AP World History 1-6 PDF

From the Paleolithic Era to the Age of Agriculture Homo sapiens, human beings essentially similar to ourselves, emerged around 300,000 years ago, almost certainly in Africa. Then somewhere between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, our species began its long journey out of Africa and into Eurasia, Austra...

From the Paleolithic Era to the Age of Agriculture Homo sapiens, human beings essentially similar to ourselves, emerged around 300,000 years ago, almost certainly in Africa. Then somewhere between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, our species began its long journey out of Africa and into Eurasia, Australia, the Americas, and much later the islands of the Pacific. The last phase of that epic journey came to an end around 1200, when the first humans occupied what is now New Zealand. By then, every major landmass, except Antarctica, had acquired a human presence. With the exception of those who settled the islands of Pacific Oceania, all of this grand process had been undertaken by people practicing a gathering and hunting way of life and assisted only by stone tools. Thus human history begins with what scholars call the Paleolithic era or the Old Stone Age, which represents over 95 percent of the time that humans have occupied the planet. During these many centuries and millennia, humankind sustained itself by foraging: gathering wild foods, scavenging dead animals, hunting live animals, and fishing. Causation In what ways did a gathering and hunting economy shape other aspects of Paleolithic societies? In their long journeys across the earth, Paleolithic people created a multitude of separate and distinct societies, each with its own history, culture, language, identity, stories, and rituals. Their societies were small, organized as bands of perhaps twenty-five to fifty people in which all relationships were intensely personal and normally understood in terms of kinship. Such small-scale societies were seasonally mobile or nomadic, moving frequently and in regular patterns to exploit the resources of wild plants and animals on which they depended. These societies were also highly egalitarian, lacking the many inequalities of class and gender that emerged later with agriculture and urban life. Life expectancy was low, probably less than thirty-five years on average, and population growth was very slow. But cultural creativity was much in evidence, reflected in numerous technological innovations, in sophisticated oral traditions such as the Dreamtime stories of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, and in cave paintings and sculptures found in many places around the world. What followed was the most fundamental transformation in all of human history, known to us as the Agricultural Revolution, sometimes called the Neolithic or New Stone Age Revolution. Between 12,000 and 4,000 years ago, this momentous process unfolded separately in Asia, Africa, and the Americas alike. It meant the deliberate cultivation of particular plants as well as the taming and breeding of particular animals. Thus a whole new way of life gradually replaced the earlier practices of gathering and hunting in most parts of the world, so that by the early twenty-first century only miniscule groups of people followed that ancient way of living. Although it took place over centuries and millennia, the coming of agriculture represented a genuinely revolutionary transformation of human life all across the planet and provided the foundation for almost everything that followed: growing populations, settled villages, animal-borne diseases, an explosion of technological innovation, horse-drawn chariot warfare, cities, states, empires, civilizations, writing, literature, and much more (see Snapshot: Continental Populations in World History, 400 B.C.E.–2017). The resources generated by the Agricultural Revolution opened up vast new possibilities for the construction of human societies, but they led to no single or common outcome. Rather, several distinct kinds of societies emerged early on in the age of agriculture, all of which have endured into modern times. In areas where farming was difficult or impossible — arctic tundra, certain grasslands, and deserts — some people came to depend far more extensively on their domesticated animals, such as sheep, goats, cattle, horses, camels, or reindeer. Those animals could turn grass or waste products into meat, fiber, hides, and milk; they were useful for transport and warfare; and they could walk to market. People who depended on such animals — known as herders, nomads, or pastoral societies — emerged most prominently in Central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Sahara, and parts of eastern and southern Africa. What they had in common was mobility, for they moved seasonally as they followed the changing patterns of the vegetation that their animals needed to eat. Except for a few small pockets of the Andes where domesticated llamas and alpacas made pastoral life possible, no such societies emerged in the Americas because most animals able to be domesticated simply did not exist in the Western Hemisphere. Comparison How did the various kinds of societies that emerged out of the Agricultural Revolution differ from one another? The relationship between nomadic herders and their farming neighbors has been one of the enduring themes of Afro-Eurasian history. Frequently, it was a relationship of conflict, as pastoral peoples, unable to produce their own agricultural products, were attracted to the wealth and sophistication of agrarian societies and sought access to their richer grazing lands as well as their food crops and manufactured products. But not all was conflict between pastoral and farming peoples. The more peaceful exchange of technologies, ideas, products, and people between pastoral and agricultural societies also enriched and changed both sides. In the thirteenth century, this kind of relationship between pastoral and agricultural societies found a dramatic expression in the making of the Mongol Empire, described in Chapter 4. Another kind of society to emerge from the Agricultural Revolution was that of permanently settled farming villages. They retained much of the social and gender equality of gathering and hunting communities, as they continued to do without kings, chiefs, bureaucrats, or aristocracies. Many village-based agricultural societies flourished well into the modern era in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas, usually organizing themselves in terms of kinship groups or lineages, which incorporated large numbers of people well beyond the immediate or extended family. Given the frequent oppressiveness of organized political power in human history, agricultural village societies represent an intriguing alternative to the states, kingdoms, and empires so often highlighted in the historical record. They pioneered the human settlement of vast areas; adapted to a variety of environments; maintained a substantial degree of social and gender equality; created numerous cultural, artistic, and religious traditions; and interacted continuously with their neighbors. In some places, agricultural village societies came to be organized politically as chiefdoms, in which inherited positions of power and privilege introduced a more distinct element of inequality, but unlike later kings, chiefs or “big men” could seldom use force to compel the obedience of their subjects. Instead, chiefs relied on their generosity or gift giving, their ritual status, or their personal charisma to persuade their followers. Chiefdoms emerged in all parts of the world, and the more recent ones have been much studied by anthropologists. For example, chiefdoms flourished everywhere in the Pacific islands, which had been colonized by agricultural Polynesian peoples. Chiefs usually derived from a senior lineage, tracing their descent to the first son of an imagined ancestor. With both religious and secular functions, chiefs led important rituals and ceremonies, organized the community for warfare, directed its economic life, and sought to resolve internal conflicts. They collected tribute from commoners in the form of food, manufactured goods, and raw materials. These items in turn were redistributed to warriors, craftsmen, religious specialists, and other subordinates, while chiefs kept enough to maintain their prestigious positions and imposing lifestyle. In North America as well, a remarkable series of chiefdoms emerged in the eastern woodlands, where an extensive array of large earthen mounds testifies to the organizational capacity of these early societies. The largest of these chiefdoms, known as Cahokia, which was located near modern St. Louis, flourished around 1200 C.E. Civilizations Contextualization Why might the Eastern Hemisphere have a larger number of the First Civilizations than the Western Hemisphere? AP® EXAM TIP Knowledge of maps throughout world history is critical. Be sure you know how to read maps and understand what they convey. Far and away the most significant outcome of the Agricultural Revolution was the emergence of those distinctive and more complex societies that we know as civilizations. The earliest civilizations emerged in Mesopotamia (what is now Iraq), in Egypt, and along the central coast of Peru between 3500 to 3000 B.C.E. At the time, these First Civilizations were small islands of innovation in a sea of people living in much older ways. But over the next 4,000 years, this way of living spread globally, taking hold all across the planet — in India and China; in Western, Central, and Southeast Asia; in various parts of Europe; in the highlands of Ethiopia, along the East African coast, and in the West African interior; in Mesoamerica; and in the Andes Mountains. Over the many centuries of the agricultural era, particular civilizations rose, expanded, changed, and sometimes collapsed and disappeared. But as a style of human life, civilization persisted and became a global phenomenon. By 1200, a considerable majority of humankind lived in one or another of these civilizations (see Map 1.1). Defining Civilizations As historians use the term, “civilization” refers to societies based in cities and governed by states. They were the product of the age of agriculture, for only a highly productive agricultural economy could support a society in which substantial numbers of people did not produce their own food. Thus civilizations marked an enormous change from the small bands of Paleolithic peoples or the villages of farming communities. Causation What developments led to the rise of the First Civilizations? Contextualization What was the role of cities in the early civilizations? Although most people in the First Civilizations remained in rural areas, sizable cities were a central feature. Those cities served as political and administrative capitals; they functioned as cultural hubs, generating works of art, architecture, literature, ritual, and ceremony; they acted as marketplaces for both local and long-distance trade; and they housed major manufacturing enterprises. In the ancient Mesopotamian poem called the Epic of Gilgamesh, dating to about 2000 B.C.E., the author describes the city of Uruk: Come then … to ramparted Uruk, / Where fellows are resplendent in holiday clothing, Where every day is set for celebration, / Where harps and drums are played. And the harlots too, they are fairest of form, / Rich in beauty, full of delights, Even the great gods are kept from sleeping at night.2 Civilizations also generated states, governing structures organized around particular cities or territories that were usually headed by kings, who employed a variety of ranked officials and could use force to compel obedience. The ancient Hebrew prophet Samuel described to his people the “way of the king”: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses.… He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves.… Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves.3 Civilizations also developed an altogether new degree of occupational specialization as scholars, merchants, priests, officials, scribes, soldiers, servants, entertainers, and artisans of all kinds appeared. All of these people were supported by the work of peasant farmers, who represented the overwhelming majority of the population in all civilizations. And accompanying this novel division of labor were unprecedented inequalities in wealth, status, and power, as the more egalitarian values of earlier cultures were everywhere displaced. Gender inequality too became far more explicit and pronounced as patriarchy took hold and ideas of male superiority and dominance became inscribed in the values of all civilizations. AP® EXAM TIP Societies’ expectations for what men and women are supposed to do or be (that is, “gender roles”) are an important theme throughout the course. But the political oppression, social inequality, and economic exploitation of civilizations were also accompanied by impressive artistic, scientific, and technological innovations. Chinese civilization, for example, virtually invented bureaucracy and pioneered silk production, papermaking, printing, and gunpowder. Islamic civilization generated major advances in mathematics, medicine, astronomy, metallurgy, water management, and more. Later European movements, particularly the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions (1600–1900), likewise reflected this innovative capacity of civilizations. And civilizations everywhere generated those remarkable works of art and architecture that continue to awe and inspire us to this day. In addition, the written literatures of civilizations — poetry, stories, history, philosophy, sacred texts — have expressed distinctive outlooks on the world. Civilizations and the Environment Like all human communities, civilizations have been shaped by the environment in which they developed. It is no accident that many of the early civilizations, such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Peru, India, and China, grew up in river valleys that offered rich possibilities for productive agriculture. The mountainous terrain of Greece favored the development of rival city-states rather than a single unified empire. The narrow bottleneck of Panama, largely covered by dense rain forests, inhibited contact between the civilizations of Mesoamerica and those of the Andes. And oceans long separated the Afro-Eurasian world from that of the Western Hemisphere. AP® EXAM TIP The relationship between humans and the environment is a key theme throughout the course. Civilizations also left an imprint on their environment. The larger populations and intensive agriculture of civilizations had a far more substantial impact on the landscape than Paleolithic, pastoral, or agricultural village societies. By 2000 B.C.E. the rigorous irrigation that supported farming in southern Mesopotamia generated soils that turned white as salt accumulated. As a result, wheat was largely replaced by barley, which is far more tolerant of salty conditions. In many places the growth of civilizations was accompanied by extensive deforestation and soil erosion. Plato declared that the area around Athens had become “a mere relic of the original country.… All the rich soil has melted away, leaving a country of skin and bone.”4 As Chinese civilization expanded southward toward the Yangzi River valley after 200 C.E., that movement of people, accompanied by their intensive agriculture, set in motion a vast environmental transformation marked by the destruction of the old-growth forests that once covered much of the country and the retreat of the elephants that had inhabited those lands. Around 800 C.E., the Chinese official and writer Liu Zongyuan lamented the devastation that followed: A tumbled confusion of lumber as flames on the hillside crackle Not even the last remaining shrubs are safeguarded from destruction Where once mountain torrents leapt — nothing but rutted gullies.5 Something similar was happening in Europe as its civilization was expanding in the several centuries after 1000. Everywhere trees were felled at tremendous rates to clear agricultural land and to use as fuel or building material. By 1300, the forest cover of Europe had been reduced to about 20 percent of the land area. Far from lamenting this situation, one German abbot declared: “I believe that the forest … covers the land to no purpose and hold this to be an unbearable harm.”6 As agricultural civilizations spread, farmers everywhere stamped the landscape with a human imprint as they drained swamps, leveled forests, terraced hillsides, and constructed cities, roads, irrigation ditches, and canals. Maya civilization in southern Mexico, for example, has been described as an “almost totally engineered landscape” that supported a flourishing agriculture and a very rapidly increasing and dense population by 750 C.E.7 But that very success also undermined Maya civilization and contributed to its collapse by 900 C.E. Rapid population growth pushed total Maya numbers to perhaps 5 million or more and soon outstripped available resources, resulting in deforestation and the erosion of hillsides. Under such conditions, climate change in the form of prolonged droughts in the 800s may well have placed an unbearable strain on Maya society. It was not the first case, and would not be the last, in which the demographic and economic pressures from civilizations undermined the ecological foundation on which those civilizations rested. Comparing Civilizations Comparison In what respects did the various civilizations of the pre-1200 world differ from one another? What common features did they share? While civilizations shared a number of common features, they also differed from one another in many other ways. The earliest civilizations were geographically quite limited, while many later civilizations — such as the Chinese, Persian, and Roman — extended over far larger regions and found political expression in empires that incorporated many culturally different peoples. The Arab Empire that accompanied the rise of Islam in the several centuries after the death of Muhammad in 632 C.E. encompassed much of North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Spain and western India. Large-scale empires in West Africa, such as Mali and Songhay, as well as the huge Inca Empire in South America, also offered an imperial setting for their civilizations. But other civilizations, such as the Greek in Europe, the Maya in Mesoamerica, and the Swahili in East Africa, organized themselves in highly competitive city-states that made unified empires difficult to achieve. Civilizations differed as well in how their societies were structured and stratified. Consider the difference between China and India. China gave the highest ranking to an elite bureaucracy of government officials, drawn largely from the landlord class and selected by their performance on a set of examinations. They were supported by a vast mass of peasant farmers who were required to pay taxes to the government and rent to their landlords. Although honored as the hardworking and productive backbone of the country by their social superiors, Chinese peasants were oppressed and exploited, as they were everywhere, and periodically erupted in large-scale rebellions. India’s social organization shared certain broad features with that of China. In both civilizations, birth determined social status for most people; little social mobility was available for the vast majority; sharp distinctions and great inequalities characterized social life; and religious or cultural traditions defined these inequalities as natural, eternal, and ordained by the gods. But India’s social system was distinctive. It gave priority to religious status and ritual purity, for the priestly caste known as Brahmins held the highest rank, whereas China elevated political officials to the most prominent of elite positions. The caste system divided Indian society into vast numbers of distinct social groups based on occupation and perceived ritual purity; China had fewer, but broader, categories of society — scholar-gentry, landlords, peasants, and merchants. Finally, India’s caste society defined social groups far more rigidly than in China, forbidding members of different castes to marry or eat together. This meant even less opportunity for social mobility than in China, where the examination system offered a route to social promotion to a few among the common people. At the bottom of the social hierarchy in all civilizations were slaves, or owned people, often debtors or prisoners of war, with few if any rights in the larger society. But the extent of slavery varied considerably. Persian, Chinese, Indian, and West African civilizations certainly practiced slavery, but it was not central to their societies. In Greek and Roman civilizations, however, it was. The Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle was home to some 60,000 slaves, about one-third of the total population. On an even larger scale, slavery was a defining element of Roman society. The Italian heartland of the Roman Empire contained some 2 to 3 million slaves, representing 33 to 40 percent of the population. Patriarchy, or male dominance, was common to the social life of all civilizations, but it too varied from place to place and changed over time. Generally, patriarchies were lighter and less restrictive for women in the early years of a civilization’s development and during times of upheaval when established patterns of life were disrupted. Chinese patriarchy, for example, loosened somewhat, especially for elite women, when parts of northern China were ruled by pastoral and nomadic peoples, whose women were far less restricted than those of China itself. Even within the small world of ancient Greek city-states, the patriarchy of Athens was far more confining for women than in Sparta, where women competed in sports with men, could divorce with ease, and owned substantial landed estates. Furthermore, elite women both enjoyed privileges and suffered the restrictions of seclusion in the home to a much greater extent than their lower-class counterparts, whose economic circumstances required them to operate in the larger social arena. Finally, civilizations differed in the range and extent of their influence. Roman civilization dominated the Mediterranean basin for much of the millennium between 500 B.C.E. and 500 C.E. (see Map 1.2), while Chinese civilization has directly shaped the cultural history of much of eastern Asia and indirectly influenced economic life all across Eurasia for much longer. Between roughly 650 and 1450, Islamic civilization represented the most expansive, influential, and pervasive presence throughout the entire Afro-Eurasian world (see Map 2.2 in Chapter 2). At the bottom of the social hierarchy in all civilizations were slaves, or owned people, often debtors or prisoners of war, with few if any rights in the larger society. But the extent of slavery varied considerably. Persian, Chinese, Indian, and West African civilizations certainly practiced slavery, but it was not central to their societies. In Greek and Roman civilizations, however, it was. The Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle was home to some 60,000 slaves, about one-third of the total population. On an even larger scale, slavery was a defining element of Roman society. The Italian heartland of the Roman Empire contained some 2 to 3 million slaves, representing 33 to 40 percent of the population. Patriarchy, or male dominance, was common to the social life of all civilizations, but it too varied from place to place and changed over time. Generally, patriarchies were lighter and less restrictive for women in the early years of a civilization’s development and during times of upheaval when established patterns of life were disrupted. Chinese patriarchy, for example, loosened somewhat, especially for elite women, when parts of northern China were ruled by pastoral and nomadic peoples, whose women were far less restricted than those of China itself. Even within the small world of ancient Greek city-states, the patriarchy of Athens was far more confining for women than in Sparta, where women competed in sports with men, could divorce with ease, and owned substantial landed estates. Furthermore, elite women both enjoyed privileges and suffered the restrictions of seclusion in the home to a much greater extent than their lower-class counterparts, whose economic circumstances required them to operate in the larger social arena. Finally, civilizations differed in the range and extent of their influence. Roman civilization dominated the Mediterranean basin for much of the millennium between 500 B.C.E. and 500 C.E. (see Map 1.2), while Chinese civilization