AP World History: Topic 1.5-1.6- Developments in Africa and Europe

Developments in Africa

Political Structures in Inland Africa

• Development of Sub-Saharan Africa was shaped by the migrations of Bantu-speaking people outwards from west-central Africa

• Most of the region had adopted agriculture

• Sub-Saharan Africa did not centralize power under one leader

• Communities formed kin-based networks- where families governed themselves

  • a male head of the network, a chief, mediated conflicts and dealt with neighboring groups

• Groups of villages became districts, and a group of chiefs decided among themselves how to solve the district’s problems

• As populations grew, kin-based networks became more difficult to govern

Hausu Kingdoms

• in what if now Nigeria

• People of the Hausa ethnic group formed seven states, the Hausa kingdoms

• The states were loosely connected through kinship ties, though they had no central authority

• People established prospering city-states, each with a specialty

• The region lacked access to the sea

• Benefited from the thriving trans-Saharan trade, a network of trading routes across the great desert

• because the states lacked a central authority, they were frequently subject to domination from outside

Political Structures of West and East Africa

• Western and Eastern sides of Africa benefited from increased trade

• The exchange in goods brought them wealth, political power, and cultural diversity

• The spread of Islam added to the religious diversity of the continent, where animism and Christianity were already practiced

Ghana

• reached its peak of influence from the 8th and the 11th centuries

• sold gold and ivory to Muslim traders in exchange for salt, copper, cloth, and tools

• the king ruled a centralized government aided by nobles and an army equipped with iron weapons

• wars with neighboring societies had permanently weakened the Ghanaian state by the 12th century

Mali

• Mali’s founding ruler, Sundiata, was a Muslim and used his connection with others of his faith to establish trade relationships with North African and Arab merchants

• cultivated a thriving gold trade

• Mali’s wealth grew tremendously

• Mansa Musa, made a pilgrimage to Mecca where his lavish displays of gold left a lasting impression

Zimbabwe

• the architecture demonstrated the growing wealth of one kingdom

• Construct their dwellings with stone (9th century)

• built its prosperity on a mixture of agriculture, grazing, trade, and above all, gold

• had rich gold fields, and taxes on the transport of gold made the kingdom wealthy

• traded with coastal city-states such as Mombasa, Kilwa, and Mogadishu

• was tied into the Indian Ocean trade, which connected East Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia

• traders blended Bantu and Arabic to develop a new language, Swahili

• the rise and decline was reflected in the defensive walls used to protect cities

• a massive wall of stone that surrounded the capital city was known as the Great Zimbabwe

• overgrazing so damaged the surrounding environment that residents of the bustling capital city abandoned it by the end of the 1400s

Ethiopia

• Christianity had spread from its origins

• the kingdom of Axum developed

• prospered by trading goods obtained from India, Arabia, the Roman Empire, and the interior of Africa

• the spread of Islam made the region more diverse religiously

• In the 12th century, a new Christian-led kingdom in Ethiopia emerged

• expressed their power through architecture

• made 11 churches out of entirely rock

• carved rock structures had been a feature of Ethiopian religious architecture

• Ethiopia was an island of Christianity on the continent of Africa

• Ethiopian Christianity developed independently

  • people combined their traditional faith traditions, such as ancestor veneration and beliefs in spirits, with Christianity to create a distinct form of faith

Social Structures of Sub-Saharan Africa

• strong central governments ruling over large territories were uncommon

• small communities were organized around several structures: kinship, age, and gender

• Age was a significant social marker

  • an 18-year-old could do more hard labor than a 60-year-old, but younger people often relied on the advice of their elders

• Gender had an influential role in social organization

  • Men dominated most activities that required a specialized skill

  • Women generally engaged in agriculture and food gathering, took the primary responsibilities for carrying out domestic chores and raising their family’s children

Slavery

• Prisoners of war, debtors, and criminals were often enslaved

• people could not own land privately but could own other people

• owning a large number of enslaved people increased one’s social status

• Indian Ocean Slave trade

• the enslaved East Africans, known in Arabic as zanji, provided valuable labor on sugar plantations in Mesopotamia

• Zanji Rebellion, 15,000 enslaved people successfully captured the city of Basra and held it for 10 years before being defeated

  • one of the most successful slave revolts in history

Cultural Life in Sub-Saharan Africa

• playing music, creating visual arts, and telling stories were important aspects of cultures

• provided enjoyment and mark rituals such as weddings and funerals

• song lyrics provided a means of communicating with the spirit world

• metalworkers created busts of past rulers so that ruling royalty could look to them for guidance

