequently conquer territory outright. Turning from the Islamic realm to imperial China, in the ninth century a former salt-smuggler, Huang Chao, led an insurgency (875) against the mighty Tang dynasty and captured vast portions of the empire, including the world-famous city of Chang'an. It would take almost ten years before the Tang state eliminated Huang and his followers. Despite its wealth, religious tolerance and political efficiency, the Song state (960-1279) saw numerous rural rebellions, including those tinged by utopian goals such as that led by Fang La (d. 1121), who was fictionalised in the well-known Chinese novel Water Margin. While China long possessed a literary heritage of hero­ism focused on high-born men, by the twelfth century oral tales of men like Fang La were reaching a broader public that idealised the man of action, the haohan, usually from a low societal status, and in possession of such qualities as courage, fortitude, endurance and stoicism, and who embodied an alter­native kind of masculinity that was emotional in contrast to the kind of manhood in traditional Chinese ethics that stressed self-control.^[10]

Trade, our third context, is not often approached from the vantage point of violence, whether in organised or more ‘mundane' forms. Huang Chao's uprising stands as a reminder, however, of the linkage of violence and trade. Huang not only disrupted trade at home but also threatened China's far- reaching international trade networks. Early, in a reign of terror, he massacred the large community of foreigners, mainly Arab and Persian sea-faring traders, temporarily resident in Guangzhou, which, in the long term, detracted inter­national commerce from the port for nearly a hundred years. Huang Chao, like many ambitious tyrants, saw foreigners as a threat to his regime. As for the early Islamic period, historians have considered the role played by trade, whether in relation to commercial expansion, or, for example, the efforts of the Sasanid and Byzantine states, followed thereafter by the early Islamic caliphate, to wrest control over lucrative commercial routes, this in the context of the political upheaval of the sixth- and seventh-century Near East. A key outcome of the Arab/Islamic conquests was not only the destruction of the Sasanid state and the ouster of the Byzantine presence from North Africa, Egypt and the Levant, but the greater integration of the two former economies into a single, transregional agrarian and commercial market sustained, through the early and medieval Islamic period, by urban investment and consumption.

It would seem, in sum, that however peaceful and profitable trade and trading diasporas could be, they were seldom strangers to violence. The Middle Millennium saw an unprecedented expansion in both long-distance and regional trade as well as in the variety and quantity of the goods exchanged; the sheer value of the goods, however, attracted the covetous. While Adam Smith proclaimed the human propensity to truck, barter and exchange, one may also add the human proclivity to rob, pilfer and extort. With regard to violence and trade in the Middle Millennium, one can think of robber-bandits along the intercontinental highways such as the trade routes composing the ‘Silk Road' or sea brigands operating in the Mediterranean across the ancient and medieval periods. The violence of pirates operating in the western Indian Ocean was well known: travellers, including Marco Polo (d. 1324) and Ibn Battuta (d. 1377), documented the well-armed and organised efforts of pirates operating along the Indian Malabar coast.¹¹

The increasing regularity of trade within Europe, across its adjoining seas and into Africa and especially Asia created new opportunities for cultural exchange but was also paired with violent behaviour. The appearance of the Vikings in northern Europe around the turn of the ninth century represented the bountiful marriage of trading and raiding. The opening act of the Viking Age, a raid in 789 near Portland in southern England, may have begun as a mercantile mission but it ended with the slaughter of the Anglo-Saxon reeve. The Viking expansion across the north Atlantic was probably driven at least in part by the desire for fruitful new lands and economic opportu­nities, which could be seized violently when they could not be secured commercially. The commercial nature of Scandinavian society in early medieval Europe facilitated violent behaviour that was recorded as some of the most horrific of the age. ^[11]

Commercial activity similarly encouraged violent activity in southern Europe and the Mediterranean basin in the later medieval period. Italian merchant republics, chief among them Venice and Genoa, sent commercial expeditions across the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts, sometimes estab­lishing a presence diplomatically, as the Republic of Genoa did with the purchase of the city of Kaffa from the Golden Horde in the thirteenth century. The European commercial presence was always tense in such locations, leading to war between the Genoese and the Mongols in the 1290s, the 1300s and the 1340s; this last war helped to create a disease vector for the Black Death into the Mediterranean basin. Often enough, though, the merchant republics used violence to establish or extend their commercial prowess. The Fourth Crusade, launched in 1202 to claim Jerusalem for Christendom, was manipulated and directed by the Venetian doge, Enrico Dandolo, first to attack the Christian city of Zara, which had resisted Venetian dominance. The doge then helped convince the crusading army to attack his commercial rivals, the Byzantines, leading to the sack of the city of Byzantium, and the establishment of the short-lived Latin Empire of Constantinople. Commercial interests provided ample incentive through­out the European Middle Ages for violent behaviour and warfare.

