A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  To duplicate the scale of Teotihuacan, the Mexica expanded their original island through extensive landfills, and on these built ceremonial centers, pyramids, temples, public buildings, markets, workshops, and houses, all separated by wide, straight streets and canals on which canoes brought goods into the city and took trash and human refuse out. They built a dike to isolate fresh water flowing into brackish Lake Texcoco; constructed terracotta aqueducts from springs in the hills to bring in fresh drinking water and supply fountains in the parks; built four causeways linking the island to the shore, with openings covered by bridges to let boat traffic pass; transformed marshlands around the edge of the lake into croplands by building chinampas, very fertile plots of land created by piling up mud and decaying vegetation behind dense wattle fencing secured by trees and stakes. (These are sometimes called “floating gardens,” but they were not actually floating.) Stone and adobe walls surrounded the city itself, making it, like Constantinople, highly defensible and capable of resisting a prolonged siege. By the end of the fifteenth century, the urban area on and near the island had about 60,000 households and a total population of around 250,000. These included Mexica, groups who had already lived there at the time of Mexica conquests, emissaries bringing tribute from distant conquered states, traveling merchants, and war captives.

  In the many public squares and marketplaces of Tenochtitlan, butchers hawked turkeys, ducks, chickens, rabbits, and deer; grocers sold kidney beans, squash, avocados, maize, and all kinds of peppers. Male artisans sold intricately designed gold, silver, and feathered jewelry, while female artisans offered various items of clothing customarily worn by ordinary people along with embroidered robes and cloaks for the rich. Wood for building, herbs for seasoning and medicine, tobacco for chewing and smoking, honey, chocolate, obsidian knives, jade jars, and many other products added to the array of goods, with both cacao beans and lengths of cloth used as money. Women and men mixed in these public places, for female seclusion was not a gender norm. Other gender distinctions were: girls were given spindles and shuttles for weaving cloth at their birth ceremony while boys were given a shield and four arrows, all of these symbols of the activities they would be expected to perform as adults in service to the expanding Aztec state.

  3.6 Punishments and chores of Mexica children of different ages, as depicted in the Codex Mendoza, a book written about twenty years after the Spanish conquest that depicts Mexica history and daily life. At the top, boys and girls of eleven and twelve are disciplined by their parents, and at the bottom adolescents sweep, carry sticks, fish, grind corn, and weave.

  Information about the social structure in Tenochtitlan and in Mexica society more broadly comes largely from documents written in Spanish in the first century after the European conquest, augmented by archaeological evidence and ethnographic research. The basic unit was the calpulli, which consisted of several interrelated family groups under the leadership of a chief. Members of a calpulli shared religious practices, often lived in the same location, and in specialized economies like that of Tenochtitlan might follow the same occupation. Society was understood to be made up of different calpullis, grouped into noble lineages that controlled most land and received taxes, rents, tribute, and labor services from those living on it, and commoner lineages. Mobility between these two groups was difficult, although occasionally successful commoner warriors could become nobles, and long-distance merchants who brought in the luxuries used by nobles gained some of their social privileges. Commoners (macehualtin) worked their own land or did other types of work in the city, and were liable for military duty if they were male, as well as other labor services. Beneath these were landless people and slaves, who included war captives, criminals, and people sold into slavery by their families. As in the Muslim world, slavery was not necessarily a heritable condition; other than war captives destined to be sacrificed to a deity, people moved in and out of slavery and could buy their own freedom. Those war captives became increasingly important in the later fifteenth century, when changes in the Mexica religion led to a greater emphasis on offerings to the sun of human blood as necessary for daily survival and cosmic order. The huge pyramid-shaped temple in the center of Tenochtitlan became the site of regular human sacrifices attended by many observers.

