Who Wasn't Impacted by the Hordes of Mongols and Germs? (Or Were They?)

A quick answer to the question asked in the title of this lesson is- Sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian Ocean Trade Route and the Americas. That's not to say that they weren't busy interacting amongst themselves or with outsiders; but by the fortunes of distance, they avoided Mongol and Plague Map of Africa invasions. Let's look at each in their turn.

Africa, Specifically Sub-Sahara

Africa is a very large continent with a variety of ecosystems or biomes. When we discussed the Bantu-speaking Africans that migrated throughout the continent in an earlier unit, you learned how the different biomes affected the cultures of the migrants as they adjusted to new climates. But what wasn't mentioned in the earlier unit was the variety of natural resources found in the different regions of Africa that also impacted the lives of the Africans living there. Before we proceed now, take a look at the mapon the right to gain an understanding of the different regions of Africa.

We have already discussed the spread of Islam through North Africa during the 7^th and 8^th Centuries CE. And we have already discussed the trade of North Africa with the rest of the Mediterranean communities. But now it is time to discuss the transregional interactions of Africa- starting with the trade between North Africa and West Africa.

These two regions traded back and forth for centuries via the Salt Road. Just as the Silk Road linked communities and was named for one of the commodities that traveled along it- so, too, did the Salt Road link communities and have a name based on a commodity. One resource that West Africans found in abundance locally was gold- but one can't use gold for food unless one uses it to trade. This is, of course, what the West Africans did. They traded gold for salt with the North Africans in order to gain a resource that helped with the preservation of food (as well as the taste.) Caravans would travel back and forth along the "Salt Road" exchanging resources, but also exchanging ideas.

Location of Ghana This exchange particularly affected the kingdom of Ghana in West Africa. Through trade, Ghana grew rich and powerful, leading to its collecting of people and lands into one empire whose heyday stretched from 800 to 1000 CE. During its peak, Muslim missionaries and traders attempted to convert this very rich kingdom to Islam and into the Dar al-Islam. Ultimately, this attempt came to blows. After the ensuing war, Ghana retained its independence and traditions- but at a cost. It was weakened and ripe for another invasion and some of the Ghanaian kings converted to Islam as a means of acquiring political and economic protection. But it was too little, too late and the kingdom of Ghana continued its decline despite its wealth.

The Mali were more than willing to take over the region and the wealth in 1240 CE and Ghana was not in a position to stop them. Under the leadership of Sundiata, the Mali conquered the Ghana Empire and expanded its territory and influence while continuing trade along the Salt Road. The story of Sundiata's vanquish of the Ghana was preserved in the Epic of Sundiata- an oral epic poem passed down from generation to generation that reveals his role within the history of Mali. Most of Mali's history was preserved orally, but visits by two very famous Muslims (Ibn Khaldun- the famous Muslim historian; and Ibn Battuta- the famous Muslim explorer) during the 14^th Century documented Mali's wealth, politics and religious practices in written form.

Mali Map The Mali Empire's government was very decentralized, with the Mansa or emperor ceding local control to local authorities in exchange for loyalty from the local level and protection from the imperial level. This relationship worked very well for the Mali Empire and kept it in business from 1240 to roughly 1450 CE. Another institution of the Mali that might have aided in its longevity was its practice of Islam. As the Ghana Empire declined, more and more West Africans converted to Islam despite their predecessors having fought to not. By the time the Mali Empire started in West Africa, the region's people were practicing Islam. In sharing a religion with North Africa, the Mali Empire benefitted from the cultural diffusion and access to scholarship housed within the Dar al-Islam. Also, as practicing Muslims, the Mali people were encouraged by their faith to make the Hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca as one of the five pillars of Islam. Mansa Musa, the great emperor responsible for the building of Timbuktu made the Hajj in 1324. His travels garnered a great deal of attention from fellow Muslims as well as merchant Venetians along the way. Reportedly Mansa Musa traveled with 60,000 men and scores of camels loaded with gold bars and gold dust which he spent lavishly along the journey. This event was a great introduction of Mali to the outside world in terms of announcing the strength and wealth located in West Africa.

The problem with making one's wealth known is that now people know what you have and consider ways to take it. In the mid-15^th Century, Sunni Ali conquered the entire region and created a new empire—the Songhai. This empire lasted until 1600 CE, during which time Timbuktu became a major cultural center that attracted scholars from throughout the Dar al-Islam. It soon also attracted the greed of Moroccans who made plans to expand south into the area that was known as "the land of gold."

Most of Africa's history to this point was preserved orally. This means that historians have had to look at a variety of sources to determine what happened there— for example, they looked at architecture and furniture at East African sites, and deduced that the presence of bookshelves meant there was a presence of books there. Of course, that sometimes raises questions. Where did the East Africans get books? [Be patient, the answer is forthcoming.]