has directly shaped the cultural history of much of eastern Asia and indirectly influenced economic life all across Eurasia for much longer. Between roughly 650 and 1450, Islamic civilization represented the most expansive, influential, and pervasive presence throughout the entire Afro-Eurasian world (see Map 2.2 in Chapter 2). Civilizations and Cultural Traditions Civilizations also differed in their cultural or religious traditions. These traditions provided a common identity for millions of individuals and for entire civilizations, even as divisions within them generated great social conflicts. Cultural traditions also made the inequalities of civilizations legitimate, providing moral support for established elites and oppressive states. But religion was a doubled-edged sword, for it sometimes stimulated movements that challenged those in power. And religion enabled millions of ordinary people to endure their sufferings, shaping the meanings that they attached to the world they inhabited and providing moral guidance for living a good life or making a good society. By 1200, the major cultural traditions of the Afro-Eurasian world had been long established. Hinduism and Buddhism; Confucianism and Daoism; Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — all of them had taken shape in the millennium between 600 B.C.E. and 700 C.E. Since they will recur often in the chapters that follow, some attention to their origins and development is appropriate. South Asian Cultural Traditions: Hinduism AP® EXAM TIP Know the basic teachings of the major Eurasian belief systems, such as reincarnation in Hinduism. AP® EXAM TIP Keep in mind the social and political effects of India’s caste system, as it will continue to be important later on in the course. Few cultures were as fundamentally religious as that of India, where sages and philosophers embraced the Divine and all things spiritual with enthusiasm and generated elaborate philosophical visions about the nature of ultimate reality. Hinduism, the oldest, largest, and most prominent religious tradition in India, had no historical founder, unlike Islam, Christianity, and another later Indian tradition, Buddhism. Instead it grew up over many centuries as an integral part of Indian civilization. Although it later spread into Southeast Asia, Hinduism was not a missionary religion seeking converts, but was, like Judaism, associated with a particular people and territory. In fact, “Hinduism” was never a single tradition at all, and the term itself derived from outsiders — Greeks, Muslims, and later the British — who sought to reduce the infinite variety of Indian cultural patterns into a recognizable system. From the inside, however, Hinduism dissolved into a vast diversity of gods, spirits, beliefs, practices, rituals, and philosophies. This endlessly variegated Hinduism served to incorporate into Indian civilization the many diverse peoples who migrated into or invaded the South Asian peninsula over many centuries. Continuity and Change In what ways did the religious tradition of South Asia change over the centuries? At one level, this emerging Hindu religious tradition was wildly polytheistic, embracing a vast diversity of gods and goddesses, each of whom had various consorts and appeared in a variety of forms. A priestly caste known as Brahmins presided over the sacrifices, offerings, and rituals that these deities required. But at another more philosophical level, Indian thinkers argued for a more unified understanding of reality. This point of view found expression in the Upanishads (oo-PAHN-ee-shahds), a collection of sacred texts composed by largely anonymous thinkers between 800 and 400 B.C.E. These texts elaborated the idea of Brahman, the World Soul, the final and ultimate reality. Beyond the multiplicity of material objects and individual persons and beyond even the various gods themselves lay this primal unitary energy or divine reality infusing all things. This alone was real; the immense diversity of existence that human beings perceived with their senses was but an illusion. One contemporary Hindu monk summarized the essence of the Hindu outlook by saying, “there is no multiplicity.” The fundamental assertion of this philosophical Hinduism was that the individual human soul, or atman, was in fact a part of Brahman. The chief goal of humankind then lay in the effort to achieve union with Brahman, putting an end to our illusory perception of a separate existence. This was moksha (MOHK-shuh), or liberation, compared sometimes to a bubble in a glass of water breaking through the surface and becoming one with the surrounding atmosphere. Achieving this exalted state was held to involve many lifetimes, and the notion of samsara, or rebirth or reincarnation, became a central feature of Hindu thinking. Human souls migrated from body to body over many lifetimes, depending on the actions of individuals. This was the law of karma. Pure actions, appropriate to one’s station in life, resulted in rebirth in a higher social position or caste. Thus the caste system of distinct and ranked groups, each with its own duties, became a register of spiritual progress. Various paths to this final release, appropriate to people of different temperaments, were spelled out in Hindu teachings. Some might achieve moksha through knowledge or study; others by doing their ordinary work without regard to consequences; still others through passionate devotion to some deity or through extended meditation practice. Such ideas became widely known throughout India — carried by Brahmin priests and wandering ascetics or holy men, who had withdrawn from ordinary life to pursue their spiritual development. South Asian Cultural Traditions: Buddhism About the same time as philosophical Hinduism was emerging, another movement took shape in South Asia that soon became a distinct and separate religious tradition — Buddhism. Unlike Hinduism, this new faith had a historical founder, Siddhartha Gautama (ca. 566–ca. 486 B.C.E.), a prince from a small kingdom in north India or southern Nepal. According to Buddhist tradition, the prince had enjoyed a sheltered and delightful youth until he encountered human suffering in the form of an old man, a sick person, and a corpse. Shattered by these revelations of aging, illness, and death, Siddhartha determined to find the cause of such sufferings and a remedy for them. And so, at the age of twenty-nine, the young prince left his luxurious life as well as his wife and child, shed his royal jewels, cut off his hair, and set off on a quest for enlightenment that ended with an indescribable experience of spiritual realization. Now he was the Buddha, the man who had awakened. For the next forty years, he taught what he had learned, setting in motion the cultural tradition of Buddhism. To the Buddha, suffering or sorrow — experiencing life as imperfect, impermanent, and unsatisfactory — was the central and universal feature of human life. This kind of suffering derived from desire or craving for individual fulfillment, from attachment to that which inevitably changes, particularly to the notion of a core self or ego that is uniquely and solidly “me.” He spelled out a cure for this “dis-ease” in his famous “eightfold path,” which emphasized a modest and moral lifestyle, mental concentration practices, including meditation, and wisdom or understanding of reality as it is. Those who followed the Buddhist path most fully could expect to achieve enlightenment, or nirvana, an almost indescribable state in which individual identity would be “extinguished” along with all greed, hatred, and delusion. With the pain of unnecessary suffering finally ended, the enlightened person would experience an overwhelming serenity, even in the midst of difficulty, as well as an immense loving-kindness, or compassion, for all beings. It was a simple message, elaborated endlessly and in various forms by those who followed the Buddha. Comparison To what extent were Buddhist teachings similar to Hindu beliefs? Much of the Buddha’s teaching reflected the Hindu traditions from which it sprang. The idea that ordinary life is an illusion, the concepts of karma and rebirth, the goal of overcoming the incessant demands of the ego, the practice of meditation, the hope for final release from the cycle of rebirth — all of these Hindu elements found their way into Buddhist teaching. In this respect, Buddhism was a simplified and more accessible version of Hinduism. AP® EXAM TIP You should know the basic differences and similarities between Hinduism and Buddhism. Other elements of Buddhist teaching, however, sharply challenged prevailing Hindu thinking. Rejecting the religious authority of the Brahmins, the Buddha ridiculed their rituals and sacrifices as irrelevant to the hard work of dealing with one’s suffering. Nor was he much interested in abstract speculation about the creation of the world or the existence of God, for such questions, he declared, “are not useful in the quest for holiness; they do not lead to peace and to the direct knowledge of nirvana.” Individuals had to take responsibility for their own spiritual development with no help from human authorities or supernatural beings. It was a path of intense self-effort, based on personal experience. The Buddha also challenged the inequalities of a Hindu-based caste system, arguing that neither caste position nor gender was a barrier to enlightenment. At least in principle, the possibility of “awakening” was available to all. As Buddhism spread across the trade routes of Central Asia to China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, differences in understanding soon emerged. An early version of the new religion, known as Theravada Buddhism (Teaching of the Elders), portrayed the Buddha as an immensely wise teacher and model, but certainly not divine. The gods, though never completely denied, played little role in assisting believers in achieving enlightenment. But as the message of the Buddha gained a mass following and spread across much of Asia, some of its early features — rigorous and time-consuming meditation practice, a focus on monks and nuns withdrawn from ordinary life, the absence of accessible supernatural figures able to provide help and comfort — proved difficult for many converts. And so the religion adapted. A new form of the faith, Mahayana Buddhism, developed in the early centuries of the Common Era and offered greater accessibility, a spiritual path available to a much wider range of people beyond the monks and ascetics, who were the core group in early Buddhism. AP® EXAM TIP Be able to give examples of factors that attract people to belief systems. In most expressions of Mahayana Buddhism, enlightenment (or becoming a Buddha) was available to everyone; it was possible within the context of ordinary life, rather than a monastery; and it might occur within a single lifetime rather than over the course of many lives. While Buddhism had originally put a premium on spiritual wisdom or insight, Mahayana expressions of the faith emphasized compassion — the ability to feel the sorrows of other people as if they were one’s own. This compassionate religious ideal found expression in the notion of bodhisattvas, fully enlightened beings who postponed their own final liberation in order to assist a suffering humanity. They were spiritual beings on their way to “Buddhahood.” Furthermore, the historical Buddha himself became something of a god, and both earlier and future Buddhas were available to offer help. Elaborate descriptions and artistic representations of these supernatural beings, together with various levels of Heavens and Hells, transformed Buddhism into a popular religion of salvation. Furthermore, religious merit, leading to salvation, might now be earned by acts of piety and devotion, such as contributing to the support of a monastery, and that merit might be transferred to others. In many forms and variations, Mahayana Buddhism took root in Central Asia, China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. Buddhism thus became the first major tradition to spread widely outside its homeland (see Map 1.3). In Tibet, a distinctive form of Buddhism began to take shape during the seventh century C.E. This Tibetan Buddhism gave special authority to learned teachers, known as Lamas, and emphasized an awareness of and preparation for death. Its many spiritual practices included multiple