To the east, Muslim caravans carried silks, spices, and precious metals out of India, China, and Central Asia along the Silk Road, an arduous and expensive route. TRADE ROUTESĮuropeans had learned through their crusading experience that Muslim merchants had access to enormous trading networks that brought volumes of valuable goods into their markets. As in Spain and Portugal, the formation of unified states in France and England opened the way to new expansive activity. Five years later in England, Henry Tudor and the House of Lancaster defeated the rival House of York in the Wars of the Roses, ending nearly a century of civil war. Consolidation began in France in around 1480, when Louis XI took control of five rival provinces to create a unified kingdom. At the same time, other European states were also waking up to new realities. Twenty-three years later, in 1492, the Spanish subdued the last Moorish stronghold on the peninsula, completing the Reconquista. In Spain, unification took much longer, but in 1469 Ferdinand and Isabella, heirs to the rival thrones of Aragon and Castile, married and forged a united Spanish state. By 1380 Portugal’s King John I had united that country’s various principalities under his rule. With the aid of crusaders, Portugal attained independence in 1147. Iberians led the way, launching a Reconquista, an effort to break Islamic rule on the peninsula. Soon Europeans would begin turning this new knowledge and these new tools against the people from whom they were appropriated. For the elite classes who engaged in crusading, provincialism died away, replaced by new information and contacts in the wider world. For two centuries, European-based Christians battled with Muslims in the Holy Lands and elsewhere. In 1095, Pope Urban II responded to a request for aid from the Byzantine emperor, whose dominions were under attack by Muslim invaders, launching the era of the Crusades.
Carrying the message of the new prophet Mohammed out of the Arabian Peninsula, Muslims began making major inroads into western Asia and northern Africa in the seventh century, eventually encroaching on Europe’s southern and eastern frontiers. This part of the story began, not in the Americas, nor in Europe, but in the Middle East. A new era of American history was about to spring from the most unexpected of places. However, forces were emerging that would open up new possibilities and engender a new restlessness that would shatter provincial confidence and stability as a new more cosmopolitan world emerged. Various sacred texts as well as long-standing folk beliefs suggested a virtually eternal order of things, instilling a sort of reassuring confidence in a stable and entirely predictable existence. In this essay you'll find information on the Reconquista, trade routes, the Old World's discovery of the New World, Native societies, the Columbian Exchange and the rise of the slave trade.Īt the end of the first millennium, most people in the Eastern Hemisphere had a firm sense of how the world was arranged, who occupied it, and how they had come to be where they were.
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