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China in the Making of an Afro-Eurasian Network Industry and Invention Textiles and Pottery Paper and Printing Compass and Ships Guns and Gunpowder Iron and Coal Industrial Revolution? Commerce and Capitalism Money and Markets Public versus Private Enterprise Hangzhou State and Bureaucracy The Modern State A Bureaucracy of Experts Mongols in the Making of an Afro- Eurasian Network The Mongols Death and Destruction Trade and Tolerance Political Divisions and Economic Unity World History for a Global Age Ecological Unity: A Dark Victory Islam in the Making of an Afro- Eurasian Network New Muslims from the Steppe

Slaves, Soldiers, and Sons In Place of Government Muslims, Merchants, and Market A Merchant’s Religion Cairo Islam in Africa Islam in West Africa Swahili Culture A Single Ecozone Islam in India and Indonesia Europe in the Making of an Afro- Eurasian Network Revival and Expansion Good Weather and Good Luck Two Europes, Four Economies Cities and States Urban Renewal City-States and Citizenship Law and Science Natural Law and Natural Reason Twelfth-Century Renaissance Popular Science The Formation of the Modern Network Death and Rebirth The Renaissance The Classical and the Novel Japan and Korea Imitators and Innovators Conclusion: The Virtues of Variety

The Making of an Afro-Eurasian Network

1000 CE–1450 CE

Reilly, Kevin. The Human Journey : A Concise Introduction to World History, Prehistory to 1450, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nu/detail.action?docID=5328388. Created from nu on 2021-11-10 02:48:17.

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Figure 5.1 Time line.

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The Making of an Afro-Eurasian Network 145

IN 1325, Ibn Battuta, a young Muslim from Morocco, left for a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. From there, he traveled through Syria, Iraq, Persia, and finally to India, where he was appointed as a judge because, al- though he did not speak any Indian languages, he spoke Arabic and was a jurist of the Quran. From 1333 to 1345, in his thirties and forties, he traveled extensively throughout India on official missions and to satisfy his curiosity. In 1345, Ibn Battuta sailed from India to China. At almost every port in China, he met some- one he knew—the man who had first offered him money to set him up in Delhi and a Chi- nese envoy who had previously accompanied him on a trip from Delhi to Calicut—and on an invitation to meet the emperor, he stopped at the port of Fuzhou, where he ran into a fel- low Moroccan who had lived 40 miles from his home in Morocco, a man he had recently seen in India. For Ibn Battuta, the earth was a very small world.1

In the age of Ibn Battuta, global travel be- came predictable and almost common. There were established agents, carriers, tickets, regu- lar stops, accommodations for the traveler, places of worship for the foreign community, contacts, letters of introduction, and even souvenirs. That a Muslim who lived near the Atlantic coast could travel to the Pacific coast of China without passport or hindrance was a sign of how integrated the world had become.

Not everywhere but in numerous places— especially across Eurasia—people encountered the ways of foreigners. And in many cases, the ways of the foreigner became their own. For- eign religions, customs, clothes, crops, crafts, ideas, and even spouses won over or converted individuals, families, and communities that had for generations prided themselves on the antiquity of their ways. Change was not always voluntary or swift, and many people dug in

their heels instead of opening their arms, but, ironically, as the variety of human experience became more visible for all to see, more people found common interests and identities over vastly larger regions of the planet.

This chapter is the story of how the inte- gration of Asia, Africa, and Europe increased between 1000 and 1450. It is also the story of how that integration changed localities, states, and regions, making them both less differ- ent, one from the other, and also each more internally varied as their inhabitants increased their contacts with foreign ways and changed their own. Thus, the story of hemispheric in- tegration is also the story of the origins of the modern world.

The previous chapters show how our world has been shaped by processes that began a long time ago. The agricultural revolution changed the way we eat and work, how many of us there are, and the lives we lead. The urban revolution multiplied our numbers and vastly increased the complexity of life. The Iron Age extended that life down the social scale and over the horizon. Our classical cultures still in- form and shape us through our languages, val- ues, and ideas. When those classical cultures were absorbed and eclipsed by a new set of ideas, techniques, and religions (the impact of southernization and universal religions), new communities emerged that were frequently both larger and more cosmopolitan than their predecessors.

In the past 1,000 years, the world has be- come far more integrated still. While we think of globalization as a very recent development, its roots actually go back to the first half of the previous millennium. Between roughly 1000 and 1450, the Chinese, Mongols, Muslims, Africans, and Europeans created and partici- pated in a single network of trade, travel, and interchange. In the previous chapter, we saw

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the development of the early stages of this network among the Muslims and Chinese. In this chapter, we see how Africa and eventu- ally Europe became active partners in an even more global network.

The story begins with China because it stood like a colossus over Eurasia from 1000 to 1450. Chinese technologies, manufactures, economic innovations, and organizing ideas formed the principal fuel of global interaction.

China in the Making of an Afro-Eurasian Network

We have seen in the previous chapter how the Chinese effort to exchange silk for horses created the Silk Road, the first important link between Asia and Europe. When the Huns and other nomadic peoples of north-central Asia interrupted the flow of goods along the Silk Road between the third and sixth centu- ries, the trade moved south. Malays, Indians, and Arabs pioneered a route that brought southern spices as well as silks and tropical products across the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. China was reduced to a number of smaller feuding kingdoms, not unlike the period before its unification 500 years earlier.

By the sixth century, however, the northern steppe stabilized as the nomads learned to ex- tract payment from the caravans for protection and provisions and China reunited its empire. Under three successive dynasties, Sui (580–618), Tang (618–907), and Song (960–1279), China achieved a level of technological innovation that the world had never seen. Consequently, as trade between China and the West developed again along the northern Silk Road, China was undergoing a profound technological transfor- mation. The new contacts between China and the West were then interrupted temporarily by

the Mongol conquests, but relations resumed under the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368). Mongol rule was devastating, though in some areas—mainly maritime and military—the technology and economy of China continued to grow. The return of native Chinese rule with the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) revitalized Chinese expansion, especially during the first half of the fifteenth century.

In three key areas that have shaped the modern world—the technology of the indus- trial revolution, the market economy, and the modern bureaucratic state—China was centu- ries ahead of the rest of the world.

Industry and Invention

So profound and pervasive was Chinese indus- trial growth from 1000 to 1450 that historians have compared it to the later industrial revolu- tion. While historians still date the beginnings of the industrial revolution in late eighteenth- century Britain, many of the roots of that revolution lay in the industrial products and techniques of China.

Textiles and Pottery. Chinese silk and por- celain were the gold standards for textiles and pottery when Britain launched an industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century by producing factory-made cottons and ceramic dishes called “China.” By the Song dynasty, Chinese porcelains were collected throughout the world as works of art. In the fifteenth cen- tury, East African merchants displayed Chi- nese blue and white dishes on the walls of their houses as a sign of prosperity. True Chinese porcelain could not be duplicated elsewhere. The luminous pottery was made from Chinese clay and feldspar, a Chinese stone. The impe- rial potteries established after 1000 employed over a million people by 1712, when French Jesuits smuggled the secrets to Europeans.

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The secrets of silk production—feeding silkworms on the leaves of mulberry trees, then unraveling the strands of their cocoons into a fine thread—had been protected by threat of death until the sixth century. In 550, however, the secret (along with the worms and leaves) was smuggled in bamboo from China to the court of the Byzantine emperor Justinian. Constantinople established a rival silk industry that later spread throughout the Muslim world as well.

Chinese silk and porcelain attracted such a huge continental demand that these industries stimulated the development of power machin- ery and mass production, very much the way British industry did hundreds of years later. Already mechanized by the Song dynasty, Chinese textile producers used water-powered mills and spinning wheels by the eleventh century.

Paper and Printing. We have already pointed to early Chinese papermaking—from mulberry bark and bamboo fiber around 100 BCE (about 1,000 years before the Muslim world and 1,500 years before Europe). Printing

with carved wood blocks may have originated in Buddhist monasteries as part of their effort to reproduce scriptures from India. The earli- est of these may have been produced by Bud- dhist monks in Korea, but the first print shops were probably those in Chinese monasteries around 700 to 750. A million copies of the first Japanese scroll book were printed between 764 and 770, but not one was meant to be read. Rather, each was to be a miniature Buddha reciting prayers.2 The earliest Chinese printed book to be read dates from 868. Block printing (carving a complete page at once) was particu- larly appropriate for Chinese with its tens of thousands of characters, and blocks could be engraved with pictures as well as words.

The use of individual pieces of movable type for printing developed later. Chinese printers experimented with wooden, ceramic, and metal type (which was probably first de- veloped by skilled Korean metalworkers). In general, however, Chinese printers continued to use block printing. Movable type worked best where a few symbols were used frequently. Not only did the Chinese have the problem of

Map 5.1 Paper spread through Buddhist monasteries on the Silk Road from Dunhuang to Korea, Japan, and Tibet and west to Samarkand, from where Muslim victors brought it to western Asia and Europe.

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innumerable characters, but Chinese culture also prized calligraphy, having turned the writ- ten script into an art form—one entirely lost by machinelike interchangeable typefaces. For Europeans, who had used phonetic alphabets for centuries, movable-type printing was a much greater advantage. Nevertheless, both printing and movable type came to Europe sometime after 1250, probably through Italy, possibly in the skills of slaves from Tibet or western China who were brought from the Black Sea markets to many Italian cities. The creation of a movable-type printing press by Gutenberg around 1450 combined the advan- tages of a mechanical press with movable type and a phonetic language that would eventually produce mass-market books and periodicals for a reading public in the millions and even billions.

Compass and Ships. The Chinese discov- ered the magnetic properties of magnetite and created magnets and compasses as early as the third century. By the eleventh century, the floating compass needle was used in Chinese ships. During the Tang dynasty, the Chinese colonized areas in the south, and by the Song dynasty, a majority of the Chinese population lived south of the Yangtze. Increasingly, rela- tions with the peoples of the southern oceans became a matter of imperial policy. By the end of the Song dynasty, Chinese ships were sailing regularly into the Indian Ocean. Chi- nese vessels also sailed to the Spice Islands of modern Indonesia for the same spices that would attract Columbus 500 years later. Dur- ing the period of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), the Mongols sent Chinese ships to invade Java and Japan. The Japanese inva- sion of 1281 failed, according to Japanese tra- dition, because of a “divine wind” (kamikaze) that sunk the Chinese ships, but recent excava- tions suggest that the ships, though huge by

European standards, may have been poorly constructed.

When the native Chinese Ming dynasty (1368–1644) gained control of China, ship- building became a major priority. Huge dry docks were constructed, new shipbuilding technologies perfected, and thousands of sail- ors trained. Between 1405 and 1433, the Ming emperor dispatched hundreds of “treasure ships,” huge vessels, any one of which could have tucked Columbus’s entire fleet of three ships into its hold. Under the command of Admiral Zheng He, a Muslim from Yunnan in southwestern China, these ships brought tens of thousands of Chinese sailors, diplomats, naturalists, artists, mapmakers, and tribute collectors on visits to foreign ports as far away as East Africa. The continual threat of inva- sion from northern and central Asia probably brought the ocean voyages to an abrupt close.

Guns and Gunpowder. In 644, an Indian monk in China showed that certain soils (containing saltpeter), if ignited, would pro- duce a purple flame. By the eighth century, Chinese alchemists were making gunpowder. In the tenth century, soldiers packed gun- powder into bamboo tubes to launch rockets against enemy troops and fortifications. The first known cannon date from 1127. Prob- ably the first population to share this Chinese technology was the nomadic confederacies of the steppe. Although their main weapons were crossbows fired from fast-moving horses, the Mongols also used gunpowder and Chinese catapults effectively, especially in the siege of cities. Weapons developed in warfare rarely remain secrets very long, particularly since it was common practice for each side to turn border populations and defeated troops into their own armies. Nevertheless, gunpowder did not reach European or Middle Eastern armament makers for more than 400 years. It

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may have come to Italy, along with printing, in the minds and skills of slaves purchased in Black Sea ports.

