Rest is History

The Human Story – The Venetians & The Ottomans: A Convenient Relationship

This instalment will discuss a relationship between a city, Venice at the north-eastern tip of the Italian peninsula, and an empire, the Islamic Ottomans.

This mutually beneficial relationship between two unlikely “frenemies” led directly to several significant changes but the two most monumentally massive deals for world history being the European Renaissance and Christopher Columbus “discovering” the New World.

The City

Now would be a good point to delve a little into the history of the city of Venice. In the middle of the fifth century, nearly all northern Italy had fallen to the Huns as they continued their march towards the eternal city of Rome during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The Adriatic coast became a refuge for many Italians fleeing from the onslaught of Atilla and his Hun hordes. However, due to the lack of fertile soil these refugees learned to live off the sea and entire communities of fisherman and salt miners began to spring up and dot the coastline. These lagoon dwellers bounded together for mutual protection against the Huns, the Goths and later the Lombard peoples. Essentially, Europe has Atilla to thank for one of its most glorious possessions: the city of Venice.

Around 300 years after the death of Atilla when the political situation in Italy had calmed down, the Venetians convened and chose a leader, known as the Doge. Soon after, the Franks, led by Charlemagne, conquered the Kingdom of the Lombards in 774 and later recognised Venice as a sort of self-governing commonwealth under Byzantine’s sphere of influence. However, Charlemagne’s son, Pepin, launched an invasion of Venice, prompting the people to relocate to the Rialto island which proved impregnable and the Franks soon withdrew as many succumbed to disease. A new capital was ordered for construction upon this island, which soon expanded to the surrounding islands of the swampy region and the Franks and the Byzantines signed an agreement which recognised Venetian independence.

The city of Venice effectively became almost like a collection of floating buildings tied together by an intricate canal system. If ever there was a city where geography was tied closely to destiny, it was Venice. The city was literally built for sea-going trade. The city did not have much in the way of natural resources so if they wanted to grow then they had to rely upon trade.

First, the Venetian people became experts in shipbuilding. Remember that when the crusaders of the crazy Fourth Crusade required ships, it was the port city of Venice that they headed for because the Venetians were famous for their ships. Not only could they masterfully build ships, they could also sail them to places like Constantinople and the Levant, so the Venetians formed trade treaties with the Byzantine Empire and when the city of Constantinople fell in 1453 to the Ottomans, the shrewd Venetians were quick to make trade agreements with their new neighbours.

Even before the Ottomans, the Venetians had experience in trading with the Islamic world and initially established itself as the biggest European trading power in the Mediterranean thanks, in large part, due to its commerce with Egypt in the spice trade. Due to the antics of the crusaders, Egyptian merchants were, understandably, not very welcoming of Europeans but they had all of the spice as they imported it from India and controlled both the overland and oversea access to the Mediterranean Sea. Whilst other nations and city-states cited moral and religious opposition to trading with the heathen Egyptians the Venetians found a way which opened to the door to unfathomable wealth.

The Venetians employed a handy story. Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice (the place with the bronze horses pillaged from Constantinople during teh Fourth Crusade) contains the body of Saint Mark, author of the Gospel according to Saint Mark, who had been the Bishop of Alexandria… which is in Egypt. Naturally, he was buried in the Egyptian city when he died. However, in 828 two Venetian merchants, with the help of two Greek monks, stole the bones of Saint Mark and hid them in a shipment of pork. Since Muslims are not permitted to eat pork, the guards did not inspect the shipment too closely. A mosaic in Saint Mark’s Basilica, which can still be seen today and includes the guards’ revulsion, depicts this outlandish tale. Afterwards the Venetians agreed that they had to trade with the Egyptians as they could use it as a secret way to ferry holy relics out of Egypt.

What exactly did Venice import? Well, lots of things but most notable is that they imported a lot of grain because the area is not very fertile, and it is difficult to farm. The Ottomans on the other hand had abundant grain, even before they conquered Egypt with its fertile Nile River valley basin in 1517. Whilst trade was certainly the cornerstone of Venice’s economic success, they did have a diverse economy which produced things such as textiles, famous for their silk makers, and glass. Venice is still known for its glassware, but it could not produce such fine works without a certain type of ash which they used to make different colours. This ash came from the Ottomans.

One final thing to note about Venice and which made it special, at least for its time, was that it was a republic in a feudal world which was dominated by nobles and royal dynasties. Its leaders were elected and had to answer to the populace, or at least the property-owning male populace.

The Empire

The Ottoman Empire lasted from around 1300 to 1919, making it one of the longest lasting, as well as wealthiest, empires in world history. The Ottomans succeeded in blending their nomadic pastoral roots with some very un-nomadic empire building and some incredibly impressive architecture, making them very different from that other nomadic people who built an impressive empire, the Mongols.

The empire, or least the dynasty, was founded by Osman Gazi who was the leader of a small Anatolian tribe that was left in the post-Mongol power vacuum. Ottoman being a Latinised version of Osmanli which means House of Osman.

Perhaps one of the most amazing things about the House of Osman’s 600-year long history was that their empire only once descended into civil war (1402 -1413) following the death of Sultan Bayezid I at the Battle of Ankara. Five of his sons each claimed the throne for himself and they fought it out in what is known as the Ottoman Interregnum for eleven years before Mehmed Çelebi emerged as victor, crowned himself Sultan Mehmed I, and restored the empire.

The question though is why was there only ever one succession crisis in the empire’s long history? Well, the reason is particularly brutal. The official practice, until the late sixteenth century, for avoiding any future civil wars was basically state-sanctioned fratricide – “survival of the fittest, not eldest, son” as the historian Donald Quataert described it. During their father’s lifetime, all adult sons of the reigning sultan obtained provincial governorships and would gather support and upon the death of the sultan, the brothers would fight amongst themselves until one emerged triumphant to claim the throne: similar to the Interregnum but approved by the state.

