TExES Social Studies 7-12 (232)

This chapter serves Competency 002. It covers the post-classical era: the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Orthodox Church; the founding and spread of Islam, the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates and the Sunni-Shia division; Charlemagne, feudalism, manorialism, the Norman Conquest and the medieval Church; the Crusades; the African kingdoms of Ghana, Mali and Songhai, the Swahili coast and Great Zimbabwe; Tang, Song, Yuan and early Ming China, the Delhi Sultanate and feudal Japan; the Mongol conquests and the Silk Road; and the Aztec and Inca states. It closes by comparing medieval Europe with earlier societies.

After the western Roman Empire fell, the eastern half survived for about another thousand years as the Byzantine Empire, ruled from Constantinople. The city sat on the Bosporus between Europe and Asia and controlled the passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, which made it rich from trade and easy to defend behind massive land walls. Byzantines called themselves Romans but spoke Greek and practiced Orthodox Christianity.

Emperor Justinian, with his influential wife Theodora, reconquered parts of Italy and North Africa for a time, built the great church of Hagia Sophia, and had Roman law collected into the Justinian Code (Chapter 5.3). The emperor also held authority over the Church, an arrangement sometimes called caesaropapism. The Byzantines preserved Greek and Roman learning, and their missionaries Cyril and Methodius carried Orthodox Christianity and a new alphabet, the basis of Cyrillic, to the Slavs.

The Christian Church gradually divided between a Latin-speaking West led by the pope in Rome and a Greek-speaking East led by the patriarch of Constantinople. Disputes over papal authority, the use of icons, the wording of the Nicene Creed, clerical marriage and the language of worship came to a head in the Great Schism of the mid-eleventh century, when the pope's representative and the patriarch excommunicated each other. The result was two churches: Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.

Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches after the Great Schism

The empire weakened over the centuries as Arab, Seljuk Turk and Slavic enemies took territory.

Islam began in the Arabian Peninsula in the early seventh century C.E., when Muhammad, a merchant of Mecca, began preaching that he had received revelations from the one God, Allah. Opposition from Mecca's leaders led Muhammad and his followers to migrate to Medina; this migration, the Hijra, marks the first year of the Islamic calendar. Muhammad united much of Arabia before his death. The beliefs and practices of Islam are covered in Chapter 4.2.

When Muhammad died, his followers disagreed about who should lead the community. The majority accepted elected caliphs ("successors") chosen from among his companions, beginning with Abu Bakr. A minority believed leadership belonged to Muhammad's family through his cousin and son-in-law Ali, the fourth caliph. Ali's assassination, and the later killing of his son Husayn at Karbala, deepened the split. Those who followed the caliphs and the community's consensus became Sunni Muslims, today the large majority. Those who followed Ali and his descendants as imams became Shia Muslims, today a majority in Iran and Iraq. The split began as a political dispute over succession and later developed doctrinal differences.

Under the first four caliphs and the Umayyad dynasty, Arab armies conquered Persia, Syria, Egypt, North Africa and most of Spain within about a century. The Byzantine and Persian empires had exhausted each other in war, the Arab armies were highly mobile, and many conquered peoples welcomed relief from heavy taxes and religious persecution. Muslim rulers generally tolerated Christians and Jews as "people of the book" (dhimmi), who paid a special tax, the jizya, in return for protection.

The Umayyads ruled from Damascus and favored an Arab elite, which angered non-Arab converts. The Abbasids overthrew them in the mid-eighth century and moved the capital to the new city of Baghdad. The Abbasid era treated all Muslims more equally and became a golden age of trade, scholarship and urban life; Baghdad's House of Wisdom translated Greek, Persian and Indian works (Chapter 6.3). One Umayyad prince escaped to Spain and founded a separate state in al-Andalus, where Córdoba became one of Europe's largest and most learned cities. The Mongols destroyed Baghdad in the thirteenth century.

The Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates compared

Islam spread by conquest, but even more by trade. Muslim merchants carried the faith across the Sahara to West Africa, down the East African coast and across the Indian Ocean to India and Southeast Asia, where Indonesia eventually became the largest Muslim country. Islamic civilization shared the Arabic language, the pilgrimage to Mecca, Islamic law and a vast trade network that connected three continents.

