Encyclopedia of World History M

The Ancient World

Ma Yuan
(14 b.c.e.– 49 c.e.) Chinese general
Ma Yuan came from a famous family in northwestern
China. Civil war raged in China after the death of the
usurper Wang Mang in 23 c.e. A powerful general in
the Wei River region, he joined the newly proclaimed
emperor Guangwu (Kuang-wu), founder of the Eastern
Han dynasty (23–220 c.e.) with these words: “In
present times, it is not only the sovereign who selects
his subjects. The subjects also select their sovereign.”
At about the same time, another regional leader, and
rival of Ma, named Dou Rong (Tou Jung), also joined
Emperor Guangwu’s cause. The Ma and Dou factions
would be rivals for years to come.
Ma Yuan distinguished himself in campaigns
against tribal people along several frontiers. The fi rst
was against the Qiang (Chiang), proto-Tibetans living
in the northwest. After defeating the Qiang he settled
many of them in the territory of the Han empire. This
policy was motivated by several factors: to prevent
them from joining forces with the Xiongnu (Hsiungnu),
the primary nomadic foe of the Han for two centuries;
to put them under direct Chinese administration
for ease of assimilation; and to alleviate the pressure
of population growth of the Qiang by settling them in
new lands.
Ma Yuan next distinguished himself in the southern
part of the empire, in present-day Guangdong
(Kwangtung) and Guangxi (Kwanghsi) Provinces in
modern China, and in northern Vietnam. This region
had been conquered and annexed during the reign
of Emperor Wu of the Western Han dynasty in 110
b.c.e. Chinese administration and immigration (initially
limited mainly to exiled prisoners) led to gradual
assimilation. But a serious rebellion broke out in the
Red River region in modern Vietnam in 40 c.e., led
by two women known in Vietnam as the Trung sisters
(Zheng, or Cheng, in Chinese transliteration).
Ma Yuan was appointed commander-in-chief of the
imperial forces, 10,000 strong in 42 c.e. The revolt
was quickly put down, and the sisters were executed.
The Trung sisters became heroines in later Vietnamese
folklore for attempting to gain autonomy for their
people, and Ma Yuan, in the folklore among southern
Chinese, for his military exploits.
In 48 c.e. there was a serious rebellion by aboriginal
tribes in Wuling (Wu-ling) commandery in presentday
Hunan Province. Ma Yuan volunteered to command
troops to suppress the rebellion; his rivals in the Dou
camp managed to insert their men among his staff,
with the goal of sabotaging him. Despite Ma’s complete
victory against the revolt, the Dou supporters among
his staff sent a secret report to the emperor accusing
him of incompetence. Ma died while he was being
investigated.
His death emboldened his opponents in their attack,
with the result that he was posthumously degraded
from the rank of marquis to commoner, and the
faction he headed fell from power. His rehabilitation
began in 52 c.e. when one of his daughters was chosen
as consort for the heir apparent but was not complete
M
255
until the emperor Guangwu’s death in 57 c.e. and the
accession of his son, Emperor Ming.
See also Wen and Wu.
Further reading: Twitchett, Denis, and Michael Loewe, eds.
The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 1, The Ch’in and Han
Empires, 221 B.C.–A.D. 220. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986; Watson, William. Cultural Frontiers in
Ancient East Asia. Edinburgh, Scotland: University of Edinburgh
Press, 1971; Wiens, Herold J. Chinese Expansion in
South China. Hamden, UK: Shoestring Press, 1970.
Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur
Maccabees
Alexander the Great’s dream of a united world speaking
Greek and living a Greek lifestyle ran into trouble
when it was applied to the Palestinian Jewish world. The
Diadochi, generals who followed the short-lived grandeur
of Alexander the Great, allotted the Asian share of
Alexander’s conquests to the Seleucid Empire. Besides
quarreling with the house of the Ptolemies over the control
of Palestine, the Seleucids had their hands full with
the resident Jews represented by the family of the Maccabees,
a name that means “hammer-like.” In rabbinic
literature they are know as the Hasmonaeans.
At fi rst favors were granted to the Jews who lived
in Palestine to win over their sympathies. Later the
Seleucids reversed their policies: They needed to raise
capital to fund their wars and pay their tribute, so now
the Jews were seen as sources of revenue. Jewish taxes
were raised, the Jerusalem temple treasury was raided,
and religious offi ces were bought and sold for the profi t
of the Seleucids. Another part of their strategy to take
over Palestine was to turn Jerusalem into a Greek citystate
(or polis), whose culture would have supported
things such as theater, gymnasiums, dance, and Greek
mythology and pantheon, all repugnant in the eyes
of the religious Jew.
The Seleucids found that Jewish opposition was so
great that they had to establish a military garrison in
Jerusalem in 167 b.c.e. The error of building a foreign
base in the Jewish holy city was compounded by another
grave error: The Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV
started derogating Jewish customs and planning for
the transformation of the Jewish Temple into a shrine
for Zeus. By these measures Antiochus was abrogating
Jewish self-rule and imposing Hellenistic values on
all Jews. Had these reforms been adopted, as they had
in nearly every realm of the Mediterranean world, the
Jewish people might not have survived past the second
century b.c.e. Instead, a new generation fought assimilation
to the Seleucids. Its leaders were the Maccabees,
who “hammered” away at the Seleucid Empire, attained
political independence, and retained their religious identity.
Their struggle lasted 40 years, beginning with Mattithias
and passed on to seven of his sons. The apocryphal
(or deuterocanonical) book of the Maccabees tells
the tale of their struggle.
The fi rst of the sons was Judas. He started a military
uprising, brilliantly capturing the temple precincts with
his elite religious force and reinstituting Jewish worship
there. The feast of Hanukkah (dedication) commemorates
this event. Judas eventually won concessions from
the Seleucids, and the disastrous decisions of 167 b.c.e.
were rescinded. Eventually, the Hellenized Jews and Seleucids
rebounded and killed Judas. The youngest son,
Jonathan, arose as the new strong man of his people,
much like the biblical Judges before the time of King
Saul. Jonathan tried negotiation. The Seleucids reciprocated
by appointing him high priest and giving him
several districts in Samaria. They also gave land to the
last remaining Maccabean brother, Simon. Instead of
drawing the Jews into the Seleucid Empire, the reverse
happened: Now Judah was reconstituted under the two
brothers, so much that the Romans even noticed and
gave the Maccabees political recognition.
The Seleucids tried to cut their losses by killing Jonathan,
but Simon acted with even greater fervor: He expelled
the foreign troops from Jerusalem and abolished
all payment of tribute to Syria. Syrian domination of
Judah then came to an end.
See also Hellenization; Israel and Judah; Jewish
revolts; Kingdom of God; messianism; Pseudepigrapha
and Apocrypha.
Further reading: Skolnik, Fred, and Michael Berenbaum,
eds. Encyclopedia Judaica. New York: Macmillan, 2006; van
Henten, Jan Willem. The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of
the Jewish People. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1997.
Mark F. Whitters
Mahabharata
The Mahabharata is an enormous epic poem that now
plays a central role in the Hindu religion. It tells the
story of the great Bharata family and its war of succession.
The poem was composed originally in Sanskrit.
256 Maccabees
Scholarly analysis of the poem has led some to believe
that some part of the poem may date from real events
that occurred as early as 1400 b.c.e. Between 400 b.c.e.
and 400 c.e. the Mahabharata reached its current form
of more than 100,000 poetic couplets.
The Mahabharata most likely began as a warrior’s
story told either by a warrior, or by a poet about a warrior
in the kingdom of Kuruksetra in northern India. It
tells the story of the struggle for the kingdom between the
descendants of King Bharata, contested by two families
(the Pandavas and Kauravas) in early Indian history. The
Pandava brothers lose the kingdom to the Kauravas and
engage in a titanic struggle to regain it. The story is fi lled
with violent confl ict, gods, goddesses, heroes, the duty of
making and keeping vows, and the futility of war. The
heroes are real historic persons in some cases. In others
the heroic fi gures represent human ideal or gods. The
main story of the Mahabharata is interrupted with many
side stories and discussions, including those on religion
and duty. Central to the Mahabharata is dharma (codes
of conduct). Dharma describes the proper conduct for
kings or for others in all kinds of situations. In its present
form there are 18 sections (parvans) to the Mahabharata.
In addition there is a supplemental section called the
Harivamsa (Genealogy of the god Hari), who is identifi
ed as the god Krishna-Vishnu.
The Mahabharata contains the whole of the Bhagavad
Gita, or the Song of God. The Bhagavad Gita records
the conversation between Arjuna and his chariot
driver who is really Krishna (an avatar of Vishnu). The
philosophical conversation takes place on the battlefi eld
between the two sides as they are poised for the fi nal
slaughter. It presupposes a defi nite cosmology that is different
from many other cosmologies including that of
the modern West. The battle between 18 armies lasted
18 days. The cosmology of the Mahabharata depicts the
universe as cycles of recurring creation and destruction.
The war and the imminent deaths of the warriors are all
going to occur as part of a cycle that is part of Brahman,
or reality. The philosophical discussion is about karma,
predestination, and human action. Actions of people are
determined but at the same time are also effi cacious in
achieving goals. The Mahabharata was retold over wide
areas of Southeast Asia. Many of its stories were carved
or painted into the walls of Hindu temples in India and
in Southeast Asia. The relief carvings at Angkor Wat and
Angkor Thom in Cambodia portray its scenes.
See also Dharma Sutras; Hindu philosophy.
Further reading: Dharma, Krishna. Mahabharata: The Greatest
Spiritual Epic of All Time. Badger, CA: Torchlight Publishing,
2001; Hill, Peter. Fate, Predestination and Human Action in
the Mahabharata: A Study in the History of Ideas. New Delhi,
India: Munshiram Monoharlan Publishers, 2001; Prabhavananda,
Swami, and Christopher Isherwood. The Song of God:
Bhagavad-Gita. New York: New American Library, 1951; Sukthankar,
V. S. Critical Studies in the Mahabharata. Poona, India:
Karnatak Publishing House, 1944; ———. On the Meaning of
the Mahabharata. Bombay, India: Asiatic Society, 1957.
Andrew J. Waskey
Maotun (Mao-t’un, Maodun)
(r. 209–174 b.c.e.) Xiongnu leader
Maotun, or Maodun, was the most powerful leader of
a nomadic people called the Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu),
who lived north of the Yellow River valley; under his
leadership the Xiongnu reached the zenith of power.
He became shanyu (king) of the Xiongnu in 209 b.c.e.
after killing his father, Toumen. A dynamic leader, he
consolidated his power between the Xiongnu and conquered
tribes, calling their leaders to an annual meeting
at his headquarters in modern Outer Mongolia. There
he took a census of people and animals and devised a system
of government with himself as the supreme leader.
Maotun’s coming to power coincided with the collapse
of the Qin (Ch’in) dynasty in China, beginning
with the death of the fi rst emperor, followed by the suicide
of General Meng Tian (Meng T’ien) in 210 b.c.e.
(his powerful Chinese army had defeated the Xiongnu
forces and built the Great Wall of China to keep
them out of Chinese territories). The Qin dynasty ended
in 206 b.c.e., and four years of civil war ensued, ending
with the founding of the Han dynasty by Liu Bang
(Liu Pang). The collapse of the Qin had left the frontiers
undefended and Liu Bang, known posthumously
as Han Gaozu (Han Kao-tsu), decided to deal with the
Xiongnu threat immediately. In 200 b.c.e. he personally
led 300,000 mostly infantry troops to war against
the Xiongnu. Maotun and Gaozu met in battle near
the modern city of Datong (Ta-tung) in Shanxi (Shansi)
Province; Maotun won with his 400,000 cavalry, and
Gaozu narrowly escaped capture.
The two sides made peace in 198 b.c.e. The He qin
(Ho-ch’in) Treaty declared the two sides as equals, demarcated
their boundary along the Great Wall, and stipulated
gifts of silver, silk, food, and liquor in fi xed quantities
several times a year from the Han to the Xiongnu.
In addition, Gaozu promised his only daughter by his
wife Empress Lu to marry Maotun. The empress vetoed
Maotun 257
the marriage of her daughter, and they adopted a relative,
gave her the rank of princess, and sent her to wed
Maotun. When Gaozu died in 195 b.c.e. Maotun proposed
to Empress Lu, suggesting that they marry and
unite their empires. She was furious but had to refuse
politely. A second Han princess was sent to marry him
in 192 b.c.e.
The Xiongnu empire continued to expand under
Maotun. They were victorious against another nomadic
people called the Yuezhi (Yueh-chih) and expelled
them from the Gansu (Kansu) Corridor. The main Yuezhi
tribe fl ed all the way to Afghanistan where they
remained. Before his death in 174 b.c.e. Maotun negotiated
the Heqin treaties with the Han, each time increasing
the amount of gifts the Han had to give to the
Xiongnu. Successive Han rulers submitted to Xiongnu
terms because the Chinese economy had been damaged
by previous civil wars, and peace was necessary for recovery.
Maotun’s son and grandson were also powerful
leaders, following Maotun’s example of intimidating
the Han. It was not until 134 b.c.e. that the Han ended
the era of the Heqin treaties and began a long-term war
that ended in the defeat of the Xiongnu.
Further reading: Sechin, Jagchid, and Van Jay Symons. Peace,
War, and Trade along the Great Wall, Nomadic-Chinese Interactions
through Two Millennia. Bloomington: University
of Indiana Press, 1989; Twitchett, Denis, and Michael Loewe
eds. The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 1, The Ch’in and
Han Empires, 221 B.C.–A.D. 220. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986.
Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur
Marathon, Battle of (490 B.C.E.)
In 490 b.c.e. Greece was threatened by an invading Persian
force led by Darius I, who was active in destroying
the rebels in the Ionian Islands. Darius landed at Marathon
to the northeast of Athens. He had previously captured
the rebels of Eretria on Euboea, and Marathon
was near that island. It was also close to the home territory
of the Peisistratid tyrant Hippias, who was accompanying
the Persians. The Persians had a clear advantage
in cavalry, as horses were scarce in Greece, although
their more lightly armed infantry was outmatched by
the Athenian citizen troop hoplites, so named for the
large hoplon shields they carried. Hoplites maneuvered
in deep, well-ordered ranks with their shields, armor,
and long spears presenting a formidable foe.
Confronted with this danger, the Athenians debated
whether to await siege or march to meet the enemy. Ten
generals were selected for command, each leading the
troops for a single day in rotation. This unwieldy system
was brought to a close when Callimachus ended an
impasse by meeting the Persians and enabling the professional
soldier Miltiades to lead the troops, upon which
a number of other generals ceded authority. Plataea sent
a contingent of 1,000 men to join the 10,000 troops
from Athens. According to Herodotus, a major source
of information about the battle, Miltiades dispatched a
runner named Pheidippides to Sparta to appeal for assistance.
Other traditions state that Pheidippides ran to
Athens to announce the result of the battle and immediately
died upon completion of his task. The Spartans did
not arrive to help.
Miltiades proved to be an able and rather lucky
commander in that the Greeks came across the Persians
while their cavalry was elsewhere. The Athenians
attacked at full speed. Miltiades strengthened
both fl anks to permit the Persians to push back and
then to fi nd themselves threatened with being surrounded
on all sides. The Persians broke and fl ed,
and 6,400 casualties were suffered, some 40 percent
of the total force of 15,000 infantry that was fi elded.
The Athenians lost just 192 men and celebrated
a famous victory as the Persians withdrew from
Greece. However, after the death of Darius a few
years later, the Persian cause was reinvigorated by his
successor, Xerxes I, who planned a greater invasion.
The Battle of Marathon has an important place in the
development of the Western intellectual tradition as
an event that marked a victory for European democracy
against Asian despotism. In reality neither side
was as black or white as they have subsequently been
portrayed.
See also Greek city-states; Persian invasions.
Further reading: Hanson, Victor. The Western Way of War:
Infantry Battle in Classical Greece. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000; Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. by
R. Waterfi eld. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
John Walsh
Marcellinus, Ammianus
(c. 330–c. 398 c.e.) Roman historian
By common consent Ammianus Marcellinus was the
last important ancient historian of the Roman Empire.
258 Marathon, Battle of
Most authorities agree that he was born in Antioch in
Syria (now Antakya, Turkey) late in the reign of Constantine
the Great, although a case has been made for
Tyre or Sidon. He was a son of a high-ranking Greekspeaking
Roman offi cer with important political connections.
Ammianus probably had a literary education, if
we credit his narrative’s frequent allusions to Cicero,
Sallust, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius. He may
have coveted a distinguished military career, which
went unfulfi lled, possibly on account of his public association
with the pagan emperor Julian the Apostate.
In Antioch during his mid-20s Ammianus entered an
elite military corps, the protectores domestici (household
guards), possibly as an intelligence offi cer. He served
on the personal staff of Ursicinus, governor of Nisibis
in Mesopotamia, as well as the mater militiae. Recalled
to Italy with Ursicinus in the mid-350s c.e., he later accompanied
his mentor to Gaul to depose the famously
unfortunate Frankish imperial usurper Silvanus. Returning
with Ursicinus to the East in 359, Ammianus barely
escaped a ferocious Persian attack on Amida (Diyarbakir,
Turkey). Ammianus spent the next few years in Antioch
until he joined the emperor Julian’s campaigns in
Gaul and in the East. After Julian’s death in battle in 363
Ammianus again repaired to Antioch. His activity for
the next 20 years is mostly unknown. He traveled to the
Black Sea, Egypt, Greece and, possibly, Thrace around
the time of the Goth invasions there, 376–378.
Ammianus does not reappear until 383 in Rome
during a food shortage in which foreigners—except
some 3,000 foreign dancing girls—were forced out
of the city. It is likely that Ammianus came to Rome
to interview eyewitnesses of signifi cant contemporary
events and to access offi cial records. The fi rst draft of
Ammianus’s Res gestae (Deeds of men) begins his history
in 96 c.e., on the accession of Nerva, and stops in
364, with the death of Jovian soon after Julian’s demise
(Books 1–25). It appears that favorable public reception
to recitations of his manuscript persuaded him to
add six more (Books 26–31). The fi rst 13 books tracing
Rome’s course from 96 to 354 are lost, and the 18
books extant cover only 25 years, from 354 to 378.
This segment is a precious survival because only fragments
exist of his contemporary Eunapius’s history; his
fellow soldier Eutropius’s Breviarium ab urbe condita
and the work of Aurelius Victor all are mere summaries
that end before 378.
Following Thucydides, he reproduced important
speeches and included gossipy character sketches. More
to modern taste, Ammianus broke with traditions to depict
contemporary social, economic, and cultural life.
Though still controversial, his usually objective treatments
of Christianity—perhaps motivated by a desire to win a
wide readership—are likely the most impartial perspectives
on this topic of any ancient writer. Much admired
by Ammianus, Julian’s virtues are duly enumerated and
lauded, but the historian also details a catalog of Julian’s
defects of judgment. By comparison, neither Julian’s predecessors
such as Constantius II, nor his successors, Valentinian
I and Valens, fare so well in Res gestae.
Ammianus’s Res gestae is the most important work
on ancient Roman history after Tacitus. It was composed
by a patriotic citizen of the empire who possessed
an idealized moral vision of the Roman past and was
anxious about the prospects of Rome’s civilization in the
future. While his text is often fl orid and gossipy, it is clear
that Ammianus Marcellinus—“a soldier and a Greek”
(31.16.9) who wrote in Latin in Rome—tried to deliver
what he promised to his readers: an account of the deeds
of men that is competent, accurate, and often comparable
to the best models of ancient historiography.
See also Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon;
Roman historians.
Further reading: Barnes, Timothy D. Ammianus Marcellinus
and the Representation of Historical Reality. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1998; Hamilton, Walter, trans., and
Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. Ammianus Marcellinus: The Later
Roman Empire. New York: Penguin, 1986; Matthews, John.
The Roman Empire of Ammianus. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Leo J. Mahoney
Mari
The Mesopotamian city of Mari is identifi ed with modern
Tell Hariri, located on the west bank of the Euphrates
River, 30 miles north of the border between Iraq and Syria.
Its palace architecture has been beautifully preserved,
and historical records provide a rare glimpse into upper
Mesopotamian politics during the Old Assyrian Period.
Mari was a circular city (1.2 miles in diameter),
excavated fi rst by André Parrot (from 1933) and later
by Jean Margueron (from 1979). Excavations reveal a
series of palaces from the Early Dynastic II–III Periods
(early third millennium b.c.e.) to the Old Babylonian
Period (early second millennium b.c.e.), each palace
built upon the ruins of the preceding one. The latest
palace is one of the best preserved and most impressive
of the entire Bronze Age. It was exceptional for its time
Mari 259
period, because it incorporated various religious shrines
together with the royal residence.
More than 20,000 cuneiform tablets were uncovered
at Mari, most dated to the Old Babylonian Period.
Although the language of most texts is Akkadian (east
Semitic), northwest Semitic grammar and syntax show
up in proper names and in various constructions. The
archive consists mostly of palatial and provincial administrative
texts, letters, and treaties, demonstrating
the political value of writing in this period. It is one
of the major sources of information on how the great
Assyrian king Shamshi-Adad I organized his empire in
northern Mesopotamia. In addition, Mari has the largest
number of Mesopotamian prophetic texts. These
were letters from prophets, often to the king, claiming
direct messages from deities.
The city of Mari likely originated from the very
start of the Early Dynastic I Period (beginning of
third millennium b.c.e.). It prospered rapidly due to
its strategic location along the trade route connecting
Mesopotamia with Syria. The archaeological evidence
found for the Early Dynastic III Period (c. 2600–2350
b.c.e.) shows Mari’s indebtedness to much of Sumerian
culture. Short inscriptions from this period refer to
Ansud as the king of Mari, a name that may also appear
in the Sumerian King List. During c. 2250–2000
b.c.e., the title shakkanakku (Akkadian for “governor”)
was used for the rulers of Mari, a term that may
allude to a time of foreign control, when Mari’s rulers
were the deputies of other kings. This seems to have
been a period of great power, when the city underwent
extensive renovation.
The fi nal century before Mari’s destruction is much
clarifi ed by the written record. Yahdun-Lim, who derived
from the Sim’alite stock of the Amorites, ruled as
king over Mari. He was assassinated in a palace coup,
and his successor, Sumu-Yaman, died shortly after. In
1796 b.c.e. the Assyrian ruler Shamshi-Adad I conquered
Mari and installed his younger son, Yasmah-
Adad, upon Mari’s throne. Zimri-Lim, a descendant
of Yahdun-Lim, fl ed to Yamhad (Aleppo), whose king
Yarim-Lim was his father-in-law. Shamshi-Adad died
in 1782 b.c.e., and Zimri-Lim reclaimed the throne of
Mari. He established strong ties with Aleppo and Babylon,
faithfully supporting Hammurabi’s expansionistic
conquests. Hammurabi, however, eventually turned
against Mari: The city was conquered in 1761 b.c.e.,
and within the next two years its riches, removed to
Babylon and its palace burned. Although Mari continued
to be inhabited as a small town, Hammurabi’s destruction
marked its end as a major political center.
See also Akkad; Assyria; Babylon, early period;
Damascus and Aleppo; Ebla; Fertile Crescent; Sumer.
Further reading: Margueron, Jean-Claude. “Mari: A Portrait
in Art of a Mesopotamian City-State.” In Civilizations
of the Ancient Near East, Vol. 2, edited by Jack M. Sasson,
885–889. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995; Young,
Gordon D., ed. Mari in Retrospect: Fifty Years of Mari and
Mari Studies. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992.
John Zhu-En Wee
Marius and Sulla
After the bloody revolt of the Gracchi, two emblematic
fi gures concentrated the political destiny of the Roman
Republic. The Senate initiated several foreign wars in order
to withdraw the attention from the internal confl icts
that had shaken the stability of the urbs. Gaius Marius
(157–86 b.c.e.), born in Arpinus into a plebeian family,
began his public career during the war against Jugurtha,
where he won the support of the popular party because
of his military victories, and was elected consul in 107
b.c.e. From 113 b.c.e. the Romans had been facing various
defeats against such Germanic tribes as the Cimbri
and Teutons that were heading into Italy. Marius commanded
the army, and the Senate allowed his consulship
to be renewed for three consecutive years.
In 100 b.c.e. Marius was elected to the consulship
for the sixth time, and by then he had forged a political
alliance with Saturninus, the tribune of the plebs,
who promoted a law in order to continue the Gracchan
reforms on land distribution. The proposal included an
extension of the privilege to the members of the populus
who had served the army: Spoils of war and landparcels
would constitute an appropriate payment for
their service. However, the Senate immediately rejected
the law, and Marius could not stand by the proposal; he
had to suppress the arising rebellions instead. Suspected
by all—since the aristocracy took him as an unfaithful
partner and the plebs regarded him as a potential
traitor—Marius left for the East. He was called back
to Rome in 91 b.c.e. when Italic allies had started to
rise up because of the profound differences existing between
Rome and the conquered cities. The Italic war
lasted for three years, and Marius managed to appease
the rebellion. Marius had come back to the urbs and
seemed to have recovered part of his prestige.
While Rome was focused on the reorganization of
its territory, the East was preparing to separate from
260 Marius and Sulla
the urbs, and by 89 b.c.e. most Eastern cities were supporting
Mithridates VI, king of Pontus. A new dispute,
related to the appointment of the military commander
who would have to fi ght the new threat, arose in Rome.
The task was fi nally entrusted to Lucius Cornelius Sulla,
a consul chosen in 88 b.c.e., who belonged to the small
aristocracy and had served as a lieutenant to Marius for
years. Having taken Caecilia Metella, daughter of the
pontifex maximus and princeps senatus, as his fourth
wife, the aristocracy considered him to be its natural
representative. Nevertheless, the tribune Suplicius Rufus
rejected this idea and, supported by the popular party,
wanted Marius to be named general instead. Sulla then
escaped to Campania and fi ercely moved the legions
against Rome. By the time they got there Marius had
already escaped to Africa as a fugitive; many opposing
leaders were brutally killed. The civil war between optimates
and populares raged.
Sulla decided to travel to Greece and deal with the
Eastern confl ict. Marius came back and joined Cinna,
who was promoting subversion in the provinciae. After
shaping an army they headed toward Rome and
implemented a violent consulship; many members of
the senatorial and equestrian orders were killed. In 87
b.c.e. Marius died, and Valerius Flaccus was appointed
as his successor. Sulla, immersed in an unfavorable
situation, let his army plunder the cities of Epidaurus,
Delphi, and Olympus. After the reduction of Athens,
he reorganized his men and defeated Mithridates in
Chaeronea and Orchomenus. He pacifi ed the rival
Roman army that had killed Flaccus in rebellion and
forced Mithridates to sign a peace treaty. When he
arrived back in Rome, where Cinna was ruling, civil
war began again. Sulla fi nally disembarked in Brindisium.
Cinna tried to stop him but was killed in combat.
Rioting started in Rome, where power was still
in the hands of the populares, led now by the younger
Marius, son of Gaius Marius. Marius declared Sulla a
public enemy and tried more than once to face him in
battle but was also overcome by Sulla’s troops. In 81
b.c.e. Sulla’s triumph was absolute.
As supreme leader in Rome, Sulla put into practice
several despotic acts. He promoted the systematic murder
of his opponents and elaborated a list (proscriptio)
of the names of those citizens whom he considered
undesirable and wished to have eliminated. An aristocratic
restoration was achieved, and the Assembly was
weakened with the intention of increasing the Senate’s
power. During his rule Sulla granted himself the title
of “dictator” and exercised an autocratic power. Once
he thought his reforms were enacted, in 78 b.c.e., he
resigned the dictatorship and left Rome. He died soon
afterward in southern Italy.
See also Caesar, Julius; Roman Empire; Rome:
buildings, engineers; Rome: government.
Further reading: Alföldy, G. Römische Sozialgeschichte.
Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag GmbH, 1984;
Brunt, P. A. Social Confl icts in the Roman Republic. New
York: Norton, 1971; Hantos, T. Res publica constitua. Die
Verfassung des Dictators Sulla. Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz
Steiner Verlag GmbH, 1988; Keaveney, A. Sulla: The Last
Republican. London: Croom Helm, 1982; Rostovtzeff, M.
Rome. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.
Silvana A. Gaeta
martyrologies
The heroic response of early Christians to persecution
led to a genre of literature that inspired later Christians
to the same zeal. This genre is called martyrology, and it
fl ourished after the Roman Empire made peace with the
church under Constantine the Great. The spirituality
inspired by martyrs goes back to a confl uence of ideas
and regional infl uences found as early as the fourth century
b.c.e. Greek philosophy and Mesopotamian myth
had put forward the idea of the heroic struggle for personal
convictions and virtue. Later, as Persian theories of
Zoroastrian dualism spread, the sense of martyrdom as a
life-and-death struggle of good versus evil found a place
in religious literature. Early Judaism, for example, began
to see the world as a struggle of its heroic remnant
people against polytheism and corrupting infl uences of
neighboring peoples. This is vividly expressed in the
martyrologies of the Maccabees and in the apocalypticism
of the Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha and
the Dead Sea Scrolls compiled as Christianity began.
Early Jewish Christians met resistance and found in
the ideology of the martyrs an expression of what had
happened to Jesus (Christ) of Nazareth. At the same
time they took advantage of the popular fascination
with the asceticism of the philosopher. The philosophers
of Stoicism, as in the Soliloquies of Epictetus, showed
that the pagans could put forward individual teachers
who were willing to lay down their lives to prove their
ideals and beliefs. As Christianity took root outside of
Judaea in Mesopotamian regions, a unique synthesis of
Greek and Asian concepts produced the fi rst generation
of martyrologies. The cult of the martyrs was in place
by the end of the second century c.e. One of the earliest
martyrologies 261
tales concerned the Syrian bishop Ignatius of Antioch,
who was condemned by imperial authorities during the
reign of Trajan (98–117 c.e.) and transported to Rome
for execution. Ignatius never called himself a “martyr,”
but an “imitator” and “disciple” of Jesus. He describes
his martyrdom as a demonstration that Jesus suffered
in the fl esh (countering the idea of Docetism, that Jesus
did not have a real body).
Polycarp of Smyrna received one of Ignatius’s last
letters, thus a link was forged between two great martyrs
of the faith. Polycarp was martyred around 156
c.e., and his death generated at least two accounts that
can be called martryologies. In the earliest one (written
about 165), the sense of “martyr” is embraced and
becomes the standard way that later lives of martyrs
are told. Martyrologies feature representatives who
are not just witnesses (martyr in Greek means “witness”)
in a judicial sense to proper beliefs about Jesus
but champion Christian confession and its vindication
over its antagonists.
In these stories, usually enemies of the faith, those
who are judicial, military, or religious functionaries of
the predominant world powers, confront the martyrs.
The martyrs are prosecuted as terrorists, criminals, or
deviants who threaten fundamental order, and yet the
martyrs in the martyrologies triumph in their death because
they refuse to adopt these fundamental societal
priorities. They confound the sensibilities of their persecutors,
confi rm the faith of their coreligionists, and
often convert their pagan audience.
Both men and women are featured in the martyrologies.
One of the more brilliant stories tells of the women
martyrs Perpetua and Felicity (d. 203). However, since
martyrologies tend to promote fi gures already in leadership
in the Christian community, it is more frequently
the male bishops and pastors who are celebrated. Where
women had more responsibility in the ancient world,
that is, in domestic contexts, they are featured in martyrologies.
Thus, Barbara’s father beheaded her when she
took a vow of virginity in the course of conversion, and
Cecilia died with her husband and friends. Both died in
the early third century.
As martyrologies fl ourished, they grew in importance
in church spirituality. Some early documents claimed that
martyrdoms were like a “second baptism” or “baptism
by blood” (for example, Shepherd of Hermas, or Tertullian’s
writings) because they took away all sins since the
fi rst water baptism. Another early writing said that the
moment of martyrdom was epiphanic, that is, divinity
possessed and transfi gured the otherwise mortal body, so
close was its imitation of Jesus in his own physical suffering.
Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Lactantius all affi rmed
this belief.
As the reputation of martyrs grew, popular zeal
went way beyond concern for a proper burial and hallowing
of their memories. Relics, funereal meals (refrigeria,
agapai), and martyrdom days (dies natalis) began
to play a role among Christians. Emperor Julian the
Apostate compared the cult of the martyrs to the hero
worship of the Greeks: Many of the same devotions occurred
for both groups, including gravesite meals, festal
days, and special oracles or revelations from the dead
person. Martyrologies would tell of the signs and wonders
surrounding the expiration of the martyr, much
like the events that surrounded the death of Jesus. Basil
the Great made the statement that “anyone who
touches the bones of the martyr is partaking in the holiness
and grace that resides in them.” The sense was that
the martyrs by their death had earned a place as powerful
patrons of the living who were devoted to them.
If the soul of the martyr was in heaven, the physical
remains of the martyr were worth treasuring on earth:
the body, the relics, and even images.
Later church teachers attempted to control the
unbridled customs of martyrologies. Augustine of
Hippo, especially, but also Jerome emphasized that
the context for understanding the martyrs was devotion
to Jesus, not the intrinsic and mystical power of
the saint. They also suggested that the real value of the
saints was in their demonstration of virtue. The lesson
for later generations of Christians, these fathers of the
church said, involved pursuing virtue in the midst of
everyday life.
See also Christianity, early; mystery cults;
persecutions of the church; Qumran; Zoroastrianism.
Further reading: Bowersock, G. W. Martyrdom and Rome.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Castelli, E. A.
Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Marking.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Mark F. Whitters
Mauryan Empire
Chandragupta Maurya founded the Mauryan Empire
in 326 b.c.e. in northern India. His son Bindusara
and grandson Ashoka (Asoka) continued his conquest
that unifi ed the entire subcontinent, with the
exception of the southern tip, and part of Afghanistan
into India’s fi rst great empire. The political and
262 Mauryan Empire
cultural achievements of the Mauryan Empire inspire
Indians to the present.
Indian history began to emerge from legend in the
sixth century b.c.e. with the formation of large kingdoms.
One was Magadha in the Ganges Valley with its
capital city at Pataliputra, near modern Patna. The
trend toward large state formation was also stimulated
by external conquest. The fi rst was in 518 b.c.e., when
King Darius I of Persia conquered part of northwestern
India, incorporating it into his empire. The Persian
Empire fell to Alexander the Great, who continued
marching eastward until he reached the Indus River valley
and defeated King Porus and other local rulers.
Chandragupta Maurya might have been inspired by
Alexander’s example. In any case, he defeated his Indian
rivals, including Magadha, established his capital
at Pataliputra, and then fought Alexander’s successor
in Asia, Seleucus Nicator, in 305 b.c.e. The two rulers
agreed to a peace treaty that settled their boundary
in Afghanistan, exchanged gifts and ambassadors,
and perhaps formed a matrimonial alliance. Seleucus’s
ambassador to the Mauryan court was Megasthenes,
who wrote a book of his observations on India. The
original is lost, but excerpts have survived in works of
other ancient writers, from which we derive much fi rsthand
information about early Mauryan India.
Chandragupta’s minister, named Kautilya, reputedly
wrote a book titled Arthasastra (Treatise on
polity), which dealt with the theory and practice of
government, the laws, and administration. The Arthasastra
described the Mauryan Empire as a centralized
bureaucratic state. The ruler was supreme commander,
chief administrator, and judge. A council of
ministers, civil servants, a network of spies, and a
large military, reputedly 600,000 men strong, assisted
Chandragupta. Megasthenes described Pataliputra
as a grand city, enclosed by a wooden wall 9 miles
long by 1.5 miles wide, interspersed with gates and
watchtowers, and further protected by a wide moat.
The city government consisted of six boards of fi ve
men each, in charge of different functions. The ruler
lived in a sumptuous palace, his hours of work and
play were strictly regulated, and when he appeared in
public he either rode on an elephant or was carried
in a palanquin.
Chandragupta ruled for 25 years. According to
Jain tradition he abdicated in 301 b.c.e., became a
Jain monk, and fasted to death. His son and successor
Bindusara ruled until c. 272 b.c.e. Little is known of
him except that he warred to expand the empire southward
and was known as the Slayer of Foes. He also exchanged
ambassadors with the Seleucid Empire, once
asking King Antiochus I to send him some Greek wine,
fi gs, and a philosopher. Antiochus sent him wine and
fi gs and replied that philosophers were not for sale.
Bindusara’s son Ashoka succeeded around 269–268
b.c.e., perhaps after a succession struggle. Ashoka (r.
269–232 b.c.e.) was India’s greatest ruler. He waged war
to expand the empire in the south, incorporating all but
the southern tip of the subcontinent. His conquest of a
state called Kalinga fi lled him with remorse for the death
and destruction and changed his personal life and state
policy. Posterity knows much about Ashoka because he
had many of his edicts and pronouncements carved on
stone pillars and rock surfaces; 10 inscribed pillars survive.
Most of the inscriptions are in the Brahmi script, the
oldest surviving post-Indus writing; it is a phonetic alphabetical
script that is the antecedent of modern Hindi.
Ashoka converted to Buddhism, became a vegetarian,
and dedicated the rest of his reign to spreading Buddhism,
although he honored all religions. He also discouraged
hunting and encouraged people to go on pilgrimages instead.
A son and daughter became Buddhist missionaries,
spreading the faith to Ceylon. He also convened the
Third Buddhist Council around 240 b.c.e. at Pataliputra
to deal with differences within the monastic order and
to fi nish compiling the Buddhist canons. He denounced
immoral behavior and appointed morality offi cers to enforce
his rules. He also renounced war, stating his intention
to change people through moral persuasion; but
importantly, he did not disband the army.
Life under the Mauryans was prosperous. While
most people lived on farms, cities grew with increasing
commerce within the empire and beyond, with China in
the East and Rome in the West. The government even
established a bureau that built ships and leased them to
merchants. Culture fl ourished. Buddhist and Jain canons
were completed during this period. Other writings
include religious commentaries and early versions of
the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana.
It appears that Ashoka lost his grip in his later years
and died around 232 b.c.e. Several sons disputed his succession,
and the empire began to fall apart as local governors,
many royal princes, exerted their autonomy. Little
is known about his successors except their names. Perhaps
the fall of the Mauryan Empire was inevitable due
to its size and diversity. In 183 b.c.e. a general killed the
last Mauryan ruler and established a dynasty in northern
India called the Sunga. Meanwhile, Bactrian Greeks
were invading the northwestern frontier. India would
be torn apart and fragmented for almost fi ve centuries.
Chandragupta Maurya was the founder of India’s fi rst
Mauryan Empire 263
great empire, and his minister Kautilya helped establish
the institutions that sustained it. The empire grew in size,
wealth, and culture under his son and grandson, reaching
its zenith under Emperor Ashoka. Its legacy to modern
times is the concept of unity for the subcontinent.
See also Buddhist councils; Jainism.
Further reading: Basham, A. L. The Wonder That Was India:
Survey of the Culture of the Indian Sub-Continent before
the Coming of the Muslims. New York: Grove Press, 1954;
Gokhale, B. G. Asoka Maurya. New York: Twayne, 1966.
Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur
Maximus the Confessor
(580–662 c.e.) Catholic theologian
Maximus the Confessor, also known as Maximus the
Theologian and Maximus of Constantinople, was
born in Constantinople to a noble Byzantine family and
received a good education. He served as a secretary of the
emperor Heraclius, became head of the imperial chancellery,
and oversaw the comprehensive overhaul of the upper
echelons of civil service. However, he renounced his
post and became a monk around 614 c.e. at the monastery
of Chrysopolis. He was unhappy about the religious
attachments of the court and retired to enjoy his love for
quiet prayer. By 618 he had made enough progress in the
monastic life to acquire a disciple, the monk Anastasius,
who was Maximus’s companion for the rest of his life.
When the Persians invaded his region in 626, Maximus
fl ed to Africa. During his time there he gained a
considerable theological reputation. The majority of what
are considered his greatest theological writings come from
his time in Africa. There, he became an outspoken opponent
of monothelitism—the doctrine that Jesus Christ had
one will but two natures: divine and human. The Catholic
Church rejected this doctrine, as did Maximus, who
insisted on dythelitism, which believed that Christ had
two wills, rather than one. He spoke out against monothelitism
at the Lateran Council of 649.
His outspokenness led to his arrest in 653 by Emperor
Constans II, and when he refused to accept the
emperor’s decrees, he was exiled. He returned to Constantinople
in 661 but once again refused to renounce his
beliefs. His punishment included having his right hand
and tongue cut off, and he was banished once again. He
died on August 13, 662. Considered one of the great
theologians of the Catholic Church, Maximus was given
the title of “the Theologian” and is ranked as a Doctor
of the Church because of his contributions to theology,
most notably of the Incarnation.
Maximus favored two forms of writing: a collection
of paragraphs, many being very short, and the other being
responses to questions asked of him by others. In
his work he saw himself as interpreting different traditions,
most important scripture, but also church fathers,
councils, saints, and sacraments. Maximus’s writings are
considered by some to be highly speculative, very intellectual,
and diffi cult to comprehend. He liked to explain
things at great length. He left behind approximately 90
writings, notably his Letter on Love, Diffi culty 10, Diffi
culty 41, Diffi culty 71, and Opuscule 7. These writings
dealt with topics such as theological and polemical
treatises, symbolism, mysticism, Gregory of Nazianzus,
spiritual maturity, and the Incarnation of Christ.
See also Jesus (Christ) of Nazareth; monasticism.
Further reading: Bathrellos, Demetrios. The Byzantine
Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of Saint
Maximus the Confessor. New York: Oxford University Press,
2004; Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. London:
Routledge Press, 1996; Nichols, Aidan. Byzantine Gospel:
Maximus the Confessor in Modern Scholarship. Edinburgh,
Scotland: T and T Clark, 1993.
James E. Seelye, Jr.
Maya: Classic Period
During the Classic Period, which is divided into Early
(250–600 c.e.), Late (600–800), and Terminal (800–
900/1100), Maya civilization reached the pinnacle of
its cultural, economic, and political development. From
the 200s to the 400s c.e. dozens of autonomous citystates,
many founded in the Preclassic, others early in the
Classic, jockeyed for power. By the 500s two had gained
preeminence: Tikal and Calakmul. These were sprawling
city-states of 100,000 people or more, with towering
pyramids and temples, massive civic and ceremonial centers,
outer rings of lesser compounds and residences, and
intensively farmed hinterlands extending many miles. A
hereditary king and a small class of elites controlled vital
trade routes and secondary centers and aggressively
pursued conquest of and alliances with other polities.
From the 500s to the 700s a series of highly destructive
wars erupted between these two great powers and their
respective allies. Elsewhere in the Maya zone other citystates
engaged in the same process of expansion, alliance
building, and warfare.
264 Maximus the Confessor
Then, for reasons still much debated, in the 700s
and 800s all of these polities underwent steep declines,
with more than a dozen major and scores of lesser urban
complexes abandoned by the early 900s. A resurgence
in northern Yucatán, beginning in the 800s and marked
especially by the rise of Chichén Itzá, also declined
by the late 1000s. This 600- to 800-year period saw
the fl ourishing of commerce, architecture, engineering,
writing, mathematics, calendrics, astronomy, cosmology,
and artistic creations of every description across
the Maya zone, achievements that emerged together as
part of a broader process of cultural, economic, and
political development.
MAYAN WRITING
While the origins of Mayan writing in the Middle Preclassic
remain obscure, by the Late Classic the Maya
had developed the most sophisticated writing system in
the history of the pre-Columbian Americas, one of only
a handful of independently invented writing systems
in the history of the world. After more than a century
of painstaking effort by scholars on several continents,
breakthroughs in the 1970s and 1980s permitted many
of these ancient texts to be read for the fi rst time.
By the Early Classic anything that could be spoken
in Maya could be rendered as written text. Using a
script consisting of more than 800 glyphs in a characteristic
round or oval shape and intricate style, Mayan
writing employed both logographs and phonetic signs.
Read from top to bottom and left to right, these glyphs
are classifi ed as “main signs” and “affi xes,” with the
latter made up of prefi xes, suffi xes, superfi xes, subfi
xes, postfi xes, and infi xes. Such written texts, often
accompanied by dates and graphic depictions of human
fi gures and divine entities (stylistically not altogether
unlike contemporary graphic novels), appear on carved
monuments, murals, pottery, other artifacts, and a
handful of surviving folded-paper codices. The Spanish
destroyed hundreds and perhaps thousands of these codices
during the conquest, a purposeful eradication of
vast quantities of accumulated knowledge on par with
the burning of the library of Alexandria.
Most extant texts memorialized signifi cant episodes
in the lives of kings, though many recorded wars, dynastic
alliances, and other major events. (Many personal
items conveyed more prosaic information, such
as “his cup” or “his bowl”). If only a tiny fraction of
the populace could write or read, the prominent display
of these texts in civic and ceremonial spaces on imposing
and magnifi cently carved stone stele, stairways, altars,
lintels, and other public monuments were clearly
intended to convey unequivocal messages of the king’s
divine power to all who bore witness to them.
MAYA INNOVATIONS
Intimately linked to writing and no less remarkable for
their sophistication were Maya mathematics and calendrics.
Having invented the mathematical concept of
zero—evidently making them the world’s fi rst civilization
to do so—the Maya went on to undertake fantastically
complex mathematical calculations. Their numerical system
was vigesimal (based on the number 20), most commonly
written using a bar-and-dot notation, with a dot
representing one; a bar, fi ve; and a shell-like fi gure, zero.
With these simple notations they were able to calculate
numbers into the millions and accurately predict lunar
and solar eclipses thousands of years into the future.
The Maya conceived of time as a series of recurring
cycles. All Mesoamerican peoples shared three cyclical
calendars: the 365-day solar year, the 260-day sacred almanac,
and the 52-year “calendar round.” These three
calendars, which can be visualized as three interlocking
wheeled gears, made each of the 18,980 days of the 52-
year “calendar round” unique.
The Maya added to this what scholars call the “Long
Count” or “Initial Series,” which was independent of
the other cycles and served as an absolute chronology by
tracking time from a fi xed or “zero” date far in the past.
Evidently they were the fi rst world civilization to mark
time from a fi xed date. According to the Long Count,
the world came to an end and was created anew every
5,128 solar years, at the close of each “great cycle.” The
Maya city-states contained 100,000 people or more, with towering
pyramids and temples and monumental civic and ceremonial centers.
Maya: Classic Period 265
current world, by this calendar, will end on December
21, 2012.
Like all Mesoamerican civilizations, the Maya invested
the movements of the Moon, Sun, planets, and stars
with deep religious and cosmological signifi cance, often
designing and constructing their temples, shrines, and
other edifi ces to align with astronomical observations.
These celestial bodies represented gods and deities, and
there is no evidence that the Maya understood the circular
or elliptical orbits of the Moon, Earth, and planets as
discovered by Copernicus and Kepler centuries later.
Maya religion and cosmology were exceedingly
complex, an all-encompassing system of belief in which
the distinction between sacred and secular did not exist.
Rivers, rocks, caves, springs, and other natural features
were seen to possess divine powers, while a multiplicity
of spirits and deities, including ancestor spirits, infused
every aspect of everyday life. Creation myths emphasized
the cyclical re-creation of the world by dualistic
divine beings who entered Xibalbá, or the Otherworld,
“a place beyond death inhabited by ancestors, spirits,
and gods—the place between the worlds,” according
to Friedel et al., outwitted the gods, and became divine
kings. The most elaborate Maya treatment of creation
myths and cosmology is the Popul Vuh, a uniquely revealing
book written by the highland K’iche (Quiché)
Maya after the Spanish conquest.
ECONOMY, SOCIETY, AND POLITICS
The economic foundations of Classic Maya city-states
and kingdoms consisted of extensive and intensive agriculture
supplemented by hunting, fi shing, and gathering;
craft specialization; and local, regional, and longdistance
trade, all of dizzying complexity. Society was
divided into two broad groups: a tiny group of elites
and the great majority of commoners, with fi ne gradations
in status at all levels. In some instances a more
prosperous strata of commoners emerged, though on
the whole wealth and power were highly centralized
and concentrated in very few hands.
Political power was exercised by hereditary ruling
dynasties. At the pinnacle stood the king (“sacred lord,”
or k’uhul ajaw), almost always male and considered a divine
or semidivine being. Beneath him was a small group
of high-ranking elites—warriors, high priests, scribes,
and administrators.
Interstate politics were byzantine, with alliances between
polities generally consummated through dynastic
marriages. Kingdoms were formed by conquest and
domination of lesser polities, whose ruling houses the
conquering power generally left intact.
The decline of the massive city-state of El Mirador
in the late 100s c.e. created a power vacuum in the lowlands
that was soon fi lled by other emergent polities,
most notably Tikal and Calakmul. From the 100s to
the late 300s, when it allied with mighty Teotihuaca´n,
Tikal became the preeminent Maya kingdom, its power
stretching from the northern lowlands as far south
as Copán in Honduras. In the 400s Calakmul began
to challenge Tikal through conquests and alliances intended
to encircle and weaken its adversary. In 562
Calakmul defeated and sacked Tikal. There followed
a period of intense confl ict lasting more than a century.
“The giant war went back and forth,” in the words of
Arthur Demarest, until 695, when Tikal “roared back
and crushed Calakmul. And then the Maya world just
broke up into regional powers, setting the stage for a
period of intensive, petty warfare that fi nally led to the
collapse of the Maya.”
During the Late Classic, similar processes unfolded
to the southwest among the kingdoms of the Usumacinta
River, most notably in the centuries-long confl ict between
Piedras Negras and Yaxchilán. The war between
these two regional powers and their allies raged off and
on from the 400s to the 800s, fi nally ending in the defeat
of Piedras Negras in 808. Another major regional
confl ict between Copán and Quiriguá, far to the south
along the contemporary Guatemala-Honduras border,
had a similar denouement.
By the 800s, as the kingdoms of the southern and
central lowlands declined, the northern lowlands saw
numerous polities rise to prominence in the 900s and
1000s, particularly in the Puuc region of western Yucatán.
To the east the kingdom of Chichén Itzá, founded
in the late 700s, soon became the most powerful and
populous state in all of Maya history. With a more decentralized
political structure and diversifi ed economic
base than its weakening southern neighbors, Chichén
Itzá prospered from the 800s through the 1000s, when
it too experienced a period of decline and was all but
abandoned by 1100.
CAUSES FOR DECLINE
A complex combination of factors most likely caused the
decline of Classic Maya polities. Despite much variability
in time and place, the most plausible scenarios point
to the interplay of overpopulation, long-term ecological
crises, endemic warfare, and the erosion of the moral legitimacy
of divine kings in the eyes of the populace.
By the 800s the Maya lowlands were inhabited by
tens of millions of people, probably exceeding the carrying
capacity of the land even under optimal conditions.
266 Maya: Classic Period
Over time, surging population densities and ever more
intensive and extensive agriculture and urban construction
led to widespread deforestation, worsening soil
erosion, and declining soil fertility, in some cases exacerbated
by prolonged drought. The evidence shows
that these processes caused increasing incidences of
malnutrition and disease and fundamental ecological
bottlenecks that in the end proved insoluble.
Endemic warfare was both symptom and cause of
these deleterious processes. By the early 500s warfare
was consuming prodigious quantities of material and
human resources, and by the late 700s the cycles of violence
had begun spinning out of control, with a series
of ever more destructive wars overtaxing not only the
land and the people but, no less important, commoners’
faith in the moral legitimacy of their kings. Since Maya
kings ruled by virtue of divine sanction, any prolonged
crisis—economic, ecological, political—could set in motion
a profound spiritual-religious-moral crisis among
the general populace, whose labor and faith were necessary
to keep the whole system operating. All of these
factors, working in dynamic and contingent combination,
were most likely responsible for the decline of one
of the world’s most creative, original, and sophisticated
civilizations.
See also Maya: Preclassic Period; Mesoamerica:
Classic Period.
Further reading: Canuto, M., and J. Yaeger, eds. The Archaeology
of Communities: A New World Perspective. London:
Routledge, 2000; Coe, Michael D. Breaking the Maya Code.
New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992; Demarest, Arthur.
“Maya Carvings Tell of a War of 2 Superpowers.” New York
Times (February 19, 2002); Freidel, David, Linda Schele,
and Joy Parker. Maya Cosmos. New York: William Morrow,
1993; Schele, Linda, and Peter Matthews. The Code of
Kings. New York: Scribners, 1998; Sharer, Robert J., and Loa
P. Traxler. The Ancient Maya. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2006; Tedlock, Dennis, trans. Popul Vuh. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.
M. J. Schroeder
Maya: Preclassic Period
During the Early Preclassic (2000–1000 b.c.e.) the
two major archaeological markers of civilization in the
Maya zone fi rst emerged in the Pacifi c and Caribbean
coastal regions: permanently settled agricultural and/or
maritime villages and pottery.
The earliest known examples of Mesoamerican pottery
have been found along the Pacifi c coast from Chiapas,
in Mexico, south and east to El Salvador. Scholars
subdivide these ceramic styles into three phases: Barra
(c. 1850–1650 b.c.e.), which apparently emerged from
an earlier tradition of gourd containers; the more sophisticated
Locona (c. 1650–1500 b.c.e.); and the
more elaborate and diverse Ocos (c. 1500–1200 b.c.e.).
Handcrafted clay-fi red fi gurines, many with highly individualized
styles and motifs, also proliferated during
this period. A wide variety of other goods made from
perishable materials, including textiles, baskets, and
nets, were also likely common, though they have left
few traces in the archaeological record.
The origins of complex society in the Maya zone
have been traced to the Pacifi c coast Locona phase. Evidence
includes differential house sizes, part-time craft
specialization, and funerary practices. Excavations at
Paso de la Amada, Chiapas, have unearthed one house
considerably larger than others at the site, and renovated
at least nine times, suggesting both growing social differentiation
and high spiritual and aesthetic value placed
on continuity of place and homage to ancestors. The superimposition
of dwellings and other buildings around a
previously sanctifi ed place is characteristic of Maya (and
Mesoamerican) construction practices generally.
A nearby site has revealed a burial of a small child
adorned with a mica mirror, indicating the growing importance
of hereditary inequality. Further east along the
coast of contemporary Belize, the Early Preclassic saw
the growth of numerous maritime settlements, founded
during the late Archaic (c.3000 b.c.e.) that by the
Middle Preclassic had expanded west into the interior.
Similar developments may have been taking place in the
highlands as well, though subsequent volcanic activity
likely buried these settlements, rendering them inaccessible
and thus creating an evidentiary bias in the archaeological
record.
Other important Early Preclassic sites have been
excavated in Honduras (Copán Valley, Cuyamel Cave,
Puerto Escondido) and El Salvador (Chalchuapa). The
inhabitants of these and other Early Preclassic settlements
made their living through a combination of
swidden agriculture, fi shing, hunting, and gathering.
Bone isotope analyses show that maize constituted less
than 30 percent of their diet, far less than the average
for many contemporary Maya, which approaches 75
percent. Extant pottery from this period indicates the
emergence and spread of a shared corpus of religious
symbols, beliefs, and concepts that formed the basis for
later cultural developments.
Maya: Preclassic Period 267
MIDDLE PRECLASSIC
The Middle Preclassic (1000–400 b.c.e.) witnessed
growing social complexity among coastal and piedmont
communities and the expansion of complex societies
into the highlands and, to a lesser extent, the
lowlands. Social differentiation intensifi ed, as symbols
of status and power came increasingly under the control
of a small group of rulers and elites. Prestige items
such as mirrors, masks, ear spools, blood letters, and
specialized vessels often made or adorned with precious
minerals or stones (jade, obsidian, pyrite, and others)
became increasingly common and elaborate. A shared
body of religious beliefs, ritualized and controlled by
a small class of ruler-priests, served as the ideological
underpinnings of an increasingly unequal society. Public
works also grew in size and complexity, indicating a
growing degree of elite control over surplus labor.
One of the largest of the Middle Preclassic sites is
La Blanca along the Río Naranjo on the Pacifi c coastal
plain in contemporary Guatemala. Mostly destroyed by
modern development, the site covered 99 acres and included
at least 40 smaller houses and four large earthen
mounds covering the ruins of temples or other public
works. The largest of these latter measured 182,987 sq.
feet at its base and rose more than 82 feet high, making
it one of the largest structures in Mesoamerica at the
time.
The polity, which fl ourished from 900 to 650 b.c.e.
and was abandoned 50 years later, ruled an estimated
60 settlements in an area of perhaps 127 sq. miles
administered through at least two secondary centers.
These patterns of growth and collapse, mounting social
differentiation, and multitiered administrative hierarchy
typifi ed the later rise, expansion, and decline
of scores of city-states across the Maya region. Other
important Pacifi c coast Middle Preclassic sites include
El Mesak and El Ujuxte, both of which, along with La
Blanca, show close economic and cultural contact with
the Olmec civilization far to the north along the Gulf of
Mexico littoral.
In the highlands the city of Kaminaljuyú (place of the
ancient ones) grew to become the largest highland Preclassic
Maya capital. Founded in the Early Preclassic and
eventually covering some 2 sq. miles, the city extended
its reach to dominate numerous satellite settlements by
around 500 b.c.e., waxing and waning in power until its
fi nal collapse toward the end of the Classic—some 2,000
years after its founding. Already by the Middle Preclassic
there is evidence for extensive earthworks, canals,
temples, and other public works, along with a carved
monument depicting a succession of rulers seated on
thrones receiving homage from bound and kneeling captives.
Other highland Middle Preclassic centers include
El Portón and the adjacent burial site of Las Mangales,
which provides clear evidence of warfare, tribute, and
sacrifi ce of war captives.
This growing public expenditure of labor, social differentiation,
and militarism along the coast and in the
highlands during the Middle Preclassic contrast with
the simpler constructions and relative egalitarianism
found in the lowlands to the north. Still, the overall trajectories
are very similar, with the lowlands having been
settled later. The most intensively studied lowland centers
in the Middle Preclassic include Altar de Sa crifi cios
and Nakbé in Guatemala, and Blackman Eddy, Cuello,
K’axob, and Cahal Pech in Belize. In particular, the El
Mirador Basin at the northernmost tip of the contemporary
Guatemalan Petén (where the Nakbé ruins are
located) saw the rapid development of numerous major
urban centers, including El Mirador, Wakna, and
Tintal. Also during the Middle Preclassic, the inhabitants
at more than 20 sites in the lowlands of northwestern
Yucatán built sizable urban centers with characteristic
Maya ball courts and temple complexes.
The Middle Preclassic, in short, was a period of
rapid transformation and growth across much of the
Maya zone. Large urban centers with accompanying
monumental architecture—including temples, plazas,
palaces, ball courts, causeways, and elaborately carved
monuments—sprang up over the course of just two or
three centuries, dotting much of the landscape by the
end of the period. This rapid growth suggests a high degree
of centralized control over surplus labor, as well as
deepening institutionalization of inherited inequalities,
though to date no tombs of lowland Middle Preclassic
rulers have been uncovered. Just as signifi cant, the
evidence also shows many signs of trade and exchange
and of intensifying competition, confl ict, and warfare
between these emergent polities.
LATE PRECLASSIC
The Late Preclassic (400 b.c.e.–100 c.e.) saw the
emergence of what is conventionally termed civilization
across the Maya zone. The period as a whole was
characterized by surging populations, deepening social
stratifi cation, increasing centralization of political
power, expanding public works, heightening militarism
and warfare, and, especially signifi cant, the full
development of writing and calendrics. The origins of
Mayan writing during the Middle Preclassic remain
obscure, with evidence of both Isthmian infl uence from
the Veracruz region to the north and of independent
268 Maya: Preclassic Period
invention. But whatever its specifi c origins, Mayan
writing reached full fl ower during the Late Preclassic,
as did the practice of dating events from a fi xed point
in time in the past, the so-called Long Count. Surviving
artifacts with Long Count dates permit scholars to
determine chronologies and sequences of events with
considerable accuracy.
The largest and most important polity in the southern
Maya zone in the Late Preclassic was Kaminaljuyú.
Control of quarries with valued minerals combined
with control over vital trade routes—both north to
south and east to west—permitted the city’s rulers to
consolidate their power over an area of hundreds of sq.
miles. Sadly, because this site lies adjacent to contemporary
Guatemala City, most of it has been destroyed by
commercial and residential development. Other important
Late Preclassic sites in the south include El Ujuxte,
Tak’alik Ab’aj, Chocola, Chalchuapa, and El Guayabal
in the Copán Valley in contemporary Honduras.
In the lowlands to the north the largest polity of this
period was El Mirador, which, like Kaminaljuyú, was
the center of an expansive regional trade and political
network. With a massive triadic pyramid at its western
edge (a structure dubbed El Tigre), and its ceremonial
and civic core extending about a mile to the east—a
core that included temples, palaces, ball courts, tombs,
and vaulted masonry buildings—El Mirador rivaled in
size and complexity the largest Classic Period urban
centers, including Tikal and Palenque. Some scholars
consider El Mirador the earliest preindustrial state (as
opposed to chieftaincy) to emerge in the Maya lowlands.
Other important Late Preclassic lowland sites
include Cerros, Nohmul, Lamanai, Tikal, Uaxactún,
and San Bartolo (the latter, not discovered by archaeologists
until 2001, contained some of the most magnifi
cent Maya murals ever uncovered, pushing the date
of the full fl owering of Maya art back centuries, to at
least 100 b.c.e.).
For reasons that remain murky these and other
Late Preclassic centers underwent a period of precipitous
decline during the Terminal Preclassic (100–250
c.e.). Some have pointed to the catastrophic eruption
of Ilopango volcano (near contemporary San Salvador),
which covered thousands of sq. miles in ash
and rendered the entire area within a 62-mile radius
uninhabitable for at least a century, as partly responsible.
Others have suggested that shifts in migratory
patterns, disruptions in trade routes, ecological bottlenecks,
dynastic crises, and other factors also played a
role. Whatever the exact causes, it is clear that many
important Maya polities experienced dramatic declines
during the Terminal Preclassic, setting the stage for the
extraordinary cultural, economic, and political renaissance
of the Classic Period.
See also Maya: Classic Period; Mesoamerica:
Archaic and Preclassic Periods; Olmecs.
Further reading: Bell, E. E., M. A. Canuto, and R. J. Sharer,
eds. Understanding Early Classic Copán. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology,
2004; Johnson, A. W., and T. K. Earle. The Evolution
of Human Societies: From Foraging Groups to Agrarian State.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001; Love, M. W.,
M. Poponoe de Hatch, and H. L. Escobedo, eds. Incidents
of Archaeology in Central America and Yucatán: Essays in
Honor of Edwin M. Shook. Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 2002; Sharer, Robert J., and Loa P. Traxler. The Ancient
Maya. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
M. J. Schroeder
Medes, Persians, and Elamites
The Medes and Persians were both Indo-Europeanspeaking
peoples and part of the broader Iranian groups.
The Elamites have very different Mesopotamian roots.
The Medes and Persians moved south to the Iranian high
plateau in the second millennium b.c.e., although exactly
when is the subject of much debate. The Medes settled
in the northern Zagros Mountains (Loristan in today’s
Iran), a land of high mountains, rich valleys, and cascading
rivers. The Median capital of Ecbatana, today’s
Hamadan, was situated at a critical point on the main
road between Mesopotamia and the Iranian Plateau,
from there leading around the Iranian central desert
and eventually to China; as a result the Medes were well
connected with the surrounding nations. The Persians
on the other hand initially settled slightly to the west of
the Medes, but the fi rst written records, from Assyria,
fi nd them in the southern Zagros Mountains, in the area
north of the Persian Gulf, around Pars and the ancient
Persian capitals of Pasargadae and Persepolis, an area
away from the main trade roots.
During the period of Assyrian dominance in Mesopotamia
in the eighth century b.c.e., Tiglath-Pileser III
invaded the Zagros region twice, and Sargon II (721–705
b.c.e.) invaded it six times. The Assyrians were determined
to control the trade routes to the east, and this
meant keeping Media under their control; deportations
of Median people are recorded 18 times in the Assyrian
annals. Sargon’s texts record 50 Median chieftains in the
Medes, Persians, and Elamites 269
eighth century b.c.e., and if Herodotus is to be believed,
it was not until the coming of the ruler Deioces in the early
seventh century b.c.e. that the Median people became
united, and Ecbatana was established as their capital. The
Medes struggled to throw off Assyrian overlordship, only
fi nally succeeding after an alliance was struck between
their king Cyaxares (c. 650–585 b.c.e.) and the resurgent
Babylonians, an alliance that resulted in the destruction
of the Assyrian Empire, following a successful joint attack
on the Assyrian capital Nineveh in 612 b.c.e. The
extent of the Median Empire before its absorption into
the Persian Empire under Cyrus II is not clear, although
it appears that it stretched to the border of the ancient
kingdom of Lydia, the center of modern-day Turkey.
The Persians played a subsidiary role to the Medes
throughout the seventh century b.c.e., and during the
reign of Cyaxares they became a subordinate kingdom.
However, in the sixth century b.c.e. Cyrus led the Persians
in a successful revolt and an eventual takeover of
the Median Empire. Although the Persians were the victors,
the Medes had a special status within the Persian
Empire, not only because they were similar peoples racially
and linguistically, but also because Cyrus had both
Median and Persian bloodline.
It seems that up until the time of Cyrus Persian was
not a written language. As a consequence the cuneiform
script used on the ancient monuments visible today
at Behistun and Persepolis was most likely invented
for the purpose, either in the reign of Cyrus or Darius
I. Overall the evidence suggests that neither the Persians
nor the Medes were literate, and in fact the main written
language of the empire was Elamite.
Whereas the Medes and the Persians were of one
tribal root, the Elamites, the people of the southeast
corner of the Mesopotamian plain were linguistically
and racially Mesopotamian. The fi rst recorded history
of the Elamites is in the early third millennium b.c.e.;
at this time they had their own form of writing, proto-
Elamite. During the third and early second millennia
b.c.e. the Elamites were rivals with the Sumerians, and
though they married their sons to Sumerian princesses,
there is evidence for their sacking of the great Sumerian
city of Ur in about 1950 b.c.e. During the second
millennium b.c.e. they swung between war and peace
with the other Mesopotamian peoples to the north and
west of them.
The Elamites fi rst met the Persians as the Persians
migrated south; even though the Persians were to have
the upper hand it is clear that they adopted many things
from the more sophisticated Elamite culture. A good
example of this cultural absorption can be seen in the
sculptured reliefs of Persepolis (the high plateau royal
capital of the Persian Empire) in which the Persians are
wearing Elamite dress and carrying Elamite objects.
The Elamites generally acted as a go-between nation
between the Mesopotamian peoples and the Iranian
and other peoples of the high plateau. However,
this role was not always an easy one; when the Assyrian
empire was seeking to maintain its dominance in
the seventh century b.c.e., Elam found itself at odds
with the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, who launched a
series of campaigns against Elam that utterly destroyed
the Elamite capital, Susa. After the absorption of Elam
into the Persian Empire in the sixth century b.c.e.
the Elamite people began to lose their distinctiveness,
even as Susa, their capital, became the main seat of
government for the empire. Neither the Medes nor the
Elamites are separate peoples today. The Persians however
maintain an identity as the dominant people of
Iran. Iran changed its name from Persia in the 20th
century to refl ect the diversity of its people.
See also Babylon, later periods; Indo-Europeans;
Persepolis, Susa, and Ecbatana; Sumer.
Further reading: Olmstead, A. T. History of the Persian Empire.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959; Yamauchi,
Edwin M. Persia and the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Book House, 1990.
Andrew Pettman
Megasthenes
(c. 4th century b.c.e.) diplomat and author
In 324 b.c.e. Chandragupta Maurya unifi ed northern
India by defeating his rivals. He went on to war against
the successor of Alexander the Great in Asia, Seleucus
Nicator, expelling his forces from the borderlands of
India. In 305 b.c.e. the two men concluded a treaty in
which the Greeks withdrew from the Punjab in northwestern
India and which fi xed the western boundary of
the Mauryan Empire to the crest of the Hindu Kush.
There was also exchange of ambassadors, gifts, and a
vague mention of a marriage alliance. Megasthenes was
Seleucus’s representative at Chandragupta’s court. He
wrote a detailed account of his observations while in India.
Although the original was lost, parts have survived
through extensive excerpting in the works of other ancient
writers.
Megasthenes described Pataliputra, the Mauryan
capital, as second in splendor only to Persepolis, capital
270 Megasthenes
of the former Persian Empire. It had a wooden city wall
9 miles long by 1.5 miles wide, which had 570 towers,
64 gates, and a 900-foot-wide moat. He wrote admiringly
of Chandragupta as an energetic ruler who personally
supervised affairs of state. The emperor lived in splendor
in an enormous palace built of wood, but he also lived
in fear of assassination, appearing only rarely in public,
attired in a splendid purple and golden robe, and was
either carried in a palanquin or rode on an elephant. He
also described the administration of the capital city by
six boards each with fi ve men, in charge of crafts and
industry, trade and commerce, tax collection, foreigners,
collection of statistical information, and public works.
Other information states that a quarter of the people’s
produce was paid as taxes and that there were dues assessed
on commerce. He described the Mauryan military
as having infantry, cavalry, chariots, elephants, navy, and
a commissariat. He also commented on the division of
people into seven castes by occupation.
One passage on the people’s lives said: “They live
happily enough, being simple in their manners, and frugal.
They never drink wine except at sacrifi ce . . . The simplicity
of their laws and their contracts is proved by the
fact that they seldom go to law . . . Truth and virtue they
hold alike in esteem . . . The greater part of the soil is under
irrigation, and consequently bear two crops in the course
of the year.” Some information Megasthenes provided
was wrong, for instance his assertion that there was no
slavery in India and that no famines occurred. Nevertheless,
his writings on India are valuable because there are
few Indian sources on actual life in the period, and his
were the fi rst extensive observations by a foreigner.
Further reading: Rapson, E. J., ed. The Cambridge History of
India, Vol. 1, Ancient India. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1922; Sastri Nilakanta, K. A., ed. A Comprehensive
History of India, Vol. 2, The Mauryas and Satavahanas,
325 B.C–A.D. 300. Bombay, India: Orient Longmans, 1957;
Vassiliades, Demetrios Th. The Greeks in India, a Study in
Philosophical Understanding. New Delhi, India: Munshram
Manoharlal Publishers, 2000; Woodcock, George. The
Greeks in India. London: Faber and Faber, 1966.
Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur
Mencius
(372–c. 289 b.c.e.) Confucian philosopher
Mencius is the Latinized form for Mengzi (Meng Tzu),
which means “Master Meng” in Chinese. He is revered
as China’s Second Sage, surpassed only by Confucius.
His personal name was Ke (K’o), and like Confucius he
came from a lower aristocratic family. Mencius’s mother
was widowed, but she made sure that he grew up in
a good environment. She is honored as a model mother,
and he later showed her great devotion. Mencius studied
under the disciple of a grandson of Confucius. Like
Confucius he traveled from state to state attempting
to convince rulers to govern by virtue and follow the
ways of ancient sage rulers, most often in vain; also like
Confucius he was a distinguished teacher. He debated
with other philosophers, most notably with Moists. He
wrote a book entitled The Mencius, which contains his
sayings and teachings.
Mencius expounded on Confucian teachings on
government and human nature. He emphasized the
quality called ren (jen), which means “humanity” and
“love,” but unlike the Moists who insisted on universal
love, or the obligation to love all equally, Mencius
insisted that one’s love to others is graded depending
on their mutual relationships and obligations. Mencius
also insisted on the practice of righteousness, a
sense of duty, or yi (i), in human relations. He argued
that it was the practice of these virtues that had made
the reigns of ancient rulers a golden age.
Mencius lectured about benevolent government, insisting
that the government existed for the people, not
vice versa. But if the ruler neglected his responsibilities,
or worse if he misruled his people, Mencius was more
radical than Confucius, saying that such a ruler has
forfeited the Mandate of Heaven and should be overthrown.
He further explained that while the ruler owed
the people a moral example, he could not expect them
to practice virtue without enjoying economic well-being.
Thus he advocated and explained various social and economic
programs that would be in the enlightened selfinterest
of rulers to provide. He idealized the early Zhou
(Chou) dynasty for implementing the well-fi eld system,
one that divided the land equitably for groups of eight
farming families that jointly farmed a ninth plot for the
government and argued for its restoration.
Mencius taught that all people are born with the
beginnings of virtue and inclination to goodness, which
is as natural as water’s inclination to fl ow downward.
People turn to evil when they neglect to cultivate their
innate goodness. Thus, self-cultivation, a moral education,
and the study of history are essential for individuals
to return to purity, and the same applies to states
to return to the virtuous ways of the golden age. These
teachings have made Mencius loved by the people and
feared by tyrants.
Mencius 271
See also Confucian Classics; Hundred Schools of
Philosophy; Mozi (Mo Tzu); Xunzi (Hsun Tzu).
Further reading: Lau, D. C. Mencius. Harmondsworth, UK:
Penguin Books, 1970; Waley, Arthur. Three Ways of Thought
in Ancient China. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, Inc., 1956;
Wright, Arthur F., ed. The Confucian Persuasion. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1960.
Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur
Meng Tian (Meng T’ien)
(d. 210 b.c.e.) Chinese general
Meng Tian was the most powerful general of the Qin
(Ch’in) dynasty. He participated in the Qin state’s fi -
nal drive to unify China that resulted in the creation
of the Qin dynasty in 221 b.c.e. His greatest feat was
the building of the Great Wall of China, called the
“Long Wall” in Chinese.
Major wall building began in China in the fourth
century b.c.e. by three northern states, Qin, Zhao
(Chao), and Yan (Yen), each of which faced nomads
in the north. In 221 b.c.e. just after Qin completed the
unifi cation of China, General Meng was given the task
of connecting existing walls and adding to them to form
a unifi ed system of defense against the nomads. Some
300,000 men, soldiers, convicts, and corvée laborers
were called up for the task, while they simultaneously
fought campaigns against the Rong (Jung) and Di (Ti)
barbarians. There is little detail on how he tackled the
gargantuan task. A biography of Meng in a monumental
work called the Historical Records, by Sima Qian
(Ssu-ma Ch’ien) in the fi rst century b.c.e., merely said:
“He . . . built a Great Wall, constructing its defi les and
passes in accordance with the confi gurations of the terrain.
It started in Lin-t’ao and extended to Liao-tung,
reaching a distance of more than ten thousand li. After
crossing the [Yellow] River, it wound northward,
touching the Yang mountains.”
In addition, Meng was responsible for building a
major north-south highway that connected the capital
city Xianyang (Hsien-yang) northward through the Ordos
desert, across the northern loop of the Yellow River,
ending at Jiuyuan (Chiu-yuan) in Inner Mongolia. Over
fl at land the road was more than 75 feet wide, and even
over mountainous terrain it measured about 17 feet in
width. Remnants of the road survive and a modern road
follows approximately the same route. This was one of
a network of imperial highways, known as speedways
that were built during the Qin dynasty that radiated
from the capital city. The total of Qin highways was
approximately 4,250 miles. They were crucial for fast
movement of troops as well as trade and colonization.
In 210 b.c.e. the fi rst emperor of Qin unexpectedly
died while on an inspection trip, leaving the throne
to his eldest son, Prince Fusu (Fu-su). Since 212 b.c.e.
Fusu had been to duty on the Great Wall under General
Meng. It was thought to be punishment for remonstrating
with his father for the latter’s harsh treatment of
Confucian scholars. The emperor’s chief minister Li Si
(Li Ssu) and chief eunuch Zhao Gao (Chao Kao) then
conspired to alter the will, designating a weak younger
son as heir and ordering both Fusu and Meng to commit
suicide. Both complied with the order. Without its
ablest general and with a weakling on the throne, the
Qin dynasty fell to widespread rebellion.
Further reading: Cotterell, Arthur. The First Emperor of China,
the Greatest Archeological Find of Our Time. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981; Nienhauser, William H.,
Jr., et al., trans. The Grand Scribe’s Records: Vol. 1, The Basic
Annals of Pre-Han China. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994; Twitchett, Denis, and Michael Loewe, eds.
The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 1, The Ch’in and Han
Empires, 221 B.C.–A.D. 220. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986.
Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur
Meroë
Evidence of civilization in Meroë, now part of Sudan
and then called Nubia, has existed from about the eighth
millennium b.c.e. The culture was fated to live in the
shadow of Egypt of the pharaohs to the north on the
Nile. Over the centuries the pharaohs raided Nubia for
gold, slaves, and other booty. However, the decline of the
Egyptian dynasties around the 11th century b.c.e. gave
the Nubian kingdoms a chance to fl ourish.
As John Reader wrote in Africa: A Biography of
the Continent, the rulers of Kush actually were able
to subdue Egypt, “where they ruled for more than sixty
years—a period of Egyptian history known as the
twenty-fi fth or Ethiopian dynasty.” However, a fi nal
burst of Egyptian power forced the rulers of Nubian
Kush to retreat up the Nile to safety at Meroë in 590
b.c.e. Meroë was ideally placed for a defensive position,
according to Reader, since “the tract of land,
250 [kilometers] broad, lying between the points at
272 Meng Tian
which the Atbara and the Blue Nile join with the main
stream of the White Nile is known as ‘the island of
Meroë.’” According to the article “Kush, Meroë, and
Nubia” in the Library of Congress’ Sudan: A Country
Study (1991), “During the height of its power in the
second and third centuries B.C., Meroë extended over
a region from the third cataract in the north to Sawba,
near present-day Khartoum, in the south.” The very
distance south gave Meroë some protection from invasion
from Egypt in the north. After Cambyses II,
son of Cyrus II of Persia, invaded Egypt in 525 b.c.e.,
an army he sent into the desert simply disappeared—
one of the great mysteries of history. With the city of
Napata as capital, the rulers at Meroë kept memories
of pharoanic Egypt alive, and in early days patterned
their court after the Egyptian court.
After the suicide of Cleopatra in 30 b.c.e., Egypt
was ruled by the Rome of Octavian, who was strong
enough to reassert power in Upper Egypt, which had
become a raiding ground for Meroitic armies. A Roman
punitive expedition in 23 b.c.e. razed Napata. Meroë
never recovered from the Roman incursion, and by the
second century c.e. the Nobatae, nomads from the west
were able to establish themselves as rulers of Meroë.
The Roman Empire, however, faced with Germanic invasion
and the continuing fi ght against Parthia in the
east, was happy to subsidize the Nobatae as allies and
use them to defend Roman Egypt’s southern frontier.
By this time, however, Ethiopia had become a regional
power, in the kingdom of Axum. Axum fi rst appeared
around 500 b.c.e. and thrived in its position on the trade
routes from the Middle East, through Arabia from Yemen
to the south, and with Egypt. Axum was one of the
most diverse of the early kingdoms, becoming a commercial
and administrative center. By this time Rome faced
severe pressure throughout its empire and could devote
less energy to the Nobatae, Meroë, or the frontiers of
Egypt. Constantine the Great died in 337 c.e., and
a struggle for succession ensued. Seizing the moment,
Axum invaded Meroë in about 350 and conquered it,
destroying Meroë as an independent state. However, as
Karl W. Butzer noted in 1981, Axum too would suffer
eclipse largely due to “environmental degradation and
precipitous demographic decline.” By about 800 Axum
had virtually ceased to exist.
See also Egypt, culture and religion; Ethiopia,
ancient; Yemen.
Further reading: Butzer, Karl W. “Rise and Fall of Axum:
Ethiopia: A Geo-Archaeological Interpretation.” American
Antiquities (v.46/3, 1981); Gardiner, Alan. Egypt of the
Pharaohs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964; Grimal,
Nicolas. A History of Ancient Egypt. Trans. by Ian Shaw.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1998; Reader, John. Africa: A Biography
of the Continent. New York: Vintage, 1991.
John F. Murphy, Jr.
Mesoamerica: Archaic and
Preclassic Periods
The geographical region and culture zone called Mesoamerica
(literally, “Middle America”) extends from
present-day central and southern Mexico as far south
as northern Nicaragua (approximately 21 to 13 degrees
north latitude). The Archaic Period (8000–2000 b.c.e.)
in this vast and variegated region was characterized by
the fi rst emergence of settled communities and agriculture.
The Preclassic Period is conventionally subdivided
into Early (2000–1000 b.c.e.), Middle (1000–400
b.c.e.), Late (400 b.c.e.–100 c.e.), and Terminal Preclassic
(100–250 c.e.). Economic, political, and cultural developments
in each of these periods are marked by both
broad similarities and regional variations—periods most
fruitfully seen as convenient dating devices rather than
fi xed horizons characterized by defi nitive shifts. Four
major Mesoamerican cultural complexes emerged during
the Preclassic: the Olmecs along the Gulf of Mexico
littoral, in the Valley of Oaxaca, in the Valley of Mexico,
and further east and south in the Maya zone.
ARCHAIC PERIOD
In the early Archaic Period people in various parts of
Mesoamerica initiated a shift from nomadic hunting and
gathering to more territorially based specialized foraging,
a prolonged process culminating in sedentary agriculture.
The fi rst permanent villages appeared along the
Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, and Pacifi c seacoasts early
in the Archaic, likely a result of the relative abundance
of maritime food resources in these areas. Sites demonstrating
year-round occupation during the Archaic include
Cerro de las Conchas on the Chiapas coast, several
along the Caribbean coast in contemporary Belize, and
inland along rivers at Colha and Cobweb Swamp.
While the precise origins of Mesoamerican agriculture
remain obscure, scholars agree that over many
generations people in two principal regions domesticated
several species of wild plants during the Archaic
that later served as the agricultural basis of Preclassic
and Classic Mesoamerican civilizations, most notably
maize, squash, beans, and chili peppers, usually grown
Mesoamerica: Archaic and Preclassic Periods 273
together in a milpa. These regions were the highlands
of Oaxaca and Tehuacán (southeast of the Valley of
Mexico) and the coastal lowlands of the Gulf of Mexico
and Pacifi c. The origin of maize in particular has
spawned extensive debates and a voluminous literature.
The resulting food surpluses resulted in higher
populations and the beginnings of more complex societies
marked by growing social differentiation, craft
specialization, and localized trade—especially food,
fl int, obsidian, chert, textiles, and feathers.
EARLY PRECLASSIC
The Early Preclassic was marked by denser populations,
the expansion and increasing complexity of settled communities,
specialized craft production—pottery and stylized
fi gurines being the most evident in the archaeological
record—more extensive regional trading networks, more
marked social differentiation, and the beginnings of warfare.
The earliest evidence for sustained Mesoamerican
warfare, from the Zapotec in the Valley of Oaxaca, dates
to around 1800 b.c.e. Armed confl icts in this zone intensifi
ed thereafter, culminating in the supremacy of the
Monte Albán polity over the entire Oaxaca watershed by
the end of the Preclassic. The earliest Mesoamerican pottery
has been traced to the Pacifi c coast of Chiapas and
areas further south, extending as far as contemporary El
Salvador. Evidence for increased social differentiation
during the Early Preclassic includes differences in house
sizes, attainment of status goods, and funerary practices.
This period also saw the rise of the Olmec, long considered
the “mother culture” of subsequent Mesoamerican
states and polities, a view that in recent years has been
displaced by a more multiregional perspective.
MIDDLE PRECLASSIC
During the Middle Preclassic these complex societies developed
further along the trajectory established during
the earlier period, with more centralized and hierarchical
polities emerging in the Valley of Oaxaca, Chalcatzingo,
the Valley of Mexico, and the Maya lowlands and highlands.
Some areas saw the transition from chiefdoms to
states, most notably in Monte Albán I (c. 500–200 b.c.e.)
in the Valley of Oaxaca. The period also saw the consolidation
of hereditary rule and the origins of notions of
divine kingship. As populations and population densities
grew, social differentiation became more pronounced,
with fi ner distinctions among members of the elite and
a wider gap between elites and commoners. Ruling and
religious elites deployed spiritual power to underpin their
legitimacy and rule. This period saw the crystallization
of a pan-Mesoamerican culture zone, with widespread
and continuous exchange of goods and ideas across the
region. Exchanges of prestige goods such as magnetite,
jade, pyrite, pearl oyster shells, and quetzal feathers accompanied
exchanges of religious beliefs and symbols.
This period also saw growing sophistication in the
development of monumental architecture and carved
monuments. The fi rst carved monuments in the Valley of
Oaxaca date to 1000 b.c.e. Here, at Monte Albán, a rudimentary
system of glyphs had developed by 500 b.c.e.
During Monte Albán I rulers erected more than 300 carved
monuments recording names, dates, and events, many
with martial themes and motifs, including ritual sacrifi ce
of captive war victims. Scholars have yet fully to decipher
these glyphs. Similar developments took place among the
Maya, with elaborately carved stelae serving as public displays
of rulers’ authority, power, and legitimacy. Middle
Preclassic Maya monuments were erected from Chiapas
as far east and south as El Salvador. Across Mesoamerica,
as contending polities jostled for power, warfare grew in
scale and complexity. Agriculture became more intensive,
evidenced by denser populations and more elaborate water-
control technologies. Pottery styles, too, became more
elaborate, sophisticated, stylized, and varied.
LATE AND TERMINAL PRECLASSIC
The Late Preclassic, characterized by a veritable “urban
revolution,” laid the groundwork for the fl orescence of
states and polities during the Classic Period. In Mexico’s
central highlands planners designed, laid out, and
began construction of the colossal city of Teotihuacán,
which came to dominate much of Mesoamerica during
the Early Classic Period. Further south Monte Albán
II (c. 250 b.c.e.–1 c.e.) was expanded as a residential
and ceremonial center, as its ruling elite consolidated its
control over the region. In the north and west (in contemporary
Nayarit, Jalisco, and Colima), urbanization, state
building, and attendant monumental architecture were
of a lesser scale, with pottery and artistic styles, along
with funerary practices, exhibiting distinctive regional
variations. In the east, along the Gulf Coast the Olmec
center of Tres Zapotes continued to thrive, while the adjacent
urban centers of La Venta and San Lorenzo waned
in infl uence and power. The most stunning achievements
of the Late Preclassic took place among the Maya, where
advances in writing, mathematics, astronomy, architecture,
urban planning, warfare, and related spheres presaged
the later developments of the Classic Period.
See also Maya: Preclassic Period.
Further reading: Brown, M. K., and J. F. Garber, eds. Warfare
and Confl ict in Ancient Mesoamerica. Walnut Creek, CA:
274 Mesoamerica: Archaic and Preclassic Periods
AltaMira Press, 2003; Flannery, K. V., and J. Marcus, eds.
The Cloud People: Divergent Evolution of the Zapotec and
Mixtec Civilization. New York: Academic Press, 1983; Miller,
Mary Ellen. The Art of Mesoamerica: From Olmec to Aztec.
London: Thames and Hudson, 1996; Sharer, Robert J., and
Loa P. Traxler. The Ancient Maya. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2006; Stephens, J. L. Incidents of Travel in
Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949.
M. J. Schroeder
Mesoamerica: Classic Period
The Classic Period in Mesoamerican history is divided
into the Early (250–600 c.e.), Late (600–800), and
Terminal Classic (800–900/1100). Four major culture
areas reached fl orescence during this period: the central
highlands, dominated by Teotihuacán until its
fall in 650; the Oaxaca Valley, dominated by Monte
Albán until its fall around 900; along the gulf coast
among the Classic Veracruz, which reached its apogee
around 900; and four distinct Maya zones, most of
whose city-states collapsed by the late 800s.
The overall trajectory of this period was characterized
by incremental and continuous social and cultural
development, economic expansion, and state formation
in all four culture areas, growing organically out
of Preclassic developments, followed (except in the
case of Classic Veracruz) by the sudden and calamitous
collapses of states and empires marking the end of the
Classic —demises whose underlying causes remain a
subject of research and debate among scholars.
THE CENTRAL HIGHLANDS AND TEOTIHUACÁN
Called the “City of the Gods” by the Aztec centuries
after its abandonment, the colossal city of Teotihuacán
remains shrouded in mystery. Its inhabitants
left many monuments, carvings, murals, and other
artistic creations, but only a few glyphs and no readable
texts comparable to the writings of the Maya.
We do not even know what they called themselves.
What is clear is that the city’s ruling elite oversaw a
city of some 150,000–200,000 people—making it one
of the largest urban concentrations in the world at
that time—and an empire that spanned most of Mesoamerica
outside the Oaxaca Valley and the Maya
zones to the south and east. For centuries the dominant
power in the Valley of Mexico, the empire of
Teotihuacán extended its economic and ideological
reach north as far as the present-day U.S. Southwest,
west to the Pacifi c coast, east to the Gulf of Mexico,
and south as far as Honduras.
Teotihuacán’s infl uence in Mesoamerica was of
three principal types: political-military, economic, and
ideological-religious. Politically and militarily the city
directly ruled most of the central highlands, including
the densely populated Valley of Mexico, which saw its
population increase by a factor of 40 in the 10 centuries
from 900 b.c.e. to 100 c.e. In towns and districts
directly ruled by the empire’s armies, labor drafts and
exacted tribute were combined with the construction
(or reconstruction) of new towns and urban centers
in styles imitative of the colossal city. Economically
the empire established and maintained extensive trade
and exchange networks throughout Mesoamerica.
Teotihuacán-style merchant residences show this as far
south as Guatemala and by a wide variety of identifi -
able exchange items spread over a large area (such as
green-tinted obsidian unearthed at sites in Honduras
from the Teotihuacán-controlled Pachuca quarry).
It was in the ideological or spiritual realm that the
city-empire exercised its greatest power. In particular,
its cult of Quetzalcoatl (the Feathered Serpent), already
a pan-Mesoamerican deity, became increasingly important
throughout much of Mesoamerica. So too did
its practice of ritual human sacrifi ce, probably derived
from the Olmecs, Maya, Monte Albán, or other antecedent
cultures. The dispersal of these and other religious
myths, symbols, and practices from Teotihuacán
to the central highlands and beyond, as well as the persistence
of these myths and practices in the centuries
following the city’s demise, demonstrate the tremendous
ideo logical infl uence wielded by the empire and
its ruling elite.
THE CLASSIC VERACRUZ
What caused Teotihuacán’s fall is unknown, though
a combination of ecological crises and invasions from
the north are the likeliest reasons. What is known is
that around 650 c.e. parts of the city were burned and
desecrated and most of the city itself abandoned. The
resultant power vacuum in the central highlands led to
the formation of numerous lesser states, most notably
Cholula and Cacaxtla in contemporary Puebla, and
Xochicalco in Morelos. Along the Gulf of Mexico
coastal region, the Classic Veracruz, most commonly
associated with the urban complex of El Tajín,
emerged as perhaps the most powerful polity north
of the Maya zones. Noted especially for its many ball
courts—the ball game, or ollama, comprising another
Mesoamerica: Classic Period 275
pan-Mesoamerican cultural tradition closely associated
with warfare and ritual human sacrifi ce and
steeped in religious symbolism—El Tajín reached its
fl orescence around 900 c.e. All of these states exhibited
a heightened emphasis on militarism that would
characterize the later Postclassic Period.
THE OAXACA VALLEY AND MONTE ALBÁN
In the Valley of Oaxaca the highly militarized Zapotec
state of Monte Albán came to dominate the surrounding
region through conquest, colonization, and
alliances with lesser powers. During the period of Teotihuacán’s
dominance Monte Albán and Teotihuacán
enjoyed good diplomatic relations, evidenced in part
by carved monuments at Monte Albán depicting ambassadorial
meetings and by neighborhoods within
Teotihuacán that housed Zapotec merchants. In Monte
Albán, too, a hereditary class of kings and priests
whose legitimacy was divinely sanctioned dominated
a rigidly hierarchical social order held together by war,
threats of war, and an elaborate corpus of religious
beliefs and practices, including ritual sacrifi ce of captive
war victims. Monte Albán reached the zenith of
its power around 400 c.e., after which numerous of
its vassal towns and districts wrested their autonomy
from the hilltop city, which subsequently underwent
a period of gradual decline. By 800 parts of the city
were no longer inhabited or used, though the site and
surrounding districts were occupied well into the Postclassic.
