TExES History 7-12 (233)

This chapter covers competency 002: the era historians often call the postclassical or medieval period. It examines the rise and spread of Islam and the caliphates, the Byzantine Empire, medieval Europe and its churches, the Mongol conquests, and the major states of Africa, Asia and the Americas, along with the networks such as the Silk Road and the Indian Ocean that connected them. The beliefs of Islam and Christianity are covered in Chapter 1.5, and the scientific achievements of the caliphates and of Tang and Song China are covered in Chapter 1.7.

The eastern Roman Empire, centered on Constantinople, survived the fall of the west and is known to historians as the Byzantine Empire. Constantinople's location on the Bosporus, between Europe and Asia and between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, made it a great trading city and a nearly impregnable fortress protected by massive land walls.

The emperor Justinian, in the sixth century, tried to restore the old empire. Justinian's lasting achievements were the codification of Roman law (Chapter 1.6) and the great church of Hagia Sophia.

Byzantine emperors held strong authority over the church (caesaropapism). Byzantium preserved Greek and Roman learning, and its missionaries carried Orthodox Christianity and the basis of the Cyrillic alphabet to the Slavs; Kievan Rus adopted Orthodoxy in the late tenth century.

Byzantium faced constant pressure: from Persians, then Arab Muslim armies that took Syria, Egypt and North Africa in the seventh century, then Seljuk Turks who crushed a Byzantine army at Manzikert in the eleventh century and overran much of Anatolia. Byzantine pleas for help after Manzikert helped trigger the Crusades. The empire was gravely weakened when the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204, and it finally fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 (Chapter 1.3).

Islam began in the Arabian Peninsula in the early seventh century. The prophet Muhammad, a merchant of Mecca, began preaching monotheism. Facing hostility from Mecca's elite, he and his followers moved to Medina in 622 C.E., the hijra, which marks the start of the Islamic calendar. Muhammad united much of Arabia before his death about a decade later.

Arabia's position on caravan routes linking the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean and East Africa helped Islam spread through commerce as well as conquest. After Muhammad's death, his successors, the caliphs, led rapid expansion. Arab armies defeated the exhausted Byzantine and Sasanian Persian empires, which had just fought a long war against each other. Within about a century, Muslim rule stretched from Spain to the Indus River.

The Sunni-Shia split grew out of a dispute over leadership of the community after Muhammad's death. The majority accepted the first caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali), chosen by community leaders; they became Sunni Muslims. A minority held that leadership belonged to Muhammad's family through his cousin and son-in-law Ali; they became the Shia ("party of Ali"). The killing of Ali's son Husayn at Karbala by Umayyad forces deepened the division. (Differences in religious practice are covered in Chapter 1.5.)

The Umayyad Caliphate ruled from Damascus. It expanded across North Africa and into Spain, where Muslim forces conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula; a Frankish army under Charles Martel stopped a Muslim raid into France at the Battle of Tours (Poitiers) in the early eighth century. The Umayyads relied heavily on an Arab elite; non-Arab converts (mawali) often faced discrimination, and non-Muslims ("people of the book") were protected but paid a special tax, the jizya. Resentment among non-Arab Muslims and Shia contributed to the Umayyads' overthrow in the mid-eighth century.

The Abbasid Caliphate replaced them and moved the capital to Baghdad, a new round city near the old Persian heartland. Under the Abbasids:

Persian administrative traditions and officials gained prominence; the empire became less an Arab kingdom and more a multiethnic Islamic state.

Baghdad became one of the largest and richest cities in the world, a hub of trade from China to Africa.

Scholars translated and built on Greek, Persian and Indian works at institutions such as the House of Wisdom (Chapter 1.7).

Political unity gradually broke down: provinces became independent, an Umayyad survivor set up a separate emirate (later caliphate) at Córdoba in Spain, and the Fatimids, a Shia dynasty, founded Cairo and ruled Egypt. Turkish soldiers and then the Seljuk Turks held real power in Baghdad, with the caliph as a figurehead.

The Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258 and executed the last Abbasid caliph there.

Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates Compared

Common Trap: The House of Wisdom and the golden age of Islamic learning belong to Abbasid Baghdad, not Umayyad Damascus. Questions also try to swap the capitals.

After Rome's fall in the west, Germanic kingdoms replaced imperial government. The Franks became the strongest. Their king Clovis converted to Roman Catholic Christianity around the turn of the sixth century, winning the support of the church and the Gallo-Roman population. Charles Martel's victory at Tours strengthened Frankish prestige, and his son Pepin the Short allied with the pope, giving him lands in central Italy (the Papal States).

Charlemagne (Charles the Great), Pepin's son, built an empire covering much of western and central Europe. On Christmas Day in 800 C.E., Pope Leo III crowned him emperor of the Romans, a symbolic revival of the western empire and a sign of the close alliance between the papacy and Frankish kings.

Charlemagne governed through counts checked by royal inspectors (missi dominici) and promoted a Carolingian Renaissance of schools and copied texts. His grandsons divided the empire in the Treaty of Verdun, and new invasions by Vikings, Magyars and Muslim raiders broke central authority, leaving local lords as Europe's real protectors.

Feudalism was a political and military system of mutual obligations among nobles. A lord granted a vassal land (a fief) in exchange for military service and loyalty. Vassals could have their own vassals, and knights were mounted warriors who served lords. Kings stood at the top in theory, but in practice power was decentralized. Manorialism was the economic system: a manor was a largely self-sufficient estate where serfs farmed the lord's land and their own strips, owed labor and dues, and could not leave without permission, in return for protection and the right to work the land.

Feudalism arose because central governments could not protect people from invaders, trade and towns had declined, and land was the main source of wealth.

From about the eleventh century, Europe revived: better farming raised harvests, trade and towns grew, guilds regulated crafts, universities appeared, and monarchs in England and France built stronger states (the Magna Carta and Parliament are covered in Chapter 1.6).

Common Trap: Feudalism (political and military ties among nobles) and manorialism (the economic relationship between lords and peasants) are related but not identical. A stem about serfs' labor obligations is about manorialism.

The framework asks you to compare medieval Europe with earlier civilizations. Compared with the Roman Empire at its height, early medieval western Europe was:

politically decentralized, with authority divided among kings, nobles and the church instead of a single emperor and bureaucracy;

more rural and less urban, with local, self-sufficient manors replacing a Mediterranean trading economy;

governed by customary law and personal oaths rather than a uniform written law code;

culturally unified mainly by the Roman Catholic Church and Latin, which preserved much Roman heritage.

Compared with contemporary civilizations, western Europe was less urban and less wealthy than Byzantium, the Abbasid Caliphate or Tang and Song China during the early medieval centuries. This comparison is a favorite exam angle.

The Christian church in the west, led by the pope in Rome, and the church in the east, centered on the patriarch of Constantinople and the Byzantine emperor, drifted apart over centuries. Issues included:

In 1054, papal legates and the patriarch excommunicated each other, an event known as the Great Schism, producing the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople later made the split far more bitter.

The investiture controversy was a struggle in the west between popes and kings over who could appoint (invest) bishops and abbots. Bishops controlled lands and wealth, so kings wanted loyal appointees. Pope Gregory VII, a church reformer, banned lay investiture. The Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV refused, and Gregory excommunicated him. The conflict was settled by the Concordat of Worms in the early twelfth century: the church would choose bishops and grant spiritual authority, while the emperor could grant the lands and secular powers. The episode strengthened papal authority and weakened the emperor in Germany, contributing to the long fragmentation of the German lands.