Two thousand years ago, trading empires emerged in East Africa. The first was the Axum Empire located in northeast Africa- just south of where the Kush lived. Based on their location, the Axum traded mostly with southern Africa and the Middle East. When the Axum Empire's king adopted Christianity , his empire followed suit in 350 CE. The conversion of the empire to this religion did not seem to affect its business transactions in the Middle East or the Mediterranean World at all. That is until 350 years later when Islam became the dominant religion of the Middle East. At that point, the Muslim traders and rulers of the Arabian Peninsula preferred to trade with religiously like-minded people and the Axum sort of went out of business. Some did convert to Islam, but most continued to practice Christianity and their descendants now make up the population of Ethiopia.

As a result of the Axum choice in religion, opportunities for power and wealth descended farther south along the East African coast. Due to improvements in navigational technology (sails, astrolabes, sextants and magnetic compasses,) East African cities there were able to expand their trade more proficiently with Mediterranean peoples via the Red Sea and Indian peoples via the Indian Ocean. Look at the maps below to see how much technology and events affected the routes taken along the Indian Ocean trade routes.

Indian Trade Map

Early Indian Ocean trade routes focused on sailing along coasts (much less risky, but not very fast or cheap.)

New technology (in harnessing winds and navigating allowed ships to sail out in the open sea (much faster and cheaper.)

A characteristic of the Indian Ocean was its predictable winds. Between April and September, the winds blew from Africa to India; between November and February, the winds blew back from India to Africa. After Muslim traders developed the triangle lateen sail and the East Africans adopted its use, great wealth arrived in the East African cities of Zanzibar, Mombasa and Mogadishu. The East Africans shipped out raw materials and imported manufactured goods in a bulk trading system that included more people than the Silk Road and created a mass market that impacted more than just elite consumers. Ivory, timber, grain, and books [yes, books—that's why the East Africans needed the book shelves] sailed between continents on dhows using the new sails. Unfortunately, the trade markets weren't as predictable as the winds. While the Indian Ocean trading routes gained in use during the 11^th-13^th Centuries CE, they fell back once the Mongols took over much of Asia and provided safer land routes over the continent. Then, when the Black Death fell over most of Eurasia, the Indian Ocean trade routes began to boom again. [So, while Africa avoided the more direct and deathly impact of the Bubonic Plague, it was affected by it after all. As you can see, the world now existed in a time when what happened in one region affected what happened thousands of miles away.]

While West Africa had gold and built their empires from that resource, the East Africans had predictable winds. As a collection, the East African cities were called the Swahili Coast and were located at a logical end to the Indian Ocean trading routes. And the Indian Ocean presented a safer route than the land routes after the Mongols went home and the Plague destroyed Eurasian societies. If one were to convert the Indian Ocean trade into a formula of logic to predict what happened along the Swahili Coast, it would look like this...

And that is precisely what happened in the Swahili Coast of East Africa. Cities like Zanzibar, Mombasa and Mogadishu transformed from trade ports to grand city-states where mud and wooden huts evolved into coral and stone buildings within fortified cities that were world renowned for their political and economic opportunities. They were connected through language, religion and trade. Their language was Swahili-- a combination of the Bantu spoken locally and the Arabic brought in by Muslim traders. The term "Swahili Coast" came from the evolution of the new language. Their religion was a blend of Islam and African traditions in an example of religious syncretism. And their trade was in natural resources indigenous to Africa for goods manufactured throughout Europe and Asia.

India and South Asia

The city-states of East Africa lay at one end of the predictable winds over the Indian Ocean. At the other end, lay the cities of South Asia that experienced roughly the same sequence of events and for the same reasons. So once again, we see another region indirectly affected by events that occurred far away. [With this in mind, one can understand why the Bubonic Plague (and the Mongols, to a lesser extent) were definitive factors in shaping the world during the 13^th and 14^th Centuries.]

Map of South India Just as in East Africa, cities rose in prominence as a result of the Indian Ocean trading routes—for example, Srivijaya of Sumatra—as did certain empires that existed in southern India. Protected by their distance from foreign conquerors and the Bubonic Plague- several kingdoms located in southern India (Tamil) flourished in connection with their Indian Ocean trade. There were three main empires located in southern India known as the Tamil Dynasties or the Three Crowned Kings. They were the Pandya, the Chola and the Chera Dynasties. These empires and the city-state of Srivijaya acted as thalassocracies—primarily maritime realms—the term, of which, translates into "rule of the sea."

Although little is known about its origins, the Chola dynasty is suspected to have started during the 3^rd century B.C. during the time of Emperor Asóka in the north. Schools, hospitals, magnificent Hindu temples, trade with China, government bureaucracy and expeditions around the Indian subcontinent were just a few of the Chola accomplishments during their reign through 1279 CE. The Pandyan Empire lasted even longer than the Chola- from 500 BCE to the 16^th century CE. Located on the tip of the Indian subcontinent, the Pandyans became experts in all things water. From irrigation, to travel, to fisheries, the Pandyans excelled and prospered. Throughout their reign, the Pandya Dynasty carried on a bitter rivalry with the Chola that occasionally erupted into physical conflicts. The Chera Dynasty lasted from the 3^rd century BCE to the 12^th century CE. Their location on the southwest coast of India helped them become successful in trading with their neighbors across the Arabian Sea. Unfortunately, they too were never able to get along with their neighbors on the Indian subcontinent. In the case of the Tamil Dynasties located in southern India, the nickname of "Three Crowned Kings" might have been more accurate had it been "the Three Kings of Conflict." Still, the success of the Tamil Dynasties at trade along the Indian Ocean protected it from the losses felt in the rest of the Indian subcontinent that relied on land routes and were constantly overrun by those traveling along them.

