World History I: Prehistory to 1500

This is Unit Five of Social Sciences and History, part two of two: world history from the Roman Empire's daily life to the fall of Constantinople. Part one closed on the Roman principate and on method. This part carries the exam's own theme for world history, interaction, and follows what traveled: iron, religions, gold, plague and gunpowder, along two networks that the anchor joins rather than opposes. Africa, the Americas and the steppe each enter on their own terms, and the capstone at the end gathers three threads at fourteen fifty-three, with the anchor's thesis about gunpowder voiced as its thesis. By the end you will be able to name Late Antiquity's two superpowers and say why both were exhausted. To tell Ghana, Mali and Songhai apart. To place the Americas' civilizations by region and date. To compare the Silk Roads with the Indian Ocean network. And to say what tied the period off at fourteen fifty-three.

Three entries from Rome to Late Antiquity: daily life in the empire, Constantine's shift and the western fragments, and the two superpowers with their neighbors.

Life in the empire.

SSH 0422 Living in the Roman Empire

The paterfamilias held authority over the household; patrons fed clients; slavery drew on war captives, and manumission made freed people a class. Publicani collected taxes and Egypt fed Rome. The imperial cult, Mithras and Isis coexisted, and Christians were persecuted in the third century, while citizenship reached all residents in two twelve. The Jewish wars ended with the Second Temple destroyed.

Constantine.

SSH 0423 Constantine's Shift and the Western Fragments

Diocletian's tetrarchy set two senior and two junior emperors. Constantine founded Constantinople and embraced Christianity, and Christian emperors managed doctrine through ecumenical councils. The shift eastward cost the west, where Germanic foederati were allies and enemies until, by the fifth century, the west fragmented into their kingdoms. Late Antiquity, about one fifty to seven fifty, is the anchor's period.

The two superpowers.

SSH 0424 Byzantium and Persia, Aksum and Himyar

Byzantium and Sasanian Persia were Late Antiquity's two superpowers, warring, then trading. Justinian built, codified Roman law, and reconquered parts of the west; the Sasanians made Zoroastrianism their state religion. Aksum's Ezana converted to Christianity in the fourth century, and Arabia's Himyar to Judaism in the fifth. Both empires were exhausted when the Arabs came.

Three entries on post-Roman Europe: feudalism, manorialism and the schism, the Crusades as interaction, and the fourteenth century's crises.

Feudalism and the schism.

SSH 0425 Feudalism, Manorialism, and the Schism of 1054

Post-Roman Europe fused Roman, Christian and Germanic traditions. Feudalism bound lesser lords to greater by land for service; manorialism put serfs' farming under a lord; chivalry Christianized knightly violence. Cluniac reform limited aristocrats in church matters, popes challenged kings, and the Great Schism of ten fifty-four divided east from west. The anchor calls feudal institutions crude but effective.

The Crusades as interaction.

SSH 0426 The Crusades as Interaction

The Seljuks pushed back the Fatimids, the only Shia caliphate, and shattered Byzantium at Manzikert in ten seventy-one, the witness's date, so its emperors looked west. The Crusades signaled papal influence and stimulated trade, the Italian city-states, and contact across Afro-Eurasia; Outremer held four states. The anchor names the failures: massacre of innocents, betrayal of Christians, war for political ends.

The fourteenth century.

SSH 0427 Europe's Fourteenth Century

England and France fought the Hundred Years' War, thirteen thirty-seven to fourteen fifty-three by the witness's dates. The Golden Bull of thirteen fifty-six fixed seven imperial electors, and from thirteen seventy-eight three men claimed the papacy at once. Peasants gained status as feudalism declined, and anxiety about the church stirred reform. The Great Western Schism is not the schism of ten fifty-four.

Four entries on Africa: geography and independent iron, Kush and the Bantu, the three Sudanic empires told apart, and the Swahili coast with Great Zimbabwe.

Africa's geography.

SSH 0428 Africa's Geography and Independent Iron

Rainfall, soil and water dictated where Africans settled, from the desert San to the rainforest Baka, across Sahel, savanna and rainforest bands. Domestication arose three times: Egypt from southwest Asia, and independently in the eastern Sahara and West Africa with sorghum and yams. Iron smelting, scholars now agree, developed independently in Central Africa. The older view routed iron through Egypt.

