In an effort to overcome social differences in pursuit of holy community, Sikh men gather in a "Sangat" to pray, to listen to scripture in the company of the guru or leader, or simply to serve one another by preparing food, playing music, or listening to stories about the founder, Guru Nanak, and his successors. Gurumustuk Khalsa—Sikhphotos.com
by encouraging marriages among people of different religions and ethnicities. Those who joined him called themselves Sikhs, or disciples, but only Bhai Mardana joined him when, following a vision in 1499, Nanak journeyed all over India, including contemporary Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, and as far west as Mecca, Medina, and Baghdad spreading his religious teachings.2
The Hindu Jat people from the northern plain of the Punjab joined Guru Nanak early on in his ministry. They were primarily workers and farmers, who belonged to one of the lower Hindu castes. But, from the tenth century on, their political practices assumed an important role in their identity as a people. A frontier society, prey to conquests from all their neighbors, they lived in fortified villages. In their communities, any adult man who defended the villages was given democratic rights, for example, to elect the five male elders who would govern them, and thus the Jat people incorporated beliefs in equality into their identity as Sikhs.
During Guru Nanak's youth, many Hindus were dissatisfied with elaborate religious rituals, pilgrimages, and conflicting sects that viewed one another with hostility. Some Hindus were attracted to another religious movement called Bhakti that emphasized spiritual surrender and recognized the needs of lower-caste people. At the same time Muslims called Sufis rejected the formal rituals of their religion. Guru Nanak drew on both Bhakti and Sufi practices to develop congregations that placed the needs of everyday life ahead of the supernatural. Making a commitment to life, for example, Guru Nanak opposed the Hindu practice of Sati, the burning of widows alongside their dead husbands. He opposed exorbitant taxes that threw merchants, workers, and farmers into poverty. And he cherished the rule of law that constrained the whims of rulers.
Guru Nanak embraced elements from Islam and Hinduism, but primarily emphasized their most egalitarian characteristics and attempted to reduce their undemocratic qualities. He particularly attacked the Hindu caste system. The Brahmins were the priestly caste that dominated the social and religious hierarchy. But Guru Nanak's caste, the Kshatryas, formed the governing class. Below them on the social scale were the urban artisans who wove and dyed silk and cotton cloth, and those, like the Jat people, who constituted the farmers of the central plain. At the bottom of the heap came the untouchables, originally aboriginals from the mountainous areas and other frontiers of the Indian subcontinent. They worked with leather, collected waste, disposed of garbage, and did the distasteful tasks the society required. Within each caste, women were subordinate to men. The caste system, which placed fixed limitations on people's physical movements from birth to death, paradoxically also assured the separation between political and religious life by keeping Brahmins out of politics. One of the greatest challenges Guru Nanak undertook was his attempt to undermine the caste system.
Guru Nanak also incorporated democratic traditions from Islam, which spread to the Indian subcontinent in the eighth century with the Muslim merchants who settled along its southern and western coasts. The merchants sailed east to Cambodia, Indonesia, and China, carrying dried fruit, nuts, and frankincense to freshen the air in societies that lacked fresh water and efficient waste disposal. The merchants carried back the rich muslin and precious cotton cloth dyed with bright colors that made the area from Lahore to Delhi relatively prosperous. Members of the lower castes in India flocked to the new religion since it opposed the caste system and promoted the equality of all people. As Guru Nanak said "Usurpation of rights of others is forbidden as pork to Muslims and beef to Hindus. The Guru or the pirs will come to your rescue only if you shun the carrion of greed."3
Guru Nanak attempted to elaborate on democratic traditions in both Hinduism and Islam to reduce the internecine struggles between them, and possibly his most advanced practice was to overcome Hindu and Muslim treatment of women. Guru Nanak invested his sister, his wife, and other women with power in the Sikh congregation. He left the administration of the Sikh community in his wife's hands during the twelve years of his extended travels, and he repeatedly acknowledged women's full participation in the early, pluralist community of the Sikhs.
Developing the concept of a community of equals in the Sagats, or congregations, Guru Nanak tried to assure that wherever the early Sikhs gathered, they formed self-governing congregations in which people met together regardless of race or original religion. These congregations functioned as legislatures and as courts that worked out conflicts according to majority rule, and Guru Nanak and the gurus who followed him participated in them as equals. Indeed, as he approached death in 1538, having settled into life as an independent scholar, Guru Nanak handed over leadership of his community to a colleague rather than pass authority to his sons according to hereditary rule. His visionary insights about democracy—his opposition to empty rituals, his insistence on following secular law, and his derision of the caste system that ruined the lives of so many people—held sway for a long time among his followers. The views he promoted continued to prosper through small, decentralized bodies whose actions were reported in the writings of the gurus who followed.
While Guru Nanak attempted to change religious practices to promote the equality of all people, the representatives of the major Castilian cities in faraway Spain vied with their rulers to win representative government and to avoid paying for Spain's rapidly growing empire. As Spain and its empire expanded first through the conquest of Muslim territories in central and southern Spain and then to Africa and the Americas in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a substantial portion of the Spanish population continued to live in cities.
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, married in 1469 and fought civil wars to establish their legitimacy in various kingdoms that they ruled separately. In 1492 Isabella embarked on a great and finally successful conquest to drive out the King of Granada, the last remaining Muslim monarch in Spain. She expelled the Jews who refused to convert and four years later made the same demand of Muslims. According to legend, she used her personal fortune to finance Christopher Columbus's first voyage to America. To manage her disparate affairs and multiple kingdoms, she organized the Royal Council of Castile made up of trusted barons. She secured archers, foot soldiers, cavalry, and armaments from other barons, but she increasingly depended on the city councils of the virtual 18 city-states of her disparate Castilian kingdoms to pay the taxes that she needed to administer her kingdom. In exchange, the city representatives demanded royal help with the surrounding barons.
When Isabella died in 1504, she had barely begun to establish a systematic pattern of ruling. Since Ferdinand and Isabella ruled separate kingdoms, Isabella's holdings were passed on to their daughter Juana and her husband, Philip the Fair of Flanders (made up of contemporary Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, and parts of Northern France). Philip's death in 1506 drove his deeply depressed wife Juana into seclusion, and required her father Ferdinand to rule as regent on her behalf until his death in 1516.
Following Ferdinand's death, his sixteen-year-old grandson, Charles V, became king of Castile and Aragon, and Duke of Flanders. Charles, who had always lived in Flanders and spoke no Spanish, appointed a Flemish advisor as regent to head the Royal Council of Castile, and then came to Spain himself in the autumn of 1517. He summoned the Cortes, a congress made up of representatives of 18 Castillian cities, to meet him in Valladolid in March 1518. The representatives who consisted of members of the lower aristocracy as well as doctors, lawyers, merchants, and manufacturers reluctantly gave him the funds he demanded, but many delegates resented the bribes and pressure techniques that Charles employed. Angry that Charles had appointed the seventeen-year-old nephew of one of his Flemish advisors as archbishop of Toledo, the highest ecclesiastical position in Spain, they protested against government by someone they regarded as a "foreign" ruler. The city delegates demanded that Charles learn to speak Spanish, marry a Spanish princess, settle in Spain, and rule all his other dominions from there. Most important for the development of democracy, they wanted the Cortes to schedule regular meetings every three years so that the cities could present their grievances when they occurred rather than simply wait until the king needed revenue. Charles promised everything in general and nothing in particular by repeating, "I swear," and quickly left Castile to visit Aragon and Catalonia, the lands he had inherited from Ferdinand.