13th Century Timelines
Episode Three: Century of the
Stirrup (1200-1300)
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1999
/millennium/learning/timelines/
The Larger Thirteenth-Century World Context
The larger thirteenth-century world was
completely transformed by the Mongols, and, in
the process, the Mongols were themselves
transformed. On the broad pages of Eurasian
history, the thirteenth century was the Golden Age
of the pastoral nomad; but it was also the
beginning of the end of steppe culture. The
thirteenth century was noteworthy as a century of
wide-ranging cultural transmission and exchange.
The Golden Age of Pastoral Nomads
Unlike hunting and gathering societies, pastoral
nomads depended on domesticated animals for their
livelihood. They herded animals from pasture to
pasture in a yearly pattern that varied in response to
the availability of water and the prospect of good
grassland. Limited resources kept social groups
small. And fierce competition among clans and tribes
for limited pasture land led to shifting alliances,
skirmishes, arranged marriages between clans, and
frequent wars punctuated by brief periods of peaceful
co-existence. Even a slight unfavorable change in the
climate could intensify competition for grazing land.
The Golden Age of Pastoral Nomads
Genghis Khan's great accomplishment was uniting
these competing groups into one military system.
Before Genghis Khan, the Mongols were a relatively
fragmented pastoral people, loosely organized into
competing clans and tribes. Genghis established a
chain of command with soldiers organized into
groups from ten to ten thousand. Able commanders
were promoted on the basis of merit rather than clan
allegiance. One of the results of Genghis Khan's
successes was that the members of conquered
tribes, like the Turks, would sometimes join the
Mongol army. Mongol conquests reached further
than those of any previous nomadic empire.
The Golden Age of Pastoral Nomads
Usually history is written by the victors but
the Mongols had not developed a writing
system. Literate victims of the Mongol
conquest shaped our understanding of this
period through their bitter stories of brutality
and terror. Their stories created the
characterization of Mongols as barbarians
that has lasted for generations.
Eurasian Cultural Diffusion
Following each Mongol conquest, small
numbers of Mongols were left to administer vast
expanses of lands and peoples. The resulting
peace opened Central Asia to travel, as
Mongols encouraged the expanding trade by
land and sea to insure the steady flow of tribute.
The consequences were enormous. Like
gossip, commercial practices, music, religious
teachings, and technical and engineering
knowledge passed from East to West and back
again.
Eurasian Cultural Diffusion
Innovations established in one location soon
became common practice in others. Such
innovations did not only move in one
direction, from more technologically
advanced urban cultures to less
sophisticated nomads. Instead, nomads
changed "civilizations" as surely as
"civilizations" changed nomads. The stirrup invented between the third and fourth
centuries - was exploited by horse riders in
Eurasia and Africa.
Eurasian Cultural Diffusion
Mongols adapted Chinese gunpowder for
war and used it against societies they
attacked. Others copied this technological
advantage. When the Mongols attacked
Central Europe in 1240-1241, they
brought gunpowder weapons with them. A
century later, Europeans were using their
own gunpowder weapons against each
other.
Origins of Gunpowder Empires
Eventually Mongol expansion began to falter.
Koreans resisted sporadically attempted Mongol
invasions for 30 years before they surrendered.
Although the Mongols were considered invincible,
they failed to capture Japan. After another
amphibious invasion, the Mongols successfully held
Java until Kublai Khan's death. In the West, the
Mamluks ended Mongol expansion toward the
Mediterranean. Within a century the great urban
cultures under Mongol rule revolted. But these
societies had changed forever. They reorganized as
land-oriented gunpowder empires with large
standing armies, strong cultural identities, and a
centralized administration..
Segments –
th
13 Century
MONGOLIA - Summary
In the Century of the Stirrup, the
Eurasian landmass was transformed by
the emergence of a new force in history:
the Mongols. Genghis Khan founded
an empire that would
eventually stretch from China to the
Middle East, blocked only by the
Mamluks in Egypt.
While regular caravan travel between
China and Mongolia began in 101
B.C.E., after the creation of the
Mongolian Empire the trails connecting
the East to the West became safe to
travel. As the "Silk Road" flourished,
Chinese knowledge flowed westward,
stimulating new approaches to science
and religion.
Genghis Khan grew up among the
Mongols, then rose quickly to
prominence, proving himself to be an
extraordinary leader. He quickly
dominated the tribes of Central Asia
and then went on to conquer parts of
Northern China and the Islamic world.
He used terror tactics to scare people into
submission, sparing only skilled artisans
if a town failed to surrender. Once a land
was conquered, however, the Mongols
were very tolerant rulers, allowing other
faiths and traditions to continue. The
method of Genghis Kahn's leadership
was so strong that the army and empire
he founded continued to grow after his
death.
CENTRAL ASIA - Summary
The Mongols enforced law and
order across Central Asia, policing a
network of routes connecting East
and West. They built post stations
throughout the empire from which
messages were carried at high speed
across vast distances.
The hostile impressions some foreign
visitors formed changed as they spent
more time with the Mongols. William
of Rubruck found that in Karakorum,
the main Mongol city, there were
"very fine craftsmen in every art, and
physicians who knew a great deal
about the power of herbs and
diagnosed very cleverly from the
pulse.”
The religious tolerance Rubruck
discovered would have been
unimaginable in Europe at that time.
CHINA - Summary
Kublai Khan continued the work his
grandfather, Genghi Khan, had begun.
But he also made significant land gains
in China, achieving a prize that had
eluded the Mongols for decades.