• the sophistication of these pieces of art would cause some Europeans to increase their respect for West African cultures

Griots and Griottes

• storytellers

• conduits of history for a community

• possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of family lineages and the lives and deeds of great leaders

• were also adept at music, singing their stories and accompanying themselves on instruments

• both venerated and feared as they hold both the power of language and of story

• preserved a people’s history and passed that history on from generation to generation

• when a griot died, it was as though a library had burned

• women served as griottes

• the griotte would counsel the bride to not talk back if her mother-in-law abused her or reassure the bride that if things got too bad, she could return home

• provided women with a sense of empowerment in a patriarchal society

Developments in Europe

• Throughout Europe, trade declined, intellectual life receded, and the united Roman state was replaced by smaller kingdoms that frequently fought one another for control of territory.

• between 1000 to 1450, learning and trade began to revive in Europe. This era is called the High Middle Ages.

Post-Classical Europe (Medieval Europe)

Byzantine Empire

• Emperor Justinian (527-565 CE)

• Constantinople- the capital of Eastern Rome

• Roman Influence

  • strong, centralized government

  • Roman law/court system

  • Taxation system

  • trade= $$$

  • roads

  • military

• Justinian Code

• Architecture

  • Hagia Sofia- mosque (when Ottoman took over)/ Cathedral (originally)

• Theocracy

  • caesaropapism- leader of church and empire

• Byzantine Influence- Constantinople

  • Central area of trade

  • linked western Europe, Russia, Central Asia, and the Islamic World

  • known for trading jewelry, gemstones, linen and wool, purple dyes

  • Had silk industry based on that of the Chinese and supplied to the Mediterranean

  • Transmitted Greek and Roman learning to the Islamic World and Latin West

  • Spread Greek Orthodox beliefs to Slavic-speaking peoples in the Balkans and Russia

    • St.Cyril and St. Methodius

    • Cyrillic alphabet= match Slavic language

Feudalism: Political and Social Systems

• Feudalism= political/social

  • limited social change in the hierarchy

  • Land ←——→ Service

• Manorialism= economic

• decentralized government

  • regional kingdoms

  • a lot like feudal Japan (shoguns) (king grows in power over time)

• Collapse of the Roman Empire= chaos and disunity after 476 C.E

  • Germanic tribes invade, settle, and create own kingdoms

• Commerce

  • politically fragmented, so harder to establish trade networks

  • But…..

    • trade guilds develop

    • markets grow and flourish

  • Merchant Guilds: associations of merchants in a town

  • Craftsman Guilds: associations of the crafts workers in a town

  • Local production and consumption

  • Rule by the lord of the land

  • MOSTLY AGRICULTURE

• characterized by a decentralized political organization based on a system of exchanges of land for loyalty known as feudalism.

• A monarch, granted tracts of land (fiefs) to lords, who became a king’s vassal (a person who owed service to another person of higher status, lords then provided lands to knights, knights became vassals of the lord, lords also provided land and protection to peasants, peasants were obligated to farm the lord’s land and provide the lord with crops and livestock, and to obey the lord’s orders

• Feudalism provided some security for peasants, equipment for warriors, and land to those who served a lord.

• wealth was measured in land rather than in cash.

• a code of chivalry an unwritten set of rules for conduct focusing on honor, courtesy, and bravery—as a way to resolve disputes.

• women were to be protected, the code put them on a pedestal while not investing them with any significant additional importance. In practice, women did not have many rights.

• Large fiefs or estates were also referred to as manors.

• manorial system provided economic self-sufficiency and defense.

• manor produced everything that people living on it required, limiting the need for trade or contact with outsiders.

• Manor grounds were small villages that often included a church, a blacksmith shop, a mill, and wine presses.

• peasants (serfs)- were tied to the land. This meant they could not travel without permission from their lords.

  • they paid tribute in the form of crops, labor, or, in rare cases, coins.

• Agriculture became more efficient near the end of the Middle Ages.

• A three-field system, in which crops were rotated through three fields, came into use.

  • One field was planted with wheat or rye, crops that provided food.

  • A second field was planted with legumes such as peas, lentils, or beans. These made the soil more fertile by adding nitrogen to it

  • A third field was allowed to remain fallow, or unused, each year.

• Technological developments included windmills and new types of plows.

  • These changes promoted population growth.

Political Trends in the Later Middle Ages

• monarchies grew more powerful

  • employing their own bureaucracy and a military

  • employees worked directly for the king or queen

France

• King Philip II was the first to develop a real bureaucracy

• Estates-General was a body to advise the king that included representatives from each of the three legal classes, or estates, in France: the clergy, nobility, and commoners.

