Images
Chapter 0 - Orientation
These earthenware statuettes from the eighth century are the animals of the Chinese zodiac figures dressed in robes. While some are damaged – for example the rabbit (fourth from the left) has lost its ears – the dragon and snake in the center are recognizable. The semi-human creatures are arranged from left to right in order of the 12-year cycle of the Chinese calendar: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, and boar. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Charlotte C. Weber, 2000, 2000.662.7a–l
Pascal’s Triangle for computing square and cube roots.
Evolution of Hindu-Arabic numerals
Carved in the Piedra del Sol or the Stone of the Sun are figures of the days, weeks, and months of the Aztec calendar. Etched in the central disk is the name of the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II, who reigned between 1502 and 1520. It weighs 54,210 pounds, about 25 tons.
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A photograph of the twelfth-century stone etching known as the Map of the Tracks of Yu.
Based on two Chinese maps from the 14th century, this Korean Kangnido (or Gangnido) Map of China was copied in 1402 on paper.
Source: Honkoji Tokiwa Museum of Historical Materials, Shimabara, Nagasaki
T/ O map diagram. Drawn in the seventh century by the Spanish intellectual, Isidore of Seville.
The Hereford Mappa Mundi was drawn around 1300 on a remarkably large single calfskin or deer hide of about four by five feet. It is the largest medieval map known to exist. Alongside geographical features and historic cities are biblical figures and mythical beasts.
Chapter of Hereford Cathedral
The Hereford Mappa Mundi is oriented with East at the top of the map, where Christ sits in majesty.
Chapter of Hereford Cathedral
Cynocephali, the dog-headed people, as featured on the Hereford Mappa Mundi.
Chapter of Hereford Cathedral
Sciapods were semi-human creatures with one leg and a giant foot. To shade itself from the hostile desert sun, a sciapod lay on its back and used the foot for shade.
Chapter of Hereford Cathedral
The Little Idrisi, a copy of the 1154 Charta Rogeriana, or map of King Roger. In order to privilege the holy city of Mecca above Medina, the map is oriented with south at the top. Notice the Arabian Peninsula is “upside down” in the top center.
Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo
Ursa Major (the Great Bear) includes the star formation known in the United States as the Big Dipper. Ursa Minor (the Lesser Bear) includes the Little Dipper. At the tip of the handle is Polaris, also known as the North Star.
McDonald & Woodward Publishing Company
The Chinese interpretation of the seven stars of the Big Dipper, the Emperor Wen-Chang and his advisors.
McDonald & Woodward Publishing Company
Chapter 1
Our Lady Mary of Zion in Aksum is a place of worship for Ethiopian Christians. It is believed that the first structure was built in the fourth century. It has been rebuilt many times since.
© A. Savin, WikiCommons
Pope Leo III crowning Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor, 800 CE. The image is from a mid-fourteenth-century Les Grand Chronique de France, a history of French kings from legendary beginnings to the thirteenth century. A digitized version of the manuscript, Royal MS 16 G VI, can be viewed on the British Library site.
Album / Alamy Stock Photo
Dome of the Rock.
Photo: Andrew Shiva
A 1910 photograph of a page now missing from the Aleppo Codex, once a full Hebrew Bible or Tanakh that was copied ca. 1008 CE. It was looted during the First Crusade and held for ransom. It survived intact until 1947, when it was damaged in a raid of the synagogue in Aleppo, Syria, where it had been kept.
The opening page of the gospel of St. Matthew in the Codex Aureus (mid-eighth century), which has an inscription in Early English written by the nobleman who gave his own hard-earned money to get the manuscript back from the Vikings who stole it.
The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
Produced in the sixth century for the Byzantine Church’s celebration of the conquest of Italy, the Rossano Gospels is a luxury manuscript with red/purple parchment pages and writing in silver ink. Along with the Abba Garima Gospels, the Rossano Gospels has early examples of images of the four Evangelists. Rossano Gospels, Rossano Cathedral, Italy.
© Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Mark the Evangelist. Abba Garima III.
History and Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
An inscription at the top of this folio of the Amajur Qur’an indicates that it was donated to a religious community in Tyre (Lebanon) in 876 CE by Amajur al-Turki, a powerful governor of Damascus, Syria, during the Abbasid Caliphate. The large kufic script and generous empty spaces on this page display wealth and power; parchment was expensive to prepare, and this artist did not worry about covering it with writing or images. Although not all of it survives, it is estimated that a full text of a Qur’an in this style would be many volumes with an overall number of 6,500 leaves, or pages. In that case, the book required at least 1,600 sheep or calf hides, an extraordinary luxury, especially in a time when the Abbasid Empire was expanding, and the military needed those hides for saddles, bags, shoes, and other uses.
Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
Chapter 2
The Chinese minted copper and bronze coins as early as the fourth century BCE. By the Han period (202 BCE–220 CE) coins looked like this, round with square holes. They were often carried on strings of up to 1,000 coins. They were regularly used throughout China for commerce and payment of taxes. This particular coinage – called Kai Yuan Tong Bao – was minted from 621 in the Tang period and often imitated by Central Asian peoples such as the Sogdians.
Five musicians wearing hats in the Sogdian style ride on a Bactrian camel, which is indigenous to Central Asia. Sogdian entertainers – musicians and dancers – were popular along the silk roads and at the Tang imperial court. This ceramic figurine was found in the grave of a high-ranking military officer named Xianyu Tinghui (660–723). It is decorated in the three-color style typical of Tang-era ceramics, although this one features an additional color, blue, which came from the highly prized mineral cobalt, mined in western Central Asia or Iran – thus indicating that this piece was expensive and meant to reflect the very high status of the person in the tomb.
Freer Sackler Gallery
The entrance to the Huaisheng Mosque (ca. 1873), also known as the Great Mosque of Guangzhou. Tradition claims that this mosque was built in the 620s or 630s by one of Muhammad’s closest associates, although this may only be legend. It is certainly true that by the late seventh century Guangzhou had one of the largest communities of Muslims in China, and mosques were probably built there and in other port cities during the Tang dynasty or early Song dynasty. This mosque was rebuilt several times during later periods.
Wellcome Library no. 29893i, Wellcome Collection
These impressive bejeweled bracelets were made in Byzantine Constantinople from materials imported from around the Eastern Hemisphere: the gold may have come from Africa via Islamicate-world traders, the pearls were from the Persian Gulf, and the gemstones from Southeast Asia.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917, 17.190.1670 and 17.190.1671
This gold dinar minted under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705) was one of the first set of Islamic coins to have only words and no images. Earlier coins had been based on Byzantine and Sassanian models, which included images of the emperor. The earliest Islamic coins also displayed human images, but caliph Abd al-Malik’s coinage reform did away with the use of pictures on money. This coin contains the Muslim profession of faith: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Joseph H. Durkee, 1898, 99.35.2386
A scrap of paper with early Chinese writing was recycled as the sole of a shoe for dressing a corpse for burial.
