2 Europe and Africa

The Mughal Empire of India was established in 1526 by a Persian-speaking dynasty that traced its authority back to Genghis Khan’s second son, Chagatai. The empire formed in a region that had been conquered by Tamerlane, a Mongol leader who consolidated the remains of several khanates. Inspired by  Tamerlane’s fusion of cultures and religious movements, a new religion called Sikhism developed in the Punjab in the 15th century by combining elements of the traditional Hinduism of the region with Islam. Sikhs opposed India’s caste system, while becoming legendary warriors on the sub-continent.

The Mughals (from whom we get the term mogul) ruled a wealthy empire that included most of the Indian subcontinent and large parts of Afghanistan. It lasted until 1857 and at its peak ruled a population of over 150 million people. ​

The Mughal golden age began in 1556 with the reign of Akbar the Great, who expanded the empire’s territory but allowed his Indian subjects to keep their languages and religions. Hinduism, which is still the dominant religion of India, is rarely divided by differences related to religion as opposed to Muslims and Christians. Another difference between the three is the polytheistic nature of Hinduism compared to the monotheistic nature of the other two; Sikhism being monotheistic as well.

Akbar’s grandson Shah Jahan (r. 1628-1658) was also an accomplished military leader, but his reign is remembered for its architectural achievements. Among them is the Taj Mahal, built as a tomb for Jahan’s favorite wife Mumtaz Mahal.

• The Russian Empire

The Russian Empire grew out of resistance to Mongol rule and the fall of Constantinople. A ruler of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, named Ivan III or Ivan the Great, refused to pay tribute to the Golden Horde and after the death of the last Greek Orthodox Christian emperor, he decided his kingdom would become the new Rome. Ivan (r. 1462-1505) tripled the size of his state and rebuilt the Kremlin in Moscow. His grandson, Ivan IV or Ivan the Terrible, (r. 1547-1584) was the first to declare himself Tsar of all the Russians; which was Russian for “Caesar.”  He annexed the khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia and recruited Cossacks from southern Russia and Ukraine to colonize Siberia.

Russia became the largest kingdom in the world, stretching from the Black Sea to the Pacific Ocean, but much of it was unoccupied and primitive. Peter I or Peter the Great (r. 1672-1725) visited Europe in disguise for 18 months to study shipbuilding and new administrative techniques that he used to modernize his realm and establish the Russian Empire. However, let’s not go into depth about this and instead turn to Europe in the late 1600s… 

The Enlightenment and Protestant Reformation

European “Dark Ages” ended in the 1400s with the ending of the Black Death. Yet, prior to the bubonic plagues arrival, harsh winters and rainy summers beginning around 1310 had caused widespread famine. Feudal lords squeezed their peasants for crops and labor, and states raised taxes. Several million died during the famine, and then two thirds of Europe’s population was lost to the plague (1347-1353). This depopulation threatened the power of the Church and the nobility, as surviving peasants became less patient and increasingly disenchanted with their bishops and lords. Peasant revolts were soon the norm in France and England; signaling the end of the feudal system of the Middle Ages. 

Unlike the new eastern Muslim empires and the continuing Chinese Empire, Europe was unable to reunify under a single leader and create its own empire. Although, the Austrian Hapsburg dynasty attempted just that with the Holy Roman Empire for centuries. Too many languages and local centers of power competed for dominance, and the Catholic Church (Europe’s largest landowner) was unable to exercise secular as well as spiritual power. Instead the church found itself pulled into regional contests for power, and after 1378, there were two competing Papal Courts, one in Rome and a rival in Avignon. We must, however, understand that the conflict was primarily about political power rather than about theology or religious doctrine. Not to say that theological conflicts were not going to happen… 

The arrival of the printing press in Europe in the middle of the fifteenth century allowed critics of the church like the friar Martin Luther to publish books and pamphlets calling for reform. Printing was a Chinese invention that was improved by Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith who understood that moveable type was much more useful for an alphabet-based language than for a character-based system like Chinese.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkfiT7p_1GA

Printing spread classical Greek and Roman texts that had been carried to Europe by refugees from Constantinople, helping ignite the Renaissance (literally “rebirth”) of Europe. A new philosophy called Humanism focused scholars on learning that was not contained in Scripture or in church-approved sources, and on skepticism toward the decrees of religious authorities. Some Renaissance geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo did not directly challenge the claims of political and religious authorities. Others like Machiavelli and Galileo did. The encounter with the Americas (the topic of the next chapter) also upset a traditional understanding of the world’s origin and history that did not account for the existence of these continents. And religious reformers like Martin Luther used the ability to print books to radically change the way Europeans thought about their Christianity and the Catholic Church.

The Reformation was not the only challenge that alarmed religious authorities into reacting with persecution. When Galileo used a telescope to prove Copernicus’s new theories that extended understanding of planetary motion beyond the second-century theories of Ptolemy, it was not the ancient Greeks who put him under house arrest for the rest of his life and nearly burned him as a heretic, but the Catholic Church; they were rejecting a human-centered world founded by God Himself. Galileo’s challenge to the Church’s outdated description of the natural world was the first of many disputes that science has had (and continues to have) with religious authority.

To be fair, though, the idea that new data should challenge centuries of intellectual and theological tradition was as radical as the idea that the Earth orbits around the Sun and not vice versa.  The Church, and European society in general, sought to have eternal and unchanging answers for social and personal conditions.  Although today we are accustomed to the idea that new information is always becoming available and can reorganize the ways we understand things, this was not part of the early modern worldview. This is why Galileo and Luther were such radical figures in European and Western history.

