World History: Middle Ages to the Modern World

A message sent east in 476

In September 476, an officer of the Roman army named Odoacer removed the emperor of the western half of the Roman Empire. The emperor was a boy of about sixteen called Romulus Augustulus. Odoacer spared his life and sent him to live on an estate near Naples, with a pension, a yearly payment, of 6,000 gold coins called solidi.

Then the Roman Senate, the ancient council of Rome's leading families, sent messengers across the sea to Constantinople, the great city where the eastern emperor, Zeno, ruled. They carried the western emperor's insignia, the special objects that marked someone as emperor. A historian of the time named Malchus reported their message: one ruler was enough for the whole world. Odoacer did not call himself emperor. He ruled Italy as its king, and some of his gold coins were even struck in Zeno's name.

No emperor ruled in the West again, which is why so many books give 476 as the year the Western Roman Empire fell. But look closely at that year. Nobody burned Rome. The Senate went on meeting, as it would for more than a century. People in Italy still spoke Latin, obeyed Roman laws and went to the same churches. So what exactly fell? Historians have argued about that for 250 years, and here you will weigh the evidence on each side. The skill you will practise is called change over time: asking what changed, what stayed the same, and how fast the change came.

How the western empire came apart

The story starts eighty years earlier. In 395 the emperor Theodosius I died, and the empire was divided between his two sons. Arcadius ruled the eastern half from Constantinople. Honorius ruled the western half, and from 402 his court lived at Ravenna in northern Italy, which became the western capital.

Picture the empire on a map. It wraps around the Mediterranean Sea like a ring, from Spain and Britain in the west to Egypt and Syria in the east. Its northern border follows two long rivers across Europe, the Rhine and the Danube. The western half had more of that river border to guard, fewer big cities and less money. The eastern half had a shorter stretch of the Danube to defend and was rich enough to pay attackers to go somewhere else, which is often exactly what it did.

Beyond the rivers lived peoples the Romans called barbarians, their word for outsiders who did not share Roman ways. Around 400, a nomadic people from the grasslands of Central Asia, the Huns, pushed west, and many Germanic peoples moved into Roman land ahead of them. Some came as invaders. Many came as allies. The empire let whole peoples settle inside its borders as foederati, a Latin word for groups bound by a treaty to fight for Rome in exchange for land. The trouble was that the western government often could not pay them, feed them or control them.

Notice what the table shows. There is no single day of collapse. Power drained out of the West over about eighty years, through raids, treaties, lost provinces and short reigns. 476 is simply the year when nobody named a new emperor.

The point: The western empire came apart gradually between 395 and 480. The year 476 marks the end of the western emperors, not a single day of destruction.

A letter from Bethlehem

The sack of 410 shocked people all over the Roman world, because it was the first time in almost 800 years that a foreign enemy had captured the city. One of the people who heard the news was Jerome, a Christian scholar famous for translating the Bible into Latin. He had studied in Rome as a young man, but by now he lived in a monastery in Bethlehem, more than 2,000 kilometres away. Two years after the sack, in 412, he wrote a long letter to a woman named Principia in memory of her friend Marcella, an elderly Roman woman who had died soon after the city was taken. Here is part of it.

A dreadful rumour came from the West. Rome had been besieged, and its citizens had been forced to buy their lives with gold. Then, robbed of everything, they had been besieged again, so that they lost not only their property but their lives. My voice sticks in my throat, and as I dictate, sobs choke my words. The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken.

Jerome, Letter 127, to Principia, written in 412. Translated by W. H. Fremantle in 1893, lightly modernised.

Who, when and why. Jerome was not an eyewitness. He heard rumours and met refugees who had fled east. He was writing to honour a dead friend, and he fills the letter with lines from the Bible, reading the disaster through his faith. Look at the word "rumour" in his first sentence: he tells you himself that his news is second-hand.

So what is this letter good for? It is strong evidence of how people felt. To a Roman, the capture of Rome felt like the end of the world. It is weaker evidence of what physically happened. Modern historians, working from many sources, think the Visigoths did little damage to the buildings of Rome, though they carried off a great deal of its wealth. The shock was bigger than the damage.

Point of view question: Jerome had lived in Rome, loved it, and was grieving for a friend when he wrote. How might those feelings have shaped the way he described the sack?

The case for a real fall

The most famous answer to "Did Rome fall?" is yes. It comes from Edward Gibbon, an English historian whose six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire came out between 1776 and 1789. Gibbon described a long moral decline, marked by barbarian invasions and by a Christianity he saw as intolerant. He summed up his view in one sentence:

The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.

Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789).

"Immoderate greatness" means greatness without limits: the empire had simply grown too big. Gibbon added that we should be less surprised that Rome collapsed than that it lasted so long.

Gibbon worked from written sources. More than two hundred years later, a British archaeologist named Bryan Ward-Perkins reached a similar verdict from a different kind of evidence: things dug out of the ground. In his book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005), he looked closely at pottery. When the empire was at its height, good pots and dishes, made in workshops and traded over long distances, turned up even in the homes of poor families. After the western empire broke up in the 400s, that flood of good pottery dried up, and nothing like its quantity and quality was seen again in the West until the 1300s or 1400s. In Britain, he argued, people ended up poorer than their ancestors had been in the Iron Age, before the Romans ever arrived.

Why pots? Pottery hardly ever rots away, so archaeologists find it almost everywhere. And a cheap bowl from a distant workshop tells you that roads, traders, money and buyers all existed. When the bowls disappear, the system that delivered them has probably disappeared too. For Ward-Perkins, the end of Rome was not a polite change of management. For ordinary people it meant real losses of comfort and safety.

The point: The case for a real fall rests on Gibbon's reading of written sources and on archaeology showing that everyday life in the West became poorer and simpler after the 400s.

The case for a slow change

In 1971 a historian named Peter Brown published a short book called The World of Late Antiquity. He asked readers to see the centuries after about 250 as a time of new beginnings as well as ruins. This was the age, he pointed out, when Europe became Christian and the Middle East became Muslim. Partly because of him, many historians now call the period Late Antiquity rather than the fall of Rome.

Historians on this side point to everything that carried on. The new kings wanted to look Roman, not to wipe Rome out. Theodoric, who ruled Italy from 493 to 526, repaired aqueducts and city walls and kept up friendly ties with the emperors in Constantinople. Germanic peoples adopted the Latin alphabet for their own languages, which is why English is written in Roman letters today. Latin stayed the language of educated people for another thousand years, and in everyday speech it slowly grew into Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese. Roman law survived. So did the Christian Church, whose bishops held real power in many cities.

A Belgian historian, Henri Pirenne, who died in 1935, went further. He argued that trade around the Mediterranean kept flowing long after 476, and that the real break with the ancient world came in the 600s and 700s, with the Arab Muslim conquests. And the strongest point of all is on the map. The eastern half of the empire did not fall. It carried on for almost another thousand years, until 1453. You will meet it in the next lesson.

The point: The case for slow change rests on what survived: Latin, Roman law, the Church, Roman ways copied by the new kings, and an entire eastern empire.

What would settle the argument?

Both sides are pointing at real evidence. They disagree about which evidence matters most. One way to see this is to break the big question into smaller ones, each answered by its own kind of evidence.

Read the table from top to bottom and you are doing what historians call looking at change over time. Some things ended fast. Some shrank over generations. Some did not end at all. "Did Rome fall?" turns out to be several questions wearing one coat. A historian of daily life and a historian of ideas can both be right, because they are measuring different things.

The answer can also depend on where you stand. Around 410, Honorius told the towns of Britain to look after their own defence, and Roman rule there was over (see the end of Roman rule in Britain). In Italy, by contrast, the Senate still met and Theodoric still repaired Roman aqueducts in the 500s. Ask a Briton and an Italian in the year 500 whether Rome had fallen, and you would probably get two different answers.

The point: "Did Rome fall?" breaks into smaller questions, and the answer depends on what you measure and where you stand.

Common misconceptions

• "Rome fell on one day in 476." Nothing dramatic happened in the city of Rome that year. The western government had been losing land, money and armies for decades, and some people still counted Julius Nepos as emperor until 480.
• "The whole Roman Empire ended in 476." Only the western half lost its emperors. The eastern half, which historians later named the Byzantine Empire, lasted until 1453, and its people went on calling themselves Romans.
• "The barbarians were wild tribes who wanted to destroy Rome." Many had lived alongside Romans and served in the Roman army for generations. Odoacer himself was a Roman officer. Most wanted land, pay and a place inside the Roman world, and their kings copied Roman ways.
• "After Rome, Europe fell into total darkness." Life in the West did become poorer in many places, but learning, law and the Latin language survived, much of it inside the Church. You will test this idea again in the lessons on medieval Europe.

Where this leaves us

• The western empire came apart over about eighty years. 476 is the year the western emperors ended, not a day of destruction.
• Jerome's letter shows how shocking the sack of 410 felt, but he was far away and relied on rumours and refugees.
• Gibbon and Ward-Perkins argue that the fall was real: the West became poorer and simpler, most of all in Britain.
• Brown and Pirenne stress what survived: Latin, law, the Church and trade, while the eastern empire lasted until 1453.
• Change over time means asking what ended, what shrank slowly and what carried on, and noticing that different evidence answers different questions.

Sources

1. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 10.1 The eastward shift. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
2. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 13.1 The post-Roman West in the early Middle Ages. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
3. Jerome. (1893). Letter 127: To Principia (W. H. Fremantle, Trans.). In P. Schaff and H. Wace (Eds.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 6. Original work written 412. Wikisource
4. O'Donnell, J. J. (2005). Review of The fall of the Roman Empire, by P. Heather, and The fall of Rome and the end of civilization, by B. Ward-Perkins. Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2005.07.69. BMCR
5. Current World Archaeology. (2005, November 4). Review: The fall of Rome and the end of civilization. World Archaeology, Issue 14. World Archaeology

Five days of fire in January 532

In January 532, the Hippodrome of Constantinople, a chariot-racing stadium whose stands held around 100,000 people, became the starting point of a revolt. Chariot racing was the city's great sport, and its fans were split into two huge clubs, the Blues and the Greens, who normally hated each other. That week the two clubs joined forces against the government. They broke open the prison, set fires across the city and shouted one password to each other: "Nika!", which means "Conquer!" The flames destroyed the city's great church. The emperor Justinian and his wife, the empress Theodora, shut themselves inside the palace while the crowd crowned a rival emperor, a nobleman named Hypatius.

Boats were waiting by the palace. Justinian and his advisers had to decide: run, or stay and fight. What happened next was written down by Procopius, a lawyer from Caesarea in Palestine who worked as legal adviser to Justinian's top general. His books are the main reason we know so much about Justinian's reign. They are also why this lesson practises a skill called point of view: working out where a writer stood, what he wanted, and how that shaped what he wrote.

A city built to survive

First, the city. In 330 the emperor Constantine turned an old Greek town called Byzantium into a new capital and named it after himself: Constantinople, the city of Constantine. Today it is Istanbul, in Turkey.

Picture a map. The city sits on a triangle of land pointing east, at the spot where Europe almost touches Asia. Along its north side runs a long, deep harbour called the Golden Horn. To the south lies the Sea of Marmara. Off its eastern tip runs the Bosporus, a narrow strait, or channel of sea, that every ship sailing between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean had to pass. Water guarded three sides. Across the fourth side, the land side, the emperor Theodosius II built a great line of walls and towers in the 400s, with a moat in front. For about a thousand years, those walls of Constantinople turned back army after army.

The people of this city spoke Greek, and they were Christians. But ask any of them who they were, and they would have answered "Romans". The name "Byzantine" was invented by later writers, after the empire was gone. To the people who lived in it, this was simply the Roman Empire, still standing after the West had lost its emperors.

Key idea: Constantinople's position on a strait between Europe and Asia, with water on three sides and huge walls on the fourth, helped the eastern Roman Empire outlast the western one by almost a thousand years.

Theodora's choice

Back in the palace, in January 532. In his History of the Wars, Procopius gives Theodora a speech at the moment when everything hung in the balance.

For one who has been an emperor, it is unbearable to be a refugee. May I never be parted from this purple, and may I not live to see the day when those who meet me no longer call me mistress. If you wish to save yourself, O Emperor, there is no difficulty. We have plenty of money, and there is the sea, and here are the boats. But think whether, once you are safe, you will not wish you had chosen death instead. As for me, I agree with an old saying: royalty is a good burial shroud.

Procopius, History of the Wars, Book 1, chapter 24, written around 550. Translated by H. B. Dewing in 1914, lightly modernised.

A burial shroud is the cloth wrapped around a dead body. Theodora means that she would rather die as empress than live as a runaway. "This purple" means the purple robes that only an emperor or empress could wear.

According to Procopius, the speech filled everyone with courage, and Justinian stayed. His general Belisarius and another commander, Mundus, led their soldiers into the Hippodrome, where the rioters had gathered around their new emperor, and attacked them from two sides. Procopius says more than thirty thousand people died that day. Hypatius was killed the next day.

Point of view question: Procopius modelled his writing on the old Greek historian Thucydides, who admitted that he wrote speeches the way he thought they must have gone, keeping to "the general sense of what they really said". So we cannot be sure these are Theodora's exact words. Why might Procopius have given the empress such a strong speech at this moment, and what does it suggest about how he wanted readers to see her?

Rebuilding: the Hagia Sophia

The riot had burned down the old great church. Within weeks, Justinian began a new one on the same spot, and he did not want an ordinary church. He hired two experts in mathematics and building, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus. On 27 December 537, five years and ten months after work began, the emperor and the patriarch, the chief bishop of Constantinople, dedicated the Hagia Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom. Its main dome is about 32 metres (105 feet) across. When it was finished, it enclosed the largest indoor space in the world, and it stayed the largest church in the world for more than five hundred years.

Procopius wrote a whole book, the Buildings, praising Justinian's building projects. Here is how he describes the dome.

A dome shaped like a sphere, standing upon this circle, makes it exceedingly beautiful. Because the building is so light, it does not seem to rest on a solid base, but to cover the place beneath as though it hung from heaven on the golden chain of the old stories. No one ever grew tired of this sight.

Procopius, Buildings, Book 1, written around 560. Translated by W. R. Lethaby and H. Swainson in 1894, lightly modernised.

The trick behind the floating look is a ring of forty windows around the base of the dome, which lets light pour in exactly where you would expect heavy stone, and also made the dome lighter. The Hagia Sophia was a church for more than nine hundred years, then a mosque after 1453, a museum from 1935, and a mosque again since 2020. You can still stand under that dome in Istanbul today.

One law for one empire

While the church was going up, a team of lawyers led by a legal expert named Tribonian was doing something just as ambitious with words. Roman law had piled up for about a thousand years: old laws, emperors' orders and lawyers' opinions, many of them contradicting each other. Justinian's team sorted it, cut it down and organised it into one great collection, in force by 534 and later called the Corpus Juris Civilis, the Body of Civil Law.

The collection remained the base of law in the eastern empire for centuries, rewritten in Greek as the empire's language changed. In western Europe, scholars rediscovered it during the Middle Ages, and it shaped the laws of many countries. The legal systems used across most of Europe and Latin America today, called civil law systems, are ultimately descended from Justinian's collection.

Key idea: Justinian left two things that outlived his empire: the Hagia Sophia, still standing, and an organised collection of Roman law that still shapes legal systems today.

Winning back the West, and a plague

Justinian wanted more than a magnificent capital. He wanted the old western lands back. In 533 Belisarius sailed to North Africa and took Carthage from the Vandals. Then he invaded Italy, now ruled by the Ostrogoths, and entered Rome in 536. The fighting in Italy dragged on for years, and Justinian's armies did not finish conquering it until the 550s. They also took part of southern Spain from the Visigoths. For a moment, the Mediterranean was almost a Roman lake again. But the wars cost enormous sums, and they pulled soldiers away from the eastern border, where the Persian Empire was a dangerous rival.

Then, in 541, a new disaster arrived. A terrible disease, now called the Plague of Justinian, reached Constantinople. Scientists have found the DNA of the plague germ, Yersinia pestis, in the remains of people buried in that period. It is the same bacterium that would cause the Black Death eight hundred years later. Procopius wrote that at its worst the plague killed 10,000 people a day in the city, and that bodies were left in the open because there was no room to bury them. Historians doubt his exact figure: his description closely copies the way Thucydides described a plague in Athens, and the true number will probably never be known. What is not in doubt is that the plague killed a great many people and kept returning for years.

Two books by one man

Now comes the strangest part of the story. Procopius praised Justinian in the Wars and the Buildings. But he also wrote a third book, the Secret History, which he probably never published while he was alive. In it he turned on the emperor and empress completely. He described them as something like demons in human form, and he told cruel stories about Theodora's early life. Theodora had in fact come from a humble family: her father kept the bears used in shows at the Hippodrome, and she had worked as an actress before she met Justinian. Here is part of what Procopius says about Justinian.

This Emperor, then, was deceitful, devious, false, hypocritical, two-faced, cruel, skilled in hiding his thoughts, never moved to tears by either joy or pain, though he could summon them skilfully whenever the occasion demanded, a liar always.

Procopius, Secret History, written around 550. Translated by Richard Atwater in 1927, lightly modernised.

Same writer, same emperor, opposite portraits. Which is true? This is where point of view helps. The Buildings was written for the public, and perhaps for the emperor himself, at a time when criticising him openly could be dangerous. The Secret History was written in private, to be read later. Being secret does not make it honest. Historians think Procopius exaggerated wildly in it, and one modern historian, David Potter, judges the stories about Theodora to be an exaggerated attack rather than careful history.

So a careful historian uses both books, and checks each against other evidence. The Hagia Sophia is still standing, so the Buildings did not invent it. The law collection survives, so Justinian really did organise Roman law. Theodora was one of Justinian's chief political advisers, which fits her role in the Nika crisis better than the Secret History's picture of her. And the couple's official images tell a story of their own. In the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, a mosaic, a picture made from thousands of small pieces of coloured glass and stone, shows Theodora in rich robes, carrying a golden cup as a gift to the church. That mosaic is a primary source too, and it also has a point of view: it shows the empress exactly as she wanted to be seen.

Key idea: Procopius's public books flatter Justinian and his secret book attacks him; each shows a point of view, so historians test both against buildings, laws and other evidence.

A thousand years of Byzantium

Justinian died in 565, and within a few years the Lombards, a Germanic people, began taking most of Italy. But the empire itself lasted almost another nine hundred years. It survived partly because of its walls and partly because of inventions such as Greek fire, a secret liquid weapon developed around 672 that kept burning even on water and was sprayed at enemy ships. Constantinople became the centre of the Orthodox Christian Church, which split from the Church of Rome in 1054, when leaders of the two churches excommunicated each other, that is, formally expelled each other from their communities.

Byzantine scholars also went on copying and studying the works of ancient Greek writers, such as Plato and Aristotle, century after century. In the 1400s, Greek scholars brought that learning to Italy and helped to revive the study of Greek philosophy there, one of the sparks of the Renaissance you will study later this year.

The end came in 1453. The Ottoman sultan Mehmed II besieged Constantinople from 6 April to 29 May with a huge army and giant cannons that pounded the old walls, and on the last day his soldiers broke in. The city became the Ottoman capital, and the Hagia Sophia became a mosque. The Roman Empire that Augustus had founded nearly 1,500 years earlier was finally over.

Common misconceptions

• "The Byzantines called themselves Byzantines." They called themselves Romans, and their empire the Roman Empire. The name Byzantine was coined only after the empire had ended.
• "A secret book must tell the real story." Hiding a book does not make it accurate. Procopius exaggerated in the Secret History as much as he flattered in the Buildings. Every source has a point of view, including the secret ones.
• "Byzantium was just a weak leftover of Rome." It lasted almost a thousand years after the western emperors ended, organised Roman law, raised the largest church in the world and kept ancient Greek learning alive.

What to carry forward

• Constantinople, founded in 330, was protected by water on three sides and walls on the fourth, and it remained a Roman capital until 1453.
• In the Nika riots of 532, Justinian stayed and crushed the revolt; Procopius credits Theodora's speech, though the words may be partly his.
• Justinian rebuilt the Hagia Sophia by 537 and had Roman law organised into the Corpus Juris Civilis, which still shapes legal systems.
• His reconquest of Africa and Italy was costly, and the plague of 541, caused by the same germ as the later Black Death, killed huge numbers.
• Procopius's praise and his attack on the same emperor show why historians always ask about a source's point of view and check it against other evidence.

Sources

1. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 10.2 The Byzantine Empire and Persia. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
2. Procopius. (1914). Justinian suppresses the Nika revolt, 532. From History of the Wars, Book 1 (H. B. Dewing, Trans.). Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University. Fordham University
3. Procopius. (1894). Description of Hagia Sophia. From De Aedificiis (W. R. Lethaby and H. Swainson, Trans.). Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University. Fordham University
4. Procopius. (1927). Secret History, extracts (R. Atwater, Trans.). Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University. Fordham University
5. Thucydides. (1874). The History of the Peloponnesian War (R. Crawley, Trans.), Book 1, chapter 22. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg

A coin with no pictures

Around the year 697, the mint of the caliph Abd al-Malik began striking a new gold coin, a dinar. Hold one in your mind. It is small and heavy and bright. It has no face on it, no emperor, no cross, no animal, no picture of any kind. Both sides are covered in Arabic writing, and among its words are these: "There is no god but God, He is alone, He has no associate."

Before this, the Muslim rulers had used coins that looked like the money of their neighbours. A Byzantine gold coin from about 608, for example, shows two rulers, a father and his son, on one side and a Christian cross on the other, and the earliest caliphs copied the styles of coins like these. So here is the first problem of this lesson. Why would a ruler take the pictures off his money?

And here is a bigger problem. Only about seventy-five years before this coin was made, in 622, the Muslims were a small, persecuted community who had fled from one Arabian town to another. By the 700s, the state they founded stretched from Spain and Portugal in the west to the Indus River valley in the east. It was larger than the empire of Alexander the Great, larger than Rome's, larger than Han China's: the largest empire the world had yet seen. How did that happen so fast? Working it out means practising a skill called cause and effect: finding the several causes behind an event, and not mixing up the causes with the results.

Arabia around 600

Picture the Arabian Peninsula as a great block of desert and mountains, with the Red Sea along its western side and the Persian Gulf to the east. Most of its people were Arabs who belonged to tribes. Many were Bedouin, herders who moved with their camels, sheep and goats. In the west, near the Red Sea, stood the town of Mecca, which played a part in the trade caravans that carried goods between east and west. At its heart was the Kaaba, a cube-shaped shrine that drew pilgrims from all over Arabia. At that time it held idols of the many gods that most Arabs worshipped, although Jews and Christians lived in Arabia too.

North of Arabia lay the two superpowers of the age: the Byzantine Empire, which you met in the last lesson, and the Sasanian Persian Empire, ruled from Iraq. They had fought each other for generations, and a long, exhausting war between them was only just ending in the 620s. Keep that fact in mind. It will matter.

Muhammad and the first Muslims

Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570. As a young man he worked in the caravan trade and married Khadija, a successful merchant who ran her own caravan business. Muslims believe that around 610, while Muhammad was alone in the cave of Hira on a mountain near Mecca, the angel Gabriel brought him the first words of God's message. According to Muslim sources, the first person to accept that message was Khadija herself.

Recite, in the name of your Lord who created, created man from clots of blood. Recite! For your Lord is the most beneficent, who has taught the use of the pen, has taught man what he did not know.

The Quran, Sura 96, verses 1-5. Translated by J. M. Rodwell in 1861, lightly modernised.

Who, when and why. These verses open Sura 96 of the Quran, the holy book of Islam. Muslims believe the Quran is the word of God, revealed to Muhammad over about twenty-two years and memorised and written down by his followers. Around 650 the caliph Uthman had a standard written copy prepared, and that text is the basis of the Quran Muslims read today. The English words above come from J. M. Rodwell, an English Christian clergyman writing in 1861.

Point of view question: Muslims hold that the Quran is truly itself only in Arabic, which is why many translations call themselves "interpretations" or "translations of the meanings". What might a Christian translator in Victorian England have brought to his English version that the Arabic original does not contain?

Muhammad preached that there is one God, whom Arabic speakers call Allah, the same word Arabic-speaking Christians use for God today. He called on people to care for the poor and to prepare for a day of judgement. Mecca's leaders, who profited from the pilgrims visiting their idols, turned against him. In 622 Muhammad and his followers left Mecca for the town of Yathrib, which became known as Medina, "the city" of the Prophet. That journey, the Hijra, is so important that the Islamic calendar counts its years from it.

In Medina the community grew, and it fought a series of battles with Mecca. In 630, on the eve of a battle outside the city, Mecca's leading tribe surrendered. Muhammad entered the Kaaba and smashed the idols inside it, and the Kaaba became the centre of Islamic worship. When Muhammad died in 632, most of the tribes of western Arabia were united under his leadership.

What Muslims believe and do

The religion Muhammad taught is Islam, an Arabic word meaning submission to God, and a Muslim is a person who submits. Its basic duties are known as the Five Pillars.

Muslims regard Muhammad as the last of a long line of prophets that includes Abraham, Moses and Jesus. That is why Islamic law treated Jews and Christians, and later Zoroastrians from Persia, as People of the Book: believers in one God who had received an earlier scripture and who deserved protection. Remember this too. It is another piece of the puzzle.

Who should lead? The caliphs

Muhammad left no simple rule about who should lead after him. The community chose his old friend Abu Bakr as caliph, from an Arabic word meaning successor or deputy. The first four caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali, are called the Rashidun, the "rightly guided".

The question of leadership never went away, and it split the Muslim community into two main branches that still exist. The Shia, whose name comes from the Arabic for "followers of Ali", believed leadership belonged to Ali, Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, and to his descendants. The Sunni, named for the sunna, or customs, of Muhammad, accepted the caliphs the community had chosen. Today the Sunni are the larger group.

After the Rashidun came two great family dynasties. The Umayyads ruled from Damascus in Syria from 661 to 750; Abd al-Malik, the maker of our coin, was one of them. The Abbasids took power in 750, and in 762 the caliph al-Mansur founded a new, planned capital in Iraq: Baghdad, where the next lesson takes place.

The upshot: Muhammad united much of Arabia by his death in 632, and leadership then passed to caliphs; a dispute over who should lead created the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam.

Working the problem: why so fast?

Now go back to the big question. Between 634 and the early 700s, Muslim armies took Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Iran, North Africa and, from 711, most of Spain, where the commander Tariq ibn Ziyad gave his name to the Rock of Gibraltar, Jabal Tariq, "Tariq's mountain". There were real battles. At Yarmuk in 636 a Muslim army beat the Byzantines so badly that they abandoned Syria, and in 641 Alexandria in Egypt fell. In 732 a Frankish army stopped a raid deep inside France, near Tours. But a single cause cannot explain the whole story. Historians put several together.

Read the table carefully. Notice that no single row is enough on its own. Weak empires with no attackers would simply have stayed weak. A united army facing strong empires might have been crushed. The causes worked together.

Now notice something that is not in the table: mass conversion. A common mistake is to treat conversion to Islam as the cause of the conquests. It was more an effect, and a slow one. The historian Richard Bulliet estimated that only about one in ten of the non-Arab subjects had become Muslim during the Umayyad period, and perhaps four in ten by the middle of the 800s. In Egypt, Muslims were probably not the majority until the 900s. For centuries, the caliphs ruled over many Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who paid a special tax, the jizya, instead of serving in the army.

There is one more thing a good historian asks: how did it look to the people on the other side? The Muslim armies saw their success as a sign of God's power. Many Christians who lost their lands also saw the hand of God in it, but as a punishment sent for their own sins. The same events, two points of view.

The upshot: Muslim rule spread fast because several causes worked together: exhausted empires, united and motivated armies, surrender deals that protected local people, and continuity in government. Conversion to Islam came slowly, as a result, over centuries.

Back to the coin

You can now solve the first problem. Abd al-Malik ruled from 685 to 705, when the conquests had created a huge empire full of people who spoke Greek, Persian, Aramaic and many other languages. He made two great changes. He replaced the old Byzantine and Persian coins with a single Islamic currency, and around 700 he made Arabic, instead of Greek and Persian, the language of government offices. A few years earlier, in 691 or 692, he had finished the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, whose inscriptions are the earliest surviving written statements of Islam and of Muhammad.

The coin, the language and the building all say the same thing. The early caliphs had copied their rivals so people would accept the new government. Abd al-Malik was confident enough to announce that this was an Islamic empire now, with its own faith and its own language. Because images of rulers were being replaced by words about God, every merchant, soldier and farmer who handled a dinar also handled a statement of the faith.

Point of view question: Think about who made this coin and who used it. What did Abd al-Malik want a Christian farmer in Syria to understand when he paid his taxes with it?

Common misconceptions

• "Islam spread because people were forced to convert." There were battles, but most land came under Muslim rule through surrender agreements, and Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians could keep their religions if they paid taxes. Conversion took centuries.
• "Allah is a different god from the God of Jews and Christians." Allah is simply the Arabic word for God, and Arabic-speaking Christians use it in their own worship. Muslims believe in the God of Abraham.
• "Almost all Muslims are Arabs." Islam began among Arabs, but today only about a quarter of the world's Muslims live in the Middle East and North Africa, while about a third live in South Asia.

Putting it together

• Muhammad, born in Mecca around 570, preached one God; Muslims believe the Quran was revealed to him from about 610.
• The Hijra to Medina in 622 begins the Islamic calendar; by his death in 632 Muhammad had united most of western Arabia.
• The Five Pillars are the declaration of faith, prayer, giving to the poor, fasting in Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca.
• Caliphs led after Muhammad; a dispute over leadership divided the Sunni and the Shia; the Umayyads ruled from Damascus and the Abbasids from Baghdad.
• Several causes together explain the rapid spread of Muslim rule, while conversion was a slow effect. Abd al-Malik's picture-free coin announced an Islamic empire with its own faith and language.

Sources

1. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 11.1 The rise and message of Islam. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
2. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 11.2 The Arab-Islamic conquests and the first Islamic states. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
3. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 11.3 Islamization and religious rule under Islam. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
4. Rodwell, J. M. (Trans.). (1861). The Koran, Sura 96. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg
5. Bulliet, R. W. (1979). Conversion to Islam in the medieval period: An essay in quantitative history. Harvard University Press.

A book for judges, merchants and canal-diggers

Around 820, in Baghdad, a scholar named Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi finished a short book and dedicated it to the caliph al-Ma'mun. Its title was The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. The Arabic word for completion in that title, al-jabr, became our word algebra. His own name, al-Khwarizmi, turned over the centuries into the word algorithm, which today means a step-by-step recipe, the kind a computer follows. So what was in the book? He tells you himself.

The fondness for science by which God has distinguished the Imam al-Mamun, the Commander of the Faithful, and the kindness he shows to the learned, have encouraged me to write a short work on calculating by completion and reduction. I have kept to what is easiest and most useful in arithmetic, such as people constantly need in cases of inheritance, legacies, dividing property, lawsuits and trade, and in all their dealings with one another, or in measuring land, digging canals and working out geometry.

Al-Khwarizmi, preface to The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, about 820. Translated by Frederic Rosen in 1831, lightly modernised and shortened.

Who, when and why. Al-Khwarizmi was a scholar working in Baghdad under the caliph's patronage, which means the caliph supported and paid for his work. He wrote in Arabic for practical readers: judges who had to divide a dead person's property fairly under Islamic law, merchants, and the engineers who measured fields and dug canals across Iraq.

Point of view question: Al-Khwarizmi opens with warm praise of the caliph before he says a word about mathematics. Why might a scholar in his position write that way, and does the praise make his description of the book's purpose less trustworthy?

This lesson is built around a skill you usually practise in mathematics, working a problem step by step, but it is also a history skill: reading a source closely enough to reproduce what its author did. By the end, you will have solved a problem the way someone in Baghdad solved it twelve hundred years ago.

Baghdad, a city of books

You met Baghdad at the end of the last lesson: a planned capital founded by the Abbasid caliphs in 762. Within a few generations it had become one of the great centres of learning in the world. The caliphs paid scholars to translate books from Greek, Persian and Indian languages into Arabic, a huge project historians call the translation movement. Many of the translators were not Muslims. One of the most famous, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, who lived from 809 to 873, was an Arab Christian doctor who translated Greek medical books. And the scholars did not only preserve the old books. They checked them, corrected their mistakes and added to them.

A new material helped. Papermaking had come from China into the Islamic world, and paper was far cheaper than papyrus or parchment, so books became cheaper too. There is a famous story that Chinese prisoners captured at the Battle of Talas in 751 taught papermaking to the people of Samarkand. But look at where the story comes from: a Persian historian writing about 300 years later. No Arab writer of the time mentions it, and a Chinese prisoner from that battle, Du Huan, who later returned home and wrote about it, listed weavers, painters and silversmiths among the captives but no papermakers. The story may be true, but it is weak evidence. Between the 800s and the 1100s, libraries in Baghdad, Cairo and Cordoba held more books than the biggest libraries in China and far more than any in Europe.

You may have read that all this happened in one building, the House of Wisdom, a kind of university where scholars translated and debated. Be careful. The historian Dimitri Gutas, of Yale University, points out that very few sources from the time mention a House of Wisdom by that name, and that none of the translators, including Hunayn, ever refers to it. He thinks it may have been a palace library, a storehouse of books, rather than an academy. The learning was certainly real. The single grand building may be partly a later legend.

What matters here: Abbasid Baghdad translated, checked and extended the learning of Greece, Persia and India, helped by cheap paper; historians still debate whether the House of Wisdom was an academy or a library.

Working a problem the way al-Khwarizmi did

Al-Khwarizmi wrote everything in words. There were no letters like x, no equals signs, and even the numbers were written out as words. He used two special terms. The root is the unknown number you are looking for. The square is the root multiplied by itself. If you picture a square field, the root is the length of one side and the square is its area. Here is his first worked example of one type of problem.

One square, and ten roots of the same, amount to thirty-nine dirhams. That is to say, what must be the square which, when increased by ten of its own roots, amounts to thirty-nine? The solution is this: you halve the number of the roots, which in the present instance yields five. This you multiply by itself; the product is twenty-five. Add this to thirty-nine; the sum is sixty-four. Now take the root of this, which is eight, and subtract from it half the number of the roots, which is five; the remainder is three. This is the root of the square which you sought for; the square itself is nine.

Al-Khwarizmi, The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, about 820. Translated by Frederic Rosen in 1831.

A dirham was a silver coin, so the problem is dressed up as money. Now follow the recipe one step at a time.

1. Halve the roots. There are ten roots. Half of ten is five.
2. Multiply that half by itself. Five times five is twenty-five.
3. Add it to the number. Twenty-five plus thirty-nine is sixty-four.
4. Take the root. Which number times itself makes sixty-four? Eight.
5. Subtract the half. Eight minus five is three. The root is three, and the square is nine.
6. Check it. The square is 9. Ten roots are 10 times 3, which is 30. And 9 plus 30 is 39. It works.

Why does such a strange recipe work? Al-Khwarizmi explained it with a drawing, and you can follow it in the picture below. Start with a square whose side is the unknown root. The ten roots are like a strip ten long and as wide as the side; cut that strip in half and stick one piece of five along the right side of the square and the other along the bottom. Together, the square and the two strips are worth thirty-nine. But the shape is now a big square with its bottom-right corner missing. That corner is five by five, worth twenty-five. Add it, and you have a complete big square worth 39 plus 25, which is 64. A square worth 64 has sides of 8. Each big side is the unknown root plus five, so the root is 8 minus 5, which is 3. This is where the word "completion" comes from: you complete the square.

What matters here: Al-Khwarizmi's method is a recipe with a reason behind it: halve the roots, square the half, add, take the root, subtract the half. The picture of completing a square shows why it always works for this type of problem.

Change one number, change the answer

Al-Khwarizmi then showed what happens when the pieces are arranged differently. His next type of problem reads: "a square and twenty-one in numbers are equal to ten roots of the same square." Now the twenty-one sits with the square, on the other side from the roots. His recipe changes to match.

1. Halve the roots: five.
2. Multiply by itself: twenty-five.
3. This time, subtract the twenty-one: twenty-five minus twenty-one is four.
4. Take the root: two.
5. Subtract it from the half, and five minus two is three. Or add it to the half, and five plus two is seven.

Two answers! Check them both. If the root is 3, the square is 9, and 9 plus 21 is 30, which is ten times 3. If the root is 7, the square is 49, and 49 plus 21 is 70, which is ten times 7. Both work. Al-Khwarizmi tells his reader to try addition first, "and if that do not serve, then subtraction certainly will".

Now change the number once more. Suppose the problem were "a square and thirty are equal to ten roots". Halve the roots, five; multiply by itself, twenty-five; subtract the thirty and you get less than nothing, so there is no root to take. Al-Khwarizmi saw this coming. When the half of the roots multiplied by itself is less than the number, he wrote, "the instance is impossible". And if it comes out exactly equal to the number, the root is simply half the roots. One small change in the question can give you one answer, two answers or none, and his book tells you which to expect.

What matters here: By sorting problems into types and giving a rule for each, including when a problem has two answers or none, al-Khwarizmi turned clever tricks into a system that anyone could learn.

Numbers from India, and a zero

Al-Khwarizmi also wrote a book on Indian arithmetic. The digits 0 to 9 that you use every day, including the zero, were first developed in India. You may remember from last year how hard it is to write 407 without a zero. Scholars in the Islamic world adopted the Indian digits, and in the 1100s Latin translations of al-Khwarizmi's arithmetic helped carry them to Europe. That is why Europeans called them Arabic numerals, and why historians now call them Hindu-Arabic numerals.

Medicine: hospitals and careful doctors

The same habit of careful sorting shows up in medicine. Abu Bakr al-Razi, who lived from about 865 to 925, was chief physician of the hospitals in Baghdad and in Ray, in Iran. He also wrote a book with the lovely title For One Who Has No Physician to Attend Him, a medical guide for people with no doctor nearby. In his treatise on two dangerous diseases, he compared their warning signs so that a doctor could tell them apart.

The eruption of the smallpox is preceded by a continued fever, pain in the back, itching in the nose, and terrors in sleep. ... The pain in the back is more peculiar to the smallpox than to the measles, while restlessness, nausea and anxiety are more frequent in the measles than in the smallpox.

Al-Razi, A Treatise on the Smallpox and Measles, about 900. Translated by W. A. Greenhill in 1848, lightly modernised and shortened.

A century later, Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, who lived from 980 to 1037, gathered Greek, Persian and Indian medical knowledge into one enormous book, The Canon of Medicine. It was translated into Latin in Toledo, in Spain, in the 1100s, and it became a standard textbook in European universities for centuries.

Astronomy: measuring the sky

Al-Ma'mun also paid for astronomers. His observatories, one in Baghdad and another on a mountain near Damascus, recorded the movements of the Sun, the Moon and the planets, and the results were collected in a work called The Verified Tables. Astronomers and navigators used the astrolabe, a flat brass instrument for measuring the height of stars and telling the time. One of the few astrolabe makers whose names survive from the 900s was a woman in Aleppo, in Syria, known as al-Ijliyyah. Look up at the night sky and you can still see this work: many bright stars have Arabic names, such as Aldebaran, "the follower", because it seems to follow a cluster of stars across the sky. In Cairo in the 1000s, Ibn al-Haytham wrote a Book of Optics based on experiments with light, and some historians credit him with helping to invent the experimental method of science.

How the knowledge travelled

Read the table as a story of change over time. Ideas did not simply sit in Baghdad. They arrived, were improved, and moved on. The flow was later interrupted: in 1258 a Mongol army destroyed Baghdad and its libraries, a disaster you will read about later this year.

Common misconceptions

• "Islamic scholars only copied the Greeks." They translated Greek works, but they also corrected them and added new work of their own, from al-Khwarizmi's algebra to al-Razi's comparison of smallpox and measles.
• "Arabic numerals were invented by the Arabs." The digits and the zero came from India. Scholars writing in Arabic passed them on, which is why Europeans gave them that name.
• "The House of Wisdom was a university like the ones today." Nobody is sure what it was. Some historians think it was mainly a palace library, and very few sources from the time describe it.

Pulling it together

• Abbasid Baghdad, founded in 762, became a centre of translation and research, helped by cheap paper and by scholars of many faiths.
• Historians debate the House of Wisdom: it may have been a library rather than an academy, although the learning around it was real.
• Al-Khwarizmi, around 820, wrote practical algebra in words: halve the roots, square the half, add, take the root, subtract the half, and complete the square to see why.
• Changing one number can give one, two or no answers, and his rules told readers which to expect.
• Al-Razi and Ibn Sina advanced medicine, astronomers built observatories and astrolabes, and much of this knowledge reached Europe through Latin translations in the 1100s.