prostrations, elaborate visualizations, complex meditations, ceremonies associated with numerous heavenly beings both peaceful and violent, and the frequent use of art and music. Incorporating various elements from native Tibetan traditions and from Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism was expressed in a set of distinctive texts compiled during the fourteenth century. A section of these texts became famous in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which vividly describes the various stages of transition from life to death to rebirth. AP® EXAM TIP Major belief systems often divided and subdivided across time and place. One example is the development of Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. But by 1200 Buddhism had largely disappeared in India, the land of its birth, even as it was expanding in other parts of Asia. Its decline in India owed something to the mounting wealth of monasteries as the economic interests of leading Buddhist figures separated them from ordinary people. Hostility of the Brahmin priests and competition from Islam after 1000 C.E. also played a role. But the most important reason for the waning of Buddhism in India was the growth during the first millennium C.E. of a new kind of popular Hinduism. AP® EXAM TIP Be able to provide examples of the expansion and contraction of major religions over time. That path took shape in what is known as the bhakti movement, which involved devotion to one or another of India’s many gods and goddesses. Beginning in south India and moving northward between 600 and 1300 C.E., it featured the intense adoration of and identification with a particular deity through songs, prayers, and rituals. By far the most popular deities were Vishnu, the protector and preserver of creation who was associated with mercy and goodness, and Shiva, a god representing the Divine in its destructive aspect, but many others also had their followers. This form of Hindu expression sometimes pushed against the rigid caste and gender hierarchies of Indian society by inviting all to an adoration of the Divine. Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu as portrayed in the Bhagavad Gita, a famous section of the long Indian epic Mahabharata, had declared that “those who take shelter in Me, though they be of lower birth — women, vaishyas [merchants] and shudras [workers] — can attain the supreme destination.” Continuity and Change How did Hinduism respond to the challenges of Buddhism? Bhakti practice was more accessible to ordinary people than the elaborate sacrifices of the Brahmins or the philosophical speculations of intellectuals. Through good deeds, simple living, and emotionally fulfilling rituals of devotion, individuals could find salvation without a complex institutional structure, orthodox doctrine, or prescribed meditation practices. Bhakti spirituality also had a rich poetic tradition, which flourished especially in the centuries after 1200. One ninth-century poet illustrated the intense emotional impact of bhakti devotion: He [God] grabbed me lest I go astray//Wax before an unspent fire, mind melted, body trembled.//I bowed, I wept, danced, and cried aloud//I sang, and I praised him.…//I left shame behind, took as an ornament the mockery of local folk.8 This proliferation of gods and goddesses, and of their bhakti cults, occasioned very little friction or serious religious conflict. “Hinduism,” writes a leading scholar, “is essentially tolerant, and would rather assimilate than rigidly exclude.”9 This capacity for assimilation extended to an already declining Buddhism, which for many people had become yet another cult worshipping yet another god. The Buddha in fact was incorporated into the Hindu pantheon as the ninth incarnation of Vishnu. Chinese Cultural Traditions: Confucianism At the far eastern end of the Eurasian continent, Chinese civilization gave birth to two major cultural traditions that have persisted into the modern era, Confucianism and Daoism. Compared to Hindu, Christian, and Islamic traditions, these Chinese outlooks were less overtly religious; were expressed in more philosophical, humanistic, or rational terms; and were oriented toward life in this world. They emerged in what the Chinese remember sadly as “the age of warring states” (ca. 500–221 B.C.E.), dreadful centuries of disorder and turmoil. At that time some Chinese thinkers began to consider how order might be restored, how the imagined tranquility of an earlier time could be realized again. From their reflections emerged the classical cultural traditions of Chinese civilization. Argument Development In what ways can Confucianism be defined as a secular or “humanistic” philosophy rather than a supernatural religion? One of these traditions was derived from the thinking of Confucius (551–479 B.C.E.), a learned and ambitious aristocrat who believed that he had uncovered a path back to social and political harmony. He attracted a group of followers, who compiled his writings into a short book called The Analects, and later scholars elaborated and commented endlessly on his ideas, creating a body of thought known as Confucianism. When China was finally reunified by the Han dynasty, around 200 B.C.E., those ideas became the official ideology of the Chinese state and remained so into the early twentieth century. The Confucian answer to the problem of China’s disorder was rooted not in force, law, and punishment, but in the power of moral behavior. For Confucius, human society consisted primarily of unequal relationships: the father and son; husband and wife; the older brother and younger brother; ruler and subject. If the superior party in each of these relationships behaved with sincerity, benevolence, and genuine concern for the other, then the inferior party would be motivated to respond with deference and obedience. Harmony would then prevail. In Confucian thinking, the family became a model for political life, a kind of miniature state. Filial piety, the honoring of one’s ancestors and parents, was both valuable in itself and a training ground for the reverence due to the emperor and state officials. For Confucius, the key to nurturing these moral qualities was education, particularly an immersion in language, literature, history, philosophy, and ethics, all applied to the practical problems of government. Ritual and ceremonies were also important, for they conveyed the rules of appropriate behavior in the many and varying circumstances of life. For the “superior person,” or “gentleman” in Confucian terms, serious personal reflection and a willingness to strive continuously to perfect his moral character were essential. Such ideas had a pervasive influence in Chinese life, as Confucianism became almost synonymous with Chinese elite culture. As China’s bureaucracy took shape during and after the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), Confucianism became the central element of the educational system, which prepared students for the examinations required to gain official positions. Thus generation after generation of China’s male elite was steeped in the ideas and values of Confucianism. Confucianism also placed great importance on history, for the ideal good society lay in the past. Those ideas also injected a certain democratic element into Chinese elite culture, for the great sage had emphasized that “superior men” and potential government officials were those of outstanding moral character and intellectual achievement, not simply those of aristocratic background. Usually only young men from wealthy families could afford the education necessary for passing examinations, but on occasion villagers could find the resources to sponsor one of their bright sons, potentially propelling him into the stratosphere of the Chinese elite while bringing honor and benefit to the village itself. Confucian ideas were clearly used to legitimate the many inequalities of Chinese society, but they also established certain expectations for the superior parties in China’s social hierarchy. Thus emperors should keep taxes low, administer justice, and provide for the material needs of the people. Those who failed to govern by these moral norms forfeited what the Chinese called the Mandate of Heaven, which granted legitimacy to the ruler. Under such conditions, natural disaster, famine, or rebellion followed, leading to political upheaval and a new dynasty. Likewise at the level of the family, husbands should deal kindly with their wives and children, lest they provoke conflict and disharmony. Finally, Confucianism marked Chinese elite culture by its secular, or nonreligious, character. Confucius did not deny the reality of gods and spirits. In fact, he advised people to participate in family and state rituals “as if the spirits were present,” and he believed that the universe had a moral character with which human beings should align themselves. But the thrust of Confucian teaching was distinctly this-worldly and practical, concerned with human relationships, effective government, and social harmony. Members of the Chinese elite generally acknowledged that magic, the gods, and spirits were perhaps necessary for the lower orders of society, but educated people, they argued, would find them of little help in striving for moral improvement and in establishing a harmonious society. In various forms Chinese Confucianism proved attractive to elites elsewhere in East Asia, such as Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. Those distinct civilizations drew heavily on the culture of their giant and highly prestigious neighbor. When an early Japanese state emerged in the seventh century C.E., its founder, Shotoku, issued the Seventeen Article Constitution, proclaiming the Japanese ruler a Chinese-style emperor and encouraging both Buddhism and Confucianism. In good Confucian fashion, that document emphasized the moral quality of rulers as a foundation for social harmony. Chinese Cultural Traditions: Daoism Comparison How did the Daoist outlook differ from that of Confucianism? As Confucian thinking became generally known in China, a quite different school of thought also took shape. Known as Daoism, it was associated with the legendary figure Laozi, who, according to tradition, was a sixth-century-B.C.E. archivist. He is said to have penned a short poetic volume, the Daodejing (DOW-DAY-JIHNG) (The Way and Its Power), before vanishing in the wilderness to the west of China on his water buffalo. In many ways, Daoist thinking ran counter to that of Confucius, who had emphasized the importance of education and earnest striving for moral improvement and good government. The Daoists ridiculed such efforts as artificial and useless, claiming that they generally made things worse. In the face of China’s disorder and chaos, Daoists urged withdrawal into the world of nature and encouraged behavior that was spontaneous, individualistic, and natural. The central concept of Daoist thinking is dao, an elusive notion that refers to the way of nature, the underlying and unchanging principle that governs all natural phenomena. Whereas Confucius focused on the world of human relationships, the Daoists turned the spotlight on the immense realm of nature and its mysterious unfolding patterns in which the “ten thousand things” appeared, changed, and vanished. “Confucius roams within society,” the Chinese have often said. “Laozi wanders beyond.” The Yin Yang Symbol Applied to human life, Daoism invited people to withdraw from the world of political and social activism, to disengage from the public life so important to Confucius, and to align themselves with the way of nature. It meant simplicity in living, small self-sufficient communities, limited government, and the abandonment of education and active efforts at self-improvement. “Give up learning,” declares the Daodejing, “and put an end to your troubles.” Contextualization How does the yin yang symbol reflect Chinese attitudes toward differing philosophies? What does the yin yang symbol tell us about Chinese attitudes toward gender roles? Despite its various differences with the ideas of Confucianism, the Daoist perspective was widely regarded by elite Chinese as complementing rather than contradicting Confucian values. Such an outlook was facilitated by the ancient Chinese concept of yin (female) and yang (male), which expressed a belief in the unity or complementarity of opposites. Thus a