In this first chapter, we investigate how different cultures across the globe understood time and place during the period 500 to 1500. People viewed, and still view, time and geography from culturally specific points of reference. Take, for instance, the term “medieval.” This word is particularly tied to European history and not necessarily applicable to the major events of non- European cultures nor to the way those cultures define historical time. Medieval is Latin for middle age, typically used for the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire (around 500) and the rise of the early modern period of Europe (around 1500). An Islamicate historian might refer to this period as the Rise of Islam (ca. 632) and the Golden Age (ca. 786 to 1258). For a Chinese historian, 500– 1500 is a portion of the Imperial Age, which includes eight different dynasties, one of which is called the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907– 979). The Postclassical period of Mesoamerica is 900– 1521 and the historical periods of the Andes (present- day Peru) are Middle Horizon (600– 1000), Late Intermediary (1000– 1470), and Late Horizon (1470– 1532). Japanese historians consider Medieval Japan to extend from around 1100 to 1603. In this book, we use the term “medieval” because it is familiar to the audience reading this book in English, but at some point in the future, there will be a new term, or no term at all, that encompasses a global period between 500 and 1500. There are many ways to think about time.
In Section A, we discuss how different societies imagined and organized time. In direct collaboration, astronomers from China, the Islamicate world, and India found ways to use the motions of the moon, the sun, and the stars to plan and coordinate systems for planting fields, observing religious rituals, collecting taxes, and recording history. European systems emerged from the solar Julian calendar, standardized in the time of Julius Caesar (d. 44 BCE) which, though fairly accurate, gained an extra three days every 400 years. During the period 500– 1500, innovations and debates about telling time culminated in the development of the Gregorian calendar, named for Pope Gregory XIII, who introduced it in 1582. Today, it is widely used throughout the world, independently or in correspondence with particular religious calendars. Across the Atlantic Ocean and unknown to these other cultures, Mesoamericans similarly synchronized planting and rituals to the movements of celestial bodies.
In the above examples there is a sense of defining and labeling time, and that time is connected to location. In Section B, we examine maps and mapping systems. In addition to the various ways of marking time, groups defined social identity and claimed resources by naming the features of the immediate geography according to their own legends and events. Maps that survive from communities across the world tell us a lot about the individual cultures that created them. They were tools of political actors and religious leaders for controlling territory, and at the same time they were guides used by merchants and average people to find their way around that territory. What is at the top of a map? That depends on one’s perspective.
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Duncan , David Ewing . Calendar: Humanity’s Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year . New York : Avon Books , 1998.
Hassig , Ross . Time, History, and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico . Austin : University of Austin Press , 2001.
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Hayashi , Takao . “ The Units of Time in Ancient and Medieval India .” History of Science in South Asia 5 , no. 1 (July 2017 ): 1 – 116.
al- Khalili , Jim . The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance . London : Penguin , 2010.Reingold , Edward , and Nachum Dershowitz . Calendrical Calculations: The Millennium Edition . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2001.
Rice , Prudence . Maya Political Science: Time, Astronomy, and the Cosmos . Austin : University of Texas Press , 2004.
Rosen , Ralph M. , ed. Time and Temporality in the Ancient World . Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology , 2004.
Sorabji , Richard . Time, Creation, and the Continuum . Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2006 .
Staal , Julius D. W . Patterns in the Sky: Myths and Legends of the Stars . Granville, OH : McDonald & Woodward , 1988 .
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Spiritual and theological concerns governed, justified, and animated the behavior of people throughout the world and, as such, we begin our journey with faith and religion. In the period 500– 900, the spread of monotheistic religions created a profound cultural influence across the Eurasian landscape. Monotheistic religions are those defined by the doctrine that there is only one God, omnipotent (all- powerful), omniscient (all- knowing), and omnipresent (present in all time and space). In the global medieval period, Europe, the Near and Middle East, and North Africa were dominated by three primary monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These faiths and their various, and often conflicting, sects inspired people to their greatest work of artistic and philanthropic achievement, but also motivated them to their most debased acts of conquest and cruelty.