Sources

1. Al-Khwarizmi. (1831). The author's preface. In The algebra of Mohammed ben Musa (F. Rosen, Ed. and Trans.). Oriental Translation Fund. Original work written about 820. Wikisource
2. Al-Khwarizmi. (1831). Compendium on calculating by completion and reduction. In The algebra of Mohammed ben Musa (F. Rosen, Ed. and Trans.). Oriental Translation Fund. Wikisource
3. Al-Razi. (1848). A treatise on the small-pox and measles (W. A. Greenhill, Trans.). Sydenham Society. Original work written about 900. Internet Archive
4. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 11.3 Islamization and religious rule under Islam. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
5. Gutas, D. (1998). Greek thought, Arabic culture: The Graeco-Arabic translation movement in Baghdad and early Abbasid society (2nd-4th/8th-10th centuries). Routledge.

Every ox, every cow, every pig

At midwinter in 1085, William the Conqueror, the Norman duke who had made himself king of England nineteen years earlier, held court for five days at Gloucester. He was worried. Word had come that the king of Denmark was planning an invasion, and William had brought over an enormous army that his English subjects had to feed. He needed to know exactly what his kingdom owned. So he sent officials into every county. A monk keeping the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a year-by-year record kept in English monasteries, wrote down what happened next.

He had them record what or how much each man had who held land in England, in land or in cattle, and how much money it was worth. So very carefully did he have them trace it out that there was not one single hide, nor a yard of land, nor even (it is shameful to tell, though he thought it no shame to do it) an ox, nor a cow, nor a pig left out that was not set down in his record.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, entry for 1085. Translated by James Ingram and J. A. Giles in the 1800s, lightly modernised. A hide was a unit of farmland.

The survey became the Domesday Book of 1086, and it survives. It names 13,418 places. It counts 268,984 households, which historians think means a population of between 1.2 and 1.6 million people. It lists 5,624 mills and about 28,000 slaves. No other kingdom in Europe at the time was counted so closely.

Point of view question: The Chronicle was written in English by monks, twenty years after a Norman duke had conquered England. Why might this writer call it "shameful" to count every pig?

Domesday is exactly the kind of evidence you need to test a model, a simplified picture that is supposed to explain how something works. This lesson tests a very famous model, one you may have seen in a textbook, and it is built as a debugging exercise: start from a plausible answer, check it against the evidence, and find exactly where it breaks.

The pyramid in your textbook

Here is the model. It is usually drawn as a pyramid.

The story that goes with it runs like this. The king owns all the land. He grants large pieces, called fiefs, to great lords, who in return become his vassals: men sworn to serve him, mainly by fighting. The lords grant smaller pieces to knights, who become their vassals in turn. At the bottom, peasants farm the land and feed everyone. Loyalty flows up the pyramid, land flows down, and the whole arrangement is called feudalism.

Part of this is right, and OpenStax, a college textbook, describes the core of it: lords gave land to fighters as fiefs, the fighters became vassals sworn to serve, mostly in war, and bishops and abbots could be lords too. But the pyramid makes four bigger claims, and each one can be tested.

1. There was one system, called feudalism, across medieval Europe.
2. Every vassal had exactly one lord above him.
3. Everyone at the bottom was the same kind of peasant.
4. The king sat safely at the top, with loyalty flowing up to him.

Test 1: the word itself

Start with the name. People in the Middle Ages used the Latin word feudum, meaning a fief; the first known example in a document comes from 984. But nobody in the Middle Ages talked about "feudalism". The French word féodal first appears in legal books in 1614. The Scottish writer Adam Smith spread the phrase "feudal system" in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, and the word "feudalism" itself was introduced in 1771. It is a label invented by later writers to sum up a world they looked back on.

Does that matter? The American historian Elizabeth A. R. Brown argued in 1974, in an article called "The Tyranny of a Construct", that it does. A construct is an idea built by historians, and her point was that the single word tricks us into believing that lords and vassals worked the same way everywhere. Twenty years later the British historian Susan Reynolds went further, arguing that the neat relationship of fief and vassal was largely worked out by lawyers after 1100. Medieval historians still disagree about whether the word is useful. Claim 1 fails: there was no single system that people at the time recognised.

Test 2: how many lords?

Now look at an actual promise of loyalty. This one was written in the 1200s in Champagne, in northeastern France, by a minor lord named John of Toul.

I, John of Toul, make known that I am the liege man of the lady Beatrice, countess of Troyes, and of her son Theobald, count of Champagne, against every creature, living or dead, saving my allegiance to lord Enjorand of Coucy, lord John of Arcis, and the count of Grandpre. If it should happen that the count of Grandpre should be at war with the countess and count of Champagne on his own quarrel, I will aid the count of Grandpre in my own person, and will send to the count and the countess of Champagne the knights whose service I owe to them for the fief which I hold of them.

John of Toul's homage to the count of Champagne, 13th century. Translated by Oliver J. Thatcher and Edgar H. McNeal in 1905.

A liege man owed his first and strongest loyalty to a particular lord. Count the lords in John's statement. There are four: the countess and count of Champagne, Enjorand of Coucy, John of Arcis and the count of Grandpre. He holds land from each of them, and he has even written out a plan for what he will do when two of his lords go to war with each other. He will fight in person for one and send hired knights to the other.

The great lords were tangled in the same way. In 1143 the count of Champagne did homage to the duke of Burgundy for a list of lands that included the city of Troyes. In 1198 the next count became the liege man of the king of France for other lands. So the count of Champagne was at once a duke's vassal and a king's vassal. Even the standard English form for doing homage, written down around 1275, has the new vassal promise faith to his lord "saving the faith that I owe unto our Lord the King, and to my other Lords". The words themselves assume that most men had more than one lord. Claim 2 fails.

Bottom line: Real documents of homage show vassals with several lords and plans for when those lords fought each other, not a tidy chain with one lord above each man.

Test 3: who were the peasants?

Go back to Domesday. Its clerks did not count one kind of peasant. They sorted people into different groups: villagers who farmed sizeable holdings, smallholders with a few acres, cottagers with little more than a cottage, free men, and about 28,000 slaves. Slavery, the ownership of people as property, still existed in England in 1086, although Domesday counts fewer slaves than there had been twenty years earlier.

Most people in western Europe at this time were serfs, and OpenStax explains how they differed from slaves. Serfs were tied to the land. They could not leave it, marry or take up other work without the lord's permission, and they owed the lord a set number of days of labour every year, often a great many. But they could not be bought or sold, and the lord was supposed to protect them and settle their disputes. Some peasants were free and owned their own land.

They lived and worked on a manor, the estate of a lord. Picture it from above. In the middle is a village of small houses with vegetable gardens, a church, and the lord's manor house. Around the village stretch huge open fields divided into long, narrow strips; each family farms strips scattered across the fields, and the lord keeps some land for his own use, called the demesne, which the serfs must work on their labour days. Beyond the fields lie common meadows for grazing and a wood for firewood and pigs. Many manors used the three-field system: one field planted with one crop, a second with another, and the third left fallow, resting, so the soil could recover, with the fields rotated each year. Villagers shared ploughs and oxen, and women looked after smaller animals and the gardens near the houses. Claim 3 fails: the bottom of the pyramid held several different kinds of people with very different rights.

Test 4: was the king safe at the top?

Here is the most telling piece of evidence of all. In 1086, the year after the survey began, William called a great meeting at Salisbury. The Chronicle says that "all the landsmen that were of any account over all England became this man's vassals", bowing to him, becoming his men and swearing oaths of loyalty.

Think about why a king would need that. If loyalty really flowed neatly up the pyramid, every knight's loyalty would reach the king through his own lord. But a knight's first loyalty was usually to the lord who had given him his land, and a rebellious baron could lead his knights against the crown. William was trying to fix exactly that weakness by making every important landholder swear to him directly. The pyramid also leaves out other powers: bishops and abbots who were great lords in their own right, and towns whose merchants bought charters of freedom from their lords. Claim 4 fails: the king was one powerful lord among others, and he had to work to keep loyalty flowing his way.

What survives of the model

Debugging does not mean throwing everything away. Some things in the pyramid passed the tests. Land really was granted in return for service. Vassals really did swear homage, placing their hands between their lord's hands and promising to be his men. Serfs really were tied to the land and owed labour to a lord. What failed was the neatness. Medieval lordship was local, tangled and always changing.

Historians often use two narrower words instead. Lordship describes the ties of land and loyalty between fighting men. Manorialism describes how lords and peasants ran the land. In a later lesson you will meet the samurai of Japan, whose world of lords and warriors has often been compared with medieval Europe. Keep your debugged model in mind when you do.

Bottom line: The pyramid is a useful first sketch but a bad map. Test any model against real documents, and keep only the parts that survive.

Common misconceptions

• "People in the Middle Ages lived under something they called feudalism." The word was invented in the 1700s. People at the time spoke of lords, men, fiefs and homage.
• "Serfs were the same as slaves." Serfs were tied to the land and owed labour, but they could not be sold. England in 1086 also had real slaves, counted separately in Domesday.
• "Medieval people had no useful technology." Domesday lists 5,624 mills, about one for every 46 peasant households. The historian Georges Duby read that as a sign that ground flour and baked bread were replacing porridge in ordinary homes.

The short version

• William the Conqueror's survey of 1085-1086, the Domesday Book, counted England's places, households, mills and slaves in extraordinary detail.
• Lords granted fiefs to vassals in return for service, mostly in war; vassals swore homage and fealty.
• The word feudalism was invented centuries later, and historians such as Elizabeth A. R. Brown and Susan Reynolds warn that it suggests false sameness.
• Documents like John of Toul's homage show vassals with several lords, so the one-lord pyramid fails.
• Peasants included serfs, free peasants, smallholders and slaves; manors worked open fields in strips, often with a three-field rotation.

Sources

1. Ingram, J., and Giles, J. A. (Trans.). (n.d.). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, entries for 1085 and 1086. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg
2. Thatcher, O. J., and McNeal, E. H. (Eds.). (1905). John of Toul's homage to the count of Champagne, and Homages paid by the counts of Champagne. In A source book for medieval history. Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University. Fordham University
3. Internet Medieval Sourcebook. (n.d.). Modus faciendi homagium et fidelitatem (The manner of doing homage and fealty), c. 1275. Fordham University. Fordham University
4. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 13.1 The post-Roman West in the early Middle Ages. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
5. Brown, E. A. R. (1974). The tyranny of a construct: Feudalism and historians of medieval Europe. The American Historical Review, 79(4), 1063-1088.

A girl given to a monastery

In the early 1100s, in the Rhineland of Germany, a couple from a noble family took their youngest daughter to the monastery of Disibodenberg and left her there. Her name was Hildegard. She became an oblate, a child offered to God by her parents, and she was placed with Jutta, the daughter of a count and only about six years older than she was. The two girls lived enclosed at the monastery, shut away from the world. The account of Hildegard's life written soon after she died says she was eight at the time, but Jutta's enclosure is recorded in 1112, when Hildegard would have been about fourteen, so even the first line of her story needs checking. Hildegard would spend almost all of her long life inside the Church, and she would become one of the most remarkable people of the Middle Ages.

Hildegard's story is a good way into the most powerful institution in medieval Europe, the Christian Church, led in the west by the pope in Rome. Follow her, and you will see the Church at three levels: the monastery where she grew up, the village churches all around it, and the great struggles between popes and emperors. Along the way you will practise sourcing: asking what kind of document you are reading, who wrote it, and for whom, before deciding what it can tell you.

A day ruled by bells

Disibodenberg followed the Rule of Saint Benedict, a book of instructions for monks written by Benedict of Nursia in Italy around 530. By Hildegard's time, many monasteries and convents across western Europe lived by it. The Rule divided every day and night into fixed times for prayer in the church, for work and for reading. A signal called the community to each service, and after the last service of the evening nobody was supposed to speak. Here is part of its chapter on work.

Idleness is the enemy of the soul. And therefore, at fixed times, the brothers ought to be occupied in manual labour; and again, at fixed times, in sacred reading. ... One or two elders shall go round the monastery at the hours in which the brothers are engaged in reading, and see to it that no troublesome brother is found who is given to idleness and trifling, and is not intent on his reading.

The Rule of Saint Benedict, chapter 48, written around 530. Translated by Ernest F. Henderson in 1910, lightly modernised.

Who, when and why. This is a rulebook, written to tell monks how they should live. That makes it excellent evidence of what monasteries were trying to be. It is weaker evidence of what monks actually did, because rules are written precisely where people might misbehave. The Rule gives itself away in a few places. In the chapter on drink, Benedict says that wine is not suitable for monks at all, then admits that "in our day, it is not possible to persuade the monks of this", and settles for asking them to drink sparingly. Even the elders patrolling the reading hours tell you that some monks dozed or chatted.

Point of view question: Benedict was the founder and abbot, the head, of a monastery. How might his position have shaped what he chose to forbid, and what does his admission about wine suggest about the monks he knew?

Monasteries were also where many books survived. Monks and nuns copied texts by hand, including the Bible, prayer books and works of ancient writers, in a writing room called a scriptorium. When Hildegard grew up, she had an educated monk named Volmar as her teacher and later her secretary, who wrote down the books she dictated.

The Church in every village

Outside the monastery walls, almost every village in western Europe had its parish church, usually the biggest and strongest building for miles. Its bells told the time and announced births, deaths and danger. The priest baptised babies, married couples, heard confessions and buried the dead. The Mass, the central Christian service, was said in Latin, a language most villagers did not speak, although they knew its prayers and rituals well.

The Church also shaped the year. Christmas, Easter and dozens of saints' days were holidays, holy days, when work stopped. People went on pilgrimages, long journeys to holy places such as Rome, Santiago de Compostela in Spain or Canterbury in England, to pray at the tombs of saints. And everyone owed the Church a tithe, a tenth of what they produced, so a farmer who harvested ten sacks of grain owed one to the Church. With its tithes and its huge estates, the Church was also one of the greatest landowners in Europe. Remember from the last lesson that bishops and abbots could be lords with vassals of their own.

Worth holding on to: The medieval Church ran through daily life: it rang the hours, performed the rituals from birth to death, set the holidays, collected tithes and owned great estates.

A king barefoot in the snow

When Hildegard was a small child, people still told the story of an event from 1077 that showed just how powerful the Church could be. The pope, Gregory VII, and the German king and future emperor, Henry IV, had quarrelled over who had the right to choose bishops. Bishops were religious leaders, but they were also great lords with land and knights, so kings wanted to pick them. Gregory said only the Church could. This quarrel is called the Investiture Controversy.

In 1076 the German bishops loyal to Henry declared the pope deposed. Gregory struck back harder. He excommunicated Henry, expelling him from the community of the Church, and declared: "I absolve all Christians from the bonds of the oath which they have made or shall make to him." In a world held together by oaths, as you saw in the last lesson, that was a terrible weapon. Henry's own vassals were now free to abandon him, and many German princes did. So in the winter of 1077 Henry crossed the Alps to the castle of Canossa in northern Italy, where the pope was staying as the guest of the powerful Countess Matilda of Tuscany. Gregory described what happened in a letter to the German princes.

Finally he came in person to Canossa, where we were staying, bringing with him only a small retinue and showing no hostile intentions. Once arrived, he presented himself at the gate of the castle, barefoot and dressed only in wretched woollen garments, begging us with tears to grant him absolution and forgiveness. This he continued to do for three days, until all those about us were moved to pity at his plight and pleaded for him with tears and prayers. Indeed, they marvelled at our hardness of heart.

Pope Gregory VII, letter to the German princes, 1077. From a translation printed in A Source Book of Mediaeval History, 1908, lightly modernised.

Who, when and why. This is a report, not a rulebook, and it was written by the winner of the contest. Gregory was writing to the German princes, his allies against Henry, to explain why he had forgiven the king. Notice how he tells it: Henry humble and weeping, the pope stern, then merciful only after everyone begged. That version made Gregory look strong and fair to the very people who might have been angry that he had let Henry off. The letter really is evidence of what happened at Canossa, because Gregory was there. But it is Gregory's side, told to Gregory's friends.

Did Henry lose? In the short run he got what he came for: the excommunication was lifted, and his enemies lost their excuse. In the long run the quarrel went on for decades, until a compromise in 1122 gave the Church the right to choose bishops while kings kept some say over their lands. What Canossa showed for good was this: a pope could make an emperor stand barefoot at his gate.

Worth holding on to: The Investiture Controversy was a struggle over power as well as faith, and Gregory's account of Canossa is a winner's report written for his own allies.

Hildegard's voice

Hildegard, meanwhile, was growing up inside the convent. In 1136 the nuns elected her their leader, the magistra. In 1141, at the age of forty-two, she said she received a vision commanding her to "write down that which you see and hear", and over the next ten years she wrote her first great book of visions, Scivias, "Know the Ways". In 1150 she moved her nuns to a new convent she founded at Rupertsberg, near Bingen, and in 1165 she founded a second.

She wrote about far more than visions. She produced books on plants and medicine, composed hymns that are still sung and recorded today, and wrote a musical play about the struggle between the virtues and the devil. She sent letters to popes, to the famous preacher Bernard of Clairvaux and to the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, sometimes scolding them. For a woman in the 1100s, the convent was one of the few places where she could learn, write, run an institution and be heard. In 2012 the Catholic Church declared Hildegard a saint and a Doctor of the Church, a title given to only a handful of its greatest teachers.

Sermons in stone and glass

In the century after Hildegard, builders across France and beyond raised a new kind of church, in the style we call Gothic. After a fire in 1194 destroyed most of the old cathedral at Chartres, southwest of Paris, rebuilding began almost at once, and the work of rebuilding and decorating went on until about 1260. Gothic builders had a trick. Stone arms outside the building, called flying buttresses, carried the outward push of the heavy stone roof down to the ground, so the walls no longer had to be massive. That meant the walls could be opened up for huge windows of stained glass, filled with pictures of Bible stories and the lives of the saints, glowing red and blue in the gloom.

From monastery schools to universities

Learning moved too. Schools attached to cathedrals grew into something new: the university, a community of teachers and students. Teaching at Bologna in Italy began around 1088, and it is the oldest university still operating in the world. Oxford, where teaching had begun by about 1096, and Paris followed. Students there studied in Latin and read, among other things, Latin translations of Greek and Arabic works, the same books whose journey through Baghdad you followed two lessons ago.

Common misconceptions

• "The Middle Ages were a dark age when nobody learned anything." Monasteries copied and preserved books, Hildegard wrote on medicine and music, cathedral builders solved hard engineering problems, and the first universities were founded.
• "A rulebook tells you how people lived." A rule tells you how people were supposed to live. The Rule of Benedict itself admits that monks would not give up wine.
• "Kings were always more powerful than the Church." At Canossa in 1077 an emperor had to beg the pope for three days to lift his excommunication, because the pope could release his vassals from their oaths.
• "Everyone in medieval Europe was a Christian." Most people in western Europe were, but Jewish communities lived in many towns, and Muslims ruled much of Spain until the 1200s.

What you now know

• Monasteries such as Hildegard's followed the Rule of Saint Benedict, a timetable of prayer, work and reading; monks and nuns also copied books.
• In the villages, the parish church marked the hours and the stages of life, and everyone owed a tithe of a tenth of their produce.
• In the Investiture Controversy, Gregory VII excommunicated Henry IV, who came barefoot to Canossa in 1077 to be forgiven.
• Hildegard of Bingen wrote books of visions, medicine and music and corresponded with popes and emperors.
• Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres used flying buttresses to hold up walls of stained glass, and universities such as Bologna grew out of cathedral schools.
• Sourcing means asking what kind of document you have: a rulebook shows ideals, and a winner's report shows one side.

Sources

1. Benedict of Nursia. (1910). The rule of Saint Benedict (E. F. Henderson, Trans.). In Select historical documents of the Middle Ages. George Bell and Sons. Original work written about 530. Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University. Fordham University
2. Gregory VII. (1908). Letters on the conflict with Emperor Henry IV, 1075-1078. In A source book of mediaeval history. American Book Company. Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University. Fordham University
3. Gregory VII. (n.d.). The deposition of Henry IV, 1076. Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University. Fordham University
4. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 13.1 The post-Roman West in the early Middle Ages. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax

A field outside Clermont, November 1095

In November 1095, Pope Urban II came to Clermont, in central France, for a church council. About three hundred churchmen attended, and crowds of knights and ordinary people gathered to hear him speak. The pope had news from the east. The Byzantine emperor, Alexios I, had sent messengers asking for help against the Seljuk Turks, who had taken nearly all of Asia Minor, the land that is Turkey today. Urban called on the knights of the West to march east, help their fellow Christians and free Jerusalem from Muslim rule. According to one writer, when he finished, the crowd shouted with one voice: "It is the will of God! It is the will of God!"

That speech launched the Crusades, a series of wars fought over the next two hundred years by Christians from western Europe, mostly for control of Jerusalem and the lands around it. But notice the words "according to one writer". Nobody wrote the speech down at the time. So this lesson is built around a skill called comparison: laying different accounts side by side, noticing where they agree and differ, and working out why. You will hear from a French priest, a Byzantine princess and a Syrian warrior.

Five versions of one speech

The official record of the Council of Clermont has not survived. What we have are several accounts of Urban's speech, written by chroniclers after the crusaders had already captured Jerusalem. The one historians generally trust most comes from Fulcher of Chartres, a priest who was at the council and later went on the crusade himself. He wrote his history between about 1100 and 1105.

All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. ... Let those who have been accustomed unjustly to wage private warfare against the faithful now go against the infidels. ... Let those who for a long time have been robbers now become knights. Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians.

Fulcher of Chartres, version of Urban II's speech at Clermont in 1095, written about 1100-1105. Adapted from the translation by Oliver J. Thatcher, 1905.

Who, when and why. "Remission of sins" means forgiveness of sins, and for a medieval Christian afraid of punishment after death, that was an enormous reward. Look at the second half of the passage too. Europe's knights were forever fighting each other in private wars, and the Church had long tried to stop them. Fulcher's Urban offers a way to turn that violence outward, against people Fulcher calls pagans and infidels. Fulcher was a crusader writing for other Christians after a victory, so he has every reason to present the whole enterprise as God's plan.

Point of view question: Fulcher wrote his version after Jerusalem had been taken. How might knowing the ending have shaped the speech he remembered the pope giving?

What happened: two hundred years in one table

Picture the map. The crusaders marched from France, Germany and Italy across the Balkans to Constantinople, crossed into Asia Minor, and fought their way south through Syria to Jerusalem, near the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Outremer was a thin strip of land along that coast, with the Muslim cities of Aleppo and Damascus just inland.

The view from Constantinople

The crusaders passed through Constantinople, the capital of the emperor who had asked for help. The emperor's daughter, Anna Komnene, born in 1083, was about thirteen when they arrived. Decades later, in the mid-1140s or 1150s, she wrote the Alexiad, a history of her father's reign, and she did not describe the Latins, as the Byzantines called western Europeans, as rescuers.

The whole West, and as much of the land of barbarian peoples as lies beyond the Adriatic Sea up to the Pillars of Hercules, all this, changing its seat, was bursting forth into Asia in a solid mass, with all its belongings. ... For, as anyone may guess from the outcome, the race of the Gauls is not only very passionate and impetuous in other ways, but also, when urged on by an impulse, cannot afterwards be checked.

Anna Komnene, the Alexiad, Book 10, written in the mid-1100s. Translated in August C. Krey, The First Crusade, 1921, lightly modernised.

Who, when and why. The Pillars of Hercules are the Strait of Gibraltar, so Anna means that the entire West was on the move. "Impetuous" means acting without thinking. She also says the Latins were greedy and broke treaties easily, and she gives the crusade preacher Peter the Hermit 80,000 foot soldiers and 100,000 knights, far more than historians think any crusading army contained. Anna was writing to defend her father's memory, and to her the crusaders were dangerous, unruly guests, useful but never to be trusted. Remember what happened in 1204. For the Byzantines, that sack proved her right.

The core of it: The same crusaders who were God's warriors to Fulcher were a dangerous flood of barbarians to Anna Komnene, even though they were supposed to be her father's allies.

The view from Shaizar

Usama ibn Munqidh was born on 4 July 1095, a few months before Urban's speech, at Shaizar, his family's castle in Syria. He grew up to be a warrior, a courtier and a poet, fought against the crusaders and also met many of them in peace. When he was nearly ninety he dictated a book of memories, full of stories. Here is his overall judgement.

Mysterious are the works of the Creator, the author of all things! When one comes to recount cases regarding the Franks, he cannot but glorify God and sanctify him, for he sees them as animals possessing the virtues of courage and fighting, but nothing else; just as animals have only the virtues of strength and carrying loads.

Usama ibn Munqidh, memoirs, dictated in the 1180s. Translated by Philip K. Hitti in 1929.

That sounds like pure contempt. But a few pages later Usama tells a very different kind of story. When he visited Jerusalem he prayed at the Aqsa Mosque, which was then held by the Knights Templar, an order of crusading knights. He calls them "my friends", and says they cleared a small mosque beside it so that he could pray there. One day a Frank who had just arrived from Europe grabbed him and twisted him to face east, the direction Christians faced in prayer. The Templars pulled the man away and apologised, explaining that he was a stranger who had never seen anyone pray any other way. Usama also describes a Frankish knight who "began to call me my brother".

Point of view question: Usama wrote for Muslim readers, near the end of a long life of war against the Franks. Why might he mock the Franks in general while describing some individual Franks as friends?

OpenStax sums up his attitude neatly: Usama could count Christians among his friends, but he warned his readers never to trust the Franks, especially the newly arrived crusaders. Both things were true at once.

Jerusalem, twice

Comparison works for events as well as writers. Jerusalem changed hands twice in the period, and the two captures were very different.

In July 1099 the crusaders, after fasting and walking around the walls as penitents, stormed the city and massacred many of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants, an act that, as OpenStax notes, shocked Muslims and Christians alike. How many died? Muslim chroniclers give figures from about 3,000 up to 70,000, the highest in the history of Ibn al-Athir, written in the 1200s. Historians reject 70,000 because the city almost certainly did not hold that many people, and because medieval chroniclers on every side tended to exaggerate numbers. The massacre was real. The exact toll will probably never be known.

In October 1187, Saladin, the sultan of Egypt and Syria, besieged the city after his victory at Hattin. OpenStax describes him as known for being humane and fair-minded. He agreed that the inhabitants could leave if they paid a ransom: ten gold dinars for a man, five for a woman and two for a child. Thousands who could not pay were enslaved, but many were freed, the city's local Christians were allowed to stay, and Jews were allowed to settle there again.

The core of it: Numbers in medieval chronicles need testing against common sense, such as how many people a city could hold, but the contrast between the storm of 1099 and the surrender of 1187 is well supported.

Putting three witnesses side by side

Read across the rows. All three agree that the crusaders were fierce fighters. They disagree about almost everything else, and each disagreement tracks the writer's position: a crusader, an ally who felt used, and an enemy who also knew the Franks as neighbours. That is what comparison gives you that a single source cannot.

What the Crusades changed

The crusader states lasted less than two hundred years. In that time Christians and Muslims fought, but they also traded, and crusader lords in Outremer kept Muslim tax systems and relied on Muslim scribes and interpreters. The sack of Constantinople in 1204 badly weakened the Byzantine Empire that had asked for help in the first place, a step on the road to its fall in 1453. The attacks on Jewish communities that began in 1096 were repeated in later crusades. And the idea of a holy war that earned forgiveness was used again, against Muslims in Spain and against peoples around the Baltic Sea.

Common misconceptions

• "The Crusades were a war between two united sides, Christians and Muslims." The Muslim world was divided between rival rulers, which helped the First Crusade succeed, and in 1204 crusaders sacked a Christian city.
• "Crusaders went only for treasure and land." Many went for gain, but the promise of forgiveness of sins was a powerful religious reason, and crusading was expensive and dangerous: many crusaders never came home.
• "Muslims and Christians in the Holy Land never got along." They fought, but they also traded, and a Muslim like Usama could call Templar knights his friends.

Looking back

• In 1095 Urban II answered the Byzantine emperor's request for help by calling for a crusade and promising forgiveness of sins.
• The First Crusade took Jerusalem in 1099 with a massacre; Saladin retook it in 1187 on ransom terms; the last crusader city, Acre, fell in 1291.
• Fulcher saw soldiers of God, Anna Komnene saw dangerous barbarians, and Usama saw brave but ignorant Franks, some of them his friends.
• Chroniclers' numbers, such as 70,000 dead in 1099 or Peter the Hermit's 180,000 followers, must be tested against what was possible.
• Comparing sources side by side shows how each writer's position shaped the story.

Sources

1. Internet Medieval Sourcebook. (n.d.). Urban II (1088-1099): Speech at Council of Clermont, 1095. Six versions of the speech, including Fulcher of Chartres, adapted from O. J. Thatcher (1905). Fordham University. Fordham University
2. Anna Komnene. (1921). The Alexiad, Book 10. In A. C. Krey (Ed.), The First Crusade: The accounts of eyewitnesses and participants. Princeton University Press. Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University. Fordham University
3. Usama ibn Munqidh. (1929). An Arab-Syrian gentleman and warrior in the period of the Crusades: Memoirs of Usamah ibn-Munqidh (P. K. Hitti, Trans.). Columbia University Press. Internet Archive
4. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 13.4 The crusading movement. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax

A bill for 10,000 marks

In 1214, the sheriff of Shropshire, the king's official in that county, wrote a line in his accounts: "William son of William son of Alan owes 10,000 marks for holding the land which belonged to the aforementioned William, his father." In plain words, William FitzAlan had to pay the king 10,000 marks to be allowed to inherit his own father's estate. That payment is called a relief, a kind of inheritance tax that a lord's heir paid to the king.

Was that a lot? Work it out. A mark was not a coin but a unit of account worth two-thirds of a pound. So 10,000 marks was about £6,667. Under the previous king, Richard I, £100 had been recognised as a reasonable relief for a baron. Divide £6,667 by £100 and you get about 67. William's bill was roughly sixty-seven times the old rate. The same year, another baron, Geoffrey de Mandeville, promised the king 20,000 marks for the right to marry a rich heiress, the Countess of Gloucester. When he could not pay, the king took his lands.

The man sending these bills was King John of England. So here is the problem this lesson works through. A king could charge whatever he liked, take land and throw people in prison. Could anyone stop him, and how? The answer produced one of the most famous documents in the world, and following what happened to it afterwards practises the skill of change over time.

Why was John so short of money?

John did not raise money for fun. He was trapped by a chain of causes.

1. He lost Normandy. In 1204 King Philip II of France took most of the lands John's family had held in France, including Normandy. Getting them back meant paying for armies.
2. He taxed his vassals hard. One favourite was scutage, a payment a knight could make instead of serving in the king's army. John demanded it again and again. Reliefs and marriage fees like William's and Geoffrey's were more ways of squeezing his barons.
3. He quarrelled with the pope. John refused to accept Stephen Langton, the pope's choice as archbishop of Canterbury. In March 1208 Pope Innocent III placed an interdict on England: priests were forbidden to hold church services, except baptisms for babies and confessions for the dying. John seized Church lands in revenge.
4. He lost the war anyway. In 1214 John's allies were beaten at the Battle of Bouvines. All that money had bought no victory.

Notice how the causes stack up. High taxes alone might have been bearable after a victory. Defeat alone might have been forgiven by barons who had not been squeezed. Together, they made the barons furious.

The barons say no

In May 1215 a group of rebel barons met at Northampton and formally renounced their ties to John. Remember the ceremony of homage from the lesson on lords and vassals: these men were taking back their oaths. Then they marched on London, and once they held the capital, more barons came over to their side. John had to negotiate.

On 15 June 1215, in a meadow called Runnymede beside the River Thames, near Windsor, John faced about forty rebel barons and set his seal to a charter of liberties drafted partly by Archbishop Langton. A seal was a stamp pressed into wax that made a document official. The charter later became known as Magna Carta, the Great Charter.

A clause for every complaint

Most of Magna Carta's sixty-three clauses were fixes for particular grievances. Read a few of them as answers to the problems you have just met.

"Peers" means equals: a baron was to be judged by other barons, not by the king alone. "The law of the land" means the known law, not the king's wishes. Put those two phrases together and you have the idea that even the king is under the law.

So what?: Magna Carta was a list of practical fixes for the barons' complaints, but clauses 39 and 40 carried a bigger idea: the king himself must follow the law.

Reading the words for yourself

The copy of Magna Carta displayed at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. is not the 1215 charter. It is one of four surviving originals of the version issued in 1297 by King Edward I, which was entered into England's official lists of laws. By then clauses 39 and 40 had been joined into a single clause, number 29. Here it is in the National Archives' own translation.

No freeman is to be taken or imprisoned or disseised of his free tenement or of his liberties or free customs, or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go against such a man or send against him save by lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land. To no-one will we sell or deny or delay right or justice.

Magna Carta, 1297 version, clause 29. Translation published by the US National Archives. "Disseised" means thrown off one's land.

Point of view question: The charter was written by and for barons. Most people in England at the time were serfs, who were not free men at all. Whose freedom was this clause really protecting in 1215, and whose was it not? The US National Archives puts it bluntly: the interests of the common man were hardly apparent to the men who made the deal.

Ten weeks later

Magna Carta did not bring peace. Neither side trusted the other. About ten weeks after Runnymede, Pope Innocent III, now on John's side, declared the charter null and void, and England fell into civil war. The rebels even invited Louis, the son of the French king, to take the English crown. Then, on the night of 18 October 1216, John died of illness, and his son Henry III became king at the age of nine.

That is when Magna Carta was saved. The men governing for the boy king reissued the charter in 1216, without its most radical clauses, to win the rebels back. They reissued it again in 1217, and Henry III issued his own version in 1225. Edward I confirmed it in 1297. By one count, later kings confirmed it more than thirty times, and it was often read aloud at the start of meetings of Parliament.

How a barons' deal became everyone's

This is change over time at its clearest. The words barely changed. What they meant, and who they covered, changed enormously. Historians in the 1800s showed that the 1215 charter was really about the relationship between a king and his barons, not ordinary people. But later generations had turned it into a symbol of the idea that no one, not even a king, is above the law, and that symbol is what lasted. Four copies of the 1215 charter survive: two in the British Library in London, one at Lincoln Castle and one at Salisbury Cathedral. Clause 29 is still part of the law in England and in New Zealand.

Common misconceptions

• "Magna Carta gave everyone rights and democracy in 1215." It protected barons and other free men, a minority. It did not give anyone a vote, and most people were unfree serfs.
• "King John signed Magna Carta with a pen." Royal documents were made official with a wax seal. John sealed the charter; he did not sign it.
• "Magna Carta solved the quarrel straight away." The pope cancelled it after about ten weeks and civil war followed. It survived only because it was reissued after John's death.

Summing up

• King John, having lost Normandy in 1204 and quarrelled with the pope, squeezed his barons with huge payments such as William FitzAlan's 10,000 marks.
• After defeat in 1214, rebel barons renounced their oaths, took London and made John seal Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June 1215.
• Its clauses fixed specific grievances, such as reliefs and scutage, and clauses 39 and 40 said free men could be punished only by lawful judgement or the law of the land.
• The pope annulled it within weeks, but it was reissued in 1216, 1217, 1225 and 1297.
• Over centuries its meaning widened, from free men to "no man, of whatever estate or condition", and on to "due process of law" in the US Fifth Amendment.

Sources

1. The National Archives (UK). (n.d.). Magna Carta 1214-1225: Sources 1-3, inheritance and marriage payments, 1198-1214. The National Archives
2. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. (n.d.). Magna Carta translation (the 1297 version). National Archives
3. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. (n.d.). Magna Carta (featured document). National Archives
4. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School. (n.d.). Magna Carta (1215). Avalon Project

A number that could not be true

In the spring and summer of 1348, a writer named Giovanni Boccaccio watched a disease empty the city of Florence in Italy. A few years later, at the start of his book of stories, the Decameron, he wrote down what he had seen.

Between March and the following July, what with the violence of that plague and the number of sick people badly cared for or abandoned in their need because of the fear of those who were healthy, it is believed for certain that more than a hundred thousand human beings died within the walls of the city of Florence, which perhaps, before that deadly disaster came, had not been thought to hold so many.

Giovanni Boccaccio, introduction to the Decameron, written about 1349-1353. Translated by John Payne in 1886, lightly modernised.

Read the end of that sentence again. Boccaccio himself admits that Florence had perhaps never been thought to hold a hundred thousand people. So how could more than a hundred thousand have died inside its walls? Modern historians estimate that Florence had between 110,000 and 120,000 people in 1338 and about 50,000 in 1351. A terrible loss, more than half the city, but not Boccaccio's number.

That small puzzle leads into the two big arguments about the Black Death, the pandemic that swept across Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe from 1346 to 1353. How many people did it kill? And what exactly was it? Answering them means practising a kind of sourcing that applies to numbers: before you believe a figure, ask who produced it, how they could have known, and what else it can be checked against.

What the disease did

The Black Death was plague, a disease caused by a bacterium, a tiny living germ. It lived mostly in rodents such as rats, and fleas carried it from animal to animal and from animals to people. OpenStax describes its main forms. In bubonic plague, the most common, the victim's lymph nodes swelled into painful lumps called buboes, and between 30 and 80 percent of victims died. In pneumonic plague the lungs were infected and the disease spread from person to person by coughing; almost everyone who caught it died. The name Black Death, given later, came from the blackened patches the disease left on the skin.

How it travelled

Picture the route on a map. Genetic evidence traces this strain of plague back to the Tian Shan mountains of Central Asia, in today's Kyrgyzstan. From there it moved west along the trade routes of the Mongol world, through Mongol-ruled cities on the Volga River such as Astrakhan and Sarai, where bales of fur crawling with fleas were unloaded. By 1346 it had reached Caffa, a trading city on the Crimean Peninsula by the Black Sea, where Genoese merchants from Italy were being besieged by a Mongol army. An Italian notary, Gabriele de Mussis, later wrote that the Mongols hurled plague-ridden corpses over the walls, although OpenStax notes that the reliability of his story is hard to establish. Ships then carried the disease across the Black Sea and into the Mediterranean, and in 1347 and 1348 it spread into Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

It was not only a European disaster. The Mamluk Sultanate, which ruled Egypt and Syria from Cairo, lost roughly a third of its people. In Aleppo, the historian and poet Ibn al-Wardi wrote about the plague in Syria before he himself died in 1349.

Remember: The Black Death was plague carried by fleas along the trade routes of the Mongol world, reaching Europe, North Africa and the Middle East in 1347-1348.

Argument one: how many died?

For centuries the usual answer was "a third". The French chronicler Jean Froissart wrote that "a third of the world died". But historians suspect that his neat fraction was borrowed from the Bible's Book of Revelation, which describes a third of humankind being killed, rather than counted. Modern estimates for Europe range from about 30 percent to about 60 percent of the population, or somewhere between 25 and 50 million people. The Norwegian historian Ole Benedictow argues for about 60 percent across Europe as a whole.

Why such a wide range? Because nobody took a census. England, for example, made no full count of its people between the Domesday survey of 1086 and a poll tax, a tax on each person, in 1377, so historians' estimates of England's population before the plague differ by more than double. Instead they work from smaller records. Churches kept track of their priests, so historians can count how many parishes needed a new priest in 1349 and use that as a sample. Then they argue about whether priests died at the same rate as everyone else. Here is what some of the better-recorded places suggest.

Notice that the Florence figure covers thirteen years, not just 1348. Some people fled, and the plague came back. A careful reader asks exactly what each number measures.

Remember: Death tolls for the Black Death are estimates built from partial records, which is why they range from about 30 to 60 percent of Europe's people; even the famous "one third" may come from the Bible rather than a count.

Argument two: what was it?

You might think the cause was never in doubt. It was. Researchers had no reliable statistics, and some argued that the disease spread too fast and too widely to be rat-borne plague, suggesting other diseases instead. The argument ran for decades because the written sources could not settle it: people in the 1340s did not know about germs, and their descriptions of symptoms could fit more than one illness.

What settled it was a completely new kind of evidence. Scientists extracted DNA from the teeth of skeletons buried in plague pits, mass graves dug during the outbreak. In 2010 a team led by Stephanie Haensch reported finding the DNA of Yersinia pestis, the plague bacterium, in victims from mass graves in several countries, and wrote that their data "ends the debate". In 2011 studies of victims from the East Smithfield cemetery in London confirmed it and rebuilt the germ's genetic code. It was the same kind of germ that had caused the Plague of Justinian eight hundred years earlier.

