Transcription
[Music]
All right class, welcome to our first actual lecture on history. We begin the semester in Europe in the medieval period, specifically the 1200s and 1300s. Today, we're going to focus on the ways in which Europe during this period had some quite robust connections to the larger world.
Each lecture [Music] in this online course will focus on a central point or question. So, if you're ever wondering what it is you're supposed to be learning as I'm rambling on here, it's that you're supposed to be able to address the central question. For today, it's: in what ways was medieval Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries, that's the 1200s and 1300s, connected to the larger world?
We're going to look for specific examples of connections, and we're going to ask how and why such connections were forged in the first place. Lastly, we can conclude by asking what views and understandings Europeans held about the larger world. To help answer this question, we'll stick to some key terms. These all come directly from your textbook reading, so if you've already read the textbook pages for this module, they should be familiar to you. If you haven't read the textbook yet, you will be introduced to these key terms again.
We'll be talking about the Mongols, the Pax Mongolica, Marco Polo, Prester John, the Silk Roads, and Mansa Musa. The idea is to answer the central question; you should really be using these terms to fill in the blanks.
Okay, so before we can talk about how medieval Europe was connected to the larger world, we should talk about what Europe was like in this period to begin with. Europe in the 1200s: the average person in Europe didn't travel far in their lifetime. Many people were born, lived, and died probably in the same town, the same locality. It was only a rare handful of people that journeyed out into different regions, different continents, across the seas and oceans of the world.
Most people in Europe in the 1200s and 1300s were tied to the land through agriculture. Many of them were farmers, many of them had very little in the way of rights, and many communities had a Christian church at their center. In some cases, literally, the church served a number of vital roles, such as recording births and deaths, providing last rites, and holding mass confession. The church was the center of the universe for people living in medieval Europe.
In terms of the economy and demographics, this was a boom time. Not since the age of the Roman Empire had the population of Europe grown as large and as rapidly as it had during this period. Indeed, in the 300 years from the year 1000 to 1300, the population of Europe rose from 30 million to 50 million people, roughly. We see the emergence once again of cities, thriving towns coming out of the Dark Ages.
Some cities, like Paris, saw their populations increase by a factor of a thousand percent during this period. A lot of this growth was spurred on by intense commercial exchanges. There were market towns cropping up all over the place. Travelers and traders would bring into regions of France, England, Germany, Italy, and Spain cloth from Northern Europe, fish from coastal regions, wine, cheese, wool, gold from North Africa, silver from the Middle East, and spices from parts even further beyond.
But all of these people were fed by agriculture. Medieval Europe was overwhelmingly rural, and the vast majority of people were agrarian laborers. The best kind of track to be on to accumulate wealth and power was to be a landowner, that is, an owner of agriculturally productive lands. The people that worked these lands typically we would call serfs—not quite slaves, but they had very limited rights and were legally bound to the land by their landlord.
Towns and cities in late medieval Europe did exist, but this was the home of only a minority of people. Many of Europe's largest cities during this period, Paris, London, Rome, Antwerp, had maybe only 50 to 100,000 people. I mean, these days you could see more people at a college football game than you could in these cities, and they're not any place you'd want to live.
No sanitation or sewage, no real fire department, police department, no public schools or anything like that. In fact, if you moved from the countryside to a city during this period, your life expectancy would go down. Cities were hotbeds of crime, starvation, and disease, but there were also beacons of wealth, mobility, and power.
It was cities that drew in merchants, craftsmen, traders, travelers, and missionaries to exchange their ideas and their goods because these cities created a network of exchange crisscrossing Europe and connecting Europe to regions beyond. I know this map is a bit blurry, but you don't need to know the details of the politics of Europe during this period. Just suffice to say the politics of Europe in the medieval period is a mess.
There are no sovereign states necessarily; these are a collection of many kingdoms, principalities, free cities, and disputed territories, all held in this very chaotic and often violent feudal political order. But for our purposes, we can focus on two regions, the commercially vibrant south and north, as being kind of the two hubs of commerce, connectivity, and wealth.