scholar-official might pursue the Confucian project of “government by goodness” during the day, but upon returning home in the evening or following his retirement, he might well behave in a more Daoist fashion — pursuing the simple life, reading Daoist philosophy, practicing meditation and breathing exercises in mountain settings, or enjoying painting, poetry, or calligraphy. Daoism also shaped the culture of ordinary people as it became a part of Chinese popular religion. This kind of Daoism sought to tap the power of the dao for practical uses and came to include magic, fortune-telling, and the search for immortality. Sometimes it also provided an ideology for peasant uprisings, such as the Yellow Turban Rebellion (184–204 C.E.), which imagined a utopian society without the oppression of governments and landlords. In its many and varied forms, Daoism, like Confucianism, became an enduring element of the Chinese cultural tradition. Middle Eastern Cultural Traditions: Judaism and Christianity From the Middle Eastern lands of what are now Israel/Palestine and Arabia emerged three religious traditions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — often known as Abrahamic faiths because all of them revered the biblical character called Abraham. Amid the proliferation of gods and spirits that had long characterized religious life throughout the ancient world, Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike affirmed a distinctly monotheistic faith. This idea of a single supreme deity or Divine Presence, the sole source of all life and being, was a radical cultural innovation. It created the possibility of a universal religion, open to all of humankind, but it could also mean an exclusive and intolerant faith. The earliest of these traditions to emerge was Judaism, born among one of the region’s smaller and, at the time, less significant peoples — the Hebrews, also known as Jews. Unlike the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia, India, Greece, and elsewhere — all of whom populated the invisible realm with numerous gods and goddesses — Jews found in their God, whose name they were reluctant to pronounce because of its sacredness, a powerful and jealous deity, who demanded their exclusive loyalty. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” — this was the first of the Ten Commandments. AP® EXAM TIP You should be able to point out the similarities and differences between the monotheistic religions in this section and the other major belief systems discussed in the chapter. AP® EXAM TIP You should know the basic tenets of Judaism and its political and social effects on world history. Argument Development What was distinctive about the Jewish religious tradition? Over time, this God evolved into a lofty, transcendent deity of utter holiness and purity. But the Jews also experienced their God as a divine person, accessible and available to his people, not remote or far away. Furthermore, for some, he was transformed from a god of war, who ordered his people to “utterly destroy” the original inhabitants of the Promised Land, to a god of social justice and compassion for the poor and the marginalized, especially in the passionate pronouncements of Jewish prophets, such as Isaiah, Amos, and Jeremiah. Here was a distinctive conception of the Divine — singular, transcendent, personal, revealed in the natural order, engaged in history, and demanding social justice and moral righteousness above sacrifices and rituals. In terms of world history, the chief significance of Jewish religious thought lay in the foundation it provided for those later and far more widespread Abrahamic faiths of Christianity and Islam. Christianity began in a distinctly Jewish cultural setting. In the remote province of Judaea, which was incorporated into the Roman Empire in 63 B.C.E., a young Jewish craftsman or builder called Jesus of Nazareth (ca. 4 B.C.E.–29 C.E.) began a brief career of teaching and healing before he got in trouble with local authorities and was executed. In one of history’s most unlikely stories, the life and teachings of that obscure man, barely noted in the historical records of the time, became the basis of the world’s most widely practiced religion. Comparison How would you compare the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha? In what different ways did the two religions evolve after the deaths of their founders? In his short public life, Jesus was a “wisdom teacher,” challenging the conventional values of his time, urging the renunciation of wealth and self-seeking, and emphasizing the supreme importance of love or compassion as the basis for a moral life. In his famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told his followers to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Jesus inherited from his Jewish tradition an intense devotion to a single personal deity with whom he was on intimate terms, referring to him as Abba (“father”). And he gained a reputation as a healer and miracle worker. Furthermore, Jesus’ teachings had a sharp social and political edge, as he spoke clearly on behalf of the poor and the oppressed, directly criticized the hypocrisies of the powerful, and deliberately associated with lepers, adulterous women, and tax collectors, all of whom were regarded as “impure.” His teachings galvanized many of his followers into a social movement that so antagonized and threatened both Jewish and Roman authorities that he was crucified as a political rebel. AP® EXAM TIP You should know that Buddhism and Christianity developed out of earlier belief systems, Hinduism and Judaism, respectively. Jesus had not intended to establish a new religion, but rather to revitalize his Jewish tradition. Nonetheless, Christianity soon emerged as a separate faith. Its transformation from a small Jewish sect to a world religion began with Saint Paul (ca. 6–67 C.E.), an early convert whose missionary journeys in the eastern Roman Empire led to the founding of small Christian communities that included non-Jews. The Good News of Jesus, Paul argued, was for everyone, Jews and non-Jews alike. This inclusive message was one of the attractions of the new faith as it spread very gradually within the Roman Empire during the several centuries after Jesus’ death. In the Roman world, the strangest and most offensive feature of the new faith was its exclusive monotheism and its antagonism to all other supernatural powers, particularly the cult of the emperors. Christians’ denial of these other gods caused them to be tagged as “atheists” and was one reason behind the empire’s intermittent persecution of Christians during the first three centuries of the Common Era (see Zooming In: Perpetua, Christian Martyr). All of that ended with Emperor Constantine’s conversion in the early fourth century C.E. and the proclamation of Christianity as the state religion in 380 C.E. About the same time the new faith also gained official status in Armenia, located in the south Caucasus region east of Turkey, and in Axum, an African state in what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea. In fact, during the first six centuries of the Christian era, most followers of Jesus lived in the Middle East and in northern and northeastern Africa, with small communities in India and China as well (see Map 1.3). As Christianity spread within the Roman Empire and beyond, it developed an elaborate hierarchical organization, with patriarchs, bishops, and priests — all men — replacing the house churches of the early years, in which women played a more prominent part. The emerging Christian movement was, however, anything but unified. Its immense geographic reach, accompanied by inevitable differences in language, culture, and political regime, ensured that a single focus for Christian belief and practice was difficult to achieve. Eventually, separate church organizations emerged in the eastern and western regions of the Roman Empire as well as in Egypt, Syria, Persia, Armenia, Ethiopia, and southern India, some of which were accompanied by sharp differences in doctrine. The bishop of Rome gradually emerged as the dominant leader, or pope, of the church in the western half of the empire, but his authority was sharply contested in the East. This division contributed to the later split between the Latin, or Roman Catholic, and the Greek, or Eastern Orthodox, branches of Christendom, a division that continues to the present. Thus by 600 or so, the Christian world was not only geographically extensive but also politically and theologically very diverse and highly fragmented. Middle Eastern Cultural Traditions: Islam AP® EXAM TIP Be ready to provide examples of how power was used to promote religion, and vice versa. The world historical significance of Islam, the third religion in the Abrahamic family of faiths, has been enormous. It thrust the previously marginal and largely nomadic Arabs into a central role in world history, for it was among them and in their language that the newest of the world’s major religions was born during the seventh century C.E. Its emergence was accompanied by the rapid creation of a huge empire that stretched from Spain to India, but the religion of Islam reached beyond that empire, to both East and West Africa, to India, and to Central and Southeast Asia. Within the Arab Empire and beyond it, a new and innovative civilization took shape, drawing on Arab, Persian, Turkic, Greco-Roman, South Asian, and African cultures. It was known as the Dar al-Islam, the house or the abode of Islam. The Arabia from which Islam emerged was a land of pastoral people, herding their sheep and camels, but it also contained some regions of settled agricultural communities and sophisticated commercial cities such as Mecca, which were linked to long-distance trading routes. Arabia was located on the periphery of two established and rival civilizations of that time — the Byzantine Empire, heir to the Roman world, and the Sassanid Empire, heir to the imperial traditions of Persia. Many Jews and Christians lived among the Arabs, and their monotheistic ideas became widely known. The catalyst for the emergence of Islam was a single individual, Muhammad Ibn Abdullah (570–632 C.E.), a trader from Mecca. A highly reflective man who was deeply troubled by the religious corruption and social inequalities of Mecca, he often undertook periods of withdrawal and meditation in the arid mountains outside the city. There, Muhammad had a powerful, overwhelming religious experience that left him convinced, albeit reluctantly, that he was Allah’s messenger to the Arabs, commissioned to bring to them a scripture in their own language. According to Muslim tradition, the revelations began in 610 and continued periodically over the next twenty-two years. Those revelations, recorded in the Quran, became the sacred scriptures of Islam, which to this day most Muslims regard as the very words of God and the core of their faith. It was a revolutionary message that Muhammad conveyed. Religiously, it presented Allah, the Arabic word for God, as the sole divine being, the all-powerful Creator, thus challenging the highly polytheistic religion of the Arabs. In its exalted conception of Deity, Muhammad’s revelations drew heavily on traditions of Jewish and Christian monotheism. As “the Messenger of God,” Muhammad presented himself in the line of earlier prophets — Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and many others. He was the last, “the seal of the prophets,” bearing God’s final revelation to humankind. Islam was socially revolutionary as well. Over and over again the Quran denounced the prevailing social practices of an increasingly prosperous Mecca: the hoarding of wealth, the exploitation of the poor, the charging of high rates of interest on loans, corrupt business deals, the abuse of women, and the neglect of widows and orphans. Like the Jewish prophets of the Hebrew scriptures, the Quran demanded social justice and laid out a prescription for its implementation. Finally, Islam was politically revolutionary because the Quran challenged the entire tribal and clan structure of Arab society, which was so prone to war, feuding, and violence. The just and moral society of Islam was the umma (OOM-mah), the community of all believers, which replaced tribal, ethnic, or racial identities. In this community, women too had an honored and spiritually equal place. “The believers, men and