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Prehistory ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Historians rely mostly on documents, or written records, to create their pictures of the past. However, no written records exist for the prehistory of humankind. In fact, prehistory means the period before writing was developed. Because prehistoric people had no written records, historians must study them by looking at the things they left behind. Archaeology is the study of past societies through an analysis of what people have left behind. Archaeologists dig up and examine artifactstools, pottery, paintings, weapons, buildings, and household items- of early peoples. Anthropology is the study of human life and culture. Anthropologists use artifacts and the remains of humans- human fossils- to determine how people lived their lives. Although modern science has given us more precise methods for examining the prehistory of humankind than we have ever had before, much of our understanding of early humans still depends on guesswork. The earliest humanlike creatures lived in Africa as long as 3 to 4 million years ago. Called australopithecines, or "southern apes," by their discoverer, Donald Johanson, they flourished in eastern and southern Africa. They were the first hominids (humans and other creatures that walk upright) to make simple stone tools. A second stage in early human development occurred with the appearance of Homo erectus ("upright human being"), a species that emerged around 1.5 million years ago. Homo erectus made use of larger and more varied tools. These hominids were the first to leave Africa and move into both Europe and Asia. They were able to do so in part because they learned to use fire to keep warm. Around 250,000 years ago, a third- and crucial- stage in human development began with the emergence of a new species, Homo sapiens ("wise human being"). Two distinct subgroups, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens, both developed from Homo sapiens. The first modern humans (people who looked like us), known as Homo sapiens sapiens ("wise, wise human being"), appeared in Africa between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago. Recent evidence indicates that they began to spread outside Africa around 100,000 years ago. The spread of these first modern humans was a slow process. Groups of people, probably in search of food, moved beyond their old hunting grounds at a rate of only two to three miles per generation. This was enough, however, to populate the world over tens of thousands of years. By 10,000 B.C., humans could be found throughout the world. Just as people do today prehistoric peoples used technology to change their physical environment. One of the basic distinguishing features of the human species is our ability to make tools. The earliest tools were made of stone. The term Paleolithic Age is used to designate the early period of human history (approximately 2,500,000 to 10,000 B.C.) in which humans used simple stone tools. Paleolithic is Greek for "Old Stone," and the Paleolithic Age is called the Old Stone Age. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans relied on hunting and gathering for their daily food. Paleolithic peoples had a close relationship with the world around them. They came to know what animals to hunt and what plants to eat. They gathered nuts, berries, fruits, grains, and green plants. Around the world, they hunted and ate various animals, including buffalo, horses, bison, and reindeer. In coastal areas, fish provided a rich source of food. Over the years, Paleolithic hunters developed better tools. The invention of the spear, and later the bow and arrow, made hunting much easier. Fishhooks made of bone increased the catch of fish. The hunting of animals and the gathering of wild food no doubt led to certain patterns of living. Paleolithic people were nomads (people who moved from place to place), because they had no choice but to follow animal migrations and vegetation cycles. It is probable that both men and women were responsible for finding food. Because women gave birth to and raised the children, they likely stayed close to their camps. There, they played an important role in acquiring food by gathering berries, nuts, and grains. Men did most of the hunting of large animals, which might take place far from camp. Still, both the men and the women were responsible for finding and acquiring the food needed to sustain life. Because both men and women played important roles in providing for the group's survival, some scientists have argued that a rough equality existed between men and women. It is likely that both men and women made decisions that affected the activities of the Paleolithic group. Paleolithic peoples, especially those who lived in cold climates, found shelter in caves. Over time, they created new types of shelter. Perhaps most common was a simple structure of wood poles or sticks covered with animal hides. Where wood was scarce, they might use the bones of large animals to build frames, which were then covered by hides. As early humans moved from the tropics into colder regions, they needed to adjust to new, often harsh, conditions. Perhaps most important to their ability to adapt was the use of fire. Archaeologists have discovered the piled remains of ashes in caves that prove that Paleolithic people used fire as long ago as five hundred thousand years. Fire gave warmth and undoubtedly encourage a sense of community for the groups of people gathered around it. Fire also protected early humans by enabling them to scare away wild animals. In addition, food could be cooked with fire, making it better tasting, longer lasting, and easier to chew and digest. Having fire to create a source of heat was especially important when Ice Age conditions descended on the Paleolithic world. The most recent Ice Age began about 100,000 B.C. and ended in about 8000 B.C. During this time, sheets of thick ice covered large parts of Europe, Asia, and North America. Ice Age conditions posed a serious threat to human life, and the ability to adapt was crucial to human survival. The use of fire, for example, reminds us that early humans sometimes adapted not by changing themselves to better fit their environment but by changing the environment. Agricultural Revolution ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In prehistoric times, people were hunter-gatherers. For thousands upon thousands of years, humans survived by hunting animals and gathering edible plants. The men almost certainly did the hunting. Women remained near the campsite to care for children, and women also gathered fruits, berries, roots, and grasses. Humans were nomadic, wandering from place to place in search of food. Then about 10,000 years ago, some of the women may have scattered seeds near a regular campsite. When they returned the next season, they may have found new crops growing. The knowledge that grains and other plants grew from seeds was a major breakthrough in human progress. This discovery would lead to the Neolithic or the Agricultural Revolution. The end of the last Ice Age was followed by the Neolithic Revolution- that is, the revolution that occurred in the Neolithic Age, the period of human history from 10,000 to 4000 B.C. The word neolithic is Greek for "new stone." The real change in the Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution was the shift from the hunting of animals and the gathering of food to the keeping of animals and the growing of food on a regular basis. Despite all of our technological progress, human survival depends on the systematic growing and storing of food, an achievement of people in the Neolithic Age. No one really knows when and how people began to plant seeds for food. Some scholars think that farming started in the Middle East and then spread. Others argue that farming developed independently in different regions. No matter which way it occurred, the change had such dramatic effects that historians call it the Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution. This shift represents one of the great breakthroughs in history. No greater change in the way people lived took place until the Industrial Revolution, which began in the late 1700s. Scientists do not know exactly why the Neolithic Revolution occurred during this period. Change in climate was probably a key factor. Rising temperatures worldwide provided longer growing seasons and drier land for cultivating wild grasses. Perhaps if animals were scarce, a band might camp at a place where plants grew and might begin cultivating them season after season. A rich supply of grain helped support a small population boom. As populations slowly rose, hunter-gatherers felt pressure to find new food sources. Farming offered an attractive alternative. Unlike hunting, the planting of grains and vegetables provided a regular or steady supply of food. Over time people learned to grow wheat, barley, rice, and millet. They learned to make furrows in the earth in which to plant seeds. The invention of the plow and the use of fertilizer marked major steps in the human record. The Neolithic Revolution included a second feature. Food gatherers' understanding of plants probably spurred the development of farming. Meanwhile, hunters' expert knowledge of wild animals likely played a key role in the domestication of animals. People learned to domesticate, or tame, some of the animals they had once hunted. They tamed cattle, horses, dogs, goats, and pigs. Rather than wait for migrating animals to return each year, hunters rounded them up. Then they herded the animals to good grasslands or fenced them in. The domestication of animals added a steady or constant source of meat, milk, and wool. Animals could also be used to do work. Not only farmers domesticated animals. Pastoral nomads, or wandering herders, tended sheep, goats, and camels. These herders moved their animals to new pastures and watering places also. Change is revolutionary when it is dramatic and requires great effort. The Neolithic Revolution marked a revolutionary change. The ability to get food on a regular basis gave humans greater control over their environment. It also meant they could give up their nomadic ways of life and begin to live in settled communities. Farmers settled into permanent villages and developed a whole new range of skills and tools. As people gradually developed the technology to control their natural environment, they had larger harvests. Settlements with a plentiful supply of food could support more heavily populated communities. More food led to a growth in population, which in turn led to more interaction among human communities. The Neolithic Revolution had far-reaching consequences. The dramatic changes that took place during this period led to further changes, affecting the way that people would live for thousands of years. For example, once people began settling in villages or towns, they had a need to build houses for protection and other structures for the storage of goods. These organized communities stored food and other material goods, which encouraged the development of trade. The trading of goods caused people to begin specializing in certain crafts, and a division of labor developed. Eventually, many of the food plants still in use today began to be grown. In addition, fibers from such plants as flax and cotton were used to spin yarn that was woven into cloth. How did the lives of Neolithic farmers differ from those of Paleolithic hunters and gatherers? They probably divided up the work much as their ancestors had done, by gender and age. Still, important differences began to emerge. The change to systematic agriculture had consequences for the relationship between men and women. Men became more active in farming and herding animals, jobs that took them away from the settlement. Women remained behind, caring for children and taking responsibility for weaving cloth, turning milk into cheese, and performing other tasks that required much labor in one place. As men took on more and more of the responsibility for obtaining food and protecting the settlement, they came to play a more dominant role. In settled farming communities, the status of women declined as men came to dominate family, economic, and political life, a basic pattern that would remain until our own times. Between 4000 and 3000 B.C., new developments began to affect some Neolithic towns. The use of metals marked a new level of human control over the environment. The widespread use of bronze has led historians to speak of a Bronze Age from around 3000 to 1200 B.C. By the beginning of the Bronze Age, large numbers of people were concentrated in the river valleys of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China. This would lead to a whole new pattern for human life- the birth of civilizations. Birth of Civilization ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In general terms, the culture of a people is the way of life that they follow. As human societies grew and became more complex, a new form of human existence- called civilization- came into being. Civilizations first developed in the following four river valleys: the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the Nile River valley, the Indus River valley, and the Huang, or Yellow, River valley. A civilization is a complex culture in which large numbers of human beings share a number of common elements. Historians have identified the basic characteristics of civilizations. These eight characteristics are (1) cities, (2) governments, (3) religions, (4) job specialization, (5) social classes, (6) arts and architecture, (7) advanced technology, and (8) writing or record keeping. The Rise of Cities Cities were the birthplaces of the first civilizations. The first civilizations developed in river valleys, where people could carry on the large-scale farming that was needed to feed large populations. Farmers began cultivating the fertile lands along river valleys. To get water to their crops, farmers learned to dig ditches and canals to move water from the river to their fields. Thus they developed the first systems of irrigation. Farmers also built dikes to keep the rivers within their banks during the rainy season. These improved farming techniques led to more and better food, which then led to increases in population. As the population grew, some of the villages swelled into the first cities. A city is more than a large group of people living together. One of the key differences is that a city is also a center of trade. Like modern-day people, people in ancient cities depended on trade. Farmers, merchants, and traders brought goods to market in the cities. The cities themselves produced a variety of goods for exchange. The Growth of Governments The soaring populations of early cities made government, or a system of ruling, necessary. Growing numbers of people, the need to maintain the food supply and oversee irrigation projects, and the need to build walls for defense led to the growth of governments. Governments organize and regulate human activity. They also provide for smooth interaction between individuals and groups. Cities rose independently in a number of river valleys. Conditions in these river valleys favored farming. Flood waters spread silt across the valleys, renewing the soil and keeping it fertile. But rivers also posed challenges. Farmers had to control flooding and channel waters to the fields. To meet these challenges, cooperation was needed. Early farmers worked together to build dikes, dig canals, and carve out irrigation ditches. Such large-scale projects such as irrigation and flood-control systems required a high level of cooperation, leadership and a well-organized government. At first, priests probably had the greatest power. In time, warrior kings emerged as the political leaders. They set themselves up as hereditary rulers who passed power from father to son. Almost always, rulers claimed that their right to rule came from the gods. Governments became more complex as rulers issued laws to maintain order and regulate people's lives, collected taxes, and organized the city's defense. To enforce order, rulers relied on officials. Over time, government bureaucracies developed. A bureaucracy is a system of managing government through departments run by appointed officials. Separate departments oversaw tax collection, irrigation projects, or the military. The Role of Religion Important religious developments also characterized the new urban civilizations. All of them developed religions to explain the working of the forces of nature and the fact of their own existence. Like their Stone Age ancestors, most ancient people were polytheistic. That is, they believed in many gods. Gods and goddesses were often believed to be crucial to a community's success. People worshipped sun gods, river goddesses, and other spirits that they believed controlled natural forces. Other gods were thought to control human activities such as birth, trade, or war. To win their favor, priests supervised rituals- such as ceremonies, dances, prayers, and hymns- aimed at pleasing them. This gave the priests power and made them very important people. To ensure divine help, people built temples and sacrificed animals, crops, or sometimes other humans to the gods. Job Specialization The lives of city dwellers differed from those of their prehistoric ancestors. As methods of farming improved, fewer people had to work the fields. Food surpluses provided the opportunity for job specialization- the development of skills in a specific kind of work. An abundant food supply allowed some people to become expert at jobs besides farming. Urban people developed so many new crafts that a single individual could no longer master all the skills needed to make tools, weapons, or other goods. For the first time, individuals began to specialize in certain jobs. In other words, there was a division of labor. Some became artisans, or skilled craftworkers, who made pottery or finely carved or woven goods. Among the crafts that developed in cities, metalworking was particularly important. People learned to make tools and weapons, first out of copper, then later out of bronze. Cities had other specialists, too. Bricklayers built city walls. Soldiers defended them. Merchants made their living by buying goods from farmers or artisans and then selling them in the marketplace. Singers, dancers, and storytellers entertained on public occasions. Such specialization made people dependent on others for their various needs. The demand of the upper class for luxury items encouraged artisans and craftspeople to create new products. The wide range of crafts that artisans produced helped cities become thriving centers of trade. Social Classes A new social structure based on economic power also arose. People were ranked according to their jobs. Such ranking led to the growth of social classes. Rulers and an upper class of priests, government officials, and warriors dominated the society. Next came a small class of wealthy merchants, followed by humbler artisans or craftsmen. Below them stood the vast majority of people- peasant farmers who lived in the surrounding villages and produced food for the city. At the bottom was a slave class. Slaves sometimes came from poor families who sold themselves into slavery to pay their debts. Others were prisoners captured in war. Arts and Architecture Significant artistic activity was another feature of the new civilizations. Temples and pyramids were built as places for worship, sacrifice, or burial of kings and other important people. Temples and palaces dominated the city. Such buildings reassured people of the strength and power of their government and religion. Closely linked to temples and palaces were vast public works that strong rulers ordered built. Such projects included irrigation systems, roads, bridges, and defensive walls. Although they were costly in human labor and even lives, such projects were meant to benefit the city, protecting it from attack and ensuring its food supply. Advanced Technology New tools and techniques are always needed to solve the problems that develop when large groups of people live together. Artisans relied on new technology to make their tasks easier. Around 3500 B.C., Sumerian artisans first used the potter's wheel to shape jugs, plates, and bowls. Sumerian metalworkers discovered that melting together certain amounts of copper and tin made bronze. The period called the Bronze Age refers to the time when people began using bronze, rather than copper and stone, to make tools and weapons. Writing A critical new skill developed by the earliest civilizations was writing. Above all, rulers, priests, merchants, and artisans used writing to keep accurate records. In early civilizations, government officials had to record tax collections, the passage of laws, and the storage of grain. Priests needed some way to keep track of the yearly calendar and important rituals. Merchants had to record accounts of debts and payments. Around 3000 B.C., Sumerian scribes- or professional record keepers- invented a system of writing called cuneiform, which means "wedge-shaped." Early writing was made up of pictograms, or simple drawings to show the words represented. In time, symbols were added. They might stand for sounds of words or for ideas that could not be expressed easily in pictures. Eventually, all of the first civilizations used writing as a means of creative expression as well as for record keeping. They also wrote about their cities' dramatic events- wars, natural disasters, the reign of kings. Thus, the beginning of civilization in Sumer also signaled the beginning of written history. Mesopotamia ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers is called Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia means the land “between the rivers.” It is at the eastern end of the Fertile Crescent. The Fertile Crescent is an area stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. Early civilization began in this area because of the land's rich soil. The soil was rich because of the two rivers. Each spring, these rivers overflowed their banks. The floods left layers of silt, a fertile material deposited by the rivers. The people of Mesopotamia learned how to control the flow of the rivers. They created irrigation and drainage ditches. This made it possible for them to grow crops on a regular basis. They were able to grow an abundance of food, which allowed people to live together in cities. The Sumerians were the creators of the first Mesopotamian civilization. By 3000 B.C., the Sumerians had started several cities in southern Mesopotamia. Three of these cities were Eridu, Ur and Uruk. A city-state is a city and the farmland that surrounds it. Each one was like its own country, and the city-states were often at war with each other. These city-states were the basic units of Sumerian civilization. Walls made out of mud bricks surrounded the cities. The Sumerian people also used mud bricks to build houses. The most important building in a Sumerian city was the temple. The temple was dedicated to the chief god or goddess of the city. The temple was often built on top of a ziggurat. A ziggurat is a massive stepped tower. Priests and priestesses supervised the temples, so they had a great deal of power. The Sumerians believed that the gods ruled their cities. This made their city-states theocracies. A theocracy is a government by divine authority. Eventually, kings began to rule the Sumerian city-states. The Sumerians believed that kings got their power from the gods. Kings led armies and supervised building and irrigation projects. Most of the Sumerians were farmers, but the Sumerians also learned how to make metal goods, pottery, and wool cloth. The Sumerians began to trade their goods for copper, tin and timber. The invention of the wheel around 3000 B.C. made it easier to take goods from place to place. Sumerian city-states had three major social groups: nobles, commoners and slaves. The nobles were the rulers and priests. Commoners included farmers, fishers, merchants and craftspeople. Slaves belonged to palace and temple officials. Rich landowners also used slaves to farm their lands. The Sumerians invented many things that still affect our lives today. Perhaps their greatest invention was their writing. Their writing system was called cuneiform (“wedge-shaped”). They made wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets. The tablets were then baked or dried in the sun. These tablets could last a long time- many have lasted until modern times and have been found by archaeologists. Writing allowed people to pass knowledge from person to person and generation to generation. The Sumerians also invented devices to help them in their daily lives. The potter’s wheel and the sundial are other examples of Sumerian inventions. The Sumerians were also the first people to make bronze out of copper and tin. They had outstanding achievements in math and astronomy. They also invented the arch and the dome. City-states fought other city-states for control of land and water. Other peoples also invaded. The land of Mesopotamia was very flat, so it was easy to invade. To the north of the Sumerian city-states were people called the Akkadians. Their leader’s name was Sargon. Around 2340 B.C., the Akkadians overran the Sumerian city-states. They setup the first empire in world history. An empire brings several peoples, nations, or independent states together under the control of one ruler. People from the neighboring hills eventually attacked the Akkadian Empire, which came to an end about 2100 B.C. In 1792 B.C., a new empire began to control much of Mesopotamia. The leadership of this empire came from Babylon. The king of Babylon was Hammurabi. He gained control of both Sumer and Akkad. Hammurabi, who ruled from 1792 B.C. to 1750 B.C., was the Babylonian Empire's greatest ruler. He brought all the people in his empire together under one set of laws. It was the first set of laws to be written down. This set of 282 laws is called the Code of Hammurabi. The laws covered family issues, business conduct, and crime. Copies were carved in stone and placed all over the empire for people to read. Hammurabi's Code followed the idea of retaliation: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. For example, one of the laws reads as follows: "If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out." Everyone had to follow the laws. However, punishments for breaking them were different for the rich and the poor, and for men and women. By today's standards, Hammurabi's Code was very strict and punishments for breaking the law were severe. However, by giving specific penalties for specific crimes, Hammurabi's Code established social order. If a person was wronged, the state punished the offender for breaking the law. This stopped people from getting revenge by taking the law into their own hands. Historians have learned a lot about the Babylonian Empire by studying the laws of Hammurabi's Code. For example, laws about marriage and family show that men were superior to women in Mesopotamian society. The Babylonian Empire reached its peak during Hammurabi's rule. After he died, weaker kings were unable to keep the Babylonian Empire united, and it finally fell to new invaders. The Assyrians exploited the use of new iron weapons to establish an empire by 700 B.C. The Assyrian Empire included Mesopotamia, parts of Iran and Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. The Assyrians were good at conquering others. The Assyrian army was large, well organized, and disciplined. A force of infantrymen was its core, joined by cavalrymen and horse-drawn war chariots. The Assyrians used terror as an instrument of warfare. The Assyrians were especially known for committing atrocities on their captives. At its height, the Assyrian Empire was ruled by kings whose power was seen as absolute. Within less than a hundred years, however, internal conflict and resentment of Assyrian rule began to tear the empire apart. After the collapse of the Assyrian Empire, the Chaldeans, under their king Nebuchadnezzar II, made Babylonia the leading state again. Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt Babylon as the center of his empire and made it one of the greatest cities of the ancient world. However, the empire proved to be short-lived. It fell to the Persians in 539 B.C. Egypt ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ We have learned about the ancient Egyptians by the things they left behind. The most famous reminders of ancient Egypt are the pyramids built during Egypt's Old Kingdom. Three pyramids were built at Giza on a plateau on the west bank of the Nile River. Egypt was described by an ancient historian as "the gift of the Nile." Egypt got this nickname because the Nile's fertile banks were home to the first Egyptian farmers. Ancient Egypt's history is divided into three time periods: the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom. These were periods of long-term stability marked by strong leadership, freedom from invasion, the building of temples and pyramids, and considerable intellectual and cultural activity. Between the periods of stability were ages of political chaos and invasion. The history of Egypt begins around 3100 B.C., when Menes the king united the villages of Upper (southern) and Lower (northern) Egypt into a single kingdom and created the first Egyptian royal dynasty. A dynasty is a family of rulers whose right to rule is passed on within the family. The Old Kingdom lasted from about 2700 B.C. until 2200 B.C. During this time, Egyptian rulers created a strong central government. They brought all the small farming villages around the Nile under their absolute control. Egyptian leaders were called pharaohs (originally meaning "great house" or "palace"), and they had total power over the kingdom of Egypt. The Egyptians believed that their pharaohs were living gods. They also felt that the pharaohs continued to rule even after they died. Egyptian religion said that a person had a spiritual body, called the ka, and a physical body. When a person died, the physical body had to be properly preserved. Bodies were preserved after death by mummification, or drying the body to stop it from decaying. Then, the ka could continue its life forever, even though the physical body had died. For this reason, pharaohs' tombs were more important than their palaces. The person's tomb had to have the same things a living person needed. Tombs were filled with supplies for the dead, like chairs, weapons, foods, clothing and even pets. One of the great achievements of Egyptian civilization, the building of pyramids, occurred in the time of the Old Kingdom. Pyramids were tombs for the mummified bodies of pharaohs. Historians and archaeologists do not know for sure how the pyramids were built. Egyptian workers moved millions of limestone blocks to build the pyramids. Somehow, the enormous stones for a pyramid were cut, moved to the site, and put together. The stones were very heavy, and the pyramids were built before the pulley or vehicles with wheels were invented. The largest of the three pyramids was built by King Khufu around 2540 B.C. Khufu's tomb, the Great Pyramid, covers 13 acres and stands 481 feet tall. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus reported that 100,000 Egyptians spent 20 years building the Great Pyramid. Guarding the pyramids at Giza is a huge statue carved from rock, known as the Great Sphinx. This colossal statue has the body of a lion and a human head. A pyramid was not only the pharaoh's tomb. It was also an important symbol of power during the pharaoh's life. The pyramid could be seen for miles and reminded everyone how rich and powerful the pharaoh was. Although the Old Kingdom's government collapsed, the pyramids stand as a symbol of the pharaohs' power The Old Kingdom was followed by a period of chaos that lasted about 150 years. Finally, a new royal dynasty gained control of all Egypt and began the Middle Kingdom, a period of stability lasting from about 2050 to 1652 B.C. The Middle Kingdom came to an end with the invasion of Egypt by a group of people from western Asia known as the Hyksos. Eventually, a new dynasty of pharaohs drove the Hyksos out and reunited Egypt. The New Kingdom was established and lasted approximately from 1567 to 1085 B.C. During this period, Egypt created an empire and became the most powerful state in Southwest Asia. Massive wealth boosted the power of the New Kingdom pharaohs. The Egyptian rulers showed their wealth by building new temples. The New Kingdom was not without troubles, however. The pharaoh Amenhotep IV introduced the worship of Aton, god of the sun disk, as the sole god. Amenhotep changed his own name to Akhenaton ("It is well with Aton") and closed the temples of other gods. In a society that had always believed in many gods, Akhenaton's actions in destroying the old gods meant to many the destruction of Egypt itself. Akhenaton's changes were soon undone after his death by the boy-pharaoh Tutankhamen (King Tut), who restored the old gods. However, the upheavals associated with Amenhotep's religious revolution led to the loss of Egypt's empire. For the next thousand years, following the collapse of the New Kingdom, Egypt was dominated by Libyans, Nubians, Persians, and finally Macedonians after the conquest of Alexander the Great, before falling to the Romans under Caesar Augustus. Writing in Egypt emerged around 3000 B.C. The Greeks later called this earliest Egyptian writing hieroglyphics, meaning "priest-carvings" or "sacred writings." The hieroglyphic system of writing, which used both pictures and more abstract forms, was complex. Learning and practicing it took much time and skill. Hieroglyphic script was used for writing on temple walls and in tombs. A highly simplified version of hieroglyphics, known as hieratic script, was used for business transactions, record keeping, and the general needs of daily life. Egyptian hieroglyphs were at first carved in stone. Later, hieratic script was written on papyrus, a paper made from the papyrus reed that grew along the Nile. Most of the ancient Egyptian literature that has come down to us was written on rolls of papyrus. Pyramids, temples, and other monuments bear witness to the architectural and artistic achievements of the Egyptians. Artists and sculptors were expected to follow particular formulas in style. This gave Egyptian art a distinctive look for thousands of years. For example, the human body was often portrayed as a combination of profile, semiprofile, and frontal view to accurately represent each part. India's Caste System ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Civilization in India began in the Indus River Valley. Settlements developed as farmers raised crops in the rich soil left behind by the river's yearly floods. The small farming communities grew into large cities like Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. An advanced civilization flourished in these cities for hundreds of years. Historians call it the Harappan or Indus civilization. As in Egypt and Mesopotamia, Harappan rulers based their power on a belief in divine assistance. Religion and political power were closely linked. Like those in Mesopotamia and along the Nile, the Harappan economy was based primarily on farming. This civilization also carried on extensive trade with city-states in Mesopotamia. The Indus River Valley civilization did well until invaders from central Asia took over around 1500 B.C. A group of nomads, called the Aryans, eventually took over all of India. Like other nomadic peoples, the Aryans excelled at war. Between 1500 and 1000 B.C., the Aryan peoples gradually moved eastward from the Indus Valley, across the fertile plain of the Ganges River. Later they moved southward into the Deccan Plateau. After settling in India, the Aryans gave up the pastoral life for regular farming. The Aryans looked down on the Indians over whom they ruled. A set of four main class divisions, called the caste system, developed in India. The caste system was based in part upon skin color. Aryans had lighter skin than the Indians. A person's position in society depended on which class or caste he or she belonged to. People were born into their caste for life. Caste membership determined what kind of job a person could have. It also decided who a person could marry. Brahmins, or priests, led religious ceremonies, and the Aryans thought religion was very important. Therefore, Brahmins made up the highest class in the caste system. Below the Brahmins were the Kshatriyas, or warriors, and below them were the Vaisyas, who were peasants or merchants. A fourth group of non-Aryan workers or laborers, called the Sudras, eventually formed. At the bottom of the caste system were the Untouchables. Members of the four castes thought the untouchables were not even human. The untouchables were considered to be impure, or "dirty," by the other groups. It was important to be spiritually pure, so the untouchables did the jobs that were considered impure. For example, untouchables worked as butchers, gravediggers, and garbage collectors. To touch or even talk to an untouchable was thought to hurt a person's spiritual purity. Purity was so important that untouchables were forced to warn others that they were coming near. They had to ring a bell, tap two sticks together, or make some other warning noise. As time passed, the four castes became more complex. Hundreds of subdivisionscalled jatis- developed. India's caste system lasted from 1500 B.C. until less than a hundred years ago. Discrimination based on the caste system was finally outlawed in India in the 1950s A.D. Hinduism & Buddhism ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Hinduism is the world's oldest organized religion, starting in India about 1500 B.C. It had no single founder. Hinduism had its start in the religious beliefs of the Aryan peoples who settled there. Hindus believe in the existence of a single force in the universe, a form of ultimate reality, called Brahman. It was the duty of the individual self- called the atman- to seek to know this ultimate reality. By doing so, the self would merge with Brahman after death. By the sixth century B.C., the idea of reincarnation had appeared in Hinduism. Reincarnation is the belief that the individual soul is reborn in a different form after death. Life is a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. After a number of existences in the earthly world, the soul reaches its final goal in a union with Brahman. According to Hinduism, all living beings seek to achieve this goal. Important to this process is the idea of karma, the force created by a person's good or bad actions that determines how they will be reborn in the next life. According to this idea, what people do in their current lives determines what they will be in their next lives. In the same way, a person's current status (caste) is not simply an accident. It is a result of the person's actions in a past life. The concept of karma is ruled by the dharma, or the divine law. The law requires all people to do their duty. However, people's duties vary, depending on their status (caste) in society. More is expected of those high on the social scale, such as the Brahmans, than of the lower castes. The system of reincarnation provided a religious basis for the rigid class divisions in Indian society. It justified the privileges of those at the top. After all, they would not have those privileges if they were not deserving. At the same time, the concept of reincarnation gave hope to those lower down on the social ladder. The poor, for example, could hope that if they behaved properly in this life, they would improve their condition in the next. There are hundreds of deities (gods or goddesses) in the Hindu religion, including three chief ones: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Siva the Destroyer. Many Hindus regard the number of gods as simply different expressions of the one ultimate reality, Brahman. However, the various gods and goddesses give ordinary Indians a way to express their religious feelings. Through devotion at a Hindu temple, they seek not only salvation but also a means of gaining the ordinary things they need in life. Today, Hinduism is the religion of the vast majority of the Indian people and has had some influence on Southeast Asia. Hindus have not one "Holy Book", but many sources of knowledge. They include the four Vedas, the Upanishads, and epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The Bhagavad Gita, or "Song of God", is a source of inspiration and comfort for many Hindus. The Gita is as important as the Bible is to Jews & Christians and as the Qur'an is to Muslims. Buddhism grew out of the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, who lived north of India, in what is now Nepal, between 563 BCE and 483 BCE. He was raised as a prince in a small state. He was born into luxury and privilege, but became aware of old age, disease, and death- i.e. suffering. After living a sheltered life, he left the palace in search of answers to the question: “Why is there so much suffering in the world?” After meditating under a bodhi tree, Siddhartha reached enlightenment and became known as the Buddha (Enlightened One). At the Deer Park in Varanasi (Benares) in 531 BC, the Buddha began his teaching career by preaching his first sermon. He remained a traveling preacher for the rest of his life- another 45 years. He died in 486 BC when he was around 80 years old. The Buddha taught that there were Four Noble Truths: 1. All life is full of suffering 2. This suffering is caused by desire. 3. The way to end suffering is to end desire. 4. The way to end desire is to follow the Middle Way or Eightfold Path which will lead to nirvana. The Eightfold Path includes right understanding, right purpose, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right awareness, and right concentration. The idea was that if you want to stop suffering, you must stop desiring. The ultimate goal for Buddhists is to reach nirvana, which is a release from the cycle of reincarnation and union with the universe. The Buddha accepted the idea of reincarnation and karma. However, according to Buddhists, people did not need to follow the rituals of the Brahmins (Hindus priests) and gods are not necessary. Everyone can seek enlightenment on their own, and no one is an outcast by birth. Buddhism rejected the caste system and thus was appealing to members of the lower castes and untouchables. Buddhists are the followers of the Buddha and his teachings. But Buddhists do not follow the Buddha in the same way as Christians follow Christ. He forbid his followers to worship either his person or his image after his death. He did not teach his disciples a way to God. Instead, the Buddha's teaching pointed to the truth (Dharma or Dhamma) and Buddhists are practicing what the Buddha preached- truthful living. For that reason, many Buddhists see Buddhism as a philosophy rather than as a religion. Buddhism would eventually split over different interpretations of the Buddha's teachings. One group believed that they were following the original teachings of the Buddha. They called themselves the school of Theravada, "the Teachings of the Elders." They see Buddhism as a way of life, not a religion that is centered on salvation. Another view emerged that stressed that nirvana could be achieved through devotion to the Buddha. This school, known as Mahayana or "Greater Vehicle", said that the Buddha was not just a wise man, but a divine figure (god). Nirvana is not just a release from the wheel of life, but a true heaven. Through devotion to the Buddha, people can achieve salvation in this heaven after death. In the end, neither Theravada nor Mahayana Buddhism remained popular in India. But Buddhism spread and deeply influenced China, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia. Confucius ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Between 500 and 200 B.C., toward the end of the Zhou dynasty, three major schools of thought about the nature of human beings and the universe emerged in ChinaConfucianism, Daoism, and Legalism. Chinese philosophers were concerned about the world in which people lived and how to create a stable order in that world. China's most influential philosopher, Confucius or Kongfuzi was born in 551 B.C. Upset by the violence and moral decay of his age, Confucius traveled around China trying to persuade political leaders to follow his ideas. Few listened, but a faithful band of followers honored him as a great teacher, recorded his sayings in the Analects, and spread his message. Confucius lived at a time of great chaos in China, caused largely when the Zhou Dynasty was being torn apart by warring lords. China was faced with one basic question: How do we restore order to this society? Confucius provided a basic set of ideas that eventually came to be widely accepted. Confucius's interest in philosophy was political and ethical. He believed that it was useless to wonder about spiritual questions. His concern was with human behavior and he paid little attention to such matters as sin, salvation, and the soul. According to Confucius, the key to proper behavior was to behave in accord with the Dao, or Way. Two ideas stand out in Confucian thought: duty and humanity. The concept of duty meant that all people had to subordinate their own interests to the needs of the family and the community. Everyone should be governed by the Five Constant Relationships: parent and child, husband and wife, older sibling and younger sibling, older friend and younger friend, and ruler and subject. Each person in the relationship had a duty to the other. Parents should be loving, and children should honor and respect their parents. Husbands should fulfill their duties, and wives should be obedient. The elder sibling (brother/sister) should be kind, and the younger sibling respectful. The older friend should be considerate, and the younger friend deferential. Rulers should be caring and subjects loyal. Three of these five relationships concern the family, which shows the family's importance to Confucius. "The duty of children to their parents is the foundation from which all virtues spring." Confucius put filial piety, or respect for parents, above all other duties, even loyalty to the state. The family was responsible for educating the child to be a good member of society. Confucius emphasized the importance of education, the aim of which is to turn people into good family members, responsible members of society, and good subjects of the emperor. "By nature, men are pretty much alike," he said. "It is learning and practice that set them apart." The Confucian concept of duty is often expressed in the form of a "work ethic." According to Confucius, everyone had duties and responsibilities, depending on his or her position. If each individual worked hard to fulfill his or her duties, then the society as a whole would prosper as well. Correct behavior, Confucius believed, would bring order. Above all, the ruler must set a good example. If the ruler followed the path of goodness and the common good, then his subjects would respect him, and society would prosper. "Lead the people by laws and regulate them by punishments, and the people will simply try to keep out of jail, but will have no sense of shame. Lead the people by virtue and they will have a sense of shame and moreover will become good." Government, Confucius felt, was more than enforcing laws. Rulers must set a good example. The second key idea in Confucian thought is the idea of humanity. This consists of a sense of compassion and sympathy for others. It is similar in some ways to Christian ideas. Christians are taught, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." Confucius would say, "Do not do unto others what you would not wish done to yourself." Confucius urged people to "measure the feelings of others by one's own," for "within the four seas all men are brothers." After his death in 479 B.C., his message spread throughout China. Confucius was a harsh critic of his own times. He seemed to stress the need to return to the values of an earlier age- the Golden Age of the early Zhou dynasty. He saw it as an age of perfection that no longer existed. Confucius was not just living in the past, however. Many of his key ideas looked forward rather than backward. Perhaps Confucius' most striking idea was that the government should be open to all men of superior talent, not just limited to those of noble birth. His ideas did not have much effect in his lifetime, but this new idea would later see widespread use. This concept became a crucial part of Chinese history after his death. For the next 2,000 years Confucianism was the official philosophy of China. It became the foundation for Chinese government and social order. Chinese rulers would base their government on Confucian ideas, choosing Confucian scholars as officials. The only way a person could achieve an important position in Chinese government or society was by having a good knowledge of Confucianism. To become a government official it was necessary to pass a difficult civil service examination based on the ideas of Confucius. Thus, until the 20th century, almost every Chinese pupil studied his sayings. Qin & Han China ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ From about 400 to 200 B.C., there were civil wars in China. Powerful states fought each other and ignored the Zhou kings. The Qin (221-206 B.C.) gradually defeated the other states and reunited China. In 221 B.C., the Qin ruler started a new dynasty. This ruler’s name was Qin Shihuangdi, which means “the First Qin Emperor.” The Qin dynasty made many changes in Chinese government. Legalism was adopted as its philosophy. Using rewards for merit and punishments for failure, he built a strong, authoritarian government. Anyone who opposed the new government was punished or executed. The Qin dynasty was a highly centralized state. The bureaucracy was divided into three parts: the civil division, the military division and the censorate. The censorate had inspectors (censors) who checked on government officials to make sure they were doing their jobs. This became standard procedure for future Chinese dynasties. Officials did not inherit their positions but were appointed and dismissed by the emperor. The censors kept a close watch over all officials and reported to the emperor. If the officials were found guilty of wrongdoing, they were executed. Qin Shihuangdi unified the Chinese world. He created a single monetary system and built a system of roads throughout the entire empire. He also had scholars create a single uniform system of writing. Under his rule, irrigation projects increased farm production. But despite these advances, harsh taxes and repressive government made the Qin government unpopular. Shi Huangdi had unified China at the expense of human freedom. Qin Shihuangdi moved harshly against critics. He jailed, tortured, and executed many who opposed his rule. Hardest hit were the feudal nobles and Confucian scholars who hated his laws. To silence criticism, the emperor murdered hundreds of Confucian scholars. To end dissent, Shi Huangdi approved a ruthless campaign of book burning, ordering the destruction of all works of literature and philosophy. Only books on medicine and agriculture were spared. His major concern was in the north. In the area of the Gobi Desert, there were people known to the Chinese as the Xiongnu. They were nomadic people and fought on horseback. The Xiongnu became a threat to the Chinese communities near the northern frontier, so the Chinese began to build walls to keep them out. Qin Shihuangid added to these walls. He connected the existing walls together to create “The Wall of Ten Thousand Li.” This wall arose on the backs of hundreds of thousands of peasants. Many of them died while working there and, according to legend, are now buried within the wall. Today this wall is known as the Great Wall of China. Most of Qin Shihuangdi’s walls were constructed of loose stone and sand and disappeared long ago. The Great Wall that we see today was actually built 1,500 years later. Qin Shihuangdi died in 210 B.C., and his dynasty was overthrown four years later. The fall of the Qin dynasty was followed by a period of civil war. This period did not last long, and was followed by a new dynasty. Liu Bang founded the Han dynasty in 202 B.C. The Han dynasty was one of the greatest and longest dynasties in Chinese history, ruling China from 206 B.C. to A.D. 220, more than 400 years. To win popular support, Liu Bang lowered taxes and discarded the harsh policies of the Qin dynasty. Confucian principles, rather than Legalism, became the philosophy of the new government. China under the Han dynasty was a vast empire. The population increased rapidlyrising from about twenty million to over sixty million. The large population created a growing need for a large and efficient bureaucracy to keep the state in proper working order. The Han rulers continued the Qin system of choosing government officials on the basis of merit rather than birth. To find the most qualified officials, the Han dynasty introduced the civil service examination. This method involved testing applicants' knowledge of Confucianism- the teachings of Confucius. Confucius had taught that gentlemen should practice "reverence [respect], generosity, truthfulness, diligence [hard work], and kindness." A scholarofficial was expected to match the Confucian ideal of a gentleman. Because these were exactly the qualities he wanted his government officials to have, Wudi set up a school where hopeful job applicants from all over China could come to study Confucius's works. After their studies, job applicants took exams in history, law, literature, and Confucianism. To pass, candidates studied the Confucian Classics, a collection of histories, poems, and handbooks on customs that Confucius was said to have compiled. The civil service system begun by Wudi worked so well that it continued in China until 1912. Han emperors had made Confucianism the official belief system of the state. This system for bureaucrats influenced Chinese civilization for two thousand years. It put men trained in Confucian thought at every level of government and created an enduring system of values. Dynasties rose and fell, but Confucian influence survived. Han emperors expanded the Chinese empire southward and westward. They also had to deal with the Xiongnu, the nomads beyond the Great Wall to the north. The Han period was a time of prosperity. Technological advances were made during the Han era. Progress was made in textile (clothing) manufacturing, water mills for grinding grain and iron casting. Iron casting led to the invention of steel. Paper was also developed. The rudder and fore-and-aft rigging for ships were invented. Ships could sail into the wind for the first time. This led to a major expansion of trade. The Qin and Han dynasties were also known for their cultural achievements. The main Confucian writings were made into a set of classics during this time. These writings became required reading for generations of Chinese schoolchildren. Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of the Qin period was discovered in 1974. Underground pits were found about a mile from the burial mound of the First Qin Emperor. The contained a vast army made of terracotta (hardened clay). Archaeologists believe it was a re-creation of Qin Shihuangdi's guard and was meant to be with the emperor on his journey to the next world. There are more than six thousand figures in the first pit alone, along with horses, chariots and seven thousand bronze weapons. The terra-cotta figures are slightly larger than life-size. The Persian Empire ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Persians were an Indo-European people who lived in what is today Iran. Primarily nomadic, the Persians, led by Cyrus, created a powerful Persian empire that stretched from Asia Minor to western India, including what is today Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Cyrus ruled from 559 to 530 B.C. The people of his time called Cyrus "the Great." Indeed, he must have been an unusual ruler for his time, a man who demonstrated much wisdom and compassion in the conquest and organization of his empire. Unlike the Assyrian rulers, Cyrus had a reputation for mercy. Medes, Babylonians, and Jews all accepted him as their ruler. Cyrus had a genuine respect for the customs and religious traditions of the diverse groups in his empire. Cyrus's successors extended the territory of the Persian empire. His son Cambyses successfully conquered Egypt. Darius, who ruled from 521 to 486 B.C., added new conquests in the east extending the empire to the Indus River. He then moved west into Europe, conquering Thrace and creating the largest empire the world had yet seen. Darius's only failure, and that of his son, Xerxes, was his inability to conquer Greece. The Persian king- the "Great King"- had absolute power- the power of life and death. At its height, much of the power of the Persian Empire and its rulers depended upon the military. The Persian kings had created a standing army of professional soldiers. This army was composed of people from all over the empire. At its core was a cavalry force of 10,000 and an elite infantry force of 10,000, known as the Immortals. To govern this vast empire, Darius divided it into 20 provinces, called satrapies. Each province was ruled by a governor, or satrap, literally a "protector of the kingdom." Each satrap collected taxes, provided justice and security, and recruited soldiers for the army. An efficient system of communication was crucial to sustaining the Persian empire. Well-maintained roads made it easy for officials to travel through the empire. The Royal Road stretched from Lydia to Susa, the chief capital of the empire, a distance of 1,677 miles. Like the Assyrians, the Persians set up way stations that provided food and shelter, as well as fresh horses, for the king's messengers. After Darius, the Persian kings became more and more isolated at their courts, surrounded by luxuries. As the Persian kings increased taxes to gain more wealth, loyalty to the empire declined. Of the nine rulers after Darius, six were murdered. Over a period of time, this bloody struggle for the throne weakened the empire and led to its conquest by the Greek ruler Alexander the Great during the 330s B.C. Of all the Persians' cultural contributions, the most original was their religion, Zoroastrianism. The prophet Zoroaster held that the world had been created by Ahuramazda, "the wise lord," but was threatened by Angra Mainyu, "the hostile spirit." In the cosmic struggle between good and evil, humanity is a participant, and individuals are rewarded or punished in the afterlife for their actions. Zoroastrianism preached belief in one supreme deity, held humans to a high ethical standard, and promised salvation. It may have exerted a major influence on Judaism and thus, indirectly, on Christianity. Athens & Sparta ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Greece is made up of a small, mountainous peninsula on the Mediterranean Sea and many small islands. The mountains and sea kept early Greek communities separate from each other. For this reason, it was difficult to bring all the Greek people together under one government. By 750 B.C., Greek communities had grown into city-states. The Greek word for city-state is polis. The polis was a town, city, or village and its surrounding countryside. Athens and Sparta were the two most famous Greek city-states, and they were very different. Sparta Sparta controlled the lives of its citizens from birth to death. All its rules had the same basic goal- to make every adult male citizen part of a military machine designed to control the helots (slaves) and extend Spartan power. The development of this military machine began at birth when a group of city officials examined newborn babies. Any baby who seemed weak, unhealthy, or deformed in any way was either abandoned in the countryside or thrown off a cliff. At the age of seven or eight, boys were taken from their mothers and went to live in military barracks. Although they learned to read and write, military training formed the basis of their education. It was a harsh education aimed at developing obedience, perseverance, and victory in battle. To build up their endurance, boys wore only a single piece of clothing, summer or winter. They never wore shoes. Once a year there was a competition in which the boys were beaten publicly to see who could bear the most pain without crying out. Some died during this thrashing. To teach them to feed themselves in wartime, they were given very little food. The boys were expected to steal food to keep from starving. Anyone caught received a severe punishment- not for stealing, but for being clumsy enough to get caught. The citizen began his military service at the age of 20 and remained in the army until the age of 60. At 30, a Spartan was expected to marry, but he had little family life. He devoted most of his time to military training, eating his meals and spending his leisure time in a military club. Only old men were allowed to live in their own homes. The city did not allow citizens to engage in any trade, craft, or profession- except that of arms- because business activities and the love of money interfered with military discipline. Instead, each soldier was allocated land and helots (slaves) to work it by the state. This left him free to pursue a military career. He supported his family and helped to supply his barracks from the produce of his land. While their husbands lived in the barracks, Spartan women lived at home. Because of this separation, Spartan women had greater freedom of movement and greater power in the household than was common elsewhere in Greece. Spartan girls and women were expected to exercise and remain fit to bear and raise healthy children. Many Spartan women upheld the strict Spartan values, expecting their husbands and sons to be brave in war. The story is told of a Spartan woman who, as she was handing her son his shield, told him to come back carrying his shield or being carried on it. She meant either return alive and victorious or lying dead upon it after a fight to the finish. The strict discipline of Sparta did lead to efficient government and an almost unconquerable army. The Spartans paid heavily for this military might, however. First, they sacrificed individual freedom to the state. Individuals were trained to think of the city-state above themselves. Second, their society produced nothing in art, literature, philosophy, or science. Athens Athens was very different from Sparta. Their government went through a series of changes from monarchy to aristocracy to tyranny and finally to democracy. In a democracy, the citizens have the power and make government decisions by voting. In the Age of Pericles, the Athenians became deeply attached to their democratic system, which was a direct democracy. In a direct democracy, the people participate directly in government decision making through mass meetings. In Athens, every citizen participated in the governing assembly and voted on all major issues. The assembly passed all laws, elected public officials, and made final decisions on war and foreign policy. Anyone could speak, but usually only respected leaders did so. However, by making lower class citizens eligible for public office and by paying officeholders, Pericles made it possible for poor citizens to take part in public affairs. Pericles believed that Athenians should be proud of their democracy. Under Pericles, Athens became the center of Greek culture. Pericles set in motion a massive rebuilding program. New temples and statues soon signified the greatness of Athens. Art, architecture, literature, drama, and philosophy flourished. Pericles boasted that Athens had become the "school of Greece." Persian Wars As the Greeks spread throughout the Mediterranean, they came in contact with the Persian empire to the east. The Greek cities in western Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) had fallen under the control of the Persian empire by the mid-sixth century B.C. In 499 B.C., an unsuccessful revolt by these Greek cities- assisted by the Athenian navy- led the Persian ruler Darius to seek revenge. In 490 B.C., the Persians landed on the plain of Marathon, only 26 miles from Athens. There, an outnumbered Athenian army attacked and defeated the Persians decisively. According to legend, news of Persia's defeat was brought by a runner named Pheidippides who raced 26 miles from Marathon to Athens. With his last breath, he announced, "Victory, we win," before dropping dead. Today's marathon race is based on this heroic story. After Darius died in 486 B.C., Xerxes became the new Persian monarch. Xerxes vowed revenge and planned to invade Greece. In preparation for the attack, the Athenians began building a navy of about two hundred vessels. Xerxes led a massive invasion force into Greece. His forces included close to 150,000 troops, almost 700 naval ships, and hundreds of supply ships. The Greeks tried to delay the Persians at the pass of Thermopylae. A Greek force of about nine thousand held off the Persian army for two days. The 300 Spartans in the Greek army were especially brave. When told that Persian arrows would darken the sky in battle, one Spartan warrior responded, "That is good news. We will fight in the shade!" Unfortunately for the Greeks, a traitor told the Persians how to use a mountain path to outflank the Greek force. "Tell them in Lacedaemon, passer-by: That here, obedient to their laws, we lie." These words are inscribed on a plaque set up to commemorate the last stand of King Leonidas and 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. The Spartan sacrifice allowed the rest of the Greek army to escape the Persians. The Athenians, now threatened by the onslaught of the Persian forces, abandoned their city. Near the island of Salamis, the Greek fleet, though outnumbered, managed to outmaneuver the Persian fleet and defeat it. A few months later, early in 479 B.C., the Greeks formed the largest Greek army up to that time and defeated the Persian army at Plataea, northwest of Athens. Although no one could imagine it at the time, the defeat of the Persians would prove to be one of the most important turning points in world history. Had Darius or Xerxes prevailed, Greece would have fallen under Persian influence. As a conquered culture, the great flowering of Greek culture that was to come in the last half of the fifth century would never have happened and the profound impact of Greek civilization on Roman, and later European, cultures would never have occurred. Peloponnesian War After the defeat of the Persians, Athens took over the leadership of the Greek world. Under Pericles, who was a dominant figure in Athenian politics between 461 and 429 B.C., Athens expanded its new empire abroad. At the same time, democracy flourished at home. This period of Athenian and Greek history, which historians have called the Age of Pericles, saw the height of Athenian power and brilliance. Unfortunately, at the same time, the Greek world came to be divided into two major camps: the Athenian empire and Sparta. Athens and Sparta had built two very different kinds of societies, and neither state was able to tolerate the other. The Athenian alliance included most of the island and coastal city-states. Sparta led most of the major land powers of Greece. Therefore, Athens had a stronger navy and the Spartans had a stronger army. A series of disputes finally led to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 B.C. The struggle would lasted for another 27 years. A crushing blow came in 405 B.C., when the Athenian fleet was destroyed at Aegospotami. Within the next year, Athens surrendered. Its walls were torn down, its navy disbanded, and the Athenian empire destroyed. The great war was finally over. The Peloponnesian War weakened the major Greek states and ruined any possibility of cooperation among them. During the next 70 years, Sparta, Athens, and Thebes (a new Greek power) struggled to dominate Greek affairs, ignoring the growing power of Macedonia to their north. This oversight would cost them their freedom. The Golden Age of Greece ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Under Pericles, who was a dominant figure in Athenian politics between 461 and 429 B.C., Athens expanded its new empire abroad and democracy flourished at home. This "Age of Pericles" saw the height of Athenian power and brilliance. Under Pericles, Athens became the center of Greek culture. During Athens' Golden Age, drama, sculpture, poetry, philosophy, architecture and science all reached new heights. For 50 years (480-430 B.C.), Athens experienced a growth in intellectual and artistic learning. The artistic and literary legacies continue to inspire and instruct people around the world. Philosophy- Some Greek thinkers denied that events were caused by the whims of the gods. Instead, they used observation and reason to find causes for what happened. The Greeks called these thinkers philosophers, meaning "lovers of wisdom." In the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., the philosophers- Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle- raised basic questions that have been debated for two thousand years. "The unexamined life is not worth living," declared Socrates (469-399 B.C.). He encouraged those around him to question their deepest beliefs and ideas. He walked around the marketplace, questioning fellow citizens. This questioning process is known today as the Socratic method. To Socrates, it was a way to help others seek truth and self-knowledge by using their own reason. This belief in the individual's ability to reason was an important contribution of the Greeks. Plato (427-347 B.C.) was a student of Socrates who wrote down Socrates' conversations. Plato later set up an Academy, a school that survived for almost 900 years. There he taught and emphasized the importance of reason. Considered by many the greatest philosopher of Western civilization, Plato's writings dominated philosophic thought in Europe for nearly 1,500 years. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) was Plato's most famous student. Aristotle promoted reason as the guiding force for learning. Aristotle came close to summarizing all the knowledge up to his time. When the first universities evolved in Europe some 1,500 years later, their courses were largely based on the works of Aristotle. Until the 17th century, science in the Western world remained largely based on Aristotle's ideas. Arts and Architecture- The arts of the Western world have been largely dominated by the standards set by the Greeks. Classical Greek art was concerned with expressing eternal ideals. The most famous building, regarded as the greatest example of the classical Greek temple, was the Parthenon (built 447-432 B.C.). It was dedicated to Athena, the patron goddess of Athens. The Parthenon shows the principles of classical architecture: the search for calmness, clarity, and freedom from unnecessary detail. Sculpture also flourished during the Hellenistic age. Rulers, wealthy merchants, and cities all purchased statues to honor the gods, commemorate heroes, and portray ordinary people in everyday situations. The only Greek paintings to survive are on vases and other pottery. They offer intriguing views of Greek life. Literature and Poetry- In literature, as in art, the ancient Greeks set the standard for what later Europeans called the classic style. Ever since, writers and artists in the western world have studied the elegance, harmony, and balance of Greek works. Greek literature began with the epics of Homer, whose stirring tales inspired later writers. Theater- Perhaps the most important Greek contribution to literature, though, was in the field of drama. The Greeks invented drama and built the first theaters in the west. Theatrical productions in Athens were both an expression of civic pride and a tribute to the gods. Plays were performed outdoors in large theaters carved out of the sides of hills. There was little or no scenery. Actors wore elaborate costumes and stylized masks. A chorus responded to the action by singing or chanting commentary between scenes. Greek dramas were often based on popular myths and legends. Through these familiar stories, playwrights discussed moral and social issues or explored the relationship between people and the gods. The Greeks wrote two kinds of drama- tragedy and comedy. A tragedy was a serious drama about common themes such as love, hate, war, or betrayal. They examined such problems as the nature of good and evil, the rights of the individual, the nature of divine forces, and the nature of human beings. The greatest Athenian playwrights were Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In contrast to Greek tragedies, a comedy contained scenes filled with slap-stick situations and crude humor. Playwrights often made fun of customs, politics, respected people, or ideas of the time. Comedy tried to make a point, intending to both entertain and provoke a reaction. Through ridicule, they criticized society, much as political cartoons do today. Almost all surviving Greek comedies were written by Aristophanes. History- The Greeks applied observation, reason, and logic to the study of history. History as we know it- as a systematic analysis of past events- was created in the Western world by the Greeks. Herodotus is often called the "Father of History." Herodotus was the author of History of the Persian Wars, a work commonly regarded as the first real history in Western civilization. Math and Science- The Hellenistic age saw important advances in the sciences and mathematics. Hellenistic thinkers built on earlier Greek, Babylonian, and Egyptian knowledge. Astronomy and mathematics were two areas of progress. Euclid was a highly regarded mathematician. His best-known book, the Elements, contained 465 carefully presented geometry propositions and proofs. Euclid's work is still the basis for courses in geometry. Pythagoras derived a formula (a2 + b2 = c2) that is still used to calculate the relationship between the sides of a right triangle. The most famous Hellenistic scientist, Archimedes of Syracuse, applied principles of physics to make practical inventions. He mastered the use of the lever and the compound pulley to lift heavy objects. Archimedes accurately estimated the value of pi- the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Medicine- The Greek physician Hippocrates studied the cause of illnesses and looked for cures. His Hippocratic oath set ethical standards for doctors. Doctors today take a similar oath. Alexander the Great ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Macedonia was a powerful kingdom north of Greece. During Phillip II's reign as king, Macedonia took over Greece. Phillip had always dreamed of uniting Greece under Macedonia because he admired Greek culture so much. After he took over Greece, Phillip and the Greek states planned a war to conquer the Persian empire. But before Phillip could invade Asia, he was assassinated. His son, Alexander, took the throne. Alexander was only 20 years old when he became the king of Macedonia. His father had taught him everything he needed to know about military strategy. Alexander hurried to carry out his father's plan of invading the Persian empire. In 334 B.C., Alexander moved into Asia Minor with a large army of Macedonians and Greeks. By 331 B.C., Alexander had taken over the Persian empire, which included Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Babylon. The young king wanted to conquer more than just the Persian empire. He decided to take over India, too. Alexander led his troops into India, where they fought many difficult battles in 326 B.C. The soldiers grew tired of fighting and refused to go any further. Alexander agreed to go home, and the troops returned to Babylon. After a long march home, Alexander died in Babylon at the age of 32 in 323 B.C. He suffered from battle wounds, fever, and exhaustion. What explains Alexander's extraordinary military success? No doubt, he was a great military leader- a master of strategy and tactics, fighting in every kind of terrain and facing every kind of opponent. Alexander was a brave and even reckless fighter who was quite willing to lead his men into battle and risk his own life. His example inspired his men to follow him into unknown lands and difficult situations. Alexander accomplished a lot in his short life. In addition to conquering many lands, he created a new age called the Hellenistic Era. Hellenistic means "to imitate Greeks." As the army conquered areas, the Greeks built new cities and military settlements. Thousands of Greek colonists moved to these cities and helped introduce Greek culture to Asia. Greek culture, including language, architecture, literature, and art, spread over a large area of the Asian continent. The cultural influences did not, however flow in only one direction. The Greeks also absorbed aspects of Eastern culture. The Hellenistic Era was a time of great cultural accomplishment. Alexander built Alexandria, as the Greek capital of Egypt. The largest city in the Mediterranean region by the first century B.C., it became home to poets, writers, philosophers, and scientists. Holding more than 700,000 scrolls, the library in Alexandria was the largest of ancient times. Great steps were made in science. The most famous scientist of the era was Archimedes. He established the value of the mathematical constant pi and mastered the use of the lever. The united empire that Alexander created fell apart soon after he died. Macedonian generals struggled for power, and several Hellenistic kingdoms emerged. These kingdoms included Macedonia, Egypt, and the Syria. All were eventually conquered by the Romans. The Roman Republic ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In 509 B.C., the Romans overthrew the last Etruscan king who had ruled Rome for years. Because their last king was a tyrant, Romans said they would never have a king again. Instead, the Romans came up with a different kind of government. They started a republic, a form of government in which citizens choose their leaders by voting. This was the beginning of a new era in Rome's history. Early Rome was divided into two groups, the patricians and the plebeians. Made up of rich landowners, the patricians were Rome's ruling class. Craftspeople, merchants, and farmers formed a larger group called the plebeians. Males in both groups were citizens and could vote. A select group of 300 patricians made up early Rome's Senate which helped run the government. Membership was for life, and the Senate had the power to pass laws. The Roman Republic had several people's assemblies in addition to the Senate. These assemblies eventually gained the power to pass laws for all of Rome as well. Instead of a king, the chief executives of the Roman Republic were consuls. Two consuls, elected each year, ran the government and the army. The two consuls had to agree on each decision they made. In times of war, the Senate could elect a dictator who had complete control over the government and the army. A Roman dictator could rule for six months. After that time, he had to give up his power. One of Rome's greatest contributions to the world is its system of law. The Roman Republic's first set of written laws was called the Twelve Tables. Laws were carved on twelve stone tablets, or tables. The Romans established the idea that all free citizens had the right to be protected by the law. Under Roman law, a person was thought to be innocent until proven guilty. People accused of crimes could defend themselves in front of a judge. A judge was expected to think carefully about evidence before making a decision in a case. These ideas continued long after the end of the Roman Republic. Many of today's standards of justice were established in early Rome. Roman law is not the only thing that was passed down through the centuries. The Roman Republic itself set an example for later governments in Europe and the Americas. For example, the United States and the Roman Republic share some characteristics. Both governments have elected officials, branches of government, and a basic law that governs the land At the beginning of the republic, Rome was surrounded by enemies. For the rest of its history, Rome was engaged in almost continuous warfare. By 264 B.C., they had conquered virtually all of Italy. Why was Rome successful? First, the Romans were good diplomats. They were shrewd in extending Roman citizenship and allowing states to run their own internal affairs. Second, the Romans excelled in military matters. They were not only accomplished soldiers but also persistent ones. Finally, in law and politics, as in conquest, the Romans were practical. From 264 to 146 B.C., Rome and Carthage fought a series of three wars known as the Punic Wars in which Rome was ultimately victorious. Carthage was a powerful and rich trading center started by the Phoenicians. It was located in North Africa along the Mediterranean Sea. By the middle of the third century B.C., it was the only remaining threat to Roman supremacy in the western Mediterranean. During the First Punic War, Rome built a powerful navy and destroyed the great sea power of Carthage. In the Second Punic War, Hannibal, the Carthaginian military genius, invaded the Italian peninsula. After several victories, though, he was defeated. However, the Carthaginians did not give up. In 150 B.C., they attacked a Roman ally. In response, Rome invaded North Africa and laid siege to Carthage. Most of the city's people starved to death. Rome sold the rest into slavery and burned the city. By the second century B.C., Rome had many economic and social problems. The government was run by the leading wealthy families of Rome for their own benefit. Two brothers, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus (known together as the Gracchi brothers), tried but eventually failed to help the poor people of Rome. Changes in the Roman army soon brought even worse problems. A Roman general named Marius began to recruit his armies in a new way. Marius created a new type of army that was not under government control. Sulla was the next general to take advantage of this new military system. His example of using an army to seize power would prove most attractive to ambitious men. For the next 50 years (82-31 B.C.), Roman history was characterized by civil wars as a number of individuals competed for power. Three men- Crassus, Pompey, and Julius Caesar- emerged as victors. Julius Caesar was a great military leader and one of Rome's most famous rulers. He was the brilliant general who conquered parts of Gaul (France) and crossed the English Channel into Britain. He hoped that his military successes would someday make him ruler of Rome. Beginning in 60 B.C., Rome was ruled by the First Triumvirate. This was a partnership of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus. Envious of Caesar's conquests and suspicious of his intentions, Pompey discredited Caesar by turning the Roman Senate against him. Caesar, in turn, declared war on Pompey and the Senate and quickly took control. With Crassus already dead, Caesar then had himself named dictator for life. During his short two-year rule, Caesar showed his great political abilities by beginning many reforms. However, his trappings of monarchy angered