These religions were formed by interaction with other religions and groups. None lived in isolation from other faiths. For example, although many see medieval Europe as a Christian space, cosmopolitan European Christians knew the Jews in their cities, and Christians along the Mediterranean and in the Middle East lived and worked alongside Muslims and Jews. Muslims in the Middle East knew Jews and Christians, as well as Zoroastrians and, to the east, Hindus. In later chapters, we extend this discussion to Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Shintoism, but in this chapter we focus on the eventual domination of two of these monotheistic religions: Christianity and Islam.
There was not one “true” practice of any of these faiths and we will introduce some of the early controversies and schisms. Since all faiths under discussion in this text are still living religions with adherents and practitioners worldwide, it is important to note that modern practices may be strongly related to their ancestral faiths, but there will be differences. Section A introduces the four major monotheistic faiths, including debates that led to separation of worshippers into sects, and discusses how political leaders adopted, adapted, and developed religious administrations for their own political and economic goals. Section B discusses the sacred textual traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all of which include the patriarch Abraham and thus are called the Abrahamic religions. Because the written word of God, Christ, or Allah is a centerpiece of these faiths, by extension each culture was dedicated to recording divine and human knowledge in scrolls and manuscripts and preserving them in libraries. They are the People of the Book.
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Blair, Heather. “Religion and Politics in Heian‐Period Japan.” Religion Compass 7, no. 8 (August 2013): 284–293.
Brown, Michelle, ed. In the Beginning: Bibles Before the Year 1000. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2006.
Cox, George. African Empires and Civilizations: Ancient and Medieval. New York: Pan-African Publishing Company, 1992.
DeHamel, Christopher. A History of Illuminated Manuscripts. London: Phaidon, 1986, 2001.
Hoffman, Adina, and Peter Cole. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Genizah.New York: Schocken Books, 2016.
Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of Christianity in Africa: From Antiquity to the Present. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1995.
Kennedy, Philip. Christianity: An Introduction. London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011.
McKenzie, Judith S., and Francis Watson. The Garima Gospels: Early Illuminated Gospel Books from Ethopia.Oxford: Manar Al-Athar Monographs, 2016.
Robinson, Chase. Islamic Civilization in Thirty Lives: The First 1,000 Years. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.
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People have been traveling long distances throughout human history – seeking new places to live and valuable goods from far away. Some of the oldest discovered human settlements provide evidence that, as early as the Neolithic period (ca. 10,000 BCE) in the eastern Mediterranean, humans were exchanging obsidian (a naturally occurring black volcanic glass, useful for hand tools) from Asia Minor for shells from the Levant and the Red Sea. And cowrie shells made their way from the Indian Ocean to gravesites in Central Asia and northern China, similarly, far back into prehistory. Such valued items are found thousands of miles from their places of origin, indicating the very early development of longdistance trade within human history, and as human settlements became more complex, so too did the networks of exchange that connected them. One of the most important reasons that historians are interested in longdistance trade is because exchanges between communities living far apart give us a sense of what people in the past valued, and how they interacted with each other. How did people in the premodern world relate to others across differences of religion, language, and culture? What did they desire enough to spend huge amounts of time and expense to acquire? What foreign items did they want to imitate, to bury alongside their beloved dead, or to adapt to their own cultural needs? The history of economies and trade is really a history of cultural connections and meaning in human societies. This chapter introduces the trade patterns of the early medieval period, highlighting the most active trade routes and the most highly desired commodities. In some ways, the early medieval period can be seen as laying the foundations for the massive economic growth and expansion of trade that characterized the later Middle Ages. However, in other ways, the early Middle Ages should be considered economically vibrant in their own right, with ships and caravans covering distances both long and short to bring coins and commodities (both luxury and subsistence goods) to people around the globe. And, indeed, by 900, various routes for long- distance trade in the Eastern Hemisphere were connected to each other at one or many points, making for globalized connections at least across this hemisphere and, at one point, even into the Americas.