Iron and Coal. The Chinese use of iron dates from the beginning of the Iron Age in Asia, but production was relatively low before the Tang dynasty. By 1078 (toward the end of the Northern Song dynasty), China produced more iron than any country in the world before the industrial revolution. In fact, the entire iron production of western Europe did not surpass Chinese production until 1700.3

By the eleventh century, Chinese iron was also pure enough to be considered steel. The first ironworkers hammered soft iron into tools. Later, iron was extracted from rock and fired with wood or charcoal to remove impuri- ties and strengthen it. But iron made this way

still contained a high measure of carbon. Steel not only was much stronger but also did not rust. The making of steel, however, required much higher temperatures (about 1,600 de- grees Fahrenheit). Those temperatures could be achieved only with coke, which was a con- centrated block of coal (like charcoal was to wood), an intensified energy source.

The Chinese use of coal and coke for fuel may have been fortuitous. Northern China was not heavily forested, and much of the forest that did exist was cut to make charcoal during the early Song dynasty. Chinese iron production was concentrated near the north- ern capital of Kaifeng near abundant sources of coal. The market of metropolitan Kaifeng, a city of a million people, drove iron and steel production in the eleventh century. Iron and

Figure 5.2 Waterwheels and Smelting Iron. As early as the first century, the Chinese were using water wheels to grind grain and (as seen here) to power the bellows of a blast furnace. This illustration comes from a book, known as the Nong Shu, written by Wang Zhen in 1313. The large book also illustrated the author’s development of wooden movable type. Waterhistory.org

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steel built a vibrant regional economy. The value of Kaifeng trade at the end of the elev- enth century has been estimated at about 12.4 million British pounds; by comparison, the imports and exports of London in 1711 were worth no more than 8.4 million pounds.4

Industrial Revolution? Figures like these have led some modern historians to ask why China did not undergo an industrial revolution as Britain did 700 years later. If we restrict our inquiry to Kaifeng, the answer is fairly straight- forward. Unfortunately for the people of Kai- feng, they entered a period after 1100 of a series of catastrophes that made iron production the least of their worries. In 1126, Kaifeng was con- quered by the Jurchen people from the north- ern grasslands. In 1176 and again in 1194, the Yellow River changed its course, causing severe flooding and isolating Kaifeng from its tradi- tional supply and trade routes. In 1233, Kaifeng fell to the Mongols after a brutal and punishing siege accompanied by plague and famine. A report of the time claimed that 900,000 coffins were carried out of the gates of the city over a five-day period. This may not be an exaggera- tion since the population of Kaifeng in 1330 had been reduced to only about 90,000—less than a tenth of its eleventh-century size.5

After the Mongol period, the Chinese economy revived, but the population shifted to the area south of the Yangtze River. While iron was no longer produced in the Kaifeng mines, it was produced in southern and cen- tral China. One problem, however, was that China’s coal fields were mainly in the north. The nine provinces of the south contain only 1.8 percent of China’s coal reserves.6 Conse- quently, most of the iron that was produced when China revived in the fifteenth century was probably fueled with wood or charcoal. Chinese metallurgists may have even lost the craft of making coke from coal, as this was

normally passed on orally from master to ap- prentice. As a result, Chinese iron in the Ming and Manchu dynasties (1368–1911) was infe- rior to that of the eleventh-century steel.

A modern historian points to a further irony.7 The industrial revolution that trans- formed Britain and the world in the nineteenth century was driven by the symbiosis of heavy industries in iron, coal, and steam. Iron became steel in blast furnaces stoked by coke. Steam en- gines were developed to remove water from the coal mines, then they powered the removal of the coal in wagons run on iron rails, and finally steam engines were refined to drive steel rail- road cars along the iron rails laid throughout the world. The irony is that Chinese coal mines did not flood but were kept dry, so they did not have to develop steam engines. Dry mines were more dangerous and difficult to mine because the dry air full of coal dust was highly combustible. Consequently, even if China had an abundance of coal easily at hand and even if the Chinese continued to produce coke and steel, the syn- ergy of iron, coal, and steam that jump-started the industrial revolution in Britain would have been less likely to occur in China.

Could China have begun an industrial revolution hundreds of years before it oc- curred in Europe? Perhaps, if there had been no Jurchen and Mongol invasions. Perhaps, if China had the global market for textiles and iron that Britain enjoyed thanks to its colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is important to realize that no one foresaw the industrial revolution; no one could have planned it. Such things are much easier to copy than create. China has been industrial- izing quite successfully in recent decades along models borrowed from nineteenth-century Europe and late twentieth-century Asia.

But what was the relationship between medieval Chinese technological inventiveness

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and the industrial revolution that eventually created the modern world? If the Mongol invasion ended Chinese steel production and dramatically curtailed Chinese iron produc- tion, there was no continuity between Chinese metallurgy and the growth of the British and European iron industry. In fact, between 1500 and 1700, Chinese, Muslim, and European iron industries were relatively equal. There- fore, the precocious inventiveness of the Chi- nese iron and steel industry during the Song dynasty had limited global consequences.

Other Chinese inventions did begin a global history, however. While Chinese iron production was not copied by Muslims or Europeans, Chinese ceramics and silk were. Chinese ships were not copied, but the com- pass was. In these and many other technolo- gies, China participated in a shared universe of technological invention and development. In an age with porous borders but no patent offices, it would be a fool’s errand to trace the history of most inventions. Many transfers are as hidden from the historian as they were hidden from authorities at the time. Often technologies were stolen or captured in war. When Muslim armies defeated Chinese troops in 751, among the Chinese prisoners brought to Samarkand were Chinese papermakers. Pa- per appeared in Baghdad by the early ninth century and in the rest of the Muslim world by 1000. Later, paper filtered into Europe through Spain and Italy. The compass also sailed on Muslim ships before European ones, but some Chinese inventions jumped straight to Europe. Gunpowder, cannon, and block printing went directly from China to Italy in the fourteenth century, possibly brought by Mongolian or Tibetan slaves purchased by Italian merchants on the Black Sea.8 Thus, in China, we see many roots of modern technology. And while some of these turned out to be only temporarily

productive, others turned into permanent routes to the modern world.

Commerce and Capitalism

Increasing trade is a long-term trend in world history. However, since rulers and religious institutions managed much of the trade in the ancient world, private, capitalist, market- driven trade has had a shorter history. China clearly played an important role in advancing private markets. Markets, merchants, private investors, and manufacturers were more im- portant in Song dynasty China than ever before. But if capitalism means a society in which commercial decisions trump most oth- ers, China was not capitalist. The government directed much of the economy, and merchants were neither independent actors nor members of a self-conscious class. Rather, they operated in great family, clan, and lineage organizations that mediated individual action and restricted the role of the market.

Money and Markets. Song dynasty China created many of the elements of modern commercial society that we take for granted. Paper money is perhaps the most notable. Marco Polo was astounded to see paper money in China when he visited in the thirteenth century, but since appearing in 1024, paper money had already been in use for hundreds of years. Between 1265 and 1279, the government backed its paper notes with gold and silver. The Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) made paper money legal tender, the only money that one could legally use. Foreign visitors like Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta wrote of having to surrender their foreign money on arrival and convert whatever they wanted to spend into Chinese paper.

During the period of the Song dynasty, government returns from commercial activity

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surpassed those of agriculture.9 This income included both taxes from private commerce and the revenues derived from government owned industries.

Public versus Private Enterprise. How much of this commercial activity was private, and how much government owned? Salt pro- duction was a government monopoly, as was tea, alcohol, and incense. The huge Chinese military (about a million strong) played an important role in directing the economy. In Hangzhou, the army owned 13 large and six small stores that sold alcoholic beverages. From these, it also ran taverns with state prostitutes.10

A class of private merchants and producers grew with the expanding Chinese economy during the Song dynasty, but it is likely that the state increased rather than decreased its con- trol of the economy over time. There were a large number of private iron producers in Kai- feng during the eleventh century, for example. But by the thirteenth century, independent entrepreneurs had been replaced by govern- ment contractors. Then, during the reign of Kublai Khan (1260–1290) and the Mongol Yuan dynasty, these contractors were replaced by government-salaried officials. Increasingly, free laborers were replaced by slave and de- pendent workers.11 Salt mines near Hangzhou employed hundreds of thousands of semi– slave workers at starvation wages. Those who were not homeless were kept in substandard public housing, six to eight in a room.

Markets also became less free during the Mongol Yuan dynasty. Merchants complained that government manufactures undersold pri- vate producers and that government purchas- ers paid less than full value. The government was a major buyer of armaments, clothing, and military equipment, some of which was made by government factories and some privately.

Hangzhou. Great cities crystallize the val- ues of the civilization from which they spring. Hangzhou was one of the greatest. Marco Polo, who visited the former capital of the Southern Song dynasty shortly after the Mongol con- quest in 1275, thought it was “the greatest city which may be found in the world, where so many pleasures may be found that one fancies himself to be in Paradise.” Hangzhou offered lowly officials, foreign merchants, and native working people a variety of recreational facili- ties and amusements. There were many spe- cialized restaurants: some served everything ice cold, including fish and soups; some spe- cialized in silkworm or shrimp pies and plum wine; and even teahouses offered sumptuous decor, dancing girls, and musical lessons of all kinds. On the lake, there were hundreds of boats, many of which could be rented, accord- ing to Marco Polo, “for parties of pleasure”:

Anyone who desires to go a-pleasuring with the women or with a party of his own sex hires one of these barges, which are always to be found completely furnished with tables and chairs and all other appa- ratus for a feast. . . . And truly a trip on this Lake is a much more charming recreation than can be enjoyed on land. For on the one side lies the city in its entire length, so that the spectators in the barges, from the distance at which they stand, take in the whole prospect in its full beauty and grandeur, with its numberless palaces, temples, monasteries, and gardens, full of lofty trees, sloping to the shore.

While anything could be purchased in Hangzhou, many things were free. Work- ers, soldiers, and the poor frequented almost two dozen “pleasure grounds.” Each was a large fairground with markets, plays, musical groups, instrumental and dance lessons, ballet

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performances, jugglers, acrobats, storytellers, performing fish, archery displays and lessons, snake charmers, boxing matches, conjurers, chess players, magicians, imitators of street cries, imitators of village talk, and specialists in painting chrysanthemums, telling obscene stories, posing riddles, and flying kites. Gam- bling, drinking, and prostitution were also part of the scene here as elsewhere in the city.

Market areas were equally a source of en- tertainment and business. Marco Polo saw so much fish in a single market that he could not imagine it would ever be eaten, but all of it was sold in a couple of hours. There were markets devoted to specialized goods and crafts that could hardly be found in the rest of China. One “guidebook” gave directions for the best rhinoceros skins, ivory combs, turbans, wicker cages, painted fans, philosophy books, and lotus-pink rice. In addition, the resident of Hangzhou could find books (hand or mechan- ically printed) on a fantastic variety of subjects: curious rocks, jades, coins, bamboo, plum trees, special aspects of printing and painting, foreign lands, poetry, philosophy, Confucius, mushrooms, and encyclopedias on everything.

Marco Polo’s description of Hangzhou reveals a metropolis of unbridled commerce, but in praise of its architecture, Marco Polo added a note that shows the enormous power the emperor exerted over individuals, families, and private owners of property:

And again this king did another thing; that when he rides by any road in the city . . . and it happened that he found two beautiful great houses and between them might be a small one . . . then the king asks why that house is so small. . . . And one told him that that small house belongs to a poor man who has not the power to make it larger like the others. Then the king commands that the little house may

be made as beautiful and as high as were those two others which were beside it, and he paid the cost. And if it happened that the little house belonged to a rich man, then he commanded him immediately to cause it to be taken away. And by his command there was not in his capital in the realms of Hangzhou any house which was not both beautiful and great, besides the great palaces and the great mansions of which there were great plenty about the city.

