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2 results

  • 1 - Introduction

  • Edited by David Luscombe, University of Sheffield, Jonathan Riley-Smith, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge Medieval History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 October 2004, pp 1-7

  • Summary

    This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this volume. The recovery in July 1099 of the city of Jerusalem by crusaders after four and a half centuries of Muslim rule was the strongest indication of a shift in the balance of power from the eastern Mediterranean region to the west. Wherever in western Europe an apparatus of courts was still recognizably under a ruler's control and was staffed by officials answerable in some degree to him, centralization was possible. In England, the Normans took care not to dismantle the system they found there, although, it coexisted with local jurisdictions and with courts that were Christian. Historians of medieval England take pride in what they consider to be a precociously advanced system of government with a wealth of records, but England was not unique. The western empire, which, in the year 1000, had looked somewhat similar to England in governmental terms, had begun to disintegrate by 1100.

  • 12 - WARFARE

  • from PART VIII - ISLAMIC SOCIETY AND CIVILIZATION
  • Edited by P. M. Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, Bernard Lewis
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Islam
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    21 April 1977, pp 824-850

  • Summary

    The Arabs, within the two decades which followed the death of the Prophet Muhammad, won for themselves a large empire embracing Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Persia and much of Arabia itself. The role, in the armies of Islam, of soldiers Muslim through conversion and non-Arab in ethnic origin grew in importance during the years of Umayyad rule. The pattern of warfare which had brought the Arabs success in the time of the great conquests was soon overlaid, as it were, with procedures drawn from the traditions of Byzantium and Persia. The Arabs who conquered a great empire for Islam had little acquaintance with the techniques of siege warfare. The period of the Abbasid decline saw a large increase in the use of mamluks recruited as slaves, trained in the practice of war and freed to serve as professional troops. The iqta system was reaching its full development in the sixth/twelfth and seventh/thirteenth centuries.