Great Schism and Investiture Controversy Compared

In 1066 C.E., William, Duke of Normandy, claimed the English throne, invaded and defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings. As William the Conqueror, he replaced the Anglo-Saxon nobility with Norman lords, required oaths of loyalty directly to the king, and ordered the Domesday Book, a survey of land and property for taxation. Effects included a stronger, more centralized English monarchy, a French-speaking ruling class whose language reshaped English vocabulary, Norman castles and cathedrals, and long-term English involvement in French lands, which later fed the Hundred Years' War.

In 1095, Pope Urban II, responding to a Byzantine request for help against the Seljuk Turks, called on western Christians at the Council of Clermont to recapture Jerusalem. Motives mixed religious devotion and the promise of forgiveness of sins with desire for land, wealth, adventure and, for Italian merchants, trade.

Effects of the Crusades:

Increased trade between Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, enriching Italian cities such as Venice and Genoa and raising European demand for spices and silk.

Weakened the Byzantine Empire, especially after the Fourth Crusade.

Increased the power of monarchs, who taxed for crusades, while many nobles died or sold lands.

Worsened relations among Christians, Muslims and Jews; crusaders massacred Jewish communities in the Rhineland.

Exam Tip: When a question asks for the most lasting effect of the Crusades on Europe, the strongest answer is usually economic (expanded trade and demand for Asian goods), not the military outcome, which was a long-term failure.

In Iberia, Muslim al-Andalus, centered on Córdoba, was among the most prosperous and learned regions of Europe, with periods of relative coexistence (convivencia) among Muslims, Christians and Jews. Christian kingdoms in the north gradually pushed south in the Reconquista. The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile united Spain's main kingdoms, and in 1492 they conquered Granada, the last Muslim state. That same year they expelled Jews who would not convert, and Muslims later faced forced conversion.

Other religious interactions of the era included Byzantine-Islamic warfare and diplomacy across Anatolia and Syria; the spread of Islam into South Asia, Central Asia, West Africa and Southeast Asia, usually through trade and Sufi missionaries as well as conquest; and the religious tolerance of the Mongol khans, discussed later in this chapter.

West Africa's savanna lay between the Sahara and the forest. The trans-Saharan trade, made practical by the camel, exchanged gold from the south for salt from Saharan mines, along with copper, cloth, horses, enslaved people and later books. Empires rose by controlling and taxing this trade.

Ghana (not the modern country, which took the name) flourished from about the eighth to the eleventh centuries. Its kings taxed gold and salt passing through, kept the location of gold fields secret and ruled from Koumbi Saleh, which had separate royal and Muslim merchant towns. Ghana weakened after attacks by the Almoravids, a Berber Muslim movement, and shifting trade.

Mali rose in the thirteenth century under Sundiata Keita, whose story is preserved by griots (oral historians). Mali controlled the gold fields and trade cities such as Timbuktu and Djenné. Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca in the fourteenth century became legendary: he gave away so much gold in Cairo that its value there fell for years. He returned with scholars and architects, and Timbuktu became a center of Islamic learning with the Sankore mosque.

Songhai, centered on Gao on the Niger bend, broke from Mali and became the largest of the three in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Chapter 1.3).

Exam Tip: The gold-salt trade is the key to all three empires. If a question asks why West African rulers became wealthy, the best answer is control and taxation of trans-Saharan trade, not mining technology or Atlantic commerce.

Along the East African coast, from Somalia to Mozambique, city-states such as Kilwa, Mombasa, Malindi, Zanzibar and Sofala grew rich from Indian Ocean trade. Monsoon winds blew ships from Arabia and India toward Africa in one season and back in another. African gold, ivory and other goods were exchanged for cotton cloth, glass beads, Persian pottery and Chinese porcelain. The Swahili culture that emerged blended Bantu African roots with Arab and Persian influences: the Swahili language is Bantu in structure with many Arabic loanwords, and the ruling merchant elite was largely Muslim.

Inland, Great Zimbabwe, built by Shona-speaking ancestors on the plateau between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers, flourished from about the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Its massive dry-stone walls, built without mortar, enclosed royal and ritual spaces. Great Zimbabwe's wealth came from cattle and from controlling the gold trade to coastal ports such as Sofala and Kilwa; Chinese porcelain and Persian items found there confirm the link.

