The challenges and crises of the fourteenth century generated many social and cultural changes as the societies of Afro-Eurasia sought to recover and rebuild. The Ming dynasty represented an era of introspection during which traditional practices and beliefs such as Confucianism were reestablished to shed China of Mongol influence. Islam continued to expand across central Asia and North Africa, incorporating many new cultural traditions and regions into the community of believers. In Europe,...

From the 1340s to the 1350s, the Black Death unleashed a wave of death and devastation across Afro-Eurasia. This global pandemic of bubonic plague not only resulted in significant population loss, but it also led to profound social and economic transformation. The formerly thriving cities of the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt quickly deteriorated, and in Europe, the psychological toll of the plague’s trauma led many to question the traditional privileges of the clergy and nobility. Although...

The field of historical climatology has enabled historians to combine analyses of written sources with data about the ecological environment of the past. Thus, we know that at the beginning of the fourteenth century, a prolonged period of temperate climate was followed by a devastating period of lower temperatures and substantial changes in precipitation in the Northern Hemisphere that wiped out crops and led to widespread droughts and famines. Many were forced to migrate in search of the...

The fourteenth century was a time of profound political change across Afro-Eurasia. From the rise of the Yuan dynasty to the emergence of the Il-Khanate, the Mongol Empire began the fourteenth century in a period of growth and expansion. By the end of the century, however, plague, revolts, rebellion, and crises of authority had led to the decline of the once-massive empire. Elsewhere in Europe, conflict between England and France and the fragmented political structure of the Holy Roman Empire...

During the Mali Empire’s period of decline, the Soninke-speaking people of the Niger established a new polity centered on the trade city of Gao, which soon became the capital of the Songhai kingdom. During the sixteenth century, Songhai grew into a larger and wealthier state than even the fabled Mali. Its prosperity depended on controlling the trans-Saharan trade routes of West Africa. This trade was made possible largely by nomadic and seminomadic peoples such as the Sanhaja and Tuareg who...

Medieval African kingdoms and polities controlled vast territories, used emerging technologies, and governed populations that were heterogeneous and cosmopolitan. In every kingdom, trade was vital not only to longevity and prosperity, but also to their dynamic cultures. Ghanaian control over trans-Saharan trade in West Africa led to a thriving relationship between Muslim traders and the empire’s rulers, who never converted. After Ghana’s fall, the larger kingdom of Mali emerged, whose mansas...

Africa’s ancient migrations diffused technological and cultural innovations that helped establish settlements later enriched by the spread of new belief systems. Beginning with both Judaism and Christianity in the early centuries of the Common Era and continuing with the long tradition of Islam, monotheism had taken root throughout much of North Africa by the end of the eighth century and gradually penetrated the sub-Saharan region. By the medieval period, the nature of religious belief...

The forces of centralization and conformity in Western Christendom scored important victories, crushing heretical movements and formalizing institutions such as the Inquisition to keep them down. On the other hand, crusaders and kings alike often ignored the papal will with virtual impunity. Monarchs in France and the Two Sicilies laid the groundwork for strong royal bureaucracies to keep the nobility in check. In other areas, nobles and merchants in places like England and Iberia created...

While Kublai’s Yuan dynasty reunited China and gave it the same ruler as the Mongol homeland and much of central Asia, it revived neither the prosperity of China nor the robustness of the steppe people. Trade continued to flow, and the effects of earlier economic growth were still apparent, but less wealth was subsequently produced. This meant less went to the steppe, and those producing wealth saw increasingly fewer returns on their labor. The seemingly invincible armies of the Mongol Empire...

Chinggis Khan ruled the Mongol Empire for twenty-one years. In that time, he established a law code, the yassa, that he hoped would allow his seminomadic people to live in harmony. He saw the people living in settled areas, such as the Xi Xia, Jin, and Khwarazmians, as a source of wealth and tribute. The empire changed enormously during Chinggis Khan’s reign, becoming more inwardly peaceful but also much more materialistic in its tastes. The military changed as well, becoming a sophisticated...

The Song dynasty revived and strengthened Confucian civilization in the areas it ruled. Technology improved agricultural yields and laid the groundwork for a type of industrial revolution to occur long before the one that took place in the Western world. The emphasis on Confucius’s pacifist vision led to a neglect of the military, however, at a time when China’s neighbors were becoming more organized and powerful. The Khitan, Xia, and Jurchen all adopted elements of Chinese civilization but...

The Crusades were a movement that signaled the growth of the papacy’s influence in western Europe and helped to stimulate trade, the growth of the Italian city-states, and contact with peoples across Afro-Eurasia. They were also complicated by the ways in which they failed their own ideals: the massacre of innocents, the betrayal of other Christians, and the too-frequent use of warfare to meet political or economic goals. The Crusades persisted in the European imagination for the rest of the...

The period of recovery from the collapse of the Carolingian Empire brought about the ordering of society from the lowliest serf to the kings of western Afro-Eurasia. Popes wanted to reform the church and used their authority to challenge the secular rulers of European kingdoms. Those same rulers worked to create stability by integrating their warrior culture with Christian beliefs, both to justify and to restrain violence. The Byzantine emperor’s call to the pope for aid leaned on all these...

