medieval worlds ‒ comparative and interdisciplinary studies, No. 6/2017
Religious Exemption in Pre-Modern Eurasia, c. 300-1300 CE
Nummer:
6
Jahrgang:
2017
MEDIEVAL WORLDS provides a new forum for interdisciplinary and transcultural studies of the Middle Ages. Specifically it encourages and links comparative research between different regions and fields and promotes methodological innovation in transdisciplinary studies. Focusing on the Middle Ages (c. 400-1500 CE, but can be extended whenever thematically fruitful or appropriate), MEDIEVAL WORLDS takes a global approach to studying history in a comparative setting.
MEDIEVAL WORLDS is open to regular submissions on comparative topics, but also offers the possibility to propose or advertise subjects that lend themselves to comparison. With a view to connecting people working on related topics in different academic environments, we publish calls for matching articles and for contributions on particular issues.
Table of Contents
- Charles West: Religious Exemption in Pre-Modern Eurasia, c. 300 – 1300 CE: Introduction
- R.I. Moore: Treasures in Heaven: Defining the Eurasian Old Regime?
- Kanad Sinha: Envisioning a No-Man’s Land: Hermitage as a Site of Exemption in Ancient and Early Medieval Indian Literature
- Mario Poceski: Evolving Relationship between the Buddhist Monastic Order and the Imperial States of Medieval China
- Kriston R. Rennie: The Normative Character of Monastic Exemption in the Early Medieval Latin West
- Anne J. Duggan: Clerical Exemption in Canon Law from Gratian to the Decretals
- Ulrich Pagel: Nothing to Declare: Status, Power and Religious Aspiration in the Policies of Taxation in Ancient India
- Antonello Palumbo: Exemption Not Granted: The Confrontation between Buddhism and the Chinese State in Late Antiquity and the ›First Great Divergence‹ Between China and Western Eurasia
- Dominic Goodall - Andrew Wareham: The Political Significance of Gifts of Power in the Khmer and Mercian Kingdoms 793-926
- Uriel Simonsohn: Conversion, Exemption, and Manipulation: Social Benefits and Conversion to Islam in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
- Thomas Kohl: Religious Exemption, Justice, and Territories around the Year 1000: The Forgeries of Worms
- Rutger Kramer: The Exemption that Proves the Rule: Autonomy and Authority between Alcuin, Theodulf and Charlemagne (802)
- Judith A. Green: From Symbiosis to Separate Spheres? England, 1163
- Julia McClure: Religious Exemption and Global History before 1300 – Closing Comments
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Treasures in Heaven: Defining the Eurasian Old Regime?
The exemption of people and institutions recognised as religious from public obligations, including taxation and military and labour services, appears to have been universal in the complex societies of Eurasia at least from the end of antiquity until the end of the ancien régime – that is, in some cases, until the present. However, the systematisation between the tenth and thirteenth centuries CE of the nature and uses of such exemption was everywhere central to the great transformation of that epoch, essential to the emergence or construction of the ancien régime in Europe as in South India, China and Japan. Religious exemption was sometimes promoted and sometimes attacked by rulers, but it is best understood neither as supporting nor as undermining ›the state‹, but as providing a long-term balancing mechanism between centralising powers and local elites; the waqf may be seen as performing a similar function in Islamic societies.
Schlagworte: feudalism, modernisation, Transformation, ancien régime, antiquity, holy man, nobles, emperors, kings, waqf, temples, monasteries, jurisdiction, taxation, immunity, exemption, Eurasia
Seite 7 - 19
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Envisioning a No-Man’s Land: Hermitage as a Site of Exemption in Ancient and Early Medieval Indian Literature
Right from the emergence of sedentary settled society in early Indian history, there has been a perceived dichotomy between settled society (grāma) and the forest (araṇya). Though each operated more or less independently, the state gradually became aware of the forest’s resource potential and sought to establish its authority over the forest realm. Forest hermitages, the residences of ascetics who had renounced the organisation of the settled society, occupied a space between these two contrasting worlds. Hermits often acted as the agents of the settled society, a channel through which its hegemonic religious and cultural mores could enter the forest-scape. In return, the hermitages were granted certain exemptions. As ancient Indian literature shows, royal authority ended at the thresholds of the hermitages, where the king had to leave behind his royal symbols and paraphernalia. The Early Medieval period (sixth to thirteenth centuries) saw royal claims over the forest increase in India, especially as the kings started to donate forest land to various religious beneficiaries who were also granted tax exemptions. However, the idea of the hermitage as a ›no man’s land‹, exempted not only from tax but from all forms of royal authority, remained present in Early Medieval texts.