Kush and the Bantu.

SSH 0429 Kush and the Bantu Migrations

Bantu speakers spread south and east from about three thousand BCE, with iron tools by five hundred BCE, reshaping Africa's languages. Kush absorbed Egyptian culture; Piye took Egypt's throne in the eighth century; after Assyria's conquest Kush withdrew to Meroë, with iron, a script, Roman trade, and the kentake, the queen mother. Meroë ended in the fourth century CE.

The Sudanic empires.

SSH 0430 Ghana, Mali, Songhai: Telling the Three Apart

The exam asks what distinguished the three Sudanic empires, and the anchor's three lines answer. Ghana controlled trans-Saharan trade and kept Muslim traders close, but its rulers never converted. Mali, larger, rose after Ghana's fall; its mansas converted, and as an Islamic kingdom Mali was far better integrated into the Muslim trading world of Africa and the Near East. Songhai, from Gao during Mali's decline, grew in the sixteenth century larger and wealthier than Mali by controlling the trans-Saharan routes, which the Sanhaja and Tuareg ran as caravan leaders. An empire whose kings profited from Muslim trade without converting is Ghana. An empire whose conversion integrated it with the wider Muslim world is Mali. The largest of the three, at its height after fifteen hundred, is Songhai. Berger's Mansa Musa, whose pilgrimage of thirteen twenty-four put so much gold into circulation that its Mediterranean price fell by a quarter, is the witness's example of Mali's reach. The trap is the sequence: Ghana, then Mali, then Songhai, not overlapping equals. The second trap is reading conversion as replacement; the anchor stresses blended, Africanized Islam and rural continuity.

The eastern coast.

SSH 0431 Swahili Coast and Great Zimbabwe

From the seventh century Arab traders and Bantu peoples built the Swahili city-states from Mogadishu to Sofala, sending gold, ivory and rare animals as far as China. Inland, Mapungubwe and then the Shona's Great Zimbabwe built medieval Africa's largest stone structures on that wealth, drystone walls interlocking without mortar. The Almoravids and Almohads reformed and fought in the Maghreb meanwhile.

Four entries on the Americas: peopling and planting, the Olmec to Teotihuacán, the Aztec and Inca, and North America's mounds and pueblos.

Peopling and planting the Americas.

SSH 0432 Peopling and Planting the Americas

Humans crossed Beringia in the last glaciation and spread through the Americas, hunting big game toward extinction. About nine thousand years ago Andean groups domesticated animals, then squash and the potato; Mesoamerica turned to maize between five thousand and three thousand BCE, common by twenty-five hundred; the Eastern Woodlands domesticated plants independently. The anchor keeps ranges, and so does the course.

Olmec and Maya.

SSH 0433 Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacán

The Olmec formed about twelve hundred BCE with a calendar and ball game that shaped the Zapotecs, Teotihuacán and the Maya. Teotihuacán became one of the world's largest cities, and Maya city-states like Tikal had writing and a calendar, while Chavín's art spread through the Andes. The anchor's summary dates Teotihuacán's size three hundred BCE; its text and Berger say centuries CE.

Aztec and Inca.

SSH 0434 Chavín's Heirs, the Inca, and Aztec Tenochtitlán

After Chavín's fall came the Moche, Nazca and Tiwanaku. The fifteenth-century Aztecs ruled central Mexico from island Tenochtitlán through the Triple Alliance of fourteen twenty-eight, with human sacrifice as central ritual. The Inca ruled western South America from Cuzco by trained warriors, tribute, and roads through the mountains. Both empires were young when Spain came, and unit four carries the conquest.

North America.

SSH 0435 Mounds, Pueblos, and Cahokia

Adena burial mounds rose in the Ohio valley from about a thousand BCE, then Hopewell. The dry Southwest farmed fully only from about two hundred CE, and by nine hundred Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde stood. Maize reached the Eastern Woodlands about eight hundred, and Mississippian towns followed; Cahokia held ten to twenty thousand people by Berger's count. Most Mississippian towns were small chiefdoms.

