A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  All three of these variants of Christianity—Roman, Orthodox, and Nestorian—sent out missionaries, built churches, established monasteries, gained converts, and acquired land. In the sixth century the pope sent monks to England, which then served as a base for the Christianization of Germany and other parts of northern Europe. In the ninth century the Byzantine emperor sent missionaries to Moravia, and in the tenth to Russia. Nestorian missionaries founded churches in cities along the Silk Roads through Central Asia, and in the seventh century in Chang-an, the capital of Tang dynasty China. Sometimes missionaries worked through established political structures, converting a ruler, who then ordered his people to be baptized and celebrate Christian ceremonies, and to support the church financially. Although there were sometimes spectacular conflicts between rulers and church officials, Christianity also offered kings and emperors a way to enhance their authority above landed nobles and other groups, as it taught that both church and state were responsible for establishing order and maintaining social hierarchy. By the eleventh century all of Europe except southern Iberia and the Baltic region was officially Christian, from Kievan Rus in the east, where in 988 Vladimir I converted to Christianity in order to marry a Byzantine imperial princess and held a mass baptism for the citizens of Kiev; to Norway in the north, where in 1024 King Olaf II introduced Christian law, for which he was later made a saint; to Castile in the south, where in 1085 King Alfonso VI at the head of a Christian army captured the city of Toledo from Muslim forces, part of the movement to expel Muslims from Iberia that Christians later called the reconquista. Even Norse Iceland was Christian, after the Althing, the legislative assembly that ruled the country, decided in favor of Christianity over paganism in 1000. Everywhere Christianity assimilated certain aspects of existing religious practice, with churches built at springs, groves, or hilltops that had been sacred to pagan gods, and then consecrated to a local saint.

  Along with close links to rulers and the incorporation of local traditions, there were other broad commonalities within Christianity. Virginity was viewed as spiritually superior to marriage, and sexual acts that could not lead to procreation were condemned. Monks and nuns lived communally and took vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty, although monasteries as institutions sometimes became quite wealthy. As in Buddhism, communities of nuns generally received fewer donations than those of men and were poorer, although some were well endowed by wealthy families as a demonstration of their piety and a place to send daughters if they could not afford to make appropriate marriages for all of them. Outside of women's monasteries, all church officials were male, as they were in Buddhism and Islam. Organized advanced theological training was for male students, who in Europe after the twelfth century could obtain this in universities, first Paris and then Oxford and Cambridge.

  Christians everywhere were organized in communities for collective worship, under the guidance of a priest or monk, which overlapped with existing villages, urban neighborhoods, and other social structures. Rituals marked the agricultural year and the human life-cycle, with a series of sacraments that expressed core beliefs, beginning with baptism through which an infant became eligible for eternal life, including penance through which people confessed and atoned for their sins, and ending with last rites, funerals, and memorials for the dead in which holy objects, blessings, and the prayers of the living helped to speed the soul to heaven. Rituals celebrated the life of Jesus, his mother Mary, and the apostles, martyrs, and saints. Relics associated with these holy individuals and the churches or monasteries that housed them became sites of pilgrimage, creating a sacred landscape that by the thirteenth century stretched from Santiago de Compostela on the northwest corner of the Iberian peninsula—where the body of Saint James had been miraculously transported, and the most popular pilgrimage destination in Europe after Rome—to Beijing, where the Nestorian monk Rabban Bar Sauma (c. 1220–94) visited local Christian holy sites before beginning a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

  Unsurprisingly in a religious system this large, there were enormous variations both between and within variants of Christianity, many of them theological but others social and cultural. Roman Christianity came to require celibacy for priests as well as monks and nuns, although this policy proved difficult to enforce, and for centuries priests and higher church officials simply took concubines. Elsewhere married men could generally be priests, and in some places they could rise higher in the clerical hierarchy. Among lay people divorce was generally prohibited, although annulment provided a practical substitute for those with the financial means to arrange this, and in some places divorce itself was allowed. The Coptic Church in Egypt, for example, came to legitimize divorce in the thirteenth century, within the environment of Mamluk society in which divorce was very common. In Orthodoxy, disputes about the proper role of religious images led in the eighth century to an iconoclastic controversy in which paintings and statues were smashed, monks arrested and executed, and provinces of the Byzantine Empire revolted from the emperors who opposed images. Icons were later restored and became a more important part of religious practice than they were in Roman Christianity, although throughout Christianity wonder-working images became pilgrimage sites.

  The expansion of Islam reshaped Christianity as well as Buddhism, separating Ethiopian and Eastern Christians from Roman and Orthodox ones. Many Eastern Christians lived within Muslim states; while the general policy was one of toleration, there were also periods of heightened fervor in which Christian practices were restricted or suppressed. When the Seljuk Turkish rulers of Jerusalem and the surrounding area made Christian pilgrimage more difficult, the pope responded in 1095 by calling on Christians to recover Jerusalem from the Muslims, which he hoped would also allow him to assert his authority over Orthodoxy. He urged a holy war against the infidels, offering spiritual and material benefits, to which thousands of Western Christians responded. They succeeded in taking Jerusalem in 1099 in a bloody siege, and established small states in the area. For several centuries Christian pilgrims and fighters went back and forth by land and sea in a series of papally approved expeditions.