THE MAYA
The most remarkable cultural achievements of the
Classic Period took place among the Maya. In virtually
every fi eld of human endeavor—writing, mathematics,
astronomy, calendrics, warfare, architecture, agriculture,
water-control technologies, and many others —
the Classic Maya bequeathed an astounding legacy.
Comprised of a shifting mosaic of city-states that never
unifi ed under a single political umbrella, the history
of the Classic Maya is conventionally divided into the
Early (250–600 c.e.) and Late Classic (600–900), with
a political reorganization in Yucatán, originating largely
from outside the region and enduring until around
1100. Scholars also divide the Maya area into four
principal geographic zones: (1) the Pacifi c coastal plain
and piedmont, which merge into (2) the northern highlands
in contemporary Guatemala and Chiapas, which
merge into (3) the southern and central lowlands, or
Petén, and further north into (4) the northern or Yucatán
lowlands. While economic, social, cultural, and
political developments in each of these zones followed
distinct trajectories, it is also the case that Classic Period
developments in the Maya region as a whole exhibited
a range of shared features and attributes that
need to be understood within both pan-Maya and pan-
Mesoamerican contexts.
See also Maya: Classic Period; Maya: Preclassic
Period.
Further reading: Blanton, Richard E., S. A. Kowalewski, Gary
Feinman, and Laura Finsten. Ancient Mesoamerica: A Comparison
of Change in Three Regions. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1992; Coe, Michael D. Mexico: From the
Olmecs to the Aztecs. London: Thames and Hudson, 1994;
Diehl, Richard A., and Janet Catherine Berlo, eds. Mesoamerica
after the Decline of Teotihuacan: A.D. 700–900.
Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1989; Marcus, Joyce,
and Kent V. Flannery. Zapotec Civilization. London: Thames
and Hudson, 1994.
M. J. Schroeder
messianism
Broadly speaking, messianism refers to any expectation
of the appearance of a messiah or messiahs in the end
time. Messianism appears in four bodies of literature:
Hebrew scripture, extrabiblical works written in the
Second Temple period, the New Testament (NT), and
the writings of rabbinic Judaism. From the middle of
the 19th century until recently scholars have generally
held that messianism was only a marginal phenomenon
not only in Hebrew scripture but also in the writings
produced in Second Temple period. Christianity has
been either credited with or blamed for introducing
messianism in such a prominent way. In more recent
years this traditional understanding of messianism has
come under criticism.
Messianism in Hebrew scripture has been approached
in two ways. The fi rst approach is to investigate
the occurrence of the word messiah, which means
“anointed one.” An extreme position would be to limit
messianism to passages that mention the word messiah
in an eschatological (end-time) context. By this criterion
Daniel 9:25–26 would be the only one that qualifi
es. Other occurrences of the term messiah in the Jewish
Bible are more debatable since an eschatological
context appears to be absent. It is unclear, for example,
whether when David is called “the Lord’s anointed”
this qualifi es as an eschatological prophecy. The most
276 messianism
one can say is that such references may have eschatological
overtones. The second approach to messianism
is to investigate it from the broader perspective of Israel’s
eschatology. It is undeniable that many passages
of Hebrew scripture envision some sort of an end-time
agent, whether human or angelic, who will restore Israel
and reestablish God’s original order on the earth.
Most scholars feel that many of such passages are messianic
even though these passages do not mention messiah.
The most important messianic fi gure in Hebrew
scripture is a future king in the likeness of David and a
descendant of David.
There are basically two scholarly opinions about
the origin of messianism. Some believe messianism
developed from the pre-exilic practice of venerating
Israelite kings as divine agents. S. Mowinckel was the
key proponent of this hypothesis. Others believe that
either before or during the exile, the Jews borrowed
the concept of divine kingship from Egypt or Persia
and shaped it into messianism, a form more consistent
with Israel’s monotheism.
Whatever the case may be, scholarly consensus
points to kingship as the primary matrix of Jewish messianism.
The extracanonical Jewish works produced in
the Second Temple period refer to the Pseudepigrapha
and Apocrypha, Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls,
Josephus, and Philo. Although end-time speculations
abound in much of these Jewish writings, direct mention
of the word messiah is found only in Philo, the Psalms
of Solomon, Jubilees, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and 1 Enoch.
Of these, 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, technically speaking, lie
outside the Second Temple period, and Philo mentions
messiah only once in a quotation of Num. 24:7 (LXX).
Also 4 Ezra is the only apocryphal writing that mentions
the word messiah.
Inasmuch as the Apocrypha was passed down
with the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Hebrew
scripture, and preserved by the Christians, one might
have expected a more overt messianism in it. In other
words, the actual occurrences of the word messiah in
the Jewish writings of this period are few and far between.
The reason may be that during the Hasmonean
period, when much of these works were produced, a
strong interest in a stable Jewish kingship here and now
tended to suppress messianism. By far the most interesting
messianic material from this period is found in the
Dead Sea Scrolls, which speak of at least two—royal
and priestly—messiahs. This development is due to the
fact that in Hebrew scripture not only kings but also
the priests, the sanctuary and its contents, and sometimes
even the prophets were anointed.
The title most frequently used for Jesus in the NT is
“Christ,” which is the Greek translation of messiah (cf.
John 1:14). Paul, who uses this title most often, also uses
it as a virtual name for Jesus. In Luke, Jesus reads a passage
from Isaiah at the beginning of his ministry to refer
to himself as the anointed: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon
me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to
the poor” (Luke 4:18). In other words, in the NT messiah
is practically synonymous with Jesus (Christ) of Nazareth.
But other messianic titles also occur in the NT. The
Gospel writers use the titles Son of David and Son of Man
in addition to Christ. Hebrews use the title high priest for
Jesus. The image of Jesus as the High Priest of God also
fi gures prominently in Revelation. These and other messianic
titles of Jesus in the NT share the common notion
that Jesus is a suffering messiah.
Rabbinic Judaism certainly knows of the messiah.
The word messiah occurs in the Mishnah, the Eighteen
Benedictions, the Targums, and the Talmud. Messianism,
as a theological idea, however, has had little direct
infl uence on the formation and development of rabbinic
Judaism. Notwithstanding, messianic movements have
played a vital role in Judaism to this day.
Nearly all messianic materials mention a connection
with God’s end-time judgment. The Qumran scrolls are
noteworthy in this regard because they not only link
together messianism and divine judgment but also develop
them into elaborate end-time scenarios. Similarly,
4 Ezra (cf. 12:32) and 2 Baruch (cf. 29:3) mention a
messiah in close connection with visions of the end-time
judgment, which in the two books is equated in part
with the fall of Jerusalem. Jesus and his followers also
center their messianic messages on the announcement
that the end-time judgment of God has fi nally arrived.
The followers of Jesus, like Paul, who believed that divine
judgment had taken place in the death of Jesus,
gave Jewish messianism its most notable and lasting
expression.
In short, messianism is an apocalyptic phenomenon
that tended to become prominent in Jewish and Christian
communities that believed themselves to be under
divine judgment.
See also Bible translations; Judaism, early; Psalms;
Zakkai, Yohanan ben.
Further reading: Charlesworth, James H. The Messiah: Developments
in the Earliest Judaism and Christianity. Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress, 1992; Horbury, William. Jewish Messianism
and the Cult of Christ. London: SCM Press, 1998.
P. Richard Choi
messianism 277
Middle Kingdom, Egypt
Ancient Egyptian language begins with Middle Egyptian,
accepted by later Egyptians as the classical period
of language, literature, and culture. The Middle Kingdom
dated from approximately 2055 to 1650 b.c.e. It
comprised the second half of the Eleventh Dynasty, the
Twelfth Dynasty that spanned 212 years (1985–1773
b.c.e.), and the Thirteenth Dynasty, at the end of which
the central administration was once again weakening,
leading into the Second Intermediate Period. The
pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty had remarkably long
reigns: two, Senusret I and Amenemhat III, reigned for
some 45 years. The First Intermediate Period was one
of decentralization, but local rulers, religious institutions,
and customs developed and fl ourished.
By the end of the First Intermediate Period power
had concentrated in two centers, Herakleopolis, near the
Faiyum in Middle Egypt, and Thebes. From the latter
city the fi rst three kings of the Eleventh Dynasty, all three
named Intef, ruled Upper Egypt and gradually pushed
the boundary of their rules further north. Around 2055
b.c.e. Mentuhotep II managed to reunify Egypt and
reigned for 50 years, ushering in a period of peace and
stability. His two successors reigned a further 18 years,
and Mentuhotep III was likely succeeded by his vizier,
Amenemhat, as the fi rst pharaoh of that name and of the
Twelfth Dynasty. His name, compounded with Amun,
signaled the demotion of the local Theban patron god,
Montu, and Amun’s steady rise to unrivaled prominence
and wealth. In his 30-year reign Amenemhat I conducted
campaigns in the eastern Delta and south in Nubia
to secure Egypt’s access to gold. He also sailed the Nile
dealing severely with any signs of rebellion from local
rulers. Amenemhat moved the capital to a site about 20
miles south of the old capital, Memphis. This was named
Itjtawy, or “Seizer-of-the-Two-Lands.” Amenemhat I
was murdered as the result of a palace coup.
Though Senusret I was campaigning in Libya when his
father Amenemhat I died, he returned, quelled any rebellion,
and ruled on his own for 34 years—having reigned
approximately 10 years with his father. He extended
Egypt’s borders as far as Buhen at the Second Cataract in
Nubia and led expeditions into Syria. Like his father, he
was a great builder and rebuilt the temple of Re-Atum at
Heliopolis. Amenemhat II succeeded around 1928 b.c.e.
His reign saw an expansion of trading contacts with Syria
and the Aegean. Egyptian artifacts from his reign have
been found at Byblos in Lebanon and Knossos in Crete.
A treasure trove from his reign was found in the temple
of Montu at el-Tod, immediately south of Luxor, with
silver goblets from Canaan and the Aegean, along with
seals and jewelry from Mesopotamia.
His son, Senusret II, continued his father’s interest
in the Faiyum by beginning to irrigate the area. His statues
display a realistic appearance of the royal subject,
which would continue into the succeeding reigns. This
was a break from the traditional representation of the
pharaoh, especially in the Old Kingdom, as a remote,
godlike being. This trend, copied among the nobility,
makes the portraiture of this period unique and vivid.
The last two major pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty
were Senusret III and Amenemhat III. Senusret
III was apparently a commanding fi gure. He conducted
several campaigns in Nubia, noted for their brutality.
He extended the southern boundary of Egypt well into
Nubia, building a fortress at Semna beyond the Second
Cataract. Even into the Thirteenth Dynasty military dispatches
show how stringently the Egyptians controlled
the natives and exploited resources. Much of the wealth
that poured in from Nubia was given to the gods. The
shrine of Osiris at Abydos was gifted with precious
metals and stones, and funds for priestly maintenance
were given to the temple of Amun at Thebes.
The last of the long-reigning and powerful pharaohs
of the Twelfth Dynasty was Amenemhat III (1831–1796
b.c.e.). His reign was long and peaceful, and the Middle
Kingdom reached its cultural and economic peak.
He expanded the use of the turquoise and copper mines
in Sinai and quarried at Aswan and Tura and in Nubia,
all recorded on inscriptions. There are two statues that
seem to show him in youth and maturity, displaying the
strong features of his ancestors. The Twelfth Dynasty
278 Middle Kingdom, Egypt
Deir el-Bahri is a complex of mortuary temples and tombs,
including the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut.
slid peaceably into the Thirteenth with the short reigns
of Amenemhat IV and his sister-queen, Sobekneferu.
Wegaf Khutawyre, the fi rst pharaoh of theThirteenth
Dynasty, seems to have succeeded legitimately, tied by
blood or marriage to the old royal family. His throne name,
Khutawyre, “Re protects the Two Lands,” proclaimed his
aim of continuing the policies of the rulers of the Twelfth
Dynasty. The pharaohs of the Thirteenth Dynasty continued
to use it as the royal seat, and there was no great crisis
or collapse until the founding of the Hyksos states (1650
b.c.e.). Life went on much as before, even as far south as
the Second Cataract. By the reign of Sobekhotep IV (c.
1730 b.c.e.), control of Nubia lessened and in the Delta,
local rulers strengthened their positions, which led to the
weakening of the Thirteenth Dynasty and the fragmented
dynastic rule of the Second Intermediate Period.
The Middle Kingdom saw the emergence of a comfortable
“middle” class, the increase in endowments
of mid-level temple priests, and a mercantile class
who traded independently of royal interests. There was
a more confi dent appropriation and expression of a
blessed afterlife that relied less on proximity to the deceased
pharaoh and more on the preparations of the
individual. As noted, the Middle Kingdom produced a
great number of literary works, many of which became
“classics” of genre, language, and style. In sum, it was
an age that encouraged the rise of the individual and
became aware of the world beyond Egypt.
See also Egypt, culture and religion.
Further reading: Allen, James P. Middle Egyptian: An Introduction
to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000; Clayton, Peter A.
Chronicles of the Pharaohs. London: Thames and Hudson,
1998; Gardiner, Alan. Egypt of the Pharaohs. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1964; Grimal, Nicolas. A History
of Ancient Egypt. New York: Blackwell, 1995; Kemp, Barry
J. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization. New York:
Routledge, 1995; Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature,
Vol. 1, The Old and Middle Kingdoms. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973; Manley, Bill. The Penguin
Historical Atlas of Ancient Egypt. New York: Penguin
Books, 1996.
John Barclay Burns
migration patterns of the Americas
Native Americans inhabited every region of the Western
Hemisphere, from arctic North America to Tierra del
Fuego at the southern tip of South America. There are
more than 500 distinct Native American tribal groups or
nations in North America alone. Native people showed
a remarkable ability to adapt to the different physical environments
throughout North America. They organized
themselves into communities, governments, and cultures
that were adapted to their local environment and were
recognized as distinct tribes or nations by the people
within the tribe as well as by the other Native nations.
Native Americans’ own stories of how they arrived in
their homelands are as varied as the tribes themselves.
There are some common themes, however, to these
creation stories and oral traditions. All tribes have a
creation story; most tell of humans being brought up
from the ground by spiritual powers, and each culture
tells of its own tribe as being the original people. This
is usually a positive story, with humans being brought
into this world with joy, companionship, and laughter.
Native cultures have a strong sense of distinct male and
female powers and principles in the universe, and often
these creation stories tell of the male spirits of the sky
and Sun bringing humanity up from the female counterpart,
the womb of Mother Earth. Sometimes these
stories tell of the women pushing the men to venture
out of the earth (or up from a lake or to embark on a
long journey) to fi nd the new world in the light.
Some tribes’ creation stories tell of their people emerging
from the earth directly into their homeland. But many
of them tell of a long migration: The people emerge and
travel a great distance to their eventual homeland. Some
tribes’ creation stories contain both subterrestial and terrestrial
journeys. The San Juan Tewa tribe of New Mexico
tells of human beings fi rst living in Sipofene, a dark
world beneath a lake far to the north. The fi rst mothers
of the Tewa, Blue Corn Woman and White Corn Maiden,
directed a man to travel to the world above the lake,
where he eventually obtains the gifts that allow the Tewa
to live in the terrestrial world.
The Potawatomi of the southern Great Lakes are
another example. The Potawatomi are culturally, politically,
and linguistically linked to the Ojibwa and Odawa
people in the northern Great Lakes, and many stories
link the Potawatomi to the Great Migration of the
Ojibwa from the Atlantic seaboard to the Great Lakes.
But Potawatomi creation stories also tell of the original
people arising from the St. Joseph River southwest of
Lake Michigan. Native creation stories always carry a
sense that it was a journey of great distance to arrive
at the homeland, whether it was a journey from underground
or a journey over land. And the goal is always
to arrive at a distinct homeland for the original people.
migration patterns of the Americas 279
This is a question that puzzled the European immigrants
and settlers, beginning with the early explorers
(once they realized they had not reached Asia as they had
expected). Some Europeans speculated that the Native
Americans were the lost tribes of Israel cited in the Bible.
The Jesuit missionary José de Acosta in the late 1500s
proposed the theory that the Native Americans traveled
from Asia following the great herds of animals that they
hunted. Anthropology grew as a science in America in
the 1800s, focusing on Native cultures and their origins.
Most contemporary evidence points to a migration of the
Native American people from Asia, coming from northeastern
Siberia into Alaska sometime between 25,000 to
11,000 years ago. But there is still much debate about
the exact time of this migration and whether it was one
migration by a single group of people or different migrations
by different groups.
The geological record points to an ice age that occurred
from 40,000 to 11,000 years ago. There are two
factors that would have infl uenced this migration. First,
tying up so much of the earth’s water into ice would
have resulted in a drop in the level of the oceans. About
60 miles of water presently separate Alaska and Siberia,
but in the last ice age, the ocean would have been low
enough for these two landmasses to be connected, permitting
easy migration from Asia into North America.
Studies of the fossil record indicate that this type of migration
has occurred among the great herding animals.
Caribou, mammoths, elk, and moose apparently traveled
from Asia to North America, and horses and camels
migrated the opposite way.
Secondly, the scarring of rock strata indicate that
the ice sheet covering North America in this time period
was vast, stretching south to the Canadian Pacifi c coast
and across to the Atlantic Ocean. While migration from
Asia into Alaska was feasible as early as 25,000 years
ago, the ice sheet would have blocked further overland
travel into the interior of North America until 14,000
years ago. Some scientists argue that travel would have
been possible along the Alaskan and Canadian coastline,
but no evidence has been found as yet to indicate
boats or a fi shing-based culture in this region prior to
11,000 years ago.
Anthropologists have applied modern language
theory and biological techniques to the question of
migration. There are more than 1,000 Native American
languages, and the North American languages are
commonly recognized as falling into eight large, related
groups. Anthropologists have attempted to determine
migration patterns tribes based on the dispersion of
these language groups. Most agree that three or more
migrations occurred, with the fi rst beginning more
than 11,000 years ago. The largest language group, the
Amerind, links many languages in all regions of North
America and is believed to be the earliest. This migration
was then followed later by the Na-Dene group, which
is found in the U.S. Southwest and Northwest Coast
(some 9,000 years ago), and still later by the Inuit and
Aleut speakers of the Arctic (less than 8,000 years ago).
Studies of dental traits and blood-group traits among
Native Americans also tend to support the concept of
three large migration events.
Once Native Americans did become established in
central North America, they began to spread out to every
region of the continent, and cultures and lifestyles
began to evolve and adapt to the various regions. Scientists
refer to these earliest cultures as Paleo-Indians.
One artifact common to these people is a distinctive fl int
spear point referred to as the Clovis point. A number of
archaeological sites along the Great Plains have been
dated to 11,000 years old, and they show evidence for
the use of the Clovis point for hunting the great herds
of mammoth, bison, and other animals. Other studies
indicate that use of the Clovis point spread throughout
North and South America as far north as the Yukon
and as far south as the Andes.
Gradually, the climate warmed in North America.
The huge herd animals of the ice age, such as the mammoths
and mastodons, died out, the vast lakes in the
U.S. West dried out and turned to desert, and deciduous
forests became widespread in the East. Native Americans
adapted to their new environments and established
new ways of life different from their Paleo-Indian ancestors.
This second wave of cultures is referred to as the
Archaic Tradition. Archaic-period cultures developed
more specifi c, regionalized characteristics. People of the
western deserts utilized the lowland seasonal marshes
and rivers for their sustenance or became huntergatherers
in the foothills and mountains. People of the
Northwest developed into great ocean and river fi shers.
California Archaic people developed hunting-foraging
cultures utilizing the abundance of resources in their
region and practiced controlled burning to encourage
plant and animal populations, particularly for oaks
and acorns. The people of the Great Plains developed a
greater reliance on the bison.
Eastern groups began to adapt to the growing
woodlands. One particular cultural group is referred to
as the Poverty Point culture. This group was fi rst studied
based on the Poverty Point earthworks in Louisiana,
dated between 4,000 and 2,000 years old. Poverty Point
includes several earthen mound constructions, with
280 migration patterns of the Americas
the largest taking the form of a bird with outstretched
wings. Artifacts uncovered at Poverty Point reveal trade
materials originating as far away as the Great Lakes.
Clay fi gurines, stone beads, and other ornaments are
distinctive to the Poverty Point culture.
The Woodland culture was the next stage to develop.
This term as used by archaeologists refers to a specifi c
Native American cultural pattern that became common
about 3,000 years ago and spread from the edge of the
Great Plains to the Atlantic Ocean. The Woodland culture
had three main characteristics: a distinctive style of
ceramics, community-based agriculture, and the construction
of burial mounds. Mound building is perhaps
the most recognized Woodland culture feature. Mound
structures from this stage have been discovered from the
Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the southern
Great Plains to Ontario.
The Woodland groups again were not a single vast
tribe or nation but instead were distinct communities
that centered on local village or city sites often with
mound structures. The mounds were usually burial
structures but also frequently served ceremonial and
political purposes. The Woodland culture showed local
variations, but certain practices were common to all.
Trade was extensive throughout the network of mound
communities, and a certain commonality of cultural
practices likely served to unite these communities and
help maintain the trade routes.
Elements of both the Archaic and Woodland stages
existed in Native cultures up to 1600 c.e. For example,
the Archaic fi shing cultures of the Northwest and the
hunter-gatherer-fi shers of California inhabited some of
the richest regions on the face of the earth. Their lifestyles
never experienced any pressure to change their
cultural practices. The early Spanish explorers reported
city-states of the Woodland mound culture in the 1500s.
The Iroquois tribes in New York are also organized on
Woodland culture patterns.
The size of the Native population prior to 1492 is
also subject to much debate. Scientifi c studies in the
early 1900s relied on the reports and estimates of the
European explorers and American settlers from the 1500s
forward. These studies generally agreed on a fi gure of
about 1 million Native Americans north of Mexico at
the time of European contact.
More recent studies have begun to take into account
additional factors, particularly the effect of Old World
diseases. Diseases such as smallpox, chicken pox, the
plague, and measles did not exist in the Native American
population prior to 1492. The disastrous effect of
these diseases in Mesoamerican and Central and South
American Native populations was well documented
by the Spanish conquistadores in the 1500s. Given the
existence of the extensive Native trade routes and the
virulence of these diseases, it is reasonable to assume
that these diseases had a similar devastating effect in
interior North America as well.
More recent population studies, taking into account
the effects of disease and the estimated carrying capacity
of the various regions of the continent, have revised
the Native American population estimate upward. Some
studies have ranged as high as 18 million, but most recent
estimates project Native population in North America
prior to 1492 as closer to 5 million people.
The indigenous people of North America, their
governments, and cultures were incredibly varied, with
great adaptation to their respective regions, and they
showed a great awareness of and respect for their physical
environment.
Native American cultures were not static and had
been undergoing cultural changes independent of and
prior to European contact. But by 1600 a radical transformation
had begun resulting from Old World immigration.
At that point disease had begun to decimate
Native populations, and this would be one of the key
factors in opening the Atlantic seaboard to English colonization
in the 1600s.
See also Native Americans: chronologies and
peoples; Native Americans: regional adaptations.
Further reading: Benton-Banai, Edward. The Mishomis Book:
The Voice of the Ojibway. St. Paul, MN: Red School House,
1988; Erdoes, Richard, and Alfonzo Ortiz, eds. American Indian
Myths and Legends. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984;
Hoxie, F. E., ed. Encyclopedia of North American Indians.
New York: Houghton Miffl in, 1996; Waldman, Carl. Atlas of
the North American Indian. New York: Facts On File, 2000;
Weatherford, Jack. Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched
America. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991.
Kevin Daugherty
Milan, Edict of (313 C.E.)
Emperor Diocletian pursued a comprehensive program
against Christianity from 302 c.e. until his retirement
in 305 c.e. His successors continued hostilities
toward the church, especially in the eastern empire for
several years, until it became clear that such programs
were futile. Sometime around 311 Galerius, one of the
ruling Caesars, grudgingly and condescendingly issued
Milan, Edict of 281
the Edict of Toleration for all religious subjects, understood
to apply mainly to the benefi t of the persecuted
Christians.
Shortly thereafter Galerius died. The western empire’s
Caesar, Constantine the Great, immediately
seized initiative and forged a similar agreement at Milan
in 313 with his eastern counterpart Licinius. This
edict was more sympathetic to the Christian cause, refl
ecting Constantine’s sympathies for the faith. In time
Christian causes even started to receive funds from the
imperial treasury.
Ten years later Licinius unsuccessfully broke from
Constantine’s religious revolution and renounced the
accord of Milan; some 40 years later Constantine’s
nephew Julian the Apostate also went this route and
tried to reinstate conventional Greco-Roman religion.
The chronology and development of the Edict of Toleration
and Edict of Milan is suspect, as the main sources
(Lactantius and Eusebius of Caesaria) do not agree in
detail; nonetheless, it is clear that Christians won their
civic rights through these proclamations.
Contrary to popular opinion, Constantine the Great
did not make Christianity the offi cial religion of the
Roman Empire. Only overt and widespread persecutions
stopped. In fact, it was Theodosius I, called “the
Great” by an appreciative church, who issued the edict
Cunctos Populos in 380 that made orthodox teachings
on the Trinity and the Incarnation of Jesus (Christ)
of Nazareth mandatory for all citizens. Anyone who
did not go along was deemed “an extravagant madman.”
In 381 he summoned the bishops to the Council
of Constantinople, as he began to deal seriously with
church divisions.
Ten years later he fi ned and forcibly removed all
church leaders who accepted Arianism. In addition,
he forbade all Roman offi cials from participating in
Greco-Roman religious sacrifi ces. By 392 Theodosius
I had banned all pagan worship. These aggressive religious
programs effectively established Christianity
as the state religion. From the fourth century onward
Orthodox or Catholic Christianity was the dominant
religion in the Mediterranean world.
See also Christianity, early; martyrologies;
persecutions of the church.
Further reading: Brown, Peter. The World of Late Antiquity:
AD 150–750. History of European Civilization Library. London:
Thames and Hudson, 1971; Fox, Robin Lane. Pagans
and Christians. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1986.
Mark F. Whitters
Minoans
The Minoan civilization has its roots on the island of
Crete in the Mediterranean Sea during the Neolithic Period
(7000–3000 b.c.e.). The original inhabitants most
likely emigrated from Asia Minor, which had already
developed cities and conducted trade by 2000 b.c.e.
The Greek poet Homer refers to the Minoan population
as “Eteo-Cretans” in book 9 of the Odyssey. This
early culture used hieroglyphics similar to that of the
Egyptians, which they eventually developed into a linear
script for keeping records. Most of what is known about
this civilization was discovered during the excavations
of Sir Arthur Evans during the early 1900s. Despite a
strong naval infl uence, Minoan culture has no evidence
of any warlike activity or organization.
The most important center of Minoan civilization
was the palace city of Knossos. Located inland on the
island of Crete, Knossos was built at the confl uence of
the Vlihia stream and the Keratos River, with good lands
for vineyards and olive groves. The main palace was
constructed on Kefala Hill in the early second millennium
b.c.e. The Minoans also built a sophisticated system
of drains, roads, and warehouses to promote trade. The
structures at Knossos show evidence of compartmentalized
homes with working doors and partitions, with no
difference between the homes of the wealthy and the
workers. This suggests that wealth may have been more
evenly shared as the Minoan trade routes prospered.
The palace and larger buildings may have even had
functioning toilets. Many of the ruins at Knossos have
colorful frescos or intricately designed pottery, which
display a unique form of art in the ancient world. Nearly
all of the artwork uncovered displays Minoan daily
life, showing fi shing, sailors trading goods, young men
and women participating in sporting games or rituals,
wildlife, and religious fi gures. The Minoans developed
art for art’s sake, a revolutionary concept in the ancient
world. Through the Mycenaeans they passed this love
of art on to mainland Greece.
The religious beliefs of the early Minoan culture
were polytheistic and matriarchal, a goddess religion. The
serpent goddess played a prominent role in the homes
of Minoans, perhaps a foreshadowing of the strong female
deities in the Greek religion. Minoan infl uence in
the Mediterranean spread through trade. The Cretans
and their Aegean relatives developed what was one of the
most advanced mercantile navies in history. There is evidence
of trade with diverse areas such as Turkey, Cyprus,
Egypt, Afghanistan, and Scandinavia. Goods traded with
Knossos included copper, ivory, amethyst, lapis lazuli,
282 Minoans
carnelian, gold, and amber. Clay tablets have been found
at Knossos with both Linear A and B writing styles that
contain records of goods traded and stored. Evidence of
this vast trading network can also be found in the palace
city of Akrotiri, located on the southwestern tip of Santorini
island. This city had only been rediscovered in the
mid-1900s, having been buried by a volcanic eruption.
Excavations revealed an elaborate drainage system built
under sophisticated, multi-tiered buildings. The building
interiors were decorated with magnifi cent frescos, furniture,
and vessels. The absence of skeletal remains or
any valuables hints that the population may have been
warned of the eruption and evacuated.
The most important Minoan artifact is the Law
Code of Gortyn, which dates to 450 b.c.e. It is inscribed
in marble at the Odeion using Dorian Greek in
the boustrophedon style (one line is read right to left,
then the next left to right). Most of the laws pertain
to property rights, marriage, divorce, and inheritance
relating to free men and women and slaves. The content
of the code corroborates the concept that men and
women were given equal status in Minoan society.
Scholars cannot agree on what exactly brought
about the end of the Minoan civilization. It was, perhaps,
a combination of calamities over a short period of
time. Crete is susceptible to seismic events. It is believed
that the volcanic eruption at Thíra (Thera) may have
caused a tsunami that decimated the civilization. Other
theories point to the adoption of Linear B writing as
proof that the Mycenaeans conquered Crete and treated
it as its colony. All that is known for certain is that Minoan
culture declined as the Mycenaeans prospered.
See also Cyclades; Homeric epics; Mycenae.
Further reading: Adkins, Lesley, and Roy A. Handbook to
Life in Ancient Greece. New York: Facts On File, 1997; Dubin,
Marc. The Greek Islands. New York: DK Publishing,
1997; Halsall, Paul. Internet Ancient History Sourcebook.
Fordham University. Available online. URL:http://www .
fordham .edu (September 2005); Hooker, Richard. “Bureaucrats
and Barbarians: Minoans, Mycenaeans, and the Greek
Dark Ages.” Washington State University. Available online.
URL:http://www.wsu.edu (September 2005).
George Raleigh Derr III
Mishnah
When Palestinian society emerged from the turbulence
of the two Jewish revolts against the Romans at the
end of the second century c.e., rabbis united to promote
a religious document called the Mishnah. The Mishnah
and its subsidiary books, commonly called the Tosefta
and the Talmud, serve Judaism to the present day just
as a constitution unites citizens to a state.
The Mishnah is the core of this constitution; its name
comes from the Hebrew word for “repeat.” It was compiled
under the leadership of Judah ha-Nasi, organized
into six “orders,” 63 tractates, and 531 chapters. The six
orders are Zera’im (agricultural laws), Mo’ed (seasonal
observances), Nashim (relations with women), Neziqin
(civil law), Qodashim (cultic law), and Tohorot (taboos).
The Tosefta is a collection of supplements to the Mishnah,
with approximately three-fourths devoted merely to
citation and amplifi cation of the contents of the Mishnah.
The Tosefta has no independent standing, being organized
around the Mishnah, probably closed around the
fi fth century c.e. Both of these documents are the basis
for the Talmuds, Palestinian (fourth century c.e.) and
Babylonian (fi fth century c.e.). The organization of the
Talmuds also follows the Mishnah’s orders and tractates.
The Mishnah is something like the New Testament
for Christians in two important ways: It represents a
new and limited perspective of the Bible, and it presents
itself as divinely inspired. After the Temple was
destroyed there was a need to reorient Judaism from
a temple-oriented cult to a Torah-oriented culture of
study and exposition. Similarly, after the life of Jesus
(Christ) of Nazareth, Christians reinterpreted the
Old Testament in a way that centered on his messiahship.
Thus, neither document was a repetition of the
Jewish Bible, since neither pays attention to all aspects
of the Bible’s themes. The Mishnah projects itself as an
orally transmitted supplement to the written inspiration
of the Bible. It claims to be the words of Moses
that were not originally written down like the Bible,
now safeguarded in written form to preserve the Jewish
faith. The Bible is the written Torah; the Mishnah is the
oral Torah. Both are from Moses and authoritative.
Surprisingly, however, the Mishnah is not at all focused
on the historical plight or future destiny of the
Jewish people. Rather, it is a compendium of topics
that the rabbis found relevant for their religious imagination.
The only historical references are the some
150 teachers and rabbis that speak out in the book,
but not much description surrounds them to help the
reader fi gure out their “real world.” In fact, the only
historical context refl ects the Jewish world after 150
c.e. Its value for historians is therefore limited. Modern
scholar ship holds that the Mishnah refl ects what the
second- century rabbis considered important for their
Mishnah 283
faith: not the temporary and changing face of external
history, but the permanent and enduring world of holiness
and eternality. For example, the fi fth order mainly
concerns the Temple, even though the Temple had
been destroyed generations earlier and its grounds were
off-limits to Jews. Half of the Mishnah addresses this
imaginary world of offi cials and customs that were no
longer present or possible in Judah ha-Nasi’s day.
Jews in late antiquity, however, could take “realworld”
consolation in the message of the Mishnah. Its
message hinted at an imaginary world that countered
the Roman worldview where Caesar demanded total
allegiance. The Mishnah says that God owns the land
of Palestine and gives it to the people of Israel, Israel
must pay God representative payments (tithes and offerings)
and observe religious calendars to show divine
ownership, and God has sovereignty over the social dimensions
of human life as in clan and culture.
If the Mishnah is a selective treatment of the Bible and
refl ects a theology that its compilers found inspiring but
not overtly related to the external world, then its sequel,
the Talmud, also commented on the Mishnah according
to its later priorities. Whole sections of the Mishnah were
ignored. The Jerusalem Talmud covers only 39 of the 63
tractates and says nary a word on the fi fth order and little
on the sixth order; the Babylonian Talmud has its own
set of equally limited applications. Together, both treated
the Mishnah in a manner that was different than what
the compilers of the Mishnah intended. If the Mishnah is
analogous to the New Testament, then the Talmuds are
analogous to the writings of the fathers of the church.
Very soon after the Mishnah was compiled, Jews
made it the centerpiece of their study, and it became the
structure and content of their discussions. Other academies
outside of Yavneh (Tiberias, Caesarea, Sepphoris,
and Lydda in Palestine; Sura, Pumbedita, and Nehardea
in Babylonia) adopted the Mishnah as their base text.
Even non-Mishnaic materials (such as the baraitot) were
studied in relation to their parallels in the Mishnah. Its
language, commonly called Mishnaic Hebrew, is a direct
development of the spoken Hebrew language of the late
biblical period with heavy infl uence by the predominant
Aramaic language. Because of the Mishnah’s authority
not only in Palestine but also in the other great center of
Jewish culture, Babylon, the Hebrew language was revitalized
and never died out in rabbinic circles.
See also Caesar, Augustus; Christianity, early; Judaism,
early (heterodoxies); messianism; Roman Empire.
Further reading: Hezser, Catherine. The Social Structure
of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine. Tübingen,
Germany: Mohr [Siebeck], 1997; Goodblatt, David M. The
Monarchic Principle: Studies in Jewish Self-Government in
Antiquity. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr [P. Siebeck], 1994;
Neusner, J. Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981; ———. The Mishnah: Social
Perspectives. Boston: E. J. Brill, 1999.
Mark F. Whitters
Mittani
The kingdom of Mittani was an impressive Indo-
European empire that ruled over northern Mesopotamia,
or the Fertile Crescent, during the 15th and 14th
centuries b.c.e. At its height the geographical region of
Mittani stretched from the ancient city of Nuzi and the
Tigris River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the
west. The two capital cities, Taite and Waššukanni, were
most likely located in the heartland of the Khabur river
valley or at its headwaters. The capitals’ archaeological
sites have not yet been located.
Despite its greatness no Mittani texts regarding its
own history have been found, so most of the information
concerning the Mittani comes from Egyptian, Hittite,
and Assyrian records. The Hurrians, a people
who were present in the Khabur River valley for several
hundred years prior to the Mittani’s political establishment,
composed the majority of the population. The
ruling class of Mittani, however, seems to have been
an Indo-European people in origin and worshipped Vedic
deities; that is, the marks of this society planted in
today’s Middle Eastern heartland bore resemblance to
classical Indian culture.
Whether the Mittani introduced the horse to the Fertile
Crescent is disputed, yet they did make use of it in
a new form of chariot warfare. The Mittani developed
a two-wheeled chariot drawn by two horses. The elite
aristocratic warriors, called Maryannu (meaning “noble
in chariot”), and an accompanying archer manned these
chariots. The Maryannu, along with their horses, were
clothed in bronze or iron scale armor. The chariots were
used as a vehicle to surround enemies and a base from
which to fi re consistent volleys of arrows and javelins.
The chariots were also used as collision and trampling
weapons. This form of warfare served as a model for the
Egyptians, Hittites, Babylonians, and Canaanites.
The Mittani kingdom ruled over all of northern
Mesopotamia in the 15th century b.c.e. and reduced
the former Assyrian state to vassal status. By the 14th
century b.c.e. the constant confl ict with the Hittites and
284 Mittani
Egyptians caused a signifi cant reduction in the size of the
Mittani Empire. After the Mittani king Artatama established
a treaty with Thutmose IV, pharaoh of Egypt,
the two nations lived in relative peace, and the Egyptians
acquired daughters of the Mittani kings for wives.
However, the growing power of the Hittite kingdom in
the west and the resurgence of the Assyrians in the east
quickly became too much for the Mittani to handle.
During Tushratta’s reign, the last independent Mittani
monarch, the Hittite king Suppiluliumas sacked
Waššukanni. This event marked the fall of the Mittani
Empire around 1370 b.c.e. The region of the
Mittani was reduced to a Hittite vassalage known as
Hanilgalbat and would later be controlled by the Assyrians.
A Hittite and Assyrian alliance destroyed the
last remnant of the Mittani state in the north about
1340 b.c.e. Finally, an Assyrian king by the name of
Shalmaneser I wiped history clean of the Mittani by
securing the territory of Hanilgalbat (1280–70 b.c.e.)
and deporting the Mittani people across the known
world as cheap labor.
See also Assyria; Babylon, early period; Egypt,
culture and religion; Indo-Europeans.
Further reading: Bancroft-Hunt, Norman. Historical Atlas of
Ancient Mesopotamia. New York: Checkmark Books, 2004;
Harrak, Amir. Assyria and Hanigalbat: A Historical Reconstruction
of Bilateral Relations from the Middle of the Fourteenth
to the End of the Twelfth Centuries B.C. New York:
G. Olms, 1987; Jarol, Richard E. A Reconstruction of the
Contributions of Mitanni to the Ancient Near East. Ottawa:
National Library of Canada, 1987; Oates, David, Joan Oates,
and Helen McDonald. The Mitanni and Old Babylonian
Periods. Cambridge: British School of Archaeology in Iraq;
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1997.
Jonah B. Mancini
Mohenjo-Daro
Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa are two ancient cities located
on the banks of the Indus and its tributary the Ravi
River in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent.
They represent the earliest civilization in the region,
called the Indus, or Harappan, civilization, dating
to approximately 2500–1500 b.c.e. Excavation of the
Indus civilization began in 1921 under the direction
of Sir John Marshall. Mohenjo-Daro is located on the
bank of the Indus River in present-day Pakistan and is
the best-preserved city of the Indus civilization.
Its name means the “Mound of the Dead” because
the center of the town is an artifi cial mound about 50
feet high surrounded with a brick wall and fortifi ed with
towers. The mound also had a great bath 39 feet by 23
feet, fl anked by a large pillared hall, small rooms, and a
granary. A well-laid-out town lay below the citadel with
streets running in a grid pattern oriented to the points of
the compass. The town was divided into wards according
to function, such as areas for shops, workshops, and
residences. All buildings were made with baked bricks
of uniform size. Besides private wells in the courtyards
of two-story individual residences, there were also public
wells at street intersections. Covered sewers disposed
of waste. There was also a cemetery where graves were
neatly oriented in the same direction. There were no
palaces or royal cemeteries.
Inscribed seals found at Mohenjo-Daro and other
Indus cities show pictographic writing, to date undeciphered.
So few characters are inscribed on each seal that
they would not give much information even if they were
deciphered. Thus despite a high-level material culture,
the Indus civilization is still considered prehistoric. The
absence of palaces and royal cemeteries and the presence
of a ceremonial bath and great hall lead specialists
to guess that a college of priests ruled. The abundance
of small female fi gurines indicates a fertility cult. The
uniform-sized bricks throughout the Indus Valley and
nearby regions lead to speculation that some kind of
government supervised the entire area; hence the name
Indus Empire is also used to describe this civilization.
In Mohenjo-Daro archaeologists have discovered
an advanced metal-using culture (bronze and copper),
where people used wheel-made pottery vessels, wove
cotton cloths, lived under a well-organized municipal
government, and traded among one another and with
other cultures. Indus seals have been found in Mesopotamia
and lapis lazuli, a semiprecious stone used by
Indus artisans, is mined in Afghanistan. Conditions in
Mohenjo-Daro deteriorated around 1700 b.c.e., shown
by hoards of buried jewelry and precious objects, pots
and utensils strewn about, evidence of fi re, and at least
30 skeletons scattered about indicating that the people
were trapped and died or were killed. Whether natural
disaster or invaders caused the fi nal disaster, the city
was abandoned, hence, posterity’s name Mound of the
Dead for its ruins. Mohenjo-Daro is the best preserved
of the Indus civilization cities excavated to date.
See also Aryan invasion.
Further reading: Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark. Ancient Cities
of the Indus Valley Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University
Mohenjo-Daro 285
Press, 1998; Marshal, Sir John, ed. Mohenjo-Daro and the
Indus Civilization, Vol. 1. Delhi, India: Indological Book
House, 1971.
Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur
monasticism
The English word monasticism derives from the Greek
word monos, meaning “alone.” Those who rejected the
world to embrace the worship of God and obedience
to his commandments without compromise were soon
grouped into a communal residence, called in Greek
monasterion, and later in English monastery; the inhabitant
of a monastery was a monachos, the source of the
English word monk.
Asceticism, which originally referred to the physical
training of athletes for sports contests, in the Christian
context means the training of the passions—physical
and mental—for the purposes of withstanding the
temptations to sin present in this world and focusing
completely on God. Asceticism is not confi ned to monasticism;
in the early church forms of asceticism were
incumbent on all Christians. Asceticism is also but one
part of the monastic life, which includes other dimensions,
including prayer, charity, the cultivation of virtue,
and education in the Holy Scriptures and other edifying
Christian literature.
Judaism and other Greco-Roman religions active
during the fi rst centuries of Christianity also had movements
in which a group separated from society to follow
religious precepts unfettered by the demands and
temptations of society. However, the attempts to fi nd in
any religion of late antiquity the precursors of Christian
monasticism are at best inconclusive. After the persecution
of Christians in the Roman Empire came to an end,
monasticism became understood as a form of martyrdom,
in which the monk became “dead to the world”
to pursue a life focused entirely on God.
Monasticism in the forms transmitted to the Middle
Ages appeared in the third and fourth centuries c.e.
Monasticism was a spectrum of living arrangements between
the anchorite, or solitary, who lived alone, and
the coenobite, who lived in a community (coenobium),
under a single abbot and a single rule. Many shades
in between the two developed, and every monk or nun
would have experienced both extremes to some extent,
either through temporary arrangements as part of his or
her training or due to the rhythm of life that might be an
alternation of elements of both extremes. Monasticism
in all of its forms was probably practiced to some extent
throughout the Christian world. The limitation of our
sources has led to a focus on Egypt, Syria, and Palestine
as the earliest centers. Even if there were monastic
communities in the West before the fourth century, the
forms of monasticism that became standard in the West
are based on Eastern models.
In Egypt the major fi gures in the third and early
fourth centuries are Anthony (c. 251–356) and Pachomius
(292–346). The Life of St. Anthony attributed to
the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius,
is less a biography of the saint than an anti-Arian work
intended to show the roots of “orthodox” monasticism.
The extant letters of Anthony reveal concerns different
from those of the later fourth-century Life. Anthony is
credited with the founding of eremitic or anchoritic solitary
monasticism, though there are clear signs in the Life
of Anthony itself that he was not the fi rst in this regard.
Pachomius is credited with having established coenobitic,
or communal, monasticism. He founded two
monasteries, according to the Life of St. Pachomius, in
Upper (southern) Egypt. At his death he had perhaps
3,000 monks under his supervision. Not to be neglected
is Shenoute (Shenouda) of Atripe (334–450 c.e.), who
was the abbot of the White Monastery at Sohag, also in
Upper Egypt. Shenoute is considered to be the greatest
of all writers in Coptic, the language of the Egyptian
church outside Greek-speaking Alexandria and the direct
descendant of the language of the pharaohs.
Monasticism in Syria also developed contemporaneously
to that in Egypt. Syriac Christianity from its
inception distinguished itself by its strict asceticism.
Baptized Christians were celibate. Syriac Christianity
also developed by the mid-fourth century the institution
of the Sons and Daughters of the Covenant, baptized
Christians who dedicated their lives to renunciation
and the service of the local bishop and church. These
Christians continued to live in close proximity to their
families of origin, not infrequently under the supervision
of their parents.
By the early fi fth century canons regulating the life
of the Sons and Daughters of the Covenant were issued
alongside canons regulating the lives of monks, indicating
that the former was not merely a stage of development
to coenobitic monasticism in Syria and Mesopotamia.
Also distinctive for Syriac monasticism were the
stylites, or solitaries who dwelled atop a pillar. The most
famous of these was Simeon the Stylite (388–459), a
monk in northern Syria (today Qa‘lat Sem‘an) whose
counsel on all matters was sought by Christians and
non-Christians alike on a variety of practical matters.
286 monasticism
The third early center of monasticism was Palestine,
where Hilarion (293–371), who was active in his native
Gaza, is portrayed as one of the outstanding early leaders.
His disciples, such as Epiphanius of Salamis (Cyprus),
established monasteries throughout Palestine. In
Anatolia (modern central Turkey) the earliest known
monastic foundations are those of Eustathius of Sebasteia
(300–377), whose infl uence on the Cappadocians
was particularly important. One of these, Basil the
Great, bishop of Caesarea, became a central fi gure in
the organization and spread of monasticism in the East
and West. He composed a monastic rule (c. 358–364)
that championed the coenobitic way of life over that of
the solitary one. In various forms the Rule of Basil had
an unparalleled infl uence on monastic life in the East
and West.
Among those who introduced monastic currents
from the East into the West were John Cassian and Benedict
of Nursia. There is evidence from writers such as
Gregory, bishop of Tours, and Jerome that some forms
of monasticism had developed in the West. However, the
introduction of Eastern monastic infl uence is due largely
to John Cassian, who after visiting Egypt founded two
monasteries in Marseilles around 415. Benedict of Nursia
(c. 480–540), infl uenced by the Rule of Basil, composed
a rule that became the classical expression of coenobitic
monastic organization in the West. Monasticism spread
early to the Celtic lands in Britain and Ireland; in the latter,
monasticism was fundamental to the shaping of the
church as well as of “secular” Christian life. The Rule
of Columbanus (543–615) exerted extensive infl uence
on the organization of monasticism in Ireland and Great
Britain as well as in Gaul.
See also Christianity, early; Desert Fathers and
Mothers; Judaism, early; martyrologies; mystery
cults; Oriental Orthodox Churches; persecutions of
the church; Syriac culture and church.
Further reading: Anathasius. The Life of Anthony, by Athanasius
of Alexandria. Translated by Tim Vivian and Apostolos
N. Athanassakis, with Rowan A. Greek. Kalamazoo, MI:
Cisterician Publications, 2003; Harmless, William. Desert
Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; Chitty,
Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study
of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian
Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966; Leyser, Conrad. Authority
and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2000.
Robert R. Phenix, Jr.
Moses
(c. 13th century b.c.e.) religious leader
If Abraham symbolizes the beginning of Israel through
a covenant between the God of the Bible and Abraham’s
descendants, then Moses symbolizes a second beginning
for Israel through another covenant, more comprehensive
and constitutional, between God and a coalition of
Hebrew tribes. Moses is quite different from the earlier
Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, and
Joseph: He is a unique and towering fi gure, singularly
set apart from the rest of Israel. Moses dominates the
writing at the beginning of the Jewish scriptures. He is
the leader of the “children of Israel” on their way to
freedom from Egyptian slavery; he is the redoubtable
consolidator of the motley band of Hebrew tribes; he is
the mediator of the aforementioned covenant; he is the
founder of biblical religion because of his knowledge of
monotheism and the unique name of the God.
Yet for all of these monumental achievements history
does not project an unequivocal image of him. Although
scholars no longer routinely deny his existence,
there is no evidence for him outside the Jewish Bible.
Even within the Bible the picture of Moses is confl icted
because perhaps it relies on complicated and ancient
sources. It is best to consider his story a legend with
Moses symbolizes a new beginning for Israel through another
covenant between God and a coalition of Hebrew tribes.
Moses 287
historical roots that must be carefully sifted through.
He is a diffi cult and ambiguous hero, according to the
written accounts. He was a solitary leader, set apart
from his very birth. His birth was strangely similar to
other ancient heroes (Cyrus II of Persia and Sargon of
Akkad): thrown into the river, miraculously rescued,
adopted, and raised by powerful rulers. His genealogy
shows his Hebrew origins and family, yet his very name
is derived from Egyptian religious sources. The fi rst
part of his life shows privilege and education.
The second part of his life continues to show his
alienation. His own fi rst efforts to free the Hebrew
slaves were rebuffed by his own people and prosecuted
by the Egyptian oppressors. He was forced to fl ee to
the land of Midian where he took a foreign wife and
family and adopted a foreign way of life. (Paradoxically,
Moses’ last public act in life would be to order the
extermination of this people.)
The third part of Moses’ life involves a summons by
God to return to the Hebrew people in Egypt. Much like
other biblical prophets, Moses at fi rst was reluctant to be
a spokesperson for God but fi nally accepted. He parleyed
many times with the Egyptian leader, called the pharaoh,
apparently his former foster father. Ten times Moses demanded
the release of the Hebrew slaves, and each time
Moses made good on his threats against the Egyptians in
the form of plagues and blights. Finally Moses won the release
of the “children of Israel,” and they celebrated with a
ritual meal called Passover at Moses’ command. Pharaoh
again reneged on his word and pursued Moses’ people.
When the water separating Egypt from the outside world
trapped them, Moses worked a miracle. The Hebrews escaped,
but the Egyptians drowned in the water.
Moses enters the fourth phase of his life as supreme
tribal chief for the throngs of refugees in the desert on
the other side of the water. He again showed his separateness
from the people by face-to-face dialogues with
the God of Israel. He was summoned to ascend Mount
Sinai to receive the laws of the covenant that would
hold Israel together, something like a religious constitution.
He had almost unlimited access to the presence of
God, and his people were afraid to draw near to him because
of his divine brilliance. Even in his defects he was
shown superior: His “meekness” in the face of criticism
was said to be greater than any other human being’s.
Moses failed to persuade his people to enter the
land of Canaan when they had the opportunity shortly
after the covenant was given at Mount Sinai, so the
people were forced to wander for 40 years in the desert
as a punishment. Moses continued as their chief until
they were ready to enter; but, as if to underline Moses’
uniqueness, God did not allow him to enter. Though
the bones of certain Patriarchs were carried in and the
new generation of Israel went across, Moses died looking
at the “promised land” from afar and was buried
in an unmarked grave. No wonder later generations of
religious writers would speculate that Moses had been
raptured and had a special place in the divine court.
Peter Machinist gives four reasons why Moses was
portrayed as an outsider. First, he played the role of an
ancient world hero, which meant he was like a demigod,
neither completely human nor divine. Second, he
symbolized the people of Israel themselves, a people that
were to be different from the other nations. Third, the
characterization of him in the Bible as an ambiguous person
allowed the reader to focus on the God of the Bible
and the covenant, not Moses. Finally, the Bible normally
portrays human leaders and authorities negatively so
that no cult of personality arises around any hero.
Around the turn of the Common Era, Moses was
described by Josephus and Philo as a divine man, perhaps
trying to persuade outsiders that he was as educated
as any Greek or Roman philosopher and as ingenious
as any founder of civilization. Qumran and the
Dead Sea Scrolls depicted him as the greatest prophet.
The New Testament revived his image, both as a model
of messianism for Jesus (Christ) of Nazareth and
as a foil representing the epitome of the Legalism representing
the Torah of the Old Testament. The later
rabbis, such as Yohanan ben Zakkai and others in the
Mishnah and the Talmud, found in Moses a model
teacher and founder for their faith: All rabbis after the
Common Era were disciples of Moses.
See also Christianity, early; Judaism, early;
Pseudepigrapha and the Apocrypha; Pharisees.
Further reading: Bright, John. A History of Israel. 2d ed.
Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972; Machinist, Peter.“The Man
Moses.” Biblical Review (v.16, 2000).
Mark F. Whitters
Mozi (Mo Tzu)
(c. 480–390 b.c.e.) Chinese philosopher
Mozi, which means “Master Mo,” began a Chinese school
of philosophy called Moism. His personal name was Di
(Ti). After studying under disciples of Confucius, he
broke away and founded his own school of philosophy.
During the era of the Hundred Schools of Philosophy
Moism was a signifi cant challenger to both Confu-
288 Mozi
cianism and Daoism (Taoism). Mozi and his disciples are
the authors of a book of 71 chapters (18 are missing), the
Mozi, that explain their views. They can be summarized
under three categories: universal love, utilitarianism, and
pacifi sm, or opposition to offensive warfare.
Mozi taught that heaven was an active force in human
lives and would punish humans for persisting in
evil. He therefore urged people to follow heaven by
practicing universal love. He said: “The way of universal
love is to regard the country of others as one’s own,
the family of others as one’s own, the persons of others
as one’s self. When feudal lords love one another there
will be no more war . . . When individuals love one another
there will be no more mutual injury . . . When all
the people of the world love one another, then the strong
will not overpower the weak, the many will not oppress
the few, the wealthy will not mock the poor . . . the cunning
will not deceive the simple.”
Moists also emphasized utilitarianism, the rejection of
all activities and expenses that do not contribute to the
welfare of the people. Moists took strong issue with Confucians
who taught the importance of all forms of ritual
and music and mocked Confucian insistence that children
formally mourn the death of their parents as a waste of
time and resources that could be better used in feeding
and caring for the living. They also condemned Confucians
as pompous elitists who would only take up government
positions that suited them. They moreover taught
that thought should be consistent with action, that leaders
obey the will of heaven and the people obey their leaders.
The third major point of Moism concerned warfare.
Mozi lived in an era when interstate wars were intensifying.
He denounced aggressive warfare as the greatest
crime against heaven but justifi ed the right of selfdefense.
Thus Moists became experts in defensive tactics
and made their help available to any state threatened
by aggression. The story goes that Mozi once walked
for 10 days and nights on a peace mission, binding his
sore feet but not resting. When he failed to persuade
the aggressor he would hurry to warn the potential victim.
Many folk tales survived of Robin Hood–like acts
of Moists in the cause of justice. Mozi and his followers
were idealists and militant do-gooders. They criticized
Confucians for being traditionalists and for their
graded approach to relationships and responsibilities.
In time Confucianism became the mainstream Chinese
philosophy, while Moism was abandoned.
See also Confucian Classics.
Further reading: Feng, Yu-lan. A History of Chinese Philosophy.
2 vols. Translated by Derk Bodde. London: George Allen
and Unwin, 1952; Hsiao, Kung-chuan. A History of Chinese
Political Thought, Vol. 1, From the Beginning to the Sixth
Century A.D. Trans. by Frederick W. Mote. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1979; Watson, Burton, trans. Mo
Tzu: Basic Writings. New York: Columbia University Press,
1963; Chan, Wing-tsit. A Source Book of Chinese Philosophy.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963.
Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur
Mycenae
Mycenae is an ancient city-state located in Greece on
the Peloponnese Peninsula, upon a hilltop on the lower
slopes of the Euboea Mountains, between two of its
peaks, on the road leading from the Argolic Gulf. This
site has been inhabited since around 4000 b.c.e. in the
Neolithic Period. Mycenae gained in power and infl uence
in the Late Bronze Age (1350–1200 b.c.e.). The
Mycenaean culture was originally based on warfare due
to the rugged geography, which made farming diffi cult
and herding a challenge. These warrior-chiefs would
eventually become conquerors and administrators,
bringing Greek knowledge to the Mediterranean.
The ancient city is built on an acropolis, surrounded
by massive “cyclopean” walls, with a palace at the
summit of the hill. Known as megarons, Mycenaean
palaces were great halls with a portico in front, similar
to the long houses of the Helladic period. These palaces
were more functional and austere than those of
Knossos or Akrotiri. As with most expansionist civilizations,
Mycenae broadened its military reach in search
of raw materials and goods to support its population.
The most famous of the Mycenaean raids is the war
against Troy in Asia Minor. Mycenaean warriors’ raiding
ships traveled to Crete and Egypt as well and were
even encouraged to practice piracy. Eventually raiding
shifted to trading, with evidence of Mycenae and Crete
trading goods as early as 1600 b.c.e. Mycenae transitioned
from a military center to a center for the redistribution
of goods over the many roads connecting
it to the surrounding coastal towns. During this time
the Mycenaeans gradually adopted Minoan technology
and artistic skills, while passing on the Linear B script
that was used for record keeping and eventually developed
into the Greek language.
The development of the Greek alphabet began in
Phoenicia, where a consonant-only writing system fi rst
appeared. The Mycenaeans took this writing and added
vowels to it, creating Linear B writing. This alphabet
Mycenae 289
had 24 letters, and its name came from combining the
names of its fi rst two letters, alpha and beta. Linear
B script was used to inscribe the stories passed on by
Homer, the trading records of Aegean cultures, and the
political and social structures they developed.
The Mycenaeans shared many of the religious beliefs
of the Minoans. Mycenae had a polytheistic religion and
was actively syncretistic, which means that they added
foreign gods to their pantheon of gods. However, many
early forms of the Hellenistic Greek pantheon of gods
and goddesses are found in the archaeological record.
Like other monarchial societies, Mycenae would bury
their kings in lavish tholos tombs, large chambers cut
into the side of a hill. Another unique religious practice
of the nobility is the burial mask, placed over the face.
Goldsmiths would fashion a likeness of the deceased’s
face and create a thin mask with the appearance of sleeping
eyes on it.
As trading with the rest of the eastern Mediterranean
increased, so did trades practiced by Mycenaean citizens.
In addition to warriors, craftsmen such as bronze workers,
potters, masons, and carpenters began to develop.
Also, bakers, messengers and heralds, and shepherds
are found in the artistic record left in frescoes and on
pottery. Mycenaean social classes began to develop and
take shape as well. At the top of the society were the
kings and other war leaders. Unlike the kings of Minoa,
Mycenaean kings accumulated wealth that they did not
share with commoners. He was also the warlord of a society
that was geared for war and prepared for invasion.
There were also lower members of society, consisting of
soldiers, peasants, artisans, serfs, and even slaves.
Mycenae became the central power in a loose confederation
of city-states throughout the Aegean Sea. Possible
other members of the city-states were Tiryns, Pylos,
Thebes, and Orchomenos. Mycenae was the strongest.
This political system is described in Homer’s Odyssey
and Iliad. Many scholars believe that Agamemnon may
have been the king of Mycenae during the events of
the Trojan War. A series of fi res from 1250 to 1100
b.c.e. brought down the political and military power of
Mycenae. The Dorians of Argos fi nally conquered the
city-state in 468 b.c.e., and its population was banished
from the ruins. The Greek writer Pausanias visited Mycenae
during the second century c.e. and reported that
it had been abandoned for some time. The political infl
uence of Mycenae over the Aegean region spread the
language, culture, and trade that would eventually develop
into Hellenistic Greece.
See also Greek city-states; Homeric epics; Linear A
and B; Phoenician colonies.
Further reading: Guy, John. Greek Life. New York: Scholastic
Books, 1998; Hellenic Ministry of Culture. “Mycenae.” Available
online. URL:http://www.culture.gr (September 2005); Ingpen,
Robert, and Philip Wilkinson. Encyclopedia of Mysterious
Places. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
George Derr
mystery cults
In the Greek and Roman worlds dissatisfaction with
civic and public religion often gave rise to experimentation
with foreign and secretive religions that promised
better benefi ts to its devotees. The reason for the
popularity is a matter of scholarly speculation. Perhaps
the population displacements, the exposure to foreign
cults, and the breakdown of the city-state (polis) made
people interested in change. The gods of the Romans
and the Greeks might have seemed out of touch with
the new realities of empire and the need for community.
The literature shows more attention to inward concepts
like self, intimacy, personal relationships, and privacy,
all terms that are not associated normally with Greek
and Roman public religion.
Public religion bound all the citizens together by sacrifi
ces that were openly conducted and enjoyed—that
is to say, at altars outside the specifi c temple. Usually
the sacrifi ce involved a feast day observed by everyone,
processions that publicized the event, and fi nally a banquet
where the sacrifi ce was consumed. All the citizens
were bound together by such public demonstrations,
and the bonding of everyone was more important than
particular emotional expressions.
Exposure to the Middle East may have presented
people with an alternative to the Greeks and Romans.
There is evidence in documents and inscriptions that
“hidden” teachings were passed on, perhaps from even
more isolated or foreign groups (such as Persians, Egyptians,
and Asians) in contact with the mediate cultures
of the Middle East. The Dead Sea Scrolls, for example,
use the notion to promote the priority of their teaching.
Certainly the New Testament (such as Col. 1:26), late
jewish bible books (such as Daniel), and rabbinic Judaism
(Moses’s “oral traditions”) also speak of knowledge
not known to mainstream religion. This idea also
fi nds expression in the Gnostic sects of later centuries.
Often a small group of people would meet privately,
and secret rituals would be conducted indoors away
from the public eye. The Greek word mysterios means a
secret that is revealed to insiders. Outsiders wrote about
290 mystery cults
the secrets, many of whom were Christian and often
hostile to or competing with the mystery cult. Members
were sworn to secrecy, and punishment was meted out
to anyone who disclosed the mystery. The small group
of the mystery cult emphasized their exclusive fraternity.
In order to belong, a process of initiation was set
up. The initiation often was available only to certain
qualifi ed individuals, instead of to every interested
person. The process of initiation might take days and
hardships like fasting or vigils. The idea was that the
initiated member would experience solidarity with everyone
else who endured the same experience. Through
the initiation the members would feel a sense of identity
and belonging in an otherwise foreign world.
Usually at the center of the mystery cult was a hero,
who was the focus of the rituals. The activities of the cult
served to reenact the life of the hero so that the members
could participate and derive the strengths and virtues
of the hero. Often initiation began the participation,
but there might be some ritual that ended or fulfi lled the
member’s process of initiation. Such things might involve
sacred meals, dramas, or liturgies. Many mystery cults
of Roman times promised their members not only intimate
community but union with the divine, liberation,
and reassurances about the afterlife. Orpheus, Demeter,
Dionysus, Achilles, Adonis, and others were the kind of
heroes celebrated by cults.
They all shared in suffering, misery, or ill fate. In
addition, they all were human (though mythical) and
shared in human nature’s limitations, including loneliness
and death. Thus, it was easier for the initiate to fi nd
solidarity with their hero than with the public religion’s
gods and goddesses. By the reenactment of the hero’s life,
the participant might be able to purge his or her own
anxieties and fears about life. As the mystery cults developed
in the Roman world, the idea of “rebirth” replaced
the idea of purgation of fear.
Some mysteries were considered deviant to public
welfare and so were persecuted—and here Christianity
might serve as an example. Public offi cials acknowledged
other mysteries as serving a constructive and cohesive
function for society. The Eleusinian Mysteries conducted
city-wide processions and inducted the likes of Marcus
Aurelius, Alcibiades, and Julian the Apostate, and
existed for more than 1,000 years before Theodosius I
destroyed its sanctuary (400 c.e.) and established Christianity
as the state religion. In general, the mystery cults
did not openly contradict the public religion.
Membership in the mysteries was limited, though
some permitted almost anyone regardless of rank and
sex to join (Eleusis). Some mysteries served soldiers
(Mithras), some women (Villa of Mysteries in Pompey),
some family members or slaves (here many
scholars would place Christianity). Since secrecy and
privacy surrounded the mystery religions, hard evidence
for their members and rituals is lacking. The
familiarity of the ancient world with the mystery cults
may explain why Christianity came to be so readily
accepted in the communities and societies outside of
Diaspora Judaism.
See also Christianity, early; Classical Period, Greek;
Greek mythology and pantheon; Moses; persecutions
of the church; Qumran; Roman pantheon and myth.
Further reading: Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1985; Burkert, Walter.
Ancient Mystery Cults. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1987.
Mark F. Whitters

The Expanding World 600 CE to 1450

Magna Carta
Rebellious barons required that King John of England
approve the Magna Carta (Latin for “the Great Charter”)
in 1215. Many consider the document to be the
foundation of English constitutional government and
individual liberties. By the end of the Middle Ages the
charter had become binding legal precedent in the English
law courts and a check on royal authority as it was
reaffi rmed, with modifi cations, by successive monarchs.
The Magna Carta is viewed as the fi rst public act of an
emerging nation-state and a revolutionary declaration of
not only the privileges of powerful lords, but also the judicial,
political, and commercial rights of Englishmen of
every rank. Moreover it is seen as a subsequent barrier to
absolutism in England, through recognition of a collective
national will and the concept of the rule of law, and
the forerunner to parliamentary supremacy and future
democratic achievements, including the Constitution of
the United States. Others view it as chiefl y an affi rmation
of existing feudal obligations forced on an administratively
able, yet unlucky king by self-interested barons.
The roots of the Magna Carta are traceable to the
reign of John’s father, the energetic and imaginative
Henry II, the fi rst ruler of the Plantagenet dynasty and
“the father of the common law.” As a part of his successful
centralization of power following years of civil
war and chaos, Henry II forged a national legal system
through uniformity of legal rules and roving royal courts
at the expense of manorial tribunals applying haphazard
local customs and dominated by individual lords. Ironically
this concentration of power by regularization of the
law would be the impetus for constraining Henry’s less
just son. Although deprived of their judicial power, the
baronage came to appreciate predictable legal standards,
impartial courts, and objective regulation of feudal obligations,
especially after John abused them.
These abuses included unprecedented taxation,
exorbitant feudal fi nes, misuse of royal authority over
warships and marriages, illegal confi scation of baronial
lands, and arbitrary judicial rulings. Discontent with
John’s rule, limited to the lords, the lower aristocracy
and many townspeople objected to his oppression, taxation,
and disregard of custom. Therefore barons sought
to preserve the law as a way to curb John and prevent the
consolidation of a tyrannical order. Thus what was once
a method of Henry II to extend royal authority became
the means of limiting it. The Magna Carta can be seen as
a conservative reaction to Henry’s misrule.
John is not totally to blame for the debacle of 1215,
for he came to the throne in 1199 without the popularity
of his charismatic brother and predecessor, the crusading
Richard I the Lionhearted and was encumbered with
an empty treasury, rampant infl ation, and the moniker
“John Lackland” because of the absence of a bequest
of territory from his father. Hindered by a reputation
for untrustworthiness, rumors that he had usurped the
throne by murdering his nephew, and his excommunication
in 1209 over disputes with the church, John saw
his loss of his possessions of Normandy and Anjou, the
heart of the Angevin empire, to the French King Philip II
Augustus become disastrous. With these military defeats
of 1203–04, a humiliated John turned to strengthening
his control of England and raising funds to fi nance a new
French campaign. When this campaign failed miserably
and he was forced to pay tribute to the French king, John
returned to England discredited, broke, and determined to
squeeze all the funds he could from his English domain.
Unlike earlier disputes between English kings and
their barons, discontent involved neither rival claimants
to the Crown nor jealous factions of the royal family.
This proved benefi cial to the barons, for instead of fi ghting
for a personage or power, they claimed to be defending
the entire realm and its traditions. At a conference
with the king in January 1215 at London, the barons
demanded that John reaffi rm his coronation oath and
institute reforms. But John, who had asked the pope to
side with him and was preparing for battle, demanded
that the barons make a new oath of allegiance. Instead
the barons mobilized for war and renounced their fealty
to the king at Northampton on May 5. Under the leadership
of Robert FitzWalter, the rebels were welcomed into
London by the populace on June 10 as John fl ed to his
stronghold of Windsor Castle. After much negotiation,
and the departure of disgruntled northern lords, John
consented to terms on June 15 in the meadow of Runnymede
near Windsor and his seal was affi xed to the document.
On June 19 the barons reaffi rmed their loyalty.
The Magna Carta, fi rst known as the “Articles of the
Barons,” contained 63 articles restricting royal power,
clarifying feudal responsibilities, and guaranteeing certain
rights, including those of the church. More particularly
it provided redress of grievances concerning land,
asserted the authority of the Great Council to block abusive
taxation, required that the courts stay fair and open,
asserted commercial rights benefi cial to middle-class
merchants, and required the restraint of royal offi cials. It
even protected widows from being compelled to marry.
It was remarkably visionary in that it recognized the
judicial due process rights of all Englishmen, not just the
aristocracy. Enforcement was provided through a council
of 25 barons with the legal authority to make war on
the king if necessary.
In keeping with his reputation John never intended
to abide by the document and was only buying time. He
soon prepared for renewed resistance and won a pronouncement
from the pope declaring the Magna Carta
void because he agreed to it under duress. But there was
no turning back. Although it failed as a peace treaty, the
Magna Carta swiftly commanded a reverence and majesty
of its own and became an indelible part of the English
constitution. John died in 1216, while once again
fl eeing his barons.
See also English common law; feudalism: Europe.
Further reading: Danziger, Danny, and John Gillingham.
1215: The Year of Magna Carta. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2003; Drew, K. F. Magna Carta. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2004; Lloyd, Alan. The Maligned Monarch:
A Life of King John of England. Garden City, NJ:
Doubleday, 1972; Lyon, Bruce. A Constitutional and Legal
History of Medieval England. New York: W.W. Norton and
Co., 1980; Warren, W. L. King John. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978.
Russell Fowler
Magyar invasions
The Magyars, Hungarian ancestors, began raiding into
western Europe in 862 against the outposts of the Frankish
kingdom in the Danube Valley. Under pressure from
the Pechenegs, they moved westward, eventually mov-
260 Magyar invasions
King John never intended to abide by the Magna Carta, which
became an indelible part of the English constitution.
ing into the Carpathian Basin in 895. Over the next 10
years, they gained control of the entire basin. From here
they continued to raid Europe over the next 55 years,
reaching as far west as the Pyrenees mountains. During
this time, their raids were successful enough that the Byzantine
Empire and several other kingdoms chose to pay
off the Magyars to gain relief from invasion. Their raids
were fi nally brought to an end in 955 at the Battle of
Augsburg when King Otto I of Germany defeated the
Magyars. The prehistory of the Magyars, because of lack
of written record, has been constructed from their language,
which is part of the Finno-Ugric language group.
Other languages in this group are Finnish and Estonian.
It is believed that the Magyars were originally part of
a group of people who lived in western Siberia. Today
most of the peoples in this group live in Russia, except
the Hungarians and those living in the Baltic region and
Finland. The name Magyar is taken to mean “speakers”
and is derived from the Finno-Ugrian mon, which means
“speak,” and er, which means “man.”
Sometime during the 10th century b.c.e., the Magyars
moved south out of western Siberia into the area
between the Ural River and the Aral Sea. They lived in
this area until sometime during the second century b.c.e.
when they moved westward into the Don Basin. During
the fi rst century c.e., the Magyars moved into the region
near the Azov Sea and the Black Sea and discovered the
use of iron and horses, most likely from their exposure
to their neighbors the Scythians and Sarmatians. Interaction
with these Iranian peoples can be seen through
the incorporation of Iranian words into their language.
They then came under the infl uence of Turkish peoples.
In the sixth century the Magyars joined the Onogurs, a
Turkish tribal alliance made up of 10 tribes. (Onogurs
means “10 peoples.”) The Onogurs, including the Magyars,
were then incorporated into the Turkish empire in
552, but then the Magyars gained their independence
again in the early part of the seventh century, only to be
incorporated into the Khazar Khanate in 630.
The Magyars gained their independence from the
Khazars in 830—at the time settled in the area between
the Don and Lower Danube Rivers. In 862 they launched
their fi rst raid against a western European kingdom and
raided the Frankish tribe. These raids continued over
the next several years, sometimes launched alone, and
other times while allied with other kingdoms, such as
the Turkish Kabars and the Moravians. In 894 they
allied with the Byzantines under Emperor Leo the Wise.
The Byzantines were involved in a war with the Bulgars
under Czar Simeon. The campaign that year was a success
for the Magyars and Byzantines. Unfortunately for
the Magyars, they set themselves up for their own defeat.
In 894 there was a massive movement of Turkish peoples
from the east that pushed the Pechenegs from their
homeland. Fleeing the Turkish invasion, the Pechenegs
moved west into Magyar land and signed an alliance
with the Bulgars against the Magyars. With the Magyar
armies away fi ghting the Bulgars, the Pechenegs had little
trouble overrunning the Magyars, who found themselves
caught between the hostile kingdoms of the Bulgars and
the Pechenegs. The Magyars had little choice but to fl ee
to the west to avoid their destruction.
Under the leadership of their chieftains Árpád and
Kurans, the Magyars moved across the Carpathian
Mountains into the middle Danube valley. Over the
next 10 years, the Magyars would secure control over
the valley, including destroying the Moravian kingdom
in 906. With the death of Kurans, caused by Bavarian
intrigue against the Magyars in 904, Árpád became the
sole ruler of the Magyars and their tradition of dual
rulers ended. Arpad died in 907 and was succeeded
by his son. The Magyars fi nished the conquest of their
new homeland and they continued raiding. Their raid
into Italy in 899 was at the invitation of the emperor
Arnulph of the eastern Frankish kingdom. Looking
for help against his rival King Berengar I of Lombardy
(who had a claim on the imperial crown), Arnulph sent
5,000 warriors on a raid into Italy. While the Magyars’
initial attack on Venice was repulsed, the Magyars were
able to defeat Berengar in battle at the river Brenta.
With the death of Emperor Arnulph in 899, the Magyars
saw their chance to raid the Frankish empire, which
was in turmoil because of the emperor’s death. In 900,
the Magyars launched their fi rst raid into Bavaria. The
raids into Bavaria continued over the next 33 years and
became more destructive. In 910 the Magyars defeated
the Germans at the Battle of Augsburg, where they led
them into an ambush by pretending to fl ee. The Magyars,
like most of the nomadic peoples from the steppes,
were excellent horsemen. They were also very profi cient
with bow and arrow. They would launch a sudden attack
and then pretend to fl ee from the enemy. They drew their
enemy into a trap, where they could encircle the enemy
and destroy them with arrows in close combat.
Another part of the success of the Magyars was due
to the weakness of the western kingdoms, who were
engaged in internal fi ghting (in Germany and Italy)
fending off other external threats (in France the Normans
and Saracens). Even the Byzantine Empire found
it more useful to submit to the Magyars, using them
as an ally against the Bulgars. A standard Magyar
strategy was repeatedly to raid an area to compel the
Magyar invasions 261
ruler to pay the Magyars to leave the area alone. In
924 the Magyars launched a raid into western Europe.
Raiding through Bavaria, Swabia, Alsace, Lorraine,
and Champagne on the way west, they then crossed the
Rhine and raided Franconia before returning home. At
this point King Henry the Fowler decided to buy nine
years of peace from the Magyars and used this time to
reorganize and strengthen the German cavalry better to
defend against the Magyars.
In 926 the Magyars launched a raid into northern
Italy. Moving through Ventia and Lombardy, they were
repulsed in their attempt to cross the Pennine Alps by
soldiers from Burgundy and Vienne. They crossed the
Maritime Alps and raided into Provence and Septimantia
in southern France all the way to the Pyrenees.
Returning through the Rhone Valley, they fought several
inconclusive battles with the troops from Burgundy
and Vienne before returning home. When the nine-year
truce King Henry had purchased in 924 expired and he
refused to renew it, the Magyars turned their attention
back to Germany in 933. The Magyars sent an army
into Germany to convince them to continue paying
tribute. Meeting the German army near Merseberg, the
Magyars suffered a defeat at the hands of the Germans,
resulting in the loss of German tribute money. Henry
and his son Otto I the Great fortifi ed eastern German
to protect it from the Magyars.
The Magyars turned to easier targets to the south
of the Carpathian Basin, raiding the Balkans region and
the Byzantine Empire. Launching a campaign into this
area in 934 and in 942 against the Byzantine Empire, the
Magyars began receiving regular tribute from the Byzantines
and others in the area. The Byzantine tribute would
continue until 970, when the Magyars allied themselves
with the prince of Kiev, who invaded the Balkans and
was defeated by the Byzantines. In 951 Prince Henry of
Bavaria defeated the Magyar troops in northern Italy and
then raided their province of Pannonia. A civil war in
Germany (953–955) between Otto I and his son Ludolf
allowed the Magyars to raid western Europe again. With
a force of between 50,000 and 100,000 warriors, the
Magyars raided through Franconia and Bavaria. Then
with help from Conrad, duke of Lorraine, who was
allied with Ludolf, the Magyars crossed the Rhine River
at Worms and moved into Lorraine, then moving into
northeastern France, Rheims, Chalons, and into Burgundy.
From there they moved into northern Italy, raided
Lombardy, and fi nally returned home.
In 955 with a force of 50,000, the Magyars moved
into Bavaria and laid siege to the city of Augsburg. The
Magyars believed that Ludolf and Conrad were still at
war with Otto. Instead, the rebels had made peace with
Otto and joined him in attacking the Magyars. With
a force of about 10,000 heavy cavalry, the Germans
moved to attack the Magyars, who lifted their siege
and prepared for battle with the Germans. The battle
was fought on August 10, 955. The Magyars were initially
successful and captured the German camp. Otto
repulsed the Magyar attack and then had his forces
attack and drive the Magyars from the fi eld with heavy
losses, including the capture of the Magyar camp. During
the fi nal attack Conrad was killed. At the Battle of
Augsburg (also known as the Battle of Lechfeld), the
Magyar raids into western Europe fi nally ended. With
their defeat at the hands of the Byzantines in 970, the
time was ripe for the Magyars to cease their raids. The
Magyars turned to farming and became infl uenced by
the Roman Catholic Church.
See also Bulgarian Empire; Byzantine Empire: political
history; Ottoman Empire: 1299–1453.
Further reading: Dupuy, R. Ernest, and Trevor N. Dupuy. The
Harper Encyclopedia of Military History, From 3500 b.c.
to the Present. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993;
Heather, Peter. The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History
of Rome and the Barbarians. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006; Kontler, Laszlo. A History of Hungary: Millennium
in Central Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2002; Kosary, Dominic G. A History of Hungary. Cleveland,
OH: The Benjamin Franklin Bibliophile Society, 1941; Lendvai,
Paul. The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in
Defeat. Trans. by Ann Major. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2003; Molnar, Miklos. A Concise History of
Hungary. Trans. by Anna Magyar. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001; Sugar, Peter F., Peter Hanak, and Tibor
Frank, eds. A History of Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990.
Dallace W. Unger, Jr.
Mahmud of Ghazni
(d. 1030) sultan and conqueror
Mahmud of Ghazni, founder of the Ghaznavid Empire,
was the son of Sebuk-Tigin, a Turkic slave soldier who
rose through military service to lead a small client state
of the Abbasid dynasty in Afghanistan. Mahmud assumed
control of this state in 997 after defeating a challenge
from his brother Ismail.
Although the state he inherited was small, Mahmud
moved aggressively to expand his landholdings, launch-
262 Mahmud of Ghazni
ing military expeditions into eastern Iran. Ghaznavid
forces conquered Khurasan in 999, which led to the collapse
of the Samanid dynasty, and in 1009, the Iranian
province of Sijistan also fell. The Ghaznavids defeated
their only rivals to power in the eastern Islamic lands, the
Khwarazmians, in 1017. Mahmud pushed as far west as
the Iranian province of Rayy—ruled by the Buyid confederation
based in Baghdad—and conquered it in 1029.
Despite his substantial conquests in eastern and
central Iran, Mahmud’s greatest legacy was the expansion
of Muslim power eastward into South Asia. Beginning
in 1001 Ghaznavid armies campaigned in India,
occasionally returning to Iran to beat back incursions
by nomadic Turkic tribes from Central Asia. Mahmud
went as far south in India as the state of Gujarat, though
he was only able to establish fi rm control over the northern
region of Punjab. Although he used Hindu Indian
auxiliary troops, Mahmud also ordered or allowed the
destruction of Hindu temples. However as a fundamentalist
Sunni Muslim, he also ordered the persecution of
Shi’i Muslims, both in the Indus Valley and in Rayy,
which had been ruled by the Shi’i Buyids. Mahmud’s
military successes were balanced out by his patronage
of certain Muslim scholars and philosophers, including
the famous historian and anthropologist Abu Raihan
al-Biruni, who wrote a lengthy and detailed study of the
Indian subcontinent.
At its height, during the reign of Mahmud, the
Ghaznavid Empire stretched from the Caspian Sea in the
west to the Punjab and northern India. After Mahmud’s
death in 1030, his son Masud assumed the throne. However
the empire’s centralized structure began to disintegrate,
as Masud concentrated on further expanding
Ghaznavid authority in India while failing to recognize
the threat posed by the Seljuk dynasty, which began
to move into Ghaznavid lands in Iran. Masud tried to
stop the Seljuk advance but was defeated in 1040 at
the Battle of Dandanqan and was overthrown the next
year. The Ghaznavids remained in power until 1187,
though their landholdings were steadily reduced until
they included only the city of Ghazna in Afghanistan
and small sections of that region.
See also Isma’ilis; Shi’ism.
Further reading: Bosworth, Clifford Edmund. The Ghaznavids:
Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran,
994–1040. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963;
Bosworth, Clifford Edmund. The Medieval History of Iran,
Afghanistan, and Central Asia. London: Variorum Reprints,
1977; Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam, Volume
2: The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1974; Nazim, Muhammad. The
Life and Times of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1931; Peters, F. E. Allah’s Commonwealth:
A History of Islam in the Near East 600–1100
a.d. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.
Christopher Anzalone
Maimonides
(1135–1204) philosopher and rabbi
Maimonides, or Moses ben Maimon, was born into
a scholarly Jewish family in Córdoba, when southern
Spain or Andalusia was ruled by Islamic dynasties.
Along with Averroës he became the most well-known
intellectual from Muslim Spain. His family fl ed Spain
for Fez, Morocco, when a repressive Berber Muslim
dynasty came to power in Spain. To escape religious
persecution the family claimed to be Muslims but ultimately
moved from Morocco to Palestine and Egypt,
where they fi nally settled in Cairo.
Maimonides was a well-known rabbi as well as a
doctor and scholar. He served as the physician to the
son and vizier of Saladin (Salah ad din, Yusuf) and
became head of the large Jewish community in Cairo.
Maimonides was a prolifi c writer on many subjects. He
wrote 10 medical works in Arabic giving advice on diet,
sexual intercourse, and healthy lifestyles. Written in neo-
Hebrew, one of his greatest works, Mishna Torah (Repetition
of the law), detailed all the laws of the Torah
and other Jewish texts. His Guide to the Perplexed
(1190) was written in Arabic with Hebrew characters
but was subsequently translated into Hebrew and Latin.
The guide was one of Maimonides’s most controversial
works, causing widespread and acrimonious debate
over the interrelationships of religion and rationality in
Christian, Jewish, and Islamic communities.
Maimonides attempted to reconcile devout religious
practices and faith with rational, scientifi c tenets. He
posited that the future coming of a messiah was one of
the 13 tenets of Jewish belief and believed in the divine
word but argued that rationality should be applied to
legal precepts and the conduct of everyday life. He also
rejected Ptolemaic astronomy that argued that the Sun
and stars revolved around Earth. He argued that humans
should not be forced to choose between religion and
reason and, in his prolifi c writings, discussed issues of
immortality, creation of the universe and humankind,
and free will. He died in Cairo and was buried in Tiberias,
Palestine.
Maimonides 263
See also Islam: literature and music in the golden
age; Islam: science and technology in the golden
age.
Further reading: Nuland, Sherwin B. Maimonides. New
York: Schocken Books, 2005; Arbel, Ilil. Maimonides: A
Spiritual Legacy. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co.,
2001; Maimonides, Moses. Ethical Writings of Maimonides.
Dover, DE: Dover Publishing, 1983.
Janice J. Terry
Majapahit kingdom
After the decline of the Srivijayas, who were based in
Palembang, Sumatra, the Singahsari dynasty tried to assert
their authority in the Malay Archipelago. Unfortunately
for them the powerful Mongol warrior Kubilai
Khan interfered with their efforts by trying to subjugate
them. He initially sent peaceful missions to make the Singahsari
ruler pay tribute to him. When the last Singahsari
ruler, Kertanagara, refused, Kubilai Khan sent a military
force to Java to subdue him forcefully. By the time the
Mongols reached Java, the Singahsari ruler Kertanagara
had been assassinated by the forces of his brother-in-law,
Jayakatwang of Kediri, who coveted the throne. In 1292
Nararya Sanggrama Wijaya, later known as Kertarjasa
Jayawardhana, the son-in-law of Kertanegara, went on
to establish his own line of dynasty, known as the Majapahit
dynasty. He managed to do so through an early
alliance with the Mongols, who had come to attack him.
After defeating his uncle, Kertajasa managed to expel the
Mongols in 1293.
The Hindu-Javanese Majapahit dynasty reigned from
about 1293 to 1500 from eastern Java. The name Majapahit
is derived from a bitter fruit. Their empire included
Borneo, Sumatra, Bali, and the southern part of the
Malay Peninsula. It stretched from Irian Jaya in the east
to Langkasuka in Malaya in the west. Either a king or a
queen was able to rule. The royal family consisted of the
king’s parents, sisters, their husbands, aunts, and uncles,
and their respective spouses shared in the administration
of the kingdom. They formed the Royal Advisory council,
and the Royal Privy councils were consulted by the
king before he made any decision.
The Majapahit kingdom achieved great prosperity
especially in the 14th century. A key fi gure in the Majapahit
era is Gadjah Mada, who acted as regent and prime
minister from 1331 to 1364. Queen Tribuana Tunggadewi,
regent for her son Hayam Wuruk, appointed him
prime minister. Gadjah Mada was a skilful politician
and was responsible for the glorious period of Majapahit
rule. His famous oath, known as Sumpah Palapa,
was recorded in the Pararaton or the Book of Kings.
He swore to conquer the rest of the Malay Archipelago
before indulging in the pleasures of life. In fact,
he named specifi c locations in his oath, such as Bali,
Tumasik (present-day Singapore), Pahang, and Palembang.
He succeeded in spreading Majapahit rule in the
Malay Archipelago, beyond present-day Indonesia. His
conquests even extended to the Muslim city-state of
Palembang Sumatra, effectively ending Srivijaya rule.
True to his word, he headed a military expedition that
conquered Bali in 1343.
In 1350 Queen Tribuana Tunggadewi stepped down
and Gadjah Mada served her son, Hayam Wuruk, who
ruled until 1389. The young king, who was only 16 years
old, gave free rein to his prime minister. Thus Gadjah
Mada was free to conquer as many places in the archipelago
as he wanted. During this time he succeeded in
gaining the islands of the Indonesian Archipelago under
Majapahit rule. During the early 15th century Majapahit
rule declined with the rise of the Malacca Sultanate,
who were becoming increasingly powerful. Toward the
end of their rule, many members of Majapahit aristocracy
moved to Bali, where they lived in isolation till the
island was colonized.
See also Srivijaya kingdom.
Further reading: Phalgunadi, Gusti Putu, trans. The Pararaton:
a Study of the Southeast Asian Chronicle. New Delhi: Sundeep
Prakashan, 1996; Shaffer, Lynda Norene. Maritime Southeast
Asia to 1500. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996; Slametmuljana,
The Structure of the National Government of Majapahit.
Jakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1966; Slametmuljana. A Story of Majapahit.
Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1976.
Nurfadzilah Yahaya
medieval Europe: educational system
One of the most important intellectual developments
in western Europe during the High Middle Ages was
the growth of urban schools and universities in which
fee paying students were able to acquire a basic education
in the liberal arts. The system of education known
as Scholasticism resulted from the rigorous application
of the liberal arts and their principles to the study of
God and the traditional teachings of the church. These
educational transitions were characteristic of the period
264 Majapahit kingdom
that Charles Homer Haskins and subsequent scholars
have dubbed “the renaissance of the 12th century,”
a time of intense cultural fl ourishing spanning from
around 1050 to 1215 and made possible by the rapid
growth of cities and the emergence of a cash economy.
Since the time of Charlemagne two types of schools
had existed in western Europe: monastic and cathedral.
Monastic schools trained oblates (that is, children given
to the monastery and the monastic life by their parents)
in the scriptural, theological, and spiritual traditions
of the church. Monastic education emphasized acceptance
and assimilation of what was known about God
rather than investigation of the unknown. Cathedral
schools, which were under the control of the local bishop,
trained young men for careers in ecclesiastical or
secular administration by providing a basic education
in reading, writing, rhetoric, and documentation. Here
again the curriculum was oriented toward the practical
rather than the speculative.
In the fi rst half of the 12th century a new type of
school began to appear in burgeoning cities like Paris.
These urban schools, which were open to all fee-paying
students, served a clientele that did not necessarily have
aspirations to serve the church or government in the traditional
ways. The interpretation of sacred Scripture and
the study of God remained, however, at the center of the
curriculum of these new schools. Teachers at the urban
schools certifi ed to give authoritative interpretations of
revelation were offi cially designated masters. Masters
such as Anselm of Laon, Bernard of Chartres, and Hugh
of St. Victor sought to use the liberal arts as tools in the
interpretation of revelation and to teach their pupils to
do the same. Thus the urban-school student would fi rst
read in the seven liberal arts before moving on to a higher
discipline such as theology or law. In the 13th century
the medieval university would come to be defi ned by a
school of theology, a school of law, and a school of medicine
beyond the liberal arts curriculum.
The seven liberal arts were divided into the trivium,
the three arts proper, and the quadrivium, the four sciences.
The trivium consisted of grammar, rhetoric, and
dialectic or logic. The quadrivium consisted of arithmetic,
astronomy, geometry, and music. About a millennium
and a half before the birth of the medieval university,
Aristotle maintained not only that all the arts
and sciences are subservient to “fi rst philosophy” (that
is, the science of the end or the good), but also that
they constitute the parts of philosophy as preparation
for that highest wisdom that determines the end of all
things and orders them accordingly. Thus subsequent
pagan thinkers such as Cicero and Seneca insisted on
the necessity of a liberal arts education for the formation
and perfection of humankind. Ancient Christian
thinkers such as Augustine of Hippo and Jerome, also
having been trained in the liberal arts, similarly insisted
on the use of the arts in the interpretation of Scripture.
