Sea routes benefited from troubles along land routes. In South China, the Yuan dynasty continued the Song policy of encouraging maritime commerce, and sea routes continued to boom. If we believe his account, Marco Polo traveled to the Mongol court by the northern land route, but returned across the Indian Ocean (actually to bring a new wife from Khubilai Khan to the Ilkhan ruler in Tabriz, whose favorite wife had died); Ibn Battuta traveled by ship in both directions. Building on earlier advances in navigation and maritime technology made by Arabs, Indians, and Malays, the Chinese introduced the magnetic compass, watertight bulkheads for shipping, and giant ships with many mainmasts that carried several hundred tons of cargo.
The Yuan dynasty collapsed in 1368 and was replaced by the native Ming dynasty; the new government refused to negotiate with the Mongols who controlled the central Asian trade routes, and initially paid even more attention to maritime commerce. Between 1405 and 1433, the third Ming emperor sent seven huge naval expeditions into the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf led by Admiral Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch from southwestern China. Designed to convince potential vassal states of Chinese power, these expeditions called at all major ports and reached the Philippines, the east coast of Africa, and the Red Sea. They were abruptly stopped in a dramatic reversal of government policy, however. The ships were scrapped, log books destroyed, shipyards closed, and Chinese merchants ordered to come home. Historians speculate about the reasons for this sudden halt and turn inward: the voyages may have seemed too costly, as they cost more than the value of the goods brought back; an anti-commercial Confucianist scholar-official faction may have gained the upper hand at court; border wars with the Mongols and with Vietnam, floods, peasant uprisings, and piracy along the coast may have sucked up all government resources. Whatever the reasons, trade in the Indian Ocean did not decline, as Indian, Arab, Malay, Persian, Turkish, and even a few Italian merchants quickly filled any vacuum left by the Chinese.
The Eurasian trading network was by far the largest and the best documented in this era, but it was not the only one. In West Africa, gold began coming across the Sahara by camel in the fifth century, traded for textiles, warhorses, cowrie shells to serve as currency, slaves, and salt. By the fourteenth century, West Africa was producing and exporting more gold than anywhere else in the world, providing metal for court luxuries and monetary uses in both Europe and the Muslim world. In the western hemisphere, regional networks also carried gold and copper, along with other luxury goods, such as obsidian for blades, cacao, jade, and turquoise. One even carried scarlet macaws, whose feathers were prized for the hats and cloaks of warriors and for religious rituals, from Mesoamerica to the North American Southwest, where they were then bred locally.
A middle millennium
The thousand years from 500 to 1500 is often defined by what came before or what came after, so termed “postclassical,” “premodern” or at best “middle.” Because the idea that this millennium was a distinct middle age was invented in Europe, it is sometimes rejected as Eurocentric, but for many of the large political divisions of the eastern hemisphere, including the Byzantine Empire, China, and the empires of Central Asian steppe nomads as well as western Europe, this thousand years amounts to a meaningful period. And for the people of the western hemisphere, although 500 may not have marked many new departures, 1500 was perhaps the sharpest dividing line since their ancestors had first migrated from Asia. In both hemispheres, similar processes occurred, as trade networks, agriculture, and cities expanded, and interactions among cultures and religions intensified.
In the eastern hemisphere, Islam began and grew, stretching at the end of the Middle Millennium from the Songhay Empire in West Africa to the sultanates of Brunei and Sulu in island Southeast Asia. Sacred texts, spiritual practices, and legal principles bound the Dar-al-Islam together, but the incorporation of existing cultural forms and social structures led to great diversity and often bitter hostilities between varieties of Islam, interwoven with political conflicts between rival Muslim states as well as with their non-Muslim neighbors. Christianity grew as well, as monks and missionaries built churches and gained converts from Iceland to Beijing, as did Buddhism, carried by monks and merchants to form a polycentric world in which ideas, texts, and practices flowed in all directions. Both Buddhism and Christianity were reshaped by the expansion of Islam, and Buddhism also by a resurgence of Hindu traditions in its Indian homeland.
Whether rulers were Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, or something else, royal courts in the Middle Millennium were centers of family and factional intrigue, cultural production, and conspicuous consumption, where rituals, ceremonies, and protocol reminded everyone of their place in the cosmic and social order, and codes of behavior set ideals for elite men and women. Courtly splendor was created by local artisans and by merchants who imported prestige goods from far away, and paid for by the increasingly systematic collection of taxes and rents on villagers, and in some cases by a flow of war booty. Rulers were one force behind the expansion and intensification of agriculture that marked this era, though people also decided on their own to migrate, sometimes sailing across vast distances of open ocean, or sometimes simply walking a short distance, and carving new fields out of forests or marshes. Others moved to cities, which pulled in people from the countryside with the promise of economic opportunity and social mobility, a promise on which they sometimes actually delivered.
