A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  Unsurprisingly, the story of Shajar al-Durr was retold as part of Egyptian folklore, becoming ever more fantastic, though it actually does not seem to need much embellishment. It is more than a tale of unhappy spouses and bloody palace intrigue, however, as it highlights a distinctive avenue for dramatic social mobility present in some Muslim societies. In other Muslim areas as well, Mamluks who had risen through the ranks to become generals also founded states, including Khwarezm in today's Iran and Afghanistan in the eleventh century, and the Delhi sultanate in northern India in the early thirteenth century, which was also for a brief period ruled by a woman, Raziya, who was killed by male rivals. Only a very few slaves in the Muslim world did become rulers, of course (and even fewer women did). Most male slaves were artisans, agricultural laborers, domestic servants, or ordinary soldiers, while the more numerous female slaves were cooks, servants, nursemaids for children, concubines, or laundresses. Slavery was not a status that extended over generations, however, nor even necessarily over a lifetime. Freeing one's slaves was viewed as a meritorious act in the Qur'an, and female slaves who gave birth to a master's child were to be freed upon the death of the master. Children of Muslim fathers were by definition Muslim and free, and conversion to Islam often brought emancipation. The conditions of labor for many slaves were harsh, but slaves often assimilated into the urban and rural societies to which they had been brought, even if few achieved great power.

  Shajar al-Durr's story thus fits within a more general pattern of slavery in the Muslim world, and it also fits within and thus illuminates another, and even broader pattern of this era: the development of courts as centers of power and culture. From one end of Afroeurasia to the other, and also at a few places in the western hemisphere, courts grew up around rulers that shared many features with the Mamluk court in Cairo, including factional intrigue, social climbing, and the tight interweaving of family and politics.

  Courts and courtly culture

  The agricultural states and empires of the ancient world had largely been monarchies ruled by hereditary dynasties, and new states created after 500 CE were generally monarchies as well. With monarchies came courts—communities of individuals around a ruler that both exercised and represented power, thus with both practical and symbolic functions. In the era from 500 to 1500, courts could be found in places where they had been earlier—China, Rome, Egypt, the Tigris and Euphrates valleys—and also in Japan, Korea, the Sudanic and Guinea Coast kingdoms of West Africa, the sultanates and caliphates of the Muslim world, the Mongol khanates, the Byzantine Empire, the small kingdoms of western Europe and South and Southeast Asia, the Aztec (Mexica) Empire in Mesoamerica, and the Inca Empire in the Andes. In places such as western Europe where religious leaders held power independent of lay rulers, courts developed around them as well, including a magnificent court around the pope in Rome. Regional or local courts often mimicked central court practices on a smaller scale.

  Because land was the chief source of wealth, status, and power in agricultural states, the largest landowners—whom we usually call “nobles” or “aristocrats”—were the top elite; this group included the ruler, although he did not always hold the most land. Aristocratic men generally handed down their status and their land to their sons, and their status and some wealth to their daughters, although rules and patterns of inheritance varied. As populations expanded and economies became more complex, rulers and other members of the elite increasingly turned from forced tribute-taking to more systematic collection of taxes, rents, and labor services in order to extract resources from the people living on their lands. The personnel needed to do this, and to carry out other functions required to administer territories, increased in number and in levels of expertise. Courts became places where authority was delegated through a hierarchy of offices, military and political decisions were made, and decrees and laws were issued.

  Courts varied greatly in size, complexity, and structure, but they also showed certain commonalities. As in thirteenth-century Cairo, all were centers of intense competition for power and prestige, as officials, advisers, courtiers, generals, wives, mistresses, and a host of others jostled, plotted, and campaigned with and against one another. Some individuals at court had clearly defined duties—the physical protection or entertainment of the ruler, the maintenance of the royal treasury, the writing of court chronicles—while others had honorific titles and offices with no clear function, but were simply favored by the ruler.

  Clever rulers or their chief officials dispensed and rescinded positions strategically, and made decisions about marriage for tactical reasons as well. Marriage to the daughters and sisters of other rulers offered opportunities for alliances, while those to women from powerful local noble families might help secure the loyalty of these families to the ruler. In cultures where powerful men married many wives either at the same time or successively, marriages could accomplish both these goals, and often reflected the changing aims of a ruler. Wives became the mothers of possible claimants to the throne, who sought (often with the assistance of their mothers) to replace rulers or at least secure their own succession. The Frankish king Sigebert I (r. 561–575), for example, married Brunhilda (c. 543–613), the daughter of the Visigothic king of what is now Spain; when he was assassinated—perhaps at the order of his brother's wife—Brunhilda became the regent for her son, and later for two of her grandsons and a great-grandson, all in situations of intense courtly intrigue and bloody feuds involving family members and officials. Like Shajar al-Durr, Brunhilda became the stuff of legend, and may have been the inspiration for the character of the same name in the medieval German epic the Niebelungenlied and Richard Wagner's opera cycle based on this.