Common Trap: European colonizers once wrongly claimed that Great Zimbabwe could not have been built by Africans. Archaeology confirms it was an African achievement, and test items will reflect that.

Temujin united the nomadic Mongol tribes of the steppe and was proclaimed Genghis Khan ("universal ruler") in 1206. The Mongols' skilled horse archers, mobility, discipline, use of terror and willingness to adopt siege techniques from conquered peoples allowed them to build the largest contiguous land empire in history.

After Genghis Khan's death, the empire divided into four khanates:

Yuan dynasty in China, founded by Kublai Khan, Genghis Khan's grandson, who completed the conquest of the Song.

Golden Horde in Russia, which collected tribute from Russian princes for more than two centuries and allowed Moscow to rise as a tax collector for the khans.

Ilkhanate in Persia, whose founder Hulagu sacked Baghdad in 1258; the Mamluks of Egypt stopped the Mongol advance at Ain Jalut soon afterward.

Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia.

The Mongols failed in two attempted invasions of Japan, when storms (later called kamikaze, "divine winds") and samurai resistance destroyed their fleets.

Mongol rule had paradoxical effects. Conquests were extremely destructive, with massacres and the ruin of cities and irrigation systems in Persia and Central Asia. Yet the Pax Mongolica that followed:

secured the Silk Road and protected merchants with passports (paiza) and a relay-station system (yam);

carried goods, technologies and ideas across Eurasia, and travelers such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta crossed vast distances;

practiced broad religious tolerance, employing Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and others as officials and exempting clergy from taxes;

also helped spread the plague westward from Central Asia in the fourteenth century (Chapter 1.3).

The Silk Road was a network of overland routes linking China, Central Asia, Persia, India and the Mediterranean. Silk, porcelain and tea moved west; horses, glassware and silver moved east, along with Buddhism, Islam and diseases. It flourished under the Han, the Tang and the Mongols. Indian Ocean sea routes carried even more bulk goods between East Africa, Arabia, India, Southeast Asia and China.

After centuries of division, the short-lived Sui dynasty reunified China and built the Grand Canal linking the Yellow and Yangzi rivers. The Tang dynasty followed.

Tang: expanded into Central Asia and made Chang'an a cosmopolitan capital. The Tang expanded the civil service examination, distributed land through an equal-field system and spread Chinese culture to Korea, Japan and Vietnam. The An Lushan Rebellion in the eighth century weakened the dynasty.

Song: presided over an economic revolution. Fast-ripening Champa rice from Vietnam increased harvests, population grew, cities such as Hangzhou grew very large, paper money circulated, and commerce expanded. The government relied heavily on scholar-officials selected by exam, and Neo-Confucianism developed (Chapter 1.5). The Song were militarily weaker: northern China fell to the Jurchen, and the Southern Song were conquered by the Mongols.

Yuan: the Mongol dynasty ruled China with a social hierarchy that put Mongols and Central Asians above Chinese, suspended the exams for a time and relied on foreign officials. Plague, floods and resentment led to rebellion.

Ming: founded by Zhu Yuanzhang (the Hongwu emperor), a peasant rebel leader, in the fourteenth century. The Ming restored Chinese traditions and exams, rebuilt the Great Wall in the form seen today, and the Yongle emperor moved the capital to Beijing and built the Forbidden City. Yongle sponsored the admiral Zheng He's seven voyages through the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia, India, Arabia and East Africa, with fleets far larger than later European expeditions. The voyages ended because of their cost, Confucian disdain for commerce and the need to defend the northern frontier, and the Ming turned inward.

Common Trap: Zheng He's voyages were diplomatic and prestige missions that collected tribute and displayed Ming power. They did not found colonies, and their end was a deliberate policy choice, not a military defeat.

