EntertainHQ

 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...

 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...

 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...

 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...

 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...

 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 ...

 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...

 Surviving the Black Death Europeans in the fourteenth century were looking at the world in a new way, seeing far-off places as desirable, worth finding out about, and maybe even worth acquiring. Yet before Europeans really got out and started taking over that world, there had to be enough personal wealth back home to make a decent-sized market for foreign luxuries. Oddly, it took a horrible disease and death on a massive scale for that market to find a foothold. The Black Death (also called the Black Plague) was a devastating epidemic of bubonic plague and its variants that probably started in the foothills of Asia’s Himalayan Mountain range. But in the fourteenth century something happened to make disease spread, and many have speculated that the culprit was the rise of trade. The disease lived in fleas carried by rats, and where people go, especially people carrying food, so go rats and their parasites. When a rat died, the fleas jumped to another rat. When no other rat was hand...

 “Discovering” America Columbus didn’t think of himself as a discoverer, and perhaps you shouldn’t either. The whole notion of discovery is insulting to the people who already lived in the Americas and had no inkling that they were undiscovered. Many different kinds of people lived in the Americas before Columbus arrived. Columbus called the people he encountered on Caribbean Islands Indians because he thought he was in Asia, so the original people of the Americas have been lumped together under that label ever since (although some prefer to be called Native Americans or Amerindians). No matter what you call them, these Americans were never a single culture. They lived in widely differing climates, made their livings in different ways, spoke different languages, and wore different clothes. Even their origins were probably different. Until late in the twentieth century, many scholars thought that all the pre- Columbian Americans crossed a land bridge that linked Asia with Alaska bet...

 Demanding respect Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India in 1498 seemed to point the way toward peaceful trade. Before he returned to Kozhikode, however, the tone of East-West relations turned ugly. Just two of da Gama’s four ships and 55 of his original crew of 177 survived the first trip to India and back. Those were considered reasonable losses for the time, especially for such a great breakthrough. King Manuel of Portugal was pleased. He sponsored a second expedition led by Pedro Cabral in 1500. On his way down the coast of Africa, Cabral veered so far west that he discovered Brazil. Cabral claimed it for Portugal, giving King Manuel a piece of the New World in addition to the route to Asia. Cabral proceeded to round Africa and continue to Kozhikode, where he built on da Gama’s work of winning trade privileges by negotiating a full commercial treaty with the zamorin. When he left India, Cabral left a small group of Portuguese traders to represent King Manuel’s interests. Althou...

 Circling the Planet Like Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese explorer who found a sea route to Asia. Like Christopher Columbus, Magellan was a non-Spanish commander of a Spanish flotilla that tried to reach Asia by sailing west from Europe. Magellan’s expedition was successful in spite of the fact that it lost its captain, four of its five ships, all its officers, and most of its crew on the eventful voyage that went across the Atlantic, through the straits at the southern tip of South America (ever after called the Straits of Magellan), across the Pacific Ocean (Magellan named it), through the coveted ports of the Spice Islands (in today’s Indonesia), around Africa from the east, and home. Although he died on the trip, Magellan (whose name in Portuguese was Fernao de Magalhaes) gets credit as the first to circle the globe. He made it as far as the Philippines, and as Magellan may have earlier sailed that far east with Portuguese expeditions, you could say he person...

 Building an empire like no other Like the Aztecs to the north, the Inca started as a subject people under the thumb of previous Peruvian empires. Incas started flexing their muscles in the twelfth century. In the 1430s, a ruler called Pachacuti repelled an invasion by a neighboring people and went on to increase the size of the Inca Empire until it encompassed parts of today’s Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador. By the sixteenth century, Pachacuti’s successors controlled more land than any South American people before them. Like the Romans (more on them in Chapter 5), the Incas brought the leadership of the people they conquered into the Inca fold, rewarding those who joined and making cooperation easier than resistance. Also like the Romans, the Incas were wonderful engineers. Inca stonemasons built fortifications of giant granite blocks fitted so perfectly together that a knife blade still won’t penetrate a seam today. Just as remarkably, the Incas maintained a 19,000-mile road system,...

