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The Shapes of Human Communities Paleolithic Persistence Agricultural Village Societies Herding Peoples

Civilizations of the Fifteenth Century: Comparing China and Europe Ming Dynasty China European Comparisons: State Building and Cultural Renewal

European Comparisons: Maritime Voyaging

Civilizations of the Fifteenth Century: The Islamic World In the Islamic Heartland: The Ottoman and Safavid Empires

On the Frontiers of Islam: The Songhay and Mughal Empires

Civilizations of the Fifteenth Century: The Americas The Aztec Empire The Inca Empire

Webs of Connection A Preview of Coming Attractions:

Looking Ahead to the Modern Era, 1500–2010

Reflections: What If? Chance and Contingency in World History

Considering the Evidence Documents: The Aztecs and the Incas through Spanish Eyes

Visual Sources: Sacred Places in the World of the Fifteenth Century

During 2005, Chinese authorities marked the 600th anniversary of the initial launching of their country’s massive maritime expeditions in 1405. Some eighty-seven years before Columbus sailed across the Atlantic with three small ships and a crew of about ninety men, the Chinese admiral Zheng He had captained a fleet of more than 300 ships and a crew numbering some 27,000 people, which brought a Chinese naval presence into the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean as far as the East African coast. Now in 2005, China was cele- brating. Public ceremonies, books, magazine articles, two television documentaries, an international symposium, a stamp in honor of Zheng He—all of this and more was part of a yearlong remembrance of these remarkable voyages.

Given China’s recent engagement with the larger world,Chinese authorities sought to use Zheng He as a symbol of their country’s expanding,but peaceful, role on the international stage.Until recently, however, his achievement was barely noticed in China’s collective memory, and for six centuries Zheng He had been largely forgot- ten or ignored. Columbus, on the other hand, had long been highly visible in the West, celebrated as a cultural hero and more recently harshly criticized as an imperialist, but certainly remembered.The voyages of both of these fifteenth-century mariners were pregnant with meaning for world history. Why were they remembered so differently in the countries of their origin?

the fifteenth century, during which both zheng he

and Columbus undertook their momentous expeditions, proved in

The Meeting of Two Worlds: This famous sixteenth-century engraving by the Flemish artist Theodore de Bry shows Columbus landing in Hispaniola (Haiti), where the Taino people bring him presents, while the Europeans claim the island for God and queen. In light of its long-range consequences, this voyage was arguably the most important single event of the fifteenth century. (Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY)

c h a p t e r t h i r t e e n

The Worlds of the Fifteenth Century

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Region Major Developments

Central, East, and Ming dynasty China, 1368–1644 Southeast Asia Conquests of Timur, 1370–1406

Zheng He’s maritime voyages, 1405–1433

Spread of Islam into Southeast Asia

Rise of Malacca

Civil war among competing warlords in Japan

South Asia/India Timur’s invasion of India, 1398

Various Muslim sultanates in northern India

Rise of Hindu state of Vijayanagar in southern India

Founding of Mughal Empire, 1526

Middle East Expansion of Ottoman Empire

Ottoman seizure of Constantinople, 1453

Founding of Safavid Empire in Persia, 1501

Ottoman siege of Vienna, 1529

Christendom/Europe European Renaissance

Portuguese voyages of exploration along West African coast

Completion of reconquest of Spain, ending Muslim control

End of the Byzantine Empire, 1453

End of Mongol rule in Russia; reign of Ivan the Great, 1462–1505

Africa Songhay Empire in West Africa, 1464–1591

Kingdom of the Kongo in West Central Africa

Expansion of Ethiopian state in East Africa

Kingdom of Zimbabwe/Mwene Mutapa in southern Africa

The Americas/Western Aztec Empire in Mesoamerica, 1345–1521 Hemisphere Inca Empire along the Andes, 1438–1533

Iroquois confederacy (New York State)

“Complex” Paleolithic societies along west coast of North America

Pacific Oceania Paleolithic persistence in Australia

Chiefdoms and stratified societies on Pacific islands

Yap as center of oceanic trading network with Guam and Palau

Snapshot Major Developments around the World in the Fifteenth Century

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retrospect to mark a major turning point in the human story.At the time, of course, no one was aware of it. No one knew in 1405 that the huge armada under Zheng He’s command would be recalled in 1433, never to sail again.And no one knew in 1492 that Columbus’s minuscule fleet of three ships would utterly transform the world, bringing the people of two “old worlds” and two hemispheres permanently together, with enduring consequences for them all.The outcome of the processes set in motion by those three small ships included the Atlantic slave trade, the decima- tion of the native population of the Americas, the massive growth of world popula- tion, the Industrial Revolution, and the growing prominence of Europeans on the world stage.But none of these developments were even remotely foreseeable in 1492.

Thus the fifteenth century, as a hinge of major historical change, provides an occa- sion for a bird’s-eye view of the world through a kind of global tour.This excursion around the world will serve to briefly review the human saga thus far and to establish a baseline from which the transformations of the modern era might be measured. How then might we describe the world, and the worlds, of the fifteenth century?

The Shapes of Human Communities One way to describe the world of the fifteenth century is to identify the various types of societies that it contained. Bands of hunters and gatherers, villages of agricultural peoples, newly emerging chiefdoms or small states, nomadic/pastoral communities, established civilizations and empires—all of these social or political forms would have been apparent to a widely traveled visitor in the fifteenth century.They represented alternative ways of organizing human communities and responded to differences in the environment, in the historical development of various regions, and in the choices made by particular peoples.All of them were long established by the fifteenth century, but the balance among these distinctive kinds of societies at the end of the post- classical millennium (1500) was quite different than it had been at the beginning (500).

Paleolithic Persistence Despite millennia of agricultural advance, substantial areas of the world still hosted gathering and hunting societies, known to scholars as Paleolithic (old stone-age) peoples. All of Australia, much of Siberia, the arctic coastlands, and parts of Africa and the Americas fell into this category.These peoples were not simply relics of a bygone age, however.They too had changed over time, though more slowly than their agricultural counterparts, and they too interacted with their neighbors. In short, they had a history, although most history books largely ignore them after the age of agriculture arrived. Nonetheless, this most ancient way of life still had a sizable and variable presence in the world of the fifteenth century.

Consider, for example,Australia.That continent’s many separate groups, some 250 of them, still practiced a gathering and hunting way of life in the fifteenth century, a pattern that continued well after Europeans arrived in the late eighteenth century.

■ Comparison In what ways did the gathering and hunting people of Australia differ from those of the northwest coast of North America?

Over many thousands of years, these people had assimilated various material items or cultural practices from outsiders—outrigger canoes, fish hooks, complex netting techniques, artistic styles, rituals, and mythological ideas—but despite the presence of farmers in nearby New Guinea, no agricultural practices penetrated the Australian mainland.Was it because large areas of Australia were unsuited for the kind of agri- culture practiced in New Guinea? Or did the peoples of Australia, enjoying an environment of sufficient resources, simply see no need to change their way of life?

Despite the absence of agriculture,Australia’s peoples had mastered and manip- ulated their environment, in part through the practice of “firestick farming,” a pat- tern of deliberately set fires, which they described as “cleaning up the country.”These controlled burns served to clear the underbrush, thus making hunting easier and encouraging the growth of certain plant and animal species. In addition, native Australians exchanged goods among themselves over distances of hundreds of miles, created elaborate mythologies and ritual practices, and developed sophisticated tra- ditions of sculpture and rock painting.They accomplished all of this on the basis of an economy and technology rooted in the distant Paleolithic past.

A very different kind of gathering and hunting society flourished in the fifteenth century along the northwest coast of North America among the Chinookan, Tulalip, Skagit, and other peoples. With some 300 edible animal species and an abundance of salmon and other fish, this extraordinarily bounteous environment provided the foundation for what scholars sometimes call “complex” or “affluent” gathering and hunting cultures. What distinguished the northwest coast peoples from those of Australia were permanent village settlements with large and sturdy houses, considerable economic specialization, ranked societies that sometimes included slavery, chiefdoms dominated by powerful clan leaders or “big men,” and extensive storage of food.

Although these and other gathering and hunting peoples persisted still in the fifteenth century, both their numbers and the area they inhabited had contracted greatly as the Agricultural Revolution unfolded across the planet. That relentless advance of the farming frontier continued in the centuries ahead as the Russian, Chinese, and European empires encompassed the lands of the remaining Paleolithic peoples. By the early twenty-first century, what was once the only human way of life had been reduced to minuscule pockets of people whose cultures seemed doomed to a final extinction.

Agricultural Village Societies Far more numerous than hunters and gatherers were those many peoples who, though fully agricultural, had avoided incorporation into larger empires or civilizations and had not developed their own city- or state-based societies. Living usually in small village-based communities and organized in terms of kinship relations, such people predominated during the fifteenth century in much of North America and in parts of the Amazon River basin, Southeast Asia, and Africa south of the equator.They had created societies largely without the oppressive political authority, class inequal-

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■ Change What kinds of changes were transforming West African agricultural village societies and those of the Iroquois as the fifteenth century dawned?

ities, and seclusion of women that were so common in civilizations. Historians have largely relegated such societies to the periphery of world history, marginal to their overwhelming focus on large-scale civilizations. Viewed from within their own circles, though, these societies were of course at the center of things, each with its own history of migration, cultural transformation, social conflict, incorporation of new people, political rise and fall, and interaction with strangers. In short, they too changed as their histories unfolded.

In the forested region of what is now southern Nigeria in West Africa, for example, three quite different patterns of change emerged in the centuries between 1000 and 1500 (see Map 13.3, p. 582). Each of them began from a base of farming village societies whose productivity was generating larger populations.

Among the Yoruba-speaking people, a series of rival city-states emerged, each within a walled town and ruled by an oba, or “king” (some of whom were women), who performed both religious and political functions. As in ancient Mesopotamia or classical Greece, no single state or empire encompassed all of Yorubaland. Nearby lay the kingdom of Benin, a small, highly centralized territorial state that emerged by the fifteenth century and was ruled by a warrior king named Ewuare, said to have conquered 201 towns and villages in the process of founding the new state. His administrative chiefs replaced the heads of kinship groups as major political author- ities, while the ruler sponsored extensive trading missions and patronized artists who created the remarkable brass sculptures for which Benin is so famous.

East of the Niger River lay the lands of the Igbo peoples, where dense popula- tion and extensive trading networks might well have given rise to states, but the deliberate Igbo preference was to reject the kingship and state-building efforts of their neighbors, boasting on occasion that “the Igbo have no kings.” Instead they relied on other institutions—title societies in which wealthy men received a series of prestigious ranks, women’s associations, hereditary ritual experts serving as mediators, a balance of power among kinship groups—to maintain social cohesion beyond the level of the village. It was a “stateless society,” famously described in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the most widely read novel to emerge from twentieth-century Africa.

The Yoruba,Bini, and Igbo peoples did not live in isolated, self-contained societies,however.They traded actively among themselves and with more dis- tant peoples, such as the large African kingdom of Songhay far to the north. Cotton cloth, fish, copper and iron goods, decorative objects, and more drew neighboring peoples into networks of exchange. Common artistic traditions reflected a measure of cultural unity in a politically fragmented region, and all of these peoples seem to have changed from a matrilineal to a patrilineal sys- tem of tracing their descent. Little of this registered in the larger civilizations of the Afro-Eurasian world, but to the peoples of the West African forest during the fifteenth century, these processes were central to their history and their daily lives. Soon, however, all of them would be caught up in the transatlantic slave trade and would be changed substantially in the process.

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Benin Bronzes With the patronage of the royal court, Benin’s artists produced an array of wood, ivory, and most famously exquisite brass or bronze sculptures, most of which celebrated the royal family and decorated their palaces. Here is a sixteenth-century representation of the Queen Mother of Benin. (National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria/The

Bridgeman Art Library)

■ Significance What role did Central Asian and West African pastoralists play in their respective regions?