The first section introduces some of the connections between ports, cities, and entrep ô ts (trading centers) in these various territories where deals were made, both luxury goods and utilitarian items were bought and sold, and representatives from various cultures and languages interacted, learned from each other, and exchanged ideas, technologies, and traditions. Travel over long distances, whether by land or by sea, was difficult, expensive, and often dangerous during the medieval period, but people continued to consider it worth the time, effort, expense, and danger. Travel by sea, despite its dangers, was much faster than overland travel and allowed for much larger cargoes, and was therefore often preferred by medieval traders. Consequently, we see that the early medieval economy was vibrant, despite periods of political decentralization, especially in the Indo- Pacific region, and increasingly in the Mediterranean and North seas. The second section takes a closer look at some of the trade goods themselves and the ideas, artistic styles, and cultural concepts that traveled with those goods.
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Hansen, Valerie. The Silk Road: A New History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Hourani, George F. Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951/1995 expanded edition.
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McGrail, Sean. Boats of the World: From the Stone Age to Medieval Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Power, Timothy. The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate: AD 500–1000. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2012.
Price, Neil S. Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings. New York: Basic Books, 2020.
Stein, Stephen K., ed. The Sea in World History: Exploration, Travel, and Trade. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2017.
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Whitfield, Susan. Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.
Ziaii-Bigdeli, Layah. “Medieval Globalism: Fragments of Chinese Ceramics in Nishapur, Iran.” Blog post, August 31, 2017. www.metmuseum.org/blogs/ruminations/2017/medieval-globalism-chinese-ceramics-iran.
Despite its reputation as the Dark Ages, the early medieval period was one of great growth and change. The Frankish kings (in the Merovingian dynasty) created a strong and stable state in the area of France that lasted for several generations. As their power waned, a new family gained ascendancy. Charles Martel, Pepin the Short, and Charlemagne created a new, more powerful state known as the Carolingian Empire. Charlemagne, a great Germanic warlord, also helped change Christianity within Europe and fostered knowledge with his insistence on education. Further north, Britain saw waves of invasions by Germanic tribes and Scandinavians. Eventually, several stronger kings were able to control most of the island. In the south, Muhammad and his message spread quickly throughout the Arabian Peninsula and, although his life was short, his ideas had resounding effects in the Near East, Central Asia, Africa, and Europe. The caliphs who followed Muhammad created multiethnic empires across large swaths of territory. In Eastern Asia, the Chinese and Japanese political entities also consolidated their territories and peoples under single rulership. Although the Chinese Tang dynasty is considered a period of political stability, it was also a time of conquest, as there was a consistent influx of nomadic peoples and unrest, as in the An Lushan rebellion that helped bring the dynasty to an end. Japan, meanwhile, created an imperial political rule by emulating Chinese ideology while still holding true to its nature.
Although we cannot call the entities of the early medieval period nationstates, we can see the beginnings of the modern nation within these early political entities. The rulers under discussion took advantage of five strategies for strengthening and extending their authority:
This chapter focuses on how early medieval rulers implemented these strategies.
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Camille, Michael. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. London: Reaktion Books, 2004.
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Ferdowsi, Abolqasem. Shahnemeh: The Persian Book of Kings. Translated by Dick Davis. New York: Penguin Books, 2016.
Friday, Karl F. Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan. New York: Routledge, 2004.
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It is difficult to capture information about the life of a premodern common person. Most texts were written for and about the secular or spiritual elite. Much of the archeological evidence we have for this period is from the buried grave goods of high- status nobles and rulers or the ruins of castles and temples. Average people survived because of sustainable practices that did not leave behind much to see. They used and reused organic materials that eventually decayed or rusted away. They melted down old tools and repurposed the metals. They restored and repaired wooden furniture, carts, and ship masts until they degraded or were used for parts. They patched together woven fabrics or animal hides until they disintegrated. Nothing was wasted, not even feces, human or animal. Across Eurasia, villagers had a constant need for fertilizer, and both human and livestock waste was “cured” (left for a time to release harmful gases and pathogens) in pits or pots and placed on the fields at regular intervals. Since human waste was a vital resource, all foods collected from fields fertilized with it needed to be boiled to kill off any parasites lingering in the grains. Despite the intense recycling and repurposing, archeologists and historians have recovered material evidence about the lives of these peoples whose agriculture provided the basis for all economies, and for most social, cultural, religious, and political practices. By clearing forests, moving water, terracing land, and enclosing pastures, peasants manipulated their landscapes to provide food for themselves, local markets, their immediate lords and spiritual leaders, and, ultimately, their kings or emperors.
