Keywords

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The objective of this work and Chaps. 4 and 5 more specifically, is not to painstakingly re-examine the history of childhood. That is already a relatively thoroughly thought through aspect of social history. Whilst most of the easily accessible literature looks at Western European children since at least the late medieval period and Britain is exceptionally well covered, interest in other parts of the world is gradually falling into place. Archaeologists have fairly recently begun to contribute complementary data that increase our knowledge of how children lived in the past (for instance, see Sofaer Derevenski 2000 or Jess Cooney’s work described earlier). Their work is extremely interesting and beginning to broaden our knowledge of children’s everyday lives. Despite that, as with historical data from most sources, we learn very little about children’s position in civil society.

There are notable exceptions like boy pharaohs, girl queens, child priests and other high ranking children whose remains and occasionally stories of their lives are discovered. They are, however, almost always exceptions to the rule and contribute little at best to a social history of childhood. Likewise, comparably recent developments in both biological and social anthropology have increased interest in children in all branches of the discipline. They now examine childhood from the prehistoric to contemporary world. History itself is often highly dependent on other disciplines. It is frequently interwoven with the descriptions of children or family life that were described by philosophers, theologians and poets. Whether these are selective or distorted by idealised descriptions is not as important as the fact that they are written and may be the only data available. Thus Socrates,Footnote 1 Plato, Confucius, Cicero, later on Thomas Aquinas, St Anselm and more recently John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau are among the many proxies for exact historical sources.

This brief examination of history has thus been divided into two chapters. This chapter looks at the ancient world until the sixteenth century then Chap. 4 continues on to the present day. The former, rather more than the latter, attempts to present a world overview. There are good reasons for this. Many of the perceptions of childhood we find today owe origins to older traditions that have only partially changed more recently. Thus it may be said that in a large part of the world the influences of Ibrahimic religions have been carried over into the modern world. To one degree or another, Christianity has not moved so very far from what Socrates was saying of children and in other places Hinduism and Confucianism have retained traditions from time well before inclusion would be at all relevant here.

However, it should be noted here that both Africa and the Americas particularly, but also other parts of the world receive scant, if any attention, in this history. In fact, those are the least influential parts of the world in a bigger picture. Africa, with exception of Islamic regions, has almost too many different histories. The great empires that include Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali and Munhumutapa (Zimbabwe) all comprised of many different people whose social organisation, beliefs and traditions were more diverse than would be practicable here. The many smaller nations, indeed even the smallest ones we sometimes refer to as ‘tribes’, are far too many to consider.

Nonetheless, apart from some exceptions, such as what we may know about child monarchs, little of substance about childhood is known. Much the same can be said for the pre-Columbian Americas and once we begin to have a picture of the great civilisations such as Aztec, Inca, Maya or Toltec again we lack real knowledge about children there. Those who survived the conquest of the Americas following Colombus’ voyage of 1492 were originally described in what are often extensive accounts of ‘savage’ people written by missionaries and pioneer colonists. More recently they have been studied by mainly anthropologists and archaeologists who also tend not to say very much about children. Thus, seen historically neither Africa nor the Americas have a great deal of substance to offer in the context of this work although knowledge of older societies is an ongoing process that may well tell us more in years to come.

There are notable exceptions. Lee and DeVore’s (1976) work on the !Kung San of the Kalahari is used in Chap. 8 because an entire section of their book (Part III) appears under the heading ‘Childhood’. They were looking at the !Kung San as they were in the early 1970s, when they remained essentially a nomadic hunter-gatherer society as they had been for many centuries. The childhood observed by those anthropologists was almost certainly little changed over most, perhaps all, of the period covered by this chapter.

One of the common strands in historical study of western childhood is either notion of an ‘emergence’ or a ‘disappearance’. It has been expressed in various ways. Cunningham (2006) calls it ‘The Invention of Childhood’, Pollock (1983) uses ‘Forgotten Children’, Ariès (1962) ‘Centuries of Childhood’, Buckingham (2000) ‘…Death of Childhood’ Postman (1982) ‘The Disappearance of Childhood’ and deMause (1974) ‘The History of Childhood’. It is the question that arises out of either proposition that allows for an assumption that there was and is again a time when adulthood and childhood are inseparable that is more interesting. It is that possibility and its implications that justify the inclusion of history. It is thus a chronological examination of what is known and has been said about childhood rather than a reconsideration of historical data. One of the obvious difficulties is to know exactly where to begin in a roughly chronologically ordered examination of childhood. The ultimate aim of this work is to look at the possibility of children’s full citizenship. Thus the question arises as to whether or not this has arisen in one form or another in the past. Any line of enquiry that pursues an exact answer to that question also needs to take into account different forms of citizenship or the absolute absence of a concept of a common membership of a society that can be understood as a form thereof.

The Classical Period

In order to not to move too far away from the intended outcome of this work into the realms of another equally intricate intellectual task, a starting point has been chosen to the exclusion of whatever is known about the period preceding that time. This beginning is sometime after 470 B.C., the birth of Socrates, and as it was recalled by Plato in his Crito (Κριτων).

In the Crito there is citation of Socrates explaining the passage of membership into citizenship thus: “…having granted the indulgence to any of the Athenians who may desire to use it as soon as he has arrived at the years of discretion and become acquainted with the business of the state…” (Stanford 1834:104). In his annotation Stanford notes that “At what age children were … enrolled does not appear; some suppose at one, others at three or four years old. …second enrolment was at eighteen” and again at “twenty years old”. The process through which a child became a citizen was, in effect, entry in the register (κοινόν γραμματεϊον) of the ward (φρατρία) in which they resided along with an oath by both parents that the child was legitimately born or adopted, thus entitled to enjoy the full privileges of citizenship. The second enrolment was for ephebi (εφηβος) who were the young men, usually 18–20 years old, undergoing military training. The final enrolment was in a further register (ληξιαρχικόν γραμματεϊον) that entitled them to full civil rights that included freedom from the will of parents or guardians and to inherit from their fathers.

What we also learn from Plato in the Crito is that Socrates expressed a view that the state is to us as a parent is to a child. Given that it is always wrong for a child to disobey a parent, it is commonsense that it is always wrong to disobey the state. We could, of course, raise serious doubts about the legitimacy of an analogy between parents and the state. Obedience to our parents is after all only a temporary obligation we ultimately grow out of by learning to make decisions for ourselves. His argument was that obeying the state is an obligation for an entire lifetime (for instance, see Emlyn-Jones 1999).

Plato, again citing the assumed words of Socrates, wrote about differences in his Republic. In the Greece of his time it was assumed that natural differences between adult male and female members of the human race results in a significant segregation into appropriate social roles. Children, in Plato’s view, should be further segregated from adults. His view is that the best interests of the state are served if children are brought up and educated by society as a whole rather than by natural parents. He proposed a simple scheme for the breeding, development and education of children of the guardian class.