Particularly Southern Europe, the states of Venice, Milan, and Genoa did a great deal to tie Europe through seas, principally the Mediterranean, to [Music] the Middle East, North Africa, and even parts of Central Asia via the Black Sea. You also see Northern European trading centers in Hamburg, Lübeck, Bruges, London, and Southampton hosting vibrant ports that crisscross the Baltic and the North Sea.
So, you can't really think of oceans and seas as barriers to human mobility; they're kind of more like highways. They facilitate long-distance exchange and travel. If we zoom way, way out, many historians have begun to identify not just trade routes but trade circuits—these circuits of trade that were frequented by cultural groups who shared common trade goods and languages and so forth.
So, you can point to a European trading circuit. I could right here be a trading circuit wheeling and dealing in grain, wine, cheese, cloth, principally wool. But Europe is connected through these overlapping trade networks to Sub-Saharan Africa via this African circuit. The Vikings established a number of colonies out here in the North Atlantic in the previous centuries, and even through Mongol conquests, as I'll show you in a minute, Europe was connected to East Asia, if indirectly, through these nomadic pastoralist Mongols.
So, let's look at a couple of these trade circuits. We don't have time to look at all of these, obviously, so let's look at this North African circuit here. Well, actually, before we get to that North African circuit, I should say, before we explore these connections, let's just stop and ask: what did the average European know of the world exactly?
It depends who you'd ask in the 1200s and 1300s, but genuinely, the average European's knowledge of the world was intensely limited. It would be a rather ignorant worldview. Only a handful of individuals would have traveled any distance outside of Europe. These have been the occasional merchant or missionary. Most of European knowledge of the larger world was governed by religion, what was contained in the Bible, and was also governed by myth, superstition, tall tales, and outright fantastical lies.
But if we want to try to get some sort of graphical representation of a medieval European worldview, probably nothing better than the T-O map. These maps have a basis in theology, in the Bible. This is probably the best source of information from medieval Europeans, where you can look to the Old Testament and see the story of the great flood with Noah and his surviving sons.
It was said they set out to perpetuate the species and repopulate the three continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa. This world map, this medieval European world map, is called a T-O map because you see the three continents here kind of form this T. They're divided by water; that's what the lines are. The O is another global ocean of water surrounding the three continents, hence the term T-O map.
This is, I mean, by today's standards, overwhelmingly simplistic, but it does kind of hold true a little bit, I suppose. Some of these Venetian and Genoese merchant seamen were charting the Mediterranean, and you can kind of see here this C-chart of the 1300s. You can see Italy here, Sicily, this is the North African coast along here, this is Cyprus, this is Turkey, Greece. It all kind of makes sense, but you can see how this would be. This is Africa down here, this is Europe down here, and this is Asia here, creating kind of a shape for the T-O map.
Now, as these merchants are crisscrossing the Mediterranean decade after decade, their instruments of navigation are getting better and better. They're getting the magnetic compass, and pretty soon, by the mid to late 1300s, you can get maps as clear as this. This is the famous Catalan Atlas. You can see there's hyper detail all along the Mediterranean. It's because the people gathering the information are the merchants, the seamen, the traders traveling across the Mediterranean.
You can see it kind of gets a little bit wonky as you go off here into the inland Central Asia, South Africa, and so forth. So, there's some highlights and some lowlights here when it comes to accuracy in Europeans' understanding of the world. If we zoom in on the Catalan Atlas, actually, right, let me show you right down here.
This map has a lot of information woven into it, but one of the things here pictured is the Mali emperor Mansa Musa, who is well known to Europeans in the 1300s and 1400s, mostly because of the spectacular wealth of his kingdom. Mansa Musa is pictured here holding up a gold nugget the size of a grapefruit. The Mali emperor had at his disposal in Sub-Saharan Africa some of the world's most lucrative gold mines.
In fact, it's rumored that on his hajj to Mecca—he was a Muslim who made the pilgrimage to Mecca—on that one trip alone, he spent so much money in the form of gold that gold prices were depressed for decades afterward because he just flooded the market with it. So, Europeans do have a knowledge of the larger world outside of Europe; it's just what kind of knowledge is it?