Not everything is settled. In 2018 researchers suggested that human fleas and body lice, rather than rats, did much of the spreading from person to person, because that fits the pattern of deaths better. Historians and scientists are still testing that idea. That is how evidence works: one question gets answered and a sharper one takes its place.

Remember: Ancient DNA from plague pits proved the cause was Yersinia pestis, but how it spread so fast is still being investigated.

A law that admits the loss

Some of the best evidence for the scale of the disaster comes from people who were not trying to describe it at all. In June 1349, with the plague still raging, King Edward III of England issued an order to his sheriffs.

Because a great part of the people, and especially of workmen and servants, lately died of the pestilence, many, seeing the needs of their masters and the great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they may receive excessive wages, and some would rather beg in idleness than work for their living.

The Ordinance of Labourers, England, 1349. From an old English translation, lightly modernised.

Who, when and why. This is a law, made by the king after consulting bishops and nobles, the great landowners. It ordered every able-bodied man and woman under sixty, "free or bond", who was not already working, to serve anyone who needed them, for the wages paid before the plague. It was an attempt to freeze wages.

Point of view question: The law calls workers' demands "excessive" and calls people who would not work on the old terms idle. How might a ploughman who had just survived the plague have described the same situation?

The ordinance tells you something its writers did not mean to reveal: so many workers had died that the survivors could bargain. OpenStax explains that peasants began to leave the estates where their families had lived for generations, because landlords elsewhere offered better terms, and many moved to towns for wages. The bonds of serfdom that you studied earlier began to break down across western Europe. Lords and kings fought back with laws like this one, and in England the anger boiled over in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

Blame and fear

Frightened people looked for someone to blame. Across Europe, Jews were falsely accused of causing the plague by poisoning wells. There was no truth in it, but the accusation led to massacres. In Strasbourg, on 14 February 1349, a mob murdered the city's Jewish community, burning many of them. A chronicler of the time noted that the pope protected the Jews in Avignon, where he lived. It is a reminder that a disaster's worst effects can come from what people do to each other.

Common misconceptions

• "The Black Death only hit Europe." It began in Central Asia and struck the Middle East and North Africa too: the Mamluk lands of Egypt and Syria lost about a third of their people.
• "Everyone agrees that exactly one third of Europe died." Modern estimates range from about 30 to 60 percent, and the old "one third" may have come from the Book of Revelation rather than from a count.
• "Doctors in bird-beaked masks treated Black Death victims." There is no evidence of the beaked costume during the Black Death. It first appeared in the 1600s, three centuries later.

What to remember

• The Black Death, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, spread from Central Asia along Mongol trade routes and reached Europe, North Africa and the Middle East in 1347-1348.
• Boccaccio's figure of 100,000 dead in Florence was more than the city's whole population; modern estimates suggest Florence fell from about 115,000 to 50,000.
• Estimates for Europe range from about 30 to 60 percent, built from partial records such as the deaths of priests, because there was no census.
• Ancient DNA from plague pits settled the cause in 2010 and 2011; how it spread so fast is still debated.
• The Ordinance of Labourers of 1349 shows that the survivors could demand higher wages, and serfdom began to weaken; Jews were falsely blamed and massacred.

Sources

1. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 16.3 The Black Death from east to west. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
2. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 16.4 The long-term effects of global transformation. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
3. Boccaccio, G. (1886). The Decameron (J. Payne, Trans.), introduction to the first day. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg
4. Internet History Sourcebooks Project. (n.d.). Ordinance of Laborers, 1349. Fordham University. Fordham University
5. Haensch, S., Bianucci, R., Signoli, M., et al. (2010). Distinct clones of Yersinia pestis caused the Black Death. PLOS Pathogens, 6(10), e1001134. PLOS Pathogens

A king on a map

In the late 1370s, on the island of Majorca in the Mediterranean, a Jewish mapmaker named Cresques Abraham painted one of the most beautiful maps of the Middle Ages, now called the Catalan Atlas and usually dated 1375. In the middle of Africa, south of the desert, he painted a king. The king sits on a throne wearing a gold crown and holding a gold sceptre. In his other hand he holds up a large gold nugget, as if showing it to the reader. The words beside him say that this lord is called "Musse Melly", that he rules the land of the black people, and that he is the richest and noblest king of all these lands "due to the abundance of gold that is extracted from his lands".

"Musse Melly" is Mansa Musa, king of Mali, who had died about forty years before the map was made. So how did a mapmaker on a Spanish island know about a king who lived on the other side of the Sahara Desert? To answer that, you have to follow the gold. And as you do, you will practise point of view in a particular way: noticing the difference between outsiders who wrote about West Africa and West Africans who remembered their own past.

Gold from the south, salt from the north

Picture a map of West Africa. Across the top lies the Sahara, the largest hot desert in the world. Along its southern edge runs a belt of dry grassland called the Sahel, from an Arabic word meaning "shore": to the camel caravans that crossed the desert, it was the far coast of a sea of sand. South of the Sahel, the land grows greener, and near the upper Senegal River lay goldfields such as Bambuk.

Now put two goods on the map. Gold was dug in the south. Salt, which everyone needs in their food, was dug from the desert itself, at places like Taghaza, deep in the Sahara, where the salt lay in great slabs and even the houses were built of salt. The people who lived in the Sahel stood in the middle. They passed salt south to the gold producers and passed gold north to the caravans heading for North Africa, taking a share at every step. Traders also carried copper and cloth, and enslaved captives were bought and sold along the same routes. The camel, which can travel for days without water, made the whole trade possible.

In short: The Sahel's kingdoms grew rich by standing between the salt of the Sahara and the gold of the south and controlling the caravan trade that joined them.

Ghana, the land of gold

The first great empire to grow rich this way was Ghana, founded by the Soninke people and lasting from roughly 300 to the 1200s. Do not confuse it with the modern country of Ghana, far to the south-east on the coast. The medieval empire lay in parts of today's Mauritania and Mali. The word ghana was a title, meaning a war chief, given to its kings. When the British colony of the Gold Coast won its independence in 1957, its leader, Kwame Nkrumah, renamed it Ghana in honour of the old empire.

Ghana's kings did not own the goldfields, which lay beyond their borders. But they controlled the trade, and OpenStax notes that they claimed every gold nugget weighing more than about an ounce, so that gold dust flowed freely while the big pieces went to the king. Their fame spread across the Islamic world. In 1067-1068, a geographer named al-Bakri described the capital, Koumbi Saleh. It was really two towns about six miles apart: one for Muslim merchants, with twelve mosques, and one for the king, who followed the traditional religion of his people but chose Muslims as his interpreters, treasurer and most of his ministers. Here is a point to hold on to: al-Bakri lived in Cordoba and Almeria in Spain and never went to Ghana. He collected his information from merchants and visitors.

Sundiata and the griots

Ghana weakened in the 1100s, and a new power rose. In 1235 a prince named Sundiata Keita defeated the rival kingdom of Sosso, and five years later he captured Koumbi Saleh. He persuaded the other Malinke kings to give up their title of mansa, "ruler", so that he alone held it. That was the beginning of the Mali Empire, larger and richer than Ghana had been.

How do we know about Sundiata? Not mainly from writing. His story has been told for generations by griots, or jeliw, West African historians, storytellers and musicians who keep the memory of families and kings alive through oral tradition, history passed on by word of mouth. The Epic of Sundiata has no single official version, but its main events stay the same from teller to teller. Oral tradition is a real source, with its own strengths and weaknesses, just like a written chronicle.

Mansa Musa's journey, 1324

Mansa Musa ruled Mali in the early 1300s and died around 1337. He was a Muslim, and in 1324 he made the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that you met as one of the Five Pillars of Islam. His route took him across the Sahara to Cairo, the capital of the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, and on to Arabia. Later accounts say his caravan included sixty thousand soldiers, five hundred captives and a hundred camel-loads of gold. Treat those numbers with the care you learned in the lesson on the Black Death: they are enormous, and they were written down by people who were not counting.

What happened in Cairo was remembered for years. The sultan received Musa as a fellow Muslim ruler, and Musa spent and gave away so much gold that, according to the accounts, the value of gold in Cairo fell and did not recover for twelve years. A great deal of what we know comes from al-Umari, a Syrian scholar working for the Mamluk government in Cairo, who wrote a few years after the visit. His information came from Cairo officials, such as Ibn Amir Hajib, who had got to know Musa during his stay. So even this famous story is second-hand.

Musa came home with more than memories. He brought scholars and builders from the Islamic world, among them the Andalusian poet and architect Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, and he helped make the trading town of Timbuktu a centre of Islamic learning, with mosques and schools. You will visit Timbuktu in the next lesson. And the story of the golden pilgrim travelled north with the caravans, which is how it reached the mapmakers of Majorca.

In short: Mansa Musa's pilgrimage of 1324 made Mali famous across the Islamic world and Europe, but most of the story reached us through writers who heard it from others.

A traveller's verdict: Ibn Battuta in Mali

In February 1352, the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta set out across the Sahara with a caravan. After twenty-five days he reached Taghaza, where enslaved workers cut the salt and even the buildings were made of salt slabs. He went on to Mali, which was then ruled by Mansa Musa's brother, Mansa Sulayman. Ibn Battuta had already travelled through much of Asia, and he did not impress easily. Here is his verdict.

[The people of Mali] possess some admirable qualities. They are seldom unjust, and have a greater abhorrence of injustice than any other people. Their sultan shows no mercy to anyone who is guilty of the least act of it. There is complete security in their country. Neither traveller nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence.

Ibn Battuta, Travels, describing his visit of 1352-1353. Translated by H. A. R. Gibb in 1929. The words in brackets replace the term used in the 1929 translation.

That sounds like high praise, and it is. But read the rest of his account and you find a more complicated man. When Mansa Sulayman's welcome gift arrived, Ibn Battuta stood up expecting robes of honour and money. It turned out to be three cakes of bread, a piece of beef fried in oil and a bowl of sour curds. He burst out laughing and called it foolish to make so much fuss over so small a thing. Earlier, in the town of Walata, he was served a meal of millet with honey and milk in a half calabash, a bowl made from a gourd, and his companions told him that for the people there it was the highest form of hospitality. Ibn Battuta decided they had no manners.

Point of view question: Ibn Battuta judged Mali's customs by the customs of the courts he knew in Morocco and Asia. What might the sultan's gift of food, or the meal in Walata, have meant to the people who offered them, and what does his reaction tell you about him?

Whose history is it?

Read down the middle column. Almost all the written sources come from outsiders, and most of them from people who never saw Mali at all. The griots are insiders, and they remember things differently. Modern historians point out that Mansa Musa is less celebrated in Mande oral tradition than in Arabic writing, where he dazzled Cairo. Some griots' versions even criticise him for straying from tradition. His reign is usually called Mali's golden age, but historians suggest that this may be partly because it is the reign best recorded in Arabic sources, not necessarily because he was Mali's greatest king. Who kept the record shapes who looks great.

Common misconceptions

• "Africa had no history before Europeans arrived." Arabic writers described Ghana's gold and its cities from the 900s onward, Mansa Musa's visit to Cairo in 1324 was remembered across the Islamic world, and West Africans kept their own history alive through griots.
• "Mansa Musa was the richest person who ever lived." The Catalan Atlas calls him the richest king of that region. The claim that he was the richest person in all of history is a modern invention that no medieval source makes.
• "The empire of Ghana was in today's Ghana." Medieval Ghana lay far to the north-west, in parts of today's Mauritania and Mali. The modern country borrowed the famous name in 1957.

Recap

• The kingdoms of the Sahel grew rich by linking the salt of the Sahara with the gold of the south, using camel caravans.
• Ghana, the empire of the Soninke, controlled the gold trade from Koumbi Saleh; al-Bakri described it in 1067-1068 from merchants' reports.
• Sundiata Keita founded the Mali Empire after 1235; griots have kept his story alive in oral tradition.
• Mansa Musa's pilgrimage of 1324 spread his fame so widely that gold lost value in Cairo and his image appeared on a map made in Majorca.
• Ibn Battuta praised Mali's safety and justice but mocked customs he did not understand; outsiders and insiders tell different stories.

Sources

1. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 15.2 Medieval sub-Saharan Africa. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
2. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 3.1 The roots of African trade. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax
3. Ibn Battuta. (1929). Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325-1354 (H. A. R. Gibb, Trans. and Ed.). Broadway House. Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University. Fordham University
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Mansa Musa: Historical sources and legacy. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

A table of stars in a family library

In a private library in Timbuktu, in today's Mali, there is a handwritten page covered in neat columns of numbers. It is a table for tracking the movements of the stars and planets, copied from the work of Ibn Yunus, an astronomer who worked in Cairo around the year 1000. Someone carried that knowledge across the Sahara, and someone in Timbuktu copied it out by hand and kept it. The page belongs to the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library, one of many family collections in the city.

Timbuktu is not a big place. It sits at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, and in English its name has even been used to mean "the middle of nowhere". Yet its families have kept hundreds of thousands of handwritten books, on astronomy, medicine, law, religion, poetry and history. So this lesson starts with a problem. How did a town on the edge of the desert become a city of books, and how did those books survive for centuries? Working it out is practice in cause and effect: finding the several causes that worked together, and following their effects over time.

Where the river meets the sand

Picture the Niger River on a map. It rises in the hills of Guinea, near the Atlantic, and flows north-east into the Sahel. Then, just where it reaches the edge of the Sahara, it makes a great bend and turns south-east towards the ocean. Timbuktu sits close to the top of that bend. Boats could carry grain, gold and other goods up the river from the south. Camel caravans arrived from the north with salt, cloth and books. Timbuktu was the place where the two kinds of travel met.

You saw in the last lesson that Mansa Musa of Mali came back from his pilgrimage in 1324 with scholars and builders. The Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu, finished in 1327, is linked to his building projects. Mosques in the Islamic world were also places of teaching, and around mosques such as Djinguereber and the Sankore mosque, teachers gathered students, who in turn needed books.

Songhai: from Gao to an empire

Mali's power did not last. In the 1430s its rulers pulled out of the trading city of Gao, farther down the Niger, and a leader of the Songhai people there, Sunni Ali, began building an empire of his own. He was a brilliant and ruthless general. In 1468 he took Timbuktu, drove out its governor, killed many of its scholars and forced others into exile. A Timbuktu chronicler later wrote that "he perpetuated terrible wickedness in the city, putting it to flame, sacking it, and killing large numbers of people". Then Sunni Ali besieged Djenne, a trading city surrounded by water when the river flooded, and took it in 1473 after a seven-month siege. There, by contrast, he treated the Muslim community with respect.

Point of view question: The chroniclers of Timbuktu were scholars, and Sunni Ali had killed and exiled their teachers. How might that have shaped the way they remembered him?

When Sunni Ali died in 1492, his son reigned for less than a year. In April 1493 one of Sunni Ali's generals, Muhammad Ture, defeated him in battle and took the throne as Askia Muhammad, later called Askia the Great. He built his authority on Islam. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca, where, OpenStax says, he gave some 100,000 gold pieces to charity, and on the way he persuaded the caliph in Cairo to recognise him as caliph of the Sudan, the lands south of the Sahara. He did not force his subjects to become Muslims, and most kept their own religions. Under Askia Muhammad, the Songhai Empire became the largest state in West Africa's history, stretching from the Atlantic coast of Senegal and Gambia to Kano in today's Nigeria and north to the salt mines of Taghaza.

Why this matters: Songhai rose on the same Niger trade that had enriched Mali, and its rulers' support for Islam and its scholars helped Timbuktu recover from Sunni Ali's attack and flourish.

What Leo Africanus saw

Around 1510, a young diplomat from Fez in Morocco visited Timbuktu with his uncle. His name was al-Hasan al-Wazzan. A few years later his life took an extraordinary turn. Christian pirates captured him at sea and presented him to Pope Leo X in Rome. He was freed, baptised in 1520 and took a new name, and in 1526, in Italy, he finished a book describing Africa for European readers. He is remembered as Leo Africanus. Here is part of what he wrote about Timbuktu, in the English translation made by John Pory in 1600.

Here are great store of doctors, judges, priests, and other learned men, that are bountifully maintained at the king's cost and charges. And hither are brought divers manuscripts or written books out of Barbary, which are sold for more money than any other merchandise. The coin of Tombuto is of gold without any stamp or inscription.

Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa, written 1526, translated by John Pory in 1600, spelling modernised. "Barbary" meant North Africa; "Tombuto" is Timbuktu.

Who, when and why. Leo saw Timbuktu as a young man and wrote about it some fifteen years later, far away in Italy, for readers who had never been to Africa. Some details may have blurred. But his main point, that the city was full of paid scholars and that books were among the most valuable goods in its market, fits everything else we know, including the huge number of manuscripts that survive.

Working the problem: why a city of books?

Scholars in Timbuktu did not only collect other people's books. They wrote their own. Around 1655 a Timbuktu chronicler named al-Sa'di wrote the Tarikh al-Sudan, the "History of the Sudan", in Arabic. It is the single most important source for the history of Songhai, and together with a second chronicle it is known as the Timbuktu Chronicles. Here is West African history written by West Africans, alongside the oral history of the griots.

Why this matters: Timbuktu became a city of books because trade, faith, paid scholars, a book market and family libraries all reinforced each other; take away any one and the story changes.

1591: guns against horsemen

After Askia Muhammad, Songhai was weakened by civil wars between his sons and grandsons. To the north, the Saadi sultan of Morocco, Ahmad al-Mansur, badly needed money, and he wanted the gold and salt trade for himself. In 1591 his army crossed the Sahara. It was far smaller than Songhai's, but it carried guns, ammunition and cannon, some supplied by Queen Elizabeth I of England, who hoped Morocco would be an ally against Spain. Many of its soldiers were Muslims who had fled from Spain, and its commander, Judar Pasha, was himself an enslaved Spaniard. At the Battle of Tondibi, the guns beat the Songhai army. The invaders then sacked Djenne, Gao and Timbuktu, and within a decade the empire had broken apart.

The scholars suffered too. Ahmad Baba, the most famous scholar of Timbuktu, was deported to Morocco in 1594, accused of stirring up rebellion. He kept writing there, and he was allowed to return home only after al-Mansur died, reaching Timbuktu on 22 April 1608.

How the books survived

Timbuktu's power faded, but its books did not vanish, because they were scattered through family libraries and passed down from parents to children. They survived another test in our own century. In 2012 armed groups occupied Timbuktu during a war in Mali, and when they retreated in 2013, some manuscripts were burned. In all, 4,203 were burned or stolen. But librarians led by Abdel Kader Haidara, whose family had kept one of the city's great libraries for generations, working with the book-preservation expert Stephanie Diakite, secretly moved about 350,000 manuscripts south to the capital, Bamako, in trunks and boxes. In 2022 about 300,000 of them were still there. Most have never been fully studied. The history they contain is still waiting to be read.

Common misconceptions

• "Timbuktu is an imaginary place that just means the middle of nowhere." It is a real city on the Niger River in Mali, and for centuries it was one of the great centres of learning in Africa.
• "African history was only ever oral; Africans did not write books." Griots kept oral history, but Timbuktu's scholars also wrote in Arabic, including their own histories such as the Tarikh al-Sudan of about 1655.
• "Songhai fell because it was backward." Songhai was the largest state in West Africa's history. It fell after civil wars weakened it and an invading army arrived with guns and cannon.

The takeaway

• Timbuktu grew where Niger River boats met Saharan caravans; Mansa Musa's building projects, such as the Djinguereber Mosque of 1327, made it a centre of learning.
• Sunni Ali built the Songhai Empire, taking Timbuktu in 1468 and Djenne in 1473; Timbuktu's scholars remembered him as a tyrant.
• Askia Muhammad, from 1493, based his rule on Islam, supported scholars and made Songhai the largest state in West African history.
• Leo Africanus reported paid scholars and a valuable book trade; Timbuktu's own chroniclers wrote histories such as the Tarikh al-Sudan.
• Morocco's guns defeated Songhai at Tondibi in 1591, but family libraries preserved the manuscripts, about 350,000 of which were rescued in 2012-2013.

Sources

1. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 3.2 The Songhai Empire. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax
2. Leo Africanus. (1896). The history and description of Africa (J. Pory, Trans., 1600; R. Brown, Ed.), Vol. 3. Hakluyt Society. Original work written 1526. Internet Archive
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Timbuktu manuscripts. Wikipedia. Wikipedia
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Tarikh al-Sudan. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

A guess made in 1871

In 1867 a German-American hunter named Adam Render, who lived among the local people of southern Africa, came across a hill crowned with stone walls and, in the valley below, a huge oval enclosure of granite. In 1871 he showed the ruins to a German explorer and geographer, Karl Mauch. Mauch looked at the walls and immediately decided that Africans could not have built them. He guessed that they copied the palace of the Queen of Sheba, a queen in the Bible, and he claimed that a wooden beam over a doorway must be cedar wood from Lebanon, carried there by Phoenician traders thousands of years earlier.

That is the plausible wrong answer this lesson will debug. It was not a student's mistake. It was repeated by educated Europeans and by a whole colonial government for nearly a hundred years. Your job is to find exactly where the reasoning broke, one step at a time, and then to see what the evidence really shows. This is practice in testing a claim against the evidence, and in asking whose point of view kept a wrong answer alive.

What the ruins actually are

Great Zimbabwe stands in the south-eastern hills of the modern country of Zimbabwe, near the town of Masvingo, on the high plateau between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. People settled there from around the year 1000. Major building began in the 1000s and went on until the 1400s, and from the 1200s it was the capital of a kingdom. It is the largest stone structure built in southern Africa before colonial times.

The site has three main parts. The Hill Complex, the oldest, was lived in from the 1000s to the 1200s. The Great Enclosure, built in the 1200s and 1300s, has walls up to 11 metres high and about 250 metres long. They are dry-stone walls, made of granite blocks fitted together without any mortar, the cement-like paste usually used to hold stones together. Inside stands a solid conical tower 5.5 metres across. The Valley Complex was lived in from the 1300s to the 1500s. Older estimates suggested up to 18,000 people lived there at its peak; a more recent study suggests it probably never had more than 10,000.

Archaeologists found eight birds carved from soapstone, each set on top of a stone pillar about as tall as a person. They also found pottery, iron gongs, worked ivory, copper, gold beads and bracelets, and objects from far away: Chinese porcelain from the 1300s and 1400s, glass beads, Persian pottery and coins from Arabia. And Great Zimbabwe was not alone. More than 400 smaller stone sites, also called zimbabwes, have been found across southern Africa. The name Zimbabwe is Shona, the language of the people who live there today. It was first written down in 1531 by a Portuguese captain, and it probably comes from dzimba-dze-mabwe, "large houses of stone".

Tracing the bug, step by step

Now go back to Mauch's answer and test each step of his reasoning against the evidence.

1. The starting assumption. Mauch began by ruling out African builders before he had examined anything. That was not a conclusion from evidence. It was a prejudice, a judgement made in advance, and it decided the answer before the question was asked. Bug found.
2. The cedar beam. Mauch had no way to test what wood the beam was made of, or how old it was. He chose the explanation that fitted his story. A guess cannot prove anything, and it certainly cannot overturn everything else on the site.
3. The foreign objects. Later believers in outside builders pointed to the Chinese porcelain and Persian pottery. But trade goods show who a place traded with, not who built it. A house full of shoes made in another country was still built by its own neighbours. The porcelain dates from the 1300s and 1400s, the time when the African city was at its height, which is exactly what you would expect if its rulers were buying luxuries from far away.
4. The excavations. In 1905-1906 the archaeologist David Randall-MacIver dug at the site and found that its objects were of local Bantu origin and its buildings medieval, not ancient. He concluded that the ancestors of the Shona people had built it. In 1929 Gertrude Caton-Thompson reached the same conclusion. By the 1950s it was the agreed view of archaeologists.

Here is a twist worth noticing. Even Caton-Thompson, who got the builders right, described the site as the "product of an infantile mind", a childish mind. Prejudice could survive even inside a correct answer. Debugging a bad idea often takes more than one fix.

The point: The claim that outsiders built Great Zimbabwe failed because it started from prejudice, leaned on an untested guess and misread trade goods as evidence of builders; excavation showed the builders were ancestors of the Shona.

Why the wrong answer lasted

If the evidence was clear by the 1950s, why did the wrong answer last into the 1970s? Ask whose interests it served. When white settlers backed by Cecil Rhodes took over the region in the 1890s, in the colony soon named Rhodesia after him, the ruins were presented as a sign of the riches waiting for its new masters. In the 1960s and 1970s, the white-minority government of Rhodesia made it the official line that the structures were not built by black Africans. It pressured archaeologists to stay quiet, because admitting the truth would have undercut its claim to be bringing civilisation to Africans who supposedly had none. The archaeologist Paul Sinclair, who worked at the site in the 1970s, later said he had been warned to be extremely careful about what he told the press about who had built it.

When the country won independence in 1980, it took its new name from the ruins: Zimbabwe. The soapstone Zimbabwe Bird appears on its flag. A monument that a government once tried to take away from its builders became the symbol of their nation.

The coast: Kilwa and the Swahili city-states

Where did Great Zimbabwe's gold go, and where did the Chinese porcelain come from? The answer lies about 400 kilometres to the east, at the port of Sofala on the Indian Ocean, and in the trading cities strung out along the coast to its north. From Mogadishu in today's Somalia south to Sofala in today's Mozambique, a chain of trading cities grew up: Mogadishu, Barawa, Mombasa, Malindi, Pemba, Zanzibar, Kilwa and Sofala. Many stood on islands, which made them easy to defend and ideal for ships.

What made the trade possible was the wind. The monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean change direction with the seasons, so a ship could sail from Arabia or India to Africa in one season and home again in another. The ships were dhows, built of planks sewn together with coconut fibre and driven by triangular lateen sails. From the 700s, Arab Muslim merchants settled on the coast and married into the African Bantu-speaking families who lived there; in the 1100s Persians settled too. The people of the coast came to speak Swahili, which combined the grammar of Bantu languages with a vocabulary of Bantu and Arabic words, so that traders from many peoples could understand each other.

Kilwa rose to the top. In the 1180s its ruler took control of Sofala, the port where gold from the inland kingdoms arrived. Here is how the coast looked to Ibn Battuta, the traveller you met in Mali, when he sailed south from Mogadishu in 1331.

I was told by a merchant that the town of Sufala lies a fortnight's journey from Kulwa, and that gold dust is brought to Sufala from Yufi in the country of the Limis, which is a month's journey distant from it. Kulwa is a very fine and substantially built town, and all its buildings are of wood.

Ibn Battuta, Travels, describing his voyage of 1331. Translated by H. A. R. Gibb in 1929. Kulwa is Kilwa; Sufala is Sofala.

Who, when and why. Ibn Battuta dictated his travels about twenty-five years after this voyage. Notice two things. First, the gold: he heard that it came to Sofala from a month's journey inland, which is exactly the direction of the kingdoms of the Zimbabwe plateau. Second, the buildings. In this translation he says they are all of wood. Yet archaeologists at Kilwa have found a Great Mosque whose oldest hall, built between about 1131 and 1170, has walls of square blocks of coral limestone, and a great stone palace called Husuni Kubwa. The mosque's flat roof does rest on columns cut from tree trunks, and ordinary houses may well have been wooden, but the stone buildings are still standing.

Point of view question: Ibn Battuta was a visitor who stayed only a short time and remembered it years later. Which do you trust more on what Kilwa was built of: his sentence or the ruins? What might explain the difference?

Goods on the move

There was a darker trade too. Enslaved people, captured in wars in the interior, were marched to the coast and sold, most of them to buyers in Arabia and the Middle East. The wealth of the coast rested partly on that trade, and it would grow in later centuries.

The point: Great Zimbabwe and the Swahili coast were two ends of one system: inland kingdoms mined gold, coastal cities such as Kilwa shipped it on the monsoon winds, and luxuries from China, India and Persia flowed back.

Common misconceptions

• "Africa had no history, or no great buildings, before Europeans arrived." Great Zimbabwe's walls were rising in the 1200s, Kilwa's coral-stone mosque dates from the 1100s, and both were part of trade networks reaching China.
• "If foreign objects are found at a site, foreigners must have built it." Imported goods show trade. Great Zimbabwe's Chinese porcelain shows that its rulers bought luxuries, not that Chinese people built its walls.
• "The people of the Swahili coast were Arabs." The coast's people were mostly African, with Arab and Persian settlers who married into local families. Swahili is a Bantu language with many Arabic words.

Where this leaves us

• Great Zimbabwe was built by ancestors of the Shona between the 1000s and the 1400s, with dry-stone walls up to 11 metres high.
• Karl Mauch's claim of foreign builders began with prejudice and an untested guess; excavations from 1905 onward showed African builders.
• The wrong answer lasted because it served colonial rule; Rhodesia's government censored archaeologists, and in 1980 the free country took the name Zimbabwe.
• Swahili city-states such as Kilwa grew rich on monsoon trade, shipping inland gold and ivory in exchange for Asian porcelain, silk and beads.
• Ibn Battuta's description of Kilwa can be tested against the coral-stone ruins, which show that a traveller's words must be checked.

Sources

1. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 3.3 The Swahili coast. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax
2. Ibn Battuta. (1929). Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325-1354 (H. A. R. Gibb, Trans. and Ed.). Broadway House. Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University. Fordham University
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Great Zimbabwe: History of research and origins of the ruins. Wikipedia. Wikipedia
4. Caton-Thompson, G. (1931). The Zimbabwe culture: Ruins and reactions. Clarendon Press.
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Kilwa Kisiwani: Great Mosque. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

A roll of paper behind a plastered wall

On 25 June 1900, a Daoist monk named Wang Yuanlu was caring for the Mogao Caves, hundreds of Buddhist temples cut into a cliff near the desert town of Dunhuang in north-western China. Behind the plaster of one corridor he found a hidden room. It had been walled up early in the 1000s, and it held an estimated 50,000 old documents. In 1907 Wang sold many of them to Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born British archaeologist, someone who studies the past through the things people left behind. That is why the most famous object from the hidden room is now in the British Library in London.

It is a roll of paper about five metres long, made of seven sheets pasted end to end. The first, shorter sheet is a picture of the Buddha with his follower Subhuti. The other six carry the words of a Buddhist holy book, the Diamond Sutra. A sutra is a Buddhist scripture, a text believed to record the Buddha's teaching. Not one character on the roll was written by hand. Every one was printed. And at the very end, printed as part of the text, is this line.

Printed on May 11, 868, by Wang Chieh, for free general distribution, in order in deep reverence to perpetuate the memory of his parents.

The closing line of the Diamond Sutra, 868, as translated by Thomas Francis Carter in 1925. Wang Chieh is an older English spelling of Wang Jie.

Who, when and why. Nothing else is known about Wang Jie. His one line gives us a date, a name and a reason. Buddhists believed that copying a holy text and spreading it earned merit, a kind of spiritual credit, and Wang Jie offered that merit in honour of his parents. Printing let him make as many copies as he could give away, instead of the single copy a scribe could make by hand. That makes his roll the oldest surviving printed book that carries its own date. Older scraps of printing exist, but none of them says when it was made.

Point of view question: Wang Jie printed his book "for free general distribution". What does that phrase suggest about why religious believers were among the first people to use printing? What would someone printing books to sell have wanted that Wang Jie did not?

Wang Jie lived under the Tang dynasty. A dynasty is a family that rules a country generation after generation, and Chinese history is usually told dynasty by dynasty. The Tang ruled from 618 to 907. After half a century of rival kingdoms, the Song dynasty ruled from 960 to 1279. This lesson is built on comparison: setting two things side by side to see what they share and where they differ. When the two things are two periods of the same country, a comparison also shows you what changed and what stayed the same.

The whole comparison in one table

Read the table through once now. The sections after it explain each row, and at the end of the lesson you will come back and read it again.

Two capitals, two ways to grow rich

The Tang capital, Chang'an, stood where the city of Xi'an stands today. Chinese records from about 750 called it a "million-man city", and modern historians estimate that 800,000 to 1,000,000 people lived inside its walls. It was the eastern end of the Silk Roads, and travellers leaving it for the west soon faced the Gobi, the largest desert in Asia. The Tang grew rich partly by conquest. Their armies pushed deep into Central Asia until 751, when an Abbasid army defeated them at the Battle of Talas, the battle you met in the lesson on Baghdad. Four years later a general named An Lushan rebelled. The An Lushan rebellion of 755-763 wrecked the empire's prosperity, and the dynasty limped on, weaker and weaker, until 907.

The Song chose a different road. OpenStax puts it simply: where the Tang had tried to grow rich by winning territory, the Song relied on growth at home. Farmers planted new kinds of rice that ripened fast enough to give two harvests a year. Chain-driven pumps lifted water up hillsides, so slopes that had been useless became terraced fields. More food fed more people. The first complete Song census, in the early 1000s, counted about 55 million people; a century later there were around 120 million. At least three Song cities had more than a million people, at a time when no city in western Europe came anywhere near that size.

Industry grew too. Song iron production rose from about 65 million pounds a year around 1000 to more than 250 million pounds by 1100. In 1024 the government began issuing the first official paper money, the jiaozi, which had started as notes printed by merchants in the south-west. Carrying paper was far easier than carrying strings of heavy copper coins.

The Song were weaker at war. In 1004 they agreed to pay a northern neighbour, the Liao, 200,000 bolts of silk and 130,000 ounces of silver every year to keep the peace. Song engineers were the first to make real weapons from gunpowder, including flamethrowers, early guns and bombs, and a military handbook finished in 1044, the Wujing Zongyao, contains the oldest written formulas for gunpowder. Even so, in 1127 the Jurchen people of the north captured the capital, Kaifeng, along with the retired emperor and the emperor. A surviving prince rebuilt the dynasty in the south, with its capital at Hangzhou. This Southern Song lasted until the Mongols conquered it in the 1270s, as you will see in the next module.

Key idea: The Tang grew powerful by conquest and were broken by rebellion; the Song grew rich at home, through new rice, cities, industry and paper money, while staying weak at war.

Printing: from carved blocks to baked clay

Wang Jie's Diamond Sutra was made by woodblock printing. Here is how a Tang printer made one page.

1. A scribe wrote the page neatly on thin paper.
2. The paper was pasted face down on a smooth block of wood, so the characters showed through backwards.
3. A carver cut away all the wood around the characters, leaving them standing up in reverse.
4. The printer brushed ink over the raised characters, laid a sheet of paper on top and rubbed the back with a dry brush.
5. The paper was peeled off with the page printed the right way round. The printer could repeat the last two steps hundreds of times.

Each of the Diamond Sutra's big sheets was about two and a half feet long, so the blocks were large and the carvers skilled. In 953, seven years before the Song began, the government finished printing the Confucian classics, the ancient books of Confucian teaching that every official was expected to know. Under the Song, printing spread fast. The imperial libraries held 13,000 juan, or scroll-chapters, when the dynasty began, and 73,877 by 1127. Printed books were far cheaper than copies made by hand, and more families could afford to educate their sons.

Then, in the 1040s, a craftsman named Bi Sheng tried something new: movable type, separate pieces for each character that could be arranged, printed and then taken apart and used again. We know about it only because a scholar wrote it down.

Bi Sheng, a man in cotton cloth [a man of the common people], made also movable type. His method was as follows: He took sticky clay and cut in it characters as thin as the edge of a coin. Each character formed as it were a single type. He baked them in the fire to make them hard. ... If one were to print only two or three copies, this method would be neither convenient nor quick. But for printing hundreds or thousands of copies, it was marvellously quick. As a rule he kept two forms going. While the impression was being made from the one form, the type were being put in place on the other. ... For each character there were several type, and for certain common characters there were twenty or more type each.

Shen Kuo, Dream Pool Essays, 1088. Translated by Thomas Francis Carter in 1925, with names in modern spelling and some sentences left out. A form is the iron frame of type, locked together ready to print.

Who, when and why. Shen Kuo (1031-1095) was a Song scholar-official, an astronomer, an engineer and a tireless note-taker. When he retired to a garden estate, he finished the Dream Pool Essays in 1088, a book of short notes on everything that interested him, from music to fossil shells. He was a teenager when Bi Sheng made his type, and he adds that after Bi Sheng died the set of type passed to Shen's own circle, who kept it as a treasure. So he was writing about something he probably saw. Carter reported that Shen was regarded as "one of the most accurate" writers of the Song.

Point of view question: Shen Kuo was an educated official, and he describes Bi Sheng as "a man in cotton cloth". Why do you think we know almost nothing else about Bi Sheng, and what does that tell you about whose lives got written down?

Notice the problem Shen Kuo points to. Written Chinese uses thousands of different characters, and a printer needed twenty or more copies of the common ones. Making and sorting a full set of type was a huge job, while carving a block was cheap and the block could be stored and printed again years later. So in China woodblocks stayed the usual way of printing for centuries after Bi Sheng. In Korea, printers went further: the Jikji, printed in 1377, is the oldest surviving book printed with metal movable type. It came 78 years before Johannes Gutenberg printed his famous Bible in Germany, using an alphabet of only a few dozen letters.

Key idea: China printed books from carved blocks by 868 and invented movable type in the 1040s; because Chinese needs thousands of characters, carved blocks stayed cheaper and more common.

A needle that points south

A lodestone is a rock that is naturally magnetic. Long before the Tang, Chinese fortune-tellers who chose lucky positions for houses and tombs used a spoon carved from lodestone that turned to face south. It was a tool for fortune-telling, not for finding the way. Chinese compasses were thought of as pointing south, not north, though of course a needle has two ends.

The Song turned the idea into a working instrument. The military handbook of 1044 describes a thin iron fish, magnetised by heating, that floated in a bowl of water to show direction. Then, in the Dream Pool Essays of 1088, Shen Kuo gave the first known description of a compass needle. A steel needle rubbed with lodestone, he wrote, would point south, and he judged that hanging the needle up worked better than floating it on water. He also noticed something no one had written down before: the needle was always a little to the east of due south. Today this gap between where a compass points and true north or south is called magnetic declination.

Sailors soon took the needle to sea. A book by Zhu Yu, written between 1111 and 1117 and published in 1119, is the first record of a compass used for navigation on ships. The first European description came about a hundred years after Shen Kuo, when the English scholar Alexander Neckam wrote around 1190 that a ship should carry a magnetised needle to guide sailors on starless nights.

Government by examination

Who should run a huge empire? China's answer was the civil service, the officials who collect taxes, judge cases and keep records, chosen by the imperial examinations. These were written tests on the Confucian classics. The first written exams for government posts began under the Sui dynasty, just before the Tang, around 605.

Under the Tang, the exams existed but did not yet decide much. Most officials still got their posts through powerful families and recommendations, and the interviews that followed the written tests favoured young men from the great clans of the capital. The hardest exam, for the jinshi degree, meaning "presented scholar", produced only 6,585 graduates in the whole Tang dynasty, about 23 a year. Wu Zetian, the only woman in Chinese history to rule as emperor in her own name, from 690 to 705, rewarded jinshi graduates generously. That made the exam road more respected and opened government a little wider, even to men from the less favoured south-east.

The Song made the exams the main road into government, and they worked hard to make them fair. From 992 the candidates' names were hidden on their papers. From 1015 clerks recopied every paper, so that examiners could not recognise a candidate's handwriting. The numbers exploded. By the middle of the 1100s about 100,000 men registered each year for the first round of exams; by the middle of the 1200s, more than 400,000. Very few passed. In Fuzhou in 1090, 3,000 candidates competed for 40 degrees, one for every 75 men. Printing helped: cheap printed copies of the classics let more families prepare their sons. The Song system became the model for choosing China's officials until the exams were abolished in 1905.

Was it open to everyone? Not quite. Women could not sit the exams at all, not even the daughters of officials. Under the Song, merchants, craftsmen, clerks and Buddhist and Daoist priests were barred from the jinshi exam. Rich families could pay for tutors and years of study, and the sons of officials had a head start. Yet OpenStax notes that a village sometimes spotted a clever boy from a poor family and paid for his studies, because an official from the village would help them all.

Key idea: Under the Song, exams with hidden names and recopied papers became the main way to choose officials, far more open than the Tang system but still closed to women and to many groups of men.

Reading the table again

Now go back to the table and read it as a historian. First, look for what stayed the same. Both dynasties were ruled by emperors, and both trained their officials on the same Confucian classics. Both used woodblock printing, both held written exams, and both used copper coins. China in 1100 was still recognisably the China of 700.

Next, look for what changed, and notice how much. The exams went from a side road to the main road. Printing went from holy texts for giving away to classics, histories and money. A fortune-teller's spoon became a sailor's compass. The population more than doubled, and the centre of the empire moved south, to the rice lands around Hangzhou.

