A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  The extensive forced and voluntary migrations of men and women within the Mongol Empire led to sexual relationships and marriage across all kinds of lines—linguistic, cultural, tribal, religious—which served as important means of cultural exchange and hybridization. In the western khanates, for example, the first Mongols to accept Islam appear to have been ordinary soldiers who interacted with the largely Muslim indigenous population and married local women. The Mongols who ruled China broke with this pattern, as they wanted to preserve their privileges as conquerors and so avoided many Chinese practices and resisted assimilation. Just as had the English conquerors in Ireland, they forbade Chinese to marry Mongols, and passed other regulations in an attempt to keep Chinese from passing as Mongols and to keep social groups apart. They assigned people hereditary occupations, each of which carried certain tax or labor obligations, and classified the population into four grades, with the Mongols at the top and the southern Chinese at the bottom.

  The legacy of the Mongols is complicated and mixed. They slaughtered and moved populations, disrupted agriculture, and plundered wealth across Asia, but they also promoted trade and the exchange of ideas. They were pastoralists, but their forced moving of people helped expand agriculture. They were nomadic, but in the thirteenth century built a new capital city, Dadu (also known as Khanbaliq), that is the heart of modern Beijing and would be the capital of China for all but two brief periods after that. In building this new capital, they broke with their nomadic past, but followed a pattern set by many other rulers, who regarded cities—just as Ban Zhao had in the Han dynasty—as the only place where a cultured and civilized life was possible.

  City life

  The order of a ruler was not the only way that cities were founded in this era. As they had been since they first appeared in Mesopotamia and Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium BCE, cities were built and grew (or were destroyed and abandoned) for many different reasons. Some began as villages along sea coasts, rivers, or trade routes that drew in more and more people because of economic opportunities. Others were, or became, ceremonial and educational centers, with churches, temples, mosques, universities, and schools. Others were places of refuge from armed conflicts, and their residents built strong walls with only a few gates in the hopes of maintaining their safety. Sometimes this worked.

  Even today, which of the world's megacities or megalopolises deserves the designation “world's largest city” is disputed, with Tokyo-Yokohama, Jakarta, Seoul, Mexico City, and Shanghai all in the running, depending on how the population is counted and estimated and where the boundaries of the city are drawn. Population estimates for earlier cities are even more difficult, although for the first centuries CE there is no dispute, as the world's largest city was certainly Rome, which may have had more than a million people when it was at its largest. By 500 CE Rome had shrunk to perhaps 50,000 people, however, and it kept shrinking for many centuries after that. (Rome did not reach a million again until the first half of the twentieth century.)

  Map 3.4 Trading networks, major cities, and religions in the eastern hemisphere, 500–1500

  In 500 the largest cities in the world were most likely Constantinople on the Bosporus and Xi'an in central China, with several hundred thousand residents each. These were joined later in the fifth century by Ctesiphon on the Tigris River, when the Sassanid Persian ruler Khosrau I moved hundreds of thousands of the people he had conquered there and built a new city. Ctesiphon's decline was even faster than Rome's, for when in the eighth century the ‘Abbasid caliphs built Baghdad as their capital about 20 miles away, the city was completely abandoned. Other cities in the Muslim world that housed courts also grew to over 100,000 in the centuries before 1500, including Cairo and Córdoba, but the most urbanized part of the world in this era was eastern China, with at least six cities that had more than 100,000 residents. Similar-sized cities, mostly capitals, could be found elsewhere in Asia, including Anghor Thom, Delhi, and Vijiyanagar, the latter growing to perhaps half a million people before it was sacked by invading armies in 1565 and never recovered. In Christian western Europe, only Paris and perhaps Venice and Genoa had 100,000 people before 1500. In the western hemisphere, the largest cities were in Mesoamerica, first Teotihuacan and then Tenochtitlan; in North America, the only large city was Cahokia (see Map 3.4).

  Because literate people in this era lived either in cities or in religious institutions (many of which were in cities), urban life has left far more records than has that in the countryside. Visitors to these cities were amazed at what they saw, and their reports and letters provide vivid details that are missing from the often dry bureaucratic records produced by local and royal officials. Universities and other institutions of higher education were established in cities, and their scholars wrote and circulated works of all types, and assembled libraries. Artists and artisans congregated in cities, where wealthy patrons commissioned paintings, sculpture, books, devotional aids, and other objects, and people of all classes purchased whatever they could afford. Thus artistic and material sources augment the rich written record.