Courtesy of the East Asian Library and the Gest Collection, Princeton University Library
Horses raised by the Central Asian nomads were highly prized in Tang China. This horse, Night-Shining White, was the personal property of Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–756).
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift, 1977, 1977.78
Prior to the arrival of Islam, most Sogdians practiced Zoroastrianism, but others were Buddhists, Christians, or Manicheans. Their mercantile activity across the silk roads meant they knew many religions and languages, and Sogdians were known for their translations of sacred texts. Here is a Zoroastrian prayer, the Ashem Vohu, in Sogdian language and script, copied in the ninth century and found at Dunhuang. Later, many Sogdians converted to Islam.
© British Library
Fashioned to look like Chinese whiteware, this ninth-century bowl is one of the earliest attempts in the Islamic world to copy the look of Chinese ceramics. It features vibrant blue Arabic calligraphy, a style that would become characteristic of Islamic art in later centuries. The Arabic word “happiness” is repeated twice in the center of the dish.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 63.159.4, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1963
Persian Sassanian ewers (pitchers) like this one from the sixth/seventh century often had imagery from ancient Greek myths and stories. The figures here – dancing women holding grape leaves and branches – are linked to the female worshippers of the ancient Greek god of wine, Dionysus. Called maenads, they danced in frenzies that caused their clothing to slip off, a provocative image often found on ancient Greek and Hellenistic wine jugs. The maenads may have been translated to signify worship of the Iranian goddess Anahita in the local context and are evidence of centuries of deep interconnections between the Persian and Greek societies.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. C. Douglas Dillon Gift and Rogers Fund, 1967, 67.10a, b
This late seventh–early eighth-century Chinese-made pitcher is modeled on the shape and style of Sassanian or Sogdian metalware but crafted in ceramic and decorated in the Chinese three-color glaze style. Green, brown (or amber), and off-white glazes were combined to create the “three-color” style, with a topcoat of lead-based clear glaze that created a shiny, waterproof surface. This decorative style is found on pitchers, bowls, trays, and figurines showing humans and animals. This pitcher has a phoenix’s head, and the body has an image of a horse-mounted warrior shooting an arrow backwards over his shoulder. This so-called “Parthian shot” was a skill associated with Persian and other horse warriors of western Central Asia.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Stanley Herzman, in memory of Adele Herzman, 1991, 1991.253.4
The Jewel of Muscat is a dhow built in Qantab, Muscat Governorate, Oman, between 2008 and 2010 as a joint project of the governments of Oman and Singapore. It was modeled after the Belitung shipwreck. It is now housed in the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore.
A seventh/eighth-century painting from a Buddhist sanctuary in Khotan depicts the story of a wily princess who smuggled mulberry seeds and silkworm eggs across the Chinese border into the ancient Kingdom of Khotan. The Khotan king wanted to know the closely guarded technology of Chinese silk production, so he requested a Chinese princess as wife. She arrived at his court with the precious items concealed in her hair and headdress British Museum.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved
This eighth-century ceramic figurine is one of many similar statues produced in Tang China. Glazed in the typical three-color style, it shows a young woman of the Tang imperial court sitting with a small pet dog at her feet. She wears vibrant clothing and sits on a stool imported from Southeast Asia. The Tang era was one of great innovation in Chinese clothing fashions, with artisans, weavers, and wealthy patrons working together to create an elite culture focused on fashion and style.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Vincent Astor Foundation Gift, 2010,2010.120
A richly decorated wooden statue of Christ, created in mid-twelfth-century Christian Catalonia (northern Spain), shows Jesus wearing a bright robe painted to resemble Mediterranean silks. With red circles around blue floral patterns and golden starbursts, the tunic recalls the long tradition of decorative silk textiles, patterns, and styles that moved between East and West during the early Middle Ages. Batlló Majesty, twelfth century, Catalonia, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona.
Photo by Sarah Davis-Secord
Chapter 3
A stirrup from the Mongolian or Tibetan regions was made in the late-medieval period. Fierce dragon heads decorate the arch, and the bottom is a sturdy and practical platform. Objects like this are a rare find. They were well used and then melted down and recycled.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Bequest and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Gift, by exchange, 2014, 2014.73
A Mongol archer on horseback as depicted in a Chinese painting on paper from the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Empress Wu Zetian (625–705) was a concubine and then a lady-in-waiting, but eventually became the Empress of China in the Tang dynasty. This fresco was made in the seventh/eighth century.
Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
The Empress Wu Zetian sponsored the construction of Buddhas at the Longmen Grottoes.
platongkoh / iStock
Emperor Shotoku of Nara Japan (574–622) and his two sons as depicted on an eighth-century hanging scroll in the Museum of Imperial Collections in Tokyo, Japan.
An illustration of Greek fire from a twelfth-century manuscript in Greek now held at the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid.
Chained library at Hereford Cathedral.
RDImages / Epics / Getty Images
As the most popular hero of Shahnemeh, Rostam is often depicted in Islamicate literature. This mid-fifteenth-century illumination depicts Rostam taming Rakhsh, the foal that will grow to be Rostam’s mighty steed and constant companion.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Grinnell Collection, Bequest of William Milne Grinnell, 1920, 20.120.240
Because the first of his great feats is killing a massive lion, Rostam is often shown in a lion’s skin (or here, more of a tiger pelt). This early fourteenth- century illustration shows his enemy Olad (who will become his friend) tied to a tree. Olad knows the secret to defeating the White Div (the Persian/ Iranian word for demon) and his evil cohort and helps Rostam to overcome the monster. In Ferdowsi’s epic, Rostam cuts out the demon’s heart and liver and gives the liver to Olad as a sign of truce and friendship.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1969, 69.74.7
Chapter 4
Juanita/Lady of Ampato.