  • they did not exact regular taxes from the upper two estates, the clergy and nobility.

  • had little power.

  • The clergy and nobility felt little responsibility to protect a government that they were not financing, a problem that only continued to increase in France up to the eve of the French Revolution of 1789.

Holy Roman Empire

• Otto’s successors survived the power struggle with the papacy over the lay investiture controversy of the 11th and 12th centuries

  • this dispute was over whether a secular (non-religious) leader, rather than the pope, could invest bishops with the symbols of office

• the Church achieved autonomy from secular authorities.

• remained vibrant until it was virtually destroyed during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). It lingered on but with little power

• came to a formal end when the French leader Napoleon invaded central Europe in 1806.

Norman England

• Normans were descendants of Vikings who settled in northwestern France

• A Norman king, William the Conqueror, successfully invaded England.

• presided over a tightly organized feudal system, using royal sheriffs as his administrative officials.

• The fusion of Normans and Anglo-Saxons created the modern English people.

• Magna Carta, which required the king to respect certain rights, such as the right to a jury trial before a noble could be sentenced to prison.

• the right to be consulted on the issue of scutage (a tax paid on a knight who wanted to pay money instead of providing military service).

• English Parliament

• These developments increased the rights of the English nobility, but not of the general population.

• the House of Lords represented the nobles and Church hierarchy, while the House of Commons was made up of elected representatives of wealthy townspeople.

• the power of these two legislative bodies in England became stronger than that of similar bodies on the European continent.

The Hundred Years’ War

• England and France fought a series of battles

• English archers armed with longbows (about six feet long) helped win several early victories

• by the end of the conflict, the English retained only the port of Calais in France.

• important results of the war were on how people saw themselves and how they fought.

  • serving under a monarch fostered a sense of unity among soldiers who often spoke distinct languages or dialects.

  • demonstrated the spreading use of gunpowder weapons.

Christian versus Muslim

• Reconquista (reconquer Spain)

• occurred over many centuries

• completed in 1492

Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages

• nI 1054, the Christian Church in Europe divided into two branches, a split called the Great Schism.

• Roman Catholic Church continued to dominate most of Europe

• The Orthodox Church was powerful farther east, from Greece to Russia.

• The Roman Catholic Church was the most powerful institution in Europe

  divided into hundreds of small political states.

• Most manors had a small church and a priest on the grounds. Christianity provided people with a shared identity even as vernacular languages emerged to replace Latin

Education and Art

• Education and Art The Church established the first universities in Europe.

• All artists worked for the Church. Most artworks focused on religious themes, which provided images to help illiterate serfs understand the Bible.

Church and State

• The Church held great power in the feudal system. If a lord displeased the Church, it could pressure the lord in various ways.

• the Roman Catholic Church had an extensive hierarchy of regional leaders.

• regional religious leaders, called bishops, owed allegiance to the pope, the supreme bishop in Rome. The bishops also selected and supervised local priests.

Monasticism

• Christian clergy remained part of the economies of Western Europe.

• monasteries had the same economic functions of agriculture and protection as other manors.

• Women were permitted to become nuns and exerted their influence in the monasteries of the Catholic Church.

Reform

• clergy also wielded considerable political influence, and some monasteries became quite wealthy.

• Wealth and political power led to corruption during the 13th and 14th centuries.

• Corruption drove reformer such as Martin Luther to take stands that would shatter the unity of the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century

Christian Crusades

• Crusades—a series of European military campaigns in the Middle East between 1095 and the 1200s.

• primogeniture, under which the eldest son in a family inherited the entire estate, left a generation of younger sons with little access to wealth and land.

• The landed nobles saw a military campaign as a way to divert the ambitions of these restless nobles as well as unemployed peasants, who often pillaged the lands of neighboring lords.

• merchants desired unfettered access to trade routes through the Middle East

• Politics shaped the conduct of the Crusades

• The Church also used its spiritual authority to recruit believers.

• granted relief from required acts of atonement and penance and even promised people they would reach heaven sooner if they joined a Crusade

• the Orthodox patriarch at Constantinople appealed to Pope Urban Il to help retake the Holy Land from Islamic control.

The First Crusade

• four major Crusades, only the first was a clear victory for Christendom

• The Crusades did promote cultural exchange between Europe and the Middle East.

• The Middle East had a higher standard of living, and European Crusaders increased the demand for Middle Eastern goods.

Fourth Crusade

• Venice had a contract to transport Crusaders to the Middle East, an area known as the Levant.

• the Venetians persuaded the Crusader debtors first to sack Zara, an Italian city, and then Constantinople, a major trade competitor of Venice.

