were generally sold to the richest citizens, but some of the territory was turned into common lands that the poorest farmers could rent. The rich quickly began to encroach on these properties, as well, until the government decreed that no one person could hold more than a thousand acres. Since owning land as well as weapons qualified men to serve in the military, the distribution of some conquered territory to the poorer farmers also expanded the number of men eligible for military service in the Roman legions.
By the time Tiberius Gracchus came to power as Tribune in 133 bce, the great landowners had increased their holdings beyond the thousand acres permitted by law. Gracchus, himself a veteran of the wars in Carthage, argued that "the savage beasts in Italy, have their particular dens, they have their places of repose and refuge; but the
men who bear arms, and expose their lives for the safety of their country, enjoy in the meantime nothing more in it but the air and light and, having no houses or settlements of their own, are constrained to wander from place to place with their wives and children."13 Tiberius Gracchus's attempt to enforce the rule limiting holdings to a thousand acres cost him his life. The King of Pergamum, a rich settlement on the Turkish coast, lacking an heir, willed his entire kingdom to the Roman Republic in hope that his donation would prevent a bloody civil war from occurring after his death. Tiberius Gracchus thought that some of this land should be given to poor farmers to cultivate in common, a view so radically democratic that the Senate, with the support of one of the Tribunes, sent three thousand armed men to Capitol Hill to murder Tiberius and his followers.14
A similar fate befell his younger brother, Gaius Gracchus, when he attempted to allow poor Romans to attain land in the recently conquered territories and permit Roman commoners to serve on juries.15 Fully embracing Roman imperialism, Gaius Gracchus nevertheless wanted to extend its benefits to the newly expanding commercial groups, veterans, and the poor. He also suggested strengthening the empire by granting full citizenship, including rights of marriage, to so-called Latins and Italians from northern Italy, which lay outside the proper boundaries of Rome. This proposal faced opposition from the Senate and the popular classes who considered themselves the only true Romans since incorporating alleged outsiders would not only have increased the size of the electorate, but would also have diminished the power of the Senate. When Gaius took the unusual step of running for a second term in 122 все, his enemies killed him. While even the pretense of a democratic government disappeared with the accession of Octavian, known as Augustus, paradoxically, the reforms of the Gracchus brothers, based as they were on extending democratic rights through imperial expansion, helped to provide imperialism with a democratic tinge.
The decline of the Roman Empire entailed the increased importance of customary law that both enhanced and diminished the possibilities for democracy. Rome's decline also resulted from widespread population movements including those of the Germanic peoples into lands previously occupied by Rome. Rome's continuous warfare, increasingly dependent on armies made up of people for whom imperial expansion was a livelihood, contributed to its decline. Former provinces and frontier societies broke off and formed independent communities, some of which attempted to govern themselves relatively democratically. In northern Europe, provinces that had formerly paid allegiance to Rome now formed their own governing units. Some in the north were cut off from long-distance trade as urban life declined. The regions bordering on the Mediterranean continued to trade with one another, but commerce became more and more unstable as pirates hijacked goods sent from one place to another. For about eight centuries, northern Europe turned inward, as people fled the cities and retreated to the countryside to produce food.
For several centuries following Rome's decline, religious communities dominated civic life. Almost all the great religious movements—Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Zoroastrianism—generated communitarian impulses, especially in their initial stages. Although the Scripture shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims as "people of the book," was widely open to interpretation, the notion of a covenant with God provided a contractual foundation for all three religions. In accounting for time in Egypt (roughly 1300 bce), the ancient Hebrews viewed themselves as people governed according to laws that Moses and other prophets secured for them. In the Ten Commandments, followers of all three religions learned, as secular groups in Babylonia had learned from Hammurabi's Code, how they should try to comport themselves. All three people of the book developed precepts for conducting good lives, but all of them had tendencies to accept the authority of patriarchal elders to rule over the community.
The early followers of Jesus of Nazareth, as radical reformers, proponents of the equality of all souls, and opponents of the political and religious rule of the Romans, seemed to some later followers to be speaking the language of democracy. For them, this entailed the equal participation of the poor, the weak, the scorned, and the denigrated who gathered together in a community that served God. In a series of aphorisms, Jesus the Carpenter and his followers represented the workers, the poor, thieves, prostitutes, and all the wretched of the earth. This interpretation, which has periodically re-emerged, focuses on forming communities of equals joined together to worship God and administer good works. As Christianity spread from Palestine to the rest of the Roman Empire, there is no doubt that the early Christians united in small, largely self-governing communities where both men and women fully participated. As late as the fourth century bce, North African born St. Augustine continued to judge Christians by their ability to integrate large numbers into a political community. In fact, Augustine thought that Christianity represented a superior "republic" to Rome since it was capable of achieving "true justice" by linking participatory democracy with the revelation of God's word.16
Muhammad, a merchant born in Mecca in 570 ce in what is now Saudi Arabia, was drawn to the teaching of Jewish and Christian people, especially their emphasis on monotheism and law uniting disparate groups. Three great monotheistic religions emerged from the Hebrew Bible, each building on earlier ideals about the need to create a community of worshippers, but each had similar tendencies toward hierarchical priesthoods and centralizing policies. Muhammad, like Jesus, was surrounded by an inner circle that constituted a political community that initially transcended kinship networks or a sense of superiority over other monotheistic religions. Muhammad's immediate successors, including Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, who died in 634 ce, and his successor, Umar, ruled through somewhat democratic councils. The center of Islamic political rule was the umma, or community, that wielded religious and political authority over people previously governed by tribal relationships. Controversies periodically ensued over the power of the imam, the spiritual leader of the community, and whether or how he spoke for the umma. Different dynasties followed one another ruling a territory that by 750 ce extended from the Indus River in India to the Guadalquivir, Tajo, and Ebro Rivers in Spain.
In the eighth century in Oman, Muslims attempted to limit the power of rulers to prevent them from becoming tyrants at the same time that the Frankish Kingdoms of the West were developing a highly centralized monarchy under Charlemagne and his successors. Like the ancient Greeks, many Muslims from the eighth to the eleventh centuries feared the emergence of tyrants and preferred easily replaced imams to those whose family connections or even personal wisdom set them apart and made them harder to remove. The Mu'tazilites of Basra and Baghdad, in what is today Iraq, were even willing to contemplate a world without any imams, especially if those imams periodically commanded enough power to become virtual kings. Once Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali were dead, assemblies of peers might have done a better job than any single imam, or might have merely served the community as Muhammad's aides were thought to have done. Al-A§amm, a ninth century Mu'tazilite writer, thought that councils rather than single imams should have simply met periodically to solve common problems. And Al-A§amm even went as far as to suggest that each province could have its own imam, who might unite with others in federations to govern the larger community.17