  Although many states developed official systems for handing on rule from one generation to the next, these were often more precept than practice, and rulers everywhere needed to show rivals inside and outside their lands just how powerful they and their supporters were. They also needed to demonstrate regularly why people should pay taxes, send their sons to be soldiers, build roads or bridges when ordered to, or carry out other obligations the ruler required. Thus rulers and their officials developed ceremonies, rituals, and other activities that made the special nature of the monarch and his (or occasionally her) connection to the cosmic and social order visible. Monarchies survived in this (or any) era more because people accepted that the hierarchy through which power was administered was legitimate than because of authoritarian or despotic power at the center. Through the creation and repetition of myths of origin and other shared traditions, rituals also reinforced the sense of a conscious common identity among the ruler's subjects, the sense that they were somehow one people.

  Courts were thus sites of cultural production and consumption, and of ceremonies and activities through which people at the court simultaneously portrayed unity within the larger society under the beneficent rule of the monarch and showed that they were different from—and superior to—those outside of the court. Certain types of food, clothing, and comportment marked one as a person familiar with courtly life, and trickled down to lesser courts or to other social groups who wished to emulate elites. As their strategies for extracting resources turned more from plunder and tribute to taxes and laws, rulers and nobles had to demonstrate that they were not simply military leaders, but also wise and learned. They became increasingly concerned with culture, literature, and the arts, and what is generally termed “courtly culture” emerged. Sometimes rulers themselves wrote poetry, played music, painted, and danced, and everywhere they determined what forms of each of these would be favored. The ‘Abbasid court in Baghdad and the Benin court on the Guinea Coast were centers of musical performance, where highly trained musicians performed for rulers in elaborate palaces. The Khmer rulers in Southeast Asia commissioned artworks, monuments, and temples, including what became the largest religious complex of the era, the elaborately carved stone temple complex of Angkor Wat, originally dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu. In Europe, r
ulers and nobles increasingly filled their castles with tapestries, paintings, and lovely furniture, hired musicians and poets, and patronized scholars and scientists.

  Rituals performed by the ruler and his entourage were crucial to the identity and role of courts. These included regularly occurring weekly, seasonal, and annual cycles of rites and festivals, along with special ceremonies marking military victories, accessions to the throne, marriages, births, and deaths in the royal family, and a host of other occasions. Some of these were held within the court, with access or participation a mark of favor and prestige. In Byzantium and other Christian courts, for example, the ruler, his family, his closest associates, and a chosen few attended weekly church services, scripted performances accompanied by chanting, incense, prescribed choreography, and the recitation of standardized prayers. Exclusive events included banquets, where huge amounts of exotic imported foods and expensive local delicacies prepared in complex recipes rewarded dignitaries and impressed foreign visitors. Banquets often involved music, dancing, theatrical pieces, puppet shows, or other sorts of entertainment, thus appealing to all five senses. They might also be occasions for gift-giving, creating ties of obligation that linked a ruler and his subordinates.

  Other rituals were massive public ceremonies, in which the ruler (or at least an enclosure in which he rode or was carried) was visible to hundreds of thousands of people, moving through a city in an impressive parade along with thousands of officials, soldiers, and slaves. Such processions were designed not only to display royal power and majesty, but also to create a bond between a ruler and his subjects, from the highest to the lowest. Spanish observers described the Inca ruler carried through the streets of Cuzco on a throne made of gold lined with the brightly colored feathers of tropical birds, wearing jewelry of emeralds and gold fitting his status as a son of the sun who defended the cosmic order. Royal parades and visitations to cities were sometimes accompanied by performances that drew on religious, mythological, and literary examples to portray the ruler and his lineage in a heroic or sacred light, and all of this was memorialized in court chronicles and paintings so that its magnificence could be recalled at a later time. Court officials also took care to portray rulers showing the generosity expected of them: Aztec records, for example, tell of Montezuma I (r. 1440–69) distributing 20,000 loads of stockpiled grain when a flood hit his capital city Tenochtitlan.

  Courts borrowed practices and values from other courts, which they learned about through written texts, imported material objects, visiting ambassadors, in-marrying wives and concubines, and traveling scholars, merchants, musicians, and monks. The court established in China during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) became the model for those that developed in Silla Korea (688–918 CE) and Nara Japan (710–784 CE), with Confucian political ideology, Buddhist religious teachings, and Chinese writing adapted for local use. Muslim forces overthrew the Persian Sassanid dynasty in 651, but Muslim rulers copied many Sassanid ceremonies and rituals, particularly those that emphasized the ruler's exalted status and pre-eminence over his subjects; Byzantine emperors and the popes in Rome copied these as well.

  3.2 In a later copy of a painting on silk by the Chinese court painter Zhang Xuan (712–756), Lady Guo Guo, the sister of the emperor's favorite concubine, rides with a young princess and other members of the Tang court. The relatively simple dress and calm trotting of the horses suggest that this is an informal spring outing rather than a formal procession.