Plato believed that the supposed pleasures of family life are among benefits that higher classes of society must be willing to relinquish. It is those children who in due course become guardians of the state. Their accomplishment at this level of education correctly ascertains whether they are qualified to do so and, if so, whether they deserve to be a leader or a soldier. Society should accordingly design its educational system as a measure by which to discriminate among those future citizens whose functions will be at variance and thus educate them appropriately to the capability of each. Thus we see that some children are allowed to watch and listen to ‘dangerous’ art whilst others are encouraged to directly observe the violence of war. Of course this is specific only to a particular class and does not extend to, for example, artisans or labourers who are citizens who should be ruled by the higher classes. Again this is example of an early example of recognition of children as future citizens rather than as being already part of their society.

Apart from Plato we know enough about the status of children to understand that it was not entirely dissimilar to what it is in the modern world.Footnote 2 However, Greek children tended not to go to school. Many children in ancient Athens, Corinth and other cities were, in fact, slaves therefore could not go to school in the first place. They would never be citizens anyway. Poor boys, including those who were free, could not go to school since their families could not afford to pay teachers. They usually needed sons at home to work, especially those of tradesmen who would be learning their future skill from fathers. Girls normally stayed at home with mothers until they were married. They either worked in the home or, among agriculture people, in the fields. Apart from that, there were no public schools.

Parents who had enough money did try to send their sons to school since not learning to read and write and having some general education meant there would have been little opportunity to participate in politics when they grew up. Boys began school when they were about seven and attended until about 13 years old. At school they generally learned to read and write and learned large amounts of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey by heart. Therewith they had basic skills for access to the political sphere which was always limited to those with literature and cultural skills and more often than not to those who were born privileged to begin with. They furthermore learned to play the lyre and pipes and also to sing (see Beaumont 2006; Golden 1990; Kamp 2001; Tames 2002).

The exception to other children in Hellenic antiquity was among the Spartans (see Cartledge 2001, 2002) whose family was quite different from that of the other city-states. The word ‘Spartan’ now describes a life of abstinence and minimalism in our terms, which is what Spartan life was essentially about. Their notions of family, childhood and citizenship were very different from modern, western understanding of these terms. Men and women did not live together although they married, but met occasionally for procreation. A wedding comprised of a ritualised physical fight which resulted in the man tossing the woman over his shoulder and taking her away. By the end of the fourth century BC there were more men than women in Sparta so that there was often more than one father of children or several men might even share a wife. Connubial love was discouraged and progeny were born children ‘of the state’ rather than of parents, raised to be soldiers or wives of soldiers, staunch supporters of the state and expected to be strong and self-disciplined. A mother’s ‘softening’ influence was in fact deemed harmful to a boy’s education.

When a baby was born, soldiers examined it assiduously to determine its strength. The child was bathed in wine instead of water to see how it reacted. If it was frail it was left on a hillside (to die) or taken away to become a slave (helot Footnote 3). When a boy reached his seventh birthday he was enrolled in the agoge (military training) under the authority of the paidonómos (παιδονόμος), or ‘boy-herder’, a magistrate who supervised education. Nurses who did not indulge them took immediate charge of them. Boys were housed in a dormitory and began the first of the three stages of the agoge: paides (ages 7–17), paidiskoi (18–19) and hebontes (20–29). The boys lived in agelai, (‘herds’) under an older boy leader and were expected to give their loyalty to the communal mess hall rather than families. Boys were given one piece of clothing per year and made beds of reeds from the Eurotas River. They suffered austere physical discipline and denial to make them robust. They marched unshod, going without food for lengthy spells. They were intentionally underfed to master skills essential for foraging or stealing food. However, they were severely punished if caught. They developed their acumen as fighters, bearing pain and in survival skills. Older boys beat younger boys to toughen them up. Abstinence, frugality, the soldier’s code, and loyalty to the city-state were their raison d’être. They were taught stories of courage and resilience.

At around age 12 boys entered into an institutionalised sexual relationship with a young adult male Spartan. It was a form of pederasty, whereby older soldiers would engage promising youths in long-lasting relationships with ostensibly educational objectives. Boys were expected to ask for these relationships which were seen as a means of passing on knowledge and upholding loyalty in war. At paidiskoi, around age 18 students became reserve members of the army. Promising students were taken to the Crypteia, a kind of festival to test skills by declaring war on helots, encouraging them to slay any who were out at night and steal their food. At the stage of hebontes they became full part of the syssitia and Spartan army after passing a rigorous test to graduate as full citizens. Only soldiers were received into the ‘aristocratic’ citizenry. If they failed tests they could not become citizens, but perioeci Footnote 4 which in contemporary terms was a kind of middle class. Thus to some extent class was based on merit rather than birth. When they passed, young men continued to live in barracks, train as soldiers and compete for a place among the Spartan hippeis, the royal guard of honour, and also required to marry to produce new young Spartans. The state gave them a piece of land which was cultivated by helots to provide income for their support so that they could remain full-time soldiers for another 10 years.

Girls were also removed from home at age 7 and sent to school where they learned dance, wrestling, gymnastics and underwent other physical training together with other subjects such as reading, writing and war education. Spartans believed that robust mothers produced strong children, thus young women competed in athletic events and probably partook nude as men did. Qualities such as grace and culture were frowned upon in favour of physical disposition and moral integrity. They wore the old-fashioned peplos (πέπλος) that was open at the side, leading to teasing by other Greeks who nicknamed them phainomerides, (φαινομηρίδες) or ‘thigh showers’. During religious ceremonies, holidays and physical exercise girls and women were naked. When they passed citizenship tests at age 18–20 and when they were emotionally mature and closer to the age of future husbands they were expected to marry. In preparation for her wedding a woman’s hair was cut short and she was dressed in male clothing. Afterwards the husband returned to his all-male barracks.

Thus childhood was seen as a preparation for particular roles in Spartan society. Those who were rejected perished or were enslaved early in life. Those who failed tests never achieved full citizenship and only those who fulfilled all criteria for full membership enjoyed all privileges. Childhood was preparation for adulthood which was more or less synonymous with citizenship. Thus childhood was ‘potential citizenship’ but not ‘citizen-becomings’ because achieving full recognition was not ensured. However those who became helots almost certainly became like other slaves who had no exact status in this regard. Perioeci were probably far more comparable with a modern European ‘blue collar class’, although those who had failed tests were probably a very different kind of adult to those born perioeci.