Hangzhou was still the emperor’s city, and China was the emperor’s country. The em- peror could encourage trade, support private businesses, and reward economic develop- ment, but the emperor could never be a busi- nessperson. He could never think or behave like a capitalist. Rather, he was like a father to all the people of the Celestial Kingdom, rich and poor, powerful and weak.

Technologically, administratively, and ec- onomically, China cleared routes to modern society that others followed only recently. But China was not a modern society. Nor was China alone, large as it was, pervasive enough to change the world. The world we know evolved from the spread of these Chinese innovations and the contributions of other societies in a vast global network of trade, migration, and influences that many contem- porary scholars call a “world system.”

State and Bureaucracy

The modern state was also a Chinese inven- tion. The Chinese state is, in fact, the longest- continuing state in world history, whether we date its origins back to the Bronze Age or the formation of the Qin (Ch’in) dynasty in the second century BCE. But by the modern state, we mean something a bit different.

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The Modern State. Our world consists almost entirely of nation-states (and the in- ternational organizations that represent these states). We take them for granted because there are no parts of the world that do not be- long to a particular state. No island is too small or too far away to avoid the jurisdiction of a state. Even ships on the ocean fly the flag of a particular nation-state (though often one cho- sen for tax or legal purposes). But this was not always the case. A thousand years ago, there was no “France” or “Egypt” or “India.” There were empires and caliphates, “no-man’s- lands,” stateless peoples, and frontiers beyond the control of governments. Many parts of the world were run by religious organiza- tions, local lords, tribal leaders, or marauding armies rather than territorial sovereigns. The transformation of a stateless or tribal society into a territorial state involved a number of important steps. We have discussed some of these in our study of the ancient and classi- cal world. Tribal, clan, or family organization

and identity had to be subordinated to state or national organization and identity, and there had to be an authority (a sovereign) able to administer the territory in some more regular and stable form than periodic plunder.

One reason why the Chinese state proved so long lasting was its development of state bureaucracy. As early as the Han dynasty, but especially during the Tang and Song dynasties, China developed a system of state administra- tion second to none. One of the distinctive fea- tures of this centralized state administration was the Chinese civil service and examination system. We referred in a previous chapter to the origins of this system in the Han dynasty. It became especially important in the Tang and Song dynasties and had much to do with the revival of the Chinese Empire after the sixth century.

In the beginning, the old aristocracy re- jected a system based on exams rather than birth, but eventually they too recognized that the system had changed. As early as the

Figure 5.3 Portrait of Jiang Shunfu, Mandarin square. The Chinese civil service exams created the first modern government of professionals. Jiang Shunfu (1453-1504) was an official (mandarin) of the first rank, as indicated by his badge of two flying cranes. His followers are probably his aides. Anonymous.

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seventh century, one Tang emperor was said to remark, on seeing young aristocrats line up for the exams, “The heroes of the empire are all in my pocket.” In fact, the battle between the palace and the old families continued throughout the Tang dynasty, and it was not until the Song dynasty that the old aristocracy was replaced by a new elite class of gradu- ates of the highest state exams. Eventually, the sons of the old families were replaced by new names. The exam lists of 1148 and 1256 (which are unusually complete) show that less than half of the winning doctoral candidates had fathers, paternal grandfathers, or paternal great-grandfathers in the bureaucracy.

A Bureaucracy of Experts. The Chinese civil service exams were part of a larger pro- cess of change in Chinese society. To prepare candidates from all social classes for the ex- ams, the northern Song emperor Shenzong (1068–1086) and his chief minister Wang An- Shih created a national university, perhaps the first in the world (although it was displaced by exam preparers in the succeeding Southern Song period [1127–1279]).

Exams may not strike modern college stu- dents as a major step forward in world history. In fact, modern society may expect exams to do too much. But in a world in which family and class stamped one for life, a test of ability or intelligence was a creative innovation. Rul- ers could be assured of experts, the ruled could expect fairness, and the talented could hope for success.

Mongols in the Making of an Afro-Eurasian Network

A network is a regional system in which the various parts (countries, nations, and peoples) not only connect but also interact with each

other in a way that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. Today, we live in a world network that embraces virtually every square foot of the planet. There are still places where one can be alone, even hide, but virtually no one on the planet anymore is unaffected by what others do and have done.

History over the very long term is a story of larger and larger spheres of interaction. The classical empires were larger than the an- cient empires. The network that connected the worlds of China, the Mongols, and Muslims in the thirteenth century was larger still. This thirteenth-century network12 was a root of the modern world network that has embraced both Eastern and Western hemispheres since 1492. Some historians call that modern net- work the “capitalist world system”; others might call it the beginning of globalization.

The Mongols

The Mongols of the thirteenth century were very different from Song dynasty China. While the Mongols may have participated in the de- velopment of some Chinese technologies like gunpowder, they were in no sense industrial, bureaucratic, or capitalist. Theirs was a no- madic pastoral society: tribes of herders who periodically organized themselves to exploit “a new type of herd—human.”13 The rise of the Mongols under Temujin, who became Great Khan (Genghis Khan) in 1206, was the culmination of a series of changes that had occurred in the grasslands of Eurasia since the period of mass migrations and upheaval that had brought an end to the Han dynasty and the Western Roman Empire. Increasingly, the peoples of the steppe—Turkmen, Tatars, Uighurs, and Mongols—chose to charge trans- port duties and extract “protection” instead of raiding settled societies. But sometimes

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this more peaceful arrangement would break down. In addition, after 1000, when the tribes of the steppe broke the new balance with the settled peoples, the impact was often more lasting. This happened in the eleventh cen- tury, when the Seljuk Turks conquered most of what is today called Turkey (after them) as well as parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. The Mongol expansion of the thirteenth century marked a similar break with the peaceful system of get and take.

The Mongols helped make the Afro- Eurasian network in two important ways: one positive and one negative.

Death and Destruction. The negative side of Mongol expansion was the enormous human cost and its economic consequences. When Genghis Khan died in 1227, his body was car- ried back across the vast empire he had created to be buried near the Mongol homeland. So that no one would reveal the burial place, how- ever, every person along the way who aided or witnessed the procession was killed.

Genghis Khan died as he had lived. He created something very close to the world em- pire he envisioned when he declared himself Khan of Khans and “ruler of all who dwell in felt tents” at a Mongol meeting of the tribes in 1206. He conquered the great cities along the Asian Silk Road (Beijing, Samarkand, and Bukhara), slaughtering perhaps a million peo- ple in the process. His rules of engagement were simple. Those who surrendered imme- diately became slaves; those who resisted were killed. Great civilizations were lost with their cities: the Muslim Kwarezmian civilization in Samarkand and Bukhara and the Chinese- Jurchen civilization at Beijing.

After his death, his successors continued his global conquests in Russia, eastern Europe, and the Muslim heartland. In 1237, Mongol cavalries under his nephew Batu Khan swept

westward to Russia, defeated the forces of Al- exander Nevsky, and destroyed Russia’s two largest cities, Kiev and Novgorod, in 1240. In 1241, Batu’s armies conquered a combined Pol- ish and German army and threatened western Europe. In front of the gates of Vienna, he sud- denly turned back to attend the funeral of his uncle Ogedai and the selection of a new Khan in Mongolia. Europe was not threatened again, but the Muslim world was the next to feel the fury of the Mongols. In 1258, the great city of Baghdad, already living on memories, fell to the Mongols, finally bringing an end to the Abba- sid caliphate. In 1279, Kublai Khan conquered China, ending the Southern Song dynasty at Hangzhou. In less than 50 years, the Mongols had conquered the known world of Eurasia.

Trade and Tolerance. The positive con- tribution of the Mongols was to bring all of Eurasia—from eastern Europe to the China Sea—under a single regime of trade and ad- ministration. The Mongols united all of Eur- asia north of the Islamic lands. They permitted the free exchange of goods along the northern Silk Road, vastly reducing the costs of du- ties, robbery, and other risks in international trade. The northern arc of the Silk Road also completed a great Eurasian circle of trade that sped goods and ideas from China to Europe to Africa to the Indian Ocean.

The trade routes of this “Pax Mongolica” were not accidental consequences of Mongol conquests. Rather, the Mongols actively sought to increase trade and the well-being of traders. The Mongol cultural attitude toward merchants was much more positive than the Chinese Con- fucian attitude. Mongols benefited from the flow of goods along the Silk Road, enjoyed lux- ury items like silks and porcelains, profited as other central Asians had from the sale of horses and sheep, and prospered more from modest taxes than occasional plunder. In central Asia

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and in their conquered realms, the Mongols also aided the growth of financial instruments that have since become common. We have mentioned paper money, which the Mongol Yuan dynasty made legal tender in China. The Mongols also attempted to introduce paper money into Persia, though there they were less successful. In addition, the Mongols created a financial institution called the ortogh, which had elements of modern ideas of the corpora- tion and insurance. The ortogh was an instru- ment of common ownership of a caravan; like a modern corporation, it divided costs and risks among a number of merchants or investors, al- lowing them to share the profits. The Mongols also encouraged the building of caravan stops and ensured that merchants would have access to food and financial needs. And for the Mon- gols, the lending of money for interest was not prohibited or restricted as it was in Christian and Muslim cultures.

In religion, Mongols were not mono- theists; they practiced traditional rites of shamanism, ancestor worship, and respect for natural forces. Mongols were open to other religions. Many Mongols married wives from tribes that were Nestorian Christian. But they neither expected other peoples to follow Mongol religion nor disparaged for- eigners who followed different traditions. Consequently, Mongols respected and ea- gerly learned from foreigners. Without a written language, they borrowed the script of the neighboring Uighur people and de- veloped a written body of literature from the thirteenth century on.

Mongol hospitality to travelers was well known. The Mongol capital at Karakorum held many foreign residents, including some Christians who lived under Mongol rule be- cause they found Mongol religious tolerance greater than in their Christian country.

Map 5.2 The Mongol Empire around 1280: Kublai Khan’s Chinese Yuan Empire and the khanates of other descendants of Genghis Khan.

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Political Divisions and Economic Unity. By the end of the thirteenth century, almost all of Asia was ruled by a single extended family. You might think that the existence of Mongol Khans governing all the major civi- lizations from Baghdad to Hangzhou would have created a unified Mongol Empire. In fact, the Mongol Khanates of Persia, called the Illkanate, and China, called the Yuan dynasty, adopted many of the traits of their respective Persian and Chinese subjects. The rulers of the Illkanate eventually became Muslims. Kublai Khan did not become either Confucian or Chi- nese, but he and his administrators adopted many aspects of Chinese culture.

Economically, the Mongol world from 1250 to 1330 was one. Goods traveled easily across the great continent again. Chinese styles of art and architecture filtered across Eurasia and fused with traditional central Asian and Persian styles (though, interestingly, fewer Persian mo- tifs were adopted by Chinese artists). Precious objects were made by a new class of interna- tional artists in a developing international style. One fitting symbol of the new global age was the invention of world history.

World History for a Global Age. Rashid al- Din (1247–1318) lived at the apex of Mongol global unity. His own life brought together the crosscurrents of global interaction. He was

Figure 5.4 Illustration of Mongol siege warfare from Rachid al- Din’s world history. bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, NY.

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born into a Jewish family in Persia. His grand- father had been an adviser to Hulegu Khan, the conqueror of Baghdad and founder of the Illkanid dynasty. At the age of 30, Rashid al- Din converted to Islam. Soon after, he began a career in his grandfather’s footsteps, serving three Khans successively as court physician, steward, and vizier (chief adviser). The first two Khans were, like Hulegu, sympathetic to the Buddhists, but they also held debates among representatives of different faiths and awarded prizes to the most convincing. In 1295, the new Khan, Ghazan, chose Islam as the official faith, but in order to ensure that Mongol traditions were not lost, he commis- sioned Rashid al-Din to write a history of the Mongol conquests. The project grew into a multivolume encyclopedic history of all the people the Mongols encountered. Ghazan threw open the Mongol and family archives, instructed all to cooperate with the historian, brought in a Chinese historian to help with Chinese history, and instructed his emissaries to Europe and India to provide information.