JAIME RAZURI / AFP via Getty Images
The Wieliczka Salt Mine near Krakow, Poland, is an example of the power of salt to stabilize economies and fund grand projects. For most of the medieval period, surface salt springs enriched the regional economy near Krakow, but in the eleventh century salt springs began drying up. At that point, the Wieliczka miners dug underground, eventually creating an intricate 100 miles of tunnels, the deepest of which is 1,000 feet. Backed by revenue from salt, Casimir the Great (1310–1370) founded the first university of Poland.
ewg3D / iStock
A late medieval calendar page shows peasants preparing the soil for fall planting. In the foreground is the heavy plow, which was better able to turn over the heavy, wet soil of northern Europe than the ancient Roman “scratch plow”. In the back, a harrow (consisting of a frame with tines) is dragged across the soil to break up clods and weeds. Both are horse-drawn, although medieval farmers also used oxen. The horses wear a padded horse collar, which protected their necks from injury and fatigue and allowed them to sustain significant pulling power over longer periods.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. Ludwig IX 18, fol. 5v
This peaceful moment of ducks under a rice panicle (spikelets that contain the seeds) would be a common image in a medieval rice paddy. The Song dynasty artist celebrates its simple beauty in India ink on silk. National Palace Museum Taipei.
INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo
Chart with data on medieval warming period produced by the OSS (Open Source Systems, Science, Solutions) Foundation.
OSS Foundation
Small traditional type of St. Brigid’s Cross.
imarly / iStock
Flooded rice paddies, Ubud, Bali, Indonesia.
Deposit Photos
Buddha in meditation with a seven-headed naga, Mucalinda. Seventh/eighth century, Central Thailand, National Museum of Bangkok.
Placebo365 / iStock
Dragon-protected stairway leading to Wat Phra That Doe Suthap temple outside Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Pakpoom Phummee / Alamy Stock Photo
This 29-inch-tall statue from Cambodia is one of the oldest surviving Ganesha icons in mainland Southeast Asia. He is a symbol of jolly prosperity, reaching into an ever-present bowl of candy. His round, chubby body contains the universe, and it is good luck to rub his belly. As a god of arts and learning, Ganesha is often shown with one tusk missing. As the story goes, when the sage Vyasa began reciting the Hindu epic Mahābhārata, the elephant god cut off his own tusk and fashioned it into a writing tool. Seventh/eighth century, Musee National de Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Ruth Hofshi / Alamy Stock Photo
Chapter 5
This printed image from the Dunhuang copy of the Diamond Sutra (868) shows the Buddha in the Jetavana Monastery (in Shravasti, Uttar Pradesh, northern India) preaching to his elder disciple, Subhuti, who engages with the Buddha in dialogue throughout the scripture. Deities and monks attend the dialogue, and two lions lie in front of the Buddha’s lotus-throne. The mulberry paper was mounted as a handscroll, which developed throughout East Asia as a primary format for preserving Buddhist sutras (printed or painted alike), whereas painted palm leaves and paper manuscripts emerged in India and Southeast Asia.
FLHC 8 / Alamy Stock Photo
The charm text of a mantra found in a wooden pagoda commissioned by the Japanese Empress Shotoku ca. 767–770.
Middlebury College Museum of Art
A pair of wooden book covers with scenes from the life of the Buddha – including his meditation beneath the Bodhi Tree in Bodh Gaya (Bihar) – was produced in Bihar around 1025. The two holes in each board once accommodated knots and binding strings that held the pages, likely made of palm leaves, of the manuscript together.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase (M.72.1.20c-d)
This page shows Maitreya, a bodhisattva of the future, who will come to Earth to complete Buddha’s teachings of enlightenment. It comes from a manuscript of the Prajnaparamita, made in Bihar, Kurkihar, India, around 1100–1125.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase (M.72.1.19a-b)
These wooden covers from an eleventh-century manuscript associated with Shiva contain depictions of Hindu deities.
The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
Vardhaman (Mahavira) and the Snake-God Sangamaka. Page from a Kalpasutra manuscript, Gujarat, India, about 1475.
From the Collection of Carrie and Tadzio Wellisz
These four scenes from the Morgan Crusader Bible/Shah Abbas Bible (ca. 1244–1254) show God creating the world, creating Adam and then Eve, and warning them not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge.
The Morgan Library and Museum
This diagram presents the Sephirotic Tree with 10 orbs and 22 channels starting with the Divine at the top and Earth or humankind at the bottom.
The text of this copy of the Qur’an reminds devout Muslims to guard against evil so that they might enter “a garden of bliss,” a phrase for paradise. The words were written in brown ink, and diacritical marks in blue and green indicate vowel sounds and other guides to pronunciation. The golden trilobed motif marks the verses.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1937, 37.21
Part of a seventh-century mural found in the Magao Caves in Dunhuang, this kneeling figure holds the çintamani gem and wears a green garment with the çintamani design and floral motifs.
© President and Fellows of Harvard College
This document demonstrates the importance of hajj for Muslims: in it we read that Maymunah, daughter of Muhammad ibn Abd Allah al-Zardali, made the pilgrimage in AH 836/AD 1432/33.
© British Library
This fifteenth-century Book of Hours made for use in Bruges contains 23 pilgrim badges sewn into the final page of the manuscript.
National Library of the Netherlands, acquired with financial support from various foundations from antiquarian bookseller F. Knuf, Buren (Gld.) 77 L 60
On this page from The Garden of Delights, abbess Herrad of Landsberg presents the sisters of her order to God. The original manuscript was made between 1167 and 1185 but was destroyed in 1870 during the Franco- Prussian War. In 1979, a modern version was created from tracings of some of the images and descriptions of the contents.
© Wikimedia Commons, public domain
The vibrant red and blue colors used across this page are reminiscent of French and German Christian manuscripts. Here they are the background for a Jewish menorah. The stunning use of gold leaf adds to the veneration of the sacred image and reveals the wealth and piety of the patron of the Rothschild Pentateuch (1296).
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, acquired with the generous support of Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, Ms. 116, fol. 226v
Chapter 6
Recovered in 1973–1974, the shipwreck known as the Quanzhou ship (after its discovery near the southeastern Chinese port of Quanzhou) is dated to the end of the Song period (roughly 1272) based on coinage evidence found on board. The ship itself was a merchant ship with about 120 tons of cargo capacity and three masts – larger than ships in the Mediterranean Sea or North Sea would be until later centuries. The cargo aboard primarily came from Southeast Asia, although some may have come from further west in the Arabian Peninsula: cowrie shells, incense, spices, dyestuffs, and ambergris. Archeologists suspect that the ship was sunk intentionally by the sailors who intended to return later in order to recover the goods.
Zhang Peng / LightRocket via Getty Images
Byzantine ships were built in the galley style, relatively shallow boats propelled by both oars and square sails. Left: This sixth-century mosaic from the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare near Ravenna, Italy, shows Byzantine ships and lighthouses. Right: This image is from the Cathedral of Monreale, Palermo, Sicily (late twelfth–mid-thirteenth century). It depicts Jesus calming the waters for St. Peter and his companions and gives a sense of the shape (although not the size) of these vessels, which became the common form of Mediterranean boat for both commerce and naval battles. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, maritime states like Genoa and Venice built large fleets of galleys that could carry cargoes of 100–300 tons. By the end of the Middle Ages, galleys were joined in the Mediterranean and Atlantic waters by a variety of larger sail-based ships.
www.BibleLandPictures.com / Alamy Stock Photo; imageBROKER / Alamy Stock Photo.
