U1 The Global Tapestry
This wealthy West African empire flourished between the 13th and 15th centuries under rulers like Mansa Musa, and dominated in gold and salt trade.
What is the Mali Empire?
Founded by Genghis Khan, this pastoralist empire's contiguous nature and its protection of merchants created a period of safety known as the ‘Pax Mogolica.’
What is the Mongol Empire?
These three Islamic empires—the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal—earned their collective nickname due to their extensive use of artillery, cannons, and other new military technology to conquer and maintain vast territories.
What are the Gunpowder Empires?
This Portuguese-perfected ship featured a triangular lateen sail, allowing it to sail into the wind and making transoceanic voyages possible.
What is the Caravel?
This Chinese dynasty, ruling from 960 to 1279, was known for its wealth, technological innovations like gunpowder, and the flourishing of Neo-Confucianism.
What is the Song Dynasty?
This network of land-based trade routes, revitalized between 1200 and 1450 by the Mongols, connected East Asia with the Mediterranean and was famous for the exchange of luxury goods like textiles and porcelain.
What are the Silk Roads?
This centralized system of government in the Ottoman Empire involved taking young Christian boys from the Balkans, converting them to Islam, and training them as elite soldiers known as Janissaries.
What is the Devshirme system?
This catastrophic demographic event in the Americas was caused primarily by the transfer of Old World diseases like smallpox to populations with no natural immunity.
What is the Great Dying?
This was the system of decentralized political and military management that structured society in medieval Europe, based on relationships between lords and vassals.
What is feudalism?
Among navigational innovations, the Chinese invented this using the earth's magnetic field to show direction, allowing sailors in the Indian Ocean and beyond to travel more reliably.
What is the Magnetic Compass?
This was a method used by absolute monarchs, most famously France's Louis XIV, that asserted a king's right to rule was derived directly from God, thus making them accountable only to God.
What is the Divine Right of Kings?
This economic system, utilized by European states, mandated that colonies should provide raw materials and markets for the mother country to maintain a favorable balance of trade.
What is Mercantilism?
This mystical branch of Islam, which emphasized personal experience of the divine and partook in missionaries, was essential in spreading faith to new regions like South and Southeast Asia.
What is Sufism?
This pandemic spread from Asia to Europe in the 14th century by fleas on rats, traveling along trade routes and killing up to ½ to ⅔ of Europe’s population.
What is the Black Death or Bubonic Plague?
This Mughal Emperor is famous for promoting religious tolerance through policies like repealing the jizya tax and patronizing the syncretic religion Din-i Ilahi.
Who is Akbar the Great?
The Spanish colonial system that adapted an earlier Inca labor practice, forcing indigenous peoples to work on public projects, most notably in the silver mines of Potosí.
What is the Mit'a System?
In the Americas, this empire built an extensive road system, used a labor obligation system called the mita, and recorded information using quipus (knotted strings).
Who are the Inca?
This Moroccan Muslim scholar and traveler wrote one of the most famous travel logs, the Rihla, documenting his extensive journeys across the Dar al-Islam, from West Africa to China.
Who is Ibn Battuta?
This treaty, signed in 1648, ended the Thirty Years' War in Europe and it established the principle of state sovereignty and fixed borders for countries.
What is the Peace of Westphalia?
This significant 1680 indigenous uprising in present-day New Mexico temporarily drove the Spanish settlers completely out of the region and destroyed their religious institutions.
What is the Pueblo Revolt?