many people. Finally, on March 15, 44 B.C., a group of senators stabbed Caesar to death on the floor of the Senate. A new struggle for power followed Caesar's death. Three men- Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus - joined forces to form the Second Triumvirate. Within a few years after Caesar's death, however, only two men divided the Roman world between them. Octavian took the west; Antony, the east. The empire of the Romans, large as it was, was still too small for two masters. Octavian and Antony soon came into conflict. Antony allied himself with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. At the Battle of Actium in Greece in 31 B.C., Octavian's forces smashed the army and navy of Antony and Cleopatra. Both fled to Egypt, where they committed suicide a year later. Octavian, at the age of 32, stood supreme over the Roman world. The civil wars had ended. So too had the republic. The Roman Empire ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In 27 B.C., Octavian proclaimed the "restoration of the Republic." However, he was aware that the republic could not be fully restored. Although he gave some power to the Senate, Octavian in fact became the first Roman emperor. In 27 B.C., the Senate awarded him the title of Augustus- "the revered one," a fitting title in view of his power. Augustus proved to be highly popular, but his continuing control of the army was the chief source of his power. The Senate gave Augustus the title imperator, or commander in chief. Imperator gave us our word emperor. Augustus maintained a standing army of 28 legions, or about 150,000 men. Augustus's new political system allowed the emperor to select his successor from his natural or adopted family. The first four emperors after Augustus came from his family. They were Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. During their reigns, these emperors took over more of the responsibilities that Augustus had given to the Senate. At the same time, as the emperors grew more powerful, they became more corrupt. At the beginning of the second century, a series of five so-called "good emperors" came to power. They were Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius. These emperors created a period of peace and prosperity known as the Pax Romana- the "Roman Peace." The Pax Romana lasted for almost a hundred years from 96 to 180 A.D. These emperors made good the idea that a single dedicated individual, with unlimited government power, could make positive reforms in the vast, diverse peoples and territory ruled by Rome. This has led some historians, such as Edward Gibbon, to call the Pax Romana "the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous." These emperors usually kept ambitious generals under control and minimized new territorial expansion. Thus, the Pax Romana was an era of peace compared to the years of military expansion that came before it, and the civil wars and invasions that came after 200 C.E. The movement of people and trade goods along Roman roads and across safe seas allowed for the spread of culture, trade, technology and religious ideas. This was when Christianity became an international religion. At its height in the second century, the Roman empire was one of the greatest states the world had ever seen. It covered about three and a half million square miles and had a population that has been estimated at more than fifty million. The government encouraged trade. Roman commerce thrived. Great public works, such as roads, bridges, and aqueducts were built. The frontiers were guarded by well-trained armies. Cities grew greatly in both size and number. While the emperors and the imperial government provided a degree of unity, much leeway was given to local customs, and the privileges of Roman citizenship were granted to many people throughout the empire. Cities were important in the spread of Roman culture, Roman law, and the Latin language. Latin was the language of the western part of the empire, whereas Greek was used in the east. Roman culture spread to all parts of the empire and freely mixed with Greek culture. The result has been called Greco-Roman civilization. The Romans excelled in architecture. Although they continued to use Greek styles such as colonnades and rectangular buildings, the Romans also used forms based on curved lines: the arch, vault, and dome. The Romans were the first people in antiquity to use concrete on a massive scale. Using concrete along with the new architectural forms made it possible for the Romans to construct huge buildings undreamed of by the Greeks. One of the most famous public buildings is the Colosseum in Rome. This amphitheater could seat about 45,000 people to watch animal hunts and gladiator fights. The remarkable engineering skills of the Romans were also put to use in constructing roads, bridges, and aqueducts. The Romans built a network of some 50,000 miles of roads throughout the empire. Until the 1800s, the old Roman roads were the best highways in Europe. In Rome, almost a dozen aqueducts kept a population of one million supplied with water. Rome boasted public buildings unequaled anywhere in the empire. Its temples, markets, baths, theaters, government buildings, and amphitheaters gave parts of the city an appearance of grandeur and magnificence. Although it was the center of a great empire, Rome had serious problems too. The poor of the city lived in crowded slums. Their tenements (apartment buildings) were subject to frequent fires and must have been damp, dark and smelly, with few furnishings. Beginning with Augustus, the emperors provided food for the city poor. Even so, conditions remained grim for the poor. Entertainment was provided on a grand scale for the inhabitants of Rome. The poet Juvenal said of the Roman masses, "But nowadays, with no vote ... there's only two things that concern them: Bread and Circuses." Public spectacles were provided by the emperor. The games served to keep the minds of the idle masses off any political unrest. These festivals included three major types of entertainment. At the Circus Maximus, horse and chariot races attracted hundreds of thousands. Dramatic performances were held in theaters. The most famous of all the public spectacles, however, were the gladiatorial shows. Gladiatorial shows were an important part of Roman society. They took place in amphitheaters (similar in appearance to our modern football stadiums). Contests between trained fighters, or gladiators, formed the central focus of these games. Most gladiators were slaves or condemned criminals who had been trained for combat in special schools. Gladiatorial games included other forms of entertainment as well. Criminals of all ages and both sexes were sent into the arena without weapons to face certain death from wild animals. Numerous kinds of animal hunts were also held. The achievement of the Romans in the ancient world was truly remarkable, but their Empire could not last forever. Eventually the pressure of attack from hordes of barbarian invaders from the east and the north, as well as weaknesses within the system of government, caused it to collapse. The modern world owes a great deal to the world of Rome, for so much of its law, politics, architecture, art and literature is rooted there. One of the enduring consequences of this empire was the spread of the Roman language, Latin. The language of the conquerors was gradually taken on by people in the conquered provinces in the form of modern Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, and Romanian. Judaism & Christianity ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Roman empire had an official religion that focused on the worship of several gods and goddesses. As the Roman empire conquered its neighbors, it took over the lands of people with different religions. At the time, most religions had more than one god. Many conquered peoples did not mind honoring Roman gods along with their own. However, in one of the conquered areas, Judea, Jewish people refused to follow Rome's religion. It was against their religion to worship many gods. Judaism was the first monotheistic religion- the Jews believe in only one God. According to Jewish beliefs, there is but one God, called Yahweh, the Creator of the world and everything in it. God was just and good, and he expected goodness from his people. If they did not obey his will, they would be punished. However, he was also a God of mercy and love. Each person could have a personal relationship with this powerful being. The covenant, law, and prophets were three aspects of the Jewish religious tradition. The Jews believed that during the exodus from Egypt, when Moses led his people out of slavery, toward the promised land, God made a covenant, or contract, with them. Yahweh promised to guide them if they obeyed the law of God stated in the Ten Commandments. According to the Bible, Yahweh gave these commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. The Jews believed that certain religious teachers, called prophets, were sent by God to serve as his voice to his people. The prophets also cried out against social injustice. They condemned the rich for causing the poor to suffer. They denounced luxuries as worthless, and they threatened Israel with prophecies of dire punishments for these sins. They said that God's command was to live justly, share with one's neighbors, care for the poor and the unfortunate, and act with compassion. In the Jewish tradition, God's wishes, though communicated to the people through prophets, had all been written down. No spiritual leader could claim that he alone knew God's will. This knowledge was open to anyone who could read the Torah (the Pentateuch), the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. A Jewish man named Jesus traveled and preached about God in Judea and Galilee. Jesus said that believing in God would bring eternal life. He told people that they should show sympathy and mercy to the poor and helpless. According to Jesus, what was important was not strict obedience to the letter of the law but the transformation of the inner person: "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets." God's command was to love God and one another. Jesus said, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. This is the first commandment. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself." Jesus voiced the ethical concepts- humility, charity, and love toward othersthat would later shape the values of Western civilization. Eventually, his speeches made Roman leaders angry. They thought Jesus might lead a Jewish political revolt against Rome. The Roman government ordered Jesus to be put to death. After Jesus' crucifixion, his followers said that Jesus had risen from the dead and appeared to them. They believed that Jesus was their savior. Christianity, a religion based on Jesus' teachings, began to spread. After Jesus' death, Christian leaders took up where Jesus left off and continued to preach his message. Peter was recognized as the leader of the apostles. Another apostle, Paul, took the message of Jesus to Gentiles (non-Jews) as well as to Jews. He founded Christian communities throughout Asia Minor and along the shores of the Aegean Sea. At the center of Paul's message was the belief that Jesus was the Savior, the Son of God who had come to Earth to save humanity. Paul taught that Jesus' death made up for the sins of all humans. By accepting Jesus as Christ (from Christos, the Greek term for Messiah) and Savior, people could be saved from sin and reconciled to God. By 100 A.D., Christian churches had been set up in most major cities in the Roman Empire. The teachings of early Christianity were passed on orally. Written materials also appeared, however. Paul and other followers of Jesus had written letters, or epistles, outlining Christian beliefs for communities they had helped found around the eastern Mediterranean. Also, some of Jesus' disciples, or followers, may have preserved some of the sayings of Jesus in writing and passed on personal memories. Later, between A.D. 40 and 100, these accounts became the basis of the written Gospels- the "good news" concerning Jesus. These writings give a record of Jesus' life and teachings, and they form the core of the New Testament, the second part of the Christian Bible. The Roman empire let people practice other religions as long as they did not cause any trouble. However, Roman officials decided that Christianity was harmful because Christians refused to worship state gods. Government leaders saw this as treason, or political disloyalty. The punishment for treason was death. The Roman government began to persecute Christians, or make them suffer. Many Christians were killed for their beliefs. The persecution in the first and second centuries did not stop the growth of Christianity. Christianity was appealing to many people, especially the poor and powerless, so the religion grew. Christianity proved attractive to all classes, but especially to the poor and powerless. Eternal life was promised to all- rich, poor, aristocrats, slaves, men, and women. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ." Although Christianity did not call for revolution, it stressed a sense of spiritual equality for all people, which was a revolutionary idea. After years of persecution, Roman officials eventually understood that Christianity could not be destroyed by force. In the fourth century, Constantine became the first Christian emperor of Rome. One legend says that before a victorious battle in 312 A.D., Constantine had a vision. The vision told him to fight under the sign of the cross, which he did. Believing this to be a sign from God, Constantine became a Christian. In 313 A.D., he passed the Edict of Milan, which allowed Christianity. Less than 80 years later, under Theodosius the Great, Christianity became Rome's official religion. Decline and Fall of Rome ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ More than 1,500 years ago, the western half of the Roman empire crumbled into ruin. Ever since, people have tried to understand why. At the time, the spectacle of decay and defeat left Romans stunned. "Who would believe ... that Rome, built upon the conquest of the whole world, would itself fall to the ground?" The end of greatness was a catastrophe for Romans, but it did not happen overnight. Decay had set in centuries before the final fall. Historians generally agree that the Roman empire began its decline at the end of the reign of the last of the Five Good Emperors, Marcus Aurelius. The rulers that followed in the next century had little or no idea of how to deal with the problems facing the empire. Most were brutal and incompetent. They left the empire greatly weakened. Throughout this period invaders threatened the borders and civil war tore at the empire. Political Weakness During most of the A.D. 200s, the empire experienced dreadful confusion and civil war. The army contributed to the decline by interfering with the choice of emperor and making the government unstable. Ambitious generals often seized control, assassinated the emperor, and assumed the throne. Only to rule for a few months or years, before being overthrown by a rival commander. During the fifty years, from 235 to 284, armies in the provinces and in Rome proclaimed 50 generals to be emperors . Of these "barracks emperors," 26 briefly reigned; 25 died violently. Oppressive public service added to the problem. As the government became more authoritarian, it lost the support of the people. Growing numbers of corrupt officials undermined loyalty, too. Perhaps most important, dividing the empire in 395 at a time when it was under attack may have weakened it beyond repair. Military Weaknesses The most obvious cause of Rome's collapse was the Germanic invasions in the 300-400s. However, tribes of barbarians had lived on the frontiers throughout the time of both the Republic and the Empire. Their numbers were small compared to the millions of people who lived within the empire. Not until the empire had declined were the mass of barbarians able to break through the frontiers. The barbarian invasions were successful in part because Roman legions of the late empire lacked the discipline and training of past Roman armies. Soldiers gave their loyalty not to Rome but to their commanders, who fought among themselves for the throne. The common soldiers lost a sense of loyalty to Rome and instead served anyone who could pay them more. To defend against the increasing threats to the empire, armies were needed more than ever, but financial strains made it difficult to pay and enlist more soldiers. To meet its need for soldiers, Rome hired mercenaries, or foreign soldiers (usually German barbarians) serving for pay, to defend its borders. While mercenaries would accept lower pay, they felt little sense of loyalty to the empire. Economic Decline Barbarian invasions, civil wars, and plague came close to causing an economic collapse of the Roman Empire in the third century. During the Pax Romana, bustling trade flowed over routes patrolled by Roman legions and ships. Rome's treasuries were enriched by gold and silver taken from conquered territories. Most important of all, the empire's farms grew enough grain to feed the population of the cities. During the third century A.D., all three sources of prosperity evaporated. There was a noticeable decline in trade. Travel became unsafe, and merchants hesitated to send goods by land or sea. Frequent wars were costly. The wealthy spent money on luxury goods from China, India, and Arabia. This spending drained the empire of gold and silver. The defense and maintenance of the empire was very expensive. The problem was made worse once the empire stopped expanding, since there were no new sources of precious metals. Desperate to pay its mounting expenses, including the rising cost of defense, the government raised taxes. Heavy taxes crushed the people. But even heavy taxes could not provide enough money. To maintain the money supply, emperors minted coins that contained less and less silver. It hoped to create more money with the same amount of precious metal. By 270 a silver coin contained little actual silver. To receive the same amount of silver as before, merchants raised their prices. A rise in prices caused by a decrease in the value of money is called inflation. Inflation became so severe in some parts of the empire that people stopped using money and reverted to barter. When trade declined, manufacturing suffered and both eventually disappeared. Agriculture suffered the same fate as trade and commerce. Harvests in western Europe became increasingly small because the overworked soil had lost its fertility. Farm production declined as fields were ravaged by invaders or, even more often, by the defending Roman armies. The rural population grew even poorer than before. Small farmers- once the strength of the empire- gradually lost their lands to a few very powerful landowners. The higher taxes imposed by the government to support the army and the bureaucracy caused many poor farmers to abandon their lands. As poor farmers left their land, they sought the protection of wealthy landowners. Living on large estates, they worked for the landowner and farmed a small plot for themselves. Although technically free, they were not allowed to leave the land. Serious food shortages resulted for all of these reasons. Eventually, disease spread and the population declined. With the decline in population, a danger that there might not be enough farmers arose. The emperor refused to permit farmers who inherited their land to leave it. The people in the cities fared no better. Many artisans or craftsmen tried to leave their jobs in the cities to find work in the country. To prevent this the government made craftwork not only compulsory but also hereditary. Population decreased throughout the empire, partly because a great plague spread through the provinces and caused several million deaths. Plague wiped out one-tenth of the population. A labor shortage created by plague affected both military recruitment and the economy. Economically, the empire suffered as heavier and heavier taxes were required to support the vast government bureaucracy and huge military. The wealth of the empire itself dwindled as farmers abandoned their land and the middle classes sank into poverty. The Roman economy did not produce enough wealth to support a great civilization permanently. Wealth was concentrated in too few hands, and poverty steadily increased. Social Decay For centuries, worried Romans pointed to the decline in values such as patriotism, discipline, and devotion to duty on which the empire was built. Most took little interest in the government. They became apathetic to the empire's fate. When the barbarians invaded the empire, Roman armies fought heroically, but when they lost, the empire lacked the leadership to recover. Moreover, morale collapsed because of the grinding oppression of the government. Taxes and public service crushed the urban middle class. The farmers paid heavy taxes, while the great landowners did not pay their share. Yet the government seemed to be unable to change. The Reforms The Roman empire would probably have collapsed in the late A. D. 200s except for the efforts of two able emperors, Diocletian and Constantine. Their reforms slowed the empire's decline and postponed the collapse for nearly 200 years. The Roman empire had gained a new lease on life; however, the empire was changed. It had a new governmental structure, a rigid economic and social system, and a new state religionChristianity. Still, the reforms failed to stop the long-term decline. After Constantine's death in A. D. 337, the empire enjoyed some 50 years of stability. However, inefficiency and corruption continued to plague the government, and the poor suffered greatly. By A.D. 400, two empires existed, one in the West and one in the East. The East would survive; the West would fall. The Fall It might seem that the western Roman Empire would have fallen apart from inner weaknesses alone. However, pressures from the outside also mounted. Wars in East Asia set off a chain of events that would eventually overwhelm Rome, thousands of miles to the west. Those wars sent the Huns, a nomadic people, migrating across Central Asia. By 350, the Huns reached eastern Europe. The nomadic Huns lived by raiding and plundering, and their fierceness terrified the people of Europe. Pressure by the Huns pushed many German tribes into the empire in 376. Increasing numbers of Germans now crossed the frontiers and occupied large parts of the western Roman empire. In 476, the western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was overthrown by the Germanic leader of the army, Odoacer. Because of this event, people sometimes refer to the "fall" of the Roman Empire as being in 476. The Western Empire broke into separate states that were ruled by many different German tribes. Although we talk of the "fall" of Rome, the Roman empire did not disappear from the map. An emperor in Constantinople still ruled the Eastern Roman empire, which later became known as the Byzantine empire, and lasted for another 1,000 years until 1453. Islam ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Arabs were nomadic people who lived in the Arabian Peninsula. By the 600s A.D., communities began to grow as trade increased. The city of Mecca became an important stop on a trade route. A mix of people, including Christians and Jews, lived in Mecca. The idea of believing in one God, who was called Allah in Arabic, was not new to Arabia. Mecca was a mixed religious environment around 570, when Muhammad was born. Muhammad had a great interest in religion. He often spent time alone praying or meditating. When Muhammad was about 40 years old, he went to the hills to meditate. Muhammad said that while he was meditating, Allah sent him a message. In this message, Allah told Muhammad that Allah was the one and only God. He said that people should abandon all other gods and worship only Allah. Muhammad came to believe that Allah had already revealed himself in part through Moses and Jesus- and thus through the Hebrew and Christian traditions. He believed, however, that the final revelations of Allah were now being given to him. Out of these revelations, which were written down, came the Quran, the holy book of the religion of Islam. The Quran contains the ethical guidelines and laws by which the followers of Allah are to live. Muhammad came back from the hills and said he was a prophet of Allah. He began to preach that everyone should follow him and convert to Islam. "Islam" means "submission to the will of Allah." Followers of Islam are called Muslims. Some people did not like Muhammad's beliefs and acted violently toward him and his followers. Muhammad became discouraged by the persecution of his followers, as well as by the failure of the Meccans to accept his message. He and some of his closest supporters left Mecca and moved north to Yathrib, later renamed Medina (city of the prophet), in 622. This journey is known as the Hijrah. As he gathered more followers, Muhammad became both a religious and a political leader. Muhammad also built an army to defend his followers. The Muslims took over Mecca in 630, and most of its people converted to Islam. During a visit to the Kaaba, Muhammad declared it a sacred shrine of Islam. Two years later, as Islam began to spread throughout the Arabian Peninsula, Muhammad died. Islam is a direct and simple faith, stressing the need to obey the will of Allah. This means practicing acts of worship known as the Five Pillars of Islam. The faithful who follow the law are guaranteed a place in an eternal paradise. 