Finally, notice that a comparison only answers the question you ask it. Ask "Which dynasty had the stronger army?" and the table points to the Tang, whose soldiers reached Central Asia, not the Song, who paid silver for peace and lost the north. Ask "Which dynasty changed daily life more?" and the rows about rice, cities, paper money, printing and exams point to the Song. Neither answer is the whole truth. That is why historians say what question they are asking before they compare.

Common misconceptions

• "Johannes Gutenberg invented printing." Chinese printers were making books from carved blocks by 868, Bi Sheng made movable type in the 1040s, and Korean printers used metal type in 1377. Gutenberg's metal-type press of the 1450s transformed Europe, but it was not the first printing.
• "The compass was invented by sailors to cross the ocean." Magnetic pointers were first used in China by fortune-tellers. The needle compass was described in 1088 and only then went to sea.
• "China's exams meant anyone could rise to the top." They were far more open than rule by noble families, but women could not take them, some groups of men were barred, and rich families could pay for years of study.

What to carry forward

• The Tang (618-907) grew powerful through conquest, reaching Central Asia until the defeat at Talas in 751, and were broken by the An Lushan rebellion.
• The Song (960-1279) grew rich at home: fast-ripening rice, a population that rose from about 55 million to about 120 million, great cities, iron and paper money.
• Wang Jie's Diamond Sutra of 868 is the oldest dated printed book; Shen Kuo recorded Bi Sheng's movable clay type of the 1040s.
• Shen Kuo described the magnetic needle in 1088 and noticed that it points slightly east of south; the compass was used at sea by the early 1100s.
• Song exams, with hidden names and recopied papers, became the main way to choose officials, though women and many men were shut out.
• A comparison is only as good as the question you ask it: the Tang look stronger in war, the Song stronger in daily life.

Sources

1. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 14.1 Song China and the steppe peoples. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
2. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 12.2 East-West interactions in the early Middle Ages. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
3. Carter, T. F. (1925). The invention of printing in China and its spread westward. Columbia University Press. Chapters 8 and 22 give the Diamond Sutra's closing line and Shen Kuo's account of Bi Sheng. Internet Archive
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Imperial examination: Tang and Song dynasties. Wikipedia. Wikipedia
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Shen Kuo: Magnetic needle compass. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

A samurai paints himself a hero

Unroll a painted scroll made in Japan around 1293 and you come to a scene that looks like a still from an action film. A warrior on horseback charges at a line of enemy soldiers. Arrows fly past him. His horse is streaming blood. Just above his head, a bomb packed with gunpowder bursts in flame and smoke, one of the earliest pictures of such a bomb ever made in Japan.

The rider is Takezaki Suenaga, a young samurai born in 1246 in Higo province, on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's main islands. The enemy soldiers belong to the army of the Mongol Empire, which has just landed on the coast of Japan in 1274. And the scroll exists because Suenaga himself ordered it to be made, almost twenty years after the battle. He wanted people to know what he had done.

That last fact changes how you should look at the picture. This lesson follows Japan's warriors from the war that created the first shogun to the day Suenaga charged the Mongols, and it practises sourcing: asking who made a source, when, why and for whom, and then deciding how far it can be trusted. Suenaga's scrolls are among the best evidence we have for the Mongol invasions of Japan. They are also a warrior's advertisement for himself. Both things are true at once.

An emperor who reigned but did not rule

Japan is a chain of islands off the coast of Korea and China. Over many centuries, ideas travelled to it across the sea: Chinese writing, Buddhism and the Confucian way of organising a government all reached Japan by way of Korea and China. In 794 the emperor moved his court to a new capital, Heian-kyo, today's Kyoto, laid out on the pattern of the Tang capital Chang'an that you met in the last lesson. Kyoto stayed the emperor's home until 1868.

At the Heian court, noble families wrote poetry, held ceremonies and competed for the emperor's favour. Out in the provinces, far from the court, landowners needed men who could fight: to guard their estates, collect their rents and chase off bandits. These fighters became the samurai. The word is thought to come from saburau, "to serve": a samurai was a warrior who served a lord. The ideal early samurai was not a swordsman but a mounted archer, trained for years to shoot a bow from a galloping horse. Early warriors spoke of their calling as "the way of the bow and the horse". By about 1100, bands of samurai had become a major power in the provinces.

In the 1150s two great warrior families, the Taira and the Minamoto, began fighting for control of the court. The Taira won the first round in 1160. A generation later, in the Genpei War of 1180-1185, the Minamoto struck back. The war ended at sea, in the Battle of Dan-no-ura in April 1185. When the Taira saw the battle was lost, the grandmother of the child emperor Antoku, a boy of six by our way of counting, took him in her arms and plunged with him into the sea rather than let him be captured. The Taira were destroyed.

A story chanted by blind monks

The Genpei War became Japan's most famous story, the Tale of the Heike. Heike is another name for the Taira, the losing side. The tale was not written by a witness. It grew out of stories chanted by travelling monks, many of them blind, who sang it while playing the biwa, a lute with four strings; these performers were called biwa hoshi. It was written down before 1330, and the version most people read today was put together by a blind monk named Kakuichi in 1371. Every performance began with the same lines.

The sound of the bell of Gionshoja echoes the impermanence of all things. The hue of the flowers of the teak tree declares that they who flourish must be brought low. Yea, the proud ones are but for a moment, like an evening dream in springtime. The mighty are destroyed at the last, they are but as the dust before the wind.

The Tale of the Heike, opening lines. Translated by A. L. Sadler in 1918. Sadler's own notes explain that Gionshoja was the monastery in India where the Buddha preached many sermons, and that his "teak tree" is the sal tree under which the Buddha died.

Who, when and why. The tale took shape more than a century after the war, and it was shaped by performers and Buddhist monks. Its purpose was not to record the facts of battles. It was to teach a Buddhist lesson: nothing lasts, and the proud are always brought low. The Taira, who rose too high and fell into the sea, are the proof. Historians treat it as a great work of literature that also preserves memories of the war, not as a reliable account of who did what on which day.

Point of view question: The Tale of the Heike is told about the losing side, with deep sadness for them. Why might Buddhist performers choose to tell the story of the losers rather than the winners? What might the story leave out or change to make its lesson clearer?

The first shogun

The winner of the Genpei War was Minamoto no Yoritomo. He did not make himself emperor. Instead, in 1192 he took the title of shogun, commander in chief, and ran the country from his own headquarters at Kamakura, far to the east of Kyoto. His government is called the Kamakura shogunate, and it lasted until 1333.

This created a strange double system that lasted, in one form or another, for almost seven hundred years. The emperor stayed in Kyoto, honoured as a descendant of the gods and performing ceremonies, but with little real power. The shogun commanded the warriors, and the warriors held the land. The emperor reigned; the shogun ruled.

The shogun's power rested on a bargain with his followers. Samurai who swore loyalty to him became his vassals, called gokenin, "honoured housemen". They fought for him when he called. In return, he confirmed their rights to land and rewarded brave service with new posts and new land. You met a similar bargain in medieval Europe, between lords and knights. Remember it, because it is the key to everything Suenaga did.

The upshot: After 1192 Japan had two centres: an emperor in Kyoto who reigned, and a shogun in Kamakura who ruled through samurai bound to him by loyalty and rewarded with land.

Letters from the Great Khan

In 1268 envoys reached Japan with a letter from Kublai Khan, ruler of the Mongols and of northern China. You will meet the Mongols properly in the next module. For now, know that they had built the largest land empire the world had ever seen, and that Korea's kingdom of Goryeo had already been forced to submit to them. Kublai wanted Japan to do the same. The shogun's government refused, and it took the letter as a warning of invasion. Temples and shrines were ordered to pray, and warriors in Kyushu were told to prepare.

1274: Suenaga rides first

In late 1274 a Mongol fleet, built in Korea at the Korean kingdom's expense, sailed across the strait and landed at Hakata Bay on the north coast of Kyushu. Suenaga rode to meet it in a party of just five riders, himself and four followers, including his brother-in-law and his flag-bearer. His commander, Muto Kagesuke, ordered the warriors to hold back and wait. Suenaga did not wait. He wanted to be the first warrior from Higo to fight.

Why the hurry? Because of the bargain. A samurai was rewarded for deeds that others had seen and reported to the shogun's officials. Being first into battle was one of the most honoured deeds of all, and it only counted if someone witnessed it. So Suenaga charged. The Mongols fought in ways the samurai had never met. Their generals stood on high ground and moved the troops with drum signals, and they used showers of arrows and bombs packed with gunpowder, the Chinese invention you read about in the last lesson. His horse was shot and he was thrown. He was saved only when another samurai, Shiraishi Michiyasu, charged in with his riders.

After a day of fighting, the invaders went back to their ships, and soon the fleet had gone. A Chinese history of the Mongol dynasty says that a great storm wrecked many of their warships. Historians are not sure whether the storm struck in Hakata Bay itself or on the voyage home.

A long ride to Kamakura

Suenaga had been first into battle, but when the reports went to the government, his deeds were not in them. No witness report, no reward. So in 1275 he sold his horses and saddles to pay for the long journey east to Kamakura, hundreds of kilometres away. There he went from official to official, and they turned him away for lack of evidence. At last he got a personal hearing from Adachi Yasumori, a powerful official of the shogun's government. Yasumori listened. Suenaga's service was certified in writing, and he was given a fully equipped horse and the right to a piece of land back home in Higo.

The scroll tells this part of the story in as much detail as the battle. For Suenaga, getting the reward right mattered as much as the fighting. In the scroll's own words, as historians summarise them, he said that apart from advancing in the world and having his deeds known, he had nothing else to live for.

1281: the wall and the wind

The shogun's government expected the Mongols to return, and it prepared. In 1276 it ordered a stone wall built along the shore of Hakata Bay, about two metres high and some twenty kilometres long. Parts of the wall can still be seen today. When Kublai's envoys came again, they were executed.

In 1281 the Mongols came back with two fleets, one from Korea and a much larger one from southern China, which Kublai had now conquered. The figure usually given for the combined force is about 142,000 soldiers and sailors, though historians argue about numbers like these. This time the invaders could not get past the wall. The samurai also attacked at night in small boats, rowing out to board the big ships. Suenaga was one of them. The second scroll shows him on the deck of a Mongol ship, fighting hand to hand.

For weeks the fleets waited offshore. Then, on 15 August 1281, a typhoon, a violent storm of the western Pacific, struck the ships at anchor and wrecked much of the fleet. Many Japanese believed that the gods had sent it. They called it a kamikaze, a divine wind.

The upshot: Japan survived two Mongol invasions because its warriors held the beaches, a stone wall kept the second army on its ships, and a typhoon destroyed the waiting fleet.

Reading the scrolls as a historian

Now put the scrolls through a sourcing check, one question at a time.

• Who made them? Unknown painters, working for Suenaga, who paid for them and told the story from his point of view.
• When? The scrolls date themselves to 1293, about twenty years after the first invasion and twelve after the second. Suenaga was remembering.
• Why? To record his courage, to thank Adachi Yasumori for his reward, and to thank the Shinto god he had prayed to. The last words praise the god, who Suenaga says appeared to him in a dream.
• What happened to them since? The scrolls were lost for centuries and found again in the 1700s. Their pictures have been changed many times, with additions, alterations and retouching, so a historian has to ask which parts are original.

None of this makes the scrolls useless. Suenaga was really there, and many details, from the bombs to the stone wall to the way rewards were claimed, match other evidence. But the hero of every scene is the man who paid for it. A historian uses the scrolls, but checks them against other sources and keeps asking whose eyes the pictures are seen through.

Point of view question: Suenaga paid for scrolls that show him charging first, boarding an enemy ship and winning his reward. What kinds of events from the invasions would you not expect to find in them, and why?

After the invasions: shoguns until 1868

Winning cost the Kamakura shogunate dearly. It had fought a defensive war, so there was no conquered land to hand out, and warriors who had fought, and paid for their own weapons and journeys, went unrewarded. Discontent spread. In 1333 the Kamakura shogunate was overthrown, and in 1336 a new family of shoguns, the Ashikaga, took over.

The Ashikaga shoguns were weak. Great lords called daimyo, "great names", ruled their lands like independent kingdoms and fought one another for more than a century. Three powerful warlords finally pulled the country back together. The last of them, Tokugawa Ieyasu, won the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 and became shogun in 1603, ruling from Edo, today's Tokyo. The Tokugawa shogunate brought peace and prosperity that lasted for generations, and its samurai moved into the castle towns of their lords. It lasted until 1868, and you will see how it ended when you reach the lesson on empire in Asia.

Common misconceptions

• "Samurai always lived by a written code called bushido." Early samurai spoke of "the way of the bow and the horse". The word bushido first appears in the late 1500s, the code was written down and made law under the Tokugawa, and it became famous abroad through a book published in English in 1899.
• "The divine wind alone saved Japan." In 1281 the samurai and the stone wall kept the invaders on their ships for weeks before the typhoon came, and in 1274 the invaders had already gone back to their ships before any storm.
• "The samurai were mainly swordsmen." The ideal early samurai was a mounted archer, trained for years to shoot from a galloping horse. Swords mattered, but for centuries the bow and the horse came first.

Putting it together

• Samurai were warriors who served lords; the ideal early samurai was a mounted archer.
• The Minamoto won the Genpei War in 1185, and in 1192 Minamoto no Yoritomo became shogun, ruling from Kamakura while the emperor reigned in Kyoto.
• The Tale of the Heike, chanted by blind monks and written down before 1330, turns the war into a Buddhist lesson that the proud must fall.
• Takezaki Suenaga fought the Mongols in 1274 and 1281 and rode to Kamakura to claim his reward, because a samurai's deeds counted only if they were witnessed.
• A stone wall, samurai raids and the typhoon of 15 August 1281 defeated the second invasion; the unrewarded war helped bring down the Kamakura shogunate in 1333.
• Suenaga's scrolls are precious evidence and also his own advertisement, later retouched; a historian uses them while checking whose eyes they show.

Sources

1. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 12.3 Border states: Sogdiana, Korea, and Japan. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
2. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 2.3 Exchange in East Asia. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax
3. Sadler, A. L. (Trans.). (1918). The Heike monogatari. Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 46(2). Internet Archive
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Moko Shurai Ekotoba: Contents and textual history. Wikipedia. Wikipedia
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Mongol invasions of Japan. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

A silver tree in the grasslands

In the spring of 1254, a Franciscan friar from Flanders named William of Rubruck walked into the palace of the Great Khan Mongke at Karakorum, in the grasslands of Mongolia, and found a tree made of silver standing at the entrance. At its roots were four silver lions, each with a pipe through it pouring out mare's milk. More pipes ran up inside the trunk to the top, where gilded serpents curled round the branches, and from them flowed four drinks: wine, clarified mare's milk, a honey drink and rice wine, each falling into its own silver bowl. At the top stood a silver angel with a trumpet. A man hidden in a space under the tree blew through a pipe to make the angel sound its trumpet, and at the signal servants in a cellar outside poured the drinks into the pipes.

The tree had been made by a goldsmith from Paris, Guillaume Boucher, who had been captured by Mongol soldiers in 1241 or 1242, during their invasion of Hungary, far away in Europe. Rubruck met him, and even met a woman from the French city of Metz who knew Boucher's brother, still living on a bridge in Paris.

Stop and notice how strange this is. Fifty years earlier, the people who ruled from this palace had been a scatter of quarrelling herding clans on the grasslands north of China, with no cities and no written language. When they came together in 1206, there were about a million of them. Yet by 1254 their empire stretched from Korea to the borders of Hungary, and a Parisian craftsman was building fountains for their ruler. How did so few people build the largest joined-up land empire in history? That is this lesson's problem. Working it will practise cause and effect: finding several causes, weighing them, and seeing how they worked together.

Life on the steppe

Start with the land. The steppe is a vast belt of grassland that runs across the middle of Asia, too dry and cold for farming but perfect for grazing animals. The Mongols were herders. They moved with the seasons, driving their sheep, goats, cattle, camels and above all horses to fresh pasture, and they lived in round tents of felt stretched over a wooden frame, called gers or yurts, which could be packed onto a cart. Chinggis Khan later called his people the People of the Felt Walls.

Steppe children learned to ride almost as soon as they could walk, and every man was a hunter who could shoot a bow from a galloping horse. The bow was a composite bow, built of layers of horn, wood and sinew glued together, small enough to use in the saddle and powerful enough to kill at a long distance. In war, each Mongol soldier usually took three or four horses, switching from tired to fresh ones so that an army could ride fast for days.

But skill with horse and bow was nothing new. Steppe peoples had been riders and archers for more than a thousand years, and most of the time they spent their energy raiding one another. Something had to change for that skill to conquer the world. That something was a man.

Temujin becomes Chinggis Khan

He was born, most historians think, around 1162, and named Temujin. When he was eight, his father died and his clan abandoned the family, leaving his mother to raise her children on roots and small game. As a young man Temujin was briefly enslaved by a rival clan and escaped. Raiders kidnapped his wife, Borte, and he won her back with the help of allies. Most of what we know of these years comes from the Secret History of the Mongols, written after his death from stories told by his people, so treat its dramatic details with care.

Temujin built his following differently from other chiefs. When he defeated a rival, he punished the leaders but took the ordinary people into his own army. He divided the loot equally among the fighters and the families of those killed, so that no soldier feared for his widow and children. And he broke up the old clan loyalties. His warriors were placed in units of ten, which were grouped into hundreds and thousands, and the commanders of the largest units were chosen for merit and loyalty, not for their family.

In 1206 a kurultai, a great assembly of the Mongol people, proclaimed Temujin Chinggis Khan, usually understood to mean "universal ruler". (You may know the older spelling, Genghis.) He issued laws called the yassa, which made theft punishable by death, banned the enslaving of Mongols and favoured no religion. He also had a script borrowed from the Uyghur people adapted to write the Mongol language, so that laws and records could be kept.

What matters here: Chinggis Khan turned quarrelling clans into one people by rewarding loyalty and merit instead of family, and he gave them laws, a script and an army organised in tens, hundreds and thousands.

Working the problem: four causes

Between 1206 and 1260 the Mongols conquered northern China, Central Asia, Persia, the lands of the Rus (the ancestors of today's Russians and Ukrainians), and Baghdad. Historians point to several causes. Take them one at a time.

Cause one: an army unlike any other. The Mongol army moved faster than any army its enemies had met. Its units were drilled to move together, following signals in the heat of battle. It used the old steppe trick of the feigned retreat: riders pretended to flee, drew their enemies after them in a disorderly chase, then turned and destroyed them. And its messengers could carry orders across huge distances, as you will see.

Cause two: borrowed skills. Horsemen cannot knock down city walls. The Mongols recruited experts from the peoples they conquered. Chinese technicians worked giant crossbows for them, and at the Chinese city of Xiangyang in 1273 two Muslim engineers, one from Persia and one from Syria, built counterweight catapults that forced the city to surrender. The Mongols also took over the knowledge of settled peoples to run what they had won. A Khitan official named Yelu Chucai is said to have told Chinggis Khan's son Ogedei that an empire can be conquered from horseback but cannot be ruled from horseback. Ogedei listened, and set up regular taxes and records in place of plunder.

Cause three: a terrible choice. The Mongols offered every city the same choice. Submit and pay tribute, and you would be spared. Resist, and you might be destroyed. In 1218, the governor of the town of Otrar, in the Khwarazmian Empire of Central Asia and Persia, seized a Mongol trade caravan and killed its merchants, and then the ruler of Khwarazm killed most of the envoys Chinggis sent to complain. The war of revenge that followed wrecked the great cities of Herat, Merv and Nishapur. In 1258, Chinggis's grandson Hulagu took Baghdad, the city of the House of Wisdom that you studied earlier. Tens of thousands of people, perhaps many more, were killed, and the caliph himself was put to death. News of such destruction travelled ahead of the armies, and many cities decided that resisting was not worth the risk.

Cause four: divided enemies. The Mongols were expert at finding their enemies' quarrels. In northern China they presented themselves to the Khitan people as liberators from their Jurchen rulers, and Khitan soldiers joined them. At Baghdad, Hulagu used the resentment of Shia Muslims against the Sunni caliph. Again and again, the Mongols did not face a united world. They faced rulers who hated one another more than they feared the Mongols, until it was too late.

The westward push reached Europe. In 1240 the Mongols took the city of Kyiv, and in 1241 they crushed the armies of Poland and Hungary, including at the Battle of Mohi. That is how Guillaume Boucher was captured. Then, in early 1242, word arrived that Ogedei had died, and the Mongol commanders turned back to choose a new Great Khan. Europe was spared by a funeral.

Karakorum: a capital of many peoples

Ogedei built the walls and palace of Karakorum in 1235, near the warehouses where his father had stored the treasure of conquered lands. It was the capital when Rubruck arrived. Rubruck had set out in May 1253, with the support of King Louis IX of France, hoping to convert the Mongols to Christianity. He rode about 9,000 kilometres to reach the khan. When he got home, he wrote a long report in Latin for the king. This is how he described the city.

Of the city of Caracarum you must know that, exclusive of the palace of the Chan, it is not as big as the village of Saint Denis, and the monastery of Saint Denis is ten times larger than the palace. There are two quarters in it; one of the Saracens in which are the markets, and where a great many Tartars gather on account of the court, which is always near this city, and on account of the great number of ambassadors; the other is the quarter of the Cathayans, all of whom are artisans. ... There are there twelve idol temples of different nations, two [mosques] in which is cried the law of [Muhammad], and one church of Christians in the extreme end of the city.

William of Rubruck, report to King Louis IX, describing his visit of 1254. Translated by W. W. Rockhill in 1900. Saracens was a European word for Muslims, Tartars for Mongols and Cathayans for the people of northern China. The words in brackets replace Rubruck's own terms, which were insulting.

Who, when and why. Rubruck was an outsider, a Christian friar writing for a Christian king who wanted to know whether the Mongols could be allies, or converts, or were a danger. He was a sharp observer: he noticed the markets, the craftsmen, the ambassadors and the temples of many peoples. He also describes the Great Khan holding a debate in May 1254 between Christians, Buddhists and Muslims, in which Rubruck himself took part. The Mongol rulers taxed their subjects, but they let people worship as they chose, and they excused religious leaders from taxes.

Point of view question: Rubruck measures Karakorum against the village of Saint Denis near Paris, and he calls other people's temples "idol temples". What do these choices tell you about him and about the readers he was writing for? What might a Chinese craftsman or a Muslim merchant living in Karakorum have said about the same city?

Holding a giant empire together

Conquest was only half the work. To hold their lands together, the Mongols built the yam, a chain of relay stations along the main roads, usually 20 to 40 miles apart, each with food, shelter and fresh horses. A messenger changing horses at every station could cover 200 to 300 kilometres in a day. Officials and envoys carried a paiza, a metal tablet that worked like a passport and ordered everyone to help them on their way. Ogedei opened the system to merchants too, and rewarded traders who brought him goods he had never seen.

The result is what historians call the Pax Mongolica, the Mongol Peace. For a few generations, merchants, missionaries and ambassadors could travel from China to the Mediterranean through lands ruled by one family. Goods and ideas moved along the Silk Roads as never before, and so did travellers such as Rubruck and, soon, Marco Polo. The Mongol Peace was real, but it rested on the fear created by places like Nishapur and Baghdad.

Now weigh the causes. Could any one of them have done the job alone? Fast horsemen had existed for centuries without conquering the world, so the army by itself is not enough. Terror without an army to back it up is an empty threat. Borrowed engineers are useless without someone to protect and direct them. The causes worked as a chain: Chinggis's organisation made the army, the army made the threat believable, borrowed skills took the cities, and divided enemies made each conquest easier than the last.

What matters here: No single cause explains the Mongol conquests; organisation, speed, borrowed skills, terror and divided enemies worked together, each making the others stronger.

One empire becomes four

The empire's success carried the seeds of its breakup. Chinggis Khan had divided his lands among his sons, with one son as Great Khan above the rest. When Mongke died in 1259, two of his brothers, Kublai and Ariq Boke, each declared himself Great Khan, and fought a civil war. Kublai won in 1264, but the western Mongol lands no longer truly obeyed him. The empire split into four separate states called khanates.

• The Golden Horde, ruling the lands of the Rus in the north-west.
• The Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia.
• The Ilkhanate in Persia and Iraq, founded by Hulagu.
• The Yuan dynasty in China, where Kublai finished conquering the Song in 1279.

The rulers of three of the four khanates, all but the Yuan, eventually became Muslims, along with many of their people. The conquerors had been changed by the conquered.

Common misconceptions

• "The Mongols won because there were so many of them." There were only about a million Mongols in 1206, and their armies were sometimes smaller than their enemies'. Organisation, speed and skill mattered more than numbers.
• "The Mongols only destroyed." They destroyed cities such as Nishapur and Baghdad, with terrible loss of life. But they also protected trade, ran a relay system across Asia, tolerated many religions and brought craftsmen and ideas from one end of Eurasia to the other.
• "Chinggis Khan's empire stayed one empire for centuries." It stayed united for only about fifty years after 1206, then split into four khanates in the 1260s.

What you now know

• The Mongols were steppe herders, skilled riders and archers, numbering about a million when Temujin was proclaimed Chinggis Khan in 1206.
• Chinggis Khan rebuilt Mongol society around loyalty and merit, with units of ten, a hundred and a thousand, a law code called the yassa and a written script.
• Several causes worked together in the conquests: a fast, disciplined army, borrowed siege skills, a choice between submission and destruction, and enemies too divided to unite.
• William of Rubruck found Karakorum in 1254 a small city of many peoples and faiths, and his report shows both what he saw and his own point of view.
• The yam relay stations and the paiza held the empire together and helped trade across Eurasia, but the Mongol Peace rested on fear.
• After 1259 a civil war split the empire into four khanates: the Golden Horde, the Chagatai Khanate, the Ilkhanate and the Yuan dynasty in China.

Sources

1. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 14.1 Song China and the steppe peoples. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
2. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 14.2 Chinggis Khan and the early Mongol Empire. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
3. William of Rubruck. (1900). The journey of William of Rubruck to the eastern parts of the world, 1253-55 (W. W. Rockhill, Trans.). Hakluyt Society. Chapters on Karakorum and the palace of Mangu Chan. Internet Archive
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Guillaume Boucher. Wikipedia. Wikipedia
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Yam (route). Wikipedia. Wikipedia

A traveller who expected not to be believed

Around 1298, in a prison in the Italian city of Genoa, a Venetian merchant began describing money made of tree bark. He knew how it would sound. "For, tell it how I might," he told his listener, "you never would be satisfied that I was keeping within truth and reason!" The merchant was Marco Polo, and the money was the paper currency of China under Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler you met in the last lesson.

About fifty years later, a Muslim judge from Morocco named Ibn Battuta, the traveller you followed across the Sahara to Mali, described the same money. Two men from opposite ends of the world, of different faiths and languages, both came home with the same astonishing story. That sounds like proof. But historians have argued for more than two hundred years about how far either man can be trusted, and whether Marco Polo even reached China at all.

This lesson sets out that argument. It practises corroboration: checking what one source says against other, independent evidence. A source is corroborated when evidence from somewhere else, made by different people for different reasons, agrees with it.

Two travellers and how their books were made

Marco Polo was born in Venice in 1254. In 1271, aged seventeen, he set out for Asia with his father and uncle, who were merchants and had already met Kublai once. The Polos stayed in the Mongol lands for about twenty-four years. OpenStax describes Marco as one of many foreigners whom the Mongol emperors used as officials, most of them Muslim traders from other parts of the empire. Around 1291-1292 the Polos left China, escorting a Mongol princess named Kokochin by sea to Persia, where she was to marry its Mongol ruler. They reached Venice again in 1295.

Venice was at war with its rival, the Republic of Genoa, and Marco was taken prisoner. In prison he told his stories to a fellow prisoner, Rustichello da Pisa, a professional writer of romances, adventure stories about knights such as King Arthur. Rustichello wrote the book in 1298-1299, adding tales of his own. The original is lost. The book was copied and translated by hand again and again, even in Polo's lifetime, and the surviving versions differ from one another.

Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier in 1304. He left home at twenty-one, in 1325, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, and kept travelling for almost thirty years, through the Middle East, East Africa, Central Asia, India and South-East Asia to China, which he reached in 1345, landing at the great port of Quanzhou. When he finally came home, the sultan of Morocco asked him to record his journeys. He dictated them to a scholar, Ibn Juzayy, who shaped them into a book, the Rihla, finished in 1355.

Notice what the two books have in common. Both were told from memory, years after the events. Both were written down and polished by someone else, a professional writer. That does not make them false, but it means every page has passed through at least two minds.

The same money, seen twice

Here are the two accounts of Chinese paper money.

He makes them take of the bark of a certain tree, in fact of the Mulberry Tree, the leaves of which are the food of the silkworms ... and this they make into something resembling sheets of paper, but black. When these sheets have been prepared they are cut up into pieces of different sizes. ... On every piece a variety of officials, whose duty it is, have to write their names, and to put their seals. ... Any one forging it would be punished with death. ... When any of those pieces of paper are spoilt ... the owner carries them to the Mint, and by paying three per cent. on the value he gets new pieces in exchange.

Marco Polo, as written down by Rustichello da Pisa in 1298-1299, describing the Great Khan's mint in his capital, Khanbaliq. Translated by Henry Yule; third edition revised by Henri Cordier, 1903.

The Chinese use neither [gold] dinars nor [silver] dirhams in their commerce. ... Their buying and selling is carried on exclusively by means of pieces of paper, each of the size of the palm of the hand, and stamped with the sultan's seal. ... When these notes become torn by handling, one takes them to an office corresponding to our mint, and receives their equivalent in new notes on delivering up the old ones. This transaction is made without charge and involves no expense.

Ibn Battuta, Rihla, describing China as he saw it in the 1340s, written down by Ibn Juzayy in 1355. Translated by H. A. R. Gibb in 1929. Dinars and dirhams were the gold and silver coins of the Islamic world.

Who, when and why. Both men were writing for readers at home who had never seen paper money, so both explain it by comparing it with what their readers knew: Polo with the gold and silver coins of Venice, Ibn Battuta with the dinar. Both wanted to amaze. Polo even says that the Great Khan seems to have "the Secret of Alchemy", the magic of turning cheap things into gold.

Point of view question: Polo and Ibn Battuta agree about the paper, the seals and the exchange of worn notes at a mint, but they disagree about whether the exchange cost anything. Which details are more likely to be true when two independent travellers agree, and what might explain the one place where they differ?

Here corroboration comes from a third, entirely separate source: China's own records and the notes themselves. Chinese governments had printed paper money since the Song, and in 1260, the first year of his reign, Kublai Khan issued new notes, called jiaochao, printed at the imperial mint. A Yuan note from 1287 survives together with its printing plate. Earlier Chinese governments had charged a fee when notes were turned in for coins, so a fee for changing notes is believable, and the rules may simply have changed between Polo's time and Ibn Battuta's. On paper money, both travellers pass the test.

Bottom line: When independent sources that were made by different people for different reasons agree, a detail becomes much more believable; this is corroboration.

The case for doubt

Now the harder question. The doubts about Marco Polo are old and serious. In the introduction to his English translation, Polo's own translator, the Scottish scholar Henry Yule, listed what the book leaves out. The Great Wall is never mentioned. Neither is tea, though Polo travelled through tea-growing country, nor the printing of books, nor foot binding, the painful custom of tightly binding girls' feet to keep them small, nor Chinese writing. Later writers added chopsticks to the list. Polo also used Mongol, Turkish or Persian names for Chinese places, not Chinese ones: Khanbaliq for the capital, Zaiton for Quanzhou.

In 1995 the British Library historian Frances Wood pushed the doubts further in a book called Did Marco Polo Go to China? She argued that at best Polo never travelled further east than Persia, and that everything he says about China could have come from Persian books and merchants' stories. There is also one claim that almost everyone rejects. The book says that the Polos offered to build siege engines that forced the Chinese city of Xiangyang to surrender to Kublai. Chinese records say the foreign engineers there came from the Middle East and had Arabic names, and the boast is missing from some manuscripts. Yule called it "the most perplexing knot in the whole book".

Ibn Battuta faces doubts too. Scholars have shown that some of his descriptions of places in the Middle East, such as Damascus, were copied from the travel book of Ibn Jubayr, written more than 150 years earlier. His chapter on China contains mistakes: he mixes up the Yellow River with the Grand Canal, and he believed that Chinese porcelain was made from coal. His 1929 translator, Gibb, noted in the back of the book that a French scholar named Ferrand had argued that Ibn Battuta did not go to China at all.

The case for trust

The defenders answer point by point, and their strongest evidence is corroboration. Polo's story of the princess Kokochin, sent by sea to Persia, is confirmed in both Persian and Chinese records. The Persian historian Rashid al-Din records the mission, and a passage preserved in the Chinese Yongle Encyclopedia names the three envoys sent to Persia, and their names match the three envoys in Polo's book. Polo adds that two of the three died on the voyage, which explains why the Persian historian mentions only one.

In 2012 Hans Ulrich Vogel, a historian of China at the University of Tubingen in Germany, published a detailed study of Polo's descriptions of money, salt and taxes. He found details that no other Western, Arab or Persian writer recorded, such as the sizes and seals of the notes and the use of cowrie shells as money in the south-western province of Yunnan, and Chinese records and archaeology support them. A man who had only read Persian books could not have known them.

What about the Great Wall? The wall that tourists visit today was mostly built by the Ming dynasty, about two centuries after Polo. The Mongols ruled on both sides of the older walls and had no reason to keep them up. Yule's explanation for the other gaps was that Polo spent his time in China mostly among Mongols, Persians and other foreigners, which is exactly what OpenStax says about the foreign officials of the Yuan. A foreigner living among foreigners might never learn to read Chinese or notice how Chinese families lived.

Ibn Battuta has his defenders too. Two important Iranians he says he met in Quanzhou appear in the official Chinese history of the Yuan dynasty. And in 2010 a researcher, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, reported on manuscripts of Islamic law, kept in Cairo, that Ibn Battuta had copied in Damascus in 1326, just as his book says. Where his account can be checked against independent evidence, parts of it pass.

Bottom line: Most historians today think Polo did go to China and Ibn Battuta did travel widely, but that both books mix real memories with borrowed material, mistakes and boasting.

What would settle it?

A dispute like this is never settled by one clever argument. It is settled, as far as it can be, by piling up tests. Here are the main kinds.

Silence is the weakest test of all. People leave things out for many reasons: they do not notice them, they take them for granted, or their co-author thinks readers will not care. So the missing Great Wall is a good question, but not a proof. A Chinese document with Marco Polo's name on it would settle the question at once, and none has been found. That is why the argument goes on, and why historians trust these books piece by piece rather than all or nothing.

Common misconceptions

• "Marco Polo wrote his book himself." He told his stories in prison to Rustichello da Pisa, a writer of romances, who wrote them down in 1298-1299 and added tales of his own.
• "Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy from China." Pasta was eaten in Italy before Polo's travels. The story was spread in the twentieth century by the pasta industry in North America.
• "If a traveller got one thing wrong, the whole account is false." Historians test a source piece by piece. Polo's boast about Xiangyang is almost certainly false, but his account of paper money is corroborated.

The short version

• Marco Polo travelled in Mongol lands from 1271 to 1295 and told his story to Rustichello da Pisa in a Genoese prison; Ibn Battuta travelled from 1325 to 1354 and dictated his Rihla to Ibn Juzayy in 1355.
• Both described Chinese paper money, and China's own records and surviving notes corroborate them.
• Doubters point to Polo's silences about the Great Wall, tea and Chinese writing, his false Xiangyang boast, and Ibn Battuta's copying and mistakes.
• Defenders point to the princess's envoys named in Chinese and Persian records, Vogel's study of Polo's money and salt, and independent records of Ibn Battuta's hosts.
• Corroboration, checking a source against independent evidence, lets historians trust a traveller piece by piece rather than all or nothing.

Sources

1. Polo, M. (1903). The book of Ser Marco Polo (H. Yule, Trans.; H. Cordier, Rev.; 3rd ed.), Vol. 1. John Murray. Book 2, chapter 24, and Yule's introduction, section 71. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg
2. Ibn Battuta. (1929). Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325-1354 (H. A. R. Gibb, Trans. and Ed.). Routledge. Chapter on China and note 22. Internet Archive
3. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 14.3 The Mongol Empire fragments. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Marco Polo: Authenticity and veracity. Wikipedia. Wikipedia
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Ibn Battuta: China and authenticity. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

A giraffe at the Ming court

On 20 September 1414, envoys from Bengal, a kingdom in north-eastern India, presented a giraffe to the Yongle Emperor of China. Nobody at the court had seen such an animal. Officials decided that it must be a qilin, a gentle creature from Chinese legend that was said to appear only when a wise and good ruler sat on the throne. They were eager to write the emperor speeches of praise. The emperor told them not to, and he probably never believed the giraffe was a qilin at all.

Giraffes come from Africa, so this one had crossed the Indian Ocean to reach China. In those same years enormous Chinese fleets were crossing that ocean in the other direction, from China to India, Arabia and East Africa. Their commander was Zheng He. In 1431, just before his seventh and last voyage, Zheng He and his officers carved a record of their voyages on a stone, and among the wonders they listed was a giraffe.

Sixty years later, much smaller fleets set out from Spain and Portugal: Christopher Columbus in 1492 and Vasco da Gama in 1497. Setting the three side by side shows two very different ideas of what a fleet was for. This lesson practises comparison with one rule added: a fair comparison asks the same questions of every case, and it does not judge people by events that came after them.

A new dynasty looks out to sea

The Ming dynasty ruled China from 1368 to 1644. Its founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, had once been a Buddhist monk. In 1368 he drove the last emperor of the Yuan, the Mongol dynasty of Kublai Khan that you met in the last two lessons, out of China. He took the name the Hongwu Emperor, meaning "vast and martial", and called his dynasty Ming, meaning "bright".

Hongwu wanted to protect China from dangerous foreign influences. In 1371 he banned private trade by sea, a policy called the haijin, or sea ban. Chinese merchants who traded overseas could be put to death. From then on, legal trade with foreign countries was supposed to happen only through official missions run by the government. The ban never fully worked, and smuggling went on along the coast.

Hongwu's son Zhu Di took the throne by force in 1402, overthrowing his own nephew, and ruled as the Yongle Emperor until 1424. He was a builder and a fighter. He moved the capital north from Nanjing to Beijing and began the great palace called the Forbidden City. He repaired and lengthened the Great Wall against the Mongols, and from 1406 Chinese armies spent more than twenty years trying, and failing, to hold Vietnam. He also wanted distant kings to know about him. The OpenStax textbook says he sent out fleets "to make their rulers aware of China's wealth and power."

Historians today call the way the Ming dealt with other countries the tribute system, although no one used that name at the time. A foreign ruler sent envoys to the emperor with gifts, called tribute, and the envoys bowed to him as the superior ruler. In return the emperor gave gifts worth more than the tribute, and the envoys were allowed to trade. So the system offered kings both honour for the emperor and profit for themselves. Zheng He's fleets were sent to draw as many rulers as possible into it.

The boy from Yunnan

Zheng He was born Ma He in 1371 in Yunnan, in south-western China, into a Muslim family. His father and grandfather both carried the title hajji, which suggests they had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1381, when Ming armies were conquering Yunnan from its last Mongol prince, his father died in the fighting and the boy was taken prisoner. Like many boys captured in war, he was made a eunuch: he was castrated, an operation that meant he could never have children, so that he could serve inside a royal household. He was sent to serve Zhu Di, the prince who would become the Yongle Emperor.

Ma He grew into one of the prince's most trusted commanders and fought for him in the war that won him the throne. On 11 February 1404 the emperor gave him a new family name, Zheng. Within eighteen months he was the admiral of a fleet of more than two hundred and fifty ships.

His faith is a small puzzle worth noticing. He was born a Muslim, yet the stones he set up honour the sea goddess Tianfei, also called Mazu, whom Chinese sailors prayed to in storms. And in 1409, at the port of Galle in Sri Lanka, his fleet set up the Galle trilingual inscription, a stone in three languages: the Chinese text makes offerings to the Buddha, the Persian text to Allah, and the Tamil text to a Hindu god. A commander who honoured every local faith was a commander who wanted to be welcome in every port.

Seven voyages across the Western Ocean

The first fleet left Nanjing on 11 July 1405. It carried about 27,800 men in 255 ships, 62 of them great treasure ships; some historians count 317 ships in all. Aboard were sailors and soldiers, but also interpreters, doctors, accountants, sailmakers and the envoys who would carry the emperor's letters. The holds were full of gifts for foreign kings: gold brocade, patterned silks and silk gauze, given "according to their status", as the Ming court records put it.

