Unit 1: The Global Tapestry

A historian's interpretation

States in the Americas took many forms. At Cahokia, near the Mississippi River, a Mississippian society built great earthen mounds and may have held 10,000 to 20,000 people around 1100, supported by maize farming and trade along the river system. In the Southwest, Ancestral Puebloans built multistory stone dwellings in Chaco Canyon and cliff houses at Mesa Verde, but severe drought in the late 1200s helped drive people from Mesa Verde. In the Yucatán, Maya city-states such as Mayapán competed for power and tribute and never united into a single empire.

Historian 1 and Historian 2

Historian 1: What stands out between 1200 and 1450 is how often rulers in very different regions solved the same problems in similar ways. The Inca, the Song and the Delhi sultans all needed to feed armies, collect revenue and keep distant provinces loyal, and each turned to record keeping, roads or canals, and appointed officials.

Historian 2: Comparisons of this kind can hide how differently power was organized. European kings shared authority with nobles and the Church, Maya city-states never united, and the Swahili towns were independent trading ports. In many regions power was spread among many small centers rather than concentrated in one state.

A historian's interpretation

Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, rulers across South and Southeast Asia drew on Indian religious traditions to strengthen their power. The Khmer kings at Angkor presented themselves as servants of the Hindu gods and later as patrons of Buddhism; the great temple of Angkor Wat, built in the twelfth century, was dedicated to Vishnu. In southern India, the Vijayanagara Empire, founded in 1336, championed Hindu kingship against the Muslim sultanates to its north. On Java, the kings of Majapahit combined Hindu and Buddhist practice while growing rich from the trade in spices.

New Muslim states as the Abbasid Caliphate fragmented (original summary)

The Abbasid caliphs, based in Baghdad, lost most of their political power after the 900s. Mongol armies sacked Baghdad in 1258.

A historian's interpretation

Most Europeans in the thirteenth century lived on the land. On a typical manor, serfs farmed the lord's fields as well as their own strips, owed him labor and a share of their harvest, and could not leave without his permission. In return the lord offered protection and justice in his court. Above the manor, kings depended on great nobles who held land in exchange for military service, so royal power was limited and Europe remained divided among many competing rulers. The Roman Catholic Church, with its own courts, taxes and monasteries, was the one institution that reached across western Europe.

Historian 1 and Historian 2

Historian 1: Song China in the eleventh and twelfth centuries looks strikingly modern. Paper money circulated, cities such as Kaifeng and Hangzhou held hundreds of thousands of people, ironworks turned out tools and weapons in great quantities, and merchants shipped porcelain and silk across the seas. In the scale of its markets and workshops, Song China had no equal in the world of its time.

Historian 2: Commerce grew under the Song, but the empire's core remained what it had long been: a society of free peasant farmers ruled by an emperor and a bureaucracy of scholar-officials trained in the Confucian classics. Officials ranked merchants below farmers and regulated trade, and successful merchant families often put their profits into land and into educating their sons for the civil service examinations.

Innovations in Song China (original summary)

The table summarizes four developments in China under the Song dynasty (960 to 1279).

Zhao Rugua, a Song Chinese official in charge of maritime trade, on Srivijaya in Sumatra, 1225

The foreign traders . . . who gather together in this country give in exchange gold, silver, porcelain-ware, silk brocades, skeins of silk, silk gauzes, sugar, iron, samshu, rice, dried galangal, rhubarb and camphor. . . .

This country, lying in the ocean and controlling the straits . . . through which the foreigners' sea and land . . . traffic in either direction must pass, in olden times used an iron chain as a barrier to keep the pirates of other countries in check. It could be kept up or lowered by a cunning device. If a merchant ship arrived it was lowered.

Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan traveler who had served as a judge in Delhi in the 1330s and 1340s, on Sultan Muhammad ibn Tughluq, account written in 1355

This king is of all men the fondest of making gifts and of shedding blood. His gate is never without some poor man enriched or some living man executed, and stories are current amongst the people of his generosity and courage and of his cruelty and violence towards criminals. For all that, he is of all men the most humble and the readiest to show equity and justice.