This introductory chapter of volume II of the Cambridge World History of Violence, which focuses on the thousand years between 500 and 1500, or what is also known as the Middle Millennium, examines .institutions and forms of violence in the geographical area including Japan and China, Central Asia, North Africa, and Europe, with two additional chapters extending coverage into Aztec and Mayan culture.The topics of this introduction are set in four contexts in which violence occurred across this broad chronology and vast territory.They are: the formation of centralized polities through war and conquest; institution building and ideological expression by these same polities; control of extensive trade networks; and the emergence and dominance of religious ecumenes.Attention is also given to the idea of how theories of violence are relevant to the specific historical circumstances discussed in the volume’s chapters. A final section on the depiction of violence, both visual and literary, demonstrates the ubiquity of societal efforts to confront meanings of violence during this longue durée.

This study treats violent actions by Buddhist groups in premodern Japan (ca. 6.-17. ces.). When Buddhism was introduced from Korea since the 6. ce., it triggered conflicts with the indigenuous beliefs. They consisted of physical war between different clans and spiritual warfare through subjugation of the local deities. Later, after Japanese Buddhism had developed into various denominations since the 8. ce., sectarian conflicts for patronage among competing Buddhist groups emerged which the state had to control. When during the late Heian period, struggles about the ownership of landed estates emerged, the aristocats employed warriors for their protection whereas monasteriesguarded their manors through low ranking “evil monks”. Because they injured and killed people in order to fullfil their duties, scholar monks developed doctrinal justifications to exculpate them against critics. When during the Kamakura period new Buddhist groups emerged, the established monasteries used their monastic armees as well as the military of the state to subdue them because they threatened their economic and social basis. Finally, during the Muromachi period violent peasant uprisings of a new Buddhist group were triggered by its suppression through a monastic complex due to economic reasons, i.e. competiton concerning membership and donations.

This chapter examines the storied and constant presence of violence in the Pacific from the earliest imperial phases in the sixteenth century to the eve of the greatest cataclysm of violence in the region: World War Two. It explores how and why violence altered over this long period, considering the impacts of technologies, economies, ideologies and colonial experiences from other imperial theatres that were deeply integrated with the Pacific from the outset. It weighs the impact of conditions particular to the Pacific – the immense asymmetries of power and population sizes, vast distances and the great diversity of human and natural geographies – on how violence shaped the Pacific across this historical expanse. Also, as it took five centuries to integrate the entire region into global systems, first encounters between Indigenous and colonial peoples, where violence often set a course for future relations, played out repeatedly across the region and across time, beginning in the early sixteenth century and ending in the 1930s in the New Guinea Highlands. This chapter is framed around innovative Indigenous responses to imperial violence, particularly the philosophy of non-violent resistance that emerged in New Zealand in the 1860s that went on to influence the course of other historical episodes.

This chapter focuses on eight historical developments identified as contexts for legitimised violence in Spanish America. These include the wars of conquest, which Spaniards legitimised through ‘factual’ arguments, such as combating barbarity and bringing civility to indigenous peoples; the Spiritual Conquest of indigenous peoples and the associated activities of the Spanish Inquisition, both of which sometimes featured violence as a means to suppress what Spaniard categorised as heresy and idolatry; hemispheric slavery and its dehumanising nature, which left African and African-descended peoples vulnerable to violence; violence towards all women, but particularly towards indigenous and African women; and finally, state-sanctioned violence used as a tool to suppress ‘revolts’, which were often the product of European anxieties regarding colonial subjects. It is argued that the twin threads of violence that strung these developments together were the promise of wealth and status combined with an ideology of justification for committing violence. Acts of violence that historians might view as being homicidal, personal, arbitrary or contrary to Spanish law could, in fact, be justified, legitimised and committed with impunity in the name of ‘civilising’, with particularly horrific consequences for indigenous peoples throughout Spanish America.

The Great War, as it began to be called as early as 1915, was a traumatic event in the life of everyone who lived through it. Industrial warfare fundamentally changed the experience of combat. In the midst of battle, physical violence fused with moral suffering. Mass death reversed the normal succession of generations. War crimes and genocides were committed against enemy civilians. The First World War was also a war of words and images. The new “cultures of war” served both to stigmatize enemies (external and internal) and to mobilize the home fronts. Yet this cultural mobilization did not remain unchanged throughout the war: the initial mobilization in 1914-1915 was followed by a process of disengagement, and later by a form of remobilization at the end of the conflict. Finally, the First World War did not end without a feeling of profound anxiety over the future of millions of veterans, who had experienced mass death and extreme violence on the battlefields. The question of violence is at the core of a new historiography studying the boundaries between war and peace, the legacies of the Great War in a global context and the “brutalization” of post-war politics.