Two particularly celebrated sultans emerged to take the throne and rule over the empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The first was Mehmet the Conqueror who ruled from 1451 to 1481 and expanded Ottoman control to the Balkans (which is why today there are Bosnian Muslims living in the area). However, Ottoman expansion reached its greatest extent under Sulieman the Magnificent who ruled from 1520 to 1566. Sulieman was deserving of the honorific “Magnificent”. He codified the secular and religious laws of his land to make the justice system fairer and more efficient. Sulieman also embarked on thirteen lightening campaigns in every direction, taking valuable territory in Mesopotamia, north Africa (thus securing control of the western parts of the Asian trade networks, both overland and oversea) and he defeated the King of Hungary and laid siege to the city of Vienna. Under his control, the Ottomans became a major naval power of the time. To top this off, Sulieman also sorted trade deals with another major trading power at the opposite end of the Mediterranean Sea: Portugal, whose own empire was in its infancy.

The Ottomans controlled around half of what the Romans did but it was far more valuable due to all the Indian Ocean Trade. All this land and trade brought a lot of wealth, but it needed to be managed. The Ottomans could have followed the Roman model of sending generals and nobles to rule over conquered territories or demanded the allegiance of client kings like the Persians had done. They could have developed a civil service like the Chinese, but instead they innovatively created an entirely new model of administration; a new ruling class system that some historians have dubbed the Slave Aristocracy.

One of the main problems for kings of this time was their landed hereditary noblemen, because they were always looking to gain more power and replace the king as top dog. One of the best solutions to bypass this situation is to pull them into the fold of government and make them feel included and even more important. Another solution is to simply kill them. However, the Ottomans circumvented the problem of hereditary nobles altogether by creating both an army and bureaucracy from scratch, whose only loyalties lay with the sultan. The devshirme (translated as “child levy” or “blood tax”) was the practice of recruiting soldiers and bureaucrats from among the children of the Ottoman’s Balkan Christian subjects. Soldiers would take the boys, from as young as eight years old, from their parents and force-convert them to Islam with the primary objective of selecting and training the best children for either the military or civil service of the empire. The boys selected for the military were enlisted into an elite fighting force known as the Janissaries. The Ottoman ruling class came to be ruled exclusively by the devshirme, creating a separate social class which was begrudged by ordinary Ottomans and the practice eventually died out at the beginning of the 18th century.

The Partnership

Without a doubt, Venice was the greatest threat to the Ottomans in the Mediterranean arena due to their massive navy but when the two states were not squabbling over island territories, they proved to be one another’s biggest trading partners. This fruitful, if tense, relationship made both polities fabulously wealthy. After the Ottomans captured Egypt, they pretty much exclusively controlled the flow of trade through the eastern portion of the Mediterranean. However, by this point the Venetians had centuries worth of experience, as well as lots of ships and so the Ottomans were content to allow the Venetians to continue carrying the goods and conduct in the lion’s share of trading whilst they made money from taxing this trade. This system worked so well because the city of Venice and the Ottoman Empire added value to one another.

Venice became immensely wealthy and being immensely wealthy was one of the prerequisites for the European Renaissance. All the art and learning that sprung up from the Renaissance required funding, which is why Venice was a leading city at the beginning before being eclipsed by the likes of Florence, Rome, and several northern European cities.

Additionally, this mutually beneficial arrangement that the Ottomans had with the Venetians established firm connections between the Islamic world and Christian Europe. This allowed once forgotten ideas to flow again, especially Greek ideas that had been preserved and built upon by Islamic scholars.

However, perhaps the most critical offshoot of the business duopoly held by these behemoths of trade was that it forced other European powers to look for alternative paths to the riches of the east. This desire to unlock other routes to the far east was fuelled by huge investments in exploration and helped kickstart the “Age of Discovery”. The Portuguese sailed south and east around the southern tip of Africa whilst the Spanish hoped to carve a more direct route. They instead sailed west, under the command of the Genoese born Christopher Columbus, believing that China and the Indies were much closer than they turned out to be.

The Rest is History

Enjoy this? Then check out the rest of the series in the links below:

The Human Story – The Indian Ocean Trade Network

Today we will be discussing the trading network that was prevalent in the Indian Ocean and provided a crucial method of exchange during the significant increase in trade in approximately 500 – 1500 CE. This article will focus on a system rather than individuals, groups of people or nations. Many world history books, classes and television programmes tend to zero in on the people whose actions have shaped the course of history and influenced our ancestors’ lives and whilst it may be interesting to note that when Pedro I (1320 – 1367) was crowned King of Portugal, he had the remains of his late mistress dug up to be crowned as well, or that King Charles VI of France (1368 – 1422) believed, at times, that he was made entirely of glass, we lose focus and forget that the common people of history also helped forge it.

The Trade Winds

The Indian Ocean trade network was much like the Silk Road in that it was a system of trading routes that connected people who had goods with people who wanted goods and were willing to pay for them. Just as the Silk Road was never just a single road, there were lots of long distance trading routes in the Indian Ocean connecting various port cities all around the Indian Ocean basin, stretching from Java and Canton in the East to Zanzibar and Mombasa in the West. The Indian Ocean Trade Network was bigger, better and included more diverse players than its Eurasian land-based equivalent. However, this trading system is much less famous than the Silk Road, probably because it does not have a catchy name attached to it.

Trade in the Indian Ocean dates back millennia and there was an extensive maritime trading network operating between the Indus River Valley Civilisation (Harappan) and the Mesopotamian civilisations as early as the middle Harappan Phase (2600 – 1900 BCE) with much of the commerce being handled by middlemen in the Persian Gulf.

However, it did not truly take off until the seventh century CE and by around 700 CE there was a recognisable major trading network in place around the Indian Ocean basin, but it really blew up between 1000 – 1200 CE. The Indian Ocean Trade Network did experience a bit of decline during the heyday of the Mongol Empire when overland trade became safer and cheaper, but then it surged again in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

So, just who was trading in this intricate network of port cities dotted around the Indian Ocean? The Swahili city-states of East Africa, the Islamic Empires of the Middle East, India, China and the principalities and states of South-East Asia. At this point, it should be noted that the states of Europe are not on this list… which is probably a contributing factor as to why the Indian Ocean Trade Network is probably not as famous as the Silk Road: the Eurocentrism view of world history strikes again!