Across the Atlantic in what is now central New York State, other agricultural village societies were also in the process of substantial change during the several cen- turies preceding their incorporation into European trading networks and empires. The Iroquois-speaking peoples of that region had only recently become fully agri- cultural, adopting maize- and bean-farming techniques that had originated long ago in Mesoamerica.As this productive agriculture took hold by 1300 or so, the popu- lation grew, the size of settlements increased, and distinct peoples emerged, such as the Onondaga, Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, and Mohawk. Frequent warfare also erupted among them. Some scholars have speculated that as agriculture, largely seen as women’s work, became the primary economic activity,“warfare replaced successful food getting as the avenue to male prestige.”1

Whatever caused it, this increased level of conflict among Iroquois peoples trig- gered a remarkable political innovation—a loose alliance or confederation among five Iroquois peoples based on an agreement known as the Great Law of Peace (see Map 13.5, p. 589). It was an agreement to settle their differences peacefully through a confederation council of clan leaders, some fifty of them altogether, who had the authority to adjudicate disputes and set reparation payments. Operating by consen- sus, the Iroquois League of Five Nations effectively suppressed the blood feuds and tribal conflicts that had only recently been so widespread. It also coordinated their peoples’ relationship with outsiders, including the Europeans, who arrived in grow- ing numbers in the centuries after 1500.

The Iroquois League also gave expression to values of limited government, social equality, and personal freedom, concepts that some European colonists found highly attractive. One British colonial administrator declared in 1749 that the Iroquois had “such absolute Notions of Liberty that they allow no Kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories.”2 Such equality extended to gender relationships, for among the Iroquois, descent was matrilineal (reckoned through the woman’s line), married couples lived with the wife’s family, and women controlled agriculture.While men were hunters, warriors, and the primary political officeholders, women selected and could depose those leaders.

Wherever they lived in 1500, over the next several centuries independent agri- cultural peoples such as the Iroquois,Yoruba, and Igbo were increasingly encompassed in expanding economic networks and conquest empires based in Western Europe, Russia, China, or India. In this respect, they repeated the experience of many other village-based farming communities that had much earlier found themselves forcibly included in the powerful embrace of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Roman, Indian, Chinese, and other civilizations.

Herding Peoples Nomadic pastoral peoples impinged more directly and dramatically on civilizations than did hunting and gathering or agricultural village societies.The Mongol incur- sion, along with the enormous empire to which it gave rise, was one in a long series

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of challenges from the steppes, but it was not the last. As the Mongol Empire dis- integrated, a brief attempt to restore it occurred in the late fourteenth and early fif- teenth centuries under the leadership of a Turkic warrior named Timur, born in what is now Uzbekistan and known in the West as Tamerlane (see Map 13.1, p. 576).

With a ferocity that matched or exceeded that of his model, Chinggis Khan, Timur’s army of nomads brought immense devastation yet again to Russia, Persia, and India.Timur himself died in 1405, while preparing for an invasion of China. Conflicts among his successors prevented any lasting empire, although his descen- dants retained control of the area between Persia and Afghanistan for the rest of the fifteenth century.That state hosted a sophisticated elite culture, combining Turkic and Persian elements, particularly at its splendid capital of Samarkand, as its rulers patronized artists, poets, traders, and craftsmen.Timur’s conquest proved to be the last great military success of nomadic peoples from Central Asia. In the centuries that followed, their homelands were swallowed up in the expanding Russian and Chinese empires, as the balance of power between steppe nomads of inner Eurasia and the civilizations of outer Eurasia turned decisively in favor of the latter.

In Africa, pastoral peoples stayed independent of established empires several centuries longer than the nomads of Inner Asia, for not until the late nineteenth century were they incorporated into European colonial states.The experience of the Fulbe,West Africa’s largest pastoral society, provides a useful example of an African herding people with a highly significant role in the fifteenth century and beyond. From their homeland in the western fringe of the Sahara along the upper Senegal River, the Fulbe migrated gradually eastward in the centuries after 1000 C.E. (see Map 13.3, p. 582). Unlike the pastoral peoples of Inner Asia, they generally lived in small communities among agricultural peoples and paid various grazing fees and taxes for the privilege of pasturing their cattle. Relations with their farming hosts often were tense because the Fulbe resented their subordination to agricultural peoples, whose way of life they despised.That sense of cultural superiority became even more pronounced as the Fulbe, in the course of their eastward movement, slowly adopted Islam.Some of them in fact dropped out of a pastoral life and settled in towns,where they became highly respected religious leaders. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Fulbe were at the center of a wave of religiously based uprisings, or jihads, that greatly expanded the practice of Islam and gave rise to a series of new states, ruled by the Fulbe themselves.

Civilizations of the Fifteenth Century: Comparing China and Europe Beyond the foraging, farming, and herding societies of the fifteenth-century world were its civilizations, those city-centered and state-based societies that were far larger and more densely populated, more powerful and innovative, and much more unequal in terms of class and gender than other forms of human community. Since the First Civilizations had emerged between 3500 and 1000 B.C.E., both the geographic space

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they encompassed and the number of people they embraced had grown substantially. By the fifteenth century, a considerable majority of the world’s population lived within one or another of these civilizations, although most of these people no doubt identified more with local communities than with a larger civilization.What might an imaginary global traveler notice about the world’s major civilizations in the fif- teenth century?

Ming Dynasty China Such a traveler might well begin his or her journey in China, heir to a long tradi- tion of effective governance, Confucian and Daoist philosophy, a major Buddhist presence, sophisticated artistic achievements, and a highly productive economy. That civilization, however, had been greatly disrupted by a century of Mongol rule, and its population had been sharply reduced by the plague. During the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), however, China recovered (see Map 13.1). The early decades of that dynasty witnessed an effort to eliminate all signs of foreign rule, discouraging the use

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■ Description How would you define the major achievements of Ming dynasty China?

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Timur’s empire about 1405

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Map 13.1 Asia in the Fifteenth Century The fifteenth century in Asia witnessed the massive Ming dynasty voyages into the Indian Ocean, the last major eruption of nomadic power in Timur’s empire, and the flourishing of the maritime city of Malacca.

of Mongol names and dress, while promoting Confucian learning based on earlier models from the Han,Tang, and Song dynasties.Emperor Yongle (reigned 1402–1422) sponsored an enormous Encyclopedia of some 11,000 volumes.With contributions from more than 2,000 scholars, this work sought to summarize or compile all previous writing on history, geography, ethics, government, and more.Yongle also relocated the capital to Beijing, ordered the building of a magnificent imperial residence known as the Forbidden City, and constructed the Temple of Heaven, where subsequent rulers performed Confucian-based rituals to ensure the well-being of Chinese society (see Visual Source 13.1, p. 610). Culturally speaking, China was looking to its past.

Politically, the Ming dynasty reestablished the civil service examination system that had been neglected under Mongol rule and went on to create a highly cen- tralized government. Power was concentrated in the hands of the emperor himself, while a cadre of eunuchs (castrated men) personally loyal to the emperor exercised great authority, much to the dismay of the official bureaucrats.The state acted vig- orously to repair the damage of the Mongol years by restoring millions of acres to cultivation; rebuilding canals, reservoirs, and irrigation works; and planting, accord- ing to some estimates, a billion trees in an effort to reforest China. As a result, the economy rebounded, both international and domestic trade flourished, and the pop- ulation grew. During the fifteenth century, China had recovered and was perhaps the best-governed and most prosperous of the world’s major civilizations.

China also undertook the largest and most impressive maritime expeditions the world had ever seen. Since the eleventh century, Chinese sailors and traders had been a major presence in the South China Sea and in Southeast Asian port cities, with much of this activity in private hands. But now, after decades of preparation, an enormous fleet, commissioned by Emperor Yongle himself, was launched in 1405, followed over the next twenty-eight years by six more such expeditions. On board more than 300 ships of the first voyage was a crew of some 27,000, includ- ing 180 physicians, hundreds of government officials, 5 astrologers, 7 high-ranking or grand eunuchs, carpenters, tailors, accountants, merchants, translators, cooks, and thousands of soldiers and sailors.Visiting many ports in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, India,Arabia, and East Africa, these fleets, captained by the Muslim eunuch Zheng He, sought to enroll distant peoples and states in the Chinese tribute system (see Map 13.1). Dozens of rulers accompanied the fleets back to China, where they pre- sented tribute,performed the required rit- uals of submission, and received in return abundant gifts, titles, and trading opportu- nities. Chinese officials were amused by some of the exotic products to be found abroad—ostriches, zebras, and giraffes, for

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Comparing Chinese and European Ships Among the largest vessels in Zheng He’s early-fifteenth- century fleet were “treasure ships” such as this vessel measuring more than 400 feet long and carrying a crew of perhaps 1,000 men. The figure at the bottom right represents one of Columbus’s ships. (© Dugald Stermer)

example. Officially described as “bringing order to the world,” Zheng He’s expedi- tions served to establish Chinese power and prestige in the Indian Ocean and to exert Chinese control over foreign trade in the region.The Chinese, however, did not seek to conquer new territories, establish Chinese settlements, or spread their culture, though they did intervene in a number of local disputes. On one of the voyages, Zheng He erected on the island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) a tablet honoring alike the Buddha,Allah, and a Hindu deity.

The most surprising feature of these voyages was how abruptly and deliberately they were ended.After 1433,Chinese authorities simply stopped such expeditions and allowed this enormous and expensive fleet to deteriorate in port.“In less than a hun- dred years,” wrote a recent historian of these voyages,“the greatest navy the world had ever known had ordered itself into extinction.”3 Part of the reason involved the death of the emperor Yongle, who had been the chief patron of the enterprise. Many high-ranking officials had long seen the expeditions as a waste of resources because China, they believed, was the self-sufficient “middle kingdom,” requiring little from the outside world. In their eyes, the real danger to China came from the north,where nomadic barbarians constantly threatened. Finally, they viewed the voyages as the project of the court eunuchs, whom these officials despised. Even as these voices of Chinese officialdom prevailed, private Chinese merchants and craftsmen continued to settle and trade in Japan, the Philippines,Taiwan, and Southeast Asia, but they did so without the support of their government.The Chinese state quite deliberately turned its back on what was surely within its reach—a large-scale maritime empire in the Indian Ocean basin.

European Comparisons: State Building and Cultural Renewal At the other end of the Eurasian continent, similar processes of demographic recov- ery, political consolidation, cultural flowering, and overseas expansion were under way.Western Europe,having escaped Mongol conquest but devastated by the plague, began to regrow its population during the second half of the fifteenth century. As in China, the infrastructure of civilization proved a durable foundation for demo- graphic and economic revival.

Politically too Europe joined China in continuing earlier patterns of state build- ing. In China, however, this meant a unitary and centralized government that encom- passed almost the whole of its civilization, while in Europe a decidedly fragmented system of many separate, independent, and highly competitive states made for a sharply divided Christendom (see Map 13.2).Many of these states—Spain, Portugal, France,England, the city-states of Italy (Milan,Venice, and Florence), various German principalities—learned to tax their citizens more efficiently, to create more effective administrative structures, and to raise standing armies.A small Russian state centered on the city of Moscow also emerged in the fifteenth century as Mongol rule faded away. Much of this state building was driven by the needs of war, a frequent occur- rence in such a fragmented and competitive political environment. England and

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■ Comparison What political and cultural differences stand out in the histories of fifteenth-century China and Western Europe? What similarities are apparent?

France, for example, fought intermittently for more than a century in the Hundred Years’War (1337–1453) over rival claims to territory in France. Nothing remotely similar disturbed the internal life of Ming dynasty China.

A renewed cultural blossoming, known in European history as the Renaissance, likewise paralleled the revival of all things Confucian in Ming dynasty China. In Europe, however, that blossoming celebrated and reclaimed a classical Greek tradi- tion that earlier had been obscured or viewed through the lens of Arabic or Latin translations. Beginning in the vibrant commercial cities of Italy between roughly 1350 and 1500, the Renaissance reflected the belief of the wealthy elite that they were living in a wholly new era, far removed from the confined religious world of feudal Europe. Educated citizens of these cities sought inspiration in the art and

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Map 13.2 Europe in 1500 By the end of the fifteenth century, Christian Europe had assumed its early modern political shape as a system of competing states threatened by an expanding Muslim Ottoman Empire.

literature of ancient Greece and Rome; they were “returning to the sources,” as they put it.Their purpose was not so much to reconcile these works with the ideas of Christianity, as the twelfth- and thirteenth-century university scholars had done, but to use them as a cultural standard to imitate and then to surpass.The elite patron- ized great Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, whose paintings and sculptures were far more naturalistic, particularly in portraying the human body, than those of their medieval counterparts.