The tiered curriculum of the medieval urban schools and
universities owes much to Augustine’s understanding of
the liberal arts as certain ordered steps intended to lead
the student from corporeal to incorporeal things.
Hugh of St. Victor (c. 1098–1141), an early Scholastic
theologian and master at the urban school of St.
Victor in Paris, was known as the “Second Augustine,”
even during his lifetime, because he used Augustine’s
basic idea to develop a holistic well-ordered philosophy
according to which the student is led from the timebound
words of humans to the eternal Word of God.
According to Hugh, it is the ordered study of the liberal
arts that ultimately leads the reader to the eternal
Word or wisdom, the second person of the Trinity, who
reorders and perfects the human student after the fall
into the disorder of sin. In the urban schools the liberal
arts were constitutive of philosophy, which Hugh
and other medieval masters understood primarily as the
love of that wisdom in whose image human beings are
created and in whose image they are restored.
Liberal arts study intends to restore within fallen
students the divine image, in Hugh’s view. The four
major branches of philosophy into which the Victorine
Master divides the arts arose as antidotes to humankind’s
sickness because of the fall of Adam. First the
medieval Europe: educational system 265
Monastic schools trained oblates in the scriptural, theological, and
spiritual traditions of the church.
theoretical arts (theology, physics, and mathematics,
the last of which includes the quadrivium) seek to heal
ignorance and restore humans to the knowledge of truth.
Second the practical arts (ethics or individual morals,
economics or domestic morals, and political science or
public morals) seek to heal concupiscence and restore
humans to the love of virtue. Third the mechanical arts
(weaving, armament construction, commerce, agriculture,
hunting, medicine, and theatrics) seek to alleviate
bodily weakness (an antidote to mortality). Finally the
logical arts (the trivium), which arose last of all, seek
to provide a form of polished discourse on which the
other branches of knowledge rely. The logical arts are
therefore to be studied fi rst, after which the student is
to learn, in order, the practical, the theoretical, and the
mechanical arts.
The second major phase of Hugh’s pedagogical
program is the study of sacred Scripture, for which the
pupil is to use the recently acquired tools of grammar,
dialectic, and the other arts. The 12th-century application
of grammar and dialectic to the study of God
was central to theology’s becoming a science or academic
discipline. The most important theological and
ecclesiastical works of the 12th century resulted from
the rigorous application of the principles of dialectic
to the enormous and disparate body of statements of
the fathers and councils of the church on innumerable
questions of faith and doctrine: for example, Peter
Abelard’s Yes and No, the Ordinary Gloss, Peter Lombard’s
Four Books of Sentences, and Gratian’s Concordance
of Discordant Canons (Decretum). Whereas
various “questions” about God and God talk fi rst
developed out of the biblical witness and closely followed
its narrative structure (as in Hugh of St. Victor’s
On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith), in the following
centuries theological refl ection would take the
standard form of the “questions” themselves systematically
arranged in summae (as in the Summa theologiae
of Thomas Aquinas).
See also Irish monastic scholarship, golden age of;
universities, European.
Further reading: Moore, R. I. The First European Revolution
c. 970–1215. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000; Swanson, R. N. The
Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1999; Colish, Marcia. Studies in Scholasticism.
Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Variorum, 2006; Haskins, Charles
Homer. The Rise of Universities. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 2002.
Franklin T. Harkins
medieval Europe:
sciences and medicine
The Latin West in the early medieval period was too
poor and rural to produce signifi cant theoretical science
and medicine. The near-total loss of the scientifi c
language of antiquity, Greek, also hindered Western
science. What remained were the Bible and the voluminous
but unsystematic and uncreative Latin works of
Roman and a few early medieval compilers, such as the
Elder Pliny’s Natural History or the encyclopedic writings
of Isidore of Seville.
Medieval science built on the tradition of Greek natural
philosophy and medicine. Ptolemy in astronomy (and
astrology); Galen in medicine; Euclid, Archimedes, and
Apollonius in mathematics; and Aristotle (along with
works falsely ascribed to him) in logic and natural philosophy
composed a body of ancient authority that underlay
medieval science. They were joined by numerous writers
from the Islamic world, particularly infl uential in the fi eld
of medicine, but important in many other areas as well.
Leaders among these included the philosopher-physicians
Ibn Sina (980–1037), known in the Latin West as Avicenna;
Ibn Rushd (1128–98), known as Averroës or “the
Commentator” (on Aristotle); and Moses Maimonides
(1138–1204). Physicians and philosophers from the
Islamic world, who included Jews like Maimonides and
Christians as well as Muslims, had further developed and
systematized Greek thought as well as innovating.
The revival of Western science can be traced to the
growing prosperity of the West in the 11th century,
which stimulated interest at fi rst in the Roman writings,
and then in an infl ux of translations from the Arabic,
both of originally Greek texts translated into Arabic
and of originally Arabic ones, beginning late in the 11th
century. The principal avenue for scientifi c translation
was Spain, where many Muslim areas with developed
scientifi c traditions were coming under Christian rule.
(There were also translations directly from the Greek
being made in the Sicilian kingdom, an area that had
never lost its connections to Greek culture.) The most
important translator of the 12th century was Gerard of
Cremona (1114–87), an Italian who worked in Toledo,
Spain. Gerard’s translations of Arabic versions of Greek
works included Ptolemy’s Almagest, Euclid’s Geometry,
and Archimedes’ Measurement of the Circle. Arab works
he translated included Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine
and the commentary on Galen by Haly Radoan, both
of which became standard medical texts. The 12th and
13th century discovery of these Greek and Arab writers
266 medieval Europe: sciences and medicine
had a radical impact on European culture, making the
physical universe an object of scholarly interest.
By the late 12th and 13th centuries, the vehicle for
disseminating science and medical theory in Latin Christendom
was the university, particularly the undergraduate
arts faculty and the medical faculty. The intellectuals
who worked in these universities are referred to as
Scholastics. Scholastics did not view qualitative science
as a discipline divorced from philosophy but as a subdiscipline
within philosophy, called natural philosophy.
Natural philosophy was taught in universities principally
by commenting on Aristotle’s genuine and spurious
scientifi c works along with previous commentaries
and other texts. Among the most important centers for
the study of nature was the University of Paris. Leading
Scholastic philosophers with an interest in natural philosophy
included the 12th century William of Conches
and Albertus Magnus (1200–80). More mathematical
aspects of science, such as astronomy and optics, were
taught outside the natural philosophy curriculum.
Scholastic natural philosophers faced the challenge
of reconciling Aristotle’s thought, produced in the culture
of pagan Greece, with Christianity. The most common
approach was to subordinate Aristotle to Christian
doctrine, denying such Aristotelian claims as the
eternal existence of the world as unbiblical. A very different
strategy based itself on the philosophical works
of Averroës. By asserting the autonomy of philosophy,
including natural philosophy, from Christian theology,
the Latin Averroists such as Siger of Brabant (c. 1240–c.
1284) at the University of Paris attracted a great deal of
suspicion from church authorities. The bishop of Paris,
Etienne Tempier, reacted to the perceived threat of the
Averroists by condemning many Aristotelian ideas as
irreligious in 1277. The Aristotelian denial of the possibility
of multiple worlds, for example, was thought to
be a heretical limitation on God’s power.
The scope of Tempier’s condemnation reached to the
works of many philosophers trying to synthesize Aristotle
with Christianity, such as the Paris professor Thomas
Aquinas (c. 1224–74). The effect of this condemnation
was limited; it did not, nor was it intended to, stop
the study of nature. It did encourage a greater focus on
God’s omnipotence, with a greater willingness to discuss
hypothetical, non-Aristotelian cosmologies. These
discussions were not assertions of physical reality but
remained speculative. When the Parisian master Nicolas
Oresme (c. 1320–82), for example, discussed the anti-
Aristotelian idea that the Earth rotated, his infl uential
arguments were directed at demonstrating that it was
possible, not that it was actually happening.
Somewhat apart from the mainstream of Scholastic
science was experimental work. Its most notable practitioner
in the Middle Ages was the Franciscan friar
Roger Bacon (c. 1219–c. 1292), whose optical and
alchemical experiments won him a bad reputation as
a magician. Another experimentalist was the French
nobleman Pierre de Maricort, who experimented on
magnets. The most active experimental program was
probably that carried out by alchemists, particularly
in distillation. As the university scientists, they drew
on Greek and Arabic science, but their discipline was
passed on outside the academy and aroused some suspicion
from church authorities.
One of the most intriguing developments in late medieval
science was the increasing quantifi cation of Aristotelian
physics. This was initially the work of a group of
scholars at Oxford University, many of them associated
with Merton College, the so-called Calculatores. Leaders
in this early effort to create a mathematical physics were
Thomas Bradwardine (c. 1300–49) Richard Swineshead
(d. 1365), and William Heytesbury (d. c. 1372). The project
was also advanced by avant-garde masters at the 14th
century University of Paris, notably Oresme, Jean Buridan
(1300–58) and Albert of Saxony (c. 1316–90). Their
brilliant work continued to be expressed in the form of
commentaries on Aristotle’s works, modifying the Aristotelian
system rather than overthrowing it. Their most
notable conceptual innovation was “impetus,” a quality
of a moving body that kept it in motion. This differed
from the Aristotelian theory that a body’s motion was
maintained by the medium in which it moved.
Although professional healing continued in early
medieval Europe, it was not based on mastery of textual
sources. The transmission of the Greek and Arab
tradition in medicine to Latin Europe began in the late
11th century, with a group of translations from the
Arabic associated with the Benedictine monastery of
Monte Cassino. These translations, made by an otherwise
unknown monk named Constantine the African,
included works of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates,
Galen, and Arab physicians. The new body of
texts was instrumental in the re-creation of medicine as
a learned profession, as well as ensuring that the Western
medicine would follow Arabic medicine into adopting
a basically Galenic framework. The fi rst recorded
institution devoted to medical education in the Latin
West was a medical school at Salerno in southern Italy,
which developed a body of texts that would form a basis
for medical learning throughout the medieval period.
With the development of the university system in
the 12th century, medicine was taught alongside law
medieval Europe: sciences and medicine 267
and theology as one of the three higher disciplines. As
they did in science, universities benefi ted in medicine
from the fl ood of Spanish Arabic translations of the
mid-12th century, the most infl uential work being Avicenna’s
Canon, a massive systematization of Galenic
medicine that eventually served in Latin translation as
a medical textbook. A third wave of medical translations
in the 13th century was led by the royal physician
Arnauld of Villanova and included a higher proportion
of translations directly from the Greek. Latin Christians
also began to write medical treatises, commentaries,
and compendia of their own, although nothing
to challenge the intellectual authority of Greek and
Arabic works.
In addition to Paris and Montpellier in southern
France, the most important universities for medicine
were mostly Italian, particularly Bologna and Padua.
The bachelor of medicine degree took about seven years,
the M.D. about 10. As the medical curriculum developed,
textual study began to be supplemented with other
forms of medical education. Some universities required
medical students to get practical experience working
with a physician, and beginning in the 14th century some
Mediterranean universities began to require attendance
at dissections. The Galenic medicine taught in the universities
was based on a theory of the four “humors” of the
human body: yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood.
A healthy body was one where the humors balanced.
This led to the popularity of bloodletting as a therapy,
as it allegedly relieved the distress caused by an excess of
blood. Although Galen differed from Aristotle on some
biological questions, Galenic medicine was mostly compatible
with Aristotelian natural philosophy, and physicians
were educated in natural philosophy as well as
medicine proper. It was also considered important for a
physician to know astrology to choose the best times to
perform medical procedures.
Largely outside the university tradition were Jewish
physicians, some of whom served as personal physicians
for the most powerful Christians in Europe. Also
outside the university tradition were women writers
on medicine such as the nun Hildegard of Bingen
(1098–1179). Her Book of Simple Medicines includes
information on the curative power of herbs and jewels.
There was also a mysterious woman medical writer at
Salerno named Trotula, but she had no successors on
university faculties.
One set of rivals to the physicians, as educated
medical professionals, were the surgeons, who in addition
to practicing what is now called surgery were
also active in the treatment of skin disease. (Italy was
exceptional in that physicians were trained as surgeons
as well.) Surgery was not taught at the university, but
through apprenticeship, which eventually led to the formation
of a guild system. Physicians, a tiny minority
among Europe’s medical practitioners, distinguished
themselves from surgeons (and other healers like midwives
and herbalists) through a focus on why the body
became sick, rather than merely on the cure. Physicians
often emphasized maintaining health through proper
diet and the observance of astrological moments rather
than healing the sick.
By the late Middle Ages a network of medical institutions
outside university medical faculties had begun
to develop. Surgeons organized themselves into guilds
such as Paris’s College of Saint Cosme, founded in
1210. Governments established systems of licensing
practitioners, although unlicensed practitioners continued
to fl ourish. Cities, beginning in Italy, hired public
physicians. Hospitals, originally places for the sick to
die or recover, started hiring physicians as attendants.
See also medieval Europe: educational system;
Scholasticism; universities, European.
Further reading: Crombie, A. C. Science in the Middle Ages,
5th to 13th Centuries. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969;
Grant, Edward. Planets, Stars and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos,
1200–1687. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994; Garcia-Ballester, Luis. Galen and Galenism: Theory
and Medical Practice from Antiquity to the European Renaissance.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002; Maier, Anneliese. On
the Threshold of Exact Science: Selected Writings of Anneliese
Maier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982; Porter, Roy.
The Greatest Benefi t to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity.
New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.
William E. Burns
Mehmed I
(1389?–1421) Ottoman ruler
Mehmed I came to the Ottoman Turkish throne at perhaps
the most desperate time in the dynasty’s history.
Up until the reign of his father, Bayezid I, the Ottoman
rise to power had been meteoric. His grandfather, Sultan
Murad I, had defeated the Serbian King Lazar at Kosovo
in 1389, opening up the Balkans to Ottoman conquest.
Yet, at the moment of victory, one of Lazar’s lieutenants,
Miloš Obilic´, as Caroline Finkel relates in her
Osman’s Dream: The History of The Ottoman Empire,
268 Mehmed I
“approached him, pretending that he was defecting to
the Ottoman. Instead he stabbed the sultan dead. Lazar
was soon captured and decapitated in Murad’s tent.”
After the death of Murad on the battlefi eld of
Kosovo, where 600 years later Serb leader Slobodan
Miloševic´ would ignite the spirit of Serb nationalism
and begin a new series of Balkan wars, Murad’s son
Bayezid I became sultan.
Bayezid was an energetic warrior, determined to
build on the patrimony of his father, Murad. He earned
the nickname of Yilderim, “Lightning,” for the speed and
decisiveness of his movements. In the First World War
when Turkey was an ally of imperial Germany, an elite
division trained by General Liman von Sanders and other
German advisers would become known as the “Yilderim
Division.” In 1396 armies from Christian Europe gathered
for a crusade to save Constantinople, the capital of
the Byzantine, or Eastern Roman, Empire, from its growing
encirclement by the Ottomans. However at Nicopolis,
the impetuosity of the French knights, which had doomed
them in 1346 and 1356 fi ghting the English at Crécy
and Poitiers, and would also lead to their defeat by the
English archers again at Agincourt in 1415, gave Bayezid
an opening in which he was able to destroy the entire
Christian army. As Lord Kinross wrote in The Ottoman
Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire, “the
fi nest fl ower of European chivalry lay dead on the fi eld of
Nicopolis or captive in the hands of the Turks.”
SIEGE OF CONSTANTINOPLE
Two years earlier in 1494 Bayezid had already begun
his siege of Constantinople, also called Byzantium. But
its ancient walls, combined with some help brought to
Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus by the French Marshal
Jean Boucicaut, who had survived the slaughter
at Nicopolis, enabled Constantinople to withstand
Bayezid’s siege. A fi nal assault by some 10,000 Ottomans,
most likely from the elite Janissary, or yeni cheri,
corps, ended in defeat.
However Bayezid was determined to try another
assault on the city when an even greater threat loomed
from the east. For several years Bayezid had been
involved in a cold war with the Turkish warlord Timurlane
(Tamerlane), or Timur the Lame, who was carving
out with his sword a vast empire in Central Asia.
Finally taunting words between the two warrior sultans
led to open warfare in 1399, when an expedition led
by Bayezid’s son Suleiman captured one of Timurlane’s
vassals, Kara Yussuf, and took him prisoner.
Timurlane immediately struck back and took the
Ottoman-ruled town of Sivas, burying alive thousands of
its citizens. A sudden paralysis seized Bayezid, who did
nothing in return. Emboldened by his rival’s lack of action,
in 1402 Timurlane invaded the heartland of the growing
Ottoman Empire, Anatolia. There on July 28, 1402, the
two great Eastern armies met at Ankara, with Bayezid’s
85,000 troops, according to Finkel, outnumbered by the
140,000 of Timurlane. It appears that Bayezid felt his
Janissaries could win the day for him, and he positioned
himself at their head in the center of the Ottoman army.
Suleiman commanded the left wing, as Kinross relates,
while the Serbian ruler Stephen Lazarevitch led the right.
Mehmed, Bayezid’s favorite son, commanded the rear. By
virtue of his position of command, the year of Mehmed’s
birth seems in question.
If he was born in 1389, it is unlikely that Bayezid
would have entrusted such a command to a prince who
was only 13 years old at the time. The battle, which
Bayezid had all hopes of winning, turned into a disastrous
defeat for the Ottomans. Some of the Anatolian princes,
newly conquered by the Ottomans, simply failed to fi ght
for him. Timurlane took Bayezid alive. Although some
stories claimed Timurlane exhibited the captured sultan
in a cage, these seem fanciful by modern accounts. Justin
Marozzi in his Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conquerer
of the World, quotes Timurlane’s chronicler Sharaf addin
Ali Yazdi that Timurlane actually had intended to
restore Bayezid to his throne. Wrote Yazdi, Timurlane
“had resolved . . . to raise the dejected spirit of Bayazid by
Mehmed I 269
The Fatih Camii (mosque) of Sultan Mehmed in Constantinople:
Mehmed was known as al-Fatih, or the conqueror.
reestablishing him on the throne with greater power and
magnifi cence than he had enjoyed before.”
If Yazdi was accurate, Timurlane may have felt that
it was better to have an Ottoman sultan on the throne,
in his debt, than another who would be hungering for
revenge. But what is true is that in 1403, Bayezid did die,
either by his own hand or by natural causes. Ironically his
great conqueror, Timurlane, died two years later in 1405,
while planning the conquest of China.
CIVIL WAR
The capture and subsequent death of Bayezid set in
motion a complex civil war, in which his sons struggled
for his power. Amazingly Christian Europe, perhaps
still remembering the disaster at Nicopolis, did little
to exploit this interregnum to deliver what could have
been a decisive blow upon the chaotic Ottoman realm.
Timurlane, according to Marozzi, actually made one
of the fi rst moves. After assuring, in Yazdi’s words, that
Bayezid would be buried “with all the pomp and magnifi -
cence” due a ruler of his rank, Timurlane paid a surprise
visit to Bayezid’s son, Musa Çelebi, who, Marozzi notes,
received from the conqueror “a royal vest, a fi ne belt, a
sword, and an [arrow] quiver inlaind with precious stones,
thirty horses, and a quantity of gold.” Apparently, before
his death, Timurlane had the idea of grooming Musa to
take his father’s place. Musa was given to the wardenship
of the emir of Germiyan, who later handed him over to
Bayezid’s son Mehmed, who had retreated to north-central
Anatolia, where Timurlane left him in peace.
In fact Timurlane seems to have determined that
whoever inherited Bayezid’s throne would be in his debt.
In fact according to the online Encyclopedia of the Orient,
in the entry for Mehmed I Çelebi, it notes, “1403:
Following the death of Bayezid I, Timur Lenk divided the
defeated Ottoman empire between 3 of Bayezid’s sons,
Murad in Amasya (center of today’s Turkey), Isa in Bursa
(western Turkey) and Süleyman in Rumelia (Balkans).”
Nevertheless in 1404–05, Mehmed defeated Isa and took
Bursa for his own. (However, Finkel states that Isa was
killed by Suleiman in 1403.)
After Ankara, Timurlane did not pursue Suleiman,
when he withdrew to the west in the Turkish part of the
Balkans, Rumelia, where he established his own realm
among the Balkan Christians, counting more on their loyalty
than that of the Muslims of Anatolia. At the same
time Suleiman ended with the Treaty of Gelibolu in 1403
the state of war that had existed been Constantinople and
the Ottomans since Bayezid had begun his siege of the city
in 1494. Indeed the diplomatic alliances between Christians
and Muslims in the Balkans 700 years ago stand in
stark contrast to what today is being called a “clash of
civilizations” by some in both religious camps.
Prince Suleiman, in fact, felt so secure with his
Christian alliances in the Balkans that in 1404 he
crossed the Dardanelles to attack his own brother
Mehmed in his small kingdom in Anatolia. Mehmed
was forced to retreat before his brother, who may have
brought some of his Serb or other Christian allies to
strengthen his army.
In 1409, however, as Finkel writes, Prince Musa
staged a surprise attack on Suleiman by crossing over
from Anatolia into Rumelia. Mircea, the voivode, or
prince, of Wallachia, formed an alliance with Musa,
affi rmed through the marriage of Mircea’s daughter to
Musa, and joined in the attack on Suleiman. Mircea, in
fact, was the grandfather of the historical Dracula, Vlad
the Impaler, who would also rule as voivode of Wallachia,
although he was born in Transylvania, then part
of Hungary. Musa proved a more competent warrior
and soon captured in 1410 much of the land Suleiman
had seized in the Balkans, including the city of Edirne. In
1411 at Musa’s orders, Suleiman was executed, removing
one candidate for the throne. He was strangled, most
likely with a traditional silken scarf, in keeping with the
Ottoman taboo about shedding royal Ottoman blood
when a member of the dynasty was executed.
With Musa now ruling Suleiman’s domains as well as
his own, the other forces in the civil war, the Byzantine
emperor Manuel II, the Serb Stephen Lazarevich, began
to see Musa as a greater threat than was Mehmed. Consequently
they threw their support to Mehmed, which was
in large degree due to Musa’s own fault. Musa broke the
treaty of 1403 with Constantinople by attacking the city
in 1411, when Suleiman’s son, Orhan, as Finkel writes,
had taken refuge with the emperor. In 1413 Musa would
capture Orhan but for some reason released him. In spite
of this act of mercy, the civil war continued.
NEW ALLIANCES
In a daring move Mehmed entered into a new alliance
with Emperor Manuel II to gain his support against his
brother, Musa. In 1412 envoys of Manuel had sealed
the pact with Mehmed at his Anatolian capital at Bursa.
With the Byzantine navy still the strongest fl eet in the
eastern Mediterranean, Manuel offered it to Stephen
and Mehmed to convey soldiers and supplies for the
coming campaign against Musa, which would be fought
in Europe, not Turkey.
Each Byzantine ship was able to fi re the feared “Greek
fi re,” at enemy ships, a fl ammable substance that, as
napalm today, would start a blaze that virtually nothing
270 Mehmed I
could extinguish. In 1412 supported by the Byzantines
and the Serbs, Mehmed met Musa at Camurlu in Serbia
on July 5, 1413, and won a smashing victory. After his triumph
Mehmed had Musa strangled in his turn. After his
victory Mehmed remained true to his treaty with Emperor
Manuel. John Julius Norwich quotes him in A Short History
of Byzantium as sending this message to Manuel:
“Go and say to my father the Emperor of the Romans
that from this day forth I am and shall be his subject, as a
son to his father. Let him but command me to do his bidding,
and I shall with the greatest of pleasure execute his
wishes as his servant.”
In 1413 Mehmed was offi cially enthroned as Sultan
Mehmed I. For the remainder of his life, Mehmed
remained true to the pact he made with Manuel II.
He now attempted to make peace with some of the
Anatolian nobles who had supported Musa or Suleiman
against him in the civil war. A large number had
supported him from the beginning; the others he now
sought as allies.
Two years later in 1415, Mehmed faced a revolt
led by either his brother, Mustapha, who apparently
had been killed at the Battle of Ankara in 1403, or by
a very convincing imposter. Mustafa, in fact, began
negotiations with Emperor Manuel and with the ruling
doge of Venice. Sensing a real threat, Mehmed struck at
Mustafa and at Cuneyd of Aydin, an Anatolian noble
who turned against him after he had fi rst made peace.
Mehmed quickly defeated the two of them and, when
they sought sanctuary in the Greek city of Thessalonica,
Manuel remained true to his treaty with Mehmed and
imprisoned them both. Mustafa was imprisoned on the
island of Lesbos.
MYSTICISM
Yet still there was no peace for Mehmed, who could
now justifi ably be referred to as Mehmed I. Just as
the dynastic struggle within his own family seemed to
have come to an end, he was faced with an uprising
by the Islamic mystic Sheikh Bedreddin in 1416. The
sheikh threatened to become a rallying point for all
who were still disaffected with Mehmed’s rule; thus it
was imperative he strike decisively. Mysticism, especially
Sufi sm, had a wide, if secretive, following in
the Ottoman Empire, and Mehmed could not risk
the sheikh’s preaching a religious jihad, or holy war,
against his rule. Mehmed swiftly attacked Sheikh Bedreddin,
who was unceremoniously put to death in the
marketplace at Serres.
Because Mircea of Wallachia had apparently leaned
toward Bedreddin, if only to gain greater freedom
from central Ottoman rule, Mehmed required hostages
from him for his good behavior. As Finkel observes,
“One of these boys was Vlad Drakul, later known as
the ‘Impaler.’ ” Indeed it was from the Turks that Vlad
learned the punishment of impaling. In 1416, Mehmed
made Wallachia a formal vassal state of the Ottoman
Empire.
For fi ve years Mehmed governed with little opposition
to his rule. Removed from the need of carrying on
far-fl ung wars, he established himself as a patron of the
arts and a great builder. On May 26, 1421, Mehmed I
died in Edirne. However he was buried in Bursa, in the
Anatolian heartland of his Ottoman Empire.
Further reading: Finkel, Caroline. Osman’s Dream: The History
of The Ottoman Empire. New York: Perseus Books,
2006; Kinross, Lord. The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise And
Fall of the Turkish Empire. New York: Morrow, 1977; Marozzi,
Justin. Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conquerer of the
World. New York: Da Capo, 2004; Norwich, John Julius.
A Short History of Byzantium. New York: Vintage, 1999;
Ostrogorsky, George. History of the Byzantine State. Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999; Creasy, Sir Edward
Shepherd. History of the Ottoman Turks: From the beginning
of their empire to the present time. London: R. Bentley
and Son, 1877.
John Murphy
mendicants
In the 12th and 13th centuries Italy was a loose collection
of cities, each with its own government and rules.
Society was divided sharply between people with money
and power (the majores) and those who lived as indentured
servants (the minores). Cities fought against
each other for domination. It was an era when knights
(wealthy young men) would destroy an entire city to
conquer it for further economic gain. The church had
recovered from the invasions of the barbarians but was
in ruins internally. Clergy were not as concerned for
the spirit of Jesus (Christ) of Nazareth as they were
about amassing their own fortunes. They were seen
as licentious drunkards. The papacy was fi ghting the
emperor for control over various city-states. Ordinary
people were not given an education in the Gospel or
their faith. Heretical and sectarian groups were springing
up as an antidote to this dangerous situation.
Many sectarian groups originated as a reaction
to the abuses of the clergy at the time. Rather than
mendicants 271
demand payment for religious services, these groups
depended on the generosity of others, claiming the Gospel
imperative to “take nothing on the journey,” and
“the worker is worth his keep.” Some of these (such
as the heretical Catharists) had a dualistic view of the
world. Only things that were spiritual were deemed
good. Anything involving the body or the Earth was
corrupt. These groups encouraged people to lead a life
of perfection that involved abstention from much food
and any sexual activity. They disapproved of the church
and any authority coming from the church.
Also in response to the times were the mendicant
orders. They were groups of unmarried Christian men
who were organized by a spiritual rule and, as their name
suggests, were beggars. In contrast to the aforementioned
groups, the followers of St. Francis and St. Dominic sought
the approval of the popes. They received papal permission
to preach in every church when the local bishop gave consent.
Both founders encouraged obedience to the Roman
Church, even when they could easily see its abuses. They
believed that Jesus had established the “universal church”
on the weak shoulders of the early apostles and their successors,
the popes, and church leaders.
Both orders, as mendicants, begged only for what
they needed to eat for that day. They trusted that God
would provide for their needs. Unlike the earlier monastic
orders, the mendicants were itinerant; they did
not live in the restricted environment of a monastery.
Rather they lived in loose groups on the road, open to
the needs of the people whom they encountered. They
agreed to live together in a common life, under a common
constitution (the “rule”), with common possessions
and clothing (the “habit”), and offering common
prayer (the “Divine Offi ce”).
Their aim was to spread the message of Jesus to all
who would listen. Their lifestyle was part of that message,
namely, that God would care for all real needs. A
common, democratic meeting, called a Chapter, held
their obedience to each other together. Unlike the monks,
who had one father abbot, the friars called their offi cial
religious superior their “minister” or “servant.”
Dominic Guzman in 1203 was an ordained priest
for the cathedral of Osma, Spain. One day while
accompanying his bishop, he found lodging at an inn
where the innkeeper was an adherent to the beliefs of
the Cathari. Being a simple man, the innkeeper was not
rejecting the Catholic faith, as he had never been taught
it. Dominic opened this man’s mind to the goodness of
God found in the simple creed of the Catholic faith.
Dominic later discovered that the people who were
charged by the church to spread the ideas of Christianity
to the public were failing. Upon examination the
reasons seemed apparent. These church delegates were
traveling with great expense and were uninspiring in
their preaching. Dominic received the papal approval
to preach to the Cathari. He founded a new kind of
religious order based on the missionary pattern of the
apostles. His followers would be well trained. They
would preach with charity the “fruits of their (prayerful)
contemplation.”
Dominic and Francis differed in their reasons for
choosing poverty. For Dominicans poverty was not their
romantic ideal, but a necessary state to allow mobility
and credibility. Dominic made the communication
of Christianity a priority. From their prayerful study
they would preach a convincing word that would be
matched with an equally persuasive simple lifestyle. His
followers would not preach the Gospel out of greed.
The followers of Francis of Assisi gathered almost by
accident. Francis had a profound conversion that pulled
him out of his middle-class background to align himselfwith
the minores, those simple people living in grinding
poverty. His joy at following Jesus in his original poverty
infl uenced Francis’s peers among the majores to leave all
they had and follow Christ. Francis called his group the
Order of Friars Minor (Fratres Minores, or Lesser Brothers).
His conversion happened in stages but was marked
by key personal events, culminating in a powerful religious
experience of embracing a man who was leprous.
This community of men held values that were contrary
to their families and their world. They sought
humble stations in life, allowed their personal relationship
with Jesus to be their primary joy, and held creation
dear. Instead of marriage they idealized poverty as their
spiritual “bride.” The humility of Jesus, being born in a
stable, dying on a cross, and by faith coming back in the
bread and wine of Communion, inspired them to pour
out their own lives in the same poverty.
The Franciscans and Dominicans (orders of Friars
Minor and Preachers, respectively) were a convincing
alternative in the Middle Ages to a corrupt clergy, divided
social class, violent culture. These simple beggars helped
to beckon the worldly church to its original spiritual
calling. Their members included the learned Franciscans
St. Anthony and St. Bonaventure and the very famous
Dominican St. Thomas Aquinas. It was a new and controversial
form of religious community that was highly
persuasive among Christians of the late Middle Ages.
See also heresies, pre-Reformation; Innocent III.
Further reading: Herkless, John. Francis And Dominic And
The Mendicant Orders. Whitefi sh, MT: Kessinger Publishing
272 mendicants
Company, 2006; Sarnowsky, Jurgen, ed. Mendicants, Military
Orders and Regionalism in Medieval Europe. London:
Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 1999.
Mark Soehner
Merovingian dynasty
The Merovingian dynasty emerged as the Roman Empire
was declining. The name Merovingian was derived
from the name Merovius, the founder of the Merovingian
dynasty, who was the powerful leader of a group
of Franks known to the Romans as Salians from 448 to
457. Because of their penchant for wearing long hair,
the Merovingian kings were known as the long-haired
kings. The Merovingian dynasty ruled parts of presentday
France and Germany from the fi fth century until
the eighth century, more specifi cally from c. 448 to 751.
They are often regarded as the fi rst kings of Frankish
(or French) race.
The Merovingian kings had a reputation as builders
of the greatest of the early medieval successor states.
The origins of France were fi rst discerned in the fi fth
century, when the Merovingian dynasty was in power
over the Frankish kingdom. They also set the stage for
Charlemagne’s later success in building his empire.
The Franks were a minority in the Merovingian kingdom,
which expanded as King Clovis I conquered neighboring
regions. He was responsible for uniting most of
Gaul situated north of Loire in 486. War was waged on
multiple fronts over many years against the Visigoths,
the Saxons, and the Alamanni. In the Battle of Vouille
in 507, the Visigoths were defeated at Toulouse. Burgundy
was captured in 534 and the alpine region of
Alamanni was added to their realm in 536 after multiple
campaigns. As a result of this rapid expansion under
the Merovingian dynasty, Gallo-Roman and Germanic
subjects surrounded the Franks.
Adhering to the law of the Franks, when a father
died, his land was divided among his sons. Since the
entire kingdom was considered the king’s land, Clovis
I partitioned his realm among his four sons. Upon his
death there were four kings who ruled his kingdom,
but they remained united. However subsequent partitions
and repartitions complicated matters as rivalries
concerning land often resulted in bloody wars on issues
of political succession, especially toward the end of
Merovingian reign from 561 to 613.
The Merovingian kings were outwardly Christian
after Clovis I converted to Catholicism, following
the conversion of his wife in 497, but their practices
veered toward paganism. The royalty was thought to
have divine powers, mixed with a strong sense of charisma
and a magical allure. The most important consequence
of this landmark conversion was that the
Frankish tribes soon followed suit and adopted Christianity.
By converting to Catholicism, an alliance was
forged between the Frankish kingdom and the Roman
Catholic Church. Saint Boniface (675–754), an eminent
English missionary, is credited with converting the
Germans to Christianity.
As the Merovingian dynasty declined in the eighth
century, the mayor of Austrasia who actually served in
the name of the Merovingian king gained more power
for himself. The mayor, Charles Martel, grandfather of
the future emperor Charlemagne, led the Frankish army
to a victory against the Muslim invaders in 732 at the
Battle of Tours. Although Charles Martel never adopted
the royal title himself, his son Pepin the Short became
the fi rst king of the Carolingian dynasty, which succeeded
the Merovingian dynasty.
See also Frankish tribe.
Further reading: Fouracre, Paul, and Richard Gerberding.
Late Merovingian France—History and Hagiography,
640–720. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996;
Hen, Yitzhak. Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul—
481–751. New York: Brill, 1995; Wallace-Hadrill, J. M. The
Long-Haired Kings. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1962;
Wood, Ian. The Merovingian Kingdoms—450–751. New
York: Longman, 1994.
Nurfadzilah Yahaya
Mesoamerica: Postclassic period
Postclassic Mesoamerica (900–1500 c.e.) encompassed
four principal geographic regions: the Maya
zones to the south and east; the central highlands,
centered on the Basin of Mexico; the Zapotecs of the
Oaxaca Valley; and the Mixtec polities in the region
north and west of Oaxaca. Sometimes called “The
Time of Troubles,” the Postclassic period in these regions
was characterized by several broad and overlapping
trends. The most important were political fragmentation
and the rise and decline of new polities; a
heightened emphasis on militarism, aggression, and
violence, accompanied by the political supremacy of
an ascendant class of warrior elites; the institutionalization
of the practice of human sacrifi ce; increased
Mesoamerica: Postclassic period 273
movements and migrations of peoples; and the disruption
and reconfiguration of regional and long-distance
trade and commercial networks.
TOLTEC
In the Basin of Mexico and the central highlands, the
Postclassic period was inaugurated by the decline and
collapse of the great city of Teotihuacán around 650;
the expansion and contraction of the city-states of
Cholula, Xochicalco, and El Tajín; and the subsequent
political fragmentation of the region into numerous
competing city-states. Around 900 another polity saw
a rapid rise to prominence in the central highlands: the
Toltecs. Originating somewhere in the northern deserts,
probably around the present-day Mexican state
of Zacatecas, the Toltecs were but one of several waves
of migrants from the arid northern regions to whom
the settled peoples of the central highlands applied the
generic name Chichimeca, meaning “lineage of the
dog” and connoting both their martial skill and their
“barbarism.” The later Aztecs would also be called
Chichimeca.
According to Toltec legend, their semidivine
founder Mixcóatl (Cloud Serpent) swiftly defeated
his adversaries in his inexorable march into the Basin
of Mexico, where he established a capital city at Culhuacán.
Mixcóatl’s brother then treacherously assassinated
him, after which his pregnant widow fled into
exile, where she bore his son, whom she named Ce
Acatl Topiltzín (Prince One Reed). As a boy, Topiltzín
became a devout follower of Quetzalcoatl (the
Plumed Serpent), the principal deity of the former great
city of Teotihuacán. Topiltzín took on Quetzalcoatl’s
name to become Topiltzín-Quetzalcoatl; the man-hero
slew his uncle (his father’s assassin) and around the
year 968 founded a new city in the northern section
of the Basin of Mexico, Tula, which would become
the capital of the Toltecs. Topiltzín-Quetzalcoatl, in
turn, became the font of all the stunning achievements
of the Toltecs, including the cultivation of maize, the
invention of writing, the introduction of the ritual
calendar, and all of the other attributes of the Toltec
civilization.
Meanwhile a power struggle emerged within the
Toltec capital of Tula between devotees of the two principal
rival gods, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca (Smoking
Mirror). The latter craftily tricked Topiltzín-Quetzalcoatl
into engaging in an incestuous relationship
with his sister and forced him into exile in consequence
of this disgrace, first to Cholula and then into the Maya
region. In this way, according to legend, Tezcatlipoca
became the preeminent god of the Toltecs. A capricious,
whimsical deity who reveled in exposing the frailties
and pretensions of human beings, Tezcatlipoca was said
to require for his propitiation ritual human sacrifice.
This is how, according to legend, the practice of human
sacrifice arose among the Toltecs. It is more likely that,
as among other polities before and after, ritual human
sacrifice emerged as a way for the Toltec ruling classes,
particularly its warrior elite, to legitimate and consolidate
their dominion and to strike fear into their actual
and potential enemies. The Toltecs ruled a substantial
portion of the Basin of Mexico until the mid-1100s,
when a combination of drought, famine, and endemic
warfare fatally weakened the still-forming polity. By
the mid-1100s they had abandoned their capital city of
Tula, which became the site from which the later Aztecs
claimed direct lineage.
ZAPOTEC
Among the Zapotec-speaking peoples of the Valley of
Oaxaca, the decline of Monte Albán between 700 and
900 (the terminal phase of Monte Albán IIIb and the
beginning of Phase IV) was followed by political fragmentation
and the rise of numerous competing polities.
Among the most prominent of these was centered at
the ceremonial complex of Mitla, southeast of Monte
Albán, where construction began in the early- to mid-
900s, around the same time as Tula to the north and
west. The ruins at Mitla have long captured the imagination
of archaeologists and visitors, with their elegant
lines, precision stonework, and complex geometric
ornamentation. While the palaces and courtyards of
Mitla were built in an open area, a nearby fortress testifies
to the heightened militarism that characterized
the Oaxaca Valley polities long after the site of Monte
Albán itself had been largely abandoned and become
mainly a site for pilgrimage and ritual.
Scholars have yet to decipher the Zapotec inscriptions
that grace the ruins of Monte Albán and other
sites in the Oaxaca Valley. It is hypothesized that specific
hand gestures represent verbs; that noncalendric glyphs
were intended to convey information regarding political,
military, and ritual affairs; and that as-yet undiscovered
connections exist among Mayan, Zapotec, Mixtec,
and Aztec writing systems. Investigations into these and
related arenas of Zapotec history continue.
MIXTEC
The mountainous zones lying north and west of the Valley
of Oaxaca were home to numerous Mixtec (Cloud
People) polities that emerged during the Postclassic
274 Mesoamerica: Postclassic period
period. By the 1200s these Mixtec states had extended
their infl uence south and east into areas traditionally
controlled by the Zapotecs—including periodic occupations
of Monte Albán and Mitla. The Postclassic Mixtec
developed one of the most extreme systems of social
stratifi cation in all of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
While all Mesoamerican polities placed a high degree
of emphasis on purity of lineage, birth order, and elite
status, these attributes were especially salient among
the Postclassic Mixtec. For instance inscriptions record
at least four cases of full brother-sister marriage among
the descendents of the Mixtec lord named Eight Deer—
an evident effort to retain purity of lineage. Among
both the Mixtec and Zapotec Postclassic polities, there
was little of the elaborate administrative and bureaucratic
hierarchy that characterized other states during
this period, including the Aztecs. Instead the word of
the ruling lord was deemed law, carried out by a second
tier of elite lords who ruled subject polities under the
main lord’s dominion.
The Aztec state, which emerged in the Basin of
Mexico during the middle of the Postclassic period,
exhibited all of the principal features characterizing the
Postclassic polities of the central and southern highlands,
particularly the heightened emphasis on militarism,
warfare, human sacrifi ce, and conquest of lesser
polities in the formation of a tributary empire.
See also Mesoamerica: southeastern periphery.
Further reading: Davies, Nigel. The Toltecs: Until the Fall of
Tula. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977; Diehl,
Richard. Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico. London:
Thames & Hudson, 1983; Flannery, Kent V., and Joyce
Marcus, eds. The Cloud People: Divergent Evolution of the
Zapotec and Mixtec Civilizations. New York: Academic
Press, 1983; Spores, Ronald. The Mixtecs in Ancient and
Colonial Times. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1985.
M. J. Schroeder
Mesoamerica:
southeastern periphery
Southeastern Mesoamerica has been so little understood
that even the two Mayan sites in the area, Copán and
Quirigua, which fl owered from the fi fth to the ninth
centuries, were thought of as the creations of itinerant
Mayans rather than having been created by the Mayans
indigenous to the region. However, as Dennis Tedlock,
the translator of the Popol Vuh, the holy book of the
Quiché Mayans of Guatemala, has noted, the Mayan
culture not only embraced Chiapas Province and the
Yucatán in Mexico, but also Guatemala, El Salvador,
and Honduras. According to Tedlock, “inscriptions
on stone monuments [sometimes called stelae] fi rst appeared
in the ‘highlands of Chiapas’ in the fi rst century
b.c.e.” Ultimately the inscriptions spread throughout
the entire area. While it was believed that the Mayans
were essentially a peaceful people, more recent excavations,
like that at Bonampak, have shown them to be
as warlike as those who followed them, the Toltecs and
the Aztecs.
Southeastern Mesoamerica, as noted in the Popol
Vuh by Tedlock, became a fertile area for Mayan development.
Uaxactún, in the Petén region of Guatemala,
became established as a ceremonial center in the fi rst or
second centuries, and El Mirador, in northern Guatemala,
was founded around the same era. The term ceremonial
center is an ambiguous one in Mesoamerican
studies. Although it refers to an archaeological site that
was used for religious ceremonies, certainly an urban
population had to exist there permanently in order to
provide the needed support for ceremonies in accordance
with the Mayan calendar. Contemporary with
the Mayans, the Mixtec and Zapotec cultures fl ourished
in the Oaxaca valleys in Mexico, while the great
center at Teotihuacán dominated the Mexican highlands.
City-states fl ourished when a particularly strong
and talented ruler held sway, much as the golden age of
ancient Athens is associated with Pericles.
Mayan civilization was not driven by a great need
for centralization, as was later seen with the Aztecs.
Instead, Mayans formed city-states like Copán and
Tikal, which seemed to be locked in almost perpetual
warfare with each other. A comparison can be made
to ancient Greece, with its wars among city-states like
Athens and Thebes, and ancient Rome, with the centralization
that would produce one of the world’s greatest
empires.
With the end of the Classic period, Mayan culture
gravitated away from the southeastern periphery
of Mesoamerica to the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico.
Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, and Mayapán became the centers
of Mayan culture in the Postclassic period, after
900. The civilization and form of government, however,
remained virtually unchanged from the heyday
of southeastern Mesoamerica. Individual leaders
dominated Mayan city-states. Traditional accounts of
Mayan civilization have usually referred to these rulers
as priest-kings, since they presided over both affairs of
Mesoamerica: southeastern periphery 275
state and religion. However their position in Mayan
society was tenuous.
During the Postclassic period, there was peace
among Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, and Mayapán for about
a century, until in about 1100 Mayapán went on a war
of conquest and seized the other two Yucatán Mayan
city-states. For about 200 years Mayapán controlled
what may have been the closest political organization
to a kingdom that the Mayans evolved. Yet in 1441
Uxmal threw off the rule of Mayapán. From then on
the Mayan city-states became embroiled in a series of
civil wars that would only end with the Spanish conquest
that followed the arrival of Hernán Cortés in
Mexico in 1519.
See also Mesoamerica: Postclassic period.
Further reading: Coe, Michael D. The Maya. London:
Thames and Hudson, 2005; Collier, John. Indians Of The
Americas. New York: Mentor Books, 1947; Tedlock, Dennis,
trans. Popol Vuh. New York: Touchstone, 1985.
John F. Murphy, Jr.
Ming dynasty
The Ming dynasty, which spanned 1368–1644, can
be divided into two segments. The fi rst part, between
1368 and c. 1450, was a period of great achievement,
growth, stability, and prosperity; the latter part, from c.
1450 to 1644, was characterized by weak and unstable
rulers, corruption, and abuse of power that culminated
in rebellions and overthrow. The Ming dynasty has an
important place in Chinese history because of its longevity
and rule over unifi ed China, and because it was
the last Chinese imperial dynasty not founded and ruled
by peoples of nomadic origin.
MING TAIZU (T’AI-TSU)
China was in ruins by the mid-1300s under the Mongol
Yuan dynasty (1279–1368). It suffered from a
collapsing economy, wrecked by fi nancial mismanagement,
runaway infl ation, natural disasters, famine,
and plague. Numerous rebel movements rose to
topple the Yuan dynasty, among them one led by an
impoverished peasant named Zhu Yuanzhang (Chu
Yuan-chang). Zhu focused on consolidating his power
in the Yangzi (Yangtze) River valley in southern China,
establishing his capital in Nanjing (Nanking), a city
rich with historic signifi cance, from which he invaded
the north, sending the last Yuan emperor in fl ight to
Mongolia in 1368. It was the second time in Chinese
history that a commoner had ascended the throne (the
fi rst was Liu Bang, who founded the Han dynasty in
202 b.c.e.). He chose the dynastic name Ming, which
means “brilliant.” He reigned for 30 years (1368–98),
chose for himself the reign title Hongwu (Hung-wu),
which means “bounteous warrior,” and is also known
by his posthumous title Taizu, which means “Grand
Progenitor.” He and his immediate successors worked
to restore Chinese prosperity and prestige after the
humiliation and exploitation of Mongol rule.
Emperor Hongwu’s policies put his stamp on the
dynasty. He restored the economy by freeing people
enslaved by Mongols and resettling them on ravaged
lands, especially in northern China. He gave tax breaks
to the peasants, repaired irrigation works, rebuilt granaries,
and adopted a tax policy that favored the poor.
He gave much authority to localities for maintaining
law and order by organizing them into the baojia (paochia)
system: 10 families formed a jia under a leader
and were responsible for each other, and 10 jia formed
a bao in which 100 families were responsible for each
other. This system of local organization persisted in
China into modern times.
CONFUCIAN EDUCATION
Hongwu ordered the founding of schools throughout
the empire, based the curriculum on Confucian teachings,
and reinstated the examination system to recruit
offi cials. His son the emperor Yongle (Yung-lo) followed
up on this by ordering the foremost scholars to
compile an offi cial version of the Confucian classics
and commentaries to guide students in their studies. In
1415 The Great Compendium of the Five Classics and
the Four Books was published, followed by the publication
of The Great Compendium of the Philosophy
of Human Nature in 1417. These works refl ected the
offi cially accepted Neo-Confucian philosophy as interpreted
by the Song philosopher Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi)
and became textbooks in schools in China, Korea, and
Japan. Another major contribution to learning was
the Yongle Dadian (Yung-lo ta-tien) or Great Literary
Repository of the Yongle Reign.
It contained 22,277 volumes, whose index alone ran
to 60 volumes. Too large to be printed, it was preserved
in manuscript sets in imperial libraries. Such great government-
sponsored works refl ected and resulted in huge
national interest in learning, which made the Ming a
great period in human history. Economic prosperity
permitted wider and growing literacy, from which the
printing industry also benefi ted.
276 Ming dynasty
DEFENSE AGAINST THE MONGOLS
Emperor Hongwu established a highly centralized
administrative system that combined features from the
previous Tang (T’ang) dynasty, Song dynasty, as
well as the Yuan dynasty. But he abolished the position
of chief minister, so that the autocratic ruler held
all the reins of power. Recognizing that abuse of power
by eunuchs contributed to the decline and fall of earlier
dynasties, he forbade eunuchs to interfere in government.
He established a million-man professional standing
army that was hereditary. He gave governmentowned
land to each garrison, requiring the soldiers to
till the land in their spare time so that they would not
be a burden on the treasury. This did not work in practice
and the treasury had to allocate funds to the army
regularly. The army units were rotated in guarding the
capital region, the Great Wall, and at strategic locations
throughout the empire and were trained by special tactical
offi cers. The division of authority between garrison
commanders and tactical commanders prevented
the development of warlordism and precluded revolts
by the army during the dynasty.
Refl ecting the deep resentment most Chinese felt
toward Mongols, he forbade Mongol dress and customs
among Chinese and ordered those Mongols remaining
in China to adopt Chinese names and to become
assimilated. Emperor Hongwu, his sons, and generals
led campaigns that drove remnant Mongols to the Lake
Baikal region in present-day Russia. They also regained
all Chinese lands including modern Manchuria, Inner
Mongolia, Yunnan, Sichuan (Szechwan), and Xinjiang
(Sinkiang) and accepted the vassalage of Korea, Vietnam,
and Central Asian states.
EMPEROR YONGLE (YUNG-LO)
Hongwu left the throne to his young grandson, who
was, however, ousted by his uncle the prince of Yan
(Yen), fourth son of Hongwu. After a civil war that
lasted between 1399 and 1402 and ended with the
burning of the palace in Nanjing it was presumed
that the young emperor and his family had died. The
victorious prince of Yan became the emperor Yongle
(Yung-lo), r. 1402–24. Yongle is also known by his
posthumous title Chengzu (Ch’eng-tsu), “successful
progenitor,” and is sometimes called the second founder
of the Ming dynasty. He moved the national capital
to Beijing (Peking) in 1421, after rebuilding it from the
ruined Yuan capital Dadu (Ta-tu); the palaces, temples,
and city walls of that city date to his reign. He had
repaired the silted up Grand Canal to connect to Beijing
to bring supplies from the south to the capital. A
seasoned general, he personally led fi ve campaigns into
Mongolia to prevent the resurgence of Mongol power.
Another Ming army intervened in Vietnam in 1404,
annexing that area to the Ming Empire. However Vietnam
regained its autonomy after 20 years and became
a Ming vassal state. Troubled by Japanese pirates he
intimidated the shogun of Japan into accepting vassalage
for the fi rst time in history. Yongle was also famous
for authorizing huge armadas to show the fl ag, promote
trade, and enroll vassal states across Southeast
Asia, the Indian Ocean, to as far as the northeastern
coast of Africa.
The eunuch admiral Zheng He (Cheng Ho) commanded
seven expeditions (the last one set out after
Yongle had died). In appointing Zheng He and other
eunuchs to high positions Yongle violated his father’s
strong injunction. Although he kept them under fi rm
control, later weak Ming rulers would rely on them for
advice, undermining the bureaucracy and resulting in
corruption and abuse of power, with disastrous effects.
For example, in 1449 a weakling emperor appointed
his favorite eunuch commanding offi cer, and together
they went to war against a Mongol chief, only to suffer
defeat and capture, throwing the government into
chaos in the process.
CHINA RECOVERS
Government policies that favored land reclamation and
economic activities resulted in growing prosperity, and
the gradual repopulation of northern China and migration
to the south and southwest, driving aboriginal peoples
to remote mountainous regions. Production of silk
was encouraged and became widespread in areas south
of the Yangzi River. Women and girls were in charge of
growing mulberry trees and tending silkworms and also
worked in silk weaving factories, bringing additional
income to farm families. The cultivation of cotton and
manufacture of cotton cloths also expanded during the
Ming, providing clothes for ordinary people. Crafts
also fl ourished, with metal, lacquer, and paper industries
leading the way. True porcelains were fi rst made in
China during the Song dynasty, hence the name china.
Its manufacture continued to advance during the Yuan,
but it was under the Ming that Chinese porcelain manufacture
reached its apogee. Under state encouragement,
Jingdezhen (Ching-te-chen), the porcelain manufacturing
center, had 3,000 government and privately owned
factories.
Four emperors followed Yongle up to 1450. They
and most subsequent Ming rulers were mediocre; many
were also eccentric. They abandoned the militant foreign
Ming dynasty 277
policy of the dynastic founders and resorted to defensive
tactics, mainly refl ected in rebuilding the Great Wall into
the formidable monument that survives to the present.
Although later Ming lost its earlier dynamism, the institutions
and policies set by the dynastic founders worked
to continue its survival until 1644.
See also Neo-Confucianism; Taizu (T’ai-Tsu).
Further reading: Chan, Albert. The Glory and Fall of the
Ming Dynasty. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1982; Hucker, Charles O. The Traditional Chinese State in
Ming Times (1368–1644). Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1961; Twitchett, Dennis, and Frederick W. Mote, eds.
Cambridge Hsitory of China. Vol. VII, The Ming Dynasty,
1368–1644, Part 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998.
Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur
Mixtec and Zapotec
The Zapotec and Mixtec were groups of Mesoamerican
people who inhabited land at different
times in the valley of Oaxaca in Mexico. This area
lay south of today’s Mexico City on the west coast
of the country and was rich in natural and cultural
resources. Monte Albán was one of the fi rst cities
in the New World. Now a ruin, it once served as a
magnifi cent ceremonial site with ball courts, plazas,
tunnels, tombs, and buildings. Archaeologists have
evidence that these people knew about irrigation because
there are terraces to allow spring water to fl ow
down and maintain their crops. As other Mesoamerican
groups they practiced ritual human sacrifi ce. The
ceremonies were complex, using obsidian knives to
cut out the beating heart of the victim from on top
of a pyramid. Tombs have been excavated where the
remains of kings and priests were buried with ornate
grave goods, some with precious metals. Monte Albán
was ideal as a ceremonial center because it was
near the juncture where three arms of the Oaxaca
Valley met.
The time periods of these cultures are defi ned in terms
of Mesoamerican chronology. The Formative is divided
into three groups: Early, Middle, and Late (300 b.c.e.–
150 c.e.) and the Classic into four: Early (150–650 c.e.),
Late Classic (650–900 c.e.), Early Postclassic (900–1200
c.e.), and Late Postclassic (1200–1521 c.e.). The Zapotec
and Mixtec occupied Mexico’s valley of Oaxaca from
the Late Formative to the Late Postclassic period.
THE ZAPOTEC
Early Zapotecs lived during the Middle Formative period
(Preclassic period) 500–400 b.c.e. One of the fi rst
pieces of archaeological evidence found was a gruesome
message in the form of carvings on stelae (stone
monuments). It was a bas-relief (raised carving) of a
dead man, stripped of all clothing with blood coming
out of his chest and some scrolls with glyphs (decorative
writing) between his legs. He probably represented
an enemy who had been sacrifi ced. The style of
art, known as Danzantes, or dancers, is unique to the
Zapotec culture, and typical for that time period. The
style differs from other Mesoamerican art because the
human fi gures are curved, not angular, without clothing,
body decoration, or jewelry.
They are shown in active rather than in posed-type
positions that were characteristic of rulers from other
time periods. These dire fi gures are captives, in agony
because they have been ritually tortured and are being
sacrifi ced. Their eyes are closed, their tongues are protruding,
and their hands and feet are limp. It is thought
that they represent high-level individuals who were
killed by other rulers because they are depicted as old,
with beards and without teeth.
The glyphs, combination of phonetic symbols, numbers,
and ideographic elements, were the fi rst in Mexico.
The Zapotec had a calendar based on a 260-day
year and a 52-year cycle. Their pottery included spouts
or hollow three-legged bowls fashioned from fi ne gray
clay. It is estimated that this early Monte Albán I culture
supported a population of about 10,000 to 20,000.
From about 200 b.c.e. to 250 c.e. (Early Classic
period), the Zapotecs lived in relative harmony and
comfort. A few new buildings were constructed. One of
them might have been an observatory because it was oriented
in the direction of a bright star known as Capella.
Another building (referred to as building J) has many
narrow dark hallways that connect at a common apex.
On the outside, there are more typical glyphs with elaborate
headdresses, but they have closed eyes.
It is believed that these heads and symbols represent
both date notations and records of victory over
neighboring enemies when a particular town was
attacked and conquered. Older cultures often documented
wars in this way. Although contact with the
Maya was evident in elements from Mayan art incorporated
in their pottery, in the Classic period, there
was more infl uence from Teotihuacán, the gigantic
complex northeast of Oaxaca. The Zapotec continued
to build terraces and maintained their Zapotec language,
which remained dominant. They had a lively
278 Mixtec and Zapotec
pantheon: the rain god, Cocijo; the maize (corn) god,
Pitao Cozobi; a feathered serpent; a bat god; a fi re god;
and a water goddess. The Zapotec thrived in Monte
Albán until about 700 b.c.e., at which time they abandoned
the site, probably because of new invaders from
the northwest.
The Zapotec moved 25 miles southwest of Oaxaca
to an area called Mitla, from the Nahuatl word Mictlan,
which means Place of the Dead. However, they called
it Lyobaa, Place of Rest. They built fi ve palatial buildings,
guarded by a fort on a strategic hill. These buildings
still stand; unfortunately after European contact,
the church destroyed and replaced indigenous religious
structures. A colonial period church was built right on
top of one of these structures.
THE MIXTEC
Mixtec comes from an Aztec word that means Place of
the Clouds, but the people, the Mixe, used the word
Ayuk to describe themselves. It meant “word” or
“language,” a word related to ha”yyu:k, “people of
the mountains.” They are best known for their elegant
books called codices in which they drew fi gures that
resembled cartoons. These deerskin books unfolded
to form a long strip, which could be read phonetically.
Eight Mixtec codices have survived from before
the conquest.
Around 850, during the Early Classic period, the
Mixtecs lived in hilltop settlements of northwestern
Oaxaca. During the Postclassic, around 1000, they
moved into adjacent areas and then down to the valley
of Oaxaca because they felt that Monte Albán was
safe from invaders. The Mixtec’s best-known cities
were Tilantongo and Teozacualco. They had superb
artistic skills in carving, metalworking, painting, and
silversmithing. There is a life-sized skull fashioned from
a huge piece of quartz, which is Mixtec in origin, on
display in the Inah Anthropology Museum in Mexico
City.
The huge centers built by the Mixtec were primarily
residential. Everyday activities took place on the
valley fl oor but the hilltops were reserved for ceremonial
sites. By the Postclassic period, most of the prior
Zapotec territory was under their control. Their success
is attributed to the way in which they organized
social groups and interacted with others. The heredity
ruling class (caciques) were the highest; next were a
hereditary noble (tay toho), a working class (macehuales),
and in certain areas, a servant-tenant class (terrazgueros)
that could be compared to the European
Mixtec and Zapotec 279
Monte Albán was one of the fi rst cities in the New World. Now a ruin, it once served as a site for complex ceremonies using obsidian
knives to cut out the beating heart of the victim from on top of a pyramid.
feudal serf in status. As in any hierarchy the upper
strata had privilege and power, hence more than one
wife and control of natural resources, although gender
did not play a strong part in social structure. Bilateral
kinship lines determined lineage, which was more
important to the Mixtec. Macehuale women as well as
men could own land.
Their language had unique symbols representing
sounds as compared to other written languages that
used glyphs and rebuses to communicate. The names
of animals fi gured prominently in titles of their rulers
such as Eight Deer, Three Alligator, Four Tiger, or Jaguar
Claw because of their symbolic signifi cance. Births,
deaths, marriages, and land conquests are documented.
Rank, occupation, and social status were defi ned by
special ornamentation. The best known and powerful
ruler, Eight Deer, had fi ve wives, and his life is elaborately
documented in the Codex Nuttal.
By 1350 c.e. the Mixtec had intermarried and taken
control of the Zapotec sites. At the time of the conquest,
great wealth and high culture abounded. Tombs
attested to kings with their courts buried with gold, silver,
turquoise, amber, coral, pearls, and carved jaguar
bones. Unconquerable by their neighbors, they survived
until the Europeans arrived.
See also Mesoamerica: Postclassic period.
Further reading: Boone, Elizabeth Hill. Stories in Red and
Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztec and Mixtec. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2000; Coe, Michael. Mexico.
New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992; Edmonson, Munro
S. Linguistics. Supplement to the Handbook of Middle
American Indians. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1984; Flannery, Kent, and Joyce Marcus. “The Changing
Politics of a.d. 600–900.” In K. Flannery and J. Marcus,
eds. The Cloud People: Divergent Evolution of the Mixtec
and Zapotec Civilization. Clinton Corners, NY: Percheron
Press, 2003.
Lana Thompson
Mon
The Mon may have been the fi rst human inhabitants of
Myanmar, better known as Burma. The Mon are also
known as the Taliang people. They migrated, perhaps
pursued by enemies, to South Burma, where they lived
near the Salween River, which empties into the Bay of
Bengal, not far east of the border with Thailand. Their
population spread into Thailand as well.
In 573 two Mon brothers named Prince Samala
and Prince Wamala created the kingdom of Hongsavatoi,
which is located near the modern city of Pegu. The
Mon realm enjoyed independence for several centuries.
However by the middle of the 11th century, the
Mon peoples came under the infl uence of those we now
call Burmese, who had formed the kingdom of Pagan.
A Buddhist monk of the Mon people converted the fi rst
king of Pagan, Anawratha (r. 1044–77), to Theravada
Buddhism. This religion was common in Southeast
Asia, so the Pagan takeover may have been less of a
conquest, and more assimilation.
Both the Mon and the Burmese were under the
strong infl uence of India and used Indian Sanskrit in
some of their writings. The Pagan kingdom refused to
pay tribute to the conquering Mongols, believing their
distance from Mongol-controlled China would provide
protection. In 1287 Kubilai Khan, the founder
of China’s Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), sent an army
south, which virtually destroyed Pagan in revenge. At
this time the Mon, with the reduction of Pagan, came
under the rule of an adventurer from the Thai people,
who established the Mon kingdom of Râmaññadesa,
which was formed from the three provinces of Bassein,
Pegu, and Martaban; the city of Pegu became the
new kingdom’s fi rst capital.
The Râmaññadesa kingdom was brutally attacked
in 1540 by the Burmese from Taungu, who went on to
virtually unite all of modern Burma. With this invasion,
Mon political independence was extinguished,
but their cultural and nationalist identity remained
strong, as it has until today. In the 18th century the
Mon temporarily threw off Burmese rule, only to invite
a brutal repression in return. At the same time as Robert
Clive was expanding British rule in India, the Burmese
ruler U Aungzeya began a genocidal invasion of
the Mon heartland.
As Dr. George Aaron Broadwell writes, the invasion
“devastated the Mon kingdom, killing tens of thousands
of Mon, including learned Mon priests, pregnant
women, and children. Over 3,000 priests were massacred
by the victorious Burmans in the capital city
alone. . . . The surviving priests fl ed to Thailand, and
Burman priests took over the monasteries. Most of the
Mon literature, written on palm leaves, was destroyed
by the Burmans. Use of the Mon language was forbidden,
and Burman became the medium of instruction.
Mon people were persecuted, oppressed, and enslaved,
and countless people were burned in holocausts, like
the Jews before the Nazis. Mon properties and possessions
were looted and burned throughout Burma. Mons
280 Mon
fl ed further south into Burma’s Tenasserim Division and
east into Thailand.”
Afterward the Mon remained fi rmly under Burmese
control. The Alompra Burmese dynasty in the 18th and
19th centuries continued U Aungzeya’s policy with a
policy of forcibly eradicating the Mon language and
culture, attempting a compulsory assimilation into the
Burmese majority. The Mon managed to preserve their
culture, and records of the kingdom of Râmaññadesa
were written and preserved in the Mon language. The
Burmese came under British rule in the 19th century,
after the First Burma War (1824–26), Second Burma
War (1852–53), and the Third Burma War (1885–87).
The British ruled Burma, with a hiatus during World
War II, until independence in 1948. After independence
the Burmese continued their oppression of the Karen,
Shan, and Mon peoples. For her opposition to Burmese
military rule, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi received the Nobel
Prize in peace in 1991. Mon people exiled from their
native land have continued to battle for international
recognition of their culture, language, and freedom.
See also Burma; Dvaravati.
Further reading: Broadwell, George Aaron. “Mon Language,”
www.albany.edu/anthro (November 2005); “Mon,”
Online Burma/Myanmar Library, www.ibiblio.org (November
2005); Phayre, Arthur P. History of Burma. Bangkok:
Orchid Press, 2002.
John F. Murphy, Jr.
Mongke Khan
(r. 1251–1256) Mongol leader
Mongke Khan was the eldest son of Tului Khan (fourth
son of Genghis Khan) and Sorghaghtani Beki and
fourth khaghan or grand khan of the Mongol empire.
He was a famous warrior and commander and was also
noted for his devotion to the Mongol way of life. He
had served on the campaign in eastern Europe under
his cousin Batu Khan’s leadership and gained the latter’s
goodwill. The good relations between Batu’s (leader
of the Golden Horde) and Tului’s families were reinforced
when Ogotai Khan’s son and successor Guyuk
Khaghan (r. 1246–48) planned to ambush Batu, and
Mongke’s mother secretly warned Batu of the plot, even
though nothing came of it because Guyuk soon died.
In the struggle among the grandsons of Genghis
Khan to be his successor, Batu successfully sabotaged
regent Oghul Khaimish’s (Guyuk’s widow) attempt to
have the Mongol council elect one of her sons the next
khaghan. Batu was not interested in being khaghan,
but as the descendant of the eldest son of Genghis, he
wanted the role of kingmaker and was successful in
having Mongke elected the fourth khaghan in 1251.
Mongke immediately consolidated his position by ruthlessly
purging and killing his cousins and other relatives
from the Ogotai and Chagatai (Genghis’s second son)
branches of the family and their supporters.
Anticipating his election, Mongke established a
shadow government. Thus he was able to move quickly
to fulfi ll his grandfather’s mandate to conquer the world.
Ruling from Karakorum in Mongolia when not on the
move, Mongke relied on Mongols in top positions in
his government, assisted by people from the conquered
ethnic groups. He made important reforms needed to
mobilize resources and manpower by unifying the tax
collection system, stopping many abuses, and rebuilding
the economies in some already conquered lands.
Starting in 1252 he began a census of the peoples and
resources of his lands from China to Iraq to assess taxes,
control resources, and identify skilled craftsmen.
In 1252 Mongke began a three-pronged campaign.
One brother, Hulagu Khan, commanded an army that
headed west, successfully targeting Kashmir, the Assassins
in the Caucasus, Iran, and the Abbasid Caliphate,
and taking Baghdad in 1258. A relative from the
Golden Horde headed for Korea, subduing it in 1259.
Another brother, Kubilai Khan, set out to conquer the
Nanchao or Dali (T’a-li) kingdom located in modern
Yunnan Province in southwestern China, securing its
surrender in 1253. His youngest brother, Arik Boke,
remained in Mongolia. In 1256 Mongke announced
his goal of conquering the Southern Song (Sung) in
which he would take personal command with a threepronged
attack from the north, west, and south. In the
midst of the campaign, Mongke died in August 1256,
of either wounds or dysentery. Mongke’s death gave
the Southern Song a 20-year reprieve because Kubilai
immediately halted the campaign to secure his succession
as khaghan. The ensuing civil war between Kubilai
and his brother Arik Boke involved his other brother,
Hulagu, and various cousins. The Mongol empire
reached its apogee under Mongke and would never
recover from the succession crisis.
See also Chagatai khanate; Mongol rule of Russia;
Song (Sung) dynasty.
Further reading: Franke, Herbert, and Denis Sinor, eds. The
Cambridge History of China, Volume 6, Alien Regimes and
Border States, 907–1368. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Mongke Khan 281
Press, 1994; Allen, Thomas T. Mongol Imperialism: The Policies
of the Grand Qan Mongke in China, Russia, and the Islamic
Lands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987;
Rossabi, Morris. Kubilai Khan: His Life and Times. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988.
Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur
Mongol invasions of Japan
Kubilai Khan, Mongol ruler and founder of the Yuan
dynasty (1279–1368) in China, twice attempted to
invade Japan, in 1274 and 1281, with huge armadas
launched from Korea and China. He failed both times
mainly because of weather. Japan thus never suffered
under Mongol rule. The Japanese attributed their deliverance
to the divine wind, kamikazi in Japanese. In 1260
Kubilai Khan seized leadership of the Mongol empire on
the death of his elder brother, Mongke Khan, in a disputed
succession. Kubilai Khan established his capital in
North China, at the site of the former Jin (Chin) dynasty
capital, which he called Dadu (T’atu), meaning great
capital in Chinese (present-day Beijing). He continued
his brother’s unfi nished work of destroying the Southern
Song (Sung) dynasty and embarked on a new adventure
even before that task was completed in 1279.
In 1268 he sent his fi rst embassy to Japan demanding
tribute. The Japanese emperor, by then a fi gurehead
residing in Kyoto, was willing to acquiesce. But
real power belonged to the shogun or military commander
and his court at Kamakura, which rebuffed the
repeated Mongol demands. Thus Kubilai Khan decided
to invade Japan to force compliance. His Korean subjects
were ordered to build 400 large and 500 small
ships, which set sail from Pusan in Korea in November
1274. The invasion force had 15,000 Chinese and
Mongol soldiers, 6,000–8,000 Korean troops, and
7,000 Korean sailors. The defending Japanese warriors
(samurai) were far less numerous and suffered serious
losses in the battle fought at Hataka on Kyushu Island.
However they were saved by a fi erce storm that blew
in. The Korean sailors persuaded the Mongol troops
to board their ships and sail for safety in the open seas.
The storm, however, damaged and sank many of the
ships and 13,000 lives were lost; the survivors eventually
limped home.
Kubilai Khan fi nished the destruction of the
Southern Song in 1279. Then he focused on subjugating
Japan. In 1281 he dispatched a huge force, reputedly
of 140,000 men, in two armadas that sailed from
China and Korea for Hataka. Anticipating the Mongols’
return the Japanese had mobilized and built a
wall to the interior of Hataka Bay. After about two
months of desultory fi ghting, another fi erce storm or
typhoon blew in and destroyed most of the Mongol
fl eet. Some survivors fl ed back to Korea; the rest were
slaughtered or enslaved by the Japanese. Kubilai prepared
for a third invasion, but the effort was abandoned
after he died in 1294. However the shogunate
continued a state of military alert until 1312. The cost
of the defenses fell mainly to the people of Kyushu
Island. The discontent generated eroded the power
of the Hojo clan of the Kamakura Shogunate.
Japanese credited the kamikazi for their deliverance
and tried to resurrect this idea during the last days of
World War II for salvation from defeat by the Allies.
Further reading: Hori, Kyotsu. The Mongol Invasions and
the Kamakura Bakufu. Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University,
1956; Rossabi, Morris. Khubilai Khan: His Life
and Times. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988;
Yamamura, Kozo. The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume
3, Medieval Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990.
Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur
Mongol rule of Russia
The almost 250-year Mongol rule over Russia was
precipitated by two separate invasions. Following
a successful invasion of the Caucasus in 1221, the
Mongols invaded a small part of Russia in 1222. Although
a small contingent of the Mongol army succeeded
against the ruling princes, they did not establish
control over Russia and instead disappeared into
the steppe. It was not until 1237 that a sizable Mongol
army commenced its invasion of Russia proper, to
which all of Russia fell and came under the dominion
of the Golden Horde.
Having conquered the Muslim empire of the shah of
Khwarazm, Jalal-ad-Din Mengubirdi, otherwise known
as Sultan Muhammad II, Genghis Khan charged his
capable generals Jebe and Subotai to march through
the hazardous Caucasus Mountains in the direction of
Russia. The Caucasian tribes, the Alans (Ossetians), the
Circassians, and the Lezgians, together with the Polovsti,
formed an alliance and put up a fi erce resistance to
the Mongol invaders on the southern Russian steppe in
1221. The fi rst battle between the Mongols and Cau-
282 Mongol invasions of Japan
casian alliance proved indecisive, but Jebe and Subotai
had no intentions of withdrawing from the engagement.
Instead the Mongol generals resorted to using the strategy
of divide and conquer. Jebe and Subotai persuaded
their nomadic brethren, the Polovsti, to remain neutral
by reminding them of their common Turkic-Mongol
fellowship and also by promising to share with them
the spoils of victory over the Caucasian tribes. With the
success of the subtle diplomacy, the generals returned
to battle the Caucasian tribes with greater ferocity and
overwhelmingly crushed the stubborn resistance.
The Mongol generals then turned against the
Polovsti, who, in defeat, fl ed in the direction of Galacia
and Kiev and appealed to the Russian princes—Mstislav
Staryi of Kiev, Mstislav Udaloi of Galacia, and Vladimir
of Suzdal—for intervention. Two sets of crucial factors
persuaded the Russian princes to join forces to help the
Polovsti. First Prince Mstislav Udaloi was obliged to
help because Kotian, the khan of the Polovsti, was his
father-in-law. And second according to the Novgorodian
First Chronicle, the Mongols were unknown to the
Russians—they did not know where they came from,
what religion they practiced, or what language they
spoke. Fearing that the Mongols would grow stronger
if they did not intervene, the princes Mstislav and
Vladimir I (Vladimir the Great), together with the
Polovsti, forged the Russo-Polovsti alliance.
In early 1222 the Mongols received news of the
Russo-Polovsti alliance and sent a 10-member diplomatic
envoy to negotiate with Princes Mstislav and
Vladimir. The Mongols claimed to have no desire to
war with the princes and did not harbor any intentions
to conquer their lands or cities. In the manner similar
to the way they isolated the Polovsti from the Caucasian
tribes, the Mongol diplomats urged the princes to
defeat the Polovsti and take the spoils of victory for
themselves and offered to enter into a peace treaty with
the Russians. The princes, suspecting a Mongol trick,
executed the diplomatic envoy, an act that was considered
by the Mongols to be unforgivable.
A strong Russian-Polovsti army of 30,000 soldiers
amassed on the Dnieper. Outnumbered by more than
10,000, Jebe and Subotai ordered the Mongol army to
retreat. They dispatched a second diplomatic envoy to
meet with the Russians and reproached the Russians
for the murder of the fi rst delegation. The second envoy
returned unharmed and carried a message for the Mongol
army—the Russians feared that, after conquering
the Polovsti, the Mongol army would attack them.
Hence, they would only be happy if the Mongol army
returned to the steppe.
As the main Mongol army retreated from the forest,
its rearguard kept a watchful eye on the Russian
mobilization. War-hardened and accustomed to being
outnumbered, Jebe and Subotai managed to evade
the Russians for more than nine days. This contrasted
sharply with the attitudes of the Russian princes. The
Russian army lacked strategic coordination because
Mstislav of Galacia and Mstislav of Kiev disputed over
the ways to engage the Mongol army. In pursuit of the
Mongol army, the Russians were led farther and farther
into the steppe and away from their supply lines.
Prince Mstislav of Galacia, accompanied by Daniil of
Volhynia, commanded the fi rst Russian battle with the
Mongol army, defeating the Mongol rearguard at the
east of the bend in the Dnieper.
Wanting to claim the glory all for himself, Prince
Mstislav Udaloi decided to pursue the main Mongol
army. Without informing the rest of the Russian army
or waiting for reinforcements to arrive, the prince took
his army, the Volynian and Polovsti soldiers, across
the river Kalka. Overconfi dent from his victory over
the Mongol rearguard, Prince Mstislav failed to consolidate
his defenses after crossing the Kalka and fell
into a Mongol trap.
The Mongol retreat was a strategy aimed at isolating
the army commanded by Prince Mstislav of Galacia
from those commanded by Prince Mstislav Staryi
of Kiev, which was concentrated some distance away
from the river Kalka. In mid-June 1222 Jebe and Subotai
seized the advantage and ordered an all-out assault
on the Russian front and fl anks. Prince Mstislav of Kiev
watched from the western banks of the Kalka as the
Mongols launched a ferocious attack against the forces
of Mstislav of Galacia. As the Polovsti fl ed and confusion
set in within the Russian ranks, the army of Prince
Mstislav of Galacia, unable to maneuver effectively in
the marshy terrain, was cut into pieces. The prince,
along with the wounded Prince Daniil of Volhynia, a
small remnant of his troops, and what remained of the
Polovsti, managed to escape.
Realizing that a hasty retreat from a swift army is
guaranteed to be fatal, Prince Mstislav of Kiev ordered
his forces to fortify themselves on a commanding hilltop.
But before the prince could securely establish his
defenses, Jebe and Subotai attacked. After three days of
ferocious Mongol assault, Prince Mstislav of Kiev surrendered
on the condition that he and his army would
be permitted to return to Kiev unharmed. The Mongol
army accepted, but, as soon as the Russian army disarmed,
Prince Mstislav of Kiev was executed and his
forces slaughtered.
Mongol rule of Russia 283
Fearing that the Mongols would cross the Dnieper,
Prince Mstislav of Galacia and his remaining forces
destroyed all the ships. The forces of Jebe and Subotai
never crossed the Dnieper and, instead, returned to join
the main Mongolian army stationed in the steppes east
of the Syr Darya River. Thus by the end of 1222 the fi rst
invasion of Russia ended as swiftly as it had begun.
In the winter of 1237, well after the death of Genghis
Khan in 1227, the Mongol army returned. In the
context of a greater invasion of Europe, the Mongol
army, headed by the veteran Subotai, amassed some
150,000 to 200,000 warriors. The large army crossed
the frozen Volga and attacked the Russian eastern principality
of Riazan because it was considered the weakest.
As the Mongol army advanced, Prince Roman
rushed to Suzdal to ask Prince Yuri for help, which
was denied. Instead Grand Prince Yuri suggested that
the four princes of the vassal state, Princes Yuri, Oleg,
Roman, and Yaroslav, end their squabbling and join
forces against the Mongols. After defeating the Russian
army at Riazan, the Mongol army constructed a wooden
palisade that encircled the town capital of Riazan. After
fi ve days of bitter fi ghting, Riazan was fi nally captured.
The trapped princes and their families were executed,
the young women and nuns were systematically raped,
and the entire population was massacred.
In the winter of 1237–38, under the command of
Batu Khan, the Mongol army attacked Suzdal and its
capital Vladimir. Although his territory and its city
came under siege, Grand Prince Yuri did not intervene.
Batu Khan targeted Novgorod while Subotai attempted
to draw Grand Prince Yuri into battle. Novgorod, particularly
the fortress of Torzhok, fought and resisted
the forces of Batu Khan. The ensuing battle lasted two
weeks, enough time for an early spring to arrive. The
spring thaw fl ooded most of the southern terrain and
made it impossible for Batu Khan to advance. Batu
Khan was forced to abandon his siege on Novgorod
and retreat to the southern steppe.
In March 1238 Grand Prince Yuri and the Suzdalian
army perished at the decisive battle against Subotai
on the river Sit. With the strongest section of Russia
conquered within several months, the Mongolian army
sacked the state of Chernigov. Through the summer of
1239 and for one and a half years, the Mongol army
rested and sought comfort in the lush steppeland of
western Ukraine, in preparation for another campaign.
In summer 1240 the Mongol army resumed their
offensive against Russia. The cities of Chernigov and
Pereyaslav were captured. On December 6, 1240, Batu
Khan arrived with his army at Kiev to reinforce the
Mongol vanguard commanded by Mongke Khan.
After Dimitri, the governor of Kiev, had executed the
Mongol ambassadors, the Mongol army stormed the
city. Apart from the cathedral of Saint Sophia, the entire
city was leveled and its population exterminated.
By 1242 the Mongol army had captured all of Russia.
Batu Khan chose Old Sarai, in the lower Volga, to
establish the headquarters of the Mongol dominion over
Russia, which became known as the Golden Horde.
The Golden Horde, as a center for the Mongol
administration of Russia, endured for almost 250
years. A daruga handled Russian political affairs and
the collection of an annual tribute. To become eligible
to take offi ce, Russian princes had to journey to the
Golden Horde to pay obeisance to Mongol overlords.
Contented with being overlords, the Mongols never
established a dynasty in Russia. Occasionally, Russian
military units had to serve alongside the Mongol
army. Despite an attempt by Prince Dimitri of Moscow
to wrestle Russia from Mongol control in 1330,
they managed to rule and exact tribute for a further
century. Ivan III of Moscow fi nally broke Mongol rule
over Russia in 1480. Failing to check the emergence
and rise of the Muscovite state, the seed of modern
Russia, the Mongols ceded control.
See also Rus.
Further reading: DeHartog, Leo. Russia and the Mongol
Yoke: The History of the Russian Principalities and the
Golden Horde. London: British Academic Press, 1996; Halperin,
Charles J. Russia and the Golden Horde. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1985; Halperin, Charles J. The
Tatar Yoke. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers Inc., 1986;
Neville, Peter. Russia—The USSR, the CIS and the Independent
States: A Complete History in One Volume. Moretonin-
Marsh: Windrush Press, 2000; Riasanovsky, Nicholas V.,
and Mark D. Steinberg. A History of Russia. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
Santi Sukha
Moravia
Moravia was an independent Slavic kingdom that ruled
the middle Danube in the ninth century c.e.. Very few
historical records exist to document its history, and the
precise origin and territorial extent of the kingdom of
Moravia are not known. Byzantine emperor Constantine
VII Porphyrogenitos in his political geography De
administrando imperio (c. 950) identifi ed the kingdom
284 Moravia
as consisting of the territories surrounding Morava, referring
either to the Morava River in present-day Moravia
or to a so-far unidentifi ed city of Morava, perhaps
near the Sava River in northern Serbia.
Slovak historians consider the kingdom of Great
Moravia to have included lands along the Morava
and Danube Rivers and stretching across modern-day
Slovakia. Other historians have placed the center of
the kingdom farther south, in Hungary and Croatia.
The earliest known inhabitants of the region were
Celts, who were joined and ultimately displaced by
Slavs arriving sometime before the sixth century. Historical
sources mention the brief existence of an independent
Slav kingdom along the Frankish border in
central Europe in the second quarter of the seventh
century. Following the defeat and destruction of the
Avar empire by Charlemagne at the end of the eighth
century two political centers emerged in the region,
the principalities of Nitra and Morava. In 828 Prince
Pribrina of Nitra invited the archbishop of Salzburg to
send missionaries to the principality and establish the
fi rst Christian church. Five years later Prince Mojmir
I of Moravia defeated Pribrina and forced him into
exile in the Frankish kingdom. Mojmir then united
Nitra and Morava to form Great Moravia.
In 863 or 864 Mojmir’s successor Prince Rastislav
asked the Byzantine emperor to send missionaries to
Moravia. By turning to Byzantium for support, Rastislav
hoped to strengthen his position and secure independence
from the Frankish kingdom. The emperor sent
the brothers Cyril and Methodios, Byzantine church
offi cials who were conversant in Slavic languages. To
promote Christianity in Moravia, Cyril developed an
alphabet for the Slavs and translated the Gospel into
their language. The written form he introduced, Old
Church Slavonic, served as the basis for subsequent
Slavic literary development. The Cyrillic alphabet he
invented is used in many Slavic languages, including
Russian, Bulgarian, and Serbian.
Between 871 and 894 Prince Svätopluk I led Great
Moravia, successfully resisting Frankish attacks and
defending Methodios’s missionizing efforts (Cyril died
in 869) from interference by the archbishop of Salzburg.
In 880 Pope John VIII recognized Methodios
as the head of an independent archbishopric in Great
Moravia, appointed a bishop for Nitra, and sanctioned
the use of Old Church Slavonic as a fourth liturgical
language, alongside Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Great
Moravia reached its height at the end of Svätopluk’s
reign, controlling Bohemia and parts of Hungary and
southern Poland, as well as present-day Slovakia.
Following Svätopluk’s death, his sons Svätopluk
II and Mojmir II fought each other for control of the
kingdom. Their struggle weakened the state and left it
vulnerable to the attacks of Magyar raiders entering the
region from across the Carpathian Mountains. Both
princes were killed in battles with the Magyars sometime
between 904 and 907. The defeat of the Bavarians
by the Magyars near Bratislava in 907 marked the permanent
settlment of Magyar tribes in the middle Danube
and the clear end of Great Moravia as an independent
force in the region.
See also Frankish tribe; Magyar invasions.
Further reading: Boba, Imre. Moravia’s History Reconsidered.
The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971; Fine, John. The
Early Medieval Balkans. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press 1991.
Brian A. Hodson
Moscow: Third Rome
The civilization and culture of the Byzantine Empire
with its capital of “New Rome” (Constantinople) greatly
infl uenced the development of Russia. Christian missionaries
were sent from the Christian empire to Russia in the
ninth century. Their work bore fruit when, in 988, Prince
Vladimir I (Vladimir the Great) of Kiev looked to
“New Rome” for spiritual direction and was baptized
into Christianity. Vladimir converted Russia to the Christian
world. The patriarch of Constantinople appointed a
bishop for Kiev and continued to appoint the highestranking
pre late in the land until the 15th century.
In 1054 the religious division of “Old Rome”
and “New Rome” became permanent as Catholic
and Orthodox Christianity parted company. Russian
Christianity was fi rmly rooted in the Orthodox sphere
in theology, ecclesiology, literature, and liturgy. In the
13th century Western crusaders conquered Constantinople
and much of the Byzantine Empire in the Fourth
Crusade and sought to impose Catholic Christianity
on the Orthodox empire, while Orthodoxy in Russia
suffered a blow as the Mongols destroyed Kiev and
established their hegemony that lasted into the late
15th century.
With the destruction of Kiev and the Mongol dominance
of the Slavic southern region, the northern city of
Moscow began to rise in prominence in the 14th century.
In the fi rst quarter of the 14th century the metropolitan of
Russia (the highest ranking Orthodox bishop, formerly
Moscow: Third Rome 285
at Kiev) chose to settle in the city of Moscow. With the
support of the church, Dimitri Donkoi, grand duke of
Moscow, defeated the Mongols at the Battle of Kulikovo
in 1380. Though their hegemony lasted another century,
the Mongol hold on northern Russia was weakened and
the prestige of Moscow greatly enhanced.
Moscow viewed itself as upholding the mantle of
Orthodoxy against the hostile forces of Catholic Christianity,
which had been attacking Orthodox Russia via
Teutonic, Knights, Swedes, Poles, and Lithuanians in
the 13th and 14th centuries as well as non- Christian
forces, such as the Mongols. Up to this time, the metropolitan
of Russia was selected by the Orthodox
patriarch of Constantinople. This changed however
after the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–39,
when the Byzantine Empire, faced with the overwhelming
threat of the Muslim Ottoman Turks, submitted
the Orthodox Church to the papacy. Moscow
and Russian Orthodoxy rejected this church council
and its submission as antithetical to true Christianity.
Henceforth, the Russian church was independent from
Constantinopolitan control.
In 1453 Constantinople or “New Rome” fell to
the Ottoman Turks. Russian czar Ivan III “the Great”
(reigned 1462–1505) married the niece of the last Byzantine
emperor and inherited the mantle of the Christian
empire that had been established by Constantine
I (d. 337), the founder of “New Rome.” The Russians
understood that God had allowed “Old Rome” to be
sacked by Germans in the fi fth century and shifted
the imperial and religious center of Christendom to
Constantinople. Now God had decreed that Second
Rome should fall. With the other Eastern Patriarchates
(Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem) also in Muslim
hands, it appeared to the Russian church that it clearly
stood as the champion of Orthodoxy and the heir
apparent to Orthodox Christian leadership: It was the
Third Rome.
Russian monk Philotheus of Pskov articulated this
most clearly in his letter to Czar Basil III in 1510: “Two
Romes have fallen, but the third stands and a fourth
there shall not be.” The czar of Moscow became the
new protector of Orthodoxy and in the later 16th century
the metropolitan of Moscow was promoted to the
rank of patriarch.
Further reading: Riasanovsky, N. A History of Russia. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2005; Ware, Timothy. The
Orthodox Church. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.
Matthew Herbst
Muhammad, the prophet
(c. 570/571–632) religious leader
Muhammad was born in Mecca to the Hashim branch
of the major Qureish tribe. He was raised in a poor
household by his grandfather and as a young man
married Khadija, a wealthy widow who was also a
successful businesswoman. Working with Khadija,
Muhammad earned a reputation for honesty.
The couple had one daughter, Fatima, who married
Ali. While Khadija lived, Muhammad remained monogamous,
although polygamy was the usual practice throughout
Arabia. After Khadija’s death, Muhammad married a
number of times. In keeping with customs throughout the
world, these marriages were often made to cement tribal,
religious, and political alliances or to give widows protection
and support. However, Muhammad’s marriage to
A’isha, the daughter of Abu Bakr, an early Muslim convert,
was by all accounts an alliance of love.
As Muhammad became increasingly religious he
began to meditate; in 610, he received the fi rst revelations
from Allah (God) transmitted through the angel
Gabriel on Mount Hira. In one vision or dream he
even traveled on a winged beast, Buruq, to Jerusalem,
which was to become the third holy city in Islam after
Mecca and Medina. The revelations would ultimately
be set down in the Qur’an, the Muslim holy book.
The new religion was known as Islam or submission
to God. Within a year, Muhammad began to preach
the word of Allah and converted Khadija, Ali, his freed
slave servant Zaid, and his uncle Abu Talib. The new
converts were known as Muslims, or those who surrender
or submit to the will of God. They followed the Five
Pillars of Islam as the articles of faith.
As the fl edgling Muslim community grew, the wealthy
merchant families in Mecca, especially the Umayyads,
grew alarmed that the new religion might threaten the
lucrative pilgrimage trade from those visiting the holy
Ka’aba, a rock in Mecca that Arabian tribal peoples
had venerated for centuries. Subsequently they began
to persecute Muslim believers and even jailed Muhammad
for a time. Some of the new believers fl ed to the
Christian kingdom of Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia),
where as other monotheists they were warmly received.
Fearing increased persecution or even death, Muhammad
accepted an invitation from the people of Yathrib,
later known as Medina, to settle in that city. In 622 the
Muslim community migrated or made a hijrah to Medina.
The Muslim lunar calendar begins with that date.
The Meccans swore revenge but were badly defeated by
the Muslims at the Battle of Badr in 624. Although the
286 Muhammad, the prophet
Muslims lost a following confrontation, ably led by the
prophet Muhammad, they ultimately triumphed and
returned to Mecca with Muhammad as the acknowledged
new leader of most of Arabia.
Muhammad died in 632 in the city of his birth.
Muhammad had no sons who lived to adulthood and left
no instructions as to who should lead the Muslim community
after his death. Following the Prophet’s death,
the community gathered and in a remarkably open and
democratic fashion chose, by consensus, Abu Bakr to be
their new caliph or representative.
See also Ethiopian Empire; Five, or Six, pillars of
Islam.
