Abstract
From the fall of the Roman Empire in the West to the Renaissance and the Reformation, there are relatively few clear-cut examples of active terrorist groups for which we have information. Warfare in China, India, and the empires of the Americas also appear to have been conventional ones.The arms available to the rebels and dissidents were similar to those in the hands of governments (although the governments frequently had the advantage of better organization and organized military units). There are a few examples of systematic terrorist violence in this period. The activity of the Assassins in the Levant and Persia from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries was in many ways the best chronicled. In addition, the city-states in Italy were often in turmoil in the Middle Ages. There were different types of political violence that occurred, including some activities involving attempts to intimidate and instill fear in opposing groups. A third case involves the appearance of some similar kinds of political violence in the great peasant uprisings in Europe. The last of these traditional peasant uprisings, and in some respects the greatest, occurred in Germany and the surrounding areas in the early sixteenth century—the German Peasant War of 1525.
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Notes
Farhad Daftary, The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Isma’ilis (London: I. B. Tauris, 1991), p. 35.
Judith Hook, Siena:A City and Its History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979), p. 44.
Steven A. Epstein, Genoa & the Genoese, 958–1528 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 81.
Laura Martines, “Political Conflict in the Italian City States,” Government and Opposition ,Vol.3, No. 1 (1967–1968), p. 81
J. R. Hale, Florence and the Medici: The Pattern of Control (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 78.
Marvin B. Becker, Florence in Transition: Volume I, The Decline of the Commune (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), p. 114.
George Holmes, Florence, Rome, and the Origins of the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 4.
Yves Renovard, The Avignon Papacy: The Popes in Exile, 1305–1403, Denis Bethell, trans. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1994, originally published in translation in 1970), pp. 28–29
Daniel Waley, The Papal State in the Thirteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 248.
Raj Desai and Harry Eckstein, “Insurgency: The Transformation of Peasant Rebellion,” World Politics,Vol. 42, No. 4 (1990), p. 449
Heiko A.Oberman, “The Gospel of Social Unrest,” in Bob Scribner and Gerhard Benecke (eds.), The German Peasant War 1525-New Viewpoints (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979), p. 44.
Walter Laqueur, Terrorism (Boston: Little Brown, 1977), p. 9; and Lewis, The Assassins, p. 139.
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© 2005 James M. Lutz and Brenda J. Lutz
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Lutz, J.M., Lutz, B.J. (2005). The Middle Ages to the Renaissance. In: Terrorism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978585_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978585_4
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