  Taken together, these sources indicate that cities everywhere had certain things in common. However they began, cities recruited people from the countryside with the promise of greater freedom and new possibilities. Cities provided economic opportunity, which led to greater wealth, a higher standard of living, and upward social mobility for many people, though the numbers of poor swelled as well. Many cities developed a sense of identity, which, like the group identities created by rulers and their courts, was enhanced by myths of origin and regularly occurring public rituals. In Venice, for example, the head of the city's government, known as the doge, was rowed once a year beginning about 1000 on a sumptuous galley at the head of a huge procession of decorated boats and gondolas beyond the lagoon on which the city had been built to the Adriatic Sea, which he both blessed and symbolically married. Throwing a gold ring into the waters, he recited words emphasizing Venice's domination of the sea—the sea was the wife in this ritual—which was to be as indissoluble as Christian marriage. This ceremony, which became larger and more elaborate over time, affirmed to all who watched it that God had lifted the city from the sea for the Venetians and that Saint Mark, whose relics Venetian traders had brought from Alexandria in the early ninth century after the Muslim conquests, protected it. Thus its naval power, commercial success, and opulence were divinely approved, a legend reinforced in other rituals, paintings, operas, and poems. (When Napoleon conquered the city in 1798 the doge abdicated and Napoleon had his ship destroyed; the current mayor of Venice has revived the ceremony, though with a much smaller boat and less pomp.)

  Some cities were founded to be capitals of states, or grew up around the court of a ruler, so that royal officials ran the city. Other cities created independent institutions of government, often dominated by major merchants, and the economic, social, and political policies of the city represented the interests of this group. Still others were mixtures of these, with different authorities and factions within them vying for power, and rising and falling over the centuries. Along with the urban government itself, corporate bodies were established in many cities that regulated the production of goods and services, provided support for religious personnel and buildings, patrolled city walls and streets, opened and ran educational institutions, and carried out a variety of other activities. These craft guilds, religious brotherhoods, and civic militias promoted both solidarity and hierarchy: members understood themselves to have a group identity separate from those not in the group, but they were also expected to follow established instructions and rules, and obey orders from the leaders of the group. Guilds and other organized corporate groups provided their members with tangible benefits such as job training and burial plots, and also what sociologists call “social capital,” a network of relationships through which they could gain economic and other advantages.

  Cities were not egalitarian; the larger they were, the more elaborate the soci
al hierarchy. These ranged from wealthy merchants, officials, and professionals at the top to artisans, students, and shopkeepers in the middle to servants, day laborers, porters, peddlers, and (in some cases) slaves at the bottom. Domestic slavery, reliant largely on women, characterized many cities in the eastern hemisphere, and may have characterized those of the western hemisphere as well. Because many cities were walled, as their populations grew space within the walls became increasingly limited, with narrow streets and alleys. People of all sorts, from beggars to wealthy merchants, regularly rubbed shoulders in the crowded city, but social standing and sometimes occupation were clearly indicated by people's clothing. In many cities, clothing distinctions became a matter of law as well as tradition, with certain costly items—fur in European cities, feathers in Mesoamerican ones—limited to members of the highest social groups.

  Because salting, pickling, and drying were the only ways to preserve food, some member of the household had to shop every day, and markets were where they met their neighbors, exchanged information, and talked over recent events, as well as purchasing needed supplies. Markets, streets, and open spaces were also where people gathered for entertainment and relaxation, playing and watching ball games of various types, board and card games, games with dice, tiles, or knucklebones, animal fights, and human sparring matches. All of these were occasions for wagering and gambling, which moralists and officials sometimes condemned but had little power to control. City officials often tried to regulate aspects of urban life, including exchanges at the markets, house construction, street maintenance, and the disposal of waste. Those of the German city of Nuremberg, for example, ordered residents to clean up their pigsties and repair holes in the streets in front of their houses that were large enough for children to drown in them.

  3.5 Customers order shoes, inspect cloth, and purchase tableware in this market scene from a fifteenth-century French illuminated manuscript. Although the scene is placed within an archway for stylistic purposes, buildings in European cities did often have covered loggias and passageways where vendors could set up their stands without worrying about rain.

  Fire was a constant danger, and because houses were built very close to one another fires spread rapidly. During the thirteenth century, for example, fire burned large sections of Hangzhou in eastern China several times, once taking a reported 30,000 buildings, while major fires in the much smaller city of London destroyed churches, houses, and bridges. (The most devastating fire in London was in 1666, which went on for four days and destroyed most of the old city.) City and royal authorities tried various ways to prevent and fight fires, including prohibiting enclosed ovens and workplaces that used open fire such as smithies and foundries, encouraging the use of non-flammable building materials, establishing systems of watchmen and warning signals, and organizing fire brigades of city residents armed with buckets, ladders, and axes. Sometimes these were effective against small fires, but major conflagrations could overcome them.