The Abbasid rulers had established their control over the Middle East and created a multiethnic, multireligious society that promoted trade, scholarship, and urbanization. By the tenth century, however, the caliphs’ sphere had been reduced to Syria and Iraq. Religious and political rivals like the Fatimids, who established the only Shia caliphate, weakened the Abbasids. The arrival of the Seljuk Turks helped to push back the Fatimids and dealt a devastating blow to the Byzantine Empire. The...

The early Middle Ages helped set the stage for a new society to emerge from Roman, Christian, and Germanic traditions, and for a revival of the classical world to influence the rise of Islamic culture. Kings, clergy, and scholars helped to preserve the classical past and maintain diplomatic and economic ties across western Afro-Eurasia. The growth of cultural and religious cohesion through western Europe and the crude but effective institutions of the feudal world laid the groundwork for a...

Sogdiana was vital to the operation of the Silk Roads beginning in the fourth century CE. Over the course of some four hundred years, Sogdian city-states like Samarkand and Panjikent grew into key markets, and Sogdian trading communities were established in China. At its height, Sogdiana was the wealthiest region in central Asia. Like many other states in East Asia, Korea was greatly influenced by Chinese civilization. Korean students were educated in Confucian schools, and Korean...

The Silk Roads originated in the Han dynasty’s trade with nomadic peoples from the Inner Asian Steppe and grew into a vast network that crisscrossed much of central Asia, linking China with the West. Beyond the obvious economic benefits, trade along the Silk Roads also facilitated cultural exchange, such as Buddhism’s spread from India to China and onward. Beginning in the seventh century, Arab expansion led to the conquest of Sasanid-controlled portions of the route, and much of southwest...

The new religion of Islam came into India with waves of invaders, from Turkic speakers of central Asia to Arabs from the distant west. In the process, northeastern India became increasingly Muslim and influenced by Islamic culture owing to the arrival of these Turkic peoples. An Islamic state was established at Delhi—the Delhi Sultanate—which lasted more than three hundred years and became the center of Islamic India. However, because the minority Muslim rulers did not enforce cultural...

The new religion of Islam came into India with waves of invaders, from Turkic speakers of central Asia to Arabs from the distant west. In the process, northeastern India became increasingly Muslim and influenced by Islamic culture owing to the arrival of these Turkic peoples. An Islamic state was established at Delhi—the Delhi Sultanate—which lasted more than three hundred years and became the center of Islamic India. However, because the minority Muslim rulers did not enforce cultural...

Through a process of conquest, conversion, and coexistence, the early Abbasids created a cosmopolitan medieval empire centered at their new capital of Baghdad. By assimilating the late antique traditions of the Byzantines and Persians before supplanting them, integrating Arab culture northward throughout the region, and overseeing the preservation and dissemination of knowledge from the ancient world, the Muslims of the Middle East created a thriving cultural hub with considerable impact on...

The issue of leadership following Muhammad’s death caused immediate tensions within the Islamic ummah even as the first four caliphs, the Rashidun, oversaw significant territorial expansion. Tensions between the family of Muhammad—especially his son-in-law Ali, the fourth caliph—and the Umayyads resulted in a civil war that brought Islam’s first dynasty to power. Within a century of Muhammad’s death, an Islamic state ruled over the world’s largest empire at that time, first unifying...

While the Arabs of northern Arabia were uniting as a capable fighting force looking for opportunities to expand, the Byzantines and Sasanian Empires were at a low ebb. In the early seventh century, the Byzantine Empire had won a long and costly war against the Sasanians, sometimes fought on both sides by proxies from northern Arabia, but now the combatants were exhausted and financially drained. Meanwhile, Muhammad’s historic unification of the majority of Arab tribes under the single leader...

The Kushan Empire in central Asia is an example of the diversity found beyond the Mediterranean during Late Antiquity. The Kushan Empire dominated trade along the Silk Roads, was home to a religiously diverse population, and promoted the burgeoning religion of Buddhism within and outside its borders. The city of Palmyra was able to rival the Roman Empire for a short time in the third-century eastern Mediterranean. By taking advantage of a tumultuous political situation, Queen Zenobia expanded...

Two kingdoms flourished on the periphery of the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires in Late Antiquity. In East Africa, Aksum oversaw a trade network with a wide geographic scope. King Ezana’s conversion to Christianity in the fourth century was a seminal moment for the empire because it was then able to use religious motivation to conduct a military campaign in southern Arabia. Here, the Himyarite Empire subsumed local groups to become a unified state that converted to Judaism sometime in the...

The two great superpowers of Late Antiquity, the Byzantine Empire and the Sasanian Empire, vied for supremacy in the fifth and sixth centuries. Though the Byzantine Empire had to contend with the Sasanians as a particularly formidable challenge, the reign of Justinian witnessed the zenith of Byzantine culture. Justinian carried out monumental building projects, codified Roman law, and oversaw the reconquest of parts of the Roman West. The Sasanians meanwhile consolidated control over a vast...