Although religious themes remained prominent, Renaissance artists now included portraits and busts of well-known contemporary figures and scenes from ancient mythology. In the work of scholars, known as “humanists,” reflections on secular topics such as grammar, history, politics, poetry, rhetoric, and ethics complemented more religious matters. For example, Niccolò Machiavelli’s (1469‒1527) famous work The Prince was a prescription for political success based on the way politics actually operated in a highly competitive Italy of rival city-states rather than on idealistic and religiously based principles.To the question of whether a prince should be feared or loved, Machiavelli replied:

One ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved. . . . For it may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, anxious to avoid dan- ger, and covetous of gain. . . . Fear is maintained by dread of punishment which never fails. . . . In the actions of men, and especially of princes, from which there is no appeal, the end justifies the means.4

Heavily influenced by classical models, Renaissance figures were more interested in capturing the unique qualities of particular individuals and in describing the world as it was than in portraying or exploring eternal religious truths. In its focus on the affairs of this world, Renaissance culture reflected the urban bustle and com- mercial preoccupations of the Italian cities. Its secular elements challenged the other- worldliness of Christian culture, and its individualism signaled the dawning of a more capitalist economy of private entrepreneurs.A new Europe was in the making, rather more different from its own recent past than Ming dynasty China was from its pre-Mongol glory.

European Comparisons: Maritime Voyaging A global traveler during the fifteenth century might be surprised to find that Europeans, like the Chinese, were also launching outward-bound maritime expedi- tions. Initiated in 1415 by the small country of Portugal, those voyages sailed ever farther down the west coast of Africa, supported by the state and blessed by the pope (see Map 13.3). As the century ended, two expeditions marked major breakthroughs, although few suspected it at the time. In 1492, Christopher Columbus, funded by Spain, Portugal’s neighbor and rival, made his way west across the Atlantic hoping to arrive in the East and, in one of history’s most consequential mistakes, ran into the Americas. Five years later, in 1497,Vasco da Gama launched a voyage that took him

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■ Comparison In what ways did European maritime voyaging in the fifteenth century differ from that of China? What accounts for these differences?

around the tip of South Africa, along the East African coast, and, with the help of a Muslim pilot, across the Indian Ocean to Calicut in southern India.

The differences between the Chinese and European oceangoing ventures were striking, most notably perhaps in terms of size. Columbus captained three ships and a crew of about 90, while da Gama had four ships, manned by perhaps 170 sailors. These were minuscule fleets compared to Zheng He’s hundreds of ships and a crew in the many thousands. “All the ships of Columbus and da Gama combined,” according to a recent account,“could have been stored on a single deck of a single vessel in the fleet that set sail under Zheng He.”5

Motivation as well as size differentiated the two ventures. Europeans were seeking the wealth of Africa and Asia—gold, spices, silk, and more.They also were in search of Christian converts and of possible Christian allies with whom to continue their long crusading struggle against threatening Muslim powers. China, by contrast, faced no equivalent power, needed no military allies in the Indian Ocean basin, and required little that these regions produced. Nor did China possess an impulse to convert for- eigners to Chinese culture or religion as the Europeans surely did. Furthermore, the confident and overwhelmingly powerful Chinese fleet sought neither conquests nor colonies, while the Europeans soon tried to monopolize by force the commerce of the Indian Ocean and violently carved out huge empires in the Americas.

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Portuguese seize Ceuta in Morocco 1415

Prince Henry the Navigator launches Portuguese exploration of the 1420 West African coast

Portuguese settle the Azores 1430s

Chinese fleets withdrawn from Indian Ocean 1433

Portuguese reach the Senegal River; beginning of Atlantic 1440s slave trade

Portuguese contact with Kongo; royal family converts to Christianity 1480s

Sugar production begins in Atlantic islands (Canaries, São Tomé) 1480s

Establishment of trading station at Elmina (in present-day Ghana) 1480s

First transatlantic voyage of Columbus 1492

John Cabot sails across North Atlantic to North America 1496

Vasco da Gama enters Indian Ocean and reaches India 1497–1498

Portuguese attacks on various Swahili cities; establishment of Fort 1497–1520s Jesus at Mombasa; Portuguese contacts with Christian Ethiopia

Magellan’s voyage to Asia via the Americas; first circumnavigation 1520–1523 of the globe

Snapshot Key Moments in European Maritime Voyaging

The most striking difference in these two cases lay in the sharp contrast between China’s decisive ending of its voyages and the continuing, indeed escalating,European effort, which soon brought the world’s oceans and growing numbers of the world’s people under its control.This is the reason that Zheng He’s voyages were so long neglected in China’s historical memory. They led nowhere, whereas the initial European expeditions, so much smaller and less promising, were but the first steps

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Mediter ranean Sea

Red Sea

N ile

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Zam bezi R.

Senegal R .

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to In dia,

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Axum

Sofala

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Mogadishu

Kano Lalibela

Elmina

Ife

Gao Dogon

Jenne

Timbuktu

Map 13.3 Africa in the Fifteenth Century By the 1400s, Africa was a virtual museum of political and cultural diversity, encompassing large empires, such as Songhay; smaller kingdoms, such as Kongo; city-states among the Yoruba, Hausa, and Swahili peoples; village-based societies without states at all, as among the Igbo; and nomadic pastoral peoples, such as the Fulbe. Both European and Chinese maritime expeditions touched on Africa during that cen- tury, even as Islam continued to find acceptance in the northern half of the continent.

on a journey to world power. But why did the Europeans continue a process that the Chinese had deliberately abandoned?

In the first place, of course, Europe had no unified political authority with the power to order an end to its maritime outreach. Its system of competing states, so unlike China’s single unified empire, ensured that once begun, rivalry alone would drive the Europeans to the ends of the earth.Beyond this,much of Europe’s elite had an interest in overseas expansion. Its budding merchant communities saw opportunity for profit; its competing monarchs eyed the revenue that could come from taxing overseas trade or from seizing overseas resources; the Church foresaw the possibil- ity of widespread conversion; impoverished nobles might imagine fame and fortune abroad. In China, by contrast, support for Zheng He’s voyages was very shallow in official circles, and when the emperor Yongle passed from the scene, those opposed to the voyages prevailed within the politics of the court.

Finally, the Chinese were very much aware of their own antiquity, believed strongly in the absolute superiority of their culture, and felt with good reason that, should they desire something from abroad, others would bring it to them.Europeans too believed themselves unique, particularly in religious terms as the possessors of Christianity, the “one true religion.” In material terms, though, they were seeking out the greater riches of the East, and they were highly conscious that Muslim power blocked easy access to these treasures and posed a military and religious threat to Europe itself.All of this propelled continuing European expansion in the centuries that followed.

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The Waldseemüller Map of 1507 Just fifteen years after Columbus landed in the Western Hemisphere, this map, which was created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, reflected a dawning European awareness of the planet’s global dimensions and location of the world’s major landmasses. (Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art

Resource, NY)

The Chinese withdrawal from the Indian Ocean actually facilitated the European entry. It cleared the way for the Portuguese to enter the region, where they faced only the eventual naval power of the Ottomans. Had Vasco da Gama encountered Zheng He’s massive fleet as his four small ships sailed into Asian waters in 1498, world history may well have taken quite a different turn. As it was, how- ever, China’s abandonment of oceanic voyaging and Europe’s embrace of the seas marked different responses to a common problem that both civilizations shared— growing populations and land shortage. In the centuries that followed, China’s rice- based agriculture was able to expand production internally by more intensive use of the land, while the country’s territorial expansion was inland toward Central Asia. By contrast, Europe’s agriculture, based on wheat and livestock, expanded pri- marily by acquiring new lands in overseas possessions, which were gained as a con- sequence of a commitment to oceanic expansion.

Civilizations of the Fifteenth Century: The Islamic World Beyond the domains of Chinese and European civilization, our fifteenth-century global traveler would surely have been impressed with the transformations of the Islamic world. Stretching across much of Afro-Eurasia, the enormous realm of Islam experienced a set of remarkable changes during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as well as the continuation of earlier patterns.The most notable change lay in the political realm, for an Islamic civilization that had been severely frag- mented since at least 900 now crystallized into four major states or empires (see Map 13.4).At the same time, a long-term process of conversion to Islam continued the cultural transformation of Afro-Eurasian societies both within and beyond these new states.

In the Islamic Heartland:The Ottoman and Safavid Empires The most impressive and enduring of the new Islamic states was the Ottoman Empire, which lasted in one form or another from the fourteenth to the early twentieth century. It was the creation of one of the many Turkic warrior groups that had earlier migrated into Anatolia. By the mid-fifteenth century, these Ottoman Turks had already carved out a state that encompassed much of the Anatolian peninsula and had pushed deep into southeastern Europe (the Balkans), acquiring in the process a substantial Christian population. In the two centuries that followed, the Ottoman Empire extended its control to much of the Middle East, coastal North Africa, the lands surrounding the Black Sea, and even farther into Eastern Europe.

The Ottoman Empire was a state of enormous significance in the world of the fifteenth century and beyond. In its huge territory, long duration, incorpora- tion of many diverse peoples, and economic and cultural sophistication, it was

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■ Comparison What differences can you identify among the four major empires in the Islamic world of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries?

one of the great empires of world history. In the fifteenth century, only Ming dynasty China and the Incas matched it in terms of wealth, power, and splendor. The empire represented the emergence of the Turks as the dominant people of the Islamic world, ruling now over many Arabs, who had initiated this new faith more than 800 years before. In adding “caliph” (successor to the Prophet) to their other titles, Ottoman sultans claimed the legacy of the earlier Abbasid Empire. They sought to bring a renewed unity to the Islamic world, while also serving as protector of the faith, the “strong sword of Islam.”

The Ottoman Empire also represented a new phase in the long encounter between Christendom and the world of Islam. In the Crusades, Europeans had taken the aggressive initiative in that encounter, but the rise of the Ottoman Empire reversed their roles.The seizure of Constantinople in 1453 marked the final demise of Chris- tian Byzantium and allowed Ottoman rulers to see themselves as successors to the Roman Empire. In 1529, a rapidly expanding Ottoman Empire laid siege to Vienna in the heart of Central Europe.The political and military expansion of Islam, at the expense of Christendom, seemed clearly under way.Many Europeans spoke fearfully of the “terror of the Turk.”

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O T T O M A N E M P I R E SAFAVID EMPIRE

MUGHAL EMPIRE

SONGHAY EMPIRE

Map 13.4 Empires of the Islamic World The most prominent political features of the vast Islamic world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were four large states: the Songhay, Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires.

In the neighboring Persian lands to the east of the Ottoman Empire, another Islamic state was also taking shape in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—the Safavid Empire. Its leadership was also Turkic, but in this case it had emerged from a Sufi religious order founded several centuries earlier by Safi al-Din (1252–1334). The long-term significance of the Safavid Empire, which was established in the decade following 1500, was its decision to forcibly impose a Shia version of Islam as the official religion of the state. Over time, this form of Islam gained popular support and came to define the unique identity of Persian (Iranian) culture.

This Shia empire also introduced a sharp divide into the political and religious life of heart- land Islam, for almost all of Persia’s neighbors practiced a Sunni form of the faith. For a century (1534–1639), periodic military conflict erupted between the Ottoman and Safavid empires, reflecting both territorial rivalry and sharp reli- gious differences. In 1514, the Ottoman sultan wrote to the Safavid ruler in the most bitter of terms:

You have denied the sanctity of divine law.. . you have deserted the path of sal- vation and the sacred commandments . . . you have opened to Muslims the gates of tyranny and oppression . . . you have raised the standard of irreligion and heresy. . . . [Therefore] the ulama and our doctors have pronounced a sentence of death against you, perjurer and blasphemer.6

This Sunni/Shia hostility has continued to divide the Islamic world into the twenty-first century.