Further reading: Ishaq, Ibn. The Life of Muhammad. Trans.
by A. Guillaume. London: Oxford University Press, 1955;
Rodinson, Maxime Muhammed. Trans. by Anne Carter.
London: I.B.Tauris, 1971; Watt, W. Montgomery. Muhammad
at Mecca. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953;
———. Muhammad at Medina. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1956.
Janice J. Terry
Muhammad of Ghur
(1149–1206) sultan
The victory of Muhammad of Ghur over the Rajput
king, Prithviraj Chauhan III (r. 1178–92), was a turning
point in the history of South Asia. Islam began to
pervade the northern portion of the Indian subcontinent,
in present-day India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. It was
Muhammad of Ghur who prepared the groundwork of
the establishment of political power. Muizuddin Muhammad
of Ghur, also known as Shahbuddin, came
from the Ghur region located in modern Afghanistan.
In the rivalry between the house of the Ghaznavids
and Ghurids, the latter under the leadership of Alauddin
Husain (r. 1149–61), emerged victorious. Muhammad’s
early career began with the conquest of Ghazni in 1173.
He was ambitious and bent upon a career of territorial
aggrandizement. Muhammad could not expand toward
the west because of the presence of the powerful Khwarizm
dynasty of Persia. He found the Indian subcontinent
ruled by regional kingdoms, with no unity among
themselves to check external aggression. Prevailing social
tensions, apathetic attitude of the common people, and
advanced military technology facilitated his conquest.
In 1175 Multan fell into the hands of Muhammad,
and afterward he occupied Uch and the lower Sind.
Three years afterward he faced defeat at the hands of
the Chalukyas of Gujrat. Bhimdev II defeated Muhammad
near Mount Abu. Muhammad planned an attack
through the Punjab region, where Ghanazvid king Tajuddaula
Khursav Malik (r. 1160–86) ruled. By 1179 he was
master of Peshawar, Lahore, and Silakot. Most of the
areas in present-day Pakistan were under his sway. His
territorial border was contiguous with Prithviraj III, the
Chauhan ruler of Delhi and Ajmer. At the fi rst Battle of
Tarai in 1191, he defeated Muhammad. The latter was
captured and brought before Prithviraj, who released the
vanquished as an act of magnanimity. Prithviraj was not
friendly with the Gaharwar ruler of Kannauj, Jaychandra
(r. 1170–93), and Muhammad exploited it. Jaychandra
sided with the Ghur ruler, as he was bitter over Prithviraj’s
forced marriage with Princess Sanjukta.
The Rajput control over North India was over after
Muhammad defeated Prithviraj in the second Battle of
Tarai of 1192. The defeated Rajput ruler was taken as a
captive to Ghur and ultimately he was blinded and killed.
The rule from the northwest began, which culminated in
establishing the political kingdom of the Delhi Sultanate.
Muhammad controlled much of northern India and
parts of Gujarat and Gwalior.
Qutubuddin Aibak (r. 1206–10), the general of
Muhammad, was put in charge of Delhi and Ajmer. He
made Delhi capital and conquered Ranthambhor, Bulandshahr,
Aligarh, and Meerut. Muhammad returned to the
Indian subcontinent in 1194. He defeated his erstwhile
ally Jaychandra in a decisive battle fought on the banks
of the Jamuna River near Chandawar. Within a year
Muhammad was master of northern India after occupying
Bayana, Varanasi, and Gwalior. He returned to
Ghur leaving his generals, who consolidated and further
expanded the territory of Muhammad. Even outlying
provinces like Bengal, Bihar, and Gujarat felt the
onslaught of a new rule. While Muhammad’s lieutenants
were busy on the Indian subcontinent, he returned
to settle the affairs of his parent kingdom. His elder
brother Ghiyasuddin had died in 1202 and Muhammad
became the ruler of Ghur. After three years Alauddin
Muhammad (r. 1199–1220), the Khwarizm Saha
ruler, defeated him in the Battle of Andhkhud.
Muhammad came to India again in 1205 to suppress
the rebellion of the Ghakkar tribe in the Punjab. On his
way back home during the next year, Muhammad made
a stop at Dhamyak on the banks of the river Jhelum.
He was stabbed and killed while offering evening
prayers in the Ghokkar territory. Some authorities
believe that the Isma’ili sect were responsible for his
death. Qutb ud-Din Aibak took control of Muhammad’s
Muhammad of Ghur 287
territory in India, declaring independence from the Ghurids.
The Ghurids continued to rule the Ghurid kingdom
until 1211, when Alauddin annexed their kingdom. The
territorial extent of the Khwarazm dynasty extended
from Turkistan in the east to the borders of Iraq in the
west. The Mongols conquered part of Ghurid territory in
Afghanistan. Earlier victories of Muhammad bin Qasim
(712) and the raids of Mahmud of Ghazni (1000–25)
had not resulted in establishment of political power.
Major areas of present-day India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan
came under the reign of the Delhi Sultanate, who
ruled after Muhammad.
See also Isma’ilis.
Further reading: Chandra, Satish. Medieval India: From
Sultanate to the Mughals. Delhi: Har Anand, 1998; Chattopadhyaya,
Brajadulal. The Making of Early Medieval India.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; Hasan, Masudu.
History of Islam. Delhi: Adam Publishers, 2002; Kulke, Hermann,
and Dietmar Rothermund. History of India. Calcutta:
Rupa, 1994; Thapar, Romila. A History of India. Aylesbury:
Penguin, 1977.
Patit Paban Mishra
Murasaki Shikibu
(c. 11th century c.e.) Japanese novelist
Murasaki Shikibu was a noblewoman of the dominant
Fujiwara clan in Japan. Fujiwara women had a monopoly
of being wives and concubines of the emperors,
while the men ruled in the sovereigns’ names. She was
lady in waiting to the empress and author of a novel
titled Tale of Genji, which is acclaimed as a great and
pioneering literary work.
The Japanese language belongs to the Altaic family
group; it is polysyllabic and is related to Korean. Since
there was no native written script, the leaders of Japan
adopted the Chinese writing system in the sixth century.
For several centuries afterward upper-class Japanese
men put great focus on learning Chinese and copying
Chinese works and Buddhist manuscripts. Japanese
government documents, historical and legal works, and
literary and poetic works were all written in Chinese
characters and indistinguishable from works on similar
subjects in Chinese. When writing Japanese names
they had to employ Chinese characters not for their
meaning, but as phonetic signs. In the ninth century a
phonetic style of writing that used abbreviated Chinese
characters selected for their sound was created. These
syllables were called kana and they were convenient for
writing down spoken Japanese.
Although Chinese culture remained very prestigious
in Japan, the Japanese court decided to end
sending embassies to China in 894, refl ecting disorders
in China as the Tang (T’ang) dynasty neared its
end, and also the growing maturity of Japanese institutions.
In 710 a fi rst permanent capital was established
in Nara, modeled on China’s capital Chang’an
(Ch’ang-an). Nara was abandoned in favor of a new
capital called Heian (later Kyoto) in 794. Heian
became an opulent city where wealth and culture
fl ourished. While men continued to write in Chinese,
noble ladies in Heian, who were not burdened with
learning literary Chinese, began to write rambling
novels, memoirs, and poetry using the kana script.
The most famous writer was Murasaki Shikibu,
who wrote Genji Monogatari or Tale of Genji, between
1008 and 1020. It is a romance of the life and loves of
an imaginary Prince Genji and portrays the frivolous
and decadent court life of the time. It is a sophisticated
depiction of Heian society and has great literary merit
and psychological insight. It is the fi rst novel in Japanese
literature written in kana. Another work by a court lady,
Sei Shonagon, is called Pillow Book, which consists of
observations and comments on manners and mores of
the Japanese court. Both ladies and their works have been
infl uential in inspiring later works of the same genre.
See also kanji and kana.
288 Murasaki Shikibu
Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji (illustrated above) portrays the
frivolous court life of the time in Japan.
Further reading: Morris, I. I. The World of the Shining Prince:
Court Life in Ancient Japan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf
1964; Lady Murasaki. The Tale of Genji. Trans. by Arthur
Waley. New York: Modern Library, 1960.
Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur
Muslim Spain
In 711 the Muslims had conquered the southern parts
of the Iberian Peninsula. By 714 following the decline
of the Visigoths, the Muslims had gained a strong grip
on virtually the entire Iberian Peninsula. The parts
in southern Spain that were under Muslim rule were
called al-Andalus. The vast region was divided into
fi ve administrative provinces—Andalusia (including
the capital Córdoba and Seville), Central Spain, Galicia
and Lusitania, and the Ebro region. The administrative
system was subject to change as the Christians
regained more power over parts of Muslim Spain in the
following centuries. However Muslim Spain was not
restricted to the region named al-Andalus. The Muslims
also controlled parts of Aragon-Catalonia and
Navarre. Parts of southern France fell briefl y under
Muslim rule but a strong French military force under
Charles Martel managed to drive them away in 756.
Although Córdoba was not the capital city of previous
rulers such as the Byzantines and the Romans, it
lay at the crossroads of important trade routes. Moreover
the city possessed rich agricultural resources. From
there the caliphs ruled parts of North Africa and the
Iberian Peninsula. The Muslims had, in fact, amassed
a vast empire stretching from Spain to India and ruled
diverse groups of people, who contributed to the later
development of a sophisticated culture in a cosmopolitan
setting found in Muslim capitals such as Córdoba.
By 757 al-Andalus had been clearly established as a
Muslim polity with a mainly Arab and Berber population,
but also with many converts. Within Muslim
Spain, the Umayyad dynasty ruled over Arabs from
various locations as well as Berbers, Jews, Christians.
The lingua franca used by diverse groups of people
within al-Andalus was Arabic.
UMAYYAD DYNASTY
In 750 after a series of rival wars between various Muslim
factions, the Umayyad Abd al-Rahman Mu’awiya,
also known as Abd al-Rahman I, refused to acknowledge
the Abbasid Sunni Caliphate based in Baghdad. By this
time the Abbasid dynasty was considered corrupt and
weak. This led Abd al-Rahman to set up his own dynasty
of emirs of Córdoba, fi rst by ousting the previous ruler,
Yusuf al-Fihri. Abd al-Rahman proclaimed himself the
fi rst emir of Córdoba in the mosque of Córdoba on
May 14, 756. The powerful Fatimid dynasty, based in
Egypt, opposed the installation of the Umayyad Caliphate
on Córdoba. The Fatimid dynasty had a strong hold
over North Africa. Abd al-Rahman thus enlisted the help
of the Zanata Berber tribe enemies of the Sinhaja tribe,
allies of the Fatimids. Pro-Umayyad rebellions against
the Fatimids were quashed and Abd al-Rahman was
unable to advance into North Africa, as he was preoccupied
with skirmishes with the Christians.
He ruled independently of the Abbasid Caliphate for
33 years, consolidating suffi cient support for Umayyad
authority to ensure the longevity of his dynasty. Abd al-
Rahman succeeded in fending off Yusuf al-Fihri’s allies
as well as the supporters of the Abbasid Caliphate within
al-Andalus. Later on the emirate became known as the
Umayyad Caliphate, which was in fact modeled upon
the older Abbasid Caliphate. The Umayyads, who were
members of the prophet Muhammad’s tribe Qureish,
claimed to be descendants from the prophet Muhammad.
Prior to conquering parts of the Iberian Peninsula the
Umayyads had already ruled a huge part of the Muslim
world including the important city of Samarkand at the
eastern edge of their kingdom. Their conquests stretched
to al-Andalus in the west with its capital in Córdoba. By
the time of Abd al-Rahman I’s death in 852, al-Andalus
was already a major diplomatic power in the Mediterranean
with emirates established over North Africa. Links
had also been established with the Byzantine emperor,
another major player in Mediterranean politics.
VISIGOTH RESISTANCE
Initially the Muslim power that was responsible for the
great wave of Muslim expansion was based in their distant
capital city of Damascus. In Muslim Spain, however,
Córdoba was made the capital, where the Muslim invaders
settled down as property owners soon after their victory
over the Visigoths. One way land was acquired in
Córdoba was through marriage with important members
of the Visigothic aristocracy. This had the added
advantage of staving off potential opposition from the
Visigoths, who had been the ruling class in Córdoba
before their defeat at the hands of the Muslims.
Despite the Visigoths’ apparent truce with the
Muslims within Spain, members of the Visigothic aristocracy
who had fl ed up north of the Iberian Peninsula
continued to resist Muslim rule in the south. This
was an impetus for the Muslims to invade the northern
Muslim Spain 289
mountainous region of the peninsula, as well as France.
The Muslim invaders were especially looking to gain
resources in France rather than the inaccessible regions
in northern Spain. These attacks were launched in order
to gain booty, because at that time the Muslim rulers
in Spain possessed a booty or ghanima economy. This
system came to an end when the three major military
expeditions to France during the eighth century ended
in disastrous defeats.
Umayyad caliphs in al-Andalus had a policy of tolerance
toward the non-Muslims under their rule. Non-
Muslim residents had to bear the heaviest burden of taxation.
They had to pay a poll tax (jizya) and a land tax.
Thus the greatest source of revenue, which went toward
fi nancing the caliphs’ military campaigns, was the non-
Muslim inhabitants of al-Andalus. This contributed to
the policy of tolerance of the Christian and Jewish population.
Conversion to Islam escalated under the reign
of the Umayyad Caliphate. This is despite the fact that
Islamic proselytizing was minimal during this period.
Thus it has been suggested that social or economic forces,
rather than any active missionary pressure on the
part of the Muslims, motivated conversion. During the
ninth century mass conversions took place. The benefi
ts of conversion included employment opportunities
in government. Not only did Muslims pay signifi cantly
less tax than non-Muslims, they could also gain better
positions in the bureaucracy.
In fact the unifying bonds between the various
groups of people were culture and literature, rather
than religion, which created a harmonious setting.
There was a large Christian group within Muslim Spain
known as the Mozarabs, who settled mostly in Seville.
They adopted a Muslim lifestyle, in terms of fashion,
architecture, and literature, without converting to
Islam. These Mozarabs suffered religious persecution in
1139 by fellow Christians after the raids of King Afonso
I (Henriques) of Portugal on Seville, as they were not
considered true Christians.
UMAYYAD DYNASTY OF CÓRDOBA
The caliph of Córdoba, formerly known as the emir of
Córdoba, ruled Spain for slightly more than a century,
from the year 929 to 1031, beginning with the reign of
the most powerful Muslim ruler, Abd ar-Rahman III,
who claimed the caliphate in 929. The caliph was especially
skilled at projecting his image as a powerful Arab
leader. Abd ar-Rahman III made sure he was visible
to his people in the many ceremonies and processions
organized for him. He was Hispano-Basque (grandson
of a Christian Basque princess) and was only a quarter
Arab. In order to look more like an Arab, it has been
said, he dyed his hair black. The caliph presented himself
as an effective leader of his own military troops. In
his image campaign, newsletters and poems were glowingly
written of his military prowess and piety.
During this period, in addition to having a reputation
as an illustrious commercial center, al-Andalus
also became an eminent center of knowledge and learning.
Al-Andalus was a great civilization, compared with
the rest of Europe at that time. Many Islamic works
of art were produced during this era of Muslim rule.
Umayyad caliph Abd Al-Rahman III had a keen interest
in the arts, as well as the religious and secular sciences.
He amassed many books from other intellectual centers
such as Baghdad, which were then stored in the
library. Scholars were also hired to supplement further
the amount of written knowledge imported.
Drawn to the bastion of knowledge and culture,
many philosophers and scientists began to migrate to
al-Andalus, making it a renowned center of learning.
Intellectual life in Córdoba peaked during the reign of
Al-Hakam II, who was in power from 961 to 967. He
was responsible for establishing a massive library fi lled
with hundreds of thousands of volumes, a useful repository
of knowledge in the Mediterranean world. During
this period several intellectuals achieved prominence in
Muslim Spain. Spanish Muslim intellectuals excelled
in the fi elds of mathematics, medicine, and astronomy.
The most famous example is Ibn Rushd, otherwise
called Averroës, who was a philosopher, theologian,
physician, and sometime royal consultant, born and
educated in Córdoba.
CHRISTIAN RECONQUEST
Simultaneously the territories owned by the caliph of
Córdoba decreased just as aspects of commerce and culture
thrived. Internal dissension among different Arab
factions weakened the Umayyad power base in Córdoba
as they disintegrated into warring divisions. The lack of
Muslim unity proved crucial to Christian success. During
the reign of Hisham II, the Umayyad Caliphate disintegrated
into party-kingdoms in 1009. He was executed
in 1013, only to be succeeded by another weak
ruler, Hisham III, the last caliph of Córdoba. Hisham
III was exiled to Lerida. Nominal rule continued under
the short-lived Hasanid dynasty until 1054. The further
remaining territories dwindled into mere Muslim
principalities, better known as independent taifas, ruled
by mainly Berber rulers, though there were also non-
Berber rulers. With their defenses weakened because of
lack of unity, these taifas often had to hire mercenaries
290 Muslim Spain
from North Africa or Christian mercenaries to protect
their principalities, which were constantly at war with
each other. This chaotic situation in the Muslim states
was conducive to Christian reconquest.
Christians in the northern parts of the Iberian Peninsula
had already begun to consolidate their military
and political power as early as the eighth century, and
into the latter half of the ninth century. Under the reign
of Alfonso II (791–842), the Christians in the northern
region had stabilized themselves. He was able to install
Visigothic institutions in his kingdom with his capital
in Oviedo. The Christians viewed the reconquest of
southern Spain (al-Andalus) as justifi ed, since they were
reclaiming what rightfully belonged to the Visigoths.
Further impetus was provided by the discovery of the
tomb of St. James the apostle, a patron saint around
whom the Christians could rally.
From the eighth to the 10th century the Christian
north had possessed an inferior economic system and
cultural milieu compared to al-Andalus in the south.
However they were already clearly formed political
entities with military forces that were able to stave off
attacks from their enemies from the south. This enabled
them to reconquer Muslim Spain upon its disintegration
during the 10th and 11th centuries.
In 1056 the Almoravid Empire took over as the
rulers of Muslim Spain. They were replaced by the
dynasty of Almohads in 1130. The decline of the Almohads
in 1269 enabled the Christians to conquer parts
of Muslim Spain with more ease. The important cities
of Córdoba and Seville had already fallen into Christian
hands in 1236 and 1248, respectively, leaving
only Granada as the last Muslim stronghold. In 1469
through the union of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella
of Castille, much of Spain was united. By 1492 a stronger
Christian Spain fi nally took over Granada.
Further reading: Fletcher, Richard. Moorish Spain. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992; Gines, Juan Vernet, and
Leonor Martinez Martin. Al-Andalus: El Islam en Espana.
Madrid: Lundwerg Editores, 1987; Kennedy, Hugh. Muslim
Spain and Portugal. New York: Longman, 1996; Roth, Norman.
Jews, Visigoths, and Muslims in Medieval Spain. New
York: E. J. Brill, 1994.
Nurfadzilah Yahaya

The First Global Age 1450 to 1750

Macao, Portuguese in Portugal established a trading empire in Asia in the 16th century by means of a string of important ports that tapped the products of the continent. Macao (Macau) was Portugal’s outpost on the South China coast. Vasco da Gama was a Portuguese explorer and the first European to reach India via Africa. He was followed by Afonso de Albuquerque (1435–1515), viceroy of Portuguese India, who arrived in Goa on the western coast of India. In 1410, he sent a fleet to capture Malacca on the Malay Peninsula. There they found many Chinese sailing vessels trading in silks and other products throughout Southeast Asia. In 1517, Portugal’s envoy Tomé Pires arrived in Guangzhou (Canton) on the Pearl River delta, an important trading port for two thousand years. The eight Portuguese ships fired cannon shots as a salute upon entering the harbor, a ritual that the Chinese misunderstood. Pires however remained in China, attempting to negotiate with the government of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The Chinese held him responsible for the misdeeds of Portuguese sailors and he died in a Chinese jail in 1524. Despite this inauspicious beginning, the Portuguese continued to explore trading opportunities along the Chinese coast and finally were permitted to build an outpost at the end of a peninsula on the southwestern end of the Pearl River estuary in 1535, a two-squaremile land with a good harbor called Macao. The Portuguese paid rent to China for Macao and in return were allowed to build docks, trading facilities, a church, schools, and so on, and to govern themselves. Even when other European nations were allowed to establish trading companies in Guangzhou, they had to leave their “factories” (offices and warehouses) along the waterfront outside that city when the trading season was over and retreat to Macao. In addition, Macao became the base for Jesuit missionaries coming to China. Jesuit missionaries were honored and their services in fields such as astronomy, cartography, architecture, and weaponry were valued by the Ming, and later the Qing (Ch’ing [1644–1911]) court. Several Jesuit fathers designed and supervised the making of European style weapons such as cannon pieces in Macao for the Ming government up to 1644 and the Qing after that. The arrival of the Portuguese in China in the early 16th century opened a new chapter in China’s relations with the outside world. Sino-Western relations would be fundamentally different from China’s interactions with its land neighbors and with earlier Persian, Arab, and Malay maritime traders in eras past. See also Ricci, Matteo. Further reading: Boxer, C. R., ed. and trans. Seventeenth- Century Macao in Contemporary Documents and Illustrations. Hong Kong: Heinemann, 1984; Souza, George Bryan. The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea 1630–1754. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Twitchett, Denis, and Frederick Mote, eds. The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 8: The Ming Dynasty, Part 2: 1368–1644. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527) historian, playwright, and diplomat Machiavelli was born in Florence on May 3, 1469. His parents provided him with a humanistic education, with a stress on Latin grammar, rhetoric, and history. As he matured, he deepened his knowledge of the works of the philosophers and historians of ancient Greece and Rome and became familiar with the comedies of Plautus. Machiavelli was head of the Second Chancery and secretary to the Ten of War of the Florentine Republic from 1498 to 1512. His duties included diplomatic missions to heads of state on the Italian peninsula and elsewhere in Europe. Especially noteworthy are those missions to Louis XII of France, Emperor Maximilian I, Caterina Sforza of Forli, Pope Julius II, and Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI. When the Medici overthrew republican rule in 1512, Machiavelli was suspected of a conspiracy against them, imprisoned, and tortured. After his exoneration and release under a general amnesty in 1513, he turned to writing. Machiavelli’s literary output is extensive. His History of Florence, commissioned by the Medici, begins with the city’s origins and ends on a pessimistic note with the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1492. The Art of War is a technical look at military preparations and makes a plea for a citizen militia. Machiavelli’s best known work, The Prince, is based on his diplomatic experience and his reading of ancient history. It is a complex assessment of the qualities needed for political leadership by a new prince. Although the book is modeled on the “mirror for princes,” advice books common to the Renaissance era, many of its recommendations are the inverse of the princely virtues advocated by that literature. Its meaning has often been reduced to the trite phrase “The end justifies the means.” Some critics have deemed the book an advice manual for would-be autocrats. As early as the century in which he lived, Machiavelli and The Prince were condemned and demonized in French Protestant circles and in Elizabethan English literature. Leading Jesuits also attacked him, and his works were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books of the Roman Catholic Church in 1559. Although criticism of Machiavelli and The Prince continues, recent scholarship has modified these negative assessments. Greater stress is now placed on his advocacy of republicanism, especially as expressed in the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy. Modern scholars also recognize Machiavelli’s literary creativity. His play Mandragola presents a comic as well as ironic look at Renaissance marriage patterns and offers an astute analysis of desire and ambition. Another, Clizia, revolves around an aged married man’s attempts to gain the love of a young woman. The fable Belfagor recounts the experiences of a fiend who is delegated by the devil to spend time in marriage on Earth. His Tercets on Fortune is an extended study of Fortune, whom he personifies as a woman and associates with discord and unpredictability in human affairs. Machiavelli died on June 21, 1527, and is entombed in the basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. Further reading: De Grazia, Sebastian. Machiavelli in Hell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993; Skinner, Quentin. Machiavelli. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; Viroli, Maurizio. Niccolò’s Smile. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Louis B. Gimelli Magellan, Ferdinand (1480?–1521) Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan’s exact date of birth is unknown but is believed to be in 1480. His parents were petty nobles. After the return of Vasco da Gama’s expedition from India, Portugal launched subsequent expeditions there. When Francisco de Almeida, who would become the first Portuguese Indian viceroy, set out for India in 1505, Magellan joined his expedition. Magellan spent eight years there in a number of different positions. He was also involved with Diogo Lopes de Sequeira’s expedition to Malacca in 1508–09. Magellan returned to Portugal in 1513. Magellan then served in Morocco, where he was involved in a number of battles and skirmishes. He also served as quartermaster in charge of the spoils of war. Upon his return to Portugal, he requested an increase in pay from King Manuel, but the request was denied because of rumors that he sold cattle to Portugal’s enemies in Morocco. Magellan returned to Morocco to clear his name so the king would consider his request for more pay. King Manuel still denied the increase. 226 Machiavelli, Niccolò This was apparently one of the main motivations behind Magellan’s decision to approach the Spanish with his idea of finding a passage from Europe to India sailing west, either around or through the Americas. Magellan convinced the Spanish to back the expedition in 1517. The expedition set out in September 1519 with five ships. They sailed to the South American coast of Brazil. From there Magellan explored the bay at Rio de Janeiro and the Rio de la Plata before halting for the winter in Patagonia from March through August 1520. It was during this time that Magellan faced a mutiny and saw one of his ships desert the expedition. With winter over, Magellan continued south along the coast of South America. Upon reaching the southern tip of South America, Magellan took 38 days to find a passage to the Pacific through the strait that now bears his name, the Strait of Magellan. Having found the way through to the Pacific, the expedition started up the western coast of South America on November 28, 1520. Magellan took 98 days to cross the Pacific with hopes of reaching China but instead made landfall at Guam. From there, the expedition continued on a western course that brought them to Cebu on April 7, 1521. There Magellan made an alliance with the local leader and agreed to help them attack a neighboring island. It was during this attack that Magellan was killed on April 27, 1521. The expedition continued west and eventually made its way back to Spain, having rounded the Cape of Good Hope in September 1522, three years after having left. While Magellan did not actually live to complete the circumnavigation of the globe, the journey was the product of his ambition and determination. More important was his discovery of a way to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean going west rather than around Africa. See also Columbus, Christopher; voyages of discovery. Further reading: Bedini, Silvio A., ed. The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992; Burton, Rosemary, Richard Cavendish, and Bernard Stonehouse. Journeys of the Great Explorers. New York: Facts On File, 1992; Guillemard, Francis Henry Hill. The Life of Ferdinand Magellan and the First Circumnavigation of the Globe, 1480–1521. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1890. Dallace W. Unger, Jr. Malacca, Portuguese and Dutch colonization of Malacca (Melaka) is a settlement that commands the strategically important Malacca Straits and thus the sea route linking China to the west. The Strait also links to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. The location of Malacca has made it attractive to pirates. A settlement was established at Malacca by the Sumatran prince Paramasvera at the beginning of the 15th century and it grew in importance rapidly. The prince converted to Islam and the Sultanate of Malacca became an important outpost of that religion in a region in Southeast Asia. In the 18th century, the sultanate became a tributary to the Ming dynasty in China. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive at Malacca and captured it in 1511, with a force commanded by Afonso de Albuquerque. The Portuguese would control Malacca for 130 years before being supplanted by the Dutch. Malacca, Portuguese and Dutch colonization of 22 7 Ferdinand Magellan discovered a way to reach the Pacific Ocean from the Atlantic Ocean by going west, rather than around Africa. The defeated sultan established a new capital at Johor and attempted to expel the Portuguese in alliance with Malay rulers nearby, but their mutual rivalry prevented them from forming effective alliances to defeat the Portuguese. The Acehnese made the most serious attempt to expel the Portuguese with an armada of 300 boats, perhaps 15,000 troops, and artillerymen from Turkey. The Portuguese, however, were able to withstand the repeated assaults. The Portuguese attempted to convert some of the people of Malacca to Christianity. The noted Jesuit Saint Francis Xavier spent some time in the region. The arrival of Sir Francis Drake of England in the late 16th century brought a new power to the region and another challenge to Portugal. Dutch ships also became active in the region in the latter part of the 16th century as part of the Dutch trading empire. The Dutch eventually struck up a strong alliance with Johor, a state on the Malay Peninsula, and thus were able to prosecute a successful siege that ended in the Netherlands’s gaining control of Malacca. The rise in importance of Malacca in the 16th century and beyond was the result of local elites and their ability to mobilize trading networks and the arrival of enterprising Chinese who became merchants, miners, and general traders. Other ethnic groups also contributed to making Malacca a cosmopolitan port. They include Indians, Arabs, Persians, and other Europeans. See also Goa, colonization of; Loyola, Ingatius of, and the Society of Jesus; Ming dynasty, late. Further reading: Andaya, Barbara Watson, and Leonard Y. Andara. A History of Malaysia. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001; Sucharithanarugse, Withaya, ed. Port Cities and Trade in Western Southeast Asia. Bangkok: Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, 1998; Pires, Tomé. The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires. Laurier Books Ltd., 1990; Reid, Anthony. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, Vol. II: Expansion and Crisis. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1993. John Walsh Malinche, La (Doña Marina) (c. 1496–c. 1529) translator La Malinche was one of the key players in the 16th century conquest of Mexico by Spanish conquistadores. However little is known about Malinche’s life before or after the years of the Spanish conquest in the 1520s. Malinche was born into a noble family of the Aztec upper class. Her name is probably derived from a corruption of the Nahuatl word Malintzin. She was probably born in Oluta, in the province of Coatzacoalcos, which is in the area between central Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula. Upon the death of her father, her mother sold Malinche into slavery. During this time, Malinche learned several languages, including Mayan. She was approximately 18 years old when the Spanish conquistadores landed in Mexico and began their conquest of her native land. In April 1519, Malinche was given as a translator to Hernán Cortés during his dealings with the Aztecs. She was immediately baptized as a member of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Spaniards bestowed upon Malinche the Christian name Marina. A great amount of the information that has survived about Malinche is the result of the writings of Bernal Díaz del Castillo. In his writings, Diaz noted that Malinche was a beautiful woman who was intelligent, extremely loyal, and not easily embarrassed. She was greatly respected by many of the men, both Aztec and Spanish, with whom she interacted in her role as Cortés’s interpreter. In his famous book The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517–21, Díaz del Castillo stated that Malinche’s mother remarried upon the death of her first husband, Malinche’s father. When her mother gave birth to a new son, in order to safeguard the baby’s inheritance, Malinche’s mother and stepfather sold the little girl into slavery to some Aztecs from Xicalango. The Aztecs from Xicalango then sold Malinche to a group of Aztecs from Tabasco. After staying in Tabasco for a short period of time, Malinche was eventually given as a gift to Cortés upon his arrival in Mexico. In addition to working as a translator for Cortés, Malinche served as a guide and diplomat. Cortés was so impressed with Malinche’s efforts on his behalf that he eventually arranged for her marriage to one of his men, a Castilian knight named Juan de Jaramillo. They were married at the town of Orizaba. She later bore him a daughter named María. Despite her marriage to de Jaramillo, Malinche remained a key figure in Cortés’s later exploits in Tenochtitlán. Diaz observed that she was present when Cortés was carrying on negotiations with Moctezuma II in 1523. Working with a Spanish priest named Geronimo de Aguilar, Malinche translated Cortés’s words into the Nahuatl dialect spoken by Moctezuma after de Aguilar 228 Malinche, La (Doña Marina) translated from Spanish to the Mayan dialect that she understood. Later, Malinche apparently became fluent enough in Spanish that Aguilar’s assistance was no longer needed during the final negotiations with Moctezuma. Indeed, Malinche’s skill in language and in secular politics was so great that she even acted as counselor to the Aztec king during his dealings with Cortés. In addition to their professional relationship, Malinche bore Cortés a son named Martín. Cortés seemed to have held his relationship with Malinche in some esteem as he named their son Martín after his own father. Cortés later had the boy legitimized, and he always seemed to favor Martín among his other children in later life. However, in the majority of letters Cortés sent back to Spain, anytime he mentioned Malinche, it was always in her role as his translator. He never alluded to any personal details about Malinche in his Spanish correspondence. Over the next several years, Malinche’s power seemed to increase. She always dressed in expensive garments and appeared to have her hair styled in the most elegant native fashions. She traveled throughout much of Mexico with Cortés, translating for him in his dealings with the Mayan Empire in 1526. Sometime after the birth of their son, Martín, the relationship between Malinche and Cortés seemed to flounder. She is rarely mentioned in Cortés’s correspondence after the mid-1520s. After the completion of the Spanish conquest of Mexico in late 1526, Malinche all but disappears from historical records to the point that little to no information is recorded about her death. There is some speculation that she may have died of complications surrounding the birth of her daughter, María, in 1527 as her husband Juan de Jaramillo is recorded as having married again the following year. vilification in history The vilification of Malinche in Mexican history can be traced to the expulsion of the Spaniards by the Mexicans in 1821. Malinche became synonymous with the image of Eve. Mexican nationalists came to blame Malinche for all the woes suffered by the Mexican people during the colonial rule of the Spanish. She served as the scapegoat when the Mexican government needed someone to blame for the poor state of political affairs that the new Mexican government faced in the 1820s. Malinche was painted as a scarlet woman whose actions were driven by her extreme sexual appetite. In the 19th century, particularly in Mexican literary and artistic movements, Malinche’s role as an interpreter, strategist, and diplomat was virtually ignored. Her historical reputation was reduced to that of having been merely Cortés’s sex-starved mistress who betrayed her people. In reality, Malinche was a respected female who played a crucial role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the growth and spread of Christianity among the Aztec and Mayan peoples. While women such as La Malinche are vilified for their respective roles in the conquests of their peoples by foreign invaders, this condemnation signifies the important role that such women played in the secular politics of their native lands. See also Aztecs (Mexica); Yucatán, conquest of the. Further reading: Cortés, Hernándo. Hernándo Cortés: Five Letters, 1519–1526. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969; Cypress, Sandra Messinger. La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991; Del Castillo, Bernal Diaz. The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517–1521. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1936; Krèuger, Hilde. Malinche, or Farewell to Myths. New York: Arrowhead Press Book for Storm Publishers, 1948; Long, Haniel. Malinche (Doña Marina). Santa Fe, NM: The Rydal Press, 1939; Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; Schroeder, Susan, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett, eds. Indian Women of Early Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Deborah L. Bauer Mamluk dynasties in Egypt The Mamluks ruled Egypt from the middle of the 13th century to 1517. The first 24 Mamluk sultans were called the Bahri (river) rulers. In 1382, they were followed by the Burji (tower) Mamluks, so called because they had been quartered in the towers of the Citadel fortress overlooking Cairo. The Mamluks, mostly of Turkish and Mongol origins, were slaves and professional soldiers. They were purchased by other former slaves as young boys in the slave markets in Syria and Egypt and educated as a professional military caste. With the completion of their education they were freed and given full military regalia and land to pay for the upkeep of the equipment and horses. The Mamluks were notoriously disputatious and constantly fought among themselves for succession to the throne. Since there was no principle of hereditary Mamluk dynasties in Egypt 229 monarchy, any Mamluk could hope to become the ruler if he could overthrow the current sultan. As a result, the average reign of a sultan was only six years. Mamluks married within the caste to the sisters and relatives of other Mamluks. Their society was based on a feudal hierarchy of allegiance of a vassal to a lord. Recent converts to Islam, the Mamluks emphasized their rule as Muslims, even though many of them were not personally particularly devout. They allowed the exiled Abbasid caliph from Baghdad to reside in Cairo but successive caliphs exercised no real power. The Mamluks encouraged metalworking, book binding, and textile industries. But Mamluk attempts to monopolize the trade on luxury goods, coupled with high taxes, discouraged many foreign and local merchants. As great builders and patrons of the arts, the Mamluks encouraged scholars, including renowned historian Ibn Khaldun, to work in Cairo. Under the Mamluks, Cairo became a major intellectual and artistic center and grew into arguably the largest city in the region. The Mamluks built hospitals, caravansaries, public fountains, and massive mausoleums for their families. The mausoleum of Sultan Qaitbay (reigned 1468–96) was particularly impressive. Much of medieval Cairo dates from the Mamluk era. The Mamluk sultan Baybars (reigned 1260–77) drove the crusaders out of the eastern Mediterranean and repelled major invasions by the Mongols. A wily politician, Baybars also established alliances with potential enemies of Sicily, Seville, and the Turks. The Black Death (plague) in 1340 reduced the population throughout Mamluk territories; in Cairo alone over 25 percent of the people perished. They were further weakened by Timurlane’s destruction in Syria. The expansion of Portuguese trading outposts along the African and Indian coasts led to mounting economic competition and as they lost control of trade from the east, the revenues from commerce declined. In addition, constant disputes over succession weakened Mamluk authority and made them vulnerable to outside attacks. Their failure to forge a united front contributed to their defeat and the conquest of Egypt by the Ottoman Turks in 1517. See also Ottoman Empire (1450–1750). Further reading: Irwin, R. The Middle East in the Middle Ages: The Early Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1382). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986; Lapidus, Ira Marvin. Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967; Thorau, Peter. The Lion of Egypt: Sultan Baybars I and the Near East in the Thirteenth Century, trans. P. M. Holt. London: Longman, 1992. Janice J. Terry Marie-Thérèse of Austria (1638–1683) queen of France, wife of King Louis XIV Marie-Thérèse’s role as the queen of France and the wife of King Louis XIV was a precarious one, as she was used by the Spanish branch of the Habsburg dynasty to secure peace with France in the 17th century. King Philip IV of Spain and Elisabeth of France welcomed the birth of their daughter Marie on September 10, 1638. The ambitions of Cardinal Jules Mazarin and Anne of Austria, the mother of King Louis XIV, to link the Bourbon dynasty to the Spanish branch of the Habsburg family extend back to 1646. These two individuals wanted to create a marriage union between Louis XIV and Marie-Thérèse to stabilize relations between the French and Spanish governments as these two countries had been at war since 1635. There were complications with the proposed marriage between the two families because the Spanish Habsburg family did not want to give the Bourbon dynasty an opportunity to inherit any part of the Spanish Empire. The Spanish court was also reluctant to allow the proposed marriage for it feared that the offspring of this union would create instability within the Spanish empire for rival claimants might seek to acquire various parts of the empire. The anxiety of the Spanish court over this proposed marriage was relieved by the fact that Mariana of Austria, Philip IV’s second wife, gave birth to a son named Philip Prospero in 1657. Despite the fact that infant mortality rates were high in the 17th century, the birth of this son made Philip IV more agreeable to the marriage between Marie and Louis XIV. The marriage contract between Marie and Louis XIV was completed when the Treaty of the Pyrenees was finalized in 1659, and the two were married in June 1660. In accordance with the marriage contract, Marie abandoned any territorial claim she possessed to the Spanish Empire, and the Habsburg family had to provide 500,000 gold escudos for Marie’s dowry. Because of the financial weakness of the Spanish Empire, the Habsburg family could not pull together enough funds for the dowry. Despite the fact that Marie renounced her claims to the Spanish Empire, she was unable to do 23 0 Marie-Thérèse of Austria this on the part of her offspring, which Mazarin knew at the time of the wedding. Mazarin also intended to use the inability of the Spanish government to pay the dowry as an excuse to ignore the fact that Marie renounced her inheritance to parts of the Spanish Empire. The French government used the failure of the Spanish government to pay the dowry as a justification to attack the Spanish Netherlands in 1667, resulting in the War of Devolution. Marie was a devout woman who believed it was her responsibility to marry Louis XIV and to provide him with offspring to succeed him. Marie fulfilled these obligations to Louis XIV by providing him with a number of children, but only their son Louis survived into adulthood. She often prayed and had great admiration for priests but was also concerned for the Catholic religious community. Despite this extreme faith in her religion, she failed to possess a strong influence in the French government, probably as a result of her lack of education and her poor relationship with her husband. Marie’s relationship with Louis XIV was a strenuous one, but she continued to be loyal to him and fulfilled her obligations as a wife and queen. Marie did exercise some influence over the French court as regent in 1672 when Louis XIV was fighting in Holland, but this was for a short period. Louis XIV had several mistresses, a well-known fact in the French court. Marie learned of many of these relationships, but it usually took time before she was made privy to this information. Despite the fact that Marie had no major influence at the French court, her death on July 30, 1683, was properly mourned in France as she was given a state funeral. There is some degree of speculation that Marie might have been poisoned, but there is no firm evidence to support this claim. Marie’s funerary rites possessed similarities to the funerary rites observed by Egyptian pharaohs, as her heart was removed from her body, placed in a silver box, and deposited in a chapel situated at Val-de-Grâce, while her intestines were also removed from her body and deposited in an urn. Further reading: Judge, H. G. Louis XIV. New York: Longmans, 1965; Lossky, Andrew. Louis XIV and the French Monarchy. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994; Maurice, Ashley. Louis XIV and the Greatness of France. New York: Free Press, 1965; Merriman, John. A History of Modern Europe, Vol. 1: From the Renaissance to the Age of Napoleon. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996; Wolf, John. Louis XIV. London: Victor Gollancz, 1968. Brian de Ruiter Maroon societies in the Americas Maroon societies is a term designating communities of runaway slaves in the Americas, the formation of which constituted a recurrent feature of the history of African slavery over nearly 400 years, from the first importation of African slaves in the early 1500s through the final abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere in Brazil in 1888. The term derives from the Spanish cimarrón, originally referring to feral cattle but by the early 1500s also signifying runaway slaves. Maroon societies were most common in the Caribbean and Brazil but were also widespread in North America and elsewhere. To slave owners and ruling groups they represented a constant and serious challenge to the institution of African slavery generally, while to slaves they represented the possibility of life outside the shackles of the slave regime. Often called palenques in the Caribbean region and Quilombos in Brazil, they had a history closely linked to the hundreds of slave rebellions that also mark the history of the Americas. Ranging from small nomadic bands to extensive settled communities of thousands of people that endured for decades, even centuries, on the fringes of the plantation economy, Maroon societies came into existence almost as soon as African slavery in the Americas did. Most of their members were African-born, as they reproduced many of the social and cultural features of their homeland in their new surroundings. Among the first official acknowledgments of the existence of such communities was a report to the Council of the Indies from Hispaniola of March 1542, in which Archdeacon Álvaro de Castro estimated that 2,000 to 3,000 runaway slaves were at large on the island. A follow-up report of July 1546 described some of the island’s numerous Maroon communities, some hundreds strong, and the mixed success of Spanish efforts to subdue them. Often mixing with indigenous groups and allying with their slave masters’ enemies, Maroon communities displayed tremendous resilience in the face of persistent efforts to eradicate them and horrific punishments meted out to captured runaways, which included castration, amputation of limbs, branding, garroting, and burning alive. Maroon societies in the Americas 23 1 The hinterlands of plantation economies throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil, North America, and elsewhere witnessed the formation of Maroon societies alongside the very introduction of slavery. In Mexico, rapid Indian depopulation prompted colonists to import upward of 120,000 African slaves in the years between 1521 and 1650. Many thousands were compelled to work in the silver mines and ranches north of Mexico City centered on Zacatecas. From the 1560s to the 1580s, a series of revolts and uprisings rocked the region, as runaway African slaves joined forces with besieged Indians to raid ranches and storehouses, attack travelers, and return to their hidden hamlets in caves, arroyos, and other places beyond the reach of the authorities. jungles of veracruz In the 1570s, the Crown issued a series of draconian laws intended to discourage such uprisings, which nonetheless failed to have the desired effect. In 1609, a rebel Maroon community in the jungles of Veracruz, led by Yanga, successfully negotiated a peace treaty with the Spanish authorities that granted them their freedom. Nearly a century later, the community was thriving. Slave uprisings and the formation of Maroon societies continued until the final abolition of slavery in Mexico in 1829. Some palenques survived for decades, later becoming towns and municipalities, such as El Cobre in eastern Cuba, where a slave uprising in 1731 led to the creation of a stable community that 50 years later had a fugitive slave population of over 1,000 scattered throughout the Sierra del Cobre. In 1800, following a recommendation of the Council of the Indies, the Crown declared the slave-descended inhabitants of El Cobre free. Other well-known palenques in eastern Cuba included El Frijol and Ciénaga de Zapata, which survived through much of the 19th century. Despite their best efforts to extinguish such fugitive slave communities, colonial authorities were often compelled to negotiate with them—as in the district of Popayán in Colombia, where in 1732 the Audiencia of Quito authorized a local official to offer a treaty of peace to the palenque called El Castillo, granting its inhabitants their freedom if they would agree to accept no more runaway slaves. The palenque refused the offer, and in 1745 a series of military expeditions finally captured and defeated El Castillo. More than a century earlier, in the early 1600s, in the Cartagena district of Colombia, a runaway slave named Domingo Bioho, claiming to be African royalty and adopting the title King Benkos, staged a series of raids on plantations and farms around Cartagena and founded a fortified palenque called San Basilio. After defeating two expeditions sent to subdue his independent kingdom, in 1619 King Benkos negotiated a favorable treaty with the Spanish authorities, only to be betrayed, captured, and hanged. Despite this setback, San Basilio survived for another century and was finally suppressed in 1713–17. Similar episodes unfolded in the British and French Caribbean islands. In Martinique in 1665, a Maroon who called himself by his master’s name, Francisque Fabulé, led a group of 400–500 Maroons who staged repeated attacks against plantations and settlements. The French Sovereign Council negotiated a treaty with Fabulé that granted him his freedom and a promise that his band would not be punished. He was later condemned to life in the galleys. In 1771, a decree of the Supreme Council of Martinique lamented the existence of fugitive slave communities on the island, where they had built huts, cleared land, and planted crops, and from which they sallied forth to commit various depredations. In the French island of Guadeloupe in 1668, the governor reported more than 30 Maroons living in Grande-Terre and recommended an example be made by capturing and beheading them. Despite the authorities’ best efforts, however, the Maroon societies could not be eradicated. Nearly 70 years later in Guadeloupe, in 1737, a group of 48 Maroons led by one Bordebois was put on trial; eight were sentenced to be garroted. Similar events transpired on Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, and other islands in the British Antilles. north american societies In British North America and, after 1783, the United States of America, Maroon societies formed and reformed repeatedly. There is evidence for at least 50 such communities during the period 1672–1864 in the mountains, forests, and swamps from Florida to Louisiana to Virginia. Most notable among these were those in the Dismal Swamp area in the Virginia–North Carolina borderlands, where thousands of runaway slaves and their descendants survived repeated efforts to capture and subdue them. Sometimes Maroons allied with local Indians, forming mixed communities of Indians and fugitive slaves. Other times Indian individuals and polities allied with Euro-American authorities, assisting them in their eradication efforts, as occurred among the Notchee Indians in South Carolina in 1744, in Georgia in 1772, and in other places. Communities descended from Maroon societies can be found in many parts of the Americas. In the 1980s, 232 Maroon societies in the Americas it was estimated that more than 10 percent of the population of the Republic of Suriname was descended from six Maroon or “Bush Negro” communities or tribes that formed in the 1500s and waged a centurylong war for liberation against the Dutch authorities before finally winning their freedom in 1762. The collective memory of the modern-day descendants of such Maroon societies has provided fertile ground for historians, anthropologists, linguists, and other scholars interested in exploring this chapter of the history of Africans in the Americas. See also slave trade, Africa and the. Further reading: Campbell, Mavis Christine. The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655–1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal. Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1988; Hoogbergen, Wim S. M. Brill. The Boni Maroon Wars in Suriname. Boston: Academic Publishers, 1997; Learning, Hugo Prosper. Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995; Price, Richard, ed. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979; Price, Richard. First-Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983; Thompson, Alvin O. Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2006. Michael J. Schroeder Mary I (Bloody Mary) (1516–1558) Catholic Tudor queen of England Mary I, queen of England, was born on February 18, 1516, in Greenwich Palace in London, England. Her father, Henry VIII, of the House of Tudor, had also been born at Greenwich on June 28, 1491. Mary was the fifth child of Henry and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Although there was jubilation at Greenwich at Mary’s birth, Henry VIII was disappointed in that Catherine of Aragon had failed to deliver a son. Mary would be the only one of Catherine and Henry VIII’s children who would live to adulthood. In an age when monarchs were preferably men, young Mary’s purpose diplomatically was to secure a strategic nuptial alliance for her father. In Henry VIII’s eyes, the only way to secure the throne in the Tudor family—and to make it a true dynasty—was to have a male son who would succeed him as king. Consequently, Henry began his quest to divorce Catherine of Aragon to marry again in the hopes of producing a male Tudor heir. However, to assure the succession of the Tudors to the throne, Mary was recognized by her father as princess of Wales, which meant that, should her father die without male issue, she would succeed him as Queen Mary I. In the end, Henry had his marriage to Catherine of Aragon dissolved, and he wed his mistress Anne Boleyn, who was crowned queen of England in 1533. Pregnant at the time of her marriage to Henry, she gave birth to the princess Elizabeth, the future Elizabeth I, in September 1533. Still the king determined to have his way in all things, Henry was frustrated in his pursuit of a male Tudor heir. In 1534, Henry had Parliament pass the Act of Supremacy, which made him the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England, known as the Church of England. As far as Princess Mary was concerned, she was placed in almost double jeopardy, because she still held out for her mother and for the Catholic Church. Boleyn was her bitter enemy, especially after the birth of Elizabeth as Mary’s rival for the throne, and it was feared that Boleyn would demand Mary’s execution. Finally, under the entreaty of the king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, Mary assented to the Act of Supremacy. When Anne Boleyn was executed for adultery in May 1536, much of the danger passed for Mary. Henry’s next wife, Jane Seymour, finally provided a male heir, Edward VI, in October 1537. Seymour began a reconciliation with Mary, who still had a spot in her father’s heart as his “chiefest jewel.” Tragically, Jane would die soon after childbirth and Edward would only rule from 1547 to 1553, at which time Mary became queen. When Mary ascended the throne in July 1553, she trod lightly at first on the issue of religion, not wishing to shake England by revoking the Act of Settlement and the new order that had come with it. However, Mary did have Henry’s divorce from her mother declared invalid, legally making Elizabeth a bastard. The half sisters carried on harsh competition for a rightful claim to the throne. Elizabeth was implicated in two plots against Mary, one led by Sir Thomas Wyatt in 1554 that caused Elizabeth to be sent temporarily to the Tower of London. Eventually Mary’s affection for the Catholic Church brought personal disaster. In November 1554, Reginald Cardinal Poole brought from the Vatican the terms by which Rome would accept England back into Mary I 233 the church—all those who had carried out the Act of Settlement must be judged as heretics and condemned to execution. Almost 300 would be executed, including Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, who had also approved of the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine. Mary sacrificed the affection of her people, not a few of whom had supported her during her years of exile. She compounded her error by marrying Philip II of Spain in July 1554. Mary’s legacy in England included the loss of Calais to France’s king Henry II in January 1558. It was the last possession England had left in France from the Hundred Years’ War. Indeed, there is much reason to think that Philip only wed Mary to draw England into the enduring feud between Spain and France, hoping to tip the balance in favor of Spain. Plagued by ill health and foreign adventures, Mary I died in November 1558. Before her death, she had provided that Elizabeth would succeed her on the throne as the rightful queen. See also Counter-Reformation (Catholic Reformation) in Europe; Reformation, the. Further reading: Ashley, Mike. A Brief History of British Kings and Queens. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005; Starkey, David. Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. London: Chatto and Windus, 2003; Weir, Alison. The Six Wives of Henry VIII. New York: Grove Press, 1991; Williams, Neville. The Tudors: The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England. Fraser, Antonia, ed. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998. John Murphy Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–1587) queen of Scotland The queen of Scotland from 1542 until 1567, Mary was born on December 8, 1542, at Linlithgow Palace, Scotland, the only child of King James V of Scotland, who died six days after she was born. When Mary was five, her French mother, Mary of Guise, sent her to the French court, where she lived for many years. Being extremely attractive, she caught the eye of Francis, the eldest son of King Henry II of France. They were married, and when Henry died in 1559, Mary became the queen consort of France. In 1558, following the accession of Elizabeth Tudor, as Mary’s grandmother was a sister of Henry VIII, the father of Elizabeth, Mary became the heir to the English throne. However, some English Roman Catholics felt that Elizabeth was illegitimate, as they regarded Henry VIII’s divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, as invalid, as was his subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s mother. Thus, Mary was queen of Scotland and the queen consort of France and had a disputed claim to the throne of England. After Mary’s first husband, Francis, died, and she became isolated at the French court, Mary decided to return to Scotland. There she had great difficulty in trying to reconcile the various court factions. Her illegitimate brother, James, earl of Moray, tried to help, and Mary, a Roman Catholic in a country that had been officially proclaimed a Protestant nation during her absence in France, initially embarked on a policy of religious tolerance. In July 1565, Mary married Henry Stewart, earl of Darnley, a cousin. He was handsome, had his own claim to the throne of England, but was foolish and quickly alienated many at the Scottish court by his irresponsible and wanton behavior. In March 1566, Darnley, jealous at Mary’s reliance on advice from her secretary, David Rizzio, stormed into the royal apartments and with others stabbed Rizzio in front of the queen. Three months later the son of Mary and Lord Darnley, James, was born. However, Mary hated Darnley for what he had done to Rizzio and may have started having an affair with James Hepburn, fourth earl of Bothwell. She certainly came to trust Bothwell. It was not long afterward that Lord Darnley was killed while recovering from an illness; his house was blown up and his strangled body was later found in the garden. Soon afterward, Mary married Bothwell, but this started a major Scottish rebellion against the pair. Mary was formally deposed as queen, with her infant son proclaimed king. She fled to England; Bothwell went overseas. Over the next 18 years, she was held in custody in England. Some English Catholics started conspiring with her, and in 1586 she was found to have been involved in a rebellion against Queen Elizabeth. Tried by an English court, she was sentenced to death and was executed on February 8, 1587, at Fotheringhay Castle. Further reading: Cowan, Ian B. The Scottish Reformation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982; Dawson, Jane E. A. The Politics of Religion in the Age of Mary, Queen of Scots: The Earl of Argyll and the Struggle for Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; Fraser, Antonia. Mary Queen of Scots. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969; Guy, John. Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart. Boston: Mariner Books, 2005; Lewis, Elizabeth Jayne. The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots: Sixteenth Cen- 23 4 Mary, Queen of Scots tury Crisis of Female Sovereignty. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Justin Corfield Maryland Maryland was chartered in 1632 as a refuge for English Catholics, although the colony’s religious mission was ultimately undermined by internal disputes. As did neighboring Virginia, colonial Maryland maintained an economy based on tobacco and bound labor. Since the Reformation, Roman Catholics in England had faced persecution. Wanting to provide a place where they could worship freely, George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, envisioned an American haven for Catholics. Baltimore was a recent convert to Catholicism and had previously invested in several colonization schemes. In 1632, King Charles I granted Baltimore’s request and issued a charter for a colony in the upper Chesapeake. The king was sympathetic to the plight of Catholics and Maryland was named in honor of his Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria. Unlike previous charters, Maryland’s named Baltimore and his heirs “absolute Lords and Proprietors,” essentially giving the Calvert family total control over the colony. English colonists first reached Maryland in 1634, settling on the north side of the Potomac River at St. Mary’s City, the colony’s first capital. Within the first decade, settlers began erecting tobacco plantations and importing indentured servants to work them. The colonists established an elective assembly in 1638, although the governor and governor’s council were appointed by Lord Baltimore. Economic success ensued, but religious tensions threatened the colony’s stability. Maryland had attracted both Protestants and Catholics from the start, although Baltimore gave the best lands to Catholic gentlemen and appointed Catholic governors and councilors. In contrast, Protestants came over largely as indentured servants and were shut out of the political process. Inspired by the English Civil War, Protestant colonists seized control of the colony in 1644 in what was termed “the plundering time.” Hoping to prevent future confrontation, Baltimore granted An Act Concerning Religion in 1649, guaranteeing that no person “professing to believe in Jesus Christ” would be “any ways troubled, molested, or discountenanced.” The first American law to ensure religious liberty, the act was intended to preserve the rights of Catholics, who had already become a minority in their own colony. Religious strife continued nonetheless. During the Glorious Revolution of 1689, Protestants led by John Coode again seized the colony. This time, the Calverts did not regain control until 1715, when the family converted to Protestantism. During the interim, the colonial assembly established the Anglican Church and barred Catholics from owning firearms and holding office. Thereafter religious conflicts abated as the population and economy diversified. In the late 17th century, African slaves replaced servants and became an important minority in the colony, constituting a third of Maryland’s population at the revolution. In the northern counties, iron foundries were established and wheat farming appeared in the 1740s. Annapolis became the capital in 1694 and soon grew into a center of culture, boasting a newspaper, academy, and several clubs by the middle of the 18th century. To the end of the colonial period, Catholics remained an important minority in Maryland. When the Maryland delegates signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, one of the signatures belonged to Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a Catholic. Further reading: Carr, Lois Green, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh. Robert Cole’s World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991; Hall, Clayton Colman, ed. Narratives of Early Maryland, 1633–1684. Boston: Adamant Media Corporation, 2001, reprinted from Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1910; Land, Aubrey C. Colonial Maryland: A History. Millwood, NY: KTO Press, 1981. John G. McCurdy Mary Tudor (Mary of France) (1496–1533) queen of France Mary Tudor was born in 1496, nine years after her father, Henry VII, had become king of England by defeating Richard III at Bosworth in 1485. Mary Tudor is often confused with Mary I, who was queen of England from 1553 to 1558, and with Mary, Queen of Scots. However, Mary Tudor, the daughter of Henry VII, would be queen in her own right. Mary was born in the age of great dynastic marriages when a king contracted for marriage of his daughter to benefit his kingdom. Mary was at first intended to wed Charles of Anjou, who would later become Charles V, the most powerful European monarch of his time. The contract, originally made by Henry VII, was renewed Mary Tudor 23 5 on the October 17, 1513, by Henry VIII at a meeting with Margaret of Savoy at Lille, with the wedding being set for the following year. But the Emperor Maximilian I, to whom Louis XII had proposed his daughter Renée as wife for Charles, with Brittany as a dowry, postponed the match with the English princess in a way that left no doubt of his intention to withdraw from the contract altogether. Henry VIII succeeded to the throne when Henry VII died in April 1509. When it came time to renew the marriage agreement with Charles of Anjou, it was King Henry VIII who did so. With the customary determination of his younger years, Henry decided to invade France in June 1513 as a forceful demonstration of English might. Henry joined the Holy League against France and went to war. While he was involved in France, his brother- in-law James IV of Scotland, who was married to his sister, Margaret Tudor, invaded the north of England. However, Henry had left the capable Thomas Howard to face any threat from Scotland. James IV was defeated and killed at Flodden on September 9, 1513. The victories at the Spurs and Flodden made both France and the Holy Roman Emperor reconsider the marriage plans of Mary Tudor. Obviously, Henry had proved it was not wise to have him as an enemy. A diplomatic settlement was reached. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey contracted for Mary to wed King Louis XII. His queen, Anne of Brittany, had died in 1514, making him a desirable spouse for Mary. The two were wed on January 1, 1515, but Louis XII died three months later. Mary had developed an intense love for Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk. His marriage to Margaret Neville Mortimer had been annulled, and his second wife, Anne Browne, died in 1512. At the time of the Battle of the Spurs, he was engaged to an orphan girl. Henry VIII knew about the love between Charles and Mary. Moreover, Francis I learned of it when Mary told him of her true feelings when he attempted to marry her off to one of his relatives. As Louis XII’s widow, Mary had become a valuable diplomatic asset to Henry again, and she feared that he might try to marry her to another royal suitor. Mary was determined she and Charles would not be parted. In February 1515, they were married in Cluny Chapel in France. In May 1515, as a mark of royal favor, the couple was wed a second time in England; Henry VIII and his queen, Catherine of Aragon, were the guests of honor. For the time, peace between France and England was maintained. Mary Tudor died on June 26, 1533. See also Edward VI; Tudor dynasty. Further reading: Ashley, Mike. A Brief History of British Kings and Queens. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005; Bindoff, S. T. Tudor England. New York: Penguin, 1977; Trevelyan, G. M. History of England, Volume II: The Tudors and the Stuart Era. New York: Anchor, 1953; Williamson, David. National Portrait Gallery History of the Kings and Queens of England. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1998. John Murphy Massachusetts Bay Colony In the early 17th century, England began acting on its imperial ambitions by chartering business organizations called joint-stock companies, which undertook the actual work and expense of spreading England and its institutions around the world. The system had 236 Massachusetts Bay Colony A portrait of Princess Mary Tudor and her second husband, Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, c. 1516, artist unknown created the colony of Jamestown, Virginia, and the Council for New England, under the leadership of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. During the 1620s, one of the council’s patents went to some Dorchester merchants to develop a fishing industry at Cape Ann on the New England coast. By 1626, the effort had failed, although John White, a Puritan minister in England associated with the project, began to see the enterprise as a potential refuge for discouraged Puritans from England. Unfortunately for White and a group of fellow Puritans who had joined him, the Council for New England had ceased effective operation, and the group instead applied directly to the government for its own charter for the lands it already held. The charter, for a company called The Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, was issued in March of 1629. The company was to be managed by a governor and a council of 18 assistants, who were to be elected by a General Court of investors, which also had the power to legislate for the company. Not part of the charter was the usual requirement that the company conduct its business meetings in England. This omission, quite possibly done by design, allowed the company to hold its meetings wherever it chose. In late August of 1629, in what is known as the Cambridge Agreement, the company opted to move its operations, including the charter, to New England. When control of the company quickly passed into the hands of dedicated Puritans willing to leave England, the company started its transformation into a colony. By late 1629, the company had sent out John Endicott to assert its control over a settlement at Salem and had then supported that effort with five more ships and possibly one hundred additional settlers. city upon a hill Thus, by April of 1630, when a flotilla of 11 ships left England, the Massachusetts Bay Company was already a significant presence on the New England coast, and its conversion into a full-fledged colony assured. John Winthrop, elected the company’s governor, established the character of early Massachusetts in a sermon preached at the outset of the journey. He stressed that the colony would be created as a covenant with God, and that religious orthodoxy would be maintained by the merging of civil and ecclesiastical power and consolidated in the hands of the colony’s leaders. His reference to Massachusetts as a “city upon a hill” to serve as an example to England of what God intended for his people further solidified the religious nature of the proposed colony. There is no question about the success of the enterprise. The Company of the Massachusetts Bay was indistinguishable from what came to be called simply the colony of Massachusetts. And the religious nature of the colony was secured by requiring that only male church members could vote in colony elections. There were challenges to some aspects of the colony from Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Quakers, and the freemen of the colony who demanded an elected body to represent them, but there was never any likelihood in New England that the colony would not succeed. But that certainty was not the case in England. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, still hanging on to the remnants of the Council for New England, argued that the colony’s charter had been secretly obtained and started a campaign to have it annulled. To the same end in 1635, the council gave up its own charter and requested that the king reassign the disputed territory to eight members of the former Council for New England. The outbreak of the English Civil War, or Puritan Revolution, in 1640, however, prevented any of the grants except the one for Maine from being made. By the time of the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, Gorges had died, the Council of New England had passed from the scene, and Massachusetts had become too powerful and too independent to be easily tamed. control of commerce With the Restoration, England commenced a colonial policy that stressed the importance of commerce in the empire and the necessity of England’s control of that commerce for the greater good of the mother country. Massachusetts viewed such a policy as interference in its self-styled independence. When England decided to oust the Dutch from New Netherland in 1664, the leaders of the expedition were ordered to investigate the situation in New England. Their report was especially critical of Massachusetts, but through delay and avoidance the colony managed to escape serious ramifications. England tried again in 1676, when it sent over Edward Randolph. Randolph’s report was more damaging than the previous commissioners’ account, and the English government felt compelled to act. It ordered the colony to send representatives to negotiate a settlement, but when England determined that the colony had not lived up to its agreements, it commenced legal action Massachusetts Bay Colony 23 7 against the original charter as the only method whereby Massachusetts could be brought under control. England completed the effort in 1684, and the courts annulled the original 1629 charter. The colony existed dependently until it was incorporated into the Dominion of New England in 1686. In the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution in England, Massachusetts received a new charter in 1691 as a royal colony, the Province of Massachusetts Bay. The Puritan old guard were displeased, but by the end of the 17th century the original charter had generally outlived its usefulness, as perhaps demonstrated by the Salem witchcraft trials. The more practical and forward-looking portion of the colonists recognized that future growth and prosperity lay with a royal charter, the institution of a property qualification for the vote, and a more cooperative relationship with English authority. Those whose ancestors had migrated as Puritans under the 1629 charter had become the Yankees of the 1691 charter. They and their colony were ready for the 18th century. See also Puritans and Puritanism. Further reading: Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958; Morison, Samuel Eliot. Builders of the Bay Colony. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964; Vaughan, Alden T. New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians 1620–1675. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995 H. Roger King Mather, Increase (1639–1723) and Cotton (1663–1728) Puritan intellectual leaders The Mathers, father and son, were intellectual and institutional leaders of New England’s Puritan clergy for decades, preachers of thousands of sermons, and authors of hundreds of books. Increase’s father was the distinguished minister Richard Mather, whose biography, The Life and Death of that Reverend Man of God, Mr. Richard Mather (1670), he wrote. Increase graduated from Harvard in 1656 and spent the next several years in Ireland and England. He returned to Massachusetts in 1661 and became an active disputant in the controversies roiling the New England churches. Increase’s most important political work was his preservation of the Massachusetts church and colony in the crisis of the 1680s, when the English government was increasingly hostile to Puritanism. He was a leader in the opposition to the new royal governor, Sir Edmund Andros, and went to England in 1688 as the representative of the General Court of Massachusetts, an unusual role for a minister. Taking advantage of the Revolution of 1688 and forging alliances with English dissenters, Increase was able to procure a new charter for the Massachusetts colony and the annexation of Plymouth Colony to Massachusetts. Mather also served as president of Harvard College, although his refusal to reside in Cambridge led to controversy, and he resigned in 1701. His son Cotton would be frustrated in his ambition to succeed his father as Harvard president, and both Mathers would shift their support from Harvard, seen as corrupted by liberal ideas about admission to communion, to the new university of Yale. Increase and Cotton would be remembered for their involvement in the Salem witch cases. Although both had a long-standing interest in the subject of witchcraft, they were not initially involved in the outbreak. Increase had been in England when the witch hunt broke out, but on his return the colony’s governor, Sir William Phips, a close political ally, consulted him on the Salem affair. Increase did not doubt that witches afflicted New England and that magistrates had acted properly in response to accusations, but he was deeply troubled by the lack of procedural safeguards and the use of “spectral evidence,” the appearance of alleged witches in spirit form used as evidence as guilt. His Cases of Conscience concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men (1693) was originally given as a sermon to a group of ministers in Cambridge on October 3, 1692. To Increase, it was perfectly possible for a devil to take the appearance of an innocent person. His position helped bring the persecution to an end. But he did not blame the magistrates; any condemnation of innocents at Salem was Satan’s fault, not that of the colony’s leaders. Cotton’s position on the Salem cases was ambivalent. He generally approved of persecuting witches, initially encouraged persecution, and intervened against the accused witch George Burroughs (1650–92). Cotton’s acceptance of the reality of Salem witchcraft can be seen in his belief that witches were responsible for the death of his infant son immediately after the trial. Despite his acceptance of the witches’ guilt, he shared his father’s concern that the persecution was getting out of hand and affecting the innocent as well as the guilty. As did other Boston ministers, he eventually followed Increase’s lead in encouraging the end of the persecutions. Cotton’s somewhat hastily composed Wonders 238 Mather, Increase (1639 –1723 ) and Cotton (1663 –1728 ) of the Invisible World (1693) was the New England leadership’s official account of the Salem witch hunt. He later interpreted some misfortunes that had befallen his family as God’s punishment of him for not having spoken out against the persecutions, but in public he defended the actions of the magistrates. He was the principal target of the Boston merchant Robert Calef’s anti–witch hunting work More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700). Cotton Mather survived the attacks of Calef and others to remain Boston’s leading minister until his death. He also reached beyond Boston to participate in the debate over the implications of the new science for Protestant Christianity taking place all over the British world. Mather prided himself on being a fellow of the Royal Society, the leading scientific society in England, and communicated stories of oddities from America to be included in its journal, Philosophical Transactions. One of Mather’s most important 18th century works was Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), an attempt at a providential synthesis of New England history. Mather had begun the Magnalia in 1693 and regarded it as his most important work. It covers the origin of the New England colonies, the lives of its governors and ministers, the story of Harvard College, remarkable events, and the colonies’s conflicts internal and external. Other major works from this part of Cotton’s career include an unpublished medical compendium, The Angel of Bethesda, and a book integrating early 18th century science and Puritan theology, The Christian Philosopher (1721). After Increase’s death, Cotton published a biography of his father, Parentator (1724). He also wrote many manuscript volumes of biblical commentaries that were never published. Cotton Mather, who lost wives and children to smallpox, was the leading American champion of inoculating people with a weak form of smallpox to prevent their catching the disease later, an idea introduced to the English-speaking world in the early 18th century. His knowledge of inoculation came primarily from reports in Philosophical Transactions and accounts of African practices from his slave Onesimus. Mather began openly promoting inoculation during a smallpox epidemic in Boston in 1721. He was personally attacked by those who thought the procedure too risky. A bomb was actually tossed into his house, but fortunately it failed to explode. (Mather believed that the devil had taken possession of those who opposed inoculation in order to attack him personally.) The smallpox campaign contributed to Mather’s loss of influence in his last years. See also Bible traditions; Calvin, John; epidemics in the Americas. Further reading: Hall, Michael G. The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639–1723. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988; Levin, David. Cotton Mather: The Young Life of the Lord’s Remembrancer, 1663– 1703. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978; Middlekauf, Robert. The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971; Silverman, Kenneth. The Life and Times of Cotton Mather. New York: Harper and Row, 1984; Winship, Michael P. Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. William E. Burns Medici family Salvestro de’ Medici, in the 14th century, was the first of the family to make a bid for political power when he led the revolt of the the small artisan class against the nobility who governed the city. Salvestro overbid his hand and became virtually a dictator in Florence, causing all Florentines to unite and banish him from the city in 1382. After Salvestro’s ejection from the city, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici was able to restore both the family’s wealth and its social standing in the community, important in the tightly knit fabric of the Italian city-states of the period. Giovanni made the Medici the richest family in Italy, perhaps in Europe. The Medici family became paramount in Florence due to Giovanni’s son, Cosimo the First, or Cosimo the Elder (Cosimo il Vecchio). However, at first, taking advantage of the death of Giovanni in 1429, the powerful Albizzi family banished Cosimo from Florence in 1433. Cosimo’s exile was brief. The Florentines brought Cosimo back in triumph to the city the next year. He respected the republican character of the city and did not make an obvious grab for power. However, through his great wealth and personal ability, Cosimo nevertheless became the first citizen of Florence and the virtual ruler of the city. Indeed, Muslim pirates, or corsairs, had been preying on Venetian shipping for some time. However, boasting one of the largest navies in Renaissance Europe, the Venetians at this time were a great power Medici family 239 at sea. A great shift in the Italian balance of power took place when Cosimo shifted the historic Florentine support to the rival city of Milan, where the Sforza family was fighting for supremacy. While Muzio Attendolo Sforza made his name as a condottiero (mercenary leader), it was his son Franceso who became duke of Milan in 1450 with the aid of Cosimo de’ Medici. Meanwhile, Cosimo was establishing himself as one of the great patrons of the Renaissance. Countless rare documents formed the foundation for Cosimo’s library; he also patronized the leading artists of his day. Piero de’ Medici was a civic-minded ruler, as was his father, Cosimo. He already had experience in Florentine diplomacy and public affairs. He wed Lucrezia Tornabuoni, whose family had turned its back on its noble heritage. Together, they had three daughters, Maria, Bianca, and Lucrezia, and two sons who would mold the future history of Florence, Lorenzo and Giuliano. Lorenzo was precocious and unusually gifted for his age. His father entrusted him with diplomatic missions throughout Italy. However, within Florence, serious opposition was building to Medici rule. Luca Pitti, perhaps Piero’s chief adviser, was secretly planning to seize power. In March 1464, taking advantage of the death of Francesco Sforza, the conspirators made their plans. When Piero was ill and left the city in August, they struck. Piero came back in force at the end of the month after Lorenzo had gathered loyal troops. The coup collapsed. Luca Pitti was pardoned; others were banished. When Piero died in 1469, Lorenzo was the natural choice to take his place. Unlike Cosimo and Piero, he ruled more as a prince or an ancient Roman tyrant than a man of the people. At the same time, there was a chilling of relations between Lorenzo and the new pope, Sixtus IV. The main reason was a struggle over the town of Imola, which Lorenzo wanted to gain for Florence because it guarded the strategic road from Rimini to Bologna. The pope wanted Imola as a gift for his nephew— possibly his son—Girolamo Riario. The cold feelings developing between Lorenzo and Sixtus led to the pope’s replacing the Medici as the papal bankers with the Pazzis, rivals of the Medici. The enmity between Lorenzo and the pope, now allied with the Pazzis, led to one of the bloodiest incidents of the Italian Renaissance: the Pazzi Conspiracy. The conspiracy aimed at wiping out the Medici. The plotters knew too that Lorenzo suffered a serious weakness: His strong ally, Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan, had been assassinated in December 1476. The conspirators struck on Easter Sunday, April 26, 1478, while Lorenzo and Giuliano were at mass. In the bloodbath that followed, Giuliano was stabbed 19 times, but Lorenzo escaped. In a purge that followed, many of the conspirators were killed, including five who were publicly hanged. Pope Sixtus continued his campaign to oust the Medicis from Florence. Finally, in a bold move, Lorenzo decided to make a trip and attempt to make peace with one of Florence’s most implacable enemies, King Ferrante of Naples, in December 1479. Amazed at the Medici’s bravery, Ferrante made peace with Florence, and Sixtus’s war came to an end. Lorenzo returned to Florence in triumph. Under him, Florence entered a new era of greatness. In January 1492, Lorenzo fell ill and died in April of that year. He was succeeded by his son Piero, who had the misfortune to rule at one of the most disastrous epochs of Italian history. King Charles VIII of France invaded northern Italy in 1494 with a large and wellequipped army. His artillery, perhaps the most modern in Europe, destroyed Italian citadels and caused cities to surrender before he even approached them. Piero, lacking the fortitude of his father, fled Florence and died in exile. During the next century, the rise of the family to the ranks of the Italian nobility gave proof of the singular determination of the family, and the faith of the Florentines in the Medici clan. The Medici rise continued when Cosimo I became duke of Florence in 1537. Like Lorenzo the Magnificent, Cosimo I was young, coming to power at 18. However, like Lorenzo, he understood the art of politics but showed a ruthlessness more characteristic of a Borgia than a Medici. Cosimo I added Siena and Luca to his realm. In 1569, his rise to eminence was recognized when he became grand duke of all Tuscany. On the death of Cosimo I in 1574, Cosimo’s son Francesco I ruled as grand duke until his death in 1587, and his rule proved to be a weak and uninspiring one. His son Ferdinand II restored luster to the Medici name. Cosimo II became grand duke in 1609 but died in 1620, never having fully recovered from a fever he had suffered in 1615. His son Ferdinand II became grand duke on his father’s death. With the reign of Ferdinand II, the House of Medici began its period of decline. It was the misfortune of the heirs of Ferdinand II to live in the era of the rise of the European great powers. Ironically, Marie de’ Medici (Médicis) played a role in the demise of her family’s duchy. In 1600, she married King Henry IV of France, and when he was assassinated in 1610, she served as regent for her son, King Louis XIII. 240 Medici family In 1735, Austria and France arranged that France would take Lorraine and Austria would seize possession of Tuscany. By this time, the Medicis were powerless to defend their ancient lands. In 1737, Austrian troops entered Florence. In the same year, in July 1737, Grand Duke Gian Gastone died without a male heir at the age of 65. The House of Medici had ceased to rule in Florence. Further reading: Hibbert, Christopher. The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall. New York: Morrow, 1975; Martines, Lauro. April Blood—Florence and the Plot against the Medici. London: Oxford University Press, 2003; Pernis, Maria Grazia, and Laurie Schneider Adams. Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici and the Medici Family in the Fifteenth Century. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006; Schevill, Ferdinand. History of Florence: From the Founding of the City through the Renaissance. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1936; Strathern, Paul. The Medici—Godfathers of the Renaissance. London: Pimlico, 2005. John Murphy Mehmed II (Mehmet II) (1432–1481) Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (reigned 1444–46; 1451–81) was only 12 years old when his father, Murad II, abdicated to pursue a life of religious contemplation (following Sufi or Islamic mysticism) and appointed him sultan in 1444. Faced with a threatening battle at Varna, Mehmed called his father back from central Anatolia to lead the troops. When his father died in 1451, Mehmed resumed the throne. Noted for the many military victories throughout his life, Mehmed was known as al-Fatih or the Conqueror. Mehmed was only in his early 20s when he launched the successful siege of Constantinople, the Byzantine capital that the Ottomans had previously failed to conquer. In a siege that lasted over 50 days, the Ottomans mounted a major assault with over 200 ships and at least 50,000 well-trained soldiers. Ottoman cannon bombarded the walled city that had been considered impregnable. A fortress, Rumeli Hisari, was constructed on the northwest coast of the Black Sea to prevent reinforcements from assisting the besieged city. To circumvent the long chain that blocked the waterway into the Golden Horn, Mehmed transported seafaring galleys over a long greased planked road built north of the city and used a pontoon bridge to take troops across. After some weeks the Ottomans broke through the city walls and met with little resistance from the inhabitants, who had vainly hoped for outside reinforcements. Rather than the customary three days allotted to soldiers taking a conquered city, Mehmed only allowed his troops a few hours of pillaging in the city. He entered the city with great pomp and promptly offered prayers at the great Byzantine basilica, Aya Sophia, which was then turned into a mosque. Although he was known, especially on the battlefield, for his furious temper, Mehmed was generous in victory, granting autonomy to the Greek Orthodox residents of city and permitting the return of those who had fled prior to the siege. Mehmed also encouraged others to move into his new capital, known to the Turks as Istanbul. Mehmed made Istanbul a major entrepôt and center of learning and culture. He established new schools, hospitals, caravanserai, and soup kitchens. He saw himself as the heir to the Roman Empire and viewed his empire as the guardian of Islam, whose duty it was to protect Muslims everywhere. Islam was the source of legality of his new great empire. Under Mehmed, the empire developed a centralized administration; the janissary corps was enlarged while the many religious and ethnic minorities within the empire were treated with leniency and fairness. Mehmed also encouraged skilled artisans and intellectuals escaping Muslim Spain after it fell to the Reconquista to settle in Istanbul. He granted monopolies over the sale of basic necessities to private individuals and used these revenues to bolster the Ottoman treasury. Well educated, Mehmed spoke numerous languages and was interested in the study of military tactics, especially the exploits of Alexander the Great. Unusually for a Muslim leader who generally eschewed physical representations, Mehmed also hired the famed Venetian artist Gentile Bellini to paint his portrait. Under Mehmed, the Ottomans dominated all of the Balkans to the Danube River and all of Anatolia, but he failed to defeat the Mamluks in Syria. Mehmed died preparing for a campaign to take the island of Rhodes and southern Italy and was succeeded by his son Bayezid II. See also Janissaries; Ottoman Empire (1450–1750). Further reading: Babinger, Franz. Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978; Inalcik, Halil, and Donald Quataert, eds. An Economic and Mehmed II 241 Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Janice J. Terry Melancthon, Philip (1497–1560) religious reformer Philip Melancthon was a key Lutheran reformer. He worked very closely with Martin Luther and was the author of many of the major Reformation documents, including the Augsburg Confession. Philip Melancthon was born Philip Schwarzerd on February 16, 1547, in Bretten, Germany. A brilliant boy, he was tutored in Greek and Latin and entered the University of Heidelberg just before his 13th birthday in 1509, graduating at age 14. The university would not allow him to study for his master’s at such a young age, so Philip moved to Tübingen, studying both philosophy and humanistic thought. He completed his master’s degree in 1514 at age 17. He was offered a position as an instructor at Tübingen and taught there until 1518. During his time at Tübingen as an instructor, Melancthon began to study theology and continued his studies of Greek, producing a Greek grammar in 1518. Offered a position at Wittenberg as a professor of Greek in 1518, Melancthon eagerly accepted. It was there he met another professor, the monk Martin Luther, who had posted his 95 Theses on October 31, 1517, on the church door at Wittenberg. Melancthon was an early supporter of Luther, attending the debates that preceded Luther’s excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church. By the time of his publishing a defense of Luther against Johann Maier von Eck in 1519, Melancthon was considered a part of the Lutheran camp. Augsburg Confession Melancthon was the primary author of the Augsburg Confession, written in 1530. This is a key Reformation document, explaining the Lutheran position on various theological issues. Written in Melancthon’s clear and lucid style, it represented the Lutheran position in a manner that many hoped would bring about reconciliation between the Lutherans and Roman Catholics. Melancthon would prove always to take the more moderate position in the various Reformation controversies. Melancthon worked closely with Luther on many of Luther’s writings. He assisted in Luther’s translation of the Bible into German, revised many of Luther’s commentaries on the Bible, and assisted Luther in some of the Luther’s most important polemical works. Yet Melancthon would not always agree with Luther. In 1537, at a meeting in Smalcald, Luther had previously prepared what are commonly called the Smalcald Articles (a part of the Book of Concord), attacking the pope virulently. Melancthon, writing his own “Treatise on the Primacy and the Power of the Pope,” persuaded the others present to adopt his more moderate position. Melancthon married Katharina Krapp, daughter of the mayor of Wittenberg, in 1520. They had four children and their marriage lasted 37 years until Katharina’s death in 1557. They lived in Wittenberg throughout their marriage. Melancthon had many roles at the University of Wittenberg. He gave immensely popular lectures in over 100 courses to thousands of students (some of his most popular lectures had over 2,000 in attendance). His lectures included theology, philosophy, philology, and world history. He served as rector and academic dean at various times, helping to establish the university as a leading educational institution. Melancthon published many books. His most famous book, a systematic theology called the Loci communes, was first published in 1521 and revised several times by Melancthon. Melancthon reached out to many church and public figures including Henry VIII, king of England; King Francis I of France; and the patriarch of Constantinople. He also counted as friends many Calvinists, including Oecolampadius, Bucer, and John Calvin himself. This would leave him open to later charges of being a crypto-Calvinist. The most tragic event in Melancthon’s life was his role in the document called the Leipzig Interim. Soon after Luther’s death in 1546, Emperor Charles V invaded the German area of Saxony and forced the defeated princes to adopt a document that was designed to be an interim document until the theological matters were settled by the Council of Trent, which had begun recently. The authors of the document were two Roman Catholic bishops and Luther’s old nemesis, John Agricola. The resulting document so favored Roman Catholicism that the defeated princes refused to sign it. Melancthon was asked to improve the document to make it more palatable. This he did, but just barely. The document compromised on justification by faith, a key Lutheran tenet, and Melancthon’s association with 242 Melancthon, Philip it would unfairly brand him as a traitor to the Lutheran cause for the rest of his life. Melancthon provided a kind of balance to Luther that Luther himself appreciated. He was not a strong leader, and many rightly accuse him of being too eager to compromise. Yet his key role in many of the Reformation documents and his personal influence and friendship with many of the reformers clearly show how essential Melancthon was in the early years of the Reformation. Melancthon died in 1560 and was buried next to Luther in the castle Church of Wittenberg. See also humanism in Europe. Further reading: Aland, Kurt. Four Reformers: Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, Zwingli. Augsburg: MPLS, 1979; Melancthon, Philip. Loci communes 1543. J. A. O. Preus, trans. St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1992; Cox, Francis Augustus. The Life of Philip Melancthon: Comprising and Account of the Most Important Transactions of the Reformation. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing Company, 2006. Bruce D. Franson mercantilism The theory and practice of mercantilism in early modern Europe were densely entwined with both the emergence of capitalism and the formation of overseas empires. Briefly, capitalism can be defined as an economic system in which goods and services, produced by individuals and privately owned firms, are bought and sold in markets, thus benefiting individual owners of capital and private property. In early modern Europe, mercantilism extended this notion regarding capitalist production and exchange to the level of the state. More specifically, it refers to the theory and practice of how the early modern European states and nation-states related to each other and to their respective colonies. The basic theory behind mercantilist practice was fairly simple. The whole point of creating overseas colonies was to augment the economic, political, and military power of the colonizing state, often referred to as the “mother country,” though this locution is deceptive, since the unit of analysis is less a “country” than a specific state apparatus. Colonies were to serve the colonizing state in two principal ways: as a market for manufactured goods produced in the home country, and as a source of raw materials from which the nation-state’s private producers would create manufactures. An ideal mercantile relationship was thus conceived as hierarchical, reciprocal, and exclusive; the colonizing power was to be dominant, the colony subordinate. Manufactures were to flow in one direction, raw materials in the other. At the same time, rival colonizing states were to be excluded from this relationship. It would not serve the English state’s mercantile interests, for instance, for its rivals (e.g., Spain or France) to trade with its colonies. From the perspective of any given colonizing state, the whole point of creating overseas colonies was to enhance its own power vis-à-vis competing states. It would therefore be counterproductive for a colonizing state to permit its rivals to benefit by trading with its colonies by either exporting manufactures to them or receiving raw materials from them. The exclusionary nature of the ideal mercantilist relationship was thus just as important as its hierarchical and reciprocal qualities. Finally, mercantilism also called for low wages and minimal consumption in the home country and for maximizing of exports, thus encouraging industrial development and permitting the greatest percentage of money and resources to be kept in the hands of the state. Mercantilist practice often deviated from mercantilist theory, however, depending on time, place, and circumstance. Spain, the New World’s first colonizing power, endeavored relentlessly to forge an exclusive mercantile relationship with its colonies, with decidedly mixed success. Despite an abundance of laws and decrees intended to ensure an exclusive relationship, smuggling, contraband, and other forms of illicit trade made Spain’s mercantile system, hermetically sealed in theory, exceedingly leaky in practice. In addition, Spain did not have the industrial base with which to meet its own or its colonies’ demands for manufactured goods. As a result, much of the silver and gold plundered from its New World colonies slipped through the fingers of the Spanish state on its way to Dutch, Flemish, and English merchants, who were able to provide the industrial manufactures that Spanish merchants were not. The English were more successful in achieving the mercantilist ideal, principally through a series of Navigation Acts (most notably in 1651 and 1660) that required England’s colonies to trade exclusively with the mother country. But here, too, smuggling and contraband poked many holes in the system, rendering mercantilist practice a far cry from the ideal. The Dutch state, committed to free trade and frequently encouraging its capitalist class to invest in its rivals’ colonies, rarely adhered to mercantilist theory, yet Dutch mercantilism 243 merchants and the Dutch state succeeded in amassing vast quantities of capital during the colonial period. Principally because their domestic economies had undergone the most extensive transition to capitalism, by the end of the colonial period the English and French states had become the most successful in employing mercantilist theory and practice to augment their own economic, political, and military power, and, by extension, the power and prestige of their respective nationstates. Further reading. Hansen, E. Damsgaard. European Economic History: From Mercantilism to Maastricht and Beyond. Herndon, VA: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2001; Vaggi, Gianni, and Peter Groenewegen. A Concise History of Economic Thought: From Mercantilism to Monetarism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Michael J. Schroeder Mexico, Basin of Like a giant bowl gouged out of the Earth, ringed by mountains and active volcanoes, the Basin of Mexico, the site of contemporary Mexico City, is one of the world’s most ancient and important cradles of human civilization. Conventionally called the Valley of Mexico, this singular geographic feature has no outlet to the sea, and thus technically is a basin, not a valley. Tectonically unstable, ranging in elevation from 2,000 to 2,400 meters above sea level, and extending roughly 110 kilometers north to south and 80 kilometers east to west, the Basin of Mexico covers an area of approximately 7,000 square kilometers. Prior to the conquest of Mexico, the basin’s diverse ecological zones saw the rise and fall of diverse city-states and kingdoms. Because it formed a closed hydrological system, and because it has ample volcanic and alluvial soils, the basin evolved a complex network of lakes, streams, and springs that also made it one of the richest and most productive ecological zones in all of Mesoamerica. The basin’s first human inhabitants, arriving some 15,000 years ago, found an environment teeming with life—not only birds, fish, plants, and insects but a staggering diversity of mammals like rabbit, fox, pigs, deer, wolves, as well as camelids, horses, mammoths, mastadons, giant sloths, bears, and other large prey. Initially a hunter’s paradise, the basin had by 9,000 years ago seen its largest fauna become extinct, probably due to a combination of climate change and anthropogenic pressures. The beginnings of maize cultivation, which later provided the economic underpinnings for the development of complex societies and civilizations across Mesoamerica and beyond, began in or near the basin around 5,000 b.c.e. It is hypothesized that the absence of large draft animals suitable for domestication delayed for several thousand years the emergence of fully sedentary societies. As late as 1,000 b.c.e., the entire basin was home to an estimated 10,000 inhabitants—a tiny fraction of its carrying capacity, and of what it would be two millennia later. Beginning around 1100 b.c.e., in the basin’s wetter southern zones, conscious manipulation of the basin’s abundant water resources marked the beginnings of an agricultural revolution, and along with it of complex societies that relatively quickly developed into large-scale state systems. Around 500 b.c.e., to the northeast the construction of irrigation ditches and other water-control mechanisms permitted the emergence of the basin’s first true city and state, Teotihuacán. Around the same time, a host of other polities emerged around the five interconnected shallow lakes that dominated the basin’s center— from south to north Lakes Chalco, Xochililco, Texcoco, Xaltocán, and Zupango. From around 100 b.c.e., and continuing for the next 16 centuries, there emerged an exceedingly intricate array of polities, kingdoms, and city-states across the basin, most with their capital cities located near the lakes at the basin’s center, the exact sequence and relationships of which scholars are still endeavoring to understand. The Aztecs built their capital city Tenochtitlán atop what began as a small island on the western edge of Lake Texcoco, the basin’s central and largest lake. By the time of the Spanish arrival in 1519, the Basin of Mexico was home to an estimated 2 million to 3 million people, making it one of the most densely packed areas in the world, with an average population density of from 300 to 500 persons per square kilometer. After the conquest, the Spanish devoted enormous resources to draining the giant lakes. In the early 21st century, the Basin of Mexico was home to the world’s second-largest megalopolis and an estimated 25 million to 30 million people. Further reading. Gibson, Charles. The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964; Kandell, Jonathan. La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City. New York: Random House, 1988. Michael J. Schroeder 244 Mexico, Basin of Mexico, conquest of The conquest of Mexico represents one of the most ofttold and epic sagas in the European conquest of the New World. Our knowledge of the defeat of the Aztecs (Mexica) is based on a rich array of firsthand accounts, both Spanish and native. The first conquest of a major indigenous polity in the Americas by a European power, the conquest of Mexico fueled the European imagination while providing a template for the violent subjugation of the rest of Mesoamerica and large parts of South America in the decades to follow. With the conquest of Cuba complete and much of the Caribbean under Spanish dominion, the first explorations along the coast of modern-day Mexico were in 1517 under captain Francisco Hernández de Córdoba. This initial exploratory foray was followed in 1518 by an expedition under Juan de Grijalva that further probed the easternmost fringes of the Aztec domain. Both were under the authority of the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez. In a series of sometimes violent encounters with the native inhabitants along the coast, the Grijalva expedition learned that a great city lay somewhere in the interior. The stage was thus set for a third expedition, also under Governor Velázquez’s authority, to ascertain further the nature of these mysterious lands and peoples. After much behind-the-scenes political intrigue and deal making within Cuba, the governor selected Hernán Cortés as the expedition’s leader—a choice he would soon come to regret. Setting sail The 11 ships under Cortés’s command set sail from Cuba in December 1519 with some 530 European men, several hundred Cuban Indians (including women), 16 horses, and numerous dogs. They were exceedingly well armed with artillery, cannons, swords, cutlasses, lances, crossbows, arquebuses, and other weaponry, and well stocked with bread, meat, and other provisions, including trinkets for use as gifts to friendly natives. Officially this was to be an expedition of discovery only. Governor Velázquez had not granted its leader the authority to conquer or colonize. Making initial landfall at Cozumel Island, Cortés learned from the natives that two Christians were held captive in the interior. One of them, Jerónimo de Aguilar, had shipwrecked off the coast of Yucatán in 1511 and lived among the local inhabitants for the past eight years. His knowledge of Chontal Maya and native customs would prove crucial in the events to follow. The expedition continued north and west, past Yucatán and along the coast of present-day Tabasco state. On March 25, 1519, at the village called Potonchan, after one in a series of violent encounters with coastal peoples, Cortés was given 20 young native women as a peace offering. One of these women, Malinali, baptized Marina, became one of the key actors of the conquest, acting as Cortés’s interpreter, confidant, and later mistress, bearing his child—reputedly the first mestizo (Spanish-Indian) child. She spoke both Maya and Nahuatl, the latter the language of the Aztecs, and had intimate knowledge of Indian people’s customs and practices. To Mexicans she was later known as La Malinche (Doña Marina), or worse, La Chingada (the violated one) and conventionally has been viewed as a traitor to her people, an interpretation challenged by more recent feminist scholarship. The expedition reached San Juan de Ulúa, an island off the coast of modern-day Veracruz, on Maundy Thursday 1519. Reaching the mainland on Good Friday, Cortés established friendly relations with the local Totonac chieftain, an Aztec subordinate named Teudile. On Easter Sunday, Cortés undertook a characteristically theatrical gesture when he staged a mock-battle on the beach, firing cannon and racing his horses, to the astonishment of his hosts. He also asked for gold, which he portrayed as medicine for sick comrades. Within days, Aztec emperor Moctezuma II was informed of the strangers’ activities via oral reports and painted renderings. Scholarly debates continue regarding whether Moctezuma and his priests viewed the bearded strangers as gods, particularly whether Cortés was the Plumed Serpent Quetzalcoatl returning from the east as prophesied. In order to circumvent the authority of Governor Velázquez and establish his own authority to wage a campaign of conquest, Cortés pulled a legal sleight of hand, founding a town called Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, appointing its officials, and resigning his office. His men in turn elected him the town’s principal judicial and military authority. In accordance with Spanish law, he now derived his authority directly from the Crown. The maneuver is often cited as a prime example of the conquistador’s political cunning. inland expedition With their base at Villa Rica, the expedition inland began. Soon a pattern developed, whereby Moctezuma politely denied Cortés the right to enter the Aztec capital, and Cortés politely insisted on visiting the sovereign as an ambassador of King Charles I. The campaign Mexico, conquest of 245 that followed demonstrated Cortés’s masterful ability to perceive and exploit the political and ethnic divisions between the Aztecs and their subordinate polities. Events in Cempoala—in which Cortés tricked the Cempoalan cacique into an alliance—are often cited as exemplary of this ability. So too is his decision to scuttle his ships, along with other actions that worked to instill a sense of purpose, unity, and loyalty among his men. After winning the alliance of the Tlaxcalans—one of the few polities the Aztecs had proved unable to subdue—and slaughtering some 6,000 Cholulans in an infamous surprise attack, the expedition reached Tenochtitlán on November 8, 1519. Entering the magnificent city, the Spaniards were greeted graciously by the indecisive Moctezuma. A few days later on November 14, Cortés boldly took the Aztec emperor hostage, holding him as prisoner within his own capital city. After some six months in this uneasy state, Cortés learned that Governor Velázquez of Cuba had dispatched an expedition under Pánfilo de Narváez to arrest him (Cortés) for violating his orders. Leaving his second in command Pedro de Alvarado in charge in Tenochtitlán, in early May 1520, Cortés hastened back to Cempoala, defeated the Narváez force on May 28–29, and won over its survivors. Returning to Tenochtitlán, the Spanish force 246 Mexico, conquest of A 1585 illustration from a painting depicting Hernán Cortés (seated) greeting Aztec leaders. La Malinche, his translator, stands at his side. The arrival of Europeans on the North American continent spelled the eventual demise of the Aztec Empire. under his command now more than 1,000 strong, Cortés learned to his chagrin that Pedro de Alvarado had slaughtered hundreds of Mexican nobility during a religious celebration. Trapped for several days, the Spanish force barely escaped the city in its withdrawal of La Noche Triste (The Sorrowful Night) of July 1, 1520, in which an estimated 400–600 Spaniards were killed. During the fighting, the emperor Moctezuma was slain, by which side remaining a matter of debate. Regrouping his forces near the coast, Cortés decided to lay siege to the great city. In an audacious and monumental undertaking, he supervised the construction of 13 brigantines, which were then carried in sections over the mountains, assembled, and launched on Lake Texcoco. By this time, his forces numbered some 900 well-armed Spaniards, 86 horses, and thousands of Indian allies. The siege of the island city of Tenochtitlán began in May 1521. Meanwhile an epidemic, probably of smallpox, was laying waste to the Aztec capital. Even before the siege had begun, an estimated one-third of the city’s inhabitants had succumbed to European diseases against which they had no immunity. After three months of furious fighting, the Spanish invaders and their Indian allies reduced Tenochtitlán to rubble. Leading the city’s defense was Cuauhtemoc, Moctezuma’s cousin, whom much Indian lore later came to memorialize as a hero. The city fell on August 13, 1521—some two and a half years after the invaders’ first landfall at Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz. Scholars have emphasized various factors that made possible the defeat of the mighty and war-hardened Aztecs by a few hundred Spanish invaders. Near the top of all such lists is Cortés’s political brilliance, combined with his unshakable will to conquer, acquire riches, and spread the Christian faith. His ability to perceive and exploit preexisting divisions within the Aztec polity, and success in gaining thousands of loyal Indian allies, are often cited as sine qua non of the conquest. Also emphasized in this vein is that no native inhabitants could have known that Cortés was but the advance guard of an aggressive and expanding kingdom, accustomed to campaigns of conquest, inspired by an exclusive and highly militarized religion, determined to create an overseas empire. Other major factors most often cited in making the conquest possible include Spanish superiority in the technologies of warfare, especially their horses, swords, and armor; the invaders’ skills in the arts of war, steely resolve, unity of purpose, and loyalty to each other and their leader; the adversaries’ very different cultural conceptions of warfare, with the Spaniards focused on killing the enemy, and the Aztecs more concerned with capturing prisoners for later sacrifice; the Spaniards’ advantage of language, thanks to Jerónimo de Aguilar and La Malinche; the weak and indecisive leadership of Moctezuma; the role of myth, legend, and fatalism in weakening Aztec resolve; and the role of disease in weakening the Aztec capacity to resist once the final siege had begun. Atop the smoldering ruins of Tenochtitlán the Spaniards built a new capital city—Mexico City— often using the same blocks of stone they had just toppled, and foundations already in place, using the labor of the vanquished Indians to realize their vision of the Spanish Christian kingdom spread to the New World. For the next 300 years, New Spain would be Spain’s most important colony. Soon many of the victorious conquistadores and their countrymen began looking beyond Mexico, as New Spain served as a launching point for further campaigns of conquest. See also Central America, conquest of; Díaz del Castillo, Bernal; epidemics in the Americas; Northwestern South America, conquest of; Peru, conquest of; Yucatán, conquest of. Further reading: Cortés, Hernándo. Five Letters of Cortés to the Emperor. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969; Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. The Conquest of New Spain. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1963; León-Portilla, Miguel. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992; Thomas, Hugh. Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993; Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. Michael J. Schroeder Ming, Southern When a frontier people, the Manchus, took over control of China in 1644, Ming dynasty loyalists fled to southern China, where they held out for many years; they became known as the Southern Ming. Over several centuries, descendants of the Ming emperor surnamed Zhu (Chu) were settled throughout the Chinese empire. As a result when the last Ming emperor committed suicide there were members of the imperial family throughout China, especially in the south, and it was natural that anti-Manchu forces would use them to legitimize their rebellions. Ming, Southern 247 The first of these was Zhu Yusong (Chu Yusung), better known as the Prince of Fu. He was descended from Emperor Wanli (Wan-Li) (r. 1573– 1620); in fact all of the main claimants of the Southern Ming were descended from him. He assumed the title Emperor Hongguang (Hung-kuang) and reigned in Nanjing (Nanking). The new Southern Ming emperor sent emissaries to the Manchus. He initially tried to conciliate the Manchus and offered them a subsidy if they would return to Manchuria. The offer was rejected by the Manchu regent, Prince Dorgon. In the ensuing fighting, the Southern Ming fared badly. Nanjing was captured by the Manchus and Hongguang was taken prisoner to Beijing (Peking), where he died in captivity in 1646. Following the Manchu capture of Nanjing, several Ming princes were elevated to lead movements by loyalists against the Manchus, but none of them showed worthy qualities and their causes fizzled in quick succession, succumbing to campaigns led by both Manchus and Han Chinese generals who had defected to the Manchus. The most notable example of Han Chinese participation in opposing the restoration of the Ming was Wu Sangui (Wu San-kuei), the general guarding the easternmost pass of the Great Wall against the Manchus, who opened the way for the combined Manchu and his effort that defeated the rebel Li Zicheng (Le Tzu-ch’eng). General Wu commanded a force that drove Prince Guei (Kuei), a Ming pretender, into Burma and was rewarded with a princely title and granted Yunnan Province as his fief. The most sustained resistance was led by Zheng Chenggong (Cheng Ch’eng-kung), better known as Koxing in the West (1624–62) who had a formidable force along the southern coast and along the Yangzi (Yangtze) River. After his defeat on mainland China, Zeng and his son retreated to Taiwan where they held out until 1683. The fall of Taiwan to Manchu forces ended the southern Ming resistance. See also Great Wall of China; Ming Dynasty, late; Qing (Ch’ing) dynasty, rise and zenith. Further reading: Dennerline, Jerry. The Chia-ting Loyalists: Confucian Leadership and Social Change in Seventeenth- Century China. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981; Hummel, Arthur W. Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, 1644–1912. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943; Kessler, Lawrence D. Kianghsi and the Consolodation of Ch’ing Rule, 1661–1684. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976; Struve, Lynn A. The Southern Ming, 1644–1662. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984. Justin Corfield Ming dynasty, late The Ming dynasty of China (1368–1644) was founded by a commoner, Zhu Yuanzhang (Chu Yuan-chang), who ruled as Emperor Hongwu (Hung-wu), 1368–98. He expelled the Mongols and began the recovery of China. His son, Emperor Yongle (Yung-lo), ruled from 1402 to 1424 and was also a capable general and administrator. Together they expanded China’s borders, strengthened the defenses, and pursued policies that led to economic recovery and agricultural revival. The schools that they founded and the examination system that they revitalized to recruit government officials would serve the empire well during long decades when minors and weaklings occupied the throne. However a succession of capricious and weak rulers eventually led to eunuchs’ controlling power and massive corruption that resulted in domestic revolts, unwise foreign wars, and dynastic collapse. Emperor Hongwu instituted an autocratic style of government and both he and Yongle exercised their power vigorously and effectively. However while Hongwu treated eunuchs as mere palace servants, Yongle began to entrust them with administrative duties, but under his firm control. Yongle died leading his fifth campaign against the Mongols. His son was already ill and died within a year, passing the throne to his son, who ruled for 11 years as Emperor Xuande (Hsuanteh). Xuande was succeeded by his eight-year-old son in 1436. Such short reigns were damaging in an autocratic system of government where continuity in leadership was an asset. Minors on the throne required regencies by empress dowagers, who notoriously relied on eunuchs rather than ministers for advice. Most Ming dynasty eunuchs came from poor families in northern China and were noted for their greed and extortion. Boy emperors who were isolated from normal human contacts grew up dependent on them as friends and advisers. For example Emperor Zhengtong (Cheng-t’ung) appointed his eunuch Wang Zhen (Wang Chen) commander in chief and the two men set out together in 1494 with a large army against the Mongol Esen Khan. The army was cut to pieces, Wang died, and Zhengtong was taken prisoner. Although the Mongols were too weak to take the offensive, this disaster ended 248 Ming dynasty, late Chinese military superiority over the nomads and put the Ming government on the defensive on the northern frontier. In the mid-16th century, Mongol chief Altan Khan would raid China’s northern borders at will for two decades. At the same time, Japanese pirates and Chinese renegades raided and looted the southern coast inflicting huge damage. In the 1590s, Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea. Suzerain China had to send a huge army to aid the Koreans for six years, at enormous cost. Two long reigns in the 16th century (Jiajing or Chia-ching between 1520 and 1566, and Wanli (Wan- Li) between 1572 and 1620) brought a measure of stability, largely due to able ministers in the early part of each reign. However both monarchs were grossly negligent of their duties, isolating themselves from government officials and relying on power-hungry palace eunuchs, with the result that the bureaucracy became increasingly demoralized. A government that was unresponsive to social and economic problems would eventually be brought down by peasant rebels from northwestern China led by Li Zicheng (Li Tzuch’eng) in 1644. Ming China prospered, however, despite inept political leadership. The population increased from about 60 million at the beginning to possibly 200 million by 1600. In addition to great metropolitan centers such as Suzhou (Soochow) and Hangzhou (Hangchow), many intermediate-sized market towns emerged. Society was egalitarian and the flourishing printing industry facilitated the spread of education so that the sons of millions of families could realistically aspire to obtain an education, pass the state exam, and join the elite. Popular culture represented by the theater and opera flourished in the cities. In addition, a new genre of literature developed during the Ming. It was the novel, written in the vernacular and depicting men and women of all social classes. The government’s principal source of income was the land tax, assessed on land owned by farming families and not on the number of males in a household. This system of taxation gave farmers greater freedom to choose employment and allowed the development of industries. Silk and cotton manufacturing prospered, as did the porcelain industry, which led the world. While China had traded with South and Southeast Asia and beyond for over a millennium, the Portuguese entered the trading scene in 1516, opening direct seaborne Sino-European commercial relations. Portuguese merchants were followed by men from the Netherlands, England, France, and other European nations. Westerners brought European products, but more significantly New World crops such as maize, sweet potatoes, and tobacco, with enormous impact on Chinese agriculture and diet. More immediately European demand for Chinese silks, porcelain, and tea brought an influx of silver to China. In 1581, the first Jesuit missionary landed in China. Jesuits would be important during the late Ming and early Qing (Ch’ing) as cultural ambassadors between China and Europe. They introduced Western sciences, mathematics, astronomy, cartography, and firearms to China and the ideals of Chinese philosophy to Europe, laying the foundations of Sinology, or study of Chinese civilization in Europe. The 16th century was an era of great changes in Europe and China, where modern societies were beginning to develop. Despite inept Ming emperors the educational system and civil service continued to provide for a prosperous and advancing civil society. However by the beginning of the 17th century, many signs pointed to the fact that the country was exhausted. An ineffective government could not simultaneously deal with internal rebellions and border incursions by nomads. The last Ming emperor hanged himself as rebels swarmed into the capital; a beleaguered frontier general then invited the Manchus, a minority ethnic group living on the northeastern borders of the Ming empire, to help him put down the rebels. Astute Manchu leaders seized this opportunity to ascend the throne and founded a new dynasty. See also Great Wall of China; Jesuits in Asia; Ming, Southern; Qing (Ch’ing) dynasty, rise and zenith; Qing (Ch’ing) tributary system; Wu Sangui (Wu Sankuei). Further reading: Chan, Albert. The Glory and Fall of the Ming Dynasty. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982; Ho, Ping-ti. The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368–1911. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962; Hucker, Charles O. The Traditional Chinese State in Ming Times (1368–1644). Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1961; So, Kwan-wai. Japanese Piracy in Ming China during the Sixteenth Century. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1975; Twitchett, Denis, and Frederick W. Mote, eds. The Cambridge History of China, Volume 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Parts 1 and 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 and 1998. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur Ming dynasty, late 249 mita labor in the Andean highlands For many centuries prior to the Spanish conquest, the indigenous peoples of the Andean highlands had employed a system of reciprocal labor exchange known as mita (MEE-ta). Literally translating as “turn work” or a “turn” of labor, mita was integral to the system of ayllus, which in the absence of markets constituted the principal mechanism by which individuals, families, and communities exchanged goods and services. Mita was also the principal way in which pre-Columbian Andean states, including the Inca, secured the labor necessary for the construction of roads, agricultural terraces, warehouses, temples, and other public works. In the aftermath of their conquest of the Inca, the Spanish came to employ a modified version of the mita labor system, which by convention is generally referred to as mita (rather than mit’a) labor. The differences between the two systems were profound. In the preconquest mita system, even the lowliest peasant could be assured of a minimal level of subsistence, just as highland communities were ensured an adequate number of workers even after local notables (kurakas) and the imperial state had siphoned off the specified number of mita laborers (mitayos). Under Spanish rule, the mita system was essentially shorn of much of its reciprocal qualities, while demands for labor intensified dramatically. Especially after the reforms instituted by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in the 1570s, the mita labor system became, in effect, a system of forced labor in which the state demanded that communities (now called repartimiento) contribute as many as one-seventh of their able-bodied labor force at any given time to work in the silver and mercury mines, in workshops (or obrajes), in agriculture and ranching, and in many other capacities. Combined with the devastation wrought by the violence of conquest and the epidemic disease that raged throughout the highlands, causing precipitous population declines for which periodic censuses failed to account, the mita labor system emerged as one of the most fearsome and brutal institutions of the entire colonial period. Overall, the Spanish state was less concerned with fostering conditions under which individuals, families, and communities could reproduce the conditions of their own existence than with extracting the greatest quantity of labor in the shortest possible time. The results of this transformation, for ordinary Andeans, were horrific. Communities were drained of their most productive workers, who were gone for months at a time, making it far more difficult for them to meet their tributary quotas “in kind” (e.g., in corn, textiles, and sundry other goods). This presented a new imposition, since before the conquest the Inca state and its agents had required communities to contribute mita labor exclusively, not goods. Mitayos, often accompanied by their wives, children, and other relatives, were often subjected to the most brutal working conditions imaginable, especially those assigned to work in the silver and mercury mines. Females who accompanied mitayos during their turn at labor became vulnerable to rape and other abuses, while other family members were frequently assigned to secondary tasks by colonial authorities, further depleting the quantity of labor available to the larger community. The abuses of mita labor continued throughout the colonial period and were a major contributing factor in the many revolts and uprisings that rocked the Andean highlands in the decades and centuries after the consolidation of colonial rule in the 1570s. See also coca; epidemics in the Americas; Potosí (silver mines of Colonial Peru). Further reading. Cole, Jeffrey A. Potosí Mita, 1573–1700: Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985; Spalding, Karen. Huarochirí: An Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984; Stern, Steve J. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Michael J. Schroeder Moctezuma II (1466–1520) Aztec emperor High priest and eighth son of Mexica emperor Axayácatl (d.1481), Moctezuma II, succeeding his uncle Ahuítzol, was selected as the new emperor by a gathering of some 30 Aztec lords in 1502. Popularly remembered as a weak and indecisive ruler who failed to perceive or resist the threat posed by the invading Spaniards, Moctezuma (or Montezuma, meaning “he who angers himself”) was a key actor in the conquest of Mexico. 250 mita labor in the Andean highlands Ample historical evidence supports the interpretation that Moctezuma’s vacillation and political paralysis were crucial in giving the Hernán Cortés and the Spanish the strategic and tactical edge they needed to defeat the mighty Aztecs. Like all seven Mexica rulers who preceded him following the establishment of the royal house in the late 1300s, Moctezuma II was considered semidivine in a culture saturated with state-sponsored religious symbols and practices. During his tenure as emperor, he also earned a reputation as a stickler for probity, propriety, and solemnity in public and religious affairs and for ruthlessness in military matters. He has been described as dark, having wavy hair and communicating in stern but eloquent speech. His weaknesses as a ruler became apparent only after his spies reported the arrival of strange, whiteskinned, bearded men, accompanied by imposing four-legged “deer . . . as high as rooftops” (horses) in large floating vessels off the Caribbean coast in April 1519. His indecisiveness from this point forward is commonly attributed to his belief that the strangers’ arrival represented the fulfillment of a prophecy regarding the return of the god Quetzalcoatl—an assertion that continues to provoke controversy among scholars. Regardless, it is clear that the Mexica emperor did almost everything in his power to appease and placate the Spaniards, especially Cortés. Most often cited in this regard are his decisions not to attack but to welcome the armed strangers into the capital island-city of Tenochtitlán, against the counsel of many of his advisers, and to submit willingly to being kept as Cortés’s prisoner for seven months, from mid- November 1519 until his death the following June. Extant documentation demonstrates many instances of his paralysis, indecision, fear, and anxiety, even as it offers a detailed portrait of him as a ruler and human being. Also controversial is the manner of his death; whether he was slain by his Spanish captors, or by the stones hurled by his own subjects following his efforts to quell their violent revolt against the invaders, the sources agree that he died on June 30, 1520, and that his death marked the end of the initial, relatively peaceful phase of the conquest and the beginning of the war without quarter that would result in Spanish victory and the onset of 300 years of colonial rule. See also Aztecs (Mexica); Aztecs, human sacrifice and the. Further reading. Lockhart, James, ed., trans. We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; Thomas, Hugh. Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico. New York: Touchstone, 1993. Michael J. Schroeder Mohács, Battle of (Mohacz, Battle of) The Battle of Mohács, which erupted in the summer of 1526, was a major Ottoman victory over the Hungarian king Louis, marking the end of the Jagiellon dynasty. Led by Suleiman I the Magnificent, the Ottoman troops, estimated at 100,000 strong, crushed the far smaller Hungarian forces on the open plain of Mohács. Besides having numerous soldiers, the Ottomans had far superior weaponry that included artillery and highly skilled marksmen. One of the first so-called gunpowder empires, the Ottomans effectively used cannons to stop the charging Hungarian cavalry. King Louis was killed fleeing the field, and Suleiman was said to have mourned him as a valiant opponent. Several bishops and over 20,000 Hungarian troops also perished. Following the victory, Suleiman swiftly moved on to conquer the twin cities of Pest and Buda, the Hungarian capital on the Danube River, in the fall of 1526. Following the custom of Ottoman armies, Suleiman then led his victorious troops, laden with booty and captives, back to Istanbul for the winter. As result of their victory, the Ottomans incorporated Hungary into their expanding empire. The Habsburgs, rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, took advantage of the destruction of most of the Hungarian nobility to increase their authority in central Europe, and the two great empires began their long struggle against one another for control of southern and central Europe. See also Habsburg dynasty; Ottoman Empire (1450– 1750). Further reading: Kortepeter, Carl Max. Ottoman Imperialism during the Reformation: Europe and the Caucasus. New York: New York University Press, 1972; Sugar, Peter. Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1804. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977. Janice J. Terry Mohács, Battle of (Mohacz, Battle of) 251 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533–1592) French philosopher The French nobleman Michel de Montaigne was the inventor of the modern form of the personal essay and the greatest exponent of philosophical skepticism in the 16th century. His father was a rural landowner and his mother a descendant of Spanish Jews who had converted to Christianity. His father ensured that Montaigne received a good humanist education; his tutor was directed to speak nothing but Latin to him until he reached the age of six. Montaigne was educated in the law and as an adult served in the parlement, or law court, of Bordeaux and was mayor of Bordeaux from 1581 to 1585. The first two volumes of his essays were published in 1580, followed by a complete revised edition of three books in 1588. A third, posthumous edition with further revisions was published in 1595, and his personal journal of a trip through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy in 1580 and 1581 was published in 1774. Montaigne is responsible for introducing the word essay, originally essai, meaning “attempt.” Unlike Sir Francis Bacon, who was greatly influenced by Montaigne as an essayist, Montaigne saw self-knowledge as a goal and dwelled on his personal thoughts, feelings, and experiences in addition to drawing from his extensive reading. Montaigne was utterly at home in the classics but wrote his essays in French. (His work has also influenced the development of the French philosophical vocabulary.) As a skeptic, Montaigne’s motto was Que sais-je? (What do I know?). He followed the tradition of classical skeptics like the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho in asserting that certainty could not be attained either by the senses or by reason. Montaigne was particularly interested in the ethical teachings of the ancient pagan Greek and Roman philosophers. As a skeptic, he held that people should be even-tempered, tolerant, and not overly invested in their opinions. Montaigne’s skepticism was also informed by the growing knowledge of foreign cultures in 16th century Europe. This knowledge led him to doubt the intrinsic superiority of his own culture. One of his most famous essays, “On Cannibals,” is about the contrast between some Native Americans who had been brought to France and French society and suggests that the “savage” custom of eating a man after he is dead is not worse, and perhaps better, than the European practices of torturing or burning people alive for their religious opinions. Montaigne’s longest essay, “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” is devoted to a 15th_century Spanish theologian, the author of Natural Theology, which Montaigne had read on the advice of his father. Montaigne published a translation of Sebond’s work from Latin to French in 1569. Sebond believed that, with a proper attitude toward the Catholic faith, the knowledge of God was attainable through reason. Montaigne doubted this thesis and suggested that there are many things about the world that the human intellect is simply inadequate to understand. Montaigne’s travels were inspired by curiosity and the pain he suffered from kidney stones and hoped to relieve in foreign spas. The journal focuses on the six months he spent in Rome. Montaigne wrote the account of his Roman stay in Italian, as he believed that one of the best ways of understanding a foreign culture was learning and using its language. Montaigne was particularly interested in ancient monuments and other reminders of the classical Romans including place names and festivals. He was less interested in the art and culture of the contemporary Italian Renaissance. A Catholic, Montaigne took a politique stand in the French Wars of Religion, emphasizing the importance of civil peace and national unity over religious uniformity. He was a friend and correspondent of Henri of Navarre, the leader of the Protestant faction who after Montaigne’s death converted to Catholicism and became the tolerant Henry IV, king of France and Navarre. Despite Montaigne’s skepticism, moderation, and occasional sympathy with Protestantism, he had little trouble with the Catholic Church, perhaps because his skepticism could be turned to Catholic ends by suggesting that faith in the authority of the church was the only source of certainty. His writings were not put on the Church’s Index of Forbidden Books until 1676, and he was invited to write Catholic polemic. Montaigne’s works were extraordinarily popular and influential, both in the original French and in the English translation by John Florio, published in 1603. William Shakespeare was among those who read Montaigne in Florio’s translation, and signs of the Frenchman’s influence can be found in Shakespeare’s later plays. Although Montaigne’s use of French rather than Latin and of the new essay form rather than traditional philosophical genres such as the treatise or dialogue limited his effect on the community of the learned, his friend and disciple the priest Pierre Charron put forth Montaigne’s skepticism in a more systematic form aimed at refuting Protestants and atheists. See also humanism in Europe. Further reading: Burke, Peter. Montaigne. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981; Frame, Donald. Montaigne: A Biography. 252 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965; Hartle, Anne. Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Starobinski, Jean. Montaigne in Motion. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. William E. Burns Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de (1689–1755) French political theorist The baron de Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu) was an important cultural critic and political theorist of the early French enlightenment. He was a member of the hereditary nobility of French judges and lawyers known as the nobility of the robe. As was a traditional right of his family, he served actively in the criminal division of the parlement, or highranking judiciary, of the French province of Guienne, at its capital, Bordeaux. His first book was Persian Letters (1721). Because it addressed controversial subjects, the book was published with no indication of its author and a false imprint; it was credited to an imaginary publisher in Cologne when in fact, like many underground French books during the Enlightenment, it was published in the Dutch Republic. Nevertheless, the book was extremely popular. Montesquieu added material to later editions. Persian Letters employed the literary device, very widely used during the Enlightenment, of having a fictional foreigner describe European society. It is an example of a popular genre in the 18th century, the epistolary novel, consisting of a collection of letters. The main characters are two Persians, Usbek and Rica, touring Europe, commenting on and sometimes mocking European society as well as discussing history and institutions. (Montesquieu’s knowledge of Persian culture came mostly from contemporary travelers’ accounts.) Europeans are not the only targets of Montesquieu’s satire, however, as Usbek, perceptive in his denunciations of tyranny in Europe, is shown in his correspondence with his household in Persia as a tyrant over the women and eunuchs of his harem. It is the resistance of Usbek’s wife, Roxana, that provides the novel’s abrupt tragic climax. Targets of Montesquieu’s satire closer to home included the emptiness of much Parisian conversation, religious intolerance, and royal despotism. In 1725, Montesquieu retired from the bench, then moved to Paris the following year. In 1728, he was admitted (with some controversy) to the French Academy, which had previously been a target of his satire. He spent some years traveling through Europe observing different social institutions and in 1731 began to work on his masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws, first published in 1748. It went through more than 20 editions during Montesquieu’s lifetime. (Some of the themes of The Spirit of the Laws first appeared in Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Grandeur of the Romans and the Causes of their Decline [1731].) The Spirit of the Laws is the first great comparative study of social, political, and legal institutions. Montesquieu believed that laws and institutions should be judged not against an abstract standard of perfection but in terms of how they were adapted to different peoples. Seemingly irrational laws may well have a rational function in their society. Given that adaptation of laws to peoples, legal reform should be undertaken very carefully. Strengthening the power of the French monarch against the nobility, for example, as many reformers of the Enlightenment wished to do, would be harmful in that it would remove a check on the monarch’s power. The king’s increased power could lead France away from monarchy, of which Montesquieu approved, toward despotism, which he despised. Despotism differs from monarchy in that the despot has no responsibility to follow the laws. Montesquieu’s three basic types of government are monarchy, despotism, and the republic, in which either the people rule democratically or the aristocratic state is ruled by a few. Except for despotism, which is innately corrupt, each of these governments can appear in good and in corrupt forms. In order to protect individual freedom and guard against corruption, it is necessary that all power not lie in the same place. Montesquieu established the distinction among legislative, executive, and judicial power. He endorsed commerce as preferable to war to enrich a state. Montesquieu’s analysis of how different types of governments are formed and maintained includes consideration of physical factors such as climate. Harsh countries are less tempting to invaders, and the hard work required to cultivate them is linked to virtue and republican government. Montesquieu analyzes religion in The Spirit of the Laws principally in relation to its social utility—different religions are adapted to different societies, as Protestantism is to republics, Catholicism to monarchies, and Islam to despotisms. As did other Enlightenment thinkers, Montesquieu strongly endorsed the principle of religious toleration and admired the Protestant and relatively free societies Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de 253 of the Dutch Republic and Great Britain. The Spirit of the Laws was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Catholic Church in 1751 but had great influence on the Scottish Enlightenment and on the founding fathers of the United States. His theory of the distribution of powers influenced the writing of the U.S. Constitution. Montesquieu also contributed an article on “taste” to the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert. Further reading: Kingston, Rebecca. Montesquieu and the Parlement of Bordeaux. Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1996; Shackleton, Robert. Montesquieu: A Critical Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1961; Shklar, Judith. Montesquieu. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. William E. Burns More, Sir Thomas (1478–1535) judge and chancellor of England Sir Thomas More was a lawyer and judge in Renaissance England who rose to the highest appointed office of chancellor under Henry VIII, king of England. More was born in London on February 7, 1478, son of Sir John More, a prominent judge. More studied at Oxford under Thomas Linacre and William Grocyn. He returned to London around 1494 to complete his studies in law and in 1496 was admitted to the law court of Lincoln’s Inn, located in central London. He became a lawyer in 1501. At one point in his early legal career, More seriously considered becoming a monk. While he worked at Lincoln’s Inn, he lived at a nearby monastery run by the Carthusians, taking part in their monastic life of prayer, fasting, and religious studies. Although More quit the monastery, he continued to live out many of its religious practices throughout his life. More decided to enter a lifetime political career when he joined Parliament in 1504. Shortly after, he married Jane Colt. She bore him four children. She died at a young age in childbirth and More quickly remarried a widow named Alice Middleton to care for his children. When More urged Parliament to decrease its appropriation of funds to King Henry VII, Henry retaliated by imprisoning More’s father until a fine was paid and More had withdrawn from political service. After the king’s death, More became active again. He was appointed undersheriff of London in 1510. He was noted for his impartiality and speed in seeing that cases were heard in a timely fashion. More attracted the attention of King Henry VIII, who appointed him to a number of high posts and missions on behalf of the government. He was made Speaker of the House of Commons in 1523. As Speaker he helped establish the parliamentary privilege of free speech. Henry made him chancellor in 1529. He resigned in 1532, at the height of his career and reputation. Throughout his life, More was recognized as a reformer and scholar. He wrote and published many works in Latin and English and was friends with a number of scholars and bishops. In 1499, the scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam first visited England and formed a lifelong friendship and correspondence with More. On subsequent visits, Erasmus lived in More’s household at Chelsea. They produced a Latin translation of Lucian’s works, which was printed at Paris in 1506. In 1509, Erasmus wrote the Encomium moriae, or Praise of Folly (1509), dedicating it to More. During one of his diplomatic missions to Flanders in 254 More, Sir Thomas Most famous for his imaginary “perfect” society, Utopia, Sir Thomas More was beheaded in 1535 for opposing Henry VIII. 1515, More wrote his Latin classic, Utopia, a witty political satire on the role of government and society. It became an instant bestseller throughout Europe. In the Reformation controversy of his time, More opposed Lutheranism and was a staunch supporter of the papacy and defender of the Roman Catholic Church. He enforced government suppression of the reformed movement in England until Parliament changed the laws at Henry VIII’s instigation. More resigned his office and withdrew from public service when Henry, with Parliament’s approval, made himself supreme head of the Church of England and enforced the Oath of Supremacy and Act of Succession. In 1534, More was imprisoned in the Tower of London on grounds of refusing to take the oath. More defended himself as a loyal subject, but he also declared that he was bound to follow his conscience on matters of principle. Fifteen months later, he was tried and convicted of treason. Henry allowed him a few public words on the scaffold when he was beheaded on July 6, 1535. He declared himself “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” Robert Whittinton, a contemporary of More, wrote of him in 1520, “More is a man of an angel’s wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons.” Further reading: Ackroyd, Peter. The Life of Thomas More. New York: Anchor Books, 1999; Chambers, R. W. Thomas More. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958; Marius, Richard. Thomas More: A Biography. New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 1984; Roper, William. The Life of Sir Thomas More (c. 1555), Harvard Classics, Vol. 36, Part 2. New York: P. F. Collier & Son Company, 1909–1914, New York: Bartleby.com, 2001; Wegemer, Gerard B. Thomas More: A Portrait of Courage. New York: Scepter Publishers, 1995; Wegemer, Gerard B. A Thomas More Sourcebook. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004. Donald K. Schwager Mughal Empire The Mughal Empire in India was founded by Babur, also known as Zahir-ud-din Mohammed, born in 1482 in Ferghana in Central Asia, a descendant of Timurlane. With Central Asia in turmoil in 1501, Babur fled his native Ferghana and gained the great city of Samarkand, but he could not hold it. He next captured Kabul in 1504, with the intention of creating his own kingdom in Afghanistan. However, for Babur, Afghanistan was only the stepping stone to the greatest conquest of all: India. For seven centuries, India had been the ultimate prize for all Muslim conquerors from Central Asia, and Babur shared that dream. In 1505, Babur staged his first raid into northern India, then controlled by Sikander, one of the Lodi dynasty of Muslim sultans in Delhi. The Lodi dynasty had also come to India from Afghanistan. Surprisingly, Sikander took no real action against Babur’s incursion, a fact that was not lost on Babur in the future. The troublesome Afghan tribes delayed Babur’s plans until 1526, when he invaded India in force. He met the Lodi sultan Ibrahim outside Delhi at the Battle of Panipat. Although Babur commanded only 12,000 men and Ibrahim about 100,000 and 1,000 elephants, Babur used his men well, armed with matchlock muskets and cannon, and won the battle. The Lodi forces were defeated and Ibrahim killed. Establishing his capital in Delhi, Babur then conquered most of northern India, establishing the Mughal (Mogul, Moghul) Empire. Babur died in 1530 and his son Humayun succeeded him as the second Mughal emperor. However within 10 years Humayun lost his empire. He fled to Persia, then ruled by the Safavid dynasty. This time of exile instilled in Humayun and his son a profound respect for Persian ways so that when they conquered India again their rule was influenced by Persian culture. Persian would become the official language for Mughal India. In 1555, Humayun raised another army in Persia with the support of Persian shah Tahmasp I and set out to reconquer his kingdom from Sher Shah, who now ruled in northern India. By August 1555, he had reentered Delhi in triumph but died in 1556. His son Akbar, then only 13, took power in 1556. But Akbar won a decisive victory at the Second Battle of Panipat and became the padishah and undisputed ruler of the realm. Having crushed his Afghan and Hindu foes at Panipat, Akbar moved to consolidate his rule of Afghanistan and northern India. Akbar began to implement a program of cooptation with his Hindu subjects to neutralize the threat of a Hindu uprising against his rule. He married a Hindu princess and his son and successor Jahangir was born of this marriage. Hindus were invited to join the bureaucracy that governed his empire and Mughal Empire 255 became an important part of Mughal administration. Akbar wisely allowed the Indian princely states a large degree of autonomy so long as they recognized him as their padishah. Religious Tolerance Akbar did not impose the shariah, or Muslim law, upon his Hindu subjects. Instead, he limited the application of the shariah to the Muslim community within his kingdom and let the Hindus retain their own laws. Exposed to a different religious tradition, including Zoroastrianism and Jainism, Akbar began perhaps the greatest intellectual exploration in Indian history. Studying all the faiths, including the Roman Catholicism that had been brought to Goa by the Portuguese, Akbar created a new religion named Din-i Ilahi, or “the Religion of God.” It was nothing less than an effort to draw together all the religions in his empire into one faith, which he hoped all would accept under his leadership. However this endeavor failed. In 1605, Akbar died, leaving a legacy of stability to his son, Jahangir. Jahangir did not pursue a military policy but did cement his position in Bengal in the east, probably to gain control of the maritime trade. In 1614, the Rajput king, Man Singh, who had fought Akbar to a stalemate at Haldhigati in 1576, made his submission to Jahangir. Toward the end of his reign, Jahangir’s son, who would reign as Shah Jahan, rose in rebellion against his father, a trend that would weaken the Mughal dynasty. When Shah Jahan became emperor in 1628, he attempted to return to the days of military glory of Akbar and engaged in campaigns in the south. In 1658, Jahan’s son Aurangzeb seized power and imprisoned his father, who would live in captivity until his death in 1666. During a reign that would last until 1707, Aurangzeb waged many wars, driving the Mughals to conquer much of the Indian subcontinent. He conquered the rest of the Deccan region, seizing the sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda, which had achieved virtual independence during the reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan. Aurangzeb turned his armies against the martial Hindu called Mavalhas and conquered their lands after an exhuastive campaign. While Aurangzeb was extending the Mughal domains to their greatest territorial extent, he was also fatally changing the unified society that Akbar had tried to create. Aurangzeb was a pious, extremist Muslim and returned to the traditional Muslim doctrine that Muslim shariah law should extend to all subjects of an Islamic realm. He persecuted Hindus. As a result, rebellions started to break out. Aurangzeb’s religious intolerance also made mortal enemies out of the Sikhs, who had peacefully followed the teachings of Guru Nanah from the 16th century. Their ninth guru, Tegh Bahadur, was brought before Aurangzeb on a charge of blasphemy for preaching a non-Muslim faith and put to death. Sikhs under their 10th guru Govind would retreat to the Punjab to form their own martial kingdom to defend themselves against Aurangzeb’s holy war. At the same time, the French and British East India Companies had established trading posts in India. Taking advantage of the growing unrest in the Mughal Empire, they would make their first inroads into the Indian subcontinent. When Aurangzeb died in 1707, another succession crisis would further weaken the great Mughal Empire, already in decline, largely the result of his policy decisions. Toward the end of his life, Aurangzeb wrote, “I am forlorn and destitute, and misery is my ultimate lot.” In a very real sense, he had also penned the obituary for the Mughal Empire. See also French East India Company; Rajputs. Further reading: Grousset, Rene. The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia. Naomi Walford, trans. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970; James, Lawrence. Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997; Keay, John. India: A History. New York: Grove Press, 2000; Magnus, Ralph H., and Eden Naby. Afghanistan: Mullah, Marx, and Mohammed. Oxford, UK: Westview Press, 2002. John Murphy Münster commune The Münster commune is a bizarre chapter in the history of the Reformation. Lasting slightly over a year beginning in 1534, it involved some revolutionary Anabaptists who took over the city of Münster and instituted a new order while defending against besieging troops. In 1533, a Lutheran named Bernard Rothmann, a former Roman Catholic priest, succeeded in bringing Lutheran control to the city of Münster, a good-sized city in northwest Germany. Rothmann, who had only been Lutheran since 1531, became more convinced of the Anabaptist beliefs and in May 1533 formally renounced infant baptism. Later that year, he began preaching in 256 Münster commune favor of primitive Christianity, interpreted to mean sharing of all goods in common and living a simpler, morally upright life. This caused much controversy with those citizens continuing to hold Lutheran beliefs. The success of Rothmann drew other Anabaptists flocking to the city, increasing the tension between the merchants and guildsmen in the town and those emigrating from other places in Germany and the Netherlands. In early 1534, Rothmann and nearly 1,400 others were rebaptized in Münster. Around this same time, there was a heightened expectation by more radical Anabaptists of the end of the world described in the book of Revelation in the Bible. Associated with this were the rise of many so-called apostles and prophets ready to prepare the people for the second coming of Jesus Christ. In February 1534, Jan Matthys (Matthijs) and Jan Bockelson, immigrants from the Netherlands, ran through the streets of Münster crying for all people to repent of their sins. This caused a mass hysteria, ending in an armed revolt against the town council (still predominately Lutheran). The town council did not act aggressively, instead continuing to allow the Anabaptists their freedom. Many Lutheran citizens, concerned that the town would revolt, departed. This event, coupled with the continuing stream of immigrants, resulted in the town’s becoming Anabaptist. On February 27, 1534, armed groups of men, led by Jan Matthys, went through the city, driving out all those not Anabaptist, calling, “Get out, you godless ones and never come back, you enemies of the Father.” By early March, the town was completely Anabaptist, with forcible rebaptizing of all those not already declaring themselves Anabaptist. Matthys, Bockelson, and Rothmann, along with a leading merchant named Knipperdollinck, took over the control of the city. They declared that all possessions were to be held in common, threatening the wrath of God and public execution against those who withheld possessions from the community. After three days of prayer, Matthys appointed seven deacons to administer these goods. All of this activity did not escape the notice of the Roman Catholic prince-bishop of Münster. While he did not live in the city and failed to get the support of those in the town in the early days of the conflict, the problems in Münster concerned the other princes enough to allow him to raise funds for troops to besiege the city. By mid-March 1534, the city was somewhat ineffectively besieged. In early April, Matthys, believing God would give him power over the besiegers, went out with a band of troops, but he and all the troops were killed immediately. Matthys’s death gave opportunity to Jan Bockelson to strengthen control over the town. Though the son of a tailor, Bockelson was an effective organizer and had, if anything, a more radical approach than Matthys. In May 1534, Bockelson ran through the town naked and then sat silent for three days. He then prophesied that God had a new plan and organization for the town, with himself as chief apostle and 12 elders. A morally strict code was at first enforced, but eventually the lack of men in the town (and probably Knipperdollinck’s very attractive daughter) led Bockelson, who was already married, to declare that God had ordained polygamy. Bockelson eventually married 15 wives, and many other men took multiple wives. This caused many problems in a few short months, resulting in an increasingly loose approach to sexual relations. In August 1534, an attack by the bishop’s forces was effectively fought off by the town militia. Bockelson took the opportunity to declare himself the king of Münster, and the short-lived kingdom began. Bockelson appointed many immigrants as his councilors and had a gold-covered throne placed in the market square. He thought of himself as a new King David and dressed in magnificent robes and held court with his equally well dressed counselors. At the same time, a reign of terror began for any of those who opposed the king and his counselors. By January 1535, the blockade of the town was increasingly effective. A time of famine followed, though the king and his court managed to escape it for the most part by requisitioning supplies. In March, the king predicted that the town would be saved by Easter, but when this day passed, he quickly asserted it was a spiritual salvation and continued to proclaim the imminent return of Christ. Finally in June of 1535, aided by some residents, the forces of the prince-bishop invaded the town, killing Rothmann during the battle. The deposed king and Knipperdollinck were put to death by torture after the king was hung in a cage and then led around the town on a chain. While a few smaller Anabaptist uprisings occurred after this, most Anabaptists distanced themselves from these more radical uprisings and somewhat in reaction would disavow any kind of military role for their followers in future generations. Further reading: Arthur, Anthony. The Tailor King: The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999; Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of Münster commune 257 the Millennium. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970; Stayer, James. The German Peasant’s War and the Anabaptist Community of Goods. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1991; Williams, George Hunston. The Radical Reformation. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2000. Bruce D. Franson music One of the most significant nonmusical events to influence the history of music in this period was the development of the printing press, which allowed for the dissemination of music in ways that had previously been impossible. A composer who had never heard another’s work performed could still be influenced by him, even working in a completely different regional tradition. Such radical borrowing was not necessarily common, but regional styles tended to spread more quickly than they had in the past. Polyphony, the use of independent melodic voices, developed from the use of chant in church music. During the Renaissance, it became more sophisticated, encompassing a broader range of tones. Masses and madrigals remained popular forms of church music, and secular music underwent a steady increase in popularity and variety. The brief-lived English madrigal school (1588–1627) produced light, a cappella madrigals based on Italian works. By the 17th century, the transition to the baroque tradition in Europe had begun in secular music. Josquin des Prez (1453–1521) was the principal composer of the Franco-Flemish school, which produced polyphonic vocal music. As for many famous artists, his reputation was great enough that his name was often falsely attached to sheet music in the hopes of selling it. He wrote for every style of music in western Europe at the time, sometimes satirizing other composers’ styles, other times producing multiple compositions to approach a theme or motif from different angles. Though in the present day his name is not as recognizable as Bach’s or Mozart’s, few creators in any media have been as accomplished. Renaissance polyphonic techniques culminated in the work of Giovanni Pierluigi (1525–94), born four years after the death of des Prez. Pierluigi was a master of the Roman school, which incorporated into church music the influences of visiting foreign composers to the Vatican, composing especially for the Sistine Choir. The Council of Trent’s 1563 requirement that vocals be clearly understandable drove the Roman school to compose crisp, clear, well-defined arrangements rather than abandon polyphony, and the result has been a cornerstone of Catholic devotional music ever since. While others experimented with forms, Pierluigi set specific rules for himself and did all that he could within those bounds. Opera was born at the very end of the 16th century. The first was Jacopo Peri’s 1597 Dafne, staged as a revival of Greek theatrical forms. In Dafne, as in the operas to follow, singing and dancing combined with acting, all in highly stylized modes, in order to tell a unified story. Opera had been developed for the Florentine Camerata, a humanist-intellectual group who met to discuss and attempt to guide trends in the arts. It was their call for a return to classical forms that inspired Peri’s Dafne, which as the other operas to come was sung in a style called monody, a style of vocal solos with a single melody. The style had been developed by composers associated with the Camerata and would become integral to the early baroque compositions. Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) was one of the earliest opera composers, whose L’Orfeo (premiering in 1607) was the first of the dramma per musica (dramatic musical) style. Monteverdi’s sense of high drama and grand scale orchestrations prefigured George Frideric Handel’s 1741 Messiah (an Easter oratorio drawing from the Christian readings of the book of Isaiah, along with Gospel selections) and Johann Sebastian Bach’s 1727 Matthauspassion, which adapted the death of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew. The chain of influence shows the way that the Italian invention of opera became popular in its most dramatic forms among German composers, beginning in the 18th century. Venice quickly became known for its opera, offering a season of shows open to the ticket-buying public, and Monteverdi moved to the city to be part of the new scene. These early Italian baroque operas mixed melodramatic tragedy with broad comedy, sometimes to a muddled effect. Over time, although opera remained a form devoted to extremes of emotion, it became more sophisticated and subtle in the expressions thereof. From the start of the 17th century until about 1750, the baroque period dominated European music, which became more ornate and ornamented, differing from Renaissance music in its tonal progressions and stronger rhythms. As would jazz music later, baroque compositions usually left room for improvisation, and solo pieces would usually repeat themselves once, with the intent of letting the performer add his own flourishes and adjustments to the repetition. The characteristic baroque form 258 music was the fugue: a contrapuntal composition in which a central theme is echoed by each of a fixed number of voices. The manner of the form allows for a great deal of sophistication in its composition, a sort of intellectualism that appealed to many of the new composers. This same intellectualism, and the Renaissance rediscovery of the classical world, led to the German Affektenlehre, or “doctrine of affects,” inspired by ancient rhetorical theory: According to the doctrine, a piece of music (or a movement in a longer work) should be characterized by one and only one vivid “affect,” or emotion. This was a considerable difference not only from the music that had come before but also from what would follow. Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725) was a baroque opera composer whose work bridged the gap between the early baroque styles, centered in Italy, and the Germanic styles of the 18th century. He worked primarily in traditional molds but brought a sense of dramatic depth to his work and was the first to incorporate horns into opera orchestration. One of the best known baroque pieces is The Four Seasons, by Antonio Vivaldi (1678– 1741), a Venetian priest; the piece consists of four violin concertos, one for each season, each evocative of the weather and mood of that season. The baroque period reached its apex with Bach (1685–1750), the son of a German musical family, whose work with fugues and canons realized the heights of polyphonic technique. He composed more than a thousand works, introducing nothing wholly new but perfecting that which was already current, as if to use up baroque tropes so that the musical world could move on to something else. In his lifetime, he was best known for his keyboard works (works composed for organ, harpsichord, and clavichord, the precursors to the modern piano). The Goldberg Variations were a set of variations (alterations performed during repetition of a musical sequence) for performance on the harpsichord, in the form of an aria followed by 30 variations on its chord progression and bassline. Almost an intellectual exercise in the limits of variations, it is a testament to Bach’s skill in he was able to make it beautiful as well. Die Kunst der Fugue (The Art of the Fugue) is a similar blend of musical beauty and technical wizardry. Two different versions were published, with 12 or 14 fugues and two or four canons; neither was finished. The work takes simple movements and repeats them with increasingly complex contrapuntal devices, including a series of counterfugues (in which both the theme and its inverse are used), double and triple fugues with multiple themes, and a quadruple fugue in which one of the themes is his own name (B-A-C-H on the musical scale) and the final theme is the same as the first fugue in the work. It was after inserting himself into the work that Bach abandoned it. Modern scholars continue to discover mathematical tricks and subtleties in Die Kunst der Fugue, including algorithms derived from the piece that can be used to demonstrate some of the necessary traits of its final form. The son of Alessandro Scarlatti, born the same year as Bach, was Domenico (1685–1757), whose work straddled the line between the baroque period and the classical. An Italian who spent most of his life on the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal), he incorporated Iberian folk music in his work to a much greater degree than had been seen before, as radical and natural as the combination of country and blues elements in rock and roll would be two centuries later. The energetic, syncopated style of his keyboard sonatas would influence the development of the pianoforte, and he completely abandoned the doctrine of the affects by emphasizing shifts in harmony in order to create sweeping changes in the emotional texture of his work. Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was another pioneer in classical music. While Scarlatti’s work set the tone for much of what was to come, C. P. E. Bach’s is sometimes called “rococo,” to refer to the very late baroque, early classical period (the term is sometimes used to refer more specifically to the French composers of this description). While his father had embodied the best of what the old forms had to offer, C. P. E. Bach preserved the old forms but moved forward with them and updated them. Developments Beyond Europe In Japan, the 1609 acquisition of Okinawa introduced that country’s folk music, relying heavily on the sanshin, a sort of snakeskin three-stringed banjo. During the Edo period, gagaku (elegant music) ensembles were reorganized into the form they derive from today, incorporating Chinese, Korean, Manchurian, and Shintoist forms played on wind instruments, percussion, and stringed instruments introduced from China. Gagaku was influenced by Yayue, the imperial court music of China, which imposed strict forms upon folk music elements. Yayue also influenced Korean court music, which took three forms: the purely Chinese aak, the native Korean hyangak, and the hybrid dangak. On the Indian subcontinent, Carnatic music was ushered in by the composer Purandara Dasa, the son of a pawnbroker, who wrote rhyming songs of various levels of sophistication and composed pieces for novice music 259 musicians in addition to his more complicated work. Carnatic music was generally devotional or concerned with revelations of human nature and was always meant to be sung, much like the sung poetry of earlier times. Much of the formal music of Latin America during this period drew heavily from Spanish and Italian music from Europe. This led to the formation of orchestras in major cities, such as Lima, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires, with the playing of harp music being common in large European households. Some European musicians also traveled to remote parts of South America in search of music of the indigenous people. The pipe music of people in the Andes and elsewhere, as well as music played on bamboo flutes, was occasionally transcribed using European notations and helped influence the pan pipes of Peru and the harp music of Paraguay. It was not long afterward that many indigenous people started using bass drums, a much longer flute, and the tambourine. The slave communities of Latin America maintained many African musical traditions. Occasionally the African rhythm was adopted by the Spanish, with the tango in Argentina essentially being a fusion of European and African forms of music and drawing from African forms of dance. The rumba and the salsa in Latin America also drew heavily from African musical traditions. In Africa, where most languages are tonal, there was a close relationship between language and music, with instrumental music usually being accompanied by singing or humming. There were also a wide range of instruments used in African music such as the balafons, similar to a xylophone, and various types of flutes and drums. Further reading: Atlas, Allan W. Renaissance Music. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998; Brown, Howard M. Music in the Renaissance. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. 1976; Butt, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Reese, Gustav. Music in the Renaissance. New York: W. W. Norton, 1954; Schulenberg, David. Music of the Baroque. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Bill Kte’pi

Age of Revolution and Empire 1750 to 1900

Macartney mission to China China’s foreign relations with other peoples and states was shaped by centuries of tradition. Called the tribute system, the tributary or vassal state sent tribute to the Chinese court, and its representative performed the kowtow, or prostration before the emperor, according to Chinese ritual, which assumed cultural and material superiority to other nations. In return he was bestowed with the seal of recognition and gifts. The system implied acceptance of Chinese superiority, regulated and maintained diplomatic relations, and sanctioned trade. It was initially land oriented, but, with the expansion of Chinese naval power under the Ming dynasty, also included many states of Southeast Asia. When the Portuguese came to China by sea in the 16th century, they, too, were enrolled in the tributary system. The Qing (Ch’ing) dynasty inherited the tributary system from its predecessor, the Ming, and expanded it to include other European nations that had begun to trade with China. It opened the major port of Canton to ships of all Western nations and in 1720 organized and regulated the important merchant fi rms of Canton into a guild called the co-hong and gave them the monopoly in trading with the Western nations. Periodically, Portuguese and Dutch representatives had gone to the Chinese capital Beijing (Peking) and performed the prescribed rituals for tributary states. By the late 18th century Great Britain had become China’s largest trading partner, underscored by the fact that of 86 foreign ships that came to Canton in 1789, 61 were British. Dissatisfi ed with China’s restrictive and humiliating conditions for trade, Britain sent an experienced diplomat, George, Lord Macartney, as ambassador to China in 1792 to negotiate new terms and establish diplomatic relations. Because his arrival in Beijing coincided with Chinese emperor Qianlong’s (Ch’ien-lung) 80th birthday when many tributary ambassadors were congregated in the capital to offer congratulations, the Chinese government assumed that Macartney was doing the same for Great Britain. Macartney and his staff were entertained with great pomp, and he was exempted from performing the kowtow when he presented his credentials. However, China rejected all Britain’s requests—for more ports and other facilities to expand trade, and new tariff and transit schedules. Macartney was sent home with a condescending letter addressed to his sovereign, King George III, that commended him for his respectful behavior. It stated that permanent diplomatic representatives in China were out of the question and reminded him that China did not need British goods and had granted trade with Britain as a favor. Although the mission was a total failure, Macartney’s report saw through the facade of Chinese power and predicted its impending collapse when Qianlong’s experienced guidance was gone. British involvement with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars would postpone the formal establishment of relations between the two countries until the 1830s. Due mainly to China’s disinterest in the outside world, it lost an opportunity to establish normal diplomatic relations with Great Britain. See also Canton system. M Further reading: Hevia, James L. Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995; Robind, Helen H. Our First Ambassador to China: an Account of the Life of George, Earl of Macartney. London: J. Murray, 1908. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur Macdonald, John Alexander (1815–1891) Canadian prime minister John A. Macdonald, the Scots-born Ontario lawyer who became the Canadian Confederation’s fi rst (and third) prime minister, was in many ways modern Canada’s founding father. He helped draft the British North America Act that established the Confederation in 1867 (for which he was knighted by Queen Victoria) and forged a close and fruitful political relationship with George-Étienne Cartier, leader of Québec’s French-Canadians. Macdonald began his long political career in 1843 as an alderman in Kingston, his home town. As a founder of Canada’s Conservative Party, heir to the outdated Tories, Macdonald had the inspired idea to call himself and his supporters Liberal-Conservatives in what would be, for a time, a successful attempt to corner the Canadian political landscape. Macdonald’s party would lead Canada for all but four years between 1867 and 1896. Quick-witted, humorous, and hardworking, despite an occasional drinking problem, Macdonald fi rst came to public attention by taking on high-profi le criminal cases before fi nding a somewhat more lucrative niche in banking and real estate law. In 1854 he was named Upper Canada’s attorney general. During the 1860s Macdonald took on the duties of the newly created post of minister of militia affairs, and served in that capacity during Fenian raids on Ontario. Although historians argue about how much credit Macdonald deserves for working out the details of confederation, his selection as Canada’s fi rst prime minister was widely acclaimed. Macdonald believed that Canada’s new federal government should eventually dominate individual provinces, but realized the limits of his power to make that happen. He worked hard to gain many provinces’s reluctant assent to the new dominion and deftly used political patronage to cement new relationships among Canada’s diverse regions. Politically tougher was the 1871 Treaty of Washington, involving Britain, the United States, and Canada. Macdonald managed his country’s negotiations, visiting the United States for the fi rst time in 20 years. Important issues of Canadian fi shing rights, Fenian attack reparations, and trade reciprocity hung in the balance. (Canada and its leader were treated by the other powers as somewhat of a third wheel.) Criticism directed at Macdonald’s treaty-making was mild compared to the events that ended his fi rst prime ministry. At issue was Canada’s long-anticipated transcontinental railroad. Huge sums were at stake; competing groups of American and Canadian businessmen vied for the most favorable terms. Macdonald’s close Québec ally Cartier spearheaded demands for unusually large political contributions in return for favorable government action, but Macdonald’s hands were not entirely clean. His government was forced to resign in November 1873. By 1878 he and his party had regained power. His second period of leadership saw the successful completion, at last, of the Canadian Pacifi c Railway by a syndicate of Canadian, American, and European investors. Less happily, in the same year of 1885, the aging prime minister faced the ordeal of Louis Riel’s Northwest Rebellion resulting in the French-Indian Humorous and hardworking, John Alexander Macdonald came to public attention by taking on high-profi le criminal cases. 252 Macdonald, John Alexander rebel’s execution. Since Cartier’s death in 1873, Macdonald could no longer depend on a strong French voice to maintain harmony between French and English Canadians. Shortly after a diffi cult 1891 reelection, Macdonald suffered a stroke and died a week later. Thousands attended his state funeral in Ottawa. His body was taken by train to Kingston where Canada’s fi rst national leader was buried in a family plot in Cataraqui Cemetery. See also political parties in Canada; railroads in North America. Further Reading: Creighton, Donald G. John A. Macdonald. Toronto: Macmillan, 1953; Smith, Cynthia M., and Jack McLeod, ed. Sir John A.: An Anecdotal Life of John A. Macdonald. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989. Marsha E. Ackermann Madison, James (1751–1836) statesman and American president James Madison was born in Port Conway, Virginia, to James Madison, Sr., and Eleanor Rose Conway. They owned a prosperous tobacco plantation, run by slaves, at the Montpelier estates in Orange County. The eldest of 12 siblings, Madison was sickly as a child, but excelled in school and entered the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1769 and graduated in 1771. Madison returned to Virginia where he engaged in local politics. He was too frail for military service himself during the American Revolution, but in 1774 was appointed to the Orange County, Virginia, Committee of Safety—a local wartime provisional government— and was heavily engaged in fundraising for the county militia. In 1776 he was elected to the Virginia Convention and worked on the state constitution. In the same year Madison entered the Virginia House of Delegates, where he met Thomas Jefferson. From 1777 to 1780 he was a member of the Governor’s Council before being elected to the Continental Congress in 1779. There he became a spokesman for stronger central government. Under the Articles of Confederation each state remained sovereign, while the weak central government could not even raise enough revenue to pay the expenses generated by the American Revolution. Another major defi ciency of the Articles of Confederation, in Madison’s eyes, was that it tied states, not individual citizens, to the federal government. Further, any amendment was impossible, since it required the unanimous consent of the states. In 1783 three years after the British surrender, the Treaty of Paris was signed and Madison left the Continental Congress. Back in Virginia, he studied law and entered into real estate and served in the Virginia House of Delegates again, from 1784 to 1786, where he drafted Virginia’s declaration on religious freedom. In 1786 Madison was Virginia’s delegate to the Annapolis Convention on interstate trade, where he decided to work for a revision of the U.S. Constitution and a stronger federal government, expressed in his Virginia Plan. Again a member of the Continental Congress from 1787 to 1788, he joined forces with Alexander Hamilton and Jon Jay. Together they wrote the Federalist Papers, published in newspapers James Madison was elected the fourth president of the United States in 1808, beating Federalist candidate Charles Pinckney. Madison, James 253 and booklets, to prepare the citizens of New York for the Convention and proposals for a stronger federal government. Madison’s contributions are an important source of political philosophy. When the Constitutional Convention was convened in Philadelphia, Madison’s Virginia Plan became the cornerstone of the ensuing work. This and his contribution during the Convention earned him the title of father of the U.S. Constitution. Checks and balances, modeled on the theories of the French philosopher Charles Montesquieu, between the legislature, the courts, and the executive, were put in place to safeguard against abuse of power. Still the Constitution did cause alarm during the process of ratification. As a member of the House of Representatives, Madison sponsored the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments that protect basic individual rights against violations from the federal government. The Federalists desired an ever-stronger central government. Madison denied any aristocratic preference once the act of founding was complete. He also had a more fundamentalist view of the role assigned to the Constitution. Together with Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe he formed the Republican Party (later known as the Democratic-Republican Party) in 1791. Madison married Dolley Payne Todd, a widow from Philadelphia, in 1794. In 1797 Madison left Congress. In the Virginia Resolutions, he condemned the centralist policies of the Federalists, especially the Alien and Sedition Acts. Their drive toward stronger central government produced a resentment that led to the election of Thomas Jefferson as president in 1800 and the downfall of the Federalists. After serving in the Virginia legislature between 1799 and 1800, Madison became Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of state, a post he held until 1809. As secretary of state he negotiated the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803. Madison was elected the fourth president of the United States in 1808, beating Federalist candidate Charles Pinckney 122 to 47 electoral votes. George Clinton, one of his sworn opponents, became vice president. The tension between Britain and the United States mounted and, after much pressure from both Federalists and Republicans alike, Madison declared war on Great Britain on June 18, 1812. Britain offered negotiations that were unsatisfactory and Madison refused to end hostilities. The United States also experienced trade disputes with France and territorial quarrels with Spain along the gulf coast. Despite American surrender of the Michigan and Detroit territory to the British, Madison was reelected for his second term in 1812, with Elbridge Gerry as vice president. In 1813 U.S. forces fared a little better, capturing York (modern-day Toronto). A British invasion was not regarded as very likely and it was a great shock when British troops landed and captured Washington in 1814, burning the Capitol and the White House. Peace negotiations concluded with the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814. The Rush-Bagot Agreement on demilitarization of the U.S.-Canadian border, negotiated by Madison but ratified after he left office, substantiated this fragile peace. Madison had let the mandate of the First Bank of the United States expire in 1811. The unsuccessful war with Britain led Madison to propose the charter of the Second Bank of the United States in 1815, calling for the establishment of a standing army and navy, a protective tariff, and direct internal taxation. Federal funds for the Cumberland Road, linking Maryland with the Ohio Valley, and other road and canal works were also proposed. All went through Congress virtually unopposed since these issues had long been on the agenda of the Federalists. James Monroe became president in 1817, and Madison retired to Montpelier to run the family plantation. Madison retained his slaves but also cofounded the American Colonization Society, of which he became president in 1833 sponsoring the repatriation of free blacks to Africa. He was also elected president of the Agricultural Society of Albemarle, but only his savings and selling off land kept his own plantation afloat through times of bad harvests and low prices. Together with Jefferson and other prominent Virginians, Madison sponsored the establishment of the University of Virginia, which opened in 1825. He also held the post of rector from 1826 to 1834. In 1829 Madison performed his last public service as a member of the Virginia constitutional convention. In 1834, he wrote “Advice to My Country” and planned to publish his memories of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, but died before he finished. See also Napoleon I; War of 1812. Further reading: Madison, James. James Madison: Writings 1772–1836. New York: Library of America, 1999; Rosen, Gary. American Compact, James Madison and the Problem of Founding. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1999. Frode Lindgjerdet 254 Madison, James Malay states, Treaty of Federation and the (1895) The fi rst British base in Southeast Asia was Bencoolen (now Bengkulu) in Sumatra in 1685, and this was followed by Penang Island, off the west coast of the Malay Peninsula in 1786 (this grew to include part of the nearby coastline in 1800). Both were established by the English East India Company. During the Napoleonic Wars, Britain also conquered the Netherlands East Indies, but it was returned to the Dutch in 1815 at the end of the war. In 1819, the British also purchased Singapore at the southern tip of Malaya. This gave the British the ports of Penang, Malacca, and Singapore, through which went much of the commerce from the Malay Peninsula. Exports of pepper and gambier (used in the treatment of leather), rice, coconuts, and spices ensured the prosperity of the region. The Malay Peninsula consisted of a number of sultanates, most of which entered into treaties with the British authorities. Initially, the northern ones had been subjects of the King of Siam (Thailand), but the larger southern states of Johore, Pahang, Perak, and Selangor, as well as many minor states such as Jelebu and Sungei Ujong all signed treaties with the British. In the late 19th century tin was found in Malaya, especially in Perak. In addition, the successful introduction of the rubber plantation made it extremely wealthy. The growth in the economy led to a massive infl ux of Chinese, which later created political problems for the indigenous Malay rulers. The British Colonial Offi ce gradually moved the whole of Malaya under British rule. Britain proposed the creation of the Federated Malay States (F.M.S.), with its capital at Kuala Lumpur (in Selangor), to consist of Pahang, Perak, Selangor, and nine small states. Johore retained seperate privileges and did not join the F.M.S. The northern states of Kedah, Kelantan, Perlis, and Trengganu did not join and were called the Unfederated Malay States. Many British civil servants who had worked in the Malay States favored a federation to standardize the rules between the states and to allow greater effi ciency in administration and in business. In July 1895 the Federation Treaty was signed by the sultans of Pahang, Perak, Selangor, and Negri Sembilan, and the Federation of the Malay States of Perak, Selangor, Negri Sembilan and Pahang formally came into existence. The Federation Treaty consisted of six articles. The fi rst confi rmed all previous treaties between the British and the Malay sultans who had “severally placed themselves and their States under the protection of the British Government.” In other articles, the states agreed that they were entering into a federation “to be known as the Protected Malay States to be administered under the advice of the British Government,” and restricted the authority of each ruler to his own state and to acceptance of British authority. The rulers also accepted the advice of the residents-general on all matters of administration except those relating to Islam. Another article mandated economic and military cooperation between the states. This new agreement established the position of resident- general, who was responsible to the governor of the Straits Settlements (Malacca, Singapore, and Penang), based in Singapore. The Federation Treaty also allowed for the establishment of the Malayan civil service, with members serving throughout the Malay Peninsula (including the Unfederated Malay States and the Straits Settlements). It also helped with the coordination of communications through unifi ed railway and postal services. NATURAL EXTENSION For most of its existence the F.M.S. was extremely successful. The fi rst resident-general was Frank Swettenham. A conference of rulers was held in 1897, and it was agreed that future conferences would take place on a regular basis. Swettenham remained in offi ce until 1901. During World War I, the F.M.S. took an active part in the war effort with hundreds of Britons from Malaya enlisting, along with some Malays who served in Aden. Rubber and tin production also helped the British war effort. In post–World War I decades, prosperity came from rubber, tin, palm oil, coconuts, and fruit exports. Many towns built civic amenities like swimming pools, dance halls, cinemas, private schools, and clubs. With the depression starting in 1929, the price of rubber fell as demand crashed. A number of plantation businesses collapsed and managers lost their jobs. The F.M.S. continued until the Japanese invasion of December 1941. The British, unable to hold back the Japanese, were forced to withdraw to Singapore where they surrendered on February 15, 1942. In response to a Thai request, the Unfederated Malay States became part of Thailand, with the other states and the Straits Settlements run by the Japanese for the duration of World War II. During the Japanese occupation, the British government drew up the Malayan Union plan which would formally end the F.M.S. once the Japanese were defeated. It envisaged the uniting of the Malay states, Treaty of Federation and the (1895) 255 F.M.S., the Unfederated Malay States, Johore, and the Straits Settlements into one political entity. When the British returned in December 1945, they put extreme pressure on the Malay Sultans to sign the Malayan Union Treaty, which formally ended the F.M.S. in 1946. In 1957 the Federation of Malaya gained full self-government from Britain, but remained a member of the Commonwealth. See also British East India Company. Further reading: Barr, Pat. Taming the Jungle: The Men Who Made British Malaya. London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1978; Bastin, John, and Robin W. Winks, eds. Malaysia: Selected Historical Readings. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1966; Hon-Chan, Chai. The Development of British Malaya 1896–1909. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1964; Kennedy, J. A History of Malaya. London: Macmillan, 1970; Ryan, N. J. The Making of Modern Malaya. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1965. Justin Corfi eld Manifest Destiny Manifest Destiny was a popular slogan in the United States in the 1840s. It was designed to signify that the fl edging American republic was fated to become a nation of continental magnitude. It was heavily infl uenced by the exuberant nationalism and the religious fervor of the decade and provided a rationale for the annexation of Texas, the acquisition of California, and the American claim to the Oregon country. The slogan was in vogue in Democratic Party circles throughout the country but was especially popular in the Mid-Atlantic States and in the states of the Old Northwest. Presidents Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan were infl uenced by its messianic message. The term Manifest Destiny was promoted by the United States Magazine and Democratic Review and by the New York Morning News, both edited by John L. O’ Sullivan, a Democrat, ardent expansionist, and fervent believer in American democracy. The slogan fi rst appeared in print in the summer of 1845 in an unsigned editorial in the Democratic Review that justifi ed the American annexation of Texas. The editorial dismissed the suspected interference of England and France in the negotiations between the Republic of Texas and the United States as attempts to frustrate “the fulfi llment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” The editorial prophesied that Mexican California would become a part of the United States and noted “the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it . . .” An editorial in the Morning News of December 1845 repeated the phrase in its discussion of the dispute between England and the United States concerning the disposition of the Oregon Country. It dismissed England’s title to Oregon by right of discovery and exploration, and justifi ed the claim of the United States to all of Oregon “by right of our manifest destiny. . . .” The sentiments expressed by these periodicals were echoed in the halls of Congress, by political and literary voices, and by newspapers across the country. While the Whig Party did not reject the continentalism the term suggested, it was never as zealous for expansion as was the Democratic Party. Indeed, some Whigs ridiculed Manifest Destiny and its accompanying Anglo-Saxonism. Manifest Destiny was never a coherent set of beliefs, but an umbrella phrase that included a number of disparate ideas, ranging from idealism to self-serving nationalism, incorporating themes that had been present since the colonial era, tailored to meet the conditions of the 1840s. Advocates of Manifest Destiny asserted that Americans were a chosen people whose political and religious institutions were sanctioned by God. Some adopted the pseudoscientifi c racism of the era to promote the belief that the American people were a superior branch of the Anglo-Saxon race. Enthusiasts proclaimed that Americans had been singled out by Providence to spread across the continent, carrying their democratic institutions and their Christian religion with them, not merely for themselves, but to regenerate the less fortunate occupants of the continent, mainly Mexicans and Indians. White southerners adopted Manifest Destiny as a slogan to justify the acquisition of territory for the spread of slavery. Other Americans endorsed the idea because they feared the presence of European powers on the continent would inhibit the growth of democracy and threaten American security. Some believed that extending America’s boundaries to the Pacifi c would enhance commerce with Asia. When Manifest Destiny was fi rst conceived, its advocates did not envision armed intervention as a means for expanding America’s boundaries and its democratic and religious institutions. However, during the course of the Mexican-American War, a shift occurred. Force was accepted, and Manifest Destiny was used as a rationale in the unsuccessful movement to annex all of Mexico. By the l850s, the views of some advocates turned from 256 Manifest Destiny justifi cations of continentalism to militant advocacy of intervention beyond the borders of North America to the Caribbean and Central America. Under the guise of Manifest Destiny, American fi libusters supported or engaged in revolutionary movements in Nicaragua and Cuba. “Young America,” a political and literary group affi liated with the Democratic Party, advocated armed intervention in the Caribbean and urged American support of revolutionary uprisings in Giuseppe Mazzini’s Italy and in the Hungary of Louis Kossuth. Beginning in 1885 a new Manifest Destiny arose, popularized by John Fiske, the historian-philosopher and Darwinian evolutionist. Fiske extolled the virtues of the Anglo-Saxon race and looked forward to the time when its institutions would be diffused around the world. Congregational clergyman Josiah Strong embraced Manifest Destiny in the same year when he linked “a pure Christianity,” “civil liberty,” Anglo-Saxonism, and Darwinism, and declared that the Anglo-Saxon was “divinely commissioned to be . . . his brother’s keeper.” He predicted a “competition of races” in which Anglo-Saxons would prevail. In the 1890s, the Republican Party endorsed Manifest Destiny and identifi ed itself with intervention and insular imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacifi c. President William McKinley endorsed the idealism expressed by Manifest Destiny when he justifi ed his decision to retain the Philippine Islands at the end of the Spanish- American War. Other Republicans spoke of America’s mission to regenerate and extend the blessings of civilization to less fortunate peoples around the world. Although the phrase Manifest Destiny fell into disuse in the 20th century, the sentiments expressed by the slogan have continued. Its idealism can be found in modern American foreign policy statements that link U.S. operations overseas with an American mission to spread liberty, freedom, and democracy. See also Darwin, Charles; Lewis and Clark Expedition; political parties in the United States. Further reading: Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: the Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981; McDougall, Walter A. Promised Land, Crusader State: the American Encounter with the World Since 1776. New York: Houghton Miffl in, 1997; Sampson, Robert D. John L. O’ Sullivan and His Times. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2003. Louis B. Gimelli Maori wars The Maori wars, also known as the New Zealand Land Wars, stretched from 1843 to 1872. These continued periods of confl ict occurred because of the British colonization of New Zealand, a process that began in the late 18th century. In 1840 the British offi cially annexed New Zealand as a colony with the signing of the Waitangi Treaty, which formally allowed the British to colonize certain parts of the archipelago and provided for the Maori to retain many of their territorial homelands. But the Waitangi Treaty held the British government to contradictory positions of protecting the Maori people while at the same time allowing European immigrants to colonize parts of the islands. Since there was only so much land available within the archipelago, land and cultural clashes inevitably occurred between British settlers and the native Maori. After the Waitangi Treaty, there was a continued infl ux of British settlers, driven by the New Zealand Company, which promoted emigration from the British Isles to New Zealand. As the British settlers increasingly sought land, they began to try to purchase land from the Maori. This was a problem for the Maori, however, because there was not a concept of individual property ownership within their society. Property was held not by the individual, as in the British tradition, but by the group as a whole. Also, the Maori who signed the Waitangi Treaty provided for the use, not necessarily the sale, of land. Because the Maori did not individually own property there were a number of battles fought between different Maori groups when a small leader sold land to settlers. The Wairau Affray, otherwise known to the settlers as the Wairau Massacre, was the fi rst bloody confl ict in New Zealand. A neighboring Maori group killed 22 settlers from Nelson, a city created by the New Zealand Company, when the colonizers tried to use a dubious treaty to expand into the neighboring Wairau Valley. This was soon followed by the Flagstaff War or Heke’s Rebellion, a war in Northern New Zealand where Hene Heke and other Maori leaders battled against the British, who were aligned with Tamati Waka Nene’s Maori group. Eventually the British and the “loyalist” Maori broke the pa, an earthen fort, defense of the Maori in late 1846, but only after a long siege campaign employed by the new governor of New Zealand, Sir George Grey. Grey gave clemency to Heke and the losing Maori groups, thus ending the Flagstaff War. After a peaceful decade in the 1850s, the tension between the Maori and the settlers began to climax Maori wars 257 into battle again. By the late 1850s the British settler population was nearly equal in number to the Maori population. The growing British population, as well as memories of the attempted Wairau expansion by the colonizers, helped to propel the King Movement, a Maori movement that promoted political unity of the Maori and placed a special emphasis on the communal ownership of land. In the Tarankai Province on the North Island, Te Atiawa tried to sell community Maori land directly to the British without gaining permission from group’s leader, Wiermu Kingi. Thomas Browne, the governor of New Zealand, decided to send troops onto the disputed land until the Maori and the settlers could litigate the land issue. Atiawa defended his land against the New Zealand militia; this proved to be the starting point of the First Tarankai War. After a year’s worth of fi ghting with no clear victor, the colonial New Zealand government and the Maori agreed to end the fi ghting in March 1861. But this truce did not end the fighting between the Maori and the settlers. British settlers in New Zealand became angry with the King Movement, which prevented the sale of land on North Island. Governor George Grey argued that the colonial New Zealanders required the intervention of British troops from overseas on the premise that the Maori near Auckland and other Northern Island cities were a military threat. In 1863 the Waikato War began with the invasion of Waikato. George Grey formally expelled the Maori off much of the land south of Auckland and sent General Duncan Cameron to fight against the Maori. The campaign, like the others before, involved fi ghting between the British troops and the Maori in their defensive pa. As the campaign continued against the Maori, the popular British press and the British Colonial Offi ce, the governmental agency that handled colonial affairs, began to turn decidedly against the 258 Maori wars Six Maori men, posing in traditional clothing, doing the haka dance (war dance). The Maori fought several wars against British colonists, most over issues of land ownership and the loss of traditional Maori lands to the British settlers. offensive. While the invasion began under the pretense of protection of Auckland and other colonial settlements, it was soon portrayed as a greedy attempt to expand the boundaries of colonial New Zealand at the expense of the native Maori. The colonial government successfully achieved their mission: they annexed and controlled large parts of the Northern Island. Though the Waikato War was the major war of the Maori wars, there were three major confl icts in the following years in addition to a major legal blow to the Maori. The Tarankai War in the mid-1860s grew out of the Hau Hau Movement, a religious movement that became increasingly antisettler, as well as the disgust of losing many of their traditional lands. During this time the Maori also lost the advantage of group ownership of land with the passing of the Native Lands Acts in 1862 and 1865, which led to the creation of the Maori Land Court that made land ownership individual instead of community. Titokowaru’s War and Te Kooti’s War were the fi nal wars between the colonial government and the British. At the end of the wars, the Maori were resigned to live under British law in smaller areas than they had previously lived in, especially in North Island. See also Australia: exploration and settlement; Australia: self-government to federation. Further reading: Belich, James. The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Confl ict. Auckland: Penguin Books, 1986; ———. The New Zealand Wars. Auckland: Penguin Press, 1988; Sinclair, Keith. The Origins of the Maori Wars. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1957. Brett Bennett Maria Theresa (1717–1780) empress of Austria The ruler of the Austrian Habsburg dominions, Maria Theresa was the only female ruler (1740–80) of the Habsburg dynasty in its 650- year history. She inherited the Austrian throne when her father, Charles VI, died in 1740 without male heirs to succeed him. A capable monarch, she was admired by friend and foe alike. Even her arch enemy Frederick the Great of Prus sia called her “a credit to her throne and her sex.” Maria Theresa’s reign was marred by three confl icts, the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48), which began almost immediately upon her ascent to the throne; the Seven Years’ War (1756–64); and the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–79). Her experience in prosecuting these wars prompted her to undertake a sweeping modernization of her armies. On the domestic scene, Maria restructured the tax system, started a universal school system that was separate from the church, and provided some relief to the beleaguered peasant class. A devout Catholic, she suppressed the Jesuits and was intolerant in her policies toward Jews. Maria Theresa was the mother of 16 children, the most famous of whom were Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor from 1765 to 1790, and Marie- Antoinette, the queen of France who fell victim with her husband, Louis XVI, to the French Revolution. Maria Theresa died in Vienna on November 29, 1780. Further reading: Dickens, A. G., ed. The Courts of Eu rope: Politics, Patronage, and Royalty 1400–1800. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1977; Macartney, C. A. The Habsburg Empire, 1790–1918. New York: Macmillan, 1969. market revolution in the United States Market revolution is a term many American historians use to describe the intensive growth in trade between the end of the War of 1812 and the beginning of the American Civil War. While no defi nitive or complete data are available for the whole range of the economy— exports alone increased sixfold between 1820 and 1860—the number of American households involved in the market economy clearly rose dramatically in those years, and their dependence upon the marketplace for a wider range of goods also increased. The market revolution has been characterized as a shift from an economy in which most Americans organized their economic activity around their household (household economy) to one in which they organized their economic activity around markets. In the household economy the primary purpose of work is to produce goods to be consumed by the household itself. Two goals, one immediate and one long-term, characterize the household economy. The fi rst is to achieve a basic level of comfort for the household, a level generally considerably above mere subsistence. The second goal is to accumulate suffi cient property to establish the children in their own household economies. Surpluses are traded locally for other necessities and on national and international marketplaces for those small luxuries market revolution in the United States 259 that provided basic comfort and for the cash necessary to accumulate property. Such an economy is focused mainly on farmers, who made up the vast majority of independent householders in the early American republic, but historians generally lump most artisan households into the category of the household economy as well, because they were primarily involved in localized economies: Few artisans sold their wares beyond their local community. GOODS FOR SALE In the market economy, the primary aim of work is to produce goods for sale, generally on national and international markets, and to use the proceeds of those sales to purchase necessities and luxuries. Market economies are generally characterized by specialization and large-scale production, and prices vary little from community to community; there are no localized economies. The market economy existed alongside the household economy from the beginning of European settlement in North America. Indeed, the household economy requires an active market economy to meet its two goals of basic comfort and property for the children. From the early Virginia tobacco plantations forward, a small percentage of American colonists had looked to the international market to secure their economic well-being, but most Americans placed their trust in their own production and that of their neighbors. By the mid-18th century, Great Britain’s Industrial Revolution had begun to entice Americans with a new array of affordable luxuries. The boycotts of the 1760s and 1770s, the subsequent embargoes of war, followed by the celebration of American simplicity, all worked to limit American purchases of British manufactured goods. With the end of the War of 1812, however, two key developments—the transportation revolution and the cotton boom—would play a signifi cant role in easing many Americans toward greater involvement in the market economy. The term transportation revolution is used to describe dramatic innovations in transportation methods and increased public and private investment in transportation systems in this same period. Steamboats, canals, and eventually railroads would signifi cantly reduce the costs of transportation, thus encouraging trade. For the household economy, a raft on a river was enough: moving surpluses into the marketplace was primarily a one-way venture, with money and small luxuries the only items needing to make the return trip. But the steamboat and subsequent innovations permitted a vast array of necessities and luxuries to be brought into the interior of the nation. Most notable among these goods were cotton textiles. The cotton boom that occurred in the wake of the development of the cotton gin also played a key role in the market revolution. The spread of shortstaple cotton production throughout the South drew some southerners directly into market production, and cotton itself became the economy’s most important commodity, creating market economy jobs in shipping, fi nance, and manufacturing. Moreover, cheap and durable cotton textiles, both imported and domestic, had vast appeal in the marketplace, drawing large numbers of Americans, especially in the North, more clearly into dependence on distant markets for necessities. COTTON TEXTILES The production of cotton textiles was the fi rst major element in the Industrial Revolution in the United States. High labor costs forced American manufacturers to depend on machinery, leading to a fi rst-rate machine tool industry, which by late in the market revolution was able to supply Americans with an increasing array of luxuries, now priced as consumer goods. Americans’ notions of what basic comfort entailed grew to include a larger and larger basket of consumer goods. Farmers in the northeast began to concentrate on producing perishable farm items for growing urban centers to provide cash to buy both necessities and luxuries, while midwestern farmers depended on the fertility of their soil to provide dependable surpluses whose sale would provide luxuries. Many farm women in the north would seek income, often through butter and eggs, so they could purchase cotton cloth rather than manufacture textiles themselves. All were brought into the market economy, together with growing numbers of men employed in the emerging white-collar jobs of the market economy and with the men and women, often immigrants, who worked in the new manufacturing concerns. Rural southerners were less likely to make the transition, though clearly most slaveholders were by defi nition involved in the market economy. While the full transition to a market economy would not be complete until the household economy was dealt twin blows by the Great Depression and the New Deal, the period of the most dramatic change occurred between 1815 and 1860. See also American Revolution (1775–83); railroads in North America. 260 market revolution in the United States Further reading: Clark, Christopher. The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990; Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Richard F. Nation Marshall, John (1755–1835) U.S. Supreme Court justice John Marshall, one of the most infl uential members of the Supreme Court in its earliest years, was born in Germantown, Virginia, in 1755 to Thomas and Mary Isham Keith Marshall. At 18 Marshall began studying law, but temporarily abandoned it when his state joined the rebellion against Great Britain. After enlisting he saw action in numerous battles, but returned to the study of law when his term of enlistment ended in 1780, and he entered private practice the next year. Marshall’s political career was fi lled with nominations and resignations, as he repeatedly tried to reject appointments or resign to return to his legal practice. He was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1782, but resigned in 1784. In 1788, he was part of the Virginia convention that was debating ratifi cation of the U.S. Constitution, where he argued strenuously for acceptance on the basis that the states needed a stronger national government to survive. After the convention, he returned to his legal practice. In 1795 President George Washington tried to convince Marshall to become attorney general and the next year ambassador to France, but Marshall declined both times. President John Adams was able to convince Marshall to serve as one of the ambassadors to France in 1797 where he became embroiled in what was later called the XYZ affair. However, Adams was unable to secure Marshall’s agreement to accept the position of associate justice on the Supreme Court in 1798. Patrick Henry convinced Marshall to run for a federal offi ce, and he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1799. The next year President Adams wanted to nominate Marshall as secretary of war, but Marshall had little interest; when Adams later asked him to serve as secretary of state, however, Marshall accepted. When Adams lost his bid for reelection to the presidency in 1800, he sought ways to ensure that a strong Federalist presence would remain, especially in the judiciary. With this in mind, he nominated Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court on January 20, 1801. Marshall continued serving as secretary of state and oversaw other of Adams’s midnight appointments that so enraged Jefferson and his Republicans. It was these appointments that brought the fi rst major case before Marshall during his tenure on the Supreme Court. In 1803 Marbury v. Madison gave Marshall his fi rst opportunity to fl ex his judicial muscles. The case centered on the appointment of certain judges and other positions by President Adams, approved by Congress, signed and sealed by the president, but left undelivered. The confl ict became whether or not the appointments were offi cial. Marbury claimed that since his appointment as justice of the peace in the District of Columbia had been made, it was a valid appointment whether or not it had been delivered to him offi cially. Incoming president Thomas Jefferson, however, believed that since such appointments only became offi cial upon delivery, those that had remained undelivered were void. Thus, attempting to block as many of these lastminute appointments as he could, he instructed new secretary of state James Madison to leave the appointments undelivered. It was in this case that Marshall fi rst elaborated the idea of judicial review. In the Court’s decision, Marshall argued that Marbury was legally deserving of his appointment but the remedy was based on the Judiciary Act of 1789, which the Court had declared unconstitutional. Technically Marbury won the case, but the Court had no constitutional power yet to enforce this decision by coercing Madison to comply. While the idea of judicial review would be used sparingly in the 19th century, it would become crucial to the legal battles of the 20th century. Marshall found himself embroiled in politics once more in 1807 during Aaron Burr’s trial for treason. Marshall served as the judge for the trial, and, interpreting the Constitution’s defi nition of treason very narrowly, limited the trial in such a way that the jury found Burr innocent. The public was furious, but Marshall had once again shown the independence and potential power of the judiciary. Other important issues decided during Marshall’s tenure included the sanctity of property rights, even if they confl icted with a state’s actions (Fletcher v. Peck, 1810); that state governments could not attempt to control federal institutions through taxation (McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819); and the power of Congress to control interstate commerce and trade (Gibbons v. Ogden, 1825). Each case stressed the Marshall, John 261 primacy of the national judiciary to decide federal issues. Marshall’s Court was also heavily involved in Indian removal. Marshall’s extended years of service on the Supreme Court played an important role in the success of the fl edgling United States by providing it with a more powerful and adaptive national government than was possible under the Articles of Confederation. His close working relationship with the other justices inspired goodwill and respect, even among the justices who chose to dissent from his majority decisions. Even more important, his opinions became valuable tools for the later judicial activity of the Supreme Court. Marshall served on the Court until his death on July 6, 1835. See also American Revolution (1775–83); Native American policies in the United States and Canada. Further reading: Newmyer, R. Kent. John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2001; Smith, Jean Edward. John Marshall: Defi ner of a Nation. New York: H. Holt & Co., 1996; Swinder, William F. The Constitution and Chief Justice Marshall. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1978. Jason A. Mead Martí, José (1853–1895) Cuban patriot Brilliant and indefatigable scholar, poet, journalist, activist, organizer, and patriot, often called the “Apostle of Cuban Liberty,” José Martí is widely recognized among Cubans as the most admired fi gure in their nation’s history and is commonly ranked among the most important Latin American heroes of the modern era. Martí’s signal contribution was to forge a coherent nationalist, anti-imperialist ideology of Cuba Libre (Free Cuba), which forcefully rejected annexation to the United States, demanded independence, and transcended the island’s historic divisions of social race and class to provide Cubans from all walks of life with a compelling and inclusive vision of national dignity, social justice, and political equality, regardless of race, class, or sex. This achievement was all the more remarkable in light of the explicitly racist ideologies across the Atlantic World in the late 19th century. Swimming against a powerful tide and despite crushing hardships in his personal life that included imprisonment, illness, and many years’ exile, Martí crafted a profoundly optimistic and progressive nationalist discourse that found very receptive ears among his compatriots and that in the decades after his martyrdom continued to fi nd deep resonance in Cuba, across the Americas, and beyond. EXILE Born in Havana, Cuba, on January 28, 1853, to Spanish parents (his father a soldier from Valencia, his mother from Tenerife in the Canary Islands), José Julián Martí y Pérez was the eldest brother of seven younger sisters. His teacher, Rafael María Mendive, a romantic poet and advocate of Cuban independence, exercised a strong infl uence on his formative years. In January 1869 a few months after the outbreak of the Ten Years’ War in Cuba, the 16-year-old Martí founded his fi rst newspaper, Patria Libre (Free Homeland), to advocate for independence. Sentenced to six years’ hard labor on trumped-up charges, he was imprisoned for two years before being exiled to Spain on the condition he not return to Cuba. In Madrid he studied law, wrote prolifi cally, and integrated into the lively intellectual atmosphere of the city and university. Earning his law degree from the University of Saragossa in 1874, the next year he traveled via Paris to Mexico, where he lived for several years. After a brief clandestine return to Cuba in 1877, he moved to Guatemala; soon after, in Mexico, he married Carmen Zayas Bazán, daughter of a rich Cuban sugar planter. Returning to Cuba under a general amnesty in 1878, he joined a conspiracy against the government, only to be exiled to Spain again. Leaving his wife behind, he traveled from Madrid to Paris before heading to New York City, where, aside from a few brief stints in Central America and Venezuela, he lived for the next 14 years until 1895. By this time, he had earned a wide reputation as a gifted writer, profound thinker, and the leading voice for Cuban independence. Through most of the 1880s, he worked mainly as a journalist based in New York, introducing to his Latin American audience the culture and history of their powerful northern neighbor, while also working with Cuban immigrants and exiles to organize the Cuban community in the United States. He became deeply ambivalent toward his host country, which he admired for its freedoms and vitality, denounced for its racial and class injustices, but mostly feared for its power and covetousness toward Cuba. “To change masters,” he repeatedly warned, “is not to be free.” 262 Martí, José In 1890 he founded La Liga de Instrucción (Instructional League) in New York as a kind of educational collective for Cuban exiles in preparation for the impending struggle. In 1891 he served as consul of Argentina and Paraguay in New York and as Uruguay’s representative to the fi rst Inter-American money conference in Washington, testament to his growing hemispheric stature. Meanwhile he intensifi ed his organizing efforts among Cuban expatriate communities in New York, Tampa, Florida, and elsewhere. In 1892 Martí founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC), the leading organizational force in the Cuban War of Independence that began in early 1895. Secretly landing with a small force in eastern Cuba in April 1895, he was killed on May 19, at age 42, in a skirmish with Spanish forces a few kilometers east of Bayamo in Oriente province. His martyrdom soon became a rallying cry for revolutionary forces. Six decades later, Fidel Castro would don the hero’s mantle to legitimate his struggle against the U.S.