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 North Africa and even into sub-Saharan Africa. Christian Europe had two religious centers at Rome and 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 the Americas nor sub-Saharan Africa 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 that were also connected through trade of foodstuffs (such as maize), cotton, 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. It is important to note that, at the same time, most people remained focused on local life, 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 identity 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 been so much shared cultural similarity—linguistic, religious, legal, and military. 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.

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TRACING THE GLOBAL STORYLINE

FOCUS ON: The Emergence of the World We Know Today

The Islamic World

• The Islamic world undergoes a burst of expansion, prosperity, and cultural diversification but remains politically fractured.
• Arab merchants and Sufi mystics spread Islam over great distances and make it more appealing to other cultures, helping to transform the religion into the unifying force of a distinct cultural sphere.
• Islam travels across the Sahara Desert; the powerful empire of Mali, supplying gold and enslaved people, arises in West Africa.

China

• The Song dynasty reunites China after three centuries of fragmented rulership, reaching into the past to reestablish a sense of a “true” Han Chinese identity, through a widespread print culture and the denigration of outsiders.
• Agrarian success and advances in manufacturing—including the production of both iron and porcelain—fuel an expanding economy, complete with paper money.

India

• India remains a mosaic under the canopy of Hinduism despite cultural interconnections and increasing prosperity.
• The invasion of Turkish Muslims leads to the creation of the Delhi Sultanate, which rules over India for three centuries, strengthening both cultural diversity and tolerance.

Christian Europe

• Roman Catholicism becomes a “mass” faith and helps create a common European cultural identity, at least in western Europe. A second center continues in Constantinople, providing a focal point for Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which spreads to the north.
• Feudalism organizes the relationship between elites and peasants, while manorialism forms the basis of the economy.
• Europe’s growing confidence is manifest in its efforts, including the Crusades and the reconquering of Iberia, to drive Islam out of “Christian” lands.

KEY TERMS

Cahokia p. 433

Chimú Empire p. 430

Delhi Sultanate p. 414

entrepôts p. 407

flying cash p. 417

jizya p. 410

Mali Empire p. 426

manorialism p. 422

Sufism p. 410

Toltecs p. 432

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 were the longer-term implications of these developments?

CHRONOLOGY