From these early descriptions of the transition from childhood to adulthood in the Hellenic world of around 400 BC we learn two important things. Firstly, when children are referred to it most frequently means male children rather than both sexes. Secondly, what Plato tells us about is a transition that gives only partial citizenship at the first stage which is a notion that will be revisited at a later stage when looking at Locke, later Durkheim and more recently Qvortrup. In further examination of antiquity there are various conditions that we can roughly compare with class structures in the modern world and the privileges enjoyed by a minority in upper echelons until the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Asian Philosophies and Beliefs

An emergent culture almost contemporary with the philosophy of Socrates and Plato is Confucianism (Oldstone-Moore: 316–332, 362–371 and 406–15). Its founder K’ung Fu Tzu (Latinised as Confucius) lived from 551 until 479 BC. He was a social philosopher in China whose teachings have profoundly influenced East Asia for at least the last 24 centuries, albeit it is sometimes held that the relationship between Confucianism and Confucius is for the largest part tenuous.

One of the central themes of Confucianism is that of relationships and various duties arising from different statuses held by individuals in relation to others. Those individuals are held to concurrently have different degrees of relationship with different people. Notably, they are junior in relation to parents and elders and senior in relation to their own children, younger siblings and all other people of lesser age. It is considered that juniors owe strong duties of veneration and duties to elders. They, in turn, have duties of benevolence and responsibility toward juniors. In one form or another, contemporary versions of this belief permeate many aspects of East and Southeast Asian culture to the present day.

There are extensive filial obligations on the part of children toward parents and elders and profound sense of responsibility of parents toward their children. Filiality (xiào or hsiao; 孝) is considered among the greatest of virtues and must be shown towards both the living and dead. Filial itself means ‘of a childFootnote 5’ and represents the respect and obedience that a child should show to parents and especially his or her father. This relationship was described as a sequence of five principal relationships (Wǔlún 五倫). Those are between ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder and younger brother and finally between friends. Particular duties were prescribed between participants in each of these relationships. Those duties also applied to the dead since the living are considered children (sons) of their ancestors. Stafford (1995) describes two different paths to adulthood in Confucian society. By the first, children are ‘persons’ from the moment of conception and growing is a natural process that needs to be protected as they grow and mature. The second sees them as formless and without competence and as growing persons who must learn the Confucian ideal of filial piety and deference to arrive at full adulthood. Stafford explains thus:

There is not so much a problem with Chinese children becoming something, as with them remaining something. The underlying assumption is that children are, were, and will forever be persons… The emphasis is (…) not on making them social, but instead on protecting a natural process and on emphasising certain forms of identification. …this exists alongside another more “Confucian” view (…) in which children are in the process of becoming persons (Stafford 1995:18)

In the fullness of time, filiality was incorporated into the Chinese legal system. A criminal was traditionally punished more severely when somebody had committed a crime against a parent. In general, fathers have always exercised great power over children. The same tends to be found in other age biased relationships where elders are involved. Thus, we again see that in the most populous areas of Asia children have not occupied a position in which a notion of the child citizen finds substance. In fact, as we also see in the Occident, they are ‘human becomings’. Indeed, a great deal of what has survived for well over 20 centuries tells us what a society which now appears to be increasingly assimilating life in the western world was like historically (see also: Ivanhoe 2000; Yao 2000).

Siddhārtha Gautama (circa 556/563-476/483 BC) who we know as the Buddha (Gautama Buddha), founder of the Buddhist philosophy (see Eckel 2000:110–29) was a contemporary of Confucius who died in 478. Buddhism and Confucianism often coexist and have shaped life in much of East and Southeast Asia. Buddhism itself does not itself precisely describe an ethos of intergenerational relations but initially introduced practices from the older Hindu ideology. Siddhārtha was himself born into that religion and incorporated numerous other tribal practices into his doctrine. Thus we find beliefs about family values that may sometimes appear to contradict each other elsewhere but correspond or occasionally overlap throughout the Buddhist, Confucian and Hindu world.

However one of the most pervasive values in all three philosophies is that the main purpose of marriage is to make and raise children. They are not only important in their own right but ensure extension of family lineage and are there to perform last rites for parents. In general, Hinduism places emphasis on children being loved and never neglected. Indeed, the first part of the ancient Bhagavad Gita touches on moral and social problems caused by unwanted children (see Coburn 1984 or Cornille 2006). Hindu texts expressed disapproval of contraception, proposing that children be wanted rather than sex being primarily for pleasure. Children, therefore, have always been most certainly very much included in the sense that for a parent duty is to their child to provide a home, warmth, food, clothes and education. In return, a child is duty bound to show gratitude to parents, work hard to make the best of his education and respect the people who provide for him or her.

Despite a great concern for the well-being and benevolent rearing of children there is little to suggest that in the past, or indeed in the development of these philosophies up to the present day, that children have ever enjoyed any manner of position that may be understood as making them in any way comparable with or equal to adults. Needless to say, where caste systems such as Hindu varnas with further classifications such as jati have ever shaped social status or are still present, it is not remarkable that the adult-child distinction is less obvious given that a child of a specific caste status may be of higher social rank than an adult of a another caste. Furthermore, Hinduism is complex and really refers to people of particular caste, community, region and language rather than a single religion or ideology. Narayanan (2005:11) says that:

In Indian law, the term ‘Hindu’ may even include those who belong to traditions usually thought of as theologically distinct from Hinduism. It is generally applied to anyone who lives in India and accepts the Hindu tradition – which is not defined – in any of its forms or developments. This therefore embraces Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs.

Thus, when looking at India rather than Hinduism itself a combination of caste, community (ethnic group) and region together with particular Hindu practices provide example without the complexity of attempting to portray a single typology. Fuller (1976) and Agarwal (1994) describe the Nayars of Kerala, a Hindu upper caste who were traditionally prominent in medicine, education, law, politics and government service. Prior to British occupation of Kerala in 1792 the region contained small, feudal kingdoms. Each had royal and noble lineages, a militia and most land administrators were exclusively drawn from the Nayars and related castes. At the beginning of the British occupation their armies were disbanded. Partly as a result of that, their tradition of plural marital unions gradually died out by the end of the nineteenth century. Laws passed in the 1930s imposed monogamy on them and permitted division of what had traditionally been matrilineal estates among male and female members. Thereby children were also given full rights of maintenance and inheritance from the father.

Thus the very different practices that had described an entirely different form of social organisation changed. It was one in which we would identify a very different kind of ‘citizenship’ that was determined by and included brothers and sisters, the latter’s children, and their daughters’ children and lineage. The oldest man was always legal head of the group. By the middle of the twentieth century it was increasingly common, especially among urban families, for nuclear families to form separate residential and economic units away from matrilineal joint-families. Furthermore, Fuller (Ibid.) draws particular attention to other issues such as the impact of the changing modern market economy, disappearance of traditional military training and assimilation of new values through the late and post-colonial system of education. A new consciousness was engendered by lower castes with their demand for equality and equal constitutional rights. Thus, Nayars began to adapt to the modern world.