women, are protectors of one another,” declared the Quran. The umma, then, was to be a new and just community, bound by common belief rather than by territory, language, or tribe. Causation Explain how Muhammad’s profession as a merchant may have influenced the early years of Islam. Like Jesus, Muhammad was threatening to the established authorities in Mecca, and he was forced to leave. But unlike Jesus, he was in a position to resist, for there was no overwhelming force such as the Roman Empire to contend with. So he gathered an army, and by 630 C.E. he had largely unified Arabia under the banner of Islam. Thus Islam began its history as a new state, while Christianity was at odds with the Roman state for over three centuries. Comparison How are the teachings of the Quran regarding social justice and the poor similar to the teachings of Buddhism and Christianity? That state soon became a huge empire as Arab armies took the offensive after Muhammad’s death in 632 C.E. (see Map 1.4). In many places, conversion to Islam soon followed. In Persia, for example, some 80 percent of the population had made a transition to a Muslim religious identity by 900, and Persian culture became highly prestigious and influential within the Islamic world. One of the early rulers of this Arab Empire observed: “The Persians ruled for a thousand years and did not need us Arabs even for a day. We have been ruling them for one or two centuries and cannot do without them for an hour.”11 But the idea of a unified Muslim community, so important to Muhammad, proved difficult to realize as conquest and conversion vastly enlarged the Islamic world. Political conflict over who should succeed Muhammad led to civil war and to an enduring division between what became known as the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam. It began as a purely political conflict but acquired over time a deeper significance. For much of early Islamic history, Shia Muslims saw themselves as the minority opposition within Islam. They felt that history had taken a wrong turn and that they were “the defenders of the oppressed, the critics and opponents of privilege and power,” while the Sunnis were the advocates of the established order.12 Other conflicts arose among Arab clans or factions, between Arabs and non-Arabs, and between privileged and wealthy rulers and their less fortunate subjects. After 900 or so, any political unity that Islamic civilization had earlier enjoyed had vanished. AP® EXAM TIP Compare features of leadership in major religions, using the ulama in Islam as one example. And yet, there was much that bound the Islamic world together, culturally if not politically. The rise of Islam had generated a transcontinental civilization, embracing at least parts of virtually every other civilization in the Afro-Eurasian hemisphere. It was in that sense a “global civilization,” although the Americas, of course, were not involved. The Quran, universal respect for Muhammad, common religious texts, a ritual prayer five times a day, and the required pilgrimage to Mecca — all of this was common to the many peoples of the Islamic world. No group was more important in the transmission of those beliefs and practices than the ulama. These learned scholars served as judges, interpreters, administrators, prayer leaders, and reciters of the Quran, but especially as preservers and teachers of the sharia or Islamic law. In their homes, mosques, shrines, and Quranic schools, the ulama passed on the core teachings of the faith. Beginning in the eleventh century, formal colleges called madrassas offered more advanced instruction in the Quran and the sayings of Muhammad; grammar and rhetoric; sometimes philosophy, theology, mathematics, and medicine; and, above all else, law. Teaching was informal, mostly oral, and involved much memorization of texts. It was also largely conservative, seeking to preserve an established body of Islamic learning. The ulama were an “international elite,” and the system of education they created bound together an immense and diverse civilization. Common texts were shared widely across the world of Islam. Students and teachers alike traveled great distances in search of the most learned scholars. From Indonesia to West Africa, educated Muslims inhabited a widely shared tradition. Paralleling the educational network of the ulama were the emerging religious orders of the Sufis, who had a quite different understanding of Islam, for they viewed the worldly success of Islamic civilization as a distraction and deviation from the purer spirituality of Muhammad’s time. Emerging strongly by 1000, Sufis represented Islam’s mystical dimension, in that they sought a direct and personal experience of the Divine. Through renunciation of the material world, meditation on the words of the Quran, chanting of the names of God, the use of music and dance, and the veneration of Muhammad and various “saints,” adherents of Sufism pursued an interior life, seeking to tame the ego and achieve spiritual union with Allah. This mystical tendency in Islamic practice, which became widely popular by the ninth and tenth centuries, was at times sharply critical of the more scholarly and legalistic practitioners of the sharia. To Sufis, establishment teachings about the law and correct behavior, while useful for daily living, did little to bring the believer into the presence of God. Furthermore, Sufis felt that many of the ulama had been compromised by their association with worldly and corrupt governments. Sufis therefore often charted their own course to God, implicitly challenging the religious authority of the ulama. For many centuries, roughly 1100 to 1800, Sufism was central to mainstream Islam, and many, perhaps most, Muslims affiliated with one or another Sufi organization, making use of its spiritual practices. Nonetheless, differences in emphasis about the essential meaning of Islam remained an element of tension and sometimes discord within the Muslim world. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Sufis began to organize in a variety of larger associations, some limited to particular regions and others with chapters throughout the Islamic world. Sufi orders were especially significant in the frontier regions of Islam because they followed conquering armies or traders into Central and Southeast Asia, India, Anatolia, parts of Africa, and elsewhere. Their devotional teachings, modest ways of living, and reputation for supernatural powers gained a hearing for the new faith. Their emphasis on personal experience of the Divine, rather than on the law, allowed the Sufis to accommodate elements of local belief and practice and encouraged the growth of a popular or blended Islam. The veneration of deceased Sufi “saints,” or “friends of God,” particularly at their tombs, created sacred spaces that enabled Islam to take root in many places despite its foreign origins. But that flexibility also often earned Sufi practitioners the enmity of the ulama, who were sharply critical of any deviations from the sharia. Interactions and Encounters Causation In what ways did cross-cultural interactions drive change in the pre-1200 world? Long before the globalized world of the twentieth century and well before the voyages of Columbus connected the Eastern and Western hemispheres, interactions across the boundaries of these civilizations and cultural traditions had transformed human societies, for better and for worse. Thus world history is less about what happened within particular civilizations or cultures than about the interactions and encounters among them. Focusing on cross-cultural connections counteracts a habit of thinking about particular peoples or civilizations as self-contained or isolated communities. To varying degrees, each of them was embedded in a network of relationships with both neighboring and more distant peoples. And broadly speaking, those cross-cultural connections grew more dense and complex over time. Various kinds of interactions and encounters had emerged long before 1200, many of which persisted and accelerated in the centuries that followed. One setting in which culturally different societies encountered one another was that of empire, for those large states often incorporated a vast range of peoples and provided opportunity for communication and borrowing among them. Empires also served as arenas of exchange, as products, foods, ideas, religions, and disease circulated among the many peoples of imperial states. For example, various non-Roman cultural traditions — such as the cult of the Persian god Mithra or the compassionate Egyptian goddess Isis, and, most extensively, the Jewish-derived religion of Christianity — spread throughout the Roman Empire during the early centuries of the Common Era. In the tenth century and after, a state-sponsored adoption of Christianity occurred in the emerging Russian state, later leading to the eastern spread of Christianity across much of northern Asia in an expanding Russian Empire. An Arab Empire, expanding rapidly in the several centuries after the death of Muhammad in 632 C.E., encompassed all or part of Egyptian, Persian, Mesopotamian, Roman, and Indian civilizations. Both within and beyond that empire the new religion of Islam spread quite rapidly, generating a major cultural transformation across much of the Afro-Eurasian world. Yet another mechanism for the interaction of distant peoples lay in commercial exchange. Premodern commerce moved along a chain of separate transactions in which goods traveled farther than individual merchants. Networks of exchange and communication extending all across the Afro-Eurasian world, and separately in parts of the Americas and Oceania as well, slowly came into being. Such long-distance trade was a powerful motor of historical change. It altered habits of consumption, changed the working lives of many people, enabled class distinctions, stimulated and sustained the creation of states, and fostered the diffusion of religion, technology, and disease. The most famous of these early commercial networks is widely known as the Silk Roads, a reference to their most famous product. Beginning around 200 B.C.E., the Silk Road trading complex operated to varying degrees for over 1,500 years, linking China and the Mediterranean world as well as many places in between. Paralleling the land-based routes of the Silk Roads and flourishing at roughly the same time were sea-based networks — the Sea Roads — that traversed the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, linking the diverse peoples living between southern China and East Africa. Yet another important pattern of long-distance trade — this one across the vast reaches of the Sahara in a series of Sand Roads (also called the trans-Saharan trade routes) — linked North Africa and the Mediterranean world with the land and peoples of interior West Africa. Finally, in the Americas, direct connections among various civilizations and cultures were less densely woven than in the Afro-Eurasian region. Nonetheless, scholars have discerned a variety of cultural and commercial linkages that operated throughout the Americas.13 (See Chapter 3 for more on this topic.) All of this exchange began well before 1200 and persisted well after it. The chapters that follow will continue the story of these diverse civilizations and societies, the movement of their cultural traditions, and their multiple interactions with one another. China and Its Neighbors Around 1200, East Asia was among the most sophisticated and dynamic regions of the world. At its core was the enormous Chinese civilization, which for centuries had experienced powerful and relatively stable states, cultural and intellectual flowering, and remarkable technological innovation and economic growth. East Asian civilization was also expanding elsewhere. Over the previous millennium, the new states and civilizations of Korea, Vietnam, and Japan had emerged along China’s borders. Proximity to their giant Chinese neighbor decisively shaped the histories of these new East Asian civilizations, for all of them borrowed major elements of Chinese culture and entered, at least for a time, into tributary relationships with China. But none were fully incorporated into the Chinese state or society. Instead they created new distinct forms of East Asian civilization. China before the Mongol Takeover Continuity and Change Why are the centuries of the