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tyrant in an ancient Greek polis (or an Italian city-state during the Renaissance), a ruler who came to power in an unconstitutional way and ruled without being subject to the law.

ultraroyalists in nineteenth-century France, a group of aristocrats who sought to return to a monarchical system dominated by a landed aristocracy and the Catholic Church.

uncertainty principle a principle in quantum mechanics, posited by Heisenberg, that holds that one cannot determine the path of an electron because the very act of observing the electron would affect its location.

unconditional surrender complete, unqualified surrender of a belligerent nation.

utopian socialists intellectuals and theorists in the early nineteenth century who favored equality in social and economic conditions and wished to replace private property and competition with collective ownership and cooperation.

vassalage the granting of a ?ef, or landed estate, in exchange for providing military services to the lord and ful?lling certain other obligations such as appearing at the lord’s court when summoned and making a payment on the knighting of the lord’s eldest son.

vernacular the everyday language of a region, as distinguished from a language used for special purposes. For example, in medieval Paris, French was the vernacular, but Latin was used for academic writing and for classes at the University of Paris.

viceroy the administrative head of the provinces of New Spain and Peru in the Americas.

volkish thought the belief that German culture is superior and that the German people have a universal mission to save Western civilization from “inferior” races.

war communism Lenin’s policy of nationalizing industrial and other facilities and requisitioning the peasants’ produce during the civil war in Russia.

war guilt clause the clause in the Treaty of Versailles that declared that Germany (with Austria) was responsible for starting World War I and ordered Germany to pay reparations for the damage the Allies had suffered as a result of the war.

Warsaw Pact a military alliance, formed in 1955, in which Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union agreed to provide mutual assistance.

welfare state a sociopolitical system in which the government assumes primary responsibility for the social welfare of its citizens by providing such things as social security, unemployment beneifts, and health care.

wergeld “money for a man.” In early Germanic law, a person’s value in monetary terms, paid by a wrongdoer to the family of the person who had been injured or killed.

world-machine Newton’s conception of the universe as one huge, regulated, and uniform machine that operated according to natural laws in absolute time, space, and motion.

wrought iron a high-quality iron first produced during the eighteenth century in Britain; manufactured by puddling, a process developed by Henry Cort that involved using coke to burn away the impurities in pig iron.

zemstvos local assemblies established in Russia in 1864 by Tsar Alexander II.

ziggurat a massive stepped tower on which a temple dedicated to the chief god or goddess of a Sumerian city was built.

Zionism an international movement that called for the establishment of a Jewish state or a refuge for Jews in Palestine.

Zollverein the customs union of all the German states except Austria, formed by Prussia in 1834.

Zoroastrianism a religion founded by the Persian Zoroaster in the seventh century B.C.E., characterized by worship of a supreme god, Ahuramazda, who represents the good against the evil spirit, identified as Ahriman.

CHAPTER NOTES

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CHAPTER 11

1. Quoted in H. S. Lucas, “The Great European Famine of 1315, 1316, and 1317,” Speculum 5 (1930): 359.

2. Quoted in Christos S. Bartsocas, “Two Fourteenth-Century Descriptions of the ‘Black Death,’” Journal of the History of Medicine (October 1966): 395.

3. Quoted in David Herlihy,