To all intents and purposes they often appear part of contemporary, rather westernised life. However, beneath the veneer of modern ways many of the old practices and rituals define who they are. Children are less ‘free’ than we understand in western terms, thus usually experience lives that are ranked by traditional structures, governed by practice and are substantively unlike occidental standards that describe how and when full membership of society, citizenship, precisely begins. India, even today, with numerous differences of origin, caste, religion and understanding of their own democracy essentially bridges time between European antiquity and contemporary western civil society.

Whilst eastern philosophies and their cultural imprint have continued to shape the historical development of the family, the importance of the philosophy of western antiquity began to decline in influence. They were eventually to be a significant influence on each of the main Ibrahimic theologies as they increased in importance. Whereas western philosophies tell us about the emergent socio-political world that continued to exist in one form or another throughout the Roman Republic and later Empire, their historians, social commentators and philosophers were little concerned with children or any other aspect of family and social life. Strabo (circa 63 or 64 BC to 24 AD), for instance, looked at people and social organisation in much of the world known to the Roman Empire to the degree that his description of the Indian caste system is reasonably recognisable today.

The Romans

What we do know about Roman childhoodFootnote 6 is that it was more or less as connected with status and class as it was in Greece (Rawson 1991, 2005). When a child was born he or she was laid at the father’s feet. If the newborn child was raised in his arms it was acknowledged as his and given access to all rights and privileges of membership in that family. Birth registration was a requirement from sometime during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (121–180; emperor from 161 to death) onward. The father was required to register his child’s name and date of birth within 30 days (Schulz 1943). However, a boy was not enrolled as a full citizen until he put on a man’s toga. When a boy came of age varied, depending to some extent to physical and intellectual development but otherwise on his father’s decision. That also appears to have depended on the period in which a boy lived. By and large, a man’s toga was donned between the 14th and 17th years whereby a higher age was customary in earlier times. In the classical period the boy’s age was by and large about 16 years.

Girls, on the other hand, were as their mothers, women who were a class apart whose status in Roman society altered over time. Roman women were not allowed to vote or enter civil and public office since they were, theoretically, subject to the almost total power of their paterfamilias. In many respects they were little more than slaves although the interrelationship of social ‘classes’ would, in fact, add another dimension of this notion.

Social and moral education and training was largely carried out by parents. The emphasis was on moral rather than intellectual development. The most essential qualities for a child to acquire were reverence for gods, respect for the law, absolute and instant deference to authority, honesty and personal independence. Education (school) was left to parents’ discretion and lasted until about age 7. Boys and girls were taught to speak Latin correctly and do elementary reading, writing and arithmetic. The 12 tablets of law were learned by rote.

In the early period of the Empire, education was left to both parents but gradually became more a duty of mothers and sometimes specially hired slaves. Additional education was limited to wealthier families who could afford a tutor and keep the child from working. Whenever possible, a boy would go to a regular teacher but a girl became her mother’s companion. Formal education was nearly always discontinued because girls married early and needed to learn about home management. Girls learned to sew, spin and weave from mothers. Boys were trained by fathers. If a father was a farmer, a son would learn to plough, plant and harvest. When fathers were of high status their sons stood beside them in the atrium when visitors were received. That facilitated them acquiring first-hand knowledge of political affairs that would enable them to be full citizens. Fathers also trained sons in use of weapons, military exercises, riding, swimming, wrestling and a form of boxing for manhood and time they would probably spend doing military service.

Full citizenship was effectively dependent on one hand on age and gender and on the other on status such as social class and whether or not an individual was free in the first place. However, in the later days of the Roman Empire Christianity began to shape the organisation of the family that would eventually become the modern model for a large part of the world. It had developed for the most part from the family structure of the ancient Hebrews that was patriarchal and monogamous. The type of family that emerged from Greco-Roman culture was also patriarchal and governed by strict religious principles. As Greek and later Roman civilisations declined so did their highly ordered family life but what remained was the importance of the union of man and woman and their children as the ‘nucleus’ of the social unit. Christianity made marriage and procreation central concerns in religious teaching. Children became the issue of the sin that made them. Other influences and several centuries during which we know little about childhood came at the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476. The Byzantine Empire retained Roman legal and cultural traditions in a markedly Christian form for about a further 1,000 years until giving way to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 when Constantinople fell. Therewith over 2,000 years of continual ‘Roman’ historyFootnote 7 came to an end (Treadgold 1997).

The purely religious nature of family relations that was once Roman, but later became the Roman Catholic Church’s dogma, more or less persisted until the Reformation. Given the continued patriarchal structure of the family, despite lack of precise knowledge about children’s lives there are few reasons for assuming they assumed any form of status that one could describe as adult-like.

The Early Middle Ages

With the end of the Western Roman Empire, the influence of the ancient order in Europe declined. The period known as the European Early Middle Ages, from about 476 to roughly 1,000, is one of the periods we know least about. All of the Eurasian landmass saw change through migration, invasion and historically speaking rapid transition that had a profound effect on social structures. A corresponding period, known as the Migration Period (also called ‘barbarian invasions’ or ‘Völkerwanderungen’),Footnote 8 largely occurred within a period from about 300 to 700 during the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. During the latter years of Roman occupation much of Western Europe had been Christianised. This was maintained by Germanic Visigoths who conquered much of Spain, France, southern Germany, the Alpine region and Italy.

Eurasian Huns who occupied large parts of the eastern Empire displaced Christianity and the established social order of centuries of Roman occupation. From about 360 onward ‘pagan’ Germanic people began to invade and settle in parts of Roman Britain. After the Roman Emperor Honorius withdrew the last legions from Britain in 410, ‘Anglo-Saxons’ progressively consolidated their foothold in the British Isles. During eighth to tenth centuries, although not customarily counted as part of the Migration Period and despite being within the Early Middle Ages, new waves of migration of the Magyars, later Turkic peoples and then the Viking expansion from Scandinavia threatened the newly established order of the Frankish Empire in Central Europe.

In East and Southeast Asia a great deal of movement and change similarly affected social environments. The Khmer Empire was consolidated in 802 (Dagens 1995, 2003). There the next 600 years were to see the wide variety of belief systems and tribal practices brought closer together to form a relatively cohesive regional culture lasting until colonialism began in the nineteenth century. At first the empire’s official religions included Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism until Theravada Buddhism became more significant after introduction from Sri Lanka in the thirteenth century. Confucian influence was also very strong since large parts of the region south of the modern Chinese border were under Khmer control until well into the tenth century.