They're usually drawn to things like wealth, tales of splendor, trade opportunities, and opportunities to spread the Christian faith. So, Mansa Musa's Mali Empire would be like this region here, capital at Timbuktu right there. This region is separated from Europe by the Sahara Desert. This kind of region up here, I mean, for settled agriculturalists, deserts are death. There's no water there; you can't grow food there; it's hot, hot, hot.
But people did crisscross the Sahara. Traders from Timbuktu and other cities within the Mali Empire would take goods from Sub-Saharan Africa up to the Mediterranean trading ports to trade with Venetian and Genoese merchants goods that you couldn't get in Europe—goods from Sub-Saharan Africa like ivory, gold, exotic animal skins, and bird feathers, occasionally slaves.
Then these caravans would come back across the desert and bring with them things you couldn't get in Sub-Saharan Africa—things like salt, salted fish, cotton textiles. And of course, going back and forth, religions: Islam entered the Mali Empire from these caravan routes, Christianity was spread throughout this region through these caravan routes.
The people doing the crisscrossing here, I should say, camel caravan operators, these are not people of any settled agrarian civilization. These are what we might call nomadic pastoralist peoples. They live on their animals; they feed off their animals; they drink their milk. It's these people that kind of unlock the desert and make it so the goods and ideas of the world can flow across the desert, linking Europe to realms of Africa beyond the desert.
Mansa Musa's Mali Empire and the capital of Timbuktu was a vibrant place of cross-cultural exchange. Multiple religions entered the region, fine exotic cloths, textiles, and spices—all thanks to this connectivity.
In Europe, evidence of this trade is everywhere. We see all sorts of religious iconography here on the left found in Europe, done in ivory, so from elephant tusks. Elephants don't live in Europe; this is imported from Africa. Ivory also making up this decorative box found in Europe. Here we see again a depiction of the Virgin Mary with her child and the crucifixion there in gold. These are all made of materials not found in Europe but imported from the trans-Saharan trade.
Well, that was this linkage right here. Once you get the goods up to the Mediterranean coastline, trade with Europe is quite rapid and intense. There's another connection kind of going from Moscow all the way this way and Constantinople across this Central Asian trading circuit, and this was largely the work of Mongols.
Mongol conquests kind of linked Europe to Asia again. This is the work of another group of peoples who did not farm; they were nomadic pastoralist peoples, this time utilizing the horse to unlock this steppe grassland. The Mongols would graze their animals, live off their animals, and they'd also practice a form of mounted warfare that was absolutely devastating to those settled agriculturalists living around them.
Now, the Mongols had been around for a long, long time, for centuries out in Central Asia. They weren't really a threat to anybody until they were unified—unified by a single, rather ruthless, and I'd imagine charismatic individual named Temujin. The Mongols, like all nomadic pastoralist peoples, are illiterate. They did not build cities or monuments or temples; they are a kin-based kind of tribal nomadic people.
So, we don't know a lot about Temujin's early life or really any details of Mongol history, but we do know that Temujin was the first to unite all the Mongol nomadic pastoralist peoples under a single ruler's command—his command. He was anointed by his people, excuse me, Khan, which means universal ruler.
So, Temujin is Genghis Khan, and once he united the Mongol peoples, he set about expanding the Mongol realm, pillaging the wealth of all the neighboring peoples along the steppe. You can see they're shaded in dark purple as the traditional Mongol homeland. It's an arid grassy plain suitable only really for the grazing of animals.
In the lifetime of just this one Khan, Genghis Khan, he expanded the Mongol realm to the region shaded in red there, linking Northern China and Korea all the way out to the doorstep of Europe along the Volga River, you can see there. As these conquests proceeded, Genghis Khan would be getting more and more wealth, more and more booty for his followers, and they would amass more and more followers, more and more power, and the conquest would go on and on.
Several generations after his death, this is largely possible because Genghis Khan is simply spreading along this grassland corridor here in blue, where you can easily take your horse armies all the way east and west along this corridor, just practicing the same way of life as you go. No need to settle down, adopt agriculture, anything like that.