1. Belief- Believing there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger 2. Prayer- Performing the prescribed prayers five times a day 3. Charity- Giving part of one's wealth to the poor 4. Fasting- Not eating or drinking from dawn to sunset during the month of Ramadan 5. Pilgrimage- Making a pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime. After Muhammad's death, the Arabs were left with a problem. Muhammad had not said who should take over after him. His father-in-law, Abu Bakr, was chosen to be the new leader. He was named caliph, or successor to Muhammad. Under Abu Bakr, the Muslims expanded throughout Arabia and beyond. The Muslims defeated the Byzantine army and took control of Syria. They then took Egypt. By 650, the Arabs had conquered the entire Persian empire. The Arabs, led by a series of brilliant generals, had put together a large, dedicated army. The courage of the Arab soldiers was enhanced by the belief that Muslim warriors were assured a place in Paradise if they died in battle. Early caliphs ruled their far-flung empire from Medina. After Abu Bakr died, problems arose over who should become the next caliph. There were no clear successors, and the first two caliphs to rule after his death were assassinated. In 656, Ali, Muhammad's son-in-law, was chosen to be caliph, but he too was assassinated. In 661, the general Mu'awiyah, one of Ali's chief rivals, became caliph. He moved quickly to make the caliphate hereditary in his own family. In doing this, he established the Umayyad dynasty. He then moved the capital of the Arab Empire from Medina to Damascus, in Syria. North Africa and Spain were brought under Arab rule during the Umayyad dynasty. In spite of Umayyad successes, internal struggles threatened the empire's stability. Many Muslims of non-Arab background did not like the way the government favored the Arabs. An important revolt took place in present-day Iraq in 680. It was led by Hussein, second son of Ali- the son-in-law of Muhammad. Hussein's tiny force fought courageously, but all died. This struggle led to a split of Islam into two groups. The Shiite Muslims accept only the descendants of Ali as the true rulers of Islam. The Sunni Muslims accepted the Umayyads as rulers. This political split led to the development of two branches of Muslims that remains to the present. The Sunnis are a majority in the Muslim world, but most of the people in Iraq and Iran consider themselves to be Shiites. Resentment against Umayyad rule grew. The Umayyads also helped bring about their own end by their corrupt behavior. In 750, Abu al-Abbas, a descendant of Muhammad's uncle, overthrew the Umayyads and set up the Abbasid dynasty, which lasted until 1258. In 762, the Abbasids built a new capital city at Baghdad, on the Tigris River. The new capital was well placed. It took advantage of river traffic to the Persian Gulf and was located on the caravan route from the Mediterranean to central Asia. The Abbasid dynasty experienced a period of splendid rule during the ninth century. Best known of the caliphs of the time was Harun al-Rashid, whose reign is often described as the golden age of the Abbasid caliphate. This was also a period of growing prosperity. The Arabs had conquered many of the richest provinces of the Roman empire, and they now controlled the trade routes to the East. Baghdad became the center of an enormous trade empire that extended into Asia, Africa, and Europe, greatly adding to the riches of the Islamic world. Despite its prosperity, all was not well in the empire of the Abbasids. Eventually, rulers of the provinces of the Abbasid Empire began to break away from the central authority and establish independent dynasties- Spain in 750 and Egypt in 973. The Golden Age of Islam ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Before the rise of western European civilization, Islamic civilization was the major force spreading ideas, ways of life, and knowledge throughout the known world. Just as importantly, Islam created a cultural umbrella, under which different peoples from lands stretching from Africa to India could share their ways of life united by a common religion and common language. The people of the Islamic world grew intensely proud of their achievements. Islam was able to combine and spread cultures so remarkably well for two major reasons. First, its geographic location was ideal. Perhaps more important, however, was the character of the Islamic religion. Islam led to at least four practices that enhanced cultural diffusion: Muslims tolerated other religions and cultures; they made pilgrimages to Mecca; they had to learn Arabic to read the Quran (Koran); and they valued trade as a livelihood. Many Muslims were excellent scholars who traded just as expertly in words and ideas. One of Muhammad's sayings was, "The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr." By recording, preserving, translating, and interpreting ideas from different cultures, Islamic scholars not only contributed to cultural diffusion, but also made many impressive intellectual achievements. "Seek knowledge even as far as China," declared Muhammad. Although he could not read and write, his respect for learning set the tone for Muslim civilization. The Prophet's emphasis on study and scholarship led to strong support of places of learning by Muslim leaders. Both the Umayyads and Abbasids encouraged scholars to collect and translate scientific and philosophical texts. In the early 800s, Caliph al-Mamun opened in Baghdad a combination library, academy, and translation center called the House of Wisdom. Al-Mamun and later caliphs made Baghdad into the greatest Muslim center of learning. Other cities, like Cairo, Bukhara, Timbuktu, and Cordoba, had their own centers of learning. After the fall of Rome in A.D. 476, Europe entered a period of upheaval and chaos, an era in which scholarship suffered. The scientific knowledge gained up to that time might have been lost. Thanks to Muslim leaders and scholars, much of that knowledge was preserved and expanded. Muslims, especially in Cordoba and Baghdad, set the stage for a later revival of European learning. Philosophy- One of the important results of Islamic scholarship was the development of Islamic philosophy. From the ninth century on, Islamic scholars were busy translating works of philosophy and science from Greek, Persian, and Indian sources. The translation of Greek philosophy, especially the work of Aristotle, caused a debate among Islamic scholars about the best path to truth. Islamic tradition held that the only truth was through faith in the revealed word of Allah. Greek tradition suggested, however, that human beings could gain truth through reason. Islamic philosophers, like Ibn Rushd, tried to combine the two approaches long before Christian thinkers in medieval Europe tried to do the same. Literature- The Quran (Koran) itself was a major contribution to literature. The Quran, held sacred by Muslims, is the standard for all Arabic literature and poetry. Written Arabic poetry began to appear during the Abbasid Dynasty. One of the most familiar works is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In this collection of four-line poems, he meditates on fate and the fleeting nature of life. Fictional adventure stories also played an important part in Islamic literature. The most famous of these is entitled The Thousand and One Nights (also called The Arabian Nights). It's wonderful tales of Aladdin and his Magic Lamp and Sinbad the Sailor are known all over the world. Architecture- Islamic art is a blend of Arab, Turkish, and Persian traditions. Mosques were the most important buildings in the Islamic world. They featured domes, towers called minarets, clusters of marble columns supporting vaulted ceilings, and pointed arches. Walls were often gilded or decorated in brilliantly colored mosaics and tiles. In Jerusalem, they built the Dome of the Rock, a great shrine capped with a magnificent dome. Domed mosques and high minarets dominated Muslim cities in the same way that cathedral spires dominated medieval Christian cities. The finest example of the Islamic palace is the 14th-century Alhambra in Granada, Spain. Every inch of the castle's surface is decorated in floral and abstract patterns. Much of the decoration is plasterwork that is so finely carved that it looks like lace. Muslim artists also perfected skills in calligraphy, or the art of beautiful handwriting. In other arts, the Muslims were especially noted for their textiles, such as wool carpets. Math & Science- Islamic scholars also made contributions to mathematics and the natural sciences that were passed on to the West. The Muslims adopted and passed on the numerical system of India, including the use of the zero. In Europe, it became known as the "Arabic" system. The greatest Muslim mathematician was al-Khwarizmi. He created algebra (from the Arabic word al-jabr), which is still taught in schools today. The sciences of mathematics and optics, along with scientific observation, led to major advances in astronomy. They perfected the astrolabe, an instrument used by sailors to determine their location by observing positions of stars and planets. The astrolabe made it possible for Europeans to sail to the Americas. The work of Muslim astronomers and navigators helped pave the way for later explorers like Columbus. Medicine- While doctors in medieval Europe still drained the blood of their patients to treat illness, Islamic physicians had developed such advanced techniques as performing successful surgery with anesthesia. Through their own careful research and observation, Muslim physicians added greatly to the storehouse of medical knowledge. The greatest physician of the Muslim world and, more than likely, of world civilization between A.D. 500 and 1500, al-Razi, studied infectious diseases carefully to find out how they differed from one another and how best to treat each one. Many patients from Europe and the Muslim world flocked to Cordoba in Spain, where the surgeons had a reputation for being the best. Abulcasis wrote the first illustrated guide to surgery, which doctors used for centuries after. Ibn Sina's gigantic medical book, the Canon on Medicine, summed up the accomplishments of Muslim medicine. So valuable was the book that 600 years after Ibn Sina died, students in European medical schools were still using it as a text. Medieval Africa ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Africa has a variety of geographical features. The huge continent is made up of snowy mountains, deserts, tropical rain forests, grasslands, and coastal areas. Deserts cover almost half of Africa. On the northern coast and the southern tip, a mild climate zone provides fertile farming land. Ten percent of the continent has rain forests with heavy rains and hot temperatures. Savannahs, or grasslands that have small trees and shrubs, cover much of the rest of Africa The varied regions offer many valuable resources, like salt, gold, iron, copper, diamonds, and oil. These natural resources made Africa a perfect place for trading empires to develop. As early civilizations grew, trade became an important part of Africa's growth. West Africa Between about 800 and 1600, several powerful kingdoms won control of the prosperous Sahara trade. Among the richest West African states were Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. Ghana, the first great trading state in West Africa, emerged in about 500 A.D. Ghana controlled the gold-salt trade routes. So great was the flow of gold that Arab writers called Ghana "land of gold." Ghana possessed one of the richest gold-producing areas in all of Africa. Some sources estimate that until about 1350, at least two-thirds of the world's supply of gold came from West Africa. Ghana's gold made it the center of an enormous trade empire. Two products, gold and salt, dominated the Sahara trade. Muslim merchants from North Africa brought to Ghana metal goods, textiles, horses, and salt. Although rich in gold, West Africa's savanna and forests lack salt, a material essential to human life. Salt was used to preserve food, as well as to improve the food's taste. Salt was also important because people needed extra salt to replace what their bodies lost in the hot tropical climate. The Sahara had an abundance of salt. Ghanaians traded their abundant gold for salt and other products brought from North Africa. A block of salt was easily worth its weight in gold. Other exports from Ghana, including ivory, ostrich feathers, hides, and slaves, also found their way to the markets of the Mediterranean and beyond. Much of the trade across the desert was carried by the Berbers, nomadic peoples whose camel caravans became known as the "fleets of the desert." Camels became a crucial factor in trade across the Sahara. Camels were useful because they could drink large amounts of water at one time. They could also travel for many days with little food. With the camel, nomads blazed new routes across the desert and trade increased. While Islam spread through North Africa by conquest, south of the Sahara, Islam spread through trade. Muslim merchants introduced their faith there. Eventually, Ghana's rulers converted to Islam. Islam's growth encouraged the spread of literacy. To study the Qur'an, converts to Islam had to learn to read and write Arabic. Muslims also introduced their coinage, business methods, and styles of architecture. The state of Ghana collapsed around 1200. In its place rose a number of new trading societies in West Africa. The greatest of these states was Mali, established in the mid-13th century. Like Ghana's, Mali's wealth was built on gold. One of the richest and most powerful kings was Mansa Musa, who ruled from 1307 to 1337. Mansa Musa doubled the size of the kingdom of Mali. During Mansa Musa's 25-year reign, he worked to ensure peace and order in his empire. He decided- as devout Muslim- to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Through his pilgrimage, Mansa Musa showed his devotion to Islam. At the same time, he forged new trading and diplomatic ties with Muslim states such as Egypt and Morocco. As a result of Musa's pilgrimage, word of Mali's enormous wealth spread across the Muslim world and into Europe. In the 1400s, disputes over succession weakened Mali. By 1450, the wealthy trading city of Gao had emerged as the capital of a new West African kingdom called Songhai. It gained control of the trade in salt and gold- the trade that had made Ghana and Mali so prosperous. The collapse of the Songhai empire in 1591 ended a 1,000-year period in which powerful empires ruled West Africa. East Africa With the growth in trade following the rise of Islam during the 7th & 8th centuries A.D., the eastern coast of Africa became an important part of the trading network in the Indian Ocean. Muslims from the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf began to settle at ports along the coast. By A.D. 1000, port cities like Mogadishu, Mombasa, Kilwa, and Sofala, and offshore islands like Zanzibar, were thriving from trade across the Indian Ocean. Riding the monsoon winds, merchant ships sailed northeast to India between April and August, and returned to East Africa between December and March. Like the empires of West Africa, these seaports grew wealthy by controlling all incoming and outgoing trade. Persian traders brought Asian manufactured goods to Africa and African raw materials to Asia. In the coastal markets, Arab traders sold porcelain bowls from China and jewels and cotton cloth from India. They bought African ivory, gold, tortoise shell, ambergris, leopard skins, and rhinoceros horns to carry to Arabia. Kilwa was the wealthiest, most powerful coastal city-state. The Arab traveler Ibn Battuta called Kilwa, which he visited in 1331, "one of the most beautiful towns in the world." In the marketplace of Kilwa, merchants offered goods from both inland and coastal regions. A thriving slave trade also developed. Thousands of Africans were seized as slaves inland and sold. International trade created a rich and varied mix of cultures in the East African city-states. Bantu-speaking Africans mingled in the streets with traders from Arabia and Southeast Asia. As in West Africa, Muslim traders introduced Islam to the East African coast, and the growth of commerce caused it to spread. Gradually, the Muslim religion and Arabic architectural styles became part of a society still largely African. As time passed, a mixed African-Arabian culture, eventually known as Swahili, began to emerge throughout the coastal area. The term swahili (from sahel, meaning "coast" in Arabic, and thus "peoples of the coast") was also applied to the major language that developed in the area. Tang & Song China ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Han dynasty ended in 220, and China fell into chaos. Three hundred years later a new empire was set up. The Sui dynasty (581-618) did not rule long, but it managed to unify China. Soon however forced labor, high taxes, and military failures caused a rebellion. A new dynasty, the Tang emerged. It would last from 618 until 907. The Tang rulers restored the civil service examination system to recruit officials for the government bureaucracy. They tried to give land to the peasants and break up the power of the large landowners. They worked hard to restore the power of China in East Asia. However, Tang rulers were unable to prevent government corruption. Rebellions led to the collapse of Tang rule. A new dynasty known as the Song rose to power. The Song ruled during a period of economic prosperity and cultural achievement, from 960 to 1279. The era from 581 to 1279 saw the development of a political system based on practices of the Qin and Han dynasties. China was a monarchy that employed a large bureaucracy. Confucian ideals were still the cement that held the system together. During this period, the Chinese economy grew. Agriculture flourished, and manufacturing and trade increased dramatically. The Silk Road thrived as caravans carried goods back and forth between China and the rest of Eurasia. Economic changes had an impact on Chinese society. The vast majority of the Chinese people still lived off the land in villages, but the period saw the rise of the landed gentry. This group controlled much of the land and at the same time produced most of the candidates for the civil service. Called the scholar-gentry, they replaced the old landed aristocracy as the political and economic elite of China. During the Sui and Tang dynasties, Buddhism and Daoism rivaled the influence of Confucianism. Merchants and missionaries brought Buddhism to China from India. The chaos caused by the fall of the Han dynasty made both Buddhism and Daoism more attractive. During the Song dynasty, however, Confucian ideas reemerged in a new form and once again became dominant. Neo-Confucianism served as a Confucian response to Buddhism and Daoism. Neo-Confucianism teaches that the world is real, not an illusion, and that fulfillment comes not from withdrawal but from participation in the world. The period of the Tang and Song dynasties was in many ways the great age of Chinese literature. The invention of printing helped to make books more available and more popular. Art, too, flourished during this period. It was in poetry, above all, that the Chinese of this time best expressed their literary talents. The Tang dynasty is viewed as the great age of poetry in China. At least 48,000 poems were written by 2,200 authors. Li Bo and Duo Fu were two of the most popular poets during the Tang era. During the Song and Mongol dynasties, landscape painting reached its high point. Influenced by Daoism, Chinese artists went into the mountains to paint and find the Dao, or Way, in nature. This practice explains in part the emphasis on nature in traditional Chinese painting. Next to painting in creative accomplishment was the field of ceramics. In particular, Tang artisans perfected the making of porcelain- a ceramic made of fine clay baked at very high temperatures. Feudal Japan ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ While the Japanese emperor presided over a splendid court at Heian, rival clans battled for control of the countryside. Local warlords formed armed bands loyal to them rather than to the government. As these armies struggled for power, Japan evolved a feudal system (a decentralized government). As in the feudal world of medieval Europe, a warrior aristocracy dominated Japanese society. In theory, the emperor stood at the head of Japanese feudal society. In fact, he was a powerless, though revered, figurehead. Real power lay in the hands of the shogun, or supreme military commander. The shogun had the powers of a military dictator. Officials, judges, taxes, armies, roads- all were under his authority. Minamoto Yoritomo was appointed shogun in 1192. He set up the Kamakura shogunate, the first of three military dynasties that would rule Japan for almost 700 years. Often the shogun controlled only a small part of Japan. He distributed lands to vassal lords who agreed to support him with their armies in time of need. These great warrior lords were later called daimyo, or "great names". Since wars between rival lords were commonplace, each lord surrounded himself with a bodyguard of loyal warriors called samurai. Samurai means "one who serves." Like medieval Christian knights in Europe, samurai were heavily armed and trained in the skills of fighting. They wore armor, fought with swords, and often rode on horseback. The samurai also developed their own code of values. Known as bushido, or the "way of the warrior," the code emphasized honor, bravery, unflinching acceptance of hardship, instant obedience to a superior's orders, and absolute loyalty to one's lord. A samurai was expected to show reckless courage, reverence for the gods, fairness, and generosity towards those weaker than himself. The true samurai was supposed to have no fear of death. Dying an honorable death was judged more important than living a long life. A samurai who betrayed the code of bushido was expected to commit seppuku, or ritual suicide, also known in the West as hara-kiri, rather than live without honor. In exchange for loyalty, the lord had an obligation to provide for the samurai and reward them appropriately for services rendered. Like European knights, samurai warriors were expensive to support because they required costly armor, weapons, and horses. Samurai were financed through system based on the shoen, or "estate." Those who held a shoen did not live on it; they simply had a right to its harvests, usually in rice. Far below the samurai in the social hierarchy were the peasants, artisans, and merchants. Peasants, who made up 75% of the population, formed the backbone of feudal society in Japan. Peasant families cultivated rice and other crops on the estates of samurai. Some peasants also served as foot soldiers in feudal wars. On rare occasions, an able peasant soldier might rise through the ranks to become a samurai himself. Artisans provided necessary goods for the samurai class. Merchants had the lowest rank in Japanese feudal society. Unlike the European ideal of chivalry, the samurai code did not set women on a pedestal. Instead, the wife of a warrior had to accept the same hardships as her husband and owed the same loyalty to his overlord. Feudal / Medieval Europe ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ As the Western Roman Empire weakened, Germanic tribes moved in, took over areas, and started new kingdoms. One of these Germanic states, the kingdom of the Franks, was ruled by Charlemagne from 768 to 814. He built an empire known as the Carolingian Empire. Covering much of western and central Europe, it was the largest empire of the time. Charlemagne became emperor of the Romans in 800, crowned by Pope Leo III. The coronation symbolized the coming together of Roman, Christian, and German ideas. A new Western civilization had begun. However, the Carolingian Empire began to fall apart soon after Charlemagne died. In the 9th and 10th centuries, western Europe was hit by a wave of invasions. These invasions completely destroyed the Carolingian Empire. The Muslims attacked the southern coasts of Europe. The Magyars, a people from Asia, moved into central Europe and terrorized Germany and Italy. And from the north sailed the most dreaded attackers of all- the Northmen or Norsemen of Scandinavia, also called the Vikings. The Vikings and other invaders posed a large threat to the safety of people throughout Europe. Rulers found it more and more difficult to defend their subjects as centralized governments like the Carolingian Empire fell apart. Kings and emperors were too weak to maintain law and order. People needed to defend their homes and lands. Thus, they began to turn to local landed lords, or nobles, to protect them. To survive, it became important to find a powerful lord who could offer protection in return for service. This led to a new decentralized political and social system called feudalism. At the heart of feudalism was the idea of vassalage. A man who served a lord as a warrior was known as a vassal. It was expensive to have a horse, armor, and weapons. With the breakdown of central governments, the more powerful nobles took control of large areas of land. When these lords wanted men to fight for them, they granted each vassal a piece of land, called a fief, that supported the vassal and his family. In the society of the early Middle Ages, wealth was based primarily on land, thus land was the most important gift a lord could give to a vassal. The highest-ranking lord was a monarch, or king. Below the king were powerful lords. Each lord had vassals, and each vassal had vassals of his own. The people at the top of society had the most land, and the vassals below them had less. A man could be a vassal to a powerful lord and a lord to someone lower at the same time. Everyone had a place in feudal society. The lord-vassal relationship was an honorable relationship between free men and implied no sense of servitude. Feudalism came to be characterized by a set of unwritten rules- known as the feudal contract- that determined the relationship between a lord and his vassal. The major obligation of a vassal to his lord was to perform military service, usually about 40 days a year. To become a vassal, a man performed an act of homage to his lord. In feudal society, loyalty to one's lord was the chief virtue. Under the feudal contract, the lord had responsibilities toward his vassals also. For almost five hundred years, warfare in Europe was dominated by heavily armored cavalry, or knights, as they came to be called. Like the Japanese daimyo and samurai, European lords and knights formed an aristocracy, or nobility, which held, political, economic, and social power. There gradually developed among this nobility an ideal of civilized behavior, called chivalry. Chivalry was a code of ethics that knights were supposed to uphold. Chivalry required knights to be brave, loyal, and true to their word. In warfare, they had to fight fairly and be generous to their enemies. Chivalry also implied that knights should fight only for glory and not for material rewards, an ideal that was not always followed. Chivalry did much to improve the rough and crude manners of early feudal lords. Chivalry had limits, though. It applied to nobles only, not to commoners. Chivalry raised women to a new status. A knight was also expected to be courteous to women and the less powerful. The code of chivalry called for women to be protected and cherished. Much later, ideas of chivalry would shape our modern ideas of romantic love. Trained to be warriors from an early age, knights had little else to do but fight. As the fierce fighting of the early Middle Ages lessened in the 1100s, tournaments, or mock battles where knights could show their skills, came into fashion. The joust- individual combat between two knights- became the main part of the tournament. Feudalism provided the social and political structure of the Middle Ages, while manorialism shaped the economy of Europe during these years. The landholding nobles were a military elite who had the leisure time to pursue the arts of war. Landed estates worked by peasants, provided the economic support that made this way of life possible. The heart of the medieval economy was the manor, or lord's estate. Manors were large farming estates that included manor houses, cultivated lands, woodlands, pastures, fields, and villages. These estates were worked by serfs, or peasants legally bound to the land. Serfs had to provide labor services, pay rents, and be subject to the lord's control. By 800, probably 60% of the people of western Europe were serfs. Peasants and their lords were tied together by mutual rights and responsibilities. Peasants had to work several days a week farming the lord's lands. The rest of the estate's land was used by the peasants to grow food for themselves. The serfs paid rent by giving the lords a share of every product they raised. Lords had a variety of legal rights over their serfs. Serfs could not leave the manor without the lord's permission and could not marry without the lord's approval. Lords often had political authority on their lands, which gave them the right to try peasants in their own courts. Even with these restrictions, however, serfs were not slaves who could be bought and sold. The land assigned to serfs to support themselves usually could not be taken away, and their responsibilities remained fixed. It was also the lord's duty to protect his serfs from Viking raids or feudal warfare, giving them the safety they needed to grow crops. In theory, at least, they were guaranteed food, housing, and land. The medieval manor was a small, self-sufficient world. Peasants produced almost everything they needed, from food and clothing to simple furniture and tools. Most peasants never ventured more than a few miles from their village. They had no schooling and no knowledge of the larger world. The Medieval Church ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church became more organized and powerful. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church played an important role in the new European civilization. By the fourth century, the Church had developed a system of organization. Local Christian communities were called parishes and were led by priests. A group of parishes was headed by a bishop. Gradually, the bishops from five of the most important citiesRome, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Constantinople- gained power. The Pope Over time, the bishop of Rome began to claim that he was the leader of the Christian Church. According to Catholic beliefs, Jesus had given the keys to the kingdom of Heaven to Peter, who was considered the chief apostle and the first bishop of Rome. Later bishops of Rome were viewed as Peter's successors. They came to be known as popes (from the Latin word papa, "father") of the Catholic Church. Western Christians accepted the Pope as head of the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope started as a religious leader but later gained political power, too. During the papacy of Pope Innocent III in the 13th century, the Catholic Church reached the height of its power. At the beginning of his rule in 1198, in a letter to a priest, the pope made a clear statement of his views on papal supremacy: God, the creator of the universe, set two great lights in the firmament of heaven, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night so He set two great dignities in the firmament of the universal Church, ... the greater to rule the day, that is, souls, and the lesser to rule the night, that is, bodies. These dignities are the papal authority and the royal power. And just as the moon gets her light from the sun, and is inferior to the sun ... so the royal power gets the splendor of its dignity from the papal authority. Innocent III's actions were those of a man who believed that he, the pope, was supreme, that the pope's authority extended over all the Christian world, Christendom, including its rulers. The Roman Catholic Church claimed influence over everything in Europe, from critical political decisions to the daily lives of peasants. Because churchmen were often the only educated people, they were given high government positions. Kings started wars in the name of Christianity. Missionaries spread the faith across Europe. However, as the Church's power grew, some Church officials became corrupt and worldly. The Monks A monk is a man who separates himself from ordinary human society in order to pursue a life of total dedication to God. The practice of living the life of a monk is known as monasticism. In the sixth century, Saint Benedict founded a community of monks for which he wrote a set of rules. This community established the basic form of monasticism in the Catholic Church. Benedict's rule divided each day into a series of activities, with primary emphasis on prayer and manual labor. A Benedictine life was a communal one. Monks ate, worked, slept, and worshiped together. Each Benedictine monastery was strictly ruled by an abbot, or "father" of the monastery, who had complete authority over the monks. Each Benedictine monastery owned lands that enabled it to be a self-sustaining community, isolated from and independent of the world surrounding it. Within the monastery, however, monks were to fulfill their vow of poverty. Monks became the new heroes of Christian civilization and were an important force in the new European civilization. The monastic community came to be seen as the ideal Christian society that could provide a moral example to the wider society around it. The monks' dedication to God became the highest ideal of Christian life. They were the social workers of their communities, providing schools for the young, hospitality for travelers, and hospitals for the sick. Monasteries became centers of learning wherever they were located. The monks worked to spread Christianity to all of Europe. English and Irish monks were especially enthusiastic missionaries- people sent out to carry a religious message- who undertook the conversion of pagan peoples, especially in German lands. By 1050 most western Europeans had become Catholics. Although the first monks were men, women, called nuns, also began to withdraw from the world to dedicate themselves to God. These women played an important role in the monastic movement. Nuns lived in convents headed by abbesses. The People What of ordinary people? What were their religious hopes and fears? What were their religious beliefs? The sacraments of the Catholic Church were central in importance to ordinary people. These rites, such as baptism, marriage, and the Eucharist (Communion), made the Church a crucial part of people's lives from birth to death. The sacraments were seen as means for receiving God's grace and were necessary for salvation. Only the clergy (priests, bishops, & popes) could administer the sacraments, so everyone who hoped to gain salvation depended on the clergy to help them achieve this goal. Other church practices were also important to ordinary people. One practice involved veneration of saints. Of all the saints, the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, was the most highly regarded in the High Middle Ages. Mary was seen as the most important mediator between humans and her son, Jesus Christ, the judge of all sinners. A sign of Mary's importance is the number of churches all over Europe that were dedicated to her in the 12th and 13th centuries. Emphasis on the role of the saints was closely tied to the use of relics. It was believed that relics could heal people or produce other miracles. Medieval Christians also believed that a pilgrimage to a holy shrine produced a spiritual benefit. The greatest shrine, but the most difficult to reach, was the Holy City of Jerusalem. On the continent two pilgrim centers were especially popular: Rome, which contained the relics of Saints Peter and Paul, and Santiago de Compostela, the site of the tomb of the Apostle James. The Changing West ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In the High Middle Ages, the population of Europe grew dramatically- almost doubling. What caused this huge increase in population? For one thing, conditions in Europe were more peaceful after the Viking invasions of the early Middle Ages had stopped. This increased peace and stability led to a dramatic increase in food production after 1000. In part, food production increased because a change in climate- it got warmerimproved growing conditions. In addition, more land was cultivated as peasants cut down trees and drained swamps. Changes in technology also aided the development of farming. The Middle Ages witnessed an explosion of labor-saving devices. The change from using oxen to using horses- they were faster- to pull plows and the shift from a twofield to a three-field system of crop rotation also added to the increase in food production. Medieval Europe was basically an agricultural society in which most people lived in small villages. In the 11th and 12th centuries, however, population growth led to a revival of trade and the growth of towns and cities. The revival of trade in Europe was gradual. Cities in Italy took the lead. Venice, for example, developed a merchant fleet (a fleet of trading ships) and by the end of the 10th century had become a major trading center. While Venice and other northern Italian cities were busy trading in the Mediterranean, the towns of Flanders were doing the same in northern Europe. Flanders (present-day Belgium and northern France) was known for its much desired, high-quality woolen cloth. The location of Flanders made it an ideal center for trade. Merchants from England, Scandinavia, France, and Germany met there to trade their goods for woolen cloth. By the 12th century, a regular exchange of goods had developed between Flanders and Italy. To encourage this trade, a series of trade fairs were held. At these fairs, northern merchants brought the furs, woolen cloth, tin, hemp, and honey of northern Europe and exchanged them for the cloth and swords of northern Italy and the silks, sugar, and spices of the East. As trade increased, demand for gold and silver coins arose at fairs and trading markets of all kinds. Slowly, a money economy- an economic system based on money, rather than barter- began to emerge. New trading companies and banking firms were set up to manage the exchange and sale of goods. All of these new practices were part of the rise of commercial capitalism, an economic system in which people invested in trade and goods in order to make profits. The revival of trade led to a revival of cities. With the revival of trade, merchants began to settle in the old Roman cities. They were followed by craftspeople or artisanspeople who had developed skills and saw a chance to make goods that could be sold by the merchants. The old Roman cities came alive with new populations and growth. Many new cities or towns were also founded, especially in northern Europe. The merchants and artisans of these cities later came to be called burghers or bourgeoisie. Medieval cities were small in comparison with either ancient or modern cities. A large trading city would number about 5,000 inhabitants. By 1200, London was the largest city in England, with 30,000 people. Italian cities tended to be larger. Venice, Florence, Genoa, Milan, and Naples each had almost a 100,000 inhabitants. Even the largest European city, however, seemed small alongside the Byzantine capital of Constantinople or the Arab cities of Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo. The revival of trade enabled cities and towns to become important centers for manufacturing a wide range of goods, such as cloth, metalwork, shoes, and leather goods. A host of craft activities were carried on in houses located in the narrow streets of medieval cities. From the 12th century on, craftspeople began to organize themselves into guilds, or business associations. Guilds came to play a leading role in the economic life of the cities. By the 13th century, there were guilds for almost every craft, such as tanners, carpenters, and bakers. There were also separate guilds for specialized groups of merchants, such as dealers in silk, spices, wool, or money (banking). Craft guilds controlled almost every aspect of the production process. They set the standards for the quality of the articles produced, specified the methods of production to be used, and even fixed the price at which the finished goods could be sold. Guilds also determined the number of people who could enter a specific trade and the procedure they must follow to do so. A person who wanted to learn a trade first became an apprentice, usually at around the age of 10, to a master craftsperson. Apprentices were not paid, but they did receive room and board from their masters. After five to seven years of service during which they learned their craft, apprentices became journeymen and worked for wages for other masters. Journeymen aspired to become masters as well. To do so, they were expected to produce a masterpiece, a finished piece in their craft. This piece allowed the master craftspeople of the guild to judge whether a journeyman was qualified to become a master and join the guild. The university as we know it today was a product of the High Middle Ages. Medieval universities were educational guilds, or corporations, that produced educated and trained individuals. The first European university appeared in Bologna, Italy. Kings, popes, and princes thought it honorable to found new universities. By 1500, there were 80 universities in Europe. Students began their studies at a medieval university with the traditional liberal arts curriculum, or course of study. This consisted of grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Teaching at a medieval university was done by a lecture method, as books were expensive. After completing this curriculum, a student could go on to study law, medicine, or theology. Universities provided the teachers, administrators, lawyers, and medical doctors for medieval society. The 11th thru 13th centuries witnessed an explosion of building in medieval Europe, especially building of churches. The Gothic cathedral remains one of the greatest artistic triumphs of the High Middle Ages. The Gothic cathedral, with its towers soaring toward Heaven, and magnificent stained glass windows bears witness to an age when most people believed in a spiritual world. The Byzantine Empire ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ After the Roman empire split into two sections, the Eastern Roman Empire came to be called the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantine Empire reached its largest size under the emperor Justinian, who ruled from 527 to 565. Justinian dreamed of bringing back the glory of ancient Rome by reestablishing the Roman empire over the entire Mediterranean world. Historians remember Justinian best for his codification of Roman law. He had officials collect all the laws of ancient Rome. The laws were gathered together, edited, and organized into a collection called the Code of Justinian. The collection included laws passed by Roman assemblies and Roman emperors. It also contained the legal writings of Roman judges. The Code covered subjects like marriage, property, inheritance, and crimes. This code of Roman laws was the basis of imperial law in the Eastern Roman Empire until its end in 1453. Furthermore, it was also used in the West and became the basis for much of the legal system of Europe. Another of his achievements was the famous Hagia Sophia- the Church of the Holy Wisdom- completed in 537. The church is crowned by an enormous dome, which seems to be floating in space. The Byzantine Empire was both a Greek and a Christian state. Greek replaced Latin as both the common language and the official language of the empire. At the same time, the empire was built on a Christian faith that was shared by many subjects. The Christian church of the Byzantine Empire came to be known as the Eastern Orthodox Church. The emperor exercised control over the church as well as the state. After Justinian died, the Byzantine Empire stayed strong for many years. Its greatest strengths were a strong central government and a wealthy economy. Trade and industry grew in cities like Constantinople, the capital. The city was the chief center for the exchange of products between West and East. By the 1000s, the Byzantine Empire was weakening. Constant warfare and struggles for the throne hurt the empire. Powerful local lords took control of some areas. As the empire weakened, its enemies attacked. In 1071, an invading Turkish army inflicted a crushing defeat on Byzantine forces at Manzikert. In the 1090s, the Byzantine emperor Alexius I asked western Europe for help against the Seljuk Turks, who were Muslims. Pope Urban II sent Christian knights to help fight the Turks in the first of four Crusades. The Crusades were military expeditions to take back lands that had been conquered by the Muslims. However, during the Fourth Crusade, Christian knights attacked Constantinople itself. They wanted its riches, so they burned the city and stole its valuables. A Byzantine emperor took back the capital in the 1260s, but the Byzantine Empire never recovered. In 1453, the Ottomans, another Turkish people, conquered the city of Constantinople. They renamed it Istanbul, and it became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The fall of Constantinople was the end of the Byzantine Empire. However, Byzantine culture continued to influence Europe, particularly Russia, much longer. The Crusades ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In the 1060s, the Seljuk Turks, who were Muslims, invaded the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantine army needed help defending their empire, so the emperor asked for help from Pope Urban II. Although Byzantine emperors and Roman Popes were rivals, the Pope said he would send help. He agreed to this because the Seljuk Turks had also taken over the Holy Land. The Holy Land included Jerusalem and other places in Palestine where Jesus had lived and taught. Pope Urban II met with a group of bishops and noblemen in 1095. The Pope called for a Crusade, a military expedition, to free the Holy Land from the invading Muslims. He challenged Christians to take up their weapons and join in this holy war. Urban II promised: "All who die ... whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission [forgiveness] of sins." The enthusiastic crowd cried out: "It is the will of God, it is the will of God." By 1096, thousands of European knights were on their way to the Holy Land. Some knights joined the Crusades because they believed strongly in their religion. Many went because they hoped to win wealth and land. Others traveled to the Middle East because they wanted adventure. Christian knights captured Jerusalem in 1099 amid a horrible massacre of the city's Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. The Muslim leader Saladin took Jerusalem back in 1187. The Third Crusade tried and failed to take the city back. During the Fourth Crusade, the crusaders fought against fellow Christians instead of Muslims! The crusaders captured and looted Constantinople, the Byzantine capital. None of the next four Crusades, which took place between 1212 and 1270, succeeded as the First Crusade had and were for the most part utter failures. The most tragic crusade was probably the "Children's Crusade" of 1212. Only 201 of the 50,000 children who went to the Holy Land survived to return home. The Crusades continued off and on for 200 years. Each time the crusaders won, they turned the captured lands into Christian kingdoms. The Muslims took back the lands, which resulted in more knights being sent from Europe. Christians and Muslims committed terrible acts against each other in the Middle East in the name of religion. The Crusades left behind a bitter legacy of religious hatred that continues to the present. In Europe, the Crusades had a major political effect. During the Crusades, European noblemen sold their lands to join the fight. This caused them to lose power. As the nobles lost power, kings created stronger central governments. By the mid-1400s, there were four strong nation-states in Europe: Portugal, Spain, England, and France. The Crusades played a part in stimulating trade between Europe and Asia by heightening demand Eastern luxury goods: spices, sugar, tapestries, and silk. Contact with the more advanced Byzantine and Muslim civilizations broadened European views of the world, expanding their horizons. Many believe that the Crusades played an important role in bringing about the Renaissance in the 1300s and an Age of Exploration in the 1400s. The Mongols ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ A belt of dry grassland called the steppe stretches 5,000 miles across Europe and Asia. The Mongols were nomadic people who lived on this steppe. They lived in small groups called clans. They prided themselves on their skill on horseback, their discipline, their ruthlessness, and their courage in battle. Around 1200 A.D., one of the Mongol khans, or clan leaders, united all of the Mongols under his leadership. This man became known as Genghis Khan, or "universal ruler" of all the Mongol clans. Once leader of the Mongols, Genghis Khan wanted more. He wanted the wealth and glory that would come with conquering mighty empires. Over the next 21 years, Genghis led the Mongols in conquering much of Asia. Under Genghis Khan, the Mongols were forged into the mightiest war machine the world had seen up to that time. The results of these campaigns were horrifying. Millions died in what was probably the worst bloodshed of pre-modern times. Their invasions ended many of the great empires of the postclassical period and also extended the world network that had increasingly defined the period. The Mongol conquests would forever transform Asia and Europe. Under Genghis Khan, the Mongols were extremely organized. An effective military planner, he grouped troops in armies of 10,000. Each army was like a moving city. Soldiers brought family members, horses, and livestock with them. Mongol women were responsible for the needs of the camp. They also took care of the wounded. Mongol soldiers were excellent horsemen. When traveling, each soldier had three extra horses. By changing horses, they could keep riding for many days and nights at a time. Sometimes, Mongol messengers traveled as far as 120 miles in a day. Each cavalry warrior had leather armor, a lance, and a dagger, as well as a bow and arrows. The Mongols used tricks to confuse their enemies. The soldiers made their foes believe they had more men than they actually had. The Mongols did this by dressing prisoners or lifelike dummies as Mongol warriors. They also used spies. Sometimes a small Mongol unit would attack and then pretend to run away. The small unit led enemy soldiers to the rest of the Mongol army. Then, the larger Mongol army surprised and slaughtered the enemy forces. Genghis Khan used fear as a tool to conquer Asia. The Mongols destroyed one city after another, killing many of the people who lived in them. The populations of some cities were wiped out completely. Sometimes, conquered peoples were forced to serve as troops for the Mongols against their own allies. People heard about the terrible things the Mongols did to those who stood up to them. The rumors about the Mongols' cruelty frightened people. After hearing such terrible stories, many towns surrendered to the Mongols without a fight. The Mongols conquered much of Asia. By 1221, Central Asia was under Mongol control. Genghis Khan died from an accident in 1227. Those who ruled after him kept expanding the Mongol Empire, conquering territory from China to Poland. Genghis Khan died in 1227. His successors, however, continued to expand his empire. In less than 50 years, the Mongols conquered territory from China to Poland. At its fullest extent, the Mongol Empire stretched from the Yellow Sea to the Baltic Sea and from the Himalayas to northern Russia. In so doing, they created the largest unified land empire in history. The vastness of the Mongol Empire allowed, for the first time, an inter-continental traffic in goods, knowledge, and ideas. From the mid-1200s to the mid-1300s, the Mongols imposed stability and law and order across much of Eurasia. This period is sometimes called the Pax Mongolica (or Mongol Peace). The Mongols guaranteed safe passage of trade caravans, travelers, and missionaries from one end of the empire to another. The caravans and embassies that crossed the Mongol lands spread new foods, inventions, and ideas from one civilization to others and from civilized peoples to nomadic peoples. Like the Islamic expansion that came before it, the Mongol explosion laid the foundations for more human interaction on a global scale, extending and intensifying the world network that had been building since the classical age. China was thrown open to the world by both land and sea. Over the Silk Roads, traders transported Chinese silk and porcelain, which continued to be desired in Europe and western Asia. Each year, so Marco Polo recorded, 20,000 cargo ships sailed up the Yangtze River, bringing diamonds and pearls from India; ginger, cotton, and muslin from Ceylon; black pepper and cloves from Java. More significant, ideas and inventions traveled along with the trade goods. The gradual westward flow of eastern artifacts, knowledge, and expertise worked in favor of a Europe that was far behind China in the arts and sciences. Many Chinese innovations, such as gunpowder, printing, the compass, and paper currency reached Europe during this period. Other things spread along with the goods and the ideas. Perhaps the greatest longterm impact of the Mongol drive to the west was indirect and unintended. In recent years, a growing number of historians have become convinced that the Mongol conquests played a key role in spreading the fleas that carried bubonic plague from south China and central Asia to Europe and the Middle East. The Mongol armies unknowingly paved the way for the spread of the dreaded Black Death across the steppes to much of China, to the Islamic heartlands, and from there to most of Europe in the mid-14th century. Ultimately, in 1259, a dispute arose concerning succession to the Grand Khanate and the empire broke into four independent states which began feuding among themselves. These four were the Khanate of the Great Khan (Mongolia and China), the Khanate of Chagatai (Central Asia), the Ilkhanate (Persia), and the Khanate of the Golden Horde (Russia). The warrior Mongols, however, knew little about administering their territory. As a result, their vast empire crumbled in just a few generations- the entire Mongol period lasted only a century and a half. Interestingly, both Beijing (or Peking) in China and Moscow in Russia owe their status as capitals to the Mongols. Both cities became important military, economic, and administrative centers under the Mongols and have remained so to the present day. The Black Death ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In the fall of 1347, Italian trading ships left the Black Sea port of Caffa. They headed for the island of Sicily. During the trip, sailors started getting sick and dying. Soon after the ships arrived in Messina, Sicily, townspeople became sick and died. The Black Death, another name for the bubonic plague, had arrived in Italy. The disease had already killed millions in Asia and the Middle East. The bubonic plague is a disease that is spread by fleas on rats. It had broken out before in Europe, Asia, and North Africa. A new epidemic, or outbreak, of the disease started in China in the 1200s. It was normal for rats to be on ships and city streets during the Middle Ages. Fleacovered rats were common in crowded cities. Most people did not bathe, and almost all people had fleas and lice. Fleas carrying the disease jumped from rats onto people. Then, fleas jumped from person to person, spreading the disease quickly. The path of the Black Death followed trade routes. Infected fleas from rats in Chinese cities leaped onto the clothes and packs of traders who were traveling west. In this way, the disease spread from Asia to the Middle East. From Sicily, the plague spread to southern Italy, southern France and Spain by the end of 1347. In 1348, the plague spread through France, the Low Countries, and Germany. It ravaged England in 1349 and expanded to northern Europe and Scandinavia. Eastern Europe and Russia were affected by 1351. Unaware of what a flea bite might mean, people paid little attention until they noticed the swellings and black bruises on their skin that promised death. Victims suffered heavy sweats and convulsive coughing. They spat blood, stank terribly, and died in agony. The disease struck with stunning speed, killing within one to five days. Out of a total European population of 75 million, possibly as many as 38 million people died between 1347 and 1351. Especially hard hit were Italy's crowded cities, where 50 to 60% of the people died. In England and Germany, entire villages disappeared. No one knows the exact number of plague deaths in Europe. They happened so rapidly and in such great numbers that often the survivors could not keep up with burying the dead. The death of so many people had severe economic consequences. Town populations fell. Production declined, trade declined, and a shortage of workers caused a dramatic rise in the price of labor. Workers, now in short supply, demanded higher wages. At the same time, the decline in the number of people lowered the demand for food, resulting in falling prices. Fewer people meant that workers were scarce everywhere. Landlords were now paying more for labor while their incomes from rents were declining. Farmland was abandoned or used to pasture sheep, which required