On the Frontiers of Islam:The Songhay and Mughal Empires While the Ottoman and Safavid empires brought both a new political unity and a sharp division to the heartland of Islam, two other states performed a similar role on the expanding African and Asian frontiers of the faith. In the West African savannas, the Songhay Empire rose in the second half of the fifteenth century. It was the most recent and the largest in a series of impressive states that operated at a crucial intersection of the trans-Saharan trade routes and that derived much of their revenue from taxing that commerce. Islam was a growing faith in Songhay

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Ottoman Janissaries Originating in the fourteenth century, the Janissaries became the elite infantry force of the Ottoman Empire. Complete with uni- forms, cash salaries, and marching music, they were the first standing army in the region since the days of the Roman Empire. When gun- powder technology became available, Janissary forces soon were armed with mus- kets, grenades, and hand- held cannon. This image dates from the seventeenth century. (Austrian National Library, picture archive, Vienna:

Cod. 8626, fol. 15r)

but was limited largely to urban elites.This cultural divide within Songhay largely accounts for the religious behavior of its fifteenth-century monarch Sonni Ali (reigned 1465–1492), who gave alms and fasted during Ramadan in proper Islamic style but also enjoyed a reputation as a magician and possessed a charm thought to render his soldiers invisible to their enemies. Nonetheless, Songhay had become a major center of Islamic learning and commerce by the early sixteenth century. A North African traveler known as Leo Africanus remarked on the city of Timbuktu:

Here are great numbers of [Muslim] religious teachers, judges, scholars, and other learned persons who are bountifully maintained at the king’s expense. Here too are brought various manuscripts or written books from Barbary [North Africa] which are sold for more money than any other merchandise. . . .Here are very rich merchants and to here journey continually large numbers of negroes who purchase here cloth from Barbary and Europe.. . . It is a wonder to see the quality of merchandise that is daily brought here and how costly and sumptuous every- thing is.7

Sonni Ali’s successor made the pilgrimage to Mecca and asked to be given the title “Caliph of the Land of the Blacks.” Songhay then represented a substantial Islamic state on the African frontier of a still-expanding Muslim world.

The Mughal Empire in India bore similarities to Songhay, for both governed largely non-Muslim populations.Much as the Ottoman Empire initiated a new phase in the interaction of Islam and Christendom, so too did the Mughal Empire continue an ongoing encounter between Islamic and Hindu civilizations. Established in the early sixteenth century, the Mughal Empire was the creation of yet another Islamized Turkic group, which invaded India in 1526. Over the next century, the Mughals (a Persian term for Mongols) established unified control over most of the Indian penin- sula, giving it a rare period of political unity and laying the foundation for subsequent British colonial rule. During its first several centuries, the Mughal Empire, a land of great wealth and imperial splendor, was the location of a remarkable effort to blend many Hindu groups and a variety of Muslims into an effective partnership.The inclu- sive policies of the early Mughal emperors showed that Muslim rulers could accom- modate their overwhelmingly Hindu subjects in somewhat the same fashion as Ottoman authorities provided religious autonomy for their Christian peoples. In southernmost India, however, the distinctly Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagara flour- ished in the fifteenth century, even as it borrowed architectural styles from the Muslim states of northern India and sometimes employed Muslim mercenaries in its mili- tary forces.

Together these four Muslim empires—Ottoman,Safavid, Songhay, and Mughal— brought to the Islamic world a greater measure of political coherence, military power, economic prosperity, and cultural brilliance than it had known since the early centuries of Islam.This new energy, sometimes called a “second flowering of Islam,” impelled the continuing spread of the faith to yet new regions.The most promi- nent of these was oceanic Southeast Asia, which for centuries had been intimately

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bound up in the world of Indian Ocean commerce. By the fifteenth century, that trading network was largely in Muslim hands, and the demand for Southeast Asian spices was mounting as the Eurasian world recovered from the devastation of Mongol conquest and the plague. Growing numbers of Muslim traders, many of them from India, settled in Java and Sumatra, bringing their faith with them.Thus, unlike the Middle East and India, where Islam was established in the wake of Arab or Turkic conquest, in Southeast Asia, as in West Africa, it was introduced by traveling mer- chants and solidified through the activities of Sufi holy men.

The rise of Malacca, strategically located on the waterway between Sumatra and Malaya, was a sign of the times (see Map 13.1, p. 576). During the fifteenth century, it was transformed from a small fishing village to a major Muslim port city. A Portuguese visitor in 1512 observed that Malacca had “no equal in the world. . . . Commerce between different nations for a thousand leagues on every hand must come to Malacca.”8 That city also became a springboard for the spread of Islam throughout the region.The Islam of Malacca, however, demonstrated much blending with local and Hindu/Buddhist traditions, while the city itself, like many port towns, had a repu- tation for “rough behavior.”An Arab Muslim pilot in the 1480s commented critically:

They have no culture at all. . . .You do not know whether they are Muslim or not. . . .They are thieves, for theft is rife among them and they do not mind.. . .They appear liars and deceivers in trade and labor.9

Nonetheless, Malacca, like Timbuktu, became a center for Islamic learning, and stu- dents from elsewhere in Southeast Asia were studying there in the fifteenth century. As the more central regions of Islam were consolidating politically, the frontier of the faith continued to move steadily outward.

Civilizations of the Fifteenth Century: The Americas Across the Atlantic, centers of civilization had long flourished in Mesoamerica and in the Andes.The fifteenth century witnessed new, larger, and more politically uni- fied expressions of those civilizations in the Aztec and Inca empires. Both were the work of previously marginal peoples who had forcibly taken over and absorbed older cultures, giving them new energy, and both were decimated in the sixteenth century at the hands of Spanish conquistadores and their diseases.To conclude this global tour of world civilizations, we will send our weary traveler to the Western Hemisphere for a brief look at these American civilizations (see Map 13.5).

The Aztec Empire The empire known to history as the Aztec state was largely the work of the Mexica people, a seminomadic group from northern Mexico who had migrated southward and by 1325 had established themselves on a small island in Lake Texcoco. Over the

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■ Comparison What distinguished the Aztec and Inca empires from each other?

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Map 13.5 The Americas in the Fifteenth Century The Americas before Columbus represented a world almost completely separate from Afro-Eurasia. It fea- tured similar kinds of societies, though with a different balance among them, but it completely lacked the pastoral economies that were so important in the Eastern Hemisphere.

next century, the Mexica developed their military capacity, served as mercenaries for more powerful people, negotiated elite marriage alliances with them, and built up their own capital city of Tenochtitlán. In 1428, a Triple Alliance between the Mexica and two other nearby city-states launched a highly aggressive program of military conquest, which in less than 100 years brought more of Mesoamerica within a single political framework than ever before.Aztec authorities, eager to shed their rather undistinguished past, now claimed descent from earlier Mesoamerican peoples such as the Toltecs and Teotihuacán.

With a core population recently estimated at 5 to 6 million people, the Aztec Empire was a loosely structured and unstable conquest state that witnessed frequent rebellions by its subject peoples. Conquered peoples and cities were required to reg- ularly deliver to their Aztec rulers impressive quantities of textiles and clothing, mili- tary supplies, jewelry and other luxuries, various foodstuffs, animal products, building materials, rubber balls, paper, and more.The process was overseen by local imperial tribute collectors, who sent the required goods on to Tenochtitlán, a metropolis of 150,000 to 200,000 people, where they were meticulously recorded.

That city featured numerous canals, dikes, causeways, and bridges.A central walled area of palaces and temples included a pyramid almost 200 feet high. Surrounding the city were “floating gardens,” artificial islands created from swamplands that sup- ported a highly productive agriculture.Vast marketplaces reflected the commerciali- zation of the economy.A young Spanish soldier who beheld the city in 1519 described his reaction:

Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real, for on one side, on the land there were great cities, and in the lake ever so many more, and the lake was crowded with canoes, and in the causeway were many bridges at intervals, and in front of us stood the great city of Mexico.10

Beyond tribute from conquered peoples, ordinary trade, both local and long- distance, permeated Aztec domains. The extent of empire and rapid population growth stimulated the development of markets and the production of craft goods, particularly in the fifteenth century.Virtually every settlement, from the capital city to the smallest village, had a marketplace that hummed with activity during weekly market days.The largest was that of Tlatelolco, near the capital city, which stunned the Spanish with its huge size, its good order, and the immense range of goods available. Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who defeated the Aztecs, wrote that “every kind of merchandise such as can be met with in every land is for sale there, whether of food and victuals, or ornaments of gold and silver, or lead, brass, copper, tin, precious stones, bones, shells, snails and feathers.”11 Professional merchants, known as pochteca, were legally commoners, but their wealth, often exceeding that of the nobility, allowed them to rise in society and become “magnates of the land.” (See Document 13.1, pp. 601–04, for another Spanish view of the Aztec realm.)

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■ Description How did Aztec religious thinking support the empire?

Among the “goods” that the pochteca obtained were slaves, many of whom were destined for sacrifice in the bloody rituals so central to Aztec religious life.Long a part of Mesoamerican and many other world cultures,human sacrifice assumed an unusu- ally prominent role in Aztec public life and thought during the fifteenth century. Tlacaelel (1398–1480), who was for more than half a century a prominent official of the Aztec Empire, is often credited with crystallizing the ideology of state that gave human sacrifice such great importance.

In that cyclical understanding of the world, the sun, central to all of life and identified with the Aztec patron deity Huitzilopochtli, tended to lose its energy in a constant battle against encroaching dark- ness.Thus the Aztec world hovered always on the edge of catastrophe.To replenish its energy and thus postpone the descent into endless darkness, the sun required the life- giving force found in human blood.Because the gods had shed their blood ages ago in creating humankind, it was wholly proper for people to offer their own blood to nour- ish the gods in the present.The high calling of the Aztec state was to supply this blood, largely through its wars of expansion and from prisoners of war, who were destined for sacrifice. The victims were “those who have died for the god.”The growth of the Aztec Empire therefore became the means for maintaining cosmic order and avoiding utter catastrophe.This ideology also shaped the techniques of Aztec warfare, which put a premium on capturing prisoners rather than on killing the enemy. As the empire grew, priests and rulers became mutually dependent, and “human sacrifices were carried out in the service of politics.”12 Massive sacrificial rituals, together with a display of great wealth, served to impress enemies, allies, and subjects alike with the immense power of the Aztecs and their gods.

Alongside these sacrificial rituals was a philosophical and poetic tradition of great beauty, much of which mused on the fragility and brevity of human life. Such an outlook characterized the work of Nezahualcoyotl (1402–1472), a poet and king of the city-state of Texcoco, which was part of the Aztec Empire:

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Aztec Women Within the home, Aztec women cooked, cleaned, spun and wove cloth, raised their children, and undertook ritual activities. Outside the home, they served as officials in palaces, priestesses in temples, traders in markets, teachers in schools, and members of craft workers’ organizations. This domestic image comes from the sixteenth-century Florentine Codex, which was compiled by the Spanish but illus- trated by Aztec artists. (Templo Mayor Library Mexico/Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive)

Truly do we live on Earth? Not forever on earth; only a little while here. Be it jade, it shatters. Be it gold, it breaks. Be it a quetzal feather, it tears apart. Not forever on earth; only a little while here.

Like a painting, we will be erased. Like a flower, we will dry up here on earth. Like plumed vestments of the precious bird, That precious bird with an agile neck, We will come to an end.13

The Inca Empire While the Mexica were constructing an empire in Mesoamerica, a relatively small community of Quechua-speaking people, known to us as the Inca, was building the Western Hemisphere’s largest imperial state along the spine of the Andes Mountains, which run almost the entire length of the west coast of South America. Much as the Aztecs drew upon the traditions of the Toltecs and Teotihuacán, the Incas incor- porated the lands and cultures of earlier Andean civilizations: the Chavín, Moche, Nazca, and Chimu.The Inca Empire, however, was much larger than the Aztec state; it stretched some 2,500 miles along the Andes and contained perhaps 10 million sub- jects.Although the Aztec Empire controlled only part of the Mesoamerican cultural region, the Inca state encompassed practically the whole of Andean civilization dur- ing its short life in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Both the Aztec and Inca empires represent rags-to-riches stories in which quite modest and remotely located people very quickly created by military conquest the largest states ever witnessed in their respective regions, but the empires themselves were quite different. In the Aztec realm, the Mexica rulers largely left their conquered people alone, if the required tribute was forthcoming. No elaborate administrative system arose to integrate the conquered territories or to assimilate their people to Aztec culture.