Common Trap: The Sunni-Shia division did not begin as a disagreement over the Quran or the Five Pillars, which both groups share. It began as a dispute over political succession after Muhammad's death.

After Rome fell, Germanic kingdoms replaced Roman rule in the West. Trade and cities declined, learning survived mainly in monasteries, and the Church became the strongest unifying institution. The Franks, whose king Clovis converted to Catholic Christianity, became the most powerful Germanic people. Charles Martel defeated a Muslim army at Tours, and his grandson Charlemagne built an empire covering much of modern France, Germany and northern Italy. On Christmas Day in 800 C.E. the pope crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Romans, a sign of the alliance between the papacy and Frankish kings and of the West's claim to the Roman heritage. Charlemagne promoted a revival of learning, the Carolingian Renaissance, by founding schools and having scribes copy classical and religious texts.

Charlemagne's empire was divided among his grandsons. In the ninth and tenth centuries Europe faced new invaders: Vikings from Scandinavia, Magyars from the east and Muslim raiders from the south. Central governments could not respond quickly to these raids, so local lords who could defend an area gained power. This is a main reason feudalism developed.

Vikings settled in northern France in a region that became Normandy. In the mid-eleventh century William, Duke of Normandy, claimed the English throne, invaded and defeated the Anglo-Saxon king Harold at the Battle of Hastings. The Norman Conquest had lasting effects. William kept all land as the king's and granted it to his Norman followers as fiefs, creating a strong, centralized feudal monarchy. He ordered the Domesday Book, a survey of land and property used for taxation. Norman French became the language of the court and law and merged with Old English, adding thousands of words to English. And because English kings were also French dukes, England and France were drawn into centuries of conflict, culminating in the Hundred Years' War.

Feudalism was a political and military system based on land in exchange for loyalty and military service. A king or great lord granted a fief to a vassal, usually a knight, who swore an oath of fealty and promised military service. Vassals could grant parts of their fiefs to lesser vassals, creating a web of obligations.

Manorialism was the economic system that supported feudalism. A manor was a self-sufficient agricultural estate including the lord's house, villages, fields, a church, a mill and woodland. Most peasants were serfs, bound to the land: they could not leave without permission, owed labor on the lord's fields and paid part of their harvest and fees, and in return received protection and the right to farm strips of land. Serfs were not slaves, since they could not be sold apart from the land, but they had little freedom.

Feudalism and manorialism distinguished

Memory Aid: Feudalism is about fighting (lords and knights); manorialism is about farming (lords and serfs). Both rest on land.

Exam Tip: Japanese feudalism is a frequent comparison. In Japan a shogun (military ruler) held real power while the emperor reigned in name only; daimyo were landholding lords; samurai were warrior vassals who followed the code of bushido. As in Europe, the system rested on land and loyalty, but Japanese loyalty was more personal and less contractual than European vassalage.

The Catholic Church was the center of medieval European life. It administered the sacraments, ran schools and hospitals, owned large amounts of land, collected the tithe and had its own courts and canon law.

The Investiture Controversy was a struggle over whether kings or the pope had the power to appoint bishops and abbots and invest them with the symbols of their office. Bishops held large estates and served kings as officials, so rulers wanted to choose them. Pope Gregory VII banned lay investiture, and the German emperor Henry IV defied him. Gregory excommunicated Henry, and Henry's nobles began to turn against him, so the emperor traveled to Canossa in Italy and stood barefoot in the snow to beg forgiveness. The conflict was settled by the Concordat of Worms, which gave the Church the right to choose bishops and grant their spiritual authority while the emperor could grant them their lands.

Common Trap: The Great Schism of the mid-eleventh century divided the Catholic and Orthodox churches. The Investiture Controversy was a struggle within western Christendom between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. A later "Great Western Schism," when rival popes claimed office at the same time, is a third and different event that weakened papal prestige in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

In the late eleventh century the Byzantine emperor asked the West for help against the Seljuk Turks, who had defeated Byzantine forces and controlled the Holy Land. Pope Urban II called for a crusade, promising spiritual rewards. The First Crusade captured Jerusalem and set up crusader states along the eastern Mediterranean. Later crusades were less successful: the Muslim leader Saladin recaptured Jerusalem, the Third Crusade (led partly by Richard the Lionheart) failed to retake it, and the Fourth Crusade never reached the Holy Land at all, instead sacking Christian Constantinople.