Though attitudes towards sexual violence shift and change over time and place, across the past two hundred years child sexual abuse has predominantly been viewed as a heinous crime. Nonetheless, there were many variations on what constituted sexual assault, and how this was understood in the community. An act that might be a heinous crime in one time period or one region may be legally and socially acceptable in another. This chapter will chart a range of attitudes and responses towards child sexual abuse. It argues that children have long been seen as vulnerable to sexual assault, which was understood as morally problematic and often a criminal offence. Yet despite significant social and legal change, state and community practices have failed to solve the problem of vulnerable children, and sexual assault of minors continues to be an issue across the globe.

Human sacrifice was a rare practice among the cultures of ancient Mesopotamia. Our best-sourced occurrences are the archaeological remains from the royal death pits at Early Dynastic Ur (c. 2600–2450 BCE) and textual records of the substitute king ritual that was practised at least from the early second millennium BCE down to the time of Alexander the Great. Such sporadic occurrences of ritual human sacrifice require an investigation as to why it happened at all. This chapter examines the practice of human sacrifice in the light of its respective historical and cultural contexts to better understand this extreme form of ritual violence. It finds that while there are rather different contexts, in both instances it is clear that the office of kingship held absolute power over the subjects who were disposed of for the sake of the ruler.

Military violence or warfare played a significant role in shaping the culture and society of ancient China. Nonetheless the subject has generated far less discussion than it deserves. This chapter studies the relationship between violence and warfare and their impact on the political, social and cultural trajectory of China in the period between the late third century BCE and the sixth century CE – a period during which the course of Chinese history went through the establishment of the early empires, their collapse, and the ensuing political division that lasted for nearly three centuries. It covers the topics of various notions of ‘just war’, the conduct of warfare, institutions of military mobilisation, military rites and their practices, and the mutual influence of religious beliefs and massive violence. Through an examination of multiple sources of evidence the chapter arrives at a broad understanding of how people in early imperial China conceptualised and justified violence in warfare, as well as the circumstances and purposes to which they resorted to war.

The Scandinavian seaborne raiders known as the Vikings are famous for their violence. Initially operating in small bands, by the second half of the ninth century they put together large armies comparable in size and weaponry to those of the kingdoms of Europe, some of which were brought to their knees. The purpose of the Vikings’ violence was to acquire wealth, which fed into the political economy of northern Europe, notably in the form of gift-giving. Viking warriors were motivated by a warrior ideology of violence that praised bravery, toughness, and loyalty. Any fallen warrior who had excelled in these qualities expected to go to Valhöll, the great hall of the god Odin, where they would constantly be feasting. The unexpected raids by previously barely known peoples from northern Europe was shocking to their victims, who tended to exaggerate the fighting prowess of the Vikings and to ascribe a particular propensity for violence to them. The idea that the Vikings were more violent than others took root in European culture and spread also to Scandinavia itself, leading to unfounded myths such as berserks and the ritual of the bloodeagle. The violence of the Vikings was, however, not dissimilar from the violence of other early-medieval Europeans.

In Late Imperial China sexual and domestic violence were understood in terms of the Confucian kinship system. Legally defined social status keyed to class structure (‘free commoner’ vs. ‘mean/debased’) had played a complementary role for much of the imperial era. But in the Qing dynasty it yielded to the primacy of gender roles defined in terms of normative kinship hierarchy – a shift from status performance to gender performance. The chief priority of Qing law was to ensure that males played their proper role as husbands and fathers, and that females played their proper role as wives and mothers. A related priority was to defend chaste wives and daughters, as well as vulnerable young sons, against the predatory threat of the single, rogue male (‘bare stick’) who was left outside the family order altogether. This shift in the law reflected not only underlying change in imperial ideology but also the long-term transformation of social structure and the mounting social crisis in China.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between the state, attitudes to warfare as enshrined in Christian theory, and the practice of warfare as exemplified in medieval eastern Roman, or Byzantine, relations with its various enemies, with a short introductory section on violence in non-warfare contexts. While nominally opposed to violent means to achieve its ends, the Christian Byzantine state found ways to justify engaging in warfare against its enemies, primarily based on the notion that it was involved in a perpetual defensive struggle with those who threatened its territorial integrity as well as its moral existence. All warfare could thus be understood by definition as a defensive struggle against those who threatened the empire’s existence. This applied likewise to overtly offensive warfare, which was legitimated within a Christian eschatology as a divinely-approved effort to recover lost territories and restore them to the Christian community. Hence, no theory of ‘holy war’ or ‘crusade’ evolved, because such was irrelevant. Such an ideology offered a constant theoretical basis for fighting the empire’s foes; and it also served the needs of the imperial elite and the court on an opportunistic basis, to justify offensive warfare whenever the empire was in a position to undertake such action. Such an ideology legitimating warfare could also deployed against Christian neighbours, when it suited the interests of the imperial state or its elite.

