Introduction

BENJAMIN Z. KEDAR AND MERRY E. WIESNER-HANKS

This volume deals with the main processes that furthered cultural, commer­cial, and political integration within and between various regions of the world from the middle of the first to the middle of the second millennium ce.

Contemporary views of the known world: cartography

True world history is a modern phenomenon: no one who lived before 1500 could have had even an approximate notion of both of the globe's hemispheres, nor did any inhabitant of the western hemisphere have even a vague idea of its shape and extent. In the eastern hemisphere however, some people did attempt to form a view of the known world in its supposed entirety, but restricted in reality to major parts of that hemi­sphere. Important testimonies to such endeavors are the so-called world

The editors wish to thank the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem, for its support of an invaluable workshop for the authors in 2011, at which draft chapters were discussed and inter-relationships explored.

1 SeeJohann Arnason's detailed discussion in Chapter 18 below. maps. Their geographical distribution and chronological evolution are illustrative of wider developments.^[2]

Kwon Kun, the Neo-Confucian scholar who watched over the making of the Korean world map of 1402, exclaimed that by looking at it “one can indeed know the world without going out of one's door!”^[3] His pride was justified, for the map attempts to represent the entire area from Korea and Japan in the east to Africa and the Iberian peninsula in the west: two of the westernmost places marked on it are Ma-li-xi-li-na (that is, Marseille) and Da-la-bu-luo-si (Tarabulus [Tripoli], Libya). The world map was based on imported maps of China and Japan, as well as on a detailed map of Korea; the depiction of the Arabian peninsula, Africa, the Mediterranean and Europe evidently depended on maps from the Islamic realm that had been brought to Mongol-ruled China and helped there to shape maps whose copies made their way to Korea. The map of 1402 has its flaws: for instance, Korea is larger than Africa, Japan faces southern China, and India and China are amalgam­ated into a single land mass (see Figure ι.ι). Kwon Kun was right to observe that “it is indeed difficult to achieve precision... in compressing and mapping [the world] on a folio sheet several feet in size.” And yet this map was a unique Korean achievement that not only corroborated Kwon Kun's conviction that “the world is very wide” but also offered a rough overview of the main components of the world's eastern hemisphere.

Such maps did not exist in East Asia before the advent of the Mongol trans­Eurasian state in the thirteenth century and appear to have remained rare after its demise. Information on the layout of the Islamic realm reached China, but was not integrated into the imperial, Sino-centric cartography. Thus the two famous Chinese maps engraved in 1136 on two sides of a stele - one of them equipped with a grid that allows for the calculation of distances and areas - are almost exclusively focused on China, depicting its coastline and river systems with a remarkable accuracy; the term Dashi (realm of Islam), however, figures merely in an annotation beyond the western margin

Figure ι.ι The Honkoji copy of the 1402 Korean Kangnido map of the world / Pictures From History / Bridgeman Images

of the second map.

The Mongols were different. Keen to form a view of their unprecedent­edly far-flung empire and of the lands adjoining it, they not only collected maps of the countries they conquered but also initiated vast cartographical projects in which Muslim scholars played a major role. Thus, the Bukharan astronomer Jamal al-DTn (in Chinese transcription, Zha-ma-lu-ding) prepared in 1267 a terrestrial globe for the Grand Khan Qubilai (Kublai, Khubilai) and endeavored in 1286 to prepare, with a Sino-Muslim staff, a massive geo­graphical compendium equipped with maps. As Jamal al-DTn put it in his memorandum to the Grand Khan, “Now all of the land from the place of sunrise to sunset has become our territory. And therefore, do we not need a more detailed map? How can we understand distant places? The Islamic maps are at our hands. And therefore, could we combine them [with the Chinese maps] to draw a [world] map?”^[4] Jamal al-DTn’s team completed its work in 1303, relying on Muslim maps deposited at the Imperial Library Directorate in Khanbaliq (Beijing) for the coverage of Islamic and probably also of other foreign countries.

The Mongol recourse to Islamic maps and geographical lore is not sur­prising, both because the cartographic achievements in the realm of Islam were remarkable and because the Mongols conquered much of it. Since this realm bordered on all other major civilizations of the eastern hemisphere - those of China, India, Byzantium and Latin Europe, as well as on sub-Saharan Africa - it produced world maps far more accurate than the Korean one that depended on them.

This map purports to show the entire inhabited world, from China (al-Sin) to Morocco (al-Maghrib al-aqsa), from Poland (Baluniya) to Sofala (in present- day Mozambique), with an oversize island of Sri Lanka (Sarandib) marked south of a non-triangular India and with Tibet (al-Tubbat) among the moun­tains north of it. As on the earlier maps of the Balkhi school, the inhabited world is surrounded by the Encompassing Sea, and a huge Africa extends all the way from its western to its eastern extremity, thus coming close to China; the latter feature reveals the influence of Ptolemy (fl. 150 ce), whose manual for map-makers, the Geography, was translated from Greek into Arabic in the ninth century. Yet these achievements were followed by relative stagnation and thus al-Idrisi’s circular world map resurfaced, with no notable changes, in Ibn Khaldun’s Book of Advice of the late fourteenth century.

In Byzantium, on the other hand, a breakthrough occurred around 1300, when Maximus Planudes used the instructions in Ptolemy’s Geography to prepare a world map as well as twenty-six regional ones. His map of the world has a rectangular frame, with the inhabited area placed on a conic graticule whose straight meridians were to merge well beyond the upper, northern frame, and whose parallels were drawn as arcs of circles. The Mediterranean, Europe, the Black Sea, the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia are depicted far more accurately than on the twelfth-century circular map of al-Idrisi, yet the two maps share an indistinct China, an oversize Sri Lanka (here called Taprobane) and an eastern extension of Africa that ultimately joins with China, thus rendering the Indian Ocean a closed sea.

Kwon Kun observed in 1402 that “by looking at maps one can know terrestrial distances and get help in the work of the government.” Two

Figure 1.2: Al-Idrisr's world map, twelfth century, rotated (Bodleian Library, Ms. Pococke 375, fols. 3v-4a)

centuries earlier, the Chinese courtier-turned-teacher Zhang Ruyu observed that “maps of the Empire are of the greatest use to states. At the time when states are first established they are of use in pacification. After the territories are consolidated, they are of use in defence. And during times of restoration, they are of use in the recuperation of lost territories.”^[5] This utilitarian approach was surely shared by the people who endeavored to prepare reliable maps of the Chinese Empire that were based on measurements, by the Mongol rulers who collected and commissioned maps, as well as by Vietnamese and Muslim map-makers. In western Europe, on the other hand, an important aim of world maps was to provide information about major events in sacred history, thus presenting time as well as space, or time superimposed on space, in a manner that recalls local maps produced in other civilizations. As the Franciscan friar Paolino Veneto put it in the early fourteenth century, “I would say that without a world map it is not just difficult but impossible to imagine, or conceive in one's mind, what is said of the sons and grandsons of Noah and of the Four Monarchies and of other kingdoms and provinces, both in theological and secular writings.”⁶ Conse­quently, on European world maps one sees Adam, Eve, and the serpent in a Paradise located in the east, or busts of the Apostles at sites where they were said to have been buried, and so on. Physical accuracy was not a major aim, with an oversize Holy Land figuring near the maps' centers. Yet at least one map-maker chose to highlight the area in which he himself lived. This was Stephanus Garsia of the monastery of St Sever in Gascony, who in the mid­eleventh century prepared the most detailed Latin world map of that age that has come down to us: it shows Europe prominently, with a Mediterranean whose northern and southern shores are almost straight, a slim India, and a still more slender China stretching south of the Garden of Eden. On this world map Stephanus not only represented his monastery with a building as big as that symbolizing Constantinople, the largest city in Christendom, but also marked six small places in the monastery's vicinity, while leaving Paris and Marseille unmentioned.

When the First Crusade left for Jerusalem in 1096, many Islamic world maps were significantly more accurate than their European counterparts; Europe had no school of geographers, nor any standardized set of maps. Consequently, a Muslim of that age looking at a world map prepared in the realm of Islam could have obtained a much more realistic idea about the shape of Italy, for example, than a contemporary Latin Christian contem­plating the most detailed European map.