If you were an ornament maker in fourteenth century China and needed some ivory to craft an intricate ivory ornament, then you would have to trade for it as elephants are only found in India and Africa. One of the reasons that the Indian Ocean Trade Network took off is that there was a massive range of resources available and a wide range of import needs from ivory to timber to books to grain. But, the most important factor in the emergence of the Indian Ocean maritime trading network as being as important as it was, was due to winds.

The Indian Ocean is home to a set of special winds known as the Monsoons. Generally, when we think of monsoons, we tend to think of them in the context of the rains in the Indian subcontinent but rather than thinking of them as rains we should picture monsoons as the winds that bring the rainy season. The great thing about seasons is that they are predictably cyclical and come around regularly, as do Monsoon Winds. If you were a thirteenth century sailor, you could count on the wind to take you from Africa to India if you set sail between April and September. Likewise, these winds could be counted on to take you back if you sailed between November and February. These winds were so reliable that early maritime travel guides often listed the times of departure down to the week and sometimes even down to the day!

Predictable winds made trade much less risky. For example, back in the days when the only power available to ships was sails and oarsmen, the cargo may not arrive in time, or may be spoiled by the time of disembarkation, or perhaps the ship would be lost to shipwreck. All of these were bad for the health of global economic trade. However, predictable winds led to lower risk which led to cheaper trade which, in turn, meant that more people could participate and benefit from the Indian Ocean Trade Network.

There are a few more aspects of Indian Ocean trade that are worth mentioning. Indian Ocean trade incorporated many more people than participated in Silk Road trade: there were Muslims, Jewish people, people from Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia, South East Asia, India and China all sailing around the Indian Ocean and setting up trading communities where they would act as middlemen trying to sell for more than they had bought and trying to buy new stuff that they could mark up to sell.

Despite all this diversity, for the most part, especially in the western half of the Indian Ocean basin, the trade was dominated by Muslim merchants. Why? Well, largely because they had the money to build the ships, although in the fifteenth century the Chinese state could have completely changed that balance.

Bulk Goods to Philosophies – What was Traded

As previously mentioned, we tend to think that states, governments and those who ruled them are the real movers and shakers of world history but that is not always the case. In the Indian Ocean, the terms and conditions of trade were set by the merchants and dictated by the demands of the market and not by the whims of the political and religious leaders of the regions. The self-regulating nature of this oceanic marketplace was astonishing and pretty much unprecedented. Perhaps the most incredible aspect is that, a few pirates besides, this whole commercial enterprise was remarkably peaceful. For the better part of seven hundred years these merchant ships were free to sail and trade without the protection of any state’s navy, even though some astonishingly valuable goods and cargoes were being traded.

The great advantage that seaborne trade has over land-based trade is that you can trade goods in bulk like foodstuffs, cotton cloth and timber that is all too heavy to strap to the back of a mule or camel and march them for hundreds of miles across inhospitable terrain. For the first time, we see goods being traded for mass markets instead of just luxury goods for the elites of society like silk. For example, wood can be used to erect houses and buildings but there is not all that much timber to be found in the barren Arabian Peninsula. However, when it becomes cheaper due to bulk trade then suddenly more people can have improved housing.

Much of the timber that was shipped throughout the Indian Ocean Trade Network came from Africa, which is kind of emblematic. Africa produced a lot of raw materials like timber, gold, animal hides and ivory, whilst the Swahili city-states imported finished goods, such as silk and porcelain from China and cotton cloth from India. Spices and rice were shipped from South East Asia, especially Sri Lanka where black pepper was a primary export. The Islamic world provided everything from books to coffee to weapons.
It was not just goods and products that were transported around the Indian Ocean basin, however. Technology also spread too. Technologies like the magnetic compass, which was crucial if you wanted to know where you were headed, came from China and dated back as far as the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE). Additionally, Muslim sailors popularised a device called the astrolabe which made it easier to navigate by using the stars. The sternpost rudder, another Chinese invention, made it easier for crews to steer ships and this technology quickly found advocates throughout the Indian Ocean. One of the most important technologies to be used in the Indian Ocean Trade Network was the triangular lateen sail which allowed ships to tack against the wind. Dating back to Roman navigation, the lateen sail was introduced into the trading network by the Islamic world and meant that a skilled crew could make their way through the ocean even if they did not have a particularly strong tailwind.

Just as with the Silk Road, philosophies and ideas also travelled throughout the Indian Ocean basin. For example, today there are more Muslims living in Indonesia than in any other country on the planet, and knowing what you have already learned about the spread of Islam and the growth of trade then it will come as no surprise to learn that Islam spread to Indonesia during the times of the Indian Ocean Trade Network.

After the 1200s, the region, which had been heavily influenced by the Indian religions of Hinduism and Buddhism became increasingly Islamic as the ruling elites began to adopt the religious practices of the incoming merchants. As has happened so often throughout history (think of the Islamisation of West Africa) the leaders of a region adopted the religion of merchants so that they could have religious as well as economic ties to the people that they were trading with.

A Lesson from History

The conversion of a region to Islam, where it continues to flourish to this day, is a pretty massive deal to world history. However, Islam did not take hold as effectively in other South East Asian countries as it did in Indonesia. The religion did not spread to Cambodia, Laos or Vietnam for one simple reason and that is because they were not centres of trade.

So, just how does an area become a centre for trade exactly?

Between the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra lies a narrow 890 km stretch of water, which is still one of the most important shipping lanes in the world, known as the Strait of Malacca which acts as a choking point for trade. Any city that controlled this channel could stop any ships from travelling through it, or at least tax them. This is exactly what happened to such an extent that a powerful merchant state called Srivijaya emerged and rose to prominence on the island of Sumatra.

For a while, Srivijaya dominated trade in the region because there were so many ships using the straits to get to and from China. However, this trade began to decline in the fifteenth century and with it, so did the Srivijayan Empire.

This leads us onto an especially important point about the Indian Ocean Trade Network, which is that it was essential to the development and growth of certain powerful city-states like those of the Swahili coast and the empire of Srivijiya. Without the riches brought in by trade, these places would never have existed, let alone become wealthy and powerful regional powers. Trade was of such huge importance to these places because they could tax it, through import and export duties or port fees but the fact that they are no longer places of great importance just proves the fact that trade is a pretty weak foundation on which to build a polity, even a small one. There are a multitude of reasons for this, for example, high taxes may motivate traders to find alternative routes. However, the main reason that trade is such a poor base for society is that it relies upon trade… this makes the society susceptible to the peaks and troughs of the global economy.