Byzantine ships were built in the galley style, relatively shallow boats propelled by both oars and square sails. Left: This sixth-century mosaic from the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare near Ravenna, Italy, shows Byzantine ships and lighthouses. Right: This image is from the Cathedral of Monreale, Palermo, Sicily (late twelfth–mid-thirteenth century). It depicts Jesus calming the waters for St. Peter and his companions and gives a sense of the shape (although not the size) of these vessels, which became the common form of Mediterranean boat for both commerce and naval battles. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, maritime states like Genoa and Venice built large fleets of galleys that could carry cargoes of 100–300 tons. By the end of the Middle Ages, galleys were joined in the Mediterranean and Atlantic waters by a variety of larger sail-based ships.
www.BibleLandPictures.com / Alamy Stock Photo; imageBROKER / Alamy Stock Photo
Interior courtyard of the “New Funduq” in Granada, Spain. The fourteenth-century structure is the only surviving Spanish example of this type of facility, which was common throughout the multicultural Mediterranean world of the later Middle Ages. They were used as inns and warehouses for foreign merchants visiting a city, usually in the Muslim world. Each such facility in a city was reserved for merchants from a particular point of origin; they slept in rooms organized around an interior courtyard, which had space for the storage of goods and pack animals.
Photo by Sarah Davis-Secord.
A gold coin minted by Roger II, the first Christian king of Norman Sicily, crowned in 1130. His coinage system adopted the gold and silver denominations minted by the previous Muslim rulers of the island. The obverse (right) of the Norman coin retains the circular Arabic inscription (stating that Roger is king by God’s grace) while the reverse (left) has an image of a Christian cross surrounded by the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ conquers.”
© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved
Pueblo Bonito, ca. 850–1115, is the largest complex at Chaco Canyon (Chaco Culture National Historical Park, New Mexico, US) and is considered to have been the central structure in the settlement. Thousands of artifacts have been recovered from the site, including jars containing drinking chocolate and piles of scrap turquoise from a workshop.
Matt Champlin / Getty Images
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the brothers Benjamin Talbot Babbitt Hyde and Frederic Erastus Hyde, Jr. financed a series of excavations in the American Southwest known as the Hyde Exploring Expeditions (HEE). In 1896 the HEE undertook the excavation of Chaco Canyon, whose artifacts were sent to the American Museum of Natural History but have since been dispersed and disconnected from their archeological context. Their discoveries both furthered knowledge about pre-Hispanic American cultures and stirred controversy about the treatment of items considered sacred by Pueblo peoples. In cylindrical jars like this one, archeologists have found the residue of cacao.
George H.H. Huey / Alamy Stock Photo
This fragment of a letter written in Judeo-Arabic and found in the Cairo Geniza was sent from David Maimonides to his brother Moses Maimonides, the famous Jewish philosopher, in 1170. David writes that he had missed the departure of the caravan with which he intended to travel from Cairo to a port in Sudan. When he arrived separately at the port, he learned that the caravan had been robbed and many people killed. While he was grateful for his good luck, it did not continue. David chose to set sail for India – a risky proposition that his brother opposed – where his ship sank, and he drowned. The grief caused by his death plunged Maimonides into what he described in another letter as a years-long depression.
Cambridge University Library
The Gokstad ship, ca. 880–900, was preserved in the burial mound of a Viking chieftain. This boat was particularly suited to sailing quickly over open seas. It was rowed by 32 people and had room for passengers and moderate amounts of cargo. It is held today in the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, Norway, along with two other Viking ships.
Scott Goodno / Alamy Stock Photo
Roughly 60,000 pieces of ceramicware like these were recovered from the Belitung wreck, ca. 830, packed into larger jars for shipment. This wreck was discovered in 1998 by Indonesians fishing for sea cucumbers, and some items were lost to looting before archeologists could begin their study. The first phase of its excavation was carried out by a commercial operation that does not follow western scholarly standards, and this has caused some controversy in Europe and the US. However, the project was approved by the Indonesian community’s elders and the Indonesian government.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Dianne and Oscar Schafer, 1986, 1986.97.3
The Vale of York hoard was buried near York, England (a Viking settlement) ca. 927 and discovered in 2007 by metal detectorists. A hoard is a collection of valued items stashed or buried for safekeeping. This hoard contained 617 silver coins and 65 other metal objects – mostly silver ingots and decorative items such as armbands but also a gilded cup containing coins. The items came from Iran, Central Asia, Russia, Ireland, North Africa, Scandinavia, and continental Europe, demonstrating interconnections among cultures in this period and the Vikings’ roles as mediators of those connections. This silver dirham from the Vale of York hoard was minted under the Samanid dynasty (819– 999), which ruled Iran and its broader region independent of the Abbasid caliphs at Baghdad. They had capitals at Samarkand (until 892) and then Bukhara, cities wealthy from trade eastward across Central Asia and westward with Baghdad and Constantinople. The coin had traveled to northern England by the time of its burial in 927. (right) Obverse and (left) reverse.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved
The Vale of York hoard was buried near York, England (a Viking settlement) ca. 927 and discovered in 2007 by metal detectorists. A hoard is a collection of valued items stashed or buried for safekeeping. This hoard contained 617 silver coins and 65 other metal objects – mostly silver ingots and decorative items such as armbands but also a gilded cup containing coins. The items came from Iran, Central Asia, Russia, Ireland, North Africa, Scandinavia, and continental Europe, demonstrating interconnections among cultures in this period and the Vikings’ roles as mediators of those connections. This silver dirham from the Vale of York hoard was minted under the Samanid dynasty (819– 999), which ruled Iran and its broader region independent of the Abbasid caliphs at Baghdad. They had capitals at Samarkand (until 892) and then Bukhara, cities wealthy from trade eastward across Central Asia and westward with Baghdad and Constantinople. The coin had traveled to northern England by the time of its burial in 927. (right) Obverse and (left) reverse.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved
Isle of Lewis Chessmen: Bishop (left), Queen (center), and King (right), ca. 1150–1200.
PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo
Chess was widely played at elite courts in the Mediterranean and European worlds. The first known book of chess strategy was written in Arabic ca. 850; later, manuals were also written in European vernaculars. This image is from a 1283 manuscript in Castilian Spanish, called the Libro de los juegos ( Book of Games ), or Libro de ajedrez, dados e tablas ( Book of Chess, Dice, and Tables ), commissioned by the Christian King Alfonso X (r. 1252– 1284). It contains specific chess problems and analysis of how to solve them, with images of different people – Muslims, Jews, Christians, royals, enslaved people, foreign visitors, men, women, and children – playing the game. For example, in this image of game 88, a Black player wins a game against a white male cleric.
Album / Alamy Stock Photo
Chapter 7
The medieval armor called a yoro wraps around the body and is secured by a separate panel. It has a flexible skirt for a warrior to ride horseback. The leather breastplate features the fierce-looking Buddhist spirit Fudō Myō-ō. Ashikaga Takauji (1303–1358), the founder of the Ashikaga shogunate, gave it to a shrine near Kyoto.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Bashford Dean, 1914, 14.100.121b–e
The medieval armor called a yoro wraps around the body and is secured by a separate panel. It has a flexible skirt for a warrior to ride horseback. The leather breastplate features the fierce-looking Buddhist spirit Fudō Myō-ō. Ashikaga Takauji (1303–1358), the founder of the Ashikaga shogunate, gave it to a shrine near Kyoto.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Bashford Dean, 1914, 14.100.121b–e
The legendary battles of the Genpei War between the Taira and Minamoto clans were popular subjects for high art. Here a fourteenth-century folding screen features the 1185 Battle of Dan-no-ura.
DEA / A. DAGLI ORTI / De Agostini via Getty Images
Mantle of Roger II of Sicily, dated by inscription in Arabic to 1133–1134. This cloak was produced in a royal workshop in Palermo, Sicily, for King Roger II. Often called his “coronation robe,” it was actually finished four years after that event. It is made of red silk, gold thread, gemstones, enamel medallions, and thousands of tiny pearls. The gold embroidery along the edges is written in Arabic in the style of Islamic tiraz (textiles with inscribed bands along the arms, cuffs, or edges that were produced exclusively by workshops under caliphal control). It is the highest-quality silk fabric produced in Byzantium and is dyed with kermes, an insect that produces the durable and vivid red color. It is likely the pearls were harvested from the Persian Gulf and may have been purchased in Constantinople along with the gold thread. Produced in Latin Christian Sicily, in the style of royal Islamic textile workshops, using materials from Greek Byzantium, Roger II’s mantle demonstrates his extensive connections across the medieval Mediterranean world.
B. O’Kane / Alamy Stock Photo
Thingvellir “Assembly Plain,” Iceland. The outdoor law court at Thingvellir was surrounded by a thriving temporary marketplace for goods and services. Merchants set up booths, musicians and actors entertained from makeshift stages, and foreign traders and dignitaries came to make deals and alliances. Among the goods exchanged were enslaved people passed along the trade routes.
Kuntalee Rangnoi / iStock
The Mongols invaded Baghdad in 1258 and dumped the contents of the city’s large libraries into the Tigris river. In this image from a Persian manuscript ca. 1430– 1434, the river runs black with ink.
DeAgostini / Getty Images
Relief carving of Arjuna competing for the hand of Draupadi in the archery contest. Hoysaleswara Temple, Indian, twelfth century.
AnandMorabad / iStock
The Giant’s Causeway, County Antrim, Ireland, is a geologic monument formed by a volcanic eruption. In Irish legend, Finn MacCumhaill (MacCool) built these steps to battle a rival Scottish giant. Finn’s superhuman physical strength is matched by his furious jealousy of Diarmuid O’Duibhne and the maiden Grainne.
Deposit Photos
This image is a detailed and richly colored depiction of the moment in The Romance of Gillion de Trazegnies where Gillion’s ship is attacked by the Egyptian sultan’s army.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. 111, fol. 21
The Bayeux Tapestry is a 231-foot-long visual epic depicting the Battle of Hastings (1066) where William of Normandy’s armies defeated King Harold of England. The language of this heroic tale is the embroidery of nuns from southern England.
FORGET Patrick / Alamy Stock Photo
Chapter 8
The Blue Qur’an was produced in ninth/tenth- century Tunisia in the tradition of dyeing parchment luxurious purple or blue (murex dye or indigo). For the main text, the calligrapher used ink made with gold. For the verse markers he used silver. This art of this luxury manuscript refers to purple-dyed parchment and gilded decorations popular in the Byzantine Empire.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2004, 2004.88
Discovered in 1994, the Tomb of the Red Queen is the grave of a woman of high status from seventh-century Mexico. Her remains and the objects buried with her were covered with vivid red cinnabar powder.
This scene from the Lady Murasaki’s Genji Monogatari Emaki, or Tale of Genji, is from the earliest existing illustrated version of this novel (early twelfth century). The image highlights the use of painted screens as dividers and decorations. An emaki is an illustrated scroll, in this case made of fine paper.
Matteo Omied / Alamy Stock Photo
Shield Jaguar II and his wife, Lady Kabal Xook. Lady Xook pulls a thorned rope through her tongue, while her husband holds a torch over her. The Yaxchilan Lintels, Classic Maya 723–726, Mexico.
Peter Horree / Alamy Stock Photo
John of Worcester, Those Who Work, Fight, Pray. For most of the European medieval period, Christian clerics and monks compiled and transcribed histories and recorded the events of their times. In this episode called The Nightmares of Henry I, the chronicler John of Worcester (1095–1140) recounts the story that the English King Henry I suffered from a recurring nightmare in which three layers of society – peasants, knights, and agents of the Church – harassed him for failing to uphold promises of justice.
This manuscript image of a banquet scene shows men and women dressed in the highest aristocratic fashions of the fifteenth century. The women wear many layers of sumptuous silk fabrics and elaborate headdresses. Men wear very short tunics that reveal their buttocks and legs covered in tight, colored hose. Sumptuary laws restricted the lower classes from wearing revealing clothing; this seductive luxury fashion was only for elites.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. Ludwig XV 8, fol. 123
Nearly human, Hanuman is marked as a monkey just by his face and tail. This eleventh-century figure is from the Chola Kingdom of southeastern India.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Bequests of Mary Clarke Thompson, Fanny Shapiro, Susan Dwight Bliss, Isaac D. Fletcher, William Gedney Beatty, John L. Cadwalader and Kate Read Blacque, Gifts of Mrs. Samuel T. Peters, Ida H. Ogilvie, Samuel T. Peters and H. R. Bishop, F. C. Bishop and O. M. Bishop, Rogers, Seymour and Fletcher Funds, and other gifts, funds and bequests from various donors, by exchange, 1982, 1982.220.9
On the left of this tenth-century carving from India, Hanuman holds healing herbs, and on the right, he fights Ravana.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Anonymous gift (M.89.159.1)
Statues of monkey soldiers of Hanuman’s army on guard at Banteay Srei temple at Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
kool99 / iStock
An illumination for a thirteenth- century bestiary depicts a monkey or ape carrying its two babies as it flees hunters. She clings to the baby she favors, ignoring the baby gripping her back. Eventually in exhaustion she drops the beloved baby, but the hated baby survives. One interpretation of the image was a lesson not to hold too tightly to earthly desire. The baby she grasps to her chest is riches and power and the baby on her back is the sin of greed.