Yet this was to change. In the thirteenth century Europeans began to draw portolans - that is, marine charts - that showed very accurately the coastlines

Song China as potent reminders of China's dismemberment as well as of the yearning for its reconstitution.

6 Latin text edited in Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, “Mappa mundi und Chrono- graphia. Studien zur imago mundi des abendlandischen Mittelalters,” Deutsches Archivfur Erforschung des Mittelalters 24 (1968): 127.

Figure 1.3 Pietro Vesconte’s world map, c. 1321 (Bodleian Library, Ms. Tanner 190, fols. 203v-204r)

of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and subsequently these coastlines were incorporated in various world maps. Map-makers gradually improved their craftsmanship, assimilating the best achievements of Islam and Byzantium, and adding information from other sources. The circular world map of the type first attested in al-Idrisi’s treatise must have become known in Italy, because the world map that the Genoese Pietro Vesconte drew up in 1321 is strikingly similar to it, although, thanks to portolan lore, the Mediterranean and Black Seas are far more exactly depicted (see Figure 1.3).

The Catalan Atlas, which the Jewish “Master of Maps and Compasses,” Cresques Abraham, prepared in Majorca in 1375, reveals the impact of reports on Inner and East Asia during the Pax Mongolica by such travelers as Marco Polo, while the spotted, brightly colored horses depicted as traversing these areas are inspired by Persian models. Ptolemy’s Geography, translated into Latin in about 1409, soon began influencing European world maps, as attested by the 1414 map by Pirrus da Noha. And the impact of Portuguese explorations along the western coast of Africa can be observed, for example, on the maps made in about 1450 by the Italian monk, Fra Mauro, and the Venetian cartographer, Giovanni Leardo (see Figure 1.4).

Thus, by 1500 European world maps were far more advanced than those of other contemporaneous civilizations and, after Europeans had reached the

Figure 1.4 Giovanni Leardo's world map, 1448 (DEA Picture Library / Getty Images)

Americas, the New World, too, started to appear on them. In 1507 Martin Waldseemuller was the first to place the name ‘America' on a world map: it is marked on the southern part of a slim, elongated continent separated by oceans from Africa and Europe to its east and Asia to its west.

This bird's-eye view of cartography during the Middle Millennium may serve as a simile for the fortunes of the main civilizations during that period: an inward-looking China that opens up under the impact of the Mongol conquest; the realm of Islam, the true Middle Kingdom of the age, whose cultural apogee is followed by a plateau in most Arabic-speaking countries; Byzantium, a storehouse of breakthroughs attained in antiquity; Latin Europe, initially backward but gradually assuming a leading position; and the Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations, each following a distinct path with no habitual contact between them.

Contemporary views of the known world: written histories

Maps are apt to traverse civilizational boundaries with relative ease. Most people who have grasped the principle of using a series of symbols to represent three-dimensional territory on a two-dimensional surface are capable of deciphering a map even though it uses a different set of symbols and is accompanied by legends in an unknown script or language. This is why Korean map-makers were able to incorporate an imported map that showed the unknown lands of the “Far West,” and why a Spanish conquista­dor could comprehend, and put to use, an Aztec cloth map that depicted a coastal region. In short, it is possible to figure out a map's rough meaning without having recourse to its language, or at any rate without mastering it. Hence the cross-civilizational flow of cartographic lore and the capability of situating on one's world map geographical information deriving from distant sources. On the other hand, historical accounts - inasmuch as they are language-bound - cross civilizational borders far less easily. This was one reason why our period witnessed a number of world maps but just one work that may be regarded as a world history of sorts. The other reason was the gap between the relatively widespread desire to form a view of the physical world in its entirety, and the sparse interest in the past of its diverse peoples.

Consequently, the countless records of the past written during the Middle Millennium, though pertaining to a vast variety of genres and revealing widely diverging depths of historical memory, share one fundamental char­acteristic: their authors focus on their own group or state or civilization, with other groups, states or civilizations mentioned only insofar as they have an impact on that to which the writer belongs. This is true of the Mesoamerican records of dynastic lineages, which may go back for just a few centuries; of China's Standard Dynastic Histories, which form a continuous sequence from pre-imperial times onward; and of Islamic, Byzantine and Western annals and chronicles, which, even when self-styled as universal, start with creation and humanity's legendary beginnings yet very soon converge on their authors' respective civilizations and their immediate predecessors. It is symptomatic of this civilization-centrism that the Standard History of the Mongol dynasty in China, compiled - according to age-old tradition - in the wake of its downfall in 1368, focuses on Mongol rule over China, not on the immense Mongol Empire of which China formed a part. No less telling is the roughly contemporary work of the Florentine Franciscan, Giovanni de' Marignolli (d. 1358), the one Western chronicler with world-historical preten­sions who visited China and India: he had nothing to say about the history of these countries and used his Far Eastern experiences primarily to elucidate the early chapters of the biblical book of Genesis.^[6]

There were a few exceptions to this lack of curiosity. Theophanes the Confessor (d. 818) stands out among Byzantine historians for dealing not only with events that occurred in the Byzantine Empire but also with those that took place in the realm of its major adversary, the caliphate; each of his annalistic entries starts with the names and regnal years of the ruling emperor and caliph. Indeed, some entries deal exclusively with events within the Islamic realm. Anastasius the Librarian translated Theophanes' work into Latin, in Rome in the early 870s, and consequently some Europeans could read about the rise of Muamed (Muhammad), the Arab conquests and the history of the caliphate down to the struggle between the heirs of Aaron (Harun al-Rashιd). Al-Mas‘udi (d. 957), “the Herodotus of the Arabs,” may be considered Theophanes' Muslim counterpart, inasmuch as he stands out among Muslim authors for spelling out which Byzantine emperor was the contemporary of which caliph, and for offering much information on Byzan­tium's internal affairs and its relations with the caliphate as well as with other neighboring countries. The breadth of vision of al-Mas‘udi - who traveled in West Asia, India and East Africa - was actually much more far-reaching than that of Theophanes. Thus he describes at some length the uprising of Yanshu in the year 264 (877-8 ce) and observes that it ushered in a protracted period of lawlessness and political fragmentation in China.^[7] This remark refers undoubtedly to the rebellion of Huang Chao (875-84), which critically weakened the Tang dynasty. Similarly, he provides information on India, the Turkic tribes, the Khazars, the Rus', and the Slavs; among the peoples of Africa he mentions the Zanj in the east and the Ghana in the west. In Egypt he came across a book that a bishop of Girona in Catalonia had presented to the heir of the caliph of Cordova, and culled from it a list of Frankish kings - from the fifth/sixth-century Q.ludiyah (emendable to Quluduwlh = Chlodo- wech, Clovis), down to the tenth-century ‘ Ludhrlq, the son of Qarluh' (= Louis IV d'Outremer, son of Charles the Simple).^[8] The list, garbled and patchy as it is, amounts to the only attempt within the vast Islamic historiography of the age to sketch a chapter of West European history.

In the age of the crusades, just two attempts were made to write the adversary's history. Hamdan al-Atharibi (c. 1071-1148), a wine-drinking Muslim poet, physician and administrator, who served first Frankish and then Muslim masters, wrote in Arabic a History of the Franks who Came Forth to the Land of Islam - that is, a chronicle of the First Crusade of 1096-9 from a Muslim viewpoint. William of Tyre (c. 1130-86), the great chronicler of the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem, was commissioned by his patron, King Amaury, to write in Latin, on the basis of books in Arabic, a History of the Princes of the East - in other words, a history of the kingdom's Muslim enemies. These extraordinary projects attest to the exceptionality of their originators; that neither of these works survived indicates how much they were out of step with their times. Only in the thirteenth century would there be written in Europe a counterpart to the book King Amaury had commis­sioned - this is the History of the Arabs by Rodrigo Jimenez de Rada (c. 1170-1247), the archbishop of Toledo, who promoted the crusade against the Almohad Muslims in 1212 and dealt in his book with the history of the Muslims of Spain from its beginnings in the eighth century down to the coming of the Almohads in the twelfth.

