"The Year 1000"

[fiefoe]

Valerie Hansen guided us around the world in the 1000s by following how goods and ideas flowed between various regions. Because of its focus on trade, most of the gore in the periods covered happened off-stage, which made the book an undemanding read.

• This city, with its many connections to distant places, sounds like any important modern metropolis, but this is what the Chinese city of Quanzhou was like in the year 1000.
• Unlike the Norse, the other key players in the year 1000—the Chinese, the Indians, and the Arabs—were not European. The longest maritime route in regular use connected China with the Persian Gulf cities of Oman and Basra, the port closest to Baghdad. This, the Persian Gulf–China route, combined two pilgrimage pathways: one for Muslims going from China to Mecca, the other for East Africans also performing the hajj.
• Political units back then were also different: warbands, tribes, kingdoms, and empires. None were nation-states that could force all of their citizens to serve in the army and pay taxes (these took shape only in the nineteenth century).
• One of the fastest ways to advance one’s own society was to convert to the religion of a more developed society, a decision not always based on religious conviction. One ruler living in modern Ukraine... Vladimir chose Christianity, specifically Eastern Orthodox Christianity as practiced in the Byzantine empire, from a very short list. He weighed the pros and cons of Judaism, Islam, Roman Christianity, and Byzantine Orthodoxy. He rejected Judaism because the Jews had lost Jerusalem. He crossed off Islam because it banned drinking. He rejected Roman Christianity without explaining why. He opted for Byzantine Orthodoxy because the magnificent Hagia Sophia cathedral in the Byzantine capital
• We live in a world shaped by the interactions of the world in the year 1000: 92 percent of today’s believers subscribe to one of the four religions that gained traction then.
• The game taught the basics of military strategy; players learned that it was wiser to move with multiple infantry, or pawns, than alone. As chess entered Europe, some of the pieces took on new identities; the elephants became bishops because craftsmen mistook the elephants’ two tusks for two points on a bishop’s mitre hat.
• Even now, U.S. Army guidelines define a normal rate for a march at 20 miles per day. Anything more rapid qualifies as a forced march. Riders on horseback could go faster: a modern rider in Mongolia can cover 300 miles in a single day if he frequently changes mounts, and in the past, Mongol soldiers could sustain speeds of 60 miles (100 km) per day for a few days during intense campaigns.
• the Chinese believed all the ocean’s waters converged into a dangerous whirlpool there from which no ship could return. There was an element of truth to this belief. The Indonesian Throughflow carries warm water from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean; the direction of flow is predominantly southward through the Indonesian archipelago and then westward into the Indian Ocean. These currents collide and move in all directions around the islands of Southeast Asia, causing the level of the oceans to rise one and one half feet (46 centimeters) higher than anywhere else on the planet. The currents are so swift and vast that scientists had to create a new unit, the sverdrup, which has a value of one million cubic meters per second, to measure the flow. The direction of the current makes it easy for boats and other objects floating in the ocean to go south and west into the Indian Ocean, but much more difficult for anything to move northward. Because it was easier to go south, humans traveled to Australia by boat early on, some 50,000 years ago, but almost no one went north. Accordingly, there was very little subsequent contact between Australia and Indonesia or the landmass of Southeast Asia until at least 1300 or 1400. In fact, the Chinese first went to Australia in search of sea slugs, which are also known as trepang, sea cucumbers,

• most surprising of all, a small bronze statue of the Buddha, 4 inches (10 cm) high, which was made in northern Pakistan around the year 500. These goods arrived in Sweden several centuries after the introduction of the sail.
• The Norse began to abandon their settlements in Greenland in the 1300s, partially because the climate was cooling as the Medieval Climate Anomaly came to an end and the Little Ice Age began.
• The Thule possessed multiple technologies that the Norse never adopted. The Thule, for example, wore thick fur clothing and used toggling harpoons for hunting seals and whales. The Inuit also knew how to dig holes in the ice in winter and catch ring seals, a crucial skill that eluded the Norse. Dogs and tools such as a feather or a light bone pin helped the Inuit to detect seals breathing under the ice. Because the ringed seals never migrated, they were a year-round food source.
