A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  In Japan, especially during the Heian period (794–1184), aristocrats in the capital city at Kyoto learned Chinese literature and philosophy, wrote poetry, and surrounded themselves with beautiful paintings and objects. They developed an aesthetic ideal called miyabi, which emphasized elegance, restraint, sophistication, sensitivity to beauty, and an awareness of the transience of things, and rejected anything uncouth, rough, or rural. This ideal was expressed most fully in the long, complex, and influential novel The Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century by a lady-in-waiting to the empress at the imperial court whose father had been an ambitious government official. Her real name is unknown, as women in Heian Japan were generally simply referred to by their fathers’ or brothers’ titles, but she is usually called Murasaki (the name of one of the main female characters in Genji) Shikibu (a title once held by her father). The book tells the story of “the shining Genji,” the handsome fictional son of the emperor and his favorite concubine in the not-too-distant past, who writes and recites wistful and sensitive poetry, paints, attends elegant ceremonies in even more elegant dress, moves from one romantic affair to another, and talks about all this at great length with his fellow courtiers and court ladies. The Tale of Genji was written for just that courtly audience, and because of this was written in kana, a syllabic phonetic script devised in the Heian period that was seen as especially appropriate for women, whereas writing in Chinese characters was a masculine pursuit.

  The Islamic code of behavior and etiquette, called adab, also called for refinement, good manners, and decorum. Young aristocrats who followed it were expected to dress well (though not as beautifully as Genji), know something about Arabic poetry, history, and the Qur'an, act in a dignified way, give and receive gifts gracefully, and be able to converse in an intelligent and witty way on a variety of subjects. In Europe, advice manuals for rulers called “Mirrors for the Prince” and other guides to ideal behavior advised young men on how to live a life pleasing to God, control their anger, handle their rivals, and speak eloquently.

  Romantic love became part of the noble ideal in some of these codes of behavior, depicted in poetry, prose, and paintings. Genji and his friends fall in and out of love constantly. In western Europe, although epic poems praising men for valor in battle such as the sagas of the Vikings or the twelfth-century Song of Roland remained popular as courtly entertainment, they were joined by romantic stories of the complicated love life of noble men and women, as in the stories of Tristan and Isolde or the court of King Arthur. In the Muslim world, a group of stories of Persian, Indian, and Arabic origin were brought together and written down in the ninth century, together with a framing story in which a wise bride, Shahrazad, outwits a king who has killed a series of his brand-new wives by telling him a succession of cliff-hangers so that he postpones her execution over and over. These One Thousand and One Nights included love stories, trickster tales, fantasies, and murder mysteries filled with bawdy humor, plot twists, and self-fulfilling prophecies. The collection continued to be expanded orally and in written versions over the subsequent centuries, and its stories spread beyond the Muslim world as far as England, where Shakespeare used elements from them as plot devices.

  In the epic poetry from the ancient world, men's primary attachments are to their kings, their fellow soldiers, and sometimes their horses, and the values praised are loyalty, comradeship, and bravery in battle. Women only get in the way or keep the hero from his mission. In the stories that became increasingly popular in courtly settings, women still get in the way, but men desire this rather than run from it, and the men themselves are praised for their good looks and charm as well as their valor. This era saw the creation of the conventions of romantic love in the literature of many cultures, the notion that love could be an ennobling and unstoppable force that takes one's breath away, sweeps one off one's feet, makes one a better person, causes time to stand still, and so on. This idealization of love was generally heterosexual, but ardent homoerotic poetry also approvingly depicted male same-sex passion, and male homosexual subcultures developed among officials, intellectuals, and actors in Song China, Japan, and Korea.

  Questions remain about who created these romantic conventions, how they were transmitted from one place to another, and why this happened when it did. In the West, one source appears to have been Muslim poets at the courts of both the Muslim rulers of Spain and the Christian rulers of Provence in southern France. Christian Provençal poets who called themselves troubadours then picked up these romantic themes and brought them to courts elsewhere in Europe. Here they blended with courtly conventions about comportment and sensitivity that had developed in bishops’ courts in the Rhineland and with literature celebrating noble dynasties and knightly virtues into a European version of this tradition, usually called “chivalry” or “courtly love.” In this variant, the male lover is socially beneath his female beloved; her higher status makes her in theory unattainable so his love can remain pure and chaste while he does great deeds in her honor.

  This line of transmission does not explain the importance of love as a plot device in Genji, however, nor in the poems, stories, and songs in other courtly cultures. Perhaps a better explanation might be that the poets at all of these courts were close observers of the power of sexual and emotional entanglements, and recognized that people wanted to hear about these, particularly if they involved beautiful people and had a tragic ending.

  In some places the scholars and officials at those courts also became increasingly concerned with the disruptive power of sexual attraction, but rather than celebrate it they attempted to control it. Laws, strong social sanctions, and sometimes physical barriers were needed, they thought, to shield men from sexual temptation, keep unmarried people apart, and preserve order within the family. Thus at the same time that women became more important characters in stories and poems, restrictions on actual women increased.