In ChinaFootnote 9 the Tang Dynasty (618–907) gave way to the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms until the Song Dynasty (960–1297) reunited much of what is modern China. Song Neo-Confucian philosophers found particular integrity in the imagination of ancient classical texts and wrote commentaries on them. The most influential was Zhu-Xi (1130–1200) whose blend of Confucian thought with Buddhist, Taoist and other ideas became official imperial ideology from the late Song period until the end of the nineteenth century (Berthrong 1998:109ff). His philosophy evolved into an uncompromising official doctrine placing emphasis on the one-sided obligations of acquiescence of each subject to the ruler. Under that nomenclature child to father, wife to husband and younger brother to elder brother were all subject to the same principles. This inhibited societal development in pre-modern China that affected the position of children through to the present day. Neo-Confucian doctrines also came to play a dominant role in intellectual life in Japan, Korea and Viet Nam with strands of influence throughout Southeast Asia into parts of modern Indonesia and Malaysia.

During the seventh century the Prophet Muhammad founded Islam (see Graham 2006; Nasr 2003). Sharia law (‘well trodden path’) determined by traditional Islamic scholarship and using the Qur’an as the principal source of jurisprudence reinterpreted older Jewish and Christian principles and established an Islamic family life in which children are categorically subject to adult, particularly paternal, authority. In fact there are very few significant sources shedding light on how and what medieval Muslims thought about children and families. What little is available tends to offer insights into physical needs of children, actions for fulfilment of those requirements and advice for parents grieving the loss of children. However legal treatises on marriage offer a few details obliquely related to childhood. The most useful ones integrate Qur’anic pronouncements and the word of the Prophet on marriage, women, children and family life. There is no apparent paradigm of the child and childhood in the classical period of medieval Islam. Indeed, if anything Islam appears to have generally been more concerned with adults and where children are mentioned tends to see them as beneficiaries of the actions of parents.

The Middle Ages

During the lengthy period described thus far, relatively little is known about childhood generally, most certainly less about the status of children. In Western Europe, England particularly, a little information survives to tell us about adult attitudes toward children during the Anglo-Saxon period from about 500 to 1066. Some archaeological work found burials where children had grave goods like adults. Knowledge about adult attitudes develops when we examine the twelfth century which was an age of law-making by both the Roman Church and lay society. Law making included specific arrangements for children who could not be expected to bear the same responsibilities and penalties as adults. Medieval law-makers usually demarked the transition from childhood to adulthood at puberty. Through baptism a child was received into the Church and freed from the burden of original sin. Infancy lasted up to the age of 7 years, pueritia or childhood traditionally until age 12 years for girls and 14 years for boys.

The Church usually led the way in deciding the distinction between childhood and adulthood based on notions inherited from Greek and Roman authorities on the stages of life. It regarded pre-pubertal children too immature to commit sin or comprehend adult concepts. Accordingly they were not allowed to marry, exempted from confession to priests and excluded from partaking in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Secular justice developed a similar concept of age of legal accountability beginning about puberty, although there are accounts of children receiving adult punishments (see Crawford 1999).Footnote 10 There is generally little that leads to believe that children really may have been considered ‘little adults’ as some historians maintain (e.g.: Ariès 1962; deMause 1974). Childhood was not thought as imperative as we now consider it in formation of personality and character. Nevertheless, there was scope for consideration on how it was best to bring up a child.

One account gives a sketchy insight into an example of how children were seen. It tells how St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109 (Southern 1972), came to be considered a ‘pioneer’ of child protection. The story tells how an abbot told Anselm about difficulties he was having raising boys entrusted to his care. The abbot was authoritarian and beat boys for every transgression. Anselm could not restrain his distaste for their treatment and chastised the abbot for unjust and violent treatment of the boys, saying that kindness and reason would always prevail. Anselm’s views were commonly quoted into the late Middle Ages. The resultant debate ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ persisted until the late twentieth century and subsequently prohibition of corporal punishment in schools in an ever increasing number of countries. That tells us very little about childhood itself beyond the treatment of boys. It at least contributes to putting paid to the idea that in the Middle Ages and much of the time thereafter children were essentially ‘little adults’. They were very clearly not and childhood was undoubtedly identifiable as being unambiguously a set of stages in the life cycle.

When we come to conduct books about two centuries later, the contradictory nature of the ‘little adult’ stance becomes clearer. Whilst children were expected to behave like adults, probably contributed a great deal to the economic survival of most households and had particular responsibilities, a conclusion we may extrapolate from an example like Anselm is that children were then as now being ‘brought up’. There was clearly a notion of transitions from infancy to adulthood that may be obscured behind the reality of contributing to domestic tasks, possibly other non-domestic work and the measure of responsibility (Icher 2002) they bore that probably demanded more ‘adult-like’ behaviour in many situations. These perceptions are also very culturally conditioned and where a thesis such as Ariès tends to be right is within a narrow European context among those whose lives were observed and recorded who tended to have belonged to an equally narrow social stratum of their society. Exactly as in the contemporary world, childhood would always be different from one place to another and in accord with conditions at particular points in time.

The Mongol Empire

Across Asia and parts of Europe the Mongol Empire (1206–1405)Footnote 11 extended influence from Western China and Japan to the eastern edges of Hungary, Poland and Lithuania, across the north of Russia and Siberia and down well into the Levantine, Persia, India and Southeast Asia. The Mongol Nation began as a group of disparate tribes in what we now call Mongolia. The man who united them was born with the name Temüjin (circa 1167–1221) in the Borjigin clan. At around age 9 his tribal leader father, Yesugai Bat’atur was poisoned, after which his household was driven away by his clan who thought he was too young to rule. He became leader of his family under his mother’s guidance. At one stage in his childhood he was carried off by a rival clan but escaped after a few months. At age 16 he married and began his career as a leader.

Whilst Temüjin was still 16 the Merkid tribe attacked his family and carried off his wife. With his small force of five men he could not retaliate, so turned to one of his father’s old allies, Toghrul Khan of the Kereyid tribe. He, in turn, enlisted Jamugha and his men. Together they defeated the Merkids so that Temüjin recovered his wife. It was over 20 years later aged over 40 that he brought the clans together to form the Mongol nation. By then he had been given the title Genghis Khan. Whilst he had been a young leader, most of his famed leadership accumulated in adulthood. There is little to suggest that among the Mongols or in their areas of influence children enjoyed any great privilege. However the influence of the Mongol Empire was that three great religions, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, were permanently to be the most influential across the entire landmass. With them their moral influence was formative in how societies were structured (Marshall 1993; Weatherford 2004).