• never made it to the Holy Land. Eventually, Islamic forces prevailed in the Levant

Economic and Social Change

• Local economic self-sufficiency in Europe gradually gave way to an interest in goods from other European areas and from far-flung ports.

• Marco Polo, an Italian native from Venice

  • Polo's captivating descriptions of the customs of the people he met intrigued Europeans.

  • Curiosity about Asia skyrocketed, stimulating interest in cartography, or mapmaking

Social Change

• Economic success started to rival religious vocation or military service in winning status.

• Middle Class- bourgeoisie, or burghers, ti included shopkeepers, merchants, craftspeople, and small landholders.

Urban Growth

• The change to the three-field system and other advances in agriculture led to population growth in the late Middle Ages.

• agricultural surplus encouraged the growth of towns and markets that could operate more frequently than just on holidays

• As the demand for more labor in the manors increased, the supply decreased.

• outbreak of bubonic plague known as the Black Death

  • The growing demand for labor and the deaths of so many people gave serfs more bargaining power with lords.

  • Famine in Europe

  • trade routes

Little Ice Age

• Lower temperatures reduced agricultural productivity, so people had less to trade and cities grew more slowly.

• led to an increase in disease and an increase in unemployment.

• created social unrest

• crime rate increased,

• Jews became victims of scapegoating

Jews

• With few other economic opportunities, many northern European Jews became moneylenders.

• resulting increase in the flow of money contributed to the economic growth of Europe.

• anti-Jewish sentiment, or antisemitism, was widespread among Christians

  • thought of Jews as outsiders and untrustworthy.

  • Jews were expelled from England in 1290, France in 1394, Spain in 1492, and Portugal in 1497, as well as from various independent kingdoms and cities in northern and central Europe.

  • Jews expelled from Western and Central Europe often moved to

    Eastern Europe.

• their numbers increased greatly because of the expulsions.

• served as a bridge between Christians and the Muslims whose goods they desired in trade.

Muslims

• Muslims faced discrimination in Europe

• The Muslim Ottoman Empire expanded its reach from Turkey into the Balkan countries of present-day Albania, Kosovo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina

  • these countries developed large Muslim populations

• Jews and Muslims helped shape society

• Contacts with traders in Muslim caliphates opened up a world of trade and a world of ideas for Europeans who had long been self-sufficient and isolated under feudalism.

Gender Roles

• A wave of patriarchal thinking and writing accompanied the movement from an agricultural society to a more urban one.

• fewer women than men received an education, although women often managed manor accounts

• became artisans and members of guilds— associations of craftspeople and merchants although not all had property rights

• Women in Islamic societies tended to enjoy higher levels of equality, particularly ni parts of Africa and Southeast Asia.

Renaissance

• expansion of trade, the growth of an agricultural surplus, and the rise of a middle class able to patronize artists sparked great creativity in Europe.

• a period characterized by a revival of interest in classical Greek and Roman literature, art, culture, and civic virtue.

• Johannes Gutenberg's movable-type printing press initiated a revolution in print technology.

  • allowed manuscripts to be mass-produced at relatively affordable costs

  • fostered a growth in literacy and the rapid spread of ideas.

• humanism, the focus on individuals rather than God.

  • Humanists sought education and reform.

  • began to write secular literature

• the increased use of the vernacular language, propelled the rise of powerful monarchies, the centralization of governments, and the birth of nationalism.

Southern Renaissance

• In regions of Italy and Spain, church patronage supported the Renaissance.

• fearlessness in criticizing corrupt religious officials and his willingness to use Italian vernacular instead of Latin reflected his independence from the Roman Catholic Church.

• Wealthy families used their money to support painters, sculptors, and architects.

Northern Renaissance

• While many Renaissance artists emphasized piety in their work, others emphasized human concerns

• Geoffrey Chaucer, writing in The Canterbury Tales in the late 1300s, portrayed a microcosm of middle-class occupations in England, including several Church positions.

  • His satirical writings portrayed monks who loved hunting and overly sentimental nuns.

The Origins of Russia

• extensive trade in furs, fish, and grain connected people from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean to Central Asia.

• adopted Orthodox Christianity, it maintained closer cultural relationships with Byzantium than with Roman Catholic Europe.

• Mongols overtook this region, so it developed even more separately from the rest of Europe

• The Mongols required local nobles to collect taxes for them.

  • As these nobles grew wealthy ni their role, they began to resist Mongol rule.

• under the leadership of a Moscow-based ruler known as Ivan the Great, the region became independent of the Mongols.