Social Sciences and History / Unit 5 SSH 0440 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Gunpowder, Constantinople, and the Turn to the Sea, 1453
The idea
The unit ends where the exam's first half of world history ends, about fifteen hundred, and the anchor's last chapter gathers three threads that tie the period off. First, the Ottomans. After the crusaders' sack of Constantinople and the Mongols' defeat of the Seljuks, they rose in northwestern Anatolia, crossed into Europe, beat the Serbs at Kosovo, were broken when Timur defeated Bayezid, and were rebuilt by Mehmed the First and Murad the Second. In fourteen fifty-three Mehmed the Second took Constantinople, renamed it Istanbul, invited scholars and artists, and tolerated his non-Muslim subjects. Historians, the anchor says, see the flight of Greek scholars westward as one factor that sparked the Italian Renaissance, and unit 04 opened on that Renaissance from the other side. Second, the slave-soldier states. Abbasids, Ayyubids and Ottomans staffed armies and administrations with enslaved men: mamluks in Egypt, who overthrew the Ayyubids in twelve fifty and held Egypt against the Mongols until the Ottomans took them in fifteen seventeen, and Janissaries in the Ottoman state, taken as Christian boys through the devshirme. Their loyalty, the anchor explains, came from dependence. Third, the Ming. After revolts drove out the Yuan, the Hongwu emperor built a secret police, abolished the chief minister, and forbade most foreign trade; Yongle resumed trade and tribute, and Chinese silks and porcelain reached Europe, Africa and India. Across all three runs gunpowder. As guns improved, infantry replaced cavalry and the mounted aristocracies lost their place; guns destroyed fortifications and ended siege warfare; centralized states that could tax to buy firearms dominated those that could not; and the nomads' way of war, which had made the Mongols, became obsolete, so steppe societies shrank and settled. Meanwhile western Europeans, seeking a way around the eastern routes, began to look for all-water passages to Asia. Unit 06, and unit 04's Columbus, begin there.
In practice
Constantinople in fourteen fifty-three; the Mamluks' end in fifteen seventeen; the Ming's turn inward and back; guns ending the horse.
Where people slip
The Renaissance-spark claim is attributed to historians, as the anchor attributes it. The gunpowder argument is the anchor's thesis about a transitional age; the exam may frame it as a cause of centralized states, and the course voices it as the anchor's account rather than as settled law. Unit 06 picks up fourteen fifty-three from the second anchor.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
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