• Arguably the world’s best-preserved city from the year 1000, Chichén Itzá daily draws thousands of tourists. The main attraction is the Castillo, a stepped pyramid standing 100 feet (30 m) tall, with perfectly balanced staircases on its four sides. Huge crowds come each year on March 21 and September 21 to see an astonishing feat of engineering. Around 3 p.m., the sun’s rays create a pattern of shadows that forms the image of a serpent on the north face of the pyramid. Over the course of an hour, the serpent’s body stretches to meet its stone head at the bottom of the stairs in a perfectly choreographed light show designed 1,000 years ago.
• The 8-inch (20 cm) balls were made by gathering liquid latex from rubber trees, allowing it to coagulate, and forming it into balls. Rubber trees were indigenous to the Americas. Ball makers added sap from morning glory flowers to give the rubber in the balls more bounce. The Spanish had never seen anything like rubber,
• The gods of the Maya required frequent and large offerings of blood. Even rulers were expected to draw stingray spines through their penises to satisfy this demand.
• Many things we know from written documents have left no archeological traces at all. People who google archeology and the Battle of Hastings are usually shocked to learn that archeologists may have only recently uncovered the first casualty from the 1066 battle that gave England to William the Conqueror.
• Xequé? The locals explained that it meant “lord” or “chief,” surely a variant of the Arabic word “sheikh,” a convincing detail given that the Maya didn’t know any Arabic. When the Moors asked to go home, the locals brought them to a port near “a savannah and unpopulated country,”
• Beans came to the Mississippi Valley around the year 1000, further contributing to population growth. (The three crops that formed the core of the Amerindian diet—corn, beans, and squash—weren’t regularly planted together until 1300.)
• The metalworkers also brought the lost-wax casting technique; it, too, originated in the Andes. Metalworkers began by crafting the item they wanted in beeswax, built a clay mold around the beeswax, fired it, and poured molten metal into the mold. The wax melted away, hence the term “lost wax.” The locals used the lost-wax technique to produce small bells, many of which were found in the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá. Bells occupied some 60 percent of western Mexican metal production.
• The regular use of arsenic bronze distinguished Andean society from other metal-using societies all around the world.
• The dense jungle of Panama posed a major geographical obstacle for those going overland; it’s the one place in Latin America uncrossed by major highways even today.
• Llamas could go up and down mountains and as far as the Peruvian coast, but because of the lack of grasslands at sea level, they couldn’t travel along the coast for long. The only way to move along the coast was by boat. But the sea journey north wasn’t easy either. One computer simulation found that it would have taken two months to sail north from Ecuador to western Mexico but five months for the return leg, which required going deep into the ocean—out of sight from the coast—for an entire month because of ocean currents.

• Damascus steel was not actually made in Syria. The Rus imported the crucible steel they used from other places, including Afghanistan.
• At the height of the coin exports, some of the Rus traveling south ended up in Constantinople as mercenaries. They were the “Varangians,” an old Norse term that began to appear in 950 and meant “men of the pledge,” and by extension, Scandinavians. The Byzantine emperor had a separate division of Varangian guards, who were famed for their ferocity.
• To defend the capital, the Byzantine emperor retrofitted fifteen warships so that they could shoot Greek fire, the most powerful of the Byzantine weapons. The Byzantines kept the ingredients secret for centuries: Greek fire contained petroleum, and like modern napalm, it continued to burn even after it came into contact with water.
• Igor’s realm differed from agrarian monarchies of the time, such as France, in that the Rus princes had only enough officials to tax commerce, but not agriculture. Taxing commerce involved posting officials at all transport nodes, a relatively straightforward task, whereas taxing agriculture required a larger, more established bureaucracy.
• Yet Vladimir realized that, because his subjects had no belief system in common, they lacked a shared identity, which weakened his hold over them. A political rival could easily challenge Vladimir’s rule by rallying his supporters around a competing deity. Vladimir began to look for a major religion that could command the loyalty of all his subjects. Once he selected the right religion and required his subjects to convert to it, he could ban the worship of other deities and head off any challenges to his government.