The only work written during the Middle Millennium that comes close to an all-hemispheric history is the Compendium of Chronicles by Rashid al-Din (c. 1247-1318) in Persian and Arabic versions. A Jewish physician who con­verted to Islam in his youth, Rashid al-Din gained the favor of Iran's Mongol rulers and served them for two decades as associate vizier. He relates that two of these rulers, the Ilkhans Ghazan and Oljeitu, commissioned him to write historical works. Said the latter:

Until now no one at any time has made a history that contains the stories and histories of all inhabitants of the climes of the world... In these days, when, thank God, all corners of the earth are under our control and that of Chinggis Khan's illustrious family, and philosophers, astronomers, scholars, and historians of all religions and nations - Cathay [northern China], Machin [southern China], India, Kashmir, Tibet, Uyghur, and other nations of Turks, Arabs, and Franks - are gathered in droves at our glorious court, each and every one of them possesses copies of the histories, stories, and beliefs of their own people... it is our considered opinion that of those detailed histories and stories a compendium that would be perfect should be made in our royal name.^{[9] [10]}

Oljeitu and his vizier were thus well aware that the envisaged compendium was unprecedented and that it was the vast extension of the Mongol Empire that rendered it feasible.

The resulting work is indeed unmatched in scope, presenting the history of the Mongols, Muhammad and the caliphs, Persia, the Turks, the Chinese, the Jews, the Franks and the Indians. Several components amount to transla­tions into Persian (and Arabic) of imported historical works. Thus, Rashid al-Din's history of China, which lists its dynasties and rulers, is based on a hitherto unidentified Buddhist chronicle; his history of the Franks (western Europeans) is largely derived from some version of Martin of Troppau's Chronicle of the Popes and the Emperors; a considerable part of his history of India, and especially the detailed account of the life of the Buddha, relied on the input of Kamalasri, a Buddhist informant who hailed from Kashmir; the Mongol intellectual and statesman Bolad provided much information on Mongolian history and on the court of the Grand Khan Qubilai. Rashid al-Din emphasized that, since it was impossible to verify the various histories, he saw it as his duty to faithfully extract them from “reliable standard books” based on continuous tradition, with the responsibility for each text's claims resting solely with the original narrator.11 Rashid al-Din's repeated disavowal of his own responsibility probably aimed at dissociating himself from asser­tions in the histories of non-Muslim peoples that conservative Muslim readers might have found offensive. Yet he exhibited also a genuine reluc­tance to decide between conflicting traditions. Still, his work is more than a mere compendium of extracts, for in the introductions to several histories he makes original statements - for instance, when he provides the earliest description in any language of Chinese woodblock printing and distribution of books, or when he mentions the Franks' ability to depict all countries, islands, mountains and deserts of their part of the world on a bab mandu (a distortion of the Latin mappa mundi, “world map”).^{[11] [12]} He also rightly underlines the originality of his history of the Jews, which he construed on the basis of the Bible and various later books. Rashid al-DTn planned to attach a collection of maps to his compendium but, while there are good reasons to assume that this objective was achieved, the maps did not come down to us.

RashTd al-DTn's work, especially his history of the Mongols, was influential in the eastern Islamic realm, that is, in Iran, Central Asia and Mughal India. But his history of the known world found just a single emulator, the Transoxanian Muhammad BanakatT, who in 1317 prepared a rather pedestrian collection of extracts from the Compendium of Chronicles. Neither the Compen­dium nor the collection had much impact west of Iran until, in the late seventeenth century, Ottoman and European scholars became aware of BanakatT's book. RashTd al-DTn himself succumbed to the machinations of a rival vizier and was charged with having poisoned the Il-Khan Oljeitu. After a court interrogation during which his Jewish origin was repeatedly men­tioned, the seventy-year-old historian was put to death. His severed head was displayed in Tabriz, the capital, as “the head of the Jew who scorned the word of God” and ninety years later his bones were exhumed from his grave in the Muslim cemetery and re-interred in the Jewish one.1³

While most historians provided few clues as to what had happened beyond the reach of their respective civilizations in the past, knowledge about conditions in distant countries spread through the accounts of pilgrims, returning prisoners of war, merchants and travelers. Thus the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang traveled in 629 to India via Samarkand and Bamiyan (where he saw the two giant rock statues of standing Buddhas, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001). Upon his return to China in 645 with many hundreds of Sanskrit texts, he left behind a description of the regions of Central and Southern Asia that included information on the Indian caste system. Du Huan, a Chinese captured by the Muslims at the Battle of Talas (751), spent a decade in the ‘Abbasid capital of Kufa (Iraq), and upon his return to China provided an early account about Islam and the Arab con­quests; Harun b. Yahya, a Muslim from Ascalon who fell into Byzantine captivity in the late ninth century, brought back much information on Constantinople and Rome. And travel accounts such as those of Benjamin of Tudela and Ibn Jubayr in the twelfth century, of Marco Polo in the thirteenth and of Ibn Battuta and Wang Dayuan in the fourteenth century, throw much light on conditions in far-away countries.

The Middle Millennium for today's historians

Having sketched the growing knowledge about the world's appearance and the largely civilization-centric works of history that were available during the Middle Millennium, let us now turn to the history of that period as it emerges from present-day research. It is a history that differs dramatically from the endeavors of Rashid al-Din, to say nothing of his less ambitious contemporaries, for its scope encompasses much more than the account of political and religious events, spiced with the recording of unusual natural occurrences like comets or bloody rains, which constituted the customary fare of history written in those times. It posits questions about such subjects as ecology and climate, family and gender, social stratification, economy, group mentality, art, and technology, and attempts to ascertain their interrelations.

Present-day research stands out also for the ever-expanding range of sources put to use in its quest for answers. Rashid al-Din's Compendium reproduces what he found written “in the well-known books of every nation” and in the reports of “the wise and learned of every group,”^[13] but nowadays documents written on parchment or paper - from laws and proclamations to chronicles and poems to merchants' contracts and manuals to private letters and diaries - are increasingly supplemented by other types of documenta­tion, such as inscriptions and coins, or data derived from archaeological finds or pollen analysis.

Occasionally such other types take pride of place. For instance, our knowledge of Cambodian history in the Angkorean period - that is, from the ninth to the fifteenth century - is based primarily on a huge number of inscriptions incised on stone: Sanskrit inscriptions, in verse, extolling the deeds of kings and the mighty, and Khmer-Ianguage inscriptions, in prose, dealing with mundane matters such as the number and names of slaves belonging to a temple. This is not to say that Angkorean Cambodia was devoid of ordinary writing. Zhou Daguan, the Chinese envoy who stayed in Angkor in 1296-7 and left behind a description of the city and of its inhabit­ants, reported that they used to write on deerskin or similar parchment and employed professional scribes for the composition of petitions^[14] - but none of such writings have come down to us.

Similarly, knowledge about Maya history largely depends on a vast number of inscriptions carved on stone; other inscriptions were etched on wooden lintels or incised on pottery. But, unlike the Khmer of Cambodia, the Maya produced also a large number of books consisting of bark paper, and although most of these were burnt by the Spanish conquerors, three or four made their way to Europe and have survived to this day.^[15] Knowledge of how to read Maya glyphs, whether carved or written, developed especially in the 1970s and 1980s, and today much understanding of Maya culture depends on written Maya sources. Scholars of the Inca Empire are currently trying to decipher khipus, or apparatuses of knotted and colored cords that allowed for the encoding of numbers and possibly also of non-numeric units of information. If they succeed, our understanding of Inca mathematics, accounting, and record-keeping systems may significantly advance.^{[16] [17]}

Archaeology of the Middle Millennium is a rapidly developing subdisci­pline that uncovers time and again totally new evidence. For instance, the birch-bark documents that have been emerging from 1951 onwards from the mud of Novgorod and elsewhere in northeastern Europe and that turned out to have been written between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries in a rough local idiom, mainly by urban laymen and also some laywomen, allow for unique glimpses of family life, commerce, litigation, devoutness, and much more.1⁸ Another example is the unlooted royal tomb discovered in 2013 in Peru, which sheds new light on the Wari polity that predated, and in several respects prefigured, the Inca Empire. Yet archaeology is important not only for the history of poorly documented societies but also for those that produced many written sources; for the latter, it holds the promise of studying issues on which the written sources are silent and of generating ever more new data even as the number of written documents that remain unpublished is constantly dwindling. In addition, written sources known for a long time may yield fresh insights or data when examined from new points of view or subjected to quantitative analysis.