 Playing by British East India Company rules The British, shut out of Molucca and Japan, had plenty of other ports to exploit, especially in India. From its headquarters in Calcutta, India, the British East India Company traded in textiles and expanded its influence. It oversaw the administration of trade, but it also governed British subjects in its trading ports and beyond, becoming a quasi-government. In the mid-eighteenth century, the British East India Company expanded its role to military power, declaring war on the local Mogul ruler, or nawab. The nawab, Siraj-ud- Daulah, had asked the British to stop fortifying Calcutta. When they refused, he captured the city in 1756, forcing company officials to flee. The nawab’s forces captured a garrison of East India Company guards and threw them into a small jail known ever after as the Black Hole of Calcutta. A British survivor claimed that 146 people were thrown into the 18-x-14-foot jail overnight and that all but 23 died. (Later s...

 Closing the door to Japan Japan was always a special case among Asian nations. Isolated by the sea, Japan didn’t succumb to the invasions of nomadic tribes who roamed the rest of East Asia and rose to power as empire-builders (people such as the Mongols, whom I discuss in Chapter 7). Although its imperial government was structured like China’s, since 1192 power in Japan was in the hands of a warrior class. Japanese authority was concentrated in the shogun, a warlord nominally appointed by the emperor, but in reality the shogun was far more powerful than the emperor was. The shoguns of the Tokugawa family, which ruled from 1603–1868, were essentially military dictators over all of Japan. Here’s a rundown on the first three of these shoguns: Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first of the Tokugawa shoguns, gained office at the end of a series of messy civil wars. Tokugawa was suspicious of outsiders, especially Europeans. When Portuguese traders set up shop in Japan (before the Dutch secured a mo...

 Trying to forestall unrest in France The kings of France took some measures to prevent insurrections such as England’s in 1649. First, a clever cleric, Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) set up governmental offices that cut into the power of the French nobles and concentrated the king’s authority. Chief Minister to Louis XIII, Richelieu suited Louis XIV, who succeeded in 1643, just fine. The English Civil War, which began the year before Louis XIV’s coronation, was a clash between King Charles I and members of Parliament. Louis XIV sought to eliminate a potential forum for dissent when he stopped calling the French equivalent of Parliament, the Estates-General, into session. Like the English Stuarts — James I and Charles I — Louis XIV believed that he, as king, was God’s deputy. His spectacularly luxurious palace at Versailles, the showplace of all Europe, reflected this conviction. Louis XIV raised taxes to support his free spending and waged an expensive war with Britain from 1701–1...

 Developing a new market By the middle of the sixteenth century, Spanish settlers on the Caribbean Islands had decided they needed a new source of labor. The local Indians, whom they enslaved, had no immunity to diseases from Europe. Many were sick or weak, and too many died. The Spaniards began importing African slaves, who were less likely to keel over from smallpox. (Smallpox — one of the deadliest diseases among Europeans and far more deadly to Caribbean Indians — was also widespread in Africa, so African slaves carried natural resistance.) The first African slaves were purchased from Portuguese ships around 1530, beginning a trade that escalated sharply through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and peaked in the eighteenth century. Also in the sixteenth century, the Spanish found that slave labor made cash crops such as sugar, which they could grow on Hispaniola and other Caribbean Islands, highly profitable. And so they bought more slaves. By 1700, 4,000 slaves arrived ...