• Recognizing the power of Christian monotheism as a unifying force for his new kingdom, he made the decision to convert. (Intel and Ericsson engineers chose to call their new technology “Bluetooth” because it brought computers and mobile phones together just as Harald had unified Denmark and Norway.) Once a ruler converted to a major religion, he gained access to clerics who could assist him in governing.
• In the 1100s, smaller fortress towns and more recently conquered localities converted, and in the 1200s a full network of parishes took shape. Byzantine craftsmen came in large numbers to build new churches all over the Rus realm, and eventually the entire populace accepted the teachings of Christianity. This was globalization at work in the year 1000:
• As the war of words escalated between hard-liners on both sides, the pope excommunicated the Eastern patriarch, and the patriarch retaliated by excommunicating the papal envoy. Yet, for all the acrimony, contemporary observers didn’t see the breach of 1054 as permanent... The conflict between the two churches came just as the Byzantine empire was hemorrhaging territory. In 1071, the Seljuks defeated Byzantium in the Battle of Manzikert in eastern Turkey and went on to conquer much of the breadbasket of the Byzantine empire in Anatolia. Equally devastating, and in the same year, was the Norman victory at the city of Bari on the east coast of Italy, which led to the loss of all Byzantine territory in southern Italy.
• the German king Henry IV so strongly objected to Pope Gregory VII’s attempts to increase his own authority that the king invaded Rome in 1084 and replaced the existing pope with a new pope, whom historians call the antipope.
• Even though the city’s residents and the expats were all Christian, the clergy of the Orthodox church encouraged their followers to target the Italian-speaking Catholic clerics. After the crowds cut off the head of the pope’s representative in Constantinople, they attached it to the tail of a dog who dragged it through the streets. The Byzantines sold 4,000 of the surviving Italians as slaves to the Seljuk Turks. The Massacre of the Latins marked a new low in the relations between the residents of Constantinople and the foreign merchants and also between the Byzantine and Roman churches. These events show how quickly the forces of early globalization changed people’s lives, creating prosperity but also profound resentment... The Massacre of the Latins stands as a classic example of the have-nots attacking the haves—we might even call them the one percenters.
• Relations between Western Europe and the Byzantines hit rock bottom during the Fourth Crusade, which was launched by Pope Innocent III in 1201. The trouble began when the leaders of the Fourth Crusade took out a loan from the Venetians that they couldn’t repay and so decided to ransack Constantinople. The Crusaders smashed the altar at the Hagia Sophia cathedral and divided the gems and precious metals among the troops. After looting Constantinople in 1204, the Crusaders didn’t go on to Jerusalem. They replaced the Byzantine emperor with a Westerner and imposed a new government called the Latin Empire, which lasted until 1261. The Byzantine empire never regained its former strength.

• Africans played a key role in the growing trade between the Islamic world and Africa. Some two thirds of the gold entering Europe and Asia before 1492 came from West Africa. And the number of slaves who left Africa for the Islamic world between 800 and 1800 was so great that it rivaled the total number of slaves shipped across the Atlantic.
• As a paid recruit, Ibn Tulun grew up in Iraq and was stationed in Egypt as a junior officer. Eventually he rose to become governor of Fustat, a predecessor city to Cairo, and took over collecting taxes for all of Egypt. The mosque he built is still one of the most popular tourist attractions in Cairo because of its imposing courtyard and unusual minaret. Ibn Tulun never forwarded tax revenues on a regular basis
• Along the way you can see a mosque built in the year 1000 by the reigning Fatimid caliph, al-Hakim, who was infamous for issuing eccentric orders, such as banning several popular vegetables and forbidding shoemakers to make footwear for women, so that they had to stay inside.
• Al-Bakri describes a truly unusual good from West Africa whose path into Eurasia vividly illustrates the expansion of trade routes after 1000: a cloth woven from threads that could pass through flames without ever catching on fire... Others, al-Bakri explains, reported that a different asbestos handkerchief had been seen in Baghdad, another example of African goods traveling on new pathways. (No asbestos handkerchiefs from the time survive today, but legend has it that Charlemagne wowed his guests by throwing a dirty asbestos tablecloth into the fire and pulling out a spotlessly white one.)