The potential of these approaches may be exemplified by some recent studies of the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem, founded in the wake of the First Crusade of 1096-9 and brought to its end by the Mamluk conquest of Acre in 1291. Archaeological finds, supplemented by an examination of structures surviving above ground, show that while Frankish domestic architecture in the towns absorbed local influences (especially the courtyard-house design), the planned street-villages and the farms the Franks established in the countryside followed European models, although the scarcity of wood in the kingdom dictated their construction in stone. The excavation of the frontier castle of Vadum Iacob showed that this hotly contested Templar fortress was still being constructed when Saladin con­quered and destroyed it in August 1179; the heaps of building materials and the many work implements, as well as the state of the unfinished fortifica­tions, throw light on the construction techniques the Franks employed. The examination of thirteenth-century latrines of Frankish Acre has revealed that many of their users carried in their intestines eggs of fish tapeworm, a species limited to northern Europe at that time: evidently the users must have been crusaders or pilgrims from Europe. An investigation of skeletons excavated in Frankish Caesarea suggests the availability of medical treatment in that town, seeing that numerous fractured tibias healed straight. And a quantita­tive study of the personal names of some 6,200 persons figuring in the kingdom's surviving charters highlights - as does the study of domestic architecture - an interplay of European and local influences.^[18]

In sum, the ever-expanding variety of sources utilizable in the study of the Middle Millennium depends on historians' inventiveness. It also depends on their ability to surmount the absence of direct evidence about a phenomenon by identifying observable facts that can be convincingly presented as its indirect indicators or proxies.

Population and history

Robert Lopez - an early practitioner of world history - used to say that since history is the study of humans in time, the first question one should ask about a period under scrutiny is: How many humans were then living? When we pose this question with regard to the Middle Millennium, all we can expect are educated guesses. And there are not many of them. Back in 1979, the French historical demographer Jean-Noel Biraben published a “provisional table” in which he offered estimates of the world's population from 400 BCE to 1970 ce. His estimates for our time frame can be seen in Table ι.ι.

Biraben assumes that the world's population more than doubled between 500 and 1500, from 207 to 461 million. In the table's earlier sections, Biraben estimates that by 200 ce the world's population had reached the unpreced­ented zenith of 257 million, so that during the first 500 years of our period, the world presumably had fewer inhabitants than it had at the earlier peak. The impact of a major pandemic that recurred several times from 541 to 750 is observable, in Biraben's table, in the sharp drop in population after 500 in Southwest Asia, Europe, and North Africa. From the eleventh century onward, however, there were, at any given moment, more people on the planet than during any previous epoch in history, with the most dramatic upsurge - from 299 to 400 million - in our era taking place in the twelfth century. To his list of round dates Biraben added the years 1250 and 1340, which allow him to present conjectures on the demographic impact of the Mongol invasions that had taken place before the first of these dates, and of the Black Death that had erupted after the second. Biraben's estimates have been adopted by subsequent students of the subject,^[19] and they are presented here, too, as reasonable approximations, largely based though they are on conjecture.

In any case, there can be no doubt that in the period 500-1500 the planet was much less evenly populated than in more recent times. Hunter­gatherers, sparsely spread out over vast tracts of land, inhabited all of Australia, much of the Americas and considerable parts of southern Africa,

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Table ι.ι World population (in millions) by major regions, 500-1500

19

Source: Jean-Noel Biraben, ''Essai sur l'evolution du nombre des hommes,” Population 34 (1979): 16.

^aThe current estimates for China, based on adjustments to recorded census figures, are: 609 - 46, 754 - 75,1003 - 60,1110 -125,1225 -140, 1290 - 68, 1393 - 73, 1630 - 192. Source: GeJianxiong, general ed., Zhongguo renkou shi (A History of Chinese Population) (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2000), vols. ιι, iii, iv. Our thanks to Prof. Richard von Glahn for supplying these data.

while pastoral nomads roamed over northern and Central Asia, the Arabian peninsula and the Sahara. Although agriculture expanded and intensified in this period, so that agricultural villages could be found in far more places in 1500 than in 500, the densely settled civilizations of the age were limited, in the western hemisphere, largely to the Mesoamerican and Andean regions and the ancestral Pueblo homeland, while in the eastern hemisphere they formed a wide belt that extended from the Atlantic coasts of North Africa and Europe all the way to China and Japan. Of the planet's three oceans, only the smallest - the Indian - witnessed cross-littoral navigation and trade.

We know much more about the large settled civilizations of the age than about its outlying, mostly isolated, and sometimes tiny groups of people. Yet modern methods allow us to reconstruct some of their history quite accur­ately as well. For instance, a recent study based on 1,434 radiocarbon dates suggests radical modifications in the existing view of East Polynesia's early history: the settlement of Samoa in about 800 bce was followed by a 1,800- years-long pause in colonization activities; then, around 1025-1120 ce, long­distance voyaging resumed and the Society Islands east of Samoa were settled; finally, in the course of a single century - between 1190 and 1293 - seafarers spread out to the most remote islands of East Polynesia, reaching Hawaii in the north, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the east, and Auckland Island in the south.^[21]

Sporadic trans-civilizational contacts

While the Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations presumably lacked direct, regular relations and were even unaware of each other's existence, the civilizations of the eastern hemisphere either directly bordered on one another or were at least conscious of their distant neighbors. Consequently, regular trans-civilizational relations were limited to the Old World, where they were of paramount importance in furthering large-area integration during our period. Yet it would be wrong to assume that sporadic contacts, presumably far more widespread, were of necessity historically meaningless.

Take for example the Parisian goldsmith Guillaume Boucher, whom the Mongols took prisoner in Hungary in 1241 and who, at the behest of the Grand Khan Mongke, constructed a semi-mechanical fountain that spurted out four different beverages to the khan's courtiers and guests in the Mongol capital of Qara-Qorum.^[22] Boucher's very presence in Qara-Qorum would have remained unknown had not the Franciscan friar William of Rubruck arrived there in 1254 and met him. William engaged Boucher's adoptive son as translator from Mongol into French, and vice versa, and took part in a Buddhist-Muslim-Nestorian-Latin religious disputation at the Grand Khan's court. He later recorded all of this in the account of his voyage to the Mongols.^[23] The dragoman skills of Boucher's adoptive son crucially deter­mined the course of the unprecedented quadrilateral disputation, which pitted a Latin Christian against a Buddhist for the first time. Friar William did not see fit to relate whether Boucher enlightened his Qara-Qorum acquaintances about Western customs and techniques, but this does not mean that he did not do so: here, as elsewhere, documentation should not be equated with reality. The same is true of the German prisoners whom the Mongols abducted to work in their gold mines, among whom Friar William originally intended to settle. The countless men and women who, in both hemispheres and in innumerable instances, were carried off into slavery, at times over great distances, provide another example of sporadic cultural transmission. At least occasionally they may have transmitted some cultural items to their captors without this leaving any record in written sources. In short, we may assume that underneath the layer of documented cross- cultural connections there is a substratum of shadowy traffic that only occasionally left behind traces. These remain baffling when they are dis­covered only as long as this level is not taken into consideration.