The fleets sailed with the monsoon, the seasonal winds of the Indian Ocean that blow one way for part of the year and the opposite way for the rest. Picture the route on a map. The ships ran south down the coast of Vietnam to Java and Sumatra, through the narrow Strait of Malacca, west across the Bay of Bengal to Sri Lanka, and up India's western coast to the spice port of Calicut, today called Kozhikode. Later voyages pushed on to the Persian Gulf, Arabia and the coast of East Africa.

How big were the treasure ships? Here the evidence is thin. The figure most often quoted comes from the official History of Ming, finished in 1739, more than three hundred years after the voyages. It gives the treasure ships a length of 44 zhang, a Chinese measure. Read one way, that is about 135 metres, longer than a football pitch. Many modern scholars doubt that a wooden ship that long could have survived the ocean, and they suggest the largest were about 60 or 70 metres. Even the smaller figure is more than three times the length of Columbus's largest ship, the Santa Maria, which was about 19 metres long.

Worth holding on to: Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming sent seven huge fleets, each of more than a hundred ships and tens of thousands of men, along the old sea routes of the Indian Ocean to show the emperor's power and draw kings into the tribute system.

The stone at Liujiagang

In February 1431 the fleet for the seventh voyage gathered at Liujiagang, a harbour near the mouth of the Yangtze River, not far from today's Shanghai. There stood a temple to Tianfei, the sailors' goddess. On 14 March 1431 Zheng He and his fellow commanders set up a stone in the temple, carved with an account of their voyages. The stone itself was later lost, but a Ming writer had copied its words into a book, so we can still read them. Here are two passages.

From the time when we, Zheng He and his companions, at the beginning of the Yongle period [1402-1424] received the Imperial commission as envoys to the barbarians, ... each time we have commanded several tens of thousand government soldiers and more than a hundred ocean-going vessels. ... On arriving in the outlying countries, those among the foreign kings who were obstructing the "transforming influence" (of Chinese culture) and were disrespectful were captured alive, and brigands who gave themselves over to violence and plunder were exterminated.

The country of Hormuz [Iran] presented lions, leopards with gold spots and western horses. The country of Aden [Yemen] presented a kirin of which the native name is tsu-la-fa (giraffe), as well as the long horned animal (oryx). The country of Mogadishu [Somalia] presented zebras as well as lions.

The Liujiagang inscription, set up by Zheng He and his fellow commanders in 1431. English translation as printed in Su Ming-Yang's Seven Epic Voyages of Zheng He (2005) and reproduced in John Bawden's sourcebook Middle and Early Modern Ages. Words in square brackets were added by the editor. Kirin is an older spelling of qilin, and tsu-la-fa is how Chinese ears heard zirafa, the Arabic word for giraffe.

Who, when and why. The commanders carved this stone while they waited for the winds, at the start of a voyage that might kill them. They wrote it, they said, because the goddess had protected them on earlier voyages, and to record their voyages "in order to make these known forever". Their readers were Chinese: officials, sailors, worshippers at the temple and people of the future. So the stone lists what the Ming court counted as success: gifts presented, kings who came to court, pirates and rebels captured.

Point of view question: The stone calls the peoples of other countries "barbarians" and says that "disrespectful" kings were "captured alive". How might the king of Ceylon, taken to China as a prisoner in 1411, have told the same story? What does the word "barbarians" tell you about how the commanders saw China's place in the world?

Notice too what the stone leaves out. It says nothing about trade, though the fleets brought home so much black pepper that a costly luxury became an everyday spice in China. It says nothing about cost either. An inscription carved to honour a goddess and the emperor shows the voyages as the Ming wanted them remembered.

Three fleets side by side

Now for the comparison. The table asks the same seven questions about the first voyage of each fleet.

Read the rows one at a time. In size, Zheng He's fleet wins by a distance: three hundred times as many people as Columbus took. In daring, the order flips. Zheng He followed routes that merchants had used for centuries, and that Ibn Battuta had sailed on Chinese junks in the 1340s, while Columbus pointed three small ships at an ocean no one in Europe knew how to cross. In aims, all three wanted wealth and all three served a ruler, but Zheng He sought honour and tribute for an emperor who already had what others wanted, while Columbus and da Gama were looking for the goods that Asia made, as OpenStax notes, "spices, silks, porcelains, and other Asian goods."

Two fleets at Calicut

Zheng He's fleets called at Calicut again and again. Zheng He probably died on the last voyage, in 1433, perhaps at Calicut itself, and he was buried at sea; some historians think he lived until 1435. Sixty-five years later, on 20 May 1498, four Portuguese ships anchored near Calicut. A man from one of them was sent ashore, and an unnamed member of the crew wrote down what followed.

They asked what he sought so far away from home, and he told them that we came in search of Christians and of spices. ...

On Tuesday [May 29] the captain got ready the following things to be sent to the king, viz., twelve pieces of lambel, four scarlet hoods, six hats, four strings of coral, a case containing six wash-hand basins, a case of sugar, two casks of oil, and two of honey. ... They came, and when they saw the present they laughed at it, saying that it was not a thing to offer to a king, that the poorest merchant from Mecca, or any other part of India, gave more, and that if he wanted to make a present it should be in gold, as the king would not accept such things.

From the journal of Vasco da Gama's first voyage, written by an unknown member of the crew, describing Calicut in May 1498. Translated by E. G. Ravenstein in 1898. Lambel was striped cotton cloth.

Who, when and why. The journal survives in a single old copy, kept in a library in the Portuguese city of Porto, and nobody knows for certain who wrote it; scholars have suggested two names, Alvaro Velho and Joao de Sa. The writer was on the voyage and wrote for Portuguese readers. He was not trying to flatter his captain: he records the laughter. Yet his own hopes show through. Elsewhere he says that Calicut "is inhabited by Christians": the Portuguese mistook the Hindus of the city for Christians, and they even prayed in a Hindu temple, thinking it was a church.

Point of view question: Why might the writer have recorded the laughter at Calicut, even though it made his captain look foolish? What does the scene tell you about how the merchants of Calicut, who were used to ships from China, Arabia and Africa, saw these newcomers?

Calicut's officials were right that the Portuguese were poor. But the Portuguese had armed ships and were willing to use them to take over trade, not just to win honour. When da Gama came back in 1502 with a heavily armed fleet, he burned a ship carrying hundreds of Muslim pilgrims and bombarded Calicut for nearly two days. Portugal began demanding that ships in the Indian Ocean carry a Portuguese pass called a cartaz; ships without one had their cargoes seized and were sunk. The Portuguese took the Indian port of Goa and made it the base of their empire in Asia.

Zheng He's fleet used force too, as its own stone boasts. The difference lay in what the force was for. The Ming captured kings who would not honour the emperor, and the captured king of Ceylon was later allowed to go home. The Portuguese fought to control the spice trade itself, and they built forts to keep it.

Worth holding on to: All three fleets served rulers and used force when they chose to, but the Ming fleets came to collect honour and tribute along known routes, while the Portuguese and Spanish came, poor and armed, to seize a share of Asia's wealth.

Why did the Ming stop?

If the treasure fleets were so strong, why were there none after 1433? Several causes worked together.

• A new emperor. Yongle died in 1424. On 7 September that year, the day he took the throne, his son the Hongxi Emperor stopped the voyages. The next emperor, Xuande, sent one last fleet in 1431, and after he died in 1435 there were no more.
• Officials against eunuchs. The voyages were run by palace eunuchs such as Zheng He. The scholar-officials who ran the government, trained in the Confucian classics you met in the lesson on the Song exams, disliked the buying of strange foreign goods, which went against their Confucian ideas, and resented that eunuchs controlled the voyages and their riches. When an eight-year-old emperor came to the throne in 1435, they had the power to end them.
• Danger in the north. With the capital now in Beijing, far from the shipyards of Nanjing, the court's eyes were on the Mongols. In 1449 a Mongol army defeated a much larger Chinese force and captured the Ming emperor himself in the Tumu crisis. Defending the northern frontier came first.
• The sea ban stayed. Private trade by sea remained illegal, so Chinese traders who went abroad did so as smugglers, and the government had no merchants of its own overseas to protect.
• Cost: an open question. Many books say the voyages stopped because they cost too much. Historians disagree. The Dutch scholar J. J. L. Duyvendak thought the heavy costs played a part, but later historians, including Edward Dreyer, point out that the voyages did not overburden the treasury, and some argue that they even made a profit.

A later story adds a twist. Two Ming books written long afterwards tell how, in the reign of the Chenghua Emperor (1465-1487), an official named Liu Daxia hid and burned the War Ministry's files on the voyages, calling them exaggerated tales of strange things. Whether or not it happened that way, the official histories say surprisingly little about the voyages; they do not even record Zheng He's death. That is one reason a stone carved by the commanders themselves matters so much.

What a comparison can and cannot prove

It is tempting to read the table and ask: what if China had kept sailing? Some people go further and call the Ming backward for stopping. That is judging with hindsight, by what happened later, which nobody in 1433 could know. To many at the Ming court the voyages looked like an extravagance run by eunuchs, the Mongols were a real and present danger, and China already made the silks and porcelain that traders from other lands came looking for. Their choice answered their own problems.

The comparison does show something real. Spain and Portugal kept sailing because their rulers competed with each other, wanted Asia's goods and believed they had a duty to spread their faith, and because the spice trade promised great profits. China stopped because the people who now ran its government no longer wanted what the fleets offered. Fleets go where the people who pay for them want them to go.

Common misconceptions

• "Zheng He's fleet discovered America in 1421." A 2002 book by a retired naval officer, Gavin Menzies, made this claim. Historians have rejected it, and OpenStax notes there is no widely accepted proof of any such voyage.
• "After 1433 China turned its back on the sea." The state stopped sending fleets, but Chinese merchants went on trading across East and South-East Asia, often as smugglers in defiance of the sea ban.
• "Zheng He sailed into the unknown, like Columbus." His fleets followed routes that sailors from Arabia, India, Africa, South-East Asia and China had used for centuries. What was new was their size.

Pulling it together

• The Ming dynasty (1368-1644) drove out the Mongols; its founder banned private sea trade in 1371, and his son the Yongle Emperor sent fleets to show China's wealth and power.
• Zheng He, born a Muslim in Yunnan in 1371 and made a palace eunuch after his capture, commanded seven voyages between 1405 and 1433, the first with about 27,800 men.
• The Liujiagang inscription of 1431 records the voyages as the Ming wished them remembered: tribute, rare animals, and disrespectful kings captured.
• Compared on the same questions, Zheng He's fleets were far larger than those of Columbus and da Gama, but they followed known routes and sought tribute rather than conquest or colonies.
• The voyages ended because of a change of emperors, the opposition of officials and the Mongol danger in the north; historians still argue about how much the cost mattered.
• A fair comparison asks the same questions of each case and avoids hindsight.

Sources

1. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 17.2 From the Mamluks to Ming China. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
2. Bawden, J. R. (Ed.). (2026). Inscriptions of Zheng He, 1431. In Middle and Early Modern Ages. Oregon State University. Translation from Su Ming-Yang (2005), Seven Epic Voyages of Zheng He in Ming China. Oregon State University
3. Ravenstein, E. G. (Trans. and Ed.). (1898). A journal of the first voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497-1499. Hakluyt Society. Entries for Calicut, May 1498. Project Gutenberg
4. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 2.1 India and international connections. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Ming treasure voyages. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

A town the Spaniards called Great Cairo

In early March 1517, after three weeks at sea and a storm that nearly sank them, about a hundred Spanish soldiers and sailors from Cuba saw land: the north-eastern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula, in what is now Mexico. One of them was a young man of about twenty-five called Bernal Diaz del Castillo. Fifty years later he remembered the moment.

From the ships we could see a large town standing back about two leagues from the coast, and as we had never seen such a large town in the Island of Cuba nor in Hispaniola, we named it the Great Cairo.

Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, describing March 1517. Translated by Alfred Percival Maudslay, volume 1, 1908. A league is about three miles.

Cairo, in Egypt, was one of the great cities of the world, so the name was a compliment. The town belonged to the Maya. Its people came out to meet the strangers in large canoes, invited them ashore, then ambushed them. Warriors in quilted cotton armour attacked, and the Spaniards fought their way back to their ships, but not before they had seen stone temples and taken some small objects of gold. Diaz wrote: "When we had seen the gold and the houses of masonry, we felt well content at having discovered such a country." Notice the two things that pleased him: gold, and buildings of stone. Remember them, because they tell you what a Spanish soldier was looking for.

Two years later Diaz marched with Hernan Cortes into the heart of the Aztec Empire, and as an old man he wrote a long first-hand account of what he saw. This lesson follows him, and it practises point of view: asking how a writer's position, his job, faith, hopes and fears, shapes what he notices and how he describes it. Every sentence Diaz wrote is precious evidence, and every sentence was written by a man who came to conquer.

The Maya: old cities and living people

The town Diaz called Great Cairo was part of a civilisation already more than two thousand years old. You met the Maya in your first year of world history, so here is a quick reminder and then what happened next. In the Classic period, from about 250 to 900 CE, around forty Maya city-states rose in the rainforests of what are now Guatemala, Mexico, Belize and Honduras. Cities such as Tikal and Calakmul had stone pyramids, ball courts and kings whom OpenStax calls "divine lords". The Maya developed a writing system that scholars can now read, and they carved their kings' histories, battles and family trees in stone.

Then, in the 800s, the great cities of the southern lowlands declined. Over about a century alliances broke down, wars grew more common and cities emptied. Historians and archaeologists still argue about why. OpenStax lists the suggested causes: disease, invasion, natural disasters, revolts and damage to the environment, and it concludes that "it is unlikely there was a single cause". One strong line of evidence points to a growing population cutting down forests, which led to soil washing away and left the cities exposed to droughts and bad harvests.

But the Maya did not vanish. In the north of Yucatan, cities such as Chichen Itza, one of the largest Maya cities, remained great centres into the 1100s, long after the southern cities had faded. When the Spanish arrived, Maya territory was divided among many competing kingdoms, which is one reason the Spanish found it so hard to conquer. Their war against the Maya began in the 1520s and did not end until 1697, when they captured Nojpeten, the island capital of the last independent Maya kingdom.

The Maya also wrote books, folded like screens and painted on bark paper. Spanish priests saw them as the work of the devil. In July 1562 a friar, Diego de Landa, burned a great pile of them at the town of Mani, saying they held nothing but "superstition and lies of the devil". Only four Maya books survive today. Yet the people survived. More than eleven million Maya live in Guatemala, Mexico and beyond, and millions still speak Maya languages.

The core of it: The southern Maya cities declined in the 800s for several reasons, but Maya kingdoms were still strong when the Spanish arrived, held out until 1697, and the Maya people live on today.

An island city in a lake

Far to the west of Yucatan, in the high Valley of Mexico, a younger people had built the greatest city in the Americas. We call them the Aztecs, after Aztlan, the land their stories said they came from; they called themselves the Mexica. According to their own origin story, their god Huitzilopochtli told them to settle where they saw an eagle on a cactus. That place was an island in Lake Texcoco, and there, around 1325, they began to build Tenochtitlan. The eagle on the cactus is still on the flag of Mexico.

For a century the Mexica were a small people who fought as hired soldiers for stronger neighbours. Then they joined two nearby city-states, Texcoco and Tlacopan, in the Triple Alliance. In 1428 the alliance made a surprise attack on the most powerful city in the valley and took its place. Over the next decades the alliance, led by the Mexica, conquered much of central Mexico. By 1502, when Moctezuma II became ruler, the empire stretched from the coast of the Gulf of Mexico to Oaxaca in the south and into parts of today's Guatemala.

Picture the city from above. Tenochtitlan sat in the lake, joined to the shore by three long causeways, raised roads built across the water. Around it lay chinampas: long, narrow fields built up from mud and plants in the shallow lake, with canals between them for watering crops and moving canoes. They helped feed a city of at least 200,000 people. Ordinary houses were made of adobe, sun-dried brick, with flat roofs around small courtyards. At the centre stood palaces, a ball court and the Templo Mayor, the Great Temple, a double pyramid about ninety feet tall with one shrine for Tlaloc, the god of rain, and one for Huitzilopochtli, the god of war.

The empire ran on tribute: goods and labour that conquered peoples had to send to the capitals. OpenStax counts thirty-eight provinces, each with its own list. Places near the capital sent food, which was hard to carry far. Distant places sent luxuries. The Gulf coast, where rubber trees grew, owed sixteen thousand rubber balls for the sacred ball game. Cloth, weapons, feathers and workers for building projects all flowed into Tenochtitlan.

Aztec religion taught that the gods had made the world through sacrifice and needed human help to keep it going. Priests offered human lives at the temples, especially prisoners captured in war, believing, in OpenStax's words, that the sacrifices "ensure that the sun stayed in the sky, the harvests continued to be bountiful" and illness was kept away. This was a real and terrible part of Aztec life. It was also something the Spanish would use, as you will see, to argue that their conquest was right.

Bernal Diaz sees the city

Cortes sailed from Cuba in February 1519 with about 11 ships, 500 men, 13 horses and a few small cannon. Marching inland, the Spaniards made allies among peoples who resented Mexica rule and the tribute it demanded. In November 1519 they reached the southern causeway across the lake.

The next day, in the morning, we arrived at a broad Causeway, and continued our march towards Iztapalapa, and when we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land and that straight and level causeway going towards Mexico, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and cues and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream? ...

[Of all these wonders that I then beheld] to-day all is overthrown and lost, nothing left standing.

Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, describing November 1519. Translated by Alfred Percival Maudslay, volume 2, 1910. Cues were temples, from a Maya word for a house of the gods; Mexico was the Spaniards' name for Tenochtitlan.

Who, when and why. Diaz was a foot soldier, not a captain. He finished his book in 1568 in Guatemala, almost fifty years after the events. There he had been granted the tribute and labour of Indigenous villages, and the book was not printed until 1632. He had a reason to write. In 1552 Francisco Lopez de Gomara, Cortes's chaplain, who had not taken part in the campaign, published a life of Cortes that gave almost all the credit to Cortes. Diaz called his own book the True History because he wanted the ordinary soldiers, and their Indigenous allies such as the Tlaxcalans, to get their share of the glory. He also felt that the Spanish Crown had never rewarded him properly.

Point of view question: To describe Tenochtitlan, Diaz reaches for Amadis of Gaul, a popular Spanish tale of knights and magic that was in print by 1508. Why would a Spanish soldier compare a real city to a story from a book? And what does the last line, written about fifty years later, tell you about how his feelings had changed?

Here is one way to answer. Diaz and his readers had no words for a city of 200,000 people standing in a lake, so he compared it to the most marvellous thing his readers knew: a fairy-tale romance. The comparison tells us how astonished he was, and it is also a clue that his memory, after fifty years, is shaped by stories. The final line is an old man's regret. He fought to destroy the city he admired.

The market and the temple

Four days after entering the city, Cortes and his soldiers visited the great market of Tlatelolco, Tenochtitlan's twin city, and then climbed the hundred and fourteen steps of its great temple, where Moctezuma was waiting at the top. Diaz described both in the same chapter.

When we got to the top of the great Cue, on a small plaza which has been made on the top where there was a space like a platform with some large stones placed on it, on which they put the poor Indians for sacrifice, there was a bulky image like a dragon and other evil figures and much blood shed that very day. ...

Some of the soldiers among us who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, and all over Italy, and in Rome, said that so large a market place and so full of people, and so well regulated and arranged, they had never beheld before.

Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, describing November 1519. Translated by Alfred Percival Maudslay, volume 2, 1910.

Read the two passages together and Diaz's point of view comes into focus. He admires what a Spaniard valued: order, trade, crowds, stone buildings, wealth. He even notes merchants who kept gold dust in clear goose quills and used them to work out what cloaks and gourds of cacao beans were worth. But when he describes Aztec religion, every word judges: "evil figures", and on the same page "cursed idols" and "that huge and cursed temple". For Diaz, a Christian, these gods were demons, and the sacrifices proved it. Historians note that he also wanted the conquest to look like a just war, and the sacrifices helped him make that case.

None of this means Diaz was lying about the sacrifices: Aztec sources such as the Florentine Codex and the Spanish accounts agree that they happened. Point of view does not tell you whether a source is true or false. It tells you what the writer chose to notice, which words he chose, and why.

The core of it: Diaz's account is the fullest eyewitness description of Tenochtitlan, but it is the view of a Spanish soldier writing fifty years later to win credit, admiring the city's wealth and condemning its religion.

How an empire fell in two years

The story of the conquest is often told as five hundred Spaniards beating an empire of millions. The evidence tells a different story, with four causes working together.

• Allies. Tlaxcala, a city-state surrounded by Aztec lands, had fought the Mexica for generations. After first battling the Spaniards, the Tlaxcalans joined them. By the final siege the Spanish force of about a thousand men fought alongside somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 Indigenous warriors.
• An interpreter. A young Nahua woman, enslaved as a girl, was one of twenty enslaved women given to the Spaniards in 1519. She spoke both Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and a Maya language. Known as Malinche, or Dona Marina, she translated for Cortes in his meetings with Moctezuma.
• A captured ruler and a massacre. Moctezuma welcomed the Spaniards on 8 November 1519 and gave them gifts. Cortes made him a prisoner. In 1520, while Cortes was away, Spanish soldiers attacked people celebrating a religious festival at the Great Temple, and the city rose against them. Moctezuma was killed; no one knows for certain whether by Spaniards or by his own people. The Spaniards fled the city at night with heavy losses.
• Disease. The Spaniards had brought diseases unknown in the Americas, most likely including smallpox. By the time Cortes and his Tlaxcalan allies returned in May 1521, the people of the city were sick and badly weakened. After a siege of three months, the city surrendered on 13 August 1521.

The Spanish destroyed the temples and built churches on top of them. They renamed the city Mexico City and made it the capital of a colony called New Spain. That is what Diaz meant by "to-day all is overthrown and lost".

The other side of the causeway

Diaz's book is not the only account. From 1545 a Spanish friar, Bernardino de Sahagun, worked with Nahua elders and former students to record their history, religion and daily life in Nahuatl and Spanish, with more than two thousand pictures by Indigenous artists. The result, now called the Florentine Codex, was completed in 1569. Its twelfth book tells the conquest from the point of view of the conquered people of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco. It describes the attack on the festival dancers and the misery of the smallpox epidemic from the inside.

The Florentine Codex has its own point of view. It was made decades after the conquest, under the direction of a Spanish friar, by people who had lost the war. Historians set it beside Diaz and check each against the other, just as you checked Marco Polo against Ibn Battuta.

Common misconceptions

• "The Maya mysteriously vanished." The southern cities declined in the 800s, but Maya kingdoms fought the Spanish from 1517 until 1697, and more than eleven million Maya people live today.
• "A few hundred Spaniards conquered the Aztecs by themselves." Tens of thousands of Indigenous allies, above all the Tlaxcalans, fought on the Spanish side, and smallpox killed many defenders before the final siege.
• "The Aztecs thought Cortes was a returning god." The story can be traced mainly to accounts written about fifty years after the conquest, and some historians who specialise in Spanish and Nahua sources now think it was invented afterwards to explain the defeat.

Looking back

• Bernal Diaz first met the Maya in 1517 at the town the Spaniards called Great Cairo, and he finished his True History in Guatemala in 1568.
• The Classic Maya cities declined in the 800s for several connected reasons, but Maya kingdoms resisted Spain until 1697, and millions of Maya live today.
• The Mexica built Tenochtitlan in Lake Texcoco from around 1325, led the Triple Alliance from 1428, and fed a city of at least 200,000 people with chinampas and tribute from thirty-eight provinces.
• Diaz admired the city's causeways, buildings and market but condemned its religion; his account is precious evidence written from a conqueror's point of view.
• Tenochtitlan fell on 13 August 1521 because of Indigenous allies, an interpreter, a captured ruler, and smallpox, not because of Spanish soldiers alone.

Sources

1. Diaz del Castillo, B. (1908). The true history of the conquest of New Spain (A. P. Maudslay, Trans.), Vol. 1. Hakluyt Society. Chapter on the voyage of 1517. Internet Archive
2. Diaz del Castillo, B. (1910). The true history of the conquest of New Spain (A. P. Maudslay, Trans.), Vol. 2. Hakluyt Society. Chapters on the approach to Mexico and the great market. Internet Archive
3. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 8.2 Early cultures and civilizations in the Americas. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
4. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 8.3 The age of empires in the Americas. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
5. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 5.2 Crossing the Atlantic. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax

A boy checks the tribute

At Christmas or on the feast of Saint John in June, local chiefs from the countryside came to the city of Cusco, high in the Andes mountains of Peru, to hand over their tribute to the Spaniard who now held rights over their villages. They brought bundles of knotted strings. And they asked for a particular person to check their accounts: the Spaniard's young son, a boy whose mother was an Inca princess. Years later, as an old man in Spain, he remembered why.

I examined the Quipus and knots with my father's Indians and other Curacas, when they came to Cuzco to pay their tribute on Christmas or St. John's day. The strange Curacas asked my mother to order me to verify their accounts, because, being a suspicious people, they would not trust the Spaniards to deal fairly with them. Thus I compared their tribute with the accounts on the knots, and soon came to understand them as well as the Indians themselves.

Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas, book 6, published in 1609. Translated by Clements Markham, 1871. Curacas were local chiefs; "strange" here means chiefs from other places, not from his father's lands.

The boy was Garcilaso de la Vega, and the knotted strings were quipus (say KEE-poos), the record-keeping system of the largest empire in the Americas. The Inca had no writing on paper or stone. Yet they counted millions of people, stored food for armies and sent orders across thousands of miles of mountains.

This lesson does two jobs. First, you will learn to read the numbers on a quipu cord yourself, step by step. Second, you will practise sourcing: asking who made a source, when, why and from what position. Almost everything written about quipus in the 1500s was written by Spaniards or, like Garcilaso, by people caught between two worlds. Knowing who they were tells you how far to trust them.

An empire along a mountain chain

The Inca called their empire Tawantinsuyu, meaning the land of four parts, because it was divided into four great regions whose corners met at Cusco. Cusco stands more than eleven thousand feet above sea level. Around the year 1000 it was a farming village where people grew potatoes and maize and herded llamas. The Inca were master stonemasons: at Sacsayhuaman, above Cusco, huge stones were cut so skilfully that they still fit tightly together without any mortar.

The empire grew fast. Inca stories say that a ruler's son, Yupanki, saved Cusco from an invading people, took the title Pachacuti and seized power. OpenStax notes that the story is "partly contrived", but Pachacuti was real, and under him the conquests began in earnest around 1430. His son and grandson pushed the borders south into today's Chile and Argentina and north into Ecuador and Colombia. By the early 1500s the Inca ruled a long strip of mountains, deserts and coast from today's Colombia down into Chile and Argentina, with perhaps twelve million people.

How do you run a place like that? The Inca answer was labour. Instead of paying taxes in money, which they did not use, families owed the state work, a system called mit'a. Some members of each household took their turn building roads, bridges, palaces and temples, carrying food to storehouses, serving as messengers or fighting in the army, while others stayed home to run the farm. The food and cloth they produced filled great storehouses that fed the armies and kept people alive in years of famine.

Roads, bridges and runners

The empire was held together by its roads. OpenStax says the Inca road system "may have included as many as twenty-five thousand miles of roads": straight paths across the coastal desert, stone staircases up mountainsides, and bridges of woven rope swinging over canyons. Armies marched on them, llama trains carried goods to the storehouses, and officials travelled from province to province.

News travelled faster than any traveller. Garcilaso describes the chasquis, relay runners posted in pairs of huts every quarter of a league, about three-quarters of a mile, along the main roads. A runner sprinted his stretch shouting the message, and the next runner took it on, so that a message passed from mouth to mouth across the empire. Some messages were not spoken at all. Garcilaso says that "in place of letters, they had knots, on threads or strings of different colours", which told the ruler and his governors the numbers of men, weapons, clothes and food that were needed.

So what?: An empire with no money and no paper still needed to know who owed what, how much was in each storehouse and how many soldiers each province could send. The quipu was the tool that answered those questions.

How to read a quipu cord

A quipu is a main cord with many thinner cords hanging from it like a fringe; these are called pendant cords. Garcilaso says the colour of a cord told you what it counted: "a yellow string referred to gold, a white one to silver, and a red one to soldiers." The knots told you how many. He explains that the knots "indicated units, tens, hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands", with the highest number at the top, "exactly in the way a good accountant places his figures to make a long addition sum."

In the twentieth century, researchers studying hundreds of surviving quipus confirmed this. An American researcher, Leland Locke, is usually credited with first showing, in 1912, that many quipus record numbers with place value, also called positional notation: the same kind of system you use when the 3 in 300 means something different from the 3 in 30. Later, Marcia and Robert Ascher studied several hundred quipus and described the knots exactly. Here are the rules.

Worked example 1. Imagine a red cord, so it counts soldiers. Hold it so it hangs down from the main cord, and follow these steps.

1. Find the bottom of the cord. There is a long knot with 6 turns. That is the units place: 6.
2. Move up to the next place, the tens. There is an empty space where a cluster would be. That means 0 tens.
3. Move up again, to the hundreds. There is a cluster of 3 simple knots: 3 hundreds.
4. There is nothing higher, so stop. Read the digits from the top down: 3, 0, 6.
5. Write the number: 306 soldiers.

Two more red cords hang beside it. The second has 2 simple knots in the hundreds place, 4 simple knots in the tens place and a figure-eight knot at the bottom: 2, 4, 1, which is 241. The third has 1 simple knot in the hundreds place, 5 in the tens place and a long knot with 9 turns: 159.

Worked example 2: the check. Many quipus contain sums. A cord may hold the total of a group of other cords, which is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the knots really are being read correctly. Suppose a fourth cord, set a little apart, has 7 simple knots in the hundreds place, an empty tens place and a long knot with 6 turns. That reads 706. Now add the three soldiers' cords: 306 + 241 + 159 = 706. The total matches, so the readings are right.

Now change one thing and watch the result flip. Suppose a careless reader ignored the empty space on the first cord and read its knots as 3 and 6, making 36. The sum would become 36 + 241 + 159 = 436, which does not match the 706 on the total cord. The mismatch tells the reader to go back and look again. An empty space is not nothing: it is a zero, and it holds every other knot in its place.

So what?: Quipu numbers work like ours: place shows value, an empty place means zero, and a total cord lets a reader catch mistakes, exactly as Garcilaso's comparison with "a long addition sum" suggests.

What the knots could hold

Numbers were only part of the story. The quipu-keepers, called quipu-camayu, were trained officials. Garcilaso says that even the smallest village had four of them and larger ones twenty or thirty, all keeping the same record, so that they could check one another. They kept census records, sorted by age, and accounts of tribute, storehouses, weapons and land. OpenStax notes that quipus also held information that was not numbers, possibly even poems, and that much of the knowledge needed to read them is lost. Garcilaso himself explains that quipu-keepers used the knots to remind themselves of histories and laws they had learned by heart, together with poems composed to be remembered.

Whether quipus recorded words, not just numbers, is still argued over. In 2017 the anthropologist Sabine Hyland argued that quipus kept in the Peruvian village of Collata use colours and fibres to stand for sounds. But those quipus were made in the 1700s, long after the Spanish arrived, so they may have been influenced by European writing. The question is open.

Two Spaniards' witnesses on the stand

Here is a second source about quipus, written fifty years before Garcilaso's book.

I was incredulous respecting this system of counting, and although I heard it described, I held the greater part of the story to be fabulous. But when I was at Marcavillca, in the province of Xauxa, I asked the lord Guacarapora to explain it in such a way as that my mind might be satisfied, and that I might be assured that it was true and accurate. He ordered his servants to bring the quipus, and as this lord was a native, and a man of good understanding, he proceeded to make the thing clear to me. He told me to observe that all that he, for his part, had delivered to the Spaniards from the time that the Governor Don Francisco Pizarro arrived in the valley, was duly noted down without any fault or omission. Thus I saw the accounts for the gold, the silver, the clothes, the corn, sheep, and other things; so that in truth I was quite astonished.

Pedro de Cieza de Leon, The Second Part of the Chronicle of Peru, written around 1550. Translated by Clements Markham, 1883. Incredulous means unable to believe; fabulous here means made up, like a fable. By "sheep" he meant llamas.

Who, when and why: Cieza. Pedro Cieza de Leon was a Spanish soldier who reached Lima in 1548 and spent the next two years travelling across Peru, collecting information for a history. He began as a doubter, which makes his astonishment more convincing: he was persuaded against his expectations. He saw the quipus himself and names the place and the lord who showed him. He also had no reason to flatter the Inca, though he did criticise the cruelty of his own countrymen. His second part was not printed until long after his death in 1554.

Who, when and why: Garcilaso. Garcilaso was born in Cusco in 1539, a few years after the conquest, to a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noblewoman, Chimpu Ocllo, from the royal family. He sailed to Spain at twenty-one and never came back. He published the Royal Commentaries in Lisbon in 1609, about fifty years after he left Peru, and he based it mostly on what his Inca relatives had told him as a child, together with the notes of an earlier writer. His book presents his mother's people to European readers as wise and well governed. In the same chapter on quipus he writes that, "owing to their gentle dispositions and excellent government", all the Inca's subjects "might be called good".

Point of view question: Garcilaso says the chiefs trusted him, a boy, more than the Spaniards. What does this suggest about how Andean people saw Spanish officials in the 1550s? And why might Garcilaso, writing for Spanish readers in 1609, have wanted to tell this story about himself?

Put the two side by side and the sourcing pays off. On quipus they corroborate each other: two writers with different backgrounds, writing fifty years apart, both describe knots that record goods and people with great accuracy, and the surviving quipus, with their place values and totals, back them up. On Inca government, though, Garcilaso's love for his mother's people means his praise needs checking against other evidence.

Conquest, and the knots that survived it

In the 1520s the ruler Huayna Capac died of smallpox, a European disease that had spread into the Andes ahead of the Europeans themselves, and two of his sons fought a civil war for the throne. In 1532 the Spanish adventurer Francisco Pizarro captured one of the brothers, Atahualpa. Atahualpa promised to fill a room with gold and two with silver if he were set free. The Spaniards executed him the following year anyway.

The quipus outlived the empire. As Cieza saw, Andean lords used them to record every load the Spaniards took. He adds that after Spanish armies passed through, the chiefs checked their quipus and shared out the losses, so that a province that had suffered less made up the difference for one that had suffered more. But in 1583 church officials at the Third Council of Lima banned some quipus and ordered them burned, because they recorded offerings to Andean gods. The skill of reading them faded. The quipus in museums today can be read as numbers, but whatever else they once said is still a puzzle.

Common misconceptions

• "Without writing, the Inca could not keep records." Quipus recorded censuses, tribute, storehouses and armies with great accuracy, and Spanish writers who doubted them changed their minds when they saw them used.
• "Historians have fully decoded the quipus." The number system has been understood since the early 1900s, but whether quipus also recorded words or stories is still debated.
• "Garcilaso was an Inca who saw the empire at its height." He was born in 1539, after the Spanish conquest, and wrote in Spain about fifty years after he left Peru, using childhood memories, relatives' stories and other writers' notes.

What to remember

• The Inca Empire, Tawantinsuyu, grew from Cusco from about 1430 under Pachacuti and his heirs into a realm of perhaps twelve million people along the Andes.
• It ran on labour service (mit'a), storehouses, up to 25,000 miles of roads and relay runners called chasquis.
• Quipus recorded numbers with place value: long knots or a figure-eight knot for units, clusters of simple knots for tens and higher, and an empty space for zero.
• Totals on some cords let a reader check the readings, which is strong evidence that the system is correctly understood.
• Cieza de Leon, a doubting Spanish soldier around 1550, and Garcilaso de la Vega, a son of an Inca noblewoman writing in Spain in 1609, agree about quipus; Garcilaso's praise of Inca government needs more checking.

Sources

1. Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca. (1871). First part of the Royal Commentaries of the Yncas (C. R. Markham, Trans.), Vol. 2. Hakluyt Society. Book 6, chapters 7-9. Internet Archive
2. Cieza de Leon, P. de. (1883). The second part of the Chronicle of Peru (C. R. Markham, Trans.). Hakluyt Society. Chapter 12. Internet Archive
3. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 8.3 The age of empires in the Americas. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
4. Ascher, M., and Ascher, R. (1981). Code of the quipu: A study in media, mathematics, and culture. University of Michigan Press.
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Quipu: Numeric usage. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

A job application in ten points

Around 1482 a thirty-year-old painter from Florence wanted a new job, and he drafted a letter to the ruler of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. He numbered his skills. Portable bridges. Ways to drain a besieged town's moat. Mortars that hurl stones "almost resembling a storm". Covered armoured chariots. Big guns, catapults and ships that could survive cannon fire. Only after nine points about war did he mention buildings and canals, and only at the very end did he add one more line.

Item: I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze or clay, and also in painting whatever may be done, and as well as any other, be he whom he may.

Leonardo da Vinci, draft of a letter to Ludovico Sforza of Milan, about 1482. Translated by Jean Paul Richter, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, 1883.

The writer was Leonardo da Vinci, who would paint the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. In his own job application, painting came last. That surprise is a good way into the age he lived in, which we call the Renaissance.

Leonardo's lifetime, 1452 to 1519, also saw a quieter revolution. When he was a small child, a goldsmith in Germany was printing Bibles with metal type. By the time he was fifty, presses were running in hundreds of European towns. This lesson follows Leonardo's life and, alongside it, the spread of printing. It practises the skill of change over time: noticing what changed, how fast, and what stayed the same.

A rebirth in Florence

Renaissance is a French word meaning rebirth. It names a movement that began in the cities of northern Italy in the 1300s and 1400s, when scholars and artists set out to bring back the learning and art of ancient Greece and Rome. The poet Petrarch (1304-1374) and the scholars who followed him searched old monastery libraries for lost works by Roman writers such as Cicero and Livy. In 1396 a Byzantine scholar, Manuel Chrysoloras, was invited to Florence to teach Greek. After the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453, as you saw in the lesson on Byzantium, more Greek scholars came west with precious manuscripts.

The scholars were called humanists. OpenStax explains that humanism "stressed the value and dignity of human beings": its followers believed that by studying the philosophy, history and literature of Greece and Rome, people could improve themselves and live a "good life", which would improve their cities too. Many Italian humanists were devout Christians; reading Cicero did not make them give up their faith.

Florence, a city of bankers, merchants and craftsmen, was the heart of the movement. Its richest family, the bankers of the Medici, paid for buildings, paintings and scholarship. Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-1492), who ran the city, encouraged Florentines to commission works from artists such as Leonardo, Botticelli and Michelangelo. A person who pays for art or learning in this way is called a patron. Painters learned new ways to make flat pictures look deep and real, such as linear perspective, in which lines meet at a point on the horizon, as railway tracks seem to.

Remember: The Renaissance was a movement to revive ancient Greek and Roman learning and art, led by humanist scholars and artists in Italian cities such as Florence and paid for by rich patrons.

A boy in Verrocchio's workshop

Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452, in or near the small town of Vinci, in the hills outside Florence. His father was a successful notary, a kind of lawyer who drew up contracts; his mother was a young woman of humble family, and his parents never married. Around the age of fourteen he went to Florence to work as a studio boy in the workshop of the painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio.

A Renaissance workshop was more like a small factory than an artist's quiet studio. Boys ground pigments, prepared panels, cast bronze and copied the master's drawings, and as they improved they painted parts of the master's pictures. In Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ, painted in the early 1470s, the young angel holding Jesus's robe is said to be Leonardo's work. By 1472, at twenty, Leonardo had qualified as a master in the Florentine guild of artists and doctors. Artists were craftsmen who worked to order: a patron asked for a picture of a certain size and subject, and paid for it.

The letter to Milan

In 1482 Lorenzo de' Medici sent Leonardo to Milan, to the court of Ludovico Sforza, who ruled there from 1479 to 1499. Here are four of the ten points from the draft letter Leonardo prepared.

1) I have a sort of extremely light and strong bridges, adapted to be most easily carried, and with them you may pursue, and at any time flee from the enemy ...

6) Item. I will make covered chariots, safe and unattackable which, entering among the enemy with their artillery, there is no body of men so great but they would break them. ...

10) In time of peace I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in architecture and the composition of buildings public and private; and in guiding water from one place to another. ...

Again, the bronze horse may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honour of the prince your father of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Sforza.

Leonardo da Vinci, draft of a letter to Ludovico Sforza, about 1482. Translated by Jean Paul Richter, 1883.

