Chapter 2

Varieties of Civilizations: Eurasia and the Americas (1200-1450)

China Before the Mongol Takeover

• In 1200 the Song Dynasty ruled large parts of ancient China

• Successive dynasties drew on older cultural and political traditions

• The Song Dynasty was a “golden age” of arts and literature—they put importance into becoming proficient in poetry, landscape painting, and ceramics

• The Song dynasty built on a bureaucratic state structure with six major ministries that were overseen by the Censorate—an agency that supervised the government, checking on the disposition and competence of public officials

• The first examination system was established and revived by the Han dynasty; it was evolved to become more intricate and was supported by printed books for the first time in history

• Schools and colleges were trained to take their difficult exams

• Village communities or a local landowner sometimes sponsored the education of a young man from a commoner background in hopes that it will allow him to enter officialdom 

  • The examination system provided social mobility

  • Though there was social mobility, a good percentage of official positions went to the sons of the privileged, even if they passed the exams

  • Those who passed lower exams could only combine landowning success

• China’s economic revolution had numerous achievements in agricultural production 

• Industrial growth was fueled almost entirely by coal, which provides energy for heating homes and cooking, but encouraging air pollution 

• There were inventions in printing (woodlock and moveable type), leading to the world’s first printed books

• Chinese navigational and shipbuilding technologies led the world and the invention of gunpowder created within a few centuries a revolution in military affairs that had global dimensions 

• Chinese innovations were produced for the market, rather than for local consumption

• An immense network of waterways called the Grand Canal was developed, linking the Yellow River in the north to the Yangtze River in the south

  • These waterways facilitated the movement of goods, allowing peasants to grow specialized crops for sale while taxes paid in cash 

• For elite men, masculinity came to be defined less in terms of horseback riding, athleticism, and warrior values and more in terms of the refined pursuits of calligraphy, scholarship, painting, and poetry

• Feminine qualities included waving textiles (silk), 

  • Food binding was associated with feminine beauty to demonstrate the delicacy and frailty in a woman meant to keep her restricted in terms of the Confucian tradition

  • Soon, women were able to control and own their own property inherited from their families and to conduct their own dowries

• Lower ranking officials strongly encouraged the education of women so that they can effectively raise their sons and increase the family’s fortune

Interacting with China: Korea, Vietnam, and Japan

• Korea maintained its political independence while being in a tributary relationship with China

• Korean missions present tribute, or products of value, and perform rituals of submission to China in order to acknowledge their position

  • In return, Chinese emperors gave their Korean visitors gifts to be brought to Korea, reaffirmed peaceful relations, nd allowed both official and personal trade to take place between the two states

• The Chinese strongly disapproved of free choice marriages in Korea and the practice of women singing and dancing together late at night

• Korean customs include:

  • Women giving birth and raising her children in her parents’ home

  • Funeral rites—where a husband was buried in the sacred split of his wife’s family

  • The remarriage of widowed or divorced women

  • Female inheritance of property

• Chinese cultural influence (except for Buddhism) had little impact beyond Korea’s serf-peasants

• Korea developed their own distinct way of writing in the Korean language called Hangul, which became their phonetic alphabet popular among private correspondence, popular fiction, and women

• Vietnam borrowed heavily from China as the adopted Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, administrative techniques, the examination system, and artistic and literary styes

• Vietnamese rulers carefully maintained Vietnam’s tributary role

• The Vietnamese elite class viewed their own country less as a separate nation than as a southern extension of universal civilization

• Some unique aspects of vietnamese culture included their distinctive language, cockfighting tradition, and the habit of chewing betel uts

• Northern officials tried to impose more orthodox Confucian gender practices in place of local customs that allowed women to choose their own husbands and married men to live in the households of their wives

• The Vietnamese made a variation of Chinese writing dubbed chu nom, or southern script, providing the foundation for their own independent national literature and the writing of most educated women

• The Japanese islands were physically separated from China and were never successfully invaded by that mainland neighbor

  • As a result, Japan borrowed from Chinese civilization rather than occurring under conditions of direct military threat or outright occupation 

