Ancient and Medieval World History: Law, Citizenship and the Medieval Order
What this domain tests
The ancient Near East, classical Greece and Rome, and medieval Europe and Asia up to about 1500. The exam compares civilisations: what environment produced, how law and citizenship were defined, and how the medieval West differed from the unified empires of Asia.
Law and citizenship
- 汉谟拉比法典 (18th century BCE): written on stone, retaliation in kind, but penalties graded by social rank - law as an instrument of a stratified slave society.
- 雅典: 梭伦 cancelled debts and graded citizens by wealth; 克利斯提尼 replaced clan tribes with territorial ones and created 陶片放逐法; 伯里克利 paid jurors, making the 公民大会 the real sovereign. Limits: women, metics and slaves were excluded - democracy for a minority.
- Rome: 十二铜表法 (451 BCE) made law written and public; as the empire grew, 公民法 gave way to 万民法, and 查士丁尼 codified the whole in the 6th century CE. Rome's contribution is law as a universal, rational order.
The medieval West
- 封君封臣: land for service, a personal contract rather than a territorial bureaucracy - “my vassal's vassal is not my vassal”.
- 庄园: manorial economy, serfs bound to the land, largely self-sufficient.
- Cities: charters bought from lords, 城市自治, guilds, and the first universities (Bologna, Paris) - a space negotiated outside feudal lordship.
- Parallel empires: 拜占庭 kept Roman law and Greek learning; the Arab caliphate translated Greek science and linked India, Persia and the Mediterranean; Japan's 大化改新 (646) copied Tang institutions.
Worked example
Why did Athenian democracy and Roman law answer different problems? Reasoning: read the political structure. Athens was a small citizen-community facing internal factional conflict, so its solution was participation - allotment, jury pay, ostracism. Rome governed a vast multi-ethnic empire where citizens and foreigners traded under different rules, so its solution was legal unification through 万民法 and its procedure. Institution follows scale and the composition of the ruled.
Traps
Saying Athenian democracy was universal; confusing the scope of 公民法 with 万民法; treating 封君封臣 as a centralised state; assuming medieval cities escaped lordship rather than being chartered within it; reading 汉谟拉比法典 as an instrument of equality.