Columbus and 15th Century

Columbus and Historical Perspective

• The perception of Columbus has shifted dramatically over time.
• In 1892, Columbus was celebrated as a pioneer of progress.
• By 1992, Columbus was denounced as a perpetrator of genocide and invasion.
• This shift reflects changing values and a reevaluation of Western dominance and imperialism.
• Columbus' voyages initiated processes unforeseeable in 1492.
• These include the Atlantic slave trade
• decimation of native populations
• massive global population growth
• the Industrial Revolution
• growing European prominence

15th Century as a Turning Point

• Columbus' voyage was a pivotal event, but not the only significant one in the 15th century.
• Timur, a Turkic warrior, launched the last major pastoral invasion of adjacent civilizations.
• Russia emerged from Mongol rule and began expanding across northern Asia.
• The European Renaissance was underway.
• A large Chinese fleet explored the Indian Ocean before voluntarily withdrawing.
• The Islamic Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople in 1453.
• Spanish Christians completed the "reconquest" of the Iberian Peninsula in 1492.
• The Aztec and Inca empires represented the last expressions of Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations before European imperialism.

Societies in the 15th Century

• The 15th century contained a variety of societies, including:
  • Bands of hunter-gatherers
  • Agricultural villages
  • Emerging chiefdoms and small states
  • Pastoral communities
  • Established civilizations and empires
• All present alternative ways of organizing human life.
• The balance among these societies was different in 1500 compared to a thousand years earlier.

Paleolithic Societies

• Substantial areas of the world still hosted Paleolithic societies in the 15th century
• Areas with these societies included:
  • Australia
  • Much of Siberia
  • Arctic coastlands
  • Parts of Africa and the Americas
• These societies interacted with their agricultural neighbors and changed over time.

Australian Aborigines

• Around 250 separate groups practiced a gathering and hunting lifestyle in the 15th-century Australia.
• These people integrated material items from outsiders.
• They also assimilated aspects of culture like artistic styles, rituals, etc
• They did not adopt agriculture despite its presence in nearby New Guinea.
• Australians had mastered their environment through "firestick farming," setting controlled burns.
• They exchanged goods over long distances and developed mythologies, rituals, sculpture, and rock painting.

Complex Hunter-Gatherers

• Along the northwest coast of North America, the Chinookan, Tulalip, and Skagit peoples had a society that flourished
• That society was called "complex" or "affluent" gathering/hunting cultures.
• Their environment was bounteous and 300 animal species were edible.
• These societies featured permanent villages, large houses, economic specialization, ranked societies with slavery, chiefdoms, and food storage.

Agricultural Village Societies

• A large group of people existed who did not incorporate themeslyes into larger empires or civilizations with their own cities or settlements
• These people usually lived in small village-based communities with kinship relations
• This describes much of North America, tropical lowlands of South America, the Caribbean, parts of the Amazon, Southeast Asia, Pacific Oceania, and Africa south of the equator.
• Historians have largely ignored these societies, but they were the center of life for the people within them.
• They had a history of migration, cultural transformation, social conflict, and interaction with strangers.

Igbo

• The Igbo people lived east of the Niger River in West Africa.
• They rejected kingship and state-building.
• Title societies for wealthy men, women's associations, ritual experts, and power balances among kinship groups maintained social cohesion.
• The Igbo traded actively.
• They constructed objects such as cotton cloth, fish, copper, iron goods, and decorative objects
• Over time they changed from a matrilineal to a patrilineal system.

Iroquois speaking people

• There were significant changes in what is now central New York State,
• These changes occurred the centuries before incorporation into European trading networks and empires.
• The Iroquois-speaking peoples became fully agricultural, adopting maize and bean farming by 1300.
• This led to settlement growth as well
• This also caused more warfare betweem the peoples
• A loose alliance/confederation was formed among the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca peoples around the fifteenth century.
• They agreed to settle differences peacefully through a council of clan leaders based on the Great Law of Peace.
• The Iroquois League of Five Nations suppressed blood feuds and coordinated their relationships with outsiders.
• The League expressed values of limited government, social equality, and personal freedom.