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Ford, Patrick. The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
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Kerlansky, Mark. Salt: A World History. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
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Phillipson, David. Foundations of an African Civilisation: Aksum and the Northern Horn, 1000 BC–1300 AD. Rochester, NY: James Currey, 2012.
The Saga of the People of Laxardal. Translated by Leifur Eiriksson. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.
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The word paradise often describes an earthly or heavenly place of unmatched beauty, but the concept can also refer to a mindset of harmony and bliss. Many world religions imagine such perfect places or enlightened states of mind, but the pathways for locating these sites – whether physical environments or spiritual modes of transcendence – vary greatly. In the Middle Ages, people journeyed across continents and oceans to uncover and retrieve precious materials believed to be auspicious, holy, and miraculous. Many of these objects were associated with sacred sites, specifically centers of pilgrimage. We know of these quests through the stories people recorded about them in handmade books or manuscripts, as well as xylographic books or scrolls (xylography is printing made from carved wooden blocks). In this chapter, we encounter sacred texts from major world religions – sutras in Buddhism, the Bible in Judaism and Christianity, the Qur’an in Islam, and others – in order to counter the outdated idea of the “Dark Ages.” As we will see, this period can be more accurately referred to as the Illuminated Ages, given the significant quantity of book arts on paper, palm leaves, and parchment that were produced across Afro- Eurasia on topics ranging from religion to medicine to history. Studying religion in a global medieval framework often involves understanding how faith communities comingled, which may involve considerations of politics and economics. In our first religion chapter, we outlined developments in the monotheisms of Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam across Afro- Eurasia, with a focus on sacred structures and scriptures. We saw how the Islamicate world began to expand and how the Christian world experienced dogmatic divisions. In this chapter, we look at visions of paradise and pilgrims’ journeys as recorded on paper, palm leaves, and parchment books made for Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain communities across India and East/ Southeast Asia, as well as for the People of the Book of the Abrahamic traditions. The theme of paradise allows us to consider ideal states, but we will also look at the realities of religious fragmentation and pluralism. Section A addresses the ways stories of the Buddha found new audiences across Eurasia, from monastery caves in China, to a powerful Muslim empire in greater Persia, to mercantile communities in the Mediterranean. The intermediality of manuscripts – that is, the relationship between text, images, devotional practices, and other media, such as painting or sculpture – varied by region and yet often invoked symbols of gems, gestures, or color to convey ideas about paradise. Section B examines the role that pilgrimage routes played in connecting distant religious communities as they sought relics or commodities, such as gems and spices, which were thought to bring an individual closer to serenity. In both sections, we will journey across Eurasia – with a few stops in Africa, coastal and interior – during the centuries 900 to 1300, with some examples into the 1500s that demonstrate the pursuit of paradise.
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Blair, Sheila, and Jonathan Bloom. Images of Paradise in Islamic Art. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991.
Keene, Bryan. Gardens of the Renaissance. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013.
Keene, Bryan, ed. Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019.