Song dynasty in China sometimes referred to as a “golden age”? In 1200 the Song dynasty (960–1279) ruled over large parts of an ancient Chinese civilization that could trace its origins back thousands of years (see Map 2.1). Since the late seventh century, China had experienced, with a few exceptions, a period of relatively stable political rule. Successive dynasties drew on much older cultural and political traditions that in turn outlasted even the Song, enduring into the twentieth century. Culturally, the Song dynasty was a “golden age” of arts and literature, setting standards of excellence in poetry, landscape painting, and ceramics, even as its scholars debated new forms of Confucian philosophy. Politically, the Song dynasty built on earlier precedents to create an elaborate bureaucratic state structure that endured into the twentieth century. Six major ministries were overseen by the Censorate, an agency that exercised surveillance over the rest of the government, checking on the character and competence of public officials. To staff this bureaucracy, an examination system first established by the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) was revived and made more elaborate, facilitated by the ability to print books for the first time in world history. Schools and colleges proliferated to prepare candidates for the rigorous exams, which became a central feature for men of the upper class. While candidates from privileged backgrounds were better able to access the education needed to pass exams, village communities or a local landowner sometimes sponsored the education of a bright young man from a commoner background, enabling him to enter the charmed circle of officialdom while also bringing prestige and perhaps more concrete benefits to those who sponsored him. Thus the examination system provided a modest measure of social mobility in an otherwise quite hierarchical society. Selecting officials on the basis of merit represented a challenge to established aristocratic families’ hold on public office. Still, a substantial percentage of official positions went to the sons of the privileged, even if they had not passed the exams. Moreover, because education and the examination system grew far more rapidly than the number of official positions, many who passed lower-level exams could not be accommodated with a bureaucratic appointment. Often, however, they were able to combine landowning and success in the examination system to maintain an immense cultural prestige and prominence in their local areas. (See Working with Evidence, Chapter 1, for more on the life of the “scholar-official” class.) Underlying these cultural and political achievements was China’s economic revolution, which made Song dynasty China “by far the richest, most skilled, and most populous country on earth.”3 The most obvious sign of China’s prosperity was its rapid growth in population, which jumped from about 50 million or 60 million in the ninth century to 120 million by 1200. Behind this doubling of the population were remarkable achievements in agricultural production, particularly the adoption from Vietnam of a fast-ripening and drought-resistant strain of rice, known as Champa rice. AP® EXAM TIP Know that for much of history China has had the world’s highest population and the greatest number of urban areas with large populations. As many people found their way to the cities, China became the most urbanized country in the world. Dozens of Chinese cities numbered over 100,000, while the Song dynasty capital of Hangzhou was home to more than a million people. For the thirteenth-century Italian visitor Marco Polo, Hangzhou was “beyond dispute the finest and noblest [city] in the world.”4 (See Working with Evidence, Chapter 3, for a fuller description of Marco Polo’s impressions of Hangzhou.) Industrial production likewise soared. In both large-scale enterprises employing hundreds of workers and in smaller backyard furnaces, China’s metallurgy industry increased its output dramatically. By the eleventh century, it was providing the government with 32,000 suits of armor and 16 million iron arrowheads annually, in addition to supplying metal for coins, tools, construction, and bells in Buddhist monasteries. This industrial growth was fueled almost entirely by coal, which also came to provide most of the energy for heating homes and cooking and no doubt generated considerable air pollution. Technological innovation in other fields also flourished. Inventions in printing, both woodblock and movable type, led to the world’s first printed books, and by 1000 relatively cheap books had become widely available in China. Chinese navigational and shipbuilding technologies led the world, and the Chinese invention of gunpowder created within a few centuries a revolution in military affairs that had global dimensions. These innovations occurred within the world’s most highly commercialized society, in which producing for the market, rather than for local consumption, became a very widespread phenomenon. An immense network of internal waterways (canals, rivers, and lakes), described by one scholar as “an engineering feat without parallel in the world of its time,” stretched perhaps 30,000 miles, including a Grand Canal of over 1,000 miles linking the Yellow River in the north to the Yangzi River in the south.5 (See Map 2.1.) These waterways facilitated the cheap movement of goods, allowing peasants to grow specialized crops for sale while they purchased rice or other staples on the market. In addition, government demands for taxes paid in cash rather than in kind required peasants to sell something — their products or their labor — in order to meet their obligations. The growing use of paper money, which the Chinese pioneered, as well as financial instruments such as letters of credit and promissory notes, further contributed to the commercialization of society. Two prominent scholars have described the outcome: “Output increased, population grew, skills multiplied, and a burst of inventiveness made Song China far wealthier than ever before — or than any of its contemporaries.”6 Continuity and Change In what ways did women’s lives change during the Song dynasty? However, the “golden age” of Song dynasty China was perhaps less than “golden” for many of its women. Confucian writers emphasized the subordination of women to men and the need to keep males and females separate in every domain of life. The Song dynasty historian and scholar Sima Guang (1019–1086) summed up the prevailing view: “The boy leads the girl, the girl follows the boy; the duty of husbands to be resolute and wives to be docile begins with this.”7 For elite men, masculinity came to be defined less in terms of horseback riding, athleticism, and warrior values and more in terms of the refined pursuits of calligraphy, scholarship, painting, and poetry. Corresponding views of feminine qualities emphasized women’s weakness, reticence, and delicacy. Furthermore, a rapidly commercializing economy undermined the position of women in the textile industry. Urban workshops and state factories, run by men, increasingly took over the skilled tasks of weaving textiles, especially silk, which had previously been the work of rural women in their homes. Although these women continued to tend silkworms and spin silk thread, they had lost the more lucrative income-generating work of weaving silk fabrics. The most compelling expression of a tightening patriarchy among elite women lay in foot binding. Apparently beginning among dancers and courtesans in the tenth or eleventh century C.E., this practice involved the tight wrapping of young girls’ feet, usually breaking the bones of the foot and causing intense pain. During and after the Song dynasty, foot binding found general acceptance among elite families and later became even more widespread in Chinese society. It was associated with new images of female beauty and eroticism that emphasized small size, frailty, and deference and served to keep women restricted to the “inner quarters,” where Confucian tradition asserted that they belonged. For many women, it became a rite of passage, and their tiny feet and the beautiful slippers that encased them became a source of some pride, even a topic of poetry for some literate women. In other ways though, there were more positive trends in the lives of women during the Song dynasty. Their property rights expanded, allowing women to control their own dowries and to inherit property from their families. “Neither in earlier nor in later periods,” writes one scholar, “did as much property pass through women’s hands” as during the Song dynasty.8 Furthermore, lower-ranking but ambitious officials strongly urged the education of women, so that they might more effectively raise their sons and increase the family’s fortune. Song dynasty China, in short, offered a mixture of tightening restrictions and new opportunities to its women. Interacting with China: Korea, Vietnam, and Japan AP® EXAM TIP Know the interactions between major empires and the states near them, such as China with Korea and Vietnam with China. On the northern and southern borders of Song China, two new kingdoms, Korea and Vietnam, were taking shape under the influence of China. But unlike the native peoples of southern China, who largely became Chinese, the peoples of Korea and Vietnam did not. They retained distinctive identities, which have lasted into modern times. While resisting Chinese political domination, they also appreciated and adopted elements of Chinese culture and sought the source of Chinese wealth and power. Immediately adjacent to northeastern China, the Korean peninsula and its people have long lived in close proximity to their much larger neighbor. Under a succession of dynasties — the Unified Silla (688–900), Koryo (918–1392), and Joseon (1392–1910) — Korea generally maintained its political independence while participating in a tributary relationship with China. Regular Korean missions to the Chinese imperial court acknowledged China’s preeminent position in East Asia by presenting tribute — products of value produced in Korea — and performing rituals of submission. In return Chinese emperors gave their Korean visitors gifts or “bestowals” to take back to Korea, reaffirmed peaceful relations, and allowed both official and personal trade to take place between the two states. Chinese culture had a pervasive influence on Korean political and cultural life in many ways (see “Religion and the Silk Roads” in Chapter 3). For instance, efforts to plant Confucian values and Chinese culture in Korea had what one scholar has called an “overwhelmingly negative” impact on Korean women, particularly after 1300.9 Early Chinese observers noticed, and strongly disapproved of, free choice marriages in Korea, as well as the practice of women singing and dancing together late at night. With the support of the Korean court, Chinese models of family life and female behavior based on the Confucian concept of filial piety gradually replaced the more flexible Korean patterns, especially among the elite. Korean customs — women giving birth and raising their young children in their parents’ home, funeral rites in which a husband was buried in the sacred plot of his wife’s family, the remarriage of widowed or divorced women, and female inheritance of property — eroded under the pressure of Confucian orthodoxy. Korean restrictions on elite women, especially widows, came to exceed even those in China itself. Still, Korea remained Korean. After 688, the country’s political independence, though periodically threatened, was largely intact. Chinese cultural influence, except for Buddhism, had little impact beyond the aristocracy and certainly did not penetrate the lives of Korea’s serf-like peasants. Nor did it register among Korea’s many slaves, who amounted to about one-third of the country’s population by 1100. A Chinese-style examination system to recruit government officials, though encouraged by some Korean rulers, never assumed the prominence that it gained in Song dynasty China. Korea’s aristocratic class was able to maintain an even stronger monopoly on bureaucratic office than its Chinese counterpart did. And in the mid-1400s, Korea moved toward greater cultural independence by developing a phonetic alphabet, known as hangul (HAHN-gool), for writing the Korean language. Although resisted by conservative male elites, who were long accustomed to using the more prestigious Chinese characters to write Korean, this new form of writing gradually took hold, especially in private correspondence, in popular fiction, and among women. Clearly part of the Chinese world order, Korea nonetheless retained a distinctive culture as well as a separate political existence. At the southern fringe of the Chinese cultural world, the people who eventually came to be called Vietnamese had a broadly similar historical encounter with China. As in Korea, the elite culture of Vietnam borrowed heavily from China — adopting Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, administrative techniques, the examination system, and artistic and literary styles — even as its popular culture remained distinctive. And, like Korea, Vietnam achieved political independence while participating fully in the tribute system as a vassal state. Unlike Korea, however, the cultural heartland of Vietnam in the Red River valley was fully incorporated into the Chinese state for more than a thousand years (111 B.C.E.