• Many schools were formed that had roots tying to Buddhism, being the first among the educated and literate classes and later more broadly in Japanese society

• Buddhism affected Japanese art, architecture, educatio, medicine, views of the afterlife, and attitudes toward suffering and the impermanence of life

• The Chinese writing system, historical writing, calligraphy, and poetry were popular among the elite class

• The Japanese never succeeded in creating an effective centralized and bureaucratic state to match China’s

• Although the court and the emperor retained and important ceremonial and cultural role, their real political authority over the country gradually diminished in favor of competing aristocratic families, both at court and in the provinces

• Local communities made their own military forces—the samurai—becoming the warrior class of the Japanese society

  • The samurai had bushido (way of the warrior), which was a set of warrior values enhancing the importance of bravery, loyalty, endurance, honor, great skill in martial arts, and a preference for death over surrendering in battle

• Kami were sacred spirits meant to embody human ancestors and many natural phenomena

  • This was later referred to as Shinto, giving legitimacy to the imperial family based on the claims of descent from the sun goddess which fortunately conflicted little with Buddhism

• Court aristocrats and their ladies lived in splendor, composed poems, arranged flowers, and conducted their own love affairs

• The Tale of Genji was a Japanese novel written by the woman author Murasaki Shikibu that paints an intimate picture of the intrigues and romances of court life

• Japanese women did not practice the oppressive factors of Confucianism such as the prohibition to remarry for widows and the seclusion within one’s home

• Japanese women were still able to inherit property from their families where their husbands would live with his wife’s family 

The Worlds of Islam: Fragmented and Expanding

• A second major expansion by conquest occurred into India, Anatolia, and a little later the Balkans, this time spearheaded by Turkic-speaking groups who had recently converted to the Muslim faith

• The Arab Empire was politically fragmented, but Islamic culture and religion remained vibrant in the Middle East, while cultural encounters with established Hindu and Christian civilizations occurred on the frontiers of this Islamic heartland in India and Spain

Islamic Hartland

• The Abbasid caliphate was an Arab dynasty that had ruled the Islamic world, who built a capital in Baghdad where the dynasty presided over a flourishing and prosperous Islamic civilization

• Many local governors and military commanders asserted the autonomy of their religions while still giving formal allegiance to the caliph in Baghdad where the dynasty presided over a flourishing and prosperous Islamic civilization

• The Abbasid dynasty’s political grip on the Arab Empire was weak as numerous local governors and military commanders asserted the autonomy of their regions while simultaneously giving allegiance to the caliph in Baghdad 

Cultural Encounters in India and Spain

• Turkic-speaking warrior groups were also spreading the Muslim faith through conquest into India; this influenced the encounter with ancient Hindu civilization

• Conquests with Hindu civilization paved the way for a lot of early Islamic regimes that governed much of India into the nineteenth century

• The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, Turkic rule became more systematic as Muslim communities came to light in northern India

• The egalitarian aspects of Islam attracted some disillusioned Buddhists, low-caste Hindus, and the untouchables, or people considered to be even below the lowest caste

• People could find conversion as a advantage because they would be avoiding the tax imposed on non-Muslims

• Holy Muslim men known as Sufis were particularly important in facilitating conversion

• Muslims usually lived quite separately, remaining a distinctive minority within an ancient Indian civilization

• Many Hindus willingly served in the political and military structures of a Muslim-ruled India

• The Vijayanagar empire controlled nearly all of southern India and was a site of sustained and peaceful Hindu-Muslim encounters

• Al-andalus, or Spain, were where Muslims, Christians, and Jews mixed more freely than in India

• Muslim Spain was the most prosperous area in Europe at this time as its agricultural economy was the most successful franchise; its capital Cordoba was one of the largest and most beautiful cities in the world where Muslims, Christians, and Jews all mingled to contribute to a culture where astronomy, medicine, the arts, architecture, and literature flourished

• Christians soon learned Arabic, veiled their women, stopped eating pork, appreciated Arabic music and poetry, and sometimes married Muslims