Depictions of violence were ubiquitous in sixteenth-century Europe and drew freely on biblical and classical sources, as well as stories of Christian martyrdom. The new media of print and printmaking dramatically increased the number of such images, while pamphlets and broadsheets ensured their widespread circulation and deployment in the service of propaganda and the reporting of sensational crimes and disasters. The outbreak of polemic and conflict associated with the Reformation also provided new markets for the visualising of violence. The fascination with soldiers and war was driven by developments in arms technology and the desire of princely patrons to emulate the valour of the ancients. Whereas battle scenes in the first half of the century were largely conventional, the outbreak of confessional wars in the second brought images of gruesome violence, wholesale destruction and massacre, in which cities and the countryside were laid waste. While the use of violence for confessional propaganda never disappeared, the cruelty, desolation and terrible miseries endured by populations at the hands of ravaging soldiers during the Dutch Revolt and the Thirty Years War gradually became the object of fierce critique by artists in the early seventeenth century, drawing parallels with Spanish savagery in the Americas.

In the highly competitive and conflictual world of early modern China, aggression and violence were a regular part of life. People not only came to blows with other people, but also with ghosts and demons that infested their world with evils and afflictions. The rock fights, cockfights, self-mortifying shamans, sword-wielding exorcists, public floggings and bloody beheadings discussed in this chapter were common spectacles of public violence. China’s educated elites, who associated such acts with vulgar lower-class culture, disparaged popular forms of violence because they were wild, senseless and uncontrollable. For the lower orders, however, violence was purposeful. It gave power to the powerless and prestige to the disreputable. Regular displays were necessary to gain respect and could even ensure social mobility. Violence was essential to masculinity and gave meaning to men’s lives, providing them with ambition and dignity. The shedding of blood also gave meaning to violence. Blood was the vital force of life important in warding off evil spirits, curing illnesses, ensuring fertility and bringing good luck. These acts were part of a well-established, but heterodox, folk tradition whereby violence and bloody rituals were deeply rooted in the everyday life and popular culture of early modern China.

From contact, gendered violence was critical to the European conquest of America. The Spanish conquistadors sexually exploited indigenous women as part of their subjugation of native societies in Mexico and Peru. French and English colonists also exploited native women, although they imagined themselves as victims of Indian sexual abuse. In the English colonies, the importance of the household as a unit of political organisation gave men enormous power over women and other dependents. This concealed sexual violence in the family and spousal abuse. Rape was illegal in the English colonies, but rarely prosecuted, except among the Quakers in Pennsylvania. The prevalence of unfree labour also contributed to gendered violence in early America. Indentured servants were often left to the mercy of their masters. Enslaved African American women were routinely brutalised and raped in order to reproduce more slaves. The Enlightenment and the American Revolution challenged colonial sensibilities. As the power of the household head weakened and marriages were idealised as loving relationships, spousal abuse and rape were problematised and prosecuted at higher rates. However, the persistence of slavery limited these changes to white women.

State violence was radically transformed in the Byzantine Empire during the period of the Komnenoi (1081-1185). At a time when the power of the reformed Catholic Church was growing, the Komnenoi implemented policies refining the notion of Orthodoxy. They sought to head off the threat to the established order of the eastern Mediterranean posed by repeated invasions from armies of Normans, Venetians and other Latins claiming to be crusaders waging holy war. Long-forgotten types of persecution re-emerged under the dynastic founder, Alexios I, who justified his actions through the reinterpretation of ancient Roman Law concerning the capital crimes of sacrilege and treason. Under Alexios, individuals and small groups with specific ethno-religious backgrounds were subjected to trials for heresy and confronted with burning at the stake. Subsequent Komnenian emperors continued to profess an attachment to these procedures, resorting to them with some regularity. But they also pursued alternatives. In the final years of the dynasty, a shift of emphasis occurred to mass arrests and, eventually, pogroms. These developments accompanied changes to imperial Byzantine authority in both domestic and foreign settings. Ultimately, the Komnenian mode of rule failed. The dynastic member, Andronikos I, was deposed and executed as a tyrant.