Urban Awareness

Italy was very influential in the development and change in Europe (see Duggan 1994:31–59). After the fall of the Roman Empire there was concerted urban awareness in northern Italy that had declined in importance in other parts of Europe. Some Italian cities and institutions were survivors of earlier Etruscan and Roman towns which had existed within the Roman Empire and the republican institutions of Rome had also survived. There were still some feudal lords with well-ordered labour forces and vast territories. By the eleventh century a number of cities such as Florence, Genoa, Milan and Venice had become large trading conurbations which had been able to win independence from monarchies. Italy between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had been very different from feudal European countries to the north of the Alps. It was essentially a peninsula, geographically divided into many small regions by mountain ranges that made inter-city communication difficult and a patchwork of cultural and political territories rather than a unified state.

The city states that survived longest were in the least accessible and best defended regions, such as Florence and Venice. Since attacks over the Alps were complicated, Teutonic invaders found it difficult to apply sustained control over Italian vassal states so that they were largely free of Germanic political incursions. Thus strong monarchies did not emerged as easily as they did in the rest of Europe. The independent city state emerged instead. While Roman, urban and republican feelings endured there were numerous movements and changes taking place. Italy had initially felt the changes in Europe from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. The influences borne on Italy were rise in population which doubled during the period and emergence of vast cities (Florence, Milan and Venice each had over 100,000 inhabitants and others such as Bologna, Genoa and Verona exceeded 50,000) by the High Middle Ages.

There was considerable rural to urban migration making Italy the most urbanised place in the world when the urban population arrived at around 20 %. There was also an agrarian revolution and rapid development of commerce. It has been estimated that per capita income in northern Italy nearly tripled from the eleventh to fifteenth century. It was a very mobile, demographically expanding society that was invigorated by rapidly growing trade throughout the Renaissance. By the thirteenth century, northern and central Italy had become the most literate society in the world. At least one third of men and a smaller but nonetheless significant number of women were able to read in vernacular languages.

During the eleventh century in northern Italy the city state or commune had emerged as a new political and social structure. The civic culture that arose in those cities was extraordinary. In other places such as Britain and Flanders where communes had arisen they usually were merged into powerful monarchies as they emerged. Almost exceptionally they survived in northern and central Italy to become independent and powerful city states. Their breakaway from feudal lords had occurred in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries during the Investiture Controversy between the Pope and Emperor. Milan led the Lombard cities against the Holy Roman Emperors to gain independence. Meanwhile Genoa and Venice were able to establish powerful naval empires on the Mediterranean. By the end of the twelfth century a new and distinctive society had emerged that was rich, mobile and expanding. It had a mixed aristocracy that was interested in urban institutions and republican government. However many city-states had within them a violent society that was based on family, association and affiliations that destabilised cohesion. By 1,300 most of these republics had become principalities dominated by a Lord (Signore). The exceptions included Florence, Lucca and Venice that remained republics despite an increasingly monarchic Europe.

The Children’s Crusades

At about the same time as waves of Mongol hordes were sweeping through Asia, the fifth to ninth, and final, ‘Crusades’ were fighting against Islamic rule of the ‘Holy Land’. The Crusades were, in fact, a series of military campaigns of a religious character waged by Christians from 1095 to 1291 (Riley-Smith 2001:66; Setton et al. 2005) and usually sanctioned by the Pope in the name of Christendom. The objective was to ‘liberate’ Jerusalem and the sacred ‘Holy Land’ and bring them back under Christian influence. They were originally called forFootnote 12 in response to a plea from the Eastern Orthodox Byzantine Empire to help quell expansion of the Islamic Seljuq dynasty into Anatolia.Footnote 13 In the thirteenth century there were several crusades, two of them in 1212 were said to be ‘children’s crusades’.

Children’s Crusades were not exactly military campaigns but something more of the nature of popular uprisings that began in France and Germany. The probable intent was to march to the Holy Land in order to peacefully convert Moslems to Christianity. There appear to have been two movements of (young) people in France and Germany. Similarities between the two led to later chroniclers and consequently historians merging them into a single account. The first appears to have been led by Nicholas, a German shepherd from near Cologne, who led a group across the Alps into Italy during spring 1212 (Raedts 1977:279–323). About 7,000 young crusaders reached Genoa in late August. Unfortunately their plans fell apart when the waters of the Mediterranean failed to part as they expected and the crusade disbanded. Some went home, others possibly to Rome and some allegedly travelled down the Rhône to Marseilles. It is said that some were sold into slavery. Only a few returned home and none ever reached the Holy Land (Munro 1914).

During the same spring the story has it that in the middle of a field near Cloyes in France, a boy of 12 years called Stephen was tending sheep (see Runciman 1951: 139–144). A stranger who he recognised was Jesus, approached and spoke to Stephen. Jesus explained that the (adult) crusades had failed because the hearts of the soldiers were impure. He told Stephen to lead a new crusade of the most pure of believers – children. Stephen was promised that his crusade would succeed because the waters of the Mediterranean would part so they could cross directly to the Holy Land. Stephen went to Saint-Denis where he began to tell his story to anyone who would listen. The story had a profound effect. Crowds gathered, listened and allegedly had no problem believing that past crusades were tainted by impure hearts. They found the proposition that children might succeed where bad adults had failed reasonable.

By June 1212 30,000 children had gathered in Vendôme located on a Roman road leading to the port of Marseilles. The large number of children appears to have marched to and fro in France until disease, exhaustion and disillusion depleted them to about 700. Two merchants ‘rescued’ the crusade and provided seven ships. During the voyage a storm wrecked two ships and all children including Stephen were lost. The remaining children were taken to Alexandria and sold into slavery. It was approximately 30 years before news of the children reached France, by which time it was far too late for them.

By some accounts it was said that as many as 50,000 children set out in the combined French and German crusades, of those only around 10,000 were ever accounted for again. Nicholas was hung (Runciman 1951:142). Of course, we know little about the children. One possibility is that they were not children at all. In the early thirteenth century bands of wandering poor appeared throughout Europe (see Zacour 2005:332–41; Raedts 1977). They were peasants displaced by economic change which compelled many poor people in France and Germany to sell their land. They were often referred to as pueri (Latin for ‘boys’) in a disdainful fashion by chroniclers which may have lent much of the substance to many of the stories. It would appear that bands of itinerant poor may have merged into a religious protest movement, thus transforming their enforced march into a ‘religious journey’. If the pueri marched behind the Cross and associated themselves to Christ’s journey in the Bible then it would have been very easy to call them ‘Crusaders’ in line with popular imagination of that time. In reality there is little consistency in any account of the Children’s Crusades and less to suggest they were children if any part of either account is at all true.