  Many of these restrictions involved limiting women's mobility, and of these the Chinese practice of footbinding has received the most attention. In order to bind a girl's feet, her toes were forced down and under her heel until the bones in the arch eventually broke. This generally began when she was about six, though a woman's feet needed to remain bound all her life to maintain their desirable small size and pointed “golden lotus” shape. Like many cultural practices, this began at court, first among female entertainers and imperial concubines about 1000; it spread among the elite and middle classes in northern China by about 1200 and eventually to all social classes in this area. Explanations of footbinding have involved a wide range of factors: fantasies among male poets and scholars that eroticized small feet and a swaying walk and linked these with nostalgia for the past; a change in the ideal of masculinity in Song China from warrior to scholar, which meant that the ideal woman had to be even more sedentary and refined; a desire to hide the actual importance of women's labor by families eager to prove they were rising socially and economically; Chinese sexual ideas that linked bound feet with improved reproductive capacity and stronger infants. Dorothy Ko has emphasized that no one explanation suffices, and that the reasons for footbinding changed over its thousand-year history and were different for men and women. She notes that women were not simply its victims; they internalized Confucian notions of the importance of self-sacrifice and discipline, and the connections between bound feet, reputation, domesticity, beauty, and self-respect. Thus it was mothers who generally bound their daughters’ feet in what became a female rite of passage, and women worked together to make the exquisite embroidered shoes that further represented their high status.

  Elsewhere as well, ideologies, norms, and laws prescribing distinct gender roles and male superiority were supported by women as well as men. New norms of masculinity did not bring significant changes in norms of proper female behavior, which continued to revolve around honor and purity. Romantic love was also not tied to marriage in either literature or life in this period. Marriage was far too important as a
social, economic, and sometimes political arrangement to leave up to personal passions; if affection developed this was nice, but if it did not people do not seem to have been terribly disappointed.

  Whether in Genji or the King Arthur stories, romantic love was understood as limited to social elites, just as were other behavioral ideals. People outside the charmed circle of the court were thought to be beneath love in the same way that they were beneath decorum, sophistication, or learning. Their lives were lives of toil, not worth mention in historical chronicles or poetry, a judgment that continued for centuries. Even later historians of labor tended to regard medieval peasants as not especially interesting, when compared with the workers of the modern world. Despite their disdain, however, all courts depended on the surplus provided by villagers, which able monarchs and officials recognized, and sought to increase or at least maintain. The world outside the court may have looked timeless and unchanging to some courtiers, but it was not.

  Agricultural expansion and village society

  The expansion of sedentary agriculture that began in the Neolithic and continued in the classical period picked up pace in this era, and by 1500 domesticated plants and animals could be found over far more of the globe than they had been in 500, including the islands of the Pacific, eastern North America, and what had been forests, swamps, marshes, and coastal areas in many parts of the world. Rulers and their officials often had a direct hand in this, forcing or providing incentives for people to move to uncleared areas and make the land suitable for farming by cutting down trees, draining swamps, terracing, building dikes and irrigation ditches, or making other alterations in the landscape. Sometimes this was internal colonization, in which spaces between villages and the farmlands that surrounded them were filled in with new villages and farmland, increasing population density. Sometimes it was external colonization, in which villagers followed, or occasionally preceded, armies, or were sent to places where no one had lived before. People also decided on their own to migrate to previously uninhabited or uncultivated land, expand farming into marginal areas, intensify their production, or grow crops that had larger yields or could bring in more income. Rulers and their tax collectors often quickly followed, and as the improvements made to land represented too much of an investment to leave, villagers generally paid their rents, taxes, and labor obligations in the new states that arose in many agricultural areas. Thus states promoted agriculture, and agriculture promoted states.

  There were certain commonalities among villages in many places, just as there were commonalities in courts. Sedentary agriculture spread far more widely than did writing, and even in areas where there was writing villagers lived in a largely oral culture. Fathers and mothers taught their children how to carry out the tasks they would be expected to do, and the traditions that otherwise structured their lives. Many of these traditions were undergirded by beliefs about deities, spirits, and sacred beings, whether those of universal religions such as Christianity, Buddhism, or Islam, or of local religions. Villagers joined with neighbors and family members in rituals to express thanks and hopes, celebrate major life transitions such as birth, marriage, and death, and ask for favors and blessings. Like rulers, divine beings and spirits were powerful and sometimes capricious, but they (or at least some among them) were also understood to be beneficent guardians who would protect those who venerated them properly. Within even small villages there was usually someone who was regarded as having a special connection with the unseen world—a shaman, priest, seer, holy man, “wise woman,” or chief with spiritual power. Those individuals engaged in rituals designed to convey the wishes of the unseen world to the village and vice versa, specialized labor for which they received food and other necessities of life, although in smaller and poorer villages they sometimes farmed as well.

  3.3 Inca men and women harvest potatoes, in an illustration from The First New Chronicle and Good Government, a handwritten book by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1550?–1616), who came from a noble indigenous family in Peru. Guaman Poma hoped his history of the Incas and the Spanish conquest would convince the king of Spain to make reforms; the book never reached the king, but it serves as an invaluable source for life in the Andes.