The enormous compendium, the Jami al- Tawarikh, written in Persian and Arabic and beautifully illustrated in numerous manuscript editions, may be called the first world history book. From 1307 until his death, Rashid al- Din supervised the writing and illustrating of numerous manuscripts of his history and other works. For his efforts, he was gener- ously rewarded by his mentor, the Khan. A later historian who knew him said that Rashid was the highest-paid civil servant in history. He was granted an entire suburb of the city of Tabriz and employed many of its residents in producing his manuscripts, he worked on the various estates that he had been given in the Caucasus and Asia Minor, he revived the efficient Mongol postal system, and he coor- dinated activities with his sons, eight of whom

governed major provinces of the Illkanate. At the age of 70, however, Rashid al-Din ran afoul of the jealous courtiers of a new Khan. Accused of poisoning his predecessor, he was summarily executed.

Ecological Unity: A Dark Victory. Ecologi- cally, the Mongol conquest left a dark legacy. The Mongol victory had incorporated all of Eurasia into a single environment. With few exceptions (Rashid al-Din noted in his history that there were no snakes in Ireland, and so it remained), the previously local animals, plants, and pests became Eurasian, at home far from their roots. Fleas could travel across a continent by horseback; rats could live long enough in the hold of a ship to wipe out an entire crew. Within a few years of the death of Rashid al- Din, that fact was to have dire consequences.

The bubonic plague, called the Black Death because of the darkened blood-stained corpses, probably originated in China in the 1320s and spread to western Asia and Europe by 1347. Plague is an endemic disease among certain burrowing rodents like rats. When these rodent populations are disturbed by contact with hu- mans, fleas can transfer the disease to humans or their animals. This is what happened in the wake of Mongol migrations and conquests. Plague had spread before, most notably in the sixth and seventh centuries, and it would strike again and again, but the fourteenth-century contagion had catastrophic consequences. The population of China declined from about 125 million to 90 million in the fourteenth century, partly as a result of disease. Between 1345 and 1347, the plague traveled west along the cara- van routes through Russia to the Black Sea and Constantinople. From the Black Sea, it trav- eled by ship to Alexandria, Cairo, and Italy. Between 1348 and 1350, the plague claimed the lives of a third to a half of the population of the Mediterranean and northern Europe. Since the

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plague was easily spread by contact, cities lost a higher proportion of their inhabitants. Half to three-quarters of the population of Florence died the first year. The poet Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) recalled in The Decameron “that a dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat would be to-day.”14

After 1350, the disease had taken its toll. Those who survived had earned their immu- nities to future outbreaks that occurred with somewhat less virulence through the seven- teenth century. But the population was slow to rise. Cities bounced back most quickly but only because the countryside emptied out. In Europe, population did not return to pre-1350 levels until 1500 or 1600.

Europe was lucky. Having escaped the Mongols, Europeans suffered only from the Black Death. The Chinese population peaked at 115 million around 1200, before the Mon- gols, a level it did not reach again until about 1550. Parts of Asia escaped both the Mongols and the plague. The Japanese population grew steadily throughout, tripling between 1000 and 1500. The population of the Indian subconti- nent grew steadily but more gradually.

The area that suffered the most severe population losses was the Muslim heartland. The case of Iraq is most striking. Its popula- tion peaked at about 2.5 million around 800, declined to 1 million by 1300, and remained at that level until around 1850. Since that decline began before the Mongols and was not a result of the plague, it is part of a larger story.

Islam in the Making of an Afro-Eurasian Network

The story of the Muslim world between 1000 and 1450 is one of simultaneous expansion and decline. At the core of the Dar al-Islam,

the great Abbasid caliphate faded away, steppe nomads looted cities, populations stagnated, and warfare became endemic. During the same period, however, the Islamic religion spread to India, the islands of Indonesia, central Asia, the Balkans, and sub-Saharan Africa. In terri- tory and population, the Dar al-Islam probably doubled. Further, as Islam spread, its followers created cultural and economic ties that made Islam a medieval stateless web. In place of an Arab faith and a centralized government, the Dar al-Islam became a continental civilization.

New Muslims from the Steppe

We have seen how the history of Eurasia has been frequently shaped by the interaction of the steppe grasslands where nomadic pastoralists tended their flocks and the agriculture-based cities of China, South Asia, and Europe. Ma- jor migrations from the grasslands—in 1700 BCE, 1200 BCE, 200 CE, and, now again, 1000 CE—initiated new eras of history. In this con- text, the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century were part of a larger steppe migration that began with the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century. The Turkic-speaking pastoralists lived farther west than the Mongols and closer to the cities of the Abbasid caliphate. Consequently, they became Muslims before they displaced the armies and administration of the caliphate. In fact, many Turks had already been brought into the Abbasid army. Without much difficulty in the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks con- quered Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Anatolia (modern Turkey), leaving the Abbasid caliphate to gov- ern in name only. Baghdad was left as a shell. Seljuk tribal leaders governed entire countries with their tribal armies.

The government of the Turks was very different from that of a bureaucratic state like the Abbasid caliphate. But it set a pattern that

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would be duplicated from Egypt to India. “Thus arose,” Marshall Hodgson, a leading historian of Islam, has written, “what was to be typical of much of Islamadom for several centuries, a fluid set of purely military governments most of them founded chiefly on the personal prestige of the emir or his father.”15 The centralized state was replaced by garrisoned troops. Emirs gov- erned by whim and wile, their display of force the final authority. But unlike the centralized state, which presumed an evenness of com- mand, the effective authority of the emir ex- tended only as far as his eye could see. Beyond the view of his fort lay large areas of anarchy.16

Slaves, Soldiers, and Sons. As the Abbasid state atrophied, sultans and emirs lacked a bu- reaucratic system to raise taxes and soldiers. Since they were themselves tribal leaders, they could draw on a large following of retainers and troops, but they were always wary of other leaders, in their own and other tribes or clans, who were prepared to challenge their authority. This was especially problematic since, under the rules of the steppe, it was customary for brother to challenge brother in a system of election by contest that was intended to ensure that the strongest would always lead.

Figure 5.5 Muslim scholars listen to recitation in front of a library wall of books. Scala. White Images/Art Resource, NY. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France.

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Who could a ruler trust? Without an insti- tution of state loyalty, Muslim rulers developed an ingenious—but to modern sensibilities un- usual—solution. It was common practice in ancient and medieval warfare for victors in battle to take the defeated as slaves. In fact, this was one of the main sources of slaves. Slavery was not necessarily permanent or inheritable, and there was a Muslim rule against enslav- ing fellow Muslims. Therefore, since at least Abbasid times, Muslim armies would capture non-Muslims and make them slave soldiers. Initially, Turks, Mongols, and other steppe peoples were thought prime candidates for slave soldiers. Later, captives were taken from the Christian Balkans, the “slavic” areas of eastern Europe, the Caucasus Mountains, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Now the idea of a slave soldier might seem a contradiction in terms. It would hardly seem prudent to give a slave a weapon or send him away to do battle. But the system of slave soldiers worked because the captives were en- slaved rather than killed and then converted to Islam—qualifying their slave status somewhat, although they were still slaves to God and to the sultan; in addition, they were well trained and well cared for. In fact, slaves became of- ficers and generals, even emirs and sultans. Since the government was military, slaves were trained for the most important positions in the administration of many Muslim governments.

The advantage of a class of slave soldiers and officials to the ruler was that such “for- eigners” were not beholden to any clan or tribal leaders; their only loyalty was to the sultan or emir who “owned” them. Further, as slaves, they were generally prevented from having families of their own and adding to the number of competing clans. In fact, on a few occasions, former slaves revolted and created dynasties of their own. One of these was the

Mamluk (literally “slave”) dynasty of Egypt (1250–1517), in which Turkic and Circassian17 slaves came to power though more through palace revolt than inheritance.

In Place of Government. Ironically, the medieval Muslim tradition of government as mainly a military matter created a civilization that unleashed numerous creative energies and granted Muslims a wide range of free- doms. Slave dynasties and military govern- ments left a good bit of daily life unattended. Without a centralized bureaucracy, many mat- ters normally regulated by government were left to other agencies.

Matters of family life were regulated by re- ligious law and authority. In lieu of legislative bodies, Muslims followed the shari’a, the body of law that emerged from the Muslim com- munity since the time of Muhammad’s gover- nance of Medina. Muslim scholars interpreted these traditions or made pronouncements based on them. Muslim courts administered and enforced the law, relying on families and clans when necessary.

Islam was a decentralized religion. There were no popes, cardinals, bishops, and church councils as there were in Christianity. The Muslim community needed little supervision because it had God’s law in the Quran. Every Muslim thereby had access to the most im- portant elements of his or her religion. The centrality of the Quran meant a high level of literacy among Muslims, at least in Arabic. Schooling in Quranic literacy was private and pervasive. Individual scholars and masters of Islam formed schools and took students. Universities, like Cairo’s Al Azhar, the world’s oldest (founded in 970), subsidized students from all over the Muslim world with the aid of donations.

Charity was an intrinsic part of Islam. Giving to the poor was one of the five central

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“pillars” of the faith. This zakat was collected from all Muslims and directed to the needs of the poor, infirm, and recently converted. Vari- ous private charities, called waqf, provided for hospitals, education, housing, welfare, burials, and other needs, public and private.

Non-Muslims were relieved of the zakat but instead paid a defense tax called the jizya, which Muslims were not required to pay. In general, non-Muslims, like Jews and Chris- tians, were governed by their own laws, courts, and authorities.

It is important to recognize that no me- dieval society treated people as individuals. For instance, Jews in Muslim and European societies were treated as a corporate group. They generally lived in separate areas, pursued separate occupations, and sometimes were ex- pected to wear clothing that established their separate identities. Freedom from arbitrary persecution was purchased with the jizya, but Jews and Christians in Muslim society were no more equal to Muslims than Jews and Muslims were equal to Christians in medieval Europe. Limited or military government opened more opportunities for Muslims than others, but Jews and Christians were rarely persecuted.

Muslims, Merchants, and Markets

A Merchant’s Religion. Like modern Amer- ica, the medieval Muslim world used markets to carry out many activities normally assumed by governments. More than any of the great religions, Islam sanctioned trade and the work of merchants. The Quran may be the only one of the world’s holy books that deals explicitly with matters of trade, and the merchant was a cultural model. Not only had the Prophet of Islam been a merchant, but merchants were particularly well placed to follow the de- mands of the faith. They could afford to give

generously to the poor, they could make the pilgrimage to Mecca as part of their business travel, and they could make the necessary ar- rangements to pray five times a day and fast during the month of Ramadan.

Islam not only began as a merchant’s reli- gion but also facilitated the needs of merchants as it developed and expanded. Muslims shared a common set of values across what would later be many national boundaries. A com- parison with Europe is enlightening. Christi- anity was also a universal religion, asserting common brotherhood and shared values, but Christians identified themselves as much with their particular nation, city, and church (e.g., Roman, Greek, and Nestorian) as they did with fellow Christians. Muslims had a wide- ranging network of good faith to support long- distance trade and exchange.

Certain ideas and institutions that were es- sential to the development of capitalist society were created or refined in this context. Banks, checks, insurance, third-party payments, ac- counting and bookkeeping procedures, shares of ownership, leasing contracts, the partner- ship, and the corporation were all refined in the Islamic world. Some of these had pre- Islamic roots but became more sophisticated under the Dar al-Islam. Virtually all of them pre-dated European ideas and instruments by a couple of centuries. Many entered Europe through Italian traders, especially from Venice and Genoa, in Cairo and Constantinople, and some, like tarifah (tariff) and sakk (check), with echoes of their Arabic names intact.

