Conclusion

Between 1000 and 1300 CE, Afro-Eurasia formed four large cultural spheres. As trade and migration spanned longer distances, each of these spheres expanded, prospered, and became more integrated. In central Afro-Eurasia, Islam was firmly established, and its merchants, scholars, and travelers acted as commercial and cultural intermediaries as they exposed others to their universalizing religion. As seaborne trade expanded, India, too, became a commercial crossroads. Merchants in its port cities welcomed traders arriving from Arab lands to the west, from China to the east, and from Southeast Asia. China itself also boomed, pouring its manufactures into trading networks that reached across Eurasia and even into sub-Saharan Africa. Christian Europe had two religious centers—at Rome and at Constantinople—states supporting each found ways to challenge polities that had adopted Islam as the primary religion. Each of these spheres consolidated internally while also engaging the other spheres through commerce, religion, and even conquest.

Neither sub-Saharan Africa nor the Americas experienced the same degree of integration, but trade and migration in these areas nevertheless had profound effects. Certain African cultures flourished as they encountered the commercial energy of trade on the Indian Ocean. Africans’ trade with one another linked coastal and interior regions in an ever more integrated world. American peoples built cities that dominated regional cultural areas and were also connected through trade of cotton, foodstuffs, like maize, or even luxury goods.

By 1300, trade, migration, and conflict connected Afro-Eurasian worlds in unprecedented ways. When Mongol armies swept into China, Southeast Asia, and the heart of Islamic territories to the west, they applied a thin coating of political integration to these far-flung regions and built on existing trade links. At the same time, and importantly, most people’s lives remained focused on the local, driven by the need for subsistence and governed by spiritual and governmental representatives acting at the behest of distant authorities.

Even so, residents noticed the evidence of cross-cultural exchanges everywhere—in the clothing styles of provincial elites, such as Chinese silks in Paris or quetzal plumes in northern Mexico; in enticements to move (and forced removals) to new frontiers; in the news of faraway conquests or advancing armies. Worlds were coming together within themselves and across territorial boundaries, while nevertheless remaining apart as they sought, or struggled, to maintain their own identities and traditions. In Afro-Eurasia especially, as the movement of goods and peoples shifted from ancient land routes to sea-lanes, these contacts were more frequent and far-reaching. Never before had the world seen so much activity connecting its parts to each other. And within each of these spheres, never before had there ever been so much cultural similarity. By the time the Mongol Empire arose, the regions composing the globe were well on the way to becoming those that we now recognize as today’s cultural spheres.

TRACING THE GLOBAL STORYLINE

THINKING ABOUT GLOBAL CONNECTIONS

• Thinking about Worlds Together, Worlds Apart From 1000 to 1300 CE, a range of social and political developments contributed to the consolidation of four cultural spheres that still exist today: Europe, the Islamic world, India, and China. In what ways did these spheres interact with one another? In what ways was each sphere genuinely distinct from the others? To what extent were sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas folded into these spheres, and with what result?
• Thinking about Transformation & Conflict and Becoming the World As the four cultural spheres of Afro-Eurasia consolidated, shocking examples of conflict between them began to take place. Whether from Pope Urban II’s call in 1095 to reclaim the “holy land” from Muslims or the Mongol Hulagu’s brutal sack of Baghdad in 1258, this period was marked by large-scale warfare between rival cultural spheres. To what extent was such conflict inevitable? In what ways did conflict transform the groups involved?
• Thinking about Crossing Borders and Becoming the World Major innovations facilitated economic exchange in the Indian Ocean and in Song China. The magnetic needle compass, better ships, and improved maps shrank the Indian Ocean to the benefit of traders. Similarly, paper money in Song China changed the nature of commerce. How did these developments shift the axis of Afro-Eurasian exchange? What evidence suggests that bodies of water and the routes across them became more significant than overland exchange routes in binding together Afro-Eurasia? What are the longer-term implications of these developments?

More information

A timeline showing events from circa 900 to 1400. The timeline shows various events represented by diamonds and lines color coded by region of the world that are situated between and around lines representing 900, 1000, 1100, 1200, 1300 and 1400. In Sub-Saharan Africa, Great Zimbabwe flourishes in 1100, Kingdom of Mali emerges in 1230 to 1670, and King Mansa Musa is placed in 1312 to 1332. In the Americas, the Toltecs dominate the valley of Mexico in 900 to 1100 and the Chimú Empire in South America is placed at 1000 to 1470. In the Islamic world, Turkish migrants and armies spread Turkish migrants and armies spread into Islamic world’s heartland circa 1000, Sufism spreads through Islamic world circa 1100, and Mongol forces sack Baghdad and end Abbasid caliphate circa 1258. In South Asia, Central Asian invasions begin circa 1000 and the Delhi Sultanate was placed at 1206 to 1526. In East Asia, Song dynasty in China is placed at 960 to 1279 and Mongol Yuan dynasty is placed at 1279–1368. In Southeast Asia, the Khmer Empire is placed at 889 to 1431. In Europe, the reconquering of the Iberian Peninsula is placed at 1061 to 1492 and the crusades are placed at 1095 to 1291.