Schlagworte: exemption, settled society, forest, vānaprastha, āśrama, Hermitage
Seite 20 - 39
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Evolving Relationship between the Buddhist Monastic Order and the Imperial States of Medieval China
The article explores central aspects of the relationship between the Buddhist monastic order and the various imperial states that ruled China during the medieval period (roughly between the third and the tenth centuries CE). It focuses especially on the points of tension created by the monastic order’s efforts to establish a sense of autonomy and receive special economic, political, or social exemptions on one hand, and the royal imperium’s assertion of absolute authority over all subjects on the other hand. While the monastic order’s efforts to safeguard its independence and ward off the encroachment of a totalitarian state was largely a losing proposition, in a protracted process that involved complex socio-political negotiations and shifting religious realignments, the Buddhist clergy was able to secure important exemptions from the Chinese rulers’ demands. Most notably, these included exemptions from certain forms of taxation, military conscription, and forced labour, which helped secure the economic foundations of monastic life and enhance the prominent place of Buddhism in Chinese society. To illustrate these issues, the article explores some of the key debates that pitted prominent Buddhist monastics such as Huiyuan (334-416) against key segments of the Chinese socio-political elites, many of whom were influenced by a Confucian ideology that was often inimical to monastic institutions.
Schlagworte: monastic order, Huiyuan, Buddhism, medieval China
Seite 40 - 60
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The Normative Character of Monastic Exemption in the Early Medieval Latin West
This paper examines the normative character of monastic exemption in the Latin West, that is to say, the negotiated interaction between monasteries and bishops. In tracing the formation and development of exemption privileges between the fifth and ninth centuries, it argues for an emerging pattern under the Franks that proved central to developing notions of spiritual and physical protection. As a consequence of this novel mentality, a monastery’s relationship with its surrounding environment became characterised by greater degrees of freedom and protection than ever before. This unique transformation took time to develop, however, forging alliances that effectively shifted individual monasteries away from their Frankish protectorate towards the spiritual centre in Rome. The consequences of this landmark shift, it is argued, benefited the early medieval papacy in its burgeoning claims of centralized power and legitimacy.
Schlagworte: Merovingian, Carolingian, protection, papacy, immunity, exemption, monasticism
Seite 61 - 77
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Clerical Exemption in Canon Law from Gratian to the Decretals
The question of clerical exemption from secular judgment was a core constituent of the fierce dispute that set King Henry II of England against Archbishop Thomas Becket of Canterbury in 1163 and culminated in the latter’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. This paper traces the Roman origin of immunity, its confused treatment in Gratian’s Decretum, and the working out of a reasonable modus vivendi through episcopal-papal consultation in the following eighty or so years.
Schlagworte: clerical exemption: origins, definition, restriction, Alexander III, Lucius III, Urban III, Celestine III, Innocent III, Ad falsariorum, Si quis suadente, Papal judgments: Eugenius III
Seite 78 - 100
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Nothing to Declare: Status, Power and Religious Aspiration in the Policies of Taxation in Ancient India
This paper examines a group of legal, religious and commercial privileges connected with revenue collection in ancient Indian society.1 These privileges, I argue, derive from and reflect the standing of Buddhist monks in that period. Much of the discussion that follows centers around the Saṅgha’s status in Indian tax law. It charts the factors that led Buddhist monks to call for tax immunity for the goods they carried on their travels across northern India. In this sense, the article is about money. But tax collection, although central to a state’s financial health, is not exclusively informed by fiscal considerations. Some of the Buddhists’ pleas for tax exemption sprang from privileges long held by their brahmanical peers. They clamoured for the very same rights that Indian political treatises (dharmaśāstra) extended to brahmins and Hindu ascetics. Taxation is also a tool deployed to manage social privilege and economic division in society and hence reflects the values its rulers seek to promote. As a result, this investigation explores the ranking of the Buddhist community within the wider arena of religious proliferation in ancient India. It contributes then to this special issue through its focus on tax exemption.