 Touchy, touchy Although Chu Yuan-chang had been a Buddhist monk and brought other monks into his court, he also promoted Confucian rituals and scholarship. Among the Chinese of this time, few people felt that it was important to accept only one religious tradition while rejecting all others. The emperor wasn’t as tolerant about other things as he was about religion. For example, he forbade any reference to his years in the monastery — not because of religion, but because he was sensitive about his humble origins. (You didn’t dare mention that he’d grown up a peasant, either.) Once, two Confucian scholars sent Chu Yuan-chang a letter of congratulations in which they used the word sheng, which means “birth.” The term was a little too close to the word seng, which means “monk.” The emperor took it as a pun and had them killed. Later, Chu got so touchy that he made it a capital crime to question his policies. When he thought the people of Nanjing didn’t display proper respect to him, ...

 Drawing strength from stealth: Guerilla tactics Paradoxically, the nuclear age of the late twentieth century was also the era of a foot soldier treading softly in the night. Guerilla war is often fought by outnumbered, ill- financed bands of revolutionaries moving stealthily against better-armed powers. Guerilla units venture out under cover of darkness to conduct small-scale raids and set booby traps. Guerilla, Spanish for “little war,” first referred to the Spanish peasants who harassed Napoleon’s conquering forces early in the nineteenth century. Then, as now, guerilla tactics followed precedents as old as war itself; they were the same tactics that the sneaky Italian tribes who frustrated early Rome’s Greek-style phalanx in Chapter 16 probably used. Similarly, the improvisational soldiering of American revolutionaries sometimes caught Britain’s infantry off-guard in the 1770s. Americans sometimes fired from cover, putting a marching formation of Brits at a disadvantage. The Br...

 Spewing bullets from the machine gun Ever since the cannon and musket became basic tools of warfare, inventors had struggled to find ways to load and fire guns faster. Early attempts at meeting this challenge included weapons with multiple barrels or multiple charges to be fired in succession. The first practical design was the Gatling gun, named after American inventor Richard Gatling. An opportunist inspired by the U.S. Civil War, he used percussion lock technology and devised a hand-crank mechanism to feed charges into his gun’s chambers, fire them, and then extract the spent cartridges. Gatling claimed that this gun would fire 200 rounds a minute. Although a Southerner, Gatling offered his invention to both sides in the war. Neither bought it. Only after the war did it become part of the U.S. arsenal. Britain, Japan, Russia, Turkey, and Spain all placed orders, too. In the 1880s, another American inventor, Hiram Maxim, came up with an improved machine gun that required no cran...

 Spreading explosive news News of Chinese explosives spread west along the ancient trade route, the Silk Road (see Chapter 6). The Arabs got primitive firearms by the late thirteenth century. In 1267, the recipe for gunpowder turned up in Europe in the hands of English scientist Roger Bacon. Less than a century later, European armies began using crude cannons. Archers with longbows, not their innovative comrades who were trying out noisy, stinky little firepots, decided the Battle of Crécy, mentioned earlier in this chapter, but the primitive cannon was a sign of things to come. The early European cannon was called a firepot because it was pot-shaped. It propelled an arrow (yes, an arrow) with impressive force but little reliability and no accuracy. The earliest European gunmakers were craftsmen who, until then, had made church bells. Often they melted down bells to make cannons. Soon the gunmakers found out that a tubular barrel worked better and that it should propel a metal shot...

 Guarding Byzantine borders The rich Byzantine Empire (see Chapter 6) was a prime target of raiders, so fast horse patrols were a must to guard its borders. Stirrups, probably copied from the Avars, gave the Byzantine patrols an advantage over Western Europeans, who didn’t have the technology yet. This superiority coupled with the use of a commissariat (a support organization that made sure cavalrymen and foot soldiers had enough to eat, even during long sieges) made the Byzantine Empire extremely difficult for outsiders to penetrate. Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, needed every advantage in the seventh and eighth centuries as its troops faced a new and persistent foe: the Arabs. The Arabs used stirrups, too, on relatively small, quick horses. More than great riders, the Arabs focused their zeal to spread their new religion, Islam, in the seventh and eighth centuries. They gained control of the Middle East and lands eastward into India and westward across North Africa and Sp...