The Incas, on the other hand, erected a rather more bureaucratic empire, though with many accommodations for local circumstances.At the top reigned the emperor, an absolute ruler regarded as divine, a descendant of the creator god Viracocha and the son of the sun god Inti. In theory, the state owned all land and resources, and each of the some eighty provinces in the empire had an Inca governor. At least in the central regions of the empire, subjects were grouped into hierarchical units of 10, 50, 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000, and 10,000 people, each headed by local officials, who were appointed and supervised by an Inca governor or the emperor.A separate set of “inspectors” provided the imperial center with an independent check on provincial

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■ Description In what ways did Inca authorities seek to integrate their vast domains?

officials. Births, deaths, marriages, and other population data were carefully recorded on quipus, the knotted cords that served as an accounting device.A resettlement pro- gram moved one-quarter or more of the population to new locations, in part to dis- perse conquered and no doubt resentful people.

Efforts at cultural integration required the leaders of conquered peoples to learn Quechua.Their sons were removed to the capital of Cuzco for instruction in Inca culture and language.Even now, millions of people from Ecuador to Chile still speak Quechua, and it is the official second language of Peru after Spanish. While the Incas required their subject peoples to acknowledge major Inca deities, these peoples were then largely free to carry on their own religious traditions. Human sacrifice took place on great public occasions or at times of special difficulty, but nothing remotely on the scale of the Aztec practice.

Like the Aztec Empire, the Inca state represented an especially dense and extended network of economic relationships within the “American web,” but these relationships took shape in quite a different fashion. Inca demands on their con- quered people were expressed, not so much in terms of tribute, but as labor ser- vice, known as mita, which was required periodically of every household.14 What people produced at home usually stayed at home, but almost everyone also had to work for the state. Some labored on large state farms or on “sun farms,” which sup- ported temples and religious institutions; others herded, mined, served in the mili- tary, or toiled on state-directed construction projects. Those with particular skills were put to work manufacturing textiles, metal goods, ceramics, and stonework. The most well known of these specialists were the “chosen women,” who were removed from their homes as young girls, trained in Inca ideology, and set to pro- ducing corn beer and cloth at state centers. Later they were given as wives to men of distinction or sent to serve as priestesses in various temples, where they were known as “wives of the Sun.” In return for such labor services, Inca ideology, expressed in terms of family relation- ships, required the state to provide elab- orate feasts at which large quantities of food and drink were consumed.Thus the authority of the state penetrated and directed the Incas’ society and economy far more than did that of the Aztecs. (See Document 13.2, pp. 605–07, for an early Spanish account of Inca governing practices.)

If the Inca and Aztec civilizations dif- fered sharply in their political and eco- nomic arrangements, they resembled each other more closely in their gender

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Machu Picchu Machu Picchu, high in the Andes Mountains, was con- structed by the Incas in the 1400s on a spot long held sacred by local people. Its 200 buildings stand at some 8,000 feet above sea level, making it truly a “city in the sky.” According to scholars, it was probably a royal retreat or religious center, rather than serving adminis- trative, commercial, or mili- tary purposes. The outside world became aware of Machu Picchu only in 1911, when it was discovered by a Yale University archeologist. (Crispin Rodwell/Alamy)

systems. Both societies practiced what scholars call “gender parallelism,” in which “women and men operate in two separate but equivalent spheres, each gender enjoying autonomy in its own sphere.”15

In both Mesoamerican and Andean societies, such systems had emerged long before their incorporation into the Aztec and Inca empires. In the Andes, men reck- oned their descent from their fathers and women from their mothers, while Mesoamericans had long viewed children as belonging equally to their mothers and fathers. Parallel religious cults for women and men likewise flourished in both societies. Inca men venerated the sun, while women worshipped the moon, with matching religious officials. In Aztec temples, both male and female priests presided over rituals dedicated to deities of both sexes. Particularly among the Incas, parallel hierarchies of male and female political officials governed the empire, while in Aztec society, women officials exercised local authority under a title that meant “female person in charge of people.” Social roles were clearly defined and different for men and women, but the domestic concerns of women—childbirth, cooking, weaving, cleaning—were not regarded as inferior to the activities of men.Among the Aztec, for example, sweeping was a powerful and sacred act with symbolic significance as “an act of purification and a preventative against evil elements penetrating the center of the Aztec universe, the home.”16 In the Andes, men broke the ground, women sowed, and both took part in the harvest.

None of this meant gender equality. Men occupied the top positions in both political and religious life, and male infidelity was treated more lightly than was women’s unfaithfulness.As the Inca and Aztec empires expanded, military life, lim- ited to men, grew in prestige, perhaps skewing an earlier gender parallelism. In other ways, the new Aztec and Inca rulers adapted to the gender systems of the people they had conquered. Among the Aztecs, the tools of women’s work, the broom and the weaving spindle, were ritualized as weapons; sweeping the home was believed to assist men at war; and childbirth for women was regarded as “our kind of war.”17 Inca rulers did not challenge the gender parallelism of their subjects but instead replicated it at a higher level, as the sapay Inca (the Inca ruler) and the coya (his female consort) governed jointly, claiming descent respectively from the sun and the moon.

Webs of Connection Few people in the fifteenth century lived in entirely separate and self-contained communities.Almost all were caught up, to one degree or another, in various and overlapping webs of influence, communication, and exchange. Such interactions represent, of course, one of the major concerns of world history. What kinds of webs or networks linked the various societies and civilizations of the fifteenth century?18

Perhaps most obvious were the webs of empire, large-scale political systems that brought together a variety of culturally different people. Christians and Muslims encountered each other directly in the Ottoman Empire, as did Hindus and Muslims

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■ Connection In what different ways did the peoples of the fifteenth century interact with one another?

in the Mughal Empire. No empire tried more diligently to integrate its diverse peoples than the fifteenth-century Incas.

Religion too linked far-flung peoples, and divided them as well. Christianity provided a common religious culture for peoples from England to Russia, although the great divide between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy endured, and in the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation would shatter permanently the Christian unity of the Latin West.Although Buddhism had largely vanished from its South Asian homeland, it remained a link among China, Korea,Tibet, Japan, and parts of Southeast Asia, even as it splintered into a variety of sects and practices. More than either of these, Islam actively brought together its many peoples. In the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, Africans, Arabs, Persians, Turks, Indians, and many others joined as one people as they rehearsed together the events that gave birth to their common faith.And yet divisions and conflicts persisted within the vast realm of Islam, as the violent hostility between the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the Shia Safavid Empire so vividly illustrates.

Long-established patterns of trade among peoples occupying different environ- ments and producing different goods were certainly much in evidence during the fifteenth century, as they had been for millennia. Hunting societies of Siberia fun- neled furs and other products of the forest into the Silk Road trading network tra- versing the civilizations of Eurasia. In the fifteenth century, some of the agricultural peoples in southern Nigeria were receiving horses brought overland from the drier regions to the north, where those animals flourished better.The Mississippi River in North America and the Orinoco and Amazon rivers in South America facilitated a canoe-borne commerce along those waterways. Coastal shipping in large seagoing canoes operated in the Caribbean and along the Pacific coast between Mexico and Peru. In the Pacific, the Micronesian island of Yap by the fifteenth century was the center of an oceanic trading network, which included the distant islands of Guam and Palau and used large stone disks as money. Likewise the people of Tonga, Samoa, and Fiji intermarried and exchanged a range of goods, including mats and canoes.

The great long-distance trading patterns of the Afro-Eurasian world, in opera- tion for a thousand years or more, likewise continued in the fifteenth century, although the balance among them was changing (see Map 13.6). The Silk Road overland network, which had flourished under Mongol control in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, contracted in the fifteenth century as the Mongol Empire broke up and the devastation of the plague reduced demand for its products.The rise of the Ottoman Empire also blocked direct commercial contact between Europe and China, but oceanic trade from Japan, Korea, and China through the islands of Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean picked up considerably. Larger ships made it possible to trade in bulk goods such as grain as well as luxury products, while more sophisticated partnerships and credit mechanisms greased the wheels of commerce. A common Islamic culture over much of this vast region likewise smoothed the passage of goods among very different peoples, as it also did for the trans-Saharan trade.

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A Preview of Coming Attractions: Looking Ahead to the Modern Era, 1500–2010 While ties of empire, culture, and commerce surely linked many of the peoples in the world of the fifteenth century, none of those connections operated on a genuinely global scale.Although the densest webs of connection had been woven within the Afro-Eurasian zone of interaction, this huge region had no sustained ties with the Americas, and neither of them had meaningful contact with the peoples of Pacific Oceania.That situation was about to change as Europeans in the sixteenth century and beyond forged a set of genuinely global relationships that generated sustained interaction among all of these regions.That huge process and the many outcomes that flowed from it marked the beginning of what historians commonly call the

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0 500 1,000 kilometers

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du s R

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D nieper R.Danube R.

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N iger R.

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Córdoba Lisbon

Marseille

Antwerp

Tangier

Marrakech Tiznit

Awdaghost

Timbuktu Gao

Kano

Taghaza

Sijilmasa

Algiers

Jenne

Mogadishu

Axum Calicut

Samarkand

Lahore

Cambay Chittagong

Malacca Maluku

Map 13.6 Religion and Commerce in the Afro-Eurasian World By the fifteenth century, the many distinct peoples and societies of the Eastern Hemisphere were linked to one another by ties of religion and commerce. Of course, not everyone was involved in long-distance trade, and many people in areas shown as Buddhist or Islamic on the map practiced other religions.

modern age—the more than five centuries that followed the voyages of Columbus starting in 1492.

Over those five centuries, the previously separate worlds of Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, and Pacific Oceania became inextricably linked, with enormous conse- quences for everyone involved. Global empires, a global economy, global cultural exchanges, global migrations, global disease, global wars, and global environmental changes have made the past 500 years a unique phase in the human journey.Those webs of communication and exchange have progressively deepened, so much so that by the end of the twentieth century few people in the world lived beyond the cultural influences, economic ties, or political relationships of a globalized world.

A second distinctive feature of the past five centuries involves the emergence of a radically new kind of human society, also called “modern,” which took shape first in Europe during the nineteenth century and then in various forms elsewhere in the world.The core feature of such societies was industrialization, rooted in a sustained growth of technological innovation.The human ability to create wealth made an enor- mous leap forward in a very short period of time, at least by world history standards. Accompanying this economic or industrial revolution was an equally distinctive and unprecedented jump in human numbers, a phenomenon that has affected not only human beings but also many other living species and the earth itself (see the Snapshot).

Moreover, these modern societies were far more urbanized and much more com- mercialized than ever before, as more and more people began to work for wages, to produce for the market, and to buy the requirements of daily life rather than

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7,000

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Snapshot World Population Growth, 1000–200019

growing or making those products for their own use.These societies gave prominence and power to holders of urban wealth—merchants, bankers, industrialists, educated professionals—at the expense of rural landowning elites, while simultaneously gen- erating a substantial factory working class and diminishing the role of peasants and handicraft artisans.

Modern societies were generally governed by states that were more powerful and intrusive than earlier states and empires had been, and they offered more of their people an opportunity to play an active role in public and political life. Literacy in modern societies was far more widespread than ever before,while new national iden- tities became increasingly prominent, competing with more local loyalties.To the mix of established religious ideas and folk traditions were now added the challenging outlook and values of modern science, with its secular emphasis on the ability of human rationality to know and manipulate the world. Modernity has usually meant a self-conscious awareness of living and thinking in new ways that deliberately departed from tradition.

This revolution of modernity, comparable in its pervasive consequences only to the Agricultural Revolution of some 10,000 years ago, introduced new divisions and new conflicts into the experience of humankind.The ancient tensions between rich and poor within particular societies were now paralleled by new economic inequali- ties among entire regions and civilizations and a much-altered global balance of power. The first societies to experience the modern transformation—those in Western Europe and North America—became both a threat and a source of envy to much of the rest of the world.As modern societies emerged and spread, they were enormously destructive of older patterns of human life, even as they gave rise to many new ways of living. Sorting out what was gained and what was lost during the modern trans- formation has been a persistent and highly controversial thread of human thought over the past several centuries.