  Courtiers and scholars often saw villagers as an undifferentiated mass, but social and gender distinctions actually permeated many aspects of village life, including work and property ownership. Men and boys generally cleared new land and built large terraces, and in areas where large animals were used for plowing they did the plowing and cared for oxen and horses; planting, weeding, and harvesting were done by all, including young children. Where crops relied on human labor alone, women sometimes raised most of these, or both sexes did. In cultures where there were ideals of female seclusion, including China and some parts of the Muslim world, women at the top of the village social heap carried out most of their work within the walls of a house or house-compound, while the men of the household along with slaves and servants of both sexes carried out work outdoors. Systems of land inheritance in most agricultural societies tended to favor sons over daughters, although in the absence of sons daughters were sometimes seen as preferable to more distant male family members, as this would keep land in the immediate family. Women's and men's lives were most similar to one another at the bottom of village society, in what historians have called an “equality of misery.”

  Although aristocratic elites—including the territorial ruler in societies where there was one—demanded taxes and rents from land under their control and sometimes appointed overseers to run things, villages in many places also developed institutions of self-governance that controlled such matters as planting times, crop rotation, the maintenance of irrigation systems, and the use of forests, pastures, or other lands held in common by the village. These local communal bodies also conducted relations with higher levels of government, with their autonomy from these higher levels varying from place to place and over time, as did the ways they fit with clan structures of authority. New agricultural techniques, epidemic diseases, climate change, and cultural developments such as the introduction of new belief systems also had an impact on village institutions. Like structures of power at the top, these communal bodies promoted both solidarity and hierarchy. They represented the village as a whole, but were generally made up only of male heads of households, with younger sons, women, landless individuals, servants, unfree people, and those in various groups understood to be outsiders excluded.

  Village authorities generally sought to maximize agricultural output, and because of this emphasis on growth some scholars have seen the roots of current environmental crises in the decisions of villagers in this era. The biogeographer Jared Diamond, for example, uses a number of agricultural societies from this era, including Viking settlements in Greenland, Anasazi towns in the American Southwest, Maya city-states, and Polynesian settlements on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to argue that societies “choose to fail” by deciding to continue practices that over-exploit the environment and maintaining rigid social mores. That scenario of collapse has been challenged by a number of archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians, who assert persuasively that people in these societies were not stupid and short-sighted, but remarkably resilient and flexible in the face of environmental changes. To view “societies” as undifferentiated wholes making decisions that determined a collective fate is overly simplistic, they note, as it ignores social and political complexities and conflicts within them.

  Sometimes these debates about land use have pointed to religious and cultural issues: the Judaeo-Christian tradition has been seen by many as promoting an exploitative and uncaring use of the natural world, while Native American religions that emphasize human connections with the land led to sustainable subsistence strategies that had little permanent impact on the environment. Here as well counter-arguments have been made: within Christianity “the book of nature” was long viewed as a central source of divine revelation, while foraging and agriculture in the pre-Columb
ian Americas are increasingly recognized as having shaped the flora and fauna in dramatic ways, even in the Amazonian rainforest. Evidence can be found to support all sides of each of these debates, but what most scholars can agree on is that people generally had their natural resources right before their eyes. In contrast to today, those who made decisions about how to use land and resources generally lived on or near that land, and the impact of their decisions was similarly local.

  Along with commonalities in village life and social structures across much of the globe, there were also regional variations, which themselves changed with the adoption of new subsistence strategies. In North America, trade networks carried maize agriculture from Mesoamerica to the Southwest, into the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys, and then to the Atlantic coast by about 1200 CE. In the Southwest, people also planted desert crops such as agave and cotton, and used large sandstone blocks and masonry to construct thick-walled houses. Across the plains and into the eastern forest, people regularly burned the undergrowth to discourage the growth of brush and trees so that grasslands where bison, elk, and deer fed expanded. These animals were not domesticated, but, through burning, their numbers and range were increased significantly, and hunting was made easier through the enhanced visibility of prairie landscapes. Combined with increasing use of bows and arrow instead of spears after about 600 CE, fire made large game a more reliable food source. In the central river valleys, people used burning and other techniques to clear acres of land to plant maize and other crops, and constructed mounds for burials, ceremonies, and house platforms. Burial chambers filled with valuable artefacts and with individuals sacrificed to accompany the deceased indicate that Mississippian mound culture was hierarchical, and that power was increasingly centralized. Kinship was reckoned matrilineally, but whether this translated into more egalitarian gender structures in this period is difficult to say. By 1500, along riverbanks in the center of North America and along the eastern coastline, fields of maize, beans, and squash and orchards of fruit and nut trees surrounded large, permanent villages containing many houses, all encircled by walls made of earth and timber. The largest of these was Cahokia near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, which at its peak in the thirteenth century was a city of perhaps 40,000 people in a complex of mounds, plazas, and houses that covered five and a half square miles.