-supported Batista regime. By this time, Martí’s face and fi gure had became a ubiquitous symbol of Cubans’ struggle for social justice and freedom from foreign domination, as he remains today. Further reading. Martí, José. Obras Completas, 27 Vols. Havana: Editorial Nactional de Cuba, 1963–66; Montero, Oscar. José Martí: An Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; Thomas, Hugh. Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Michael J. Schroeder Marxism, Karl Marx (1818–1883), and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) Karl Marx fi rst met Friedrich Engels in 1842 in the offi ce of a leftist Cologne newspaper, Rheinische Zeitung. They were both students, analysts, and critics of their respective environments, Marx in Cologne and Paris and Engels in various parts of England. In 1844 they met again in Paris; this meeting evolved into a lifelong collaboration, resulting in some of Europe’s, perhaps the world’s, most profoundly infl uential political philosophy. The ideology contained within their collective writings is called Marxism; it was and is a revolutionary way of thinking that nuanced the already prevalent ideas of socialism and communism. Marxist thought intensely infl uenced the socialist movements in several parts of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries; these ideas were to spread to almost all other parts of the world. The most renowned pamphlet of this movement is the 1848 Communist Manifesto (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei). Marxist thought is explained at length in the substantial three-volume book called Capital (Das Kapital); it was Marx’s lifetime of work, which was completed and published after his death by Engels. Marx was born in 1818 in the Prussian town of Trier (now in Germany). Heinrich Marx, his father, was a lawyer, a progressive thinker, and an advocate for constitutional reform; his mother, Henrietta Pressburg, was from Holland. They were Jewish, but when his father converted to Christianity, six-year-old Karl was also baptized. However, his earliest experiences were of being Jewish, which introduced him to discrimination on the basis of religion. After completing high school in 1835, Karl entered the University of Bonn, where he studied the humanities. As a student, he was active in the rebellious student culture that prevailed. When he shifted to the University of Berlin in 1836, his thinking was honed, as he was introduced to Hegelian philosophy as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s thought was held in high regard in Berlin. Marx became politically active in student groups, the Young Hegelians and the Doctors Club, sacrifi cing serious study to activism; interestingly, he could not quite appreciate Hegel’s singular attention to the world of ideas. In 1841 he received his degree from the University of Jena, where academic rigors were less demanding; there, informed by Hegelian analytical method, he completed his dissertation, titled The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophies of Nature. Marx returned to the University of Bonn hoping to fi nd a job; instead he decided to become a writer and then editor in an opposition journal in Cologne, the aforementioned Rheinische Zeitung. In his writings from 1841 onward, there is another resonating infl uence. It was the Feuerbachian “transformational criticism” of Hegel in The Essence of Christianity; in effect, Ludwig Feuerbach turned Hegelian thought on its head, grounding human reality in social and material realities. Deeply affected by Feuerbach, Marx now formulated his comprehension of history as a process of self-development of the human species; humans were basically producers and material production was the foremost form of human activity. From this idea he was to extrapolate the more sophisticated ideological theories, not the least of which was that religion was “the Marxism, Karl Marx (1818–1883), and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) 263 opiate of the masses.” During his time with Rheinische Zeitung he wrote on the material realities of the invisible poor and the underclass and on communism. To understand and critique their conditions of existence, he found his development of Feuerbach’s ideas to be much more useful than Hegelian ideas. With the Prussian government’s repressive policies against Rheinische Zeitung, Marx and his new bride, Jenny von Westphalen, moved to Paris in 1843. Paris was the hotbed of oppositional thinking, extreme forms of communism, and revolutionary socialist thought. Marx was to be entirely radicalized when his world intersected with that of the revolutionaries and French and German working classes. Marx began to study the history of the French Revolution; he further fed his intellectual curiosity with the classics on political economy. In 1844 he met Engels for the second time; so started an intellectual and personal collaboration which contributed an impressive corpus of valuable writings to the world. Engels was born in 1820 at Barmen; he graduated from Elberfeld high school in 1837. He came from a liberal, affl uent, Protestant family; his father was a millowner in Barmen and in Manchester, England. Despite his leftist leanings, he could count on fi nancial support from his family. Historians think that it was his relationship with his mother that allowed for the Janus-like existence of Engels—on the one hand he was a part of the industrial owner class and on the other a severe critic of it. He was sent to Bremen for business training in 1838 where he worked as an unsalaried clerk for an export business. But Engels was more interested in writing; his journalism was infl uenced by the ideology of the Young Hegelians who questioned all. Engels’s rebelliousness found its fi rst expression in defying religion and second in his incisive, clear, and razor-sharp radicalized writings. During this time, his nom de plume was Friedrich Oswald. From 1841–42, Engels served in the Household Artillery of the Prussian Army and attended lectures at the University of Berlin while simultaneously remaining active with the Young Hegelians. On his way to England in 1842, he met Marx in Cologne and then proceeded for his business training in the fi rm of Ermen and Engels in Manchester. He had occasion to closely observe and study the life of the English working class; he also joined the Chartist movement and continued with his leftist writings. In 1844 Engels contributed two of his writings to the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, a journal that Marx had founded with Arnold Ruge. In these articles, he enunciated his earliest notions of private property as the source of material and social inequalities; it was his study of the English working class which had led to his fi rst enunciations of scientifi c socialism. When Marx and Engels met in Paris, following their correspondence on these articles, their collaboration began. Marx had to move to Brussels in 1845 after he was made to give up his Prussian citizenship; Engels followed him. Their fi rst writing, The German Ideology, was written there. It was followed by several pieces, the most infl uential of which was the Communist Manifesto in 1848. Both participated in the Revolutions of 1848– 1849 in Prussia; eventually moving to live in London in the fall of 1849. Marx resumed his studies at the British Museum in London, while Engels lived in Manchester, working for his father’s fi rm for the next 20 years; his salary supported his and Marx’s activities. Engels lived with Mary Burns, an Irish working class girl, until her death in 1863. He was opposed to the institution of marriage, and the two lived as partners. Marx became a regular contributor to the New York Daily Tribune from 1850–61; some historians believe that it was in Karl Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels are seen as the fathers of modern communist political thought. 264 Marxism, Karl Marx (1818–1883), and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) fact Engels who wrote the articles for publication under Marx’s name. In 1867 the fi rst volume of Capital was published while the other two volumes, which were ready, still needed some editorial work. Engels moved to live in London in 1870 and continued to publish books in his own right, notably, Anti-Dühring in 1878. After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels published on his own but he also completed the editing on the second volume of Capital in 1885 and the third volume in 1894. Engels died in August 1895. Despite the passing of both these thinkers and philosophers in late 19th century, their ideas, writings, and ideology continued to infl uence many in the following century. RADICALLY NEGATE Marxism cannot simply be called a philosophy because at its very base it is a critique or a criticism (Kritik); to comprehend the mentality of Marx and Engels one has to use the lens of Kritik. For Marx, it was the way to radically negate the existing social reality, or in his own words, “a ruthless criticism of everything existing.” Marxist thought moves to a second step by then transforming what has been criticized. Marx and Engels’s writings take concepts from the exclusive realm of ideas and connect them to the social and material reality around them. For instance, the concepts of alienation, knowledge, and nature connect with the historical, political, and economic realities so that they all exist in a vigorous relationship with one another. Marx’s basic premise was the primary human capacity to be a producer and his concern with the material conditions under which humans produced. In his words, “The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and intellectual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men which determines their existence; it is on the contrary their social existence which determines their consciousness.” This idea, known by the moniker of historical materialism, is the basis of all Marxist thought. Infused within all his writings, the idea of historical materialism demonstrated that every society is founded by the connections established between the “material forces of production” and the relationship between these forces—this is the economic basis. On this structure then is built the superstructure of politics and legalities which correspond to the nature of the economic substructure. It is through ideology that humans become conscious of the disjuncture between the sub- and super-structures which when critiqued reveal their lack of correspondence; it is then that confl ict can arise. Marxist texts enunciate the methods in which those who have the wealth (Kapital) also control the ways for creating more wealth; they are called the bourgeoisie. Conversely, those who have neither wealth nor the means to make it are in the employ of the bourgeoisie in their factories; those whose labor is a commodity are called the Proletariat. In Marx’s time, this term referred specifi cally to the industrial working class. The proletariat and the underclasses are likely to move steadily toward pauperization; they are dependent either on wage labor or on the capitalist’s largesse, both of which are decided by the bourgeoisie. This relationship then leaves all in a constant state of class struggle, which is not necessarily an overt struggle. The relationship between the classes is always tenuous and can rip apart societies and economies very quickly. Marxist thought offers alternative systems of production to the capitalist one because, according to him “Capitalist production develops the technique and the combination of the process of social production only by exhausting at the same time the two sources from which all wealth springs: the earth and the worker.” OPPOSITIONAL RELATIONSHIP In the capitalist system, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat exist in an oppositional relationship. It is in the Communist Manifesto that this relationship and its consequences are most clearly enunciated. Since capitalism commodifi es all material reality, there will come a time when human consciousness will challenge bourgeois ownership, most likely through a violent revolution led by the proletariat. The details of the types and consequences of class revolution were unfi nished in the third volume of Capital. However, classical Marxism does offer freedom from alienated wage labor when the proletariat leads a revolution by which it repossesses its productive powers. Once the repossessed forms of material production are changed, then humans will once again produce in freedom, leading to self-realization and self-actualization on the scale of all humanity. This new form of production was not the fundamental nature of socialism or communism, but only its precondition. Neither Marx nor Engels offered any particular name for this mode of production, other than to mention in several places that it was to be a “free activity of human beings producing in cooperative association,” as stated by scholar Robert Tucker. Marx wrote with an acerbic pen, with a tone that was intellectually powerful, indignant, and angry. His writings were not easily accessible. In fact, it was Marxism, Karl Marx (1818–1883), and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) 265 Engels’s clear, concise, free-fl owing prose the made the powerful message in Marx’s works popular; his complementary treatises on Marx’s writings explained their intense concepts. Some scholars believe that without Engels, Marxism would not have been what it became. Marx and Engels contributed through their Kritik and theorizing a massive body of political thought whose signifi cance continues unabated. See also Smith, Adam; socialism. Further reading: Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto. McLellan, David, ed. Marxism: Essential Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988; Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000; Tucker, Robert C., ed. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978. Jyoti Grewal Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805–1872) Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, born in Genoa on June 22, 1805, was the intellectual source behind the Risorgimento, or resurgence. The son of a doctor, he completed his legal education in 1827 at the University of Genoa and became a practicing lawyer. He was a romantic revolutionary and an avid reader of drama and history. His writing was not just intended for the elite but for the masses. As a lawyer, he had tried cases for the disadvantaged. The annexation of his native republic of Genoa into the kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont in 1815 dismayed him, and Mazzini had a burning desire to make Italy an integrated republic. An avowed antimonarchist, he favored a republican tradition. The task of unifying Italy divided into the kingdoms of Piedmont-Sardinia, the Two Sicilies, Lombardy-Venice, the Papal States, and smaller grand duchies was unappealing. Mazzini joined the revolutionary carbonari (literally coal burners), whose members signed their oaths to rebel with blood. The bulk of carbonari members were drawn from the middle class and were responsible for insurrections in the 1820s in Naples, Sicily, and Piedmont. Mazzini was declared an outlaw and imprisoned at Savona in 1830. After his release, he appealed to King Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia to liberate the Italian states from Austrian rule. In 1831 he went to Marseille, France, as an exile and gathered fellow Italian emigrants. There he began organizing the movement to unify Italy from abroad, and he spent most of his years as an exile. Mazzini established a political society, La Giovine Italia (Young Italy), based on the ethical principle of a strong faith in God and commitment to progress, sacrifi ce, and duty. Branches of Young Italy sprang up in various Italian cities and by 1833 its membership reached 60,000. Only people under the age of 40 were eligible. In 1834 he set up a revolutionary organization called Young Europe to unite movements like Young Poland, Young Germany, and Young Italy. Mazzini believed that a mass movement could drive foreigners from Italy, and an Italian republic could be established based on the principles of democracy, equality, and social reforms. He combined his political philosophy with action in hopes of making his dream of Italian unifi cation a reality. In 1832 Mazzini made an attempt to foment a rebellion in the Sardinian army. He was sentenced to capital punishment in absentia. He was expelled from France and from his new home in Switzerland. He organized another insurrection against the government of Sardinia in 1834, which also failed. His Young Europe movement made him a cult fi gure and prophet of nationalism throughout Europe. In 1837 he moved to London, where he lived for many years. He published a newspaper, Apostleship of the People. Attempts were made to revive the Giovine Italia, which was languishing due to series of abortive attempts at rebellion. In his writings, Mazzini talked of a national consciousness of Italy. The mantra of the February Revolution that swept Europe was nationalism. It prompted Mazzini to make another attempt at the political unifi cation of Italy. For him, the revolutions of 1848 fulfi lled a mission for humanity. He came back to Italy after the Austrians were ousted from Lombardy. The impact of the revolution was felt all through Italy. The people of Milan welcomed Mazzini, who served for awhile with another Italian revolutionary, General Giuseppe Garibaldi. The adherents of Giovine Italia in Rome rebelled in November 1848 and drove out Pope Pius IX, who fl ed to the Neapolitan area. The democratic Roman Republic was put into place, with Mazzini at the helm, instead of the Papal States. It was the crowning glory of his career. Elected as a triumvir of the republic, Mazzini carried out his social reforms with effi ciency and an authoritarian streak. On July 1, 1849, the popularly elected Assembly passed the constitution of the Roman Republic. But Mazzini’s dream was short-lived as French troops, who responded to the appeal of the pope, besieged the new 266 Mazzini, Giuseppe republic. Mazzini surrendered on July 3. Italy almost returned to its pre-Revolutionary status, divided into sovereign principalities, and a disillusioned Mazzini returned to London. He disliked the “narrow spirit of nationalism,” and deplored the usurping of leadership by the politicians of Italy and Germany afterward. The revolutionary phase of Italian unifi cation was over and the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia took leadership in proclaiming the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. The amateur revolutionaries failed, and the path was cleared for professional politicians to take leadership of Italy’s unifi cation, much to Mazzini’s dismay. He continued to strive for democracy and an agenda of social reforms. Mazzini was arrested in 1870 and lived in Pisa for two years under a pseudonym. He died of pleurisy on March 10, 1872. Mazzini remains a respected fi gure in Italy, whose ideals were active into the 1990s under the banner of the republican party. Mazzini’s philosophy infl uenced not only nationalists in Italy, but nationalists abroad as well. Mohandas Karmachand Gandhi, an important fi gure in the Indian freedom movement, for example, was infl uenced by Mazzini and worked for both political and social emancipation in his struggle against British colonial rule. See also Cavour, Camillo Benso di; Italian nationalism/ unifi cation. Further reading: Beales, Derek. The Risorgimento and the Unifi cation of Italy. London: Longman, 1981; Coppa, Frank, ed. Studies in Modern Italian History. From the Risorgimento to the Republic. New York: Lang, 1986; Gooch, John. The Unifi cation of Italy. London: Methuen and Co, 1986; Hearder, Harry. Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento. New York: Longman, 1983; King, Bolton. The Life of Mazzini. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1938; Smith, Denis Mack. Mazzini. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Patit Paban Mishra Meiji Restoration, Constitution, and the Meiji era In December 1867 the 15th and last shogun (military leader) of the Tokugawa dynasty (1603–1867), Yoshinobu, surrendered his power to Emperor Meiji, which means “enlightened government.” The event is called the Meiji Restoration. In 1868 Meiji took a charter oath that would create a modernized state when several important feudal lords (daimyo) surrendered their lands to the emperor. The process was completed in 1871 when all feudal holdings were confi scated from their traditional landowners, and Japan was divided into prefectures, still the main organizational departments of Japan today. When Meiji became emperor, he inherited a state that had been severely handicapped in its development by the Tokugawa Shogunate, which closed Japan to foreign infl uence. Emperor Meiji and his supporters had to move swiftly to modernize his empire and, above all, its armed forces. The treaty of 1858, which was negotiated with the United States’s fi rst envoy to Japan, Townsend Harris, included a clause: “The Japanese Government may purchase or construct in the United States ships-of-war, steamers, merchant ships, whale ships, cannon, munitions of war, and arms of all kinds, and any other things it may require. It shall have the right to engage in the United States scientifi c, naval and military men, artisans of all kind, and mariners to enter into its service.” In his search for military and naval modernization, Meiji looked also toward western Europe. A delegation was sent to study the armed forces of Europe and initially felt that the French represented the best model for Japan’s army and that Britain would furnish the naval model since the British navy had reigned supreme since Admiral Horatio Nelson’s defeat of Napoleon I’s fl eet at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The Meiji government thus went to Britain to purchase Japan’s warships. May of the early Imperial Japanese battleships came from British shipyards. Japan’s army, however, shifted to the German model when the French army was decisively defeated by Prussian forces in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. In 1873 Emperor Meiji introduced universal conscription to the armed forces, to bring Japan in line with German and other European practices. This ended the centuries-long samurai monopoly of armed military service. Such drastic changes, however, resulted in discontent. In 1877 some early supporters launched the Satsuma Rebellion, which failed in the face of the discipline and modern weaponry of the new army. Meiji pursued reforms throughout the government. In 1885 Meiji adopted a cabinet system loosely based on the cabinets under the U.S. president and the British prime minister. In 1889 a constitution was promulgated for Japan with a bicameral legislature. The upper house, or House of Peers, resembed the British House of Meiji Restoration, Constitution, and the Meiji era 267 Lords, while the lower house, or Diet, would be elected by adult males who paid a certain sum in taxes. In order to create the modernized state Meiji and his advisers realized that a comprehensive system of education was essential. In 1871 a ministry of education was created to carry out a far-reaching system of educational reforms. It created universal education for both boys and girls and modern universities and vocational colleges. Industrialization was a primary goal of the Meiji government because it was the way that Japan could quickly take its place among the Great Powers. The government undertook major infrastructural building and also encouraged modernizing traditional industries. The textile industry was a prime example. It benefi ted from having a considerable labor pool available for industry. Many of the textile millworkers were girls from peasant families who could fi nd no work for them on their agricultural lands. Japanese economic development followed that of other industrializing countries. As manufactured goods became a larger part of the economy of the country, the share of agriculture declined, refl ecting the draw which the burgeoning factories had upon Japan’s laboring population. While the fi rst 20 years of Emperor Meiji’s reign were devoted to development at home, the last 20 years were involved with foreign adventurism. In 1894–95, Japan joined the ranks of those countries seeking to benefi t from the weakness of neighboring China. One result of victory in the Sino-Japanese War was its annexation of the island of Taiwan (Formosa). It also contributed forces to the multinational army that rescued foreigners trapped in Beijing (Peking) during the Boxer Rebellion. In 1902 Japan and Great Britain formed an alliance (Anglo-Japanese Alliance) to counter the threat posed by Russia toward British India and the Far East, especially Japanese interests in Korea. In February 1904 Japan attacked and infl icted a series of stunning defeats on the Russian army and navy in the Russo-Japanese War. A peace treaty was mediated by U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in September 1905 whereby Russia conceded to Japan’s domination of Korea. In 1910 Japan annexed Korea and would rule it until 1945. See also Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars; Qing (Ch’ing) dynasty in decline; Satsuma Rebellion (1877); Tokugawa Shogunate, late. Further reading: Miller, David. The Illustrated Directory of Warships from 1860 to the Present Day. London: Salamander Books, 2001; Morton, W. Scott. Japan: Its History and Culture. New York: McGraw Hill, 1984. John F. Murphy, Jr. Metternich, Prince Clemens von (1773–1859) European diplomat and peace broker Prince Clemens Lothar Wenzel von Metternich was the son of the Austrian envoy to the Rhenish clerical courts (later envoy to the Netherlands). A man of charm and presence, Metternich gained infl uence by marrying Maria Eleanora Kunitz, the granddaughter of the minister of Maria Theresa. Having received educational credentials via a degree in philosophy from the University of Strasbourg and a degree in law and diplomacy from the University of Mainz, and after traveling to England, he began his offi cial career. He entered diplomatic service in 1797 as the representative of Westphalian courts at a congress of German states. In 1801 he became ambassador to Saxony for Austria. Metternich’s obsequious manner and shrewd powers of observation helped advance his career. In November 1803 he was named to the major court of Berlin for Austria. He then became Austria’s ambassador to Russia for a year and fi nally ambassador to France in 1806. In that post, he ingratiated himself with the rising statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand and Napoleon I’s sister Caroline. When war broke out between France and Austria in 1809, he was held as a hostage for two months. In October 1809 the treaty of Schon brunn greatly reduced Austria in size and brought it to its lowest point in history. At this point, Metternich, who had become minister of state in August, was appointed both foreign minister and minister of the imperial house. He was appointed partly because of his knowledge of Napoleon and partly because of his ability. From that point forward, Metternich was to dominate Austria (and often Europe) for nearly 40 years. From this time onward, his emphasis was on maintaining a balance of power to preserve Austria. To gain time for Austria to recover and prevent a possible rapprochement between Napoleonic France and the Czar that might crush Austria, he acceded to Napoleon’s request to arrange for the hand of Marie Louise. Marie Louise was the daughter of Austria’s Francis II (who was also Holy Roman Emperor Francis I). In the subsequent Franco-Russian hostility, Metternich negotiated with both sides until it became apparent that Napo- 268 Metternich, Prince Clemens von leon was on the defensive. He was then able to gain the maximum advantage for Austria as Russia and Prussia were becoming more anxious for Austrian troops as the decisive engagement at the battles of Leipzig and Dresden drew near. After these coalition victories against Napoleon, Metternich hosted the powers of Europe as they arrived in Vienna to draw up settlements, many of which would last for a century. His main goal at this congress and thereafter were balance of power, legitimacy, and compensation. At the Congress of Vienna he led the effort to prevent Russia from becoming too powerful. The Russians wanted all of Poland, which would threaten Europe as the Czar had already taken Finland, most of the Caucasus, and Bessarabia during the Napoleonic War. Prussia, in turn, who would give up her share of Poland, wanted all of Saxony, a densely populated industrialized state in Central Germany. This would make Prussia too powerful in Germany. Supported by the British and the French who were anxious to be readmitted to the club of Europe, Metternich managed to limit Russian gains in Poland and keep half of Saxony free. The period 1815–48 was the age of Metternich, who dominated European diplomacy. The bases for this dominance were the arrangements made at the Congress. Under legitimacy, monarchs were restored in much of Europe, although much of the feudal system west of Austria was abolished. Monarchs were restored in Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands. States that lost territory were compensated. Thus Sweden, which had lost Finland to Russia, received Norway, and Holland, which had lost colonial territories to Britain, received Belgium from Austria to form the Kingdom of the Netherlands. After 1815 the council of Europe was formed to make sure that the leading powers of Europe (Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and, in 1818, France) would act in unison to maintain order, peace, and stability, thereby avoiding confl ict among themselves. This system, although threatened by the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 as well as independence movements in the Balkans against Turks, endured until the Crimean War in the middle of the century. To enforce the system, the powers utilized two alliances. The Holy Alliance was signed in order to placate the czar. All of Europe signed an agreement to promote “justice, Christian charity, and peace.” The exceptions were the British king (who was insane); the pope, who considered himself the keeper of Christian charity; and the Turkish sultan, who was not Christian. A more practical alliance was the Quadruple Alliance among the great powers (changed to the Quintuple alliance with the eventual addition of France). This alliance would hold congresses to act on matters of mutual concern. The business of the alliance involved collective security, and the results involved multimilitary intervention to restore the status quo, even if it resulted in application of force to repress forces of liberalism and nationalism. Thus the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818 adjusted the relationship of France to the other powers; the Congress of Karlsbad in 1819 occurred after the assassination of a Russian envoy in Germany and was used by Metternich to force press censorship, government supervision of universities, and the suppression of representative institutions not sanctioned by ancient usage. The German states submitted to this Congress. After the Congress of Laibach in 1821, Austrian troops intervened to suppress a popular uprising in Naples and Sicily and fi nally in 1822 at Verona, French troops were sanctioned to put down a Spanish uprising against the king. As a result of the last three congresses, the parliaments that had been established in Sardinia, in Naples, and in Spain were abolished. By that time, Britain and Russia had become less enthusiastic. The British, along with the United States, opposed a plan to restore the Spanish king’s authority over Latin America. They had developed a thriving trade with a Latin America free of Spanish mercantilism. Russia supported the Greeks as fellow Orthodox coreligionists. By the middle 1820s Metternich was no longer unfettered in his policy objectives but was still considered fi rst among equals. Inside Austria, he exercised complete power for as long as Francis II ruled. However, after 1835 he had to share power as one of a number of councilors who advised the somewhat feebleminded Ferdinand I. By the 1840s the Metternich system came to be seen as something oppressive and even reactionary, and the author of this system was hated. On March 13, 1848, having seen the writing on the wall, he resigned. Exiled, he went to England and Belgium, before returning to Vienna in 1851. He died in 1859, at the age of 86. Married and widowed three times, he died alone. He had 11 children, seven of whom survived him. In terms of 19th-century diplomacy, only Otto von Bismarck rivaled his infl uence and impact. Further reading: Holsbaum, Eric. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Kann, Robert A. A History of the Habsburg Empire, Metternich, Prince Clemens von 269 1525–1918. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974; Mosse, Werner Eugen. Liberal Europe: The Age of Bourgeois Realism, 1848–1878. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974. Norman C. Rothman Mexican-American War (1846–1848) In a profound national humiliation for Mexico and the biggest land-grab in U.S. history, from April 1846 to February 1848 the United States waged a war of conquest against its southern neighbor that had major repercussions for both nations. For Mexico, La Guerra de ’47 discredited the leadership of José Antonio López de Santa Ana and his cohort of ruling conservatives, setting the stage for the emergence of a new generation of liberal reformers after 1855. It also created in Mexican national consciousness a combination of resentment, fear, and respect toward its northern neighbor that endured well into the 20th century. For the United States, the war added 1.3 million square kilometers to the young republic, thus fulfi lling the vision of proponents of the notion of Manifest Destiny by spreading U.S. dominion from the Atlantic to the Pacifi c Oceans. It also sharpened the sectional division between North and South and played a key role in the eruption of the American Civil War 13 years later. Before the war, most of this vast region was claimed by Mexico but not under its effective dominion. Comprising the northern frontier of the viceroyalty of New Spain and inherited by Mexico after independence in 1821, the region was inhabited by perhaps 75,000 people, some of Spanish descent and perhaps as many native peoples. The Spanish-speaking population was clustered in two main zones: the Upper Río Grande Valley, centered on Santa Fe (in present-day New Mexico); and further west in the ribbon of missions and settle- 270 Mexican-American War (1846–1848) General Winfi eld Scott invaded Mexico on the southern outskirts of the city of Veracruz in March 1847. He took Mexico City on September 13, 1847, after several weeks of fi erce fi ghting that left thousands dead. ments hugging the Pacifi c coast of California from San Diego to San Francisco. The vast bulk of the conquered region was given over to an intricate mosaic of sedentary, semi-sedentary, and nomadic native peoples in the throes of dramatic changes. The long-term roots of the war lay in the aggressively expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny, shared by the most prominent U.S. politicians and opinion-makers in the aftermath of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812 with Britain. The war had an important precedent in the Texas War of Independence in 1836, in which a highly militarized and wellorganized group of Anglo-Americans wrested Texas from Mexico. After 1836 debates swirled regarding the status of Texas. Most Anglo Texans urged annexation to the Union, as did many white Americans west of the Mississippi and in the Southern slaveholding states. In 1844 at the prompting of President Tyler, Texas applied for statehood for a second time (it fi rst applied in 1836), an initiative defeated in the Senate by a coalition of Northern non-slave states. In the presidential elections of 1844, former governor of Tennessee James K. Polk was elected on a platform of reoccupying Oregon territory and annexing Texas. After Texas became a state in December 1845, Mexico protested by breaking diplomatic relations with Washington. Meanwhile, pressures were mounting in Washington and beyond for the acquisition of New Mexico and California territories. Rebuffed in its bid to purchase the land, the Polk administration turned to war. Using the pretext of a border confl ict between U.S. and Mexican troops in the disputed territory between the Rios Grande and Nueces in southeastern Texas, on May 13, 1846, the U.S. Congress declared war on Mexico. The war itself, the subject of an expansive literature, was more hard fought than U.S. policy makers had anticipated. In summer 1846 General Stephen W. Kearney’s Army of the West captured Santa Fe before marching west to California, where it linked up with an expedition led by Colonel John C. Frémont. By early 1847 the two principal zones of Mexican settlement in what later became the U.S. Southwest were in U.S. hands. Meanwhile forces under General Zachary Taylor marched south from the disputed territory in Texas, meeting unexpectedly fi erce resistance before taking Monterrey in September 1846. The third arm of the offensive, the Army of the Occupation led by General Winfi eld Scott, invaded Mexico on the southern outskirts of the city of Veracruz in March 1847. Bombarding the walled city for 48 hours with some 6,700 artillery shells, killing hundreds of civilians and reducing much of the city to rubble, Scott’s army moved methodically westward, following the same route as Hernán Cortés 328 years earlier, taking Mexico City on September 13, 1847 after several weeks of fi erce fi ghting that left thousands dead. By the terms of the February 2, 1848, Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo that formally ended the war, the United States acquired the northern two-fi fths of the national territory claimed by Mexico, a region embracing the present-day states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, and parts of Utah and Colorado. In exchange Mexico received $15 million in cash, plus $3.25 million in U.S. assumption of outstanding claims—about $14 per square kilometer. The treaty also guaranteed full U.S. citizenship of Mexican nationals in the ceded lands, a provision to which the U.S. government did not adhere in the long term. In subsequent years, the landholding Spanish-descended californios (settlers in California) were stripped of their lands and political rights, while many of the Spanishspeaking peoples of the Southwest, especially in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado, became second-class citizens and a low-wage labor force in the region’s burgeoning commercial agriculture, ranching, and mining industries. In the shorter term, the war sharpened the sectional confl ict between North and South by reopening the divisive issue of the expansion of slavery into the territories, initiating a chain of events that led directly to the Compromise of 1850, a deeply fl awed agreement whose unraveling 11 years later resulted in the Civil War—a war in which many of the most prominent military leaders on both sides were veterans of the Mexican campaigns. Further reading. Bauer, K. Jack. The Mexican War, 1846– 1848. New York: Macmillan, 1974; Osio, Antonio María. The History of Alta California: A Memoir of Mexican California. orig. 1851. Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz, trans. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996; Richmond, Douglas, ed. Essays on the Mexican War. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 1986; Robinson, Cecil, ed. The View from Chapultepec: Mexican Writers on the Mexican-American War. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1979; Weber, David J. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Michael J. Schroeder Mexican-American War (1846–1848) 271 Mexico, early republic of (1823–1855) Several major themes dominated the fi rst three decades of the independent Mexican republic—sometimes referred to as the “Age of Santa Ana”—each relating to a specifi c axis of social, political, and international confl ict. The central arena of struggle was the process of state formation, the constituent elements of struggles to forge a viable national government pitting liberals against conservatives, centralists against federalists, and pro-church against anti-church factions. Conservatives generally were centralist and pro-church, and liberals were federalist and anti-church, though there were many exceptions to these broad tendencies. Related to these domestic political confl icts were struggles in the international arena, pitting the new Mexican state against foreign interlopers, especially Spain, France, and the United States. The early republican period was marked by profound political instability, economic dislocation, and deep divisions between various leaders, parties, and factions. It also saw Mexico’s national territory slashed nearly in half, with the loss of Texas in 1836 and the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. The political turmoil and national humiliations of the early republican period set the stage for the rise of a new generation of political leaders in the mid-1850s, epitomized by the revered Liberal reformer Benito Juárez. Following the overthrow of Agustín de Iturbide in 1823, a provisional military junta oversaw the creation of the nation’s fi rst constitution, the Constitution of 1824. A liberal, federalist document modeled on the U.S. Constitution, the 1824 Constitution created the Estados Unidos Mexicanos (Mexican States United) comprised of 19 states and four territories. The new charter gave individual states more power than did its counterpart to the north (as implied in the new nation’s name, the “Mexican States United,” not the “United States of Mexico”), while also granting the president special powers in times of emergency. It also preserved the religious monopoly of the Catholic Church and special privileges of military offi cers and the clergy. The administration of the country’s fi rst elected president, Guadalupe Victoria, was marked by fi scal crises and an armed revolt by Vice-President Nicolás Bravo—squashed by forces led by José Antonio López de Santa Ana—a harbinger of the political turmoil to come. In 1829 under Victoria’s elected successor Vicente Guerrero, Spain attempted to reconquer their former colony but was roundly defeated by forces under Santa Ana. In the same year the Guerrero government abolished slavery throughout the republic. Meanwhile, the conservative disenchantment with the liberal government intensifi ed. Sensing the shifting political winds, Santa Ana, elected president as a liberal in 1833, retired to his estate and left the daily business of governance to his vice-president Valentín Gómez Farías. When a coalition of conservatives rose in revolt, Santa Ana put himself at their head, defeated the liberal government, and installed himself as the new conservative president. The Constitution of 1824 was scrapped and in its stead was imposed the Constitution of 1836, or Siete Leyes (Seven Laws), a far more conservative and centralist document. The new constitution dramatically circumscribed the political autonomy and power of states and territories, including the slaveholding Anglo-American settlers in Texas, whose numbers had grown dramatically in the past two decades. Rising in revolt, in 1836 Texas declared its independence from Mexico. Santa Ana took the fi eld again, and, after some initial successes, was defeated, captured, and sent back to Mexico City. Soon after, in 1838, a confl ict with French property-holders escalated into open hostilities with France—the so-called Pastry War—in which French battleships shelled the port city of Veracruz before Santa Ana (who lost his leg in the battle) negotiated a settlement. The fi nal nail in Santa Ana’s political coffi n came with the Mexican-American War of 1846–48, in which the United States, driven by visions of Manifest Destiny, wrested from Mexico the northern two-fi fths of its national territory. Discrediting Santa Ana, the war was experienced by many Mexicans as a profound national dishonor. Compounding the crisis, just as the war with the United States was ending in the far north, a major revolt by Maya Indians was erupting in the far south—the so-called Caste War of Yucatán, which came to a boil in 1848 and simmered for the next half-century. Atop all the turmoil and strife of the fi rst three decades of independence, the defeat at the hands of the United States created an auspicious environment for the emergence of a new generation of leaders and the period of La Reforma (the Reforms) from the mid-1850s. See also Mexico: from La Reforma to the Porfi rato (1855–1876); Texas War of Independence and the Alamo. Further reading: Costeloe, Michael P. Church and State in Independent Mexico: A Study of the Patronage Debate, 1821–1857. London: Royal Historical Society, 1978; Stevens, Donald Fithian. Origins of Instability in Early Republican Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991; 272 Mexico, early republic of (1823–1855) Tenenbaum, Barbara. The Politics of Penury. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1986. Michael J. Schroeder Mexico, from La Reforma to the Porfi riato (1855–1876) Coming on the heels of the devastating defeat in the Mexican-American War, in 1855 the Revolution of Ayutla ousted the aging dictator José Antonio López de Santa Ana for the last time, ushering in a period in Mexican history known as La Reforma, or the period of Liberal Reforms. Indelibly associated with the fi gure of Benito Juárez, the period saw a host of economic and political reforms inspired by Enlightenment notions of private property, secularism, free trade, and individual rights of citizenship. These reforms in turn sparked widespread resistance on the part of the church, Indian communities, army offi cers, and other conservative elements. The result was a major civil war from 1858–61 (the War of the Reform). This massive civil war, ending just as the American Civil War was beginning, led to the period of French intervention. After the expulsion of the French came the period of the Restored Republic, which ended with the coming to power of the dictator Porfi rio Díaz, the Porfi riato. The tumult and confusion of the period 1855–76 has been attributed to the depths of the differences separating various protagonists’ visions of Mexico’s past and future, compounded by the turmoil wrought by foreign invasion and occupation. THE LIBERAL REFORMS (1855–1857) In 1853 as discontent with the ruling conservative regime mounted, a group of prominent liberals plotted the overthrow of the dictator Santa Ana from exile in New Orleans. Their leaders included Melchor Ocampo, Santos Degollado, Guillermo Prieto, and Benito Juárez. Allying with dissident rebel chieftain Juan Alvarez, one of whose lieutenants Ignacio Comonfort had issued the Plan de Ayutla calling for the dictator’s ouster, the exiles returned to Mexico, fomented a rebellion, and forced Santa Ana’s resignation in August 1855. One of the fi rst acts of the new government bore the name of the new minister of justice: the Ley Juárez (Juárez Law). The law abolished the special privileges, or fueros, enjoyed by members of the military and the church, which since the early colonial period had exempted soldiers and clerics from prosecution in civil and criminal courts. In a stroke, the law overturned more than 300 years of jealously guarded tradition among two of society’s most powerful groups. The Ley Juárez was quickly followed in June 1856 by the Ley Lerdo, brainchild of the new secretary of treasury Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, an even stronger anticlerical measure that essentially required the church to divest itself of most of its real property via public auction. The Catholic Church was far and away the country’s single largest landholding entity. The law also abolished the collectively owned land of Indian communities, compelling their sale at public auction. The law was intended to weaken the church, turn Indians in communities into individual citizens, advance its framers’ vision of a more secular and modern state and society, and create an important new government revenue stream. This frontal assault on the church’s power and Indians’ collective rights in land was followed by what is widely considered to represent the height of 19th-century Mexican liberalism: the 1857 Constitution. Incorporating the Juárez, Lerdo, and other reform laws, the Constitution created a unicameral legislature as a stronger check on the power of the executive. It also created Mexico’s fi rst bill of rights, which included freedom of the press, speech, assembly, and education. The new charter did not specify freedom of religion, but nor did it privilege the Catholic Church, creating de facto state toleration of non-Catholic sects. The church, the military, Indian communities, and other conservative elements bridled at this assault on centuries of tradition, a resistance that soon erupted into open civil war. THE WAR OF THE REFORM (1858–1861) Spearheaded by conservative general Félix Zuloaga and his Plan de Tacubaya, conservative elements rose in revolt. Zuloaga and his allies marched on Mexico City, dissolved Congress, arrested the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Juárez, and forced the resignation of President Comonfort. Juárez, the most charismatic and visionary of the liberal leaders and second in line to the presidency, escaped and established a provisional government in Querétaro, then in Veracruz, rallying liberals around him. For the next two years, a horrifi c civil war wracked the country. By this time, liberalism had become a homegrown ideology embraced by Mexicans from diverse walks of life; lines of alliance and confl ict were complex, shaped by ideology, personal allegiances, and many other factors. Atrocities mounted on both sides. The war devastated Mexico, from La Reforma to the Porfiriato (1855–1876) 273 the economy, destroying crops and livestock and bringing commerce to a standstill. In July 1859 the liberal government in Veracruz enacted the Veracruz decrees, deepening earlier reforms by nationalizing church investment capital as well as its lands. Soon after the U.S. government bestowed diplomatic recognition on the liberal government in Veracruz. By 1860 the liberals had gained the upper hand, and on New Year’s Day 1861, a liberal army, 25,000 strong, marched into Mexico City unopposed. THE FRENCH INTERVENTION (1862–1867) Endless troubles bedeviled the restored liberal regime under Juárez, elected president in March 1861. Most nettlesome, the economy was in ruins and the government bankrupt. A confl uence of events overseas soon compounded the diffi culties. The U.S. Civil War, begun in April 1861, meant that the United States was no longer able to enforce the Monroe Doctrine prohibiting European powers from intervening militarily in Latin America. In France, the conservative, pro-Catholic regime of Napoleon III, infl uenced by large numbers of Mexican conservatives exiled in Paris, determined to seize the opportunity to fulfi ll a longtime national vision and make Mexico part of the expanding French overseas empire. Using the pretext of the Juárez government’s failure to compensate its nationals for properties destroyed in the late war, in December 1861 Napoleon III dispatched some 2,000 troops with orders to occupy Veracruz, reinforced by 4,500 more early the next year. On their march toward Mexico City on May 5, 1862, the invading French army met unexpectedly fi erce resistance in the city of Puebla. The famous battle, later memorialized in the national holiday Cinco de Mayo (fi fth of May), forced the French to retreat. It also catapulted into prominence General Porfi rio Díaz, who played a key role in the fi ght. The battle of Puebla delayed the French invasion for nearly a year. With the arrival of some 30,000 reinforcements and after a two-month siege, the French fi nally took Puebla in May 1863 and occupied Mexico City in June. Napoleon III selected an obscure Austrian archduke to serve as the new emperor of Mexico—Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, or Maximilian, who entered Mexico City with his royal entourage in June 1864. Weak, indecisive, and well-meaning, Maximilian fl oundered while armed resistance to the French occupation mounted. Soon after the end of the U.S. Civil War in April 1865, the United States demanded French withdrawal. Meanwhile, the Mexican venture proved more costly than Napoleon had anticipated. Opting to cut his losses, in January 1866 Napoleon ordered his troops home. The hapless Maximilian, deluded into believing that the Mexican people embraced his reign, opted to stay. Forces under Juárez captured, tried, and, on June 19 in Querétaro, executed him before a fi ring squad. THE RESTORED REPUBLIC (1867–1876) The restored Juárez government soon embarked on an ambitious program to implement the provisions of the 1857 constitution. Slashing the size of the army, enacting measures to revivify the moribund mining economy, and encouraging foreign investment, it also intensifi ed its efforts to secularize education and privatize church and Indian lands. Elected to a fourth term in 1872, Juárez died of a heart attack in July. His successor Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, elected in October, announced his intention to seek reelection in 1876. Rising in revolt on the principle of “no reelection,” Porfi rio Díaz took the National Palace in the fall of 1876, dominating Mexican political life for the next 35 years. Further reading. Krauze, Enrique. Mexico: Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996. Translated by Hank Heifetz. New York: HarperCollins, 1997; Mallon, Florencia. Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995; Meyer, Michael C., William L. Sherman, and Susan M. Deeds.The Course of Mexican History, 8th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006; Ruiz, Ramón Eduardo. Triumphs and Tragedy: A History of the Mexican People. New York: Norton, 1992. Michael J. Schroeder Mexico, independence of Mexico followed a path to independence that both resembled and differed from the path taken by other Latin American nations in the Age of Revolution. As in South America, the Napoleonic invasion of Iberia in 1807–08 generated a crisis of authority in New Spain, prompting the formation of a cabildo abierto (open city council) in Mexico City. Of the various plots and conspiracies hatched against the Spanish colonial government in the Basin of Mexico and beyond, one in particular would have major repercussions for the process of independence. 274 Mexico, independence of On September 16, 1810, the Creole priest Miguel Hidalgo issued his famous Grito de Dolores (Cry of Dolores), denouncing the bad government of the Spanish and demanding an end to the Spanish colonial rule of Mexico. The Hidalgo rebellion rapidly snowballed, reaching its height in late October 1810, when as many as 100,000 of the priest’s impoverished mestizo and Indian followers stood on the outskirts of Mexico City, posing the threat of an all-out race and class war in the heart of Spain’s overseas empire. The Hidalgo rebellion thus played much the same role in New Spain as the Haitian Revolution two decades earlier across the Caribbean. It could be seen as a cautionary tale for Creole elites who wished to achieve independence, but not at the cost of subverting the colony’s rigid race-class hierarchy and thus risking their own privileges and power. After the Spanish defeated Hidalgo’s insurgency, autonomist Creoles bided their time, most refusing to support the simmering rebellion waged in the regions surrounding the basin of Mexico by another parish priest, José María Morelos. The Morelos rebellion fi zzled, despite the 1813 Congress of Chilpacingo (in the province of Guerrero) in which delegates formally declared independence. In 1815 Spanish fortunes improved with their capture and execution of Morelos and, back in Europe, with the defeat of Napoleon I and restoration of King Ferdinand VII to the throne. For the next fi ve years, until 1820, the independence movement in New Spain remained relatively quiescent, though the Spanish proved unable to snuff out the numerous guerrilla bands led by Vicente Guerrero, Guadalupe Victoria (both future presidents), and others. In 1820 it was once again events in Spain that triggered a movement toward independence in the colony: the Riego Revolt against King Ferdinand, in which Colonel Rafael Riego led an uprising of army offi cers demanding that the king adhere to the provisions of the liberal 1812 Constitution, in effect establishing a constitutional monarchy. The king had little choice but to yield to Riego’s demands. Back in New Spain, the conservative Creole elite felt threatened at this latest turn of events. One such conservative Creole, Colonel Agustín de Iturbide abandoned his royalist allegiances and struck out for independence. Iturbide sought an alliance with his erstwhile foe, the rebel leader Vicente Guerrero, and after a series of conferences the two agreed on a plan to make New Spain independent: the Plan de Iguala. It boasted 23 articles and three guarantees: that the new nation would be ruled under a constitutional monarchy; that Roman Catholicism would be the state religion; and that equality would reign between Creoles (Spaniards born in New Spain) and peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain). Under Iturbide’s command, the so-called Army of the Three Guarantees (Ejército Trigarante) attracted allies from throughout the colony, and in September 1821 marched triumphantly into Mexico City, effectively making Mexico independent after almost exactly 300 years of colonial rule. As elsewhere in Latin America, the devastation wrought during the independence period was immense. Mines were fl ooded, crops destroyed, livestock slaughtered, and commerce crippled. As many as half a million people died in the violence. The range and depth of the problems facing the new nation were immense. While the actual date of Mexican independence was thus September 28, 1821, Mexicans celebrate independence on September 15–16, in commemoration of Hidalgo’s Grito de Dolores of 1810—a national memory that reveres the courage and sacrifi ce of the renegade parish priest and his followers while ignoring the legacy of the turncoat conservative-cum-emperor. Further reading: Anna, Timothy E. The Fall of Royal Government in Mexico City. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1978; Archer, Christon, ed. The Birth of Modern Mexico, 1780–1824. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003; Rodriguez O, Jaime E., ed. Independence of Mexico and the Creation of the New Nation. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center, 1989; Van Young, Eric. The Other Rebellion. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Michael J. Schroeder Mexico, New Spain revolts in Indian revolts, rebellions, and insurrections played a key role in the colonial history of the Americas, shaping Indian-Spanish relations in lasting ways and helping to structure the principal features of colonial society. In New Spain, patterns of violent collective action by Indian communities varied widely in time and space. In Central and Southern Mexico, the core of the viceroyalty, colonial-era revolts were local, small-scale, and of relatively brief duration, at least until Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla’s Revolt of 1810, in the waning days of 300 years of colonial rule. In peripheral zones, outside the core areas of Indian settlement, north and south, Mexico, New Spain revolts in 275 several large-scale rebellions erupted during the colonial period. These patterns were partly an expression of demographics, geography, and the Spanish Crown’s geopolitical strategy of rule: those areas of densest Indian settlement yielded more labor, more wealth, and thus, were more worth controlling and defending. Areas with fewer people had less labor, less wealth, were costlier to control, and were thus less worth defending. Because their power was far from absolute, the Spanish in effect gave up large parts of the Americas as unconquerable, launching occasional forays into those areas, but for the most part leaving their generally seminomadic inhabitants alone. It was on the boundary between these zones of Spaniards’ unequivocal domination and generalized absence that the largest and most violent Indian rebellions erupted. Each of these collective outbursts can be traced to a unique confl uence of long-term causes and short-term triggers; each followed a distinctive trajectory and each produced a different outcome. All can also be seen to have had certain features in common. On the northern periphery, in 1680 a major rebellion broke out among the sedentary Pueblo Indians of the Upper Río Grande Valley, the result of decades of extreme exploitation, oppression, and violence at the hands of Spanish encomenderos, combined with epidemic diseases, drought, widespread hunger, and an intensifi - cation of religious persecution by Franciscan missionary friars. After 1692 when the Spanish managed to retake the area, the Pueblo Revolt (or Popé’s Rebellion) led to a major restructuring of Spanish colonial rule throughout the region, resulting in decreased exactions in tribute and labor, greater religious autonomy, and an overall easing of the most oppressive features of colonial rule. In 1740 in the highland valleys of the Sonora desert, the Yaqui and Mayo Indians rose in rebellion against the Jesuit missionaries and the small number of Spanish miners and hacienda owners. The revolt, which lasted some six months and extended across large parts of the north, was rooted in intensifi ed labor demands by secular Spaniards, grievances against specifi c Jesuit friars, and an erosion of the autonomy of individual communities, and was triggered by fl oods and famine. In the wake of the uprising, the mission and mining system on the northern frontier was considerably weakened, while the Yaqui exercised greater political, economic, and cultural autonomy for the rest of the colonial period and after. On the southern periphery, the Tzeltal (Maya) Revolt in Chiapas in 1712 was similarly rooted in decades of excessive labor demands compounded by extreme political and religious persecution. This revolt was triggered by the vision of a 13-year-old Tzeltal girl named María López, of the Virgin yearning for her own kingdom. Dissident Maya leaders and thousands of their Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Chol-speaking followers embraced her vision; the revolt spread throughout large parts of Chiapas before being suppressed by the Spanish military. Subsequent decades saw a lessening of exactions and greater religious autonomy among Tzeltals and other Mayan-speaking peoples throughout the region. The Maya Insurrection of 1761 in Yucatán, led by Jacinto Canek, had similar long-term causes and was triggered by Canek’s argument with a priest that escalated into a major, regionwide rebellion. Its aftermath saw a diminution of Spanish labor and tribute demands and a relaxation of friars’ religious intolerance, along with a legacy of struggle that inspired later generations of rebels (most notably, the Caste War of Yucatán from 1848). All of the foregoing were major regional events that offered direct and sustained challenges to Spanish authority and power, and whose repercussions endured for decades. In central and southern Mexico, episodes of violent collective action by Indian communities followed a different pattern. Large-scale regional rebellions were impossible here; the Spanish were simply too strong. Instead, Indian communities devised and pursued a host of strategies intended to more effectively endure the weight of colonial rule. From the mid-1500s on, Indians became adept at using the judicial system against specifi c infringements of their collective rights in land and labor, initiating litigation and pursuing legal cases through the courts that could and often did last for decades. Many Indian communities became renowned for their savvy and skill in using the courts. Another way Indians in central and southern Mexico defended the rights of their communities was through violent collective action. Such violent outbursts did not assume the character of sustained frontal challenges to the overall structure of Spanish domination and Indian subordination. Instead they were localized, spontaneous, without identifi able leaders, of relatively brief duration, and focused on specifi c sets of grievances against individual agents of state and ecclesiastical authority. Targets most often included specifi c authorities such as priests, municipal offi cials, hacienda overseers, land surveyors, census takers, tax collectors, and government buildings like jails and administrative offi ces. Women often played key roles in these unplanned outbursts. Weapons were makeshift, consisting of diggings sticks, hoes, clubs, slings, rocks, and powdered chili peppers used to temporarily blind and disable the targets of the community’s wrath. Few such revolts lasted more than 276 Mexico, New Spain revolts in a day or two. Deaths were usually few. The authorities generally responded to such spontaneous outbursts with “a calculated blend of punishment and mercy,” and the outcome commonly led to redress of the community’s specifi c grievances. The Mexican historian Agustín Cue Cánovas has identifi ed more than 100 conspiracies and rebellions during the 300 years of Spanish colonial rule in New Spain, while U.S. historian William B. Taylor has unearthed evidence for more than 140 episodes of communities in revolt against Spanish rule. Scholars are just beginning to unravel the complexity of these episodes of rural and urban unrest and the variety of ways in which violent collective action by Indian communities shaped the overall structure of colonial society and of Spanish-Indian relations in the heartland of Spain’s American empire. Further reading. Gosner, Kevin. Soldiers of the Virgin: The Moral Economy of a Colonial Maya Rebellion. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1992; Hu-DeHart, Evelyn. Missionaries, Miners and Indians: History of the Spanish Contact with the Yaqui Nation of Northwestern New Spain, 1533–1820. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1981; Katz, Friedrich, ed. Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Confl ict in Mexico. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988; Taylor, William B. Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979. Michael J. Schroeder Midhat Pasha (1822–1884) Ottoman reformer Midhat Pasha entered the Ottoman government service as a young man and rose quickly within the ranks. He worked in Syria and then in Istanbul before being appointed governor (vali) over Bulgaria in 1857. Midhat quickly restored order to the rebellious province and instituted a wide-ranging series of modernization projects. While he supported modernization of the empire, Midhat opposed local nationalist sentiments and repressed Bulgarian nationalism. His anti-pan- Slavic stance incurred the enmity of Russia and owing to Russian pressure he was withdrawn from Bulgaria and brought back to Istanbul. Midhat served as provincial governor over Baghdad from 1869–72. As governor of Baghdad, he in effect ruled all of Iraq. He extended Ottoman infl uence into the Arabia Peninsula and, as in Bulgaria, worked to modernize the territory. He modernized Baghdad with the construction of new roads and a bridge across the Tigris River, a bank, and textile factory. He also improved shipping lanes for the Shatt al-Arab leading into the Persian Gulf and enlarged irrigation projects to increase productivity and income. Midhat also effi - ciently applied Ottoman Land Law to regularize and register land titles and the collection of taxes. Midhat served as Grand Vizier from 1876–77 and was accorded the title of pasha. However, Midhat’s effi - ciency, fi nancial acuity, and honesty threatened many increasingly corrupt offi cials who frequently intrigued against him. On the other hand, the pro-reform Young Ottomans called Midhat “the ideal statesman.” Midhat supported the programs of the Young Ottomans who wanted the implementation of a constitutional monarchy over the Ottoman Empire. Midhat and the Young Ottomans sought to halt the further erosion of Ottoman fi nancial independence to European creditors and to prevent national uprisings in the Balkans. In 1876, the Young Ottomans and Midhat were instrumental in ousting Sultan Abd al-Aziz, who was subsequently assassinated, and placing Murad V on the throne. Murad V only served a few months before mental illness forced his removal. His brother Abdul Hamid II became the new sultan after promising to implement the constitution written by Midhat and to support reforms. The fi rst Ottoman parliament opened in 1877, but Abdul Hamid II used the impending war with Russia as the excuse to suspend the constitution and parliament within a year. Midhat was ousted from offi ce on charges of complicity with the assassination of Abd al-Aziz. To escape further persecution, Midhat then toured Europe and observed the House of Commons in session in London. He was called back to serve as governor of Syria, but within months the sultan reconsidered and brought him back to be tried with others for the killing of Abd al-Aziz. In a highly biased trial, Midhat was sentenced to death, but following pressure from the British his sentence was commuted to banishment. He was exiled to Taif, Arabia, where an agent of the sultan probably was responsible for his death by strangulation in 1884. See also Young Ottomans and constitutionalism. Further reading: Davison, Roderic H. Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–1876. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963; Zachs, Fruma. Ottoman Reform and Muslim Regeneration. London: I.B.Tauris, 2005. Janice J. Terry Midhat Pasha 277 Mississippi River and New Orleans North America’s most important river, contested by four nations and many native tribes, has played an essential role in U.S. history. Flowing 2,301 miles from northern Minnesota’s Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans, the Mississippi was a key American Civil War arena. Until 1865, Cairo, Illinois, at the confl uence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, was the boundary between freedom and slavery. Reshaped over hundreds of years by settlers, engineers, and business interests, the Father of Waters has been and remains an important commercial artery and an ecological battlefi eld. The Mississippi even has its own bard—Mark Twain (penname of Samuel L. Clemens) who grew up on the river’s banks, plied its waters, and wrote two books in which the Mississippi is the central character. His 1883 Life on the Mississippi is a nonfi ctional account; 1884’s Huckleberry Finn uses a fi ctional journey down the mighty north-south river to explore slavery and freedom in pre–Civil War America. By 1750 France was the major player in the Mississippi basin, obtaining furs from local Indian tribes and establishing military fortifi cations and trading posts along the upper Mississippi. New Orleans, founded in 1718, became the major port and capital of France’s sprawling Louisiana colony. The Seven Years’/French and Indian Wars demolished France’s imperial dreams for the Mississippi and the New World generally. In 1755 thousands of French colonists know as Acadians were deported by British victors from Nova Scotia to Louisiana delta lands. Later known as Cajuns, they found a living fi shing, trapping, 278 Mississippi River and New Orleans In 1815 two weeks after a treaty ended the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson, assisted by French pirate and slave trader Jean Lafi tte, won a major victory over British forces at New Orleans, permanently securing this port for the United States. and farming along the lower Mississippi. A deal with Spain before the war’s end in 1763 allowed France to maintain its fur trade. Spain, at least nominally, held all lands west of the Mississippi and the vital port of New Orleans from 1762 to 1800. Access to the Mississippi was an issue that aggravated relations between Britain and its North American colonies. The treaty ending the American Revolution promised river rights to the new United States, yet French and British fur traders and their Indian allies continued to dominate the region. In 1802 President Thomas Jefferson learned that Spain had secretly sold Louisiana back to French emperor Napoleon I. A worried Jefferson asked to buy New Orleans. Napoleon instead agreed to sell his entire holding for about 18 dollars per square mile. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States. The Lewis and Clark Expedition and concurrent explorations along the Mississippi by U.S. Army lieutenant Zebulon Pike in 1805 began to reveal just what the United States had acquired. The Mississippi remained a wild frontier. Soon after killing Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel, former vice president Aaron Burr rode a keelboat down to New Orleans, which he hoped would become the seat of his own American empire. Burr was warmly welcomed by New Orleans’s French population but his plans were undone by a coconspirator. In 1815, two weeks after a treaty ended the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson, assisted by French pirate and slave trader Jean Lafi tte, won a major victory over British forces at New Orleans, permanently securing this port for the United States. By this time, the Mississippi had become a busy waterway for travel and commerce of every kind. Although navigable for its entire length, the river was treacherous, especially in seasons of drought and fl ood. Many different kinds of vessels were tried on the river— canoes, rafts, pirogues, pole boats, and keelboats, to name a few. In 1811 the steamboat New Orleans, engineered by Robert Fulton, took four months to travel from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. Within a decade, boats could reliably sail upstream. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, established in 1802, played (and continues to play) a major role on the Mississippi and its watershed. In 1824 Congress authorized the Corps to manage and improve the river’s navigability and safety. Locks and dams were installed; later, levees to prevent fl ooding were constructed almost continuously from New Orleans to Dubuque, Iowa. Other projects that began in the 19th century but did not reach their zenith until the 20th included dredging, channelization, and construction of auxiliary canals. Before railroads in the 1850s began to cut into Mississippi shipping, lead ore, lumber, and agricultural products, mostly heading to St. Louis or New Orleans for processing or transshipment, kept “river rats” busy until winter ice buildups curtailed travel. Galena, Illinois, became an important metropolis, supplying 90 percent of the nation’s lead ore. Logging in Minnesota and Wisconsin, spurred by an almost insatiable need for lumber, especially on the treeless Great Plains, fi lled the Mississippi with huge logs heading to sawmills. Logging increased erosion and soil loss; logs snagged underwater became a major threat to river shipping. The Mississippi’s north-south trade suffered a huge setback when war broke out in 1861. It was apparent to Union leaders that controlling the Mississippi could cripple the Confederacy, making cotton shipments to Europe almost impossible. The “River War” of 1862 made heroes of offi cers Ulysses S. Grant and David G. Farragut. Using ironclad gunboats adapted for river conditions, Union naval units occupied New Orleans in April. In June Union forces captured Memphis. Besieged at Vicksburg that summer, Confederates, although lacking suffi cient weaponry, held off the attack and maintained control of about 200 miles on the Mississippi. Today’s Mississippi is still crowded with boats and barges, but its commercial importance continued to decline after the Civil War. New Orleans’s importance was eclipsed by New York’s Harbor. St. Louis lost out to Chicago, the nation’s railroad hub. River tourism increased on paddlewheel excursion boats appealing to gamblers and a growing leisure class. By 1882 Mark Twain, nostalgically traveling his river from New Orleans to St. Paul, found the formerly bustling river eerily quiet. The nation’s traditional watery heart, now mostly driven and fl own over, makes headlines only when the Mississippi experiences devastating fl oods. See also abolition of slavery in the Americas; railroads in North America. Further reading: Fremling, Calvin R. Immortal River. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005; Hall, B. Clarence, and C. T. Wood. Big Muddy: Down the Mississippi Through America’s Heartland. New York: Dutton, 1992. Marsha E. Ackermann Mississippi River and New Orleans 279 Mitre, Bartolomé (1821–1906) Argentine statesman Bartolomé Mitre was one of the Argentine statesmen who dominated his country’s political scene following the overthrow of Juan Manuel Ortiz de Rosas in 1852. The son of Ambrosio Mitre and Josefa Martinez, he grew up in Buenos Aires where the political life was dominated by Rosas. Disliking the dictatorship that Rosas had established, when Mitre was 26 he began his 15-year exile, leaving Argentina for Uruguay where he took part in the defense of Montevideo against the Argentine dictator. He then went to Bolivia and Peru, returning to Uruguay, where in 1852 he led their forces in the Battle of Caseros, which led to the overthrow and fl ight of Rosas. In 1853 Buenos Aires province refused to accept the new Argentine constitution which massively diminished its role in the nation’s politics, and Mitre was called upon to lead the breakaway province. Eight years later he was governor and led the Unitarists at the Battle of Pavon on September 17, 1861, when the Federalists, who wanted regional autonomy, were decisively defeated. Although few realized it at the time, it was the end of the Federalist cause. Mitre, who became president on April 12, 1862, moved the capital back to Buenos Aires and spent the next two years ensuring that the Federalists were politically marginalized. He extended postal and telegraph lines throughout the country with stamps being issued for the whole of Argentina rather than separate regional issues as had previously been the case. Mitre also ended most local taxes, consolidated provincial and regional debt, and established a nationwide system of courts. Immediately, the power of the Federalists had been diminished. In December 1864 war with Paraguay broke out when the Paraguayan president, Francisco Antonio López, still believing that the Federalists would prevent Argentina playing an important role in the impending confl ict, attacked the Brazilian Matto Grosso region and then marched into Argentina and captured the city of Corrientes. However, López had miscalculated, and Mitre took charge of the Argentine forces and became a passionate advocate of continued Argentine involvement, allying his country with Brazil and the new government of Uruguay. This resulted in the war becoming known as the War of the Triple Alliance. One of Mitre’s sons, Jorge, was killed in that war. The war dominated Argentine affairs, and Mitre used it to achieve greater national unity. It also seems certain that the war was particularly benefi cial to Mitre’s supporters, some of whom amassed fortunes in war contracts. Mitre’s political party became known as the Purveyors’ Party, as the prices for beef, leather, horses to serve as cavalry mounts, fodder, and military supplies soared. The main Federalist leader, Urquiza, was also placated by massive contracts for supplying the Argentine and the Brazilian military. In 1868, when his term as president came to an end, Paraguay’s defeat was inevitable, even if the fi nal victory was still two years away. The defeat of the Paraguayan forces at the Battles of Tuyuti in May 1866 and Curupayty in September, as well as the subsequent capture of the Paraguayan fort of Humaita, failed to gain Mitre much popularity in Buenos Aires. In January 1868 Mitre stepped down as commander in chief of the Allied forces, and the post went to the Brazilian marquis (later duke) of Caxias. In the 1868 presidential elections, the Argentine population was clearly weary of the confl ict and refused to support Mitre’s handpicked successor-designate in the presidential elections. However, Mitre was elected to the senate and in 1874 ran again for the presidency. On losing, Mitre tried to lead a rebellion, which quickly petered out. In 1891 he again contested the presidency, but withdrew before the fi nal election. In his old age, Mitre was regularly seen around Buenos Aires, and when he died on January 19, 1906, he was acclaimed as one of the great men in Argentine politics. The newspaper La Nacion ran a full-page obituary on the day after he died and another on the following day. He was buried in Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires. He was featured on a 1935 postage stamp and again in 2006 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his death. As well as being a politician, Mitre was also a great scholar. He translated Dante’s Divine Comedy into Spanish and was the author of many books. He wrote poetry and detailed biographies of both independence heroes Manuel Belgrano and San Martín. An avid reader and book collector, a contemporary painting of his bedroom by Pierre Calmettes shows many books open around the room. Mitre’s library of 20,000 books has been augmented since his death by an additional 50,000 volumes, making it one of the most important in Argentina. Known as the America Library, the vast majority of the books are concerned with the Americas, or printed in the Americas. It is open to the public and contains many rare works in Spanish and English, as well as a map collection, rows of bound periodicals, and a coin collection. In addi- 280 Mitre, Bartolomé tion, there is a historical archive of 48,000 documents covering 19th-century Argentine history. The library is housed in Mitre’s old house, now the Mitre Museum, where the room in which Mitre met Urquiza and Derqui on the ground fl oor has been recreated. On the upper fl oor, Mitre’s bedroom, bathroom, and adjoining study have all been faithfully preserved with a photograph of the former president’s wife above the bed, fl anked by those of his sons Jorge and Adolfo. Entry to the museum is two pesos—the two peso note having Mitre on one side, and his residence—the museum—on the other. One of Mitre’s sons, Emilio became an engineer and politician, another son, Bartolomé Mitre y Vedia, was a well-known writer. Further reading: Hole, Myra Cadwalader. Bartolomé Mitre. New York: Hispanic Institute in the United States, 1947; Robinson, John L. Bartolomé Mitre: Historian of the Americas. Washington D.C.: University Press of America, 1982; Rock, David. Argentina 1516–1987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsín. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987. Justin Corfi eld Monroe Doctrine In 1823 in response to the long-anticipated successes of the Spanish-American independence movements, U.S. president James Monroe announced a hemispheric policy that later came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine. Penned principally by secretary of state and future president John Quincy Adams, the doctrine forbade subsequent European colonization in the Western Hemisphere. “The American continents,” Monroe proclaimed, “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” The doctrine further implied that the United States would oppose strategic or political alliances between European powers and Latin American nations: “We could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing [the newly independent nations], or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as a manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.” An expression of an emergent muscular foreign policy following the victorious War of 1812 with Great Britain, the doctrine applied to all European powers but was aimed specifi cally at Britain, which had designs on Cuba, and at France, one of Spain’s most important allies in the early 1820s. The doctrine had important precedent in the thinking of U.S. policy makers. In 1808 Thomas Jefferson, pondering the probable emergence of new nations in the wake of Spain’s collapse, wrote that “We consider [the new Latin American nations’] interests and ours as the same, and that the object of both must be to exclude all European infl uence from this hemisphere.” The United States provided substantial material aid to the Latin American revolutionaries, despite a formal proclamation of neutrality in 1815. The year before Monroe announced his hemispheric doctrine, the United States extended diplomatic recognition to the newly independent Latin American nationstates of La Plata (later Argentina), Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, and the not-yet-independent nation of Peru. The fi rst open defi ance of the doctrine came in the early and mid 1860s. With the United States embroiled in its own Civil War, France under Napoleon III launched an invasion and occupation of Mexico. After the defeat of the Confederacy in April 1865, the administration of President Andrew Johnson demanded French withdrawal, and Napoleon soon complied. The Caribbean presented a more nettlesome situation, with every island a European colony (save Hispaniola, divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic). In the 1880s and 1890s, as U.S. aspirations for hemispheric domination grew, policymakers sought not only to keep European powers out but to establish a positive U.S. right to intervene if warranted. This came in 1904, with President Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. While the 1823 Monroe Doctrine did not explicitly proclaim U.S. domination of the hemisphere or include any U.S. right to intervene militarily in Latin American affairs, many Latin Americans denounced the doctrine as a fundamental violation of the principle of national sovereignty. A vast polemical literature from south of the U.S. border decries the Monroe Doctrine as a signal expression of Yankee imperialism. See also Latin America, independence in; Napoleon I. Further Reading: Murphy, Gretchen. Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005; Smith, Peter H. Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Michael J. Schroeder Monroe Doctrine 281 Mormonism The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was established in 1830, shortly after The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ was published. The church was “restored” by the prophet Joseph Smith. At 14, Joseph, born in Vermont but living in Palmyra, New York, claimed to have had a vision, in which God informed him of his mission to restore the true religion. At 17, Joseph reported that an angel named Moroni directed him to a hidden manuscript preserved on golden plates and written in an unknown language. Smith’s translation narrates the story of how Middle Eastern exiles, associated with the so-called Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, came to America in 600 b.c.e., how the resurrected Jesus later had preached to these nownative American tribes, and how one tribe of Christian converts, the Nephites, were reduced by wars to only Mormon and his son, Moroni. Before their deaths, they buried this narration in 384 c.e., to be recovered in a “latter day” when their spiritual descendants would restore the true faith. Smith’s community, identifying itself as the restoration of this ancient faith (authentic Christianity), was forced by harassment to leave New York and move first to Kirtland, Ohio (1832), and then to Independence, Missouri (1838). They eventually settled in Illinois on the Mississippi and built the city of Nauvoo, which would become in the early 1840s the largest city in the state. Smith, who began taking many other wives in addition to his first wife Emma Hale, advanced the general practice of polygamy as an ordinance of the church. Despite his enormous popularity and prosperity, such that he was able to mount a viable candidacy for the U.S. presidency, Smith’s practice of polygamy led disillusioned ex-members to establish a newspaper designed to expose him as a fraud and suppress his political ambitions. Eventually, a riot led to the burning of the newspaper office, and Joseph and his brother, Hyrum, were arrested. While detained in a Carthage jail, a lynch mob murdered both men. After Smith’s death, the church split. The largest group, following their new leader Brigham Young, migrated in 1847 to Salt Lake City, Utah. This group withdrew support for polygamy in 1890. The second group, now known as the Community of Christ (Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), followed Smith’s wife Emma back to its current home in Independence, Missouri. They rejected polygamy immediately and have attempted to maintain a theology closer to mainstream Christian thought. The Book of Mormon, read by literary critics as an early American romance based on Bible stories, is for the Utah church merely the first of many revelations, which early on included Smith’s Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price. The doctrines of progressive revelation (in which leaders are divinely inspired with teachings for a developing community) 282 Mormonism Mormon pioneers on the trail in 1847: Following the death of Joseph Smith, many in the Mormon Church headed west to Salt Lake City, Utah. The second group, the Community of Christ, followed Smith’s wife Emma back to Independence, Missouri. and progressive spirituality (in which believers are destined to become divine beings) form the framework of Mormon theology. However, the most contentious point with critics is the secrecy of Mormon Temple practices. Clearly, church membership has not been hindered by such clandestine behavior. In 1947, the community reached the million mark and today it has risen to over 12 million. By the beginning of the 21st century, this aggressive missionary church could boast 200 million members worldwide. Further reading: Bushman, R. L. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005; Ostling, R. N. Mormon America: The Power and the Promise. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000; Southerton, S. G. Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2004; Stark, R. The Rise of Mormonism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Rick M. Rogers Mughal dynasty (decline and fall) Descended from both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, the Mughal dynasty originated in Central Asia. It became the strongest dynasty to rule India, lasting from 1526 to 1858. The Mughal dynasty reached its height under Akbar, who encouraged reconciliation among his subjects by encouraging intermarriage between Hindus and Muslims and appointed competent administrators. His empire stretched from the Himalayas to the Hindu Kush and included present-day India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The Mughal Empire passed its zenith after Akbar. Shah Jahan, although famous for the construction of the Taj Mahal, was an unsuccessful military leader. He launched three failed campaigns against the ruler of southern Afghanistan, was defeated in his attempt to regain the ancient Mughal patrimony in Central Asia, was repulsed four times in his efforts to extend rule from northern to southern Deccan, and lost an effort to oust the Portuguese from its coast. The cumulative effect of these campaigns was the imposition of higher taxes on the peasantry, whose loyalty to the Mughals began to diminish. This became more evident under Aurangzeb. The fortunes of both the empire and the dynasty decreased in the last half of Aurangzeb’s reign. Overwhelmingly ambitious, he spent the last 28 years of his reign campaigning in the south to conquer and unite the subcontinent from the south tip to the northern Himalayas and Hindu Kush. Although initially successful, many areas quickly revolted. Aurangzeb’s wars took a toll on the empire’s resources, which became strained. This led to peasant resistance and fl ight, thereby increasing the burden on the remaining peasants. Aurangzeb’s strict Islam and intolerance toward other religions also roused opposition. He destroyed Hindu temples and schools, dismissed Hindu offi cials from government, and reimposed the tax on non-Muslims. These policies led to the rise of the greatest military opponents of the Mughals—the Marathas and the Sikhs. Under the leadership of Shivaji, the Marathas in the northwest Deccan carried out resistance and by 1750 controlled large sections of central and northern India. The Sikhs, originally a peaceful sect that attempted to synthesize Hindu and Muslim beliefs, became militarized by persecution and by 1750 controlled much of the Punjab in northeast India. The Hindu Rajputs in northcentral India, initially won over by Akbar’s policies, became hostile and began to attack the Mughals. Even within the Delhi area, Hindu peasants called the Jats became radicalized and also revolted. After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, most of the 10 Mughal emperors who followed him between 1707 and 1857 were little more than fi gureheads for one of the contending parties for power in India. Court feuds and civil wars also led to disintegration as Muslim dynasties arose in south Deccan, the eastern province of Oudh, and northeast Bengal between 1704 and 1720. One Mughal emperor, Muhammad Shah, attempted to repair some of the damage by placating the Hindus but with little success, partly due to his own indolence and foreign invasions. Mughal power never recovered from the invasion of the Persian ruler Nadir Shah, who sacked Delhi in 1739, carried away the fabled peacock throne, symbol of the dynasty, and plundered northern India. Even more devastating was the invasion of Ahmed Khan, ruler of eastern Persia, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and portions of northern India. He sacked Delhi, defeating the Marathas and Rajputs, but his empire disintegrated after his death in 1772. Mughal power also suffered with the rise of European merchants, especially the British and French who replaced the earlier Portuguese and Dutch. In 1691 the British East India Company received a charter from the Mughal government not only to trade but to collect taxes in what is now Calcutta. In time, it became progressively more involved in politics; by 1765, the company controlled all Bengal, the richest province of Mughal dynasty (decline and fall) 283 India. By 1800 Britain had ousted the French from India. By 1818 the company either directly or indirectly ruled most of India. By the 19th century, Mughal emperors had become mere pensioners of the company. The last Mughal emperor was deposed and exiled to Burma after the Indian Mutiny in 1857. There were many causes for the decline and fall of the Mughal dynasty. First, the lack of tolerance shown to the non-Islamic majority by later Mughal emperors; second, the imperial overreach by emperors in terms of military expeditions which strained resources after 1680; third, the diversity of India’s ethnic and religious groups as well as strong traditions of regionalism which served to weaken the center; and fourth, the superior technological and fi nancial expertise which the West, including England, enjoyed after 1500 gave it an advantage dealing with Islamic emperors who had fallen behind. Finally, and perhaps most important, the Mughal dynasty remained a minority in India, distinct in religion, culture, and language from the majority of subjects. Given the circumstances, its fall was perhaps inevitable. See also Sikh wars. Further reading: Chaudhuri, K. N. Asia Before Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Richards, John: The Mughal Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Schimmel, Annemarie. The Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art and Culture. Chicago: Reaktion Books, 2006; Schweinitz, Karl. The Rise and Fall of British India. London: Routledge, 1989; Stewart, Gordon. The Marathas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India, 8th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Norman C. Rothman Muhammad Ali (1769–1848) Egyptian ruler An Ottoman janissary of Albanian origin, Muhammad Ali became the founder of modern Egypt. Following the Napoleonic invasion and short-lived British occupation of Egypt, Muhammad Ali and a number of other janissary forces were sent to reassert Ottoman control in 1802. Muhammad Ali had outmaneuvered rival janissaries for leadership by 1806. Muhammad Ali then cleverly aligned himself with the weaker of the perennially warring Mamluk factions that had previously governed Egypt to defeat the stronger. He eliminated the remaining Mamluks by inviting them to a celebration at the heavily fortifi ed citadel overlooking Cairo in 1811. Once the Mamluks were securely inside the high walls of the fort, the janissaries massacred them, leaving Muhammad Ali the sole ruler. Pledging allegiance to the Ottoman sultan, he was appointed pasha of Egypt and began an ambitious program to increase the strength of his armed forces and to build a new navy. The army was conscripted from the Egyptian fellaheen, or peasantry, and ultimately reached over 100,000 men. To fi nance military expenditures, Muhammad Ali increased taxes and established government monopolies over the economy. Monopolies controlled the sale of oil, coffee, and Egyptian products including tobacco, grains, sugar, and cotton. He also moved the Egyptian economy toward the production of cash crops, especially tobacco and the highly desirable Egyptian long-grain cotton. Through government support, Muhammad Ali underwrote the creation of small industries in textile manufacturing, food processing, and some armaments. This began a process of industrial modernization that was largely halted by the British occupation of Egypt at the end of the 19th century. The irrigation systems were expanded and water and road transport systems were developed throughout the area. Medical care improved, although cholera and malaria remained problems. A new administrative elite was created. The top offi cials were predominantly of Turkish origins; like Muhammad Ali, they spoke Turkish rather than Arabic. Although he was illiterate, Muhammad Ali valued education and established a military training school and sent students at government expense to European universities. Muhammad Ali made one graduate Rifa’a Rafi al-Tahtawi director of a new School of Languages; the school was responsible for the translation of many European, especially French, political and philosophic works. The Bulaq Press published hundreds of books in Arabic, including many translations from European works. These infl uenced a new generation of Arab and Islamic reformers in the late 19th century. An offi cial gazette was also issued. As leader of Egypt, Muhammad Ali was involved in four major wars. At the behest of the Ottoman sultan, he sent his sons Abbas and Ibrahim to crush the puritanical Islamic reformist movement, the Wahhabis, who threatened Ottoman control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz from 1811–81. The Wahhabis were defeated in their stronghold in the Nejd (in northern modern-day Saudi Arabia). After making a pilgrimage to Mecca, Muhammad Ali withdrew his troops in 1824, 284 Muhammad Ali thereby allowing the Wahhabis to regroup and emerge as an even stronger force at the end of the century. In 1820 Muhammad Ali launched military campaigns into the Sudan. He wanted new recruits and slaves for his army and hoped to obtain gold to help fi nance his army and navy. Although his troops were militarily successful, most of the army recruits and slaves died of diseases and the gold resources failed to materialize. In 1822 the ongoing Greek War of Independence threatened Ottoman control in the Balkans, and the sultan again called on Muhammad Ali to use his new navy and army to defeat the Greeks and their allies. Muhammad Ali took the island of Crete in 1824 and met with initial success. But in 1827 his new fl eet was destroyed at the Battle of Navarino Bay. Muhammad Ali was ready to negotiate, and he lost Crete to the British in 1840. He then turned his attention toward Palestine and Syria, where he hoped to enhance his prestige as well as stop the fl ow of draft dodgers from Egypt who sought to escape the much-hated state conscription. He also hoped to obtain wood to rebuild his navy. Syria had suffered under a long period of Ottoman misrule and initially offered little opposition to Muhammad Ali’s troops, who under Ibrahim’s command took Acre in 1832. Ibrahim advanced to Konya, deep inside the Anatolian Peninsula, and might have advanced to Istanbul, but he was stopped by Muhammad Ali. Although he wanted further territory, Muhammad Ali recognized that the European powers, who were engaged in a long-term diplomatic rivalry over the so-called Eastern Question, or what to do about the weakened Ottoman Empire, would not allow it to collapse. When Russia offered to support the sultan in the war against Muhammad Ali, Great Britain, which opposed Russian advances in the Black Sea, stepped in to force negotiations. Under the Kutahya Convention of 1833, Muhammad Ali retained control over Greater Syria in exchange for a small yearly tribute to the sultan. He thereby controlled key trade routes and the Muslim holy cities in Arabia. Ibrahim was made governor of Syria, but effi cient tax collection and conscription led to local dissent and rebellions. Wishing to reassert his authority, Sultan Mahmud II was confi dent that his newly reformed army would be able to defeat Muhammad Ali. Ottoman forces attacked in 1838, but at the Battle of Nazib in northern Syria, Ibrahim routed the Ottoman army in 1839. Fearing Muhammad Ali’s mounting power and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain intervened. Britain rallied the support of Russia, Prussia, and Austria and offered Muhammad Ali control over Egypt for life if he immediately agreed to a settlement. When Muhammad Ali refused, a four-power blockade was put in place, and British marines took Acre in 1840. Recognizing defeat, Muhammad Ali withdrew from Syria. In 1841 the sultan granted Muhammad Ali and his heirs the hereditary right to rule Egypt as khedives; however, the Egyptian army was limited to 18,000, a huge decrease from its size during the zenith of Muhammad Ali’s power. In 1848 Ibrahim, the presumed heir, died, before his father. Thus when the ailing Muhammad Ali died shortly after Ibrahim, his grandson Abbas succeeded to the throne. The conservative Abbas halted many of Muhammad Ali’s development projects, but they were resumed after Said, Muhammad Ali’s son and Abbas’s uncle, and later Ismail, another of Muhammad Ali’s grandsons, became khedives. The dynasty established in Egypt by Muhammad Ali survived until it was overthrown in a military-led revolution in 1952. See also Arab reformers and nationalists; British occupation of Egypt; Ismail, Khedive. Further reading: Dodwell, Henry. The Founder of Modern Egypt: A Study of Muhammad ‘Ali. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931, 1967; Fahmy, Khaled. All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2002; Marsot, Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid. Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984; Sabini, A. P. Armies in the Sand: The Struggle for Mecca and Medina. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1981. Janice J. Terry Muhammad al-Mahdi (1848–1885) religious leader Muhammad Ahmad Abdullah was born on the island of Lebab on the Nile River. He had a traditional Islamic education and as a child committed the Qur’an to memory. Known for his fervent religious belief, as a young man he secluded himself in a cave to meditate. Following in the pattern of the prophet Muhammad, Muhammad Abdullah began to receive revelations that he shared through teaching and preaching. In 1881 he declared himself the Mahdi or “rightly guided one”; according to Islamic tradition, the Mahdi was to appear to foreshadow the end of an age. The Mahdi was sent to establish the faith and custom of the prophet. The Mahdist movement in the Sudan was a combination of Muhammad al-Mahdi 285 nationalist and religious belief and was seen by many as the beginning of Sudanese nationalism. The Mahdi established his state in a power vacuum when the Ottoman Empire, the ostensible governing authority, and Egypt, in the midst of the Urabi revolt, were weak and torn by revolts and local problems. In addition to his undoubted religious appeal and charisma, the Mahdi’s refusal to pay Ottoman or Egyptian taxes attracted further support among the Sudanese. The taxes levied by the Mahdi were generally lower than those of the Ottomans. He garnered tribal support and crushed internal uprisings. In 1882 the Mahdi took el Obeid, the capital of western Sudan. He struck money in the name of the new Mahdist government, pacifi ed most of the country, and ousted the remaining Turkish garrisons. He established a theocratic state based on religious law. The Mahdist movement was another of the 19th-century Islamic revival movements such as the Sanusiya in Libya and the Wahhabis in Arabia. Alarmed by the rising new power in the south, the British who had occupied Egypt in 1882, sent a military expedition led by William Hicks to defeat the Mahdi. Without proper supply routes or knowledge of the local terrain, Hicks, with a force of Egyptian soldiers, moved deep into Sudanese territory where his expedition was cut to pieces by the Mahdi’s army in 1883. Cut off from Egypt and outside supplies, foreign missionaries and adventurers in the Sudan were taken prisoner by the Mahdi; some remained under virtual house arrest for years. As the Mahdi moved closer to the capital of Khartoum, Charles “Chinese” Gordon, so named for his role in defeating the Boxer Rebellion, was sent to evacuate the remaining British forces. A Christian zealot, Gordon believed it was his mission to stop slavery in the Sudan and to secure the territory. Ignoring orders to withdraw, he was trapped in Khartoum as the Mahdi’s army lay siege to the city. The siege lasted from 1884 until late January 1885. A British relief expedition was sent to rescue Gordon, but before it arrived the Mahdi’s forces, known as dervishes in the West, took the city. Against the Mahdi’s orders, Gordon was killed and beheaded. His head was then presented to the Mahdi as a sign of the victory. The British relief forces arrived on the outskirts of Khartoum two days too late and, recognizing their untenable position, promptly retreated back to Egypt. Gordon became a martyr to the cause of British imperialism. Although the British prime minister William Gladstone favored withdrawal from the Sudan, the British public, including Queen Victoria, were outraged and demanded that Gordon’s death be avenged and the Mahdi destroyed. The Mahdi died shortly after the taking of Khartoum in 1885. He was succeeded by Abdallahi, as the khalifa, or companion. Abdallahi struck money with an Omdurman mint mark and legislated proclamations and decisions on points of law. He defeated the Abyssinians (in present-day Ethiopia) in 1889, but shortly thereafter the Mahdist state faced internal uprisings, a plague of locusts (a recurring ecological problem in much of Africa), and a resulting famine. Meanwhile, the British remained determined to defeat the Mahdist state. The British military hero Herbert Kitchener was appointed commander in chief of Egyptian forces to take the Sudan. Avoiding the mistakes of previous expeditions, Kitchener extended the railway system deep into southern Egypt to ensure effi - cient movement of supplies and men. In 1898, Kitchener met the Mahdist army at the Battle of Omdurman, where with superior armaments his army easily defeated the larger but poorly armed dervishes. Kitchener then moved to eradicate any traces of the Mahdist state, even destroying the Mahdi’s tomb. However, the movement remained a latent force in the Sudan, and the Mahdi’s heirs emerged as political leaders when the Sudan became independent in the second half of the 20th century. See also Sudan, condominium in. Further reading: Holt, P. M. The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881–1895: A Study of Its Origins, Development, and Overthrow. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958; Lord Elton, ed. General (“Chinese”) Gordon’s Khartoum Journal. New York: The Vanguard Press, Inc., 1969; Theobald, A. B. The Mahdiya: A History of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1881–1899. London: Longman, 1951. Janice J. Terry music The period from 1750 until 1900 covered the European musical periods of the classicists and romantics. Most European countries had offi cial orchestras, with smaller bands of musicians performing in stately homes, town halls, and other places, and folk music traditions existing throughout Europe, where performers would play at fairs, festivals, and other occasions. However, there was a stronger innovative musical tradition in Germany, 286 music where many rulers and states had their own courts and competed with rivals as cultural centers. germany and austria In Austria and the German lands, there were a number of important patrons of music, one of the foremost in the mid-18th century being the Habsburg rulers of Austria, although the war over Silesia—the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War—were extremely costly, causing Empress Maria Theresa to economize on her court music. In this period Johann Georg Reutter continued to write church music and opera, and Gottlieb Muffat wrote for the harpsichord and the organ. The elector Palatine also maintained considerable musical talent in his court at Mannheim, recruiting musicians such as the Bohemians Johann Stamitz, Franz Xaver Richter, and Christian Cannabich, as well as a number of Italians. By contrast the Prussian court at Berlin tended to favor more academic music, with Carl Heinrich Graun being the Kapellmeister (director of music) for Frederick the Great. In charge of the Berlin opera, he also wrote The Death of Jesus, a Passion cantata. He was later joined by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the son of Johann Sebastian Bach. Mention should also be made of musicians in Hamburg such as Georg Philip Telemann, director of the Leipzig Opera in 1702, and the Hamburg Opera from 1732 to 1738. The great age of classicism in Europe started in the 1770s with renewed confidence and increasing wealth at many central European courts. This period saw the Austrian cities of Vienna and Salzburg emerging as centers for this new musical style, with G. C. Wagenseil, a composer of many symphonies, quartets, and piano concertos, and also J. B. Vanhal. Another musician during this period was Leopold Mozart, father of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and an important composer in his own right. Franz Josef Haydn managed to get a position in the choir at St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, and then joined the household of the famous Esterhazy family, as their Kapellmeister from 1766. It was not long before the Italian Antonio Salieri emerged as an important musician at the Habsburg court, with his youthful prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart quickly rising to prominence. Mozart traveled to Italy when he was young, and there he heard many other musicians, remaining in contact with many of them throughout his life. As a result he had a wide knowledge of contemporary European compositions and was able to compose new music, including 21 operas. His work included Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute, as well as 27 concertos, piano trios, and serenades. He worked at the Austrian court in Vienna under Emperor Joseph II, dying from renal failure. A cousin of Mozart’s wife was Carl von Weber. Also a youthful prodigy, he wrote a number of concertos and then the operas Sylvana and Abu Hassan. the enlightenment The forces of the Enlightenment, which came to influence events around the French Revolution, led to the romantic era, which saw a decline in the prestige and wealth of the Austrian court and the rise in importance of France. Franz Josef Haydn died in 1809 on exactly the same day that Napoleon i entered Vienna after defeating Austria. In spite of this decline, there were still a number of Austrian musicians who helped Vienna retain its prominent position, albeit briefly. Italian Luigi Boccherini composed several hundred compositions for string quartets. Franz Schubert was a prolific composer, writing 145 songs in 1815 alone, including nine in one single day. These included some of his bestknown works, although critics feel his finest music dates from the 1820s. Another important German composer of this period was Robert Schumann, who produced a choral work titled Paradise and the Peri and was director of the Dusseldorf Orchestra from 1849 until 1853. By this time new composers had emerged, notably Ludwig van Beethoven, who developed from a classicist from the 1780s into the leading romantic composer of the 19th century. He rose to international prominence with his symphonies, and his music was seen as breaking from the classical tradition and being unpredictable, clearly influenced by Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven used a much greater range of tempos, rhythms, harmonies, and key changes than most of his contemporaries. Beethoven initially admired Napoleon I and dedicated his Third Symphony, to him, before renaming it the Eroica Symphony when he became disillusioned after Bonaparte crowned himself emperor. Beethoven later went on to compose his Fifth Symphony, known as The Emperor Symphony, and the Ninth Symphony, The Choral Symphony. His other work included the opera Fidelio, originally entitled Leonora. He is also well known for his popular piano pieces Moonlight Sonata and Für Elise. Some of Beethoven’s contemporaries included Johann Ladislaus Dussek, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and the pianist Ferdinand Ries. music 287 THE ROMANTIC PERIOD The romantic period also saw cultural infl uence from other parts of the world, with music in the Americas becoming infl uenced by Indian musical traditions alongside a growing appreciation of the indigenous cultural traditions throughout the Americas. This gradually led to some changes in music in the newly independent United States and also in Spain, with some of the rhythms gradually spreading around Europe. In Bohemia, Antonin Dvor˘ák composed From the New World, which shows infl uences of African-American musical traditions. The emerging power—political and fi nancial—of France saw Paris become a center of music from the last decade of the 18th century into the early 19th century. The Belgian-born composer François-Joseph Gossec worked in the French capital throughout the Revolution and enduring changes of government, with Nicholas D’Alayrac composing many comic operas in the early French Republic. Later French composers include Hector Berlioz, who composed many symphonies, including the Symphonie Fantastique, and Romeo and Juliet; and also Gioacchino Antonio Rossini from Italy who composed Le Comte Ory and William Tell in France. Jacques Offenbach moved to Paris from Germany and became famous with his Orpheus in the Underworld and La Belle Hélène. Other French composers include Charles Gounod, composer of Faust and Romeo and Juliet; Léo Delibes, composer of ballets including Coppelia and Sylvia; and Jules Massenet, who produced music for the ballet Le Cid. With the rise of German nationalism and the increasing connections between France and western Germany, many new composers became important, including Giacomo Meyerbeer, Camille Saint-Saëns, Georges Bizet, Emmanuel Chabrier, César Franck, and Gabriel Fauré. Felix Mendelssohn composed many pieces of music for strings and piano, including the oratorio Elijah. Later the increasing political unity of Germany coincided with the popularity of Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner. Wagner became an opera conductor at Dresden and produced The Flying Dutchman and Tannhauser before spending years perfecting The Ring of the Nibelungs, Siegfried, and Tristan and Isolde. His music came to epitomize German national identity during the late 19th century, building on Teutonic legends and infl uenced by Greek tragedies and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. Austrian composer Johann Strauss composed over 400 waltzes, including An der Schönen Blauen Donau, better known in English as the Blue Danube, and Richard Strauss, not related to Johann, composed German operatic concertos. BRITAIN AND THE REST OF EUROPE In Britain, the most famous composer of the period was Sir Arthur Sullivan, who wrote the music for operas for which W. S. Gilbert wrote the words. Their operas included Trial by Jury, H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, Patience, Iolantha, The Mikado, Ruddigore, The Yeoman of the Guard, and The Gondoliers. In eastern Europe, much of the new musical traditions came from Poland, even though Poland as an independent nation had ceased to exist. Frédéric Chopin, who had a French father and Polish mother, embodied both western and eastern European concepts. Most of his music was composed for solo piano, and with the increase in the number of pianos throughout the world, it was not long before his music was being played all over the globe. In Hungary Franz Liszt became popular with his orotorio Christus; Gustav Mahler, best known for his symphonies, directed the Budapest Opera in 1888–1891; and Franz Lehár conducted military bands in Vienna and wrote The Merry Widow. In Italy Niccolo Paganini was an important violinist and composer from Genoa, and Vincenzo Bellini composed a number of pieces of music and had an important infl uence on Giuseppe Verdi, whose operas included Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and Aida, composed for the opening of the Suez Canal. Other important Italian musicians were Gaetano Donizetti, whose operas included Lucrezia Borgia, Lucia di Lamermoor, and La Favorita; and Giacomo Puccini, who composed La Bohème and later Madama Butterfl y. In Spain the major composers included Isaac Albeniz, Emmanuel Charbier, composer of Espana, and Enrique Granados y Campina, who became a prominent pianist. Norwegian composers included Edvard Grieg, who wrote, among other pieces, music for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and Rikard Nordraak. In Russia prominent composers of this period include folk musician Mikhail Glinka; Alexander Dargomizsky; Alexander Borodin; Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky from Ukraine, who composed much work including Boris Gudonov; Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, composer of The Golden Cockerel; Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, who wrote mazurkas and piano concertos; and most notably Piotr Illyich Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky’s great works include Swan Lake, Eugene Onegin, Sleeping Beauty, the Nutcracker, the Pathétique Symphony, and the 1812 Overture. Mention should also made of Sergei Rachmaninov, whose First Symphony was performed in 1897, and Jean Sibelius, whose work En Saga was played for the fi rst time in 1892. 288 music THE REST OF THE WORLD Outside Europe and the Americas, music in Africa involved heavy use of percussion, especially drums, with lutes and zithers also being common in northern and Saharan Africa. Drums and dance played an important part in religious ritual in much of sub-Saharan Africa. In the Arab and Islamic worlds, chanting of the Qu’ran remained the most esteemed musical form. Even in present-day Islamic societies, such as Malaysia, national competitions in Qu’ranic chanting are held for both men and women. Some local and instrumental improvisational performances were considered the Arab equivalent to classical music in the West. The oud (a short-necked lute), tambourine, qanun, tabla (a small, hand-held drum), and various fl utes were the main instruments. Numerous authors from Morocco, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey wrote about musical theory and the lawfulness of singing and musical performances from the 17th to 19th centuries. There was also a lively tradition of folk music and dance. In India musicians used a very wide range of musical instruments such as the two-stringed lute, the sittar, the tabla, the sarangi, and the tambura, with much of the music being associated with ritual religious festivals. Ghazals—classical Urdu love songs—were popular throughout the year. Chinese music tended to rely on percussion, with drums and cymbals heavily used in theatrical performances, but use of the fl ute and stringed instruments were also common. Mention should also be made of gamelan bands (musical ensemble bands), which remain common in Java and Bali in modern-day Indonesia. They trace their origins back to medieval times, and during the 18th century most villages in Java and Bali had at least one gamelan— the orchestra being imbued with special spiritual signifi cance. Japanese court musicians were formed into orchestras playing for members of the imperial family and to accompany plays. Further reading: Abraham, Gerald. A Hundred Years of Music. London: Duckworth, 1949; Bacharach, A. L. The Music Masters, Vol 2: After Beethoven to Wagner. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1958; Barea, Ilsa. Vienna: Legend and Reality. London: Secker & Warburg, 1966; Carse, Adam. The Orchestra in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, 1940; Cooper, B., ed. The Beethoven Compendium. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1991; Cooper, Martin. French Music c. 1850–1924. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951; Einstein, Alfred. Music in the Romantic Era. London: J.M. Dent, 1947; Hindley, Geoffrey, ed. The Larousse Encyclopedia of Music. London: Hamlyn, 1971; Lang, Paul Henry. Music in Western Civilization. London: J.M. Dent, 1942; Robertson, Alec, and Stevens, Denis. The Pelican History of Music. Vol. 3, Classical and Romantic. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1968; Yorke-Long, Alan. Music at Court. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1954. Justin Corfi eld Muslim rebellions in China The three Muslim rebellions against the Qing (Ch’ing) dynasty in China in the 19th century were caused by economic, ethnic, and religious problems. The Xinjiang (Sinkiang) Rebellion also had diplomatic implications. The fi rst was the rebellion in Yunnan, known in the West as the Panthay Rebellion, from a corruption of the Burmese word for “Muslim.” Between 20–30 percent of the population of Yunnan, located in southwestern China, is Muslim, descended from Central Asian Muslim troops sent by Kubilai Khan to garrison the region in the 13th century. They were discriminated against by the majority non-Muslims and the Han and Manchu offi cials because of their distinctive lifestyles. Disputes over mining rights led to the rebellion in 1855 under Du Wenxiu (Tu Wen-hsiu), who proclaimed himself Sultan Sulieman of a Muslim kingdom with capital at Dali (Tali). After enjoying initial successes, a new governor appointed by the Qing was able to eliminate the rebels in 1873. Du sought British help in vain and committed suicide. The second Muslim rebellion occurred in Shaanxi (Shensi) and Gansu (Kansu) Provinces in northwestern China between 1862 and 1873. It is also called the Tungan Rebellion, after the approximately 14 million Chinese Muslims in these provinces who were of mixed Central Asian and Chinese descent; although largely assimilated in language and customs, they nevertheless suffered from discrimination. The rebellion broke out in 1862 as a result of the incursion of Taiping rebels into Shaanxi, igniting local grievances. The situation was very confused because the Muslims were divided into the warring Old and New Sects and was further complicated by incursion of another rebel group, the Nian (Nien), into Shaanxi in 1866, who joined forces with the Muslims. The Qing court appointed Zho Zongtang (Tso Tsung-T’ang), a great general-statesman who had helped defeat the Taiping Rebellion, governor- general of Shaanxi-Gansu, in charge of suppressing the Tungan rebels. Zuo could not take up this task until Muslim rebellions in China 289 he had suppressed the Nian Rebellion in 1868, after which he spent six years of hard campaigning before pacifying these two provinces. Xinjiang, in the far northwestern part of China, was its historic gateway to the West along the ancient Silk Road. After several campaigns it was conquered in 1759 by Emperor Qianlong (Ch’ien-lung), who expelled the previously infl uential religious leaders called khojas to Khokand beyond China’s border. After 1759 Xinjiang was governed by a military governor from Ili, who delegated local chieftains called begs to control the Muslims called Uighurs. It was garrisoned by Manchu banner troops concentrated on the north and south of the Tianshan Mountains. In 1864 as the Uighurs rebelled, Yakub Beg (1820–77), a Khokandian adventurer, invaded Xinjiang. Preoccupied with rebellions elsewhere, the Qing government was unable to respond; thus Yakub Beg gained control of parts of northern Xinjiang (Kashgaria) and proclaimed himself ruler. Russia took advantage of China’s disarray to occupy Ili. Xinjiang became part of the Great Game between Great Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia. After suppressing the Muslim rebellion in Shanxi and Gansu, the Qing court appointed Zuo Zongtang imperial commissioner to suppress the Xinjiang Rebellion. An experienced and careful commander, he was able to crush the rebels in 1877. Yakub Beg committed suicide, and Xinjiang was pacifi ed. Russia was compelled to restore the Ili to China in the Treaty of St. Petersberg in 1881. On Zuo’s recommendation Xinjiang received the status of province and was fully integrated into the Qing Empire. The three Muslim rebellions were indicative of the decline of the Qing dynasty. Their suppression, along with the defeat of other rebellions, would give a new lease on life to the dynasty. See also Anglo-Russian rivalry. Further reading: Chu, Wen-djang. The Muslim Rebellions in Northwest China, 1862–1878: A Study of Government Minority Policy. The Hague: Mouton, 1966; Kim, Hodong. Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864–1877. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur mutiny on the Bounty (1790) In 1790 the crew of the Her Majesty’s Armed Vessel (HMAV) Bounty and the Polynesians accompanying them arrived to populate Pitcairn Island. They found traces of earlier Polynesian settlements, but no indigenous people were resident at the time of their arrival. Over 2,000 accounts of the mutiny and the subsequent settlement of Pitcairn have been told, often contradictory and must be regarded as part myth, part fi ction. Also, fi ve motion pictures have captured the tale of the Bounty. Vessels from the Royal Navy discovered Pitcairn Island in 1762, but the rough sea prevented any landings. It rose to fame from the events that unfolded on the Bounty in 1789. The trader Bethia was armed and renamed HMAV Bounty and under command of Captain William Bligh sailed for the South Seas on December 23, 1787, with orders to collect seeds of the breadfruit tree to help feed African slaves in transit to the Americas. After some diffi culties, the Bounty arrived in Tahiti on October 30, 1788, and stayed for fi ve months while the seeds were collected. The Bounty left Tahiti but had only been at sea for three weeks when some of the crew mutinied under the leadership of Fletcher Christian. The Royal Navy in those days was known for its harsh discipline. Also, the pleasant lifestyle on Tahiti and the fact that several of the crew had engaged in intimate relations with local women might have inspired the subordination. The events and roles in the mutiny remain disputed. The Hollywood version shows the captain of the Bounty, William Bligh, as a inhuman tyrant, while recent research suggests that Christian may have been suffering from a mental condition that led to irrational behavior. The captain and 18 loyal crewmembers were cast adrift in open boats and later picked up at sea. The Bounty returned to Tahiti to pick up supplies, livestock, and to take some of the native Polynesians back with them. Sixteen mutineers had decided to stay in Tahiti, but Christian rightfully thought it would be too risky—the Royal Navy captured those that stayed behind. Christian and the others continued to search for an isolated island to settle on. On January 15, 1790, the Bounty happened upon Pitcairn. Their cargo was brought ashore, and on January 23 the Bounty was set on fi re so it would not be spotted and reveal the presence of the mutineers on the island. The soil was fertile and the climate warm. A settlement was established at what is now known as Adamstown, and a kind of apartheid developed. The male Tahitians did not receive any land, were treated like slaves, and had to share the women that were left after the mutineers chose their spouses. The Tahitian men rebelled, and several mutineers were killed, Christian 290 mutiny on the Bounty (1790) among them. But the rebels fell out over the women, and the mutineers killed them. Peace was eventually maintained, but having learned how to distil spirits from local produce, drunkenness plagued the community, until John Adams, the last remaining mutineer, had a religious experience. He started holding mass and showed leadership, bringing about some order. The community developed a unique mix of Victorian and Tahitian culture, but the outside world would reach them sooner or later. Ships had been sighted, some even having come ashore without contact being established. An American whaling vessel, the Topaz, reported the presence of the community in 1808, but it was not until 1814 that British naval vessels visited Pitcairn. They took pity on Adams, given his place in the community and his piety. He had requested a resettlement of the islanders, since population growth made their resources meager. Adams died in 1829, and in 1831 the entire community was moved to Tahiti. There they experienced disease and discovered that their culture was too European to thrive in Tahiti. That same year, they went back to Pitcairn. Adams and his successors had no formal powers, but increasing interaction with the outside world exposed the need for legitimate governance. A constitution was drawn up in 1838, making the islands a British colony, giving universal suffrage for the election of a chief magistrate to anyone over the age of 18 and who intended to stay on the island for more than fi ve years. A new emigration followed in 1856 because of overpopulation (193 people) on Pitcairn, this time to the Norfolk Island that was uninhabited. But again some chose to return to Pitcairn, fi rst in 1858, then in 1864. Meanwhile, visitors to Pitcairn had vandalized the houses, and the gardens were overgrown. Selling handicrafts to passing vessels and salvaging provided some extra income, but they could no longer trade any surplus crops for needed supplies. Missionaries and sailors that the islanders had rescued offered some gifts, and Queen Victoria even sent them an organ. Religion had played a prominent part in the life of the inhabitants on Pitcairn. However, a visit by American Seventh-day Adventists caught them in a time of social crisis and with lack of unifying leadership, and the Anglican Church was replaced. The conversion spurred social and political reform. Education was improved, a newspaper was founded, and a judiciary and parliament introduced. But the ill fortune that haunted the islanders since returning from Norfolk would not relent. The parliament was removed, and the chief magistrate was reintroduced in 1904. In the 20th century, communications improved, with about one ship a week arriving at Pitcairn. The population peaked at 233 in 1937 but had dropped to 40 by the turn of the millennium. Most of those who left emigrated to New Zealand. Further reading: Alexander, Caroline. The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty. New York: Viking, 2003; Bligh, William. A Voyage to the South Sea, The Project Gutenberg EBook Available online. URL: <http://www. gutenberg.org/fi les/15411/15411.txt>. Accessed December 2005; Carlsson, Suzanne C. Pitcairn Island at the Edge of Time. Rockhampton, Queensland: Central Queensland Univ. Press, 2000; Lummis, Trevor. Pitcairn Island: Life and Death in Eden. Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 1997. Frode Lindgjerdet

