9  New Empires and Common Cultures, 600–1000 CE

Before You Read This Chapter

GLOBAL STORYLINE

Religion and Empires: Islam, the Tang Dynasty, Christendom, and Common Cultures

  • The universalizing religion of Islam, based on the message of the Prophet Muhammad, originates on the Arabian Peninsula and spreads rapidly across Afro-Eurasia.
  • The expanding Tang dynasty in East Asia consolidates its bureaucracy, struggles with religious pluralism, and extends its influence into central and East Asia.
  • Christianity splits over religious and political differences, leading to a divide between Roman Catholicism in the west and Greek Orthodoxy in the east.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

FOCUS QUESTIONS

  • How and where did Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity spread in the period 600–1000 CE?
  • What were the organizational structures of the Abbasids, Tang China, and Christendom?
  • What were the internal divisions within the Islamic, Tang, and Christian worlds?
  • What was the relationship between religion, empire, and commercial exchange across Afro-Eurasia during this period?

In 754 CE al-Mansur, ruler of the new Muslim Abbasid dynasty, decided to relocate his capital city from Damascus (the capital of Islam’s first dynasty) closer to the Abbasids’ home region on the Iranian plateau. Islam was barely a century old, yet it flourished under this second dynasty. The caliph al-Mansur chose, for both practical and symbolic reasons, to build his capital near an unimposing village called Baghdad. Not only did the site lie between Mesopotamia’s two great rivers, at the juncture of the canals that linked them, but it was also close to the ancient capital of the earlier Sasanian Empire and the site of ancient Sumerian and Babylonian power. By building at Baghdad, al-Mansur could reaffirm Mesopotamia’s centrality in the world and promote the universalizing ambitions of Islam.

Al-Mansur’s choice had enduring effects. Baghdad became a vital crossroads for commerce. Overnight, the city exploded into a bustling world entrepôt. Chinese goods arrived by land and sea; commodities from Inner Eurasia flowed in over the Silk Roads; and cargo-laden camel caravans wound across Baghdad’s western desert, linking the capital with Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and southern Spain. The unity that the Abbasids imposed from Baghdad intensified the movement of peoples, ideas, innovations, and commodities.

While Islam was gaining ground in central Afro-Eurasia, Chinese might was surging in East Asia under the Tang dynasty. Yet Islam and Tang China were clearly different worlds. The Islamic state had a universalizing religious mission: to bring humankind under the authority of the religion espoused by the Prophet Muhammad. In contrast, the Tang state had no such grandiose religious goals; the ruling elites supported religious variety within China, and they did not use Buddhism to expand their control into areas outside China. Instead, the Tang rulers expected that their neighbors would copy Chinese institutions and pay tribute as symbols of respect to the greatness of the Tang Empire. Though not as expansive as Islam and the Tang Empire, Christianity also strived in this period to extend its domain and add to its converts. With Islam’s warriors, traders, and scholars crossing into Europe, Chinese influences taking deeper root in East Asia, and Christendom extending itself across Europe, religion and empire once again intertwined to serve as the social foundation across much of Afro-Eurasia.