As challenges became more frequent, some people tried to resist them by force. The Inquisition and persecution of witches flourished because authorities felt threatened. The doctrine of papal infallibility did not even exist until the First Vatican Council in 1868 when science had gained a pretty substantial lead over faith…something to think about, since it implies that the Catholic Church never seemed to need to declare infallibility until it was challenged.

The development of science in Europe during the Renaissance would not have been possible without the contributions and the preservation of classical Greek philosophy and science made by Muslim scholars.  During the period when Europe was suffering an intellectual “Dark Age” in the centuries following the fall of Rome,  the embrace of Islam in North Africa, the Middle East, and beyond created stability that encouraged the establishment of trade routes to China, which was accompanied by an exchange of ideas and technology.

• • Al-Khwarizmi (780-850) the inventor of algebra
  • Al-Kindi (801-873) philosopher and musician
  • Al-Zahrawi (936-1013) the father of surgery
  • Ibn Al-Haytham (965-1040) physicist and father of optics
  • Al-Biruni (973-1050) a historian and scientist
  • Ibn Sina (980-1037) an astronomer and physician
  • Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) a philosopher and scientist

For those who dislike or believe Math just isn’t their subject thank the Muslim scholars for that! Then again, all jokes aside, Arab mathematicians took to the Indian number system, which included the concept of zero, and without this there would be no computers!  Arab scholars helped trigger the Renaissance which led to both the European Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution that produced the modern world we live in today.

In most of their kingdoms and caliphates, Muslim sovereigns respected Jews and Christians as “people of the book.”  This was especially important in the Iberian Peninsula, todays Portugal and Spain, parts of which were dominated by Muslim rulers from 711 to 1492.  The introduction of ideas in astronomy, navigation, and mathematics in Iberia soon spread to other parts of Europe. In 1492, Christopher Columbus was able to sail to the New World partly because of Arab naval and navigation technology. Although, many might argue that the latter was not a good thing…

The European philosophers and scientists who led the Enlightenment were dominated by Isaac Newton (1643-1727), who co-invented calculus and produced the first unified theory of nature. Newton’s Principia Mathematica (first published in 1687) created a foundation for all the physics and engineering that followed it, and his theories were basically undisputed until Einstein and quantum physics took up the challenge of describing the universe at the macroscopic and microscopic levels in the early 20th century. Other important Enlightenment thinkers included Émilie du Châtelet, a French aristocrat who studied and translated both Newton and his chief rival, German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz was the other inventor of Calculus, and the version we now use is actually based a little bit more on his notation system than on Newton’s. These scholars and their colleagues described their field as “natural science” and they tried to find natural laws for society, politics, and the economy to parallel Newton’s discoveries of gravity and optics. John Locke, Adam Smith, and Voltaire formulated ideas about natural rights and society that epitomized what English speakers called Enlightenment and what Germans like philosopher Immanuel Kant called aufklärung (literally, a “clearing up”). Kant famously explained that his aufklärung was humanity’s emergence from its self-imposed adolescence. 

European intellectuals also considered economic questions.  Capitalism, the idea that invested wealth can be an engine for economic, social, and technological development, was most famously explained by the  English philosopher Adam Smith. An agricultural revolution contributed to increased crop production and population growth in the 1400s, and that led to a surplus population being able to gather in towns and cities to engage in artisanal activities which produce goods for trade as well.  Even before the development of mechanized textile factories in Great Britain, for example, weavers lived and worked in districts like East London for generations. People began to specialize in particular trades, making products for customers beyond their own families and neighborhoods. Some general-purpose craftsmen like blacksmiths became increasingly specialized, making for example guns or carriage-springs, rather than whatever the locals needed from day to day. ​

Banks in Europe began forming financial networks that standardized prices across larger regions, such as in Italy, the Low Countries and along the Baltic coast. When transportation and communication are poor, there are many opportunities for arbitrage: buying products cheap where they are abundant and then selling them for a profit where they are scarce; as networks improved, these opportunities decreased.

Politics and finance were connected at this time: capitalism did not develop in a vacuum. Although Adam Smith famously described the “Invisible Hand” of market forces in 1776, merchants were heavily involved in the government in England and Europe, influencing their nations’ policies and regulations to favor their own goals. Also, as described in later chapters, imperial expansion and colonial armies were indispensable for the spread of capitalism throughout the world.

The Reconquista and Portuguese Trade with Africa

In the next chapter, we will turn to the Americas and their discovery by Europeans. The backstory for this discovery and colonization is the Reconquista, a centuries-long effort by the Portuguese and Spanish to push the Muslim Moors back to Africa. Muslims had taken over most of the Iberian Peninsula  beginning in 711 and the Reconquista began to get rid of them; this took about 800 years to do especially in Spain.

The Portuguese Christians “reconquered” more quickly, because Portugal does not extend as far into the south and the Spanish kings and princes had to contend with the fortified cities of Seville and Granada. However, Portugal also captured Ceuta, a Moroccan fortress in North Africa in 1415, which gave them control over the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic. After a brief but successful war with Castile, the principle kingdom in central Spain,  Portugal turned its attention to exploring and acquiring territory along the coast of Africa in the 1430s and 1440s under the direction of Prince Henry the Navigator.  The Portuguese became merchants and traders while the Christian Spanish were still fighting Muslims.

Following the route established by Bartolomeu Dias (1488) and Vasco de Gama (1497), Portuguese mariners began sailing to Asia around southern Africa. They conquered coastal east African city-states, established colonies in Angola and Mozambique, and took advantage of the existing slave-trading network. Portuguese control of the African coast was one of the reasons the royal court in Lisbon showed little interest in Columbus’s proposal to sail west across the Atlantic to India; it is also why the Spanish were eager to take Columbus up on his plan in search of a route to Asia. We will return to Spain’s interest in Columbus in the next chapter.