The Mongol conquests were probably some of the most violent, bloody, rapacious things in all of recorded human history. It's estimated conservatively that some 60 million people may have been killed during these about centuries' worth of conquests—many, many, many more millions displaced. But once the conquests were completed, there was ushered in a remarkable period of peace, stability, and social transformation. Entire regions were remade by these Mongol conquests.
Now, support, know the Mongols are always in a minority wherever they went. I mean, this is just a small group of people doing this conquest. When they'd show up, burn down a city, establish themselves as rulers, and so forth, all they really did was to allow things to continue as they had, but just everybody now pays taxes to the Mongols.
The closest they got to Europe was Russia, arguably part of Europe. The Mongol conquest of Russia took place many years after the death of Genghis Khan. It was a project completed by one of his sons, I believe Batu Khan, in 1237-1240. One of the things the Mongols did was to kind of reorganize society, where previously the center of tax, center of commerce, and population was Kiev, modern-day Ukraine.
The Mongols kind of reorganized that and set up shop in Moscow, and Moscow became the new de facto center of economic activity. When the Mongol Empire collapsed, Moscow remained as the dominant political and commercial center of Eastern Europe. So, these scars of Mongol conquest still remain.
Now, as I said, once the conquests were over, as bloody as they were, the Mongols were content to sit back, relax, and govern what they'd conquered. They conquered what is today still the largest contiguous land empire ever assembled, stretching from all of China and Vietnam, Korea, across all of Central Asia to modern-day Turkey and Russia.
Indeed, from Moscow, the Mongols launched kind of these little half-hearted raids into Poland, making it as far as modern-day Germany, but these conquests couldn't be completed because you're just getting too far away from the steppe. There are too many mountains and forests; mounted horse warfare just doesn't work out there.
The point is this post-conquest period is referred to generally by historians as a Pax Mongolica, a Mongol peace, where this prolonged period of stability fostered unrivaled commercial exchanges—the movement of peoples, ideas, and goods east to west from Europe to Asia.
Let's give you some examples. Excuse me. One such movement of peoples back and forth was a religious movement. One person who was quite worried about Mongol activity was the Pope in Rome, understandably. This heathen barbarian group is encroaching further into Europe.
So, Pope Innocent IV dispatched an envoy of monks who bore a letter from the Pope introducing the Pope to whoever the Great Khan was at the time and pleading with the Mongols to convert to Christianity. The poor fellow that had to carry that letter was Friar Giovanni of Plano Carpini, and he made it. He just kept walking further and further east until he got to the court of the Great Khan.
The letter he carried was long, complex, convoluted; it was all about the minutiae of theocracy and Christian law and so forth. Anyway, it kind of fell on deaf ears. The Mongols wrote a reply to the Pope, basically saying, "We don't understand much of your letter, but if you, the Great Pope, together with all the princes of Europe, come in person to me to serve me, I shall make known my wishes."
So, neither of these things happened. The Pope did not submit to the Mongols, and the Mongols did not in mass convert to Christianity. There's just too far apart still these centers of power. But the Mongol Empire endured, and many, many Europeans traveled, crisscrossed their way through Mongol territory relatively safely and molested.
There's William of Rubrik, who after completing a crusade in the Middle East set out deep into Mongol territory to once again kind of establish diplomatic relations with the Mongols. He famously wrote a travel account, a pretty good one, when he returned to Europe, where he reported on the surprising level of multiculturalism he saw in the Mongol Empire.
He saw the Great Khan discussing ideas with Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, and Jews. It was a relatively peaceful multicultural period. If you read some of these travel accounts, another group of Europeans who made it into the Mongol territory were the Venetian brothers Niccolo and Matteo Polo. This is the father and uncle of the famous Marco Polo.
Here they are pictured meeting with the Great Khan, seated in the red chair there. I would say the Polo brothers were merchants. They went into the Mongol Empire seeking commercial opportunities to open up trade and maybe find Asian silks and spices and other luxury goods to bring back to Europe.