King, Anya. Scent from the Garden of Paradise: Musk and the Medieval Islamic World. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
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McHugh, James. “Gemstones.” In Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism, edited by Knut A. Jacobsen, Helene Basu,
Angelika Malinar, and Vasudha Narayana. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
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Although travel along overland routes continued, between 900 and 1300 long- distance travel and trade was increasingly conducted by sea. Maritime lanes across the Indo- Pacific and around the Mediterranean were not new in this period, but we can see greater traffic in commodities, raw materials, and people along the sea routes. Chinese- controlled fleets were particularly active in the China Seas and Indian Ocean, as were ships under the control of the Southeast Asian maritime empire of Srivijaya. Meanwhile, merchants from Muslim- ruled territories sailed throughout the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean, and Scandinavian voyagers, commonly known as Vikings, dominated the North Sea routes. These merchants were intermediaries of long- distance trade and communications, both within their own and between regions. Along their paths, they met and interacted with many different peoples and their cultures. We find evidence of these extensive networks of land and sea travel from not only historical documents but also extant literary texts, archeological remains, transcriptions of oral traditions, and modern DNA science (using what is known as “aDNA” for “ancient DNA” evidence). These artifacts can help us to reconstruct the voyages and pathways by which the transmission of goods, technologies, and people moved across the medieval world.
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Chen, BuYun. Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019.
Crown, Patricia, and W. Jeffrey Hurst. “Evidence of Cacao Use in the Prehispanic American Southwest.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 7 (2009): 2110–2113.
Crown, Patricia, et al. “Ritual Drinks in the Pre-Hispanic US Southwest and Mexican Northwest.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 37 (2015): 11436–11442.
Frazier, Kendrick. People of Chaco: A Canyon and its Culture, rev. ed. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2005.
Freedman, Paul, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
Goitein, S. D., trans. Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Haddawy, Husain, trans. The Arabian Nights II: Sindbad and Other Popular Stories. New York: Knopf, 1998.
Heng, Geraldine. “An Ordinary Ship and Its Stories of Early Globalism: World Travel, Mass Production, and Art in the Global Middle Ages.” Journal of Medieval Worlds 1, no. 1 (2019): 11–54.
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Jung-pang Lo. China as a Sea Power 1127–1368: A Preliminary Survey of the Maritime Expansion and Naval Exploits of the Chinese People during the Southern Song and Yuan Periods, edited by Bruce A. Elleman. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2011.
Kunz, Keneva, and Gísli Sigurðsson, trans. The Vinland Sagas: The Icelandic Sagas About the First Documented Voyages Across the North Atlantic: The Saga of the Greenlanders and Eirik the Red’s Saga. London and New York: Penguin, 2008.
Lunde, Paul, and Caroline Stone, trans. Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North. New York: Penguin, 2012.
Mair, Victor H., and Erling Hoh. The True History of Tea. London: Thames and Hudson, 2012.
Pollard, Edward, and Charles Kinyera Okeny, “The Swahili Coast and the Indian Ocean Trade Patterns in the 7th–10th Centuries CE.” Journal of Southern African Studies 43, no. 5 (2017): 927–947.
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Zaouali, Lilia. Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Oakland: University of California Press, 2007.
In this section we examine the centralization and fragmentation of several political entities. The recognized definition of a state is “a sovereign organized political community under one government, that is concerned with both civil and military affairs.” States have recognized territory, bureaucracies, and some control over their constituents. They levy taxes, operate a military and police force, and are comprised of bureaucratic institutions (like a court system) that administer and enforce laws. Although few of the political communities from 900 to 1300 can be classified formally as nation- states (nation- states are “imagined communities” where the people see themselves as one unit, tied to a political and geographic space), most of the political leaders were working to establish statehood. Bureaucratic stability became the key. With stability comes the ability to innovate (see Chapter 3 ) and to create lasting legacies. Leaders began creating political states by using their authority to create succession plans, administer justice and enforce laws, and levy consistent taxes. While some areas grew toward statehood, others found themselves spread too thin, with challenges to their governmental institutions that caused retraction and fragmentation. Losing the bureaucratic center, these states often fell to internal and external fighting. The crusades of the Middle East and the growth of the Mongol Empire are two important events that show how external pressures, combined with internal disintegration, had far- reaching consequences.
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Ciocîltan, Virgil. The Mongols and the Black Sea Trade in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, translated by Samuel Willcocks. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
Cobb, Paul. The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Davis-Secord, Sarah. Where Three Worlds Met: Sicily in the Early Medieval Mediterranean. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017.
De Nicola, Bruno, and Charles Melville. The Mongols’ Middle East: Continuity and Transformation in Ilkhanid Iran. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
Jackson, Peter. The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Hansen, Valerie. The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020.