Both courts and cities offered imported luxuries to those who could afford them. In the Afroeurasian trading network, the scarlet macaw feathers so valued in the Americas were unknown, but other red and purple prestige items were especially prized, including coral beads, blood-red rubies, lacquerware dishes, and cloth dyed Tyrean purple with the secretions of the murex sea snail or vermilion red with the powdered mineral cinnabar. Just such luxury goods—combined with travelers’ tales of foreign lands, marriage to the daughter of a Portuguese sea captain, experience in ports, and a sense of personal destiny—would inspire one Genoese merchant and mapmaker not to head east to make his fortune like most of his fellow Italians, but west, first to Lisbon, then to the Atlantic island of Madeira, and then to the Spanish court. In 1492, several weeks after Spanish armies had conquered the last remaining Muslim state in Spain and the Spanish monarchs had banished all practicing Jews from their realms, he received royal support to head further westward. He took with him a printed version of Marco Polo's Travels along with other books, religious objects, red cloth, and other goods, and an Arabic-speaking Jewish convert to Christianity as an interpreter, figuring that someone at the Chinese court certainly spoke Arabic or Hebrew. The network of interaction that resulted from his voyages would be far larger than even Rashid al-Din could have imagined, and his voyages brought the Middle Millennium to an end.
Further reading
The works of Rashid al-Din, Murasaki Shikibu, Marco Polo, and Ibn Battuta are all available in English translation: Rashid al-Din, Rashiduddin Fazlullah's Jami‘u't-tawarikh: Compendium of Chronicles. A History of the Mongols, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, trans. Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976); Marco Polo, The Travels, trans. Ronald Latham (London: Penguin, 1958); The Travels of Ibn Battuta, ed. Tim Macintosh-Smith (London: Macmillan, 2003). For recent works about the two travelers, see Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century, rev. edn. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Hans Ulrich Vogel, Marco Polo Was in China: New Evidence from Currencies, Salts and Revenues (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
Regional studies with a social and cultural focus include: K.N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Victor Lieberman, Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c. 1830 (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Catherine B. Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India before Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006); Charles Holcombe, The Genesis of East Asia, 221 BC–AD 907 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001); S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); John Haldon, ed., A Social History of Byzantium (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Steven A. Epstein, An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Michael E. Smith and Frances F. Berdan, eds., The Postclassic Mesoamerican World (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003). On gender, see: Gavin R.G. Hambly, ed., Women in the Medieval Islamic World (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998); Rosemary A. Joyce, Gender and Power in Prehistoric Mesoamerica (Austin: University of Texas, 2001); Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush and Joan R. Piggott, eds., Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Leslie Brubaker and Julia M.H. Smith, eds., Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
The expansion of Islam has been examined in: Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jonathan P. Berkey, The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); David Robinson, Muslim Societies in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On the Mamluks, see Thomas Philipp and Ulrich Harmann, eds., The Mamluks in Egyptian Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Studies of courts and courtly culture include: Jeroen Frans Jozef Duindam, Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires: A Global Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Hugh Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs: When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World (Cambridge, MA: DaCapo, 2005); Joachim Bumke, Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in the High Middle Ages (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2000); Daud Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Mikael S. Adolphson, The Gates of Power: Monks, Courtiers, and Warriors in Premodern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000); Mikael Adolphson, Stacie Matsumoto, and Edward Kamens, Heian Japan: Centers and Peripheries (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007); Anne Walthall, ed., Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Dorothy Ko, Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) is the most insightful analysis of this complex issue.
On the expansion of agriculture and the changes this brought with it, see Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Dieter Kuhn, The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011); George R. Milner, The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of Eastern North America (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005); Patrick Vinton Kirch, A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief: The Island Civilization of Ancient Hawai‘i (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). On whether villagers exploited or sustained their environments, see Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Chose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005) and Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee, eds., Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) examines groups that resisted the expansion of agriculture and the state.
On the Mongols, see Thomas T. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410 (London: Routledge, 2005); George Lane, Daily Life in the Mongol Empire (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006). The study of the male descendants of Chingghis Khan is Tatiana Zerjal et al., “The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols,” American Journal of Human Genetics 72 (2003): 717–21.