Who, when and why. What survives is not the letter Ludovico received but a rough draft, now in a huge collection of Leonardo's papers called the Codex Atlanticus. It has corrections and no signature. It is also written from left to right, while Leonardo normally wrote in mirror writing, from right to left. Its editor, Richter, thought it might have been dictated or copied by an assistant, but he judged the contents genuine. Leonardo was writing to win a well-paid post. The Italian city-states were often at war, and Milan's ruler needed military engineers more than painters, so Leonardo put first what his patron would want most.

Point of view question: Leonardo promises to make "the bronze horse" for "the immortal glory and eternal honour" of Ludovico's family. What does this phrase tell you about why Renaissance rulers paid for art? Whose point of view does the letter mainly show: Leonardo's, or the patron's he was trying to please?

Ludovico hired him, and Leonardo stayed in Milan until 1499. He painted the Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper on the wall of a monastery dining hall. He also worked for years on the great bronze horse he had promised, making a full-size clay model, shown off at a Sforza wedding in 1493, and detailed plans for casting it. Then, in November 1494, with the French king Charles VIII threatening Italy, Ludovico gave the bronze set aside for the horse to be made into cannon. The war machines Leonardo had offered in his letter had won out over his sculpture. In 1499 a French army took Milan, and Leonardo left.

Remember: Renaissance artists worked for patrons who paid for what they needed; Leonardo's letter shows that a ruler of Milan wanted war engineering first and glory in bronze and paint second.

Meanwhile, in Mainz

Far to the north, in the German city of Mainz, a former goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg had been working on printing since about 1436. A lawsuit against him in 1439 already mentions his type and his metal moulds. His idea combined several pieces: separate metal letters cast in an alloy of lead, tin and antimony that was tough enough to be used again and again; an oil-based ink that stuck to metal; and a press, adapted from presses used for squeezing grapes and olives, that pushed paper evenly onto the inked type.

In the lesson on Song China you saw why Bi Sheng's clay type never replaced carved blocks: Chinese needs thousands of different characters. Gutenberg's Latin alphabet needed only a few dozen letters, plus capitals and punctuation, so a set of type was far easier to make and sort.

In the 1450s Gutenberg printed the Latin Bible. Somewhere between about 160 and 185 copies were made, some on paper and some on vellum, fine calfskin; 49 survive today. In March 1455 a churchman who later became Pope Pius II saw pages of it on display in Frankfurt and described them in a letter. By about 1600, two men working a hand press could make around 3,600 printed impressions in a long working day.

Then printing spread with astonishing speed. Here are the numbers from the Wikipedia survey of the history of the printing press.

What changed, and what stayed the same

Read the table as a historian of change over time. First, the speed: in about fifty years, Leonardo's lifetime so far, one workshop became hundreds, and books went from being copied one at a time by hand to being made in hundreds of identical copies. Because every copy of an edition was the same, scholars in different cities could read exactly the same text, and a mistake could be corrected once for every copy in the next edition. Books became cheaper, and over the following century more and more were printed in the languages people spoke, such as Italian, German and French, rather than only in Latin.

Now look for what stayed the same. Much of what the early presses printed was what scribes had copied before: Bibles, prayer books and Latin works for priests and scholars. Most Europeans still could not read. And handwriting did not disappear. Leonardo himself filled thousands of pages of notebooks by hand, in mirror writing, with studies of birds, water, machines and the human body. He wrote that he meant to prepare them for publication, but he never did, and nobody knows why. Many of his ideas stayed unknown to most readers for centuries, until editors such as Richter printed selections in the 1800s.

Leonardo's drawings did reach print once in his lifetime. The mathematician Luca Pacioli, who worked alongside him at the Milan court, wrote a book on proportion, finished in 1498, with geometric drawings by Leonardo. In 1509 a Venice printer published it, and Leonardo's drawings of solid shapes went out to readers who would never meet him. That is the change over time in a single book: a handwritten copy for a duke in 1498, a printed edition for anyone who could buy one in 1509.

Remember: Between about 1450 and 1500 printing spread from one workshop to some 270 cities and produced more than 20 million copies, but Latin religious books, a minority of readers and handwriting all carried on.

Common misconceptions

• "Gutenberg invented printing." As you saw in the lesson on Song China, the Chinese printed a dated book in 868, Bi Sheng made movable type in the 1040s, and Korean printers used metal type in 1377. Gutenberg's achievement was a practical system of metal type, ink and press for an alphabet.
• "The Renaissance ended the Dark Ages." Renaissance humanists invented the idea of a gloomy middle age between Rome and themselves. Medieval scholars in Baghdad, Constantinople and European monasteries had preserved and studied ancient works, and many historians now prefer the term early modern for this period.
• "Renaissance artists made art for its own sake." They worked in workshops for patrons who paid for particular subjects. Leonardo's own job application put war machines before painting.

Summing up

• The Renaissance, meaning rebirth, revived ancient Greek and Roman learning and art, starting in Italian cities such as Florence in the 1300s and 1400s.
• Humanists believed that studying ancient writers helped people live a good life; most of them stayed devout Christians.
• Artists such as Leonardo trained in workshops and worked for patrons such as the Medici and Ludovico Sforza.
• Leonardo's draft letter of about 1482 offered nine kinds of war engineering before painting, because that was what Milan's ruler needed most.
• Gutenberg's metal type and press, working by the 1450s, spread to about 270 cities by 1500, producing more than 20 million copies.
• Printing changed how fast and how widely texts spread, but religious books, Latin, a minority of readers and handwriting carried on.

Sources

1. Leonardo da Vinci. (1883). The notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (J. P. Richter, Ed. and Trans.). Drafts of letters to Lodovico il Moro, sections 1340-1341. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg
2. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 5.1 The Protestant Reformation. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Printing press: Gutenberg's press and the printing revolution. Wikipedia. Wikipedia
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Leonardo da Vinci. Wikipedia. Wikipedia
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Gutenberg Bible. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

A wooden chest in Juterbog

In the church of Saint Nicholas in Juterbog, a small town in eastern Germany, there is an old chest for collecting money. It is said to have belonged to Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar who in 1517 was travelling from town to town preaching a special offer from the pope. People who paid into the chest received a letter of pardon called an indulgence. A rhyme went round about the preachers: "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs."

Not far away, in the university town of Wittenberg, a thirty-three-year-old monk and professor named Martin Luther was furious. In the autumn of 1517 he wrote ninety-five short arguments against the way indulgences were being sold. Within a few years western Christianity, united under the pope for centuries, had split in two. That split is called the Reformation.

This is a lesson about a dispute that people have cared about deeply for five hundred years, and still do. It practises point of view in a special form: setting out each side's case in its own words, as its supporters would recognise it, before asking what a historian can say about it.

What an indulgence was

First, the Church's own teaching, as OpenStax explains it. Catholics believed that after death most souls passed through purgatory, a state of cleansing in which they made up for their sins before reaching heaven. An indulgence reduced or cancelled that time of punishment. It could be earned by actions of great religious merit, such as going on crusade. The Church also taught that the pope controlled a "store" of extra merit built up by Jesus and the saints, and could share it out in the form of an indulgence.

Over time, indulgences came to be granted in return for gifts of money. In 1515 Pope Leo X granted a special indulgence to raise money for rebuilding Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, and Tetzel was one of its preachers in Germany. Even some Catholics thought the preachers went too far. Theologians in Paris had criticised the coin-in-the-coffer rhyme back in the 1400s, and the Wikipedia biography of Tetzel notes that the rhyme is "almost certainly not a literal quotation" of his own words. Keep that in mind: a slogan about your opponents is evidence of what people said, not proof of what the opponents believed.

The case against: Luther's theses

Here, in Luther's own words, is the heart of his objection.

1. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.

27. They preach man who say that so soon as the penny jingles into the money-box, the soul flies out [of purgatory].

36. Every truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt, even without letters of pardon.

43. Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better work than buying pardons.

86. Again: "Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?"

Martin Luther, Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, known as the Ninety-Five Theses, October 1517. Translated in Works of Martin Luther, 1915. Poenitentiam agite is Latin for "repent"; "they preach man" means they preach human ideas, not God's.

Who, when and why. Luther wrote the theses in Latin, the language of scholars, as propositions for a formal academic debate at his university; the heading invites anyone who cannot come to argue "by letter". He sent a copy to the archbishop in charge of the indulgence in his region. He was a priest and a believing Catholic, and at first he seems to have wanted reform, not revolt. Notice thesis 86: Luther does not ask the question in his own voice. He puts it among the "shrewd questionings of the laity", the awkward things that ordinary churchgoers were asking, and warns that unchecked preaching makes the pope look bad.

Point of view question: Luther claimed to be defending the pope against preachers who misused his name. Read theses 43 and 86 again. Would the pope's officials in Rome have read them as loyal advice or as an attack? What in the words makes you think so?

Printed copies spread quickly across Germany, and German translations followed. Luther's ideas grew into a whole teaching. Its centre was what is called justification by faith: OpenStax sums it up as the belief that "only God could grant forgiveness" and that salvation, being saved from sin and death, depended entirely on God and was received through faith. Luther also taught that the Bible alone, not popes or councils, was the final authority for Christians, and he translated the New Testament into German so that ordinary people could read it, publishing it in 1522. He no longer saw the life of a priest, monk or nun as holier than any other calling, and he himself, a former monk, married a former nun, Katharina von Bora.

The pope condemned his teachings, and in January 1521 Luther was excommunicated, expelled from the Church. In April that year he refused to take back his writings before the emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms, an assembly of the empire's rulers, and was declared an outlaw. Friendly German princes protected him.

In short: Luther argued that forgiveness was God's free gift received through faith and true repentance, not something a payment could buy, and that the Bible was the final authority for Christians.

The case for: the Council of Trent

The Catholic Church answered at length. From 1545 to 1563, bishops and theologians met at the Council of Trent, in the town of Trento in northern Italy, to define Catholic teaching and to reform the Church. Here is the Catholic case in the Council's own words.

On scripture (1546): this truth and discipline are contained in the written books, and the unwritten traditions which, received by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ himself, or from the Apostles themselves ... have come down even unto us.

On justification (1547): If any one saith, that by faith alone the impious is justified; in such wise as to mean, that nothing else is required to co-operate in order to the obtaining the grace of Justification ... let him be anathema.

On indulgences (1563): the sacred holy Synod teaches, and enjoins, that the use of Indulgences, for the Christian people most salutary ... is to be retained in the Church ... It ordains generally by this decree, that all evil gains for the obtaining thereof,--whence a most prolific cause of abuses amongst the Christian people has been derived,--be wholly abolished.

The Council of Trent, sessions 4, 6 and 25. Translated by J. Waterworth, 1848. Anathema means cut off from the Church; salutary means healthy or good for the soul; the impious are sinners.

Who, when and why. The Council was called by the pope and its decrees were written by bishops and theologians who believed the Catholic Church was the one true Church founded by Christ. They wrote in Latin, carefully and slowly, over eighteen years, for the clergy who would teach the faith. Their aim was double: to answer the Protestants point by point, and to fix the real problems inside their own Church.

Point of view question: The decree on indulgences keeps indulgences but orders "all evil gains" from them "wholly abolished". What does this tell you about whether the Council thought Luther's complaints about money were completely wrong?

The Catholic case, put in its own terms, runs like this. God's grace comes first, but a person is not saved by faith alone: grace calls for a response, and faith must work through love and good deeds. Christ gave his teaching to the apostles, and it has come down through the Bible and through the living tradition of the Church, which interprets the Bible. Indulgences are a right use of the Church's power to forgive, though they had been badly abused. Trent backed its words with action. It stopped church officials from appointing their relatives to church posts, limited each bishop to one diocese, and set out to train priests better. A new religious order, the Jesuits, founded by the Spanish nobleman Ignatius of Loyola, opened schools and sent missionaries across the world. Historians call this the Catholic Reformation.

In short: The Council of Trent taught that salvation comes by God's grace with faith and good works, that truth comes through the Bible and the Church's tradition, and that indulgences were valid but their money-making abuses must end.

What would settle it?

Set the two cases side by side.

Notice what a historian can and cannot do with this table. The questions in the first three rows are questions of faith. No archive, coin box or manuscript can prove which answer is true, and a history lesson does not try to. What a historian can settle are questions of fact and cause. Were indulgences being sold in ways that troubled believers? Yes, and both sides said so: Luther in 1517, and the Council itself in 1563, which ordered "all evil gains" to stop. Why did Luther's ideas spread so fast and so far? Historians point to the printing press, which carried thousands of copies of his writings across Europe, and to German princes who welcomed a reason to reject the pope's authority.

The disagreement over faith has a surprising later chapter. In 1999, after years of talks, the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, stating that they now share "a common understanding of our justification by God's grace through faith in Christ". Differences remain, but the churches themselves, not historians, found much of the common ground.

A divided Europe

The split did not stay peaceful or simple. Other reformers went their own ways: in Geneva, John Calvin taught that God had already chosen who would be saved, and his followers spread to the Netherlands, Scotland and France. In England, King Henry VIII broke with the pope for a different reason: he wanted his marriage ended, and the pope would not allow it. In 1555 the Peace of Augsburg let each ruler in the Holy Roman Empire choose whether his lands would be Lutheran or Catholic, and his subjects had to follow. Before long, wars of religion broke out in several parts of Europe, as devout Catholics fought equally devout Protestants.

Common misconceptions

• "Luther set out to start a new church." He began as a Catholic priest asking for an academic debate about the abuse of indulgences. OpenStax notes that he probably wished to reform the Church's practices, not to spark a rebellion.
• "Luther nailed his theses to the church door in a dramatic public protest." Posting theses for a university debate was routine in Wittenberg. The story was first told by his colleague Philip Melanchthon, and the date he gives conflicts with some of Luther's own statements, so historians still debate exactly what happened.
• "The Catholic Church refused to change anything." The Council of Trent kept Catholic teaching, but it also ended abuses such as profiteering from indulgences, tightened rules for bishops and improved the training of priests.

Recap

• Indulgences reduced the punishment for sin in purgatory; in 1515 Pope Leo X offered one to raise money for Saint Peter's in Rome.
• In 1517 Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, written in Latin for an academic debate, argued that true repentance, not payment, mattered, and asked why the pope did not pay for Saint Peter's himself.
• Luther came to teach justification by faith and the Bible alone; he was excommunicated in 1521 and translated the New Testament into German.
• The Council of Trent (1545-1563) taught grace with faith and good works, the Bible and tradition, and kept indulgences while abolishing their evil gains; the Jesuits spread Catholic schools and missions.
• Historians cannot settle the questions of faith, but they can show that both sides admitted abuses, and that printing and princes helped the Reformation spread.

Sources

1. Luther, M. (1915). Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther on the power and efficacy of indulgences. In A. Spaeth, L. D. Reed, H. E. Jacobs and others (Trans. and Eds.), Works of Martin Luther (Vol. 1, pp. 29-38). A. J. Holman. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg
2. Council of Trent. (1848). The canons and decrees of the sacred and oecumenical Council of Trent (J. Waterworth, Trans.). Dolman. Sessions 4, 6 and 25. Hanover Historical Texts Project. Hanover College
3. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 5.1 The Protestant Reformation. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Ninety-five Theses: Background and posting. Wikipedia. Wikipedia
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

A globe made in 1492

In a museum in the German city of Nuremberg stands a ball about 51 centimetres across, painted with the lands and seas of the world. It was made between 1490 and 1492 by a merchant and mapmaker named Martin Behaim, and it is the oldest surviving globe of the Earth. It is also known as the Erdapfel, German for earth-apple. Look at the side facing the Atlantic and you see Europe and Africa on one edge, a huge Asia on the other, and between them only open ocean dotted with islands. Japan sits too large and too far south. There is no America at all.

Hold that object in your mind, because here is a claim many people learned at school: "In 1492 most people believed the world was flat, and Columbus proved it was round by sailing west without falling off the edge." The Behaim globe, made in the very year Columbus sailed, is already round.

This lesson is a debugging job. We start with that plausible wrong answer and test it, step by step, against the evidence, until we find exactly where it fails and what the truth was. Along the way you practise sourcing in a particular form: tracing a claim back to where it first came from.

Test 1: what did educated people know?

The idea of a round Earth was old by 1492. Around 240 BCE the Greek scholar Eratosthenes calculated the Earth's circumference, the distance around it, from the shadows cast at two distant places, and got remarkably close. Medieval scholars in the Islamic world and in Christian Europe studied the Greek works that described a round Earth. The historians David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers sum up the evidence: there was "scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference".

Poets assumed it too. In the Divine Comedy, written in the early 1300s, the Italian poet Dante imagines himself climbing down through the centre of the Earth, then turning round to climb up and out on the far side of a round world. Sailors used the height of the Pole Star above the horizon to work out how far north they were, which only makes sense on a curved Earth.

Why this matters: The first step of the claim fails. Educated Europeans in 1492, including Columbus and the people he argued with, already knew the Earth was round.

Test 2: what were Columbus's critics really saying?

Christopher Columbus, a sailor from Genoa, spent years asking kings to pay for a voyage west to Asia. On 1 May 1486 he put his plan to Queen Isabella of Castile, who passed it to a committee of learned men. They, like experts in Portugal who had already turned him down, replied that Columbus had grossly underestimated the distance to Asia, and they advised against the plan. Around the start of 1492 a council led by the queen's confessor, Hernando de Talavera, again found the plan implausible.

So the argument was never about the shape of the Earth. It was about its size, and about how far Asia stretched east. That changes the question we have to ask. Who was right about the distance?

Test 3: run the numbers

Columbus built his estimate out of several sources, and at almost every step he chose the one that made the ocean smaller.

1. The size of the Earth. Columbus read a medieval Arab astronomer's figure for the length of a degree but took it in the wrong kind of mile, a shorter Italian mile instead of a longer Arabic one. He ended up thinking the Earth was only about three-quarters of its real size.
2. The width of Asia. Most scholars followed the ancient geographer Ptolemy, who stretched Europe and Asia across 180 degrees of the globe, already more than the real figure. Columbus preferred an even larger figure from an older writer, 225 degrees, which left less ocean.
3. Japan. From Marco Polo he took the idea that Japan lay about 1,500 miles east of China, and he placed it even further east.

The result: Columbus reckoned that Japan lay about 2,400 nautical miles west of the Canary Islands. The real distance is about 10,600 nautical miles, more than four times as far. No ship of the 1400s could have carried enough food and fresh water for that voyage. The experts were right. If no land had lain in his path, his crews would have died at sea.

What saved him was something nobody in Europe knew about: two continents and thousands of islands, home to millions of people, lying across the ocean between Europe and Asia. Columbus's three ships left Spain on 3 August 1492, stopped at the Canary Islands and sailed west on 6 September. On 12 October they reached an island in the Bahamas, and from there he sailed on to Cuba and Hispaniola. The islands could give him food and water for the journey home.

Why this matters: Columbus was wrong about the size of the Earth and the width of Asia, his critics were right, and his voyage succeeded only because the Americas were in the way.

What Columbus thought he had found

On his way home, aboard the little ship Nina, Columbus wrote a letter announcing his success. It is dated 15 February 1493, and he sent copies to the king and queen and to Luis de Santangel, the royal official who had helped raise money for the voyage.

I write you this letter, whereby you will learn how in thirty-three days' time I reached the Indies with the fleet which the most illustrious King and Queen, our Sovereigns, gave to me, where I found very many islands thickly peopled, of all which I took possession without resistance, for their Highnesses by proclamation made and with the royal standard unfurled. ... When I reached Juana, I followed its coast to the westward, and found it so large that I thought it must be the mainland, the province of Cathay ...

They are not acquainted with any kind of worship, and are not idolaters ... On my reaching the Indies, I took by force, in the first island that I discovered, some of these natives, that they might learn our language and give me information ...

Their Highnesses may see that I shall give them all the gold they require, if they will give me but a very little assistance; spices also, and cotton, as much as their Highnesses shall command to be shipped ... slaves, as many of these idolators as their Highnesses shall command to be shipped.

Christopher Columbus, letter on his first voyage, dated 15 February 1493. Translated by R. H. Major, 1870. Juana was his name for Cuba; Cathay was the European name for northern China.

Who, when and why. Columbus wrote at sea, weeks before he reached Spain, to the people who had paid for him and could pay for more. He needed them to believe the voyage was a triumph, and in April 1492 they had promised him the title Admiral of the Ocean Sea and a tenth of all the revenues from any lands he claimed. Printers saw the news value at once. A Spanish edition was printed in Barcelona by early April 1493, a Latin translation in Rome about a month later, and within a year eight more Latin editions came out in Basel, Paris, Rome and Antwerp. Thanks to the printing press, this letter shaped Europe's first picture of the lands Columbus had reached.

Point of view question: Early in the letter Columbus says the islanders "are not idolaters". At the end he offers the monarchs "slaves, as many of these idolators as their Highnesses shall command". What might explain the change of word, and what does it tell you about what Columbus wanted his readers to think?

Read the letter as a debugger and more mistakes appear. Columbus believed he had reached the Indies, the islands off Asia, and that Cuba might be China. He called the people "Indians", a name that stuck for centuries. He passed on stories, told to him or misunderstood, of people born with tails and an island of women. The people he met were the Taino, skilled farmers and canoe-builders; the letter itself describes canoes carrying seventy or eighty paddlers. From the first island onwards he seized people by force. In later letters he went on claiming that he had reached Asia, telling the pope in 1502 that Cuba was the east coast of Asia.

Tracing the myth to its source

If nobody in 1492 thought the Earth was flat, where did the story come from? Historians have followed it back.

Notice the pattern. The myth was not handed down from 1492. It was made in the 1800s by writers who wanted a dramatic story, or wanted to show the Middle Ages and the Church as enemies of knowledge, and it was repeated because it was a good story. Russell found that it spread most widely between 1870 and 1920. Irving himself admitted in his book that the real issue was the distance to Asia; the flat-Earth scene was his decoration.

Why this matters: A claim that "everybody knows" may have a short and traceable history. Asking where a claim first appeared, and who wanted it to be true, is one of the most powerful habits a historian has.

Common misconceptions

• "People in 1492 thought the Earth was flat." Educated Europeans had known the Earth was round since ancient times; the Behaim globe of 1490-1492 shows it. The argument was about the Earth's size and the distance to Asia.
• "Columbus discovered America." Millions of people already lived there, and Norse sailors had reached Newfoundland, at L'Anse aux Meadows, around five hundred years earlier. Columbus's voyages began lasting contact between the two halves of the world.
• "Columbus knew he had found a new continent." His letter of 1493 claims he reached the Indies, and in 1502 he still told the pope that Cuba was part of Asia.

The takeaway

• The claim that Columbus proved a round Earth fails every test: Eratosthenes measured the Earth around 240 BCE, medieval scholars knew it was round, and the Behaim globe of 1490-1492 is round.
• The real argument was about distance. Spanish and Portuguese experts said Columbus had underestimated the distance to Asia, and they were right: he reckoned 2,400 nautical miles to Japan when it is about 10,600.
• His voyage of 1492 succeeded only because the Americas and their peoples lay in the way.
• His letter of 1493, spread by the printing press, claimed the Indies, promised gold and spices and offered to ship enslaved islanders, after he had already seized people by force.
• The flat-Earth myth was created in the 1800s by Washington Irving, Letronne, Draper and White, and traced by the historian Jeffrey Burton Russell.

Sources

1. Columbus, C. (1870). A letter sent by Columbus to Luis de Santangel. In R. H. Major (Trans. and Ed.), Select letters of Christopher Columbus (2nd ed.). Hakluyt Society. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg
2. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 5.2 Crossing the Atlantic. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax
3. Russell, J. B. (1991). Inventing the flat Earth: Columbus and modern historians. Praeger.
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Myth of the flat Earth. Wikipedia. Wikipedia
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Christopher Columbus: Geographical considerations. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

A strange new fruit in Italy

In 1544 an Italian doctor named Pietro Andrea Mattioli wrote about an odd new plant that people in Italy had begun to eat, fried in oil. It was the tomato, which had arrived from the Americas only a few decades before. Italians took their time with it. The first Italian cookbook with tomato sauce came out in the 1690s, and the first recipe putting tomato sauce on pasta appeared in a cookbook of 1790. A food that seems as Italian as anything on Earth is an American plant that crossed the Atlantic after 1492.

The tomato's journey was one tiny part of an enormous movement of plants, animals, germs and people between the two halves of the world. In 1972 the American historian Alfred Crosby gave it a name: the Columbian exchange. OpenStax defines it as "the back-and-forth flow of plants, animals, and diseases between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres", and adds that ideas, religions and enslaved people crossed too.

This lesson is built around a comparison: what went one way against what went the other. Then it practises cause and effect, following chains of consequences, many of them unintended, from a single voyage to kitchens, farms and graveyards on four continents.

The whole exchange in one table

Before 1492 the plants and animals of the Americas and of Afro-Eurasia, the joined lands of Africa, Europe and Asia, had developed apart for thousands of years. After 1492 they mixed. Read the table across, row by row.

Two things jump out. First, the lists of food are long in both directions, but the animals went almost all one way, because Afro-Eurasia had domesticated many more animals. Second, look at the diseases row. The exchange was not equal, and the difference cost millions of lives.

West across the ocean: horses, pigs and germs

The animals that arrived in the Americas changed lives in ways nobody planned. On the Great Plains of North America, peoples such as the Lakota took up the horse and built a new way of life around hunting bison on horseback. The Navajo became sheep herders and expert weavers of wool. In Mexico and Central and South America, chickens and goats became valuable sources of food. But European livestock also roamed loose, and pigs especially trampled and ate Indigenous peoples' crops.

The germs were worse. Many of the deadliest diseases of Afro-Eurasia had first jumped to humans from farm animals, and the Americas had few such animals. So the peoples of the Americas had little or no immunity, the body's learned defence against a disease it has met before. Smallpox was first recorded in the Americas in 1518. In 1520, during the war with Cortes, an estimated forty percent of Tenochtitlan's 200,000 people died of it. One estimate holds that disease and Spanish exploitation reduced the population of Mexico from about 20 million to little more than a million during the 1500s.

Disease did not work alone, and OpenStax is careful to say so. Where the Spanish raided for slaves, people hid in the hills and could not farm or fish, and hunger weakened their bodies against infection. Colonists took land, water, timber and metals, forced people to work in mines and fields, and met resistance with violence. OpenStax concludes that, through "violence, exile, enslavement, and a high death rate from disease, the original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere experienced a cataclysm during the sixteenth century". A cataclysm is a sudden, terrible disaster.

The point: Animals and crops from Afro-Eurasia reshaped American ways of life, but the diseases they carried, together with violence, forced labour and hunger, caused a catastrophic collapse of Indigenous populations.

East across the ocean: food for billions

Now read the other column, and you see why historians call the exchange one of the great turning points in the history of food. Before 1500, potatoes were not grown anywhere outside South America. By the 1700s they were a staple food across much of Europe. Economists Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian estimate that the potato alone accounts for between 12 and 25 percent of the growth in the population of Africa, Europe and Asia between 1700 and 1900.

In Africa, Portuguese traders brought cassava, a starchy root from South America, in the 1500s; over time it replaced sorghum and millet as Africa's most important food crop. Spanish colonizers carried maize and sweet potatoes to Asia, where they helped populations grow, including China's. Chili peppers from the Americas became part of the cooking of India and China. In Europe, chocolate and tobacco became fashionable. Knowledge travelled too: rice, including a kind first farmed in West Africa, was planted widely in the Americas, and planters relied on the skills of enslaved Africans to grow it.

The point: American crops such as potatoes, maize and cassava fed growing populations across Africa, Europe and Asia, so the exchange changed what billions of people would eat for centuries.

A chain that led to slavery

Follow one more chain of causes, because it leads straight into the next lesson. Sugar cane, from Asia, and later coffee, from Africa and the Middle East, grew extremely well in the hot lands of the Caribbean, Brazil and the southern parts of North America. Europeans wanted more and more sugar. Growing and processing it took huge amounts of hard labour. As Indigenous populations collapsed, planters turned to Africa for workers. OpenStax calls this "a chain reaction of increased demand", which "eventually led to the plantation-style slavery" of the Caribbean, Brazil and parts of what became the United States.

A friar's accusation

One man who watched the collapse happen spent the rest of his long life protesting against it. Bartolome de las Casas was born in Seville in 1484 and came to Hispaniola in 1502 as a young colonist. He owned land and enslaved Indigenous people, and he took part in raids. Later, as a priest in Cuba, he held an encomienda, a grant of the labour of Indigenous people. In 1514, while preparing a sermon, he became convinced that everything the Spanish were doing in the Americas was unjust. The next year he gave up his encomienda, and he spent the rest of his long life defending Indigenous peoples at the Spanish court. In 1542 he wrote a book for the heir to the Spanish throne, Prince Philip.

Among these gentle sheep, gifted by their Maker with the above qualities, the Spaniards entered as soon as they knew them, like wolves, tigers, and lions which had been starving for many days, and since forty years they have done nothing else ... than outrage, slay, afflict, torment, and destroy them with strange and new, and divers kinds of cruelty, never before seen, nor heard of, nor read of ... to such extremes has this gone that, whereas there were more than three million souls, whom we saw in Hispaniola, there are to-day, not two hundred of the native population left.

Bartolome de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, written in 1542 and printed in Seville in 1552. Translated by Francis Augustus MacNutt, 1909. Divers means various; souls means people.

Who, when and why. Las Casas was an eyewitness, a former colonist who knew the system from the inside, and a churchman who believed Spain would face God's punishment for its crimes. He wrote to persuade the royal family to stop the conquests and the encomiendas, and in the same year, 1542, the emperor Charles V signed the New Laws, which banned the enslavement of Indigenous people and set out to abolish the encomiendas. The colonists fought the New Laws fiercely. The book was later translated into Dutch, German, French and English, and Spain's rivals used it as propaganda against Spain. An English edition of 1689 blamed "the Popish Spanish Party" on its title page, turning a Catholic friar's plea into an attack on Catholics.

Point of view question: Las Casas's figure of three million people on Hispaniola is far higher than most modern estimates, which suggest a population of at least 500,000, with fewer than 500 still alive by 1526. Why might a writer pleading with a king use the largest numbers he could? Does an exaggerated number mean the story is false?

Historians answer that last question carefully. Inflated numbers were normal in sixteenth-century writing, from Las Casas's enemies as well as his friends. Many historians think his population figures were too high and that he gave too little weight to disease, which was the biggest killer. Yet they also accept that his general picture of a violent, abusive conquest matches other evidence, and that the population collapse was real and terrible. There is one more hard truth about Las Casas. In his early writings he suggested that enslaved Africans could replace Indigenous workers. Later in life he wrote that he had come to realise "that black slavery was as unjust as Indian slavery", and he regretted his advice.

Common misconceptions

• "Disease alone emptied the Americas, so nobody was to blame." Disease was the biggest killer, but slave raids, forced labour, hunger, the seizure of land and open violence all made the death toll far worse.
• "Tomatoes in Italy, potatoes in Ireland and chilies in India go back to ancient times." All three are American plants that crossed the oceans after 1492. Before 1500, potatoes were not grown anywhere outside South America.
• "The exchange was only Europeans taking things from the Americas." Plants, animals and germs moved in both directions, and Africa and Asia were part of it too: cassava fed Africa, maize and sweet potatoes fed China, and African rice-growing skills shaped American farms.

Where this leaves us

• The Columbian exchange, named by Alfred Crosby in 1972, was the flow of plants, animals, diseases and people between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia after 1492.
• American crops such as potatoes, maize, cassava, tomatoes and chili peppers changed diets in Europe, Africa and Asia; the potato alone may account for 12 to 25 percent of Afro-Eurasia's population growth between 1700 and 1900.
• Horses, cattle, pigs and sheep reshaped American ways of life, from Lakota bison hunting to Navajo weaving.
• Diseases such as smallpox, with violence, forced labour and hunger, caused a catastrophic collapse of Indigenous populations.
• Sugar and coffee plantations created a demand for labour that led to plantation slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.
• Las Casas's Short Account of 1542 is a powerful eyewitness protest; his numbers were probably too high, but the collapse he described was real.

Sources

1. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 5.2 Crossing the Atlantic: The Columbian Exchange. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax
2. MacNutt, F. A. (1909). Bartholomew de Las Casas: His life, apostolate, and writings. Arthur H. Clark. Includes a translation of the Brevissima relacion, paragraphs 9-10. Project Gutenberg
3. Crosby, A. W. (1972). The Columbian exchange: Biological and cultural consequences of 1492. Greenwood Press.
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Columbian exchange. Wikipedia. Wikipedia
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Bartolome de las Casas: Criticisms. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

A boy watching from a tree

In a village in West Africa, in the land of the Igbo people in what is now Nigeria, the grown-ups went out to work in the fields each day and left the children to play together. The children took turns to climb a tree and keep watch. They were looking out for kidnappers. One boy on watch spotted a kidnapper creeping into a neighbour's yard, raised the alarm, and the older children caught him.

The boy was Olaudah Equiano. Not long afterwards, when he was about eleven, it was his turn. He tells it simply: "One day, when all our people were gone out to their works as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both." The children were gagged, tied and carried off. Soon brother and sister were separated.

This lesson follows Equiano's life through the transatlantic slave trade, the forced shipping of millions of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to be enslaved in the Americas. It is a hard subject, and the lesson tells it plainly. It also practises point of view. For most of the trade's long history, the records were kept by the people who bought and sold human beings. Equiano's book is one of the few in which an enslaved person tells the story in his own words, and we need to ask why he wrote it and for whom.

To the coast and onto the ship

Equiano was passed from owner to owner across Africa, sometimes treated kindly, sometimes not, and he reached the coast about seven months after he was kidnapped. Kidnapping like his was one of the ways people were captured. Others were taken as prisoners in wars, some of which were fought mainly to seize captives, and some were tricked or sold. OpenStax explains that captives were usually chained together and marched for days to trading posts on the coast, where European traders exchanged goods for them. Many died on the way. Then came the ship.

The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror when I was carried on board. ... When I looked round the ship too and saw a large furnace or copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate; and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted.

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, London, 1789. A copper was a large metal cooking pot; countenances means faces; dejection means deep sadness.

Notice that the frightened child had never seen the sea or a ship. He tells us he believed he had "gotten into a world of bad spirits" who were going to kill him, and he asked other Africans on board whether the white men were going to eat them. Imagine the gap between that boy's understanding and the ship's crew, who saw him as part of the "cargo" the ship was waiting for.

The Middle Passage

The voyage across the Atlantic was called the Middle Passage, because it was the middle leg of a three-sided trade, the triangular trade.

1. Ships from Europe carried manufactured goods such as cloth, guns, metal goods and rum to West Africa and exchanged them for captives.
2. The ships carried the captives across the Atlantic and sold them in the colonies of the Americas.
3. The ships returned to Europe with goods that enslaved people had produced, such as sugar, tobacco, coffee, rice and cotton.

Conditions on board were brutal. OpenStax describes ships holding as many as five or six hundred people. Men were chained side by side in the hold, sometimes with only a few inches of space above them. In 1713 the Royal African Company, a British slave-trading company, told its captains to allow each captive a space five feet long, eleven inches wide and twenty inches high, which suggests that captains often packed people into even less. The air was foul and disease spread easily. Some captains expected ten to twenty percent of the people on board to die, and packed in as many as possible so that enough would survive for them to make a profit.

Equiano survived the crossing. He and about 244 other captives were landed on the island of Barbados in the Caribbean, and there he saw a sale.

In this manner, without scruple, are relations and friends separated, most of them never to see each other again. I remember in the vessel in which I was brought over, in the men's apartment, there were several brothers, who, in the sale, were sold in different lots; and it was very moving on this occasion to see and hear their cries at parting. O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you?

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 1789, describing the sale at Barbados. Without scruple means without any sense that it was wrong; nominal Christians means people who are Christians in name only.

Key idea: The Middle Passage was the deadly middle leg of a triangular trade that carried European goods to Africa, captive Africans to the Americas, and the products of their forced labour back to Europe.

The scale of the trade

Equiano was one of millions. Historians working on the Slave Voyages database, which gathers the records of tens of thousands of voyages, estimate that the trade carried off about 12.5 million captives from Africa, and that about 10.7 million survived the crossing. That means roughly 1.8 million people died at sea, before even reaching the Americas. The trade to the Americas began in the 1500s and lasted well into the 1800s.

Where did the ships go? In the 1700s, when the trade was at its height, about 61,000 people a year crossed the Middle Passage. OpenStax gives the destinations: 42 percent to the Caribbean, 38 percent to Brazil, and only 4 to 5 percent to the British colonies of mainland North America. Most were put to work on sugar plantations. Portuguese, British, Spanish, French, Dutch, American and Danish ships all carried captives, and ships based in Brazil carried a great many.

Africans were not only victims of the trade; some were traders. Some African kingdoms grew rich by selling captives to European ships, and their rulers often protested only when their own people were taken. In 1526 King Afonso I of Kongo wrote to the king of Portugal complaining that traders were kidnapping free people of his kingdom, even members of his own family. He did not demand an end to the trade, but asked that captives be checked by his officials so that free Kongolese were not taken. The demand that drove the whole system, and the ships, chains and plantations, came from Europeans and their colonies in the Americas.

The trade harmed Africa too. Communities lost young men and women in the prime of life, the people who did the most work. Fear of raiders spread through villages across West and Central Africa, which is why Equiano and his friends kept watch from a tree.

Equiano's road to freedom

Equiano was not sold at Barbados. He was sent on to the colony of Virginia, where a British naval officer, Michael Henry Pascal, bought him and renamed him Gustavus Vassa, after a king of Sweden. The boy protested, wanting to keep the name Jacob that an earlier owner had given him, and was hit for it; he used the name Gustavus Vassa for the rest of his life. He served with Pascal at sea in the Seven Years' War between Britain and France, carrying gunpowder to the guns in battle. He learned to read and write, and in 1759 he was baptised a Christian in London.

Then, in 1762, Pascal sold him. He was taken to the Caribbean island of Montserrat and sold to Robert King, a Quaker merchant. King put him to work on his ships and in his stores, and allowed him to trade on his own account, buying and selling fruit, glasses and other goods. In 1765 King promised that Equiano could buy his freedom for the same price King had paid for him: forty pounds. In 1766 Equiano paid it and became free. Freedom was fragile. Soon afterwards, while loading a ship in Georgia, he was nearly kidnapped back into slavery.

Equiano settled in London, where he joined the campaign against the slave trade. With other Black Londoners he was one of the Sons of Africa, who spoke and wrote against it. In 1789 he published his life story. It went through nine editions while he lived and was published in the Netherlands, Germany, Russia and the United States. He married an Englishwoman, Susannah Cullen, in 1792, and they had two daughters. He died in 1797.

Who, when and why. Equiano opened his book with a letter to the members of Parliament. He said that "the chief design" of his book was "to excite in your august assemblies a sense of compassion for the miseries which the Slave-Trade has entailed on my unfortunate countrymen". He was writing to persuade British lawmakers, at the moment when Parliament was debating whether to abolish the trade. So he praised Britain's "humanity" and "glorious freedom", called himself "an unlettered African", and appealed to his readers' Christian faith.

Point of view question: Why would a skilled writer call himself "an unlettered African" and praise the nation whose ships had carried him into slavery? How does knowing his purpose help you read the "nominal Christians" passage?

Knowing his purpose does not make his story false; it tells us why he chose what to include and how to say it. Historians have argued about one part of it. In 1999 the scholar Vincent Carretta pointed out that the record of Equiano's baptism in 1759, and a ship's list from 1773, both say he was born in Carolina in North America. If so, his African childhood may have been put together from other Africans' stories. Other historians reply that many details of his account can be checked against other sources and turn out to be right, and that the weight of the evidence supports an African birth. The question is still debated, and much of the rest of his life story has been confirmed by other records.

Resistance and the long road to abolition

Enslaved people never simply accepted their fate. OpenStax describes how captives rose up on ships, especially when they were brought on deck. On plantations, enslaved people broke tools, set fire to cane fields and ran away. In the mountains of Jamaica, runaways formed hidden communities; such people became known as maroons. Several times enslaved people rose in armed rebellion. They also built new families and communities, created new religions, music, stories and dishes that blended African traditions with what they found in the Americas, and kept African cultures alive.

Campaigners such as Equiano, together with enslaved people's own resistance, slowly turned opinion. The ending came in stages.

The next module tells the story of one place where enslaved people did not wait to be freed: the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which became Haiti.

Common misconceptions

• "Most enslaved Africans were taken to the United States." In the 1700s about 42 percent went to the Caribbean and 38 percent to Brazil; the British colonies of mainland North America received only 4 to 5 percent.
• "Enslaved people did not resist." They rebelled on ships, ran away, formed maroon communities, sabotaged plantations and rose in armed revolts, and they kept their cultures alive.
• "Because some Africans sold captives, Africa as a whole was to blame." Some African rulers profited and others protested, and African peoples suffered enormously. The ships, the plantations and the demand that drove the trade came from Europe and the Americas.