In the realm of ideas, sporadic transmission could preserve an item's content with astonishing accuracy. The spread of a tale that originated somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean in the wake of the Arab conquests of the 630s provides an arresting example. As the story has it, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius saw in the stars that a circumcised people would lay waste to his realm and therefore ordered that all Jews be killed or baptized, only to realize later on that the calamity was brought on him by another circumcised people, the Arabs. In the lands of the East this legend was transmitted orally for several generations and first appeared in writing in Arabic works composed 150 years later. But already in about 658 the tale appears in Gaul in a Latin chronicle - striking proof of the story's rapid transmission to the far west of those times. Moreover, this story was copied for centuries, with little or no changes, from one Latin chronicle to another until, early in the fourteenth century, Rashid al-Din incorporated it into his history of the Franks.^[24]

An item could also undergo radical metamorphoses in the course of a sporadic transmission, however. The story of the Bodhisattva - the future Buddha - which in Central Asia assumed a Manichaean guise in which the hero is called the Bodisav prince, was adapted into Arabic in eighth-century Baghdad. It was only slightly Islamicized, rendering the hero's name as Budasaf, or - due to some careless copyist - YudasafIn the ninth century the Arabic version gave rise to a Georgian-written, intensely Christianized adaptation that gave the hero's name as Iodasaph. Euthymius the Georgian (c. 955-1028) translated the story into Greek, calling the hero Ioasaph; from the Greek it was translated into Old Slavonic, Armenian and Christian Arabic, the latter giving rise to an Ethiopian version as well as to a de-Christianized Hebrew one. From the mid-eleventh century onward, the Greek version was repeatedly translated into Latin, with the hero rebaptized as Iosaphat, and the Latin versions served in their turn as the basis for adaptations in most of Europe's vernacular languages, from Italy to Iceland and from Portugal to Russia, with episodes from the story utilized time and again. For example, the four caskets figuring in the story - some adorned with gold and jewels, others smeared with tar - gave rise to the two chests, one containing the king's crown, scepter and orb, the other full of earth, in Boccaccio's Decameron (x, ι), and to the three caskets of gold, silver and lead in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice (ii.vii.ix). In its turn, the parable of the man who avoids falling into a well by clutching on to a tree at whose root two mice are relentlessly gnawing played a crucial role in Lev Tolstoy's spiritual conversion. Moreover, Josaphat - and his mentor Barlaam - even­tually entered the Roman Catholic Martyrology under 27 November, while the Georgians commemorated ‘Iodasaph, King of the Indians' on 19 May and the Greeks honored the Blessed Ioasaph on 26 August. Although the Portu­guese historian Diogo do Couto remarked in about 1612 on the similarity between Josaphat and the Buddha, it was only around i860 that Western scholars established definitely that the saintly Christian prince-turned-hermit was a distant yet unmistakably identifiable reincarnation of India's great spiritual teacher.^[25]

When what appears to have been sporadic transmission is attested solely by archaeology, one might wonder whether the transmission was simply accidental. Mesoamerican metallurgy is a case in point. Comparative labora­tory studies of Mesoamerican and Andean copper artifacts have revealed that the same fabrication techniques were employed in their production; but while Andean metallurgical traditions evolved over more than a millennium, in Mesoamerica - to be more precise, in present-day west Mexico - well- crafted metal assemblages of the same kind appeared all of a sudden around 800 ce. Hence it stands to reason that Andean metallurgy influenced that of Mexico. Bronze production, too, appears to have reached Mesoamerica from the Andean region, and T-shaped axes that served as money, which spread after c. 1200 over most of Mesoamerica, also followed South American designs.^[26] In the Andes, however, bronze served for the manufacture of everyday tools, while Mesoamerican smiths used it primarily for ritual items and for items reserved for the elite. Moreover, recent lead isotope studies of Mexican and Andean copper ores and artifacts point to an adoption of techniques, rather than an import of artifacts. This suggests that some relatively extended interaction must have taken place, and it is plausible to assume that it was not limited just to metallurgy but rather touched also upon subjects that leave no archaeological traces.

Regular trans-civilizational relations

While sporadic contacts ought not to be neglected, pride of place in the study of the movement toward more intense integration of large-area units, and of communication among them, should go to regular interactions. Of these, the most important were three types: war and conquest that led to the formation of states; the development of trade networks; and the emergence of religious ecumenes. These interactions, whether voluntary or coercive, are at the heart of the present volume.

The first type of regular interaction was political. During our time frame, a number of centralized empires aspired to intense, large-area integration: Byzantium (from its beginnings in the fourth century), China (from the reunification under the Sui dynasty in 589), the ‘Abbasid Caliphate in its heyday, the Aztec and Inca Empires (from 1428 and 1438, respectively). Of these, only China succeeded, some hiatuses notwithstanding, in preserving its empire throughout our period and much beyond. The Byzantine Empire, though nominally existing down to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, had already lost some of its most important provinces by the seventh century, and after the Fourth Crusade of 1203-4 was reduced to a dwindling territory. Far more short-lived were the conquest empires of Charlemagne, Chinggis Khan and Timur (Tamurlane), all three of which lacked a durable centralized administration. Smaller political units - for instance, Japan, Angkorean Cambodia, Ethiopia, England - attained a significantly more robust durability. Still, even ephemeral empires could boost long-term connectivity or bequeath a cultural legacy, as the cases of Charlemagne and Chinggis Khan demonstrate.^[27] The latter may have affected genetics as well: a famous DNA study suggests that about 8 per cent of the men now living between Uzbekistan and Northeast China carry a chromosome that arguably goes back to Chinggis Khan and his close male relatives.^[28]

Regional trade networks, the second type of regular interaction, were more common than empires. In the eastern hemisphere, they were increas­ingly interlinked and, in about 1250, developed into a loose system that extended in the wake of the Mongol conquests from England to China and persisted for about a century. According to one reconstruction, it was made up of eight circuits: China to the Strait of Malacca, India to the Strait of Malacca, China to the Black Sea, Arabia to East Africa and West India, the eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, Egypt to the Indian Ocean, and the trans-Mediterranean and West European subsystems;^[29] to these one may add the network that linked sub-Saharan Africa with the Maghreb. The extent to which some contemporaries were aware of these interlinkages is highlighted by the proposal of the Dominican friar William of Adam, in about 1317, to prevent the flow of goods from India via Egypt to Europe by blockading the Gulf of Aden with four crusader war galleys.³⁰

There were also trade networks in the western hemisphere. For Late Postclassic Mesoamerica, four exchange circuits have been identified: west Mexico, the Aztec Empire, the Maya zone, and the southern Pacific coastal zone.³¹ In addition, archaeological investigations indicate that cacao and scarlet macaws, alongside their ritual roles, were imported from Mesoamer­ica to the North American southwest; the macaws, in at least one case, were then bred locally, over 500 kilometers north of their natural habitat.³² In the Inca Empire trade apparently took place only in two regions: in the north­ernmost periphery of the realm traders procured sumptuary goods for local lords, and traders based in the central Peruvian Chincha Valley used rafts to reach the Guayaquil Gulf (modern Ecuador) and took the land route to the Inca capital at Cuzco.³³ Despite all of these connections, however, it would appear that during the period 500-1500 economic exchange circuits played second fiddle to war and conquest in connecting different populations in both hemispheres.

Religion was a third important ligament of connection. The Buddhist, Christian and Islamic ecumenes, expanding during much of the Middle Millennium, served as the arenas for intense and durable cultural integration. Of these, the largest by far was the Islamic realm, which originated in the Arab conquests of the seventh century and eventually extended from West Africa and Spain to Southeast Asia. The only civilization to border on all

Kuroda, “The Eurasian Silver Century, 1276-1359: Commensurability and Multipli­city,” Journal of Global History 4 (2009): 245-69.

30 See William of Adam, How to Defeat the Saracens, ed. and trans. Giles Constable (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2012): 96-116; see also 9, n. 37.

31 Michael E. Smith and Frances F. Berdan, “Spatial Structure of the Mesoamerican World System,” in Michael E. Smith and Frances F. Berdan (eds.), The Postclassic Mesoamerican World (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003): 29-30.

