Capstone: Six Periods, One Exam

This is Unit Eighteen of Western Civilization One, part two of two, and the last lecture of the course: fifteen joins across the six periods, the five abilities the exam tests, how the course was sourced, the record of what it could not source, and the whole course in one chain. Part one worked the ten sample questions. Carry the same idea through this part: every question belongs to a unit you have taken, and the hardest ones cross the seams between periods. So this part draws fifteen threads across them, the alphabet to print, citizenship from polis to commune, empire from Persia to the Habsburgs, one God through four turns, law from Hammurabi to Westphalia, and ten more. Then the five abilities, each with the entries that drill it. Then a note on how this course was built, and a list, kept on purpose, of the names its sources do not contain, so you know exactly where its knowledge stops. Then one chain, one word per period. By the end you will be able to trace eight joins. To trace seven more. To name the five abilities. To say how the course was sourced and read its disclosure record. And to state the chain.

Eight joins: the word from alphabet to press, citizenship, empire, monotheism, law, the economy's moving center, the Church's arc, and the weapons that reshaped who ruled.

One technology of the word.

WC1 1718 Join: From Alphabet to Print

The Phoenician alphabet of sound signs needed no scribal class, the Greeks adapted it about eight hundred, Rome inherited it, Charlemagne's scribes gave it spaces and cases, and Gutenberg's press of the fourteen fifties multiplied it: one technology of the word, owned by entries in units two, three, ten and thirteen. Print is the Reformation's medium, and the join runs into unit fifteen.

Basic membership, then ornament, then charter.

WC1 1719 Join: Citizenship From Polis to Commune

The polis made citizenship the basic membership; Rome extended it without the vote to Latins, then to loyal elites, then to all free people in two twelve; the Hellenistic kingdoms made it an ornament; medieval towns revived it as a charter freeing a serf in a year and a day, in units three, six, seven and eleven. Each version excluded someone.

What held each empire together.

WC1 1720 Join: Empire From Persia to the Habsburgs

Persia held an empire by satraps and leniency; Rome by legions, roads and citizenship; the caliphs by adopted bureaucracies and the dhimma; Charles the Fifth by an inheritance he could not govern; the Ottomans by conquest, Janissaries and millets, across units three, seven, nine and fourteen. The exam asks what held each together, and marriage and conquest are different glues, as unit fourteen's map showed.

One line, four turns.

WC1 1721 Join: Monotheism to the Reformations

Judah moved from henotheism to monotheism under the prophets and exile; Christianity opened that God to everyone through Paul; Islam claimed the same God through a last prophet; and the Reformations split Western Christianity over how that God saves, in units two, eight, nine and fifteen. One line, four turns, and each faith is stated as its tradition states it: the course reports.

From a king's claim to a rule above kings.

WC1 1722 Join: Law From Hammurabi to Westphalia

Hammurabi's code punished by class; the Twelve Tables made Roman law public; Justinian's Corpus purged it into the form Europe revived at Bologna; Magna Carta bound a king; Westphalia bound princes to a treaty, in units one, six, nine, eleven and seventeen. Law moved from a king's claim to a rule above kings. The primary layer reads three of these, and the exam quotes them.

The center moved twice.

WC1 1723 Join: From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic

Rome's economy drained gold east for silk; medieval Italy carried spices and became Europe's banker; Venice ran the spice trade and the first banks; then Portugal sailed around the middlemen, Spain found silver, and Amsterdam replaced Venice by sixteen forty-eight, in units seven, eleven, thirteen and sixteen. The center moved twice: Mediterranean to Italy, Italy to the Atlantic.

Rise, height, humiliation, division, reform.

WC1 1724 Join: The Church's Rise, Height, and Division

Bishops copied the imperial map; the pope claimed Peter's keys; Gregory the Seventh beat an emperor at Canossa; Innocent the Third made kings vassals; Boniface the Eighth lost to a king at Anagni; Avignon and the Schism followed; Trent reaffirmed doctrine after Luther, in units eight, eleven, twelve and fifteen. Rise, height, humiliation, division, reform, and the largest band of the exam runs along this line.

Each weapon reshaped who ruled.

WC1 1725 Join: War's Technology From Hoplite to Musket

The hoplite made citizens soldiers; the legion made soldiers professionals; the stirrup and the knight made war aristocratic; the longbow at Crecy and gunpowder after it let a peasant kill a knight; pike, musket and cannon made kings need taxes, in units three, seven, twelve and fourteen. Each weapon reshaped who ruled. The chain is the course's, drawn from the anchor's separate chapters.

Seven more joins: two plagues, three cities, three transmissions of the classics, slavery in every period, women's standing, East and West divided and reconnected, and two neighbors.