• As Islam spread, local rulers faced exactly the same choices about religion as did their counterparts in other places: which universal religion best served their interests and could bring the most powerful allies? Some tribal leaders opted for Islam, the religion of the Abbasid caliphs and Samanid rulers, whose capitals lay nearby at Baghdad and Bukhara. Surprisingly, given the appeal of Islam to tribal peoples, some leaders chose Buddhism. The result? The line between the two religious blocs ran down the middle of Central Asia, close to where it is today in the Xinjiang region of modern China.
• Thirty-seven biographical dictionaries listing prominent scholars and interpreters of the Quran preserve the names of hundreds of female scholars. Twenty-three percent of the scholars listed in one dictionary written in 1201 turned out to be female. Multiple female scholars attained sufficient scholarly eminence that men, including those who weren’t their relatives, traveled to study with them.
• Whenever non-Chinese peoples defeated the Chinese in battle and took over part of the empire, they had to select which Chinese religion to support from among Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Otherwise their Chinese subjects would not accept their rule. Few conquering dynasties chose Confucianism or Daoism with their daunting textual traditions. Buddhism, a belief system that originated in India and became popular in China, appealed to foreign rulers because of its teachings about ideal monarchs, called chakravartin rulers. Such rulers didn’t have to live in monasteries or take vows of sexual abstinence as monks did.
• Abaoji resisted it. He particularly objected to having to seek the approval of all the tribal leaders every three years as was the Kitan custom. In 916 he founded a Chinese-style dynasty later called the Liao and named himself emperor. Ending the triannual meetings, he asserted that he couldn’t be replaced.
• In a remarkable innovation, he created a form of government called dual administration, setting up a north-facing government for nomadic tribes and a south-facing one for sedentary subjects. The south-facing government was staffed by officials who kept records in Chinese and worked in offices. The north-facing government included a large multilingual entourage who traveled with the emperor wherever he went. Determined that his native Kitan language should be written down, Abaoji ordered the creation of two scripts. Indirectly related to Mongolian, Kitan has only been partially deciphered because so few original documents survive and there is no equivalent of the Rosetta Stone... the Kitan were the first to name Beijing as a capital city.
• The Song and the Liao emperors signed the Treaty of Chanyuan in 1005. The Song agreed to send annual payments north—200,000 bolts of silk and 100,000 Chinese ounces of silver, which consisted of 2,000 ingots weighing around 4 pounds (1.9 kg). Saving face, the Song officials who drafted the treaty didn’t admit that the payments to the Kitan were “tribute,” which they, the weaker power, paid to the stronger Liao. Instead they called the payments “military assistance.” The Treaty of Chanyuan established an arrangement that suited both sides so well that it lasted for over a century. The quantities of silver and silk were high, but the Chinese could certainly afford them: they were equal to the central government’s annual income from just one or two towns.
• The Liao had discovered the most efficient way for steppe tribes to wrest revenue from wealthy sedentary powers, more efficient even than Mahmud’s ongoing raids on North India.
• To everyone’s surprise, the year 1052 came and went without any major catastrophe. Some believed that the era of the Final Dharma had arrived quietly, but others weren’t so sure. After a few years, everything settled down again. No one proposed a new date for the Final Dharma, and life went on much as it had before.
• Chinggis formed an army of steppe peoples larger and more powerful than any earlier confederation. Every soldier had multiple mounts, each capable of different movements (such as being steady enough that a rider could swoop down to pick something up off the ground), and complex cavalry maneuvers that allowed the freshest warriors to ride at the head of the armies.
• The Mongols succeeded in forming the largest contiguous land empire in history. It stretched across the Eurasian grasslands all the way from modern Hungary to China. The various sections of the empire pledged allegiance to the great khan, and they were required to provide mounts for both the members of his postal service and for envoys from other lands.
• The Spice Islands, or the Moluccas of modern Indonesia, are justly famous for being the home of multiple spices including cloves and nutmeg. In a world in which few people bathed and most meals were simple, these aromatics had enormous appeal.
• The long-distance slave trade in the Indian Ocean wasn’t as large as in the Islamic world, probably because most societies were able to source slaves and other types of laborers locally. Moreover, the societies around the Indian Ocean didn’t encourage the freeing of slaves as did contemporary societies in the Islamic world. As a result, they did not have to replenish their slave populations.