Hempel, Rose. The Golden Age of Japan, 794–1192. Translated by Katherine Watson. New York: Rizzoli, 1983. Levtzion, Nehemia, and Jay Spaulding, eds. Medieval West Africa: Views from Arab Scholars and Merchants. Princeton, NJ: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 2003.
Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic. Translated by R. K. Narayan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
Murasaki Shikibu. Tale of Genji. Translated by Royall Tyler. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.
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Sánchez García, Raúl. The Historical Sociology of Japanese Martial Arts. London: Routledge, 2018.
Shinoda, Minoru. The Founding of the Kamakura Shogunate, 1180–1185: With Selected Translations from the Azuma Kagami. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960.
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The Tale of the Heike. Translated and introduction by Helen C. McCullough. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.
Vernon, Clare. “Dressing for Succession in Norman Italy: The Mantle of King Roger I.” Al-Masāq 31, no. 1 (2019): 95–110.
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Class is an ordering of society, generally based on differences in wealth, inherited rank or position, profession, occupation, race, or gender. “Class” is a comparative tool used to define hierarchical social groups; although it is a modern term with ties to post- Industrial society, we use it because people in the Middle Ages were organized along economic, occupational, and institutional lines. Those within a particular class share similar economic or social status, which often aligns with political power. These separations make the people easier to control and organize, which, in turn, makes the creation of a stable state easier to manage. In the premodern period, class- based societies were closely linked to economic security. Those of the noble classes held legal, social, cultural, and political sway over the lower classes, and, although members of the military and religious organizations could occasionally come from lower classes, aristocratic nobles held the positions of leadership. This meant that almost all the positions of authority and power were held within one class, a small group of families that passed down resources and titles to their descendants and lived off the labor of the agricultural class. Medieval people believed these classifications were divinely determined, and religious organization reiterated these categories within their written commentaries, supporting social and political striations. Since the advent of writing, codes have separated people by birthright, economic status, occupation, and gender. From ancient Mesopotamia, laws privileged free men of property over free men; after all, free men of property were the ones who wrote the laws. Slaves had no power at all. These ancient codes also defined religious leaders (priests) from the rest of society, and women almost always held a lesser position within their economic state – that is, free women of property were “worth more” than free women, and both classes were above slave women, but all women were less than men within their class. In all societies under discussion here, women held lower positions than men, socially, legally, and economically.
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In the first chapter on religion, we discussed the major monotheistic faiths that influenced Eurasia from 500 to 900. In the second chapter on religion, we discussed India, China, and the subcontinental region with the massive expansion of Buddhism during the central medieval era. In this last chapter, we discuss the rise of affective religious experiences that permeated several faith traditions. This key development of late medieval religiosity was endemic throughout many of the cultures we have been discussing. We focus, in this chapter, on women’s experiences with the spirituality of the late medieval world. This chapter also expands its timeline to include women who lived prior to 1300 and who died after 1500. As Joan Kelly wrote, in her groundbreaking 1977 article “Did Women Have a Renaissance?”, women’s history must question all accepted historical periodization, as the historical development of men’s history has differing effects on women, and, we might add today, all peoples outside a strict gender binary.
As we have seen in earlier chapters, it behooved sovereigns to have strong connections with religious leaders; religion created group cohesion while also motivating political, social, and cultural decisions and divisions. Throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, the time from 1300 to 1500 was politically unstable, particularly after the traumas of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Economically, politically, and socially, societies were changing, and we see this directly within the religious ideologies popularized during this time. So- called heretical movements and challenges to religious leadership increased, as people sought more personal and intimate relationships with their gods.