32 Patricia L. Crown and W. Jeffrey Hurst, “Evidence of Cacao Use in the Prehispanic American Southwest,” Proceedings of the National Academy of the United States of America 106/7 (2009): 2110-13; Andrew D. Somerville, Ben A. Nelson and Kelly J. Knudson, “Isotopic Investigation of Pre-Hispanic Macaw Breeding in Northwest Mexico,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 29 (2010): 125-35.

33 Frank Salomon, “A North Andean Status Trader Complex under Inka Rule,” Ethnohis­tory 34 (1987): 63-77; Maria Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, History of the Inca Realm, trans. Harry B. Iceland (Cambridge University Press, 1999): 159-62, 209-14. other major ones of the eastern hemisphere, it played a crucial role in the communication among them. The borders between the religious ecumenes were not stable: for instance, Buddhism lost present-day Afghanistan to Islam, and Islam lost Spain to Latin Christendom. Nevertheless, the ecu­menes enjoyed far more durability than the empires, with the exception of China.

Communication and transmission of knowledge among large-area units assumed various forms. Some are closely documented, such as the transla­tion of philosophical and scientific treatises in eighth/ninth century Baghdad or in twelfth/thirteenth century Spain. The migration of literary motifs, on the other hand, can often be established only through a painstaking scrutiny of apparently unconnected texts.^[30] Similarly, the study of the diffusion of crops or techniques can rely but rarely on an explicit mention of a transcul- tural borrowing; usually historians have to rely on indirect evidence, such as the geographical diffusion of a crop or a technique whose chronological progress can be unquestionably attested. The spread of paper is a case in point. Widely used in China by the third century, paper reached the Islamic realm soon after its creation, and came to be manufactured in Samarkand after 751, in Baghdad in about 794, in Egypt in the tenth century and in Jativa (Muslim Spain) in the eleventh century; by the end of the twelfth century there were 472 paper mills in Fez (Morocco). Some Egyptian paper was exported to India. In Europe paper was first used some time before 1000 but came to be manufactured only from the thirteenth century onward. The Byzantines apparently never took to paper-making; but from the eleventh century they used imported paper. (In Mesoamerica paper was invented independently.)

The spread of paper exemplifies the ways in which knowledge and tech­nology spread, but also demonstrates the way in which an item could be detached from its original major use as it spread. In China woodblock printing on paper, attested since the eighth century, became very common and set off an information revolution. In the realm of Islam, on the other hand, although paper was extensively adopted for writing, block-printing of books was not emulated. In western Europe, too, paper was used for centuries before Johann Gutenberg, in about 1440, invented printing with movable type.^[31]

Diasporas fulfilled a major role in the spread of goods and ideas. In the ninth century the Jewish merchants called al-Radhaniyya (or Radhanites) carried their goods all the way from the land of the Franks to China and back; from the twelfth century onward, Jewish scholars took part in the translation of Arabic treatises into Latin. They could fulfill these functions because in the realm of Islam Jews (and Christians) were accorded protected status, and because in Christendom, despite recurrent bouts of persecution, the theological doctrine that regarded Jews as witnesses to Christianity's truth sanctioned their presence. The Muslim commercial diasporas in West Africa and in Southeast Asia were instrumental in the Islamization of these regions. (The absence of such a Muslim diaspora in western Europe may have resulted, in the early centuries, from the West's commercial insignifi­cance, and in the later ones from the absence of a Christian doctrine sanctioning Muslim presence.) And Chinese diasporic communities spread popular strains of Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia.

While conquest, commerce, and religion furthered the expansion of various webs, and pilgrims, merchants and envoys, as well as some thinkers and tinkers, traveled the roads and seas, and such exceptional men like Rashid al-Din dramatically promoted cross-civilizational awareness, we can only guess to what extent an ordinary person who lived in those times was conscious of these developments or of their actual extent. With most people's horizons limited to the nearby vicinity and bounded by custom, it is probable that few perceived these thickening webs, even as their lives were increasingly affected by them.

Overview of this volume

This volume is divided into five sections, with a final concluding chapter. The first section, “Global developments,” provides a series of chapters that are global in scope and focus on structures, institutions and processes that developed long before the Middle Millennium and continue to shape world history today. In Chapter 2, Joachim Radkau examines the interaction between humans and the environment, noting the ways humans shaped nature and nature simultaneously shaped humans in a process of co-evolution. He explores the dynamics of the relationship between humans and nature among agriculturalists and nomads, and evaluates scenarios that

before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). have been proposed for that dynamic, which have ranged from witless exploitation that led to environmental degradation and societal collapse to rugged resilience and sustainability. The Middle Millennium, he concludes, saw gradual acceleration in human alteration of the environment, but this was limited and local; in contrast to today, those who caused environmental damage belonged to the same social group as those affected by it, and lived with its effects. In Chapter 3, Susan Mosher Stuard surveys women, family, gender, and sexuality, noting regional differences in marital patterns and the ways families organized societies. She pays particular attention to the role of religion in structuring patriarchal and paternalistic gender assumptions, and also uses domestic slavery and inheritance systems as examples of the way in which the webs of exchange that grew denser in this era had differential impacts on men and women. Sexual responses and reproduction were apprehended through gender distinctions, and notions of sexuality were communicated in erotic art, law codes, medical treatises, and scientific works. Gender systems remained varied, Stuard concludes, but in general moved from being somewhat diverse and flexible to becoming more rigid in this era, particularly as they applied to women. In Chapter 4, Susan Reynolds examines social hierarchy and solidarity, opening with the central assump­tion that all societies of which there is any record in this era were more or less unequal, but also all had expectations of proper and just behavior for those at the top, including the ruler. Government came in layers, and growing wealth and economic complexity led to new types of elites and more complex systems of governance, law, and bureaucracy. Societies from the local to the large-scale were also envisaged as solidarities linked by bonds of assumed (though often fictitious) genealogical connection, myths of origin, shared customs, and common interests, but only rarely, Reynolds asserts, did such bonds lead to calls for greater social egalitarianism rather than justice within a hierarchical system. In Chapter 5, Linda Walton surveys educational institutions beyond the household, focusing especially on those that arose with the expansion of Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, but also describing organized education in Eurasian Judaism and in the Aztec and Inca Empires. Learning was both a path to religious knowledge and a means of fulfilling the secular administrative and legal needs of rulers, dual functions that sometimes stood in tension to one another. Everywhere, Walton con­cludes, the organization and transmission of knowledge reflected not only diverse cultural values and traditions, but also differing relationships between states, which both utilized and controlled knowledge, and also relationships among elites, whose status depended on their access to knowledge and role in its transmission. In Chapter 6, Clifford J. Rogers provides an analysis of warfare, examining the reasons why wars were fought, who fought them, and how they were fought, including questions of recruitment, equipment, and organization of armed forces as well as strategy, tactics, and logistics. He examines the role of tribute-taking and slave-raiding in warfare, and pays particular attention to patterns of conflict between Eurasian nomadic soci­eties and agro-urban civilizations, exploring why the former were so often able to defeat and overrun the latter despite disadvantages in manpower and resources. At the end of the Middle Millennium, Rogers comments, mastery of gunpowder weapons gave both the Ottomans and Europeans key advan­tages that allowed them to conquer and hold large areas.

The second section, “Eurasian commonalities,” narrows the geographic focus slightly, but includes analyses of developments with broad cultural, political, economic, and social impacts that occurred in parallel across much of Eurasia in this era. In Chapter 7, an author team headed by Patrick J. Geary examines courtly cultures in western Europe, Byzantium, the Islamic world, India, China, and Japan. In all of these regions, courts became centers of power where specialized communities of individuals carried out functions related to the exercise of power, and simultaneously created cultural forms and ceremonial rituals that represented the court to itself and to outsiders. Courts varied widely in their size, organizational complexity, spatial arrangements, physical stability, structure, and gradations of rank, but across Eurasia there was intense competition for power and access to royal favor, which gave rise to particular codes of behavior that sought to teach courtiers how to survive and advance and that distinguished men and women participating in court life from those outside the court. Courts exchanged novel and precious cultural products of display and consumption and directly or indirectly borrowed practices and values from other courtly cultures, thus creating, the authors conclude, a Eurasian system of exercising and representing power. In Chapter 8, Bjorn Wittrock examines a series of transmutations, renovations, and reorientations from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries within various Eurasian cultural ecumenes through which core traditions and cultural legacies were reinterpreted and rearticulated in the face of challenges posed by economic, political, and social change. He notes that these occurred across Eurasia, but pays particular attention in this chapter to China, Japan, and Western Christendom. Wittrock argues that these reorientations involved a process of “cultural crystallization” by which these ecumenes were distinctly formed and became clearly demarcated from each other, both in their self-image and the view of other societies, in terms of their cultural order, cosmological focus, historical consciousness, and other aspects of life.

The third section, “Growing interactions,” highlights networks of long­distance trade and migration in agricultural and nomadic societies, and the transmission and exchange of knowledge and technologies that accompanied these. In Chapter 9, Richard Smith provides a broad overview of trade and commerce across Afro-Eurasia during the Middle Millennium, noting that by the fifteenth century “a more professional merchant class moved larger cargoes of more varied commodities longer distances to more destinations serving a wider consumer base than could have been imagined at the close of the fifth century.” He divides this huge area into three categories of zones: engines such as China and the Islamic heartland that were centers of production, consumption, and exchange; passageways such as Central Asia or the sea routes of Southeast Asia; and cul-de-sacs such as western Europe and West Africa. Smith traces the ways in which cataclysms such as the Mongol conquest and pandemic disease, as well as technological innovations and political decisions, shaped the ability of any zone to gain or maintain its status as a commercial engine. In Chapter 10, Michel Balard examines the northwestern portion of the Afro-Eurasian zone, Europe from the north Baltic Sea to the eastern Mediterranean. He discusses merchants and their associations, the commercial techniques invented for raising and handling capital, new forms of paper and metal currency, changes in ships and navigational routes, expanded fairs and markets, methods of obtaining gov­ernmental protection, and the wide variety of luxury goods, subsistence products, raw materials, and human cargo that merchants handled. Balard concludes that despite ups and downs, by the fifteenth century the Mediterra­nean and the north of Europe were tied together by numerous land and sea routes and were experiencing strong economic growth in what might be termed a first globalization of trade. In Chapter ιι, Himanshu Prabha Ray examines another segment of the Afro-Eurasian trading zone, the dynamic maritime communities of the Indian Ocean. She finds that local demand and local fishing and sailing communities played an important and steady role, but Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and Jewish institutions and merchants coming from elsewhere also shaped trade. Partnerships were established across religious affiliations and ethnic boundaries that connected coastal cities to each other and to distant trading centers, while in southern India merchant associations dominated commerce, founded temples, and employed private armies. Ray notes that evidence for seafaring communities comes from historical and archaeological sources, but also cautions that a holistic understanding of cultural interaction across the maritime world must take into account diverse channels of communication, including oral transmission by priests and pilgrims, traders and sailors, wandering storytellers and entertainers.

This third section moves from trade to other types of interactions. In Chapter 12, Dagmar Schafer and Marcus Popplow explore technology and innovation within expanding webs of exchange. They note that while earlier historiography tended to emphasize sudden technological breakthroughs, change actually occurred continuously, as people invented and adapted tools, machines, designs, methods, and processes deliberately to address new environmental or other circumstances, and also playfully or because of changing tastes and patterns of consumption. State or elite interests often acted as the catalysts, but artisanal experts and everyday practitioners held the basis of technical knowledge and stabilized its circulation. The motiv­ations for innovation and methods of transmission were manifold, Schafer and Popplow argue, and no culture was hostile toward technology or ignorant of it, but used innovations for both reform and the continuation of traditions. Turning from the practical to the theoretical, in Chapter 13 Charles Burnett discusses the transmission of science and philosophy, com­menting that writers during the Middle Millennium and modern scholars have both regarded questions about the cultural origins of scientific know­ledge as essential. Contemporary legends about the transmission of science reflect some degree of reality, for certain courts or cities stand out as hubs of learning and intellectual exchange, where books and mobile practitioners brought new ideas, although these were also to be guarded lest they fall into the wrong hands. Burnett concludes that ideas became transformed and appropriated to new situations and cultures as they moved, and that in at least some cases their transmission transcended religious and other types of boundaries. In Chapter 14, Anatoly M. Khazanov examines one type of boundary crossing that was particularly evident during the Middle Millennium, large-scale pastoral nomadic migrations and conquests. He analyzes the economic and political causes for pastoral nomadic migrations in this period, and discusses similarities and differences in three parts of Afro- Eurasia: the Eurasian steppes, semi-deserts and deserts; the Near and Middle East and North Africa; and India. Khazanov asserts that nomadic conquests brought significant cultural and economic changes, including the spread of Turkic languages and the flow of ideas and goods through long-distance trading, but did not ultimately alter sociopolitical structures drastically or permanently, because nomadic rulers had to adopt or adjust to the pre-existing institutional infrastructure, administrative models, and religious situation of conquered states.

The fourth section, “Expanding religious systems,” focuses on three reli­gions that proved to be so portable that by the end of the Middle Millennium they could legitimately be termed “world religions.” In Chapter 15, Michael Cook explores the centrality of Islamic civilization, which by the fifteenth century stretched east/west from Southeast Asia to West Africa, and north/ south from the bend in the Volga River to Madagascar. He begins with a bird's-eye view of differences among regions within this vast area as Islam interacted with and superseded earlier civilizations and cultural formations, and then highlights the components that helped to bind Islamic civilization together, including institutions, traditions of scholarship, and language. Cook argues that Islam is the only world religion that was also a world civilization, and suggests that this may have resulted from the complementary fusing early in its spread of the strong ethnic, religious, and political identity of the Arabs with the elaborate literary traditions of the Fertile Crescent. In Cha­pter 16, Miri Rubin examines Christendom's regional systems, first discussing central features of Christian life, including rituals, the veneration of saints and the Virgin Mary, bishops and other clergy, and collective worship, and the implications of these for polities, communities, and individuals. She surveys areas of the world governed by Christian rulers, those in which Christians lived as large, tolerated indigenous communities (largely under Muslim rulers), and those further east where Christian groups were small. Rubin highlights certain movements, including trade, crusading, and missionary activities, which encouraged links between the Christian regions, concluding that Christian institutions and teaching possessed the potential for inclusion and exclusion, for accommodating diversity as well as encouraging polities to become persecuting societies. In Chapter 17, Tansen Sen surveys the spread of Buddhism, noting that this was a complex multi-directional process that involved the transmission of art forms, literary genres, ritual items, geographical knowledge, and technologies along with religious doctrines. He sees two key turning points, one in the fifth century, after which places such as Sumatra, Japan, and Korea were incorporated into the Buddhist realm and diverse forms of Buddhist teachings adapted to local needs and values emerged, and one in the tenth century, after which there were multiple centers of Buddhism with their own spheres of influence and connections. Sen concludes that the spread of Buddhism triggered vibrant commercial interactions and cross-cultural exchanges that integrated various regions of Asia from Iran to Japan, and transformed the worldviews, political/cultural identities, sacred landscapes, and social lives of numerous people living across most of Asia.