Schlagworte: Vinaya Studies, Buddhism and the State, Buddhism in Society, Economic History of Ancient India, History of Buddhism, Indian Buddhism, Buddhist Monasticism
Seite 101 - 117
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Exemption Not Granted: The Confrontation between Buddhism and the Chinese State in Late Antiquity and the ›First Great Divergence‹ Between China and Western Eurasia
Starting from the end of the fourth century, the Buddhist monastic community in China entered a protracted confrontation with a variety of political regimes, Sinitic and barbarian, significantly affecting their own processes of state formation and the reconstitution of a unified empire after a long period of division. Although elites and rulers often lavished patronage upon the clergy, and used Buddhism to buttress their authority, the overall response of these regimes, especially in the north, was unforgiving. Four persecutions from 446 to 955 and increasingly tight regulation effectively undermined monastic prerogatives, ultimately thwarting the emergence of a Buddhist ›church‹ in China. The last major episode of suppression intriguingly took place only a few years before the founding of the Song dynasty (960-1279) and China’s subsequent transition towards what many historians have seen as her first modern period. Buddhism did live on in the new era, but as a social body it was terminally hamstrung by the state’s inflexible grip. Comparing this trajectory to the fortunes of Christianity in the late antique Mediterranean and then in early medieval Europe raises several counterfactual questions. One of the most important perhaps concerns the long-term effect that religious exemption, or the lack thereof, respectively had on imperial state formation on the two sides, in what Walter Scheidel has called the ›First Great Divergence‹ between China and Western Eurasia. Whether the rise of the Christian church with its privileges may have decisively stood in the way of an imperial resurgence in the West is an already old question; but whether, conversely, the Chinese state’s successful confrontation with Buddhism was key to its extraordinary endurance as an imperial entity is a still largely unexplored avenue of inquiry, which this paper intends to probe.
Schlagworte: imperial formation, population registration, religious exemption, taxation, Great Divergence, Late Antiquity, Buddhism, China
Seite 118 - 155
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The Political Significance of Gifts of Power in the Khmer and Mercian Kingdoms 793-926
This paper compares four Latin charters and one recently discovered Sanskrit inscription recording various royal gifts of taxation to religious foundations in the contemporary Mercian and Khmer kingdoms in the early ninth and early tenth centuries. It draws upon philology and medieval history as its principal disciplines, and considers three models of gift-giving as a way of interpreting the data. Close textual investigation of these records is used to challenge narratives which suggest that such gifts of power weakened the power of rulers, and thus led to the breakup of states. It is equally possible to argue that these gifts of power enhanced the power of Mercian and Khmer kings. Moreover, other powerful factors, such as a cultural renaissance or environmental crisis, may be adduced to explain the context for the compilation of these documents, thereby opening up new perspectives for enquiry into the history of the Khmer and Mercian kingdoms in the early medieval period.
Schlagworte: Vat Phu, taxation, Sanskrit, Śaivism, military, Mercia, Latin, Laos, Khmer, inscriptions, immunities, Hwicce, gifts, charters, Cambodia
Seite 156 - 195
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Conversion, Exemption, and Manipulation: Social Benefits and Conversion to Islam in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
The choice of individuals and groups to embrace Islam in the first few centuries after its emergence is rightfully considered an act that was charged with spiritual meaning. At the same time, however, the act also brought with it dramatic implications for the configuration of communities whose social and political structures were dictated by theological ideologies, scriptural traditions and memories of primordial pasts. In this essay, I wish to focus on the social aspects of conversion to Islam, particularly on how shifts in confessional affiliation were prompted by social concerns. Once they entered into the Islamic fold, the new converts were able to enjoy a variety of benefits and exemptions from burdens that had been imposed on them as non-Muslims. Yet conversion to Islam did not only offer exemption from taxes or liberation from slavery. In the final part of this essay, I attempt to show that conversion to Islam, or even its mere prospect, could be used for obtaining various favours in the course of negotiations for social improvement. An ecclesiastical authorization to divorce without legal justification, the release of a Jewish widow from her levirate bonds, and the evasion of penal sanctions are examples of some of the exemptions that were sought out or issued in response to conversion to Islam. In the period under discussion, in the context of a social setting that was founded on confessional affiliation, conversion to Islam signalled a social opportunity that was at times manipulated by individuals for the sake of improving their personal status.