less labor. Serfs had often been unpaid or poorly paid for their labor. They left the manor in search of better wages. Some peasants bargained with their lords to pay rent instead of owing services. In essence, this change freed them from serfdom. People at the time did not know what caused the plague. Many believed that it either had been sent by God as a punishment for their sins or had been caused by the devil. Frightened people looked around for a scapegoat. They found one in the Jews, who were blamed for causing the plague by poisoning the town wells. In the resulting hysteria, thousands of Jews were slaughtered. All over Europe, Jews were driven from their homes or, worse, massacred. The worst attacks occurred in Germany. Many Jews fled eastward, especially to Poland, where the king provided protection. The plague brought terror and bewilderment, since people had no way to stop the disease. Some people turned to magic and witchcraft for cures. Still others saw the plague as God's punishment. They beat themselves with whips to show they repented their sins. Many people who saw how abruptly life could end became pessimistic about life itself, fearing the future. The art and literature of the time reflect an unusual awareness of death. On the other hand, many people displayed the attitude of "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die." Normal life broke down. Unlike catastrophes that pull communities together, this epidemic was so terrifying that it ripped apart the very fabric of society. "This scourge had implanted so great a terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases wives deserted their husbands. But even worse, fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children." The Church suffered a loss of prestige when its prayers and penances failed to stop the onslaught of the bubonic plague. In addition, many clergy deserted their flocks or charged high fees to perform services for the dying. The Church lost some of its power and importance. One person out of every three was killed by the epidemic in Europe. The bubonic plague spread death and caused many economic and social problems. Western Europe was left in a decline from which it did not fully recover for over 100 years. The Maya ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In the early centuries A.D., the peoples of Mexico and Central America were entering into the full flower of civilization. An example of this cultural flowering was the Maya, who built an extraordinary civilization in the heart of Mesoamerica. The civilization of the Maya flourished between A.D. 300 and 900. It was one of the most sophisticated civilizations in the Americas. The homeland of the Maya stretched from southern Mexico into northern Central America. This area includes a highland region and a lowland region. The lowlands lie to the north. They include the dry scrub forest of the Yucatan Peninsula and the dense, steamy jungles of southeastern Mexico and northern Guatemala. The highlands are further south- a range of cool, cloud-wreathed mountains that stretch from southern Mexico to El Salvador. The period from A.D. 250 to 900 is known as the Classic Period of Mayan civilization. During this time, the Maya built spectacular cities such as Tikal, a major center in northern Guatemala. Other important sites included Copan, Palenque, Uxmal, and Chichen Itza. Mayan cities were built around a central pyramid topped by a shrine to the gods. Nearby were other temples, palaces, and a sacred ball court. Tens of thousands of people lived in residential areas surrounding the city center, which bustled with activity. Archaeologists have identified at least 50 major Mayan sites, all with monumental architecture. Political: Mayan civilization was composed of city-states, each governed by a hereditary ruling class. Each city was an independent city-state, ruled by a god-king and serving as a center for religious ceremonies and trade. Rulers of the Mayan city-states claimed to be descended from the gods. His position was hereditary. When he died, he passed the throne on to his eldest son. Economic: Most of the Mayan people were peasant farmers. They lived on tiny plots or on terraced hills in the highlands. They grew corn, beans, and squash- the basic food crops of Middle America- as well as fruit trees, cotton, and brilliant tropical flowers. There was a fairly clear-cut division of labor. Men did the fighting and hunting, women the homemaking and raising of children. Women also made cornmeal, the basic food of many Mayans. To support the cities, farmers paid taxes in food and helped build the temples. For years, experts assumed that the Maya practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. This method involves farmers clearing the land by burning existing vegetation and planting crops in the ashes. Evidence now shows, however, that the Maya also developed more sophisticated methods which allowed them to thrive in the tropical environment. Mayan farmers cleared the dense rain forests and then built raised fields that caught and held rainwater. They also built channels that could be opened to drain off excess water. This complex system produced enough maize and other crops to support rapidly growing cities. Much of the wealth of Tikal and the other Mayan cities came from trade. Along roads made of packed earth, traders carried valuable cargoes of honey, cocoa, and feathers across most of Middle America. Cities exchanged the products of their local environment such as salt, flint, feathers, shells, and honey. Also traded were craft goods like cotton textiles and jade ornaments. While the Maya did not have a uniform currency, cacao (chocolate) beans sometimes served as one. Religion: Religion influenced most aspects of Mayan life. Crucial to Mayan civilization was its belief that all of life was in the hands of divine powers. The Maya believed in many gods. There were gods of corn, of death, of rain, and of war. Gods could be good or evil, and sometimes both. Mayan religious beliefs also led to the development of the calendar, mathematics, and astronomy. Mayans believed that time was a burden carried on the back of a god. At the end of a day, month, or year, one god would lay the burden down and another would pick it up. A day would be lucky or unlucky, depending on the nature of the god. Thus it was important to have an accurate calendar to know which god was in charge of the day. The Maya practiced human sacrifice as a way to appease the gods. Human sacrifices were usually of captured enemies. At Chichen Itza, in the Yucatan, they threw captives into a deep sinkhole lake, called a cenote, along with gold, jade, and other offerings. The Maya believed that human sacrifice pleased the gods and kept the world in balance. Nevertheless, the Maya's use of sacrifice never reached the extremes of some other Mesoamerican peoples, like the Aztecs. Cultural: The Maya also developed the most advanced writing system in the ancient Americas. They created a sophisticated writing system based on hieroglyphs, or pictures. Mayan writing consisted of about 800 hieroglyphic symbols, or glyphs. The Maya used their writing system to record important historical events. Mayan hieroglyphs remained a mystery to scholars for centuries. The Maya used two different systems for measuring time. One was based on a solar calendar of 365 days. The other system was based on a sacred calendar of 260 days. The two calendars were linked together like meshed gears so that any given day could be identified in both cycles. The calendar helped identify the best time to plant crops, attack enemies, or crown new rulers. Mayan astronomers used a math system that included the concept of zero. The Mayan number system was a base 20 system. They used the numerical system primarily for calendar and astronomical work, not to count people or objects. The remarkable history of the Maya ended in mystery. About A.D. 900, the Mayas abandoned their cities, leaving their great stone palaces and temples to be swallowed up by the jungle. Not until modern times were these "lost cities" rediscovered. No one knows for sure why Mayan civilization declined. Increased warfare may have disrupted trade and produced economic hardship. In addition, population growth and over-farming may have caused ecological damage, causing food shortages, famine, and disease. All these circumstances probably contributed to the fall of Mayan civilization. The Aztecs ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ According to their legends, their god of war and of the sun, Huitzilopochtli, had told the Aztecs that when they saw an eagle perched on a cactus growing out of a rock, their nomadic wanderings would end. In 1325, on one of the islands in Lake Texcoco, they saw an eagle standing on a prickly pear cactus on a rock. There they built Tenochtitlan (or "place of the prickly pear cactus"), now the location of Mexico City. Political: The Aztecs, who were then called the Mexica, were fierce and ambitious. Over the years, the Aztecs gradually increased in strength and number. The Aztecs were outstanding warriors. Through a combination of fierce conquests and shrewd alliances, they spread their rule over most of Mexico, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. By the early 1500s, they controlled a vast Mesoamerican empire. Unlike the Mayan city-states, each of which had its own king, the Aztecs had a single ruler. Power in the Aztec state was in the hands of the monarch, who claimed that he was descended from the gods. The Aztec kingdom was not a centralized state. The Aztecs exercised loose control over much of their empire. They often let local rulers govern their own regions. The Aztec ruler supported these rulers in their authority in return for tribute, goods in the form of gold, maize, cacao beans, cotton, jade, and other products, paid by conquered peoples to their conquerors. If local rulers failed to pay tribute, or otherwise defied the Aztecs, the Aztec warriors would respond brutally. They would destroy villages and capture or slaughter the inhabitants. War brought immense wealth as well as power. Social: At the height of the Aztec empire, military leaders held great power in Aztec society. Along with government officials and priests, these military leaders made up the noble class. Many nobles owned vast estates, which they ruled over, like lords, living a life of great wealth and luxury. Next came the warriors, who could rise to noble status by killing or capturing enemy soldiers. The other two broad classes in Aztec society were the commoners and the slaves. Commoners included merchants, artisans, soldiers, and farmers who owned their own land. Most people were commoners, and many commoners were farmers. At the bottom of society were the slaves, mostly criminals or prisoners of war. Slaves did many different jobs. From the beginnings of their lives, boys and girls in Aztec society were given very different roles. As soon as a male baby was born, the midwife who attended the birth said, "You must understand that your home is not here where you have been born, for you are a warrior." To a female infant, the midwife said, "As the heart stays in the body, so you must stay in the house." Economic: The Aztecs controlled an extensive trade network, which brought many products from faraway regions to the capital at Tenochtitlan. The economic heart of the city was the huge market of Tlatelolco. When the Spanish reached Tenochtitlan in 1519, they were awestruck. "The city has many squares where markets are held and trading is carried on. There is one square where there are daily more than 60,000 souls, buying and selling, and where are found all the kinds of merchandise produced in these countries, including food products, jewels of gold and silver, lead, brass, copper, zinc, bones, shells, and feathers." Much of the agricultural produce sold at the market was grown on chinampas, artificial islands made of earth piled on reed mats that were anchored to the shallow lake bed. On these "floating gardens," they raised corn, squash, and beans. These farm plots, which spread out from Tenochtitlan in all directions, were extremely productive. They provided the food needed for a huge urban population. Religion: Religion played a major role in Aztec society. In Tenochtitlan, there were hundreds of temples and religious structures dedicated to the gods. Aztec religious practice centered on elaborate public ceremonies designed to communicate with the gods and win their favor. The priests performed the rituals needed to please the many Aztec gods and prevent droughts, floods, or other disasters. Aztec religion was based on a belief in an unending struggle between the forces of good and evil throughout the universe. The Aztecs believed that Huitzilopochtli, the chief Aztec god / the sun god, battled the forces of darkness each night and was reborn each morning. As the Legend of the Five Suns shows, there was no guarantee that the sun would always win. To give the sun strength to rise each day, the Aztecs offered human sacrifices. Without regular offerings of blood, the sun would fall from the sky and all life would perish. For that reason, priests offered the hearts of tens of thousands of victims to Huitzilopochtli and other Aztec gods. At the center of the capital city of Tenochtitlan was a massive pyramid dedicated to Huitzilopochtli. A platform at the top held shrines to the gods and an altar for performing human sacrifices. Thousands of victims, usually prisoners of war, were led to the altar atop the Great Temple, where priests carved out their hearts using obsidian knives. Other cultures such as the Olmecs and the Mayas had practiced human sacrifice, but not on the massive scale of the Aztecs. To fulfill this sacred duty, the priests required a steady supply of war captives. The Aztecs carried on almost continuous warfare, using the captured enemy soldiers for a regular source of sacrificial victims. The battle tactics of Aztec warriors were designed to provide live prisoners of war for the sacrifices. Cultural: By the early 1500s, Tenochtitlan had become an extraordinary urban center. With an estimated population of 200,000 people, it was larger than London or any other European capital of the time. In Tenochtitlan, palaces, temples, markets, and residential districts were connected by streets and avenues. Canals divided the city, allowing canoes to bring people and cargo directly into the city center. Aqueducts funneled fresh water in from the mainland. At the center of the city was a huge, walled complex, filled with palaces, temples, and government buildings. The main structure in this complex was the Great Temple. It was a giant pyramid with twin temples at the top, the Aztec religious center. The Inca ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Pachacuti, a skilled warrior and leader, was the founder of the Incan empire. In 1438, he proclaimed himself Sapa Inca, or emperor. He and his son rapidly conquered an empire that stretched 2,500 miles down the Andes and along the Pacific coast, extending Incan rule from Ecuador in the north to Chile in the south. The Inca called this empire Tihuantinsuya, or "Land of the Four Quarters," it was the largest empire ever seen in the Americas. Political: The Sapa Inca exercised absolute power over the empire. Claiming he was divine, the son of the sun itself, he was also the chief religious leader. The Incan god-king owned all the land, herds, mines, and people. To create a well-organized empire, Pachacuti divided it into four quarters, with each ruled by a governor. In turn, the quarters were divided into provinces, each also ruled by a governor. From their capital at Cuzco, the Inca ran an efficient government with a chain of command reaching into every village. Nobles ruled the provinces. In general, local administration was left in the hands of local rulers, and villages were allowed to continue their traditional ways. The Incan state was built on war, so all young men were required to serve in the Incan army. They created an efficient economic system to support the empire and an extensive road system to tie it together. They also imposed a single official language, Quechua, and founded schools to teach Incan ways. All of these actions were to unify the variety of people controlled by the Inca. There was almost no crime in the Incan empire. Inca laws were very harsh. Punishment was swift. If you insulted the Inca, cursed the gods, or committed a murder, you were thrown off a cliff. If you were caught stealing or cheating, you either had your hands and feet cut off. There were lesser punishments- you could be stoned or you could be tied to a wall and left to freeze. If you lived through your punishment, you were classified as a criminal, and you became a ward of the state. The state took care of you. They clothed and fed you. Your job as a criminal was to tell others about your crime. Every day, criminals were taken to the city gates and given a begging bowl. As people passed by, criminals had to announce their crimes. If their stories were interesting, people would toss food or small trinkets into the bowls. That way, each criminal could prove how many had stopped to listen as they confessed their crimes. And the people had daily reminders of what would happen to them if they broke the law. Economic: The Incan state controlled most economic activity, regulating the production and distribution of goods. Unlike the Maya and the Aztec, the Inca allowed little private commerce or trade. Land ownership was divided in three ways: state lands, religious lands, and community lands. Farmers worked on all three types of land. On steep hillsides, farmers carved out strips of land to be held in place by stone walls. These terraces kept rains from washing away the soil and made farming possible in places where flat land was scarce. The Inca also created a massive water management system that stored water for the dry season. The main demand the Incan state placed on its subjects was for tribute, mainly in the form of labor. The labor tribute was known as mita. It required all to work for the state a certain number of days every year, usually for several weeks. Mita workers might labor on state farmlands, produce craft goods for state warehouses, or help build public works, such as roads, palaces, or irrigation canals. Farmers had to spend part of each year working land for the emperor and the temples as well as for their own communities. The government took possession of each harvest, dividing it among the people and storing part in case of famine. Historians have compared the Incan system to a type of socialism or a modern welfare state. Citizens were expected to work for state and were cared for in return. For example, the aged and disabled were often supported by the state. Religion. The Inca were polytheistic. The Inca focused on key nature spirits such as the moon, the stars, and thunder. Chief of the Incan gods was a creator god called Viracocha. Next in importance was the sun god, Inti. Because the Incan ruler was considered a descendant of Inti, sun worship amounted to worship of the king. The Temple of the Sun in Cuzco was the most sacred of all Incan shrines. It was heavily decorated in gold, a metal the Inca referred to as "sweat of the sun." Cultural: The heart of the Incan empire, Cuzco, the capital, was a splendid city of temples, plazas, and palaces. Like the Romans, the Inca were master engineers and stonemasons. Incan builders carved and transported huge blocks of stone, fitting them together perfectly without mortar. Nothing shows the architectural genius of the Inca more than the ruins of the abandoned city of Machu Picchu. The Incan road system was one of the great road systems in history. A marvel of engineering, this road system symbolized the power of the Incan state. The 24,800-milelong network of roads and bridges spanned the empire, traversing rugged mountains and harsh deserts. The roads ranged from paved stone to simple paths. Hundreds of bridges spanned rivers and deep gorges. Steps were cut into steep slopes and tunnels dug through hillsides. As in Rome, all roads led to the capital, Cuzco. Along the roads, the Inca built rest houses, located a day's walk apart, to provide shelter for weary travelers. The roads allowed armies and news to move rapidly throughout the empire. A system of runners traveled these roads as a kind of postal service, carrying messages from one end of the empire to the other. Ordinary people, though, were restricted from using the roads at all. Despite the sophistication of many aspects of Incan life, the Inca never developed a writing system. For numerical information, the Inca created an accounting device known as the quipu, a set of knotted strings that could be used to record data. The lack of a fully developed writing system did not prevent the Inca from attaining a high level of cultural achievement. The Age of Exploration ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ For almost a thousand years (500-1500), Europeans had mostly remained in one part of the world. Then at the end of the 15th century, they set out on a remarkable series of overseas journeys. First Portugal and Spain, then later the Dutch Republic, England, and France. What caused them to take such dangerous voyages to the ends of the earth? The desire to grow rich and to spread Christianity, coupled with advances in sailing technology, spurred an age of European exploration. The desire for new sources of wealth was the main reason for European exploration. By the late 1400s, the desire to share in the rich trade in spices and other luxury goods from Asia spurred Europeans to explore the oceans. Europeans had long traded with Asia. The people of Europe had been introduced to Asian goods during the Crusades, the wars fought between Christians and Muslims from 1096 to 1270. After the Crusades ended, Europeans continued to demand spices which added flavor to the bland foods of Europe. Later, when the Mongol empire united much of Asia in the 1200s and 1300s, Asian goods flowed to Europe along the Silk Road (an overland trade route). The Black Death and the breakup of the Mongol empire disrupted these routes. By the 1400s, though, Europe was recovering from the plague. As its population increased, so too, did the demand for Asian goods. The most valued trade items were spices, such as cloves, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg- and, especially, pepper. In the days before refrigeration, meat spoiled quickly. People used spices to preserve food and to add flavor to dried and salted meat. Spices were also used to make medicines and perfumes. The major source of spices was the Moluccas, an island chain in present-day Indonesia, which Europeans called the Spice Islands. Because demand for these goods was greater than the supply, merchants could charge high prices and thus make great profits. In the 1400s, Muslim and Italian merchants controlled most of the trade between Asia and Europe. Muslim traders brought spices and other prized goods to eastern Mediterranean ports in Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. From there, traders from Venice and other Italian cities carried the precious cargoes to European markets. Each time goods passed from one trader to another, the prices increased. Europeans wanted to cut out the Muslim and Italian middlemen and gain direct access to the riches of Asia. This meant finding a sea route directly to Asia. In the hope of enormous reward, sailors risked death on long sea voyages in tiny wooden ships. Europeans also had hopes of finding precious metals (gold and silver and precious jewels). A few even went in search of fabulous cities with enormous riches, such as the legendary El Dorado. The desire for wealth was not the only motive that lured men to sea. The desire to spread Christianity also fueled European exploration. Some voyagers were still fired by the centuries-old desire to crusade against the Muslims. Others believed that they had a sacred duty to convert non-Christians throughout the world. Bartolomeu Dias, an early Portuguese explorer, explained his motives: "to serve God and His Majesty, to give light to those who were in darkness and to grow rich as all men desire to do." Many people shared the belief of Hernan Cortes, the Spanish conqueror of Mexico, that they must ensure that the natives "are introduced into the holy Catholic faith." Finally, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had led to religious and political persecution. Many people, like the Pilgrims and Puritans, went overseas to seek religious freedom for themselves and to escape persecution at home. Grandeur, glory, and a spirit of adventure also played a major role in European expansion. By the early 1400s, Europeans were ready to venture beyond their borders. For one thing, the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution had created a desire to learn more about the world. Thus simple curiosity and a spirit of discovery moved many people to explore the world outside Europe. In many cases, there was no single reason that motivated a person or group of people to explore or colonize. Rather, a combination of these hopes and aims led Europeans to leave their old lives for new and, to them, unknown lands. "God, glory, and gold," then, were the chief motives for European expansion, but what made the voyages possible? Europeans had reached a level of technology that enabled them to make a regular series of voyages beyond Europe. Several improvements in technology helped Europeans conquer the vast oceans of the world. In the 1400s, the Portuguese developed a new vessel- the caravel, which combined the square sails of European ships with Arab lateen, or triangular, sails. The new rigging made it easier to sail across or even into the wind. Caravels also adopted the sternpost rudder and numerous masts of Chinese ships. Ships traveled more quickly and could be steered more easily. Along with larger and better ships, Europeans had more reliable navigational tools. New technology enabled ships to sail beyond sight of land without getting lost. European sailors also learned to use the astrolabe, an instrument developed by the ancient Greeks and perfected by the Arabs, to determine their latitude at sea. One of the most important instruments to be developed during this time was the compass. Explorers were able to more accurately track their direction by using a magnetic compass invented by the Chinese. Cartographers, or mapmakers, created more accurate maps and sea charts. Improved ways of doing business also played a part. Banks could store large sums of money that they could lend governments or businesses wanting to explore overseas. Individual merchants joined together into a new kind of organization called a joint-stock company. Owners raised money by selling shares, or stock, in the company. Investors who bought the stock became co-owners and shared in the profits. The more shares they owned, the more of the profits they would receive. Joint-stock companies raised large sums of money from investors to finance exploration. In other cases, Europeans changed basic economic practices. The changes were so great that many historians refer to the period between the late 1400s and the 1700s as the Commercial Revolution. The Explorers ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Age of Discovery, also known as the Age of Exploration, was a period in history starting in the 15th century, in which Europeans explored the world by sea searching for particular trade goods- the most desired being gold, silk and spices. Leading up to the Age of Exploration was a series of European travelers crossing Eurasia by land during the Pax Mongolica. The most famous of whom was Marco Polo, an Italian merchant, who wrote of his journeys throughout Asia from 1271 to 1295 in a book called Travels. The Mongol empire collapsed almost as