The legacy of the South East Asian market kingdom lives on in the city-state of Singapore, for instance, but one of the great lessons to be learned from cities and states that have declined or disappeared is that there is usually a town or country nearby that is eager to take your place and happy to offer lower taxes. It is almost as if the merchants and markets decide where the shakers and movers of history go, rather than the other way around.

The Rest is History.

Enjoy this? Then check out the rest of the series in the links below:

The Human Story – Black Death & Disease

We left this series off last time by laying a large portion of blame for the Black Death at the doorstep of the Mongol Empire and their opening of trade routes. It only seems natural to have a look at disease and how it has impacted the human story.

Fortunately for us, we live in the 21st century, a time when communicable disease does not play such a massive role on society, unless you are speaking about cases of SARS and its various offshoots, including the coronavirus, HIV/Aids, bird flu, swine flu or any other recent anti-biotic resistant bacteria.

Traditionally, the study of history has not focused much on disease, partly because they are mysterious and terrifying and partly because they do not fit in with our narrative that history has been made as the result of some people doing good things, or some people doing bad things, or at the very least some people doing some kind of things. However, the reality is that history often happens due to factors that are out with human control such as lots of people contracting smallpox or bubonic plague. Also, very often diseases are seen as a result of some divine judgement. Perhaps the most likely reason that people tend to not focus so much on disease as being a major contributor to the human story is down to the fact that people did not understand or know very much about them. If they did not understand it, they were less likely to write about it and when they did, which some chroniclers did, they would often write rather vaguely about them.

A New Dawn for Bacterial Evolution

Given that, we are going to have to engage in a little speculation here. So, diseases have been with humans for as long as there have been humans, this much we do know. Humans, you will recall from the first article of this series, first appeared in the tropical regions of Africa, in which live a wide and varying range of micro parasitic bacteria so it is probably a safe bet that these parasites played some role in keeping the human population extremely low for a very long time. It is only after we see the migration out of Africa and into regions that are less agreeable to diseases, around 64,000 years or so ago, that we really start to see the growth of human populations necessary to create what we would call civilisations.

Humans migrated into these river valleys that over time became the cradles of civilisation with their agriculture and surpluses. This allowed these early migrants to escape the population limiting tropical diseases, but it created all kinds of new disease problems. The communities that sprang up in these river valleys had more people which led to population density that, in turn, allowed for epidemics. One of the great things about hunting and gathering is that diseases cannot wipe out cities if there are no cities to wipe out.

Also, river valleys can often be breeding grounds for diseases, especially in the valleys where cultures developed irrigation which often relied on slow moving or standing water. Still water is the perfect incubator for disease carrying and nasty micro-organisms that are often associated with disease. For example, schistosomiasis, the symptoms of which include abdominal pain, diarrhoea, bloody stool and blood in the urine, was recorded as early as 1200 BCE in ancient Egypt. Additionally, lots of diseases originate in domestic animals who were living in close proximity to these new agriculturists; but you cannot have ham and bacon without having a little swine flu.

From a macro historical point of view, it is not like these diseases always came only with downsides. It is a matter of historical fact that certain diseases have helped certain populations throughout history shield themselves against would-be conquerors. For example, large swathes of Africa were protected as late as the nineteenth century; early modern-era European attempts to colonise the continent were thwarted by diseases such as malaria which sickened the humans and nagana which the European’s horses contracted.

We like to say that one of the hallmarks of civilisation is the written word and surely pandemics were exactly the type of events that people would tend to write about in early civilisation because they were such a big deal. Pestilence appears in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh and early Chinese historians recorded an alarming decrease in populations as diseases and their migrant hosts spread from the northern Yellow River region down to the more tropical Yangtze River basin.

Ancient Greece was relatively disease free thanks to its climate and the isolationist nature of city-states. However, as these city-states began to trade more with one another they became more susceptible to endemics. The most well-known example of this was the plague that struck the city of Athens in 430-429 BCE during the Peloponnesian War with Sparta and her allies. This conveniently leads us to a very important point: there is a decent correlation between war and disease. Armies tended to carry disease along with them and this combined with food shortages and displacement meant that civilian populations were more likely to get sick. This is still very much the case.

However, nothing spreads disease quite like trade.

Trade is so good for economies and yet so bad for keeping individual people healthy and alive. Ancient Rome’s integration into the transcontinental trade routes, like the Silk Road, may explain why the Roman historian, Titus Livius, more commonly known today as Livy, recorded as many as eleven separate pestilential disasters and it is very likely that these diseases and the accompanying decline in Rome’s population contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire.

Black Death

Of course, we cannot talk about disease throughout history without touching upon the most infamous pandemic of them all: The Black Death which ravaged Europe from 1347 to 1353.

In October 1347, twelve Genoese ships dropped anchor at the Sicilian port of Messina. Those that eagerly approached the vessels were met with a grisly sight. Almost all onboard the vessels were either dead or dying, their skin erupting with blackened boils that oozed pus and blood. The Sicilian authorities quickly moved these cargo ships on, but the damage had already been done.

Europe may have been hit hard by the plague, but it was not hit first. Those Genoese ships were travelling from somewhere, after all and the reason that they were quickly moved away from the port was because the rumours about the disease spread westward before the disease itself. There were stories of a terrifying and mysterious sickness devastating the populations of first China, then India, Egypt, Persia and Syria, getting ever closer to Europe.

The death rate of this plague was incredibly high. It is estimated that anywhere from 30% to 60% of the population of people living in Europe died from the Black Death.

We are not 100% sure that the disease that caused the Black Death was the bubonic plague as its virulence in some regions suggest that it may have been pneumonic, but we do have descriptions of it that match bubonic plague symptoms. The Florentine chronicler Matteo Villani said:

“It was a plague which touched people of every condition, age and sex. They began to spit blood and then they died – some immediately, some in two or three days, and some in a longer time… most had swellings in the groin, and many had them in the left and right armpits and in other places, one could almost always find an unusual swelling somewhere on the victim’s body.”