The one exception underscores the flex- ibility of the Islamic financial system. While Christians were forbidden to charge usurious or excessive interest, the Quran specifically forbid Muslims from charging any interest at all. Consequently, Muslims were nonstarters in the development of interest-bearing loans

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and the computation of variable time-sensitive interest rates. Nevertheless, with the precision of a modern American mortgage banker who charges a borrower “points” to get a loan, Muslim bankers figured in processing costs and fines for late payment (as Islamic banks still do today).

Cairo. The heart of the Muslim market economy in the centuries after 1000 was Cairo. Located close to the remains of ancient Egyp- tian Memphis and Giza, Cairo was actually a new city in the Muslim period—or, rather, a series of new cities along the Nile (separate then but today all a part of huge metropolitan Cairo).

Cairo’s golden age (1294–1340) had mili- tary roots. Within a brief time, the new Turkic Mamluk slave dynasty of Egypt defeated the Mongols (1263) and reoccupied Syria and Pal- estine, including the Crusader states (1291). After military consolidation, the Mamluks en- couraged the expansion of trade across North Africa and the Muslim heartland but especially along the southern maritime route to India, the Spice Islands, and China.

Much of our information about the mer- chants and advanced market economy of Cairo comes from a most unusual and for- tunate source. At the end of the nineteenth century, scholars of medieval Judaism dis- covered a treasure trove of documents, let- ters, sacred and formal writings, and everyday jottings that detailed life in medieval Cairo for centuries. Because in Jewish tradition it was considered irreligious to destroy anything with the name of God written on it—and virtually any piece of writing might refer to God—a Jewish synagogue in Fustat (old Cairo) col- lected all discarded paper and other materials with any writing on them. The synagogue deposited every piece of writing in a storage room called a geniza. This pile of writings had

reached the top of the attic hundreds of years before it was rediscovered in 1896. The geniza yielded books and sacred writings previously unknown, intricately detailed accounts of Jew- ish life in medieval Cairo and a dense array of materials for reconstructing the entire kaleido- scope of Cairene life for 1,000 years, especially during the period between the ninth and thir- teenth centuries.18

S. D. Goitein, who devoted a long life of scholarship to the Cairo geniza documents, concluded that they revealed a world that, especially in the eleventh and twelfth centu- ries, combined “free enterprise, a monetary economy, and fluid forms of cooperation” in a “comparatively salutary” society.19 Indeed, the many records of correspondence and travel in the Cairo geniza show that not only Cairo but also much of the Islamic world, from Morocco and Spain to Iraq and Iran, was not unlike a modern free trade zone where one could travel without a passport, buy a home or secure employment in a foreign country, and make a contract with or send money to a stranger 1,000 miles away by means of a piece of paper. Goitein wrote,

To sum up: during the High Middle Ages men, goods, money and books used to travel far and almost without restrictions throughout the Mediterra- nean area. In many respects the area represented a free trade community. The treatment of foreigners, as a rule, was remarkably liberal. . . . How is all this to be explained? To a certain extent by the fact that the machinery of the state was relatively loose in those days. . . . At the root of all this was the concept that law was personal and not territorial.20

The golden age of Cairo lasted until about 1340. In the 1320s, Ibn Battuta described it

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as the “Mother of Cities”: “Mistress of broad provinces and fruitful lands, boundless in multitudes of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendor.”21 And, of course, he had been almost everywhere.

In 1347 (as Ibn Battuta was returning from China), an Egyptian ship sailed from the Black Sea bringing slaves and grain to Alexandria and Cairo. In the grain, it also carried at least one rat and fleas infected with the plague that had already swept across central Asia. The ship left with 332 on board. It arrived in Egypt with 45, all of whom died before they could leave the port.22 The death toll was 1,000 people per day in Cairo in 1348. Normally crowded streets were empty except for funeral processions. But the difference that began to emerge between cities like Cairo and the cities of Europe was that in Cairo the plague kept returning. Between 1347 and 1513, the plague struck Cairo 50 times—once every three years on average.

The great world historian Ibn Khaldun, who lost both his parents to the plague in Tu- nisia, came to Cairo to understand and to help others make sense of the great catastrophe. He offered his conclusions in the last volume of his multivolume world history.

Civilization in both the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused popula- tions to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads

and way signs were obliterated, settle- ments and mansions became empty, dy- nasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed.23

Islam in Africa

The Black Death did not bring an end to civi- lization, not even to Muslim civilization. The very size of the Dar Al-Islam by 1350 made it able to resist even pandemics.

Islam in West Africa. In its golden years, Cairo had many visitors besides Ibn Battuta. There were years when the Mamluk sultan held welcoming parades for what seemed a new visiting dignitary each day. But for years afterward, Cairenes remembered the spectacu- lar entrance in 1324 of Mansa Musa from the West African kingdom of Mali. The Muslim king of Mali was on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He arrived in Cairo with a retinue estimated at over 60,000 with 80 camels carrying two tons of gold. People said that he gave away so much gold as gifts that the price of the precious metal did not recover for years afterward. This would not be surprising since Mali in the fourteenth century produced about two-thirds of the world’s gold exports. By 1324, Islam had not only spread to sub-Saharan Africa but also won many followers. Ibn Battuta visited Mali 30 years later and remarked, “On Fridays, if a man does not go early to the mosque, he can- not find a corner to pray in, on account of the crowds.”24

Camel caravans had crossed the western Sahara for 1,000 years before 1324, as long as the camel had been domesticated in the Sa- hara. Christian North Africans and then Arabs and Berbers crossed the wide expanse of desert by camel train for gold, slaves, and ivory. In return, the northerners provided horses and precious salt, which they (or, more often, their

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slaves) dug from the desert salt mines in the northern Sahara, an area that had been under water during the Pleistocene epoch 10,000 to a million and a half years ago. At first, the north- erners raided and traded with black Africans, coming into increasing contact in the market cities along the Niger River like Timbuktu. With the influence of Muslim merchants and scholars in the towns and the local initiative of ambitious tribal leaders, Islam spread from the towns to the courts of kings. Mansa Musa was one of many.

Increasingly between 1000 and 1450, sub- Saharan Africa became fully integrated into the Muslim trade network. Just as trade began while black Africans were still pagan, it con- tinued after their conversions. Raids contin- ued especially after 1000, when Berber tribes became more numerous in the Sahara, raising and breeding camels and competing for scarce resources. But even as clashes became more frequent, the forest lands south of the Sahara became a permanent part of the Dar al-Islam.

Some elements of Islam took root in West Africa better than others. The allowance of monarchial polygamy in African society cor- responded with Arab traditions, though the Muslim practice was restricted by the example of the Prophet’s limit of four wives. On the other hand, Middle Eastern traditions of veil- ing women played poorly in African societies that prized fertility above modesty in dress. Ibn Battuta was scandalized on his visit to Mali by the sight of naked women in public.

Swahili Culture. In fact, the people of West Africa were relatively latecomers to the Dar al- Islam. The people of East Africa were involved from the beginning. East Africa is only about 100 miles across the Red Sea from Mecca. Long before Muhammad, Arab ships sailed back and forth between Arabia and Africa. In the ninth and tenth centuries, African villages

on the offshore islands and east coast of Africa grew wealthy by trading with Arab Muslims. Initially, they traded African tortoiseshell, rhi- noceros horn, and ivory elephant tusks, which were highly valued in Asia for jewelry and medicinal purposes. By the tenth century, gold mined in southeastern Africa became a profit- able addition. Villagers whose livelihood had been based on fishing and farming became city merchants, steeped in Arab market culture and Islam. Their language and culture blended Arabic with their ancestral Bantu, forming something called Swahili (after the Arabic for “coastal”), and this new hybrid language be- came the common tongue of the East African coastlands.

In East Africa, as in Spain, the Balkans, and the Holy Land, Islam encountered Christian peoples, kings, and clerics. In Ethiopia, the Christian church was older than any in Eu- rope, with ties through the Coptic church of Egypt dating back to the first century of Chris- tianity. In conflict and peaceful exchange, the Afro-Eurasian network stretched down both the eastern coast and the western interior of Africa, integrating African peoples, products, and cultures with their own.

A Single Ecozone. The linking of sub- Saharan Africa to the Eurasian zone was also ecological. Crops and animals were exchanged with salt and gold, and eventually so were wives, and genes, and germs. Historians are not sure to what degree this had occurred by 1350. Ibn Battuta makes no mention of the plague while traveling in Mali in 1352, leading most historians to conclude that the disease did not cross the expanse of the Sahara Desert. Recent research, however, points to popula- tion decline in this period, a possible outcome of new diseases.25

Certainly by 1500, the people of western Africa had become part of the same biological

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regime as Europeans. After the European attempt to enslave American Indians failed largely because the American Indians had no immunity to European smallpox, Europe- ans used West African slaves almost exclu- sively. Clearly, West Africans had been part of the same world of microbes and diseases long enough to have developed immunities to smallpox. But the Bantu-speaking Africans of the western sub-Saharan grasslands had little contact with the Khoi Khoi San–speak- ing people of southern Africa, many of whom were annihilated by European diseases when Europeans settled the southern tip of Africa in the seventeenth century. The descendants of those same Europeans, however, had no immunity advantage over the Bantu-speaking Zulu and Xhosa people, whose ancestors had come down from West Africa with Afro- Eurasian microbes. As a consequence, while European settlers in the Americas largely anni- hilated American Indians, the Europeans who settled in South Africa faced Bantu peoples with immunities similar to their own.

Islam in India and Indonesia

While Islam began as an Arab religion, the conversion of Persians, Europeans, Africans, central Asians, and Turks changed the ethnic balance of the faithful by 1000. During the next 500 years, Islam spread throughout South and Southeast Asia as well. As a consequence, today Muslim Arabs constitute only about 20 percent of the world’s Muslims (about 10 per- cent of Arabs are not Muslims). The majority of Muslims today live in the Indian subcon- tinent and Indonesia. Those countries that today have the largest Muslim populations are Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India.

Muslim expansion in India and Indonesia occurred in each of the three stages we have

chronicled for other areas of the world. First, Arab armies brought Islam as far as the Indus River by 750. Then, around 1000, Turkic and other central Asian tribal armies brought Is- lam to what is today Pakistan and northern India. And finally, from the seventh century on, especially after 1000, Muslim merchants brought Islam to southern India and Indo- nesia. Each of these made different demands. The early Arab armies sought to govern rather than convert. The Turks wanted both con- trol and converts. The merchant communities sought neither, but their religious piety and economic power made them a force to be fol- lowed. In addition, Muslim merchants were often accompanied by devotees of Sufism, a form of Islam that stressed rigorous spiritual exercises while teaching love of God and re- spect for other faiths. The great Sufi poet Rumi (1207–1273) wrote,

The sufi opens his hands to the universe and gives away each instant, free.26

As often happens in the winning of hearts and minds, the least demanding were the most persuasive.

Geographically, the realms of steppe-nomad Islam and maritime-merchant Islam were also quite different. The northern Muslim states were more accomplished in military might than mercantile prowess. Descended from pastoral nomads, their skills and interests led more to military maneuvers, and their eco- nomic techniques tended more to extraction than production. The armies of the northern land empires were huge, and the military officers, tribal or slave, dominated nobility, clergy, landowners, and merchants (usually in that order). In the south, especially along the sea routes, Muslim merchants played a lead- ing role in the governance of smaller maritime

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states. Some of the most notable—Malacca, Hormuz, and Aden—were not much larger than the port city itself. From an economic standpoint, however, these smaller city-states turned out to hold more of the future than the vast continental empires.

