The Venetian Republic reached its zenith in the dramatic takeover of “a quarter and a half a quarter” of the Byzantine Empire in the Fourth Crusade. It acquired a network of port cities – the Stato da Mar – that enabled its control over trade routes between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Called the “hinge” of Europe by one historian, Venice spearheaded an economic leap forward on the continent through a mastery of long-distance navigation. This was Italy’s second great urban age, as cities saw resurgences from the dramatic declines into feudalism in late antiquity. Venice was the prototypical world city of the time, competing with Genoa for control of seaborne trade routes. Indeed, the activities in Italian city-states are critical to the scholarly understanding of the European economic revivals in the ninth and eleventh centuries. The city figures centrally in major works by Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Michael McCormick, Henri Pirenne, and Fernand Braudel for fostering seminal forms of intercity relations at crucial times. Its relations with Constantinople, for example, were of equal importance with those of its Italian neighbors.

The caliph Al Mansur literally forged the city plan in fire in 762 CE. His Round City was an architectural symbol of order in a vast combustible empire. Ninth-century Baghdad had relations extending from the Atlantic to China, with tranches of coins found as far afield as Scandinavia. The city was by design the heart of a vast city network at a time of pronounced urbanization, an urban golden age by standard reckonings. At the height of Abbasid power its population was an estimated 840,000. It thereby stretched the geographic boundaries of time and space across Eurasia, a Silk Roads terminus in its own right. Baghdad was one of the world’s preeminent “open cities,” incubating trade, knowledge in art, astronomy, mathematics, amidst a myriad of other cross-cultural exchanges. It attracted generations of scientists, philosophers, planners, and literati, especially from Central Asia. Migratory flows included a durable revolving network linking Baghdad to Merv and other key centers of learning and trade along the Silk Roads. Rapidly expanding Islamic civilization had to develop new forms of city building to spread Dar al Islam (the realm of Islam) across vast disparate realms.

What are medieval polyphony and song? Who composed this music, sang it, and wrote it down? Where and when did the different kinds of polyphony and song originate, and under what circumstances were they composed and performed? This chapter provides definitions of the key terms and sets out the scope of the book. It explains how we have grouped the material into chapters based on geographical locations, and the rationale for this organization. We then give a broad, outline history of the medieval period (or ‘Middle Ages’) to help readers navigate the major events, characters, and places that helped to shape this long historical period. A timeline of key musical and historical events of the Middle Ages concludes the chapter, giving a helpful point of reference for readers to understand the overlapping chronologies of different kinds of medieval polyphony and song, and their historical contexts.

This Introduction to Volume I of The Cambridge World History of Genocide, which covers the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds, raises questions about the nature of premodern genocide, about the meaning of genocide and genocidal intent in the premodern era, and about both perpetrators and victim groups, and about the scale, techniques, and ideologies of genocide in that long historical period in comparison to those of genocides committed in modern times. The chapter considers whether or not genocide can be considered a ‘transhistorical phenomenon’. It also asks whether mass violence in the pre-modern and early modern periods occurred in a different moral context than that of modern times, presenting some differing views on this question. Finally the chapter introduces the substantive chapters of the volume, and how they variously examine material, political, sociocultural, and ideological factors that contributed to premodern outbreaks of genocide, as well as noting some changes over time from prehistory to the early modern era.

The Introduction explicates the rationale behind and structure of the book, its thematic and chronological purview and methodological premises, and its take on the Byzantine phenomenon.

European society has long been wedded to narratives of progress, and many people believe that, despite increased economic inequality, the basic conditions of the majority have improved and rights have expanded. T. H. Marshall’s claim that political rights developed first and were later followed by socio-economic rights is ingrained in contemporary historiography. Yet, if we lengthen our historical perspective, we see that socio-economic rights predate not only the twentieth century but the entire modern period. From the Middle Ages, poverty was considered not only an economic but also a theological and legal condition. The rights of the poor were socio-economic in nature, encompassing necessities and legal representation. However, these rights were eroded in the sixteenth century, as new power structures and labour relations emerged and capitalism developed. By taking a long view, we see that the history of socio-economic rights is defined not by the inexorable march of progress but by moments of erosion, when the rights of the poor were suppressed, along with the history of poverty as a legal condition.

This volume is a selection of essays taken from the excellent range of papers presented at the British Legal History Conference hosted by the Institute for Legal and Constitutional Research at the University of St Andrews, 10–13 July 2019. The theme of the conference gives this book its title: ‘comparative legal history’. The topic came easily to the organisers because of their association with the St Andrews-based European Research Council Advanced grant project ‘Civil law, common law, customary law: consonance, divergence and transformation in Western Europe from the late eleventh to the thirteenth centuries’. But the chosen topic was also connected to the fact that this was, we think, the first British Legal History Conference held at a university without a Law faculty. Bearing in mind the question of how far institutional setting determines approach, our hope was that an element of fruitful comparison would stimulate people to think further about the range of approaches to legal history. With its explicit agenda of breaking down barriers, comparative legal history provided a particularly suitable focus for this investigation. After situating the subject matter of comparative legal history, and then discussing the levels of comparison that may be most fertile, this introduction moves on to considering the practical tasks of researching and writing such history, using the essays included in the volume to suggest ways ahead. The introduction groups the essays under certain headings: ‘Exploring legal transplants’; ‘Investigating broader geographical areas’; ‘Case law, precedent and relationships between legal systems’; and ‘Exploring past comparativists and the challenges of writing comparative legal history’. Yet the essays could be kaleidoscopically rearranged under many headings. We hope that the book, like a successful conference, includes many stimulating conversations.

Jean de Blanot, the enigmatic Iacobus Aurelianus, and Jean Blanc de Marseille are the first known French lawyers trained in Italy to have shown interest in one of the most famous custumals in medieval Europe, the Lombard book of fiefs known by the name of Libri Feudorum. Considering that this compilation was increasingly gaining authority in the Italian law schools, this chapter shows how these three lawyers re-elaborated these teachings and compared (or opposed) them to local bodies of norms. By observing how they developed different notions of custom and argued about the validity of the Libri Feudorum outside Lombardy, the chapter unveils the problematic dialectics between Civil law, local custom, and practice, and provides some insights into the making of the ius commune, its practical and historical roots, its geographical dimensions.

James VI and I was the first king personally to act as a judge in both Scotland and England. He was also the last king to sit as a judge in either country. Although James did not sit as a judge frequently, he did so on several occasions. James’s ideas about the king as a judge were disseminated in his speeches and printed works. This material has not been used by historians, despite the importance contemporaries attached to some of James’s appearances as a judge. This paper investigates James’s judicial role. It compares both James’s judicial activity in his two realms and James’s ideas of the king as judge to his practice of judging.

This paper discusses Regiam Maiestatem, known by the mid-fifteenth century to constitute much of Scotland’s ‘ancient law’.Although it was used and cited as an authority of Scotland’s common law into the modern period, Regiam has an unusually controversial past. It is currently understood to have been compiled during the reign of Robert I (1306–29), during Scotland’s ‘wars of independence’ with England, although much of its material is based on the late twelfth-century English legal tractate known as Glanvill. As a result of the relationship between it and Glanvill, Regiam has been both dismissed as constituting ’no part’ of Scots law and as providing evidence for the shared legal framework of Scotland and England. Yet it remains a remarkably understudied work in itself, partly because of its complicated manuscript tradition and its confused and often conflicting readings. This lecture offers a new interpretation of Regiam’s intended purpose by situating it in the context of later thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century political thought and, in so doing, offers a different interpretation of the intellectual underpinnings and practice of Robert I’s kingship.