A third defining feature of the last 500 years was the growing prominence of European peoples on the global stage. In ancient times, the European world, focused in the Mediterranean basin of Greek culture and the Roman Empire, was but one of several classical civilizations in the Eastern Hemisphere. After 500 C.E.,Western Europe was something of a backwater, compared to the more prosperous and power- ful civilizations of China and the Islamic world.

In the centuries following 1500, however, this western peninsula of the Eurasian continent became the most innovative,most prosperous,most powerful,most expan- sive, and most imitated part of the world. European empires spanned the globe. European peoples created new societies all across the Americas and as far away as Australia and New Zealand.Their languages were spoken and their Christian reli- gion was widely practiced throughout the Americas and in parts of Asia and Africa. Their businessmen bought, sold, and produced goods around the world. It was among Europeans that the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution first took shape, with enormously powerful intellectual and economic consequences for the entire planet.The quintessentially modern ideas of liberalism, nationalism, feminism, and socialism all bore the imprint of their European origin. By the beginning of the

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twentieth century, Europeans or peoples of European descent exercised unprece- dented influence and control over the earth’s many other peoples, a wholly novel experience in human history.

For the rest of the world, growing European dominance posed a common task. Despite their many differences, the peoples of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, and Pacific Oceania all found themselves confronted by powerful and intrusive Europeans.The impact of this intrusion and how various peoples responded to it—resistance, submission, acceptance, imitation, adaptation—represent critically important threads in the world history of the past five centuries.

Reflections:What If ? Chance and Contingency in World History

Seeking meaning in the stories they tell, historians are inclined to look for deeply rooted or underlying causes for the events they recount.And yet, is it possible that, at least on occasion, history turns less on profound and long-term causes than on coin- cidence, chance, or the decisions of a few that might well have gone another way?

Consider, for example, the problem of explaining the rise of Europe to a posi- tion of global power in the modern era.What if the Great Khan Ogodei had not died in 1241, requiring the forces then poised for an assault on Germany to return to Mongolia? It is surely possible that Central and Western Europe might have been overrun by Mongol armies as so many other civilizations had been, a prospect that could have drastically altered the trajectory of European history. Or what if the Chinese had decided in 1433 to continue their huge maritime expeditions, creat- ing an empire in the Indian Ocean basin and perhaps moving on to “discover” the Americas and Europe? Such a scenario suggests a wholly different future for world history than the one that in fact occurred. Or what if the forces of the Ottoman Empire had taken the besieged city of Vienna in 1529? Might they then have incor- porated even larger parts of Europe into their expanding domain, requiring a halt to Europe’s overseas empire-building enterprise?

None of this necessarily means that the rise of Europe was merely a fluke or an accident of history, but it does raise the issue of “contingency,” the role of unfore- seen or small events in the unfolding of the human story.An occasional “what if ” approach to history reminds us that alternative possibilities existed in the past and that the only certainty about the future is that we will be surprised.

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Paleolithic persistence

Benin

Igbo

Iroquois

Timur

Fulbe

Ming dynasty China

Zheng He

European Renaissance

Second Thoughts What’s the Significance?

To assess your mastery of the

material in this chapter, visit

the Student Center at bedfordstmartins.com/strayer.

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Ottoman Empire

seizure of Constantinople

(1453)

Safavid Empire

Songhay Empire

Timbuktu

Mughal Empire

Malacca

Aztec Empire

Inca Empire

For Web sites and additional

documents related to this

chapter, see Make History at bedfordstmartins.com/strayer.

Big Picture Questions

1. Assume for the moment that the Chinese had not ended their maritime voyages in 1433.

How might the subsequent development of world history have been different? What value

is there in asking this kind of “what if” or counterfactual question?

2. How does this chapter distinguish among the various kinds of societies that comprised the

world of the fifteenth century? What other ways of categorizing the world’s peoples might

work as well or better?

3. What would surprise a knowledgeable observer from 500 C.E., were he or she to make a

global tour in the fifteenth century? What features of that earlier world might still be

recognizable?

4. What predictions about the future might a global traveler of the fifteenth century reasonably

have made? To what extent would it depend on precisely when and where those predictions

were made?

Next Steps: For Further Study

Terence N. D’Altroy, The Incas (2002). A history of the Inca Empire that draws on recent archeological and historical research.

Edward L. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty (2006). The most recent scholarly account of the Ming dynasty voyages.

Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914 (1994). A classic study of the Ottoman Empire.

Robin Kirkpatrick, The European Renaissance, 1400–1600 (2002). A beautifully illustrated history of Renaissance culture as well as the social and economic life of the period.

Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (2005). A review of Western Hemisphere societies and academic debates about their pre-Columbian history.

J. R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web (2003). A succinct account of the evolving webs or relationships among human societies in world history.

Michael Smith, The Aztecs (2003). A history of the Aztec Empire, with an emphasis on the lives of ordinary people.

“Ming Dynasty,” http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ming/hd_ming.htm. A sample of Chinese art from the Ming dynasty from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Renaissance Art in Italy,” http://witcombe.sbc.edu/ARTHrenaissanceitaly.html. An extensive collection of painting and sculpture from the Italian Renaissance.

601

Documents Considering the Evidence: The Aztecs and the Incas

through Spanish Eyes

During the fifteenth century, the Western Hemisphere hosted human com-munities of many kinds—gathering and hunting peoples, agricultural vil- lage societies, chiefdoms, and two major state-based agrarian civilizations. Most of the population of the Americas was concentrated in those two societies— the Aztec and Inca empires (see Map 13.5, p. 589). Since neither had an exten- sive literary tradition, historians seeking to understand their history and culture have depended heavily on the records and observations of the Spanish who conquered them in the sixteenth century.This raises obvious questions about the credibility of such accounts. Can writers from a conquering power and a completely different culture accurately describe the life and history of those they have recently defeated? At least some of those Spanish observers were able to draw on the local knowledge and experience of native peoples.What fol- lows are accounts of the Aztec and Inca empires as seen through the eyes of two remarkable Spanish observers, both of whom at least tried to understand the people of these American civilizations.

Document 13.1

Diego Duran on the Aztecs

Coming to Mexico with his family as a young boy, Diego Duran (1537–1588) subsequently became a Dominican friar, learned to speak fluently the native Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, and began a lifelong enterprise of studying their history and culture.His research often involved extensive interviewing of local people in the rural areas where he worked and resulted in three books published between 1574 and 1581.The first excerpt records a series of laws or decrees, which Duran attributes to the Aztec ruler Moctezuma I, who governed the empire between 1440 and 1469.They reveal something of the court practices and social hierarchy of the Aztec realm as the empire was establishing itself in the middle decades of the fifteenth century.The second excerpt touches on

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various aspects of Aztec culture—religion, human sacrifice, social mobility, commercial markets, and slavery.

■ What do Moctezuma’s laws tell us about the social and moral values of the Aztecs?

■ Based on these two excerpts, how would you describe Aztec society? What distinct social groups or classes can you identify? How were they distinguished from one another? What opportunities for social mobility were available? How might people fall into slavery?

■ What impressed Duran about the markets operating within the Aztec Empire?

■ How was human sacrifice related to war, to market activity, to slavery, and to religious belief and practice?

■ Duran’s accounts of Aztec life and history were written more than fifty years after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire.To what extent do you think this compromises his efforts to describe preconquest Aztec society?

King Moctezuma I

Laws, Ordinances, and Regulations ca. 1450

The following laws were decreed:1.The king must never appear in public except when the occasion is extremely important and unavoidable.

2. Only the king may wear a golden diadem in the city, though in war all the great lords and brave captains may wear this (but on no other occasion).. . .

3. Only the king and the prime minister Tlacaelel may wear sandals within the palace. . . . [N]oblemen are the only ones to be allowed to wear sandals in the city and no one else, also under pain of death, with the exception of men who have performed some great feat in war. . . .

4. Only the king is to wear the final mantles of cotton brocaded with designs and threads of differ- ent colors and adorned with featherwork. . . .

5. The great lords, who are twelve, may wear special mantles of certain make and design, and the minor lords, according to their valor and accomplish- ments, may wear others.

6. The common soldiers are permitted to wear only the simplest type of mantle.They are prohibited from using any special designs that might set them off from the rest. . . .

7.The commoners will not be allowed to wear cotton clothing, under pain of death, but can use only garments of maguey fiber. . . .

8. Only the great noblemen and valiant warriors are given license to build a house with a second story; for disobeying this law a person receives the death penalty. . . .

9. Only the great lords are to wear labrets, ear plugs, and nose plugs of gold and precious stones, except for commoners who are strong men, brave captains, and soldiers, but their labrets, ear plugs, and nose plugs must be of bone, wood, or other infe- rior material of little value. . . .

Source: Fray Diego Duran, The History of the Indies of New Spain, translated by Doris Heyden (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 208–10.

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11. In the royal palace there are to be diverse rooms where different classes of people are to be received, and under pain of death no one is to enter that of the great lords or to mix with those men [unless of that class himself]. . . .

12. An order of judges is to be established, beginning with the judges of the supreme council. After these would come regular court judges,munic- ipal judges, district officials, constables, and coun- cilmen, although none of them may give the death sentence without notifying the king. Only the sov- ereign can sentence someone to death or pardon him.. . .

13. All the barrios will possess schools or mon- asteries for young men where they will learn religion and correct comportment.They are to do penance, lead hard lives, live with strict morality, practice for warfare, do physical work, fast, endure disciplinary

measures, draw blood from different parts of the body, and keep watch at night.There are to be teach- ers and old men to correct them and chastise them and lead them in their exercises and take care that they are not idle, do not lose their time.All of these youth must observe chastity in the strictest way,under pain of death.

14.There is to be a rigorous law regarding adul- terers.They are to be stoned and thrown into the rivers or to the buzzards.

15. Thieves will be sold for the price of their theft, unless the theft be grave, having been commit- ted many times. Such thieves will be punished by death.

16. Great privileges and exemptions are to be given those who dedicate themselves to religion, to the temples and the gods. Priests will be awarded great distinction, reverence, and authority.

Diego Duran

Book of the Gods and Rites 1574–1576

I wish to tell of the way in which the nativessacrificed. . . . So ended the ceremony of the blessing of the

pieces of dough in the form of the bones and the flesh of the god.They were revered and honored in the name of Huitzilopochtli with all the respectful veneration that we ourselves hold for the Divine Sacrament of the Altar.To exalt the occasion further, the sacrificers of men were also present. . . .

Smeared with black, the six sacrificers ap- peared. . . . Seeing them come out with their ghastly aspect filled all the people with dread and terrible fear! The high priest carried in one hand a large stone knife, sharp and wide. Another carried a wooden yoke carved in the form of a snake.They humbled themselves before the idol and then stood

in order next to a pointed stone, which stood in front of the door of the idol’s chamber. . . .

All the prisoners of war who were to be sacrificed upon this feast were then brought forth. . . . They seized the victims one by one, one by one foot, another by the other,one priest by one hand,another by the other hand.The victim was thrown on his back, upon the pointed stone, where the wretch was grabbed by the fifth priest,who placed the yoke upon his throat.The high priest then opened the chest and with amazing swiftness tore out the heart, ripping it out with his own hands.Thus steaming, the heart was lifted toward the sun, and the fumes were offered up to the sun.The priest then turned toward the idol and cast the heart in its face.After the heart had been extracted, the body was allowed to roll down the steps of the pyramid. . . .

All the prisoners and captives of war brought from the towns we have mentioned were sacrificed in this manner, until none were left.After they had been slain and cast down, their owners—those who

Source: Fray Diego Duran, Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar, translated by Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 90–92, 137–38, 273–76, 279, 281–82.

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had captured them—retrieved the bodies.They were carried away, distributed, and eaten, in order to cele- brate the feast.There were at least forty or fifty cap- tives, depending upon the skill which the men had shown in seizing and capturing men in war. . . .

[M]any strove, in every possible way, to lift their names on high, to obtain glory, to procure greater honors, to found lineages and titles, and [to gain] good fame for their persons.There were three estab- lished and honored ways in all the nations [for obtain- ing these rewards].The first and principal path which the kings designated was soldiery—to make oneself known in war through valiant feats, to be outstand- ing in killing, taking prisoners, to destroy armies and squadrons, to have directed these things.These [war- riors] were given great honors, rewards,weapons, and insignia which were proof of their splendid deeds and valor. . . .