Album / Alamy Stock Photo
Manuscript illuminators regularly placed humorous monkeys in the margins of otherwise serious texts. This illustration from a fourteenth-century Latin Christian prayer book features a monkey leisurely roasting a pig on a spit.
Stowe MS 17 f.176r Page from ‘Book of Hours, Use of Maastricht’ (‘The Maastricht Hours’) / Bridgeman images
In Mesoamerica, the howler monkey was the patron god of writing and creativity, and spider monkeys represented fertility and sensuality. This monkey-god statue is at the Archeological Site of Copan in Honduras, built in the fifth–ninth centuries.
Siempreverde22 / iStock
Christ healing the blind man and raising Lazarus from the dead from a cycle of wall paintings in the church of San Baudelio in northern Castilla (Spain), possibly 1129–1134.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of The Clowes Fund Incorporated and E.B. Martindale, 1959, 59.196
A begging leper missing an arm and leg is painted in the margin of an early-fifteenth-century manuscript. Although the manuscript text is in Latin, the banner above the figure is in Middle English and translates “some good my gentle master for God’s sake.”
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Chapter 9
Hildegard von Bingen’s twelfth- century Scivias, or Know the Way to the Lord, is a record of her revelations. In this image she receives knowledge from God (the red waves coming from above and connecting to her head) and uses a wax tablet on which to record them. Her scribe, Volmar, leans in to hear her and read her notes. Luckily, in 1933 this manuscript was carefully copied by nuns at the Abbey of St. Hildegard in Ebingen, Germany. The original was lost during World War II and has never come to light.
© Wikimedia Commons, public domain
The Masnavi is a poem of epic length written in Persian by Jalal al- Din Rumi. Through it, he explores the mystical dimensions of achieving the complete love of God. This late fifteenth- century six-book manuscript features spiritual seekers in intense study and contemplation. Other painted pages include receptions, feasts, and gilded pages of calligraphy and intricate abstract design.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Alexander Smith Cochran, 1913, 13.228.12
Christine de Pizan presents The Book of the Queen (ca. 1410–1414) to its namesake, Isabeau of Bavaria.
The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
Illumination by Christine de Pizan for The Book of the City of Ladies (ca. 1410– 1414). On the left is Christine visited by Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice. On the right, Christine and Lady Justice begin work on the city to be governed by women.
Photo 12 / Alamy Stock Photo
Two pages of The Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux (mid- 1320s) depict the Annunciation, where the Angel Gabriel tells Mary she will be the mother of Jesus (right), and the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane (left). Below the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a tiny portrait of Jeanne contemplating a religious book, possibly this Book of Hours. Medieval artists are usually not identified, but in this case we know the illuminator was Jean Pucelle.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, 1954, 54.1.2
The metaphor of hell as a great beast that devours wicked souls was inspired by the biblical book of Revelation. The monster’s great, gaping mouth of flame and torture is prevalent in Medieval European art. This example is from a Book of Hours made around 1440 for the Dutch aristocrat Catherine of Cleves.
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The Theotokos of Vladimir, ca. 1405, by Andrei Rublev.
Album / Alamy Stock Photo
The Holy Trinity, ca. 1410, by Andrei Rublev.
PAINTING / Alamy Stock Photo
Enshrined in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the cloak of Juan Diego features the image of the Virgin Mary surrounded by a mandorla, an oval halo around her body.
bpperry / iStock
An oliphant was a ceremonial horn to be blown at certain moments, especially in hunting. Even if it was not useful as a horn, a hollowed-out elephant’s tusk was still a symbol of elite culture, connecting the owners to exotic African and Indian landscapes and the charismatic elephant. This one was made in the twelfth/thirteenth century in southern Italy.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917, 17.190.215
Keshava Temple in Karnataka, India is a model of Hoysala architecture. The main temple has a star-shaped platform and a series of steps for the faithful. Inner and outer walls are carved with gods and goddesses, historical scenes, and animals.
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One of a multitude of images carved into Keshava Temple, Parvati is featured with a wasp waist and generous proportions, indicating alluring sexual beauty and good health. An elephant sits at her feet, and lotus flowers adorn the sculpture.
ERIC LAFFORGUE / Alamy Stock Photo
Notre Dame de Chartres Cathedral illuminated at night.
Deposit Photos
Interior arches and stained glass of Notre Dame de Chartres Cathedral.
Deposit Photos
Christian and Islamic architecture combined in the Mezquita of Cordoba, Spain, which has been adapted from a Muslim mosque to Catholic cathedral.
Deposit Photos
This image of matzah from The Golden Haggadah was produced in Catalonia, Spain between 1320 and 1330. Jewish communities used haggadahs as part of the ritual of Passover, and this one shows the combination of Jewish, Islamic, and Christian iconography of medieval Spain. It is embellished in a gold, red, and blue pattern common to Islamic art of the period. It also resembles the tracery of a rose or wheel window, a primary architectural element of Catholic churches. The story of Moses and the Exodus is celebrated in all three faiths, and Passover commemorates an important chapter in the story. To punish the Egyptians, God sent ten plagues. The final punishment was that he would take the life of the first- born son of every Egyptian family. To distinguish Egyptian families from Hebrew ones, Moses instructed the Hebrews to paint the blood of a sacrificed lamb over the doors of their houses. In this way, the angel of death would know which houses to pass over. Passover is a time to honor and remember the sacrifices and hardships the early Hebrews endured, and Christian and Muslims consider it representative of their suffering as well.
© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images
Chapter 10
Important copper or bronze objects were produced locally in West Africa using sophisticated casting techniques. Many of these items assumed important ritual functions, even into the modern period. For example, this naturalistic and detailed statue of a seated human figure (thirteenth/fourteenth century, Nigeria) was made using an advanced lost-wax casting process. Thus, imported raw materials were crafted into elaborate works of art and ceremony.
Photo © Dirk Bakker / Bridgeman Images
The paiza was an official pass that allowed the bearer to travel along the roads of the Mongol Empire freely and to obtain food, shelter, and fresh horses at government relay stations. Typically reserved for government envoys and officials, paizas were also granted to foreign merchants in order to attract their business. Marco Polo left a gold paiza to his heirs in his will. This example, in iron inlaid with silver, contains writing in the Mongol language warning that the khan’s edict of protection for the bearer must be respected. Yuan dynasty (1271–1368).