Unlike the view of neoclassical economics where trade is mutually bene­ficial and exchange is voluntary, the real world is and was a messy place where involuntary trade occurred as well. The intersection of trade, raiding and enslavement deserves especial mention, given the ubiquity of the latter institution across this long era. The activity of ‘Saracens' of late antique Syria, Viking invasions, and the marauding of Mongol bands in the later medieval period are but three examples.^{[12] [13]} The active commerce in human beings conducted by Japanese Kyushu-based merchants beginning in the last quarter of the thirteenth century brought them profit from the thousands of Chinese and Korean captives forcibly sold into indentured slavery.1³ Slavery, high- level trade and violent state-level confrontation merged, as well, in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century eastern Mediterranean. Commercial con­cerns, and, especially, access to the Black Sea region - the source of slave military recruits - informed diplomatic, political and military initiatives by the Bahri Mamluk sultanate in Egypt, confronted as it was by the ambitions of Genoa, Venice, Byzantium and the Ilkhanid state (1256-1353), the Mongol polity then in control of Anatolia, Iraq and Iran. The Mamluk state, in the Bahri and Burji (or Circassian) phases alike, took no less an interest in the commerce of the Red Sea basin and the Indian Ocean, and devoted consider­able military and political resources to assuring access of this kind.

Finally, to our fourth context, the ascendancy in the Middle Millennium of the three major religions, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, launched a new kind of integrative force in world history. The Islamic realm would, in time, extend from the Arabian peninsula to Spain to West Africa, and to Central, East and Southeast Asia; Buddhism into not only East, Southeast and Central Asia but also Iran; and Christianity into Iran and Central Asia. The historical record is clear on the linkages of violence, the shaping of religious identity, and the propagation of faith. Our volume contains chapters discussing Christian crusades, Islamic jihad, Buddhist monastic armies, and Aztec cam­paigns to obtain captives for sacrifice in Mesoamerican religious cults.

But these are only windows onto extended and intricate discussions. All three of the major religious traditions are replete with consideration over the proper approach to, and expressions of, war and violence. Just as it is vital to avoid reducing analysis to well-worn symbols - the ‘sword of Islam', say, or the red crusader cross - it is no less vital to shed sharp light on the persistence of sanctioned violence in the name of faith and religious commitment.^[14] Violence ensued as Buddhism lost its influence in Central Asia (e.g., Afghanistan) to Islam, and Islam in Spain to Christendom. The Augustinian concept of ‘just war' was not confined to Christian advocates; it penetrated the mind-sets of other religious thinkers preoccupied with the moral criteria that made war permissible. When Han Shantong (d. 1351), the grand patriarch of White Lotus Buddhism, led his adherents into rebellion against the Yuan state, he transformed the religion from one of acceptance and religious orthodoxy into a heterodox millenarian move­ment that the authorities felt justified to challenge militarily.

Jihad, the topic of a chapter in this volume, has been subject to intense modern debate, especially in the period after the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington, followed by similar atrocities in Madrid in November 2003 and London in July 2005. The fury of the debate, much of which was conducted online, has too frequently obscured the history and subtlety of the term as it evolved in Islamic conception and practice. To fault the Qur'an on this score, a typical turn in much anti-Islamic discourse, was to miss the mark. The Qur'anic usage is normally viewed as more pacifist than the understanding of the term that ensued in Hadith and the copious juristic and religious literature that followed the Arab/Islamic conquests and the gradual rise of Islamic society. Thus the Qur'an speaks to a ‘striving' that encompassed moral, inner discipline, that is, moral rectitude as much if not more than outward behaviour including the taking up of weapons. The shaping of a systematic discourse on the appropriate use of armed force in the service of religion (read: Islam) came only later, in the context of the shaping of Islamic law and Near Eastern political history. Central to the formulation of jihad by jurists, propagandists and political theorists was the distinction of two realms, the Islamic and the non-Islamic, the latter one in which Islamic law was necessarily absent.