Five entries to close: Islam's rise, the Mongol exchange, two trade networks compared, the plague across Afro-Eurasia, and the year that ties the period off.

Islam.

SSH 0436 Islam's Rise and the Caliphates

Muhammad united most Arab tribes under one monotheist faith; the hijra to Medina was six twenty-two. Four Rashidun caliphs expanded fast; the dispute over Ali split Sunni from Shia, and civil war brought the Umayyads. Within a century the empire was the world's largest, and the Abbasids' Baghdad preserved ancient knowledge. Conversion was slow. Islamization was cultural first.

The Mongols.

SSH 0437 Chinggis Khan and the Mongol Exchange

Song China revived Confucianism and technology but neglected arms, and the Jurchen Jin shrank it. Temujin united the People of the Felt Walls by twelve oh four; as Chinggis Khan he issued the yassa, built the yam relay and a siege-capable army. Ogedei built bureaucracy and Eurasia-wide exchange, and Kublai's Yuan reunited China without its prosperity. Succession failures divided the empire.

Two trade networks.

SSH 0438 Comparing Two Trade Networks: Silk Roads and Indian Ocean

The exam compares the Silk Roads with the Indian Ocean network, and the anchor supplies the axes. Origin: the Silk Roads began in the Han dynasty's trade with steppe nomads and grew across central Asia to link China with the West; the Indian Ocean network joined East Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia and China by sea, with Arab traders from the seventh century joining Aksum's trade to it. Carriers: overland, Sogdian city-states like Samarkand ran the markets and caravansaries housed travelers; by sea, Swahili city-states exchanged gold and ivory for Chinese goods. What moved besides goods: Buddhism traveled the Silk Roads from India to China; Hinduism and Islam spread by sea into Southeast Asia. Control: after seven fifty-one at the Talas River the Tang and the Abbasids each stopped expanding, leaving the overland route divided; the ocean route had no single master. The route that carried Buddhism into China is the Silk Roads. The route the monsoon winds scheduled is the Indian Ocean, a detail Berger supplies. The network that linked Great Zimbabwe's gold to China is the Indian Ocean. The trap is treating them as rivals; the anchor joins them at Sogdiana and the Red Sea, with China at the end of both. That is this lecture's theme, interaction, drawn as a map.

The plague.

SSH 0439 The Black Death Across Afro-Eurasia

Early in the fourteenth century the Medieval Warm Period gave way to the Little Ice Age, about zero point six degrees colder, with famine and migration. In the thirteen forties the Black Death crossed Afro-Eurasia; Mamluk cities deteriorated, Europeans questioned clergy and nobility, and flagellants flogged themselves to appease God. Long-term effects: the Ming's Confucian restoration, Islam's expansion, feudalism's decline.

Fourteen fifty-three.

SSH 0440 Gunpowder, Constantinople, and the Turn to the Sea, 1453

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. 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. 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, which unit four opened from the other side. Second, the slave-soldier states. Abbasids, Ayyubids and Ottomans staffed armies with enslaved men: mamluks in Egypt, who overthrew the Ayyubids in twelve fifty and held Egypt until the Ottomans took them in fifteen seventeen, and Janissaries, taken as Christian boys through the devshirme; their loyalty, the anchor explains, came from dependence. Third, the Ming. 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 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. 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, voiced as its account rather than as settled law. Unit six picks up fourteen fifty-three from the second anchor.

Look at what you can now do. You can name Byzantium and Sasanian Persia as Late Antiquity's superpowers and say that both were exhausted when the Arabs came. You can tell Ghana, Mali and Songhai apart by conversion, integration and size, in sequence, never as overlapping equals. You can place the Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacán, Aztec, Inca and the mound builders by region and date, keeping the anchor's ranges. You can compare the Silk Roads with the Indian Ocean network and say the anchor joins them, with China at the end of both, which is the interaction this lecture followed. And you can say what tied the period off at fourteen fifty-three, Ottomans, mamluks, Ming and guns, with the gunpowder argument voiced as the anchor's thesis. Unit six opens on the world after fifteen hundred.