  For Jews in Europe the Crusades proved disastrous. Inflamed by preachers, Christian mobs attacked and killed whole communities of Jews in many cities, sometimes burning them alive in their places of worship. Legal restrictions on Jews gradually increased throughout Europe, culminating in King Edward I of England expelling the Jews from England in 1290 and confiscating their property and goods, and Philip IV of France doing likewise in 1306. During the Fourth Crusade (1202–4), armies stopped in Constantinople, and when they were not welcomed they sacked the city and grabbed thousands of relics, which they later sold in Europe. This weakened the Byzantine Empire further, and made the split between the Roman and Orthodox churches permanent. Similar infighting among Muslims had facilitated the initial crusader victories, but in the late thirteenth century the Mamluk armies that were conquering other Muslim states also turned against the Crusader states. Their last stronghold, the port of Acre, fell in 1291, although some Christians, especially merchants, remained. The effects of the Crusades on Christian/Muslim relations is disputed; some historians argue that they left an inheritance of deep bitterness, while others note that this might be a projection backwards of later conflicts.

  Shifting and lengthening trade routes

  For Italian merchants the Crusades were a boon. Venetians and Genoese in particular profited from outfitting military expeditions as well as from the opening of new trade routes and the establishment of trading communities that did not disappear when the Crusader states themselves did. Venetian merchants set up permanent offices in Cairo, where they dealt in spices traded up the Red Sea, while Genoese merchants went to Constantinople and the Black Sea, where they met caravans carrying goods over the Silk Roads. A few Italians went to the coastal cities of western India, which were becoming cosmopolitan mixtures of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Zoroastrians (termed Parsis in India), and Christians, all intent on expand
ing their profits.

  The rise of Italian merchants was one aspect of a general expansion of trade, invention of more sophisticated business procedures, and development of new forms of credit that historians have labeled the “commercial revolution.” Although this term was first proposed for Mediterranean Europe, it actually applies more broadly, as throughout much of Eurasia after about 1100 professional merchants moved larger cargoes of more varied commodities longer distances to more destinations serving a wider consumer base than could have been imagined several centuries earlier. Along with religion, trade created regional and transregional zones of exchange.

  Most of these professional merchants were male, as trade requires access to trade goods and the ability to move about, both of which were more available to men. Male heads of household generally had control over the products of their household, including those made or harvested by female family members as well as slaves and servants of both genders. Because of this, and because women's ability to travel was often limited by cultural norms about propriety and respectability, men were the primary long-distance traders, sending or taking items of great value such as precious metals, spices, perfumes, amber, and gems, or large quantities of less valuable goods, such as grain, timber, and metals. In some places women did trade locally, handling small retail sales of foodstuffs and other basic commodities, though in others men handled this small-scale distribution of goods as well. In a few places, including West Africa and Southeast Asia, women were important traders at the regional and even the transregional level, handling both basic commodities such as cloth and luxuries such as pepper, betel, gold, and ivory. In many places, male traders established temporary or even long-term relationships with local women. Through such a relationship, the man gained a sexual and domestic partner and connections with groups who provided supplies and goods to trade, and the woman and her family gained prestige through their contact with an outsider. These marriages or other types of domestic arrangements also served as ways in which religious ideas and rituals or other cultural practices traveled and blended, as husbands, wives, and children converted or mixed elements from different traditions as these proved appealing or useful.

  The largest trading network in this era was that across Eurasia, which encompassed Muslim, Buddhist, and Christian ecumenes, and both facilitated and was in turn enhanced by the spread of these religions. At the western end of this network in Europe, long-distance trade nearly died out after the collapse of the Roman Empire, but began to revive in the eighth century when Frisians and other northern Europeans began to transport slaves, wax, honey, and especially furs in return for Eastern luxury goods. They sometimes connected with the Radhanites, a loose network of merchants based in Jewish communities who were regarded as neutral by both Muslim and Christian rulers, so were able to cross hostile religious boundaries. The Radhanites traveled by land and sea routes from the caliphate of Córdoba to India and on to China, buying slaves and furs in the West and spices, perfumes, incense, silk, and other high-end commodities in the East. By the twelfth century Venetians and other Europeans had established large merchant colonies in the Crusader states, Constantinople, and the Black Sea, and the Radhanites declined in importance.

  The middle of this trading zone was the Muslim world, where the spread of Islam enhanced a wide network of trade contacts and productive handicraft industries already in place. Commerce was judged to be an honorable profession in Islam, as the Prophet himself had once been a merchant. Islam provided a corpus of commercial law, a common commercial language in Arabic, and an international currency, the Muslim dinar. In the eleventh century trade on the Red Sea became increasingly important, and Cairo soon surpassed Baghdad as the hub of world commerce. Persian and Arab merchants sailed down the East African Swahili coast, establishing fortified, independent, merchant-controled trading towns as far south as Sofala in Zimbabwe, and linking these with those across the Indian Ocean. In contrast to this economic growth, the Turkish military leaders who ruled the smaller states of the Islamic heartland after 1100 tended to impose predatory rates of taxation to support the extravagant lifestyles at their courts; these were often imposed in arbitrary ways on trade and production, and merchants did not have the institutionalized political power to oppose this. The commercial and technological innovation that had earlier been common slowed, and imported goods—including basic commodities such as cloth, imported from Europe and India—became cheaper, which ruined local industries.