One plague made the West poor, the other made survivors freer.

WC1 1726 Join: Plague Twice

Justinian's plague of five forty-two killed half of Constantinople and severed East from West; the Black Death of thirteen forty-eight killed a third or more of Europe and reversed the manor's bargain, in units nine and twelve. Both figures are the anchor's, attributed; both consequences are the record. The first plague helped make the West poor; the second helped make its survivors freer.

Temple, court, charter, bank.

WC1 1727 Join: The City Three Times

Uruk was a temple's redistributive economy; Constantinople was a walled court with a silk monopoly and a million people, the anchor says; medieval towns were chartered communes; Florence was a banking republic that turned money into art, in units one, nine, eleven and thirteen. Ask what each city ran on: temple, court, charter, bank.

Three transmissions, one rejection.

WC1 1728 Join: The Classical Inheritance Three Times

Rome took Greek art, Stoicism and rhetoric; the Abbasids translated Aristotle and advanced him; Europe got Aristotle back through Arabic and Hebrew for scholasticism; the Renaissance reread Cicero and Plato for humanism; the Scientific Revolution finally threw Aristotle out, in units six, nine, eleven, thirteen and seventeen. Three transmissions, one rejection, and the exam tests the route.

Every period had it.

WC1 1729 Join: Slavery in Every Period

Helots in Sparta; a third of Italy under Rome; Vikings selling Slavs; Berbers forced to convert; the mita in Peru; and the Atlantic trade the anchor calls the first racial slavery, its claim, in units three, six, nine, ten and sixteen. Every period had it, and the course states each as the record. No verdict is voiced, and no period is exempt.

The line is not upward.

WC1 1730 Join: Women's Standing Across Six Periods

Egyptian women nearly men's legal equals; Athenian women legal minors; Hellenistic women holding property; medieval widows as vassals; the plague's century of wider rights; Christine de Pizan's argument that education, not nature, made the difference, in units two, four, five, eleven, twelve and thirteen. The line is not upward: Athens was worse than Egypt, and the anchor says so.

Division and transmission at once.

WC1 1731 Join: East and West, Divided and Reconnected

The Schism of ten fifty-four split the churches; the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in twelve oh four; yet Cordoba and Sicily carried Arab learning west, Aristotle came back through them, and Greek scholars fled to Italy before fourteen fifty-three, in units nine and eleven. Division and transmission ran at once, and the exam asks both.

Both Rome's heirs, both fell to the Ottomans.

WC1 1732 Join: Byzantium and Islam as the West's Two Neighbors

The anchor argues Islam belongs to Western civilization; the exam files Byzantium and Islam under medieval history. Both were Rome's heirs, both traded with and fought the Latin West, both fell to the Ottomans, who then stood at Vienna in fifteen twenty-nine, in units nine, eleven and fourteen. The thesis is the anchor's, attributed; the placement is the exam's.

Six entries on the five abilities and the sourcing: recall, cause and effect, chronology, maps and documents, a passage's assumptions, and how the course was built from an anchor, three witnesses and a primary layer.

One fact each.

WC1 1733 Ability One: Recall of Facts and Terms

Most questions ask for a fact, a term or a name: ziggurat, hoplite, princeps, dhimmi, fief, indulgence, encomienda. The course's fact entries are built at that grain, one fact each, with the anchor's figures attributed and the witnesses' names marked; read any entry's first line for the fact the exam wants. Terms outnumber dates on this exam. Learn both.

Why, and what resulted.

WC1 1734 Ability Two: Cause and Effect

Many stems ask why or what resulted: why the Arab armies won, why the Republic fell, why Europe grew after one thousand, why wages rose after the plague. The course's capstone entries hold each unit's chain, every link a fact taught in a fact entry, so read a unit's capstone for its chain and then check each link. Attributed causes stay attributed.

Six dates that never move.

WC1 1735 Ability Three: Chronology

The exam orders events within and across periods. The course's sequencing procedures teach a method: fix three anchors, hang the rest between them. Across periods, six dates never move: three thousand, four seventy-nine, thirty-one, four seventy-six, ten fifty-four, fifteen seventeen, which are Uruk's kings, Plataea, Actium, Odoacer, the Schism, and the Theses. B.C.E. dates count down, and the exam uses that convention.

Rings and edges, who speaks and to whom.

WC1 1736 Ability Four: Maps and Documents

The exam shows maps and quotes documents. The course's map procedures teach rings and edges; its document procedures teach who speaks, to whom, and what is assumed, across Hammurabi, the Twelve Tables, the Cyrus Cylinder, the Pact of Umar, Magna Carta, the Theses and The Prince, each read in translation from the primary layer. Read the map's date before naming a people.