The fifth section of this volume, “State formations,” surveys the development of centralized regional states and empires. In Chapter 18, Johann P. Arnason provides an overview of state formation and empire building, linking these processes with the previous section on religion by emphasizing that in this period state formation was everywhere inter­twined with religious cultures and institutions. He notes that political developments across Afro-Eurasia and to some extent in parts of the Americas lend support to the idea that the Middle Millennium was a distinct period. Of these, interaction between inner and outer parts of Eurasia was of particular importance for political history, but this did not lead to a unified pattern of state-building among either nomadic pastoral­ists or sedentary societies. Instead, Arnason asserts, imperial patterns - as distinct from more basic or common forms of statehood - were present in all Eurasian civilizations, though on different levels and with different levels of durability. Chapters 19-24 comprise a series of chapters that explore state-building in various parts of the world. In Chapter 19, Richard von Glahn notes that with the reunification of China under the Sui dynasty in the sixth century, a unified empire became the political ideal and - with fairly brief interruptions - the historical reality from this time onward, and inspired China's neighbors to emulate the Chinese model and form their own more centralized “national states,” engendering a multi-state political order that has persisted in East Asia down to modern times. Despite its political and cultural supremacy, however, China faced challenges from within and without that ultimately led to dramatic changes, including a revitalized Confucian model of imperial sovereignty and civil bureaucracy and a rapid monetization of taxes, rents, and other aspects of the economy in part through government interventions. In Chapter 20, Michal Biran examines the Mongols, who embarked on an unprecedented mobilization of peoples, goods, and ideas to forge the largest contiguous empire the world has known, and created an imperial administration and culture that merged their indigenous norms with various elements of their subjects' cultures. She acknowledges the destruc­tion that was part of this empire building, but primarily emphasizes the role of Chinggis Khan and his descendants as active promoters of inter- civilizational exchange that bolstered Eurasian integration and broadened the horizons of the Mongols' subjects and neighbors. Their legacy is complex, Biran asserts, as they triggered a long-lasting cultural effervescence, a thriving artistic and scientific exchange, booming international trade, and a host of religious, ethnic and political changes. In Chapter 21, Jean-Claude Cheynet discusses Byzantium, the only Euro­pean or Mediterranean state formed in antiquity that survived almost the entire Middle Millennium, despite its geographic position in the path of every people on the move, instability in the succession to the emperor­ship, and challenges by local elites. This longevity was in part the result of certain advantages - Roman traditions, an influential religious hierarchy, a well-defended capital, and a relatively stable financial system - but also the Byzantines' capacity for adaptation. Cheynet argues that contrary to the image of stability emanating from official discourse and often accepted by later historians, the structures of the Byzantine Empire were regularly transformed to meet new situations. In Chapter 22, David C. Conrad surveys polities that emerged in the Western Sudan from the late eighth century to 1500, including the Soninke kingdom of Wagadu/Ghana, the Mali Empire, the kingdom of Gao that expanded into the Songhay Empire, and other smaller states. All of these drew significant resources from long-distance and trans-Saharan trade in gold, copper, iron tools and weapons, slaves, salt, and other goods. Conrad makes innovative use of oral traditions along with archaeological, epigraphic, linguistic, and writ­ten evidence to examine the ways in which these states developed more efficient methods of food production, gained control of sources of artisa­nal, agricultural, and mineral goods, imposed control over trading centers, and established political dominance.

The final two chapters in the fifth section move across the Atlantic to investigate the Americas, where there are parallels in several places to many of the economic, political, and social processes that characterized Afro- Eurasia in the Middle Millennium. In Chapter 23, Michael E. Smith examines Mesoamerican state formation in the Postclassic period (from the eighth century through the fifteenth), when societies grew and expanded after an interval of collapse, ruralization, and stagnation. Peoples migrated, commercial networks increased in size and scope to encompass a greater diversity of goods, empires and city-states rose and fell, and ideas and styles traveled widely, forming a distinctive art style and a set of common symbols that were used all over Mesoamerica. Smith emphasizes that Postclassic Mesoamerica was very dynamic politically with multiple historical trajector­ies, but in general polities were smaller, shorter-lived, and less despotic than those of the Classic period, although the large Aztec and Tarascan Empires developed in contradistinction to this trend. In Chapter 24, Sabine MacCormack analyzes the ways in which state and religion were inter­twined in the creation of the Inca Empire, the largest imperial state of pre­Columbian America, which at its height stretched over 4,000 kilometers along South America’s Pacific coast. Inca rulers expanded their power and their territory in a variety of ways, forging marriage alliances with neighboring lords, waging wars to gather plunder and incorporate new territory, extending a system of roads with way stations, and engaging in diplomacy and negotiation. These practical measures were enhanced, MacCormack asserts, by creation myths and other narrative traditions (later recorded by the Spanish) in which the Inca rulers deliberately portrayed themselves as the founders and originators of civilization in the Andes, giving order to human society just as the Creator had given order to the cosmos, and by the Inca rulers’ participation in the religion of their subjects.

The volume ends with a final synoptic chapter, in which Diego Olstein surveys the social, economic, cultural, intellectual, and political develop­ments discussed in the preceding chapters with an eye to forces of regional integration and movements of interaction that led to what Shmuel N. Eisenstadt has termed “proto-globalization.” This globalization was “proto” because it was intermittent and fell short of encompassing the globe, and also because local trends often prevailed upon global ones in a process Olstein labels “proto-glocalization,” modifying the term invented by economists to describe the adaptation of a global product to local conditions and standards. Glocalization stresses the tensions between the local and global origins of - and inputs into - structures and processes in any given society, as well as tensions in the outcomes of such processes. Olstein thus begins with the local, then looks at the irruption of outside forces that transformed local worlds especially in Afro-Eurasia, including the often intertwined trans- regional processes of empire building, the expansion of trade networks, and religious conversion. He surveys the various ways these were localized, as ideas, technologies, gender patterns, court traditions, laws, rituals, and educational institutions were adapted and modified in the process of making an impact upon local arrangements. The combination of limiting conditions for a globalized world and the presence of powerful external forces that permeated so many local lives, he concludes, suggests that expanding webs of exchange and conquest did indeed make the Middle Millennium a “proto- global” era.

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Map 1.1. Eastern hemisphere, 500 ce

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Map i.2. Eastern hemisphere, 1000 ce

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Map 1.3. Eastern hemisphere, 1500 ce

FURTHER READING

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Bentley, Jerry H. “Hemispheric Integration, 500-1500 ce.” Journal of World History 9 (1998): 237-54.

Biraben, Jean-Noel. “Essai sur l'evolution du nombre des hommes.” Population 34 (1979): 13-25.

Bloom, Jonathan M. Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

Boas, Adrian J. Domestic Settings. Sources on Domestic Architecture and Day-to-Day Activities in the Crusader States. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

Brentjes, Sonja. “Revisiting Catalan Portolan Charts: Do They Contain Elements of Asian Provenance?” In Philippe Foret and Andreas Kaplony (eds.), The Journey of Maps and Images on the Silk Road. Leiden: Brill, 2008: 181-201.

Chandler, David P. A History of Cambodia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983.

Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to BigHistory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011.

Cook, Michael. A Brief History of the Human Race. New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2003.

Edson, Evelyn. The World Map, 1300-1492: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

Edson, Evelyn and Emilie Savage-Smith. Medieval Views of the Cosmos: Picturing the Universe in the Christian and Islamic Middle Ages. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2004.

Ellenblum, Ronnie. Crusader Castles and Modern Histories. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Harley, J. B., and David Woodward (eds.) The History of Cartography, 3 vols. University of Chicago Press, 1987-2007.

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“Metal Production.” in Michael E. Smith and Frances F. Berdan, eds., The Postclassic Mesoamerican World. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2003: 159-71.

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Olschki, Leonardo. Guillaume Boucher: A French Artist at the Court of the Khans. Baltimore, MD: TheJohns Hopkins Press, 1946.

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Ptak, Roderich. “Images of Maritime Asia in Two Yuan Texts: Daoyi zhilue and Yiyu zhi.” Journal of Sung-Yuan Studies 25 (1995): 47-75 [The Daoyi zhilue is the account by Wang Dayuan, based on his voyages in the 1330s].

Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, Maria. History of the Inca Realm. Trans. Harry B. Iceland, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Shagrir, Iris. Naming Patterns in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Oxford: Linacre College, Unit for Prosopographical Research, 2004.

Sharer, RobertJ. The Ancient Maya, 5th edn. Stanford University Press, 1994.

Shboul, Ahmad M. H. Al-Mas‘udi and His World. A Muslim Humanist and his Interest in Non­Muslims. London: Ithaca Press, 1979.

Tedlock, Dennis. 2000 Years of Mayan Literature. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010.

Tsien, Tsuen-Hsuin. Paper and Printing. Vol. v, part ι ofJoseph Needham (ed.), Science and Civilisation in China. Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Xuanzang. The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions. Trans. Li Rongxi, Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1996.