  Opportunities for work were generally not as plentiful as the number of people flocking into cities, so people supported themselves and their families by activities judged illegal or at least questionable or dishonorable. They stole merchandise from houses, wagons, market stalls, and storage facilities, fencing it to pawnbrokers or taking it to the next town to sell. They stole goods or money directly from people, cutting the strings of their bags or purses. They made and sold mixtures of herbs and drugs claimed to heal all sorts of ailments, perhaps combining this with a puppet show, trained animals, magic tricks, or music to draw customers. They sold sex for money, standing on street corners or moving into houses that in some places were officially sanctioned (and taxed) brothels. Prostitution was especially common in cities where men married late, where there were large numbers of transient merchants, or where certain groups of men, such as university students, soldiers, or clergy, were prohibited from marrying. Both Rome and Paris were known for the quantity (and quality) of the prostitutes who lived there. Most women and men at the bottom of a city's social heap combined all kinds of work in an economy of makeshifts. Religious and charitable institutions provided support for the poor in some cities, but beggars were everywhere.

  The economic situation of many people in cities was precarious, and a rise in food prices—on which the poor spent a majority of their income—could be devastating. This sometimes sparked food riots, or attacks on merchants who were perceived to be hoarding or speculating. At times these mixed in suspicion of outsiders: Christians in European towns and cities attacked Jews, while in the Chinese port of Guangzhou rebels in 878 massacred Muslim merchants. Urban unrest and revolts also developed from other causes, including new taxes, higher house rents, changing conditions of work, charismatic religious leaders who urged opposition to authorities, conflicts between corporate groups such as guilds or student organizations, and sometimes even sporting events. In many of these, young unmarried men with no family responsibilities formed the core of the unrest, although women participated in riots over high food prices.

  Every city had a slightly different variation on these common themes. Constantinople, built by the Roman emperor Constantine on the site of the smaller city of Byzantium, was initially designed in a distinctly Roman style to reinforce its similarities with the older capital, with colonnaded forums, marble public buildings, and churches that resembled temples. But it was a seaport rather than an inland center, and its well-protected deep-water harbor dominated the city. Constantine walled off the landward side immediately, and later emperors built massive ramparts and sea walls, making it impregnable in both appearance and reality. The city became a frequently copied prototype for later walled cities in Europe and the Mediterranean. Emperors also built churches, monuments, warehouses, race courses, forums, aqueducts, and fountains. As part of his efforts to revitalize the Roman Empire and affirm its Christian identity, Justinian ordered the construction of Hagia Sophia, a colossal domed church dedicated to Holy Wisdom filled with mosaics and relics, and built on the site of an earlier church that had been burnt to the ground in riots between the supporters of two teams in chariot races. Within the walls of the city were huge underground cisterns that provided water, and vast gardens and grazing areas that supplied vegetables and meat, all of which would allow the city to withstand a long siege. Constantinople was probably at its largest in the middle of the sixth century, with about half a million people, before the Plague of Justinian and subsequent epidemics, along with a series of earthquakes and dwindling imperial income because of the spread of Islam, led it to shrink to about a third of this size by the eighth century.

  Despite this decline, the city remained an important trade as well as political and religious center, and attracted people from all over the Mediterranean and western Asia. Its foreign quarters were filled with Italians, Jews, Armenians, and Slavs, and even the occasional Persian and Viking. Its markets offered goods from many parts of the world. Furs and timber flowed across the Black Sea, as did slaves across the Mediterranean from northern Europe and the Balkans via Venice. Spices, silks, jewelry, and other luxury goods came to Constantinople from India and China by way of Arabia, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. In return, the city exported glassware, mosaics, gold coins, silk cloth, carpets, and a host of other products, with much foreign trade in the hands of Italian merchants. The typical household in the city included family members and servants, some of whom were slaves. Artisans lived and worked in their shops, while officials and merchants commonly dwelled in multistory buildings, and wealthy aristocrats resided in freestanding mansions that frequently included interior courts, galleries, large reception halls, small sleeping rooms, reading and writing rooms, baths, and chapels. In the homes of the upper classes, women were secluded in separate women's quarters as they had been in ancient Athens.

  Like Constantinople, Tenochtitlan was also built to be the center of an empire by people who understood themselves to have a divine mission. Nahuatl-speaking people who called themselves Mexi
ca migrated into the central valley of Mexico beginning in the twelfth or thirteenth century. Here they settled on the shores and islands of Lake Texcoco, and in 1325 on an island in the lake they built the twin cities of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, choosing the location in fulfillment of a prophecy attributed to the warrior-god Huitzilopochtli, who ordered the city built where they found an eagle perched on a cactus growing out of a rock sunk in water and eating a snake. (This origin myth is depicted in the Mexican coat of arms on the center of the Mexican flag.) Tenochtitlan became the larger of the two, and was built with two models in mind: Aztlan, the legendary island home of the Mexica in the north (and the origin of the word Aztec, given to these people by nineteenth-century scholars), and the real city of Teotihuacan about 50 miles north of Lake Texcoco, whose immense pyramids, carefully laid out avenues, residential areas, and vast market compounds were abandoned ruins by the time the Mexica saw them.