The second way in which men rose was through religion, entering the priesthood.After having served in the temples in a virtuous,penitential, and cloistered way of life, in their old age they were sent out to high and honorable posts. . . .They were present when the government councils were held, their opinions and advice were listened to,and they were part of the rul- ing boards and juntas. Without their council and opinion kings did not dare act. . . .

The third and least glorious manner of [rising in the world] was that of becoming a merchant or trader, that of buying and selling, going forth to all the markets of the land, bartering cloth for jewels, jewels for feathers, feathers for stones, and stones for slaves, always dealing in things of importance, of renown, and of high value.These [men] strength- ened their social position with their wealth. . . .They acquired wealth and obtained slaves to sacrifice to this their god [Quetzalcoatl].And so they were con- sidered among the magnates of the land, just as the valorious soldier brought sacrificial captives from war, gaining fame as a brave. . . .

[I]n olden times there was a god of markets and fairs. . . .

The gods of these market places threatened ter- rible ills and made evil omens and auguries to the neighboring villages which did not attend their mar- ket places. . . .

The markets were so inviting,pleasurable, appeal- ing, and gratifying to these people that great crowds attended, and still attend, them, especially during the big fairs, as is well known to all. . . .

The markets in this land were all enclosed by walls and stood either in front of the temples of the gods or to one side. Market day in each town was considered a main feast in that town or city. And thus in that small shrine where the idol of the mar- ket stood were offered ears of corn, chili, tomatoes, fruit, and other vegetables, seeds,and breads—in sum, everything sold in the tianguiz. . . .

Furthermore, a law was established by the republic prohibiting the selling of goods outside the market place. Not only were there laws and penalties connected with this, but there was a fear of the supernatural, of misfortune, and of the ire and wrath of the god of the market. No one ventured, therefore, to trade outside [the market limits]. . . .

There were many ways of becoming a slave within the law of the Indian nations. . . .

First, he who stole the number of pieces of cloth or ears of corn, jewels, or turkeys which the laws of the republic had determined and set a penalty for was himself sold for the same amount in order to satisfy the owner of the purloined goods. . . .

Second, another way in which a native could become a slave was that of the gambler who risked all his possessions on the dice or in any other game which the natives played. . . .

Third, if the father of a family had many sons and daughters and among them was one [who was] incorrigible, disobedient, shameless, dissolute, in- capable of receiving counsel or advice, the law.. . permitted [the father] to sell him in the public mar- ket place as an example and lesson to bad sons and daughters. . . .

Fourth, one became a slave if he borrowed valu- able things, such as cloth, jewels, featherwork, and did not return them on the appointed date. . . .

In times of famine a man and wife could agree to a way of satisfying their needs and rise from their wretched state.They could sell one another, and thus husband sold wife and wife sold husband, or they sold one of their children.

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Document 13.2

Pedro de Cieza de Léon on the Incas

Like Duran, Pedro de Cieza de Léon (1520–1554), a Spanish chronicler of the Inca Empire, came to the Americas as a boy. But unlike Duran, he came alone at the age of thirteen, and he followed a very different career. For the next seventeen years Cieza took part as a soldier in a number of expeditions that established Spanish rule in various parts of South America.Along the way, he collected a great deal of information, especially about the Inca Empire, which he began to publish upon his return to Spain in 1550. Despite a very limited education, Cieza wrote a series of works that have become a major source for historians about the workings of the Inca Empire and about the Spanish con- quest of that land.The selection that follows focuses on the techniques that the Inca used to govern their huge empire.

■ How would you describe Cieza’s posture toward the Inca Empire? What in particular did he seem to appreciate about it?

■ Based on this account, what difficulties did the Inca rulers face in governing their large and diverse realm?

■ What policies or practices did the Inca authorities follow in seeking to integrate their empire? How do these compare with other empires that you have studied?

■ Some modern observers have described the Inca Empire as “totalitarian” or “socialist.” Do such terms seem appropriate? How else might you describe the Inca state?

Pedro de Cieza de Léon

Chronicles of the Incas ca. 1550

The Incas had the seat of their empire in the cityof Cuzco, where the laws were given and the captains set out to make war. . . . As soon as one of these large provinces was conquered, ten or twelve thousand of the men and their wives, or six thou- sand, or the number decided upon, were ordered to

leave and remove themselves from it. These were transfered to another town or province of the same climate and nature as that which they left. . . . And they had another device to keep the natives from hating them, and this was that they never divested the natural chieftains of their power. If it so happened that one of them committed a crime or in some way deserved to be stripped of his power, it was vested in his sons or brothers, and all were ordered to obey them.. . .

* * *

Source: The Incas of Pedro de Cieza de Leon, translated by Harriet de Onis (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), 56–57, 158–60, 165–73, 177–78.

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One of the things most to be envied these rulers is how well they knew to conquer such vast lands. . . .

[T]hey entered many lands without war, and the soldiers who accompanied the Inca were ordered to do no damage or harm, robbery or violence. If there was a shortage of food in the province, he ordered supplies brought in from other regions so that those newly won to his service would not find his rule and acquaintance irksome.. . .

In many others, where they entered by war and force of arms, they ordered that the crops and houses of the enemy be spared. . . . But in the end the Incas always came out victorious, and when they had van- quished the others, they did not do them further harm, but released those they had taken prisoner, if there were any, and restored the booty, and put them back in possession of their property and rule, exhort- ing them not to be foolish and try to compete with his royal majesty nor abandon his friendship,but to be his friends as their neighbors were.And saying this, he gave them a number of beautiful women and fine pieces of wool or gold. . . .

They never deprived the native chieftains of their rule. They were all ordered to worship the sun as God, but they were not prohibited from observing their own religions and customs. . . .

It is told for a fact of the rulers of this kingdom that in the days of their rule they had their representatives in the capitals of all the provinces. . . . They served as head of the provinces or regions, and from every so many leagues around the tributes were brought to one of these capitals, and from so many others, to another.This was so well organized that there was not a village that did not know where it was to send its tribute. In all these capitals the Incas had temples of the sun, mints, and many silversmiths who did nothing but work rich pieces of gold or fair vessels of silver.. . .The tribute paid by each of these districts where the capital was situated, and that turned over by the natives, whether gold, silver, clothing, arms, and all else they gave, was entered in the accounts of the [quipu-] camayocs,who kept the quipus and did everything ordered by the governor in the matter of finding the soldiers or supplying whomever the

Inca ordered,or making delivery to Cuzco;but when they came from the city of Cuzco to go over the accounts, or they were ordered to go to Cuzco to give an accounting, the accountants themselves gave it by the quipus, or went to give it where there could be no fraud, but everything had to come out right. Few years went by in which an accounting of all these things was not made. . . .

When the Incas set out to visit their kingdom, it is told that they traveled with great pomp, riding in rich litters set upon smooth, long poles of the fin- est wood and adorned with gold and silver. . . .

So many people came to see his passing that all the hills and slopes seemed covered with them, and all called down blessings upon him.. . .

He [the Inca] traveled four leagues each day, or as much as he wished; he stopped wherever he liked to inquire into the state of his kingdom; he will- ingly listened to those who came to him with com- plaints, righting wrongs and punishing those who had committed an injustice. . . .

[T]hese rulers, as the best measure, ordered and decreed, with severe punishment for failure to obey, that all the natives of their empire should know and understand the language of Cuzco, both they and their women.. . . This was carried out so faithfully that in the space of a very few years a single tongue was known and used in an extension of more than 1,200 leagues; yet, even though this language was em- ployed, they all spoke their own [languages], which were so numerous that if I were to list them it would not be credited. . . .

[The Inca] appointed those whose duty it was to punish wrongdoers, and to this end they were always traveling about the country.The Incas took such care to see that justice was meted out that nobody ven- tured to commit a felony or theft.This was to deal with thieves, ravishers of women, or conspirators against the Inca; however, there were many prov- inces that warred on one another, and the Incas were not wholly able to prevent this.

By the river [Huatanay] that runs through Cuzco justice was executed on those who were caught or brought in as prisoners from some other place.

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There they had their heads cut off, or were put to death in some other manner which they chose. Mutiny and conspiracy were severely punished, and, above all, those who were thieves and known as such; even their wives and chidren were despised and considered to be tarred with the same brush. . . .

[I]n each of the many provinces there were many storehouses filled with supplies and other needful things; thus, in times of war, wherever the armies went they draw upon the contents of these store-

houses, without ever touching the supplies of their confederates or laying a finger on what they had in their settlements.And when there was no war, all this stock of supplies and food was divided up among the poor and the widows.These poor were the aged, or the lame, crippled, or paralyzed, or those afflicted with some other diseases. . . . If there came a lean year, the storehouses were opened and the provinces were lent what they needed in the way of supplies; then, in a year of abundance, they paid back all they had received.

Using the Evidence: The Aztecs and the Incas

through Spanish Eyes

1. Assessing documents: Both Duran and Cieza were outsiders to the societies they described, and they were part of the conquering Spanish forces. In what ways did these conditions affect their descriptions of the Aztec and Inca empires?

2. Considering the subtext of documents: In what ways might these authors have been using their observation of Aztec or Inca society to praise or to criticize their own European homeland?

3. Evaluating the credibility of documents: Which statements in these documents do you find most credible and which ones might you be inclined to question or challenge? What criteria might you use to assess the evidence in these documents?

4. Relating primary documents and text narrative: How might you use the information in these documents to support the descriptions of the Aztec and Inca empires that are contained in this chapter? Are there ways the documents might challenge statements in the text?

5. Making comparisons: What similarities and differences between Aztec and Inca societies can you glean from these documents?

6. Seeking more data: What additional primary sources about the Aztec and Inca empires of the fifteenth century would you like to have? What other perspectives on those states would be useful for historians?

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Visual Sources Considering the Evidence: Sacred Places in the World

of the Fifteenth Century

Virtually every human community throughout history has designated cer-tain places and certain structures as particularly sacred or holy, even if they understand all of creation to partake in that sacredness. Such sites represent intersections between the ordinary world and the world beyond. Many such places were private—the Chinese family altars displaying ancestral tablets and the “house churches”of early Christians, for example—but the most visible and prominent were public spaces such as shrines, cathedrals, temples, and mosques.

Sometimes the holiness of such sites derived from the burial of a highly respected figure, such as the tomb of Abraham in Israel, sacred to Jews and Muslims alike, or Lenin’s tomb in Moscow, virtually a shrine to faithful com- munists. Particular historical or religious events, such as the birth of Jesus or the enlightenment of the Buddha, have contributed to the sacred status of struc- tures erected in those places.Formal rites of consecration, the presence of relics, and rituals of devotion such as the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca add to the extraordinary character of particular buildings. So too did distinctive architec- tural styles as well as the sensory stimulus of bells, calls to prayer, and the burn- ing of incense or candles.20 Still other buildings acquired a sacred character because they were gathering places for prayer or worship.

Such sacred sites, however, did not function exclusively in the spiritual realm; they often operated as well in the more secular domains of commerce and politics.The New Testament records that Jesus angrily drove the money changers from the temple in Jerusalem,while Buddhist monasteries on the Silk Road and elsewhere often became wealthy centers of trade.Furthermore, sacred places played important political roles as rulers sought the blessing and support of religious leaders and the aura of legitimacy that derived from some associa- tion with the realm of the holy.State authorities and wealthy elites often patron- ized the construction of sacred buildings and contributed to their upkeep. Sacred sites have sometimes spawned violence as rivalries erupted among com- peting sects or between political and religious authorities.

The four sacred sites shown in this section might well have been on the itinerary of an imaginary global traveler in the fifteenth century.Together they

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illustrate something of the diversity of such places in terms of their physical setting and architectural styles, the sources of their sacredness, their intended function, and their relationship to those who exercised political power.Yet they also bore similarities to one another.All of them were deliberately set apart from the profane or ordinary world, were linked to a wider sacred geography, and were commissioned and funded by a ruler.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the largest sacred site in the world of the fifteenth century lay in China. Known as the Temple of Heaven, it was constructed during the early fifteenth century in the Ming dynasty capital of Beijing by the ambitious emperor Yongle (reigned 1402–1424), who likewise ordered the building of the magnificent imperial residence of the Forbidden City. (He also sent Zheng He on his immense maritime voyages in the Indian Ocean; see pp. 577–78.)