Kublai Khan eventually rejected the
harsh life of the steppes and built a
luxurious palace complex in what is
present-day Beijing; the poet Samuel
Coleridge called it Xanadu. A visiting
Venetian named Marco Polo recorded
his impressions of the palace¹s
grandeur: "the walls are of gold and
silver.
It glitters like crystal and the sparkle
of it can be seen from far away." The
Khan had many concubines and the
women in his court held great sway
over him. When Kublai's senior wife
died, he lost the will to rule and
retreated into a life of increasing
decadence. In 1368, the conquered
Chinese seized the opportunity to
regain their independence.
EGYPT - Summary
After the rule of Kublai Khan ended,
others followed China‘s lead and
challenged the myth of Mongolian
invincibility. The Mamluks in Cairo,
Egypt, were the first soldiers to halt the
Mongol military advance west. Their
leader was a man called Baybars, who,
like Genghis, excelled on the battlefield.
He led an elite mounted corps that
trained on the polo fields. At the
battle of Ain Julut, in Palestine, the
Mamluks dealt the Mongols their first
defeat in an Islamic area and were able
to protect Islam from further
Mongolian domination. While not a
defeat for the Mongol army as a whole,
this small-scale battle had great
symbolic significance.
Much of the architecture in Cairo
today dates back to the Mamluk era
when a secure empire ensured
flourishing trade. Cairo remained a
leading cultura center within the
Islamic world.
EUROPE - Summary
Europeans who had contact with
Eastern knowledge often embraced new
ways of thinking. A scientific revolution
resulted, as Europeans began to explore
and test the laws of nature. Frederick II
of Sicily conducted numerous
experiments, including disemboweling
men to see how their digestive
systems worked.
Working in Paris, France, and
Oxford, England, Roger Bacon
dissected human eyes. His
discoveries contributed to the
invention of spectacles. A new
religious movement encouraged
people to regard the natural world as
a thing to be loved and studied
rather than feared.
But these innovative movements
would be stalled in the following
century as disease and climatic change
wiped out much of the population.
Kublai Khan 1215 - 1294
Ruler of the Mongols from 1260, Kublai Khan
completed the conquest of China that had been
started by his grandfather Genghis. In 1271 he
became the first emperor of the Yüan Dynasty.
Establishing Beijing as his capital, Kublai boosted
agriculture and business, fostered scholarship,
encouraged the arts, retained many Chinese
institutions, promoted religious tolerance and
oversaw generally prosperous times for nearly
one quarter of the world's population. The
splendor of his court stirred the imagination of
Western travelers, including Italian adventurer
Marco Polo.
Thomas Aquinas 1225 - 1274
Scholars at Europe's universities in the 13th
century were arguing about the Greek texts being
translated back into Latin from Arabic. Was
Christian dogma correct or was the world
explainable by the rationalism of Aristotelian
science? Both were right, said Thomas Aquinas, a
Domincan priest from Italy. Synthesizing the two
traditions, he asserted that faith and reason did
not conflict, that man is rational but that his
highest happiness can be found in contemplation
of God. Aquinas taught in Naples and Paris,
advising popes and wrote the unfinished Summa
theologiae, a dominant influence on Roman
Catholic theology.
Marco Polo 1254 - 1324
History tells of his leaving Venice at age
17 to join his father and uncle on a
journey deep into Kublai Khan's China.
Marco Polo himself tells in his writings how
they were welcomed and spent 20 years
in Asia. Polo's tales have been called
products of the imagination, but whether
fact or fiction, they inspired Europeans to
seek out the Orient and Columbus to sail
the Atlantic.
Dante Alighieri 1265 - 1321
The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri's epic
masterpiece, is an allegorical and literary
triumph, a walk through the cultural,
political and religious landscape of 13th
century Italy. Dante's writing influenced
poets from Chaucer to Byron. But his vivid
depiction of the nine circles of hell terrified
centuries of ordinary readers with its
descriptions of horrendous punishments
after death. "Dante and Shakespeare
divide the modern world between them,"
T.S. Eliot said. "There is no third."
Pope Innocent III 1160 - 1216
Lotario di Segni was only 38 when he was
elected Pope Innocent III in 1198; his 18year reign dominated the Middle Ages.
Claiming the right to guide the Holy
Roman Empire, he launched two crusades
to assert the Church's power. Meanwhile,
he embraced the poor and saw the
Church's rolls swell. His Fourth Lateran
Council shaped the Catholic Church that
we recognize today
Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi 1207 - 1273
A 13th century Sufi mystic, Jalal ad-Din
ar-Rumi composed passionate love poems
while turning in a circle to the beat of
drums or the music of rushing water. The
poems found Allah outside the Koran -- in
people, nature and the commonalties of
everyday life. Recorded in Persian by a
disciple, they helped spread Islam to a
wider audience. Rumi is still read today,
and his followers, whirling dervishes (holy
men), still perform their elegant, hypnotic
dances to express the idea that God can
be experienced in manifold ways.
13th Century Segments
Mongolia
Central Asia
China
Egypt
Europe
13th Century Legacies
The Mongols facilitated trade. They protected overland routes and ports
linking the civilizations of Europe and Asia. Inventions as diverse as the
folding fan and gunpowder traveled from Asia to Europe.
Mongols brought trusted advisors and craftsman with them to newly
conquered lands. A transfer of basic knowledge such as astronomy, math,
and science were the results of these cross cultural exchanges between
peoples of Eurasia.
Large Muslim and Jewish trade communities encouraged trade between
local markets and across larger regions of Asia.
Genghis Khan’s army has served as a source of military strategy and an
organizational model for later military commanders.
The century of communication stimulated exploration in search of new
trade routes once Mongol rule ended.