Yet from a military and political perspec- tive, the large Turkic land empires dominated the century between 1350 and 1450. Timur the Lame (1336–1405) revived Mongol ambitions of global conquest in a period of feuding khan- ates at the end of the fourteenth century, briefly conquering central Asia from Delhi to Greek Smyrna in the eastern Mediterranean. When European ships sailed to relieve Smyrna, Timur warned them away by filling the harbor with floating plates carrying the severed heads of the garrison defenders lit from inside the skulls by burning candles. Typical of many tribal con- quests, Timur’s empire did not last beyond his death. Much longer lasting, however, was the empire of the Ottoman Turks, who conquered not only Turkey but extended their control in the fifteenth century to eastern Europe and the Balkans, including Greece. Having surrounded the city of Constantinople for generations, the Ottomans finally captured the city in 1453, putting an end to the Byzantine Empire. From there, the Ottomans created a sophisticated military state and went on to threaten Europe as far west as Vienna until 1683. Seven hundred years of conflict between Christianity and the Muslims remained as unresolved as it was at the beginning of the First Crusade in 1095.

Europe in the Making of an Afro-Eurasian Network

Revival and Expansion

The European economy began to revive from the debacle of Roman decline, nomadic

incursions, and urban depopulation by the end of the eighth century. The ascendancy of Charlemagne in 800 was a sign and agent of that revival. Charlemagne brought to his court scholars from as far afield as England and Italy and was visited by representatives of the patriarch at Constantinople and Slavic and Muslim lands. Recent historians have discov- ered evidence of hundreds of travelers between Europe and the Byzantine and Muslim worlds in the ninth century as well as hordes of Arab and Byzantine coins that indicate a level of trade that grew from 780 to 900.27 With little to export for such “real money” and Arab spices and pharmaceuticals, European mer- chants supplied their one surplus product: other Europeans, whom they sold as slaves for the bustling slave markets of Africa and the caliphate.28

European population and agricultural land expanded simultaneously. Between 800 and 1200, Europeans brought new lands under cultivation by reclaiming marshes, clearing forests, and colonizing new areas. The expan- sion of agriculture was aided by a range of new technologies. After 800, northern Europeans began using a heavy plow that could turn over the heavy soils of northern fields. A new horse collar permitted the harnessing of horses in a way that did not choke them, and teams of horses could be harnessed to the heavy plow.

An Irish legend tells of a king in the third century who supposedly brought the first water mill builder from “beyond the sea” to give a rest to the slave girl who was bearing his child.29 Whether the legend is true or apoc- ryphal (and the date is probably too early), it calls attention to the correlation between labor and technology. Societies that were too poor to keep slaves might be quicker to substitute machines. The use of water mills, which had been used in classical times in Rome and

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Map 5.3 Compared to China, Europe was a land where numerous seas, rivers, mountains, islands, and peninsulas helped divide peoples into separate states.

Figure 5.7 This twelfth-century manuscript shows the European’s use of the heavy plow as his wife prods the oxen. The Granger Collection, New York.

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China, increased dramatically in Europe after the ninth century. Windmills are more recent, dating from about 700 in the Middle East. They were used first in the dry plains of Iran and Afghanistan, where they served the same purposes as water mills—mainly pumping water and grinding grain. Persian windmills were introduced into Europe through Muslim Spain, but by 1185, Europeans had invented a different kind of windmill. The Persian wind- mill was a fixed conical structure with open doors that drew the prevailing winds inside to turn the central pillar and its grinding stone. European windmills employed large exterior sails that swiveled on a horizontal axis to catch the changing direction of the wind. By the sixteenth century, the new windmill had sprung up everywhere in Europe—even in

Spain, where Don Quixote imagined that the windmill sails were the threatening arms of invading giants.

Good Weather and Good Luck. European growth also came during a time of good weather. Between 700 and 1200, the climate of northern Europe warmed considerably. The combination of warming and abundant rainfall aided the expansion of farming into new regions, especially in the north. The Vikings settled in Greenland and Iceland. In the early 1200s, the east coast of Greenland permitted agricultural cultivation, grapes were grown and wine was produced in southern England and northern Germany, and farmers grew crops at high altitudes in Norway and Switzerland. Medieval warming was not lim- ited to Europe, but there it coincided with a

Figure 5.8 The windmill came to Europe from Persia, but the Persian windmill was a solid structure set to the prevailing winds. The European windmill rotated on a platform to catch changing winds. Gianni Dagli Orti/ The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. Bibliotheque Municipale Valenciennes.

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period of agricultural expansion in the north- ern marshes and forests. European growth slowed a bit during a colder period from the later 1200s to 1450,30 when Viking settlement in Greenland ended and wine production and farming in high latitudes and mountain sides of Europe was curtailed.31

Europe also had good luck in escaping the more serious nomadic invasions of the period between 1000 and 1250. Viking attacks and Magyar (Hungarian) migrations caused seri- ous disruption in parts of Europe in the ninth century, but after 1000, Europeans escaped the equivalent of the Jurchen, who destroyed Beijing; the Seljuk Turks, who overran much of the Byzantine Empire; and the Mongols, who overwhelmed the cities of China, central Asia, Russia, most of the Muslim heartland, and eastern Europe.

Two Europes, Four Economies. The expan- sion of settlement and farming in the north created a second Europe that had barely ex- isted in classical times. The Greeks and Ro- mans had colonized the Mediterranean. While Roman legions fought as far north as England and maintained a line of village forts across France and Germany, the forests of northern Europe were sparsely settled. Medieval settle- ment changed that balance. Around 700, the population of northwestern Europe overtook that of Mediterranean Europe for the first time, an advantage the north retained until about 1900.

The fledgling economy of Charlemagne’s Franco-German Empire did not thrive much beyond his grandchildren, but in the tenth and eleventh centuries a new economy developed in France that attracted merchants, bankers, and traders from wealthy Venice. Interna- tional merchants came to trade at the seasonal fairs in Champagne in central France. One of the more desired items was the cloth from

Flanders (modern Belgium), which was made from the best English wool.

The economies of Venice, Champagne, and Flanders were very different. Venice was an international banking and trading center with interests in Constantinople and the Mus- lim world. Venetian bankers provided much of the capital and financial know-how for the merchants at the Champagne fairs. Flanders and Champagne were local economies at- tached to international markets. Together, they added a European loop to the great Mon- gol–Muslim circle of trade.

A fourth European economy developed farther north along the Baltic Sea and the coast of northern Germany. These cities consti- tuted themselves as the Hanseatic League and traded codfish, salt, lumber, and furs. After 1200, some of the Hanseatic port cities, like Hamburg and Lubeck, and the Belgian city of Bruges began to challenge the dominance of the European Mediterranean cities like Venice and Genoa, although Venice remained the dominant European sea power before 1450.

Cities and States

The nomadic incursions of the fourth century destroyed not only the Western Roman Em- pire but also its many cities. The area of that empire became a deurbanized patchwork of agricultural estates run by local notables and worked by dependent laborers. Between the fall of Rome around 400 and the coronation of Charlemagne in 800, there was no states and few cities. Except for southern Italy, there were few cities of any size in Europe in 1000. North- ern Europe was particularly rural. London and Paris were “small muddy towns” of a few thousand inhabitants in 1000, while Cordoba in Islamic Spain contained 260,000 houses, 80,000 shops, and 4,000 markets.32

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Urban Renewal. Europe produced an un- usual number of cities after 1000. The Hanse- atic League alone included more than 60 cities at its height in the fourteenth century. The growth of cities after 1000 was due in part to the increased productivity of European agri- culture and the expansion of the population.

New cities were also a product of changes in European politics and society. Feudal soci- ety allowed little freedom or social mobility. Knights, vassals, serfs, and even lords were bound by contracts, some made generations earlier. New cities grew up on the coasts and boundaries of the great agricultural estates, kingdoms, and principalities. The residents of the cities provided arts, crafts, precious goods, advice, and financial support useful to the neighboring lords and kings. In return, local rulers often gave cities control over their own affairs. City finances, courts, taxes, tariffs, and even laws were turned over to the people of the city. Kings and city leaders drew up contracts that spelled out the freedoms of the city. A common saying of the time declared that free- dom was in the city air; indeed, in some cases, a serf was legally free after living in the city a stipulated amount of time. In addition to cit- ies that negotiated their independence, there were cities that fought for it. Between 1080 and 1132, the cities of northern and central Italy, which had been ruled by German emperors since 962, declared their independence, each setting up a municipal government that they called the “commune.”

City-States and Citizenship. Many of these late medieval cities became city-states. In northern and central Italy, the newly indepen- dent cities proceeded to control surrounding territory and create city-states that included farmland as well as urban areas. Relations between city-states were not always peaceful. Pisa and Genoa fought frequently over their

mutual designs on neighboring Sardinia, to give just one example. Yet because they were independent states, they had to find a way to conduct their affairs. Often there was a leading family or group of families, sometimes even an individual, who seized control. An elite group of families governed Venice for centuries; a single family, the Medici, did the same for Florence. For a brief period in Florence, the monk Savonarola ruled—before the towns- people turned on him and burned him at the stake in the public square. Even in abeyance, the rule of the new city-states required the participation of all who lived within the walls. By contract or custom, these city-states be- came the first self-governing states since those of ancient Greece. These autonomous zones required a high degree of public participation. A budget for the city of Siena in 1257, which had an adult male population of about 5,000, included 860 holders of public office, includ- ing police (but not military, which would have potentially included all). City-states created the first legislative bodies since the classical era, and these too demanded a high degree of public participation. In Italy, city councils normally had a Great Council of 400 or more and an Inner Council of about 40.

Urban residents, at least men with prop- erty, were citizens, not subjects, of their city- state. They voted on issues ranging from the choice of an architect for the cathedral to matters of war and peace. They served in the city councils, staffed government offices, and fought when they called on themselves to do so. This experience—by no means universal— shaped a different idea of politics, government, and the role of the individual than commonly existed in other societies.

A Muslim like Ibn Battuta could live and work in Delhi, India, or Fez, Morocco, but he was a citizen of neither. He could even govern

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as a judge in India, but he played no role in making the law and served only at the pleasure of the sultan. Marco Polo was a proud citizen of Venice. Thanks to Muslim universalism and hospitality, he could travel freely anywhere in the Dar al-Islam, but he had to be much more careful in Italy; when he returned, the great Venetian was captured by rival Genoese and had to dictate his “million tales” from a “foreign” jail.

Law and Science

Ibn Battuta did not make the law in India; in truth, no one did. In Islamic societies, there was no need for human law because there was God’s law—the sunna, or summation, of the Quran and the hadiths (witness reports). Judges like Ibn Battuta might enforce or inter- pret the law, and they might issue a fatwa or judgment based on the law, but there was no need for humans to add to the laws, rules, and advice that God provided.

Natural Law and Natural Reason. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it adopted Roman law. Long after the empire had breathed its last, the church continued to use Latin and Roman law to run its affairs and shepherd its flock. In the early Middle Ages (400–800), Europeans fol- lowed the particular customs, rules, and laws of their clans. In addition, they were subject to the laws of the land, ruler, or government, if there was one. But when it came to religion, they talked of following the “Roman law” of the church.

Roman law, like Greek law, was a univer- sal code based on territorial sovereignty that applied to everyone equally. Roman law was legislated, but it purported to be fair and just because it was based on principles of “natural law” accessible to “natural reason.” We have

already traced this idea of a correspondence between human law and natural law back to the ancient Greeks. We have noticed the fit between the idea of an ordered universe and a society ruled by law. Greeks and Romans be- lieved that people had a capacity to understand the laws of nature through their own powers of reason. Thus, the public sphere could be effectively managed by citizens. Some of these ideas continued to operate in the Eastern Ro- man Empire at Constantinople. Many Roman laws were enshrined in the code of the Byzan- tine emperor Justinian in the seventh century. Nevertheless, most people of medieval western Europe knew as much Roman law as most Christians today know Latin.

Along with the loss of Roman law, medi- eval Europeans lost much of Greek science, which also derived from the idea that laws of nature could be discovered by human reason. Early medieval Christianity was sometimes indistinguishable from the mystery religions and pagan folk customs that bubbled up in the post-Roman world. The term “dark ages” would be an appropriate characterization of the enormous loss of classical texts, knowl- edge, and universal law and science.

Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Western Eu- ropeans began to retrieve the classical texts and revive legal-scientific ways of thinking in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Two events in the late eleventh century revitalized aware- ness of natural law. One was the discovery of the Byzantine emperor Justinian’s law code, showing what a vast, sophisticated, coherent, and equitable system Roman law had been. The other was a conflict between the emerg- ing kingdom in Germany and the papacy that brought to a head the budding conflict between state and church authority. The conflict estab- lished the principle of a separation of church and state—two powers, two jurisdictions—that

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became an essential element of western Euro- pean thought. By the beginning of the twelfth century, the Roman papacy had declared itself free of secular control, including the appoint- ment of its clergy, which had previously been chosen by local government officials. As a re- sult, from that time on, every western European Christian faced two governments with over- lapping jurisdictions—religious and secular. Further, at least one of those governments, the church, claimed universal validity, represent- ing God’s law and natural law. Some historians have suggested that, ironically, this competition led to the beginning of the modern Western state.33 In opposition to the claims of secular rulers who ruled because they could, the church declared itself a sovereign body, an independent public authority, with the right to make laws according to accepted principles and to admin- ister those laws with its own hierarchy over a defined territory. The key is that it did not deny the right of other bodies like secular govern- ments to do the same (as a Muslim caliphate or Chinese emperor would have). It therefore encouraged the development of overlapping but separate authorities, many of which could claim universal or natural validity within their own jurisdictions. The result was a world of multiple sovereignties: cities (as we have seen), states, and the church but also guilds, parishes, and corporations. Europeans grew accustomed to participating in different governing institu- tions in different ways. Some, like guilds and cities, were relatively democratic; others, like monasteries, were egalitarian but not demo- cratic; and others still were neither democratic nor egalitarian, but even they had to defend their jurisdiction in terms of certain principles that would be generally recognized.

Between 1200 and 1350, Europeans cre- ated dozens of universities that were similarly independent with separate jurisdictions and

hierarchies. Committees of faculty (or students in student-run Bologna) set standards, awarded degrees, and administered these institutions as corporate bodies—ministates on the model of the larger ones. The first European universities copied the earlier Muslim models, but the Mus- lim universities were not independent entities with faculties and degrees, and they were always administered by religious authorities.

The key ingredient of the European twelfth-century Renaissance was the retrieval of many of the works of Aristotle and some of the Greek scientists. All these had been avail- able in the original Greek or in Arabic transla- tions but were unknown to Europeans before the twelfth century. Aristotle gave Europe a complete set of natural laws, internally con- sistent, logical, and sweeping in coverage but fundamentally at odds with much of church teaching. Aristotle’s principles of natural law held, for instance, that the universe had no cause since something could not be created from nothing and that the laws of nature were uniform and consistent, seemingly ruling out God and miracles in two easy assumptions.

The idea of a world of nature knowable to human reason was insidious in its simplicity and persuasiveness. Muslim and Christian clerics challenged Aristotle. Islam became in- creasingly critical of secular philosophy after 1000. Science was called “foreign,” making it an easier target for religious surveillance. Universities, madrassas, and mosque schools all emphasized Quranic education anyway; the only institution that taught Aristotle, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, eliminated it.

Christian Europe was more divided. When reading Aristotle was banned at the University of Paris, the other universities continued to teach his works. The faculty of the University of Toulouse advertised its teaching of Aris- totle in order to steal Parisian students away.

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Eventually, Paris relented. In Europe, universi- ties, cities, and states could act independently, even competitively. There was no emperor or caliph to impose a uniform curriculum or command. Christian Europe opened its doors enough to invite the Greek guest in because Eu- rope had become accustomed to separate tables.

It would be a mistake to suggest that Ar- istotle or natural science monopolized the European mind in the twelfth century or even the fifteenth. Many of the greatest thinkers of the period sought to integrate reason and faith, science and theology, and the heritage of Ath- ens and Jerusalem. Nevertheless, a significant part of European intellectual life was thereaf- ter devoted to an idea of truth that required no prior commitment but could develop in a neutral space and lead where it would. “Truth in search of itself has no enemies,” the philosopher Peter Abelard (1079–1142) de- clared, convinced that God-given human rea- son could lead nowhere else. To be a “friend of truth” became a frequent call among European philosophers and theologians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.34

By the mid-thirteenth century, the works of Aristotle formed the core of the curriculum in most of the dozens of European universities. A master of arts degree at Paris or Oxford was heavily weighted with courses in logic, phys- ics, astronomy, and mathematics. A modern historian writes,

Since virtually all students in arts studied a common curriculum, it became clear that higher education in the Middle Ages was essentially a program in logic and science. Never before, and not since, have logic and science formed the basis of higher education for all arts students.35

Popular Science. From the thirteenth cen- tury, students and professors at the universities

studied and practiced science, but many of their less privileged neighbors became increas- ingly science minded. Monotheistic religion had long established the belief in absolute truth. Christianity had nurtured faith in hu- man reason—in part, perhaps, to require re- sponsibility in a world that the church did not fully control. This had the effect of empha- sizing the power of the individual to under- stand. The Judeo-Christian idea that nature was God’s creation and that mankind was in charge of nature also contributed to a sense of scientific objectivity. In Christian cultures, humans were observers of nature rather than participants (as a Hindu, Buddhist, or Daoist might be). For late medieval European Chris- tians, the world was a stage; for their ancestors and many pagans and polytheists, the world was more like a garment that one wore or the air that one breathed. Muslims, of course, shared the biblical belief in God’s creation, but they also had the Quran. Their religion called on specific pieces of scientific knowledge. They studied astronomy for such purposes as marking the beginning and end of the month of Ramadan with precision. They studied ge- ometry and geography to align the prayer mats and mosques with Mecca. But they did not need science to understand the truths contained in the Quran. For Christians, lack- ing “The Book,” God’s Truth was contained in His creation. Nature was His book. Even the Bible was only a partial guide to a greater and continuing revelation. Consequently, Chris- tian culture became more science minded than other cultures.

Europeans probably integrated science and technology more than other cultures as well. The historian Alfred Crosby suggests that “the West had a greater proportion of individuals who understood wheels, levers, and gears than any other region on earth.”36 The Christian

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intellectual class valued manual labor more than the masters of Confucianism. “To work is to pray” was the motto of the Benedictine monastic order.

By the fourteenth century, European soci- ety was full of machines. The most important for the development of science-mindedness was not the latest windmill or water mill but rather the mechanical clock. We do not think of the clock as a machine because it seems to do no more than tell time. But the clock is an elaborate mechanism of moving wheels, balances, and springs, and it does something

that no other machine can do: it abstracts time. With the mechanical clock, time was abstracted from nature. Time was no longer slower in summer, lighter or darker, or cloudy or bright; it was a series of equal moments— abstract, interchangeable, neutral, and merely mathematical. Instead of the time the creek thaws or the mare foals, people began to tell time by numbers. Days were divided into hours, not prayer times or eating times, and those times came at different hours and min- utes each day. Once the clocks were installed in the town square and in the church steeple,

Figure 5.9 An anatomy lesson from a fifteenth-century edition of a thirteenth-century text by Mondino de Liuzzi, who restored public dissection in anatomy instruction, a practice shunned for 1,000 years. Universal Images Group/Getty Images.

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the bells would chime the hour, and the prayers and meals would follow the chimes. In the fourteenth century, European towns installed public clocks like there was no to- morrow—at least none to be wasted. The philosopher Nicola Oresme (ca. 1323–1382) coined a metaphor that would stand for the modern universe: he wrote that the “heavenly machine” was a kind of “clockwork.”37

Beginning in the fourteenth century, Eu- ropeans abstracted space as well. After a copy of Ptolemy’s Geographia arrived in Florence from Constantinople around 1400, Europe- ans imitated the ancient use of grid maps of neutral space and applied them to lands and oceans still unknown. They drew directional “plumb lines” for navigation charts and in- vented three-dimensional perspective in paint- ing. They created lenses, spectacles, and, after 1600, telescopes. To think of things abstractly may be an element of scientific thinking that, once developed in one area, can be easily ap- plied elsewhere: measurement, mathematics, alphabetization, and the notation of musical notes on gridlike staffs. All these scientific ways of thinking spread with great alacrity in Europe after 1400.

The Formation of the Modern Network

By almost any measure, western Europe in 1000 had been a backwater. We have noted signs of growth and significant changes, but no one in 1000 would have imagined that in a mere 500 years, the small cities and states of western Europe not only would have joined the world system as an equal partner but also would have begun to seize control of it. We have probed the precocious rise of western Europe. We should keep in mind that most of

the changes we have noted—the rise of cities, citizenship, modern states, the rule of law, and scientific laws and ideas—would have been unremarkable to most medieval observers. The Chinese or Muslim visitor to the West in the fourteenth century would have felt more pity than envy. We have already mentioned some of the raw comparisons: cities, libraries, and ironworks a fraction the size of those of China and the Islamic world and Europeans struggling without some of the basic conve- niences of the then modern world, such as paper, printing, the classic literature of the Greeks, and ancient science and its Arabic im- provements. As late as the thirteenth century, Arab astronomers were invited by the Chinese to Peking to run the Chinese observatory. As late as the fifteenth century, Chinese ships were the vessels of choice for the discriminat- ing world traveler. As late as the sixteenth cen- tury, Europeans were still using Arab medical texts. So it would seem that the rise of western Europe was still remote.

Death and Rebirth

We have already indicated how the late medieval period was slashed by the Black Death of 1348–1350. Europe suffered as much as China and the Muslim world. A third to a half of the population died. But we have also remarked that the people of Cairo suffered another 50 plagues in the next century and a half and that Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and much of the Muslim heartland was already in population and agricultural decline long before 1300. European agriculture and popula- tion may have peaked around 1280, but most parts of western Europe gradually recovered after 1350. Later plagues were far less frequent and less severe; they returned every 10 or 15 years, not every three. Temperatures cooled,

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farm yields shrank, and famine dogged those on the margins. To make matters worse, the ruling dynasties in England and France fought the Hundred Years’ War, which did not end until 1453.

Nevertheless, European society revived after the plague. Survivors found their labor in great demand. Dependent laborers gained leverage in negotiating with their “betters.” Despite the more challenging climate condi- tions, the average European lived better in 1450 than in 1300.

The Renaissance. Europe also experienced a cultural renaissance in the 200 years after the plague. Even before the plague, Italian painters like Cimabue (d. 1302) and Giotto (d. 1337) filled churches and canvases with strikingly unmedieval three-dimensional figures. They and their successors before 1450 still chose religious subjects for their art, their paintings and sculptures gracing altars, sacristies, and church doors. But they placed their patrons, their townsmen, and even themselves around the manger of the Christ child or looking up at Jesus on the cross.

While the Italian artists filled their re- ligious paintings with Greek gods in con- temporary Renaissance clothing and crafted meticulous spaces with scientific accuracy, art- ists in Flanders put a mirror to their world and each other. Dutch masters showed an Adam and Eve who in their nakedness resembled lo- cal peasants rather than Greek gods, and in the background they meticulously layered details of everyday life on a landscape so realistic that you could find your way without a map.

At the same time, the poets Dante (d. 1321), Petrarch (d. 1374), and Boccaccio (d. 1375) began the creation of a national Italian language and literature. Petrarch, who along with Boccaccio survived the plague, has been called the father of the Italian Renaissance.

Refreshed by the discovery of Latin authors like Cicero, he expressed a classical faith in human capacity and civic virtue in a new ver- nacular language that he “got together [with] my lime and stones and wood.”38 The younger Boccaccio crafted a Florentine Italian language as modern as yesterday into what may have been Europe’s first piece of literature as enter- tainment, the Decameron, 100 tales of love and deception told by ladies and gentlemen wait- ing out the Black Death. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) did much the same for a Middle English language that would be less recognizable today.39 These Renaissance clas- sics shock us with their modern secular tone, sexual themes, and entertaining narratives.

