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 Sailing away for a spell In the early fifteenth century, Emperor Yung Lo turned outward — an unusual posture for a Chinese ruler — and sponsored impressive voyages of exploration. Zheng He (sometimes written Chung Ho or Cheng Ho), a Muslim court eunuch who was also an accomplished sea admiral, commanded the ventures. (A eunuch was a male servant, generally a slave, who had been castrated, presumably to make him more docile and to ensure that he wouldn’t be tempted by the master’s women, or they by him.) Zheng He somehow overcame his lowly status to become an important member of Yung’s court. Zheng sailed seven large, well-financed expeditions. His ships landed in India, navigated the Persian Gulf, and anchored off East Africa. His vessels were larger and faster than Arab and European ships of the time and equipped with sophisticated bulkheads (walls between sections of the ship’s hold), so that if one part of the ship sprung a leak or caught fire, the damage could be contained and...
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 Rebounding Guptas in India Islamic armies surged eastward as well as westward, and new national and ethnic identities formed around the faith and variations within it. Muslims from Afghanistan conquered much of India in 1100. Yet before Muslims got there, India experienced another flowering similar to the Mauryan Dynasty of the fourth to second centuries BC. In Chapter 5, I talk about both the Mauryans, the first dynasty to unite most of India, and the Gupta Dynasty, whose stable rule brought an Indian golden age in the arts, architecture, and religion in the mid-fourth to mid-sixth centuries AD. Hun attacks on India’s northern borders eventually caused the Gupta Empire to collapse, just as a western contingent of Huns were among the barbarian people whose attacks brought down Roman authority in Europe, beginning the Middle Ages. As decades passed, the Huns of India became more Indian, adopting local customs and habits. Assimilating into the general population diffused the Huns’ p...
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 Ottomans control trade routes between Europe and the East Turkish empire-building reached its height in the fifteenth century, when another Islamic Turkish clan, the Ottoman Turks, assembled a humongous collection of lands into the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman power lasted until the twentieth century. In its heyday, the empire made significant inroads into Eastern Europe. (Animosity between modern Islamic Bosnians and Christian Serbs is rooted in long-ago Ottoman incursions west.) European traders who lusted after eastern riches had to take the Ottomans into account because these Turks blocked land trade routes east. Coupled with Venice’s and Genoa’s dominance in the Mediterranean, the Turkish presence made other Europeans wonder if they could find their own Silk Roads, perhaps by sea. One sailing ship could carry more cargo than camels could, anyway. The problem was that no one knew how to get from Europe to East Asia by sea. Necessity, as the saying goes, became the mother of inventi...
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 Writing the first best-selling travel book Over the Silk Road to China, shippers and wholesalers customarily traded goods only to the next trader down the way, so that no one trader or camel driver covered the entire, exhausting route. Thirteenth century-traveler Marco Polo’s father and uncle were more ambitious than most other traders in Venice: They traveled all the way from Italy to China in their quest for lucrative deals. Marco’s elders were on their second trip to the Far East when they invited the young man (probably about 19 at the time) to tag along. The trio arrived in Beijing in 1275. According to the book that Marco Polo later wrote, he entered Emperor Kublai Khan’s diplomatic service and traveled to other Mongol capitals on official business. (Kublai Khan, though China’s emperor, was a Mongol.) Almost two decades went by. Young Polo, not quite so young anymore, finally left China in 1292 and returned to Venice. But the rival city-states were at war, and Marco Polo was...
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 Setting a precedent for conquest Where did Europeans of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries get the nerve to sail all over the world claiming chunks of other continents for their kings back home? You could argue that their attitude hearkens back to Rome’s imperial habits, or that the Europeans, many of barbarian stock (and thus perhaps Asian as much as European), were born to rapacious conquest. You could argue that, but your argument would be a stretch. More accurately, you could reach back to the Middle Ages, the need to fight off Viking invaders, and how that need prompted feudal vassals to rally around strong leaders. This trend began to build nations such as Saxon England as it took shape under Alfred the Great. But nation building was a slow process, and Europeans didn’t think in terms of a political state based on national identity. (For more on the emergence of strong kings, such as Alfred and Charlemagne, and the beginnings of nation building, see Chapter 6.) T...
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 Meeting the main players The Crusades began in 1095, when diverse Europeans, answering a call from the pope and united in religious zeal (or so they said), tried to free the Holy Land, Palestine, from Turk rulers. They weren’t the Ottoman Turks, whose great empire would supplant the Byzantine Empire in the fifteenth century, but rather their predecessors in Middle Eastern empire-building, the Seljuk Turks. The Seljuk Turks were a nomadic and marauding population of barbarians from wild north central Asia. Barbarians show up in Chapters 5 and 6 as well as in this chapter because they kept showing up in successive centuries — riding into lands as diverse and far-flung as China and Spain. Like the China-conquering Mongols, the Turks called their chiefs by the title khan. In the early centuries of the first millennium, Turks were a subject people, paying tribute (sort of like taxation without representation) to another barbarian group, the Juan- Juan. But as the Arab conquests of the ...
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 Doing the math: Fewer folks, more wealth The Black Plague so drastically reduced Europe’s population that a smaller labor pool changed the economy. Ironically, this turn of events improved many Europeans’ lives by creating disposable income, which in turn spurred a demand for eastern luxuries and even eastern ideas. The intellectual and cultural result of this reduction in population and eastward focus was called the Renaissance. You can find out about the Renaissance in Chapter 13. With so many dead, fewer people were left to work the land. A few workers had the spunk to stand up to the nobles and landowners and point out that they weren’t about to work more for the same money — not when the supply of workers had become smaller and thus more valuable. The most famous of these uprisings was led by Wat Tyler, an English rabble-rouser who got himself killed for his trouble in 1381. Post-plague economics forced some large landholders to split their estates into smaller plots. Instead...
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