Japan borrowed heavily from Tang China, including Buddhism, Chinese characters, city planning and ideas of centralized government, while keeping its own traditions such as Shinto and a hereditary imperial family. During the Heian period, an elegant court culture flourished in Kyoto, but real power passed to aristocratic families such as the Fujiwara.

As central authority weakened, provincial warrior families gained power. In the late twelfth century, Minamoto Yoritomo became shogun, a military ruler, establishing the Kamakura shogunate. The emperor remained a revered figurehead. Under the shogun, daimyo (great lords) controlled lands and were served by samurai, warriors bound by personal loyalty and a code later called bushido. The Ashikaga shogunate that followed was weaker, and Japan slid into a century of civil war among daimyo before reunification in the late sixteenth century (Chapter 1.3).

Feudal Europe and Feudal Japan Compared

Exam Tip: Similarities questions on Europe and Japan usually point to a hereditary warrior elite bound by personal loyalty in exchange for land in a period of weak central government. A difference: European feudal contracts were formal and reciprocal, while samurai loyalty was more one-sided and absolute.

Turkic Muslim rulers from Afghanistan raided northern India and, in the early thirteenth century, founded the Delhi Sultanate, which ruled much of northern India for about three centuries under several dynasties. The sultans defended India from Mongol invasion, a major achievement, but the sultanate was weakened by internal revolts and was devastated when Timur (Tamerlane) sacked Delhi at the end of the fourteenth century. The period blended cultures, producing Indo-Islamic architecture and the Urdu language, while most Indians remained Hindu. The sultanate was replaced by the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth century (Chapter 1.3).

The Aztecs (Mexica) migrated into the Valley of Mexico and founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco in the fourteenth century. They expanded chinampas, raised farm plots built in the lake, and connected the city to the shore with causeways. Through the Triple Alliance with two other city-states, they built an empire in the fifteenth century. The Aztecs generally left conquered city-states under their own rulers but demanded heavy tribute in goods and captives. Their religion required human sacrifice to sustain the sun god Huitzilopochtli, and wars were fought partly to take captives.

The Inca built their empire in the Andes in the fifteenth century under Pachacuti and his successors, from their capital at Cuzco. At its height it stretched about 2,500 miles along western South America. The Inca governed far more directly than the Aztecs:

The emperor (Sapa Inca) was considered a descendant of the sun god.

A road system of roughly 25,000 miles, with rope bridges and way stations, allowed relay runners (chasquis) to carry messages quickly.

Instead of a tax in money, subjects owed the mit'a, a labor tax, working on roads, terraces, mines and in the army.

Officials kept records with the quipu, knotted cords, in place of writing.

The state resettled loyal populations among conquered peoples, imposed the Quechua language and stored food in warehouses for emergencies.

The Aztec and Inca Empires Compared

Memory Aid: Aztecs "took tribute"; Inca "took time" (the labor of their subjects through the mit'a).

Islam spread quickly through conquest and trade; the Sunni-Shia split began as a succession dispute; the Abbasids moved the capital to Baghdad, embraced Persian influence and sponsored a golden age before fragmenting and falling to the Mongols.

Medieval western Europe was decentralized (feudalism and manorialism) after Rome's fall; Charlemagne's coronation linked the papacy with Frankish power, and the Norman Conquest centralized England.

Church conflicts included the Great Schism (Catholic vs. Orthodox) and the investiture controversy (pope vs. emperor over appointing bishops); the Crusades and Reconquista intensified religious interaction and boosted trade.

West African empires grew rich on trans-Saharan gold-salt trade, Swahili city-states on Indian Ocean trade, and Great Zimbabwe on the inland gold trade.

Mongol conquests were destructive but created the Pax Mongolica, which revived the Silk Road, practiced tolerance and helped spread plague; Tang, Song and Ming China, feudal Japan and the Delhi Sultanate each built distinctive states.

The Aztecs ruled through tribute, while the Inca ruled through centralized labor obligations, roads and resettlement.