The Americas

While the communities discussed earlier in this lesson were not directly affected by the Mongols and the Black Death due to their distance, they were impacted indirectly because they interacted with those communities that were directly affected. However, the communities in the Americas were sufficiently far enough away to remain untouched by the connections within Afro-Eurasia. That is not to say, however, that the Pre-Columbian Map of Inca Empire societies of the Americas weren't forming their own connections. Earlier lessons covered how societies in the Americas formed civilizations that developed into city-states. We've covered some of the second-generations societies that evolved out of the city-states as well. If you will remember from the experiences in the Middle East and Asia—the next step was to develop into empires. This is exactly what happened in South America and Mesoamerica.

In the 10^th Century CE, the Chimú Culture developed along the north coast of modern-day Peru on the Pacific Ocean. Its agrarian economy blossomed as the Chimú traded surplus food and cotton with people living in the Andes Mountains using caravans of llamas and porters for the trek. Governed by a well-trained bureaucracy, their region was divided into provinces with local leaders that answered to the dictates of the central government located in the capital city. In the capital city of Chan, 30,000 Chimú lived within a fortified metropolis sporting ten palaces and a great deal of wealth.

If you have picked up on a common theme in this lesson, you will have noticed that a community with vast amounts of wealth rarely lasts for long without experiencing an attack from a greedy neighbor. Such was the case for the Chimú who fell to the more famous Incas in the late 1460s CE.

The Incas emanated from the Peruvian highlands in the early 13^th Century CE, conquering and assimilating different groups of people until they finally conquered the Chimú. As an empire, the Incas continued their path of conquest along the Pacific Ocean. At their height, the Incas reigned over 2,000 miles of coastland through the use of a professional army (which explains their success at expansion,) a single language (Quechua,) an efficient bureaucracy based in the capital of Cusco, and a sophisticated road system to ease connections with the empire and Cusco. The Inca Empire became the largest and richest of the Pre-Columbian empires in the Americas.

To the north, in Mesoamerica of 1000 CE, the Mayan and Teotihuacan civilizations were gone. The people of the region, however, continued to interact amongst themselves and over great distances through caravans that traveled and traded with villages between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, and between Central America and modern-day Texas. If you picture the land area that these caravans canvassed, you can't help but notice that right in the middle would have been the former city of Teotihuacan. Such a central location within such a vast trading network could not sit vacant for too long. Indeed, a group of nomads eventually settled there and filled the vacuum left in the absence of Teotihuacan. The Toltecs, a combination of northern nomadic farmers and southern refugees, created a military state that thrived between 900 and 1250 CE. Their capital, Tula, served as a commercial, political and religious hub that continued the earlier practice of earlier Mesoamericans in hosting temples, pyramids and ball courts—and, of course, human sacrificial sites.

As the power and influence of the Toltecs waned, the Aztecs (who called themselves the Mexica) arrived on the scene. They built their empire of 12 million people through conquests (seen on the map) and maintained it through alliances that created a tribal system that allowed local rule. Within a locality, an authoritative family would rise to lead the tribe or village. These families were the Calpulli who, in turn, chose the brightest amongst themselves to go to the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, to advise the emperor.

Map of Aztec Expansion

While the Aztecs continued many ancient practices—the worship of the sun/war god, the use of a calendar similar to the Mayan calendar, the sacrificing of human prisoners of war—they also developed new practices. In the pictures below, you see a painting illustrating the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan with a model of the temple district, a map of the city's locale, and a photograph taken centuries after the Aztec's demise. These depictions are very telling of the Aztec culture. First- the city is built on an island in Lake Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico. This meant that the Aztec had to be proficient road, causeway and bridge engineers in order to connect the city with its empire; but they also had to be enterprising agriculturalists. Indeed, the Aztec created the chinampas—artificial islands used for growing food and built up by piling soil into a fenced area between canals—to allow for agriculture near the city.

Just as the Inca Empire was the last Pre-Columbian empire in the Andes Mountain region, so too was the Aztec Empire the last Pre-Columbian empire in Mesoamerica. Beginning in the 16^th Century CE, European explorers arrived in the Americas altering the local course of history forever. It should be noted, though, that when European explorers arrived in the Americas, the Aztecs and Incas were certainly not the only peoples they met. However, they were the only empires, as understood in the traditional sense, on record at that time. But let's save the story of how the empires of the Americas met nations of Europe for later.

Recap Section

Watch the videos below to review what you've learned.

RESOURCES IN THIS MODULE ARE OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (OER) OR CREATED BY GAVS UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED. SOME IMAGES USED UNDER SUBSCRIPTION.