East Asia
This Chinese dynasty (960–1279) rose to power after the Tang dynasty. At its height, it ushered in a "Golden Age" in agricultural and industrial production, making China the richest and most populated country on the planet.
Song Dynasty
By 1200, this powerful Islamic caliphate was in steep decline after enjoying a brief Golden Age presiding over a flourishing and prosperous Islamic civilization. Its grip on what had been the vast Arab Empire was slipping.
The Abbasid caliphate
The surviving eastern Roman Empire and one of the centers of Christendom during the medieval centuries, this powerful and centralized European empire survived until its conquest by Muslim forces in 1453
Byzantine Empire
Western European branch of Christianity that gradually defined itself as separate from Eastern Orthodoxy. By the eleventh century, this was centered on the pope as the ultimate authority in matters of doctrine. The Church struggled to remain independent of established political authorities.
Western Christendom
This east Asian country's position as an island gave it a unique ability to selectively borrow aspects of Chinese culture without getting overtaken by it.
Japan
This Chinese invention, which came about during the ninth century, contains a mix of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal. Ultimately this innovation revolutionized global military affairs and changed world history forever
Gunpowder
This Islamic empire, which sacked Constantinople and emerged as one of the most powerful states in world history, was founded by Turkic-speaking pastoralists who had migrated into Anatolia (present-day Turkey)
The Ottoman Empire
A culturally diverse civilization that emerged around the city of Kiev in the ninth century C.E. and adopted Christianity in the tenth, thus linking this emerging Russian state to the world of Eastern Orthodoxy
Kievan Rus
A highly fragmented and decentralized society in which power was held by the landowning warrior elite. In this highly competitive system, lessor lords and knights swore allegiance to greater lords or kings and thus became their vassals, frequently receiving lands and plunder in return for military service.
Feudalism
This species of rice, which was native to Vietnam, was brought back to China and fueled tremendous population growth under the Song.
Champa rice
This practice, common among China's elites, consisted of wrapping young girls' feet until they broke, symbolizing the tightening patriarchy in Song China.
footbinding
This was the tax paid by non-Muslims in Muslim controlled areas
jizya
Branch of Christianity that developed in the eastern part of the Roman Empire and gradually separated, mostly on matters of practice, from the branch of Christianity dominant in Western Europe; noted for the subordination of the Church to political authorities, a married clergy, the use of leavened bread in the Eucharist, and a sharp rejection of the authority of Roman pope
Eastern Orthodox Christianity
A term used to describe the “holy wars” waged by Western Christendom, especially against the forces of Islam in the eastern Mediterranean from 1095 to 1291 and on the Iberian Peninsula into the fifteenth century. Further Crusades were also conducted in non-Christian regions of Eastern Europe from about 1150 on.
Crusades
a massive pandemic that swept through Eurasia in the early 14th century, spreading along the trade routes within and beyond the Mongol Empire and reaching the Middle East and Europe by 1347.
The Black Death
This ancient Chinese political philosophy held that the ruler would be supported by divine forces if they acted with moral responsibility towards their subjects.
Mandate of Heaven
Muslim kingdom that occupied much of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain) from 711 C.E. until the collapse of the Spanish Umayyad dynasty in the early 11th century.
Al-Andalus
The capital of the eastern half of the Roman Empire; its highly defensible and economically important position helped ensure the city’s cultural importance for many centuries - until it was sacked by the Ottoman Turks in 1453
Constantinople
an association of craftsmen or merchants formed for mutual aid and protection and for the furtherance of their professional interests. Guilds flourished in Europe between the 11th and 16th centuries and formed an important part of the economic and social fabric in that era.
guild
Method of agricultural organization introduced in Europe in the Middle Ages and representing a decisive advance in production techniques. In the old system, half the land was sown to crop and half was left fallow (unused) each season; in this new system, however, only a third of the land lay fallow (unused); this system provided two harvests instead of one, and helped enable Europeans to catch up to the 'superior' civilizations of Islam and China.
Three-field system
phrase that captures the Chinese sense of being “the center of the world, infinitely superior to the “barbarian” peoples beyond its borders.
The Middle Kingdom
Ruler of the West African empire of Mali. He left a realm notable for its extent and riches—he built the Great Mosque at Timbuktu—but he is best remembered for the splendor of his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324
Mansa Musa
The condition in medieval Europe in which a tenant farmer was bound to a hereditary plot of land and to the will of his landlord. This was the essential feature differentiating serfs from slaves who were bought and sold without reference to a plot of land.
serfdom
A “rebirth” of classical learning that is most often associated with the cultural blossoming of Italy in the period 1350–1500 and that included not just a rediscovery of Greek and Roman learning but also major developments in art, as well as growing secularism in society. It spread to Northern Europe after 1400.
The Renaissance
In Islamic history, this is the term for the ruler of the Muslim community
Caliph