Crisis and Achievement 1900 to 1950

MacArthur, Douglas (1880–1964) U.S. general General Douglas MacArthur was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on January 26, 1880, the son of Arthur MacArthur, a Civil War hero and military offi cer, and Mary Pinkney Hardy MacArthur. His early years were spent in military postings throughout the western part of the United States, but he eventually settled in Washington, D.C., following his father’s move to the War Department. There he built a strong relationship with his grandfather, Arthur MacArthur, an infl uential judge who had access to important Washington contacts. MacArthur’s education was fairly transient and lackluster until his father enrolled him in the West Texas Military Academy, where he started to reveal talents that would take him to the U. S. Military Academy at West Point in 1898. At West Point he established a considerable reputation, emerging as fi rst in his class in 1903. After graduation his fi rst service was in the Philippines, where he established a lifelong love for the country. Following the death of his father in 1912, he took up a valuable posting in the War Department, where he came to the attention of Army Chief of Staff General Leonard Wood. In 1915 MacArthur was promoted to major, and within the year he became the army’s fi rst public relations offi cer, a post that helped him sell preparations for war to the U.S. public in the form of the Selective Service Act of 1917. World War I established MacArthur’s reputation as a striking leader of dash and courage. He was appointed brigadier general in August 1918 and became the youngest divisional commander in France, leading the 42nd Division. He was awarded 13 decorations and was cited for bravery seven times. Following military demobilization, MacArthur maintained his rank and became the youngest superintendent in the history of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He modernized the curriculum and doubled the size of the academy. In 1922 he married Henrietta Louise Cromwell Brooks, a marriage that led to divorce in 1929. In the interwar years from 1922 until 1930, MacArthur served two tours in the Philippines, where he built a strong friendship with Philippine leader Manuel Quezon and commanded the army’s Philippine department from 1928 until 1930. He became chief of staff of the U.S. Army in 1930, when the Great Depression was in full swing. Army strength was severely affected by cutbacks, and political protests drew MacArthur, along with George Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower, to the unsavory task of suppressing the Bonus Army of 1932. This campaign by World War I veterans was met by tanks and cavalry, and the action was in some quarters deemed an excessive use of force. In 1935 MacArthur returned to the Philippines at the request of President Quezon to head the U.S. military mission and help prepare the Philippines for full independence in 1946. It was at this time that he also met and married Jean Marie Faircloth, who would make MacArthur a father at age 58. After retirement from the army in 1937, MacArthur remained in the Philippines as a military adviser. Yet when negotiations M with the Japanese broke down in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recalled MacArthur to service with the rank of major general, and he was charged with the task of mobilizing the Philippine defenses. He built up his forces in Luzon and Mindanao and was confi dent in his ability to resist a Japanese attack, a fact that he reported to General George Marshall in Washington. Immediately following Pearl Harbor, the Japanese launched widespread attacks on the Philippines, where they quickly overcame MacArthur’s defenses and destroyed his air force, much of it caught on the ground. Although previously encouraged to do so, MacArthur failed to attack the Japanese air bases in Taiwan; the Japanese invasion met little effective resistance. Luzon fell, as did Manila, and MacArthur retreated to the Bataan Peninsula and the fortress at Corregidor. In late February 1942 he was ordered to withdraw to Australia, leaving his surrounded army of 11,000 men under the command of General Jonathan Wainwright to face the Japanese. Their surrender would lead to the infamous Bataan Death March, which incensed all Americans and increased their desire for revenge. MacArthur’s daring escape with his wife, son, and a small group of advisers was initially by patrol boat before connecting with an aircraft that got him to Australia’s Northern Territory by March 17. It was at Terowie, South Australia, that he made his now famous “I Shall Return” speech. MacArthur now became supreme commander of the Allied forces in the southwest Pacifi c area, working with Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacifi c fl eet, and Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the U.S. Navy. From offi ces in Brisbane, Australia, MacArthur developed an islandhopping strategy to counter the Japanese and stop their advance across the Pacifi c. By 1943, because of MacArthur’s expert use of navy support and army and marine amphibious landings, as well as the benefi ts of major victories at Midway and at Guadalcanal, the tide turned. Importantly, New Guinea fell to the Allies in 1944, allowing MacArthur to plan the retaking of the Philippines. The destruction of the Japanese navy at Leyte was the largest naval battle in history and made the successful landings possible while ending all hope that the Japanese could counter. U.S. troops advanced across the Philippines and moved on to attack Luzon in January 1945. Manila was taken after brutal resistance by Japanese troops under the command of General Yamashita on March 4, 1945. From headquarters now established in Manila, MacArthur planned the fi nal attacks upon Japan, including a 1,300-ship invasion of Okinawa, which was but 350 miles from mainland Japan, on April 1, 1945. The struggle for Okinawa was extremely costly, resulting in 12,520 U.S. and 110,000 Japanese killed and the introduction of major kamikaze suicide raids on U.S. shipping. The heavy cost extracted from this invasion made an invasion of the Japanese main islands a daunting prospect. The atomic bomb strategy was introduced to quicken the end of the war and deliver Japan’s unconditional surrender. On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, which did not produce the desired capitulation. On August 9 a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The Japanese accepted terms on August 10. Their surrender ended World War II in the Pacifi c. MacArthur received the formal surrender onboard the USS Missouri on September 2, 1945, and President Harry S. Truman appointed him head of the Allied occupation of Japan. Japan was a defeated and dev- 230 MacArthur, Douglas General Douglas MacArthur was charged with the task of reclaiming the Philippines from the Japanese in World War II. astated country, and MacArthur worked to salvage and reconstruct the country, including the creation of a democratic constitution that would ensure a peaceful Japan. MacArthur turned over authority in 1949 to a new Japanese government, which preserved the emperor but in a symbolic role. MacArthur remained in Japan until relieved by President Truman in April 1951. The North Korean attack on South Korea in 1950 changed the course of Korean history, as it did MacArthur’s own. MacArthur assumed command of a United Nations–sanctioned coalition of Allies authorized to drive out the North Koreans. He saved a desperate situation by organizing a brilliant rearguard amphibious landing at Inchon, which outfl anked and destroyed much of the North Korean army, whose remnants hastily retreated back across the 38th parallel and then toward the Chinese border. The Chinese warned that they would become involved if their border was threatened. From his position of strength, MacArthur was dismissive of the Chinese threat until on October 25, 1950, the Chinese crossed the Yalu River and drove the Allies back. MacArthur wanted to now attack the Chinese with overwhelming force, including nuclear weapons, but President Truman feared this would involve the Soviet Union and create the framework for a new world war. MacArthur’s relations with Truman broke down. By March 1951 the prewar boundary position along the 38th parallel was established. This development encouraged Truman to ask for a cease-fi re and negotiations to end the confl ict. While Truman tried to secure such talks, MacArthur continued to threaten the Chinese and undercut Truman’s position as commander in chief. The president responded on April 11, 1951, by relieving McArthur of his command. Truman’s decision, because of MacArthur’s extreme popularity and infl uence, was not well received by many Americans, particularly those desiring a stronger cold war response to aggressive communist expansion. Upon his return to the United States, his fi rst time on the mainland in 11 years, MacArthur was invited to address Congress. It was here that he gave a powerful performance, where he emotionally and famously ended his speech with the declaration, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” MacArthur’s considerable popular acclaim led to the belief that he would be a 1952 Republican challenger for the presidency, or at least be the vice presidential candidate on a Robert Taft ticket. His political views and a Senate investigation of his dismissal helped cool some of this enthusiasm. The successful emergence of General Dwight David Eisenhower as the Republican presidential candidate ended MacArthur’s involvement in national politics. After leaving the army, MacArthur lived in New York and became chairman of the board at the Remington Rand Corporation. He did offer military advice to presidents, if requested, and did so for John F. Kennedy, when his advice was critical of the Pentagon policies of the day. He also managed a return visit in 1961 to the Philippines, where he received further accolades, including the naming of the Pan-Philippine Highway as MacArthur Highway in his honor. General Douglas MacArthur was one of the most highly decorated soldiers in U.S. history, holding numerous citations as well as the highest award, the Medal of Honor. He died at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington on April 5, 1964. See also Japanese constitution (1947). Further reading: Kinni, Theodore B. No Substitute for Victory: Lessons in Strategy and Leadership from General Douglas MacArthur. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005; Leary, William M. MacArthur and the American Century. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001; Manchester, William. American Caesar. New York: Bantam, 1996; Perret, Geoffrey. Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of Douglas MacArthur. Holbrook, MA: Adams Media, 1996; Wainstock, Dennis D. Truman, MacArthur and the Korean War. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. Theodore W. Eversole Macaulay, Herbert (1864–1945) Nigerian politician Herbert Macaulay was a Nigerian political leader, civil engineer, journalist, and musician. He was among the fi rst Nigerians to oppose British rule in the African nation. Macaulay’s grandfather, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, was the fi rst African bishop in Nigeria. Macaulay’s father, Thomas Babington Macaulay, was also a minister and an educator. Herbert was born and educated in Lagos, one of the 12 states in present-day Nigeria. In 1881 he became a clerk for the public works department in Lagos. His abilities soon won him the respect of the government, and he was offered a scholarship to study civil engineering in England. Returning from England three years later, Macaulay was named surveyor of the Crown lands for the Macaulay, Herbert 231 colony of Lagos. Soon, however, he became embittered by the racial inequities he saw in civil service. In 1898 Macaulay resigned his post and began his own surveying company. Macaulay’s dissatisfaction with colonial rule in Africa led him to express himself, contributing a number of articles to the Lagos Daily Times. Lagos and the entire Nigerian region were under the Lugard system called indirect rule. Britain established its power using extant administrative systems rather than imposing entirely new governmental institutions. Although the governments and offi cials were often Africans, they had no real power. British governors and primarily white legislatures made all the decisions. As a result, the leaders lost standing among their people, the people distrusted the British even more, and protests were common. In an effort to compromise, the British marginally increased African representation. This action was partly the result of Macaulay’s 1921 trip to London as a representative of the king of Lagos. Macaulay used the opportunity to denounce British rule for usurping the power of the king, or eleko, who Macaulay asserted was recognized by all Nigerians as their rightful ruler. In 1922 Lagos and Calabar were able to send African representatives to the legislature, but they remained in the minority. Macaulay then established the fi rst Nigerian political party, which was able to win three seats in the legislative council in 1923. The Nigerian National Democratic Party sought self-government for Lagos and all Nigeria, universal primary education, the building of schools, and more representation of Africans in government and civil service positions. Macaulay continued to work for these causes and in 1944 was instrumental in the formation of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC). Macaulay was elected president of the NCNC. The council brought together more than 40 different factions that represented many geographical, cultural, age, and ethnic groups. Although he is often called the father of Nigerian nationalism, Herbert Macaulay did not see Nigerian independence. He became ill in 1945 while on a speaking tour promoting the NCNC agenda. He returned to Lagos, where he died the same year. Nigeria was granted independence from Britain on October 1, 1960. For further reading: Anene, Joseph C. International Boundaries of Nigeria, 1885–1960: The Framework of an Emergent African Nation. New York: Humanities Press, 1970; Ezera, Kalu. Constitutional Development in Nigeria: An Analytical Study of Nigeria’s Constitution-Making Development and the Historical and Political Factors that Affected Constitutional Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. Jean Shepherd Hamm Madero, Francisco (1873–1913) Mexican president The president of Mexico from 1911 until 1913, Francisco Indalecio Madero González was a prominent revolutionary who was from one of the richest families in Mexico. He was born on October 30, 1873, at Parras de la Fuente, Coahuila, in northeastern Mexico. His grandfather Evaristo Madero (1828–1911), of Portuguese ancestry, had established massive plantations in the region, becoming fabulously rich and also donating large sums to fund schools and orphanages in the area. Francisco Madero went to school in Baltimore, Maryland, and then studied in Paris, where he attended the École des Hautes Études Commerciales before studying agriculture at the University of California, Berkeley. Madero came to respect both systems of democracy and was intent on going into politics. In 1904 Madero organized the Benito Juárez Democratic Club, with himself as the president, and they managed to get a candidate elected in the local municipal elections. In 1905 they decided to contest the next election for governor when the incumbent illegally stood for reelection and protests did not succeed in getting him ousted. In 1908 the Mexican dictator Porfi rio Díaz announced that he would not stand for reelection. He later decided that he would stand, which was unconstitutional. In 1909 Madero wrote The Presidential Succession of 1910, in which he argued for free and fair elections and that rules to stop incumbents from standing for reelection should be enforced. This led to the formation of the Mexican Anti-Reelectionist Center, with Madero as cofounder. This movement rapidly gained support, and Madero’s enemies decided to preempt the result by having him arrested. Madero was charged with stealing a guayule (a crop used in rubber cultivation). He evaded the police and managed to make it to the convention of the Anti-Reelectionists, where he was chosen as their candidate for the elections. On the eve of the election, Madero was arrested, as were 6,000 other Anti-Reelectionists. Porfi rio Díaz was reelected with 196 votes in the electoral college. 232 Madero, Francisco As soon as the elections had ended, after being released on a large bail posted by his father, Madero started a campaign against the reelection of Porfi rio Díaz. On October 4, 1910, Madero fl ed to Laredo, Texas. On November 20, 1910, he managed to persuade the people to take up arms and topple Díaz, who, Madero claimed, had subverted the constitution. Madero also declared that the elections were null and void. He was a better political speaker than a revolutionary leader, and the small force that he brought with him from the United States into Mexico was routed. His supporters, mainly drawn from the middle class and upper-class elite, were easily rounded up. This meant that Madero had to get help from many other people, some of whom had been traditional supporters of rebellion against the government, including the men who served Francisco “Pancho” Villa. At one battle Madero held back from sending his men to attack government soldiers at the border town of Ciudad Juárez, and it was left to Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco to order an assault. At the subsequent Treaty of Ciudad Juárez, signed on May 17, the president’s representatives agreed that he would stand down and so end the civil war. Diaz stood down on May 25, 1911, and Francisco León de la Barra became interim president. In October 1911 a presidential election was held, with Madero standing as presidential candidate. His former vicepresidential running mate, Francisco Váquez Gómez, did not like Madero’s plans to stand down the revolutionary forces, and José María Pino Suárez became the new running mate. Madero easily won the elections, and on November 6, 1911, he became president. As president, Madero introduced many reforms, including the freeing of all political prisoners and the abolition of the death penalty. He also lifted censorship of the press, although this did result in the various factions of his party managing to increase their hostility to each other. Madero allowed trade unions to organize railway workers, ending the system of giving preference to U.S. workers, and also, through a new department of labor, reduced the workday to a maximum of 10 hours and introduced regulations for the employment of women and children. His most far-reaching change in the political system was the ending of the jefaturas politicas, party bosses who had controlled various regions, towns, and provinces. They were replaced by nonpolitical municipal authorities who had the tasks of demobilizing the revolutionary soldiers, settling them back into the community, maintaining law and order, and overseeing local and national elections. In October 1911 Féliz Díaz, the nephew of Porfi rio Díaz, staged a revolt to overthrow Madero. In November 1911 Madero became the subject of another rebellion when Emiliano Zapata wanted a considerably more far-reaching agrarian reform program. In addition, some revolutionary soldiers felt that Madero had let them down and had not done enough for his former supporters. The economy began to stumble, and foreign companies and powerful Mexican business interests began to move against Madero. General Bernardo Reyes staged a third rebellion in December 1911, and Pascual Orozco led a rebellion in January 1912. Finally, Madero was overthrown in February 1913 when troops led by General Victoriano Huerta fought in the streets for 10 days. Madero was telephoned with the news that his opponents had seized the National Palace and had deposed him, believed to be the fi rst time that a head of state was telephoned to be told of his overthrow. Madero resigned on February 18, 1913, and was executed four days later. He was only 39. Further reading: Cumberland, Charles. The Meaning of the Mexican Revolution. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1967; ———. Mexican Revolution: Genesis Under Madero. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1952; Ross, Stanley. Francisco I. Madero, Apostle of Mexican Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1955. Justin Corfi eld Maginot line There was never unanimous consensus among military men about the lessons of World War I. When the adversaries of 1914–18 fought again in 1940, the Germans interpreted their experience as one that taught the need for a rapid and forceful offense. Interpreting that same confl ict quite differently, France planned to fi ght almost purely defensively in the fi rst stages. It would then attack the Germans, who they believed would have worn themselves out assaulting the centerpiece of French strategy, the Maginot line. Planned in the 1920s and essentially completed by 1935, the Maginot line (named after a French minister of war) was a network of fortifi cations on the border between Germany, Luxembourg, and Italy. The line was designed and built to serve several purposes. First, the Maginot line would protect French industry in the Alsace-Lorraine region. Second, a strong defensive line would help the French make the Maginot line 233 most of their available forces while mobilizing their remaining reserves. Finally, it was envisioned that the Germans would go directly for the line, allowing the French to hold them off and infl ict heavy casualties. The relatively fresh French would then launch an assault of their own and defeat the Germans on their own territory. The Maginot line was not an uninterrupted line like the trench system of World War I. Instead, it was a network of steel and concrete fortifi cations facing the Germans to the east and the Italians to the southeast. Each fort (commonly designated as an ouvrage, or work) was an independent structure; in all there were over 100 of these with additional minor fortifi cations. Using guns in a variety of calibers, each fort was within the range of another so they not only could fi re on assaulting troops but could also cover other forts in the immediate area. To add further support, there were permanent garrisons of “interval troops,” infantry units that would provide support in the areas between forts. The forts were among the most advanced technical structures of the day. Each had large storage areas for ammunition, facilities for food supplies, command centers, fi re control centers, miles of tunnels, small railroads, air-conditioning, electrical power plants, and water supplies. In addition, the guns were mounted in turrets that used a series of complex, highly advanced mechanical devices to change elevation or direction. The line was strong, it refl ected state-of-the-art technologies for the 1930s, and it even made a high degree of military sense. There were, however, drawbacks. Perhaps the most signifi cant of these was that the line did not go all the way to the North Sea. France did not extend the line for several reasons: the expense, the unsuitability of the terrain, and the appearance that France was abandoning Belgium. In fact, the French believed that while the Maginot line was holding, the newly mobilized French forces would join with the Belgians to contain the German advance. Together, probably with British assistance, they would then advance through Belgium and eventually invade Germany. At the same time, the French made an assumption that the very northern end of the Maginot line, which stopped near the Ardennes, would be safe, as the Germans would never launch a major offensive through the rough terrain there. Although war was declared in September 1939, there was no signifi cant action by either side on the western front until May 1940. This period, known as the phony war, allowed the British and the French to mobilize and bring their troops to hold positions without interference by the Germans. On the morning of May 10, over 100 German divisions attacked the French, British, Belgians, and Dutch. The main German attack went through the Ardennes forests and mountains in Luxembourg, south of Liege, exactly where the French had assumed it would never take place. Thus, the German tanks and motorized forces went around the extreme left fl ank of the Maginot line and straight into France. They bypassed the line and did not attack it directly until after the British evacuation from Dunkirk and the surrender of the French government. The Maginot line forts surrendered only when their mobile interval troops had retreated and they were completely surrounded. The Germans occupied the Maginot forts but did not maintain them. They used them only briefl y when the United States attacked some nearby French cities in 1944 and 1945. After the war the French army reoccupied them and used them. In the years of the cold war, they provided headquarters and communications centers that would have provided signifi cant protection in the case of a nuclear war. In the years between the world wars, the French were not alone in seeing the usefulness of fortifi cations. Although they would rely upon a highly mobile and powerful offensive, the Germans maintained two lines, one facing Poland (the East Wall) and one facing France (the West Wall, better known as the Siegfried line, which would be used in 1944 against the United States). In addition, Czechoslovakia constructed a line of defenses built with French assistance. Finally, Switzerland had built a complex of fortifi cations. Although not as extensive as the Maginot or German lines, it was well placed, using the mountainous terrain and command of the few lines of communications through the passes. The Maginot line has become a symbol. On one level it represents a defense that deluded its builders into thinking they need not do anything else but rely upon what seemed to be an impenetrable defense. It has also become a symbol or a shorthand expression for all of the reasons for France’s defeat in 1940. The irony is that had it been used properly, that is, supplemented with an acute understanding of what the enemy might do and not what the French wanted them to do, it might have been a symbol of victory. As designed, the Maginot line worked. It was the rest of France’s strategy that failed. Further reading: Allcorn, William. The Maginot Line 1928– 45. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2003; Kaufmann, J. E. Fortress France: The Maginot Line and French Defenses in World 234 Maginot line War II. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006; ———. Maginot Imitations: Major Fortifi cations of Germany and Neighboring Countries. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997; Martin, Benjamin F. France in 1938. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005; May, Ernest R. Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000; Rowe, Vivian. The Great Wall of France: The Triumph of the Maginot Line. London: Putnam, 1959. Robert N. Stacy Manchurian incident and Manchukuo The Manchurian, or Mukden, incident occurred on September 18, 1931. It was a Japanese attack against China and resulted in the establishment of a Japanese puppet state, Manchukuo. This incident was, in fact, the opening of Japan’s quest to conquer China that culminated in World War II in Asia. Japan had sought to control China’s northeastern provinces (Manchuria) since the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. As a result of its victory in that war, Japan had established a sphere of infl uence in southern Manchuria. It had built the Southern Manchurian Railway (SMR), which linked Mukden (or Shenyang), the administrative capital of the region, with Port Arthur, a port leased to Japan at the southern tip of the Liaodong (Liaotung) Peninsula in Manchuria. Capitalizing on China’s weakness during the dying years of the Qing (Ch’ing) dynasty and the early republic, Japan had obtained extensive additional mining and other rights throughout southern Manchuria. After 1912 this resource-rich region, which is larger than Germany and France combined, had been ruled by a Chinese bandit turned warlord named Zhang Zholin (Chang Tso-lin) and his allies, who survived by complying with Japan’s demands. In 1928 Zhang Zholin, known as the Old Marshal, was assassinated by Japanese offi cers of the Kwantung Army stationed in Manchuria, who hoped to seize the provinces in the ensuing chaos. However, astute actions of Zhang’s supporters ensured a smooth transition of power to his son Zhang Xueliang (Chang Hsueh-liang), known as the Young Marshal. The Young Marshal sponsored Chinese immigration to his sparsely populated land (approximately 30 million inhabitants in 1930) and undertook economic development projects. He also threw in his lot with the newly established Nationalist government at Nanjing (Nanking) led by Chiang Kai-shek. In 1930 Zhang led about 200,000 of his best troops to help Chiang defeat rebel warlords and remained in Beijing (Peking) to ensure stability in northern China. Meanwhile, economic depression had discredited the civilian governments in Japan and swayed many people toward support for the growing rightist, ultranationalist movement centered among ambitious junior military offi - cers. They formed the Society of the Cherry, the Black Dragon Society, the National Foundation Society, and others that advocated war and expansion as an answer to Japan’s problems and saw conquest of Manchuria as the fi rst step toward eventual control of all China and other Asian lands. These Japanese imperialists feared growing Chinese nationalism and the emergence of a strong and unifi ed China and moved to prevent it. On September 18, 1931, fi eld grade offi cers of the Kwantung Army staged a minor bombing incident along the railway track of the SMR line just outside Mukden. In a well-coordinated and well-planned act, the Kwantung Army simultaneously attacked over a dozen cities in Manchuria. Other units from Japan’s colony Korea soon joined the action. Too weak to resist militarily, China appealed to the League of Nations and the United States under the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Emergency sessions of the league repeatedly demanded that both sides cease military action. Both the Chinese and Japanese governments signaled compliance, but the Kwantung Army ignored orders and continued its conquest, to popular acclaim in Japan, forcing the cabinet to fall in December 1931. Japan then set up a puppet government in Manchuria, calling it Manchukuo, meaning “country of the Manchu,” and enticed the last Qing emperor, Pu-i (P’u-yi), to become its chief executive and emperor in 1934. The league dispatched an investigative mission under British diplomat Lord Lytton to Manchuria. Its report, submitted to the league in September 1932, refuted Japanese claims that its actions in Manchuria were motivated by self-defense, branded Manchukuo a puppet state that was completely controlled by Japanese military and civilian leaders, and recommended its restoration to China. The report was endorsed by the league assembly, with one dissenting vote: Japan’s. Japan then resigned from the league, signaling its failure as an effective international body. In 1933 Japanese forces added another Chinese province, Rehe (Jehol), which adjoined Manchuria, to its puppet state. The United States refused to recognize Manchukuo but took no other action. Japan’s government developed Manchuria with a network of modern industries designed to furnish raw Manchurian incident and Manchukuo 235 materials and fi nished products to the Japanese economy. They included coal mining, iron and steel works, and manufacturing. Roads and railways were also expanded to improve the infrastructure and facilitate the transport of goods and products to Japan. Japanese immigration was encouraged, and Japanese were granted privileged status, while the Chinese were strictly and brutally controlled. Manchuria became an arsenal and a granary for Japan. War with the United States after 1941 resulted in a reduction of the fl ow of equipment and fi nancing from Japan to Manchuria, causing factory production in the area gradually to grind to a halt. In defeat the Japanese overlords abandoned Pu-i and other Chinese puppets. Soviet troops poured into Manchuria as World War II ended, stripped equipment and facilities worth over 1 billion 1945 U.S. dollars, and shipped them to the Soviet Union. Japanese arms captured by the Red Army in Manchuria were later transferred to the Chinese Communist army. See also Lytton Commission and report; Yalta Conference. Further reading: Power, Brian. The Puppet Emperor: The Life of Pu Yi, The Last Emperor of China. New York: Universe Pub, 1986; P’u-i, Henry. The Last Manchu: The Autobiography of Henry Pu Yi, Last Emperor of China. Edited and translated by Kuo Ping Paul Tsai, introduced by Paul Kramer. New York: Putnam, 1967; Yoshihashi, Takehito. Conspiracy at Mukden: The Rise of the Japanese Military. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project was a secret U.S. weapons program that applied nuclear technology to create the fi rst atomic bombs. Although other nations, including Great Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan, had modest nuclear research programs during World War II, only the United States had the scientifi c talent, industrial capability, and fi nancial resources to successfully create, test, and eventually use the world’s most powerful weapon of the time. In December 1938 German scientists Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, and Lise Mietner discovered that bombarding an atom of radioactive uranium with neutrons caused its nucleus to split, thereby releasing an enormous burst of energy. This process would come to be called nuclear fi ssion. The development opened up the possibility for further research into harnessing this energy to be new sources of power as well as the possibility of new, more destructive types of weapons. In the 1930s the scientifi c community involved in nuclear research was international in character and included contributions from both Europe and North America. By 1939 political tensions in Europe caused many scientists to congregate in the United States and Britain, including many émigrés from Germany and Italy. Work on using nuclear fi ssion for military applications began in Germany on April 29, 1939, when the Reich Ministry of Education convened a secret conference and created a new research program. Germany also banned the export of uranium, an essential and rare element needed for this research. In 1939 Leo Szilard, a Hungarian émigré physicist, understood the military potential of nuclear fi ssion and the danger if Germany harnessed this power. Szilard went to the United States to enlist the help of Albert Einstein, at that time the most famous scientist in the world. In August 1939 Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning that a weapon based on nuclear fi ssion was possible and that Germany could be in the process of constructing such a weapon. Einstein further urged the president to begin a project to develop an atomic bomb. Roosevelt responded by creating a committee to study the military implications of nuclear physics. In December 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States went to war with Germany, Japan, and Italy. During the war the fundamental military strategy of the United States was to achieve complete victory at the lowest cost to U.S. lives. U.S. offi cials believed that an atomic bomb could shorten the war and reduce the number of U.S. casualties. By early 1942 British scientists concluded that a uranium weapon was feasible. Based on these reports the secret weapons program was put under the auspices of the U.S. War Department and was code-named the Manhattan Engineer District, more commonly known as the Manhattan Project, because it originally was to be headquartered in New York City. In September 1942 army general Leslie Groves was named director. Groves soon appointed J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist from the University of California at Berkeley, scientifi c director. The project soon encompassed a crew of over 100,000 people, involving 37 installations in 13 states, and more than a dozen university laboratories. Secrecy 236 Manhattan Project was considered to be of the utmost importance. In fact, many of the scientists and engineers were given only information that immediately affected their work, and they therefore were unaware of the larger implications of their research. On December 2, 1942, a team led by Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist émigré from Italy, created the fi rst controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago. This proved that an atomic bomb many times more powerful than conventional weapons was possible. The project focused on two main tasks. The fi rst was the design of the bomb. Most of this work was done at the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico under the direct supervision of Oppenheimer, who supervised the actual design and construction of the bomb. The other task, the production of nuclear fuel, was undertaken at a site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that focused on isolating uranium isotopes. Although the Manhattan Project had originally been conceived to combat a potential German nuclear weapon, work on the bomb would continue after Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945. U.S. offi cials were determined to use the bomb against Japan in order to end the war at the earliest possible moment with the fewest casualties. Secretary of War Henry Stimson told President Harry S. Truman that the bomb could create problems for the United States because it could not maintain a monopoly on the technology. Stimson requested that Truman convene a special committee to consider the implications of the new weapon. Truman agreed, and the Interim Committee, made up of high-level advisers, held fi ve meetings between May 9 and June 1, 1945. The committee debated the most effective use of the bomb in order to expedite a Japanese surrender. The committee determined that the weapon should be employed without prior warning, which would increase its psychological impact. The committee suggested that the purpose of the bomb should be to impede the Japanese capacity to wage war and to shock the Japanese with the overwhelming destructive power of the bomb. POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS The committee also debated the effects of the bomb on postwar international relations. Although the Soviet Union remained aligned with the United States and Great Britain, tensions between the Allies continued to grow, especially over Soviet control of Eastern Europe. The committee fully realized that the bomb could increase the already tense relationship with the Soviet Union. The committee discussed two ways of handling the issue. The fi rst would be to offer general information to the Soviets about the bomb in order to increase cooperation between the two allies. The other approach would be to use the bomb to gain diplomatic advantages in U.S. dealings with the Soviets, at least for the short term. The committee was opposed to even providing general information on the bomb to the Soviets and determined that the United States should work to ensure that it stayed ahead of the Soviet Union in the research and production of nuclear weapons. Truman accepted the committee’s fi ndings. For several months Truman had delayed a conference with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill until after a successful test of the plutonian bomb, planned for July, believing that a successful test would improve his bargaining position. On July 16, 1945, the United States successfully exploded the fi rst nuclear bomb in a test code-named Trinity at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The force of the bomb equaled 18,600 tons of TNT, approximately 2,000 times more powerful than the British “Grand Slam,” the largest conventional bomb used in World War II. ULTIMATUM At the end of the conference the Allies presented an ultimatum to Japan in what is known as the Potsdam Declaration. The declaration called on Japan to unconditionally surrender to the Allies or face “prompt and utter destruction.” The United States elected not to specifi cally refer to the atomic bomb by name. After Japan refused to surrender, Truman made the decision to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese home islands. The Manhattan Project instituted Project Alberta, which involved the wartime delivery of the completed bomb. Research groups were sent to Tinian, an island in the Pacifi c, which was the base from which the planes carrying the atomic weapons would ultimately depart. On August 6 at 8:15 a.m., the Enola Gay, piloted by Brigadier General Paul W. Tibbets, released a 15- kiloton uranium bomb nicknamed Little Boy 31,060 feet over the city of Hiroshima, Japan; 43 seconds later the bomb exploded 1,900 feet above the city. Witnesses reported seeing a searing fl ash of light, hearing a deafening roar, and feeling a massive rush of air. The 4.4 square miles surrounding the point of detonation were completely destroyed. Estimates suggest that over Manhattan Project 237 60,000 people died immediately, while possibly 70,000 more were to die over the next few years, many from acute exposure to radiation. Three days later, on August 9, Bock’s Car, piloted by Major Charles Sweeny, dropped a 21-kiloton bomb nicknamed Fat Man on Nagasaki. Originally, the mission had been to bomb the Japanese city of Kokura, but the crew was unable to do so because of a heavy haze. Instead, the plane went to its secondary target. Estimates suggest that 38,000 were killed immediately, with an estimated 35,000 additional fatalities as a result of injuries sustained during the bombing. In the aftermath of the bombings and the Soviet invasion of the Japanese colony of Manchuria, Emperor Hirohito broke a deadlock in the Supreme Council to accept the Potsdam Declaration as the basis for the Japanese surrender. The sole Japanese condition was that the emperor be allowed to retain his throne as titular ruler of the people. The Japanese government accepted the terms of surrender on August 15 and formally surrendered to General Douglas MacArthur in Tokyo Bay aboard the battleship USS Missouri on September 2. Further reading: Howes, Ruth H., and Caroline L. Herzenberg. Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999; Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986; Serber, Robert. The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lecture on How to Build an Atomic Bomb. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992; Stoff, Michael B., Jonathon F. Fanton, and R. Hal Williams, eds. The Manhattan Project: A Documentary History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991; Walker, J. Samuel. Prompt & Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Michael A. Ridge, Jr. Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) (1893–1976) Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong was the son of a prosperous farmer from the Hunan Province in central China. After graduating from normal school he worked as a library assistant at National Beijing (Peking) University, where he came under the infl uence of intellectuals disillusioned with Western democracies and turned to Marxism, hailing the success of the communist revolution in Russia. Mao joined a Marxist study club organized by faculty leaders of Beijing University Chen Duxiu (Ch’en Tuhsiu) and Li Dazhao (Li Ta-chao). In July 1921 he was one of 12 men who formed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai; Chen was elected general secretary of the party. In January 1923 the father of the Chinese republic, Sun Yat-sen, formed a (First) United Front with Soviet representative Adolf Joffe under which the Soviet Union gave advice and aid to Sun’s Kuomintang (KMT, Nationalist Party) in return for admission of members of the CCP to the KMT. As a result, Mao was elected a reserve member of the Central Executive Committee of the KMT and made head of the farmers’ organization in the United Front government in Canton. Mao participated in the Northern Expedition led by Chiang Kai-shek against the warlords and helped rouse the peasants in Hunan A Chinese soldier guards in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in front of a portrait of Mao. Mao held unlimited power in post-1949 China. 238 Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) against the warlord regime and economic inequities. In 1927 Chiang Kai-shek purged the CCP from areas under his control. Mao escaped to the hills of Jiangxi (Kiangsi) Province in central China. Between 1927 and 1933 Mao and other Communists who fl ed the Nationalist dragnet established a Chinese Soviet Republic in the hills of Jiangxi, where they implemented violent land reforms while their Red Army, under commander Zhu De (Chu Teh), fought off KMT armies sent against them. However, decisive defeats by an army personally led by Chiang forced the battered CCP to fl ee in the Long March, which lasted a year (1934–35). Mao consolidated his power in a conference at Zungyi (Tsungyi) during the fl ight and maintained it throughout the subsequent Yanan (Yenan) period of the CCP. Although Yanan’s location in remote northwestern China bought the CCP time, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War ensured its survival because it forced the KMT to call off its anti-Communist campaign and form a Second United Front. The CCP grew explosively during the eightyear war (1937–45). Mao wrote extensively during the war and mapped out strategies for future victory against the KMT. Civil war broke out almost immediately after the defeat of Japan. After the United States failed to mediate a cease-fi re, it withdrew support from the KMT government. A combination of many factors led to the KMT’s defeat in 1949 and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, which Mao led as chairman of both the CCP and the government. China became allied with the Soviet Union, received Soviet aid, and followed its model of land collectivization and industrialization. Impatient to surpass the Soviet Union, Mao inaugurated in 1958 the Great Leap Forward, which dragooned the people into communes and wrecked the economy with wildly unrealistic programs. As a result, about 30 million people died in a Mao-made famine, the greatest in human history. Mao’s pragmatic colleagues then forced him to give up his chairmanship of the government in 1959 and began repairing the catastrophically broken economy. Mao fumed in impotence between 1959 and 1966, then formed a coalition with his wife, Jiang Qing (Chiang Ch’ing), young students, and army leader Lin Biao (Lin Piao) and launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966. The student Red Guards ousted the pragmatists, wreaked havoc throughout the land, and returned Mao to power in a cult of personality that rivaled Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s. China did not begin recovery from the disastrous Cultural Revolution until the increasingly sick and senile Mao died in 1976. See also anti-Communist encirclement campaigns, china (1930–1934); May Fourth Movement/intellectual revolution. Further reading: Fairbank, John K., and Albert Feuerwerker, eds. Cambridge History of China. Part 2, Vol. 13, Republican China 1912–1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Li Zhisui. The Private Life of Chairman Mao. New York: Random House, 1994; MacFarquhar, Roderick, and John K. Fairbank, eds. Cambridge History of China. Part 1, Vol. 14, The People’s Republic, The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1946–1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, and Part 2, Vol. 15, The People’s Republic, Revolution Within the Chinese Revolution 1966– 1978. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; Mac- Farquhar, Roderick, and Michael Schoenhals. Mao’s Last Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006; Spence, Jonathan. Mao Zedong. New York: Viking Press, 1997. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur March on Rome The October 1922 March on Rome entered into the mythology of Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party as the moment when the Fascists conclusively demonstrated their power over the Italian government and people. In fact, they had already displayed their collective ability to destroy law and order, to undermine parliamentary rule, and to attract the support of Italians fearful either of falling out of the lower middle class or of losing their extensive property holdings pending a socialist revolution. Thus, the march symbolized the transfer of power and authority that had already occurred when the king had refused to proclaim martial law against the Fascists and had then invited Mussolini to become prime minister. Immediately after World War I, Italians received universal suffrage. Electoral politics acquired a new tone as peasants and workers began to vote. The failure of the Popular Party and the Italian Socialists (PSI) to cooperate in the chamber of deputies, despite their shared concern for Italy’s poor and working class, created an opportunity for Mussolini and fatally weakened parliamentary democracy in the country. March on Rome 239 In the elections of 1920, the PSI had acquired control over Milan, Bologna, 25 provincial councils, and 2,200 district councils. These victories dislodged and irritated traditional elites. Some smaller landed proprietors also sympathized with the Fascist efforts to eviscerate the PSI, as many had managed to secure land only in recent years and feared that they would have it taken away. Given the notable labor strife and class confl ict in urban, industrialized areas, Mussolini attracted the support of major industrialists, including Alberto Pirelli and Giovanni Agnelli (Fiat). Meanwhile, nationalists continued to harbor bitter feelings about the government that had accepted the Treaty of Versailles, which had awarded Italy almost none of the territory that it had expected to gain upon allying with the Triple Entente during World War I. They wanted to erase memories of the snubs suffered by Italy at the hands of her erstwhile war partners. A large number of veterans and lower-ranking soldiers undertook paramilitary activities on behalf of the Fascists as well as appearing in Fascist rallies. By late 1920 the Fascists had control over life in much of northern Italy. Local Fascist leaders such as Italo Balbo used intimidation to wrest control of cities and towns from elected socialist governments. By mid-1921 the Fascist militias were often assistants to the offi cial police forces. Conservatives and government offi cials generally ignored the Fascist contributions to public violence; indeed, many appreciated the militancy and virility of the Fascists as crucial to the restoration of Italian national honor. Mussolini adeptly shifted his rhetoric and program in the interests of retaining his new group of supporters. He virtually eliminated references to class confl ict and social revolution, replacing them with evocations of the need for discipline and strong leadership in Italy. The queen mother and the duke of Aosta avidly supported the Fascist movement. He also placated the Roman Catholic Church by avoiding anticlerical rhetoric and by cultivating good relations with the new pope, Pius XI (elected in 1922), who worried about communism far more than any possible threat from the Fascists. Having amassed such support among propertied and infl uential Italians, Mussolini could contemplate seizing power. This proved unnecessary, however, since the existing government had already lost control over the country. While heading to Naples for the Fascist Party Congress in late October 1922, Mussolini threatened that the Fascists would seize power following a mass march to Rome if they did not receive at least fi ve ministerial posts. Prime Minister Facta asked the king to declare martial law in order to prevent such a march, but the king refused. Instead, he suggested a coalition government. Mussolini rejected the proposal, anticipating a complete victory if he was patient. This expectation was fulfi lled on October 29, 1922, when King Victor Emmanuel asked him to form a government. The March on Rome of approximately 30,000 Fascists thus served little practical purpose except as a celebration of having achieved power. Mussolini himself reached the outskirts of Rome by rail. Wearing a suit and walking into Rome at the head of his ill-clad band of Fascists, Mussolini looked every inch the bourgeois politician on whom the traditional elites of Italy could rely. Further reading: Bosworth, R. J. B. Mussolini. London: Arnold, 2002; DeGrand, Alexander J. Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Development. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982; Elazar, Dahlia S. The Making of Fascism: Class, State, and Counter-Revolution, Italy, 1919–1921. Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2001; Morgan, Philip. Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945. London: Routledge, 2002. Melanie A. Bailey Marco Polo Bridge incident See Sino-Japanese War. Mariátegui, José Carlos (1894–1930) Peruvian journalist and political activist José Carlos Mariátegui was the founder of the Socialist Party of Peru, which was later transformed into the Communist Party of Peru. He was also one of the more infl uential social theorists in Latin America. José Carlos Mariátegui was born on June 14, 1894, at Moquegua, a dry, dusty town on the outskirts of the Atacama Desert, close to Peru’s southern border with Chile. It was 11 years after Peru’s disastrous war with its southern neighbor. His father was Francisco Javier Mariátegui Requejo, a grandson of Francisco Javier Mariátegui (1793–1884), one of the original signatories of Peru’s declaration of independence in 1821. When José Carlos Mariátegui was a young boy, his father abandoned the family and left his mother, María Amalia La Chira Ballejos, to look after the three children. They moved to Lima and then to the town of Huacho, north of Lima, close to where San Martín had proclaimed Peru’s independence. When he was eight José Mariátegui suffered a bad injury to 240 Marco Polo Bridge incident his left leg and spent four years in a hospital in Lima. When he was 14 he started working for the newspaper La Prensa, initially running errands, then becoming a linotypist, and ending up as a journalist. He also found work with the magazine Mundo Limeno. In 1916 Mariátegui decided to leave La Prensa to join a new slightly left-wing daily newspaper called El Tiempo. By this time he had been heavily infl uenced by the Spanish socialist Luis Araquistán. After two years Mariátegui had suffi cient confi dence to leave El Tiempo and try to establish his own magazine but had trouble getting anybody to agree to print it. He then decided to establish his own paper, La Razón, which was the fi rst avowedly socialist paper in Peru. In May 1919 La Razón supported a strike held to try to get legislation restricting work to an eight-hour day. It also wanted price controls for basic goods. This rapidly began to annoy the president, Augusto B. Leguía y Salcedo, who decided to defuse the matter by forcing Mariátegui to take a government scholarship to study in Europe. As a result, Mariátegui left to go to Europe in 1920. After a brief time in France, Germany, and Austria, he moved to Italy and there married Ana Chaippe, returning to Peru in 1923. Very soon Mariátegui was becoming well known as a Marxist and also a friend of Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, who led the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance. Together they worked on Claridad, a Marxist magazine, and when Haya de la Torre was deported Mariátegui remained as editor, dedicating its fi fth issue, in March 1924, to Lenin. Personal tragedy was to strike soon afterward when he had to have his left leg amputated. However, he struggled on and in the following year, 1925, wrote La escena contemporánea (The contemporary scene), a collection of essays on the problems facing the world at the time. In the next year he was running the magazine Amauta, which projected his ideas of socialism and Latin American culture throughout South and Central America. He was arrested in 1927 and placed under house arrest by Leguía. Initially, Mariátegui planned to move to Buenos Aires or Montevideo but in the end he decided to stay in Lima, where he established the Socialist Party of Peru in October 1928, with himself as general secretary. This political party later became the Communist Party of Peru. As he was formalizing his ideas, also in 1928, Mariátegui wrote Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, which covered the social history of Peru from a Marxist standpoint. In 1928 and 1929 Mariátegui founded and edited the journal Labor, about the labor movement in Peru. Mariátegui helped in the founding of the General Confederation of Peruvian Workers in 1929, and this body was represented at the subsequent Constituent Congress of the Latin American Trade Union Conference, which was held at Montevideo. Mariátegui died on April 16, 1930, from complications that resulted from his injury to his leg. He was 35 years old. Further reading: Becker, Marc. Maríategui and Latin American Marxist Theory. Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1993; Harris, Richard L. Marxism, Socialism, and Democracy in Latin America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992. Justin Corfi eld Marshall in China (1945–1947) George Marshall (1880–1959) was one of the architects of the Allied World War II victory in Europe. In an attempt to prevent civil war in China after victory over Japan, U.S. president Harry S. Truman appointed Marshall special ambassador to China in November 1945. He was charged with helping the Nationalist, or Kuomintang (KMT), government reestablish its authority in areas that had been controlled by Japan during the war, including Manchuria, but without involving the United States in direct military intervention. He was also to urge Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek to convene a national conference to establish a united democratic government, making U.S. aid to his government contingent on achieving that goal. Marshall arrived in China’s wartime capital, Chongqing (Chungking), in December 1945 and obtained agreement by both the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to appoint a representative each to a committee under his chairmanship that would work out the terms of cooperation. On January 10, 1946, both sides agreed to commence an immediate cease-fi re, to convene a Political Consultative Conference that would work on the terms for forming a coalition government, and to work toward the integration of KMT and CCP military units into a national army. Happy with his success, Marshall returned to the United States in March, and President Truman announced the establishment of a U.S. military mission to China to help it train a national army. Because of a history of bitter relations, the KMT and the CCP mistrusted each other, nor did either party trust Marshall, but they paid him lip service because he Marshall in China (1945–1947) 241 represented the powerful United States. Civil war resumed in April 1946 and initially went well for the Nationalists, who announced the convening of a national assembly in November 1946 to write a constitution for the nation. The CCP immediately announced that it would boycott the national assembly. Realizing that the United States had totally failed to mediate an end to the Chinese Civil War, Truman recalled Marshall in January 1947 and stopped most aid to China. Marshall issued a farewell message before leaving China in which he blamed both Chinese parties for the failure of his mediation. On the other hand, each Chinese party accused Marshall of partiality toward the other. The Nationalist government felt abandoned by the United States. Marshall was appointed secretary of state upon his return. He ignored the report of a fact-fi nding mission led by General Albert Wedemeyer concerning a continued U.S. role in China and decided on a hands-off policy in Chinese affairs. The CCP won the civil war in 1949. See also mao zedong. Further reading: Beal, John R. Marshall in China. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970; May, Ernest R. The Truman Administration and China, 1945–1949. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975; Pogue, Forrest C. George C. Marshall: Statesman, 1945–1949. New York: Viking, 1987; Tang, Tsou. America’s Failure in China, 1941–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963; Wedemeyer, Albert. Wedemeyer Reports! New York: Devin-Adair, 1959. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur Martí, Agustín Farabundo (1893–1932) El Salvadoran revolutionary leader Martí was born on May 5, 1893, in Teotepeque, El Salvador, a small town in the region of La Libertad. He was the sixth of 14 children born to wealthy landholding parents. His family estate consisted of two haciendas and fi ve square miles of land. He was educated at the academy of the Silesian Fathers, excelling in both studies and sports. He graduated around 1913 and entered the National University. However, he immediately got into trouble over differences of philosophy with his professors and even challenged one of them to a duel. Martí was exiled from the country more than once because of his radical beliefs. Some sources have Martí taking part in the Mexican Revolution as a member of the “Red Guards,” but this seems to be part of the myth surrounding him. He most likely lived in Honduras and Guatemala. In 1925 he became a charter member of the organization that began communist activity in Guatemala. However, the organization’s president did not want foreign leftists, so Martí was forced out. In 1927 the government of El Salvador began to persecute Martí. While imprisoned he went on a hunger strike, and many university students rallied around him. Because of this pressure, he was released, and he went to New York in 1928. He was picked up in a police raid and decided to return to El Salvador. He returned via Nicaragua and came into contact with Sandino’s anti- American campaign. During the year he was associated with Sandino and his movement, Martí tried to convert him, unsuccessfully, to communism. After leaving the Sandino forces, Martí went to Mexico City to visit his mother. At one point he was arrested and jailed for allegedly taking part in the coup of Daniel Flores. In 1930 Martí was in Guatemala and then returned to El Salvador in May. He was arrested and put on an enforced ocean voyage. He returned in February 1931, determined to stir up trouble. Conditions were horrible in El Salvador, and Martí took advantage to lead uprisings. He led a march on the president’s house and was arrested on April 9. After being released from jail in 1931, Martí continued his activities. He was arrested again in 1932 during an attempted major uprising. Many bombs had been found throughout the capital city, and Martí said there were many more. Because of this he was tried, found guilty, and executed by fi ring squad on February 1, 1932. The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front was named after him. Further reading: Alexander, Robert. Communism in Latin America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1957; Anderson, Thomas. Matanza. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1992; Karnes, Thomas. The Failure of Union: Central America, 1824–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961. James E. Seelye, Jr. Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue (1850–1937) Czechoslovakian president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (Thomas Masaryk in English) was a leading campaigner for Czech independence from 242 Martí, Agustín Farabundo Austria-Hungary both prior to and during World War I and the fi rst president of Czechoslovakia in 1918. Masaryk was born in Moravia on March 7, 1850, the son of a Slovak coachman. Educated to become a teacher, Masaryk worked as a locksmith for a short time. He subsequently entered the German College at Brünn/Brno (Moravia) in 1865 and continued his studies at the University of Vienna, where he obtained a doctorate in philosophy in 1876. When studying in Leipzig for a year, he met an American student, Charlotte Garrigue, whom he married in 1878 and from whom he took his middle name. The following year Masaryk was appointed lecturer in philosophy at Vienna University. In 1882 he became a professor of philosophy at the Czech University of Prague. Early in the same year the Austrian government had been forced to divide the former common university into a German and a Czech section, thereby offering career opportunities for Czech scholars like Masaryk. As a philosopher, Masaryk was strongly infl uenced by neo-Kantianism, the British Puritan ethics, and the teachings of the Czech Hussites. Simultaneously, Masaryk showed a lifelong critical interest in the frictions of modern capitalism. His fi rst major works were devoted to suicide in modern civilization as well as to the Czech Reformation and the Czech national revival of the fi rst half of the 19th century. Masaryk founded two scientifi c periodicals, one of which he transformed into a political review in 1889. This was the beginning of his political career. In this early phase his attention was devoted to the Slovaks in the Kingdom of Hungary. By criticizing the outdated policy of many Slovak politicians, he became the idol of the younger progressives in Slovakia. Deeply impressed by contemporary ideas of full democracy, Masaryk became increasingly estranged from the conservative and Catholic concept of the so-called Old Czech Party. He distanced himself from this party’s deep loyalty toward the Habsburg monarchy and sided with the liberal Young Czech Party. As a member of the Austrian parliament, the Reichsrat, Masaryk represented fi rst the radical Young Czechs, but he soon disagreed with their emotional nationalism and resigned his seat in 1893, only two years after his election. In the spring of 1900, he founded his own moderate Realist Party. Both parties, however, were determined to achieve the creation of an independent Czech state. After his reelection to the Reichsrat, Masaryk became the outstanding fi gure of the Slav opposition to the government of Emperor Franz Josef. Masaryk, as a parliamentarian, made himself a name as a sharp opponent of Austria-Hungary’s alliance with imperial Germany. He defended the rights of the Croats and Serbs, who had come under heavy pressure after Austria-Hungary had formally annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. With the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Masaryk fl ed to Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1914 and then onward to London the following March. In western Europe Masaryk was recognized as the spokesman and representative of what he called the underground Czech liberation movement. He worked tirelessly to encourage and then commit Allied support for the creation of a Czech state following the war. While staying in London, he cofounded the Czechoslovak National Council, located in Paris. Masaryk’s private and scientifi c acquaintances in France and Great Britain helped him to get in contact with leading Allied politicians. With their assistance Masaryk was able to propagate the Czech war aims: the restitution of Bohemia’s historical independence, which the Habsburgs had curtailed after the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648); the establishment of a union between the Czechs and the Slovaks; and the dismemberment of the Austro- Hungarian monarchy in favor of new states to be created according to ethnic principles. Throughout the war Masaryk worked closely with fellow Czech independence campaigner Eduard Beneš. The latter attended to political negotiations among the Allies, while Masaryk functioned in a more ambassadorial capacity. After the breakdown of the czarist monarchy in Russia in the spring of 1917, Masaryk transferred his headquarters to Russia. Shortly after the Russian Revolution Masaryk set out for the United States. Czech and Slovak groups of emigrants there welcomed him as the recognized negotiator of Czechoslovak future independence. Negotiations with President Woodrow Wilson and his secretary of state, Robert Lansing, were successful, resulting in the Lansing Declaration of May 1918. This declaration expressed the sympathy of the Wilson government with the Czechoslovak freedom movement and supported the formation of an independent Czech state after the conclusion of the war. ALLIED POWER On June 3, 1918, the Allied governments recognized the Czechoslovak state as an Allied power. The frontiers of this future state were demarcated according to Masaryk’s proposals. Masaryk concluded the so-called Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue 243 Pittsburgh Convention with the Slovak associations existing in the United States. This agreement promised the Slovaks a large measure of home rule and played a decisive role in the Czech-Slovak union in 1918–19. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in late October 1918 led to a fi rm commitment from the Allied governments to the immediate creation of a new state, Czechoslovakia, in mid-November. Masaryk was elected the new country’s fi rst president on November 14, 1918. He was reelected in 1920, 1927, and 1934. During the war Masaryk had promised that the new state would respect the minority rights of its numerous Hungarian and German ethnic groups. Masaryk was one of the fi rst leading European politicians to publicly express his anxiety over the future of Europe after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933. Aged 85, Masaryk resigned his post as president of the republic in December 1935 and died nearly two years later, on September 14, 1937. He was succeeded by Beneš. Masaryk’s son Jan served as foreign minister in the Czechoslovak government in exile (1940–1945) and in the governments of 1945 to 1948. Although deeply involved in political fi ghting during the last 45 years of his life, Masaryk also wrote two monumental books before World War I. In a study on Marxism published in 1898, he dealt with the contradictions of both socialism and capitalism. In a book titled Russia and Europe he provided a survey of Russia’s crises with respect to social, intellectual, and religious problems. Masaryk opposed racial prejudice, as shown by his publicly defending a Jew falsely accused of ritual murder. During the 1930s Masaryk’s Czechoslovakia was one of the few European countries that accepted refugees of various political orientations. A huge number of refugees from Germany, Austria, and the Soviet Union found shelter in Czechoslovakia, especially in the capital, Prague. Further reading: Capek, Karel. Talks with T.G. Masaryk. Edited with a Substantially New Translation by Michael Henry Heim. North Haven, CT: Catbird Press, 1995; Kovtun, George J. Masaryk & America: Testimony of a Relationship. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1988; Neudörfl , Marie. Masaryk’s Understanding of Democracy before 1914. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian and East European Studies, 1989; Polson, Edward William. Masaryk. London: Campion Press, 1960. Martin Moll May Fourth Movement/ intellectual revolution In 1919 a student-led protest movement became the catalyst for an intellectual revolution in China. On May 4th, 1919, thousands of university students in the Chinese capital city, Beijing (Peking), gathered outside Tiananmen (Gate of Heavenly Peace) to protest the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that would transfer Germany’s sphere of infl uence in Shandong (Shantung) province to Japan. They targeted the perfi dy of the great powers and burned down the residence of a leading Chinese offi cial, accusing the corrupt warlord-dominated government of selling out China’s interests. The arrest of some students led to a brief boycott of classes. News of the incident spread to 200 other cities where students organized into unions and rallied local merchants, workers, and citizens to join a general strike and boycott of Japanese goods. The ensuing unrest led to widespread confrontations with police and mass arrests but resulted in the resignation of pro-Japanese cabinet ministers and China’s refusal to sign the peace treaty with Germany. The immediate goals of the May Fourth protests were thus achieved. The term May Fourth Movement fi rst appeared in an article by Luo Jialun (Lo Chia-luen), a student leader at the National Beijing University, published in a journal named The Weekly Review. In Luo’s words the movement “represented the spirit of sacrifi ce on the part of the students, . . . and the spirit of self-determination on the part of the Chinese nation.” As the fi rst mass patriotic demonstration organized and led by youthful students, it was a landmark event in 20th-century Chinese history. During the following decades the May Fourth Movement came to denote a broader phenomenon in China’s response to the challenges of the modern world. The political chaos and diplomatic weakness that followed the republican revolution of 1911 and growing Japanese imperialism exhibited in its Twenty-one Demands in 1915 that aimed at making China a Japanese protectorate had created a deep sense of urgency among modern educated young Chinese. In 1917 Cai Yuanpei (Ts’ai Yuan-p’ei), a distinguished scholar who had attained the highest Chinese degree and also studied in Germany, was appointed president of National Beijing University. Cai insisted on academic freedom and built up a strong and diverse faculty that attracted China’s brightest students who became leaders of the intellectual revolution. The faculty journal New Youth and student journal New Tide became the beacons of new thought and intel- 244 May Fourth Movement/intellectual revolution lectual debate that included such subjects as Social Darwinism and Marxism, the writings of John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, and the importance of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. They attacked outmoded traditions rooted in Confucianism and advocated language and other reforms in Chinese society, including the status of women. The broadened quest for reforms that lasted into the 1920s was also called the New Culture Movement, the Chinese Renaissance, or the Chinese Enlightenment. The most visible success of this movement was the replacement of the stilted classical written style with vernacular Chinese that was led by Chen Duxiu (Ch’en Tu-hsiu), who later was a founder of the Chinese Communist Party, and Hu Shi (Hu Shih), who remained committed to Western liberalism. The language reforms helped to spread literacy and mass education and the development of new literary genres that brought China into the mainstream of modern world literature. The intellectual revolution brought about the introduction of Western methodologies of critical reasoning to the social and natural sciences. It also advocated individual freedoms and the democratic values of the West. A parting of ways took place among the activists after the tumultuous events of 1919 subsided. While many of the Western-oriented liberal intellectuals resumed their academic pursuits, the radicals turned toward Marxism and the model of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution. With the encouragement of representatives of the Comintern (Third Communist International), several faculty members of National Beijing University and some students and their allies formed the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Other patriotic youths turned to Dr. Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Chinese Republic, who responded to the changes by reorganizing his Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang. The Nationalist and Communist Parties would fi rst coalesce and then split in 1927 to become locked in a life-and-death struggle for control of China that would last throughout the 20th century. During the 20th century efforts to implement the goals of the May Fourth Movement met countless obstacles. In China after 1949, supporters of its goals suffered grievously during numerous campaigns launched by the Communist Party. Nevertheless, the values it expounded have survived to the present, and its memories have been selectively invoked during the commemorations of the movement to the present in both the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China. During the war of resistance against Japanese aggression (1937–45), May 4th was celebrated as National Youth Day; it is still designated as Youth Day The Forbidden City in Beijing (Peking), China, in the early 20th century: Central government policy has been at odds with the values of the May Fourth Movement, which have survived to the present. May Fourth Movement/intellectual revolution 245 in the People’s Republic of China. On its 70th anniversary in 1989, students gathered at Tiananmen Square in Beijing and hoisted the twin banners “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy,” slogans fi rst raised by Chen Duxiu in 1918. Since the 1980s there has been growing interest in the study of Hu Shi, the preeminent liberal thinker of the May Fourth era; Hu had earlier been harshly criticized by the regime of the People’s Republic. Ironically, Confucius, once the target of attacks by radicals among the May Fourth intellectuals and later consigned to “the dustbin of history” by Maoist extremists during the Cultural Revolution, is once again honored as China seeks to remake its image in the 21st century. See also Shandong Question (1919). Further reading: Chow, Tse-tsung. The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960; De Francis, John. Nationalism and Language Reform in China. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950; Goldman, Merle, ed. Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977; Lin, Yu-sheng. The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Anti-Traditionalism in the May Fourth Era. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979; Schwarcz, Vera. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Jiu-Fong L. Chang Mexican constitution (1917) To many modern Mexicans the Mexican constitution of 1917 is an important document in their history, one that embodies the values of the Mexican Revolution. It was the fourth constitution written for Mexico, and its inception occurred under the leadership of Venustiano Carranza, president of Mexico from 1917 to 1920. It established sweeping reforms in regard to land distribution and labor, severely curtailed the power and autonomy of the Catholic Church, guaranteed the rights of Mexican citizens, and sanctioned a federal system and balance of powers. Since 1917 the constitution has been ignored, changed, and reinterpreted many times depending on the leadership and political climate, with a total of 350 amendments added to it. Carranza initiated the creation of the 1917 constitution to bolster his claims that he would transform the ideals of the revolution into actual practice. In January 1915 Carranza embarked on a campaign to prepare Mexico for a new constitution. In his capacity as fi rst chief during the preconstitutional period (1915 and 1916), he decreed in September 1916 that elections would be held the following month in every Mexican city and town to elect delegates to the constituent congress, which would draft the constitution. Many regional leaders and revolutionaries loyal to Carranza but dedicated to implementing the ideology of the revolution to the point of radicalism were elected to the congress. The constituent congress convened in November 1916 in the town of Querétaro, the location of Emperor Maximilian’s execution in June 1867. Given only two months to draft the document, the delegates quickly focused on the task at hand. The moderate liberals of the delegation found themselves head to head with many of the revolution’s military leaders. These men attacked the Catholic Church fi rst, focusing on its role in education and proposing article 3, which barred the church from primary education and secularized private institutions. After a spirited debate coupled with powerful speeches, the radicals passed article 3, alarming Carranza. He sent General Alvaro Obregón to the congress in hopes that he would moderate the leftists. Instead, Obregón threw his powerful military and political weight behind Múgica and the other reformers. The delegates went on to propose several articles to the constitution characterized by sweeping social and economic reform. Article 27 proposed radical new land policies that reversed Díaz’s policy of encouraging foreign investment and land ownership. Article 27 attempted to restore national sovereignty by making these restrictions retroactive, allowing the president to seize land and property held by foreign owners. This opened the door for peasant communities to petition for the return of lands lost to large estates. The relationship between the church and the state was the subject of more than one article of the Constitution of 1917. Besides article 3, which excluded the church from education, articles 27 and 130 stripped the church of much of its power in Mexico. Barred from holding or administering property, the church lost a signifi cant portion of its revenues used to support charitable works. Clergy members could no longer vote, hold political offi ce, or assemble for political purposes. Múgica and his supporters introduced article 130 at the very end of the constituent congress when delegates were weary of debate. Some scholars cite fatigue in the passing of the severe anticlerical provisions, as the vote was taken at 2:00 a.m. on the fi nal meeting day of the congress. 246 Mexican constitution (1917) Labor also took center stage on the radical agenda for the new constitution. Article 5 ended the system of debt peonage, the misery of many poor Mexican workers. Article 123 organized labor by authorizing labor unions and the right to strike. It also put in place several regulations to protect workers, especially women and children. It established an eight-hour day with one day of rest per week. Women and children were barred from working after 10:00 p.m., children less than six years old were forbidden to work, and those under 16 could only work six-hour days. Wages had to be paid in cash, and a minimum wage was set. The constitution of 1917 set up a framework for radical change in Mexico. However, it also granted the president great power, and Carranza ignored many of its reforms. The provisions set forth by the constituent congress would take almost the entire 20th century to be implemented, and some would never be fully realized. The administration of Lázaro Cárdenas, from 1934 to 1940, did the most work on realizing the ideals of the constitution, especially in regard to land reform, labor, and education. After 1940 some articles were deemphasized, such as article 27, which discouraged foreign investments. Despite such permutations of the constitution of 1917, it remains an important document in Mexico’s modern history that cleared the way for considerable social and economic reform. Further reading: Bakewell, Peter. A History of Latin America, c. 1450 to the Present. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004; Beezley, William H., and Colin M. MacLachlan. El Gran Pueblo: A History of Greater Mexico. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999; Camín, Héctor Aguilar, and Lorenzo Meyer. In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution: Contemporary Mexican History, 1910–1989. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993; Coerver, Don M., Suzanne B. Pasztor, and Robert M. Buffi ngton. Mexico: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Culture and History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004; Quirk, Robert E. The Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church, 1910–1929. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. Kathleen Legg Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) In one of the most violent, chaotic, and consequential events in modern Latin American history, from 1910 to 1920 Mexico was convulsed in a massive social revolution and civil war. The fi rst major social revolution in postcolonial Latin America, the Mexican Revolution arose from complex origins and bequeathed an equally complex legacy. The origins of the revolution can be traced to two major trends from the late 19th century, both set in motion under the dictatorship of Porfi rio Díaz (the Porfi riato, 1876–1910) that transformed the country’s economy and society in far-reaching ways. Both trends resulted from rapid capitalist development combined with the oligarchic nature of Porfi rian politics. These two trends gave the revolution its dual character as both a middle-class revolt and a mass popular uprising. The fi rst trend was the process by which capitalist development fostered the formation of an emergent middle and professional class that was systematically shut out of the nation’s political life by the Porfi rian oligarchy. Thus, the revolution began in 1910 as a middleclass revolt against the corrupt Díaz dictatorship, led by the wealthy landowner Francisco Madero under the slogan “no reelection.” In essence, this emergent middle and professional class, represented by Madero and other reformers, sought a greater political voice and an opening up of the political system, in keeping with classical liberal democratic principles. The second trend had its roots in the countryside, where the great majority of Mexicans (around 90 percent) resided. This was the process of land concentration and related forms of rural oppression, which resulted in growing landlessness, poverty, hunger, and destitution among the rural majority. Thus, when Madero launched his revolt against Díaz in 1910, it opened up an opportunity for the rural poor to press their claims and vent their accumulated grievances, principally the return of the lands that had been taken from them in the previous decades and the exaction of retribution against abusive local powerholders. These were the origins of the revolution’s popular, agrarian impulse, epitomized in the fi gure of Emiliano Zapata and his slogan “Land and Liberty.” These twin engines of revolution—a middle- and professional-class reformist impulse and a lower-class, agrarian, socialrevolutionary impulse—combined to make the Mexican Revolution both a political revolt from above and a social revolution from below. The complex sequence of events from 1910 to 1920 refl ects these dual and often contradictory impulses. The most important of these events can only be summarized in capsule form here. The rigged elections of June 21, 1910, swept the 79-year-old Porfi rio Díaz into his fi nal term in offi ce. On October 5 in San Antonio, Texas, Francisco Madero, recently released from jail, proclaimed himself in revolt against Díaz in his Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) 247 Plan of San Luis Potosí, a reformist document calling for a return to the principles of the 1857 constitution. In May 1911 the combined forces of Madero, Pascual Orozco, and Pancho Villa defeated Díaz’s federal troops in the border city of Ciudad Juárez. In accord with the provisions of the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez, Díaz resigned; his foreign secretary, Francisco León de la Barra, became interim president (May–November 1911). On October 1, 1911, Madero was elected president. He served for 15 months (November 1911–February 1913). His presidency was largely a failure, his moderate reforms placating neither hardline Porfi ristas nor agrarian radicals like Zapata and Orozco. On February 18, 1913, Madero was overthrown by one of his leading generals, the conservative Victoriano Huerta, following the the Decena Trágica (Tragic Ten Days), a destructive battle in Mexico City between Porfi ristas and Maderistas—an overthrow made possible by the “Pact of the Embassy” between Huerta and U.S. ambassador Henry Lane Wilson. Huerta, reputed for his cruelty and hard drinking, ruled for the next 17 months (February 1913–July 1914). His regime, whose policies garnered the animosity of the United States, was overthrown by the constitutionalists under Venustiano Carranza following the U.S. occupation of the port city of Veracruz, which had begun on April 21, 1914. The three years following Huerta’s ouster were the most chaotic of the revolution, with several major and scores of minor armies wreaking havoc across the country. The most prominent fi gures included Pancho Villa and Pascual Orozco in the north; Zapata in the south; and the constitutionalists Carranza, Plutarco Calles, and Alvaro Obregón. In December 1914 Villa and Zapata briefl y occupied Mexico City. Five months later—in April 1915—came the most famous military engagement of the war: the Battles of Celaya (in the state of Querétaro, April 6–7 and 13–15), in which Villa’s cavalry, estimated at more than 25,000 strong, was nearly destroyed by Obregón’s entrenched forces (Obregón was a keen student of European trench warfare). The battles’ outcome heralded the rising fortunes of Carranza and the constitutionalists. Villa, his army severely weakend, retreated northward. After the United States recognized Carranza as Mexico’s legitimate head of state in October 1915, Villa staged a series of anti-U.S. reprisals, most famously his raid of Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, 1916, in which his forces killed 18 U.S. citizens and looted and burned the town. The United States responded with Pershing’s Punitive Expedition, in which General John J. Pershing led some 6,000 U.S. troops into the northern Mexican deserts in pursuit of Villa. The expedition, which cost $130 million, failed and withdrew from Mexico in January 1917. Meanwhile, in the south the Zapatistas continued their guerrilla campaign against the Carranza government, which had not endorsed Zapata’s Plan of Ayala demanding agrarian reform. In November 1916 Carranza and the constitutionalists, entrenched in Mexico City, convened a constitutional convention in the city of Querétaro. Excluding Villistas, Zapatistas, Huertistas, and others, the meetings eventually produced the constitution of 1917, which governs Mexico to the present day. In March 1917 Carranza was elected president of Mexico, an offi ce he assumed on May 1. Several months earlier, in January 1917, Carranza had been approached by the German ambassador with a proposal to ally with Germany in a war against the United States (following his instructions in the famous Zimmermann Telegram, sent January 16, 1917, by the German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann). Carranza refused the offer, but the telegram, intercepted by the British, is often cited as hastening U.S. entry into World War I. With the formation of a constitutional, U.S.- recognized government in Mexico City, the most violent years of the revolution were drawing to a close. While fi ghting still raged across much of the country, by this time many Mexicans had wearied of the violence. In the south the Zaptistas put up a stiff resistance against Carrancista forces sent down to suppress their armies. In early 1919 Carranza dispatched a hit squad to Morelos to assassinate Zapata, which it did on April 10. A year later, on May 21, 1920, Carranza himself fell to an assassin’s bullet, leaving the presidency open to Obregón, one of whose allies had pulled the trigger. When the revolution began in 1910, Mexico was home to an estimated 15 million people; 10 years later that number had dropped to an estimated 14 million. In other words, between 1 and 2 million Mexicans died during this “age of violence,” while an additional quarter million or more migrated north to the United States—marking the origins of many Mexican- American communities in major U.S. cities like Detroit, Chicago, and others. After 1917 the revolutionary regime, dominated by elites from the northern state of Sonora (especially Obregón, Calles, and Adolfo de la Huerta), entrenched itself in power. Through the 1920s the revolutionary state became increasingly institutionalized and its policies increasingly conservative. It retained power despite frequent fl are-ups of violence, most notably the Cristero Revolt of 1926–29, sparked by the Catholic Church’s disgruntlement with the 248 Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) constitution’s anticlerical provisions, in which an estimated 80,000 people died. The revolution bequeathed a complex legacy, not only in Mexico but across the hemisphere. Radicalizing an entire generation of politicians, intellectuals, labor leaders, and activists, it also helped to create a new narrative of Mexican history that put Indians and mestizos at the center of the nation’s past (as seen most graphically in the public murals of Diego Rivera), while contributing to the erosion of traditional bonds of deference and relations of domination-subordination that had been so central to the country’s postconquest history. It also largely failed to deliver on the promise of agrarian reform, at least in the short term. Of the revolution’s twin engines of a politically disenfranchised rising middle class and an impoverished agrarian sector, the former essentially triumphed—expressed most concretely in the dominance of the Sonorans and the formation in 1929 of the predecessor to the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), a political party that was (and remains) “revolutionary” in name only, that dominated the country’s politics in a “one-party democracy” for most of the 20th century. It was not until the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) that popular demands for agrarian reform were largely met. Further reading: Katz, Friedrich. The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981; ———. The Life and Times of Pancho Villa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998; Knight, Alan. The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986; Womack, John. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1968. Michael J. Schroeder Mitsui and Mitsubishi, Houses of Before the conclusion of World War II, Mitsui and Mitsubishi were two of the four major zaibatsu (familycentered banking and industrial combines) in Japan; the others were Sumitomo and Yasuda. The term zaibatsu refers to a particular economic and social arrangement characteristic of large capitalist enterprises in Japan in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. Each zaibatsu was controlled by a single family that owned companies in many different spheres of economic activity, including banking and industry. The zaibatsu developed after the Meiji restoration in 1868, when the government wanted to encourage industrial development. The zaibatsu were a very strong economic and political force in early 20thcentury Japan. For instance, in 1937 most heavy industry and one-third of all bank deposits in Japan were directly controlled by the four major zaibatsu. After Japan’s surrender in World War II, the Allied occupation authorities ordered the zaibatsu dissolved. This meant that officially individual companies were freed from the control of their parent companies. However, many reformed their ties later in a less-formal arrangement, so some aspects of the control and coordination of the zaibatsu lived on in reality if not in law. Mitsui Mitsui is one of the largest publicly traded companies in contemporary Japan. The origins of Mitsui date back to the House of Mitsui, a merchant house of the Tokugawa Mitsui and Mitsubishi, Houses of 249 The House of Mitsui began with Mitsui Takatoshi, who opened a number of successful textile shops in Edo, Japan, depicted above. period (1603–1867). Mitsui is thus the oldest of the four leading zaibatsu of early 20th-century Japan. The history of the House of Mitsui begins with the enterprises of Mitsui Takatoshi (1622–94), who opened a number of successful textile shops in Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto. He later expanded his enterprises into fi nancial services, including moneylending. In 1691 members of the Mitsui family were granted the status of gyo shonin (chartered merchants) by the shogunate, which gave them considerable infl uence within the government. The Mitsui family drew up a “constitution” in 1694, detailing matters such as the duties of the family council and the amount of property due each branch of the family; these arrangements remained in force into the 20th century. In 1876 the Mitsui bank became the fi rst private bank in Japan. Minomura Rizaemon (1821–77), an orphan who worked his way upto the top position in the Mitsui exchange brokerage, became president of the Mitsui bank and helped launch Mitsui into other enterprises that allowed it to succeed in the changing fi nancial world of modern Japan. The Mitsui family owned more than 270 companies by the end of World War II. Although the Mitsui zaibatsu was offi cially broken up in 1946, many of the companies involved formed themselves into keiretsu in the 1950s. The name Mitsui means “three wells,” and the three wells are represented in the company logo. MITSUBISHI The Mitsubishi group’s origins lie with Yataro Iwasaki (1835–85), who founded the shipping fi rm the Mitsubishi Commercial Company in 1873. This company grew to be Japan’s largest shipping fi rm, partly due to fi nancial assistance from the Meiji government. The second and third heads of Mitsubishi were family members: Yataro was succeeded by his brother, then by his son. The family expanded into many industries, including coal mining, shipbuilding, banking, insurance, paper, steel, oil, and real estate. In 1893 the holding company Mitsubishi, Ltd., was created to organize these diverse business interests. The principal arms of the company in the early 20th century were (1) Mitsubishi Bank, founded in 1919 and currently part of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, the largest bank in Japan; (2) Mitsubishi Corporation, founded in 1893, which provides internal fi nancing; and (3) Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which includes the photographic equipment company Nikon and the Mitsubishi Motor Corporation. Mitsubishi was an important military contractor during World War II, building warships and the Zero aircraft used in the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. After the zaibatsu were required to disband in 1946, the companies forming the Mitsubishi zaibatsu became independent entities. However, some voluntarily recombined after the outbreak of the Korean War and formed a keiretsu known as the Mitsubishi group. The name Mitsubishi means “three diamonds” and is not a family name. Rather, it refers to the three stacked diamonds of Yataro Iwasaki’s family crest, which appear in the Mitsubishi trademark. Further reading: Beasley, William G. The Rise of Modern Japan. 3d. ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000; Blackford, Mansel G. The Rise of Modern Business in Great Britain, the United States and Japan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998; Johnson, Chalmers A. Miti and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982; Miyashita, Kenichi, and David W. Russell. Keiretsu: Inside the Hidden Japanese Conglomerates. New York: McGraw- Hill, 1994; Tamaki, Norio. Japanese Banking: A History, 1859–1959. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Tamaki, Norio. Yukichi Fukuzawa, 1835–1901: The Spirit of Enterprise in Modern Japan. New York: Palgrave, 2001; Weston, Mark. Giants of Japan: The Lives of Japan’s Greatest Men and Women. New York: Kodansha International, 1999. Sarah Boslaugh Mongolian People’s Republic During the Q’ing (Ching) dynasty in China (1644–1911) Mongolia had been a part of the Chinese Empire under a theocratic government, with the ruler, the Jebtzun Damba (Living Buddha), acknowledged as the Bogd Khan (Holy King). During the Chinese revolution of 1911, the status of Mongolia was briefl y in doubt until in May 1915 the Treaty of Kyakhta, signed by Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian offi cials, granted Mongolia limited autonomy. During the Russian Revolution in October 1917 and the subsequent Russian Civil War, Xu Shucheng (Hsü Shu-Cheng), a Chinese warlord, sent his soldiers into the area and captured Urga (modern-day Ulan Bator) in 1919. Two years later the White Russians were decisively defeated in western Russia, retreated to Siberia, and took over Mongolia, occupying Urga on February 4. Seeing the White Russians as a potential long-term army of occupation, some Mongolians contacted the Bolsheviks. This allowed the Mongolians under Damdin Sükhbaatar to take over Urga with 250 Mongolian People’s Republic the aid of Russian Communists. Soon afterward the White Russian leader, Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, who claimed to be a reincarnation of Genghis Khan, was shot, and Sükhbaatar helped form the Mongolian People’s Party, the fi rst political party in the country, with Soliyn Danzan as the fi rst chairman of the party’s central committee. Sükhbaatar met Vladimir Lenin in November 1921, and in January 1922 serfdom was abolished throughout Mongolia. These moves gave great impetus to the proclamation of the Mongolian People’s Republic on November 26, 1924, making it the second Communist nation in the world. The capital was then renamed Ulan Bator (Red Hero). After the death of Lenin, Joseph Stalin was initially more anxious to assert his control over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, allowing Mongolia some independence. However, by the late 1920s Stalin began to assert some control over the country through the renamed Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party. Stalin eventually found a willing ally in Khorloogiin Choibalsan (or Choybalsan). Born in 1895 at Tsetsenkhan Aimak, a village near a town that bears his name, Choibalsan was a monk who turned to politics. He had been a leader in a pro-Communist Mongolian revolutionary group as early as October 1919 and had supported Sükhbaatar’s formation of the Mongolian People’s Party. When the Bogd Khan died in May 1924, Choibalsan did not allow the discovery of his new reincarnation to take place. In that year Choibalsan became commander in chief of the Mongolian army, a post he held until 1928, and he was appointed chairman of the presidium of the state little hural (the parliament) in January 1929. In 1930 Choibalsan became the minister of foreign affairs. Choibalsan helped introduce land reform, and land seized from landlords was handed over to peasants or turned into cooperatives. On December 27, 1933, the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo offi cially claimed sovereignty over Mongolia. The Japanese were anxious to expand their control in the region, and several Mongolian princes had been persuaded to move to Japan many years earlier. One of them, Prince Kanjurab, had been married to Yoshiko Kawashima, a member of the Qing (Ch’ing) imperial family and a Japanese agent who was rapidly emerging as one of the most powerful people in Manchukuo. In November 1934 the chairman of the council of people’s commissars, Peljidiyn Genden, negotiated a military alliance between Mongolia and the Soviet Union. Soon afterward Genden was executed, suspected of being a Japanese spy. Choibalsan became marshal in 1936 and in 1939 took Genden’s position as the chairman of the council of people’s commissars, which became the council of ministers in 1946. In 1939 Choibalsan signed a Soviet-Mongolian mutual assistance treaty, sending Mongolian soldiers to help the Red Army when they faced the Japanese in several engagements along the Soviet Union’s border with Japanese-occupied China. It was the stiff resistance that the Japanese faced at the Battle of Halhyn-gol that convinced the Japanese high command not to attack the Soviet Union but to proceed with plans to invade Southeast Asia. In 1944 the small autonomous state of Tannu Tuva decided to offi cially become a part of the Soviet Union. Most of its people were Mongolian. Salchack Toka, the nominal leader of Tannu Tuva, met Choibalsan to try to persuade him to bring Mongolia into the Soviet Union. However, Choibalsan refused. He even sent 80,000 Mongolian soldiers into Inner Mongolia hoping to exploit the Japanese military weaknesses toward the end of the Pacifi c war but was forced to withdraw them after demands from the Soviet Union on behalf of its Chinese Communist allies. At Yalta in February 1945, the United States and Great Britain agreed that Mongolia should belong to the Soviet sphere of infl uence—in the previous year U.S. vice president Henry Wallace had visited Ulan Bator. A plebiscite was held on October 20, 1946, in which nearly all the people voted for Mongolian “independence.” Nationalist China was forced to waive any claims to Mongolia and recognized the Mongolian People’s Republic on January 5, 1946. Choibalsan died on January 26, 1952. Choibalsan is commemorated by a town in eastern Mongolia built during his rule in his honor, and also Choibalsan State University, founded in Ulan Bator in 1942. Further reading: Bawden, C. R. The Modern History of Mongolia. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968; Sanders, A. J. K. The People’s Republic of Mongolia. London: Oxford University Press, 1968. Justin Corfi eld Moroccan crises There were two major crises involving France and Germany over the control of Morocco prior to World War I. France’s interest in Morocco steadily increased after it took over neighboring Algeria in 1830. Having not unifi ed until 1870, Germany came late to the Moroccan crises 251 imperial game and had to content itself with attempting to secure territories that had not already been taken by other European imperial powers, particularly Britain and France. By the turn of the century, Morocco was one of the few African nations that had not been taken over by European powers, and the Germans were therefore interested in it. Although it purported to be neutral on the Moroccan issue, Britain had secretly agreed to French expansion into the area during negotiations resulting in the beginning of the Entente Cordial in 1904. The Tangier Crisis was the fi rst clash between France and Germany. In 1905 Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Tangier, where he proclaimed his support for an independent Morocco. This provocation irritated the French government and raised public anger toward Germany. The Moroccan sultan of the Alawi dynasty, seeking to prolong his rule, announced his support for an international conference that he hoped would result in Morocco’s maintaining its independence. In 1906 13 nations, including the United States, gathered at the Algeciras Conference in southern Spain. The Spanish already had small holdings in northern Morocco around the city of Ceuta. The Spanish and French subsequently agreed to separate spheres of infl uence in Morocco. After protracted negotiations France was granted special status in Morocco, although it pledged to respect German interests. Secretly, Britain, fearing Germany’s growing naval strength, reiterated its support for the French in Morocco. Sultan Abd al-Hafi d (r. 1908–13) objected, but France continued to expand its control over Morocco’s fi nances. A small crisis, the so-called Casablanca Affair, broke out in 1908 when the French captured three German deserters from the French foreign legion while they were in the custody of the German consul, in violation of conventional international law. Germany protested, and the matter was referred to the Hague Tribunal. Under the following Franco-German accord, Germany briefl y accepted the special position of France but gained some economic concessions. In 1911 France moved troops deep into Morocco and took the major city of Meknes. A second major crisis erupted when the Germans reacted by deploying a gunboat, the Panther, off the coast of the port city of Agadir in southern Morocco. The British government publicly stated its support for France and even threatened Germany with possible war. Subsequent negotiations resulted in Germany’s gaining a small piece of territory in French Equatorial Africa (in the present-day Republic of the Congo) and France’s keeping its favored position in Morocco, by far the more important of the two territories. France established a full protectorate over Morocco in the Treaty of Fez in 1912. The sultan was forced to sign the French terms, and Marshal Louis Hubert Lyautey was appointed the fi rst French resident general of Morocco. France retained control until it granted Moroccan independence in 1956. The French and German rivalry over Morocco added to the mounting tensions among European nations and was a contributing factor to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Further reading: Anderson, Eugene N. The First Moroccan Crisis 1904–1906. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1966; Porch, Douglas. The Conquest of Morocco. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. Janice J. Terry motion picture industry The motion picture industry can be traced back to the 1890s, when Kennedy Laurie Dickson, the chief engineer at the Edison Laboratories, was credited with making celluloid strips containing a sequence of images that, when projected, would show movement. Thomas Edison himself developed this further, and in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair he introduced the Kinetograph, the fi rst moving picture camera, and the Kinetoscope, which used a continuous loop of Dickson’s fi lm. The Kinetoscope spread successfully around the United States and Europe. British and European inventors did work on similar systems. Work in Britain was pioneered by Robert William Paul and his partner Birt Acres. In France Auguste and Louis Lumière invented the cinematographe—a portable motion picture camera, fi lm processing unit, and projector all in one piece of equipment—which quickly became one of the most manufactured items in France. Until the late 1920s the producers were unable to capture sound and synchronize it with the fi lm, so the early fi lms were known as silent movies, whereby the fi lm was played and sometimes live musicians and live sound effects were used, including human voices off stage. The words of the fi lm appeared on screen, being part of the fi lm itself. Georges Méliès, a Paris stage magician, started shooting and exhibiting fi lms from 1896, many of his works being science fi ction, with A Trip to the Moon (1902) the fi rst fi lm to portray space travel. Gradually, there were fi lms lasting up to 15 minutes, with Edwin 252 motion picture industry S. Porter becoming an early director for Life of an American Fireman (1903) and the fi rst “western” movie, The Great Train Robbery (1903). The fi rst full-length movie was The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), which was made in Australia and ran for 80 minutes. Filmed mostly at Rosanna, on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia, it told the story of the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly and was made by the Tait brothers, costing them £400 to make and netting them over £25,000. It was shown all over Australia to packed audiences and was also shown in some places overseas. As with many fi lms, it tells the story of an event, although on many occasions it is not a reliable account of the actual historical event. Very little of the fi lm has survived, although a large number of “stills” were released at the time, which, together with newspaper reviews, allow historians to analyze the fi lm in considerable detail. It was later reissued as Ned Kelly and His Gang with some extra scenes included. The next major fi lms came out in Europe with Queen Elizabeth, produced in France in 1912, Quo Vadis? in Italy in 1913, and Cabiria in Italy in 1914. Soon longer fi lms started to be produced in the United States with The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), both directed by D. W. Griffi th (1875–1948). In 1907 the Lafi tte brothers launched the fi lms d’art (“art fi lms”), which were aimed at introducing wealthier people to the cinema, many of them at the time regarding fi lms for the working class and the theater for the higher social classes. EARLY FILM STARS The outbreak of World War I held up feature fi lm production, but it did result in newsreel fi lms being made. These were shown in movie theaters—by 1908 it was estimated that there were 10,000 of these theaters in the United States alone. After World War I Hollywood in California became the center of much of the world’s fi lm production, with an average output of up to 800 feature fi lms each year making up 82 percent of the total world output during the 1920s. By this time many actors and actresses were becoming famous around the world, with Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), Buster Keaton (1895–1966), Lon Chaney (1883– 1930), Douglas Fairbanks (1883–1939), Clara Bow (1905–65), Gloria Swanson (1899–1983), and Rudolf Valentino (1895–1926) all being important early fi lm stars. Valentino became well known through fi lms such as The Sheik (1921), Blood and Sand (1922), and Son of the Sheik (1926), and was the heartthrob of girls throughout the 1920s, with his death at the height of his popularity causing a mass outpouring of grief. Other famous actors of the silent era were Tom Mix (1880–1940), who entered the fi lm industry in 1918, joining the Selig Company, and was said to be earning up to $30,000 per week—appearing in 270 fi lms from The Trimming of Paradise Gulch (1910) until The Miracle Rider (1935); and Joan Crawford (1906–77), who continued through the silent era into sound fi lms. Some of these fi lms were controversial, with the British 1928 fi lm Dawn, about Edith Cavell, evoking a storm of protest in Germany. A later fi lm, Nurse Edith Cavell, was produced in 1939. Another early silent fi lm was Ben Hur (1925), remade by M.G.M. in the 1959, and others that became well known were Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1924) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Hollywood, near Los Angeles, was the base for American-produced fi lms, the main companies including Columbia, M.G.M., Paramount, R.K.O., Twentieth Century Fox, and Warner Brothers. Other famous studio locations were in Britain at Ealing, in France, in Italy, and in Germany. Indian fi lms were largely produced in Bombay. SOVIET AND INDIAN FILM In the Soviet Union the early directors included Yakov Protazanov, whose fi lms included Father Sergius (1917– 18) and Aelita (1924). Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) perfected a technique that became known as the dialectical or intellectual montage, whereby nonlinear and often clashing scenes provoke different emotional reactions in the audience. His fi lms included The Battleship Potemkin (1925), Strike (1925), October (1928), Alexander Nevsky (1938), and Ivan the Terrible (1944 and 1946). The Indian fi lm industry also started early, with Dadasaheb Phalke, considered by many as the “Father of Indian Cinema,” producing many feature length silent fi lms, with Raja Harishcahndra (1913) being the most famous early Indian fi lm. In Japan the earliest fi lm was The Cuckoo (1909), produced by Shisetsu Iwafuji, with an early well-known one being Souls on the Road (1921). Sessue Hayakawa (1889–1973) appeared with his wife in The Typhoon (1914) and as the villain in Cecil B. De Mille’s The Cheat (1915), acting in Tokyo Joe (1949) alongside Humphrey Bogart and then playing other major roles in the 1950s. With the ability to introduce accurate synchronization of sound and suffi cient amplifi cation for it to be heard in cinemas, the Hollywood studio Warner Brothers introduced Vitaphone in 1926, and in 1927 their The Jazz Singer had the fi rst piece of synchronized dialogue and singing in a feature-length fi lm. The Lights of New motion picture industry 253 York (1928) was the fi rst all-synchronized sound feature fi lm, again produced by Warner Brothers. Quickly other studios started to produce these fi lms, with Alfred Hitchcock’s detective story Blackmail (1929) being the fi rst sound feature in Britain. The Broadway Melody (1929) was the fi rst classic-style Hollywood musical, with French director René Clair producing Under the Roofs of Paris (1920) and Le Million (1931). Paramount produced the fi rst fi lm version of Somerset Maugham’s The Letter in 1929, and the story was produced again by Warner Brothers in 1940. Production increased with the gangster fi lm Little Caesar (1931) and others on a similar theme such as The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932), based on the life of Al Capone. Other Hollywood fi lms of this period included A. E. W. Mason’s The Four Feathers (1929), Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel (1932), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1932), King Kong (1933), Cecil B. de Mille’s Cleopatra (1934), Charles Dickens’s The Tale of Two Cities (1936), Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth (1937), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Alexandre Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), and Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed (1939). There were 28 Sherlock Holmes fi lms starting with The Return of Sherlock Holmes in 1929, with the most famous probably being Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) starring Basil Rathbone. SEQUELS There were also a number of other fi lms that were followed by many sequels: the Charlie Chan fi lms from 1929 that continued until 1981; The Mysterious Fu Manchu (1929), The Return of Fu Manchu (1931), The Daughter of Fu Manchu (1931), The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), and eight more fi lms ending in 1980; Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and many other Tarzan fi lms to the 1960s; and “The Saint” fi lms from The Saint in New York (1938), which continued up until 1959 when a French-language fi lm Le Saint mene la danse was released. Perhaps the fi lm that had the most versions made was Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which was fi rst produced in Britain in 1917 but saw American versions made in 1919, 1933, and in 1949. The height of the U.S. fi lm industry was probably in 1939 with The Wizard of Oz and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. In the latter Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh starred in the romantic fi lm about life in Atlanta before, during, and after the American Civil War. During World War II there were a large number of war fi lms and ones on related spy themes, including Went the Day Well? (1942), The Way Ahead (1944), and In Which We Serve (1942), which starred Noel Coward and was directed by David Lean. Other British fi lms of the prewar and early wartime period include Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1934); R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone (1935); John Buchan’s The 39 Steps (1935), starring Peggy Ashcroft (1907–91); Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), directed by Alexander Korda; Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), starring Charles Laughton (1899–1962) as Captain Bligh and Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian; The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936); Ryder Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1938); Marie Antoinette (1938); George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara (1940), starring Rex Harrison (1908–90); Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1940); Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941); and Jane Austen’s Jane Eyre (1943). In the United States fi lms on war themes included Desperate Journey (1942), pitting Errol Flynn against Charlie Chaplin in A Dog’s Life, with Edna Purviance. Chaplin was one of the most recognizable faces of the early days of movies. 254 motion picture industry the Germans; Casablanca (1942), starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman (1915–82), and Claude Rains; Mrs Miniver (1942); Forever and a Day (1943); Objective Burma (1944); and Going My Way (1944), starring Bing Crosby. There were also a number of other great successes, including John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor (1906–87), and Sidney Greenstreet (1879–1954); Citizen Kane (1941), directed by Orson Welles (1915– 85); A. J. Cronin’s The Keys of the Kingdom (1944); and Howard Spring’s Fame Is the Spur (1947). Mention should also be made of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1942), which starred Sabu (Sabu Dastagir, 1924– 63). The impact of Walt Disney on the movie industry began with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), and Bambi (1941). In Europe fi lm production during the 1920s and 1930s saw large numbers of fi lms produced, although not on the level being produced in Hollywood. In France there were many French-language fi lms, with actors Maurice Chevalier (1888–1972) and Jacques Tati (1908–82) being the best known abroad. Others include Jean-Louis Barrault (1910–94), who appeared in Les Enfants du Paradis (1944); Charles Boyer (1897– 1978); Danielle Darrieux (b. 1917), who appeared in La Ronde (1950); and Michèle Morgan (b. 1920), who starred in La Symphonie Pastorale (1946). Of the many German fi lm producers and directors of the period, Leni Riefenstahl became the most famous with her Triumph of the Will (1936). Elisabeth Berner (1898–1986) was born in Poland and trained in Vienna, becoming the favorite actress of the German stage director Max Reinhardt and appearing in his fi rst fi lm, Der Evandelismann (1923). Another German fi lm star was Conrad Veidt (1893– 1943), who was born in Potsdam and after also acting at Max Reinhardt’s theater, starred in silent fi lms such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), The Student of Prague (1926), and The Hands of Orlac (1926). When the Nazis rose to power he wanted to leave Germany because of his Jewish wife. Eventually, he was allowed to move to Britain, where he became a British citizen, playing German roles in Nazi Agent (1942) and Casablanca (1942). Mention should also be made of Vienna-born Luise Rainer (b. 1910), who played a key part in The Good Earth along with Paul Muni; and Anton Walbrook (1900–67), also from Vienna, who starred in Gaslight (1940). Also from Europe were Swedish actress Greta Garbo (1905–90) and German singer and actress Marlene Dietrich (1901–92). In Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore the Shaw brothers dominated the fi lm industry, and the Cathay Film Company was also formed covering British Malaya and Singapore. Mention should also be made of two fi lm actresses who rose to important political positions, both by marriage. In 1937 a fi lm actress, Jiang Qing, left the Chinese city of Shanghai to join the Chinese Communist Party, marrying its leader, Mao Zedong, in the following year. In Buenos Aires actress Evita Duarte (later Evita Perón) starred in a number of fi lms before meeting and then marrying Juan Perón, who went on to become president of Argentina. After World War II the British at Ealing Studios produced a number of important fi lms, including Whisky Galore! (1948), Passport to Pimlico (1949), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), and Graham Greene’s The Third Man (1949). Mention should also be made of Italian fi lms, one about the wartime resistance to the Germans in Rome in Open City (1945), directed by Roberto Rossellini (1906–77), who married Ingrid Bergman; and Bicycle Thieves (1948), directed by Umberto Scarparelli. A number of Italian actors found work overseas, with Paul Henreid (1908–92), from Trieste (then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), going to Hollywood, where he starred in Casablanca. In the United States some important fi lms were produced in the late 1940s, but it was not long before the House Committee on Un-American Activities turned its attention to Hollywood resulting in many actors, writers, and directors leaving for Europe, including Charlie Chaplin, Morris Carnovsky (1897–1992), and Dalton Trumbo (1905–76), and many more unable to get work. It also saw others like Ronald Reagan (1911– 2004), president of Screen Actors Guild, and later president of the United States, rise to prominence. Further reading: Aylesworth, Thomas G., and John S. Bowman. World Guide to Film Stars. London: Bison Group, 1991; Brownlow, K., and J. Kobal. Hollywood—The Pioneers. New York: Knopf, 1979; Halliwell, Leslie. Halliwell’s Film and Video Guide 2004. London: HarperCollins Entertainment, 2003; Karney, Robyn, ed. Who’s Who in Hollywood. London: Bloomsbury, 1993; MacCann, Richard Dyer, and Edward S. Perry. The New Film Magazine: A Bibliograpjy of Magazine Articles in English 1930–1970. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1975; Ragan, David. Who’s Who in Hollywood 1900–1976. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers, 1976; Rawlence, Christopher. The Missing Reel: The Untold Story of the Lost Inventor of Moving Pictures. motion picture industry 255 London: HarperCollins, 1990; Richie, Donald. Japanese Cinema. London: Secker & Warburg, 1972. Justin Corfi eld muckraking During the early 20th-century heyday of America’s progressive movement, many journalists published slashing articles that revealed problems and faults in U.S. business, government, and social conditions. Their exposés, most published in nationally circulated magazines, often helped to spark important reforms but arguably failed to change society in fundamental ways. Investigative journalism is still often called “muckraking.” Although this style of journalism began in the late 19th century, when author-photographer Jacob Riis showed “how the other half lived” in New York’s urban slums, the term was popularized in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt. Infuriated by a series of articles denouncing the U.S. Senate, Roosevelt publicly berated author David Graham Phillips for seeing only the bad and the corrupt in U.S. life. Like the man obsessively raking muck in John Bunyan’s 17thcentury religious tract Pilgrim’s Progress, such critics, said the president, failed to acknowledge beauty and social advancement. There was plenty of raking to do. Ida Tarbell was foremost among muckrakers who focused on the misdeeds of business and laissez-faire capitalism. Born in Pennsylvania oil country, Tarbell saw her oil refi ner father lose his livelihood to an oil scheme put together by John D. Rockefeller and others. Nevertheless, she became the fi rst woman to graduate from Pennsylvania’s Allegheny College. Between 1902 and 1904 her exhaustively researched book, The History of the Standard Oil Company, was serialized in McClure’s magazine, and it was later published in book form. Her work has been credited with helping to instigate a 1911 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that broke up the Standard Oil trust. McClure’s in 1902 also began serializing Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities. Visiting St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, Steffens found ample evidence of graft, kickbacks from public utilities, unoffi cially sanctioned prostitution, and manipulation of police forces, all in the cause of enriching corrupt municipal offi cials. He also found honest workers who helped him reveal these practices and earnest efforts at good government. Collected into a book, Shame created a stronger push by progressives, including jane addams, for local government reforms. Charles Edward Russell, the son of Iowa abolitionists, was a muckraking jack-of-all-trades, writing primarily about business misdeeds in such industries as meat packing, railroads, and housing. A declared socialist, Russell nevertheless supported Woodrow Wilson’s preparations for World War I. His investigation of the Beef Trust inspired Upton Sinclair’s 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle, an exposé of danger and fi lth in Chicago’s slaughterhouses and mistreatment of a largely immigrant workforce. In 1909 Russell was a founding member, with black sociologist W. E. B. DuBois, of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), but muckrakers, most of them white, paid little attention to the plight of African Americans as the nation grew more segregated. Ida B. Wells, another NAACP cofounder, fl ed her Memphis home in 1892 after a white mob destroyed her newspaper offi ce. From Chicago she continued investigating and publicizing lynching, the extralegal system of “justice” used in the South and elsewhere mainly to terrorize and control African Americans. Her Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases and many other writings and personal appearances also brought news of U.S. racial injustice to Britain and other European nations. Further reading: Brasch, Walter M. Forerunners of Revolution: Muckrakers and the American Social Conscience. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990; Miraldi, Robert, ed. The Muckrakers: Evangelical Crusaders. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. Marsha E. Ackermann Mukhtar, Omar (1862–1931) Libyan politician Many successive empires ruled present-day Libya until the Ottoman Turks conquered it in 1551. Libya remained under Ottoman control until the 1911 Italian invasion; the Italians desired it mainly as a strategic location. British colonial forces had control of Egypt, and the French had made claims in North Africa as well. The Ottomans, whose last North African territory was Libya, were extremely weak owing to a recent 256 muckraking revolution and were unable to defend against the Italian invasion. Faced with bombardment by the Italian fl eet under Admiral Farafelli, the Ottoman Turks abandoned Tripolitania, which the Italians easily captured. The Italian presence was made offi cial after a Turkish- Italian treaty was signed in October 1912 giving Italy control of Libya. After World War I ended in 1918, Italy expressed its desire to construct a “Second Roman Empire” that encompassed Libya. This idea was propagated under Benito Mussolini and included the resettling of Italians in the agricultural areas of Libya along the coast as well as the construction of roads, communication lines, and military facilities throughout the country. In 1929 the Italians used the term “Libya” offi cially, and in 1939 they made Libya an Italian colony. The Italian occupation was immensely unpopular in Libya. Immediately after the Italian conquest in 1911, resistance groups formed to push the Italians out. One group, the Sanusiya movement, under the direction of Muhammad Idris al-Mahdi al-Sanusi, mounted resistance to the Italian occupation. Omar Mukhtar led the most famous resistance movement. Omar Mukhtar was born in 1862 in the town of Zawia Janzour. He was from the Mnifa tribe and a Qur’anic teacher by profession. After the Italians took over in 1911, he initiated and led a campaign against the occupation that lasted for 20 years. He fought a guerrilla war against the Italians, using his extensive knowledge of the Libyan terrain to successfully attack and harass them. Mukhtar had a strong following among Libyans, receiving food, supplies, and fi ghting men from the local population. Since the Italians could not capture Mukhtar, they decided to cripple his support base by incarcerating the Libyan population in concentration camps. These horrifi c camps interred an estimated 125,000 Libyans, of which two-thirds perished because of the appalling conditions. The resistance continued despite the concentration camps, which only served to increase anger among the Libyans. When Omar Mukhtar was around 70 years old, he was wounded in battle and captured by the Italians. He was interrogated, tortured, and hanged on September 16, 1931. Omar Mukhtar is a hero to the Libyans and is still revered in the 21st century. After Mukhtar’s execution the Italians were able temporarily to subdue Libya until it became a battleground in World War II, during which Libya was the scene of massive desert battles between the German-Italian armies and the British- French armies. Further reading: Harmon, Daniel E. et al., Foreign Policy Research Institute, eds. Libya. New York: Mason Crest, 2002; Wright, John. Libya: A Modern History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982 . Katie Belliel Munich Pact See appeasement era. Muslim Brotherhood The Muslim Brotherhood, or the Society of the Muslim Brothers (also known as the Ikhwan), was established in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna in 1928. The new organization stressed community, games, and healthful pursuits. Although al-Banna denied it, some alleged that the brotherhood was patterned on the YMCA, which had opened branches in several Arab countries, including Egypt. Born in 1906 in a lower-middle-class family, al- Banna was infl uenced by Sufi orders and took an active role in school activities. He attended school at Dar al ‘Ulum and taught at a government school in Ismailia, where the brotherhood began. A good speaker, al-Banna visited mosques and began to attract youthful members to his new organization. The organization, divided into cells with an individual leader, had a gradation of members who advanced by passing examinations. Periodically, leaders would convene at congresses to coordinate programs. Women’s sub-branches were also established. During the 1930s and 1940s, like other political forces in Egypt, such as the Wafd Party with its Blue Shirts and the fascist Young Egypt with its Green Shirts, the Brotherhood also had a secret paramilitary force. The Ikhwan sought to eradicate all foreign infl uences. It had pan-Islamic aims and ultimately gained a following outside Egypt, especially among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and in Syria and Jordan. The brotherhood advocated the unifi cation of Egypt and Islamic nations on Qur’anic principles. The organization’s aims broadened over the years. Al-Banna sought to use science to increase national wealth and to establish social welfare programs including pension plans. The Ikhwan also considered reviving the caliphate. Initially, many observers underestimated the potential of the organization, which emphasized Muslim Brotherhood 257 the rejuvenation of the Egyptian nation through a return to Islamic principles. In 1933 al-Banna transferred the headquarters of the brotherhood to Cairo, where he used radio broadcasts to popularize his program. He also sent letters to politicians and began to increase the brotherhood’s commercial activities, including ownership of printing presses. These were used to produce a magazine, pamphlets, and various other publications. From 1939 to 1945 the brotherhood took an active role in Egyptian politics and became a major political force. The brotherhood attracted young members who had become disenchanted with the Wafd, the major political party of the era. Generally eager for immediate results, students were dismayed and angry over the Wafd’s compromises and alliances with the British. The brotherhood was also periodically courted by the palace in order to discredit and undermine the Wafd. In 1948 then prime minister Mahmud Nuqrashi arrested and imprisoned al-Banna. A member of the brotherhood took revenge by assassinating Nuqrashi in 1949. But in 1949 al-Banna was in turn killed, probably with the complicity of both the palace and the government. Al-Banna and the brotherhood strongly supported the Palestinian cause, and many members volunteered to fi ght for the Palestinians in the 1930s and in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. By the late 1940s the brotherhood probably had close to half a million members. After al-Banna’s death, Ismail al-Hudaybi became the leader, or director general. A lawyer, Hudaybi was not as charismatic as al-Banna, but he doggedly pursued the programs of the organization. The Ikhwan quietly supported the 1952 revolution led by Gamal Abdul Nasser, but when the new regime refused to institute an Islamic state, the brotherhood became disenchanted. After the brotherhood attempted to assassinate Nasser in 1954, its members were persecuted, imprisoned, or went into exile to other African or Arab nations. Many of the exiles became teachers and subsequently converted students to the cause. The Muslim Brotherhood fostered an Islamic revival that had major consequences for the 20th and 21st centuries. Many contemporary Islamist movements are offshoots or were infl uenced by the tenets and approaches of the Muslim Brotherhood. However, many present-day Islamist leaders, believing that the policies and approaches of the brotherhood are too moderate, have adopted more radical programs and strategies to force the establishment of regimes operating in accordance with their narrow interpretations of Islamic law and tradition. Further reading: Mitchell, Richard P. The Society of the Muslim Brothers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; Musa Husaini, Ishak. The Moslem Brethren. Beirut: Khayat’s, 1956. Janice J. Terry Mussolini, Benito (1883–1945) Italian dictator Il Duce, “the leader,” was born in Predappio, in northern Italy, on July 29, 1883. His father was a socialist blacksmith and his mother a schoolteacher. A brilliant but unruly student, he qualifi ed for teaching in elementary schools in 1901 and soon afterward fl ed to Switzerland to avoid military service, where he was arrested for vagrancy and then expelled. He had repeated confrontations with the police. Mussolini’s Marxism was greatly infl uenced by Nietzsche’s reactionary modernism and Social Darwinism, Spengler’s anthropological and historical pessimism, and Sorel’s revolutionary syndicalism. However, before World War I he had remained true to the socialist commitment to pacifi sm, so much so that during the war between Italy and Turkey (1912) he was apprehended for pacifi st propaganda. He eventually broke away from the party in 1914, following the outbreak of World War I. The Italian government had temporarily opted for neutrality and tested the waters to see which side would offer a better deal for an Italian military intervention. The Socialist Party condemned the war, arguing that it was a carnage that would only benefi t big industrialists. Initially inclined to stick to the party line, within a few weeks Mussolini made a sudden about-face and joined the prowar side. His inextinguishable ambition, moralistic intransigence, and aggressive temperament led to his resignation from the editorship of Avanti and from the party. In November 1914 he founded Il Popolo d’Italia, the would-be Fascist offi cial newspaper. When Italy joined the war on the side of the Entente, Mussolini was conscripted and attained the rank of corporal. In 1917 he was wounded during grenade practice and returned to Milan, where he launched his own political party in 1919. Badly defeated at the fi rst general elections, held in the same year, Mussolini resolved that fi ghting workers’ militancy would earn him the respect of 258 Mussolini, Benito the middle and upper middle classes. Consequently, he organized the rank-and-fi le members of the party, who were mostly war veterans, in armed squads (squadracce) and instructed them on how to intimidate Catholic and Socialist political activists. When three liberal governments in a row failed to restore order, King Victor Emmanuel III asked Mussolini to form a new government in October 1922. The famous March on Rome was rather a triumphal parade of the winning side. Liberal deputies, more concerned with the unrest of the working classes than with liberal safeguards, did not object to the imposition of strict censorship and to an electoral reform that clearly favored the Fascist Party. As a result, between 1925 and 1926, following the murder of the Socialist leader, Giacomo Matteotti, Mussolini transformed his government into a dictatorship and Italy into a police state by abolishing all other parties; controlling the press, trade unions, and youth education; centralizing the economy; and having his opponents silenced by the secret police and the Fascist Party militia. He then propagated through the mass media the main tenets of the Fascist ideology, which was described as the third way between socialism and the market ethos. Mussolini dismissed liberal democracy as decadent and unable to stir the souls of the masses and imposed his ostensibly antimaterialistic, antipositivistic, ruralist, and at once militarist and technocratic worldview, intending to offset universalist and cosmopolitan trends as well as bourgeois hedonism and its obsession with rights to the detriment of duties. Mussolini preached the inequality of individuals, human groups, and nations and portrayed citizens as mere corpuscles immersed in the eternal stream of history and of the internal dynamics of the organic Fascist state. Mussolini also advocated absorption of private conscience into the collective conscience of the body social, which entailed the subordination of individual welfare to the needs of communal welfare and the abolition of individual rights. Mussolini’s economic policies involved autarchic neoprotectionism, centralized control of the national economy, a meticulous division of labor, large industrial cartels, and the coordination of transnational economic blocs. Mussolini’s conception of totalitarian demography privileged quantity over quality, and he offered prizes for the most prolifi c mothers. His ruralist bent arose from his fear that industrial cities exerted devastating effects on people’s health, which was intolerable for a country that was bound to revive the glories of the Roman Empire and therefore needed as many ablebodied men as possible. In 1929, with the Lateran Treaty, Mussolini made several important concessions to the pope in exchange for his recognition of the Italian state. This allowed il Duce to reach the height of his popularity and power. However, fascism could not exist without the prospect of an approaching victorious war. From the start, Mussolini, Benito 259 Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini joined forces with Germany and Japan to form the Axis powers in World War II. Mussolini had toyed with the idea of reconquering the Mediterranean basin, and this explains his decision to bombard Corfu in 1923, to exterminate the seminomadic Libyan Bedouins who refused to surrender, and to invade Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935–36 and subdue it by means of mustard gas, phosgene, fl amethrowers, the slaughter of civilians, forced labor camps, and scorchedearth tactics. He also bombed Red Cross encampments in Ethiopia as a retaliation for their denunciations of the Fascist atrocities. The ensuing international sanctions drove Mussolini out of the League of Nations and into a deadly alliance with Adolf Hitler, which was sealed by the Nazi-Fascist intervention in the 1936–39 Spanish civil war on the side of the future Spanish dictator, general Francisco Franco. A pact of mutual defense, the Pact of Steel, which paved the way to World War II, was fi nally signed by Mussolini and Hitler in May 1939. After the proclamation of the empire (May 1936), he adopted segregationist and anti-Semitic legislation more extensive and stricter than that of Nazi Germany. The German attack against Poland in September 1939 took Mussolini by surprise. In spite of Mussolini’s militaristic rhetoric, the Italian army had demonstrated in Spain that it was not prepared for a full-scale confl ict with the world’s major powers. However, completely blinded by the prospect of a quick defeat of France, he declared war in June 1940, only to be bitterly disappointed when the United Kingdom refused to give up the fi ght and defeated the Italians in Egypt and Libya, and the Greeks not only halted the Italian invasion of northern Greece but also forced the Italian army into an inglorious retreat at the end of 1940. From then on Mussolini’s fate was in the hands of Germany. Thus, the king ordered that Mussolini be placed under arrest. The former Duce was rescued by German paratroops a few months later and proclaimed the Italian Social Republic, nothing but a puppet state in Germanoccupied northern Italy. To prove his loyalty to Hitler, Mussolini had his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, executed on the charge of treason. By the end of 1944, approximately 16 free partisan republics had been formed in various valleys of northern Italy, and the Social Republic was quickly sliding into an all-out civil war and was being carpet bombed by the Allies. In April 1945 the German army was retreating, thousands of partisans were streaming from the valleys into the cities, and Mussolini once again attempted to seek refuge in Switzerland. He was recognized and arrested by the partisans and summarily executed along with his mistress Claretta Petacci in a village on Lake Como. Further reading: Bosworth, Richard J. B. The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism. London: Arnold, 1998; ———. Mussolini. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; Deakin, F. William. The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler and the Fall of Italian Fascism. New York: Harper and Row, 1962; Mack Smith, Denis. Mussolini. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981. Stefano Fait

The Contemporary World 1950 to the Present

Macao (1999) Macao (or Macau) is a tiny peninsula of eight square miles located 40 miles west of Hong Kong on the southern China coast. It became a Portuguese settlement and trading center in 1557; Portugal paid the Chinese government rent for the land until 1849, after which it became a de facto Portuguese colony. By the late 20th century Macao had just under half a million people, about 96 percent Chinese, 2–3 percent Eurasians of mixed Portuguese-Chinese ancestry, and 1 percent Portuguese from Portugal. Despite long Portuguese control, few Chinese residents learned Portuguese, the official language of the colony. As a result few Chinese worked in the government. Most Eurasians, called Macanese, were bilingual; many of them worked for the government bureaucracy. The government was nonelected until 1974, when a revolution in Portugal brought in a liberal government there that enacted new laws established by a partially elected legislative assembly. The main sources of government revenue were tourism, light industry, and gambling casinos. Negotiations for the return of Macao to China began in the 1980s. However, China gave priority to its negotiations for the return of the much more important British colony of Hong Kong, and it was not until agreement had been reached for Hong Kong’s rendition that talks between Portugal and China began in earnest. Because of the asymmetry of power between China and Portugal the Chinese government imposed most of the terms of Macao’s rendition. A Joint Declaration was signed in April 1987, and a Sino-Portuguese Joint Liaison Group was created in 1988 to manage the transition and prepare for the handover in 1999. As in the case of Hong Kong, Macao was given the status of a Separate Administrative Region (SAR) and assured of autonomy governing many aspects of its life for 50 years. However, China could control its foreign affairs and defense, a Chinese-appointed chief administrator would head its administration, and the Chinese People’s Congress would have final say in judicial decisions. The handover took place at the end of 1999. According to Macao Basic Law, the government of Macao consists of a Western-style partially elected legislature, with a framework of separation of power among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, an independent judiciary, and freedom of expression and the press. Further reading: McGivering, Jill. Macao Remembers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; Yee, Herbert S. Macau in Transition: From Colony to Autonomous Region. New York: Palsgrave, 2001. Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur Macapagal-Arroyo, Gloria (1947– ) Philippine president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is the daughter of former Philippine president Diosdado Macapagal. When she M ascended to the presidency in January 2001, Arroyo joined the small group of female Asian leaders who had followed in their fathers’ footsteps to assume prominent political positions in their respective countries. An economist by training, Macapagal-Arroyo spent two years at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She then returned to the Philippines, where she graduated from Assumption College in Manila in 1968 with a degree in commerce and economics. She went on to earn graduate degrees in economics from Ateneo de Manila University and the University of Philippines. In 1968 she married José Miguel Arroyo. The couple had three children. She spent her early professional life as an economics professor and held teaching positions in various institutions in the Philippines, including all three of her alma maters. Macapagal-Arroyo entered government service when she was invited by President Corazon Aquino to join the Department of Trade and Industry as assistant secretary in 1987. In 1989 she became the undersecretary. At the same time she also held the post of executive director of the Garment and Textile Export Board. Macapagal-Arroyo made her first foray into politics when she campaigned successfully for a seat in the Philippine Senate in 1992. Three years later she was overwhelmingly reelected. She drew upon her own academic training and experience to push for social and economic reform legislation. In 1998 she entered presidential politics as a vice presidential candidate, running with presidential candidate José De Venecia. While she emerged victorious with almost 13 million votes, the largest number ever earned by a presidential or vice presidential candidate, her running mate lost to the incumbent vice president, Joseph Estrada. President Estrada appointed his vice president to the cabinet as secretary of the Department of Social Welfare and Development. But the Estrada administration quickly became embroiled in a corruption scandal. Macapagal-Arroyo resigned her cabinet post and joined in the chorus calling for Estrada’s resignation. In January 2001, the Philippine Supreme Court removed Estrada from office, and Macapagal-Arroyo ascended to the presidency. As president Macapagal-Arroyo faced many challenges, not the least of which was questions about the legitimacy of the court’s action. She had to contend with demonstrations by pro-Estrada supporters in May 2001. She declared a State of Rebellion, which was lifted a few days later. Two years later she faced another challenge to her authority when junior officers and soldiers mutinied to push for reforms to the armed forces. The incident ended in their peaceful surrender. A more pressing problem was the Philippine economy. The Asian financial crisis, the Second Gulf War, and the mounting deficit contributed to turbulent economic times. Late in 2001 Macapagal-Arroyo announced the implementation of Holiday Economics, a policy that involved adjustments to national holidays so that Filipinos could enjoy longer weekends. The government hoped this would promote domestic tourism and in turn stimulate economic growth. The program yielded mixed results. National security issues also preoccupied Macapagal- Arroyo. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Macapagal- Arroyo quickly pledged Filipino support for President George W. Bush’s War on Terror in the hope that her domestic problems could now be subsumed under the fight against international terrorism. After the U.S. invasion, the Philippines sent a small number of troops to Iraq to work on civic and humanitarian projects, but Macapagal-Arroyo ordered their withdrawal to free a Filipino civilian who had been taken hostage in July 2004. In 2004 Macapagal-Arroyo decided to seek another six-year term. In a four-way race, Macapagal-Arroyo emerged victorious in May 2004, but questions about legitimacy continued to dog her presidency when revelations involving her remarks to an election officer about needing a certain number of electoral votes surfaced, leading to accusations of corrupt electoral practices. Further reading: Crisostomo, Isabelo T. The Power and the Glory: Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Her Presidency. Quezon City, Philippines: J. Kriz, 2002; Owen, Norman G., ed. The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005; Tyner, James A. Iraq, Terror, and the Philippines’ Will to War. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Soo Chun Lu Makarios III (1913–1977) Cypriot political leader Archbishop Makarios was born in the village of Panayia in the Paphos district of Cyprus on August 13, 1913, and died on August 3, 1977. Makarios, meaning blessed, was the name chosen by Mikhalis Khristodoulou Mouskos when he was ordained as a deacon 276 Makarios III in 1938. After being ordained, Makarios enrolled in the theological school at the University of Athens, Greece. While studying in Athens during World War II, Makarios lived under the Nazi occupation. After the Allies liberated Greece, Makarios traveled to Boston to further his theological studies. In 1948, while in the United States, Makarios was elected bishop of Kitium, Cyprus. Shortly upon his return to Cyprus, Makarios became involved in the Cypriot enosis movement for a union with Greece, and in 1950 he was elected archbishop of Cyprus. His association with EOKA (National Organization of Cypriot Fighters), an underground organization that focused its attention on freeing the island from British colonial rule, caused Makarios to be exiled to the Seychelles by the British, who charged him with encouraging acts of terrorism. One year later he was allowed to return to Cyprus; when the British withdrew, Makarios was elected the first president of Cyprus. With his new outlook on the independent nation of Cyprus, Makarios distanced himself from the enosis movement. He attended the Belgrade Conference of the Heads of State of Non-Aligned Countries; his political position made him a target for the supporters of enosis. In 1965, when his term of office was to expire, the Cypriot people extended his term to 1968. In 1968 and 1973 he won reelection. Makarios was heavily pressured by the Greek government to increase Greek influence on Cypriot politics. Athens had been under the control of a military junta, which disliked Makarios and his reluctance to push for enosis. Makarios replied to the Greek Junta in the form of a letter demanding that the remaining Greek National Guard stationed in Cyprus be withdrawn. He also accused the junta of plotting against his life and against Cyprus. Thirteen days later, the junta ordered the Greek National Guard in Cyprus to overthrow Makarios and take control of the island. Makarios survived the attempted coup and escaped to England. The coup caused permanent damage in Cyprus by giving Turkey a pretext for a Turkish invasion that split the island in two, separating the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities. After a brief exile, Makarios returned to Cyprus in December 1974 to resume his presidency until his death in 1977. See also Cyprus, independence of; Cyprus, Turkish invasion of. Further reading: Bryant, Rebecca. Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus. London: I.B.Tauris, 2004; Mayes, Stanley. Makarios: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. Brian M. Eichstadt Malaysia, Federation of The modern nation of Malaysia came to being at one minute past midnight on September 16, 1963, and within weeks was embroiled in controversy. Its formation was not looked upon kindly by its neighbor Indonesia, and soon scores of “spontaneous” demonstrations filled the streets of Jakarta as angry Indonesians shouted their displeasure outside Malaysia’s new embassy. Indonesian foreign ministry spokesmen made their feelings clear to Australia: Indonesia did not like being encircled by what it saw as the British Commonwealth. From that shaky start Malaysia emerged as a prosperous nation keen to embrace the world of new technology. In 2006 Malaysia was a nation of around 25 million people, building its own cars, possessing a burgeoning manufacturing industry, and exploiting its waters for oil, gas, and fish. Four areas—all British colonial possessions—were combined to make up Malaysia: the Federated Malay States, Singapore, British North Borneo, and Sarawak. Brunei, which had expressed interest, did not become a part of Malaysia. The four component parts of the new country had developed a common identity following Japanese occupation during World War II. Indonesia and the Philippines opposed the union and Indonesia supported military rebels in Malaysia after its formation. The new country was led by Prime Minister Abdul Rahman, who had been a principal figure before independence, and his premiership lasted until September 22, 1970. Known generally as Tunku—a Malaysian title for a prince—Abdul Rahman had trained as a lawyer in Britain, and upon his return to Malaysia worked as a prosecutor. He became a leader of UNMO, the leading nationalist party, and became the natural choice to lead the campaign for independence from Britain. This was achieved for the new nation of Malaya in 1957, with Abdul Rahman as its prime minister. Regional discussions then took place about including the other British possessions in the region, the island of Singapore, and, to balance the racial mix, the eastern states of Sabah and Sarawak in the new nation. As a result, Malaysia was formed in Malaysia, Federation of 277 1963. Abdul Rahman went on to become the prime minister, leading the Alliance Party. He died in 1990. Several issues troubled the new nation. One was the exit of Singapore from Malaysia in 1965 to become a sovereign country. The Vietnam War of the United States and its allies against the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong was another issue. In 1969 racial riots broke out between Malays and non-Malays, chiefly over attempts to make Bahasa Malaysia the national language and over privileges that had been conferred on people of Malay race. Hundreds of people were killed in the riots. The government acted to cement the position of Malays with the creation of the title bumiputra, or son of the soil, which was given to the indigenous peoples of Sarawak and Sabah as well as Malays. Many of Chinese descent left the country as a result. Malaysia’s internal policies and its external relations were dominated for years by the oftenaggressive Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, who came to power in 1981. Mahathir saw Malaysia prosper through his vision for the country’s future. A series of five-year plans were installed with the aim of having the country become a fully industrialized nation by 2020. This plan seemed successful until 1997, when economic crisis beset Southeast Asia, and a recession ensued. Internal politics gained international notoreity in September 1999 when a dispute between the deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, and the prime minister became public. Anwar was arrested and, after a trial for alleged sodomy held in the full glare of world publicity, was sentenced to six years in jail. He was released before serving the full prison term. Geographically, Malaysia is split in two. Peninsular Malaysia borders Thailand at its northern end. In the south the island nation of Singapore is connected to Malaysia by a causeway. Kuala Lumpur is the capital, with several universities and major industries as well as government institutions. Eastern Malaysia, with only about 15 percent of the population, occupies about fourth of the island of Borneo—Indonesia owns the lower section, with tiny Brunei surrounded by Malaysia on the western coast. Politically the population of nearly 24 million is divided into 13 states, four of which have a governor, with the remainder ruled by hereditary sultans. All states have unicameral state legislatures relected every five years that deal with state matters. One of the nine sultans is elected for five years to be the paramount ruler of Malaysia. Major industries include the harvesting and export of palm oil, rubber processing, electronics, tin mining, light manufacturing, timber logging, petroleum production, and agriculture processing. Malaysia also exports electronic equipment. Malaysia’s foreign affairs are dominated by its relationships with neighboring giant Indonesia, the tiny island of Singapore, and a sometimes testy relationship with the West. Forest burning in Indonesia is a source of irritation between Malaysia and Indonesia as well as offshore oil exploration claims. An ongoing rebellion in Thailand’s Muslim-majority southern provinces also causes border tension. Malaysia has been a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) since its founding in 1967. It now includes 10 nations and over 500 million people. ASEAN primarily exists to promote economic growth, friendship, and regional stability. With its series of five-year economic plans, Malaysia aims to become a fully industrialized nation by 2020. Further reading: Hooker, Virginia M. A Short History of Malaysia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003; Kaur, Amarjit. Historical Dictionary of Malaysia. Lanham, MD, and London: Scarecrow Press, 2001. Thomas A. Lewis Malcolm X (1925–1965) American civil rights leader The militant African-American leader was born Malcolm Little, later taking the Muslim name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. His life story, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, was published posthumously in 1965, making him a hero among African Americans. Malcolm Little was born on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska. His father was Earl Little, a lay preacher and supporter of Marcus Garvey. One of Earl Little’s uncles had been lynched, and three of his brothers died at the hands of whites. His mother’s family was from Grenada. The family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1926, and then to Lansing, Michigan, where Malcolm grew up. He saw his family’s house burned down by the Ku Klux Klan. Two years later, in 1931, his father was found dead after having been run over by a street car; it was believed that he had been murdered by the group who set fire to his house. Soon afterward Malcolm’s mother was declared insane and was moved to a mental institution. Malcolm did well at junior high 278 Malcolm X school, graduating at the top of his class, but a teacher he admired told him that it was unrealistic for African Americans to aspire to be lawyers. After several years in foster homes, Malcolm spent some time in a detention home and then moved to Boston to be with his sister. He found work shining shoes, then joined the New Haven Railroad, but he quickly found himself involved in crime. He was refused an army position in World War II after allegedly claiming that as soon as he had a gun, he would organize other African Americans. In 1946, he was arrested with another African American and two white women stealing goods to sell to a pawnshop. The women claimed that they had been coerced into the crime, and Malcolm was jailed for 10 years. In prison, Malcolm joined the Nation of Islam, which held the belief in the inherent superiority of black people. Released from prison in 1952, he visited the Nation of Islam headquarters in Chicago, where he met with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the sect. Many African Americans believe that their surnames came to them from white slave owners; Malcolm Little changed his family name to “X.” Over several years, Malcolm X toured the United States and was regarded as one of the best speakers and organizers for the Nation of Islam. He talked much of the exploitation of African Americans by whites and urged black separatism rather than integration and racial equality. Indeed, he felt that there should be greater black self-dependence and that violence was justified for self-protection. This latter belief alienated him from many of the civil rights leaders at the time who urged for nonviolent resistance to racism. In 1959 Malcolm X went to Africa for the first time, visiting the United Arab Republic (Egypt), Sudan, Nigeria, and Ghana, partially to help organize a tour by Elijah Muhammad that followed. The Nation of Islam in the United States grew in numbers, and in 1961 he founded Muhammad Speaks, the official journal for the Nation of Islam. Settling in Harlem, New York, he became a minister at Mosque Number Seven. Malcolm X had become a controversial figure in the Black Muslim movement, meeting with Cuban leader Fidel Castro in September 1960 when the Cuban politician was in New York to address the United Nations General Assembly. The Cuban delegation refused to stay in the Shelburne Hotel after being asked to pay in advance, and moved to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where Malcolm X and other African-American community leaders met them. In 1963 Elijah Muhammad suspended him from the movement when he described the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy as a “case of chickens coming home to roost,” a remark that was regarded as extremely controversial. In March 1964 Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam and in the following month went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He had wanted to set up his own organization as a more radical wing of the Nation of Islam, but his time in Saudi Arabia led him to see that whites were not necessarily innately evil and that compromise was possible. In October 1964 he reaffirmed that he had embraced orthodox Islam, but this did not prevent death threats from white extremists and also rival Black Muslims. He was shot dead on February 21, 1965, at a Harlem ballroom. Three Black Muslims were later convicted of the murder. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, compiled by writer Alex Haley from numerous interviews with Malcolm X shortly before the latter’s murder, was published posthumously and became an overnight best seller. Malcolm X had married Betty X (née Sanders) in Lansing, Michigan, and Malcolm X 27 9 Malcolm X is most associated with the militant struggle for civil rights for African Americans in the United States. they had six daughters; the youngest two, twins, were born after Malcolm’s murder. See also Civil Rights movement, U.S. Further Reading: DeCaro, Louis A., Jr. On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X. New York: New York University Press, 1996; Dyson, Michael Eric. Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995; Sales, William W., Jr. From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Boston: South End Press, 1994. Justin Corfield Mandela, Nelson (1918– ) South African leader Nelson Mandela was considered by many to be the most respected world leader alive in the early 21st century. During the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa, he remained unembittered by a regime that offered him only indignity and poverty. His story cannot be separated from that of his family, colleagues, and supporters in the African National Congress (ANC) and a wider coalition of liberation groups in South Africa. In his fight for the right to live an ordinary life, Mandela gave up career and family, lived the life of an outlaw, and endured 27 years of imprisonment. Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, the eldest child of his father’s third wife, Nosekeni Fanny, in the village of Mvezo, Umtata, the capital of the Transkei, in the southeast of South Africa, and was called Rolihlahla. He was given the name Nelson Mandela at age seven when he attended a mission school, the first member of his family to do so. Madiba, as ANC leaders call him affectionately, is his clan name. Following his father’s defiance of a local magistrate, the family lost their inheritance and moved to Qunu, a large village north of Mvezo, where Mandela enjoyed an idyllic childhood as a herd boy. When he was nine, his father died and he was sent to the house of Chief Jongintaba Dalindyebo, the acting regent of the Thembu people, who raised him to become an adviser to the Thembu royal house. Through education Mandela gradually developed a tribal and national identity. Tribal elders expected him to learn by observation and passed down Xhosa history and culture to him. He witnessed the free speech and consensus decision-making of the men of the Thembu court, and also learned about British and Dutch imperialism. At 16, he was circumcised, a traditional site of passage into manhood. Following his mother he became Christian, was baptized into the Methodist Church, and enrolled in a number of mission schools. At the Clarkebury Boarding Institute, Mandela reveled in sports and learned that ability was more important than lineage. He then attended Healdtown, the Wesleyan College at Fort Beaufort, 175 miles southwest of Umtata, the largest liberal arts school for Africans south of the equator, and was appointed prefect. His education made him both an Anglophile and an African, as he came to admire British manners, to meet people from other tribes, and to think independently. At 21, Mandela entered University College, Fort Hare, the only institution for higher education for blacks in South Africa. He studied law and joined the Student Christian Association, where he met Oliver Tambo. Mandela started a B.A., but did not complete it until 1943 because he disagreed with the principal about the voting system for the Student Representative Council. At 23, to escape an arranged marriage, Mandela ran away to Johannesburg, where he lived on a meager wage and studied at night to complete his degree at the University of South Africa. Mandela was so poor that he went without food, wore patched clothes, and walked six miles to and from work to save the bus fare. Although the partners at the law firm discouraged politics, Walter Sisulu and Gaur Radebe—a fellow articled clerk—believed that politics was the only longterm solution to the problem of race relations in South Africa. In the 1950s Mandela opened the first firm of black African lawyers with Oliver Tambo. Mandela joined the ANC in 1943 and helped transform it from a deferential nongovernmental organization to a mass movement. Founded in 1912, the ANC was the oldest African organization in South Africa and advocated multiracialism. By the 1940s, however, the ANC was more concerned with maintaining the privilege of elite black South Africans. Mandela enrolled in the law program at the University of Witswaterand, where he met white and Indian students his own age who would also become leaders in the struggle. The ANC formed a Youth League on Easter Sunday 1944, and adopted its proposal for boycotts, strikes, and protest demonstrations. The Youth League had been inspired by Indian demonstrations in 1946 in response to laws restricting their movement and their right to buy property. The National Party won national elections in 1948 and passed the Group Areas Act in 1950. Apartheid, or the separation of black and white into urban areas on 28 0 Mandela, Nelson the basis of white superiority, became law. On Freedom Day, May 1, 1948, two-thirds of African workers stayed at home, and the government banned meetings by antiapartheid activists. A coalition of groups organized a National Day of Protest (NDP) on June 26, 1950. The Defiance Campaign, in which 8,500 volunteers defied laws and went to jail on the anniversary of the NDP in 1952, was Mandela’s apprenticeship as a freedom fighter. Mandela believed that the form of resistance was determined by the enemy, and that nonviolent resistance was a tactic rather than a principle. He traveled the country explaining the campaign and training volunteers to respond to police nonviolently. The government began to ban people, which was like informal imprisonment, and to conduct arrests and raids of the homes and offices of people linked to nongovernmental organizations. The government increased repression with the Sophiatown evictions in 1953, the Bantu Education Act of 1955—which transferred control of education to the Native Affairs Department—and the massacre of 69 peaceful protesters at Sharpeville in 1960. Oliver Tambo left the country and formed the external wing of the ANC. Mandela was arrested for treason in 1956, and when the trial ended in 1961, the government began to appoint its own judges, to use torture in prison, and— starting at the end of 1963—to harass and imprison wives of freedom fighters, including Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela, whom Mandela had married in 1958. For the next two years Mandela went underground and became an outlaw, disguising himself as a chauffeur, chef, or garden boy. By 1962 the ANC had established a military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which adopted a policy of sabotage of infrastructure. Mandela studied guerrilla warfare and surveyed the country’s industrial areas, transport system, and communications network. He attended the Pan African Freedom Movement for East, Central and Southern Africa in Addis Ababa, and organized financial support for the MK. The government passed the Sabotage Act, which allowed house arrests that were not subject to challenge in court, restricted the printing of the words of banned people, and passed the Ninety-Day Detention Law, which allowed detention without charge. On his return to South Africa Mandela was arrested and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. He defended himself against the charges of inciting the country to strike and leaving the country without travel documents. Standing in the courtroom in his kaross, or traditional clothing, he put the state on trail, arguing that in a state where there was no justice without representation, he had no option but to follow his conscience in defiance of the law. In late May 1963 Mandela was transferred to Robben Island, to the north of Cape Town. He knew about the island from childhood stories of Xhosa warriors who had been banished there. Nine months into his sentence the police discovered Rivonia, the house from which the ANC had operated underground; they arrested the commanders of the MK and charged them with sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government. Realizing they could face the death penalty, the accused defended themselves on moral grounds. Mandela rejected the allegation that he was a communist and admitted his African nationalism and support for British parliamentary democracy. The MK, seeking to respond to increased Afrikaner repression and growing African restlessness, had adopted a policy of sabotage to prevent civil war and to provide the best conditions for future relations. prison life Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment; he would be imprisoned for 27 years. By 1962 Robben Island had become the toughest correctional facility in South Africa. Prisoners were classified into four groups according to political opinion and the extent to which they were prepared to adopt servile behavior. D prisoners could write and receive only one letter of 500 words every six months to or from their immediate families, defined according to Western culture. Prisoners were not permitted to touch their relatives or to speak in their native language. They were given insufficient clothing, bedding, and food. In 1979, after 15 years of protests, African, Indian, and mixed-race prisoners received the same food as white prisoners, including fresh vegetables and meat. Mandela considered the struggle in prison a microcosm of the struggle in the country. He refused to be robbed of his dignity, to show emotion, or to despair. He fought for reforms such as better food, study privileges, and dismissal of officers, communicating his complaints during the visits of dignitaries such as the Red Cross, three justices of the Supreme Court, and Mrs. Helen Suzman, the only member of the Liberal Progressive Party in the parliament and the sole parliamentary opposition to apartheid. Mandela’s first protest was against short trousers. He refused a pair of long trousers until all prisoners were given them in 1965. He endured 13 years of hard labor in the limestone quarry until it was abolished in 1977. It took three years to convince the authorities that prisoners needed sunglasses, and when they were given them, the prisoners had to pay for these Mandela, Nelson 28 1 glasses themselves. Sunday services with a sympathetic preacher, books, games, tournaments, plays, concerts, and gardening provided some relief. Beginning in the early 1980s, Mandela sought to bring the government and the ANC to the point of talks. In March 1982 Mandela was transferred off Robben Island, and in 1988 he was relocated to a cottage within Victor Verster prison, in the town of Paarl, northeast of Cape Town. South African president F. W. de Klerk began to dismantle apartheid. He seemed prepared to negotiate with Mandela, but often sought to secure his own power through the guise of equality. On February 3, 1990, Mandela was released and greeted by a great crowd in Cape Town. He challenged the people to bring the government to the negotiating table. After his release Mandela knew that his dream of a simple family life would again be sacrificed as he worked for a new South Africa. (His first marriage, to Evelyn, had ended in 1955 when she became more interested in the Jehovah’s Witnesses than in politics.) In 1992 Mandela and Winnie separated. Democratic elections were held in 1994. Mandela was elected president for a five-year term and immediately embarked upon an ambitious program of reconstruction, which remained the struggle for South Africans into the 21st century. Further reading: Asmal, Kader, David Chidester, and Wilmot James, eds. Nelson Mandela in His Own Words: From Freedom to the Future. London: Little, Brown, 2003; Drummond, Allan. Nelson Mandela. Mentone, Vic.: Green Barrow Publishing, 2004; Guiloineau, Jean. Nelson Mandela: The Early Life of Rolihlahla Mandiba. Berkeley, CA: Atlantic Books, 2002; Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. Abacus, 1994; Nelson Mandela Foundation. A Prisoner in the Garden: Opening Nelson Mandela’s Prison Archive. Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin, 2005. Julia Pitman Manley, Michael (1924–1997) Jamaican political leader A leading spokesperson for Third World socialist movements and social justice for the world’s downtrodden and underprivileged, Michael Norman Manley dominated Jamaican politics from the time of his father’s death in 1969 until his retirement from politics in 1992. Serving three terms as prime minister (1972–76, 1976–80, and 1989–92), he headed Jamaica’s People’s National Party (PNP), founded in 1938 by his father, Norman Manley, which led the drive for Jamaican independence from Great Britain, achieved in 1962. Likened in his impact on global affairs to Indira Gandhi of India, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and other prominent Third World figures of the cold war era, Manley was born in Kingston, Jamaica on December 10, 1924. His Jamaican-born black father, an Oxford-trained attorney, was a leading figure in the island’s political life from the 1930s until his death; his England-born white mother, Edna Swithenbank Manley, was a highly regarded artist and sculptor. Despite his privileged background, which he readily acknowledged, in 1942 at age 18 Manley enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force, serving in the European theater but seeing no combat. After the war he attended the London School of Economics, becoming a protégé of prominent British socialist Harold Laski. Returning to Jamaica, in the early 1950s he became involved in the country’s burgeoning trade union movement; in 1962 he was appointed to a Senate seat in the newly independent nation-state and became vice president of the PNP. Described as “tall, handsome, charismatic, and a spellbinding orator,” Manley promoted a pragmatic left-socialist democratic populism that resonated among large sectors of the Jamaican electorate. Determined to improve the living conditions of his country’s poor majority and to enhance Jamaica’s standing vis-à-vis the more advanced industrial world, during his first term as prime minister he increased the state’s role in the country’s bauxite industry, the country’s principal export commodity and a major source of foreign exchange. He also instituted a range of leftpopulist policies in the arenas of health, education, and unemployment. A shrewd politician, he cast himself as an authentic expression of the needs and aspirations of Jamaica’s poor and dispossessed, allying himself with the religio-nationalist Rastafarian movement and integrating reggae music and other forms of Afro- Caribbean artistic expression into his political repertoire. After his 1980 electoral defeat by Conservative E. P. G. Seaga, and in the context of the neoliberalism of the Reagan-Thatcher years, Manley recast his policies during his third and final term in office (1989–92), privatizing some industries, cutting government spending, and pursuing more orthodox monetary, trade, and investment policies, while never relinquishing his rhetorical or practical commitment to improving the living standards of the majority. Further reading: Levi, Darrell E. Michael Manley: The Making of a Leader. London: A. Deutsch, 1989; Meeks, Brian. 282 Manley, Michael Narratives of Resistance: Jamaica, Trinidad, and the Caribbean. Mona, Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2000. Michael J. Schroeder Marcos, Ferdinand and Imelda (1917–1989 and 1929– ) Filipino leaders Although popularly elected at first, Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, transformed the Philippines into a police state during the early 1970s. With the financial and political backing of the United States, which valued their strong anticommunist policies, the Marcoses ruled for 15 years before being forced from power by popular protest in mid-1986. Ferdinand Marcos was born in Llocos Norte Province at the northwestern tip of Luzon, a rice- and tobacco-growing region. His father was a politician and educator, his mother a teacher from a prominent local family. Marcos was a brilliant law student in the 1930s; he successfully convinced the Philippine Supreme Court to drop a murder conviction against him for shooting a political rival of his father. During World War II, Marcos fought in the Battle of Bataan and claimed to have led a guerrilla unit, the Maharlikas, against Japan. Many critics doubted the veracity of his claims. In 1949 Marcos won a seat in the Philippine House of Representatives. In 1954, he married Imelda Romualdez, a well-connected former beauty queen. He became a senator in 1959 and served as president of the senate from 1963 to 1965. He was elected president of the Philippines in 1965. During his first term, Marcos championed a number of large-scale development projects that earned him the support of both elites and peasants. He built roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals. Politically, such programs fared far better than the land reform agenda that Marcos had made a key part of his campaign. Much of the money for these projects came from the United States, which was eager for the support of Asian nations in its struggle against communism. Marcos won a second term in 1969. Soon after, the situation within the country deteriorated; economic stagnation, crime, and political instability came to characterize national life. A communist insurgency erupted in the countryside. With the instability as pretext, and, as later accounts would reveal, actually engineering much of it, Marcos began arrogating more powers to himself. In September 1972 he instituted martial law and would rule by decree for much of the next decade and a half. During this period Marcos proclaimed the beginning of a New Society, which would cast away the personal and political values of colonialism in favor of modern values. But even as Marcos and his supporters called for self-sacrifice they began to pocket enormous sums of money from the public till. Marcos broke up many of the business conglomerates run by some of the country’s leading families and handed these profitable enterprises to his own family members and loyal supporters. He also nationalized industries and created monopolies to enrich himself and his supporters. Marcos ended martial law in January 1981 with Proclamation 2045. Although he appeared to loosen his grip on power, the New Republic proved to be little more than a repackaged version of the corrupt and repressive New Society. Because of a boycott by the main opposition parties, Marcos won a large victory in the June 1981 presidential election. However, years of corruption began to affect the economy as its national debt climbed to $25 billion by early 1985. Marcos’s health also begin to fail. Because he suffered from what was believed to be kidney disease, his wife Imelda took on more responsibilities, including meeting foreign dignitaries. The United States also began to withdraw its support of Marcos. The assassination of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr., the main opposition leader, in August 1983 ignited a people’s movement that would result in the exile of the Marcoses three years later. Aquino and his wife, Corazon, had been Marcos, Ferdinand and Imelda 283 From left: Lady Bird Johnson, Ferdinand Marcos, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Imelda Marcos stand in front of the White House. long-term rivals of Marcos. It is widely believed that had martial law not been declared, Aquino would have won the 1972 presidential election. Although a high-level commission blamed Marcos loyalists for the killing, the government ignored its findings. Aquino’s murder and the subsequent cover-up became the rallying point for a diverse group of opponents. Still confident of his popularity, in November 1985 Marcos called a “snap” election for February 1986, 16 months before the end of his term. After the Marcoscontrolled National Assembly declared him the victor, Catholic Primate of the Philippines Cardinal Jaime Sin, Minister of Defense Juan Ponce Enrile, and Lieutenant General Fidel V. Ramos rallied around the legitimate winner, Aquino’s widow Corazon Cojuango Aquino. The People Power Movement forced Marcos out of office on the day of his inauguration. He fled in a U.S. Air Force plane with his family and closest supporters and eventually settled in Honolulu, Hawaii. In ensuing months details emerged about how he had used his office to accumulate vast amounts of wealth. Filipino officials estimated that Marcos and his wife and supporters stole between $5 and $10 billion. The great symbol of this corruption amid poverty became Imelda Marcos’s collection of shoes, handbags, and formal gowns, which numbered in the thousands. Ferdinand Marcos died on September 28, 1989, in Hawaii. Imelda Marcos returned to the Philippines in 1992, served in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2001, and lost two bids for the presidency. Further reading: Brands, H. W. Bound to Empire. New York: Oxford, 1992; Marcos, Ferdinand. Notes on the New Society of the Philippines. Marcos Foundation, 1973; Rempel, William C. Delusions of a Dictator. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993; Zaide, Sonia M. The Philippines: A Unique Nation. Manila: All Nations Publishing, 1999. Thomas Robertson Marshall, Thurgood (1908–1993) U.S. Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall was special counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a U.S. Supreme Court justice during the 20th-century Civil Rights movement of the United States. Marshall is lionized for his argument before the Supreme Court in the case Brown v. Board of Education, which ended the federal sanction of segregation in public schools. He was also the first African-American Supreme Court justice. Thurgood Marshall was born Thoroughgood Marshall on June 2, 1908, in Baltimore, Maryland. His father was a steward at a country club, and his mother was an elementary school teacher. Marshall was named for his paternal grandfather, a slave from the Congo who won his freedom. His grandfather had chosen the name Thoroughgood when he enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War. At age six, Marshall legally had his name changed to Thurgood due to criticism from his peers. Marshall was a self-proclaimed hell-raiser in elementary school and was first introduced to the Constitution of the United States when he was forced to read it as punishment. He took great interest in Article III, which concerned the judiciary branch, and also in the Bill of Rights. Even from an early age, he was troubled by civil rights abuses. Marshall graduated with honors from Douglas High School in Baltimore, Maryland, and then attended the all-black Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania, the oldest African-American institute of higher education in the country. In his junior year Marshall married his first wife, Vivian Burey. The next year, Marshall graduated Lincoln University. Experience on the debate team at Lincoln University had inspired Marshall to major in prelaw. After graduation Marshall applied to the University of Maryland Law School, but was rejected due to his race. He then turned to Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C. It was there that Marshall met Charles Hamilton Houston, the vigorous vice dean of the Howard law school. Houston inspired Marshall’s interest in constitutional law and instilled in him the idea of lawyers as “social engineers” capable of effecting change for the African- American community. Marshall graduated Howard University Law School as valedictorian and opened a law practice in Baltimore. Marshall acted as legal counsel to the local chapter of the NAACP. In 1933 Marshall argued his first major court case with the NAACP, in which he won the first African-American student, Donald Gaines Murray, a place in the University of Maryland Law School, the school that had rejected Marshall. In fact, Murray was the first African-American student to enter a state law school below the Mason-Dixon Line. In 1935 Charles Hamilton Houston became chief counsel for the NAACP. A year later, Marshall joined the New York City chapter of the NAACP as Hous- 284 Marshall, Thurgood ton’s assistant. When Houston retired to private practice in 1938, Marshall took over as chief counsel for the NAACP. Marshall founded the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) to attack segregation through judicial and legislative means. Throughout the 1950s Marshall traveled the South arguing civil rights cases before state and federal courts. He received several death threats during this tour and narrowly avoided a lynching. Of the 32 cases Marshall argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of the NAACP, he won 29. In 1954 Marshall won the landmark case for the NAACP, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The unanimous Supreme Court decision overruled the Plessy v. Ferguson precedent. A year after the Brown v. Board decision, Marshall’s wife, Vivian Burey, died; Marshall remarried the same year. His second wife, Cecilia Suyat, was a secretary at the NAACP’s New York City office. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy appointed Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit. Marshall struggled with the decision to leave behind 23 years as the NAACP head counsel, but ultimately followed his sense of duty to his country. After serving three years on the Court of Appeals, Marshall was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson as solicitor general of the United States, the third-highest office in the Justice Department. President Johnson proceeded to nominate Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967. Marshall’s nomination was confirmed in the Senate 69 to 11, and he was sworn in as the first African-American Supreme Court justice on October 2, 1967. Marshall served on the court for almost 24 years. On the liberal Warren court, Marshall joined a majority in favor of civil rights for minorities and the expansion of rights for all citizens. Marshall focused his energy on negotiating unanimity among his fellow justices to increase the weight of the Warren Court’s rulings. However, as the court grew more conservative in the 1970s and 1980s, Marshall became famous for his vehement minority dissents, arguing in favor of affirmative action, due process, and First Amendment rights, and against the death penalty. Thurgood Marshall died of heart failure in Bethesda, Maryland, on January 24, 1993. His legacy as Mr. Civil Rights marked him in history alongside activists such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. See also Civil Rights movement, U.S. Further reading: Mooney, L., ed. “Thurgood Marshall.” In Newsmakers. Vol. 1993. Detroit, MI: Gale Research; “Profile of Justice Thurgood Marshall.” In U.S. Courts: The Federal Judiciary. United States Government website, http://www. uscourts.gov/outreach/resources/brown_marshallbio.htm (cited February 2006); Williams, Juan. Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. New York: Times Books, 1998; Wilson, H. W. “Marshall, Thurgood.” In Biography Reference Bank online database, http://hwwilsonweb.com (cited January 2006). Anna Brown Marshall Plan World War II decimated Europe’s infrastructure and economy, leaving bombed and gutted buildings, destroyed factories and businesses, and high unemployment. Hit heaviest were areas of industrial production and transportation. With Europe debt-ridden and financial reserves depleted by the war, the problems could not be easily fixed. Both U.S. and European officials put forth several plans, all of which were rejected. The one alternative for recovery called for German reparations. Marshall, Plan 28 5 Thurgood Marshall was the first African-American justice on the United States Supreme Court. However, many officials felt such a plan would be the same mistake that was made after World War I and opted instead for U.S. investment in Europe. The United States initiated the European Recovery Program (ERP), generally referred to as the Marshall Plan. On June 5, 1947, U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, in addressing the graduating class of Harvard University, outlined the U.S. government’s intentions for aiding European recovery. Marshall called for Europeans to create a plan that the United States, whose economy had grown rapidly during the war and the one major power whose infrastructure remained intact, would then subsidize. State Department officials would work with the nations of Europe to develop the program, which was named for Marshall. A month after Marshall’s speech European officials, led by British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin and French foreign minister Georges Bidault, met in Paris to discuss options for the proposal at the Conference of European Economic Cooperation (CEEC). Invited by the Western powers as a sign of good faith, the Soviet Union attended the conference as well. However, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov walked out, calling for Soviet rejection of the plan. Seeing it as a U.S. scheme to subjugate Europe by promoting free trade and economic unity, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin pressured Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary into rejecting it as well. In September the CEEC approved the formation of the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) to oversee the European side of the recovery program. Except for Germany and Spain, every nation outside the Soviet sphere joined. On April 2, 1948, the U.S. Congress formally authorized the ERP through passage of the Economic Cooperation Act, which President Truman signed the next day. Truman appointed Paul G. Hoffman, president of the Studebaker automobile corporation, as head of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), the U.S. agency that operated the ERP. W. Averell Harriman, a Lend-Lease representative to Britain and secretary of commerce under Truman, was made special representative to the participating countries to advise them on the program. Beginning operations in July 1948, the ECA had the objectives of strengthening European currencies, encouraging the development of industrial production, and facilitating international trade within Europe and its partners, especially the United States. Meanwhile, the OEEC met to determine European needs prior to any distribution of appropriations under the act. The revitalization plan proposed to the United States asked for $22 billion in aid. Congress approved a Truman-backed $17-billion aid package with strong bipartisan support. The amount of aid received varied by country on a per capita basis. For instance, Great Britain received an approximate total of $3.3 billion while Iceland received only $43 million. Moreover, Allied nations and major industrial powers were given priority aid over those that had sided with the Axis powers or had remained neutral during the war. The same went for countries seen as strategic in the fight against communism, like West Germany. The basic idea of the plan was simple: The United States gave monetary grants to participating countries, which then utilized that aid to buy the materials needed for recovery—typically from the United States. The ECA and local governments jointly administered and processed the exchange, examining and distributing the aid where needed. As a result the U.S. economy flourished as the European recovery effort grew. Early on, imports consisted mostly of essential items like food, fuel, and materials for reconstruction; however, as western Europe stabilized and the cold war heated up, aid went more toward rebuilding military capabilities to defend against communist expansion. On the other hand, eastern Europe’s forced rejection of the Marshall Plan clearly showed the division in Europe leading toward the cold war. Unlike its former allies, the Soviet Union imposed large reparations on former Axis nations in its sphere of influence. Finland, Hungary, Romania, and East Germany were all forced to pay large stipends to the Soviet Union as well as to provide supplies and raw materials. Consequently the economies of eastern Europe did not recover as quickly, if at all, under Soviet rule. Over the four years of the Marshall Plan’s existence, participating countries received in total close to $13 billion in economic aid; with the exception of West Germany, the economies of all surpassed prewar levels when the program ended in 1951. Under the provisions of the plan none of the aid had to be repaid, as it was absorbed and reinvested in the economies of Europe and the United States. The lone exception was West Germany, which had to repay the United States a reduced amount of $1 billion; the final payment came in 1971. Seen as the first instrument of sustained European economic integration, the European Recovery Program removed tariff barriers, ended protectionism, and established institutions that could control the economy on a continental level—an idea European leaders had sought to institute in the past. Further reading: Duignan, Peter, and Lewis H. Gann. “The Marshall Plan.” Hoover Digest (1997); Hogan, Michael J. 286 Marshall Plan The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; Milward, Alan S. The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–51. London: Methuen, 1984; Reynolds, David. “The European Response: Primacy of Politics.” Foreign Affairs (May/June 1997); Schain, Martin, ed. The Marshall Plan: Fifty Years After. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Steve Sagarra McCarthyism The term McCarthyism defined a period of U.S. history during the 1950s when there was intense concern about Communist infiltration of American society. It took its name from U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, who was involved in accusing many people of being Communist or having Communist sympathies. These people were then often subjected to aggressive investigations, questioning by congressional committees. In many cases they faced harassment and, in some cases, what became known as “selective prosecution.” After World War II, the U.S. government became increasingly worried about the establishment of Communist or pro-Communist governments throughout all of eastern Europe. Many people in the United States started to feel threatened by the Soviet Union. This certainly increased in 1949, when the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb and the Communists were victorions in the Chinese civil war in the same year. With the start of the Korean War the following year, the idea of communism seeking to expand over the whole world was seen in many circles in the United States as a very real possibility. In January 1950 Alger Hiss, a high-level official in the State Department, was convicted of perjury. He would have been charged with espionage, but the statute of limitations had run out. Instead, he was charged with lying when he testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the major group involved in questioning suspected Communists. On February 9, 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy produced a piece of paper that he claimed contained a list of 205 people working in the State Department who were known to the secretary of state as having been members of the Communist Party. McCarthy received much press coverage, and the term McCarthyism has been traced to a Washington Post cartoon by Herblock, published on March 29, 1950, showing a tottering pillar on which an elephant—the symbol of the Republican Party—is being asked to stand. In July 17, 1950, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested. Both were members of the Communist Party, and the couple both worked on the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory during the war. With the American government eager to find out how the Soviet Union had managed to explode their atomic bomb so quickly, investigations led to the Rosenbergs, who were charged with stealing atomic bomb secrets for the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs were found guilty, although doubts were cast on the constitutionality and the applicability of the Espionage Act of 1917, under which they were tried, as well as the perceived bias of the trial judge, Irving R. Kaufman. The Rosenbergs were executed on June 19, 1953, being the first U.S. civilians to be executed for espionage, and the first Americans ever to be executed for espionage in peacetime. With many high-profile cases like those of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, it was not long before the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, started assigning increasingly large numbers of his agents to investigating Communists and suspected Communists. In this, the FBI were subsequently found to have broken laws, being involved in burglaries, opening mail, and installing illegal wiretaps. From 1947 on, the House Un-American Activities Committee had started to question people connected with Hollywood, serving subpoenas on film actors, directors, and some screenwriters. The first 10, known as the “Hollywood Ten,” refused to cooperate and pleaded the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and free assembly. The defense was rejected, and eight of the 10 were jailed for a year, and two for six months. Thereafter, witnesses tended to plead the protection of the Fifth Amendment, refusing to give any evidence that might incriminate them. Those questioned could either use this as a defense or name other Communists. Senator McCarthy came to head the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He then started searching through the card catalogs of the overseas library program of the State Department, finally getting them to remove books which were deemed to be communist or pro-communist. The blacklists then started, although in many ways these had been operating since November 1947, when Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, issued a press release that came to be known as the Waldorf Statement. Several hundred people were jailed during the McCarthy period, as it became known, with between 10,000 McCarthyism 287 and 12,000 losing their jobs. A few scholars, such as John D’Emilio, have managed to show that more people were targeted for homosexuality than communism. In the film industry more than 300 actors, actresses, writers, and directors were not able to find work because of the blacklists. In 1952 the U.S. Supreme Court voted to uphold the decision made in lower courts in Alder v. Board of Education of New York that state-based loyalty review panels could fire any teachers deemed subversive. As tensions mounted, Arthur Miller launched his attack on McCarthyism in his play The Crucible, using the Salem witch trials of 1692 as a metaphor in which the accusation was tantamount, in the public mind, to guilt. It was Edward R. Murrow, the CBS broadcast journalist, who criticized McCarthy on March 9, 1954, on his “Report on Joseph R. McCarthy,” stating that the senator had been abusive toward witnesses. Soon afterward, when McCarthy attacked the U.S. Army’s chief counsel, Joseph Welch, Welch replied, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” It was a rebuke that slowly led to a move away from McCarthyism. Gradually, even President Dwight D. Eisenhower began to see McCarthy as extremely distasteful. In November 1954, when the Republicans lost control of the Senate, McCarthy was dumped from the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate. Soon afterward he was formally censured by a vote of 67 to 22 for conduct “contrary to Senate traditions.” McCarthy remained as a senator for another two years. He had always been a heavy drinker and died on May 2, 1957, from cirrhosis of the liver. Further Reading: Fried, Albert. McCarthysim: The Great American Red Scare: A Documentary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; Haynes, John Earl. Red Scare or Red Menace?: American Communism and Anti-Communism in the Cold War Era. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000; Schrecker, Ellen. Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998; Schrecker, Ellen. The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2004. Justin Corfield Meir, Golda (1898–1978) Israeli politician Known for most of her life as Goldie Mabovitch, Golda Meir spent her formative years in Kiev, Ukraine, where pogroms and anti-Semitism plagued her life. Golda’s only memories of this time were of being afraid, hungry, and cold. Tired of their lives in Kiev, the Mabovitch family moved to Byelorussia in 1903 and then to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1906. Upon graduation as valedictorian from junior high school, Meir pleaded with her parents to allow her to attend high school and become a teacher. At 14 she ran away from home to live with her sister in Denver. She attended high school and worked at a restaurant, where she overheard debates about Zionism, anarchism, socialism, and suffrage. Meir met Morris Meirson in 1915, and they moved back to Wisconsin so she could finish high school. With her parents’ support she enrolled in Wisconsin’s normal school for teaching in 1916 and taught Yiddish the following year. Meir and Meirsen married in 1917, and she began working with the Poalei Tzion movement. Meir and Morris then moved to Palestine. Their first child was born in 1924. That same year Meir was elected as an officer of Histadrut, where she met influential Zionists including David Ben-Gurion, with whom she would be professionally connected for much of her career. She 288 Meir, Golda Israel’s first woman prime minister, Golda Meir, was noted for both her idealism and her practical nature. was elected secretary of the Women’s Labor Council in 1928 and separated from her husband; however, they never officially divorced. Meir helped found Mapai, Israel’s major labor party, which led every coalition government for the first three decades of its existence. In the mid-1930s Meir was elected to the executive board of Histadrut, became the fundraiser for the Jewish Agency, and was elected as the head of the agency’s Political Department. Following Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, Ben-Gurion appointed Meir as Israel’s ambassador to the Soviet Union. Unhappy to leave the newly established Israel, she returned and was appointed minister of labor and national insurance, in which post she remained until 1956. She adopted the Hebrew name Golda Meir. As foreign minister from 1956 to 1966, she attempted to build bridges with the emerging independent countries in Africa via an assistance program based on Israel’s nation-building experience. Diagnosed with cancer in 1963, Meir retired from the Knesset; however, her retirement was short-lived. Supportive of the Mapai Party merger and multiparty alignment, she was elected secretary general of the coalition in 1966. When Prime Minister Eshkol died in 1969, Golda Meir became the world’s third female prime minister. Combining idealism and practicality, Meir led a full professional and personal life. She dedicated her career to leading Israel’s struggle in survival and peace. Both of these objectives were thwarted when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel during Yom Kippur in 1973. Meir was blamed for overestimating the strength of the Israel Defense Forces and misjudging the surrounding Arab countries’ intentions. In 1974 she resigned and during the following four years worked on her autobiography and spent time with her family until her death in 1978. See also Arab-Israeli War (1973). Further reading: Martin, Ralph G. Golda: The Romantic Years. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988; Meir, Golda. My Life. Jerusalem: Steimatzky’s Agency Ltd, 1975; Meir, Menahem. My Mother Golda Meir: A Son’s Evocation of Life with Golda Meir. New York: Arbor House Publishing Company, 1983. Jenna Levin Menchú, Rigoberta (1959– ) Guatemalan peace activist Catapulted to international fame by her moving testimonial, I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983), Rigoberta Menchú Tum was born on January 9, 1959, to a poor family of Quiché-Maya Guatemalan Indians, among the largest of Guatemala’s 26 indigenous ethno-linguistic groups. Her gripping narrative of her life, her community, and their struggles for peace and justice in the highlands, coffee plantations, and cities of Guatemala was the principal impetus behind her receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. In recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples, the prize committee stated that “. . . Rigoberta Menchú stands out as a vivid symbol of peace and reconciliation across ethnic, cultural and social dividing lines, in her own country, on the American continent, and in the world. . . . In her social and political work, she has always borne in mind that the long-term objective of the struggle is peace.” In 1999 her narrative was challenged as partly fabricated. The allegations opened up a wide-ranging debate about the veracity of her account and the nature of truth in testimonial narratives. Challenges to specific episodes in her account did not question the genocidal nature of the Guatemalan government’s anti-insurgency campaigns; the extremes of exploitation, oppression, and violence suffered by the country’s indigenous peoples; or Menchú’s moral courage or commitment to peace and justice. In response to the controversy, the Nobel Prize Committee reaffirmed its decision. As a vast anthropological and historical literature attests, Guatemala’s indigenous population has been subject to centuries of victimization and oppression by more powerful groups. This is the context for understanding Rigoberta Menchú’s narrative, life, and struggles for justice. In her teens she became involved in the social justice initiatives of the Catholic Church and in the women’s rights movement. Her father, Vicente Menchú, was a political activist, jailed and tortured for his alleged involvement in the death of a plantation owner. Upon his release he joined the Peasant Union Committee (CUC), and in 1979 Rigoberta did the same. The next year Vicente was killed by security forces during a peaceful protest action at the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City. Soon after, she became involved in a strike by farm workers on the Pacific coast and in other anti-government actions, and in 1981 was compelled to flee the country. In exile she became a leading figure in the international movement for indigenous rights in Guatemala. In 1983 she narrated her testimony to a Venezuelan anthropologist, who published her account the following year. The book proved enormously influential, used in colleges and universities worldwide. In 1999 a U.S. anthropologist detailed numerous discrepancies in her account. Controversy has raged Menchú, Rigoberta 28 9 since. A predominant consensus acknowledges many of the discrepancies while affirming the essential veracity of Menchú’s account. Since 1992 she has received many honors and prizes and in 2007 remained active in the struggle for the rights of indigenous peoples and women in Guatemala and Latin America. See also Guatemala, civil war in, (1960–1996). Further reading: Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth Burgos Debray. Translated by Ann Wright. London: Verso, 1984; Montejo, Victor D. Maya Intellectual Renaissance: Identity, Representation, and Leadership. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005; Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. Michael J. Schroeder Mexico, agrarian reform in Among the principal causes of the Mexican revolution (1910–20) were the country’s highly unequal landowning patterns and growing landlessness among the rural majority, especially during the regime of dictator Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910). The 1917 constitution, which has governed Mexico since that time, included among its provisions several articles addressing the land issue, most prominently Article 27, which states in part: “The nation shall at all times have the right to impose on private property such limitations as the public interest may demand, as well as the right to regulate the utilization of natural resources . . . in order to conserve them and to ensure a more equitable distribution of public wealth.” Article 27 also stipulated that only ejidos (inalienable village-owned collective lands, generally distributed by villages to individual heads of households) and individual Mexican citizens could own Mexican land or subsoil rights. In the early 1920s, under intense international pressure, Article 27 was watered down in a series of constitutional amendments to permit foreign firms, most notably U.S. oil companies, to be granted concessions on Mexican territory for the exploitation of natural resources. Actual implementation of Article 27 varied greatly in accordance with the proclivities of individual presidents. In the 23 years from 1917 and 1940, approximately 30.6 million hectares were redistributed to villages and individuals. Around one-third of this total (34 percent) was redistributed from 1917 to 1934 under the presidencies of Venustiano Carranza (1917–20), Alvaro Obregón (1920–24), and Plutarco Calles and his subordinates (1924–34), amounting to a little over 10.5 million hectares. The remaining two-thirds (66 percent), amounting to some 20.1 million hectares, was distributed by the administration of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40). After 1940, the popular clamor for land declined substantially, in consequence of both the aggressive implementation of the constitution’s land reform provisions under Cárdenas; formal representation of rural producers in national and local governments via the National Peasant Confederation (Confederación Nacional Campesino, or CNC); and the growth of rural-urban migration and the attendant shift in the nation’s demographic structure. According to one leading scholar, “[the] era of agrarian violence that began in 1810 finally ended with the land reform of the 1930s.” (Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution, p. 348.) After 1940, the national government under the PRI favored large commercial agricultural enterprises at the expense of smaller production units, resulting in growing impoverishment among rural dwellers. Under President Luis Echevvaría (1970–76), the government again emphasized the ejido sector, adding some 17 million hectares to the ejido total. This was the last major redistribution of Mexican land. In 1992 the government radically altered the nature of the ejido, in effect privatizing it by permitting ejido-holders (ejidatarios) to sell, rent, lease, or mortgage their properties. The neoliberal, free market, privatization-oriented reforms under President Vicente Fox (2000–06) continued the erosion of the ejido, though the institution remained important in many rural areas, while local struggles for land (as waged by the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, for instance) promised to continue into the foreseeable future. Further reading: Barry, Tom. Zapata’s Revenge: Free Trade and the Farm Crisis in Mexico. Boston: South End Press, 1995; Tutino, John. From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Michael J. Schroeder Mobutu Sese Seko (1930–1997) Congolese president Mobutu Sese Seko, a member of the Ngbandi ethnic group, was born in Lisala, Belgian Congo, in 1930. After receiving a Catholic education from white m