The passage's silence is often the answer.

WC1 1737 Ability Five: Reading a Passage for Its Assumptions

The hardest stems quote a passage and ask what its author assumes. The method: what the writer wants, what must be true for the claim to persuade, and what the text leaves out, with Pericles, Augustine, Machiavelli and Las Casas as the cases. The passage's silence is often the answer. Never credit an author with modern knowledge.

An open textbook, three witnesses, a primary layer.

WC1 1738 How This Course Was Sourced: Anchor, Witnesses, Primary Layer

The course rests on an open textbook, Brooks's Western Civilization, which the exam board does not name, checked against three independent witnesses and a primary layer of documents. Where the anchor errs, the course corrects it and says so, and about fifty entries rest on the witnesses alone and say so. The board names no textbook for this exam.

One entry: the list, kept on purpose, of the names this course could not find in any of its sources, so that you know where its knowledge stops.

No source, no claim.

WC1 1739 The Disclosure Record: What This Course Could Not Source

A course built on a named anchor and named witnesses owes the learner a list of what it could not find in any of them, and this is that list. These names appear only here or as marked disclosures, never taught as facts, because neither the anchor, nor the three witnesses, nor a located primary document carries them: the Star Chamber; the Fuggers; the putting-out system; the Sforza; Bosworth and Chaldiran, taught by their years alone; the Ciompi revolt; the Casa de Contratacion; the Amsterdam Exchange and Bank by name; Sublimis Deus; Sepulveda; Ivry; Ravaillac; the Union of Utrecht and the Act of Abjuration by name; the Twelve Years' Truce; Paracelsus; epicycles by name; Phidias; and Montaigne, Bodin and Grotius. Beside them stand five items taught from convention and said so: Kepler's ellipses, Speyer, the missi dominici, the King's Peace, Edington. Every one is exam-plausible, and several appear in standard textbooks. The rule is that a fact is voiced only when a source on disk carries it; the rule cost these names and bought every other claim its citation. The owner may close any item by adding a source, and until then the course would rather name a gap than fill it from memory.

One entry: the whole course in one chain, six periods, one word each, every link taught in the seventeen units before this one.

Rivers, polis, Republic, Church, plow, print, Westphalia.

WC1 1740 The Whole Course in One Chain

Six periods, one chain, every link taught before this unit. Civilization began between two rivers about three thousand B.C.E., when cities, writing, kings and law appeared together, and Egypt showed how a predictable river makes a stable kingdom; the Bronze Age system rose and collapsed, iron and the alphabet came out of the wreck, Assyria built the first empire that held, Persia learned to rule by leniency, and the Hebrews arrived at one God. The Greeks inherited all of it and added the polis; they beat Persia, built Athens on an empire, invented drama, history and philosophy, lost the polis to Macedon, and sent Greek culture east without Greek politics. Rome added law, roads and citizenship, ran a Republic until land, loyalty and murder ended it, built a Principate that kept the forms, held the Mediterranean for two centuries, was rebuilt by Diocletian and converted by Constantine, and lost its West in four seventy-six while its Church stood. Byzantium kept the state, the Arabs kept the learning, the Franks and the Church rebuilt the West on feudalism and sacraments, and Charlemagne wore a crown in eight hundred. After one thousand Europe grew, plow, coin, town, school, crusade; the Church reached its height and its humiliation; plague, war and schism broke the fourteenth century. Italy turned money into the Renaissance, print carried it, kings turned guns into taxes and taxes into states, Luther split the Church in fifteen seventeen, and Spain and Portugal crossed the oceans. From fifteen sixty to sixteen forty-eight Europe fought over religion until Westphalia made states sovereign, while Copernicus, Galileo and Bacon began to read the world by method. The chain is the course's arrangement of the anchor's chapters, not a thesis the anchor states, and the next question on the exam is one link of it.

Look at what you can now do. You can trace the word from alphabet to press, citizenship from polis to commune, empire by its glue, one God through four turns, law from a king's claim to a rule above kings, the economy's center moving twice, the Church's arc, and the weapons that reshaped rule. You can trace two plagues, three cities, three transmissions and one rejection, slavery in every period, women's standing that did not rise in a line, East and West divided and reconnected, and two neighbors that fell to the same Ottomans. You can name recall, cause and effect, chronology, maps and documents, and assumptions, with six dates that never move. You can say the course rests on an unnamed open anchor, three witnesses and a primary layer, and read its list of nineteen names and five conventions it would rather disclose than invent. And you can state the chain, rivers, polis, Republic, Church, plow, print, Westphalia, which is the course's one idea. This is the last lecture of Western Civilization One. The exam is one hundred twenty links of that chain, and every one of them has a unit, an entry, and a named source behind it.