Set in a forest of more than 650 acres, the Temple of Heaven was, in Chinese thinking, the primary place where Heaven and earth met. From his residence in the Forbidden City, the Chinese emperor led a procession of thou- sands twice a year to this sacred site, where he offered sacrifices, implored the gods for a good harvest, and performed those rituals that maintained the cosmic balance.These sacred ceremonies, from which commoners were barred even from watching, demonstrated the emperor’s respect for the age-old source of his imperial authority, the Mandate of Heaven, from which Chinese emperors derived their legitimate right to rule.As the emperor bowed to Heaven, he was modeling in good Confucian fashion the respect required of all subordinates to their social superiors and especially to the emperor himself.

The temple complex was laced with ancient symbolism. The southern part of the wall that enclosed the complex was square, symbolizing the earth, while the northern wall was rounded or semicircular, suggesting Heaven in Daoist thinking. Major buildings were likewise built in the round while being situated within a square enclosure, also symbolizing the intersection of Heaven and earth.The most prominent building was the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest (Visual Source 13.1), constructed by 1420.There the emperor prayed and conducted rituals to ensure a successful agricultural season on which the country’s well-being and his own legitimacy depended.The emperor and others approached the hall from the south on a gradually ascending 360- meter walkway symbolizing progression from earth to Heaven.The walkway divides into three parallel paths: the center one for the gods; the left for the emperor; and the right for the empress and court officials. Originally the three roofs of the structure were of different colors: the top was blue, suggest- ing Heaven; the middle was yellow, the color of the emperor; and the lowest was green, indicating commoners or the earth. Later all three roofs were painted blue.

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Visual Source 13.1 The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest at the Temple of Heaven, Beijing, China (AP Images)

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■ Which symbolic features can you identify in Visual Source 13.1?

■ What did the original color scheme of the roofs suggest?

■ What was the role of the emperor within the Temple of Heaven and in the larger religious or cosmological framework of Chinese thinking?

■ What impressions or understandings might those who observed the ceremonies or learned about them take away from that experience?

About the same time as the Temple of Heaven was taking shape in China, another sacred site was under construction in Kyoto, Japan: a Buddhist temple known as Kinkakuji, or the “Temple of the Golden Pavilion” (Visual Source 13.2). Like the Chinese structure, Kinkakuji was a project of the Japanese ruler of the time, the shogun (military leader) Yoshimitsu Ashikaga (1358–1408), rather than the emperor. Unlike his Chinese counterpart, the Japanese emperor functioned more as a symbol of Japan’s historical tradition rather than its effective ruler. Initially, Kinkakuji was constructed as part of a villa to which Yoshimitsu retired when he gave up his formal political role in 1394 to devote himself to Buddhist practice and the arts.After his death it was converted into a Zen Buddhist temple, as he had wished.

The building itself reflects the strong influence of Chinese culture on Japan. Yoshimitsu, well known as a lover of all things Chinese, modeled Kinkakuji on the lakeside villas of earlier Chinese emperors and collected in the Golden Pavilion thousands of Chinese paintings. He also accepted the title “King of Japan” from a Ming dynasty emperor and reopened trade relations with China.

As a Buddhist temple, Kinkakuji is situated in a garden setting at the edge of a “mirror lake,” suggesting, some have said, a position between heaven and earth.The lake contained a series of rocks and small islands representing the eight oceans and nine mountains of the Buddhist creation story. Inside were statues of the Amida Buddha, the benevolent bodhisattva of compassion known as Kannon, and dozens of other sacred figures. It also became known as one of the few Buddhist temples housing relics of the historical Buddha himself.

While Buddhism has a reputation as a religion of peace and tranquillity, in Japan from the tenth century on, various Buddhist sects organized private armies, fought among themselves, and contested both imperial and samurai authorities. Kinkakuji itself was burned several times in the fifteenth century amid the wars that racked Japan and left Kyoto in ruins.

■ How might you compare the purposes that Kinkakuji served with those of the Temple of Heaven?

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■ What elements of Kinkakuji and its surroundings contribute to its sacredness?

■ What emotions do you think Kinkakuji was intended to evoke?

■ In what ways did Kinkakuji have a political as well as a religious significance?

In the Islamic world of the fifteenth century, the structure known as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (Visual Source 13.3) was second only to Mecca as a pilgrimage site for Muslims.When expanding Muslim forces took control of Jerusalem in 638 and subsequently constructed the Dome of the Rock (687–691), that precise location had long been regarded as sacred.To Jews, it contained the rock on which Abraham prepared to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God, and it was the site of the first two Jewish temples.To Christians, it was a place that Jesus had visited as a youngster to converse with learned teachers and later to drive out the moneychangers.

Thus, when the Umayyad caliph (successor to the prophet) Abd al-Malik ordered the construction of the Dome of the Rock on that site, he was appro-

Visual Source 13.2 Kinkakuji: A Buddhist Temple in Japan (© Craig Lovell/Corbis)

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priating for Islam both Jewish and Christian legacies. But he was also demon- strating the victorious arrival of a new faith and announcing to Christians that “the Islamic state was here to stay.”21 The architecture and decoration of the Dome of the Rock drew heavily on Roman,Byzantine, and Persian prece- dents as if to show that “‘unbelievers’ had been defeated and brought into the fold of the true faith.”22The domed rotunda had long been used in the Chris- tian Byzantine Empire to denote holy sites, often the burial place of a martyr, saint, or prophet.The Muslim structure, designed and built by Christian archi- tects and artisans, closely resembled the nearby Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Interior decorations featured crowns, jewels, breastplates, and flowers of Persian origins.

Nonetheless, the Dome of the Rock was distinctly Islamic, as its many mosaics lacked any representations of animals or humans,while multiple inscrip- tions from the Quran emphasized Islamic monotheism, presenting Jesus as an honored prophet but not as the divine son of God. Furthermore, the Dome of the Rock was soon thought to cover the stone from which Muhammad had made his famous Night Journey into the presence of God as suggested

Visual Source 13.3 The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem (© Aaron Horowitz/Corbis)

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in the Quran and embellished in popular mythology. Some claimed to see an indentation in that stone, which lies uncovered in the center of the dome, as the footprint of the prophet himself.

Over many centuries, and even to the present, the Dome of the Rock has been an enormously contested site.When Christian crusaders seized Jerusalem in 1099, they did not destroy the Muslim shrine but converted it into a Chris- tian sacred place—the Temple of the Lord—and erected a huge golden cross on its dome. Likewise, when Muslim forces retook Jerusalem in 1187, they removed that cross, replaced it with a Muslim crescent, and then cleansed the Dome of the Rock three times with rose water. In the fifteenth century, the Dome was under the control and protection of a Turkic dynasty, known as Mamluks, based in Egypt. In 1517 it fell within the domains of the Ottoman Empire.

■ The Dome of the Rock was never intended as a mosque for regular worship but rather as a pilgrimage site. How might you imagine the reaction of a Muslim pilgrim encountering it for the first time during the fifteenth century? How would that pilgrim’s place of origin (Arabia, Africa, India, or Europe, for example) have made a difference in how he or she responded to it?

■ What contributed to the sacred character of the Dome of the Rock?

■ How might you compare the intended purpose of the Dome of the Rock to that of the Temple of Heaven in China?

■ You might do a little research on the current disputes about the Dome of the Rock.What role does it play in the contemporary Israeli/Palestinian conflict?

In seeking sacred sites within the Christian world of the fifteenth cen- tury, our imaginary global traveler would have had a wide range of choices. He or she might well have visited one of the many Renaissance cathedrals of Italy or chosen from among the dozens of impressive Christian churches scat- tered across Europe.The newly reconstructed Kremlin in Moscow might also have been of interest, for in that fortified enclosure lay an elaborate palace for Grand Prince Ivan III as well as a number of churches, demonstrating the close relationship of religious and political authority in the emerging Russian state.But in the highlands of Ethiopia,amid some of the most remarkable Chris- tian architecture of the time, the rock churches of Lalibela provide a useful reminder that the Christian world of the fifteenth century was not limited to Europe.

With its origins in the ancient civilization of Axum well before the birth of Christ, Ethiopia by the fifteenth century had hosted a Christian culture for more than a thousand years. By then, the center of that civilization had moved southward to the region later known as Lalibela.There, in the twelfth

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century, a local prince had seized the throne and initiated the Zagwe dynasty. Zagwe rulers, in particular King Lalibela (ruled early thirteenth century), for whom the region was subsequently named, sponsored the creation of eleven remarkable underground churches, carved from the soft volcanic rock of the region.This enormous and sacred project served to legitimate the rule of these upstart Zagwe monarchs over this ancient Christian kingdom and provided an alternative to the older political and religious center of Ethiopian civiliza- tion in Axum to the north.

A further motivation for the construction of these churches lay perhaps in Ethiopia’s long relationship with Jerusalem.Ancient stories linked its mon- archy to the union of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, said to be an Ethiopian monarch. Local legends held that King Lalibela had been mysteri- ously transported to Jerusalem, where he received divine instructions about building the churches.Certainly,Ethiopian Christians had long made pilgrim- ages to the Holy City.When Muslim forces reconquered Jerusalem from the Christian crusaders in 1187, Ethiopia’s Zagwe monarchs apparently determined to create a New Jerusalem in their kingdom.The churches of Lalibela, many of them named for famous sites in Jerusalem, were the outcome of that project.

Visual Source 13.4 The Church of St. George, Lalibela, Ethiopia (Heltler/Robert Harding World Imagery/Corbis)

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Thus, while the Dome of the Rock physically occupied an already sacred site in Jerusalem, the rock churches of Lalibela sought to symbolically re-create the Holy City in the highlands of Ethiopia.They have been both a monastic site and a pilgrimage destination ever since.

These belowground churches represent an enormously impressive archi- tectural achievement, said by local people to have been assisted by angels. But well before the coming of Christianity, the local Agaw-speaking people had long incorporated rock shrines into their religious practice.And the architec- ture of the churches shows a clear connection to earlier Axumite styles.

While this sacred site clearly had indigenous roots, these churches were certainly distinctive as Christian structures. Unlike almost all other religious architecture—Christian or otherwise—they were virtually invisible from a distance, becoming apparent only when the observer was looking down on them from ground level. In fact these eleven churches were not really con- structed at all, but rather excavated, using only hammers and chisels. Under- ground, they were connected to one another by a series of “hidden tunnels,dark twisting passages, and secret chambers,” while the whole complex abounded with “columns and arches, shafts and galleries, courts and terraces.”23 The first European observer to see them, the Portuguese priest Francisco Alvarez in the 1520s, was stunned.“I weary of writing more about these buildings,” he declared,“because it seems to me that I shall not be believed if I write more.”24

Visual Source 13.4 shows one of these structures, the Church of St. George, the patron saint of Ethiopia.

■ How might our imaginary traveler, a pilgrim who had toured the grand Christian cathedrals of Europe, have responded to these Ethiopian churches? How might he or she understand their belowground construction? What might strike such a traveler as distinctive about Lalibela as a sacred site in comparison to the others presented here?

■ What do these churches disclose about the outlook of the Zagwe monarchs who ordered their creation?

■ What might you infer about the labor and social organization required to create these churches?

Using the Evidence: Sacred Places in the World of the Fifteenth Century

1. Comparing experiences of the sacred: What do these visual sources and the documents for this chapter (see pp. 601–07) suggest about the experience of the sacred? What common features and what differences

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characterize that experience? In particular, how might our global traveler have responded to sacred places among the Aztecs after visiting the various sites shown here?

2. Considering the construction of the sacred: What historical circum- stances and what motivations contributed to the creation of each site? What factors rendered them holy in the eyes of believers? What evidence of cultural borrowing can you see in these sites?

3. Defining purpose: How would you compare the purposes for which each of these sacred places was intended?

4. Thinking about religion and politics: In what ways were these sacred sites embedded in the political circumstances of their societies? How might people of the fifteenth century have understood the connection between the religious and the political as evidenced in these images? To what extent did those understandings differ from more modern views?