  Not every city in this era had a giant church or temple at its center (though many did), nor were they all built to promote imperial power and glory (though many were). Hangzhou began as a rice-growing village in the fertile Yangzi River delta, and grew steadily to become the largest city in China (and perhaps the world) by 1200. During the short-lived Sui dynasty (581–618), residents built the first walls, and the city became the southern end of the Grand Canal system that linked the Yangzi River region with the Yellow River region in the north. Barges on the canals carried rice for tax payments and the feeding of troops to the centers of political and military power in northern China, along with goods imported from Japan, Southeast Asia, and India. This trade continued in the longer-lived Tang dynasty (618–907), when the city became one of many cosmopolitan centers of learning, where Nestorian Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and Islam brought by foreign merchants joined various branches of Buddhism. Officials selected through the examination system were in charge of the city, and gained renown for their poetry and calligraphy as well as their public policies. The scholar-official Bai Juyi (772–846) expanded the city walls, repaired a collapsing dike to improve irrigation, built a large causeway to assure access to a lake renowned for its peaceful beauty, and also wrote thousands of poems, popular for their simplicity of language. His poems were taken as far as Japan, where they were quoted by characters in Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji.

  When centralized Tang rule collapsed, Hangzhou became the center of the small independent coastal Wuyue kingdom, continued to prosper economically through agriculture and trade, and exchanged diplomats and Buddhist monks with Japan and Korea. The city was reabsorbed into the expanding Song dynasty in the late tenth century, and in 1132 was made the capital of the Southern Song state when the existing Song capital at Kaifeng was captured by nomadic Jurchens. Immigrants poured into the city from the surrounding countryside and the conquered north, and its population may have reached a million or even a million and a half a century later. Merchants in Hangzhou—and other large Chinese cities—organized themselves into guilds according to the type of product they sold, and used paper certificates of deposit issued by the Song government, the world's first paper money, along with coins for their business. Social hierarchies were somewhat fluid; marriages between social equals were preferred, but wealth gained through new economic opportunities might make up for slightly lesser stature, as would a prospective husband's success in the civil service exams that could lead to an official position.

  The city was a center not only of trade and production, but also of culture, entertainment, and education. The scholar-official and scientist Shen Kuo (1031–95) wrote his major works in Hangzhou after political factionalism resulted in his dismissal from court. These included essays on medicine, astronomy, mathematics, civil engineering, archaeology, and geography, and contain the earliest known discussions of the magnetic needle compass, the dry dock for repairing ships, erosion and uplift as geological forces, and climate change, along with plans for improving relief maps, astronomical and surveying instruments, and the cultivation of medicinal herbs. Visitors reported on the city's many markets, bathhouses, silk draperies, painted ships, and brothels. Conquest by the Mongols established a new dynasty, the Yuan (1234–1368), and the capital moved north again, this time to the newly built capital Dadu, but Hangzhou remained an important port and a giant city. Dynasties, states, and empires might rise and fall, and occasionally cities fell with them and completely disappeared. Like Dadu, however, many of the most important cities from this era have endured far longer than the governments that first built them. By 1500, most of the world's largest megalopolises today were already cities, though sometimes with a different
name: Tokyo was Edo, Jakarta was the port of Sunda, Mexico City was Tenochtitlan. Seoul was already Seoul, and Shanghai was Shanghai.

  Zones of cultural and religious exchange

  Among the many visitors to Hangzhou during the Yuan dynasty were two who came from slightly further away than most, the Venetian merchant Marco Polo (c. 1254–1324) and the Moroccan scholar and diplomat Ibn Battuta (1304–68). Polo apparently spent seventeen years in China, primarily as a courtier and official of the Yuan emperor Khubilai Khan, and dictated the account of his travels to a writer of romance stories while they were imprisoned together as war captives after he returned to Italy. Originally written in French—a common language for European merchants traveling east—The Book of the Marvels of the World was recopied and translated many times even before the development of the printing press, providing accounts of the riches and splendors of Asia that Polo's contemporaries suspected were exaggerated, but that inspired them nonetheless. Ibn Battuta began his travels with the pilgrimage to Mecca expected of observant Muslims, and then continued on to Persia, down the east coast of Africa to Kilwa on the Swahili Coast, back north through Syria to the Central Asian steppes, then south again to India, where he became an official of the sultan ruling there. The Delhi sultan sent him as a diplomat to China, and although he was shipwrecked he did make it to the Yuan emperor's court in Beijing, with stops in Bengal, southern China, and various Southeast Asian ports on the way. He returned home to Morocco by way of Mecca, stopped for a bit, and then set out by camel caravan across the Sahara desert to Mali. When he returned from that trip the sultan of Morocco gave him a scribe, and the two together composed a travel book in Arabic, whose formal title reads A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling. A few copies were made, but it was largely unknown until the nineteenth century. Both books relied on memory rather than written notes and mixed in stories of foreign lands from the works of earlier travelers to increase the number of “marvels” they contained. For these reasons there has been some skepticism about both travelers, but the scholarly consensus now is that both were actually in most of the places they said they were.

  Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta were not typical travelers—Ibn Battuta may have traveled more than 75,000 miles—but their journeys share features with those undertaken by increasing numbers of men (and some women) in this era. Marco Polo's began as a trading venture and Ibn Battuta's as a religious pilgrimage, but their skills and foreign backgrounds brought them to the attention of rulers, and they became official envoys as well. Religion, trade, and diplomacy (along with conquest) motivated more people to travel after about 1100 than had before. Some wrote about their travels, and people wanted to read what they wrote because they thought of traveling. Polo and Ibn Battuta traveled by both land and sea in their journeys from and back to the Mediterranean, along trade routes that had developed in ancient times, but were becoming increasingly active.

  Pilgrimage was one of the duties of a believer in Islam, and Buddhism and Christianity also encouraged pilgrimages to holy places, which became scattered all over the map as both religions continued to expand—but also contracted—in this era. Like Islam, Christianity and Buddhism became large zones of cultural exchange through which people, ideas, and objects flowed (see Map 3.4).

  The transmission of Buddhism was never undertaken in a centralized way, but itinerant monks and merchants carried Buddhist teachings, texts, relics, devotional objects, and images widely, and by the tenth century Buddhism extended from the western steppes of Central Asia to the towns and mountains of Heian Japan. Buddhist festivals became popular holidays, and rituals marking stages of life incorporated Buddhist concepts, especially funerals, when the deceased moved from one lifetime to a new existence. Thousands of temples and monasteries were built, and many became wealthy as believers gave them land and goods. Communities of nuns were poorer and less popular than those of monks, who were regarded as spiritually superior, but they did offer some women an opportunity to learn to read and write. Monasteries housed literate and numerate men, and merchants entrusted monasteries with money and merchandise for safe-keeping; the monasteries in turn provided loans to merchants and space for fairs and markets. The wealth and power of monasteries occasionally led rulers to suppress them and persecute Buddhism itself—most famously in China under the Tang emperor Wuzong in 845—but Buddhism had penetrated deep into society, and it soon became an important force again. Monasteries ran schools, engaged in charity, provided lodging for travelers, and became major centers of art and learning. The Nalanda monastery in the present-day Bihar state of India developed into the leading center of advanced Buddhist learning, and by the seventh century was attracting students from across Asia and sending out monks to propagate Buddhist teachings. Korean monasteries printed the entire canon of Buddhist texts using woodblocks, while those in Japan produced narrative hand scrolls that conveyed Buddhist ideas about the transience of life and the rewards open to the believer.