Independent societies that transform

• Over time these societies including the Iroquois and Igbo would be encompassed by expanding empires such as Westwe Europe - Westwe Europe in Russia, China, and India.
• This replicated the experience of other communities which had become forcibly included in such empires as Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Roman, Indian, Chinese, and other civilizations.

The Mongol Incursion

• Pastoral groups impinged directly on civilisations than did hunting/gathering or farming villagers
• The Mongol incursion was a challenge
• The Mongol Empire is now disintegrating and a brief attempt to restore it was attempted
• Timur is the Turkic warrior that attempted to restore it
• He caused immense devastation to Russia, Persia, and India
• Timur died in 1405
• Timur's Conquest was the last great military success for the pastoralist people
• Their homelands were swallowed by expanding Russian and Chinese empires
• Their homeland's new power was to civilizations in outer Eurasia, in favor for later

Fulbe People

• African pastoral people stayed independent of established empires several centuries after
• The Fulbe are West Africa's largest pastoral society
• They lived in small communities among agricultural people
• They were tense because Fulbe resented subordination to agricultural people
• The Fulbe later adopted Islam and some dropped out of their pastoral life and settled
• Their new settlements were in highly respected religious leaders
• In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Fulbe were at the center of wave uprisings causing in new states for themselves

Civilizations

• Civilizations are
• City-centered and state based societies
• Large
• Densely populated
• Powerful
• More innovative than other forms of human community
• More unequal in terms of class/gender than other forms of human community
• Since the First Civilizations had emerged 3500-1000 BCE, the area and number of people they embraced had grown substantially
• By the fifteenth century, a considerable majority of the world's population now lived within one or another of these civilizations

Ming Dynasty China

• Heir to a long tradition, Confucian and Daoist philosophy, a major Buddhist presence, sophisticated artistic achievements, and a highly productive economy.
• The dynasty witnessed an effort to eliminate all signs of foreign rule, such as Mongol names and customs
• This effort consisted of promoting Confucian learning and orthodox
• Emperor Yongle sponsored an enormous Encyclopedia of some 11,000 volumes.
• The Encyclopedia summarized or compiled all previous writing.
• Yongle relocated the capital to Beijing and ordered construction of the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven to perform religious rituals.
• Empresses wrote instructions for female behavior, emphasizing traditional expectations.
• The Ming dynasty reestablished civil service, creating a centralized government.
• Power was concentrated in the emperor’s hands, while eunuchs exercised great authority.
• The state restored millions of acres to cultivation by rebuilding canals, reservoirs, etc

Eunuchs in the Ming Empire

• Zheng He was an unusual person who became the helm of the shipping expeditions in the Ming empire
• Zheng He was born in what is now Uzbekistan
• Both his father and grandfather were devout Muslims
• The family had also achieved local prominence as high officials
• Zheng He would become castrated in the Ming empire so he was not able to provide offspring
• During the 276 years of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), some 1 million eunuchs served the Chinese emperor and members of the elite

Ming Dynasty Maritime Expeditions

• Zheng He captained the fleets sought to enroll distant peoples and states in the Chinese tribute system
• They brought back rulers to China, where rulers presented tribute and received gifts/trading opportunities
• Exotic Items such as zebras were being found abroad
• The expeditions served to establish Chinese power in the Indian Ocean and to control the region.
• The Chinese sought intervene in local disputes, not conquer
• A recent historian wrote that "China's greatest navy" had ordered its navy "into extinction"
• High ranking officials said expeditions were a waste of resource
• They viewed the voyages as the project of the court eunuchs
• Private Chinese merchants and craftsmen continued to settle and trade in Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Southeast Asies, even without state suppor

European Civilizations similarities

• Westerm Europe experienced a large ammount recovery
• After Mongol conquest and devastation by the plague,
• Also like CHina it continued earlier patterns of State building