  Coastal Indian cities, including Muslim ones in the north and Hindu ones in the south, made a profit from trade going in any direction. Ships carried all types of merchandise, but spices from the “Spice Islands” (now the Moluccas, part of Indonesia) and other parts of South and Southeast Asia were the most important luxury product. Spices—pepper, cloves, nutmeg, mace, cardamom, cinnamon, and ginger—served not only as flavoring for food, but also as ingredients in perfumes, love potions, painkillers, and funeral balms. In an era before refrigeration, spices helped preserve meats and masked the taste of meat that was slightly spoiled. Other growth markets were cotton textiles, porcelain, and horses for use in warfare and as symbols of power and status. From India, ships went through the Straits of Malacca, carrying merchants and their products to China, the eastern end of this trading zone, and especially to the growing cities of South China. Here the Confucian value system disparaged merchants as dishonorable parasites, tolerable only because they brought in luxuries desired by elites at court and could be taxed. This attitude prevented merchants from achieving political power the way Italian and Swahili merchants did, but did not prevent at least some from becoming very rich.

  Wherever they came from and wherever they went, merchants bought and sold slaves along with other merchandise. Italian merchants bought young women in Russia and North Africa to be household slaves in Venice, Genoa, and other Mediterranean cities. Spanish and Portuguese merchants bought North African men captured in war, and sold them for use as galley slaves to row merchant vessels and warships. Vikings sold captives at slave markets from Ireland to the Volga River. Turkish merchants bought Slavs from Turkish and Mongol forces, selling them for use as household slaves, soldiers, textile workers, or in the palaces of rulers. Arabic and African merchants crossed the Sahara Desert in both directions with slaves—West Africans going to the Mediterranean, eastern Europeans going to West Africa. Indian and Arabic merchants bought slaves in the coastal regions of East Africa, taking them to the west coast of India or further eastward. The Turkic Muslim rulers of North India—some of whom had been slaves themselves—sold captives as military and domestic slaves into Central Asia, primarily Hindus and Buddhists, but also Shi'a Muslims whom the Sunni Turks viewed as heretics. Because they were often taken far from home, slaves in many places were outsiders, differing from their owners in terms of religion, language, or physical appearance. Such differences did not prevent sexual relations between male owners and their slaves, although the legal status of the children of slave mothers varied. Laws usually forbade owners to kill their slaves, and religious teachings advised owners to treat them kindly, or (in Islam) to free them in their wills, but everywhere slaves were a normal part of the social hierarchy.

  The routes that connected this Eurasian trading zone varied in their importance over the centuries depending on their relative safety and security. In the fifth through the ninth centuries the Silk Roads were essential, but the fall of the Tang dynasty in 909 and the subsequent Turkic invasions and splintering of the ‘Abbasid caliphate led to unsettled conditions in West and Central Asia and a growing preference for shipping via the Indian Ocean. The Mongols first destroyed ancient trade centers such as Baghdad and Samarkand, but once the conquest was complete they adopted policies designed to foster long-distance trade, chief of which was to secure trade routes so that merchants and other travelers, and their goods, were assured safe passage. Merchants could now better predict their risks and profits. Some of the great caravan cities that had been destroyed were r
ebuilt, and along the routes way-stations were established. The old network of Silk Roads re-emerged, and a newer route further to the north carried luxuries to the Mongol capital at Karakorum and later to the new Mongol Yuan capital of Khanbaliq.

  In the middle of the fourteenth century, these routes also carried the pandemic that became known as the Black Death, which originated in Central Asia and was carried in all directions by the people and rats that were in every caravan and on every merchant ship. This virulent disease, new to the populations to which it spread, is estimated to have killed at least a third of the European population in the years 1347–51, and waves of recurrent plague continued for centuries. How many millions died in other places that it spread is unknown, but everywhere the plague brought a decrease in production, a plunge in demand, and an overall sharp decline in prosperity. Some areas began to recover in the fifteenth century, but the overland caravan routes never regained their importance in long-distance trade.

  Sea routes benefited from troubles along land routes. In South China, the Yuan dynasty continued the Song policy of encouraging maritime commerce, and sea routes continued to boom. If we believe his account, Marco Polo traveled to the Mongol court by the northern land route, but returned across the Indian Ocean (actually to bring a new wife from Khubilai Khan to the Ilkhan ruler in Tabriz, whose favorite wife had died); Ibn Battuta traveled by ship in both directions. Building on earlier advances in navigation and maritime technology made by Arabs, Indians, and Malays, the Chinese introduced the magnetic compass, watertight bulkheads for shipping, and giant ships with many mainmasts that carried several hundred tons of cargo.