Schlagworte: Christians, Jews, law, marriage, mawlā, slavery, jizya, conversion, ahl a-dhimma, Islam
Seite 196 - 216
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Religious Exemption, Justice, and Territories around the Year 1000: The Forgeries of Worms
While immunities were perhaps the most important form of religious exemption in the medieval West throughout the Middle Ages, they have not been studied extensively for the period around the turn of the millennium. This paper treats immunities from the perspective of the institutions that received them, drawing on the example of the bishops of Worms in southwestern Germany. Two questions are asked: 1) What did institutions expect from receiving immunities? 2) Can we tell if they had consequences in practice? The unique sources from Worms – a dossier of forged or interpolated royal charters created by Bishop Hildibald of Worms (978-998), and numerous documents connected to his successor Burchard (1000-1025) – make it possible to study these questions in depth. Hildibald’s charters were one important starting point in the redrawing of regional power structures in favour of the church of Worms and thus its developing territorial lordship. In part, they expanded property and immunity rights, but Hildibald’s forgeries were mostly concerned with specifying and defining the terms of immunity that his church already possessed in face of regional competition by the monastery of Lorsch and by the Salian dukes and counts. This suggests that practical advantages in terms of income and power were what made immunities interesting for a church. Hildibald’s successor Burchard used his close ties to Emperor Henry II to achieve a large degree of independence from these regional political powers, relying in part on Hildibald’s forged charters. As a result of this, the counts’ powers in and around Worms were all but abolished, and judicial matters lay in the hand of the bishop. These changes in the regional power structure were accompanied by outbreaks of violence, which were countered by the emperor’s intervention and the promulgation of new laws by the bishop.
Schlagworte: forgeries, charters, Hildibald of Worms, Burchard of Worms, justice, Worms, immunities
Seite 217 - 230
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The Exemption that Proves the Rule: Autonomy and Authority between Alcuin, Theodulf and Charlemagne (802)
When the two Carolingian intellectuals Alcuin of Tours and Theodulf of Orleans engaged in a dispute over the fate of a criminal who had sought asylum in the church of Saint Martin in Tours, their conflict quickly turned into a heated political debate that reached the highest level of the Frankish Empire. As evidenced by the letters written during this altercation, this seemingly simple matter of church asylum brought up intractable questions of who should arbitrate on matters such as these, what it would mean if bishops interfered in church matters outside their own diocese, and how this matter affected the essential unity of the Carolingian church. From appeals to personal responsibility to the institutionalisation of the Empire, the debate between Alcuin, Theodulf and Charlemagne was ultimately about everybody’s place in the greater scheme of things, and the question of who should play by the rules, and who would be exempt.
Schlagworte: ecclesia, imperium, politics and religion, letters, conflict resolution, church asylum, Theodulf of Orléans, Alcuin, Charlemagne, Carolingian empire
Rutger Kramer
Seite 231 - 261
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From Symbiosis to Separate Spheres? England, 1163
This paper focuses on discussions of Christian kingship in 1163, a critical year in the relationship between King Henry II of England and Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury. On the basis of the revised Lives of Anselm (by John of Salisbury) and Edward the Confessor (by Aelred of Rievaulx), it is clear that traditional views of a symbiotic relationship were still very much to the fore, even though the quarrel between king and archbishop was to lead ultimately to a clearer separation of secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions.
Schlagworte: Council of Westminster, Council of Tours, Pope Alexander III, Henry II, Thomas Becket, John of Salisbury
Seite 262 - 271
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Religious Exemption and Global History before 1300 – Closing Comments
Seite 272 - 277
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Ausgabe:
978-3-7001-8243-6, E-Journal, PDF, nicht barrierefrei, 01.12.2017
Seitenzahl:
277 Seiten
Sprache:
Englisch
DOI (Link zur Online Edition):