Well, that sounds utterly horrifying!

People fleeing the cities for the countryside were no safer there either as plague infected and killed livestock too. Countless pigs, chickens, goats, sheep and cows fell to the disease that was caused by Yersinia Pestis. This was such a problem that it led to shortage of wool throughout Europe. The disease was so bad in Florence that an estimated 90% of the city’s population lost their lives. The European death toll is generally estimated to be between 50 and 75 million, whilst the worldwide death toll is placed between 155 and 200 million. To put into perspective just how devastatingly high this number is the world population at the time was approximately 500 million.

The plague obviously affected a lot of individual’s lives but it also affected world history. For example, the plague probably contributed massively to the fall of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in China. The Yuan Dynasty’s collapse did not follow the typical dynastic loops that historians have observed throughout the history of China. There were virtually no records of serious corruptions, power struggles, internal conflicts within the royal court, external invasions or even large-scale famines during most of the Yuan’s reign. Yet the Dynasty fell so quickly and inevitably that many believe the Black Death may have been the underlying reason, in a roundabout way. The first wave of the plague struck China in 1344, three years before Europe and the epicentre appears to have been in the Huai River Basin, hometown of the later Hongwu Emperor of the Ming Dynasty. The story goes that he became homeless as all of his family had perished in the plague and as a result, he was forced to flee the disease by begging as a travelling monk, during which time he fell into the company of a resistance army against the Mongol Yuan. He quickly rose through the ranks and became a leading figure of the rebellion group and eventually captured the entire country, founding the Ming Dynasty.

Aside from being beneficial to the fortunes of the Ming Dynasty, there is substantial debate as to whether the Black Death kick-started Europe’s economy and ended the Middle Ages, propelling Western Europe onto a trajectory that would lead to the gunpowder empires and the modern era. Undoubtedly, the shortage of skilled workers did create opportunities, for example, Guilds being forced to admit new members in order to replace the many workers who had died and persistent European inflation until the end of the fourteenth century suggests both a shortage of products and higher wages. Again, we can look to Matteo Villani to provide some evidence to the effect of the plague on Italy’s economy:

“Nurses and minor artisans working with their hands want three times or nearly the usual pay, and labourers on the land all want oxen and all seed, and want to work the best lands, and to abandon all others.”

So, the Black Death may have been good for the standard of living for the workers who survived the pestilence.

Another probable impact that the plague had on world history is that it changed Europe’s views on Christianity. When people were faced with seemingly random and widespread deaths, it was inevitable that some people would completely abandon piety for decadence and debauchery and the ineffectiveness of the priesthood in dealing with the crisis may have led to an increase in anti-clericalism which later transpired into a greater and more readily acceptance of the Protestant Reformation when it came around.

Attempts to combat the pestilence sweeping across the land, which left thousands of European villages without one single living soul, changed the way that the people lived. For example, construction techniques changed, and people began building out of brick rather than wood and many places saw the mass introduction of tiled roofing which replaced thatched rooftops which were a haven for rats. These new shelters created more barriers between humans and the disease carrying, flea infested rodents.

The Fightback: Medicine – Leading the Charge

So, the Black Death looms larger in our Eurocentric imaging of history, but in terms of devastation and human suffering it pales in comparison to the Great Dying that accompanied the Columbian Exchange (which we will look at later). It is estimated that somewhere between 80% and 95% of Native Americans died within the first 150 years of Christopher Columbus setting foot on the New World. That truly is an astonishing and horrifying number, and much of it was down to the Old World diseases that the European invaders brought with them that the Americans had little or no immunity to.

Thankfully, the world has not seen anything remotely like the devastation brought by the Columbian Exchange since. Some of this is down to our shared immunological profiles, but much of the credit is due to massive improvements in science and medicine.

The most significant medical advance in the battle against infectious disease and viral epidemics like smallpox was the invention of inoculation. The first recordings of this form of fighting disease come from tenth century China but it came under widespread use in England in the eighteenth century and was soon followed by the rest of Europe. The development of antibiotics in the twentieth century proved to be extremely effective against bacterial diseases, like bubonic plague and tuberculosis. Some of these advances have had a tremendous results: smallpox was officially declared as the first disease to be completely eradicated from the human population in 1980 by the World Health Organisation.

However, infectious diseases continue to be a leading killer of human beings and we still see deadly outbreaks of diseases like Ebola and cholera around the world. And even though antibiotics have only been in wide use for less than a century, we are already beginning to see the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria and diseases such as tuberculosis making a bit of a comeback in recent years. Then there are the more modern diseases like HIV/Aids and the prospect of lurking epidemics like the various flus that we often hear about.

All of this demonstrates that diseases are still shaping the human story. Just look at the current flu pandemic that is sweeping its way across the earth, COVID-19, or better known by its virial name, the coronavirus, which has investors running for the hills and entire countries on lockdown.

The Rest will be History

The Rest is History

The Human Story – The Mongols

It is time to discuss the Mongols!

Now, you probably have a picture in your head of the Mongols as being brutal, blood-thirsty warriors, clad in furs and riding the Eurasian plains on horseback. In short, we imagine the Mongol Empire as stereotypically barbarous – and we are not entirely wrong to think this. The amazing speed and success of their ruthless conquests was truly breath-taking. They conquered more land territory in 25 shorts than the Romans did in 400 years! They controlled 11 million contiguous square miles of land and created nations like Russia and Korea. It has even been suggested that the Mongols smashed the feudal system and created an early form of international law.

Renowned for their religious tolerance of conquered peoples, the Mongols in this new and modern viewpoint created the first great trade zone, similar in many ways to a medieval Eurasian European Economic Area and that is not entirely wrong either.

The Great Khan

Do you remember the herders that we looked at earlier? We briefly discussed them as an alternative to agricultural societies or hunting and gathering. There are four key points to remember:

1) Nomads do not just go out on random road trips. They migrate according to Climate Conditions in order to feed their flocks.

2) Generally, they do not produce manufactured goods and for this reason they tend to live fairly nearby established settlements in order to trade.

3) Because they live close to nature and sometimes in harsh conditions, they have a tendency to be a rather hardy and tough bunch.