• The peoples who settled the Pacific between 1000 BC and AD 1300 spoke languages in this family, as did those who went all the way to Madagascar. To linguists, then, it was clear that settlers speaking Malayo-Polynesian languages arrived in Madagascar before anyone from East Africa. Similarly, DNA tests on the modern population of Madagascar have shown that they have both Southeast Asian and African ancestors.
• One of the best informed mariners was Mau Piailug. He was born in 1930 and grew up on the Micronesian island of Satawal in the Caroline Island chain,... Using no navigational instruments at all, Piailug closely observed the flight paths of birds, and clouds, and the movement of the waves (he could describe eight different varieties of ocean swells).
• The chakravartin ideal wasn’t limited to Buddhism; Hindus also believed that talented leaders were able to rule over large realms only because of divine support. The adoption of these new religions led to the construction of some of the world’s most stunning monuments, including Borobudur in central Java, the Brihadisvara temple to Shiva in Thanjavur, India, and Angkor Wat in Cambodia.
• These societies developed a distinctive pattern of governing that we will call “temple states” because of the importance of ritual and the pivotal role of temples in organizing these large construction projects.
• Sometime before 350, ships traveling from the Arabian Peninsula to China discovered a new route. Before 350, they did the trip in two stages, stopping in modern Thailand, carrying cargo overland across the Isthmus of Kra, and reloading the cargo on vessels bound for China. After 350, ship owners started to make one long voyage rather than suffering cargo loss by portaging the goods overland. The new route went through the Strait of Malacca and required dropping anchor there for six months to wait for the monsoon winds to change. Even though the wait was tedious, the ship’s crew didn’t have to unload, carry cargo overland, and reload it.
• Some of the Belitung ceramics look as though they have Arabic script on them, but upon closer inspection it turns out that the script isn’t real Arabic. It just looks like it. (Experts call this pseudo-Arabic.) Ingenious Chinese craftsmen wanted to sell to consumers in the Abbasid empire,
• Camphor and benzoin grew in the same region in Sumatra, so the same workers could harvest the two crops and the same ships could carry them to Chinese consumers.
• At first glance the late shift to Southeast Asian commodities doesn’t make sense: why would merchants start by shipping goods from far away Arabia and then centuries later change to nearer sources? Surely it would have made more economic sense to start by selling commodities from a location closer to China. The answer has a modern ring: initially Southeast Asia lacked the infrastructure and specialized suppliers to support international trade.
• In 879, as the Tang dynasty was weakening, a rebel named Huang Chao led a massive uprising that explicitly targeted the Muslim merchants who were the key actors in the trade just as did the anti-foreign riots that occurred slightly later in Cairo and Constantinople. The number of foreigners killed in the city of Guangzhou is recorded variously as 80,000 or 120,000.
• Surpassing other kingdoms on the east and west coast of India, the Cholas became one of the most powerful kingdoms in South Asia, rivaled only by Mahmud’s Ghaznavid dynasty, lying far to the north in modern Afghanistan. The careful management of water was key to the Cholas’ success. The Cholas constructed large tanks and irrigation channels to bring water to the fields. Rather than collect taxes directly from their subjects, the Chola rulers asked them to contribute a share of the rice harvest to the temples they financially supported.
• Although Southeast Asian rulers and commoners alike continued to worship Indian deities, they had less direct contact with South Asia after 1000. Instead, China became the major trade destination,... In ports all over the region, Chinese merchants came to outnumber Indian merchants, especially after the Mongol conquest of South China in the 1270s, when many Chinese moved permanently to Southeast Asia. The thirteenth century was also the time of the earliest Muslim graves in northern Sumatra, where Islam eventually became firmly established.
• In fact, it took sophisticated logistics and quasi-industrial processing to prepare all these natural goods for export. Professional full-time hunters, Zhou explains, lured male kingfishers into their nets by using a female to attract them; on a good day they might snare three to five kingfisher birds, on a bad day, none at all.
• The most common import from Southeast Asia was aloeswood. Aloeswood was harvested from the Aquilaria tree that grew all along the coast of mainland Southeast Asia and on the islands of Indonesia. When invaded by a certain mold, the tree produces a fragrant resin, and wood from affected trees also gives off a pleasant odor.