quickly as it formed and soon the route to the east became difficult and dangerous. The rise of the hostile and expansionist Ottoman Empire, a Muslim empire, further limited the possibilities of European overland trade. Thus Western Europeans sought a sea trade route to Asia. Portugal led the way in European exploration. Beginning in 1420, under the sponsorship of Prince Henry "the Navigator", Portuguese fleets began probing southward along the western coast of Africa. In 1488, Bartholomeu Dias rounded the tip of Africa, called the Cape of Good Hope, and proved that one could sail around Africa and enter the Indian Ocean. In 1498 Vasco da Gama made good on this promise by reaching India itself. He returned to Portugal with a fabulous cargo of spices and jewels. Portugal's rival Spain had been somewhat slower than its neighbor to begin exploring the Atlantic. It was not until the late 15th century following the completion of the reconquista that Spain began looking for new trade routes and colonies overseas. In 1492, the rulers of Spain- Ferdinand and Isabella- funded Christopher Columbus' expedition. Columbus, like most educated people, knew the Earth was round, and thus he believed that he could reach Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic instead of east. In August, Columbus set sail with three ships- the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. After a voyage of six weeks, Columbus reached the Americas on October 12, where he explored the coastline of Cuba and the island of Hispaniola. Claiming the islands for Spain, Columbus believed he had reached Asia. Through three more voyages, he sought in vain to find a route through the Caribbean islands- which he called the Indies- to the Asian mainland. Columbus did not reach Asia, but rather found what was to the Europeans a New World. For Portugal and Spain a division of influence became now necessary to avoid conflict. The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in 1494, split the world between the two powers. Territories east of the line would be controlled by Portugal, and those west of the line by Spain. The Portuguese "received" Africa, Asia and eastern South America (Brazil), while the Spanish "received" everything to the west- almost all the Americas. Upon da Gama's return to Portugal in 1499, the jubilant King Manuel styled himself "Lord of the Conquest, Navigation, and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India," setting forth the ambitious scope of his plans. Previously the Indian Ocean had been an open sea, used by merchants of all the surrounding lands. Now the Portuguese intended to make it Portugal's sea, the private property of the Portuguese alone, which others might use only on Portuguese terms. The Portuguese began seizing key points that would allow them to control all the major trade routes of the east. Thus forts and trading posts were established in West and East Africa, at Hormuz/Ormuz in the Persian Gulf, at Goa & Diu in India, at Malacca in Southeast Asia, and Macao in China. The ability of little Portugal to assert control over the Indian Ocean stemmed from the superiority of its ships and cannons. The Portuguese never gained complete control of the Indian Ocean trade, but their domination of key ports and the main trade routes during the 16th century brought them great wealth. It was the Northern Europeans who became the great rivals to the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. The Dutch, French and English ignored the division of the world. During the 17th century, they established trading posts and colonies of their own in the east, at the expense of Portugal. The Portuguese state proved to be simply too small to provide the money and manpower needed to control and defend its empire. Initially, Columbus and other Spanish explorers were disappointed with their discoveries- unlike Africa or Asia, the Caribbean islanders had little to trade with the Spanish ships. The islands thus became the focus of colonization efforts. It was not until the continent itself was explored that Spain found the wealth it had wanted in the form of abundant gold and silver. In the Americas, the Spanish found a number of rich empiresthe Aztecs and the Inca- to conquer. In 1519 the Spanish crown funded the expedition of Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan. The goal of his mission was to find the Spice Islands by travelling west, which would place the islands in Spain's sphere. The fleet managed to cross the Pacific Ocean and reach the islands, and was the first to circumnavigate (sail around) the world upon its return three years later. The expedition was a failure though in the sense that its route was impractical. It was not a realistic alternative to the route around Africa. European voyages of discovery were undertaken to search for sea routes to Asia. The Portuguese found a route east around Africa, the Spanish a route west around South America. The English, Dutch, and French began looking for a route west around North America. The first mission in 1497 was an English expedition led by the Italian, John Cabot. In 1534, the French explorer, Jacques Cartier discovered the St Lawrence River which carried him deep into the continent. Martin Frobisher set out in 1576. Henry Hudson, an Englishman, sailed for the English in 1607, the Dutch in 1609, and the English again in 1610. The Northwest Passage to Asia was never discovered, but in their travels other possibilities were uncovered and in the early 17th century colonists began to settle on the east coast of North America. During the early period of the Ming dynasty- the late 1300s and early 1400s- the Chinese were probably the most skilled sailors in the world. The Chinese admiral Zheng He led seven expeditions between 1405 and 1433 exploring the coasts of Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, and East Africa. Everything about them was large- distances traveled, size of the fleet, and the size of the ships themselves. The Chinese clearly had the ability to become a great seafaring power. After the seventh voyage ended in 1433, there were no more. China withdrew into isolation. Given the impact of Europe's voyages of discovery, we can only wonder how history might have changed if the Chinese had continued their explorations. The Conquerors ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Spanish colonization of the New World began in the West Indies. From there, Spanish explorers, known as conquistadors, after the Spanish word for conquerors, went to Central and South America. There they found new and thriving civilizations- the Aztecs and the Inca. Rich in treasure, their wealth proved to be their ruin. The two Spaniards leading the conquests of the Aztec and Incan empires were Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro respectively. Cortés landed his expedition on the coast of modern-day Mexico in 1519 and established a settlement called Vera Cruz, which was the starting point for his attempt to conquer the Aztec empire. After destroying his ships, effectively stranding his men, Cortés led his band of some 600 soldiers inland towards the fabled Tenochtitlan. After a journey of nearly three months, Cortés arrived at the outskirts of Tenochtitlan, the island capital of the Aztecs. It is believed that the city was one of the largest in the world at that time. The Aztec ruler Moctezuma II welcomed him with great pomp and they exchanged gifts. Cortés then seized Moctezuma, made him his prisoner as insurance against an Aztec revolt, and demanded an enormous ransom of gold. At this point, Cortés received news from the coast that a much larger force of Spaniards had arrived with orders to arrest him and bring him back to Cuba for trial for mutiny. Cortés returned to Veracruz and convinced the soldiers to join him instead. When Cortés returned to Tenochtitlan, he found that the men he had left behind had attacked and killed many of the Aztec nobility during a festival. The population of the city risen in mass after the Spanish attack. The Aztecs besieged the palace housing the Spaniards. Cortés ordered Moctezuma to speak to his people and persuade them to let the Spanish leave in peace. Moctezuma was jeered and stones were thrown at him, injuring him badly. He died a few days later. Now the Spaniards and their allies had to flee the city. On a rainy night, the Spaniards and their allies set out for the mainland via a causeway, taking all the gold they could carry. Their movement was detected and Aztec forces attacked, both along the causeway and by means of canoes on the lake. The Spanish were thus caught on a narrow road with water on two sides. The retreat quickly turned into chaos. The bulk of the Spanish infantry had to cut their way through masses of Aztec warriors. Many of the Spaniards, weighed down by gold, drowned or were killed by the Aztecs. In this retreat the Spaniards suffered heavy casualties. It is said that Cortés, upon reaching the mainland, wept over his losses. This episode is called "La Noche Triste" (the sad night). The Aztecs pursued and harassed the Spanish, but the Spanish were able to escape to Tlaxcala. There Cortés made an alliance with Tlaxcalteca, who hated the Aztecs, and began to fight back. Cortés returned to Tenochtitlan and mounted a siege of the city. The Spaniards cut off the supply of food and water to the city. Even worse, many of the Aztecs were afflicted with smallpox and died. Despite heroic resistance, the city fell on August 13, 1521 when the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtemoc, surrendered to Cortés. Tenochtitlan was dismantled and the Spanish began to build Mexico City. At the time that the Spanish arrived in 1528, the Incan Empire extend from southern Colombia to Chile, and from the Pacific Ocean to the edge of the Amazonian jungles (about 380,000 square miles). Scholars estimate that the population of the empire probably numbered over 16,000,000. Francisco Pizarro was attracted by the news of this rich kingdom. In 1529, he obtained permission from the Spanish king to conquer the land. Pizarro returned to Peru in 1532 and learned of the civil war and of the smallpox epidemic that was weakening the Incan Empire. At this point, Pizarro had 168 men under his command: 106 on foot and 62 on horses. Most accounts agree that Atahualpa, the Sapa Inca or Incan emperor, met with Pizarro voluntarily. It seems Atahualpa did not consider the small Spanish force a threat. Atahualpa met with the Spaniards at Cajamarca. He came with 7,000 unarmed soldiers and attendants. But Pizarro had prepared an ambush to trap the Inca. At the signal to attack, the Spaniards unleashed volleys of gunfire at the vulnerable mass of Incas and surged forward. The effect was devastating, the shocked Incas offered such feeble resistance that the battle has often been labeled a massacre with the Inca losing 2,000 dead compared to five of Pizarro's men. Accounts by members of Pizarro's force explain how the Spanish used a cavalry charge against the Incan forces, who had never seen horses, in combination with gunfire (the Inca had never seen guns either). Other factors in the Spaniard's favor were their steel swords, helmets and armor, against the Incan forces which only had leather armor and were unarmed. The Spanish also had a three small cannon which were used to great effect in the crowded town square. Pizarro took Atahualpa captive. The Incan Empire had a highly centralized chain of command which meant that once the greatly outnumbered Spaniards held the emperor hostage, they effectively paralyzed the empires' military forces. Noticing the Spanish lust for precious metals, Atahualpa offered to fill a large room with gold and promised twice that amount in silver in exchange for his freedom. While Pizarro accepted this offer and allowed the gold to pile up, he had no intention of releasing the emperor. He needed Atahualpa's influence over his generals and the people in order to maintain the peace. By May 1533, Pizarro received all the treasure he had requested. The question now was what to do with Atahualpa. A mock trial was held. He was charged with revolting against the Spanish and practicing idolatry. Atahualpa was sentenced to execution by burning. Upon converting and being baptized, he was strangled to death instead. Having deprived the Incan empire of its leader, Pizarro moved south to Cuzco, the capital and heart of the empire, which he captured in November 1533. He then led his men in an orgy of looting, pillaging, and torture in search of more precious metals. The Spaniards destroyed almost every Incan building in Cuzco, built a Spanish city on top of the old foundations, and proceeded to colonize and exploit the former empire. Riding horses, carrying firearms, and spreading disease, a small number of conquistadors had conquered two empires and put the New World's vast wealth at Spain's disposal, making Spain the most powerful nation on Earth for the next 100 years. The Atlantic Slave Trade ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ During the Age of Exploration, the Portuguese first explored the coast of Africa. As they advanced down the coast in search of gold and a route to Asia, they exchanged goods with African traders. In return for European goods, local traders offered gold, ivory, and slaves. At first the Portuguese were less interested in slaves than in gold and ivory. The demand for slaves changed dramatically, however, with the discovery of the Americas and the planting of sugarcane there. Cane sugar was introduced to Europe from the Middle East during the Crusades. During the 16th century, plantations, large agricultural estates, were set up along the coast of Brazil and on islands in the Caribbean to grow sugarcane. Sugar plantations and tobacco farms required a large supply of workers to make them profitable for their owners. European owners had planned to use Native Americans as a source of cheap labor. European colonists in the Americas had forced Native Americans to work in their mines and plantations. But millions of Native Americans had died from disease and warfare. The small native population could not provide the cheap labor needed. Therefore, the Europeans in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern colonies of North America soon turned to Africa for workers. The Spanish took an early lead in importing Africans to the Americas. By 1650, nearly 300,000 Africans labored throughout Spanish America on plantations and in gold and silver mines. However, the Portuguese soon surpassed the Spanish. During the 1600s, Brazil dominated the European sugar market. As the colony's sugar industry grew, so too did European colonists' demand for slaves. During the 17th century, more than 40% of all Africans brought to the Americas went to Brazil. By the time the slave trade ended, Brazil had received more than 3.6 million Africans. That was nearly 10 times the number of Africans who would arrive in North America. As the other European nations established colonies in the Americas, their demand for cheap labor grew too. Thus, they also began to import and enslave large numbers of Africans. A majority of these slaves labored on sugar, tobacco, and coffee plantations in the Dutch, French, and English colonies in the Caribbean. In time, the buying and selling of Africans for work in the Americas- known as the Atlantic slave trade- became a massive enterprise. This Atlantic slave trade soon dominated all relations between Europe and western Africa. It had begun in the 1500s, to fill the need for labor in Spain's American empire. In the next 300 years, it grew into a huge and profitable business. Each year, traders shipped tens of thousands of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to work on tobacco and sugar plantations in the Americas. In 1518, a Spanish ship carried the first boatload of African slaves directly from Africa to the Americas. During the next two centuries, the trade in slaves grew dramatically and became part of the triangular trade that marked the emergence of a new world economy. The pattern of triangular trade connected Europe, Africa and Asia, and the American continents. Over one trade route, European merchant ships carried European manufactured goods, such as guns and cloth, to Africa, where they were traded for a cargo of slaves. Europeans seldom went into the interior to take part in slave raids. Instead, they relied on African rulers and traders to seize captives in the interior and bring them to coastal trading posts and forts. There, the captives were exchanged for textiles, metalwork, rum, tobacco, weapons, and gunpowder. The slaves were then transported across the Atlantic Ocean and sold in the Americas. This second leg was known as the Middle Passage. European merchants then bought tobacco, molasses, sugar, and raw cotton and shipped them back to Europe to be sold in European markets. The prosperity of port cities such as Nantes in France, Bristol in England, and Salem in Massachusetts depended in large part on the slave trade. On another triangular route, merchants carried rum and other goods from the New England colonies to Africa. There they exchanged their merchandise for Africans. The traders then transported the Africans to the West Indies and sold them for sugar and molasses. They then sold these goods to rum producers in New England. Various other transatlantic routes existed. In fact, the triangular trade encompassed a network of trade routes crisscrossing the Northern and Southern colonies, the West Indies, England, Europe, and Africa. The network carried a variety of traded goods. These included furs, fruit, tar, and tobacco, as well as millions of African people. For enslaved Africans, the Middle Passage was a horror. Sickening cruelty characterized this journey. Once purchased, Africans were packed below the decks of slave ships. Hundreds of men, women, and children were crammed into a single vessel. Slave ships became "floating coffins" on which up to half the Africans on board died from disease or brutal mistreatment. The smell of blood, sweat, and excrement filled the hold. African captives often lived in their own vomit and waste. Some enslaved Africans resisted. A few tried to seize control of the ship and return to Africa. Others committed suicide by leaping overboard. Scholars estimate that roughly 20% of the Africans aboard each slave ship perished during the brutal trip to the Americas. Between 1500 and 1600, nearly 300,000 Africans were transported to the Americas. In the 17th century, the total climbed to over a million and jumped to six million in the 18th century. By then the trade had spread from West Africa and central Africa to East Africa. As England's presence in the Americas grew, it came to dominate the Atlantic slave trade. From 1690 until the nation abolished the slave trade in 1807, England was the leading carrier of enslaved Africans. Historians are still debating the number of Africans who were affected by the Atlantic slave trade. By the 1800s, when the overseas slave trade was finally stopped, an estimated 11 million enslaved Africans had reached the Americas. One reason for these astonishing numbers, of course, was the high death rate. The journey of slaves from Africa to the Americas became known as the Middle Passage, the middle portion of the triangular trade route. Another 2 million probably died under the brutal conditions of the voyage between Africa and the Americas. Those who arrived often died from diseases to which they had little or no immunity. The Columbian Exchange ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Though his landing was not at the spot that he had proposed to the Spanish rulers, Columbus's arrival at Guanahani was to have consequences far more significant and farreaching than the discovery of a western trade route to India. Perhaps the most important consequence of Columbus's voyage was the unleashing of a set of extraordinary forces of change. As Columbus strode ashore to meet the friendly, generous natives, he began a series of exchanges between the two worlds. From that moment on, neither world was ever the same. Historian Alfred W. Crosby Jr. calls this transfer of peoples, animals, plants, and diseases between the New and Old Worlds- the Columbian Exchange. Crosby notes that some catalysts, like the potato, were humble, while others, like religion, were more profound. The Smithsonian Institution selected five catalysts, which it called "seeds," for its 1992 exhibit, Seeds of Change: disease, the horse, corn, the potato, and sugar. As the exhibit pointed out, the exchange was not one-way. While sugar and the horse were brought to the Americas, corn and the potato were taken to Europe and Africa. Diseases sought out victims in both hemispheres. Each of these seeds, once transplanted, had farreaching, often contradictory, consequences. At first an agent of Spanish conquest, horses became a catalyst for change in Indian culture. By giving the Plains Indians increased mobility, the horse brought tribes into increased contact- both peaceful and warlike- with each other and with encroaching whites. Moreover, it influenced virtually every aspect of Plains culture, from hunting and transportation to concepts of wealth and courage, to marriage customs and funeral traditions. Disease, too, brought major changes in both hemispheres after Columbus's voyages. Smallpox, especially, among the diseases common in Europe but unknown in the Americas, ravaged the native American population, producing as much as a 90% population loss in the first century after contact. Though the disease was not introduced intentionally, it became an unexpected ally of the conquest. Cortes' victory at Tenochtitlan can be credited largely to the effects of smallpox. Food seems a more benevolent seed of change. For Europe and Africa, the Americans provided a cornucopia of new foods. Among the over three hundred food crops cultivated by the American Indians were peanuts, beans, squash, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, papayas, manioc (cassava or tapioca), guavas, avocados, pineapples, tomatoes, chili peppers, cocoa, sunflowers, and the two "miracle crops" corn and potatoes. The major New World crops, especially corn and the potato, provided a greater number of calories per acre than did the Old World wheat, barley, rice, or rye. Other foods, like many varieties of beans, became known as the "poor man's meat," providing a source of protein for those who could not afford to own livestock. In contrast to most of these crops, sugar brought controversial change. Growing and processing sugar is labor-intensive, and, when the native labor pool declined from disease and harsh treatment, an alternative source was needed: slaves from Africa. By the eighteenth century, sugar cane was the most important cash crop in tropical America. The Americas became an integral part of the world economy, largely because of the sugar trade. The sugar colonies bought slaves from Africa, manufactured goods and luxuries for Europe, and harvested basic foods and lumber from North America. In return, they exported sugar, rum, and molasses. The sugar industry of the Americas began a global economy in which decisions made on one continent had consequences for several others. It is this interconnectedness that the Smithsonian claimed was Columbus's greatest legacy. In 1492 the world was round. After 1492 the world was one. Today, the world is even more closely linked than it became in October 1492. This, then, may be the most significant result of Columbus's voyages- not that he discovered a "a new world" but rather that, from his time on, two "old worlds" merged into one. Columbus: Hero or Villain? ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ No, Columbus didn't discover America. It's pretty clear by now that Columbus was not the first outsider to set foot in the Western Hemisphere. That distinction belongs to the original human settlers, who probably crossed from Asia tens of thousands of years ago. Or, most likely, Leif Eriksson and the Vikings who landed in "Vinland" in about A.D. 1000. But even if they did reach the American continent, none of them made a big deal about it- which Christopher Columbus, in 1492, emphatically did. He left European settlers and animals behind, he brought native people and vegetables back. He told tales of rich lands and potential treasure. He inspired a wave of explorers and adventurers to head west. In short, he had consequences. That is why, 500 years later, the world still takes notice. It was as if scattered pieces of the human puzzle were fitted together at last. Parts became a whole, and life was transformed in a hundred ways. New foods reshaped the diet of both hemispheres; sugar, cattle and pigs moved west, the tomato and the potato, cocoa and corn moved east. The horse, unknown in the New World, changed daily existence for the Indians of the North American plains and made possible the world of the gauchos and cowboys. The wheel, which the pre-Columbian civilizations of the West used only in children's toys, revolutionized work and travel. Written language spread through the continent, replacing either a ponderous system of hieroglyphics or nothing at all. Inevitably, there was havoc. Diseases against which they had no natural immunity took a terrible toll among the people of the New World; smallpox alone wiped out many millions. Germs were the conquistadors' most devastating weapon; local populations were so racked by illness that they could offer little resistance to the European conquest. Syphilis may have spread in the opposite direction; it first appeared in Europe after the conquistadors began returning from the Americas. Tobacco, its delights masking its dangers, was another gift from the New World to the Old. Not only Europeans came over; soon Africans began arriving in great numbers, as slaves. They were brought in, at first, to work the sugar plantations springing up on the islands of the Caribbean; the local population was found to be unsuitable for the work- or, in many instances, had been decimated by disease. Agriculture based on slavery spread both north and south. The Western Hemisphere's natives were thus not the only ones to suffer from the European advance. Columbus and his followers sowed seeds of racial antagonism that tangle life in many parts of the American continent to this day. Slavery, conquest, disease and humiliation- these are the legacy of Columbus, in the eyes of some people today. They see nothing to celebrate in the 500th anniversary of his crossing; instead, they think it should be an occasion for protest- or at best a vast, sad silence. Fair enough- up to a point. Much of the old "Columbus sailed the ocean blue" lore does need refinement. For one thing, some of it is wrong. Past ages, too, have told the story mostly through European eyes. The problem is that those who denounce Columbus today, like those who used to glorify him, are looking at history through contemporary glasses. It's fairly easy to paint Columbus and the early explorers as people who oppressed the local residents, smashed alien civilizations and chopped down a lot of trees. It's a damning portrait. But it also leaves a lot out. Above all, it leaves out the fact that this encounter was inevitable. This is not simply to state the obvious: that if Columbus hadn't set sail in 1492, some other European voyager would have made the trip soon afterward. The key point is that whoever made the first crossing and whenever it occurred, the consequences for the people of the Western Hemisphere would not have been much different. Therefore, don't look for heroes and villains, look at the vast changes that were wrought. Because of what happened in 1492, life in much of the world has never been quite the same. Not everyone will find this an occasion to celebrate. But it was indisputably one of the great divides in human history, an event to marvel at and to learn from.