But funny enough, they're pictured here in this chronicle holding a Bible and a Christian cross, kneeling before the Khan as if once again attempting to get him to convert to Christianity. I don't know how much sincerity the Polo brothers held here when it came to the conversion of people to Christianity. I suspect they were much more interested in things like profiteering.
Indeed, it was Niccolo Polo's son and Matteo's nephew, Marco Polo, who upon their return made an even more famous trek through Mongol territory, leaving his home in Venice, across the Mediterranean, through the Middle East, through Central Asia, above the Himalayas, to the court of the Great Khan in Khanbaliq, where he was actually hired by the Mongols to be kind of like a mid-ranking state official.
He crisscrossed his way through China and East Asia under his employ, and it was only years later that he got on board a ship and made it all the way back home to Venice, where he wrote his famous description of the world—a kind of semi-accurate, somewhat exaggerated account of his travels and what he saw. Indeed, you'll be reading an excerpt of Marco Polo's travels in your textbook.
Now, just to conclude here, what the Mongols did inadvertently was kind of conquer one of the more important exchange networks in all of Eurasia. This trade network is called the Silk Roads—not because they're actual roads, not because they're made of silk or anything like that, but these are a collection of well-established trade networks that are centuries old, dating back to the Roman Empire at least.
They carried along them some of the more prestigious or sought-after items of the era, namely silk, spices, precious metals, gemstones, as well as all sorts of ideas, religions crisscrossing back and forth, ideologies, and so forth. The Mongols basically just took these Silk Roads and conquered them under one umbrella, and once the conquest was over, these Silk Roads were humming, just bustling with activity.
Also note there are the maritime Silk Roads. Mongols were not adept at seafaring; they never touched these things. But there is a complementary maritime exchange network here where goods and ideas of Europe could easily make their way out of the Mediterranean through the Arabian and Indian Oceans all the way to China and back.
I have to skip a slide there, so I'll just conclude by saying [Music] many of these travelers wrote accounts. Many of these travelers exaggerated what they saw, in no small measure. But what you'll be reading in your textbook is an excerpt from Marco Polo's description of the world, which is somewhat accurate, and you also have an excerpt from the truly fantastical, make-believe travel account, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which historians debate whether this guy even existed.
But it's basically a work of travel fiction, so keep in mind what these two books are saying as you read, and keep in mind the context in which these supposed travelers were operating in, what they wrote about, what they cared to describe, and what their interests were.
One such myth put forward by John Mandeville and others before him was this hugely popular myth that just refused to die: the myth of Prester John. Prester John was supposedly some long-lost Christian king ruling a vast, wealthy empire somewhere far, far, far out in the world—maybe somewhere in Africa or deep in Asia or India or something like that.
Many of these travel accounts longed to connect with this Christian king to link Europe to this fantasy Christian kingdom somewhere in the world. Keep an eye on that as well as you read. Why would it be that Europeans imagined there was some long-lost Christian king somewhere? How truly did they believe in this Prester John myth? What role did such myths serve?
So, looking back very briefly, I'll wrap up. I've been talking for too long. What sort of links have we seen? We've seen commercial links—that's links of trade, links of conquest, particularly with the Mongols, religious links. Many, many of these Silk Road exchange networks hosted missionaries, projects of conversion, and so forth.
Then there are simply people who were travelers—people like Marco Polo, certainly a commercial interest he shared, but he was just a traveler for sure. Europe's knowledge of the world, even with all these connections, though, is still shrouded in superstition and myth. I mean, just read Prester John in your textbook; it's kind of humorous.
But maps are getting better, trade routes are becoming more established, and there's an increasingly more accurate worldview unfolding in the late Middle Ages. Then just take note of the methods of connection at work here. You have seaborne connections, desert connections, steppe connections. These things that seem like obstacles—oceans, deserts, vast grassy wastelands—are actually connections, quite robust ones.
Okay, sorry for stammering on and on and on. That's my bit done. Please take care of the reading in the book if you haven't yet, and there will be some assessments and quizzes to come in this module. I will see you next week for the next modules.