Although these changing religious ideologies affected people of all classes and genders, in this particular chapter we focus on how religion affected and was affected by women. In doing so, we highlight the particular roles of women within the larger movements of religious change, and learn about these larger trends through looking at women’s spiritual lives. Despite constraints placed on them by male- controlled religious doctrine, women across the world created religious and spiritual opportunities and spaces for themselves and their concerns. It must be said, piety and spirituality themselves have no gender, except that which is socially constructed. People across time and space have lived within the gender constraints of their worlds, and certain types of customs, beliefs, and behaviors have become known as “female” since those who were coded female were the ones who practiced them. In the first section of this chapter, we discuss the spiritual practices of women within major religious groups around the world. The second section discusses how expanding spiritual consciousness affected literature and art just prior to the modern period.
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The late Middle Ages was a transformative period for the world system, and economic exchange was at the heart of these developments. West African gold mines had long supplied the Islamicate and Byzantine economies, and gold from eastern Africa was one product among many traded in the Indian Ocean. But, over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, European traders established trade colonies along the southern shores of the Mediterranean, allowing them greater access to that precious metal. Mongol conquests across Central Asia and China facilitated trade connections across land and sea, but also changed the relationship between China and the rest of the hemisphere. Although known as land- based warrior nomads, the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271– 1368) was in fact quite interested in maritime long- distance exchange. Under their rule, China’s ships dominated commerce in the China Seas and eastern Indian Ocean. Their successors, the Ming dynasty (1368– 1644), oversaw the further growth of maritime trade (to the disadvantage of overland trade along the silk roads) and revived the tributary economy of earlier Chinese dynasties. In western Asia, merchants based in Europe and the Middle East took advantage of Mongol rule to trade for desired eastern products. After the breakup of the Mongol Empire, however, the flow of goods from the East became more difficult for merchants to access by land routes, so European merchants and explorers, already in control of Mediterranean Sea trade, launched out on new maritime routes to the East. In South America, the powerful Inca Empire facilitated the production and distribution of both basic foodstuffs and valued luxury goods. This system was demolished during the sixteenth- century Spanish conquest of the Inca.
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From 1300 to 1500 CE, ambitious rulers followed in the footsteps of traders and explorers, laying claim over territories and resources, natural and commercial. The familiar borders of present- day nations or states began to take shape for some parts of Eurasia, and these centuries also witnessed the rise of European colonial exploitation that we must continually keep in mind while looking at the politics of naming, erasing, acknowledging, and reclaiming the histories of land, water, and, most importantly, of people, in large parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, Austronesia, and the Americas. Keep in mind as you read that despite their small size and disconnection from land masses, several island- nations – from Great Britain to Indonesia and Japan – ruled considerable territory and contributed to the trade examples discussed at the beginning of this chapter.
Maps assist in the creation of national history and in the process of state formation. As an example, consider a letter written on 21 August 1501 by Angelo Trevisan, secretary of the Venetian chancellor to Spain, to the Venetian naval captain Domenico Malipiero (1428– 1515): “The map of the voyage to Calicut (India) is impossible to acquire, as the king has decreed the penalty of death to anyone who gives it away.” Trevisan is referring to the prohibition by King Manuel I (r. 1495– 1521) of spreading information about the voyages of Vasco da Gama (1460s– 1524) and Pedro Á lvares Cabral (ca. 1467/ 68– ca. 1520) to India. This mandate exemplifies the maxim that knowledge is power. More specifically, that knowledge of geography is power: geography is political.
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The common understanding of the Black Death is that it was European in scope and generally limited to the period from 1347 to 1353. While partially true, this limits our understanding of the extent of this pandemic that lasted from the early 1220s to the late 1370s. Widening our lens to 150 years and including an Afro- Eurasian context reveals how much more virulent, dangerous, and devastating the disease was, as well as showing us the resiliency, adaptiveness, and determination of humanity. We begin with a medical understanding of the bacteria, move to the thirteenth- century plague in China, and then shift westward to the Middle East, Africa, and European spaces. The growth of technology (a direct by- product of globalization) intensified long- distance travel and the spread of knowledge, which both helped and hindered responses to the plague. It is estimated that over 150 million people died across Eurasia and Africa, with significant consequences for the societies, cultures, and economies of the impacted communities. Labor shortages led to major changes in wages and labor practices in Europe, and long- distance trade was slowed for a time as quarantines were imposed.
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