4) Pastoral people are also usually more egalitarian, especially where women are concerned. Paradoxically, when there is less to go around, humans tend to share more and both men and women must work for the social order to survive. More often than nought this leads to less patriarchal control over women. (although it is worth mentioning that Mongol women rarely went to war).

If you had to choose one pastoral, nomadic group to come out of central Asia to dominate medieval Eurasia it is unlikely that you would have chosen the Mongol people. For most of their history they had been living in the foothills which border the Siberian forests, mixing, herding and hunting. However, another way to look at it is that they were quietly getting expert at horse riding and archery. The Mongols were also much smaller than other Asiatic nomadic pastoral groups such as the Tatars or Uighurs.

The reason that the Mongols rose to a position of dominance is down to one man: Genghis Khan. It is time to delve into another episode of “Great Man History”.

The story goes that Genghis, or Chingis, Khan was born around 1162 to a lowly clan and named Temujin. His father was poisoned to death, leaving the young Temujin under the control of his older brothers, one of whom, Behter, he soon killed during a heated argument, over a fish that he had brought back and had snatched from him, whilst only 14 years old.

By the age of 19, Temujin was married to his first and most important wife, Börte, who was kidnapped (this was common practice amongst the Mongol people; Temujin’s own mother had, herself, also been kidnaped). In rescuing his bride, Temujin proved his military mettle and soon became a leader of his tribe. However, uniting the Mongol confederation would require a civil war which he won largely down to two innovations. Firstly, Temujin enacted a system of meritocracy, promoting people on merit as opposed to the traditional method of familial position. Secondly, he brought lower classes of conquered people into his own tribe whilst dispossessing the leaders of these conquered clans. Thus, the peasants loved him whilst the rich hated him but that did not really matter as they were no longer rich.

With these two building block policies, Temujin was able to win the loyalty of a growing number of people and in 1206 he was declared as the Great Khan: leader of all the Mongol people. This was done during a council called the Kurultai which was called by a prospective leader. During the Kurultai, anyone who supported the prospective leader’s candidacy for leadership would show up on their horses; and boy did Temujin, now styled as Genghis Khan, have a lot of men and horses show up to his Kurultai.

Once Genghis Khan had united the Mongol people he went on to conquer a vast swathe of territory. By the time that the Great Khan died in his sleep in 1227 his empire stretched from the Mongolian homeland all the way west to the Caspian Sea and east to the northern parts of the Korean peninsula.

The Massive (Fragmented) Empire

So, the Mongols had a fantastic looking empire, sure much of it was pastureland, mountains and desert but the Mongol armies did conquer a lot of people too. With the death of Genghis Khan the empire was really only getting started and his son Ogedei Khan expanded the Empire even further and Genghis’ grandson, Möngke was the Great Khan in 1258 when Baghdad, the fabulous capital city of the Abbasid Empire fell to the Mongol hordes. Another of Genghis’ grandsons, Kublai Khan, conquered the Song Dynasty in China in 1279, establishing the Yuan Dynasty which ruled China until it was ousted by the Ming Dynasty in 1368. If Mamluks had not stopped another of Genghis’ grandsons, Hulagu Khan, at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260 in southern Galilee then the Mongols probably would have taken the whole of North Africa too.

Unfortunately for the Mongol Empire its leaders were not always working in unison and although he may have been an incredible general Genghis Khan was not a great statesman and he failed to create one single political unit out of his vast empire. Instead, after his death the Mongols were left with four smaller empires called Khanates:

• Yuan Dynasty in China
• Ilkhanate in Persia
• Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia
• Khanate of the Golden Horde in Russia and Eastern Europe

If this seems a little familiar it is because this is what happened to the empire of another of history’s “Great Men”: Alexander the Great. Another great general who was not much for administration.

The Mongols were so successful primarily because of their military skills and Genghis Khan’s army, which never numbered more than 130,000, was built upon speed and archery. Compared to the foot soldiers and knights that they were up against, the Mongols were more like superfast modern mobile fighting vehicles, sniping their enemies from afar. So, the question begs: why did people not just hole up in castles and behind city walls when they knew the Mongols were approaching? Well, they did. However, the Mongols were incredibly adaptable and even though these nomadic peoples had never laid eyes upon a castle before they began invading foreign lands they soon became experts at siege warfare by interrogating prisoners and adapting gunpowder; most likely introducing it to the Europeans.

As testament to their flexibility, the Mongols, those warriors famed for their horseback blitzkrieg tactics, even built ships with which to attack the Japanese. It may have worked too if it had not been for typhoons, or the “Divine Winds” (Kamikaze). These Divine Winds, incredibly, saved Japan not once, but twice. The First Mongol invasion attempt of Japan was in 1274 and they made a second attempt in 1281. Both spectacular failures which eroded further Mongol naval ambitions.

The blood thirsty reputation of the Mongol armies preceded them, and it must have been a truly terrifying experience to learn that a Mongol army was bearing down on your city. Often, cities would surrender the moment that the Mongols arrived in an effort to avoid the slaughter that usually accompanied them. It is estimated that the Mongol invasions directly killed anywhere between 20 and 60 million people. The vast majority of these deaths were not of enemy warriors, but rather stem from the wholesale elimination of civilian populations. Hundreds of thousands would be executed in a single day and the Mongols did not stop at killing the people, but all the living creatures of a town or city that put up resistance, right down to the cats, dogs and livestock.

The Mongols: A Force for Good?

With this grisly background, let us return to the question of Mongol “excellence”. There are five reasonable arguments to suggest that the Mongols were a force for good in medieval Eaurasia:

1) The Mongols really did reinvigorate cross-Eurasian trade and the Silk Road trading routes that had existed for over 1,000 years by this point had fallen into disuse. The Mongols, however, really valued trade because they could tax it and they did a fantastic job of keeping their empire safe. It was said that a man could walk from one end of the Mongol Empire to the other with a gold plate upon his head without fear of being robbed.

2) The Mongols did a great job of increasing communication through Eurasia by developing a pony express-like system of way stations with horses and riders that could quickly relay information. They called this the Yam system and it also included bronze passports which helped facilitate travel.

3) It was not just goods that travelled along the Mongol trading routes, but also cuisine. For example, it was because of the Mongols that rice became a staple food of the Persian diet.