  Many of the individuals at court were members of landholding hereditary aristocracies who also had judicial, political, military, and economic responsibilities away from the court, and whose control of land and the people living on it gave them a base of power unconnected to the whims and wishes of the ruler. In a number of places, aristocrats were, in fact, quite independent during this period, and the ruler at the top was not especially powerful himself but was more of a figurehead. In Japan, for example, the emperors—who had ruled since before the earliest written records from Japan in the sixth century CE—were regarded as direct descendants of the sun goddess Amaterasu, the most important deity, but real power was in the hands of landowning aristocrats (daimyo). They and their bands of warriors (samurai) swore undying allegiance to the emperor, but he was very rarely seen in public and his primary function became siring a son so that the imperial office continued (a task at which emperors were remarkably successful, as the Japanese emperor today is a direct descendant of those of the sixth century). From the sixth century to the nineteenth, often one noble family predominated in Japan; although members of this family never challenged the emperors for the throne, they were granted the title shogun (top general), advised the emperors on major decisions, appointed officials to all important government positions, directed the military, and became the center of public courtly life.

  In the Byzantine Empire as well, as Arabic, Slavic, and Turkish forces gradually took over more territory beginning in the seventh century, the emperors increasingly relied on the military aristocracy and less on soldiers over whom they had direct power. Those aristocrats engaged in revolts, assassination plots, and court intrigues that sometimes led to the overthrow of an imperial dynasty; these later gave rise to the word “byzantine” in English, meaning overly intricate and entangled. In many Muslim states, although the sultan officially held authority, real power rested with his advisers and generals. In western Europe after the end of Roman Empire in the fifth century there was no strong centralized authority at all. The smaller kingdoms that emerged had weak kings and powerful nobles, who themselves often maintained their own regional courts.

  Despite—or perhaps because of—the decentralized and distributed nature of power in reality, various rituals were created to perform the official loyalty of elites to their rulers or other superiors. Japanese nobles and samurai swore loyalty to the emperor, and in western Europe beginning in the tenth century rulers often required nobles to publicly affirm their loyalty in a ceremony that made them the ruler's vassals—from a Celtic word meaning “servant.” Such oath-swearing ceremonies of homage and fealty grew out of earlier Germanic oaths of loyalty to a tribal leader, and, like everything in courtly society, became increasingly ritualized and complex. The vassal knelt before the ruler, invoking God and the saints as well as his sense of duty and honor, and the lord responded with prescribed words and actions, generally touching the vassal in a way that physically demonstrated the lord's superiority and magnanimity, such as laying his sword on his vassal's shoulders and head.

  The dominant group in most courtly societies in this era remained the hereditary nobility, but courts also housed some men and women from families of lower stature, and a few—as we have seen in Mamluk Cairo—who were from the bottom, or near the bottom, of the social heap. Thus conflicts between individuals and factions were embedded within conflicts between different types of social hierarchies: inherited status, familial relationships with the ruler, wealth, ability, formal training, and physical attractiveness.

  For example, beginning in the Tang dynasty, entry into government service and the imperial court bureaucracy in China increasingly occurred through examinations based on the Confucian classics, and by the Song dynasty (960–1279) hundreds of thousands of young men took these examinations after a long period of rigorous study. Aristocratic lineage and patronage still eased one's path to power and influence in China, as about half of the palace bureaucracy rose through their connections, but the examination system provided an alternate route to influence for some able men. Examination systems were also set up in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam in emulation of the Chinese model, although kinship ties and personal connections remained important, and in Japan examinations were soon abandoned. In Byzantium, appointments at court were considered favors of the emperor, not the result of merit or aristocratic pedigree, and were in practice facilitated by a circle of powerful advisers. In the Hindu courts of South and Southeast Asia, religious functions were reserved for Brahmins, but otherwise courts were
fluid spaces as far as caste was concerned, and people from many groups sought fortune, employment, prestige, and status through service at court. Elsewhere as well, courts were to some degree socially porous.

  Codes of behavior and tales of romance

  Intense rivalry and status insecurity gave rise to particular codes of behavior that sought to teach courtiers—and particularly male courtiers—successful skills to survive and flourish in these challenging settings. Some of these codes, such as Confucianism, revolved around ethical ideals like duty and benevolence, but more often they involved aesthetic and cultural ideals, demonstrated in speech, gestures, clothing, personal grooming, and eating. Although these began among courtiers and court ladies, they eventually spread more widely, becoming the basis of codes of manners and comportment taught in many middle-class families as well. Their courtly origins are evident in words used to describe such behavior, however: ladylike, gentlemanly, courteous.

  Those who resided at court—or who hoped to gain a position there—took great care in their appearance, spending large sums on clothing and cosmetics, often imported over vast distances, to make themselves more attractive. They were expected to appreciate literature, music, and art, and perhaps even to produce these, and many did. Chinese courtiers, members of the imperial family, and some emperors wrote poetry and other literary works, produced calligraphy, and painted on silk. In India, rulers sponsored competitions of poetic talents and other types of cultural production.