Medieval Children

Some of the most valuable explanations of how children and youth lived in Western Europe appear in conduct books mainly written between 1300 and 1500. They tell us that two dominant behaviours of children are either ‘behaving’ or ‘misbehaving’. The books give an overview of how children and young people were perceived in various social and domestic situations since the literature describes the propagation of representative perceptions of the ‘ideal’ child. In early fourteenth century literature particularly, emphasis was on courteous behaviour and conduct of children as they carried out specific tasks. Those included serving in privileged households, how they used public spaces such as the street and how they interacted socially. That literature develops the notion of ideal behaviour of children characterised by the figure of male child servants who lived and worked within elite households. They generally expressed concern with behaviour through repetition of rules on manners, public conduct and how to follow a consistent set of procedures. Those would combine to exemplify the model ‘courteous’ child. A very good example is How the Goode Man Taght Hys Sone (Salisbury 2002) that illustrates particularly well that sons were subject to the will and wishes of fathers rather than being, by any means, little adults. Another example is Symon’s Lesson of Wisdom for all Manner of Children (Opie and Opie 1959) from circa 1,500 that very precisely described how children were expected to conduct themselves and, above all, “worship they father and thy mother”.

St Anselm, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) as well as other theologians and Christian philosophers gave rise to implications that filter right on through into the work of Kant and later Hegel. Is this a clear historical point for the end of the notion of ‘little adults’ and separable childhood and adulthood? Probably not, since the readership of those books was limited to the essentially small number of people who were literate and had access to books in the first place.

There were boy bishops and Festivals of Misrule throughout the occidental Christian world. The custom of electing a boy bishop on the feast of St Nicholas dates (see for instance ecclesiastic website sources such as The Catholic Encyclopedia) from very early times and was in vogue in most Catholic countries, although chiefly in England. It prevailed in all larger monastic and scholastic establishments as well as many country parishes with the full consent of civil and ecclesiastical authorities. A boy bishop was selected from a monastery school, cathedral choir or pupils of a grammar school. He was elected on St Nicholas’s Day, 6 December, dressed in clerical vestments, followed in procession round the parish by his companions in priest’s robes to bless the people. He then occupied the church to officiate at all ceremonies and offices until Holy Innocents Day on 28 December.

In Scotland the Abbot of Unreason and in France the Prince des Sots was an officer appointed during Advent to preside over the Feast of Fools or Festival of Misrule. The Lord of Misrule was a boy appointed to be in charge of Christmas revelry, including drunkenness and wild parties as in the pagan Saturnalia. In England the custom was abolished by Henry VIII in 1512, restored by Queen Mary and again abolished by Elizabeth I. In practice it lingered on longer. Across mainland Europe it was suppressed by the Council of Basle in 1431 but revived in some places from time to time until as late as the eighteenth century. It was essentially no more than a symbolic office preceding Holy Innocents Day that conferred no real power on any boy.

We know very little about young people as individuals during this period. One of the exceptions is Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc) who was a peasant girl born in Domrémy in eastern France who laid claim to divine guidance to lead the French to victory during the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) between England and France for the throne of and which in turn lead to the foundation of what has become modern France (for instance see Warner 1983, Part One, Chapters 1 and 2). Joan was born in 1412Footnote 14 and lived only to the age of 19 yearsFootnote 15 when she was executed. At age 16 it is said that she asked a relative to bring her to see a garrison commander, Count Robert de Baudricourt to gain access to the French royal court at Chinon. She was initially refused, but returned a few months later and gained support of Jean de Metz and Bertrand de Poulengy. With their backing had a meeting at which she made an extraordinary prediction about the reverse in French military fortune near Orléans. The prediction came true. She successfully turned the longstanding Anglo-French conflict into a holy war.

Her military ‘career’ lasted only 12 months between May 1429 and the May of the following year when she was captured. One year later on 30 May 1431 she was burned at the stake in Rouen for heresy. Since then she has since been pardoned, declared a martyr and later canonised and is considered a model of French patriotism. In fact, her cause was neither of loyalty to her country or people but to God in the pursuit of justice for France in his name. She was also on the upper edge of what we would consider youth at the time of the events that shaped her story. However, the visions she claimed to have had clearly began at a lower age thus a little more justifying her inclusion here. In October 1429, after Joan lead in taking Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, she was granted nobility which should have given her what would have served as full citizen’s rights at that time. There are, unfortunately, no historic accounts as to whether or not that played any significant role in her life. For the purposes of this work she is more anecdotally that substantially interesting, mainly because of her being at the upper age limit. Despite that, she is one of the few young lives recorded during this period and thus serves as an exemplar of the potential young lives held at that time.

The Black Death

However, other forces contributed to change. A ruinous bubonic plague pandemic began in south-western Asia and spread to Europe where it appeared in Sicily in 1347. It became known as the Black Death. Each successive wave of the plague killed between a quarter and two-thirds of Europe’s populationFootnote 16 and, including the Middle East, India and China is said to have killed at least 75 million people. The Black Death is thought to have reappeared in Europe roughly every generation with varying intensity and numbers of fatalities until disappearing from Europe during the eighteenth century. The Black Death had a drastic effect on Europe’s population, irrevocably changing Europe’s social structure.

The plague brought radical reorganisation of the economy in its wake and in due course changes in the organisation of European society. In emergent urban centres the disasters of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century and consequential labour force shortages caused rapid drive for economic diversification and scientific innovation.

Subsequent to the Black Death the loss of life, famine and desertion of entire communities and previously productive agricultural land contributed to an intensification of capital accumulation in urban areas. This stimulated trade, industry and rapidly increasing urban populations in fields as diverse as banking, textiles and weapons. The Hundred Years’ War brought about a boom in production of armaments which also brought about growth in the making of iron and steel and thus the materials required for their manufacture. As recovery and success advanced the population grew back to its former levels by the early sixteenth century.Footnote 17 A combination of a more than ample labour supply and improving productivity were a ‘mixed blessing’ for many sections of European society. Regardless of tradition some landlords began to remove peasants from ‘common’ and unenclosed land.

The Emergence of Mercantile Capitalism and the Reformation

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the most powerful Italian city states (Duggan 1994: 60ff), Florence, Milan and Venice, had been able to conquer other weaker city states thus creating regional states. In 1454 the Peace of Lodi had ended the struggle for hegemony in Italy and brought about a balance of power that was to largely persist until the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century. By the beginning of the sixteenth century and the period pertinent to this chapter only Venice was still able to fully preserve her independence and compete with the European monarchies of France and Spain or the Ottoman Empire. Nonetheless, the experiences of the Italian republics and the mercantile capitalism that had arisen and thrived within them were to be of great influence on economic development.

As trade became more successful landowners progressively moved away from the feudal economy. Wool production greatly expanded in England, France, Germany and the Netherlands and new textile industries began to expand. With the new ‘mercantile capitalism’, the ‘humanism’ of the Renaissance enjoyed unprecedented academic interest. With it came disquiet about the lack of academic freedom. Intense theoretical debates came about in the universities that seriously questioned the nature of the church, the authority of the Pope and Vatican Councils and also of monarchies.