  The diffusion of Buddhism was a complex process, with ideas sometimes filtering back to places that were the original transmitting centers; multiple strains of doctrines originated in different regions that addressed local situations, but then spread. One of these was Tantra, a body of esoteric beliefs and practices that sought to channel the divine energy understood to maintain the universe in creative ways, often through chants (mantras), diagrams with cosmic meaning (mandalas), gestures, and rituals. Tantrism developed in South Asia in the seventh century and spread rapidly to all parts of the Buddhist realm; it became particularly important in Tibet, where in the eighth century King Tri Songdetsen (r. 754–797) converted to Buddhism. He employed Buddhism not only to consolidate and legitimize his political power, but also in diplomatic relations with other states, a pattern seen with new dynasties that emerged across Asia, including the Tang in China and the Koryo (935–1392) in Korea. Tibet also added its own unique features to Buddhism, including the belief in reincarnating lamas (religious teachers). Another strain of Buddhism was Chan, which emphasized rigorous meditation, monastic discipline, and direct master-to-student transmission more than the authority of sacred texts. Japanese monks who had traveled to China introduced Chan (or Zen, as it was known in Japan) to Japan in the twelfth century, where samurai were attracted by its emphasis on discipline and obedience to a master. Tantra was also followed at some monasteries in Japan, and Pure Land Buddhism, which venerated the Buddha Amitabha and offered the possibility of reaching paradise through simple devotional practices, was popular among many lay people, who blended this with traditional Japanese religion (termed Shinto). In many other places as well various strains of Buddhism that had developed locally or were brought in from elsewhere mixed and coexisted.

  3.7 A wooden figure of Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion who helps all sentient beings, from eleventh- to twelfth-century Tibet. Avalokiteśvara was (and is) widely venerated in different branches of Buddhism, and depicted in an extraordinary variety of forms and manifestations, both male and female.

  The polycentric nature of Buddhism encouraged travel in many directions as followers sought to visit holy places and find new teachings and texts. Chinese Buddhists visited the sites of the Buddha's life in South Asia, but Mahayana Buddhist monks from South Asia also went to China to honor celestial buddhas and bodhisattvas purportedly living on Chinese mountains. That polycentric nature also allowed Buddhism to survive the Turkic Muslim conquest of its homeland. In 1193 a Muslim army destroyed the great center of learning at Nalanda, and in general the Muslim rulers of North India were hostile to Buddhism as a rival proselytizing religion. Many monks fled. Buddhism declined in India, while Hinduism flourished, especially in southern areas that had not been conquered by Turkic forces, and often including practices shared with Islam and Buddhism, including mysticism akin to Sufism and esoteric Tantra teachings. Elsewhere Buddhism continued to thrive, however, bonding distant towns, ports, oases, and sacred sites more closely than did me
rcantile networks alone, and shaping the formation of political/cultural identities throughout much of Asia.

  Christianity also expanded and developed variant strains in this era, although these divisions were more clearly geographic than those in Buddhism and only rarely coexisted in one area. The bishops of Rome claimed authority over all Christians, asserting that they had a privileged position because Jesus had given special power to one of his disciples, Peter, and Peter had been the first bishop of Rome. They became known as popes—from the Italian word papa, meaning father—and with the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west in the fifth century the popes also took over political authority in central Italy, charging taxes, sending troops, and enforcing laws. Churches in what had been the western half of the Roman Empire and the rest of western and central Europe slowly coalesced into a single hierarchical Roman Church—later called Roman Catholic—with Latin as the official language and periodic councils deciding matters of doctrine and discipline, although with local variations in devotional practice.

  The Byzantine emperors in Constantinople and the bishops in what had been the eastern half of the Roman Empire did not accept Rome's claim to primacy, and gradually the Eastern Christian or Orthodox Church developed, over which the emperor retained some power and which split formally from the papacy in the eleventh century. By the fifth century Christianity had spread beyond the borders of the Roman/Byzantine Empire south to Ethiopia, and east to Persia, Armenia, Parthia, and the southwest coast of India. Churches here generally looked neither to Rome nor to Constantinople as the ultimate authority, but formed their own hierarchical structures of power that split, shifted, and regrouped with changes in the political landscape and doctrinal differences. Some of these churches were in states that were officially Christian, such as Ethiopia and Armenia, but most of them were in states where the ruler was not Christian, which resulted in alternating patterns of toleration and repression. Many of these Churches of the East, as they came to be known, used Syriac as their liturgical language and accepted an interpretation of the nature of Christ based on the ideas of the fourth-century church leader Nestorius, which regarded the divine and human natures in Jesus as distinct from one another, whereas in Catholic and Orthodox understanding they were united. The Nestorian position was declared heresy and outlawed in the Byzantine Empire in the fifth century; many Nestorians moved eastward, spreading this interpretation.