The Classical and the Novel

The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales were actually modeled on a literary form that may have originated in India and became known to Europeans in the form of A Thousand and One Nights, or The Arabian Nights, which, we have already noted, was compiled in Baghdad in the tenth century, probably from older Persian stories. The Arabic work, however, was always more popular in the West than in the Muslim world, where it was disparaged as inelegant, especially in its mix of classical and vernacular languages. Classical Arabic, the language of the Quran, enjoyed a status among Muslim clerics and intellectuals that was far beyond Latin in the West. The development of a ver- nacular or modern Arabic was not a project that anyone encouraged. Popular vernacular expressions were to be corrected rather than imitated.

We called the Decameron the first piece of modern European literature. Consider- ably older and as modern is the Japanese Tale of Genji, which was written by Lady

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Murasaki around 1000. It is sometimes called “the world’s first novel.” Why should Japan rather than China invent the novel? And why should it be written by a woman? In China, learning the characters and the classics defined the educated gentleman. The Chinese Empire and bureaucracy resisted local variations more than the plague. Classical Chinese authorized cultural expression throughout East Asia. The development of national identities was a grad- ual process of separation from China. In 1000, the Japanese popular vernacular was just in the process of distinguishing itself from classical Chinese. Chinese was the language of officials in Japan; it was considered inelegant for gentle- men to use the emerging vernacular. But that is why Lady Murasaki could use the popular speech and, like Boccaccio and Chaucer, invent her language as well as its literature. As a lady in waiting in the Japanese court, Murasaki was free of the pretensions of male officialdom. She and Sei Shonogon, another courtesan, were not embarrassed to write in Japanese, and they had much to say. As cultural outsiders, women could be more inventive.

Japan and Korea

Japan was to China as Europe was to Rome, Byzantium, and the Dar al-Islam: an under- developed outlier where a sense of cultural inferiority encouraged eager imitation of the dominant culture but also provided the space for experimentation and innovation. Both ar- eas, on opposite ends of Eurasia, escaped the Mongols. Both grew rapidly between 1000 and 1300 (Japan continuing apace until 1700). Japan’s political geography was also similar to that of Europe in some ways: both created maritime cities rather than large land empires, and Japanese cities resembled European city- states even in their relative autonomy. The

city-states and small maritime states were the innovators of Europe as they were of the Mus- lim world. If East Asia had nurtured other Ja- pans, their competition and interchange might have forced innovation more quickly.

One other potential Japan was Korea. In fact, because Korea was adjacent to China, it was more dominated by the classical Chinese language and culture than was Japan. As the Korean language diverged from Chinese, the scholars and administrators of the Korean court (which recruited officials with its own Confucian examination system) struggled us- ing Chinese characters to write Korean.

During the first half of the fifteenth cen- tury, under the guidance of King Sejong, Korea experienced a cultural revival that bore similarities to the Italian Renaissance. The king gathered many scholars to his court, some merely to follow their stars, others to help with some of the king’s pet projects in language, printing, music, and science. The common theme of the king’s projects was the realization of certain principles that he believed to be in keeping with the neo- Confucian movement sweeping China. In China, neo-Confucianism meant Confucian- ism tempered by Buddhist meditation. To King Sejong, neo-Confucianism meant more Confucian emphasis on public welfare (and less Buddhist introspection). All his reforms, the king declared, were intended to educate and uplift the people. In two critical areas, these reforms bear a striking resemblance to a combination that was soon to transform Europe. King Sejong chose to greatly increase the use of printing with movable type, and he chose to create a Korean alphabet. He accom- plished both. In the preface to his New Korean Phonetic script, the king wrote, “Because our language differs from the Chinese language, my poor people cannot express their thoughts

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in Chinese writing. In my pity for them I cre- ate 28 letters, which all can easily learn and use in their daily lives.”40 In addition, he dedicated his rule to the spread of knowledge through printing by metal movable type:

To govern it is necessary to spread knowledge of the laws and the books so as to satisfy reason and reform men’s evil nature; in this way peace and order may be maintained. Our country is in the East beyond the sea and books from China are scarce. Wood-blocks wear out easily and besides it is difficult to engrave all the books in the world. I want letters to be made from copper to be used for printing so that more books will be available. This would produce benefits too extensive to measure.41

In Europe, the combination of a phonetic script and a printing press based on movable type caused a revolution in popular literacy and linguistic invention. In Korea, it had no such effect. In fact, the two reforms were rarely combined. Despite the advantage of setting a phonetic system with movable type, most Ko- rean books continued to be block printed, and few works were written in the new script. The book that introduced the alphabet in 1446, The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People, was block printed. During King Sejong’s reign, 194 books were printed in woodblock and 114 in metal print; 70 of the latter were on the sub- jects of Chinese history, Chinese characters, Chinese classics and literature, and Chinese law.42 As in Japan, the educated elite preferred the use of classical Chinese characters, while Korean women used the new Hangul alphabet in writing Korean.

King Sejong’s alphabet for writing Ko- rean sounds was uniquely innovative. The letters not only stood for particular vowels,

consonants, or syllables but also were shaped to suggest the position of mouth, teeth, and tongue in pronouncing the sounds. In ad- dition, the letters were divided into Yin and Yang types and made to represent the five elements: air, earth, fire, water, and metal. The richness of the invention, however, made other things more difficult. The Hangul script carried layers of meaning that hindered its use as a tool for abstraction in the way the Euro- pean alphabets could be used to alphabetize. Very much like the original idea of the length of a king’s “foot,” until measurements could be completely divorced from their natural associ- ations, scientific abstraction was encumbered.

Imitators and Innovators

We think of imitators as the opposite of in- novators, but they are not. Those who see no reason to imitate have no reason to change. Large landed empires like China and the Muslim states of central Asia were guided by people who had a greater stake in preserva- tion. Innovation in China often came inad- vertently or in response to a particular crisis. Confucianism encouraged good works, social improvements, and good government, and the Chinese state and bureaucracy could put enor- mous resources behind a policy or project. The private sector in China was huge because China was huge, but the government was the force behind the building of canals and cities and the adoption of new military and indus- trial technologies. If the social conscience of Confucianism was an advantage, the elitism of the scholar administrators was not. Mind work and manual labor marked two different worlds in China as they had in most societies, and the workers and thinkers had no place or inclina- tion to talk to each other. New tools and new ideas rarely struck a chord much less a chorus.

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In the Dar al-Islam, innovation was more a product of private initiative, mercantile trade, and individual leadership. Despite their pres- tige, however, the Muslim merchant class was as subject to higher authority as the Chinese. Only the authority was different: clerical and military rather than political and bureaucratic. In fact, in neither China nor the Islamic world was there an independent class of merchants. In both societies, business combinations were made up of families and relations whose loyal- ties lay with the lineage or clan.

Religious conservatism increasingly un- dermined innovation in the Islamic world after 1000. Chinese block printing was widely condemned by Muslim clerics who believed that books should be produced by hand, the way the Quran had been copied for centuries. The technical advantage that block print- ing had in duplicating images made it even more suspicious from the standpoint of those who believed that the Quran forbade visual replication.

European Christians had no such religious obstacles to printing, but they were slow to see its benefits. In fact, they were slow to recognize its existence. Block-printed seals on messages from the Ilkanid rulers of Iran to the kings of England and France seem to have gone un- noticed by their European recipients; although Marco Polo was struck by the paper money of China, he seems to have failed to notice the significance of its printing. Imitation is not automatic. One’s culture prepares one to see and understand.

And cultures change. Muslim science was studied in Europe until the sixteenth century, but once Europeans translated the Greek and Arabic texts, the balance shifted decisively. By the sixteenth century, European artists were drawing precise diagrams of human anatomy taken from dissected cadavers. Islam forbade

dissections of human cadavers or pigs. Islamic medical students studied vague and inaccurate depictions of the human body, while students at Bologna were cutting them open.

In Europe sometime after 1200, innova- tion became systematized. A range of institu- tions paved the way. Europeans learned to work together in civic and other nonfamilial groups. Investment corporations, merchant companies, and banks often started as family ventures, as they were commonly elsewhere, but the experience of participation in other corporate groups—civic, guild, university, and church—spilled over into business, increasing their scale and flexibility.

In Europe, merchants and bankers could not be controlled or fleeced as easily as they could by an emperor or sultan. In autonomous cities, they became a self-governing class, used to operating independently and communally to secure their fortunes and opportunities. They loaned money to princes and kings and supplied their armies with armaments and uniforms. They were indispensable. Some large merchant banks, such as the Medici in Florence and the Fuggers in Germany, were more powerful than princes, who were a dime a dozen in the patchwork quilt of competing European states. In Europe, a class of capi- talists created society in their own image. A recent world history puts it well:

Since moneyed men were continually on the lookout for anything that might turn a profit, a self-sustaining process of eco- nomic, social, and technological change gathered headway wherever political con- ditions allowed it the freedom to operate. Time and again, local interests and old fashioned ways of doing things were dis- placed by politically protected economic innovators, who saw a chance at monetary profit by introducing something new. This

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situation still persists today, having trans- formed European society, and then in- fected the whole wide world, thus marking modern times off from earlier, more stable forms of society.43

But we have seen that merchants were not the only innovators in Europe. Poets, painters, composers, scientists, and mechanics were cultural innovators as much as preservers. The city was as much the crucible of the new order as was the market. And the yeast of change was not only greed and private profit. It was also a product of universalism and civic identity, individuality and community, and reason and faith.

Finally, as we have seen over and over again, to invent something is not to own it. Often the borrowers are able to do more with an invention than its creators. While the seedlings of the modern age dug their roots in different soils and climes, their fruits are as transferable as the apples of Kazakhstan or the peaches of Samarkand.

Conclusion: The Virtues of Variety

“Social and political institutions of Europe,” the historian Arnold Pacey says in a particu- larly felicitous phrase, “favored ‘the multipli- cation of points of creativity’ in the many small states in which the continent was divided.”44 We might generalize further and argue that cities had always favored “the multiplication of points of creativity,” that the intensity of city life led to more frequent interchange, imi- tation, and innovation than was possible on pasture or farm. This explains the enormous inventiveness of the first cities, especially the city-states of the ancient world.

Not only did the political geography of European rivers and mountains lead to nu- merous small states, able to compete with each other for the most talented or ambitious, but many of those states were city-states. They were states led from the city, not the county seats of aristocratic families or ancient lin- eages. Their leaders were people who prized innovation, who believed that advantage was everything, and who recognized that personal, social, and civic advantage came from doing something new and different and better.

Cities activated the inventions of Chinese, Islamic, and even Mongol civilizations as well. The cities of China and the Islamic world played a major role in shaping Chinese and Islamic civilizations. Together as links of a network, these civilizations became something much more. Each new addition to the network not only added a different way of thinking or doing but also changed the ways of all. The belated addition of European cities to the net- work of China, the Mongols, and Islam mul- tiplied already numerous points of creativity.

Ibn Battuta never got to Christian Eu- rope.45 He wrote and retired in the great city of Fez in what is today Morocco. But he began his travels with the most important pilgrimage a Muslim could make: the hajj to the holy city of Mecca. For the rest of his life, he traveled from one city to another. The full title of his account, called the Rihla, was A Gift to the Ob- servers concerning the Curiosities of the Cities and the Marvels Encountered in Travels. Like a modern American who goes not to Europe but to London, Paris, Rome, and Venice, Ibn Bat- tuta traveled to the great cities of his world: to Mecca, Medina, Cairo, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Damascus, Baghdad, Basra, Isfahan, Kabul, Samarkand, Bukhara, Constantinople, Kilwa, Mogadishu, Aden, Cambay, Calicut, Delhi, Chit- tagong, Canton, Quanzhou (Zaiton), Timbuktu,

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and many more. The Afro-Eurasian network was in fact a brilliant chain of cities, each a point of creativity that, like a string of lights on a tree, turned into something more magical and marvelous.