The Crusades had political, religious and social effects beyond commerce:

West African empires grew rich from the trans-Saharan trade, carried by camel caravans that crossed the desert. The basic exchange was gold from mines south of the empires for salt from Saharan mines such as Taghaza. The empires did not usually own the gold fields; they grew rich by controlling and taxing the trade that passed through their territory.

Ghana (in modern Mauritania and Mali, not the modern country of Ghana) was the first great trading empire. Its king taxed every load of salt and gold entering or leaving, and he kept all gold nuggets for himself so that gold dust would stay scarce and valuable. Ghana declined in the eleventh and twelfth centuries after attacks by the Almoravids of North Africa and the loss of trade.

Mali rose in its place under Sundiata Keita, whose story is told in the Epic of Sundiata. Mali controlled the gold fields more directly and extended its rule to the trading cities of Timbuktu and Gao. Its most famous ruler, Mansa Musa, made a pilgrimage to Mecca in the fourteenth century with a huge caravan of attendants and gold. He spent and gave away so much gold in Cairo that its value there fell for years. His pilgrimage put Mali on European and Arab maps, and he brought back scholars and architects who built mosques and helped make Timbuktu a center of Islamic learning. Mali's rulers were Muslim, but most common people kept traditional beliefs.

Songhai, centered on Gao, broke away from Mali and became the largest of the three empires in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries under Sunni Ali, a military leader, and Askia Muhammad, who organized the government and promoted Islam (Chapter 1.3 covers its fall).

Ghana, Mali and Songhai compared

Memory Aid: GMS, in order, like a "Gold Moving South" caravan: Ghana first, Mali (Mansa Musa) second, Songhai (Sunni Ali, Askia) third and largest.

On the East African coast, a string of independent trading city-states such as Kilwa, Mombasa, Mogadishu and Zanzibar formed the Swahili coast. Monsoon winds carried ships between East Africa, Arabia, Persia, India and even China. African merchants traded gold, ivory and other goods from the interior for cotton cloth, porcelain and spices. The Swahili language combines a Bantu base with many Arabic words, and Swahili culture blended African, Arab and Persian influences; most ruling elites became Muslim.

Inland, Great Zimbabwe (in modern Zimbabwe) was the capital of a Shona kingdom that flourished from about the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Its builders fitted granite blocks without mortar to form massive enclosures, the largest ancient stone structures in southern Africa. The kingdom grew rich from cattle and from controlling gold sent to the coast, and Chinese porcelain and Persian glass found at the site show its link to the Indian Ocean network.

After centuries of division, China was reunified by the short-lived Sui dynasty, which built the Grand Canal linking the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. The Tang dynasty that followed was a golden age: it expanded into Central Asia, restored the civil service examination system, redistributed land to peasants under the equal-field system, and made its capital Chang'an one of the world's largest cities, filled with foreign merchants. The Song dynasty ruled a smaller territory but saw remarkable economic growth: fast-ripening Champa rice from Southeast Asia doubled harvests, cities grew, paper money and printing spread, and the examination system became the main path to office (Song technology is covered in Chapter 6.3).

The Mongols, nomadic herders of the Central Asian steppe, were united by Genghis Khan early in the thirteenth century. Using skilled mounted archers, strict discipline, terror against cities that resisted and engineers recruited from conquered peoples, they created the largest land empire in history, stretching from Korea to eastern Europe. After Genghis Khan's death the empire was divided into khanates: the Yuan dynasty in China, the Golden Horde in Russia, the Ilkhanate in Persia and the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia. His grandson Kublai Khan conquered the Song and founded the Yuan dynasty, keeping Mongols and foreigners in top posts.