• In the period before the consumption of aromatics exploded, their use was limited to the top echelons of society. We obtain a glimpse of this elite consumption in The Tale of Genji, a novel written around the year 1000 by Lady Murasaki,... In this rarefied world, the mark of a gentleman was his own distinctive scent. Genji’s friends—and his many lovers—knew him by his odor, which was so powerful that it lingered long after he left the room.
• Aromatics enjoyed great popularity because the Chinese devoted enormous energy to changing the way that things smelled and tasted. People didn’t bathe often, and it was difficult to clean silk clothing. The poor had so few clothes, usually made of ramie, hemp, and other bast fibers, that washing them wasn’t practical.
• During the 1030s, the tribute voyages came to a temporary halt. After that year, although it hosted the occasional tribute mission, the Song government shifted primarily to taxing foreign goods. The scale of the maritime commerce prompted the Song dynasty to break with the fiscal practices of earlier dynasties and to tax international trade aggressively.
• They confiscated a portion, usually between 10 and 20 percent of the cargo’s value. Direct confiscation allowed officials to obtain the items the central government—effectively the emperor and his household—required. Trade officials collected a second tax on “fine goods,” or high-value imports such as pearls, large elephant tusks, and ambergris, by buying them at an artificial rate lower than prevailing market prices. This regulation effectively granted the government a monopoly on all fine goods,
• Hangzhou—about 100 miles (160 km) southwest of modern-day Shanghai—was the only coastal port ever to serve as the Chinese empire’s capital, showing the importance of maritime trade to the Song dynasty. Initially, it wasn’t clear whether Emperor Gaozong or the dynasty would survive. Wartime made it difficult to collect taxes, especially agrarian taxes, traditionally the main source of revenue for Chinese dynasties. Emperor Gaozong realized that taxing foreign trade offered a solution to the budget shortfall.
• Frankincense, along with other imported aromatics like cloves and putchuck, appear in medical prescriptions for the first time in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries more and more druggists prescribed myrrh, borax, and black pepper. Most Chinese prescriptions
• After the fall of the North in 1127, the Kaifeng branch moved to the new capital in Hangzhou, while the two other branches looked for cities sufficiently prosperous to support them. The western branch, which had about 200 people, chose Fuzhou, a port in northern Fujian province, while the southern branch, with some 400 members, opted to move farther south down the coast to Quanzhou, where they became deeply involved in the aromatics trade.
• Foreign trade was so important during the Song that math textbooks covered the topic.... The problem goes on to explain that Partners A, B, C, and D borrowed different amounts from each other, which adds to the challenge. You can solve the problem only with matrices, which shows that the Chinese were using linear algebra by this time.
• Killing the last boy-emperor of the Song in 1279, the Mongols conquered all of China. They took over as the successor to the Song dynasty and ruled China as the Yuan dynasty. Trade with Southeast Asia continued to flourish under Mongol rule.
• As knowledgeable as Chinese mariners were about the geography of Southeast Asia, India, the Arabian Peninsula, and Africa, they didn’t venture east of the Philippines into the Pacific because they believed that the world ended there. As Superintendent Zhao explained in 1225, “still farther east [of Java] is where the Ultimate Drain empties. People don’t live beyond this point.” The Ultimate Drain was the name of the place where the Chinese thought all the ocean’s waters flowed back into the earth. The Chinese wrote about the Ultimate Drain as early as the third century BC, when the great Chinese philosophical text Zhuangzi explains: “Of all the waters of the world, none is as great as the sea. Ten thousand streams flow into it—
• The Chinese fear of the Ultimate Drain parallels the Roman idea of the Torrid Zone that Portuguese navigators gradually disproved as they made their way down the west coast of Africa. Contrary to what the ancient Roman geographer Ptolemy had written, they found no region so hot that humans couldn’t survive. Unlike the Portuguese navigators, Song observers continued to believe in the dangers of the Ultimate Drain;
• In 1857, another invention, the telegraph, allowed the British to put down a mass mutiny in India by informing British officers where troops were most needed.