European Civilizations Differences

• China had a Unitary government that encompasses almost its civilization
• Europe had a fragmented system of many states, seperate and independent

European Renaissance Commonalities with the Mings

• Ming Dynasty and Europe experienced similar revival
• Europe blossomed in the classical Greco-Roman tradition that earlier had been lost

The renaissance focused

• That wealthy aristocrats were living in a wholly new era
• Educated in cities which sought inspiration for art from ancient Greece and Rome
• Their purpose was for using it as a cultural standard to imitate/surpass
• Some looked to the Islamic World as well

Renaissance art

• Artists portrayed
• Paintings and sculptures that far more naturalistic
• Renaissance artists also included portraits and scenes from history
• Depictions of Islamic splendor

Machiavelli

How the Medici and the Renaissance intertwin

• The family supported the arts and their home was a center of commerce and intellectual discussion
• The family had also acquired control of the Florentine papacy the city had become the art/cultural and intellectual epicenter of Italy
• The Medici family was the primary reason for Florence's cultural boom of the renaissance

China's sea and trade

• Europeans also launched sea voyages
• Portugal initiated oversea trade, sailing West of Africa
• Christopher Columbus found the Americas
• Vasco de Gama found the Indian ocean
• The motivation wa slinked to money and spices

Size of the voyage difference

• da Gama had 4 ships, and Columbus have 3
• Zhen He had 300

Motivations to explore Differences

• China was overwhelmingly powerful fleets sought, neither contest nor colonies
• Needed nobody the Chinese people thought
• Europeans did want to monopolize force and to commerce and violently curve out huge empire

How Chinese trade ended

• The only reason Zheng He was able to do what he did was based on the Emperor
• After is departure nobody was there to pick up the sword again

How European exploration kept occurring

• The was nobody to take the sword and nobody is going to take the glory
• Europe has no way to prevent the travel
• Europe saw this as a religious opportunity

Motivations to explore commanalities

• Both civilizations shared growing populations and land shortage
• China used rice based agriculture
• Europe used exploration to gain more space

Ottoman and Safavid Empire

• During this time four nations were taking form
• This new crystallizations of power in the Islamic Civ resulted in the Ottoman safivid and and Mughal empire's
• The Ottoman empire in it's enormous territory and long term civilization, stood as a great empire for the world
• There has also been great social change going on during this period,

How The World of islam was affected

• Emergence from the Turks became dominant group with Islam which is what caused faith 800 years prior -Claiming the legacy form Abbasid empir
• New phase also occurred between Christendom and world Islam
• Seizure has also marked for dominance as to Roman empire
• Ottoman empire at its height in 1453

Safavid

• Islamic state also taking shape from 15/16 century
• The safavid empire has established its self with many decisions which also created Persian culture
• There also became a Shia divide into politics

Sunni/Shia

• Conflict between Ottoman and satavid
• There have been hostility

Frontier

• Songi and mughal were also states performing with frontiers power
• Many trans Saharan trade routes and revenue from it made this state
• Islam started to grow more and more into states

Timur vs the Aztecs

• Aztec claimed decent from from the Tolects
• Aztec was a loose a structured state With 5-6 million people
• Empire gave labor for Aztec and to send goods for roasters
• Was always unstable and their people wanted more pay always

Capital state of the Aztec

• Large, many Canals
• Many gardens that support the economy
• Spanish is very stunned by the sight's

Wealth

• Aztecs had the richest amount textile, clothing, military, jewelry, and food supply
• These were also mainly the source of sacrifice

Aztec god

Key Notes

Sacrifice had great importance to Aztec but to the cost of people's blood -The gods are at odds with other gods and they need blood

Comparison with Inca

• Small speak group lead by the quechua
• Largest amount of andes mountain with huge territory of 10mm
• Military conquest

Aztec empire

Not elaborate the Mexicans ruler will let's you be, the incas had a much ore bureaucratic system

• All states had known land