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Bequest of Dorothy Graham Bennett, 1993, 1993.256
This late fifteenth-century illumination depicts four of the seven liberal arts – Music, Geometry, Arithmetic, and Astronomy – as elite women dressed in exquisite finery. We can see here a variety of styles in their dresses’ shapes, colors, and designs – many with elaborate gold-thread embroidery and gold trim – and their elaborate headdresses. (The three liberal arts not pictured are Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. 42, leaf 2v
The Republic of Venice, an independent city-state ruled by a doge who was elected by a council, used its massive naval fleet to control both commerce and territory in the Adriatic and eastern Mediterranean Sea regions. Warfare with the Genoese, Byzantines, and later the Ottoman Turks was waged by its armada of oared galleys built at the public shipyard called the Venetian Arsenal. Galleys – used for both naval warfare and carrying commercial cargo and passengers – were the primary ships of the Mediterranean until the seventeenth century. The final all-galley battle in the Mediterranean was the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, in which an alliance of Catholic states (called the Holy League) defeated the Ottoman Turks. This is a model of the flagship galley of the Holy League.
Because of their involvement with long-distance trade, many European Jews became moneylenders, supposedly aided by freedom from the restrictions on usury (charging interest on loans) by Christians. However, these restrictions were circumvented as often as they were observed by Christians, even in the earlier periods; by the thirteenth century, Italian bankers openly offered loans at interest. Jewish bankers are here shown accepting and sorting gold coins in the Cantigas de Santa Maria. Caricatures of Jews in medieval images often looked like the man in the red hat: wearing pointy hats and having large, crooked noses. Pictures like these contributed to negative and stereotyped images of Jews as greedy, ugly, and secretive. This was connected with the rise of anti-Semitism in the late Middle Ages. Codice Rico produced during the reign of Alfonso X (1221–1284), Biblioteca de San Lorenze el Real at El Escorial, Madrid.
Prisma / UIG / Getty Images
Since no culture in the pre-Hispanic Americas developed the use of wheeled transportation, distribution of military supplies and various goods along the Inca royal roads was facilitated by llama caravans. Camelids were both economically and also spiritually important to the Inca, who used them in important ceremonies and rituals, as well as for transportation, food, and textile fibers. Many small gold camelid figurines have been excavated from burial sites in South America, where they were placed as sacred objects. Figurines like this one from the fifteenth century were crafted of an alloy of gold, silver, and copper using the lost-wax technique.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift and Bequest of Alice K. Bache, 1974, 1977, 1974.271.36
Spondylus shells were regarded as religiously significant by most Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations. This is a collar made sometime in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries from hundreds of shells and black stone beads by the Chimú of northern Peru. One of the last states conquered by the Inca Empire (in about 1470), the Chimú ruled from their capital at Chan Chan for many centuries. They grew wealthy in part because of their control over the spondylus trade, which was highly desired throughout the Americas.
Metropolitan Museum, Purchase, Nathan Cummings Gift and Rogers Fund, 2003, 2003.169
Men in the Andes region typically wore sleeveless tunics over loincloths, while women wore wrap-around dresses belted and pinned at the shoulder. The highest textile grades were colorful ones woven of camelid fibers, like this woman’s dress from Chuquibamba, Peru (fourteenth to early sixteenth centuries). Textiles for both men and women were woven into repeated symmetrical patterns out of brightly colored wool, with the softest fibers reserved for the social elite.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Pfeiffer Fund and Arthur M. Bullowa Bequest, 1995, 1995.109
This maravedí of Alfonso IX el Baboso (the Slobberer), King of León (1188–1230) retains the style of its model, the Almoravid dinar, which had Arabic inscriptions: one in a circular band around another in the center. On the Spanish Christian coin, the circular inscription is in Latin and the center is replaced with a portrait of the crowned king on the obverse and the heraldic image of a lion on the reverse.
A silk purse, made in early fourteenth century Paris, was embroidered with brightly colored silk yarn and gold thread. It depicts a scene associated with the cultural concept of “courtly love,” a literary and artistic construct that was closely connected to the idea of chivalry. Chivalry was a social code of honor that supposedly differentiated the knightly class from the wealthy but non-noble burgesses. The themes of courtly love and chivalry were popular images for tapestries and embroidered items.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Irwin Untermyer, 1964, 64.101.1364
Like the silk purse above, shoes were another item of clothing subject to changing fashions. All levels of society wore leather or fabric shoes, although the elite turned shoes into sensational objects. This example of a leather shoe from fourteenth-century England has an extremely long and pointy toe. This was a man’s shoe, cut quite low to display the wearer’s ankle. Medieval aristocratic men wore tunics with colored tights (called hose) underneath, and a shoe like this would accentuate the length and shapeliness of the leg. In the mid-fifteenth century, shoes like this were the target of sumptuary laws on the grounds that they were both impractical and sexually explicit. Short tunics were also restricted by such laws, often intended to keep lower classes from imitating high-class fashions, especially ones that revealed so much of the body.
© Museum of London
Noble Christians were not the only ones who adorned themselves with gold and silk in later medieval Europe, so too did Jews, many of whom were wealthy burgesses. The gold wedding ring at the center of these jewels is just one of many items of high value found buried in what is known as the Colmar Treasure. Enameled in red and green and inscribed with Hebrew letters spelling “mazel tov” (“congratulations’) and with a gold dome in the shape of the Temple of Jerusalem (destroyed in 70 CE), it held both monetary and cultural value. It was buried in the wall of a house along with many other items of gold and silver jewelry and coins around 1348, when the Jewish community of Europe was suffering doubly – both from the disease of the plague and from attacks against Jews carried out by Christians who thought that Jews might be the cause of the epidemic. The treasure was collected and hidden, probably in an attempt to safeguard it from attackers. It was not discovered until 1863.