Scholars up until the middle of the twentieth century saw Roman warfare as restrained and disciplined. At that point the consensus changed to one that viewed it as fierce and bellicose. This view, in turn, has been challenged in the early twenty-first century, with the argument that Roman conflict was typical for ancient states. Rome’s rise from city-state to empire certainly involved considerable violence, but the available evidence cannot conclusive demonstrate either that it was particularly brutal and aggressive or that its military actions were ordinary for the period. Sources report that Roman battle was especially bloody, but this can be interpreted as a result of culture or of weaponry. We read of large numbers of civilians killed and enslaved, but such accounts need to be viewed critically and compared to the ancient norm. Additionally, the reality and nature of the imperial Pax Romana continues to be debated. The apparent decline in uprisings against Roman rule is worthy of note, but there may have been revolts and wars we do not know about. At this point in time historians are not in a position to definitively state what the nature of Roman military violence was.

Sexually-violent practices and ideologies have varied dramatically over time and geographical region. There have also been important shifts in the weighting given to its two components: “sexual” and “violence”. Sexual violence is deeply rooted in specific political, economic, social, and cultural contexts. In exploring these issues on a global-scale the first question to ask is: who is entitled to label something as “sexually violent”? Despite the incredible personal suffering inflicted on victims of sexual assault, under-reporting is pervasive: victims routinely struggle to find words for their pain. Cognitive distortions about gender, sexuality, and violence have left legacies of abuse that are difficult to counter. Perpetrators of violence are often presented as victims and, in the context of mass rapes during wartime, international law has been sluggish in responding. The chapter concludes by evaluation the attempts by victims of sexual violence, feminists, politicians, lawmakers, police, and community activists to resist and eradicate sexual violence not only in their own societies but also globally. Rape thrives in situations of structural inequality. Although women act in sexually aggressive ways (and there is some evidence that the proportion of female aggressors is increasing), in the final analysis, political attempts to reduce and finally eliminate sexual aggression must start with the main perpetrators. Eradicating rape requires a radically different conception of agency and masculinity.

‘Violence’ is a term that has no counterpart in medieval Japanese. Instead, the epistemology of “disorder” that destabilized the Confucian notion of Heavenly order governed the newly graphic images of mutilation, injuries, and death emanating from the fourteenth-century War of Northern and Southern Courts (ca. 1330s-90s). In this war, instigated by an emperor – the supposed keeper of Heavenly order– instead of a warrior, the dismembered male body came to articulate the symbolic weight of discord, epitomized by a form of self-mutilation, seppuku (disembowelment), described en masse for the first time in The Tale of Grand Pacification. The precisely measured and recorded cut flesh of the male body also represented the calculable cost and benefit of the war, by serving as the legible evidence of “loyal military service” that could accrue reward. All forms of cut flesh, whether narrated in the tale or inscribed in administrative records of loyal service, belonged to the male body, whereas the female body, with its womb (the same word as the men’s “bowel”-to-be-cut), was typically shielded and ritually excluded from the combat space. This war, more than any other, determined the descriptive language of masculine dismemberment, which would serve as a model for future writings.

Chapter 10 suggests that the Irish government and the SDLP talked to Sinn Féin from the late 1980s for two primary reasons: Sinn Féin’s sizeable minority of nationalist support in Northern Ireland, and the IRA’s persistence. Continuing IRA activity, Sinn Féin’s electoral mandate in Northern Ireland, and the pan-nationalist talks also encouraged a shift in British government strategy towards trying to bring republicans into a political settlement in the 1990s. The IRA’s aim of encouraging the British government to return to talks had succeeded by the 1990s. Nonetheless, this chapter suggests that the electoral stagnation of Sinn Féin alongside the stalemate that the conflict had reached by the 1990s convinced the republican leadership to make political concessions in talks. But the prospect of further increasing Sinn Féin’s electoral mandate and achieving concessions for Irish nationalists via the pan-nationalist alliance also influenced Irish republicans to end the armed campaign. This chapter also explores how various grass-roots republicans agreed with the peace process strategy, and why Denis Donaldson and other Sinn Féin informers were not pivotal to the peace process strategy being formed and accepted within republicanism. I emphasise the importance of political factors, rather than the intelligence war, in leading to peace.