• Assimilated or Arabized Chirstians remained religious infidels and second-class citizens in the eyes of their Muslim counterparts

• The Cordoba-based regime broke into rival states; warfare with the remaining Christian kingdoms in northern Spain

• Under the rule of al-Mansur, and official policy of tolerance turned to one of overt persecution against Christians

• Devout Muslims now avoided contact with Christians; Christian homes had to be built lower than those of Muslims and priests were forbidden to carry a cross or a Bible 

• Arabized Christians were permitted to live only in particular places

• Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of a unified Spain, took Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula 

• The Spanish monarchy issued a series of edicts outlawing Islam in its various territories, forcing Muslims to choose between conversion or exile

• Many Muslims were thus required to emigrate, often to North Africa or the Ottoman Empire

• Jews were expelled from Spain 

• The translation of Arab texts into Latin continued under Christian rule, while Christian churches and palaces were constructed on the sites of older mosques and incorporated Islamic artistic and architectural features

The Worlds of Christendom

• The Byzantine Empire, or Byzantium, declined yet still had its religious, political and cultural traditions inhabited drastically by the Rus, an emerging civilization in Eastern Europe

• Their region was emerging as an especially dynamic, expansive, and innovative civilization, combining elements of its Greco-Roman-Christian past with the culture of Germanic and Celtic peoples to produce a distinctive hybrid or blended civilization

The Eastern Orthodox World: A Declining Byzantium and an Emerging Rus

• Byzantium consciously aimed to preserve the legacy of classical Greco-Roman civilization; its capital, Constantinople, was regarded as a “New Rome,” and its inhabitants referred to themselves as “Romans”

• The Byzantine Empire controlled Greece, much of the Balkans, and Anatolia

• From their territorial base, the empire’s naval and merchant vessels were active in both the Mediterranean and Black seas

• Political authority remained tightly centralized in Constantinople, where the emperor claimed to govern all creation as God’s wordly representative, calling himself the “sole ruler of the world”

• The Eastern Orthodox Church became known as caesaropapism

• The emperor appoints the patriarch of the Orthodox Church and sometimes makes decisions about the doctrine, called church councils into session, and generally treated the church as a government department

• Eastern Orthodox Christianity provided a cultural identity for the empire’s subjects as they identified themselves as orthodox, or “right-thinking” Christians

• The Crusades, initiated in 1095 by the Catholic Pope against Islamic forces, further strained relations, particularly during the Fourth Crusade

• Western seized Constantinople and ruled Byzantium for the next half century

• Kievan Rus were led by princes but was a society of slaves and freemen, privileged people and commoners, dominant men, and subordinate women

• The increasing interaction of Rus with the wider world led Prince Vladimir of Kiev to align with the Eastern Orthodox faith of the Byzantine Empire

• The prince was searching for a religion that would unify the diverse peoples of his region while linking Rus into wider networks of communication and exchange

• Rus borrowed extensively from Byzantine architectural styles, the Cyrillic alphabet based on its Greek counterpart, the extensive use of religious images known as icons, a monastic tradition stressing prayer and service, and political ideals of imperial control of the church

• Byzantium disappeared and the empire entered a period of gradual decline

A Fragmented Political Landscape in Western Europe

• The Church replaced some of the political, administrative, educational, and welfare functions of the now vanished Roman Empire 

• Western Christendom was at a distance from the growing routes of world trade—by sea in the Indian Ocean and by land across the Silk Roads to China and the Sand Roads to West Africa

• Western Europe’s geography made political unity difficult, of population centers were divided by mountain ranges and dense forests as well as by five major peninsulas and two large islands

• New european civilization never achieved political unity and was a highly fragmented and decentralized society, known as feudalism, was founded

• In thousands of independent, self-sufficient, and largely isolated landed estates or manors, power—political economic, and social—was exercised by warrior elite of landowning lords, in a system known as manorialism

• Lesser lords and knights swore allegiance to greater lords or kings, becoming their vassals; monasteries also often became lords of manors, typically through donations