Photographer: Jean-Gilles Berizzi. Paris, Musee National du Moyen Age et Thermes de Cluny. © 2020. RMN-Grand Palais / Dist. Photo SCALA, Florence
This bronze incense burner is shaped like a lion and elaborately decorated with scrolling designs and Arabic inscriptions, which provide details that are rare for medieval works of art: the names of the artist and owner, and the date of manufacture. Made by Jafar ibn Muhammad ibn Ali in 1181/82 for an elite patron in Iran (then under the control of Seljuq sultans, Muslim Turks who paid allegiance to the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad but operated independently), this item also displays words – like the Jewish ceremonial ring above – that wished happiness and prosperity on its owner. Animal and bird forms were popular shapes for incense burners, and lions were particularly used to represent bravery, ferocity, and nobility of bearing.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1951, 51.56
A bowl from late twelfth- or thirteenth-century Iran is enameled in turquoise glaze with gold and brightly colored decorations. Showing a scene of elite courtly life, it depicts a lute player at the center with ten seated people either singing or watching the performance. All wear gorgeous robes and jewelry, speaking to the importance of elaborate textiles and adornments among wealthy Muslim elite. Bowls of fruit suggest a banquet scene, where people would enjoy music performances, poetry recitations, aromatic perfumes, and lots of highly spiced foods and drinks.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Henry G. Leberthon Collection, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. A. Wallace Chauncey, 1957, 57.61.16
A sign of luxury and status, this tunic with gold panels sewn onto an alpaca textile belonged to a powerful nobleman from the south coastal Inca Empire, 1430–1532.
Werner Forman / Universal Images Group / Getty Images
Chapter 11
The Cantino Planisphere, 1502.
World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo
A Ship Sailing to Oman in Maqamat al-Hariri (The Assemblies of al-Hariri) by Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti, Baghdad, Iraq, 1237 CE/AH 634.
World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo
A scroll of the Illustrated Account of the Mongol Invasion, Japan, 1293. Called the Moko shurai ekotoba, the first measures over 75 feet long (23 meters), and the second stretches over 65 feet long (20 meters).
Flateyjarbók (The Flat Island Book), 1387–1394.
The Arni Magnusson Institute for Icelandic Studies, Reykjavik
These pages from the Dresden Codex provide a glimpse into the Maya hieroglyphic system of recording calendrical and divine cosmic content, including eclipses, multiplication tables, and an account of a flood.
Navigational Chart (Rebbilib), Marshall Islands, nineteenth or early twentieth century.
The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Gift of the Estate of Kay Sage Tanguy, 1963. Acc.n. 1978.412.826 © 2020. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource / Scala, Florence
Mansa Musa is one of numerous rulers depicted on this map of Afro-Eurasia. He is shown on the second panel from the left, and he holds a golden orb.
Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo
This grid of brass plaques (1550–1680) came from the palace of the Oba in the Kingdom of Benin, Nigeria – they were brutally taken by the British in 1897 when British forces launched a punitive expedition on Benin City. From February 9 to 18, the British sacked the palace, burned the city to the ground, and looted more than 2,000 plaques, hundreds of which can now be found in museums in Europe and the United States.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved
The Seventy-Two Disciples and The Virgin and Child with Archangels Michael and Gabriel in a gospel book (1480–1520) from Gunda Gunde Monastery in Ethiopia.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. 105, fol. 9v
In this large, luxurious copy of John Froissart’s Chronicles (1480–1483), the English prince John of Gaunt (1340–1399) sails for Brest as the battle between the English and the Bretons ensues.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. Ludwig XIII 7, fol. 116v
Tupac Inca Yupanqui and a Quipucamayoc in Historia general del Piru (General History of Peru) by Martín de Murúa, Southern Andes, South America, 1616.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. Ludwig XIII 16, fol. 49v
Chapter 12
In a fifteenth-century fresco from the Chapel of St. Sebastian in Villard-de-Lans, Rhone-Alpes, France a doctor treats a plague victim with buboes.
DeAgostini / Getty Images
An image of Death strangling a victim of the plague from a fourteenth-century manuscript called the Stiny Codex.
Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images
This woodcut is the earliest known illustration of a printer’s shop (ca. 1500) and is an image from the danse macabre artistic genre of late medieval Europe. In danse macabre images, people from all classes and activities are visited by the skeletal figure of Death, usually at their most productive moments. It is a memento mori emblem, which is Latin for “remember we all die.” Reminders of death were a common apotropaic gesture of post-plague Europe. In this picture, Death actively participates in the daily bustle of a printer’s shop. The compositor arranges type in a tray with Death’s hand on his shoulder, the worker with the inking ball fights Death’s grip, and Death greets a customer.
Album / Alamy Stock Photo
At the end of the fifteenth century, which in art history is the early Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli illustrated the Inferno. In this drawing he depicts the tricky moment in the text when Virgil guides Dante down, down, down, suddenly twisting so they are facing down and yet moving up and out of hell. On the right side of the image, follow the figures of Virgil and Dante as they descend along the hairy, frost-covered body of Lucifer. As the poem tells us, at about the top of the monster’s thigh, Virgil turns them upside down, but impossibly, they are now climbing up to Lucifer’s feet. When they reach the surface, Dante looks down to see the devil’s body inverted. They have flipped over and emerged in Purgatory on the other side of the world.
The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (ca. 1485).
World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo
Chaucer’s Wife of Bath as depicted in the Ellesmere Chaucer (1400–1410).
© Huntington Library, Pasadena, California
In an image from Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1413– 1416) peasants sowa field in front of the Chateau de Lusignan, the favorite estate of Jean de France, Ducde Berry (1340– 1416).
The Print Collector / Heritage Images via Getty Images
Forbidden City, Beijing, China.
zhaojiankang / iStock
The court of the Yongle emperor Zhu Di of early Ming China had close ties to Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, which provided manuscripts for the Chinese emperors who desired accurate and complete translations of the major texts of Buddhism. A pair of sutra covers once preserved part of an edition of the 108 volumes of a Tibetan Buddhist text – likely including the Prajnaparamita Sutra – produced in Beijing, China. Surviving manuscripts from the reign of the Yongle and subsequent Xuande emperor (Zhu Zhanji; r. 1426–1435), some of which were enclosed by such lacquered boards, may have featured block-print illustrations, while others were lavishly decorated with costly materials and golden calligraphy. At the center of both covers are the three flaming jewels that represent the Buddha, his teaching, and the monastic community. This particular symbol, called the triratna, corresponds with the concept of an auspicious and wish-granting gem, or çintamani, which appears frequently in Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain art.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Florence and Herbert Irving, 2015, 2015.5001.52a, b
Machu Picchu.
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Chicha, a kind of beer made from fermented or non-fermented corn, is a traditional beverage of the Inca and other peoples of the Andes and the Amazon region and was part of Inca religious ceremonies and rituals. This vessel from Machu Picchu was probably used for chicha. It is part of the vast collection of artifacts “jointly” owned by Yale University and the Museo Machupicchu.
Frank Scherschel / The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images
Hagia Sophia Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey.
iStock
The famous Theotokos (image of the Mother of God with the infant Christ) hovers in the apse dome of Hagia Sophia, and rondels around the interior feature ornate Arabic calligraphy that celebrates Islam.
kotomiti / iStock