Several recent works have examined the interplay between myth and reality in cities of this era: Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Jonathan Harris, Constantinople: Capital of Byzantium (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009); José Luis de Rojas, Tenochtitlán: Capital of the Aztec Empire (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012). Chiara Frugoni, A Day in a Medieval City, trans. William McCuaig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) presents a fascinating ramble through Italian cities in this era, with wonderful illustrations.
Richard Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization, 2nd edn. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) provides a concise introduction to the transmission and intertwining of many different religions. On Buddhism, see Ronald M. Davidson, Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600–1400 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003); Jason Neelis, Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks: Mobility and Exchange within and beyond the Northwestern Borderlands of South Asia (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011). On Christianity, see James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Michael Angold, Eastern Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Thomas F.X. Noble and Julia M.H. Smith, Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600–c. 1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Broad analyses of trade networks include Richard L. Smith, Premodern Trade in World History (London: Routledge, 2008); Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Kenneth G. Hirth and Joanne Pillsbury, eds., Merchants, Markets, and Exchange in the Pre-Columbian World (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2013); Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 3rd edn. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2013). More specific studies of cultural exchange and trade include: Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Pamela O. Long, Technology and Society in the Medieval Centuries: Byzantium, Islam, and the West, 500–1300 (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 2003); Ralph Austen, Trans-Saharan Africa in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Essays on many of the topics in this chapter may be found in Benjamin Z. Kedar and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, eds., Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conflict, 500 CE–1500 CE, Volume 5 of the Cambridge World History. Richard Smith introduced the phrase “Middle Millennium” in an essay on trade and commerce in this volume.
4
A new world of connections, 1500 CE–1800 CE
In 1503, the Florentine trader and explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512) wrote to his former employers, the Medici banking family, detailing in vivid language the mapping expedition sponsored by the Portuguese in which he had been involved over the previous several years. This voyage sailed along the coast of a large land mass across the Atlantic Ocean from Portugal, which Vespucci in the opening paragraph of the letter called a “new world, because none of these countries were known to our ancestors” and extolled as “a continent full of animals and more populous than our Europe, or Asia, or Africa, and even more temperate and pleasant than any other region known to us.” This letter and a subsequent even longer one were published many ti
mes in different European languages over the next several years. Among those who read them was the German map-maker Martin Waldseemüller (1470?–1522?), who in 1507 printed a globe and a giant wall map of the world in which the land mass Vespucci had helped map was not connected to any other. Waldseemüller gave the southern part of this landmass a name: America, taken from the Latin form of Vespucci's first name. He justified this with the comment, “I see no reason why, and by what right, this land of America should not be named after that wise and ingenious man who discovered it, Amerigo, since both Europe and Asia had been allotted the names of women.” (Europa and her mother Asia were Greek demi-goddesses.) By just a few years later, map-makers—including Waldseemüller—and others knew this was wrong, and that Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) had reached the continent before Vespucci; they wanted to omit “America” from future maps, but the name had already stuck. The Flemish cartographer, mathematician, and instrument maker Gerardus Mercator (1512–94), who invented the projection most commonly used to show the globe on a flat surface, used the word America on his world map of 1538, and later the designations “North” and “South” were added.
To the people who already lived there, of course, Vespucci's designation of what he had mapped as a “New World” was no more accurate than Waldseemüller's claim that Vespucci was the first European to see it. The idea that any European “discovered” islands and continents that were already full of people is also now seen as silly, and many historians avoid using either “discovery” or “New World.” Biologists, epidemiologists, agronomists, and environmental scientists do use “New World” and its counterpart “Old World,” however, as spatial terms to designate parts of the globe that had been cut off from each other for tens of thousands of years, so that their biospheres evolved independently. By crossing the Atlantic and then the Pacific, European ships linked the two worlds, which allowed the transfer of plants, animals, germs, and people in new directions over vast distances, with consequences that were both disastrous and beneficial. In 1972 the environmental historian Alfred Crosby termed this process the “Columbian Exchange,” and noted it began with Columbus’ very first voyage. Columbus took ordinary and luxury goods with him, along with men and boys, a group of whom he left in the Caribbean. (They all apparently died, though there are legends that some did not.) He brought back what seemed most exotic: parrots, feathers, cotton cloth, tobacco, rubber, perhaps the pineapple, and several Taino boys captured on the islands. European mariners and adventurers may not have discovered a new world, but they created one.
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