• Serfdom was were serfs were not the personal property of their masters but they could not be arbitrarily thrown off their land, and were allowed to live in families

• Royal courts and fledging bureaucracies were established, and groups of professional administrators appeared

• Frequent wars and constant death was the result of Europe’s political system 

  • These same wars enhanced the roles and status of military men 

• Europeans were the first to use gunpowder in cannons

• Advances in shipbuilding and navigational techniques provided the foundation for European mastery of the seas

  • There was also the magnetic compass and sternpost rudder from China and adaptations of the Mediterranean or Arab lateen sail, which enabled vessels to sail against the wind

• The Roman Catholic Church was the only organization in Western Europe with influence that extended throughout the entire region

• Its hierarchical organization of popes, bishops, priests, and monasteries meant that the church had a representative in nearly every community in Europe, and Latin provided a shared language among churchmen

• The church had grown wealthy as they posses a lot of land and the proceeds gave great power and influence

  • Funded its many religious, charitable, and educational initiatives 

• The wealth funded lavish lifestyles and political aspirations of many leading churchmen, causing reformers to accuse it of forgetting its spiritual mission

• Church authorities, rulers, and nobles competed against each other since there were rivals trying to get power even though they reinforced each other

  • Rulers provided protection for the papacy and strong encouragement for the faith 

  • In return the church offered religious legitimacy for the powerful and the prosperous

• The inability of kings, warrior aristocrats, or church leaders to prevail over the others provided room for urban-based merchants in Europe to achieve an unusual independence from political authority

• Many cities won the right to make and enforce their own laws and appoint their own officials

• The relative weakness of Europe’s rulers allowed urban merchants more leeway to open the way to a more thorough development of capitalism in later centuries

An Evolving European Society and Economy

• The High Middle Ages paved the way economic and social change 

• Great Lords, bishops, and religious orders organized new villages on what had recently been forest, marshes, or wasteland

• Warmer weather during the summer months allowed farmers and pastoralists to herd their flocks into previously wild highland regions

• As expansion brought new opportunities for settlement, many peasants were able to break free from serfdom 

• The loss of life caused by the Black Death (the plague) led to labor shortages across much of Europe, allowing those who survived to demand higher wages and better working conditions

• Europeans developed a heavy wheeled plow that could handle the dense soils of Northern Europe

  • They also began to rely increasingly on horses rather than oxen to pull the plow and to use iron horseshoes and a more efficient collar

• Europeans developed a new three-field system of crop rotation, which allowed considerably more land more land to be plowed at any one time 

• Deforestation, field tilling, overfishing, human waste, and the proliferation of new water mills and their associated ponds all contributed to the degradation of freshwater ecosystems

• Constantinople housed towns that gave rise to new groups of people such as merchants, bankers, artisans, and university trained professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and scholars

• Women were active in weaving, brewing, milling grain, midwifery, small-scale retailing, laundering, spinning, and prostitution

• By the 15th century artisan opportunities were declining for European women from aristocratic families were attracted to secluded monastic life of poverty, chastity, and obedience within a convent, in part of for the relative freedom from male control

Western Europe Outward Bound

• Settlers cleared new land for merchants travelers, diplomats, and missionaries brought European society into more intensive contract with more distant peoples and with Eurasian commercial networks

• In European thought and practice, the Crusades were considered wars undertaken at God's command and authorized by the pope as Christ’s representative on Earth

• Crusaders were required to swear a bow and in return received an indulgence which removed the penalties for any confessed sins, and were also granted immortality from lawsuits and a moratorium on the repayment of debts

• The Crusades aimed at reclaiming Jerusalem and other holy sites associated with the life of Jesus from Islamic control and restoring them to Christendom

• Guided by an array of kings, popes, bishops, monks, lords, nobles, and merchants, the Crusades showcased Europe’s increasing capacity for organization, finance, transportation, and recruitment. This achievement was all the more impressive given the lack of centralized direction

• Christians who waged war for centuries to reclaim the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim hands were declared “crusaders” 

• The Crusades had little lasting impact, either political or religiously, in the Middle East