–939 C.E.). Even in 1200, centuries after securing their independence, Vietnamese rulers carefully maintained Vietnam’s tributary role, sending repeated missions to do homage at the Chinese court. Successive Vietnamese dynasties found the Chinese approach to government useful, styling their rulers as emperors, claiming the Mandate of Heaven, and making use of Chinese court rituals. More so than in Korea, a Chinese-based examination system in Vietnam functioned to undermine an established aristocracy, to provide some measure of social mobility for commoners, and to create a merit-based scholar-gentry class to staff the bureaucracy. Furthermore, members of the Vietnamese elite class remained deeply committed to Chinese culture, viewing their own country less as a separate nation than as a southern extension of a universal civilization, the only one they knew. Beyond the elite, however, there remained much that was uniquely Vietnamese, such as a distinctive language, a fondness for cockfighting, and the habit of chewing betel nuts. More importantly, Vietnam long retained a greater role for women in social and economic life, despite heavy Chinese influence. In the third century C.E., a woman leader of an anti-Chinese resistance movement declared: “I want to drive away the enemy to save our people. I will not resign myself to the usual lot of women who bow their heads and become concubines.” Female nature deities and a “female Buddha” continued to be part of Vietnamese popular religion, even as Confucian-based ideas took root among the elite. In the centuries following independence from China, as Vietnam expanded to the south, northern officials tried in vain to impose more orthodox Confucian gender practices in place of local customs that allowed women to choose their own husbands and married men to live in the households of their wives. So persistent were these practices that a seventeenth-century Chinese visitor commented, with disgust, that Vietnamese preferred the birth of a girl to that of a boy. These features of Vietnamese life reflected larger patterns of Southeast Asian culture that distinguished it from China. And like Koreans, the Vietnamese developed a variation of Chinese writing called chu nom (“southern script”), which provided the basis for an independent national literature and a vehicle for the writing of most educated women. Unlike Korea and Vietnam, the Japanese islands were physically separated from China by 100 miles or more of ocean and were never successfully invaded or conquered by their giant mainland neighbor. Thus Japan’s very extensive borrowing from Chinese civilization was wholly voluntary, rather than occurring under conditions of direct military threat or outright occupation. The high point of that borrowing took place during the seventh to the ninth centuries C.E., as the first more or less unified Japanese state began to emerge from dozens of small clan-based aristocratic chiefdoms. That state found much that was useful in China and set out, deliberately and systematically, to transform Japan into a centralized bureaucratic state on the Chinese model. Chinese culture, no less than its political practices, also found favor in Japan. Various schools of Chinese Buddhism took root, first among the educated and literate classes and later more broadly in Japanese society. Buddhism deeply affected Japanese art, architecture, education, medicine, views of the afterlife, and attitudes toward suffering and the impermanence of life. The Chinese writing system — and with it an interest in historical writing, calligraphy, and poetry — likewise proved attractive among the elite. But the absence of any compelling threat from China made it possible for the Japanese to be selective in their borrowing. By the tenth century, deliberate efforts to absorb additional elements of Chinese culture diminished, and formal tribute missions to China stopped, although private traders and Buddhist monks continued to make the difficult journey to the mainland. Over many centuries, the Japanese combined what they had assimilated from China with elements of their own tradition into a distinctive Japanese civilization. In the political realm, for example, the Japanese never succeeded in creating an effective centralized and bureaucratic state to match that of China. Although the court and the emperor retained an important ceremonial and cultural role, their real political authority over the country gradually diminished in favor of competing aristocratic families, both at court and in the provinces. As political power became increasingly decentralized, local authorities developed their own military forces, the famous samurai warrior class of Japanese society. Bearing their exquisite curved swords, the samurai developed a distinctive set of values featuring bravery, loyalty, endurance, honor, great skill in martial arts, and a preference for death over surrender. This was bushido (boo-shee-doh), the way of the warrior. Japan’s celebration of the samurai and of military virtues contrasted sharply with China’s emphasis on intellectual achievements and political office holding, which were accorded higher prestige than bearing arms. “The educated men of the land,” wrote a Chinese minister in the eleventh century, “regard the carrying of arms as a disgrace.”10 The Japanese, clearly, did not agree. Religiously as well, Japan remained distinctive. Although Buddhism in many forms took hold in the country, it never completely replaced the native beliefs and practices, which focused attention on numerous kami, sacred spirits associated with human ancestors and various natural phenomena. Much later referred to as Shinto, this tradition provided legitimacy to the imperial family, based on claims of descent from the sun goddess. Because veneration of the kami lacked an elaborate philosophy or ritual, it conflicted very little with Buddhism. In fact, numerous kami were assimilated into Japanese Buddhism as local expressions of Buddhist deities or principles. Comparison In what different ways did Japanese and Korean women experience the pressures of traditional Confucian teachings? Japanese literary and artistic culture likewise evolved in distinctive ways, despite much borrowing from China. As in Korea and Vietnam, there emerged a unique writing system that combined Chinese characters with a series of phonetic symbols. A highly refined aesthetic culture found expression at the imperial court, even as the court’s real political authority melted away. Court aristocrats and their ladies lived in splendor, composed poems, arranged flowers, and conducted their love affairs. “What counted,” wrote one scholar, “was the proper costume, the right ceremonial act, the successful turn of phrase in a poem, and the appropriate expression of refined taste.”11The Tale of Genji, a Japanese novel written by the woman author Murasaki Shikibu around 1000, provides an intimate picture of the intrigues and romances of court life. At this level of society, Japan’s women, unlike those in Korea, largely escaped the more oppressive features of Chinese Confucian culture, such as the prohibition of remarriage for widows and seclusion within the home. Japanese women continued to inherit property; Japanese married couples often lived apart or with the wife’s family; and marriages were made and broken easily. None of this corresponded to Confucian values. When Japanese women did begin to lose status in the twelfth century and later, it had less to do with Confucian pressures than with the rise of a warrior culture. The Worlds of Islam: Fragmented and Expanding Causation What features of the Muslim faith would account for the appeal of the religion across such diverse populations (see Chapter 1)? By around 1200, a dynamic and expanding Islamic world was firmly established along a vast and continuous expanse of Afro-Eurasia stretching from Spain and Morocco in the west to northern India in the east, with its heartland in the Middle East and Egypt. With the exception of India, these territories had largely been incorporated into the Islamic world through the construction of the Arab Empire in the century and half following Muhammad’s death in 632, even if wide-scale conversion of subject peoples to the faith took considerably longer (see Chapter 1). From around 1000, a second major expansion by conquest occurred into India, Anatolia, and a little later the Balkans, this time spearheaded by Turkic-speaking groups who had recently converted to the Muslim faith. By 1200, Islam was also spreading far beyond these regions of conquest into Southeast and Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa through the activities of Muslim merchants and missionaries (see Map 2.2; see Chapter 3). Between 1200 and 1450, the Arab Empire was politically fragmented, but Islamic culture and religion remained vibrant in the Middle East, while cultural encounters with established Hindu and Christian civilizations occurred on the frontiers of this Islamic heartland in India and Spain. The Islamic Heartland AP® EXAM TIP Understand the extent of the spread of Islam. In 1200, the Abbasid caliphate, an Arab dynasty that had ruled the Islamic world in theory if not practice since 750, was a shadow of its former self. At the start of their rule, the Abbasids built a splendid new capital in Baghdad, from which the dynasty presided over a flourishing and prosperous Islamic civilization. But for all its accomplishments, the Abbasid dynasty’s political grip on the vast Arab Empire slipped away quickly. Beginning in the mid-ninth century, many local governors or military commanders asserted the autonomy of their regions, while still giving formal allegiance to the caliph in Baghdad. Contextualization To what extent were Ibn Battuta’s travels influenced by trade routes and the expansion of the Islamic world? Continuity and Change Describe the changes and continuities in pastoral societies after the rise of Islam. A major turning point in both the political and cultural history of the Islamic Middle East was the arrival starting around 1000 of Turkic-speaking pastoralists from the steppes of Central Asia into the fragmenting political landscape of the Abbasid Empire. At first, they served as slave soldiers within the Abbasid caliphate, and then, as the caliphate declined, they increasingly took political and military power themselves. In the Seljuk Turkic Empire of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, for instance, rulers began to claim the Muslim title of sultan (ruler) rather than the Turkic kaghan as they became major players in the Islamic Middle East. Even as their political power grew, the Turks were themselves experiencing a major turning point in their history as ever more groups of Turkic-speaking warriors converted to Islam between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. This extended process represented a major expansion of the faith and launched the Turks into a new role as a major sustainer of Islam and carrier of the faith to new regions. By 1200, the Islamic heartland had fractured politically into a series of “sultanates,” many ruled by Persian or Turkish military dynasties. In the thirteenth century, the Mongols, another pastoral people, invaded the region, put an official end to the Abbasid caliphate in 1258, and ruled much of Persia for a time (see Chapter 4