The Catholic Church faced a crisis in theology that commenced with William of Ockham (circa 1288–1348) in England during the fourteenth century that was taking place alongside communal discontent. Again in England, John Wycliffe (1320–1384) made an English translation of the Bible and spoke out against the authority of the Pope and monasticism. A little later, In Bohemia, Jan Hus (1369–1415) a follower of Wycliffe’s teachings challenged the authority of the papacy for which he was excommunicated in 1411, then tried and burned at the stake in 1415.

With the gradual collapse of philosophical fundamentals of scholasticism, nominalism replaced it with a doctrine that regarded abstract concepts or universals to have no independent existence other than as ‘names’. They threatened the existence of the established church whose legitimacy was based on its institution and clergy being the only mediator between man and God. A new argument emerged that preferred the notion that no religious doctrine can be proven by philosophical arguments. It thus made inroads into the previously unchallenged alliance between reason and faith expressed by Thomas Aquinas that had taken firm root in the medieval period. The Reformation was the outcome.

Martin Luther (1483–1546) finally inspired the Reformation and his theological work gave life to several major traditions that have collectively come to be known as Protestantism. With those changes the Peasant’s War (1524–1525) began as a response to his teachings. Peasants’ revolts had occurred periodically since the fourteenth century. However some peasants erroneously believed that Luther’s attack on the established church would also lead to the downfall of the social hierarchy on the basis of his condemnation of the close relations between secular princes and those who were called princes of the church. Small revolts in Swabia, Franconia, and Thuringia in 1524 gained support among peasants and nobles disaffected with their power and influence, often influenced by debts owed to both groups of princes.

The New World

At the same time the world was both changing and opening up very quickly. In Spain the Islamic Moorish conquest and occupation that began in 711–18 came to an end with the union of Castile and Aragón in 1479. The ensuing conquest of Granada in 1492 and Navarre in 1512 brought most of Spain together as a single country. Spain and their neighbour Portugal also began extensive exploration of the globe.

In 1453 the Ottoman Empire under Mehmed II conquered Constantinople which became Istanbul, the capital of the entire empire. It was at its height of power during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly during the rule of Süleyman I (the Magnificent) from 1520 to 1566. The Empire covered three continents, dominated much of south-eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. It extended from the Strait of Gibraltar (and in 1553 the Atlantic coast of North Africa beyond Gibraltar) in the west to the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf in the east. It northern limits were the edge of Austria and Slovakia and the hinterland in the region of Ukraine to Sudan and Yemen at its southern limits. The Ottomans inherited aspects of both Roman and Islamic traditions with a ‘unification of cultures’ that to this day directly influences large parts of the ‘Mediterranean world’.

At its eastern edge was the Islamic Mughal Empire, which at its greatest territorial extent ruled most of the Indian subcontinent, known then as Hindustan, and parts of what are now Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was established in 1526 by the Timurid prince Babur, a descendant of Genghis Khan, expanded and consolidated until about 1707 when it was at its zenith. It was a dominion of Islamic rule over Hindu and Buddhist subjects that shaped much of the region and incorporated values from each to form many of the social structures and values that persist to the present day.

Throughout the fifteenth century Portuguese explorers had already sailed the coast of Africa and set up trading posts as they searched for a route to India in order to bring back spices which were in high demand throughout Europe. During 1498 Vasco da Gama finally round the Cape of Good Hope, reached India and thus brought economic prosperity to Portugal. In 1500 Pedro Álvares Cabral landed in Brazil and claimed it for Portugal. Ten years on Afonso de Albuquerque occupied Goa in India, Ormuz in the Persian Strait and Malacca in what is now Malaysia. Consequently the Portuguese empire held dominion over commerce in the Indian Ocean and South Atlantic. Don Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus) set out on voyages across the Atlantic in order to find the Indies from the opposite direction and began a determined European venture to explore and colonise the Americas. Although history places great emphasis on his first voyage of 1492, he did not in fact reach the mainland until his third voyage of 1498. At more or less the same time Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer in the service of Spain, led the first successful attempt to circumnavigate the world. Thus, not only the social environment but also the space in which changes would occur began to become greater.

The Changing World of Children

The impact on children was little visited by contemporaries and generally largely unknown. What is certain is that very few of them made noticeable impact as Protestantism took hold and more devout groups such as those known as ‘Calvinists’ flourished. Children became more subject to adult authority than previously since it was the duty of adults, out of whose sin children were born, to teach them righteousness and piety. In the Protestant world, Marianism was mainly discarded with its veneration and admiration of Mary as the spiritually immaculate and eternally giving mother of the Christ child and the baby Jesus who was the embodiment of godliness and purity. Thus one a cornerstone of belief that had once guided the view of what and how children should be became unfashionable.

On the other hand, conduct books and changing values of ‘behaviour’ and ­‘misbehaviour’ indicate a shift in perceptions of childhood in late medieval Europe as the Reformation began. Compared to the idealised behaviour of the type the conduct books prescribed, late fifteenth century literature shows growing concern with identifying misbehaviour as an indicator of the child’s moral nature and character. That was combined with a diminution of the importance of superficial ‘courteous’ behaviour in children’s overall actions.

Throughout much of the world little is known about children, although we can often see that many traditions have continued for almost as long as the entirety of history covered in both periods. With exploration, conquest and eventual Christian missionary activity vast parts of the ‘New World’ were drawn under the influence of a Western notion of childhood and, thus, what a child should be and how they conduct themselves as children. This, in turn, has also had varying amounts of influence on parts of the world that were not themselves under the power of European colonial powers. There are no precise universal standards to describe citizenship which makes this manner of search for what may at the very least provide a clue to a shared understanding of children as citizens. However there are also no apparent local standards other than those measured against occidental principles.

The transition from fifteenth into sixteenth centuries marks the end of the ancient to pre-modern period in which about 2,000 years of childhood has been considered. There have been a very few children who have found a place in history about whom we have a consistent and comprehensive knowledge. There are many more who are of uncertain provenance (e.g.: the rise of Genghis Khan as a ‘young’ leader or the Children’s Crusades). There is little to suggest that in whatever form citizenship can be extrapolated out of the societies considered in this ‘thumbnail’ history that it was ever inclusive of children. Where there is divergence from modern-day standards is in that the transition from childhood to adulthood was often earlier. Thus, age 14 years would perhaps not refer to a child but a young adult which may colour contemporary versions of those we remember for their youth. Nevertheless, when we look at the ancient European world particularly, childhood in Greek and Roman civilisations does not look so much different to the modern world when we look at when (and occasionally how) the transition from youth to full adulthood actually occurred.