What to remember

• Olaudah Equiano, by his own account, was kidnapped in Igboland at about eleven, shipped to Barbados and Virginia, renamed Gustavus Vassa, and bought his freedom in 1766 for forty pounds.
• The triangular trade carried European goods to Africa, captives to the Americas on the Middle Passage, and slave-grown sugar, tobacco and cotton to Europe.
• About 12.5 million Africans were carried off and about 10.7 million survived the crossing; most were taken to the Caribbean and Brazil to work on sugar plantations.
• Some African rulers took part in the trade and others, such as Afonso I of Kongo in 1526, protested; the demand came from European colonies.
• Equiano wrote in 1789 to persuade Parliament to end the trade; historians still debate his birthplace, but his book helped the campaign that led to Britain's ban of 1807.
• Enslaved people resisted in many ways, and slavery was ended in stages, from 1807 to Brazil's abolition in 1888.

Sources

1. Equiano, O. (1789). The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Author. Chapter 2. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg
2. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 5.4 The Atlantic slave trade. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax
3. Eltis, D., Richardson, D., and others. (n.d.). Slave Voyages: The trans-Atlantic slave trade database. Emory University and partners. SlaveVoyages
4. Carretta, V. (2005). Equiano, the African: Biography of a self-made man. University of Georgia Press.
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Olaudah Equiano: Controversy over his origins. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

Three little stars

On the night of 7 January 1610, a professor of mathematics at the University of Padua, in northern Italy, pointed a telescope he had built himself at the planet Jupiter. Beside the planet he saw three little stars, small but very bright, lying in a perfectly straight line. He assumed they were ordinary stars far behind it. The next night he looked again, and the three little stars had moved.

The professor was Galileo Galilei, and this lesson begins with his problem. Stars do not move from night to night. So what were these? Galileo solved the puzzle in a week, and his answer helped change how people understood the universe. Before you read his solution, you are going to work the problem yourself.

The skill is reasoning from evidence: making careful observations, suggesting possible explanations, and testing each one against what you see. It is the skill at the heart of what historians call the Scientific Revolution, the great change in how Europeans studied nature between the 1500s and the 1700s.

Two pictures of the heavens

To see why Galileo's little stars mattered, you need the two pictures of the universe people were arguing about. For more than a thousand years, most European and Islamic scholars had followed the Earth-centred model of the Greek astronomer Ptolemy, who lived in Egypt in the 100s CE. The Earth stood still at the centre, and the Moon, the Sun, the planets and the stars all circled around it. It matched what everyone sees: the Sun appears to cross the sky each day, and the ground does not feel as if it is moving.

In 1543 a Polish astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus, published a different picture: the Sun-centred model. The Sun stood at the centre, and the Earth was one of the planets travelling around it, spinning once a day. Critics raised objections. One was simple. Everyone could see that the Moon went round the Earth. If the Earth was racing round the Sun, how could the Moon possibly keep up with it? Would it not be left behind?

Working the problem night by night

Here are Galileo's first observations, as he reported them. East and west mean the two sides of Jupiter as he saw it.

Now work it like a detective. Write down every possible explanation, then test each against the table.

1. Explanation A: they are ordinary stars, and Jupiter is moving past them. Planets do drift slowly against the stars. But on 7 January Jupiter was east of two of them, and on 8 January it was east of all three. To explain that, Jupiter would have had to move in a way that did not match the astronomers' tables for the planet, and it would have to keep switching direction. Galileo himself first worried about this, then rejected it.
2. Explanation B: they are something wrong with the telescope. But a flaw in a lens would stay in the same place in the view, not hop from one side of Jupiter to the other, and it would appear beside every object, not only Jupiter.
3. Explanation C: they are small bodies moving around Jupiter. Then they would always stay close to Jupiter and in a line, as if seen edge-on; sometimes they would be east, sometimes west; one might vanish behind the planet; and they would travel across the sky with Jupiter. Every row of the table fits.

Only explanation C survives the evidence. On 11 January Galileo decided "unhesitatingly" that there were stars "moving about Jupiter, as Venus and Mercury round the Sun". Two nights later he found the fourth. Today they are called the Galilean moons.

The upshot: By recording careful observations night after night and testing each possible explanation against them, Galileo showed that the little stars were moons circling Jupiter.

The Starry Messenger

Galileo rushed his findings into print. His short book, the Sidereus Nuncius, meaning the Starry Messenger, was published in Venice on 13 March 1610, in Latin, the language every scholar in Europe could read. Here is how he described the first night, and the argument he drew at the end.

On the 7th day of January in the present year, 1610, in the first hour of the following night, when I was viewing the constellations of the heavens through a telescope, the planet Jupiter presented itself to my view, and as I had prepared for myself a very excellent instrument, I noticed a circumstance which I had never been able to notice before, owing to want of power in my other telescope, namely, that three little stars, small but very bright, were near the planet ...

Besides, we have a notable and splendid argument to remove the scruples of those who can tolerate the revolution of the planets round the Sun in the Copernican system, yet are so disturbed by the motion of one Moon about the Earth ... that they consider that this theory of the constitution of the universe must be upset as impossible; for now we have not one planet only revolving about another, while both traverse a vast orbit about the Sun, but our sense of sight presents to us four satellites circling about Jupiter, like the Moon about the Earth.

Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius, Venice, 1610. Translated by Edward Stafford Carlos, 1880. Scruples here means doubts; satellites means moons.

Who, when and why. Galileo was a working scientist who also needed a patron. He had heard in 1609 of a spyglass invented in the Netherlands, built his own, and kept improving it until it magnified about twenty times. He dedicated the book to Cosimo II de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had once been his pupil, and he named the four moons the Medicean Stars after Cosimo and his brothers. It worked: he was soon appointed chief mathematician and philosopher to the Medici.

Point of view question: Galileo wanted a post at the Medici court when he named the moons the "Medicean Stars". Does his wish for a job make his observations less trustworthy? What would you want to check before believing him, and how could other people check it?

That last question was exactly what people asked in 1610. Some scholars doubted that the new instrument showed what was really there and did not simply deceive the eye. The answer was that anyone with a good enough telescope could look for themselves. The Medici court even paid to have telescopes made so that others could confirm the discovery. Observations that other people can repeat became one of the foundations of modern science.

What the moons proved, and what they did not

Here is where reasoning from evidence needs care. The moons of Jupiter proved that not everything in the heavens circles the Earth. They also answered the objection about our own Moon: Jupiter clearly kept four moons as it travelled, so a moving Earth could keep one. But the moons did not prove that the Earth goes round the Sun. They were consistent with that idea without proving it.

Later in 1610 Galileo saw that the planet Venus has phases, like the Moon: sometimes a thin crescent, sometimes almost full. That pattern was impossible in Ptolemy's Earth-centred model, which could no longer be held. Yet most astronomers did not jump straight to Copernicus. Many adopted a mixed model invented by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, in which the planets circled the Sun while the Sun circled a motionless Earth. It explained the new observations too. The question was finally settled as evidence kept piling up: Johannes Kepler showed that the planets move in ellipses, slightly stretched circles, around the Sun, and in 1687 Isaac Newton explained all their motions with a single law of gravity.

The upshot: One observation rarely settles a big question. The moons removed one objection to the Sun-centred model, Venus ruled out Ptolemy's model, and only many more observations and Newton's laws settled the matter.

A revolution with many roots

The Scientific Revolution was not only a European story. OpenStax points out that its tools came from many places. Medieval Persian mathematicians such as al-Khwarizmi, whose algebra you met in the lesson on Baghdad, and Omar Khayyam, and the Indian mathematician Aryabhata, gave later scientists the mathematics they needed. Calculating planetary orbits would have been almost impossible without the decimal number system developed in India and the numerals that came to Europe through the Arab world.

Scientists also argued about method. The English writer Francis Bacon championed inductive reasoning: gathering many observations first, then building a general rule from them, as Galileo did with his nightly drawings. The French philosopher Rene Descartes stressed deductive reasoning: starting from general principles and working out what must follow. Modern science uses both.

The trial of Galileo

Galileo became more and more openly a Copernican, and that brought conflict with the Catholic Church. In February 1616 a commission of the Inquisition, the Church's court for judging heresy, declared the Sun-centred idea "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical", and Galileo was ordered not to hold or defend it. In 1632 he published a book, the Dialogue, that seemed to many readers to defend it anyway, and it offended Pope Urban VIII, who had once supported him. In 1633 Galileo was tried, found "vehemently suspect of heresy", and forced to take back his views. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest near Florence, where he wrote one of his most important books on physics. He died in 1642. In 1992 Pope John Paul II acknowledged that the Church had been wrong to condemn him.

Common misconceptions

• "Galileo invented the telescope." A Dutch spectacle-maker, Hans Lipperhey, tried to patent one in 1608. Galileo built improved versions and was the first to publish what a telescope showed in the sky.
• "Jupiter's moons proved that the Earth goes round the Sun." They proved that not everything orbits the Earth and removed one objection. The full case took the phases of Venus, Kepler's orbits and Newton's gravity.
• "Science and religion were always at war." Galileo was a Catholic, and churchmen, including the pope, had supported him before 1632. The conflict was over particular claims and who had authority to interpret them.

Putting it together

• In January 1610 Galileo saw little stars near Jupiter change position night after night; testing each explanation against his records, he concluded that four moons circle Jupiter.
• He published his discoveries in the Sidereus Nuncius in March 1610, dedicated to Cosimo II de' Medici, and others could check them with good telescopes.
• The moons showed that not everything orbits the Earth and that a moving Earth could keep its Moon, but they did not prove the Sun-centred model alone.
• The phases of Venus ruled out Ptolemy's model; Kepler's ellipses and Newton's gravity of 1687 completed the case.
• The Scientific Revolution built on mathematics from Persia, India and the Arab world, and on new methods of observation and reasoning.
• In 1633 the Inquisition forced Galileo to recant and kept him under house arrest; in 1992 the Church acknowledged its error.

Sources

1. Galilei, G. (1880). The sidereal messenger of Galileo Galilei (E. S. Carlos, Trans.). Rivingtons. Observations of January 1610 and the conclusion on Jupiter's satellites. Project Gutenberg
2. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 7.1 The Enlightenment. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Sidereus Nuncius. Wikipedia. Wikipedia
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Galileo Galilei: Controversy over heliocentrism. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

Born free, and everywhere in chains

In 1762 the Geneva-born writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau published a book on government that begins with one of the most famous sentences of the century: "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." The same year he published a long book about how to educate a boy, called Emile. It was so controversial, because of its ideas about religion, that it was banned and publicly burned in Paris and Geneva. Near the end of Emile, Rousseau turned to the education of the girl Emile would marry, and he wrote something very different about freedom.

Thirty years later, a woman in London wrote a whole book to answer him. This lesson is a dispute between them, and behind it lies the question at the heart of the age we call the Enlightenment: if every human being has reason, the power to think things through, then who gets to use it, and who gets the rights that are supposed to follow from it?

The skill is historical context: reading each writer against the world they lived in, so that we understand what they took for granted, what was new, and who was arguing with them at the time.

The age of reason

The Scientific Revolution had shown that careful reasoning could uncover the laws of nature. In the 1700s writers across Europe asked whether reason could also improve government, religion, law and education. OpenStax explains that many of them argued for natural rights, rights that every person has simply by being human. The English philosopher John Locke had argued that people have rights to "life, liberty, and property", and that government should exist only by the consent of the governed.

Ideas spread in new places. Coffeehouses, which had long been centres of conversation in the Islamic world after coffee drinking began in Yemen in the 1400s, became a fixture of European cities, where people of many backgrounds argued over newspapers and pamphlets. In Paris, wealthy women hosted salons, regular gatherings in their homes where writers and philosophers met. OpenStax names hosts such as Marie-Therese Geoffrin and Julie de Lespinasse, who chose the guests and steered the conversation.

In 1784 a newspaper in Berlin asked its readers a question: what is enlightenment? The philosopher Immanuel Kant, a professor in the Prussian city of Konigsberg, sent a famous answer.

Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! "Have courage to use your own reason!" - that is the motto of enlightenment. ...

That the step to competence is held to be very dangerous by the far greater portion of mankind (and by the entire fair sex) - quite apart from its being arduous is seen to by those guardians who have so kindly assumed superintendence over them.

Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, Konigsberg, 30 September 1784. Translated by Lewis White Beck. Tutelage means being under someone else's direction, like a child with a guardian; Sapere aude is Latin for "dare to know"; the fair sex was a polite phrase for women; arduous means hard.

Who, when and why. Kant wrote for educated readers of a Berlin magazine, in Prussia, a kingdom ruled by an all-powerful king, Frederick the Great, who allowed a good deal of free debate. Later in the essay Kant praises a ruler who says, "Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, only obey!" So Kant's call to think for yourself came with a limit: argue freely, but obey the king.

Point of view question: Kant says that "the entire fair sex" fears the step to thinking for themselves. Does he blame women for this, or does he blame the "guardians" who manage them? Reread the sentence carefully before you answer.

What matters here: Enlightenment writers argued that every person has reason and natural rights, and Kant summed up the movement as having the courage to use your own reason without being told what to think.

The case for separate education: Rousseau

Rousseau was one of the boldest writers of the age on freedom. Here, from Emile, is what he wrote about how girls should be brought up.

A woman's education must therefore be planned in relation to man. To be pleasing in his sight, to win his respect and love, to train him in childhood, to tend him in manhood, to counsel and console, to make his life pleasant and happy, these are the duties of woman for all time, and this is what she should be taught while she is young.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, book 5, 1762. Translated by Barbara Foxley, 1911.

Put Rousseau's case in his own terms. He believed that men and women are different by nature, not only in body but in mind, and that a good education must follow nature. Mothers shaped children's health, morals and happiness, so women's duties at home mattered enormously, and girls should be trained for them. OpenStax sums up his view: he described women as "weaker and less rational by nature", and argued that they belonged in the home while politics and business were for men. His evidence was what he observed of women in the society around him, and his own idea of what nature intended.

The case for equal education: Wollstonecraft

In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft, a writer and former teacher and governess in London, published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. A vindication is a defence. She dedicated it to the French politician Talleyrand, who had just written a plan for national education in revolutionary France.

Contending for the rights of women, my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge, for truth must be common to all ...

"Educate women like men," says Rousseau, "and the more they resemble our sex the less power will they have over us." This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, London, 1792. Contending for means arguing for.

Who, when and why. Wollstonecraft wrote in the middle of the French Revolution, when new constitutions were promising rights to "men" and new school systems were being planned, and she wanted women included before the plans were fixed. She argued that what Rousseau called women's nature was really the result of their upbringing. Girls, she wrote, were kept indoors without exercise and taught to be timid, then blamed for being weak. Educate them properly and they would "discharge the important duties of life by the light of their own reason". She also pointed out that the same kind of argument was used against teaching poor people to read and write, because it might take them "out of the station assigned them by nature".

Point of view question: Rousseau said that educating women like men would give them less power over men. Wollstonecraft turned his sentence round. What kind of power was each of them talking about, and why does the difference matter?

What matters here: Rousseau argued that women's education should be planned in relation to men because of their nature; Wollstonecraft replied that women's apparent weakness came from their education, and that women needed reason and power over themselves.

Who else was left out?

The argument was not only about women. OpenStax points out that the Enlightenment's ideals of equality mainly benefited White men of the upper and middle classes in western Europe and what became the United States, while "most women, men at the lower end of the social hierarchy, and people of color were generally excluded". Locke wrote about the natural equality of all people, yet he and many of his contemporaries supported colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, which denied those rights to millions. Equiano, whose book you read in the last module, used the language of reason and Christian duty to turn these ideas against slavery. In the next lessons you will see revolutionaries in America, France and Haiti fight over exactly the same question: whose rights were the rights of man?

Some women did take a leading part in the intellectual life of the age. The French scientist Emilie du Chatelet translated Isaac Newton's great book on gravity into French with her own commentary, and the writer Germaine de Stael became famous for her political ideas. But they were rare, and they came from wealthy families.

What would settle it?

Some parts of this dispute are about values, and history cannot vote on them. But Rousseau also made a claim of fact: that women are by nature less able to reason. That claim can be tested, and Wollstonecraft suggested how. If the difference comes from nature, it should survive equal education; if it comes from upbringing, it should shrink when girls are taught like boys. When schools and universities slowly opened to women in the 1800s and 1900s, women's achievements in science, literature, law and government answered Rousseau's claim. Reading Rousseau in context explains why an educated man of 1762 could believe it. It does not make it true.

Common misconceptions

• "The Enlightenment gave everyone equal rights." Its ideals mainly benefited White men of the upper and middle classes; most women, poor men and people of colour were left out, and many thinkers supported slavery and colonialism.
• "Enlightenment thinkers all agreed with each other." They argued constantly: Rousseau and Wollstonecraft disagreed sharply, and Kant's call to reason came with the advice to obey the king.
• "Women played no part in the Enlightenment." Women hosted the Paris salons where ideas were debated, and writers and scientists such as Wollstonecraft and du Chatelet made major contributions.

What to carry forward

• The Enlightenment applied reason to government, religion and education; Locke argued for natural rights to life, liberty and property and government by consent.
• Ideas spread through coffeehouses, which came to Europe from the Islamic world, and through Paris salons hosted by women.
• Kant in 1784 defined enlightenment as having the courage to use your own reason, but he also advised obedience to the king.
• Rousseau, champion of freedom, wrote in Emile (1762) that a woman's education should be planned in relation to man.
• Wollstonecraft replied in 1792 that women's weakness came from their education, and that they needed reason and power over themselves.
• Read in context, the dispute shows that Enlightenment ideals of equality left out most women, poor men and people of colour, which later struggles set out to change.

Sources

1. Kant, I. (1784/1963). What is enlightenment? (L. W. Beck, Trans.). In On history. Bobbs-Merrill. Wikisource. Wikisource
2. Rousseau, J.-J. (1911). Emile (B. Foxley, Trans.). Dent. Book 5. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg
3. Wollstonecraft, M. (1792). A vindication of the rights of woman. J. Johnson. Dedication and chapter 4. Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg
4. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 7.1 The Enlightenment. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax
5. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 7.2 The exchange of ideas in the public sphere. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax

Two statements to the world

On 4 July 1776, in Philadelphia, delegates from thirteen British colonies in North America approved a statement explaining why they were breaking away from their king. It began by saying that "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" required them to explain themselves. Thirteen years later, on 26 August 1789, the National Assembly of France approved a statement of the rights that every person and every citizen should have, declared, it said, "in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being". Both documents still matter. The signed copy of the first is displayed at the US National Archives in Washington; the second is still part of the constitution of France.

This lesson puts the two side by side. It practises comparison: asking the same questions of both documents, then reading the answers to see what the two revolutions shared and where they parted. You compared fleets in the lesson on Zheng He; this time you compare ideas.

Why thirteen colonies broke away

Britain won the Seven Years' War against France in 1763 but was left deep in debt. To save money and avoid more wars with Native Americans, it banned colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains. Then Parliament began to tax the colonies. The Stamp Act of 1765 taxed legal documents and printed papers, and it caused protests across the colonies. OpenStax explains the sharpest complaint: the colonists could not vote for members of Parliament, so they had no representatives to consent to the taxes. More taxes followed, and when Britain sent soldiers to Massachusetts to restore order, many colonists decided to break away completely.

Colonial representatives met in Philadelphia as the Continental Congress. In June 1776 Congress chose five men to draft a declaration, and they gave the writing to Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. Twelve colonies approved it, with New York abstaining. War followed. Britain won most of the early battles, but the Continental Army under George Washington, helped by France, forced a British surrender at Yorktown in 1781.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government ...

The Declaration of Independence, approved by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, 4 July 1776. Transcript from the US National Archives. Unalienable means impossible to take away; self-evident means so plainly true that it needs no proof.

Who, when and why. Jefferson wrote for several audiences at once: the colonists, who had to be persuaded to fight; foreign governments, especially France, whose help they needed; and "mankind". Most of the document is a long list of complaints against King George III, because its purpose was to justify a break, not to set out a full system of government. The colonies' laws were left for later.

Point of view question: Jefferson, who wrote that "all men are created equal", enslaved about 600 people over his lifetime on his Virginia plantations. Later in the same document the king is blamed for stirring up "the merciless Indian Savages". What do these facts suggest about whom the writers had in mind when they wrote "all men"?

Bottom line: The American Declaration of 1776 justified independence by natural rights and the consent of the governed, but it was written by men who did not extend those rights to everyone.

Why France rose in 1789

France had helped the Americans win, and it paid a price. OpenStax explains that the king's extravagant spending and the cost of supporting the American war, together with poor harvests, left the French crown close to bankrupt and many peasants and city poor hungry. French society was divided into three estates, or orders. The clergy and the nobles, together a small minority, held much of the land and paid little tax. Everyone else, about 95 percent of the population, from peasants to rich merchants, formed the Third Estate and carried most of the tax burden.

In 1789 King Louis XVI called the Estates General, an assembly of the three estates that had not met since 1614, to approve new taxes. Each estate had one vote, so the clergy and nobles could always outvote the Third Estate. Its members refused to go on until the voting changed, and with the support of many clergy they declared themselves a National Assembly. When the king gathered troops, the people of Paris rose and on 14 July 1789 captured the Bastille, a fortress prison that stood for the king's power. Six weeks later the Assembly issued its declaration.

1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.

2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation. ...

11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, approved by the National Assembly of France, 26 August 1789. English translation from the Avalon Project, Yale Law School. Imprescriptible means permanent; sovereignty means the highest power in a state.

Who, when and why. The first drafts were prepared by the Marquis de Lafayette, a French noble who had fought in the American war, with help from his friend Thomas Jefferson, then the American government's representative in Paris. Much of the final text came from the Abbe Sieyes and other deputies. Unlike the Americans, the Assembly was not breaking away from another country. It was tearing down the privileges of its own society, so it set out a list of rights for every person in France, and its opening says that "ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man" are the cause of all public misfortunes.

Point of view question: Article 1 says that "social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good". Whose privileges was that sentence aimed at, and why would the Third Estate in particular want it written down?

The two declarations side by side

Now read the table. The similarities are striking, and they are no accident: both documents grew from Enlightenment ideas of natural rights, both say that power comes from the people rather than from a king, and Jefferson himself advised Lafayette. Both appeal to God or a Supreme Being while grounding rights in nature.

The differences come from the different situations. The Americans needed to explain a war of independence, so their declaration is mostly a list of complaints, with rights stated in one powerful sentence. The French needed to rebuild their own society, so their declaration is a list of rights, written almost like a law: what liberty is, how taxes must be agreed, that no one may be punished except by law, that people may speak and print freely. The American "pursuit of Happiness" became, in France, "property" and "security", the worries of a country in turmoil.

Bottom line: Both declarations rested on natural rights and power coming from the people; the American one justified independence, while the French one set out rights to rebuild a whole society.

Living up to the words

Neither revolution gave its rights to everyone. In the United States, OpenStax notes, "political liberty coexisted with the institution of slavery": many of the founders were slaveholders, and slavery lasted until 1865. Women could not vote in national elections until 1920. The new Constitution, adopted in 1789, created a lasting republic, but full rights were extended only slowly, after long struggles.

In France the revolution moved fast and turned violent. In 1791 the writer Olympe de Gouges published a Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, pointing out that the 1789 declaration ignored women; she was executed in 1793. France became a republic, and the king was executed in January 1793. From 1793 to 1794, during the Reign of Terror led by Robespierre, tens of thousands of people were imprisoned or executed as enemies of the revolution. The same radical government abolished slavery in France's colonies in 1794. Then the revolution turned back: the general Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799, and in 1802 he brought slavery back to France's sugar colonies. France did not abolish slavery for good until 1848.

The words outlived the failures. People left out of both declarations later used their language to demand their own rights. The next lesson tells of the most dramatic example: enslaved people in a French colony who took the words of 1789 at their word.

Common misconceptions

• "The French Revolution simply copied the American one." France had its own causes, such as bankruptcy and the privileges of the clergy and nobles, and its declaration listed rights for a whole society rather than justifying independence.
• "'All men are created equal' included everyone in 1776." Enslaved people, women and Native Americans were not given equal rights; the Declaration itself calls Native Americans "merciless Indian Savages".
• "The French Revolution brought democracy straight away." It passed through a constitutional monarchy, a republic, the Terror and then Napoleon's rule, and it brought back slavery in 1802.

The short version

• The American colonies broke away over taxes they had not consented to; Jefferson's Declaration of 4 July 1776 justified independence by natural rights and the consent of the governed.
• France's revolution began in 1789 with bankruptcy, hunger and anger at the privileges of the clergy and nobles; the Third Estate formed a National Assembly and Paris captured the Bastille on 14 July.
• The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 26 August 1789 listed rights for everyone in France, including liberty, property, security, resistance to oppression and free speech.
• Both declarations rested on natural rights and power coming from the people; Jefferson advised Lafayette on the French draft.
• Both left people out: slavery continued in the United States until 1865, and France abolished slavery in 1794, restored it in 1802 and ended it only in 1848.

Sources

1. United States. (1776). Declaration of Independence: A transcription. US National Archives. National Archives
2. National Assembly of France. (1789). Declaration of the rights of man. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School. Avalon Project
3. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 7.3 Revolutions: America, France, and Haiti. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Wikipedia. Wikipedia
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Abolition of slavery in France. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

A pamphlet in an English archive

In 2010 a history graduate student from Duke University, Julia Gaffield, was working through old government papers at the National Archives near London when she found a small printed pamphlet in French. It was an original printed copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence, proclaimed on 1 January 1804 in the town of Gonaives. Historians had searched for one for years. In 2011 she found a second. They are still the only two printed copies known.

The pamphlet had ended up in Britain because a copy was sent to British officials in nearby Jamaica, who wanted to know what had happened on the island next door. And what had happened was astonishing. People who had been enslaved had defeated the armies of France, Spain and Britain, abolished slavery and founded their own country, which they named Haiti. OpenStax calls the Haitian Revolution "the first uprising of enslaved people in history that not only toppled a colonial regime but also established national independence".

This lesson tells that story in order, and it practises cause and effect: finding the causes of each turning point and following the consequences, some of which reached far beyond the island.

The richest colony in the world

In the 1700s the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the western part of the island of Hispaniola, was the most profitable colony France had. OpenStax says it produced roughly 40 percent of the sugar and nearly half of the coffee imported into Europe. That wealth came from forced labour. When the revolution began, about 500,000 enslaved people lived there, most born in Africa. There were about 40,000 White colonists, from rich planters to poor labourers, and about 30,000 free people of colour, many of mixed African and European descent, some of whom were slaveholders themselves.

The plantations were among the deadliest places in the Americas. In 1787 alone about 20,000 enslaved Africans were brought to the colony. Disease, overwork and hunger killed so many newcomers that planters kept buying more rather than caring for the people they held.

1791: the great uprising

News of the French Revolution of 1789 set the colony's free groups against one another. Rich White planters wanted to run the colony themselves; poor Whites wanted equal rights for Whites only; free people of colour wanted the same rights as White citizens, though many did not want slavery ended. Then the enslaved majority acted for themselves.

In August 1791 a group of enslaved people met secretly in a forest called Bois Caiman and sealed their plan in a ceremony of Vodou, a religion that blended West African traditions with Catholic practices, led by a priest named Dutty Boukman. Within days the uprising began in the north of the colony. Thousands of enslaved people burned plantations and fought the planters, and by September the revolt had spread to the capital, Port-au-Prince. OpenStax warns against a simple explanation: the rebels were inspired less by French ideas than by rumours that France had already ended slavery, by their own leaders, and by Vodou, which united people from many different African homelands.

The war drew in the great powers. In 1793 Britain and Spain, at war with revolutionary France, sent troops to the island, hoping to seize its sugar wealth and to stop the revolt spreading to their own colonies. Facing defeat, French officials in Saint-Domingue declared the enslaved free, and in 1794 the government in Paris abolished slavery in all French colonies.

Worth holding on to: Enslaved people in Saint-Domingue began the revolution themselves in 1791, and France abolished slavery in 1794 because of their uprising, not before it.

Toussaint Louverture

The leader who emerged from the fighting was Toussaint Louverture, born in Saint-Domingue in 1743 and himself formerly enslaved. A brilliant general, he fought at first alongside Spain, then for France once it had abolished slavery, and he drove out the British and Spanish forces. By 1801 he controlled the whole island of Hispaniola and freed the enslaved people in the formerly Spanish eastern part too.

In 1801 he issued a constitution. It gave rights to all citizens regardless of race, which neither the United States nor France had done. But it also made Toussaint governor for life, and he ordered formerly enslaved workers back to the sugar fields, now for wages, to keep the economy alive. He still said the colony belonged to France. That was not enough for Napoleon. In 1802 a large French army arrived under the general Charles Leclerc, with secret instructions to remove Toussaint and to bring slavery back. Toussaint was invited to a meeting, arrested, shipped to France and locked in the cold mountain prison of Fort de Joux. There he wrote a memoir defending himself.

I have not been so treated; on the other hand, means have been employed against me which are only used against the greatest criminals. Doubtless, I owe this treatment to my color; but my color, my color, has it hindered me from serving my country with zeal and fidelity? Does the color of my skin impair my honor and my bravery?

Toussaint Louverture, memoir written in prison at Fort de Joux, France, in 1802. Translated in J. R. Beard, Toussaint L'Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography, 1863. Zeal means eagerness; fidelity means loyalty; impair means damage.

Who, when and why. Toussaint wrote as a prisoner, accused of treason, addressing Napoleon's government. He wanted to prove that he had served France loyally and that he had been betrayed, so he describes his record and his honour in detail. He died in the prison on 7 April 1803, before the war ended.

Point of view question: Toussaint calls France "my country" and asks whether his colour has stopped him serving it. Why might he stress his loyalty to France so strongly in 1802? What does his question about colour suggest about how he believed Napoleon's government saw him?

The last war

Toussaint's arrest did not end the fight. When people in Saint-Domingue learned that the French meant to restore slavery, as they had nearly done on the island of Guadeloupe, the cultivators rose again in the summer of 1802. The French army was also being destroyed by yellow fever, a disease spread by mosquitoes; by the middle of July 1802 about 10,000 French soldiers had died of it. Leclerc himself died later that year. The revolutionary army, led now by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, another formerly enslaved general, and joined by many free people of colour, won the final battle at Vertieres on 18 November 1803. The French left.

The declaration of 1804

On 1 January 1804, at Gonaives, Dessalines and his generals swore never to live under French rule again. Dessalines could not read and did not speak French, the language of the colony's rulers, so his secretary, Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, wrote the declaration and read it aloud. A British translator in Jamaica turned it into English that same year.

Citizens: It is not enough to have forced out of your Country the Barbarians who have ensanguined it for the Space of two Centuries. It is not sufficient to have put an End to factions reviving from Phantom of Liberty, which France exposed to our Eyes. It is necessary by the last Act of National Authority, to ensure everlasting Liberty to the Country which gave us Birth. ... we must live Independent or die.

Independence, or Death, let these sacred Words rally us, and let them be the Signal of Battle, and of our reunion.

The General in Chief to the People of Hayti, the opening of the Haitian Declaration of Independence, Gonaives, 1 January 1804. English translation made in 1804, from the British Admiralty records, as transcribed by Julia Gaffield. Ensanguined means covered in blood; a phantom is a ghost or something that is not real.

Who, when and why. The declaration was written by and for people who had just won a twelve-year war against slavery, and who expected France to come back. It speaks to the people of the new nation, rallying them to defend their freedom, and to the world, announcing that Haiti would never again be French. Its language is fierce. Later passages call for vengeance on the French, and in the months that followed, OpenStax notes, White plantation owners "either fled or were killed", and land was redistributed to formerly enslaved and free Black people.

Point of view question: The declaration calls French promises of freedom a "Phantom of Liberty". Thinking back to the French Declaration of 1789 and to Napoleon's restoration of slavery in 1802, why would the writers describe French liberty as a ghost?

The price of freedom

Haiti became the second independent country in the Americas, after the United States, and the first founded by people who had freed themselves from slavery. The rest of the world made it pay. The United States, led by President Thomas Jefferson, himself a slaveholder, refused to recognise Haiti and cut off trade, fearing the example it set; it did not recognise Haiti until 1862. In 1825 France, with warships anchored off the coast, forced Haiti to pay 150 million gold francs to compensate former slaveholders in return for recognising its independence. OpenStax says the debt devastated the country's economy for many years.

Freedom did not bring equality for everyone at once. Dessalines made himself governor-general for life and, within the year, emperor; formerly free people of colour often took the planters' place at the top of society; and Haitian women, like women in France and the United States, waited until the twentieth century for the vote. Even so, the revolution destroyed slavery and racial rule in one of the richest slave colonies on earth. Historians still debate how much it changed elsewhere, but slaveholders across the Americas feared it, and enslaved people heard about it.

Worth holding on to: Haiti won independence on 1 January 1804 as the first nation founded by people who freed themselves from slavery, but other powers punished it, and France's demand of 150 million francs in 1825 crippled its economy.

Common misconceptions

• "France freed the enslaved people of Haiti." The enslaved rose up themselves in 1791. France's abolition of 1794 followed their revolt, and in 1802 Napoleon tried to bring slavery back; Haitians won their freedom by war.
• "The Haitian Revolution simply copied the French Revolution." French events opened the door, but OpenStax stresses rumours of abolition, enslaved leaders and Vodou as sources of inspiration, and the Haitians made ending slavery and racial injustice their main aim.
• "Independence brought equality for everyone at once." Dessalines ruled as a dictator and then emperor, free people of colour often replaced the old planters at the top, and women could not vote until the twentieth century.

What you now know

• Saint-Domingue was France's richest colony, producing about 40 percent of Europe's imported sugar with the forced labour of about 500,000 enslaved people.
• In August 1791, after a Vodou ceremony at Bois Caiman, enslaved people rose up; their revolt led France to abolish slavery in 1794.
• Toussaint Louverture, formerly enslaved, defeated Britain and Spain and issued a constitution in 1801, but Napoleon's army arrested him in 1802 and he died in a French prison in 1803.
• Yellow fever and renewed resistance destroyed the French army, and Dessalines's forces won at Vertieres on 18 November 1803.
• On 1 January 1804 the Haitian Declaration of Independence proclaimed the first nation founded by people who had freed themselves from slavery.
• The United States refused recognition until 1862, and France forced Haiti to pay 150 million gold francs in 1825.

Sources

1. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 7.3 Revolutions: America, France, and Haiti. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax
2. Gaffield, J. (2013, August 2). English translation of the HaitiDOI. Haiti and the Atlantic World. Transcription of an English translation made in 1804, British Admiralty records ADM 1/254. Haiti and the Atlantic World
3. Beard, J. R. (1863). Toussaint L'Ouverture: A biography and autobiography. James Redpath. Includes the memoir Toussaint wrote at Fort de Joux. Internet Archive
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Haitian Declaration of Independence. Wikipedia. Wikipedia
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Haitian Revolution. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

Questions for a father, July 1832

On 4 July 1832 a committee of the House of Commons in London questioned a father named Samuel Coulson about his three daughters. All three worked in a worsted mill, where machines spun wool into a smooth, strong yarn. When they started there, the eldest was nearly twelve, the middle girl nearly eleven and the youngest not yet eight. The committee was considering a law to shorten children's working hours, so its first questions were about time.

At what time in the morning, in the brisk time, did those girls go to the mills? In the brisk time, for about six weeks, they have gone at three o'clock in the morning, and ended at ten, or nearly half-past, at night.

What intervals were allowed for rest or refreshment during those nineteen hours of labour? Breakfast a quarter of an hour, and dinner half an hour, and drinking a quarter of an hour.

Was any of that time taken up in cleaning machinery? They generally had to do what they call "dry down": sometimes this took the whole of the time at breakfast or drinking, and they were to get their dinner or breakfast as they could.

What time did you get them up in the morning? In general me or my mistress got up at 2 o'clock to dress them.

Samuel Coulson, evidence to the House of Commons committee on factory children's labour, July 1832, as printed in Henry Allsopp, The Change to Modern England (1922). The committee's questions are in italics. The brisk time was the mill's busiest season; dinner was the midday meal; drinking was a third, shorter break; dry down meant cleaning the machines; "my mistress" means my wife.

Who, when and why. Coulson was a parent describing what he had seen in his own home, not a mill-owner or a doctor. He was answering questions from a committee chaired by Michael Sadler, a Tory MP who wanted Parliament to limit young people's work to ten hours a day. Coulson was describing a busy season that had ended "better than a year since", and, like every witness before this committee, he did not speak under oath.

Point of view question: Coulson says that his wife sometimes sat up all night "for fear that we could not get them ready for the time". What does that detail tell you about how the family felt about the mill's hours? Why might they have kept sending the girls anyway?

This lesson works like a maths problem with a history question at the end. First you will turn Coulson's answers into a working day, hour by hour, and test it against the laws of 1832 and 1833. Then you will practise sourcing: asking who collected this evidence, why they collected it, and how far it can be trusted.

Cotton, coal and the first factories

Coulson's daughters worked in a kind of building that had barely existed a lifetime earlier. In the 1700s, OpenStax explains, English merchants paid farm families to work at home, a system called cottage labour: rural women spun wool or flax into thread, men wove it into cloth, and the merchant collected the finished goods. Then, in the late 1700s, Britain and other western European countries began to adopt mechanization, "the use of machines to replace the labor of animals and humans". The new machines were easier to install in a large building than in a cottage, so owners gathered machines and workers together in one place: a factory, or mill. A factory also gave the owner control, because he could hire managers to watch the workers all day. Historians call the whole change the Industrial Revolution.

In 1771 Richard Arkwright opened one of the first water-powered cotton-spinning mills, at Cromford in Derbyshire, where a stream could turn its water wheel. Water power tied mills to rivers. The steam engine set them free. A steam engine heats water into steam, and the steam pushes a piston that drives machinery. By 1776, OpenStax notes, some British factories were already using improved engines designed by the Scottish engineer James Watt. Steam engines burned coal, so every new engine meant more coal to be dug.

Much of the raw cotton came from across the Atlantic. In 1793 Eli Whitney developed the cotton gin, a machine that pulled the seeds out of cotton far faster than hands could. Cotton farming then spread across the southern United States, worked by enslaved people. By 1860, OpenStax says, the region was "producing two-thirds of the world's cotton", and the bulk of it was shipped to Liverpool and sold to British mills. The same cotton could be picked by an enslaved child in Mississippi and spun by a child in Lancashire. In OpenStax's words, "Southern cotton, picked and processed by enslaved labor, helped fuel the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution in both the United States and Great Britain."

Why did children work in the mills at all? Children had always worked on farms and in family workshops, as OpenStax points out, and their earnings helped to pay the rent. What changed in the factory was the clock. A machine did not slow down when a child grew tired, and an overlooker, the supervisor in charge of a room, was expected to keep the machines running. Wages were low: children often earned about a quarter of an adult man's pay. A Leeds woollen weaver, Joshua Drake, told Sadler's committee why he let his children work in mills where they were badly treated: "Necessity compels a man that has children to let them work."

Step by step: the brisk-time day

Now turn Coulson's answers into numbers. Work slowly and write each step down; most mistakes in time sums come from rushing past noon or midnight.

1. Write down the start and the finish. Work began at 3:00 a.m. and ended at 10:00 p.m., "or nearly half-past". Use 10:00 first.
2. Split the day at noon. From 3:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon is 9 hours.
3. Count the afternoon and evening. From 12:00 noon to 10:00 p.m. is 10 hours.
4. Add the two parts. 9 + 10 = 19 hours inside the mill. That matches the committee's own words, "those nineteen hours of labour".
5. Add up the breaks. 15 + 30 + 15 = 60 minutes, which is 1 hour.
6. Subtract the breaks. 19 - 1 = 18 hours of work. On a night when the girls finished at half past ten, it was 18 and a half.
7. Check that the breaks were real. When "dry down" swallowed breakfast or drinking, the girls worked through that break too, so 18 hours is the shortest possible answer, not the longest.

Now do the same for sleep. The girls got home and into bed "near eleven o'clock", and a parent woke them at 2:00 a.m. From 11:00 p.m. to midnight is 1 hour, and from midnight to 2:00 a.m. is 2 more, so they had about 3 hours of sleep. The committee asked Coulson, "So that they had not above four hours' sleep at this time?" He agreed. Your sum shows the truth was nearer three.