The Mongol peace, or Pax Mongolica, made the Silk Road safer than it had been in centuries. Merchants, diplomats and missionaries such as Marco Polo traveled across Eurasia, and goods, technologies and ideas moved more freely. The same connections helped carry the bubonic plague from Central Asia to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean in the fourteenth century.

The Ming dynasty drove out the Mongols in the fourteenth century and restored native Chinese rule. In the early fifteenth century Admiral Zheng He led seven huge fleets across the Indian Ocean as far as East Africa to display Ming power and collect tribute. The court then ended the voyages, and China turned inward, focusing on its northern frontier and its land-based economy.

In India, Turkic Muslim invaders founded the Delhi Sultanate in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The sultans ruled much of northern India, repelled Mongol invasions, and introduced Persian-influenced culture and architecture, such as the Qutb Minar tower. Most of the population remained Hindu, and new blended traditions emerged, including the Urdu language.

Japan developed its feudal system after the Heian court lost control of the provinces. Minamoto Yoritomo became the first shogun, establishing a military government (the Kamakura shogunate) while the emperor remained a ceremonial figure in Kyoto.

The Aztecs (Mexica) migrated into the Valley of Mexico and in the fourteenth century founded Tenochtitlan on an island in Lake Texcoco, where they built causeways and farmed on chinampas, artificial island gardens. Through a Triple Alliance with neighboring cities, they built a tribute empire: conquered city-states kept their own rulers but paid tribute in goods such as maize, cotton, cacao and feathers, and supplied captives for human sacrifice to gods such as Huitzilopochtli. Tenochtitlan may have held 200,000 people at its height, larger than most European cities. The resentment of tribute-paying peoples later helped the Spanish (Chapter 1.3).

The Inca built their empire in the Andes in the fifteenth century under rulers such as Pachacuti, who expanded a small kingdom around Cuzco into an empire stretching more than 2,000 miles along western South America. Unlike the Aztecs, the Inca ruled directly and tightly. They imposed the Quechua language, resettled loyal groups among conquered peoples, and required the mita, a labor tax in which households worked for the state on roads, terraces, temples and in the army. A road network of about 25,000 miles with suspension bridges and relay runners, storehouses of food and cloth, and quipu records held the empire together.

The Aztec and Inca empires compared

Competency 002 asks you to compare medieval Europe with earlier civilizations. Compared with the Roman Empire, early medieval Europe was decentralized: power was local and based on land, cities and long-distance trade shrank, and the Church, not the state, provided unity and learning. Like ancient Egypt or Shang China, medieval society was hierarchical and closely tied to religion, but unlike those river civilizations, it lacked a strong central ruler for centuries. Compared with the Abbasid caliphate or Song China in the same era, Europe was poorer, less urban and less advanced in science and commerce, which is why contact with those societies mattered so much. From the eleventh century onward, towns, guilds, trade fairs and universities revived, and kings slowly rebuilt central authority, setting the stage for the Renaissance.

Exam Tip: When a stem asks how medieval Europe differed from Rome, choose the option about decentralized, land-based political power and the Church's central role. When it asks how medieval Europe compared with Song China or the Abbasids, choose the option that recognizes Europe as less urbanized and commercially developed in the early centuries.

Byzantium preserved Roman law and Greek learning, spread Orthodox Christianity to the Slavs, and split from the Roman Catholic Church in the Great Schism.

The Sunni-Shia division began as a dispute over succession after Muhammad; the Umayyads expanded the caliphate, and the Abbasids ruled a golden age from Baghdad.

Charlemagne's coronation linked the papacy with Frankish kings; Viking raids encouraged feudalism; the Norman Conquest created a strong feudal monarchy in England and reshaped English.

Feudalism exchanged land for military service; manorialism exchanged protection for serf labor; the Investiture Controversy pitted pope against emperor over appointing bishops.

Ghana, Mali and Songhai grew rich by controlling the trans-Saharan gold-salt trade; the Swahili coast and Great Zimbabwe tied East Africa to the Indian Ocean.

The Mongols created a vast empire that reopened the Silk Road; the Ming restored Chinese rule and later ended Zheng He's voyages; the Aztecs ruled by tribute and the Incas by direct control and labor service.