T

English Glossary

Taille: the direct tax on the French peasantry.

Tenants: farmers and workers who rented land or buildings from the owners of country villas.

Terrorist: someone who uses violence -often against civilians- to fight for their political beliefs.

Tertiaries: lay people affiliated with the monastic life who took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience but remained in the world.

Tetrarchy: Diocletian's (r.306-337 AD) system for ruling the Roman Empire by four men with power divided territorially.

Third Reich: Hitler's regime in Germany, which lasted from 1933 to 1945.

Three-field system: a medieval innovation that increased the amount of land under cultivation by leaving only one-thir fallow in a given year.

Tithe: a tax of one-tenth of produce, paid yearly to the Church.

Transubstantiation: the doctrine that the entire substances of the bread and wine are changed in the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ.

Tribunal: a kind of court; the French revolutionary tribunals had power to sentence people to death.

Tribunes: Roman officials who had to be plebeians and were elected by the plebeian assembly to protect plebeians from the arbitrary power of the magistrates.


 * Troubadors:** a traditional medieval poet who wrote verse to music

Tsar: Title of the emperor of Russia. Also spelled Czar and Tzar. Believed to be a shortened form of Caesar (Roman emperor).

Tyrant: a ruler who rules badly and unfairly.