• European power was not sufficiently strong or long-lasting to induce much conversion, and the small European footholds there had come under Muslim control

• In Europe, however, crusading in general and interaction with the Islamic world in particular had very significant long-term consequences

• The rift between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism deepened further, becoming a fundamental divide in Christianity that persists to this day 

• Many Europeans came into personal contact with the Islamic world, from which they picked up a taste for the many luxury goods available there, stimulating a demand for Asian goods

  • They learned techniques for producing sugar large plantations using slave labor, a process that had incalculable consequences in later centuries as Europeans transferred the plantation system to the Americas

Reason and the Renaissance in the West

• An outgrowth of earlier cathedral schools, universities enabled scholars to pursue their studies with a degree of autonomy from religious or political authorities, although this autonomy was never absolute and was frequently contested

• This small group of literate churchmen emphasized the ability of human reason to penetrate divine mysteries and to grasp the operation of the natural order

• European intellectuals also applied their newly discovered confidence in human reason to law, medicine, and the world of nature, exploring optics, magnetism, astronomy, and alchemy

• The scientific study of nature, known as “natural philosophy,” began to separate itself from theology

• Stimulated European scholars to seek out original texts, particularly those of Aristotle

• Aristotle’s writings became the basis for university education and largely dominated the thought of Western Europe in the five foundations of the later Scientific Revolution and the secularization 

• The European Renaissance educated citizens of these cities sought inspiration in the art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome

• The elite patronized great Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, whose paintings and sculptures were far more naturalistic, particularly in portraying the human body

• Renaissance culture culture reflected the urban bustle and commercial preoccupations of Italian cities

Civilizations of the Americas 

• Mesoamerica and the Andes had little if any direct contact with each other

• They shared a rugged mountainous terrain with wan enormous range of microclimates as well as great ecological and biological diversity 

The Emergence of the Aztecs in Mesoamerica 

• Mesoamerica was also a distinct region, bound together by a common culture

• Its many peoples shared an intensive agricultural technology devoted to raising maize, beans, chili peppers, and squash and based their economies on market exchange

• They practices religions featuring a similar pantheon of male and female deities, understood time as a cosmic cycle of creation and destruction, practiced human sacrifice, and constructed monumental ceremonial centers

• Civilization started with the Olmec, then the Maya, the the Inca

• Builders and artisans created substantial urban centers dominated by temples, pyramids, palaces, and public plazas, murals, and stone carvings 

• They invented a writing system that used pictographs and phonetic or syllabic elements 

• They made a mathematical system where the introduced the new idea of there being a number zero

• The Aztec Empire was the last and largest of the Mesoamerican states to emerge before the Spanish conquered the region in the early sixteenth century

• The Mexica developed their military capacity, served as mercenaries for more powerful people, negotiated elite marriage alliances with those people, and built up their own capital of city of Tenochtitlan

• A Triple Alliance formed with the Mexica and two neighboring city-states embarked on a program of military conquest that unified a substantial portion of Mesoamerica under a single political framework

• There were dikes, causeways, and bridges

• Slaves were important to Aztec society because they were usually destined for sacrificed in bloody rituals in their religious practices

• Aztecs patron sun deity was Huizilophoctli 

The Emergence of the Incas in the Andes 

• Andean societies tried obtaining resources of numerous environments through colonization, conquest, or trade—seafood from coastal regions, maize and cotton from lower-altitude valleys; potatoes and quinoa

• The Inca Empire was created by military conquest ruled by an emperor 

• The state presumably owned all land and resources

  • However, there were practice lands known as “lands of the sun”

• Births, deaths, marriages, and other population data were recorded on quipus, or knotted cords that served as an accounting device 

• Leaders of conquered peoples were forced to learn Quechua

  • Their sons were placed in Cuzco to learn Inca culture and language

• They practiced a labor service required by every household called mita

• Individuals manufactured textiles, metal goods, ceramics, and stonework

• Specialists known as the “chosen women” were removed from their homes as young girls and trained in Inca ideology to produce corn beer and cloth at state centers