Coulson also told the committee what the brisk time paid. In ordinary weeks each girl earned three shillings a week; in the brisk time, three shillings and sevenpence halfpenny. Sevenpence halfpenny a week was all the girls received for the extra hours. The work was dangerous, too. His eldest daughter, Ann, caught her finger in the machinery and lost part of it. She spent five weeks in the Leeds Infirmary, and her wages were stopped from the moment of the accident.

The core of it: In the brisk time Coulson's daughters were in the mill for 19 hours, worked at least 18 of them and slept about 3, for sevenpence halfpenny a week more than usual.

Change one fact and the answer flips

Was any of this against the law? Britain already had factory laws in 1832. Taken together, the Acts of 1819, 1825 and 1831 said that no child under nine could be employed, that nobody under eighteen could work more than twelve hours a day, not counting meal times, and that nobody under twenty-one could work at night. But, as the historians B. L. Hutchins and A. Harrison explain, those Acts covered cotton mills only; at that time "woollen mills were entirely unregulated by law". Coulson's daughters worked with wool. So the answer is no: their 18-hour day broke no law at all.

Now change one input. Keep the same girls, the same year and the same hours, but put them in a cotton mill.

• Hours: 18 hours of work against a limit of 12 is 6 hours over the limit.
• Night work: a start at 3:00 in the morning is night work, which the 1831 Act banned for anyone under twenty-one.
• Age: the youngest girl began work before her eighth birthday, and no child under nine could be employed in a cotton mill.

Same girls, same day, same year: legal in a worsted mill, illegal three times over in a cotton mill. That is why campaigners wanted one law for every kind of textile mill, and why the next law mattered so much. In 1833 Parliament passed a new Factory Act. It covered cotton, woollen, worsted, flax, linen and silk mills alike, and Hutchins and Harrison set out its rules, compared in the table below with the old ones. Children under thirteen were also supposed to receive two hours of schooling a day, and, for the first time, paid government inspectors were appointed with the power to walk into any mill.

Test the girls' ordinary weeks against the new law. Coulson said the "common hours" ran from 6:00 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., with the same three breaks. From 6:00 a.m. to noon is 6 hours and from noon to 8:30 p.m. is 8 and a half, so 14 and a half hours in the mill; take away the hour of breaks and you get 13 and a half hours of work. The day starts after 5:30 a.m. and ends exactly at 8:30 p.m., so it is not night work. But for a girl of fifteen it is an hour and a half over the twelve-hour limit, and for a girl of twelve it is four and a half hours over her nine-hour limit, every working day. The Act also required an hour and a half for meals, not one hour. Even the family's ordinary week had become illegal.

The core of it: Before 1833 the law protected children in cotton mills only; the Factory Act of 1833 covered every kind of textile mill, set limits by age and sent inspectors to enforce them.

Who collected the evidence, and why?

Now the sourcing. A historian never takes testimony at face value, so ask who gathered Coulson's words and what they wanted.

Sadler had campaigned for factory children since 1823. He brought a Ten Hours Bill to Parliament at the end of 1831, and in April 1832 he became chairman of the committee that heard Coulson. His ally Richard Oastler had begun the public campaign in 1830 with fierce letters to the Leeds Mercury about "Yorkshire Slavery". Supporters of the bill, the Ten Hours Movement, found most of the workers who gave evidence. The editors of a 1930 collection of these documents, Jonathan Scott and Alexander Baltzly, add a warning: "It will be observed that the questions are frequently leading". A leading question is one that suggests its own answer.

Look again at one question put to Coulson: "So that they had not above four hours' sleep at this time?" The committee, not Coulson, chose those words; he only had to say yes. Your own sum showed that the claim was, if anything, too generous, so this leading question did not exaggerate. But a careful reader always notices who supplied the words.

The mill-owners noticed too. They complained that the committee had heard one side only, and in 1833 Parliament sent a fresh team, the Factory Commission, to visit the mills and take evidence on oath. Many workers distrusted these commissioners, believing they favoured the owners. Yet within about two months the commission reported in favour of a new law. Hutchins and Harrison summarise its findings: children were "commonly employed in manufactures for as long a time per day as adults", their health and schooling suffered, and the old law was "almost entirely inoperative". The commission found less cruelty than Sadler's witnesses had described, but it agreed about the hours, and the Factory Act of 1833 followed.

That agreement is what makes the evidence strong. Two inquiries, run by people on opposite sides of the argument, agreed on the central fact: children were working adult hours. When sources with opposing interests agree, a historian can trust that point far more than either source alone. Where they disagree, as they did about beatings, the question has to stay open.

Point of view question: Sadler lost his seat in Parliament at the election of 1832, and Lord Ashley, later the Earl of Shaftesbury, took up the cause. Why do you think the mill-owners wanted an inquiry that visited the mills, and why did the workers distrust it?

Down the coal pits

Steam engines, ironworks and city fireplaces all burned coal, and children worked in the pits that supplied it. In 1842 a government commission published a report on children and women in the mines, full of the workers' own words. Here is one of them.

I'm a trapper in the Gawber pit. It does not tire me, but I have to trap without a light and I'm scared. I go at four and sometimes half past three in the morning, and come out at five and half past. I never go to sleep. Sometimes I sing when I've light, but not in the dark; I dare not sing then. I don't like being in the pit.

Sarah Gooder, aged eight, evidence to the Children's Employment Commission on mines, printed by Parliament in 1842; reprinted in Jonathan Scott and Alexander Baltzly, Readings in European History Since 1814 (1930). "Come out at five and half past" means at five, or half past five, in the afternoon.

Who, when and why. Sarah's words were written down by an official sent by the commission to collect evidence, and they were printed so that Parliament could decide whether to change the law. A trapper sat beside a ventilation door in an underground tunnel and opened and shut it; the doors controlled the flow of fresh air through the mine. Her hours make one more time sum: from four in the morning to five in the afternoon is 13 hours, and from half past three to half past five is 14, all of it underground and much of it in the dark.

The report shocked the country. One colliery owner, Thomas Wilson, who owned three pits at Silkstone in Yorkshire, told the commission that he would "rejoice" to see women and girls kept out of the mines, but he objected "on general principles to government interference in the conduct of any trade". Parliament interfered anyway. The Mines Act of 1842 banned all women and girls, and all boys under ten, from working underground, as Parliament's own history pages record.

People who pushed back

Working people did not simply suffer these changes; many fought them, and others fought to reform them. Beginning in 1811, OpenStax records, textile workers calling themselves Luddites smashed machines that threatened their skilled jobs. Parliament made such sabotage punishable by death, and by 1816 the movement had been crushed. Others chose a slower road. Workers' groups called Short Time Committees kept the campaign for shorter hours alive for years, while Oastler, Sadler and Lord Ashley carried it into Parliament. It took fifteen more years. In 1847 Parliament passed the Ten Hours Act, which limited women and young people aged thirteen to eighteen in textile mills to ten hours of work a day. Hutchins and Harrison record that when it became law "the greatest rejoicing took place all over the country, especially amongst those members of the Short Time Committees".

Common misconceptions

• "Factories invented child labour." Children had long worked on farms and in family workshops. What the factory changed was the pace and the length of the day, set by machines that never tired and overlookers paid to keep them running.
• "The Factory Act of 1833 ended child labour." It set a minimum age of nine in most textile mills and limited hours by age. Children still worked in mills, mines and workshops; mines were regulated only in 1842, and OpenStax notes that child labour declined mainly when laws made schooling compulsory later in the century.
• "A one-sided source is useless." Sadler's evidence was gathered by campaigners, but a rival inquiry that the mill-owners had demanded agreed that children worked adult hours. A one-sided source can still be right on the points that independent evidence confirms.

Pulling it together

• From the late 1700s machines, factories and coal-fired steam engines transformed British work, and much of the raw cotton was grown by enslaved people in the American South.
• Samuel Coulson told Parliament in 1832 that in the brisk time his daughters worked from 3:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.: 19 hours in the mill, at least 18 of them working, and about 3 hours of sleep.
• Before 1833 the factory laws covered cotton mills only, so the same day was legal in a worsted mill and illegal in a cotton mill.
• The Factory Act of 1833 covered all textile mills: no children under nine except in silk mills, 9 hours a day for under-13s, 12 for under-18s, schooling, and four inspectors.
• Sadler's evidence was gathered by campaigners and drawn out with leading questions, but the Factory Commission of 1833, which the mill-owners wanted, agreed that children worked adult hours.
• The 1842 mines report, with voices like eight-year-old Sarah Gooder's, led to a ban on underground work for women, girls and boys under ten; the Ten Hours Act followed in 1847.

Sources

1. Coulson, S. (1832). Evidence to the Select Committee on Factory Children's Labour, 4 July 1832. House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 1831-32, vol. XV. Reprinted in H. Allsopp, The change to modern England (from 1750) (1922), pp. 100-104, Nisbet; also transcribed at The Peel Web. Internet Archive; The Peel Web
2. Scott, J. F., and Baltzly, A. (Eds.). (1930). Readings in European history since 1814. Appleton-Century-Crofts. Extracts from Parliamentary Papers 1831-32, vol. XV (evidence of Joshua Drake, Matthew Crabtree and Elizabeth Bentley) and 1842, vols. XV-XVII (evidence of Sarah Gooder and Thomas Wilson), transcribed by L. Del Col at The Victorian Web. The Victorian Web: Sadler Committee; The Victorian Web: Mines Commission
3. Hutchins, B. L., and Harrison, A. (1911). A history of factory legislation (2nd ed.). P. S. King and Son. Chapters 1-5. Internet Archive
4. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 6.3 Capitalism and the first industrial revolution, and 10.1 Inventions, innovations, and mechanization. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax 6.3; OpenStax 10.1
5. Corbett, P. S., Janssen, V., Lund, J. M., Pfannestiel, T., Waskiewicz, S., and Vickery, P. (2014). 12.1 The economics of cotton. In U.S. History. OpenStax. OpenStax

A king writes to a queen, April 1889

On 23 April 1889 Lobengula, king of the Ndebele people in what is now Zimbabwe, sent a letter of protest to Queen Victoria in London. Six months earlier, at his capital, Bulawayo, three agents of the British businessman Cecil Rhodes had persuaded him to put his mark on a document. Now he knew what it said.

Some time ago a party of men came into my country, the principal one appearing to be a man called Rudd. They asked me for a place to dig for gold, and said they would give me certain things for the right to do so. I told them to bring what they would give and I would show them what I would give. A document was written and presented to me for signature. I asked what it contained, and was told that in it were my words and the words of those men. I put my hand to it. About three months afterwards I heard from other sources that I had given by that document the right to all the minerals of my country. I called a meeting of my Indunas and also of the white men and demanded a copy of the document. It was proved to me that I had signed away the mineral rights of my whole country to Rudd and his friends. I have since had a meeting of my Indunas and they will not recognise the paper, as it contains neither my words nor the words of those who got it. ... I write to you that you may know the truth about this thing.

Lobengula, letter to Queen Victoria, 23 April 1889, as printed in E. D. Morel, The Black Man's Burden (1920). Indunas were the king's counsellors and commanders; "I put my hand to it" means that he made his mark on the paper.

Who, when and why. Lobengula could not read the document himself; he had to ask what it said, and he trusted the answer. He wrote to the queen because Britain claimed to be his friend. In February 1888 he had signed a treaty with a British official, John Moffat, the son of a missionary his father had known, promising to deal with no other foreign power. In March 1889 the queen's minister had answered an earlier message in her name: "Lobengula is the ruler of his country, and the Queen does not interfere in the government of that country." Lobengula hoped she would undo what had been done.

Point of view question: Lobengula says the paper "contains neither my words nor the words of those who got it". What does he believe went wrong? Why might he have written to the queen rather than to Rhodes?

The problem: a continent in thirty years

Lobengula was not alone. OpenStax estimates that when the Scramble for Africa began, Europeans controlled about 10 percent of the continent, mostly near the coasts, and that by the end of the nineteenth century they controlled 90 percent. By 1914 only two African countries, Ethiopia and Liberia, remained outside European rule. So here is the problem. How could a handful of European countries take almost a whole continent in about thirty years? And why did some African states manage to stop them?

You will work the problem the way a historian works out cause and effect. Historians separate two kinds of cause: motives, the reasons people wanted something, and means, the things that made it possible. A conquest needs both. Europeans had traded along Africa's coasts for four hundred years, as earlier lessons showed, but disease and the land itself had kept most of them out of the interior. Something changed in the 1800s.

Motives: why Europeans wanted Africa

OpenStax lists the motives plainly. European nations wanted "access to raw materials and new markets for their goods", and they wanted "to boost international prestige and national pride, and to achieve military dominance over rivals." The table shows what each motive meant in practice.

The last motive needs explaining, because it was the one Europeans liked to say out loud. A theory called social Darwinism claimed that some peoples were naturally superior to others, and many Europeans used it to argue that they had a duty to rule Africans for their own good. OpenStax says this view "no doubt served many as merely a cover for baser motives". Rhodes, who made a fortune from diamonds and founded the British South Africa Company, wanted more room for "Anglo-Saxons, whom he considered a superior race"; OpenStax calls him plainly "a racist with no respect for Africans".

So what?: Motives explain why Europeans wanted African land, but not why they could suddenly take it. For that you need the means.

Means: what made conquest possible

Three new tools, all products of the industrial age you met in the last lesson, opened the interior.

• Medicine. Malaria, spread by mosquitoes, had killed many Europeans who went inland. In the 1840s the British found that quinine, from the bark of the cinchona tree, could prevent the disease if it was taken beforehand, and by the 1870s Dutch plantations in Indonesia were growing enough trees to make much more of it.
• Steamboats. Africa's great rivers tumble over waterfalls on their way to the sea, so sailing ships could not follow them inland. Steamboats could, and when one reached a waterfall it was taken apart, carried around the falls by African porters and put back together.
• Guns. European soldiers carried breech-loading repeating rifles, and the Maxim gun, OpenStax notes, "could fire eleven bullets per second". Africans could get such guns only by buying them from the industrial countries, at enormous prices.

A fourth tool was paper. Treaties and concessions, written in European languages and signed by rulers who could not read them, let European governments claim that Africans had agreed. Lobengula's concession is one example; you will meet another in Ethiopia.

The European powers also agreed the rules among themselves. At the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, OpenStax says, "without input from Africans, European nations simply allotted different parts of the continent to one another." The conference handed the vast Congo basin to King Leopold II of Belgium as his private colony, the Congo Free State. Leopold promised to help the Congolese. Instead his agents forced people to gather wild rubber and ivory, held wives and children hostage until the men brought it in, and punished anyone who fell short with whipping, mutilation or death. Reports and photographs of the victims led to an international campaign of protest, and in 1908 the Belgian Parliament took the Congo away from him.

So what?: The Scramble happened when it did because old motives met new means: medicine, steam and machine guns let Europeans act on wants they had long had, and agreements like Berlin's let them share out the land with less fighting among themselves.

The kingdom that fell: Matabeleland

Lobengula's letter changed nothing. In October 1889 the British government gave Rhodes's company a royal charter, a licence to govern, and in November the queen's minister wrote again, now telling Lobengula that it was "impossible for him to exclude white men". Company settlers moved into Mashonaland, the land of the Shona people, from whom the Ndebele had long taken tribute. In 1893 a quarrel over an Ndebele raid near the settlers' town of Fort Victoria gave the company the excuse it wanted. Its man in charge, Leander Starr Jameson, promised every volunteer a large farm, gold claims and a share of the captured cattle, a fact that came out in full only in 1918.

The company's small army carried Maxim guns, while most Ndebele soldiers fought with spears and shields. In less than three months, Morel writes, "the war was over. Thousands of Matabele were killed". Lobengula fled, his people burning the royal town of Bulawayo as they left, and he died early in 1894. This was the First Matabele War.

The Ndebele were not finished. In March 1896, while most of the company's fighting men were away, the Ndebele rose up, and the Shona soon joined them, in what Zimbabweans call the First Chimurenga, a Shona word meaning struggle. The risings were crushed by late 1897. Among the leaders captured and executed was the Shona spirit medium Mbuya Nehanda, who inspired Zimbabwe's later fight for independence; in 2021 her statue was unveiled in the capital, Harare.

The kingdom that said no: Asante

Two years after Lobengula's letter, a young king in West Africa gave Britain a different kind of answer. Prempeh I, then about twenty, ruled Asante, a rich kingdom in what is now Ghana that had fought the British more than once. In the spring of 1891 a British official came to its capital, Kumasi, with a treaty that would place Asante under the "protection" of Queen Victoria. Prempeh's messengers caught up with him on his way home with this reply.

The suggestion that Ashanti in its present state should come and enjoy the protection of Her Majesty the Queen and Empress of India, I may say this is a matter of a very serious consideration, and which I am happy to say we have arrived at this conclusion, that my kingdom of Ashanti will never commit itself to any such policy; Ashanti must remain independent as of old, at the same time to remain friendly with all white men. I do not write this with a boastful spirit, but in the clear sense of its meaning.

Prempeh I, King of Asante, reply to the British offer of protection, May 1891, as printed in Francis Fuller, A Vanished Dynasty: Ashanti (1921). "As of old" means as it always had been.

Who, when and why. Prempeh wrote as a king refusing politely: he says no, promises friendship and insists that he is not boasting. Notice who preserved his words. Francis Fuller was the British Chief Commissioner who later ran the colonial government of Asante, and he dedicated his book to the colleagues who had helped him turn "a sullen and suspicious race, still smarting from defeat", into "a contented and prosperous people". A source can keep an opponent's words accurately even when its author's own point of view runs the other way.

Britain did not accept the answer. In January 1896 a British force marched into Kumasi. Prempeh, fearing reprisals, told his people not to resist; he was arrested and sent into exile, first to Sierra Leone and then to the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, where he stayed until 1924. In March 1900 the British governor, Sir Frederic Hodgson, came to Kumasi, demanded yearly payments and asked the chiefs: "Where is the golden stool? Why am I not sitting on the golden stool at this moment?"

The Golden Stool was Asante's most sacred object, believed to hold the spirit of the nation, the living, the dead and those not yet born. It must never touch the ground, and even a new king is only lowered over it without touching it. Yaa Asantewaa, the Queen Mother of Ejisu, then about sixty, led the Asante into the War of the Golden Stool. The British won by force of arms and made Asante part of their Gold Coast colony in 1902, and Yaa Asantewaa died in exile in the Seychelles in 1921. But they never got the stool.

Fuller, the British official, thought the payments Hodgson demanded were "the deciding factor" in the decision to fight, more than the stool or the king's long exile. The war's own name shows which cause the Asante remember. Here is cause and effect at work: one war, several causes, weighed differently by people on different sides.

The kingdom that won: Ethiopia

In 1889 Italy signed the Treaty of Wuchale with the new Ethiopian emperor, Menelik II. OpenStax explains the trick in it. In the Italian-language version, Ethiopia handed Italy control of its foreign affairs; in the version in Ethiopia's own language, the emperor could choose whether to accept Italian control. When Italy insisted on its version in 1895, Menelik refused, and war began.

Menelik had prepared. His soldiers carried large numbers of modern rifles imported from France and Russia, and in September 1895 he called the whole country to arms. On 1 March 1896, near the town of Adwa, a much larger Ethiopian army, with Empress Taytu Betul commanding troops of her own, fell on an Italian army that had split into separate columns in rough mountain country. About six thousand Italian soldiers were killed and three thousand captured, and the Ethiopians seized eleven thousand rifles. In Italy there were riots. The peace treaty confirmed that Ethiopia was independent.

So what?: Ethiopia kept its freedom because it put a large, united army into the field with modern rifles in great numbers, under rulers who refused a treaty's trick before it could be used against them, and Italy's own mistakes at Adwa did the rest.

Common misconceptions

• "Africans did not resist European conquest." OpenStax says that "resistance movements and outright revolts sprang up wherever colonizers went", from Egypt and the Mahdi's Sudan to the Zulu and the Ndebele. Asante fought in 1900, and Ethiopia won outright.
• "The Berlin Conference divided Africa all at once." It set rules and recognised claims among Europeans. The actual takeover went on from the 1880s into the 1910s, and most of it took wars of conquest.
• "African rulers knowingly sold their countries." Lobengula was told the paper held his own words and protested within months; the two versions of the Wuchale treaty said different things; and Prempeh refused outright.

Recap

• Europeans controlled about 10 percent of Africa when the Scramble began and 90 percent by 1900; by 1914 only Ethiopia and Liberia were independent.
• The motives were raw materials, markets, prestige, rivalry and a racist "civilizing mission"; the means were quinine, steamboats, repeating rifles and Maxim guns, plus treaties that Africans could not read.
• At Berlin in 1884-1885 Europeans shared out claims without Africans, and Leopold II's Congo Free State became infamous for forced labour until Belgium took it from him in 1908.
• Lobengula protested against the Rudd Concession in 1889, but Rhodes's company conquered Matabeleland in 1893-1894; the Ndebele and Shona rose again in 1896.
• Prempeh I refused British protection in 1891 and was exiled in 1896; in 1900 Yaa Asantewaa led the War of the Golden Stool.
• Menelik II rejected the Italian version of the Treaty of Wuchale, and the victory at Adwa in 1896 kept Ethiopia independent.

Sources

1. Morel, E. D. (1920). The black man's burden. National Labour Press. Chapters 4-5, which print Lobengula's letters of 1889 and the Colonial Office's replies. Internet Archive
2. Fuller, F. C. (1921). A vanished dynasty: Ashanti. John Murray. Chapters 10-11, which print Prempeh's reply of 1891 and Governor Hodgson's speech of 1900. Internet Archive
3. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 9.2 Motives and means of imperialism; 9.3 Colonial empires; 9.4 Exploitation and resistance. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax 9.2; OpenStax 9.3; OpenStax 9.4
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). First Matabele War. Wikipedia. Wikipedia
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Battle of Adwa. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

Twenty thousand chests at the river mouth

In June 1839, at Humen, near the mouth of the Pearl River in southern China, workers began mixing a drug with lime and salt and throwing it into the sea. The job took them weeks. The drug was opium, made from the juice of poppies, and it came from 20,283 chests that foreign merchants at Canton, the city now called Guangzhou, had been forced to hand over. The man in charge was Lin Zexu, a senior official whom the emperor of the Qing dynasty had sent south with orders to end the opium trade.

Opium eases pain, but it is powerfully addictive: people who use it come to crave it. British merchants bought huge amounts of Chinese tea, silk and porcelain, but China wanted few British goods, so for a long time the merchants had to pay in silver. Opium grown in British-ruled India, smuggled into China and sold for silver, solved their problem. The Qing government had banned the drug, but smugglers, helped by officials who took bribes, landed it by the shipload. Lin arrived in Canton in March 1839, forced the merchants to surrender their stocks, and wrote to the ruler of the country whose merchants sold the most.

We have heard that in your own country opium is prohibited with the utmost strictness and severity: this is a strong proof that you know full well how hurtful it is to mankind. Since then you do not permit it to injure your own country, you ought not to have the injurious drug transferred to another country, and above all others, how much less to the Inner Land! ... Let us suppose that foreigners came from another country, and brought opium into England, and seduced the people of your country to smoke it, would not you, the sovereign of the said country, look upon such a procedure with anger, and in your just indignation endeavor to get rid of it?

Lin Zexu and two fellow officials, letter to Queen Victoria, 1839, in the English translation printed in the Chinese Repository, Canton, February 1840. The Inner Land means China; seduced means tempted.

Who, when and why. Lin wrote this public letter with two fellow officials, in the name of the emperor's government. It opens by describing the emperor as a ruler who looks on "all mankind" with kindness, and it calls earlier British kings "respectful and obedient", senders of "tribute". That was the Qing view of the world: China at the centre, other rulers below. Lin assumed that the queen could simply order her merchants to stop, as an emperor could. He also believed that opium was banned in Britain. It was not. In 1839 opium was sold freely in British shops, often as a medicine, and the first law to control its sale came only in 1868. The letter seems never to have reached the queen, although it was later printed in the London newspaper The Times.

Point of view question: Lin asks the queen to imagine foreigners bringing opium into England. What does that question show about how he expected a good ruler to think? Which of his beliefs about Britain were mistaken, and how might those mistakes have shaped what happened next?

This lesson follows one chain of events from Lin's beach in 1839 to Japan's victory over Russia in 1905, across three great Asian societies: China, India and Japan. It practises point of view, because the same events looked very different from Beijing, London, Delhi and Tokyo.

The Opium War

Britain answered with warships. A British fleet reached China in 1840, including the Nemesis, the first British ocean-going iron warship, a steamship shallow enough to sail up China's rivers. Chinese forces were beaten again and again. The emperor blamed Lin; in 1840 he was dismissed, and he was later sent into exile in the Ili region of Xinjiang, in the far west of China. He died in 1850.

Not everyone in Britain supported the war. In April 1840 the House of Commons debated it for three nights. Supporters of the government complained of the "indignities practised upon British merchants", and a minister had spoken of the British flag "waving in glory at Canton". A young member of Parliament named William Gladstone, who would later be prime minister four times, answered them.

This I can say, that a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know, and I have not read of.

William Gladstone, speech in the House of Commons, 8 April 1840, as recorded in Hansard, the official report of Parliament's debates. Permanent disgrace means lasting shame.

Gladstone called the opium trade "infamous and atrocious". When the House voted on 9 April, the government survived by just nine votes, 271 to 262, and the war went on.

The Treaty of Nanjing, signed aboard a British warship on 29 August 1842, ended the war on Britain's terms. China gave Britain the island of Hong Kong, opened five ports, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Ningbo, Fuzhou and Xiamen, to British trade, and paid millions of silver dollars. Other powers followed: in 1844 France and the United States won the same trading rights. In a second war, from 1856 to 1860, Britain and France forced China to open more ports and accept foreign diplomats in Beijing, and foreigners won the right to be judged only by their own countries' laws while in China. In 1860 British and French soldiers looted and burned the emperor's Old Summer Palace. The Chinese came to call the years that followed "the century of humiliation".

Remember: China lost the Opium War because Britain's industrial warships outgunned its forces, and the treaties that followed gave foreign powers ports, money and special rights inside China.

A rebellion from within

China's deadliest crisis came from inside. In 1850 a village schoolteacher named Hong Xiuquan, who had come to believe that he was the son of the Christian God and the brother of Jesus, led his followers into war against the Qing. He called his state the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, told his followers to give up alcohol and opium, and promised land and wealth to the poor. In 1853 his armies took the great city of Nanjing. The Taiping Rebellion lasted until 1864. OpenStax estimates that twenty to thirty million people died in the fighting and in the famines it caused.

The Qing survived, but the war drained the government when it most needed strength. From the 1860s reformers in the Self-Strengthening Movement built arsenals and shipyards and began railways, telegraph lines and mines. Many officials trained in Confucian learning saw these changes as a threat, and reform moved slowly.

India: the knife of sugar

India's story ran differently. Britain did not need to force a door open there, because a British business, the East India Company, already ruled about half of the country directly. In the middle of the 1700s, OpenStax notes, India was "the largest exporter of cotton cloth in the world". Then British laws kept Indian cloth out of Britain, and cheap machine-made British cloth flooded Indian markets and put weavers out of work. India was turned into a supplier of raw materials: raw cotton, tea, sugar, and the opium that Britain sold in China.

On 10 May 1857 Indian soldiers in the company's army, called sepoys, rose in revolt at Meerut, about forty miles from Delhi. A rumour had spread that new rifle cartridges, which soldiers bit open, were greased with cow and pig fat, offensive to Hindus and to Muslims. Historians now see the rumour as the spark rather than the whole cause, which lay in years of anger at the company's rule. The rebellion spread across northern India. In Delhi the rebels declared the eighty-one-year-old Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah Zafar, emperor of Hindustan, and Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, led her own forces until she was killed fighting at Gwalior in June 1858.

The British crushed the rising after brutal fighting on both sides. In 1858 Parliament ended the company's rule and governed India directly, the period known as the British Raj. The last Mughal emperor was sent into exile, and in 1876 Queen Victoria took the title Empress of India.

After 1857 many Indians turned from armed revolt to argument and organisation. In 1871 the merchant and scholar Dadabhai Naoroji weighed up British rule for British readers. It had brought peace and order, he wrote, but also heavy taxes and the impoverishment of the people, and Indians had a name for it.

The natives call the British system Sakar ki Churi, the knife of sugar. That is to say, there is no oppression, it is all smooth and sweet, but it is the knife, notwithstanding.

Dadabhai Naoroji, "The Benefits of British Rule", 1871, as excerpted in OpenStax, World History Volume 2. Notwithstanding means all the same.

In 1885 Indian reformers founded the Indian National Congress to press for change, and Naoroji later served as its president. Others went further: Bal Gangadhar Tilak declared, "Swaraj (self-rule) is my birthright and I shall have it."

Point of view question: Why might Naoroji, writing for British readers, have chosen an image as gentle as a knife made of sugar rather than an angrier one?

Japan's choice

Japan was watching. In July 1853 the American commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay, beside the city now called Tokyo, with four warships, and demanded that Japan open its ports. Since the 1600s Japan's rulers, the Tokugawa shoguns, had kept most foreigners out. Perry had his ships' guns fire blanks; the Japanese did not know they were blanks. On 31 March 1854 Japan signed the Convention of Kanagawa, opening two ports to American ships.

Japanese leaders drew a lesson from China. OpenStax explains that modernizers, "remembering the American gunboats and China's humbling by Britain's navy in the first of the Opium Wars", decided that the best way to protect Japan was to adopt Western technology and institutions. The last shogun gave up power in 1867, and in January 1868 the teenage Emperor Meiji was proclaimed ruler in fact as well as in name. This was the Meiji Restoration. On 6 April 1868 the new government issued a short oath in five articles.

1. All the affairs of the state shall be guided by public opinion. ... 4. All old absurd usages shall be disregarded, and resort shall be had to the right way that exists between heaven and earth. 5. Wisdom and ability shall be sought after in all quarters of the world, for the purpose of firmly establishing the Imperial domination.

The Charter Oath of 6 April 1868, articles 1, 4 and 5, in the English translation printed by Sidney Gulick in The White Peril in the Far East (1905). Usages means customs; Imperial domination means the emperor's rule.

Who, when and why. The oath was issued in the young emperor's name by the men who had just taken power, to tell Japan's lords and people what kind of government was coming. Notice the reason that article 5 gives: knowledge from abroad was wanted to make the emperor's rule strong, not to make Japan more Western for its own sake.

The change that followed came at astonishing speed. The samurai lost their special rank and privileges, and a new national army with modern weapons defeated those who rebelled. By 1872 a railway linked Tokyo with the port of Yokohama, and in the same year Japan began a public school system; by 1900, OpenStax says, nearly all boys attended, and girls were not far behind. Companies such as Mitsubishi built ships and mined coal, and students went abroad to study Western technology and government.

Then Japan did to others what had been done to it. In 1876 it sent a gunboat to force Korea to sign a treaty opening its ports, much as Perry had forced Japan. In 1894-1895 Japan's modern navy defeated China, and China handed over the island of Taiwan. In 1904-1905 Japan defeated Russia, a European great power. In 1910 Japan annexed Korea.

Remember: Japan's leaders chose to learn from the West in order to resist it, and within forty years Japan had become an industrial power and an empire, ruling Taiwan and soon Korea.

Common misconceptions

• "The Opium War happened because China refused to trade." China had sold tea and silk to Britain for generations. The war followed Lin's seizure of opium, a drug that was illegal in China, and even in Parliament Gladstone called it unjust.
• "Japan stayed free by refusing to change." Japan changed faster than its neighbours: it ended the shogunate, abolished the samurai's privileges, built railways and schools, and then became an empire itself.
• "The 1857 rebellion was only about greased cartridges." Historians treat the cartridge rumour as the spark that set off years of anger over the company's rule, its treatment of its soldiers and fears that it threatened Indians' religions.

Summing up

• In 1839 Lin Zexu destroyed 20,283 chests of smuggled opium and wrote to Queen Victoria; his letter shows a Qing official's view of the world, including mistaken beliefs about Britain.
• Britain won the Opium War of 1839-1842 with industrial warships; the Treaty of Nanjing gave it Hong Kong and five ports, although Gladstone called the war unjust.
• The Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864 killed an estimated twenty to thirty million people and left the Qing weaker still.
• India, once the world's largest exporter of cotton cloth, became a supplier of raw materials; after the rebellion of 1857 Britain ruled it directly.
• Japan, forced open by Perry in 1853-1854, chose rapid modernisation after 1868 and by 1910 ruled Taiwan and Korea.

Sources

1. Lin Zexu and two fellow officials of Guangdong. (1840). Letter to the Queen of England [written 1839]. The Chinese Repository, 8, 497-503. Reprinted in the Internet Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham University. Fordham University
2. UK Parliament. (1840, April 8-9). War with China: Adjourned debate. Hansard, House of Commons, 3rd series, vol. 53. Hansard, 8 April 1840; Hansard, 9 April 1840
3. Gulick, S. L. (1905). The white peril in the Far East: An interpretation of the significance of the Russo-Japanese War. Fleming H. Revell. Chapter 2, which prints the Charter Oath of 1868. Internet Archive
4. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 9.1 The second industrial revolution; 9.3 Colonial empires; 9.4 Exploitation and resistance. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax 9.1; OpenStax 9.3; OpenStax 9.4
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Lin Zexu. Wikipedia. Wikipedia

An address to the nations, July 1900

Thirty-seven delegates and about ten other guests gathered at Westminster Town Hall in London from 23 to 25 July 1900 for the First Pan-African Conference. They had come from Africa, the Caribbean, the United States and Britain, and among them was Dadabhai Naoroji, whose "knife of sugar" you read in the last lesson. The meeting was organised by a lawyer from Trinidad, Henry Sylvester Williams. Before it ended, it adopted an "Address to the Nations of the World", to be sent to the rulers of the great powers. The address was drafted by a thirty-two-year-old American scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois.

In the metropolis of the modern world, in this the closing year of the nineteenth century, there has been assembled a congress of men and women of African blood, to deliberate solemnly upon the present situation and outlook of the darker races of mankind. The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the question as to how far differences of race, which show themselves chiefly in the color of the skin and the texture of the hair, will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization. ...

Let the nations of the world respect the integrity and independence of the free Negro states of Abyssinia, Liberia, Haiti, and the rest ...

W. E. B. Du Bois, "To the Nations of the World", adopted by the First Pan-African Conference, London, July 1900, as printed in Alexander Walters, My Life and Work (1917). A metropolis is a great capital city; to deliberate is to discuss carefully; Abyssinia is Ethiopia. Negro was the usual word in 1900, used by Du Bois himself; today it is considered outdated.

Who, when and why. Du Bois, born in Massachusetts in 1868, was a historian and sociologist. In 1900 he also organised an exhibit of photographs and charts about African American life, The Exhibit of American Negroes, for the great world's fair in Paris. The address spoke for a whole conference, and it was written to persuade the rulers of empires, which is why it appeals to "the high ideals of justice, freedom and culture" and calls Britain "the first modern champion of Negro freedom". The text quoted here was printed in 1917 by the man who had chaired the conference, Bishop Alexander Walters, in his memoirs.

Point of view question: Du Bois calls London "the metropolis of the modern world", and he names Abyssinia, Liberia and Haiti as free states. What do these choices tell you about where power lay in 1900, and about what he hoped would change?

This last lesson steps back to look at the whole road you have travelled, from the sack of Rome in 410 to Du Bois in 1900. It practises change over time by comparing three snapshots of the world, taken in about 500, 1500 and 1900, and asking what changed, how fast, and what stayed the same.

Three snapshots of one world

Here is the world at three moments, drawn from the lessons of this course. The population figures are modern scholars' estimates, gathered by Our World in Data; the further back you go, the rougher they are, because nobody counted the world's people in 500.

Before reading on, look along each row and ask two questions: did this change a lot or a little, and did it change steadily or suddenly?

What changed, and how fast

Start with the people. The world's population took about a thousand years, from 500 to 1500, to double. In the four hundred years after 1500 it more than tripled, and most of that growth came after 1800. New crops from the Americas helped to feed it, as you saw in Module 9, and then industry, railways and steamships did. Change, in other words, did not move at a steady speed. It crawled for centuries and then raced.

The second great change was connection. In 500 the people of Constantinople and the people of the Maya city of Tikal lived on the same planet without knowing that each other existed. After 1492 the two halves of the world were joined, with all the exchange of crops, animals, diseases and people, including the terrible trade in enslaved Africans, that you studied in Module 9. By 1900, OpenStax notes, telegraph cables connected every continent except Antarctica, and the Suez Canal, opened to shipping in 1869, had cut the sea route from Britain to India.

The third great change was in power. In 1500 some of the largest and richest states in the world were in Asia: the Ming China whose treasure fleets you followed with Zheng He, and the Ottoman Empire. By 1900 a handful of industrial countries, most of them European, ruled most of Africa and much of Asia. OpenStax notes that the countries of Africa, Latin America and Asia, "with the exception of Japan", did not industrialise in the 1800s, and that historians disagree about the reasons for this "Great Divergence". The lessons of Module 11 suggest some of the pieces: coal and machines, the profits of slavery and empire, and states willing to use steam, guns and treaties to take what they wanted.

In short: Between 500 and 1900 the world became far more crowded, far more connected and far more unequal in power, and most of that change came in the last four hundred years, faster and faster.

What stayed the same

Change over time also means noticing continuity: the things that changed little or not at all. Even in 1900, Our World in Data's estimates suggest, about five people in every six still lived in the countryside, as most people had in 500. Empires rose and fell across the whole period, from Justinian's to Victoria's, and so did the people who stood up to the powerful: the barons at Runnymede, the Haitians at Vertieres, Prempeh in Kumasi, Menelik and Taytu at Adwa. The great faiths you met in this course were still spreading in 1900, carried to new places by missionaries. And the questions you have asked of every source, who made it, when, why and for whom, worked as well for a monk's letter about the sack of Rome as for Du Bois's address.

In short: After fourteen centuries of change, most people still lived in the countryside, empires still rose and fell, and people still resisted the powerful, often in writing that historians can still read.

The century Du Bois saw coming

Du Bois's sentence about "the color line" became one of the most quoted he ever wrote, because the twentieth century bore it out. The empires of 1900 did not last. Asante, the kingdom of Prempeh and Yaa Asantewaa, had become part of Britain's Gold Coast colony, and on 6 March 1957 the Gold Coast won its independence as the new nation of Ghana. Du Bois himself moved to Ghana in 1961, and he died in its capital, Accra, in 1963, at the age of ninety-five. The world he described in 1900 is the starting point for the history of the twentieth century.

Common misconceptions

• "History is a story of steady progress." Change came in bursts and sometimes went backwards. The Black Death killed somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of Europe's people, Indigenous populations in the Americas collapsed after 1492, and the century that brought railways also brought the Scramble for Africa.
• "Europe always led the world." Between 500 and 1500 the great centres of wealth and learning included Constantinople, Baghdad, the cities of Tang, Song and Ming China, and Timbuktu. Europe's lead came only with industry, in the 1800s.
• "By 1900 everyone lived in a modern, industrial world." Only parts of Europe, the United States and Japan had industrialised, and about five people in six still lived in the countryside.

Looking back

• In July 1900 the First Pan-African Conference adopted Du Bois's address, which declared that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line".
• World population grew from about 250 million in 500 to about 500 million in 1500 and about 1.6 billion in 1900, with most of the growth after 1800.
• The two halves of the world, separate in 500, were joined after 1492 and tightly linked by steam, canal and telegraph by 1900.
• Power shifted from a world of many great states, several of the greatest in Asia, to one dominated by a few industrial countries that ruled most of Africa and much of Asia.
• Continuities remained: most people still lived in the countryside, empires still rose and fell, and people everywhere resisted the powerful.

Sources

1. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1900). To the nations of the world. In A. Walters, My life and work (1917), pp. 257-260. Fleming H. Revell. Transcribed at BlackPast.org. BlackPast
2. Our World in Data. (2024-2026). Population and Share of population living in urbanized areas [Data sets]. Based on HYDE 3.3 and 3.5, Gapminder, and United Nations World Population Prospects. Our World in Data: population; Our World in Data: urban share
3. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2022). 9.1 The second industrial revolution, and 9.3 Colonial empires. In World History Volume 2, from 1400. OpenStax. OpenStax 9.1; OpenStax 9.3
4. Kordas, A., Lynch, R. J., Nelson, B., and Tatlock, J. (2023). 10.2 The Byzantine Empire and Persia. In World History Volume 1, to 1500. OpenStax. OpenStax
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). First Pan-African Conference. Wikipedia. Wikipedia