Some Muslims apparently shared ancient Greeks' fears that even esteemed leaders might easily turn into tyrants, and such anxieties undoubtedly played a role in certain Muslim translations of Greek political thought, including the works of Aristotle on democracy. The revival of Aristotle's Politics in thirteenth-century Europe and North Africa seems to have played a role in promoting the ideal of political community as central to human life.18 From the thirteenth to the fourteenth centuries, Jewish and Christian scholars translated these works from Arabic into Hebrew and Latin, re-establishing them as central tenets of Western thought. In Al Andalus, the name the Muslims gave to Southern Spain, they debated the merits of democracy according to the Greeks, but they also helped reintro- duce Roman law that supported the contrary tendency of enhancing opportunities for secular and religious leaders to expand their powers.
Unfortunately, democratic gains for some can often come at the expense of diminished freedom for others, particularly when one group takes over the other's territory. In the Middle Ages, Christians from northern Spain expanded into the territories held by Muslims in the south and Christians from what is today Germany conquered the Wends in the areas east of the Elbe River. For example, as Christian forces moved south from their small kingdoms in northern Spain to carry out what subsequent historians mislabeled a "Reconquest" of lands that had been settled by ancient Iberians, Phoenicians, Romans, Jews, Visigoths, and later people from contemporary Syria, Iran, Iraq, and North Africa, the northern Christian Kings offered self-governing rights in charters, or fueros, to those who agreed to repopulate the cities and towns and the surrounding land. As such, the Spanish Christians succeeded in conquering people whom they regarded as heathens and replacing them with loyal citizens of Christian city-states.
On Europe's eastern frontier, the Teutonic and Livonian Knights, who were members of militarized religious orders, attempted from the twelfth century on to spread Christianity from medieval German territories that had been part of the eastern holdings of Charlemagne and his successors into Prussia and what became the Baltic states east of the Elbe River. Like their Spanish brethren, these German military orders were willing to offer settlers contractual rights and privileges in exchange for leaving friends, families, and familiar territory to move east. Like later settlers in the United States, Australia, Argentina, and South Africa, those who bettered themselves by abandoning their home territories in the Middle Ages sought rights and privileges for themselves, but did not have any intention of extending those rights to the indigenous groups they displaced.
Kings also gained and lost powers to govern as a result of charters. As early as the Norman Conquest of 1066 ce, the kings of England conferred with their barons, though they were not required to take their advice. But in the Magna Carta of 1215 ce the secular and religious magnates forced King John to acknowledge their demands. John, his father, and his brother, Richard the Lion Heart, had increasingly consolidated their power over the barons and the Church. John and his forebears' need for funds to defend French territory they had inherited led John to increase demands for funds from English feudal lords. In the barons' attempts to resist King John's taxes and the imposition of laws with which they disagreed, they demanded that the king win their consent before raising revenues and sending troops anywhere. Animosities increased between 1204 and 1213, but John was at first able to buy off individual lords by granting them feudal titles and land and promising to grant "that the English Church be free, and that the men in our kingdom have and hold all the aforesaid liberties, rights, and concessions well and peaceably, freely and quietly, fully and wholly, for themselves and their heirs, of us and our heirs, in all respects and in all places forever. . . ."19
The court magnates, a highly select group of barons, consisted of a relatively small group of people who felt no obligation to extend to commoners the democratic rights they had gained. Even though some scholars believe that laws such as having the punishment fit the crime date at least as far back as the time of King John's father, Henry II, and were even found in town charters of the time, having a written document like the Magna Carta that limited the powers of the king set a precedent that future groups tried to imitate.20
From the ancient world to the high Middle Ages, publicizing people's rights on tablets, parchment, or other forms of paper ensured that there would be a written record buttressing future claims for democratic rights. Even when those rights disappeared under subsequent regimes, as most of them did, memories of these written documents lived on or were rediscovered granting legitimacy to those who hoped to create democracies of their own.
Prophetic Movements and Cities of Promise
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medieval German saying claimed that "city air makes you free." The lowest peasant or escaped slave could frequently start a new life, achieve a new identity, and find a certain level of freedom and justice in the city. The process of urbanization—the fact that people lived in cities where they could converse with strangers as well as with neighbors and family members—augmented the possibilities for democracy in sixteenth-century South Asia. The rights to speak, write, and gather with anyone one chose formed the platform on which democracy began to rest. The Sikhs, a religious group founded by Guru Nanak (1469-1539 ce), promoted self-government, caring for the less fortunate, and overcoming the Hindu caste system.1
Born a Hindu of the Khartri or Kshatrya caste in the middle of the Punjab near Lahore, Guru Nanak was the son of a tax collector for a local Muslim official. As a boy he showed an early interest in languages and poetry and learned Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, and Punjabi, the language that was developing in his region. But Guru Nanak's father wanted him to have a "practical" career as a government official, an accountant, a cattle trader, or a shopkeeper, and when the boy was sixteen, his father arranged for him to marry Sulakhni, the daughter of a pious Hindu merchant. The couple had two sons, and Guru Nanak combined his work as a small merchant with intense meditation. Lower-caste Hindus and Bhai Mardana, a Muslim minstrel who became his closest friend, joined Nanak in evening meetings, known as Sangats, filled with poetry, songs, and ethical and political discussions. During this period of invasions and religious conflict culminating in the establishment of the Mughal dynasty (1526-1857), Guru Nanak and his companions shared their meals together, violating caste and religious rules. But Guru Nanak carried notions of equality even further