4) The Mongols forcibly relocated people that were useful to them, like artisans, musicians and administrators. The Mongols were not especially good at administrative tasks like keeping records, so they found people who were good at it and dispersed them throughout their empire. Although this one does not necessarily paint the Mongols in a great light, it had an interesting result: it led to cross-culture pollenisation that modern world historians love to talk and write about.

5) Finally, the Mongols were almost unprecedently tolerant of all religions. They themselves were Shamanistic, believing in nature spirits but since their religion was tied to the lands of their homelands they did not expect others to adopt it and they did not force them to. So, within the Mongol Empire, one could expect to find Buddhist, Jew, Muslim, Christian, Zoroastrian and people of any other religion prospering. It was this kind if openness that has led many historians to go back and re-evaluate the Mongols and view them as a pre-cursor to modernity.

Of course, there is another side to the story of the Mongol Empire too that we really should not forget. So, here are five reasons that the Mongols were not all that excellent:

1) Genghis Khan defined happiness in the following way: “The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.” I am not so sure that you would find too many people nowadays that would find this level of brutality as pleasurable.

2) As an extension to the first point, Genghis Khan’s definition of happiness, the Mongols were seriously brutal conquerors who often destroyed entire cities and the estimated number of people that they killed is in the tens of millions.

3) Their Empire did not last long. Within only 80 years of conquering China they left and were replaced by the rival Ming Dynasty and in Persia they blended in so thoroughly that by the fifteenth century they were completely assimilated and unrecognisable from the local populace.

4) The Mongols were not particularly interested in artistic patronage and architecture and under their rule, the once great cities of Eurasia fell into ruin.

5) Although we viewed their opening of the trade routes as a positive earlier, it also most likely led to the Black Death. By opening up these trading routes they also opened up avenues for the disease to travel in the form of fleas that were infected with Yersinia Pestis and according to one story the Mongols even intentionally spread the plague by catapulting their plague-ridden cadavers over the walls of Kaffa in the Crimean peninsula. Whilst this primitive form of biological warfare may have happened, it is unlikely that it would have caused the spread of the disease. It is more likely that it was the fleas on the rats on the holds of ships that traded with Europeans… but that trade only existed because of the Mongols!

So the Mongols promoted trade, meritocracy, diversity and tolerance but they also promoted wholesale slaughter and senseless destruction. So, all in all, the Mongols probably were not that great after all!

The Rest is History

The Human Story – Islam and Trade in Medieval Africa

The controversial British historian Hugh Trevor Roper through a galvanised and very Eurocentric point of viewing history wrote that the only history in Africa is the history of Europe in Africa and that Africa was “no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit.” Was he correct? Let’s find out.

Much of African history has been preserved and handed down through the generations through oral tradition rather than through the written word. These days we tend to think of written records as being the most accurate and reliable form of description… then again, we do live in a print-based culture (you are reading this after all!!).

It has already been noted in an earlier article of the series that one of the markers of civilisation is the ability to record things in the written form. This implies that peoples who do not develop a writing style are not “civilised” – a prejudice that has been applied many times to describe Africa, its peoples and its history.

However, if you need evidence that it is possible to produce incredible artefacts of literacy without first creating the benefits of writing then let me direct your attention to two of the central pieces of ancient Greek literature: namely, the Odyssey and the Iliad. The Greek poet Homer’s voluminous poems were memorised and recited by subsequent poets for centuries before anyone had the idea of writing them down. Secondly, no less an authority than Plato himself said that writing destroyed humanity’s ability to memorise by alleviating the need to remember anything (he may have had a point – I cannot remember anything on my shopping list unless it’s written down). And finally, to transport ourselves thousands of years to the present, everyday billions of people around the globe tune into radio and television rather than pick up a book and I do not think that anyone would consider our times as uncivilised.

Mansa Musa and his Golden Pilgrimage

Whether or not you consider lack of written records as civilised or uncivilised there are many interesting records of African historical note that have made their way down the generations, including the tale of the African king Mansa Musa.

Mansa (King or Emperor) Musa ruled the vastly wealthy Islamic Mali Empire in western Africa from 1312 to 1337. Sometime in the middle of his reign (it is thought around about 1324, Musa left his home to make the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the Arabian city of Mecca. You may remember that the Hajj was one of the Five Pillars of Islam and all devout Muslims are expected to at least attempt to visit the city at least once in their lifetime. He brought with him an entourage of over 1,000 people and some say as high as 60,000, but most importantly to this story is that he travelled with one hundred camel loads of gold.

Along the way Mansa Musa spent freely and gave away much of his riches: most famously when he reached the Egyptian city of Alexandria, one of the most cultured and learned cities of antiquity and the medieval period. Musa spent so much gold in the city that he inadvertently caused runaway inflation throughout the city and the price of the precious metal plummeted. Alexandria took years to recover from the recession.

The great king built homes in Cairo and Mecca to house his many attendants and as he travelled throughout northern Africa and the Middle East a lot of people took notice, particularly the merchants of Venice. These merchants returned home to Italy with tales of Mansa Musa’s ridiculous wealth which, in turn, helped to foment the myths in the minds of Europeans that West Africa was a land laden with gold; exactly the kind of place that you’d pillage. The seed was sown and a couple of centuries later, Europeans did indeed pillage West Africa of both its physical wealth and of its people.

So, what is so important about the tale of Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage? Well, firstly, it tells us that there were African kingdoms that were ruled by fabulously wealthy African kings which sort of undermines the modern stereotypes of Africa: that the people were poor and lived in basic tribal hierarchies ruled by chieftains and preached to by shamanistic witchdoctors. It also tells us that Mansa Musa was making the Islamic holy pilgrimage to Mecca which demonstrates that he must have been a relatively devout Muslim. This simple tale of one king’s (and his colossal entourage’s) journey east also illuminates us to the fact that West Africa was far more connected to other parts of the world than contemporary views are generally led to believe. Mansa Musa knew all about the places that he was visiting before he got there and after his journey the Mediterranean world was very keen to learn more about his homeland with its seemingly inexhaustive treasures.

Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage to Mecca also dredges up a lot of important questions about medieval West Africa. Principally, what did his kingdom look like? And how exactly did he come to follow the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad?

Islamic Empires Come and Go in the West

The Empire of Mali (1235 – 1670) encompassed a massive swathe of West Africa which ran from the Atlantic coast hundreds of miles inland and included many large cities, the largest and most well known being the city of Timbuktu (which was settled as early as the fifth century BCE). How this impressive territory came to follow the doctrines laid out by the Prophet Muhammad is one that was mirrored all over Africa.

The story of the Islamisation of Africa is a little complicated. Pastoral North Africans called Berbers had long traded with the peoples of West Africa with the Berbers offering life-preserving salt in exchange for West African gold. The Berbers were early converts to Islam and the religion spread along those pre-existing trade routes between the people of North Africa and West Africa. So, the first converts to Islam in Mali were the traders who benefitted from having a religious, as well as a commercial connection to their trading partners in the north and the rest of the Mediterranean. The kings followed the traders, perhaps because following the religion of the more established kingdoms in the north and east would provide them with more prestige, not to mention access to administrators and scholars who could help them solidify their power.

Consequently, Islam became the religion of the elites in West Africa which meant that Islamic kings were trying to exert their power over largely non-Muslim populations which worshipped traditional African gods and spirit deities. In order to not seem too foreign to their subjects these kings would often blend the traditional local religion with Islam, for example by providing women with more rights than in the birthplace of their adopted religion.

The first records that we have of kings adopting Islam come from the Ghana Empire (700 – 1240) which was probably the first true empire located in West Africa and it really took off around the eleventh century. As with all empires across the world throughout history the Ghana Empire rose and fell to be replaced by the next up and coming empire: in this case it was the Malian Empire. The kings of the Mali Empire, especially Mansa Musa and his successor, Masa Sulieman, tried to increase the knowledge and practice of Islam within their territory. For example, when Mansa Musa returned from his Hajj, he brought back scholars and architects to build mosques.

The real reason that we know so much about the Empire of Mali is because it was visited by a man called Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan cleric and scholar who led an incredible life. He was particularly interested in gender roles within the Malian Empire and by Malian women. Ibn Battuta was an extremely learned scholar who managed to develop his vast knowledge of Islam over one of the greatest road trips in history. The Moroccan born Battuta travelled from Mali to Constantinople, to India, Russia and China and even to the islands of Indonesia: he was quite possibly the most well-travelled man before the invention of the steam engine. Everywhere that Ibn Battuta visited, he was treated like a king and he wrote a book, capturing the world of his day, called Rihla which is still widely read today.

However, as unfortunate as it may be, as with all great empires, the Malian Empire eventually fell and was replaced, in parts, by the West African Songhai Empire (a one-time dependency of the Mali Empire) which itself, in turs, collapsed to be replaced by various states of varying local dominance.

All this is to say that much like Europe, China and India, West Africa had its own empires that relied upon religion, war, dynastic politics and familial power struggles in order to survive, thrive and ultimately decay and dive.

On that note, it is now time to cross the vast continent and explore how civilisation evolved in the east of Africa.

East African Trading

An alternative model of civilisation developed on and around the shores of East Africa from that of their fellow Africans in the west. The eastern coast saw the rise of the Swahili civilisation which was neither an empire nor a kingdom but rather a collection of city-states, perhaps the most well-known being Zanzibar, Mogadishu and Mombasa, all of which formed an intricate network of trading posts. There was no one central authority to govern these trading posts, but rather each city-state was autonomously ruled, usually, but not always, by a king.

There were three things linking these city-states in the east that make the argument for them having a common culture. These were language, trade and religion. The Swahili language is part of a linguistic family known as Bantu and, curiously, its original speakers originated in West Africa. Their migration east altered not just the linguistic traditions of East Arica but everything else as they brought with them iron work and agriculture. Until this point most of the people living in East Africa had been hunter-gatherers or herders but once agriculture was introduced it revolutionised life in that part of the world, as it almost always has done.

For a long time it was believed that these East African cities were all founded by Arab or Persian traders exclusively for trading, owing much to the prejudices of earlier western scholars and historians who did not believe that Africans were sophisticated enough to found such great cities. However, nowadays, we recognise that all the major Swahili cities were established long before Islam arrived in the area, and that trade had been occurring since at least the first century CE.

However, it is also acknowledged that Swahili culture and civilisation did not truly begin its rapid development until the eighth century when Arab traders arrived on the shores looking for goods that they could trade on the vast Indian Ocean network: the Silk Road of the Seas. Of course, these merchants brought the religion of Islam with them, which was adopted by the ruling elites, just as it had been in West Africa, who sought religious as well as commercial connections to the rest of the Mediterranean world.

In many of these Swahili city-states the Islamic communities started out quite small but at their height during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries most of the cities boasted large and magnificent mosques, the one in Kilwa (an island off modern day Tanzania) even impressing Ibn Battuta with its great dome.

Most of the goods exported from these east African Islamic communities were raw materials like ivory, timber and animal hides. However, much like the rest of history, there is also a darker side to the history of the east African trading posts: the east African slave trade. Although humans were not exported in the huge numbers that would be seen later in the west during the Atlantic Slave Trade, human life still had a price tag and slaves were traded for imported luxury goods like porcelain and books. In fact, archaeological digs at the aforementioned Kilwa have unearthed houses that often contained bookshelves built into the walls.

The learning of script consumption through archaeology neatly captures the magic of studying history. Through a mixture of archaeology, writing and oral tradition we are presented with a concoction that intermingles and provides us with a glimpse into the past. Each of these lenses may show us the past as if through some distorted fun-housesque mirror but when we are conscious of these distortions, we can at least recognise them for what they are.

Studying Africa reminds us that we need to study many sources and lots of different kinds of sources if we are to get a fuller picture of the past. If we only relied on written sources, it would be far too easy to fall into the old trap of viewing Africa as backward and uncivilised. However, by approaching the subject matter through multiple source types we are introduced to a complicated and diverse place that was sometimes rich and sometimes poor. When we look at it from these different angles, African history becomes not separate but very much part of the human story: a very “historical part of the World.”

The Rest is History

Enjoy this? Then check out the rest of the series in the links below: